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Open Thread, May 5 - 11, 2014
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Comments (284)
Short question, is Newcomb's Problem still considered an open issue, or has the community settled on a definite decision theory that will yield the right answers yet?
A good decision theory performs well in many problems and not only in one problem. Having a decision theory that solves Newcomb's Problem but that doesn't perform well for other problems isn't helpful.
There isn't yet the ultimate decision theory that solves everything so I don't see how individual problems can be declared solved.
From the 2013 survey results:
Well that's nice, but I had meant: have we come to a consensus on what sort of decision theory will auto-generate the right result, rather than merely writing down the result of the decision theory preinstalled in our brains and calling it correct? Has the "Paradox" part been formally resolved?
Because, you know, I don't want to post about it and then get told my thoughts were already thought five years ago and didn't actually help solve the problem.
Incarnations of UDT sufficient for this problem have been made completely formal.
Ummm.... link please?
Not for any mathematically rigorous value of “what sort”, as far as I can tell.
Great, I'm drafting a post.
Five biotypes of depression
Those people ranting about anti-depressants and school shootings may have been partially on to something.
Unfortunately, the source for this information about biotypes and depression is looking very sketchy
That's unfortunate. Knowledge like this would be incredibly useful for treatment. Rather than just throwing drugs at a problem and seeing what sticks, doctors and psychiatrists could actually try treating each type in turn, or even better, test for markers of each condition.
I'm hoping the information will pan out. Sketchy source doesn't = guaranteed false.
Below is an edited version of an email I prepared for someone about what CS researchers can do to improve our AGI outcomes in expectation. It was substantive enough I figured I might as well paste it somewhere online, too.
I'm currently building a list of what will eventually be short proposals for several hundred PhD theses / long papers that I think would help clarify our situation with respect to getting good outcomes from AGI, if I could persuade good researchers to research and write them. A couple dozen of these are in computer science broadly: the others are in economics, history, etc. I'll write out a few of the proposals as 3-5 page project summaries, and the rest I'll just leave as two-sentence descriptions until somebody promising contacts me and tells me they want to do it and want more detail. I think of these as "superintelligence strategy" research projects, similar to the kind of work FHI typically does on AGI. Most of these projects wouldn't only be interesting to people interested in superintelligence, e.g. a study building on these results on technological forecasting would be interesting to lots of people, not just those who want to use the results to gain a bit of insight into superintelligence.
Then there's also the question of "How do we design a high assurance AGI which would pass a rigorous certification process ala the one used for autopilot software and other safety-critical software systems?"
There, too, MIRI has lots of ideas for plausibly useful work that could be done today, but of course it's hard to predict this far in advance which particular lines of research will pay off. But then, this is almost always the case for long-time-horizon theoretical research, and e.g. applying HoTT to program verification sure seems more likely to help our chances of positive AGI outcomes than, say, research on genetic algorithms for machine vision.
I'll be fairly inclusive in listing these open problems. Many of the problems below aren't necessarily typical CS work, but they could plausibly be published in some normal CS venues, e.g. surveys of CS people are sometimes published in CS journals or conferences, even if they aren't really "CS research" in the usual sense.
First up are 'superintelligence strategy' aka 'clarify our situation w.r.t. getting good AGI outcomes eventually' projects:
More and larger expert surveys on AGI timelines, takeoff speed, and likely social impacts, besides the one reported in the first chapter of Superintelligence (which isn't yet published).
Delphi study of those questions including AI/ML people, AGI people, and AI safety+security people.
How big is the field of AI currently? How many quality-adjusted researcher years, funding, and available computing resources per year? How many during each past previous decade in AI? More here.
What is the current state of AI safety engineering? What can and can't we do? Summary and comparison of approaches in formal verification in AI, hybrid systems control, etc. Right now there are a bunch of different communities doing AI safety and they barely talk to each other, so it's hard for any one person to figure out what's going on in general. Also would be nice to know which techniques are being used where, especially in proprietary and military systems for which there aren't any papers.
Are there examples of narrow AI “takeoff”? Eurisko maybe the closest thing I can think of, but the details aren't clear because Lenat's descriptions were ambiguous and we don't have the source code.
Cryptographic boxes for untrusted AI programs.
Next, high assurance AGI projects that might be publishable in some CS conferences/journals. One way to categorize this stuff is into "bottom-up research" and "top-down research."
Bottom-up research aimed at high assurance AGI simply builds on current AI safety/security approaches, pushing them along to be more powerful, more broadly applicable, more computationally tractable, easier to use, etc. This work isn't necessarily focused on AGI specifically but is plausibly pushing in a more safe-AGI-helpful direction than most AI research is. Examples:
To be continued...
Continued...
Top-down research aimed at high assurance AGI tries to envision what we'll need a high assurance AGI to do, and starts playing with toy models to see if they can help us build up insights into the general problem, even if we don't know what an actual AGI implementation will look like. Past examples of top-down research of this sort in computer science more generally include:
But now, here are some top-down research problems MIRI thinks might pay off later for AGI safety outcomes, some of which are within or on the borders of computer science:
These are just a few examples: there are lots more. We aren't happy yet with our descriptions of any of these problems, and we're working with various people to explain ourselves better, and make it easier for people to understand what we're talking about and why we're working on these problems and not others. But nevertheless some people seem to grok what we're doing, e.g. I pointed Nik Weaver to the tiling agents paper stuff and despite not having past familiarity with MIRI he just ran with it.
I recently saw an advertisement which was such a concentrated piece of antirationality I had to share it here. Imagine a poster showing a man's head and shoulders gazing inspiredly past the viewer into the distance, rendered in posterised red, white, and black with a sort of socialist realism flavour. The words: "No Odds Too Long. No Dream Too Great. The Believer."
If that was all, it would just be a piece of inspirational nonsense. But what was it advertising?
Ladbrokes. A UK chain of betting shops.
That is a hilariously apposite name for a chain of betting shops.
Isn't it? The first time I read about the British betting industry and Betfair & Ladbrokes, I had to look the latter up on WP to verify it was randomly named after a building and wasn't a mockery of their customers.
The main problem is that facebook encourages drastically different quality of thought and expressions than lesswrong does. The quality of thought in Eliezer's comments on facebook is sloppy. I chose to unfollow him on facebook because seeing Eliezer at his worst makes it rather a lot more difficult to appreciate Eliezer at his best (contempt is the mind killer). I assumed that any particularly insteresting work he did (that is safe to share with the public) would end up finding its way into a less transient medium than facebook eventually...
...Have I been missing anything exciting?
Not sure if this applies to Eliezer's debate threads, but not having downvotes is a horrible setup for a debate. Every stupid comment is either ignored, which seems like "silence is consent", or starts a flamewar. There is simply no way to reduce noise.
There is no way to reduce noise for everyone else. For myself I've adopted a strategy of using the 'block use' feature whenever I encounter a comment that I especially wish to downvote. These days I consider 'block' to be a far more critical feature than downvoting is (despite remaining a big fan of downvoting liberally).
You can delete comments to your posts, and IIRC EY has endorsed doing so.
Links: Young blood reverses age-related impairments in cognitive function and synaptic plasticity in mice (press release)(paper)
I think the radial arm water maze experiment's results are particularly interesting; it measures learning and memory (see fig 2c which is visible even with the paywall). There's a day one and day two of training and the old mice (18 months) improve somewhat during the first day and then more or less start over on the second day in terms of the errors they are making. This is also true if the old mice are treated with 8 injections of old blood over the course of 3 weeks (the new curves lie pretty much on top of the old curves in supplemental figure 7d). Young mice (3 months) perform better than the old mice (supplemental figure 5d) they learn faster on the first day and retain it when the second day starts (supp 7d).
However, if you give 8 injections of 100 micro liters of blood from 3 month old mice to 18 month old mice, the treated mice perform dramatically better than the old-blood treated old mice (2c) and much more like young mice (this comparison is less certain; I'm comparing one line from 2c to one line from supp. 7d, but that's how it looks by eye).
One factor in the new blood that plays a role is GDF11. From another paper: "we show that GDF11 alone can improve the cerebral vasculature and enhance neurogenesis"
The New York Times gives an overview and other known effects of young blood such as rejuvenating the musculature / heart / vasculature of old mice with young blood. Young Blood May Hold Key to Reversing Aging, e.g. Restoring Systemic GDF11 Levels Reverses Age-Related Dysfunction in Mouse Skeletal Muscle
As per issue #389, I've just pushed a change to meetups. All future meetup posts will be created in /r/meetups to un-clutter /r/discussion a little bit.
Hmm, I just noticed that the 'Nearest Meetup' feature is mostly removed (you can still see the field when you refresh before everything has loaded), so you cant see any notification anywhere for local meetups happening soon unless you are specifically checking /meetups or r/meetups.
I understand why Luke and co wanted this change asap (people have been complaining about the clutter), but I suspect that this change will have a big overall impact on LW Meetups turnouts. I'm fairly certain that a lot of non-regulars decide to go to a specific meetup because they are randomly reminded of it in the sidebar or in discussion, and not because they actively check.
Anyway, is there any chance you know why the 'Nearest meetup' area was removed (no mention of the removal in the issues)? I am not sure what the benefit is of having Upcoming Meetups over Nearest Meetups, but the latter at least provides a reminder for people of posted local meetups. Alternatively, is there anything else planned to serve as a reminder?
PS: I would've published this as a comment on the issue itself, but that didn't look very appropriate.
I currently see 'nearest meetups'.
I've noticed that when I'm at work (but still logged in), it shows me 'upcoming meetups' instead. My first guess, that I've made no attempt to confirm or disconfirm, is that it tries to determine your location from your IP address. If it succeeds it shows you 'nearest meetups', and if it fails it shows you 'upcoming meetups'.
I feel like there should definitely be a link to 'meetups' next to 'main' and 'discussion'. It's so easy to miss things in the sidebar.
I, too, expect this to reduce meetup turnout.
Looks like it is the same for me - I posted the above comment from work, however, I see 'Nearest Meetups' now that I am home. Your theory sounds reasonable.
I can't figure out who runs the Less Wrong Twitter. Does anyone know?
Hi, I wonder how you would use your rationality skills to solve this problem.
I'm very sensitive to cold and have been for at least 2-3 years. (I'm a 25 year old male). This is manageable with (really) warm clothes, but sometimes very inconvenient.
I've seen multiple doctors about this, and the response I've got was basically "our tests indicate there's nothing wrong with you, so there's nothing I can do". I've left multiple blood samples, and all the things that were tested are within normal (well, my trombocyte count is a bit low. Doubt it's related to this).
I'm slightly underweight, and have a history of fatigue and depression.
I'm looking for both practical advice and general rationality advice on how to deal with a confusing health problem.
Thank you for all the comments and suggestions. :)
At this point I have made an appointment to have my hormone levels checked (as suggested by Lumifer and NancyLebovitz).
I also think my blood pressure and circulation is worth looking into.
I'm still processing a lot of the suggestions and ideas, and might make another thread on this in the future.
There are a bunch of ways temperature is regulated. Blood circulation is on of the main ways the body regulates the temperature of the extremities. Blood moves very fast through the body and has therefore a relatively constant temperature. The blood in your hand is warmer than the rest of the hand.
If there's more blood in the capillaries in your hand than your hand gets warmer. Low blood pressure in the arterioles means that less blood flows into the capillaries. If muscle tissue is tense that also usually makes it harder for blood to flow into it.
I personally used to often feel cold five years ago but solved the issue for myself. There are days where something emotional is going on and my thermoregulation is messed up but that's not my default. I do have done a bunch of different things, so I can't give you a single solution.
Firstly an easy suggestion. Drink a lot. Drinking can increase blood pressure. There were weeks where I needed to drink 4-5 liters a day for my body to work at it's peak. I would recommend you to try drinking 4 liters a day for a week and see whether that changes how you feel.
On of the main things I personally did was dancing a lot of Salsa. Salsa gave me a new relationship with my body. Part of Salsa is also having body contact and that allows me to feel which parts of the body of the woman I'm dancing with are warm and relaxed and which aren't.
Good Salsa dancers are usually well circulated. On the other hand I do know woman who danced for years and didn't solve issues like that in their body. Knowing dancing patterns doesn't seem to be enough. In the Salsa sphere body movement classes seem like the produce such results but I don't know whether they are optimal.
I do personally think that there's a case that 5 Rhythms or Contact Improvisation is better for your purpose than Salsa. But to be open, the theory based on which I make that recommendation are not academic in origin.
Another thing that I believe but which does not come from an academic source is that the problem is likely emotional in origin. I consider it to be a self defense mechanism of the body. If they get removed I consider it likely that emotions will come up and that have to be dealt with. Based on what you wrote about severe trauma, I would recommend you to have professional help.
I appreciate you bringing attention to my blood circulation. My hands and feet rarely freeze (I do wear warm socks and gloves in winter, though). My ears are very sensitive to cold, though, which could well be a symptom of poor circulation.
The link between emotions and blood pressure as well as thermoregulation you describe sounds a lot like vasovagal response
In that case I doubt that is what I'm experiencing, since I haven't noticed ANY correlation between my day-to-day emotional state, and how hot or cold I'm feeling.
So unless there's a possibility of very long-term correlations, on the scale of months/years (which doesn't seem to be what you're describing), I doubt this particular mechanism is causing my cold sensitivity.
I am receiving therapy. Thanks for the suggestion.
I think the fact that vasovagal responses exist illustrate one well documented instance where there's interplay between those forces.
I speak about repressing certain things for longer periods of time. Not something where you repress your trauma one day and don't do it the next. You can do the change in a single day. Even in a minute but that's not what happens most of the time.
My first tactic with confusing health problems is adjusting my diet, but I seem to be more affected by diet than the typical person, so your mileage may vary Taking a very complete multivitamin for a few days and seeing if you feel any different is an easy way to check for nutrition deficiencies, if your blood tests didn't check for that (or only checked for a few usual suspects). If you do feel different, then you at least know you were deficient in something. You could also do an elimination diet for the most common food allergies, but that takes a lot of effort, so it might not be worth it if you and your family don't have a history of food issues.
If you're more sensitive to cold at some times than others, try to notice the fluctuation and see if it correlates with anything (especially stress, based on ChristianKi's comment). Maybe try writing down how cold you felt and what you did that day? (I usually don't write this sort of thing down, even though I know I should.)
Interesting perspective, thanks.
I am taking vitamins and have been for some time.
My diet has had a random drift over time due to practical concerns, taste changing etc... and random diet adjustments don't seem to have a noticeable effect. There might some specific nutritional strategies that would help - I don't have enough information to choose one, though.
More data and more detailed observations seem like a good idea. There might have been some fluctuations, but I'm not noticing any obvious correlations (besides, you know, exposure to cold temperatures).
This is a long shot, but is there a chance you're eating less than you need?
It's possible. I don't know. I eat when I'm hungry, which is quite regularly (once per 3-4 hours, maybe 5), so I'm definitely not starving myself. And if I try to eat more, I feel unpleasantly full, and I feel less hungry later - so I don't think it makes a difference.
I'm not sure how to check whether I'm eating enough save for counting calories (which seems complicated and unreliable).
I'm hoping I'll gain some muscle mass by exercise, both for its own sake and because weight gain by other means doesn't seem to be working for me (I suspect I naturally have a slim build).
At this point, I'd say it's unlikely that you're eating so little as to lower your temperature.
If you still want to test the hypothesis without counting calories, you could try a higher fat diet and see what happens.
Does your temperature ever get higher or lower?
Did something happen 3 years ago? Maybe a major emotional trauma?
I've had a really bad childhood and experienced a lot of severe emotional trauma throughout my life since then, including at that time.
I do think that what you have can be caused by severe emotional trauma. If that's the case it basically explains why the tests that doctors run come up empty.
There are defense mechanisms that the body can use in cases of trauma that lead to reduced blood circulation which in turn messes up temperature regulation and shows itself as low blood pressure.
That means that the first step would be to move to a safe environment where you aren't constantly exposed to severe emotional trauma. Did you already make that step?
And these mechanisms don't involve anything that would show up on medical tests?
His low blood pressure does show up in medical tests. The question of why the body set blood pressure at a certain point is largely unsolved.
In our academic system mainstream medicine doesn't investigate psychological issues and psychology generally doesn't investigate physiological issues like body temperature.
Yet, for some reason the intervening mechanisms don't?
That would require running to see studies with big enough sample sizes to gather proxies for those proxies. There no money to run those studies.
Things that happen through complex patterns of neuron interactions are also not easy to study.
Yes, to the extent it's realistically possible.
Do you do sports?
Not regularly.
I exercise at a gym (upper body strength program, started quite recently).
In my anecdotal experience, being underweight is correlated with being unusually susceptible to cold. Building some mass might help. Consider doing a more general strength program too.
Long underwear. Even if your legs don't specifically feel cold, adding more insulation there helps the whole body. Your legs are a pair of huge heat exchangers, and there's a limit to how useful it is to pile more layers on your torso if all your body heat can still leak out through your legs.
I've had something like that for the last 35 years or so. I just live with it. I suspect a connection with a serious illness I had back then, but I've never bothered to raise the matter with a doctor, because it doesn't seem like the sort of thing that a doctor is likely to have any remedy for. I am also slightly built (BMI 19 to 20) and have occasional attacks of great fatigue, but not depression.
Thick woolly hats are good too. A lot of heat is lost through the head.
I'm similar. I have found scarves to be both stylish and practical. The neck area is highly sensitive to cold. I've taken to toting a scarf if I am going to bring a jacket.
First question: what's your blood pressure?
Second question: did you do a thyroid panel and what did it show?
Third question: did you measure your body temperature in controlled settings (e.g. first thing upon waking up before getting out of bed)?
Common causes of sensitivity to cold are low blood pressure and hypothyroidism.
90/60 mmHg according to what a doctor told me during a measurement a month ago (though my journal says 98/60 for some reason). 105/60 in an another measurement a week before that.
Thyroid panel:
P-TSH mIE/L 1.5 (0.3-4.2)
P-T4, free pmol/L 15 (12-22)
P-T3, free pmol/L 5.2 (3.1-6.8)
S-Ak, (IgG) TPO kIE/L 8 (<34)
The last one is TPO antibodies. The parentheses are the reference ranges at my lab.
All values are within what is considered normal range. I've also had the thyroid physically examined (though palpation) and it appears there are no abnormalities (it's not swollen or enlarged).
I have not measured my body temperature.
Your systolic is low, but I'm sure you're well aware of that.
The thyroid panel looks normal, but there exists a bunch of people (including a few doctors one of whom, I believe, wrote a book) who think that hypothyroidism is seriously underdiagnosed and that it will not necessary show up in the TSH/T3/T4 tests. Google it up. I have no opinion on their claims.
There is also, of course, the non-answer that your thermoregulation set point just happens to be very low :-/
I doubt it's a "thermoregulation set point" issue, since I haven't always felt this way.
Thanks for pointing out the blood pressure thing. I hadn't considered it might be related to cold sensitivity.
I have considered it might be a thyroid issue, and I am familiar with the controversy around thyroid disease. Not completely trusting all the alternative claims - but I think there's enough evidence to believe something might be going on. I think I might try to get a prescription for thyroid hormone medication, and see if it improves my condition. I'll probably try other options first, since there are potential side effects.
If you're male you might also want to check your testosterone levels. And if your doctors and insurance are amenable, run a thorough hormones check in general.
Thanks, these seem like good suggestions.
I've made a list of what I'll try to have checked. Any comments?
DHEA-S
DHT
Estradiol
Estrone
PSA
Pregnenolone
Total and Free Testosterone
Sex Hormone Binding Globulin (SHBG)
Insulin like Growth factor (IGF-1)
Given that you were/are under much stress, I'd focus on the HTA axis.
In particular, try to get a 24-hour cortisol test -- cortisol has a pronounced circadian cycle so one measurement taken at a single point in time might be misleading.
Your thermoregulation set point could have moved. In fact, I'd say that's exactly what happened, since I get the impression your temperature is fairly stable. The problem is that it's too low.
Very tentatively-- maybe you should get your hormones checked. This is based on a weak hypothesis that if menopause can send body temperature too high erratically, maybe there's a hormone problem which is keeping yours too low.
Thanks. A hormone check does seem like a good idea to me.
I'm in a similar situation, and am leaning toward it being a circulation issue. Would you happen to know what your last blood pressure measurements were?
My previous lead candidate was proto-diabetes, but the most recent tests suggest otherwise. The only comment made about my bloodpressure was by the trainee EMT, saying "I wish my bloodpressure was that low!". I've been suspicious that the safe range for bloodpressure might be shifted a bit too far downward, since most people suffer from high bloodpressure-related conditions, but I'll need to refind the evidence that pushed me in that direction.
Anyway, my current strategy is to try and get more/better exercise, fresh air and sunlight. Those are good ideas in general, and should have an impact if it's circulation-related. It's too early and I'm still struggling to get good exercise, and I didn't think to try and quantify changes until... just now, so right now, this solution is experimental on my end.
Thanks for sharing.
(just posted my blood pressure results in an another comment)
Study which finds biological similarity between men and women is spun as evidence of difference in the popular press.
Is Less Wrong dying?
Some observations...
About all I look at on LW anymore is the Open Discussion Thread, Rationality Quotes and the link to Slate Star Codex. I noticed CFAR and MIRI's websites gave me the impression they were getting more traction and perhaps making some money.
Has LW run it's course?
I remember people saying things like "Less Wrong is dying" for a long time, from 2010 at least. Which doesn't invalidate the claim that LW's much more quiet than it used to be, of course, but it does challenge the claim that this would be a recent development.
I personally believe it's basically dead—at least for me. The sequences are great... But I wouldn't recommend LW to anyone at this point in terms of it's recent content, and that is a big change for me.
It's been a good run.
Maybe it's because the important things have started, and moved to real life, outside of the LW website. There are people writing and publishing papers on Friendly AI, there are people researching and teaching rationality exercises; there are meetups in many countries. -- Although, if this is true, I would expect more reports here about what happens in the real life. (Remember the fundamental rule of bureaucracy: If it ain't documented, it didn't happen.)
Anyway, this is only a guess; it would be interesting to really know what's happening...
It seems to be a common sentiment, actually. I mentioned this a few times on #lesswrong and the regulars there appear to agree. Whether this is a some sort of confirmation bias, I am not sure. Fortunately, there is a way to measure it:
Look at the recent Main entries: http://lesswrong.com/recentposts/
Then look at the entries from about 1 year ago: http://lesswrong.com/recentposts/?count=250&after=t3_gnv
Count interesting articles from each period and compare the numbers.
The LW census get's every year more participants. If LW would be dying I would expect the opposite.
I'm not sure total participants is a good metric to use in making that determination. It depends on people's level of participation and engagment, I think.
When it comes to engagement we do have a bunch of in person meetups that we didn't have a few years ago.
There do seem to be more meetups globally, but I'd say the SF Bay Area meetup scene -- where MIRI is based and many prominent contributors live or have lived --- is well off its peaks. This is perhaps an unreasonable time to be saying so, since the South Bay and East Bay meetups have just gone through major shakeups and haven't yet stabilized; but even ignoring that we're well down from two or three years ago in terms of engagement with high-karma users, in terms of number of local meetup groups, and probably in terms of people as well.
I blame Facebook. Many of the discussions that are had there were of the type that used to invigorate these here boards.
Hm. I think you have a much higher level of sophistication in your FB friend group. I get a lot of Tea Party quotes and pictures of peoples' dinner.
It's mostly that Eliezer has taken to disseminating his current work via open Facebook discussions. I can see how that choice makes sense, from his position, but it's still sad for the identity-paranoid and the nostalgic remnants still roaming these forgotten halls. Did I have a purpose once? It's been so long.
Also, it's much harder (impossible?) to find older discussions on FB.
It turns out that while there may be no good way to use Facebook to find old discussions on Facebook, I used google and found an old Facebook post.
And perhaps harder to grow, at least through the usual means - the Facebook discussions wouldn't show up on Google searches (or at least not highly ranked, I think), and it's a less convenient format to link someone to for an explanation of a concept.
I would say LW is evolving.
The Sequences are and always were the finger that points at the objective, not the objective unto itself. The project of LW is "refining the art of human rationality." But we don't have the defininition of human rationality written on stone tablets, needing only diligence in application to obtain good results. The project of LW is thus a dynamic process of discovery, experimentation, incorporating new data, sometimes backtracking when we update on evidence that isn't as solid was we had thought.
You correctly observe that the style of participation has changed over time. This is probably mostly the result of certain specific high volume contributors moving on to other things. It could also be the result of an aggregated shift in understanding as to what kinds of results can actually be produced by discussing rationality in a vacuum, which may perhaps be why these contributors have moved on. Or maybe they just said all they felt they needed to say, I don't know. I have a 101.1 F fever right now.
I'd add "Metacontrarianism is on the rise" to your list. Many of the top posts now are contrary to at least the spirit of the sequences, if not the letter, or so it feels to me.
I think it's a little early to predict the end, but there's less I'm interested in here, and I'm having trouble thinking of things to write about, though I can still find worthwhile links for open threads.
Is LW being hit by some sort of social problem, or have we simply run out of things to say?
Dear LW,
I've just this morning been offered funding for a research placement in a British University this summer (I'm 17). I have to contact researchers myself, and it generally has to be in a STEM subject area. I am looking very generally for any recommendations of researchers to contact in areas of Maths, Physics and Computer Science. If you know any people who do research that would be of interest to the average LessWronger, especially in the aforementioned fields, I would appreciate it greatly.
Obviously there are hundreds of possibilities, but the Future of Humanity Institute springs to mind.
I checked them out actually, and it doesn't seem like they normally do that kind of thing. Still, I've sent them an email, and I'll see what they say :)
Added: They've said they're happy I'm interested, but haven't got anything for me at the minute,
So I often find that interesting people live near me. Anyone have tips on asking random people to meet up? Ask them for coffee? I suppose a short email is better than a long one, which may come off creepy? Anyone have friends they met via random emails?
I have a lot of friends who I met through fan mail - people contacting me to tell me they like something about my online footprint. My recommendation is to establish online correspondence for a while, then when they don't send "leave me alone" signals like terse or perfunctory responses you can ask to hang out.
Thanks.
After a bit of random googling it seems there are a lot of results about 'saying no to people who want to get coffee/pick your brain' so it seems like reasonably successful people with an internet presence get a lot of these requests.
I imagine different successful people with internet presences have different intersections of request quantity and request tolerance. I don't get people paying attention to me and wanting to hang out with me as often as I'd like yet so that's probably biasing my recommendations.
Have you guys noticed that, while the notion of AI x-risk is gaining credibility thanks to some famous physicists, there is no mention of Eliezer and only a passing mention of MIRI? Yet Irving Good, who pointed out the possibility of recursive self-improvement without linking it to x-risk, is right there. Seems like a PR problem to me. Either raising the profile of the issue is not associated with EY/MIRI, or he is considered too low status to speak of publicly. Both possibilities are clearly detrimental to MIRI's fundraising efforts.
See also this old post where Robin Hanson basically predicted that this would happen.
I think this is fine. Convincing people that this is a Real Thing and then specifically making them aware of Eliezer and MIRI should be done separately anyway. Doing the second thing too soon may make the first thing harder, while doing the second thing late makes the first thing easier (because then AI x-risk can be put in a mental category other than "that weird thing that those weird people care about").
Effective parenting advice: Babys names affect life outcomes:
Names Race and Economists on Baby Name Wizard.
I'd guess that means choosing names that are
used in high status circles (sample celebrity babies names)
probably matching your ethnicity
sufficiently popular; best just starting to climb in popularity (not topping or declining)
or altzernatively timeless (e.g. old roman or biblical names)
Also choose multiple names because
it allows to later choose the best fit
allows for easier compromises with your spouse
allows to satisfy more relatives
a high number or surnames indicates higher status in itself
Nice infographic for naming children:
http://www.informationisbeautifulawards.com/2013-longlist/infographic/
You don't want hollywood celebrities. Low status people name their kids after hollywood celebrities. In Germany given kids Anglosaxon names is a sign of low status. http://www.sueddeutsche.de/leben/studie-kindernamen-und-vorurteile-von-wegen-schall-und-rauch-1.44178
According to that article good names for German children that make teachers think the child is high performing are: "Charlotte, Sophie, Marie, Hannah, Alexander, Maximilian, Simon, Lukas and Jakob". On the other hand bad names are: "Kevin, Chantal, Mandy, Justin and Angelina".
Gunnar said to name children after the children of celebrities, not directly after celebrities. But certainly using foreign celebrities is a very bad idea.
The kind of person who follows magazine that tells them about the name of celebrities still isn't high status.
It's been a while till I researched the topic in more detail. Artists don't wear suits to appear high status and the don't give their children high status names. Royals and aristocrats might be a valid choice if you live in a country that has them.
In the US the way that people who go to Harvard and Yale name their children is what's counts as high status signal.
Yes. Use the childrens names of your local high status people.
I second that. Celebrity is misleading. I wanted to give a concrete example "high status people" is too abstract.
Idea for a question for the next LW survey: Have you ever been diagnosed with a mental disorder? If so, what was it? [either a list of some common ones and an "other" box, or, ideally, a full drop-down of DSM-5 diagnoses. Plus a troll-bait non-disorder and a "prefer not to say", of course]
Update: 3 months later, it just popped into my head that this ought to be a checklist, not a drop-down.
I think I'd want a second question about the severity of the disorder, including whether person thinks the disorder has some advantages.
...and a follow-up question: Have you ever self-diagnosed yourself with a mental disorder?
:-)
Would that be interesting enough as a question to be worth including? I imagine there's a lot of variability in self-diagnosis.
The first interesting point is the one-bit yes/no answer.
I would not expect a majority of the general population to self-diagnose itself with a mental disease at any point in their life. However for certain specific groups this changes. One group of interest is high-IQ reflexive self-doubting people. Another group is freaks, that is, people who are clearly weird/strange/different from those around them for whatever reason. Yet another group is borderline cases, those whose symptoms are not strong or pronounced enough for a clinical diagnosis and yet they are not entirely "normal" anyway. And another group is a variety of neurodiverse people.
There are also people who do have a disorder, but have reasons for not seeing a doctor about it. (Lack of funds, not expecting treatment to help, not needing treatment, etc.)
Do you mean "reasons" or do you mean "rational reasons"?
The opinion of someone who does have a mental disorder on whether treatment will help or is needed, that opinion is... suspect.
In this context, they don't have to be good reasons - my point was that a self diagnosis doesn't necessarily disagree with what a doctor would say if asked.
Okay, that makes sense. And although it might take some clever structuring, I think it might be interesting to try to determine how frequently those self-diagnoses were accurate... something about "confirmed by a medical professional", perhaps?
This is tricky ground. If you want more follow-up questions, the first probably should be "Have you, of your own will, talked to a mental health professional about an assessment or a diagnosis?". Again, the majority of the general population would answer "no" to this.
I seem to recall something like 30% of the adult American population being in therapy or having been recently. That's not a majority, but it's pretty substantial, and they didn't get there by magic.
My impression is that mostly involves people going to their doctor and saying "Doctor, I feel horrible!". And the good doctor says "Sure, try these antidepressants!" (yes, I know I'm exaggerating).
That's a different thing from "Doctor, I believe I'm mentally ill".
Depression is a mental illness. You might not go to the doctor and ask about depression (though I doubt this is anywhere near as uncommon as you're making it out to be), but going to the doctor and saying "Doc, I can't sleep, feel sad all the time, everything I do seems pointless, etc." is as much asking for a consultation on mental illness as "Doc, I've got this nasty bullseye-shaped rash on my leg and I've got a fever and a bad headache" is asking for a consultation on Lyme disease.
The standards of diagnosis might not be as rigorous, but that's a separate issue.
Then there's me.
"Doctor, I can't sleep!" "Here, take this Ambien." "Ambien scares the crap out of me; it makes my friend call me up late at night and ramble incoherently at me, and I've heard it makes people have sex and forget it happened." "Eh. Take it anyway, that doesn't happen to most people."
"Doctor, I still can't sleep, I worry all the time, and it's wrecking my motivation at work. And the Ambien works, but it makes me trip out more than I probably should most nights." "You have an anxiety disorder. Here, go to this psychiatrist, Doctor #2. And don't take so much Ambien."
"Doctor #2, I can't sleep, I worry all the time, and it's wrecking my motivation at work. Oh, and Ambien makes me trip out before I fall asleep." "You have anxiety and depression. Here, take these antidepressants, and these benzodiazepines if you need them, plus these folates and vitamin D ... oh, and replace that Ambien with this Lunesta, and come back every week. And let's talk about the work situation, something's messed up there ..."
Anecdotal, sure; and pretty recent. But I didn't start out with the idea "I'm depressed and should seek antidepressants". I thought I had a sleep disorder, but it turns out our reality doesn't issue time machines for those.
Yes, if the question were "How many people go to a doctor to complain of symptoms of mental illnesses" then sure, a large chunk of the general American population (still don't know if a majority) would qualify.
However recall the context. We started with the question "Have you ever self-diagnosed yourself with a mental disorder?" and are talking about the follow-up to it. Here the question about going to the doctor means mostly "Did you take your self-diagnosis seriously enough to talk to a medic about it?" And, still within this context, the question is much more like "I think I'm mentally ill, is that so?" than "I can't sleep and life is pointless, how do I fix that?"
Are you sure about that?
I don't have data, but my prior is fairly strong.
There are a lot of (temporarily) depressed teenagers, but it's rarely clinical and they rarely go for a formal evaluation to a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist.
How many people, do you think, go to a doctor and say "I think I'm mentally ill"?
Ah, when you phrase it like that I realize that my estimate is rather low. Near vs. Far mode, I guess. Since it's relatively unlikely that someone would do that if they weren't actually mentally ill, and some mental illness is mild enough that one wouldn't bother, and a lot of the severe ones could prevent someone from consulting a doctor on their own, a pretty low proportion of the population seems reasonable.
Does that line up with your reasoning?
edit: I think that part of what was muddling me was that your original phrasing ("talked to a mental health professional about an assessment or a diagnosis") was sort of unclear, so I resorted to nearby heuristics rather than trying to parse it properly. We might want to fix that up before putting it on the survey.
Well, I meant this in the context of being a follow-up to the previous question about self-diagnosis. So it mostly means "Did you take your self-diagnosis seriously enough to go to a doctor?"
Such a question outside of this context needs to be more precisely formulated, I think. As we were discussing with Nornagest, going to a doctor and saying "I can't sleep, life sucks, can you help with that?" is sufficiently common.
I wonder what you think of the question of the origin of consciousness i. e. "Why do we have internal experiences att all?" and "How can any physical process result in an internal/subjective experience?"
I've read some material on the subject before, and reading the quantum physics and identity sequence got me thinking about this again.
My suggestion would be to start with Dennett's Consiousness Explained. It tackles exactly the questions you are interested in, and it is much more entertaining than the average philosophy/neurology book on the topic.
Douglas Hofstadter is the go to, mainstream, "hey I recognize that name" authority, though it obviously should be noted that he is a cognitive scientist, not a biologist, neurologist, or nuero-biologist. So, you couldn't build a brain from reading Godel, Escher, and Bach. The only other material I intimately know that discusses the origin of consciousness is Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden, which, again, is mainstream and pop science. It's fun reading and enjoyable, but you can't build a brain from it. Someone else can probably suggest better sources for more study.
Of course, some components of these questions can be answered by reducing the question to find out more about what you're looking for.
What's the make up of an internal experience? What are its moving parts? How do you build it?
How are subjective experiences not physical processes? If they aren't physical, what are they?
Taboo "internal/subjective experiences." What are you left with to solve? What mechanics remain to be understood?
Since you've read through the quantum physics sequence, I'm sure you've been exposed to these ideas already. I'm not a neuroscientist or a cognitive scientist. I know very little about the brain that wasn't used for blunt symbolism in Neon Genesis or Xenogears. But I'd guess that, whatever mechanism(s) allows for consciousness, it's built using the matter available. No tricks or slight of hand.
Thank you - this is helpful.
Is anyone familiar with any effective-altruist work on pushing humanity towards becoming a spacefaring species? Seems relevant given the likely difference between a civilization that develops it vs. one that doesn't.
I think it might even have negative return. If you do PR in that regard you are going to encourage misallocation of NASA funds. NASA should spend more resources on tracking near-earth objects and less on PR moves like trying to put a man on Mars. Understanding the climate of our own planet better is also an useful target for NASA spending.
Building human civilisation in Alaska is much easier than doing it on Mars. We don't even get things right in Africa where there fertile ground on which plants grow.
Colonizing Mars will need much better biotech and smarter robots than we have at the moment.
.. the obvious E-A answer to this question is "Don't do any pushing". - Increased space presence is a nigh-certain consequence of a more generally prospering and peaceful world, and diverting resources towards pushing this above trend is going to have just awful returns in utility per dollar. Space will happen on it's own accord as people find useful things to do there (I figure telescopes will be the main thing, tbh.) but beyond that? People are already mapping the asteroid trajectories, which is the only issue really directly relevant to E-A work. If the world dies, and a remnant lives on in tincans in space, that is.. not actually very helpful.
But arguably still vastly better than everybody dying, particularly if that tincan civilization can eventually rebuild and recolonize habitable planets.
I've been wondering a lot about whether or not I'm acting rationally with regards to the fact that I will never again be as young as I am now.
So I've been trying to make a list of things I can only do while I'm young, so that I do not regret missing the opportunity later (or at least rationally decided to skip it). I'm 27 so I've already missed a lot of the cliche advice aimed at high school students about to enter college, and I'm already happily engaged so that cuts out some other things.
Any thoughts on opportunities only available at a certain age?
One point, just a nitpick: I would suggest not to aim to act "rationally." Aim to win. I may be assuming overmuch about your intended meaning, but remember, if your goal is to do what is rational rather than to do what is best/right/winning, you'll be confused.
That said, I understand what you mean. There are activities I know can done now, in youth, that, while maybe not impossible in my 40s, 50s, or 60s, would be more difficult.
First, your health. Work out, eat right, stay clean. Do everything that can maximize your health NOW and do it to the utmost that you can. If you start working on your health now, the long term payoffs will be exponential rather than linear. The longer you wait to maximize your health, the greater your disadvantage, the less your payoff. EDIT: (As I have no citation to back this claim up, it'd be best not to take my word on this. I would still suggest not delaying improving your health because doing so will result in benefits now, regardless of whether health improvements are exponential or linear with age.)
Second, try everything. We have a whole article on this that spells it out better than I can. And I'll be the first to admit I haven't dove into its methods full force so I can't vouch for them. But, basically, expose yourself to the world. Not in any mean or gross sense, but as a human being, gathering experience. Go to art classes, go to yoga classes, go to MIRI classes, take karate, learn to dance, learn to sing, play an instrument, learn maths, learn history, go to LW meetups.
Of course, you will be limited, and should be limited, by circumstances. You aren't a brain with infinite capacity yet, so you can't literally do everything. So, focus on a few things at a time. Set a schedule to try out new activities while continuing old, beneficial ones. For example, you might have three days for working out, two days for programming learning (as a hobby), one for online studying, one for social networking. Replace with whatever activities most interest or most benefit you (and don't be afraid of overlap if you want to double up). I live in a place with very little stimulus, so I double up on audiobooks and exercise and use recreational times (gaming or working out) to listen to audiobooks or expose myself to new music. The point is to jump in with both feet and do whatever you do well.
Ultimately, your youth gives you two real things: health (presumably) and energy. Now, I have seen 60 year old men in better shape and with more pep than me (marathon runners!), but for the average, your health and energy will come easier to you now than later. Use it.
[Citation needed]. That doesn't look true to me.
Hmm, fair enough. I made an assumption given my understanding of the body and the effects of age. Since I'm at work and cannot provide a validation for my claim, I'll strike it for the time being. Thank you.
Here's a comment that I posted in a discussion on Eliezer's FB wall a few days back but didn't receive much of a response there, maybe it'll prompt more discussion here:
--
So this reminds me, I've been thinking for a while that VNM utility might be a hopelessly flawed framework for thinking about human value, but I've had difficulties putting this intuition in words. I'm also pretty unfamiliar with the existing literature around VNM utility, so maybe there is already a standard answer to the problem that I've been thinking about. If so, I'd appreciate a pointer to it. But the theory described in the linked paper seems (based on a quick skim) like it's roughly in the same direction as my thoughts, so maybe there's something to them.
Here my stab at trying to describe what I've been thinking: VNM utility implicitly assumes an agent with "self-contained" preferences, and which is trying to maximize the satisfaction of those preferences. By self-contained, I mean that they are not a function of the environment, though they can and do take inputs from the environment. So an agent could certainly have a preference that made him e.g. want to acquire more money if he had less than $5000, and which made him indifferent to money if he had more than that. But this preference would be conceptualized as something internal to the agent, and essentially unchanging.
That doesn't seem to be how human preferences actually work. For example, suppose that John Doe is currently indifferent between whether to study in college A or college B, so he flips a coin to choose. Unbeknownst to him, if he goes to college A he'll end up doing things together with guy A until they fall in love and get monogamously married; if he goes to college B he'll end up doing things with gal B until they fall in love and get monogamously married. It doesn't seem sensible to ask which choice better satisfies his romantic preferences as they are at the time of the coin flip. Rather, the preference for either person develops as a result of their shared life-histories, and both are equally good in terms of intrinsic preference towards someone (though of course one of them could be better or worse at helping John achieve some other set of preferences).
More generally, rather than having stable goal-oriented preferences, it feels like we acquire different goals as a result of being in different environments: these goals may persist for an extended time, or be entirely transient and vanish as soon as we've left the environment.
As an another example, my preference for "what do I want to do with my life" feels like it has changed at least three times today alone: I started the morning with a fiction-writing inspiration that had carried over from the previous day, so I wished that I could spend my life being a fiction writer; then I read some e-mails on a mailing list devoted to educational games and was reminded of how neat such a career might be; and now this post made me think of how interesting and valuable all the FAI philosophy stuff is, and right now I feel like I'd want to just do that. I don't think that I have any stable preference with regard to this question: rather, I could be happy in any career path as long as there were enough influences in my environment that continued to push me towards that career.
It's as Brian Tomasik wrote at http://reducing-suffering.blogspot.fi/2010/04/salience-and-motivation.html :
If this is the case, then it feels like trying to maximize preference satisfaction is an incoherent idea in the first place. If I'm put in environment A, I will have one set of goals; if I'm put in environment B, I will have another set of goals. There might not be any way of constructing a coherent utility function so that we could compare the utility that we obtain from being put in environment A versus environment B, since our goals and preferences can be completely path- and environment-dependent. Extrapolated meta-preferences don't seem to solve this either, because there seems to be no reason to assume that they'd any less stable or self-contained.
I don't know what we could use in place of VNM utility, though. At it feels like the alternate formalism should include the agent's environment/life history in determining its preferences.
What I think is happening is that we're allowed to think of humans as having VNM utility functions ( see also my discussion with Stuart Armstrong ), but the utility function is not constant over time (since we're not introspective recursively modifying AIs that can keep their utility functions stable).
I don't think of things like "what I want to do with my life" as terminal preferences - just instrumental preferences that depend on the niche you find yourself in. Terminal stuff is more likely to be simple/human universal stuff (think Maslow's hierarchy of needs)
I think you'll probably find Kevin Simler's essays on personality interesting, and he does a good job explaining and exploring this idea.
http://www.meltingasphalt.com/personality-the-body-in-society/ http://www.meltingasphalt.com/personality-an-ecosystems-perspective/ http://www.meltingasphalt.com/personality-beyond-social-and-beyond-human/
Thanks, those are good essays. :-)
I also have lots of objections to using VNM utility to model human preferences. (A comment on your example: if you conceive of an agent as accruing value and making decisions over time, to meaningfully apply the VNM framework you need to think of their preferences as being over world-histories, not over world-states, and of their actions as being plans for the rest of time rather than point actions.) I might write a post about this if there's enough interest.
I've always thought of it as preferences over world-histories and I don't see any problem with that. I'd be interested in the post if it covers a problem with that formulation
I would be very interested in that.
Robin Hanson writes about rank linear utility. This formalism asserts that we value options by their rank in a list of options available at any one time, making it impossible to construct a coherent classical utility function.
Yeah, that was my first link in the comment. :-) Still good that you summarized it, though, since not everyone's going to click on the link.
Oops, I frankly did not see the link. The one time I thought I could contribute ...
Well, like I said, it was probably a good thing to post and briefly summarize anyway. If you missed the link, others probably did too.
Anyone else doing the course Functional Programming Principles in Scala ? It started last week, but still should be time to join and get the first assignment done.
OK, I'll try. Signed in, but will look at it deeper on Thursday.
This was the first Coursera course I took! Highly recommended, if anyone's still on the fence.
Looks like when my current job ends (May 31), I'll have the summer free before my next one starts (Sept). My June is pretty much booked with a big writing project with a looming deadline, but I get to decide how to fill July and August, and I'd appreciate crowdsourced suggestions.
I'm lucky enough to not need to find alternate work to cover living expenses for those two months, so I'm not particularly in the market for short-term work suggestions. I'll be based out of D.C. during this period. Not super interested in travel. I'm considering some self-study but I'm not planning to become a programmer.
Here are some of the things I currently have in mind (not highly optimized, the things that occur immediately when I think "What do I want to do this summer?":
What kinds of things am I not thinking of that might be delightful?
Maybe try doing nothing. For some people that would drive them crazy, but for others a month of rest and peacefulness can be life-changing. Try turning off the computer for a month. Take walks. Read a book under a tree. Smell the flowers. Meditate.
Also, I'm not sure if this counts as travel, but Shenandoah is only about 1:30 from DC. Getting a small cabin or a room in a bed and breakfast for a month is not so expensive. Immersing yourself in a more natural, less hectic environment can itself be extremely restorative. And you can even sew / embroider while you're doing it.
I am definitely in the "would drive them crazy" camp. One of the worst vacations I've taken was to St. John with my family. It's a long way to go just to read on the beach rather than read in a park or a library.
I do have Ignatian retreat on my list, though.
I don't know what falls under 'freelance writing', but have you considered writing fiction?
It's a huge time-sink even if you're deliberately trying to improve your speed, but the skills are also surprisingly applicable - modelling your characters in your head isn't dramatically different from modelling other real people, even if you ignore the skills that merely fall under "knowing how to write". I've had a great deal of fun with that, lately.
You don't necessarily need to immediately jump into original fiction, either. Fanfiction is often considered "training wheels", but that doesn't just mean it's easier - well, it is, but it's also much easier to tell if you're getting characterisation right when there's the original work to compare to (and rabid fans to do the comparison), while the usual "benefit" of writing fanfiction (not needing to invent your own setting) can be trivially set aside if you feel like it.
I've written fanfiction, but I've only enjoyed writing fiction with a writing partner, as I did for those two stories. I get very very bored writing things that aren't dialogue.
I'm currently at a magazine for a journo internship, and have done some freelance book/theatre reviews for pay.
If you're planning to link this account to your real world identity, or already have, you might think twice about linking to those writings. Sorry if this was already obvious and considered.
edit: that said, I'm really enjoying APoF :-)
Glad to hear it! I'm traceable to those writings, but not though easy googling. The nice thing about being a writer with daily blog updates is security through obscurity. It's hard to trawl through to find whatever would be the worst thing ;)
(means "American Sign Language" for the curious like me)
According to the principle of enlightened self-interest, you should help other people because this will help you in the long run. I've seen it argued that this is the reason why people have an instinct to help others. I don't think that this would mean helping people the way an Effective Altruist would. It would mean giving the way people instinctually do. You give gifts to friends, give to your community, give to children's hospitals, that sort of thing.
This makes me wonder about what I'm calling enlightened altruism. If you get power from helping people in that way, then you can use the power to help people effectively.
Well, we can use the outside view here. If we look at people who are particularly successful, did they get that way by helping others? What's the proportion relative to poor people?
I don't think this backs up the idea of enlightened self-interest very well. Sure, you have to "play by the rules" to be successful, but going above and beyond doesn't seem to lead to additional success.
Another question we might ask is "where do peoples' instincts for giving come from?" If you believe Dawkins et al., it's the selfishness of genes, which does not have to causally pay of for the organism (instead, the payoff is acausal). This is not the sort of thing where giving according to our instincts will lead to us getting more money.
Survivorship bias alert!
He qualified that by "What's the proportion relative to poor people?" thus not just looking at the survivors.
Imagine a planet with one billion people each of whom has $1000, except the 99,999,990 people who played the lottery and lost and now have $990 each and the 10 people who played the lottery and won and now have $1,000,990 each. 100% of the rich people played the lottery whereas only 10% of the poor people did so, but that doesn't mean playing the lottery was a good idea.