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Open Thread, Jul. 13 - Jul. 19, 2015
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Comments (297)
I was just wondering abou the following: testosterone as a hormone is actually closely linkable to pretty much everything that is culturally considered masculine (muscles, risk-taking i.e. courage, sex drive etc.) and thus it is not wrong to "essentialize" it as the The He Hormone.
However it seems estrogen does not work like that for women: surprisingly, it is NOT linked with many culturally feminine characteristics, and probably should NOT be essentialized as The She Hormone. For example, it crashes during childbirth: i.e it has nothing to do with nurturing, motherhood stuff (if it had, it should peak at birth and gradually drop as children become more self-sufficient, yet it actually peaks in early pregnancy and drops at birth). Given that birth control pills are estrogen, it reduces fertility (at least in those doses) and there is a common report that it reduces libido as well (at least in those doses, again). The primary behavioral effects seem to be a strong desire to be accepted by one's group (see puberty, "teenage girl syndrome", and once I learned it I saw the word "marginalization" in a different light as well) and mood swings (see: early pregnancy). (I should also add I see more and more health-conscious women warning each other about xenoestrogens in food, increasing the risk of ovarian cancer. They are probably not very good for men either (manboobz?) so I think this should be paid attention to in general, I just want to point out how xenoestrogens seem to have no beneficial effects for women which is a bit weird as well.)
So I just want to say it is sort of odd, estrogen does not represent cultural femininity nearly as well as testosterone represents cultural masculinity.
Any good articles or books or personal opinions that shed some light on this?
I should not be surprised that complex human behaviors cannot be reduced to a hormone. But once I was surprised that many popular, symbolical, role-model men in fact often can be, that everything that a Mike Tyson type symbolizes is T, I expected the same...
It actually is not very odd for there to be a difference like this. Given that there are only two sexes, there only needs to be one hormone which is sex determining in that way. Having two in fact could have strange effects of its own.
Sex determination in placental mammals turns out to be really complicated, which is probably why there are so many intersex conditions. It's much simpler in marsupials, which is why male kangaroos don't have nipples. (Where would they keep them?)
If you think it's complicated in placental mammals, it's REALLY fun in zebrafish... all embryos start off building an ovary and dozens of loci all over the genome on autosomes rather than sex chromosomes alter the probability of the ovary spontaneously regressing then transforming into a testis. Immature egg cells are vital to both the process by which it becomes an ovary and by which it becomes a testis. Every breeding pair of zebrafish will produce a unique sex ratio of offspring depending on their genotypes at many loci and what they pass on to their offspring.
I think there's some form of the mind projection fallacy going on here. I think the oddness is a result of expectations based on the principles of culture, instead of the principles of biology.
Introductory texts on cell biology.
You say that sex drive is "male". Then crashing libido would be "female".
This should dissolve any feelings of oddness about this topic.
Woman is the biological default. That's why women have redundancy on the 23rd chromosomal pair, whereas men have a special "Y" chromosome - leading to much higher rates of genetic disorders in men. That's why in infant male humans, the testicles have to descend. And so on. Both from an encoding and from a developmental point of view, a man is a woman altered to be masculine. And testosterone is what does that altering.
Yes, it could have been different. We can imagine a species with a neutral default, which then gets altered to be either masculine or feminine by different sex-encoding hormones. But that's not how humans came about.
I am not convinced that "is the biological default" is a meaningful concept.
If (a) then b else c
is the same thing as if (!a) then c else b
The point is that !a (not testosterone) is just the lack of testosterone, but not the presence of estrogen.
People with full androgen insensitivity syndrome (never responding to androgens produced by gonads) or gonadal dysgenesis of various stripes (gonads fail to develop properly and don't make any hormones) usually wind up more or less externally normally female regardless of the state of their sex-associated karyotypes/genoypes (with the internal plumbing variable depending on the exact reasons for lack of creation of sex hormones). In this way, the pre-pubescent female state is probably the closest thing we have to a default inasmuch as that means anything.
These people do, however, fail to naturally go through most of puberty (a few androgens are usually made by the adrenal glands in everyone regardless of sex but not much) which is an active switch being thrown regardless of sex. As such, the secondary female sex characteristics of sexual maturity are not exactly 'default' themselves in the same way.
Not sure how the following anecdotal observation relates but it seems to me female gender expression is far more fluid. That is, if situation is tough, poverty and all that, and women end up doing hard physical labor and facing similar challenges of deprivation and difficulties, they end up pretty close to becoming tough-guys, even including things like having insults develop into fist-fights.
The opposite does not seem to be true, it is pretty rare that circumstances make men adopt feminine traits, it is more like they either like them on their own or will never pick up.
However the situations are not exactly parallel because any sort of deprivation and difficulty is generating an obvious response to toughen up with moves people naturally towards masculine roles while there is no such similarly compelling force that could force men towards feminine roles.
Or is there? It would be interesting to examine 1) what fathers do if their wives suddenly die, do they manage to simulate the motherly role as well 2) do more or less cis/straight men sometimes adopt gay traits in prisons?
This is a bit of a chaotic comment, I probably need to organize my thoughts better. My thoughts are roughly like, put women into a tough environment and their testosterone goes up and adopt masculine traits. But there is not really such an environment for men that would make their estrogene go up, except xenoestrogens. However it is possible to create testosterone-lowering environments e.g. schools with an anti-competitive ethos.
I don't think that women doing hard physical labour is a consequence of " female gender expression" under certain circumstances. If you need to do physical labour to survive, you do physical labour to survive and gender has nothing to do with it.
As to feminization of men, it's a popular topic (google it up), usually in the context of political correctness / rise of feminism / anti-discrimination policies / SJWs / etc. in the first world countries.
By the way, for feminization you don't need estrogen to go up, all you need is testosterone to go down. And, hey, look, testosterone seems to be decreasing in late XX century...
You could with equal sense (i.e. very little) summarise the same empirical observations as "a woman is an incompletely developed man."
No quite because 'development' at least suggests that the change happens 'later'.
We don't have to imagine. We can look at birds, where the sex chromosomes are the opposite. I haven't looked at them, so I don't know how much is a consequence of the chromosomal structure. But, for some reason, I'm skeptical that most people who pontificate their role have looked either. The points about hormones and development are more reasonable.
Are the opposite? I assumed the XX/XY goes back to the very beginnings of gender i.e. fishes... how comes very different chromosomes can make the same hormones i.e. AFAIK birds do have testosterone?
How come very different organs in mammals can make the same hormones? ie. testes, ovaries, adrenals all make testosterone
They all contain the same genome and can activate the same pathways. Same way that your skin and airways can make histamine as an inflammitory signal while your midbrain makes it as a sleep suppressing neurotransmitter (which is why most antihistamines make you sleepy). Genes and pathways and enzymes are quite often not organ specific.
Birds have a ZZ/ZW system where the male is the homogametic sex.
Yes, birds have testosterone. Mind you, women have testosterone. It's the elevated quantity of testosterone that leads to masculinity.
The sheer number of ways sex can be determined amongst vertebrates is amazing, let alone other animals or microbes (there are fungi with 10,000 'sexes'/mating types...). I will restrict my examples to vertebrates.
As a rule, in most vertebrates (including humans and other organisms in which it is genetically determined) everything needed to make all the biology of both sexes is present in every individual, but a switch needs to be thrown to pick which processes to initiate.
Many reptiles use temperature during a critical developmental period with no sex chromosomes. Many fish too.
The x y system has evolved independently several times, when an allele of a gene or a new gene appears that when it is present reliably leads to maleness regardless of what else is in the genome. For weird population genetic reasons this nucleates an expanding island of DNA that cannot recombine with the homologous chromosome and which is free to degenerate except for sex determining factors and a few male gamete specific genes that migrate there over evolutionary time, until eventually the entire chromosome degenerates and you get a sex chromosome.
The zw system has evolved multiple times, in which the factor present in one sex and leading to a degenerate sex chromosome leads to femaleness.
In species that are hermaphroditic like some fish all this is superfluous.
In many organisms where sex determination is random or temperature based there are still genetic loci that bias the choice of program one way or another, see my recent comment about zebrafish. These traits are kept in balance in the population because the more males there are the less likely any one of them is to successfully reproduce and vice versa.
Biological sex is ancient but the method of picking which program (or both) to follow has changed frequently.
To echo Salemicus, everyone with a normal endocrine system has testosterone/androgens and estrogens (and other sex hormones too) and indeed both are needed for normal puberty in both sexes, but the ratios and absolute levels vary a lot between the two usual patterns. For example, sealing growth plates in bones to establish adult height requires estrogen for males and females, and androgens are required to establish a lot of hair and skin changes.
One interesting thing I have heard is that amongst hyenas females have more androgens, and this is also visible in size, behavior etc. Must be an interesting kind of puberty.
Yep. While having different developmental payhways to making ova and sperm is ancient, pretty much everything else associated with biological sex is potentially mutable over evolutionary time (and even that can revert to hermaphrodite status).
Testosterone is popularly very misunderstood.
This is a bit of a word-game really, the article could use some tabooing. While cooperation and competition are often seen as opposites, in reality any status-competition game has both, because one needs allies to win.
It is really a huge stretch to imply an fair outcome means a cooperative outcome means a cooperative mentality means an anti-competitive mentality.
If we want to interpret the experiment hugging the query as close as possible, we see an attitude of enforcing fairness or more properly standing up to an punishing people if they try to play unfair with you which is very, very close to what we consider traditionally masculine approach and does NOT indicate a non-competitive personality: would we really expect a highly competitive person to gladly accept and take unfair deals? Offer a sucker's deal to a Clint Eastwood type and he will gladly take it? Surely not. What the experiment seems to confirm is that competitive drives can result in cooperative and fair overall outcomes - i.e. a modern version of the Fable of the Bees, it does not suggest that the mentality and approach of guys who rejected unfair offers was not competitive. It is the outcome that was fair and cooperative, not the drive.
It's a gross oversimplification to link testosterone with 'masculinity' in this way. Testosterone is most closely linked with muscle size, bone density, acne, and body hair. All other links you mention seem tenuous and ill-supported by evidence. No link has been established between testosterone level and aggression. A link between risk-taking and testosterone does exist, but as it turns out, both high and low testosterone levels are linked with risk-taking. It's average testosterone levels that display lower risk-taking. Even so, the correlation is small and risk-taking is much more correlated with other chemicals like dopamine levels. As for sex drive, most studies looking at this correlation haven't eliminated the effects of aging and lifestyle changes which are probably more important.
Aggression is one of the less useful terms here and really deserves tabooing, because it is a too broad term, it covers everything from a bit too intense status competition to completely mindless destructivity.
In other words, aggression is not a useful term because it describes behavior largely from the angle of the victim or a peaceful bystander, and does not really predict what the perpetrator really wants. Few people ever simply want to be aggressive. They usually want something else through aggressive behavior.
I would prefer to use terms like competitiveness, dominance and status, they are far more accurate, they describe what people really want. For example, you can see war between tribes and nations as a particularly destructive way to compete for dominance and status, while trade wars and the World Cup being a milder form of competing for status and dominance. This actually predicts human behavior - instead of a concept like aggression which sounds a lot like mindless destructivity, it predicts how men behaved in wars i.e. seeking "glory" and similar status-related concerns.
This formulating is actually far more predictive of what people want and here the link with testosterone is clear, even so much that researchers use T levels as a marker of a compeititive, status-driven behavior, for example when they wanted to test the effects of stereotype threat in women, they had this hypothesis that being told that boys are better at math will only hold back women who have a competitive spirit i.e. want to out-do boys and will not harm women who simply want to be good at it but not comparatively better than others, they used T levels as a marker of such spirit. They say " given that baseline testosterone levels have been shown to be related to status-relevant concerns and behavior in both humans and other animals".
This is the central idea, aggression is not really a good way to formulate it. To see war-waging esp. tribal raids and other typically, classically male behavior as aggressive, while technically correct, it misses the real motivation i..e. competing for status and dominance.
If that is true then it kind of comes back to my original point which is that testosterone level isn't necessarily linked with traits considered traditionally 'masculine'. Certainly aggression is considered masculine, far more so than the more abstract idea of dominance and status-driven behavior, which is considered traditionally 'evil' (although in fiction 'evil' characters tend to be more often male than female, so there's that).
Strange, I think aggression is far too often seen as evil, and dominance and status-driven competition as traditionally masculine but maybe we need to taboo both and use some visual examples. For example, when a boy bullies and tortures a weak kid who cannot fight back, I would call that aggression, but when he seeks to brawl with an opponent who is largely his equal, that is status-seeking, because winning such a brawl brings honor, glory, respect. The first is pretty universally seen as evil, the second maybe stupid but not inherently that wrong.
Many women are intensely status-driven (look at their shopping habits, etc.) and dominance is not uncommon, though usually in a "softer" way.
Very funny. Women begin to compete for status and form alliances at age 4...
That may be more of a group acceptance thing: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mgr/open_thread_jul_13_jul_19_2015/ckda
The stereotypical female shopping habits are high-quantity, mid-quality and low price i.e. hunting for discounts and sales. This is not really a status game. A guy is more likely to have status-oriented clothing habits i.e. have only 5 t-shirts but all of them have Armani Jeans written over them in big letters telegraphing the "I am rich, hate me" message :)
I think what you see as dominance amongst women is more often group acceptance / non-acceptance, i.e. popularity vs. marginalization e.g. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=teenage+girl+syndrome
This is IMHO different. A dominant person wants to have a high rank and if he or she cannot have it then would much rather exit the group and lone-wolf it instead of being a low ranking member. A person who is more interested in group acceptance wants to be a member of the group at all costs and not excluded, not marginalized, does not want to lone-wolf it and accepts a lower rank as long as being accepted inside the group.
So in other words the dominant person will keep asking "Are you dissing me?!" and the group acceptance oriented person will keep asking "Are we still friends?" which is markedly different and the later seems to be more feminine to me.
Don't forget that status signals radically change between social classes.
Lower-middle females indeed shop for a lot of cheap items because the status signal is "I can afford new things" or maybe even "I can afford to buy things".
In the upper-middle class, it's rather about whether you can afford that bag with the magic words "Louis Vuitton" inscribed on it.
And in the upper classes you have to make agonizing decisions about whether to wear a McQueen or a Balenciaga to the Oscars (oh God, but what if there will be other McQueen dresses there?!?!!?)
Or you might go for countersignaling and just release a sex tape X-D
I see no reason to define dominance that way. A dominant person is just one for whom social dominance is a high value and who is willing to spend time, effort, and resources to achieve it. And, of course, it's not either alpha or omega, there is a whole Greek alphabet of ranks in between. Being a beta is fine if there are a lot of gammas, etc. around.
A dominant person doesn't ask questions like this to start with :-) It's a very submissive question.
It's extremely weird to me that you do not consider aggression to be a masculine trait.
However there are many cultural differences in what is considered masculine, hence the problem. A lot of Asian cultures consider risk-taking to be anti-masculine, for instance.
Perhaps I do, the point is that we may define it differently, this is why I am trying to taboo it and focus on more concrete examples. In my vocab aggression is something assymetric - like picking a fight with a weaker, easily terrorized opponent, while picking opponents of roughly equal dangerousness (to prove something) is closer to competitiveness for me. Aggression wants to hurt, competition wants to challenge - although often through hurting.
I think empirically it is. The personality changes in (usually older) men who start taking testosterone (e.g. as injections) are well-documented.
"Competitive spirit" can play out in more than one way. Some people give up when they're told they have no chance of winning, others are motivated to try to do the "impossible".
Yes. The first is more common, the second is what perhaps one may call the dafke spirit.
Most men in war didn't try to seek glory but tried to avoid getting killed and prevent their mates from getting killed.
In a reddit AMA a couple of days ago, someone asked Sam Altman (president of Y Combinator) "How do you think we can best prepare ourselves for the advance of AI in the future? Have you and Elon Musk discussed this topic, by chance?" He replied:
Any guesses on the news?
Announcing that YC accepts a related nonprofit into it's next batch.
Maybe machine learning can give us recommendations for gardening without hurting your back.
"When changing directions turn with the feet, not at thewaist, to avoid a twisting motion."
“Push” rather than “pull” objects.
Depends on your feature extractor. If you have a feature that measures similarity to previously-seen films, then yes. Otherwise, no. If you only have features measuring what each film's about, and people like novel films, then you'll get conservative predictions, but that's not really the same as learning that novelty is good.
Why not take a machine learning class?
I live in South Africa. We don't, as far as I know, have a cryonics facility comparable to, say, Alcor.
What are my options apart from "emigrate and live next to a cryonics facility"?
Also, I'm not sure if I'm misremembering, but I think it was Eliezer that said cryonics isn't really a viable option without an AI powerful enough to reverse the inevitable damage. Here's my second question, with said AI powerful enough to reverse the damage and recreate you, why would cryonics be a necessary step? Wouldn't alternative solutions also be viable? For example, brain scans while alive and then something like the Visible Human Project (body sliced into cross sections) coupled with a copy of your genome. This could perhaps also be supplemented by a daily journal. Surely a powerful enough AI would be able to recreate the human that created those writings using the information provided?
Is it a completely stupid idea?
Cryonics is an ambulance ride through an earthquake zone to the nearest revival facility, The distance is measured in years rather than miles, and the earthquake is the chances of history. The better the preservation, the lower the technology required to revive you, and the sooner you will reach a facility that can do it.
A "powerful enough" AI isn't magic: it cannot recover information that no longer exists. We currently don't know what must be preserved and what is redundant, beyond just "keep the brain, the rest of the body can probably be discarded, but we'll freeze it as well at extra cost if you want."
On a present-day level, the feted accomplishments of Deep Learning suggest to me that setting such algorithms to munch over a person's highly documented life might be enough to enable a more or less plausible simulation of them after death. Plausible enough at least to be offered as a comfort to the bereaved. A market opportunity! Also, fuel for a debate on whether these simulations are people.
You might be able to reconstruct the person's public face, but will have major problems with his private life.
By "highly documented" I had in mind not just the ordinary documentation that prominent public figures get, but someone who has deliberately taken steps to exhaustively record as much as they can, public and private.
I remain sceptical. External observation (something on the life cam lines) still cannot distinguish an hour of thinking about the stars' main sequence from an hour of thinking about cosplay lolis. And diaries have the big problem of self-reflection... not being entirely accurate.
I think you're taking the suggestion a bit more seriously than I intended it. The commercial opportunity only needs the simulation to be good enough to tug at the heartstrings of those who knew the subject. Pictures and mementos are treasured; this would be a step beyond those, a living memorial that you could have a conversation with. It wouldn't work for LessWrongers though. They'd spend all their time trying to break it.
LOL, certainly a fair point :-)
The problem for your commercial opportunity is the uncanny valley, though. Also, people tend to me more interested in virtual girlfriends than in virtual grandpas :-/
I take it our hypothetical system would not simply assume that diaries are accurate records; they would (so to speak) ask the question "how likely is it that any given person would write this diary entry?" which is not at all the same as the question "how well does this diary entry, taken at face value, match the actual life of this person?".
This is a widely discussed topic. See, eg, here: http://mindclones.blogspot.com/?m=1
Can you recommend an article about what is the difference between the simulation of a person vs. "really" reviving a person? Primarily from the angle of: why should I or anyone would consider someone in the future making a plausible simulation of us is good for "us" ? I am really confused about the identity of a person i.e. when is a simulation is really "me" in the sense of me having a self-interest about that situation. I am heavily influenced by Buddhist ideas saying such an identity does not exist, is illusionary. I currently think the closest thing to this is memories, if I exist at all, I exist as something that remembers what happened to this illusion-me. I see this as a difficult philosophical problem and don't know how to relate to it.
Same here. My own attitude is that we do not currently have software for which the question of it being any more conscious than a rock arises, nor any route to making such software. Therefore I am not going to worry about it. While it may be interesting for philosophers, I relate to the problem by ignoring it, or engaging in it no further than as an idle recreation.
Technically, it can of course - through inference. Any information we have recovered about our history - history itself - is all inference used to recover lost information.
Even with successful cryonics, you still end up with a probability distribution over the person's brain wiring matrix - it just has much lower variance, requiring less inference/guesswork to get a 'successful' result (however one defines that).
Agreed with your last paragraph that crossing the uncanny valley will be difficult and there is much room for public backlash. It's so closely related to AI tech that one mostly implies the other.
Sounds like Hollywood image enhancement, where a few blurry pixels are magically transformed into a pin-sharp glossy magazine photograph.
I could point out that if you can infer the information, then by definition it still exists, but the real point here is just how powerful an AI can be and what inferences are possible. Let's say that yesterday I rolled a dice ten times without looking at the result. Can a "powerful enough" AI infer the numbers rolled? Is the best-fit reconstruction of someone's mind, given an atom-by-atom scan a century from now of a body frozen by Alcor today, good enough to be a mind?
This is not real?y true.
When typing the above sentence, I removed a letter and replaced it with a ?. You can probably infer what the originally intended letter was, thus using inference to recover information that did not exist anywhere in your physical locality.
But yes this is a terminology/technicality, and agreed that
Yes and no. A powerful enough AI in the future can recreate many historical path samples (ala monte carlo sim) through our multiverse.
Of course, if the information was just erased and didn't effect anything, then it doesn't matter. It literally can't matter, so the AI doesn't even need to infer/resolve that part of space-time - any specific choice for the die roll is equally as good, as is an unresolved superposition . There may be a connection here to delayed choice quantum eraser experiments.
I imagine that will completely depend on the details of their death, the delay, and the particular tech used by Alcor at the time they were frozen.
That being said, in a century powerful SI seems quite possible/likely. There are huge economies of scale involved in simulations. It is enormously less expensive - in terms of per human reconstruction cost - to do a historical simulation/reconstruction for all of the earth's inhabitants at once.
The SI would use DNA (christendom has done a great job over the millenia at preserving an enormous amount of DNA), historical records, all of the web data from our time that survives, and of course all of the alcore data. It could have the equivalents of billions of historians working out the day by day details of each person's lives before constructing more detailed sims, etc etc. It would be the grand megaengineering project of the future, not some small scale endevour.
With regard to your first question, you could also
A) plan to move to a hospice near a facility when you are near to death
and/or
B) arrange for standby to transfer you after legal death.
Of course, there are many trade-offs involved with either. In my estimation, the most useful thing would be for you to get engaged in a local community and try to push forward on basic research and logistical issues involved, although obviously that is not an easy task.
With regard to your second question, as with everything in cryonics, this has been endlessly discussed. See a good article by Mike Dawrin on the topic here: http://chronopause.com/chronopause.com/index.php/2011/08/11/the-kurzwild-man-in-the-night/index.html
You could start a cryonics facility in South Africa.
It's full of people who can afford to take out a life insurance in the hundreds of thousands of USD range to a cryo facility. /sarcasm
Actually, yes.
EDIT: At least, adjusting the cost for how much a USD gets you in South Africa.
From Omnilibrium:
What is the True Islam?
Are finanicial sector profits primarily reflective of real value created?
Is faster economic growth good for improving long-run outcomes for humanity?
The firing of Tim Hunt - right or wrong?
Political Evolution and the Future of Democracy
What is Omnilibrium? What are these links about? If this comment is a reply to something or making a point, what?
LessWrong offshoot for political discussion.
I strongly disagree with the True Islam post. Definitions are neither true nor false, but useful or not useful. It's extremely useful for Western leaders to define Islam so that ISIS is not part of it.
Whether it is "useful" depends on what purpose you are trying to determine it is useful for. It's obviously useful for certain kinds of Western political rhetoric., but it may be useful for one purpose and harmful for another.
Link from March that apparently hasn't been discussed here: Y-Combinator's Sam Altman thinks AI needs regulation:
“For example, beyond a certain checkpoint, we could require development [to] happen only on airgapped computers, require that self-improving software require human intervention to move forward on each iteration, require that certain parts of the software be subject to third-party code reviews, etc.,”
Sounds sensible.
More recent is his AMA. He answered a question about AI: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3cudmx/i_am_sam_altman_reddit_board_member_and_president/csz46jc
He also wrote some stuff about AI on his blog (which turned out to be very controversial among readers.) I believe this is the source of your article:
http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1
http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-2
Yeah, that quote was mentioned below and put me on a search for statements by Altman to this end.
Good books on economics, investing?
Are there equivalent books to "Probability theory, the logic of science" and/or "The Feynman lectures on Physics" in economics or investing?
Who are the great authors of these fields?
Obligatory link to The Best Textbook on Every Subject.
I'm told that Mas-Colell's book is the classic on microeconomics (provided you have the mathematical prerequisites), although this recommendation is second-hand since it's still on my to-read list.
I haven't read Feyman's lectures on physics, but if it's "someone really good at this explains how he thinks in an intuitive way", then Warren Buffet's letters to shareholders are an equivalent in investing.
Not necessarily the best, but a good one and immediately accessible: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_ToC.html
One-Minute Time Machine -- a short romantic movie that LW readers might like.
Excellent! I don't share the guy's qualms, though. The girl I can empathize with. Oh, and hopefully Eitan_Zohar doesn't come across it.
What are your thoughts on this AI failure mode: Assume an AI works by rewarding itself when it improves its model of the world (which is roughly Schmidhuber’s curiosity-driven reinforcement learning approach to AI), however, the AI figures out that it can also receive reward if it turns this sort of learning on its head: Instead of changing a model to make it better fit the world, the AI starts changing the world to make it better fit its model.
Has this been considered before? Can we see this occurring in natural intelligence?
Isn't it basically the definition of agency? Steering the world state toward the one you want?
It would be a form of agency but probably not the definition of it. In the curiosity-driven approach the agent is thought to choose actions such that it can gain reward form learning new things about the world, thereby compressing the knowledge about the world more (possibly overlooking that the reward could also be gained from making the world better fit the current model of it).
The best illustrating example I can think of right now is an AI that falsely assumes that the Earth is spherical and it decides to flatten the equator instead of updating its model.
The problem is that in this specific case "the world state you want" is more or less defined as something that is easy to model (because you are rewarded when your models for the world), which may give you incentives to destroy exceptional complicated things... such as life.
One might call this 'cleaning' or 'homogenizing' the world; instead of trying to get better at predicting the variation, you try to reduce the variation so that prediction is easier.
I don't think I've seen much mathematical work on this, and very little that discusses it as an AI failure mode. Most of the discussions I see of it as a failure mode have to do with markets, globalization, agriculture, and pandemic risk.
17/7 - Update: Thank you to everyone for their assistance. Here is a re-worked version of Father. It is unlisted, for testing purposes. If one happens to comes across this post, please consider giving feedback regarding how long it captures your attention.
In the interests of privacy, please excuse the specialised account and lack of identifying personal information.
A bit of background: recently created a YouTube channel for the dual purposes of creating an online repository of works that can easily be hyperlinked, and establishing an alternative source of income. The channel is intended to be humorous, though neither speciously nor vituperatively so. One aim of posting this here is to see whether the humour is agreeable to elements of the LW community.
Another is to ask for advice. After a few days utilising Google's AdWords to generate views on one of the videos, of the 600 views received, not a single one engaged with the video beyond merely watching it. All the low-hanging fruit - enticing the viewer to engage by liking, subscribing, etc. has been plucked. One question is whether these requests for engagement are too subtle; perhaps erring on the side of not trying to annoy viewers has led to missed opportunities? The prospect for channel growth seems bleak in light of the above statistic.
Social media marketing, in the form of reddit, Twitter, and Pinterest have not yielded any subscribers. Word of mouth has yielded positive feedback, but no engagement outside of personal acquaintances. If the advice received here does not help, the next step is to create an account on a YouTube specific forum asking for assistance.
Are there obvious avenues for marketing being overlooked, here? Is there an obvious demographic or audience that would most enjoy these videos? Outside perspective is needed, and the dearth of feedback from strangers - both positive and negative - does not offer much indication of how to do things differently. Thank you for your time.
You fail to say what the videos are about. That's bad for any venue that you want to market.
The two longer videos somewhat rely on the unexpected for their laughs; working around that, here are descriptions of each video. Do you think the descriptions would help engage viewers?
Father: A son, apart from his father for many years, returns home to his father's mansion to restore the intimacy of their relationship. As context, imagine you told your father to listen to this for Father's Day, for this was their present.
Documentary: A satire of serious public radio news stations: the modern expectations parents have of their children is taken to a logical and absurd extreme.
Donerly: A parody of the character and substance of reality television programming. Donerly is a vulgar figure, prone to foul language - be advised.
Silly Things: Mini-parodies of the common types of voice overs. These are, in order: sales; promotions; quickly relating terms of service; avant-garde marketing; IVR; two normal people like you having a conversation; and a jingle that isn't selling what you were expecting.
You don't articulate a purpose.
If your goal is to make money, starting a comedy youtube channel doesn't seem to be the obvious choice. There's lot's of competition and little money.
Making money would be amazing, but is not the primary goal. These files will be made regardless of whether there is a YouTube channel hosting them, and YouTube seems the ideal platform with which to achieve the secondary goal of monetising the files.
The bare minimum purpose is to have work that can be hyperlinked. That bare minimum has already been met. However, seeing a video with very few views, or many views and few likes, does not signal positive things. It would be wonderful to be able to hyperlink these files in contexts where sending a positive signal is a necessity.
Spare time is being spent to market and try to monetise the files; ideally, this effort will result in a moderately sized audience that likes the files. These are the goals of the project. If you have more promising ideas, please share them.
Why? What your purpose for creating them?
Fun.
Eh, it's not my kind of humor. I found all those videos totally unfunny, so I just clicked on them, listened for 5 seconds, and closed the page. So the first question is whether my reaction is typical or not. Can you measure how many of those people who clicked on video watched it till the end? Because only those are your audience. And if they are your personal acquaintances, there is still a risk they wouldn't watch the whole video otherwise.
I believe there is a niche for any kind of product, but the question is how to find it. Perhaps you could find similar videos and see how they do it.
Your reaction is typical. There is an 18% view rate for 75% of the 'Documentary'; only 8% watch the whole thing. Even those that watched the whole video did not engage with the channel, or watch other videos. Thank you for the feedback!
The only similar channel is OwnagePranks, which has images of characters, and animated subtitles. The latter is infeasible, while the former is a promising indication of a needed change.
My 5 second judgement, which is about as much attention as a totally unknown channel can expect to get, is that these videos are stand-up comedy by somebody without the confidence to perform live in front of an audience. This immediately signals that it's not worth my time.
Which video did you watch? And do you know how could that impression be averted, at least from a personal perspective? Thank you for the feedback.
You're giving me no relatable subject I could be interested in, nothing pretty to look at and no music. Literally the only hint that lets me expect anything good from this channel is the word "Comedy" in the title. And when you fail to give me a good joke in the first 5 seconds, my expectation for funniness from the rest of the video goes way down. This means no expectation to be entertained is left, so I leave.
Your voice is good though, and the sound quality is fine.
Minor points: You talk too slowly, except in your first video. Your channel banner is repulsive. The visualizations you use are both ugly and getting worse; the newest one is downright painful to look at. (Seriously, an unmoving image would do less harm.)
If you show your face and drop a quick one-liner right at the beginning and talk a bit faster, this might be going places, otherwise I don't think you have a chance to be talked about for this, let alone make money.
EDIT: Here's an example video incorporating a few of the ideas you suggested.
Pretty things: A fairly static visualisation, basically a four pointed blue star that very slowly rotates, could be used as a standard replacement for every video. Would you suggest that, a similar option, or one of the following: an image of nature that may not fit the theme of the video, crudely drawn images of one thing that do not change, crudely drawn images of characters that change infrequently if at all?
Music: Do you suggest inserting background music into the audio files? If so, should the music be opposite the tone of the file (e.g. happy-go-lucky music to the Documentary), or match the tone?
Thank you.
What video do you mean by, 'first'? Father, or Donerly?
Banner: Is this better? Or is the font the main issue? If the latter, what attribute would you recommend in a better font - more rounded letters, blockier letters, more Gothic letters, more elongated letters?
One-liner: This sounds a very good idea. Will it work without showing a face?
Relatable subjects: See the comment to Christian for descriptions of the audio files. Would including those descriptions in the in static image, and/or the description box below, keep you listening?
Apologies for the onslaught of questions; you are in no way obligated to answer any of them, and thank you for the above feedback.
This new example video is much better. If I wasn't invested in watching it in order to assist you, I would have clicked away from it after about 45 seconds rather than 5, and then mostly because of your pausing speech. (Many YouTube creators cut out every single inbreath, and I suggest you try that.) The music made a surprising amount of positive difference, and I actually like the picture a bit - I hope you have rights to use both?
Of the visualization options you name, I figure a nature image, possibly with a textual description, is the least bad option. But really, not showing your face cuts down your appeal by at least 90%. As long as you don't do that, your problem isn't in the marketing, it's in the product.
I'm not suggesting background music, although it evidently helps. I'm saying that when I watch videos, expecting to hear enjoyable music is frequently my main motivation. And since almost all of the most-viewed videos are music videos, that's obviously a common motivation. Your video is not adressing that motivation, and background music is unlikely to change that. Nor is it adressing the common motivations for personal connection, interesting or actionable information, or something pretty to look at. You could get at the personal connection bit if you made jokes about (what you claim to be) true stories from your personal life and - did I say that already? - show your face.
To me, your banner looks simply cheap. It signals you're not committed to making me have a good time. Yes the clouds help a bit, but I'm sure you could do much better.
A one-liner (or better yet, three good jokes in the first 20 seconds to build up expected entertainment value for the rest of the video, and keep me watching) will help even without a face. A face would help more. Compare this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHczVzGfyqQ . The guy isn't conventionally pretty, and the video is clearly not about visuals, but still, he wouldn't have gotten over 300K views with a goddamn static visualisation.
And yes, people will make stupid hurtful comments about your face, even if you're the sexiest person on the planet. Growing to tolerate that is one of the best reasons to make videos.
Descriptions will occasionally make me invest a couple more seconds in a video, i.e. make me give it a couple more opportunities to get me hooked.
Edit: Here's Father with an animated face and a one-liner in the beginning. Thoughts?
Can't find rights information for the image, and the music is royalty-free. Will endeavour to minimise the pauses in the future. How much of the difference was due to content, would you say?
If that is the least bad option, then barring showing a face, what would you say is an actually good option?
Face: Attractiveness and confidence are non-issues, but still can't show a face. The true objection is for reasons of privacy; one of those reasons is a negative impact upon professional life. On the plus side, upon achieving a sizeable audience, that reason no longer applies. At that point, a face may be able to be shown.
Here's the only other channel with similar content that does not show a face. They keep viewers engaged with animated subtitles that take a month to produce. If you watch Father with subtitles on, is your interest held better?
Will make a new banner. Was going for a homey, casual vibe; still want that vibe, but will make it look more produced.
How about this as a slate / one-liner example?
Something you could do, alternatively, is use software like facerig, assuming you have a webcam. It would work fairly effectively, I think, and is comedic enough in its own right to go along with your show.
That is excellent, thank you. Do you think a mobile PC with an Intel® Core™ 2 Duo @ 2.8GHz and an ATI Mobility Radeon 4650 can handle the minimum specs of Intel® Core™ i3-3220 or equivalent and NVIDIA GeForce GT220 or equivalent?
I've no clue myself. My minimal expertise in computer specs is 5 years old; the last time I payed attention to them was when I built my current computer (and even then with parts recommended by a friend). However, I've long since delegated figuring out if my computer can run something to Can You Run It. It functions fairly effectively in checking that sort of thing.
I listened to about three minutes of the one about the narrator's father. The humor wasn't to my taste-- a sort of silliness that just didn't work.
I see you were trying not to be annoying, but I wasn't crazy about the unclear context (was this a video game, a dream, or what?), the weird voices, and the narrator's fear of his father.. My tentative suggestion is that you go for being as annoying as you feel like being, and see whether you can attract an audience who isn't me.
Thank you for listening. There wasn't really any context beyond 'son returns to Father's mansion', and the matrimonial surprise revealed during his speech.
Would perhaps a static image in the background with text stating the above have helped?
You're welcome.
An image wouldn't have helped-- my problem was with the monologue.
It has been reported, that a 5 quarks particle has been produced/spotted in LHC CERN.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33517492
I am very happy, that this apparently isn't a strange matter particle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_matter
At least not of a dangerous kind. For now, at least.
So, I hope it will continue, without a major malfunction on the global (cosmic) scale.
Nothing terrible was going to happen. As has been pointed out, collisions that energetic or more happen all the time in the upper atmosphere.
Energetic perhaps. But as dense also?
These things are only about 4 GeV (4 times heavier than a proton, much lighter than the Higgs boson, much smaller than the energies in the LHC, an extremely easy energy for cosmic rays to reach). Neither energy nor density are keeping us safe if these things are dangerous - the LHC just detected them by making lots of them and having really good sensitivity.
Iranian leaders regularly chant "Death to America" and yet the United States seems to be on course to letting Iran acquire atomic weapons even though we currently have the capacity to destroy Iran's military and industrial capacity at a tiny cost to ourselves.
Iranians chant "death to America" because of America's past abuses, such as overthrowing the democratic government of Mohammad Mosaddegh to install the dictatorship of the Shah of Iran and supporting Saddam Hussein's bloody war of aggression against Iran (hundreds of thousands of Iranians died.) This included direct support for Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons programs. It's ridiculous to frame this as Iranian "mad dogs" vs. innocent Americans. They have every reason to fear foreign aggression. For example, this and this.
Attacking Iran again would simply be continuing the pattern of violent aggression the US has established in the Middle East for decades.
I didn't mean to frame this as " Iranian "mad dogs" vs. innocent Americans." Rather, for reasons another nation hates my nation, and my nation seems willing to let this other nation acquire atomic weapons.
I remember some U.S. general (I think) saying that the great tragedy of the Iran/Iraq war was that someday it will end.
Downvoted for mindlessly regurgitating a pile of propaganda onto LW.
Upvoted for happening to be true.
LOL. I'm not going to play "burn out the heresy with my karma flamethrower", but you might want to step back from the tribal fight and think about what "true" actually means in this context.
Note: that downvote is not mine.
This is a bit of a suspicious summary to me, because it sounds exactly like the summary from the angle of a highly educated, perhaps pol sci grad left-leaning highly critical American. Is it really likely that average guy in Iran really has the same perspective? Or their leaders? You simply don't seem to be making any effort to simulate their minds.
To give you one example of the lack of simulation here: too long memory. Mossadegh, really? 1953? That is what some guy born in 1970 or 80 will riot about? You have to be half a historian and full of a high-brown person to care what happened in 1953. For comparison, for most people who shot Kennedy and why is ancient history and that was 10 years later, in a country with far better collective memory than Iran (more books published, more media made etc.) If it turns out today the Russkies did it somehow, how many Americans will get angry? My prediction: not many.
That's an awesome typo :-D
A nation's memory is limited, and too many things have happened in the U.S. since Kennedy's death. Bolivia is still sore from losing its coast to Chile in 1884, because not much has happened to Bolivians afterwards.
Are you really arguing that not that much happened in Iran since 1953??
Much indeed, but instead of being varied and fleeting, the events that followed were directly related to 1953 and served to reinforce that memory. The fact that the U.S. has steadily kept ruining the lives of Iran's neighbors doesn't help, either.
So, the Islamic Revolution was directly related to 1953? As was the Iraq-Iran war?
Let's look at Iran's neighbors. There's Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, which all are doing just fine. There's Turkey, which is just fine as well. There are some former Russian republics which are a mess, but for that you have to talk to Mr.Putin. There is Afghanistan which has been a mess since the Russian invasion (or, arguably, since the British Empire's Great Game) and while the US has certainly been involved, I don't think you can blame it for Afghanistan being what it is. There's Pakistan which is not the best of countries but is still managing to muddle through and even acquire nuclear weapons in the process.
So I guess all you mean is Iraq. Same Iraq which you agreed was supported by the US in "the bloody war of aggression against Iran"? But yes, you have a valid point in that the Second Iraq war was started on the pretext of preventing Iraq from developing weapons of mass destruction. Iran certainly took notice and, I suspect, came to the conclusion that a deterrent against a conventional US invasion would be a very useful thing to have.
I think you just undermined your own argument that Iran doesn't want nukes :-)
Yes, the whole point of the revolution was to remove the U.S.-appointed monarch and reverse the pro-Western trend he had started. And then Iraq invaded Iran because it was afraid the revolution would spread.
Just one year after the revolution, Jimmy Carter proclaimed that the Persian Gulf was the U.S.'s personal playground, and no one (else) was allowed to mess with it. Bush I and Bush II acted accordingly. Even the continued goodwill toward Saudi Arabia is a cause of worry for Iran, as they're sectarian rivals. And then there's Israel, which is viewed as a representative of U.S. interests against Muslim populations.
The Second Iraq war was started on the pretext that Iraq already had WMDs. For Iran, having them isn't going to stop a U.S. invasion.
Sigh. OK, we live in different universes. I wish you luck in yours.
He needs less luck than you since his contains the President of the United States and most of academia.
You really are in your own delusional universe if you think the revolution had nothing to do with removing the foreign-imposed dictator.
More media doesn't mean better collective memory. Iranian children are taught their history in school.
Western culture focuses more on the short term, than more traditional cultures do.
I'm actually more of a conservative than liberal but I think anyone acquainted with the facts and making a good-faith effort not to see Iranians as Evil Mutants should come to the same conclusions. The US media essentially never mentions these facts and even when they do they treat each as an isolated incident rather than part of a consistent pattern which explains the attitude many Iranians have toward the US. I learned these things from being active in the US antiwar movement for the last 10 years or so.
First of all they aren't rioting; they're protesting. It would be one thing if the US had acknowledged the wrongness of this action and apologized for it. To the best of my knowledge this has never happened. And don't forget that the Shah was imposed by the US and reigned until 1979! That isn't exactly ancient history. There are many people presently alive who fully remember the Iran-Iraq war and the Shah's dictatorship.
That's very different. The government wasn't replaced when JFK died; his vice president (who largely continued his policies) was made president. Very little changed for most Americans. Furthermore the Soviet Union no longer exists, whereas the US government continues to behave in a very similar, heavy handed way in the Middle East as it did in the 1950s. The difference is instead of dictatorships, the US tends to create anarchy and long-term civil war.
Here is a counter-example for you. I am well acquained with the facts and I do not see Iranians as Evil Mutants (well, not any more than I see Americans as such :-P). I do not come to the same conclusions as you, obviously.
What conclusions have you arrived at? Do you think some statements mentioned are incorrect or do you think that something else (e.g. role of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi himself and other people within Iran itself, or ideology of Iranian Revolution and role of people like Ali Shariati, or role of contemporary events in neighbouring countries or something else entirely) should be more emphasized?
What exactly is the question here?
In the comments above I was mostly pushing against the leftist view of geopolitics which sets up the US as Evil Mutants intent on oppressing the rest of the world (in the Middle East together with their lapdog / puppet Israel), while anyone opposed to the US is a victim with legitimate grievances and if they have the "Death to America" attitude it is justified.
There is a difference between one-off events and events that fall into a certain pattern and narrative. The latter are often remembered as being an example of events that fall into that narrative. In my impression Kennedy's assassination, despite all conspiracy theories surrounding it, is rarely thought of as being a part of a bigger narrative.
Both all of your statements and those of James_Miller can be true without contradicting each other.
Regardless of how modern Iran came to be or who is to blame, you seem to agree that the Iranian public is quite hostile to the U.S.
I don't worry about this too much, because I assume that the CIA/DOD/whoever have determined that we can live with a nuke powered Iran, even if they hate us.
Are you confused as to why politicians would repeat a phrase that reliably energizes their political base even though it may not represent reality completely accurately?
In general, no. But I take the chant as evidence that lots of people in Iran would be happy if an atomic bomb went off in New York City. If someone says he wants to kill me, I raise my estimate of the likelihood of him wanting to kill me. If he says it over and over again to his cheering friends, I fear him and want him to be weak even if in the past I have given him justifiable cause for offense. I become really, really scared and desperate if I think he would be willing to kill me even at the cost of giving up his own life. I wish my president shared this view.
I think the issue is how seriously do you want to take that phrase.
For example, a few years ago when Putin was talking about gathering all the Russians under the protective wings of Mother Russia, most people interpreted this as a "phrase that reliably energizes [his] political base". And then Ukraine happened.
I think you're underestimating Iran's defences.
At the present time, with Natanz's plant fully bunkered, there's no way to disable it and the couple of other support plants with a surgical attack. If you want to disable Iran's nuclear capacity (not even considering its military or industrial facilities) you need to go heavy tactical or nuclear, which will mean full scale war (ugliness ensues).
Besides, international sanctions were much more effective at destroying Iran's economy, which is the only reason why they accepted the terms under the present treaty.
The current deal will lift international sanctions. The Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb might be able to destroy any of Iran's nuclear plants.
I think you underrate the cost of destroying Iran's industrial capacity. It costs more than just the bombs. It likely will result in Russia deploying more troops in Ukraine and issues in a variety of other conflicts.
I think it cuts the other way, and we will have more additional conflicts if the United States allows Iran to acquire atomic weapons. I don't see how it will be in Russia's self-interest to put more troops in Ukraine if the U.S. attacks Iran.
Moral capital has value. It would create a situation in which European powers are a lot less likely to do anything about Ukraine.
Bombing in a way that targeted to do industrial damage might even tipp the scales in a way that the value of US military bases on EU soil get's more questionable.
Europe acts out of self-interest in opposing Russian actions in Ukraine. Europe will be less likely to act if they perceive the U.S. being unwilling to use force against its enemies because it makes us a less reliable friend. I see the current deal as a U.S. betrayal of Israel and think other U.S. allies will interpret it likewise. The Baltic states will figure that if the U.S. isn't willing to stand up to Iran, it certainly won't protect them from Russia so they will be far less likely to anger Russia. Please keep in mind how Sweden reacted when Hitler requested access to Swedish territory to help with his invasion of Norway.
I think you are very wrong if you think that unilateral usage of force against international law (which a specific attack targeted on destroying industry clearly is) will make the US seem reliable to European nations.
Israel prefers to have a weak Iran with little influence in other states in the middle East. Sanction weaken Iran regardles of the subject of nuclear missles.
Given Sunni ISIS there are advantages of a stronger Shia Iran.
There are no treaty obligations at all in which the US promised to attack Iran for Israel. I don't see how it could be betrayal.
You mean like the US is also wanting to request to use Swedish territory to have military bases (Sweden currently not being a NATO country)? In Germany US military bases currently enaging in economic spying. The NSA even spied on the German ministry of agriculture.
I think you make a mistake of modeling countries as single actors when politics is much more complicated and there are a lot of forces within countries pushing against each other.
As if Putin needed help finding an excuse to meddle in Ukraine.
This deal doesn't give Iran a path to the bomb. The whole process is to be closely supervised. More importantly, Iran doesn't want the bomb. It would be suicidal for them to invite a hundredfold-larger U.S. arsenal.
How do you know?
For example.
I am not impressed by the opinion of this guy, mostly because he states obviously false things as if they were facts. Notably:
"A handful of bombs doesn’t help as long as Iran is surrounded by bombs". That is not true at all, a nuclear weapon is a highly useful deterrent, especially against conventional attacks. Ask Kim Jong-un about it.
"Iran would cease to exist only twenty minutes after having carried out a nuclear attack on Israel". Is there any evidence that the US stands ready to launch a nuclear attack (in 20 minutes!) against a country that would drop a nuke on Israel? Not to mention that the way Iran is likely to nuke Israel is via their Hezbollah proxy.
The whole strawman premise there seems to be that Iran wants to do some kind of nuclear-brinkmanship new Cold War with the US. This is utter nonsense, of course. Iran does want nuclear weapons, but not for launching at the US.
Whether or not the US is willing to launch nukes, Israel has submaries that carry nuclear weapons and that likely would retaliate with them in case Israel get's nuked.
Not "has", but "is in the process of acquiring". I suspect that has much to do with the nuclear weapons that Iran does not want and is not building X-/
Besides, the easiest way to nuke Israel looks like this: a rusty freighter under the Panamian flag arrives into Tel Aviv. One minute after it docks, Tel Aviv is a radioactive crater. That's all the information you have -- what next, do you order a nuclear launch on Tehran? On which basis?
And, of course, a few nukes will not make a large country like Iran "cease to exist". Look at Japan.
Israel has at least 3 submaries capable of carrying nuclear weapons: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/israel-deploys-nuclear-weapons-on-german-submarines-a-836671.html
I would guess that Israel has protocols for direct nuclear answers.
There are the old Dolphins and the new Dolphins, they are very different. It is the new Dolphins which are supposed to have the second-strike nuclear capability and Israel just got the first one in the series. See e.g. here.
I am sure it has. But the situation when you tracked a long-range bomber from Iranian airspace and that bomber dropped a nuke is very different from the situation when a nuke just exploded in a city and you have no idea how that happened or who is responsible.
NTI cites a 1999 Jane's report saying that the old Dolphins carried nuclear missiles. (And the 1999 ship may well have been specified in 1989.)
Especially if Iran announces that should we be hit in retaliation, we will use all of our (remaining) nuclear weapons.
Yes,and think what happens to economic investment in Tel Aviv if people in a nuclear-armed Iran hint that they might do this.
I was under the impression that the true deterrent there was hardened and decentralized conventional artillery able to do significant damage to Seoul, since we're pretty sure North Korean nukes will work as well as their cure for MERS, Ebola, and AIDS.
Ideally you want multiple deterrents, of course.
As to the chances of the nuke working, well, you gotta ask yourself, do you feel lucky, punk? X-/
Edited to add: We are discussing here whether Iran wants nukes. Therefore what is relevant is that the Kims wanted nukes, even though they had the artillery-can-reach-Seoul deterrent already.
Israel has its own very sophisticated nuclear arsenal. US participation would not be needed.
From what I understand, if the U.S. suspects Iran of cheating we have to wait at least 24 days and get the approval of other nations before we can inspect anything. Closely supervised, NO. Once Iran has an atomic weapon and the ability to hit a U.S. allied city with it, Iran wins immunity from U.S. attacks, unless it strike us first.
Wouldn't any early limited nuke capabilities of Iran be unlikely to get past our missile defense? From my understanding our current defense systems could not withstand say a full-scale russian assault, but they are fairly capable in defending against limited strikes from smaller powers.
Not if they smuggle the bomb into the United States.
Someone seems to have downvoted nearly ever comment to my top post.
I think someone disapproves of political discussions on LW and is willing to karma-hose all participants in such.
I agree with them. this is very specific of a political discussion, not a political philosophy one. Don't like it taking place here
There is a bit of a difference between disliking a particular discussion on a forum and mass-downvoting all participants.
Sorry, let me clarify, I agree that this place is not for politics, but a simple downvote on the top post, and a post describing that would have been fine. no need to downvote all sub-posts.
Is it worth it to learn a second language for the cognitive benefits? I've seen a few puff pieces about how a second language can help your brain, but how solid is the research?
Quality observational research is probably very difficult to do since you can't properly control for indirect cognitive benefits you get from learning a second language and I'd take any results with a grain of salt. You also can't properly control for confounding factors e.g. reasons for learning a second language. I think you'd need experimental research with randomization to several languages and this would be very costly and possibly inethical to set up.
I have without a question gotten a huge boost from learning English since there aren't enough texts in my native language about psychology, cognitive science and medicine that happen to be my main interests. My native language also lacks the vocabulary to deal with those subjects efficiently. I have also learned several memory techniques and done cognitive tests and training solely because of being fluent in English.
You just need to have an area where different schools have different curriculums and there a lottery mechanism for deciding which student goes to which school.
That deals with the costs but I doubt consent would be easy to obtain unless the schools are very uniform in quality/status and people don't have preferences about which languages to learn, hence the possible problem with ethics. Schools have preferences too, quality schools want quality students.
There are multiple ways you can solve the problem of who gets to go to the most desired school. You can do it via tuition fees and let money decide who goes to the best school. You can do tests to have the best students go to the best school. You can also do random assignments.
Neither of those are "better" from an ethical perspective.
If you let money decide or do tests you lose the statistical benefits of randomization. I don't understand how you see no ethical problem in ignoring preferences or not matching best students with best schools, perhaps I misunderstand you.
Yes of course, you need the randomization.
If you want an equal society that it's impotant that poor students also get good teachers.
LOL
Quote:
I thought the trolley experiment didn't actually have a known best-case solution? I thought the point of it was to state that one human life is not always worth less than N other human lives. Where N>0.
Confused as to why we are evaluating a "test" for the test's sake, and complaining about the test results when the only point of it was to make an analogy to real life weights.
There is no "solution", but the point of the study is "substantial framing effects and order effects", that is, people gave different answers depending on how the same question was framed or what preceded it.
I experienced a discussion on facebook a few months ago where someone tried to calmly have a discussion, of course it being facebook it failed, but I am interested in the idea, and wanted to see if it can be carried out here calmly, knowing it is potentially of controversy. I first automatically felt negative to the discussion but then I system-2'd it and realised I don't know what the answers might be:
The historic basis of relationships was for procreation and child rearing purposes. In the future I expect that to not be the case. either with designer-babies, or just plenty of non-natural birthing solutions as to make the next generation make-able without needing to go through a regular-family structure.
At that time, the potential for intra-family sexual relations would be possible and not at all whatsoever biologically-risky of causing genetic abnormalities.
How will the world's opinion change about intra-family intra-relations in the future?
Potentially anyone consenting could have sexual encounters with anyone else who is also consenting. However there are existing relationships where one party carries the power - i.e. parent-child, where even if the child is above consenting age (even as far as 10+ years above the age of consent) there can still be power held by the parent over the child.
That was the only point of value before the thread turned to a mush-zone.
Of course there already exist normal relationships with power imbalances. And as was mentioned a few days ago here - an abusive relationship sucks if its from an AI to you, or from a human partner to you.
Any thoughts?
(Edit: inter -> intra, Thanks @Artaxerxes)
The big phrase to keep in mind for incest is "conflict of interest". We are expected to keep certain kinds of social relations with our relatives. Also having romantic and sexual relationships conflicts with those.
Furthermore, because there is a natural tendency for humans to be less attracted to close relatives than to others, it is in practice very likely that a sexual/romantic relationship with a close relative will be dysfunctional in other ways--so likely that we may be better off just outlawing them period even if they are not necessarily dysfunctional.
I am of the opinion that I am "of similar brain" genetically and phenotypically and equally theoretically "of similar mind" to people who are related to me. Therefore able to get along with them better. When looking for partners today, I look for people "of similar mind", or at least I feel like its a criteria of mine.
Do you have a source for "natural tendency for humans to be less attracted to close relatives than to others"? I am interested.
One mechanism is the MHC complex
There are other mechanism that prevent siblings that lived together as children from developing romantic interest in each other as well. As a result most cases of incest between siblings are not by siblings that lived together as children.
That has impressive applications on why foreigners or "exotic" people have a bonus placed on them for desirability. I must say I did know about MHC mechanism, and the studies done on birds, but not the human one. Also I did not connect the two.
Thanks!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect
Thanks! I am not sure how my knowledge of the universe had a hole in this specific space.
I don't see any moral reason why this should not happen, aside from deontological. It's possible to make the case that you would be more likely to end up in a dsyfunctional relationship, but it's possible to make the opposite case too - you have a much better idea of what the person is REALLY like before entering into a relationship with them, so you're less likely to enter into a relationship if you're incompatible.
I think this is one of those "gay marriage 50 years ago" things. People are going to come up with all sorts of excuses why it's wrong, simply because they're not comfortable with it.
That's partway where the original discussion was going.
if only that were true for all people who enter relationships.
(rational relationships is a recent pet topic of mine)
I would apply the rule that I apply to polyamory - there are ways to do it wrong, and ways to do it less wrong. I do wonder if it has an inherent wrongness risk to it, but people probably implied that about being gay 50 years ago...
Isn't this a fully general explanation for anything at all?
It could be, for anything that people aren't comfortable with. This isn't in any way a rebuttal to arguments - it's an explanation for bad/non-arguments.
In the absence of a singularity, I would not expect this to become widely accepted within my lifetime. I'd say polyamory is the next type of relation likely to become tolerated and that is still at least ten years off. Incest is probably only slightly less despised than pedophilia, but I've seen pedophilia frequently equated with murder, so that's not saying much. Bestiality is probably the least likely thing I'd expect to become accepted. None of these three are going to happen within a timeframe I'd feel comfortable making predictions about, but never is a really long time so who knows.
yes, obviously the singularity changes everything.
Not true at all. Nobody takes up a pitchfork when they hear about incest.
Wouldn't "inter-family" be between different families? I'm not sure, but "intra-family" makes more sense to me, if you're trying to refer to incestuous relationships. A quick google search suggests the same.
I'm not sure what society will do, but I don't see anything wrong with incest or incestuous relationships in general, and don't believe that they should be illegal. That's not to say that incestuous relationships can't have something wrong with them, but from what I can tell, incestuous relationships that have something wrong with them are due to reasons separate to the fact that they are incestuous (paedophilic, abusive, power imbalance, whatever).
Thanks for this. I believe, based on the responses that this might classify as an interesting and soon outdated; old-world belief. Glad to have made note of the idea.
I have no support for it, or personal interest, but I am also entirely not against it either.
Some users might find this interesting: I've finished up 3 years of scraping/downloading all the Tor-Bitcoin darknet markets and have released it all as a 50GB compressed archive (~1.5tb). See http://www.gwern.net/Black-market%20archives
Thank you.
Can someone explain this article in layman terms? I do not know any sort of quantum terminology, sorry.
Specifically I would like to know what this means:
New papers byt Jan Leike, Marcus Hutter:
Solomonoff Induction Violates Nicod's Criterion http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.04121
On the Computability of Solomonoff Induction and Knowledge-Seeking http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.04124