a self-sustaining system capable of Darwinian evolution.

My favorite example is challenging people to show that stars (in space) are any less alive than stars (in Hollywood).

It just doesn't matter very much - certainly not enough to keep wrangling over the exact definition of the boundary. As long as we understand what we mean by crystal, bacterium, RNA, etc., why should we care about the fuzzy dividing line? Are ribozymes going to become more or less precious to us according only to whether we count them as living or not, given that nothing changes about their actual manifested qualities? Should they?

Every science uses terms which are called universal terms, such as ‘energy’, ‘velocity’, ‘carbon’, ‘whiteness’, ‘evolution’, ‘justice’, ‘state’, ‘humanity’. These are distinct from the sort of terms which we call singular terms or individual concepts, like ‘Alexander the Great’, ‘Halley’s Comet’, ‘The First World War’. Such terms as these are proper names, labels attached by convention to the individual things denoted by them.

[...] The school of thinkers whom I propose to call methodological essentialists was founded by Aristotle, who taught that scientific research must penetrate to the essence of things in order to explain them. Methodological essentialists are inclined to formulate scientific questions in such terms as ‘what is matter?’ or ‘what is force?’ or ‘what is justice?’ and they believe that a penetrating answer to such questions, revealing the real or essential meaning of these terms and thereby the real or true nature of the essences denoted by them, is at least a necessary prerequisite of scientific research, if not its main task. Methodological nominalists, as opposed to this, would put their problems in such terms as ‘how does this piece of matter behave?’ or ‘how does it move in the presence of other bodies?’ For methodological nominalists hold that the task of science is only to describe how things behave, and suggest that this is to be done by freely introducing new terms wherever necessary, or by re-defining old terms wherever convenient while cheerfully neglecting their original meaning. For they regard words merely as useful instruments of description.

Most people will admit that methodological nominalism has been victorious in the natural sciences. Physics does not inquire, for instance, into the essence of atoms or of light, but it uses these terms with great freedom to explain and describe certain physical observations, and also as names of certain important and complicated physical structures. So it is with biology. Philosophers may demand from biologists the solution of such problems as ‘what is life?’ or ‘what is evolution?’ and at times some biologists may feel inclined to meet such demands. Nevertheless, scientific biology deals on the whole with different problems, and adopts explanatory and descriptive methods very similar to those used in physics.

-- Karl Popper, from The Poverty of Historicism

What's wrong with 'A self-sustaining (through an external energy source) chemical process characterized by the existence of far-from-equilibrium chemical species and reactions.'?

Just because a boundary is fuzzy doesn't mean it's meaningless.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the class of Basilisks". Do you mean "sensations that cause mental suffering" or some such?

It is unclear what will be the consequences and side-effects of not knowing the specific evidence. And on meta level: what will be the consequences of modifying your cognitive algorithms to avoid the paths that seem to lead to such evidence.

Depending on all these specific details, it may be good or bad. Human imperfection makes it impossible to evaluate. And actually not knowing the specific evidence makes it impossible again. So... the question is analogical to: "If I am too stupid to understand the question, should I answer 'yes', or should I answer 'no'?" (Meaning: yes = avoid the evidence, no = don't avoid the evidence.)

Ideally, I'd want the people to feel that the behavior is unwelcome rather than that they themselves are unwelcome, but people are apt to have their preferred behaviors entangled with their sense of self, so the ideal might not be feasible. Still, it's probably worth giving a little thought to discouraging behaviors rather than getting rid of people.

There are no official community norms on the topic.

For my own part, I observe a small but significant number of people who seem to believe that LessWrong ought to be a community where it's acceptable to differentially characterize women negatively as long as we do so in the proper linguistic register (e.g, adopting an academic and objective-sounding tone, avoiding personal characterizations, staying cool and detached).

The people who believe this ought to be unacceptable are either less common or less visible about it. The majority is generally silent on such matter, though will generally join in condemning blatant register-violations.

The usual result is something closer to wheaton's law at the surface level, but closer to "say what you think is true" at the structural level. (Which is not quite free speech, but a close enough cousin in context.) That is, it's often considered OK to say things, as long as they are properly hedged and constructed, that if said more vulgarly or directly would be condemned for violating wheaton's law, and which in other communities would be condemned for a variety of reasons.

I think there's a general awareness that this pattern-matches to sexism, though I expect that many folks here consider that to be mistaken pattern-matching (the "I'm not sexist; I can't help it if you feminists choose to interpret my words and actions that way" stance).

So my guess is that if you attempt to make people who engage in sexism (and related defenses) feel unwelcome you will most likely trigger net-negative reactions unless you're very careful with your framing.

Does that answer your question?

(I haven't seen the LW co-working chat)

If you want to tell people off for being sexist, your speech is just as free as theirs. People are free to be dicks, and you're free to call them out on it and shame them for it if you want.

I think you should absolutely call it out, negative reactions be damned, but I also agree with NancyLebovitz that you may get more traction out of "what you said is sexist" as opposed to "you are sexist".

To say nothing is just as much an active choice as to say something. Decide what kind of environment you want to help create.

What are community norms here about sexism

Depends on how you define sexism. Some people consider admitting that men and women are different to be sexism, never mind acting on that belief :-/

TheOtherDave's answer is basically correct. Crass and condescending people don't get far, but its possible to have a discussion of issues which cost Larry Summers so dearly.

I don't have an answer here, just a note that this question actually contains two questions, and it would be good to answer both of them together. It would also be a good example of using rationalist taboo.

A: What are the community norms for defining sexism?

B: What are the community norms for dealing with sexism (as defined above)?

Answering B without answering A can later easily lead to motivated discussions about sexism, where people would be saying: "I think that X is [not] an example of sexism" when what they really wanted to say would be: "I think that it is [not] appropriate to use the community norm B for X".

I connotationally interpret your question as: "what are the community norms about bad things?"

You're not giving us enough information so that we could know what you're talking about, and you're asking our blind permission to condemn behaviour you disagree with.

I'd like to see some evidence that such stuff is going on before pointing fingers and making rules that could possible alienate a large fraction of people.

I've been attending the co-working chat for about a week, on and off (I take the handle of 'fist') and so far everyone seems friendly and more than willing to accomodate the girls in the chat. Have you personally encountered any problems?

So is this person a big actor in the pony fanfic culture?

Hmm, not sure why that's happening. I'll look into it.

I quite enjoyed https://www.fanfiction.net/s/2857962/1/Browncoat-Green-Eyes

(Yes, it's a Harry Potter/Firefly crossover. It's much, much better than the premise makes it sound)

Object level response To the Stars. Meta level, check the monthly media thread archives and/or HPMOR's author notes. They have lots of good suggestions, and in depth reviews.

Harry Potter and the Natural 20.

If you haven't yet taken EY's suggestion in the author's notes to read Worm yet, do so. It's original fiction, but you probably don't mind.

Edit: also this might belong in the media thread?

There's a new subreddit dedicated to rationalist fiction. You can check out stories linked there. I'm currently reading Rationalising Death, a Death Note fanfic and it's pretty good even though I haven't seen the anime on which it's based.

I'm also one-thirds into Amends, or Truth and Reconciliation, which is a decent look at how Harry Potter characters would logically react to the end of the Second Wizarding War. So far no idiot balls and pretty good characterization.

This deserves some music:

Old King Plague is dead,
the smallpox plague is dead,
no more children dying hard
no more cripples living scarred
with the marks of the devil's kiss,
we still may die of other things
but we will not die of this.

Raise your glasses high
for all who will not die
to all the doctors, nurses too
to all the lab technician who
drove it into the ground
if the whole UN does nothing else
it cut this terror down.

But scarce the headlines said,
the ancient plague was dead,
then they were filled with weapons new
toxic waste and herpes too,
and the AIDS scare coming on
ten new plagues will take its place
but at least this one is gone.

Population soars,
checked with monstrous wars
preachers rant at birth control
"Screww the body, save the soul",
bring new deaths off the shelves,
and say to Nature, "Mother, please,
we'd rather do it ourselves".

Old King Plague is dead,
the smallpox plague is dead,
no more children dying hard
no more cripples living scarred
with the marks of the devil's kiss,
we still may die of other things
but we will not die of this, oh no,
we will not die of this.

-- Leslie Fish, The Ballad of Smallpox Gone

With any luck, Polio will be next.

The virus currently only still exists as samples in two freezers in two labs (known to the scientific community). These days I think that that is overkill even for research purposes for this pathogen, what with the genome sequenced and the ability to synthesize arbitrary sequences artificially. If you absolutely must have part of it for research make that piece again from scratch. Consign the rest of the whole infectious replication-competent particles to the furnace where they belong.

EDIT: I found a paper in which smallpox DNA was extracted and viruses observed via EM from a 50 year old fixed tissue sample from a pathology lab that was not from one of the aforementioned collections. No word in the paper on if it was potentially infectious or just detectable levels of nucleic acids and particles. These things could be more complicated to 100% securely destroy than we thought...

It wasn't even true in 1995, I don't think. The first way of evaluating it that comes to mind is the startup times of "equivalent" programs, like MS Windows, Macintosh OS, various Corels, etc.

It was my impression that Wirth's law was mostly intended to be tongue-in-cheek, and refer to how programs with user interfaces are getting bloated (which may be true depending on your point of view).

In terms of software that actually needs speed (numerical simulations, science and tech software, games, etc.) the reverse has always been true. New algorithms are usually faster than old ones. Case in point is the trusty old BLAS library which is the workhorse of scientific computing. Modern BLAS implementations are extremely super-optimized, far more optimized than older implementations (for current computing hardware, of course).

I mean, this formulation is wrong (software isn't getting slower), except for the tongue-in-cheek original interpretation I guess. On the other hand, software is getting faster at a slower rate than hardware is and that is still an important observation.

I find it interesting that Wirth's Law was apparently a thing for decades (known since the 1980s, supposedly) but seems to be over. I'm no expert though, I just wonder what changed.

I think both software and hardware got further out on the learning curve which means their real rates of innovative development have both slowed down which means the performance of software has sped up.

I don't get how I get to the last part of that sentence from the first part either, but it almost makes sense.

There weren't any planets 15 million years after the Big Bang. The first stars formed 100 million years after the Big Bang, and you need another few million on top of that for the planets to form and cool down.

Now that is scary, although there are a few complications. Rocky bodies were probably extremely rare during that time since the metal enrichment of the Universe was extremely low. You can't build life out of just hydrogen and helium.

Is that a relevant number?

Doesn't the relevant number of opportunities for life to appear have units of mass-time?

Isn't the question not how early was some Goldilocks zone, but how much mass was in a Goldilocks zone for how long? This says that the whole universe was a Goldilocks zone for just a few million years. The whole universe is big, but a few million years is small. And how much of the universe was metallic? The paper emphasizes that some of it was, but isn't this a quantitative question?

1 - why should no intelligent life arising from a set of places that were likely habitable for only 5 million years (if they existed at all, which is doubtful) be surprising?

2 - I raise the possibility of outcomes for intelligent life that are not destruction or expansion through the universe.

Edit: Gah, that's what I get for leaving this window open while about 8 other people commented

I don't think this is frightening. If you thought life couldn't have arisen more than 3.6 billion years ago but then discover that it could have arisen 13.8 billion years ago, you should be at most 4 times as scared.

The number of habitable planets in the galaxy over the number of habituated planets is a scary number.

The time span of earth civilization over the time span of earth life is a scary number.

4 is not a scary number.

It seems to take a lot more than 15 million years to get from "life" to "intelligent life". According to the article this period would only have lasted for a million years, so at most we would probably get a lot of monocellular life arising and then dying during the cooloff.

Does it add billions of years? That's not saying that life could have arisen and survived since 15 million years after the Big Bang.

Alternative: buy a freezer and buy your food in bulk.

This makes me wonder: What are some simple ways to save quite some time that the average person does not think of?

Game theory is about strategies, not about values. It tells you which strategy should you use, if your goal is to maximize X. It does not tell you what X is. (Although some X's, such as survival, are instrumental goals for many different terminal goals, so they will be supported by many strategies.)

There is a risk of maximizing some X that looks like a good approximation of human values, but its actual maximization is unFriendly.

Austrian school economics, in its reliance on allowing markets to come to equilibrium on their own, is inhuman

Connotational objection: so is any school of anything; at least unless the problem of Friendliness is solved.

Sorry, how did you go from "non human agents use X" (a statement about commonality) to "X is inhuman" (a value judgement) to "if you use X you become a monster" (an even stronger value judgement), to "being a jerk in the style of Cthulhu" (!!!???).

Does this then mean you think using eyesight is monstrous because cephalopodes also have eyes they independently evolved?

Or that maximizing functions is a bad idea because ants have a different function than humans?

"Inhuman" has strong connotations of inimical to human values-- your argument looks different if it starts with something like "game theory is a non-human-- it's a simplified version of some aspects of human behavior". In that case, altruism is non-human in the same sense.

not uniquely human does not imply inhuman. Lungs are not uniquely human, hardly inhuman though.

Generally, using loaded, non-factual words like "inhuman" and "monster" and "cthulhu" and "horrifying" and "puny" in a pseudo-logical format is worthy of a preacher exhorting illiterates. But is it helpful here? I"d like to think it isn't, and yet I'd rather discuss game theory in a visible thread than downvote your post.

Immediate consequence the second: Austrian school economics, in its reliance on allowing markets to come to equilibrium on their own, is inhuman.

I suspect all economics is inhuman. I suspect that any complex economy that connects millions or billions of people is going to be incomprehensible and inhuman. By far the best explanation I've heard of this thought is by Cosma Shalizi.

The key bit here is the conclusion:

There is a fundamental level at which Marx's nightmare vision is right: capitalism, the market system, whatever you want to call it, is a product of humanity, but each and every one of us confronts it as an autonomous and deeply alien force. Its ends, to the limited and debatable extent that it can even be understood as having them, are simply inhuman. The ideology of the market tell us that we face not something inhuman but superhuman, tells us to embrace our inner zombie cyborg and lose ourselves in the dance. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry or run screaming.

But, and this is I think something Marx did not sufficiently appreciate, human beings confront all the structures which emerge from our massed interactions in this way. A bureaucracy, or even a thoroughly democratic polity of which one is a citizen, can feel, can be, just as much of a cold monster as the market. We have no choice but to live among these alien powers which we create, and to try to direct them to human ends. It is beyond us, it is even beyond all of us, to find "a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all", which says how everyone should go.

Game theory is not like calculus or evolutionary theory--something any alien race smart enough to develop space travel is likely to formulate. It does represent human values.

What you're referring to is a problem I've been thinking about and chipping away at for some time; I've even had some discussions about it here and people have generally been receptive. Maybe the reason you're being downvoted is that you're using the word 'human' to mean 'good'.

The core issue is that humans have empathy, and by this we mean that other people's utility function matters to us. More concisely, our perception of other people's utility forms a part of our utility which is conditionally independent of the direct benefits to us.

Our empathy not only extends to other humans, but also animals and perhaps even robots.

So what are examples of human beings who lack empathy? Lacking empathy is basically the definition of psychopathy. And, indeed, some psychopaths (not all, but some) have been violent criminals who e.g. killed babies for money, tortured people for amusement, etc. etc.

So you're essentially right that a game theory where the players do not have models of each other's utility functions shows aspects of psychopathy and 'inhumanity'.

But that doesn't mean game theory is wrong or 'inhuman'! All it means is that you're missing the 'empathy' ingredient. It also means that it would not be a good idea to build an AI without empathy. That's exactly what CEV attempts to solve. CEV is basically a crude attempt at trying to instill empathy in a machine.

.i'enai

What does the Red Queen hypothesis have to do with value change?

CEV is supposed to refer to the values of current humans. However, this does not necessarily imply that an FAI would prevent the creation of non-human entities. I'd expect that many humans (including me) would assign some value to the existence of interesting entities with somewhat different (though not drastically different) values than ours, and the satisfaction of those values. Thus a CEV would likely assign some value to the preferences of a possible human successor species by proxy through our values.

Neither. CEV is supposed to look at what humanity would want if they were smarter, faster, and more the people they wished they were. It finds the end of the evolution of how we change if we are controlled by ourselves, not by the blind idiot god.

Interesting.

I have been convinced that people donating should publicly brag about it to attract other donors

It certainly seems to make sense for the sake of the cause for (especially large, well-informed) donors to make their donations public. The only downside seems to be a potentially conflicting signal on behalf of the giver.

instead of remaining silent about their donation which leads to a false impression of the amount of support MIRI has.

I'm not sure this is true. Doesn't MIRI publish its total receipts? Don't most organizations that ask for donations?

Growing up Evangelical, it was taught that we should give secretly to charities (including, mostly, the church).

I wonder why? The official Sunday School answer is so that you remain humble as the giver, etc. I wonder if there is some other mechanism whereby it made sense for Christians to propogate that concept (secret giving) among followers?