Some of you may have heard about the following paper already:

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1305/1305.3913.pdf

Here's a news article wrapping up the main points:

http://atom-ecology.russgeorge.net/2013/05/20/an-italian-cold-fusion-tide-lifts-all-boats-arvix-independent-review-paper-confirms-rossi-fusion/


I'm way out of my depth here so I find it hard to judge, is this a pile of BS or are we finally getting somewhere for real?
Is burning coal (and using chemical reactions in general) for the purpose of producing energy coming to an end in the upcoming decades?



EDIT: Here's a review of the article, it should be read. http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/05/21/the-e-cat-is-back-and-people-are-still-falling-for-it/

On the principle of organising events that I want to attend myself, I would very much like to organise a rationality conference/convention in the UK. I organise events for a living; in addition, in my free time I've organised five ~200 person weekend conventions and several other events.

At the moment I am thinking of a one day event on a weekend or a Friday in August, at Stamford Bridge or somewhere else easy to get to around London. There would probably also be a pre-conference dinner, or private bar night with music.

Costs would be in the region of £50-£100 a head including lunch.

Can I get a show of hands to see if the idea is viable?

I am just working on a list of rationalist rules I live by, and this is the one I have most confidence in, so it seems a good topic for my first ever post (which will be short as I have to be on a train in 15)

Since people routinely exaggerate risk, and social norms pull us towards the crabs in a bucket effect (especially for women) I want to correct for that. (Preferably without ending up with a giant Rob Me sign over my head, but that's not the direction I err in.)

For example, there was this rationalist walked into a bar. I had a lot of luggage - everything I need for a four day break, including over two thousand pounds worth of electronic devices and binoculars. I am insured, but it would be an especially annoying time to lose stuff. I had a coffee and then I needed the bathroom, which was far away through a lot of people.

I knew logically how little risk there was in leaving all my stuff; a Highland bar in the middle of the afternoon is even safer than where I live in Edinburgh, and no-one was pinging any alarm bells, but I still spent more time than I'd like to admit convincing myself I didn't have to drag the huge bag with me to the ladies and back. Yes brain, even though I'm alone, and the customers are men, and I'm a middle aged woman, and my mother would freak if she saw me... 

Of course it was fine, like it was the last  hundred times. One day I hope to not even have to persuade myself, but meanwhile I notice my prediction was correct and feel just a little bit pleased with myself. 

Note: I completed a PhD in Mathematics from University of Illinois under the direction of Nathan Dunfield in 2011. I worked as a research analyst at GiveWell from April 2012 to May 2013. All views expressed here are my own.

About this post: I've long been interested in ways in which mathematicians can contribute high social value. In this post, I discuss a tentative idea along these lines. My thoughts are very preliminary in nature, and my intent in making this post is to provide a launching point for further exploration of the subject, rather than to persuade.

Recessions as a serious threat to global welfare

In 2008, the US housing bubble popped, precipitating the Great Recession. The costs of this were staggering:

• It’s been claimed that the cost to US taxpayers in bank bailouts was $9 trillion.
• The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by almost 50% and took over 4 years to recover.
• US unemployment jumped from ~5% to ~10%, and has only gradually been declining.
• Budget cuts were especially great for government support of activities with unusually high humanitarian value to those without political constituency, such as investment in global health.

• It’s been claimed that recessions cause a drop in prosocial behavior.

When an idea occurs to two people independently, the case for it being a good idea is strengthened. Moreover, Koblitz has a long history of involvement with humanitarian efforts and so can be expected to have perspective on them. 

Some reasons why mathematicians seem unusually well suited to the task are:

Transferable Skills — Most mathematicians are unfamiliar with some of most important tools used in finance: statistics, data analysis & programming. But there’s a historical track record of mathematicians being able to pick up these skills and use them to powerful effect. James Simons transitioned from differential geometry to quantitative finance, and became one of the most successful hedge fund managers ever. Cathy O’Neil did a PhD in algebraic number theory under Barry Mazur’s direction, and got a job at DE Shaw, which is one of the most prestigious hedge funds. Mathematicians who are motivated to learn these skills are well positioned to do so.

There are other skills that are very important for successful financial analysis – in particular, one has to have a good eye for empirical data. This is a skill that’s not directly transferable, but it still seems likely that a nontrivial fraction of mathematicians could develop high facility with it.

Intellectual Caliber — The mathematics community has a very dense concentration of intellectual power.  James Simons offers a direct point of comparison between math and finance:

Simons won the Oswald Veblan Prize in Geometry before leaving academia to start Renaissance Technologies. There are 25 living mathematicians who have won this prize. The prize is awarded exclusively for work in geometry/topology, and if one looks more broadly at all mathematical fields, one can generate a list of about 100 living mathematicians who were at least as accomplished as Simons at the same age.

 After leaving academia, Simons made $10 billion in quantitative finance. What I find most interesting about this is that the situation is not that Simons succeeded where other mathematicians of the same caliber had failed – rather, Simons is virtually the only pure mathematician of his caliber to have left academia. This raises the possibility that there are a handful of elite mathematicians who could make much better financial predictions than most present day actors in finance. Less accomplished but capable mathematicians may also do very well.

Cautiousness — Mathematicians are naturally intellectually conservative, as they spend much of their time rigorously examining arguments for flaws. Thus, they’re unusually unlikely to succumb to greed and fear, which are factors that are thought to play a large role in the behavior of financial markets, and which lead to speculative bubbles. This is corroborated by some of Cathy O’Neil’s remarks on finance.

Implications

The above considerations suggest that mathematicians could contribute enormous social value by engaging in transparent financial analysis. 

Many mathematicians who I know wish that they could contribute more social value. In the essay Is there beauty in mathematical theories?, the great mathematician Robert Langlands wrote:

In a letter to A.-M.Legendre of 1830, which I came across while preparing this lecture, Jacobi famously wrote

It is true that Mr. Fourier thought that the principal goal of mathematics was their public utility and their use in explaining natural phenomena. A philosopher like him should have known that the only goal of Science is the honor of the human spirit, and that as such, a question in number theory is worth a question concerning the system of the world.

I am not sure it is so easy. I have given a great deal of my life to matters closely related to the theory of numbers, but the honor of the human spirit is, perhaps, too doubtful and too suspect a notion to serve as vindication. […] Moreover, the appeal to the common welfare as a goal of mathematics is, if not then at least now, often abusive. So it is not easy to find an apology for a life in mathematics.

A fair number of mathematicians don’t have any choice but to do pure math. Gromov wrote:

You become a mathematician, a slave of this insatiable hunger of your brain, of everybody's brain, for making structures of everything that goes into it.

I'm very sympathetic to Gromov's remark, and I think that for people who constituted in this way, it’s probably best not to try to suppress these urges, as such attempts tend to be unsustainable and result in lower contributions to global welfare rather than higher ones.

But for mathematicians who are:

• Tenured professors who don’t have to worry about career considerations 
• Able to enjoy financial analysis
• Strongly motivated to do an excellent job

there may be a major opportunity to contribute enormous social value by conducting transparent high quality financial analysis.

This question warrants further investigation.

Thought experiment:

Through whatever accident of history underlies these philosophical dilemmas, you are faced with a choice between two, and only two, mutually exclusive options:

* Choose A, and all life and sapience in the solar system (and presumably the universe), save for a sapient paperclipping AI, dies.

* Choose B, and all life and sapience in the solar system, including the paperclipping AI, dies.

Phrased another way: does the existence of any intelligence at all, even a paperclipper, have even the smallest amount of utility above no intelligence at all?

If anyone responds positively, subsequent questions would be which would be preferred, a paperclipper or a single bacteria; a paperclipper or a self-sustaining population of trilobites and their supporting ecology; a paperclipper or a self-sustaining population of australopithecines; and so forth, until the equivalent value is determined.

It's all right there in the title. Link. I believe the law under which the seizure occurred is Title 31.

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair), Nineteen Eighty-Four

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is brilliant, terrifying and useful. It's been at its best fighting against governmental intrusions, and is often quoted by journalists and even judges. It's cultural impact has been immense. And, hey, it's well written.

But that doesn't mean it's accurate as a source of predictions or counterfactuals. Orwell's belief that "British democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war" was wrong. Nineteen Eighty-Four did not predict the future course of communism. There is no evidence that anything like the world he envisaged could (or will) happen. Which isn't the same as saying that it couldn't, but we do require some evidence before accepting Orwell's world as realistic.

Yet from this book, a lot of implicit assumptions have seeped into our consciousness. The most important one (shared with many other dystopian novels) is that dictatorships are stable forms of government. Note the "forever" in the quote above - the society Orwell warned about would never change, never improve, never transform. In several conversations (about future governments, for instance), I've heard - and made - the argument that a dictatorship was inevitable, because it's an absorbing state. Democracies can come become dictatorships, but dictatorships (barring revolutions) will endure for good. And so the idea is that if revolutions become impossible (because of ubiquitous surveillance, for instance), then we're stuck with Big Brother for life, and for our children's children'c children's lives.

But thinking about this in the context of history, this doesn't seem credible. The most stable forms of government are democracies and monarchies; nothing else endures that long. And laying revolutions aside, there have been plenty of examples of even quite nasty governments improving themselves. Robespierre was deposed from within his own government - and so the Terror, for all its bloodshed, didn't even last a full year. The worse excesses of Stalinism ended with Stalin. Gorbachev voluntarily opened up his regime (to a certain extent). Mao would excoriate the China of today. Britain's leaders in the 19th and 20th century gradually opened up the franchise, without ever coming close to being deposed by force of arms. The dictatorships of Latin America have mostly fallen to democracies (though revolutions played a larger role there). Looking over the course of recent history, I see very little evidence the dictatorships have much lasting power at all - or that they are incapable of drastic internal change and even improvements.

Now, caveats abound. The future won't be like the past - maybe an Orwellian dictatorship will become possible with advanced surveillance technologies. Maybe a world government won't see any neighbouring government doing a better job, and feel compelled to match it by improving lot of its citizens. Maybe the threat of revolution remains necessary, even if revolts don't actually happen.

Still, we should refrain from assuming that dictatorships, whether party or individual, are somehow the default state, and conduct a much more evidence-based analysis of the matter.

Severe problems with the biomedical research process

GiveWell has recently been investigating ways to improve biomedical research. When I discovered GiveWell's research was shocked by how severe and comprehensive the problems with the field seem to be:

From a conversation with Ferric Fang:

Because scientists have to compete for grants, they spend a very large fraction of their time fundraising, sometimes more than 50% of their working hours. Scientists feel [strong] pressure to optimize their activities for getting tenure and grants, rather than for doing good science. 

From a conversation with Elizabeth Iorns:

Researchers are rewarded primarily for publishing papers in prestigious journals such as Nature, Science and Cell. These journals select for papers that report on surprising and unusual findings. Papers that report on unsound research that is apparently exciting are more likely to be published than papers which report on less exciting research that is sound.

There is little post-publication check on the soundness of papers’ findings, because journals, especially prestigious ones, generally don’t publish replications, and there is little funding for performing replications.

[…]

Pharmaceutical companies such as Bayer and Amgen have studied the frequency with which studies are reproducible by trying to reproduce them, and they have found that about 70% of published papers in the areas that they considered don’t reproduce.

[…]

Because many published results are not reproducible, it is difficult for scientists to use the published literature as a basis for deciding what experiments to perform.

[…]

As things stand, the pharmaceutical industry does replications, however, these are generally unpublished. Because a given lab doesn’t know whether other labs have found that a study fails to replicate, labs duplicate a lot of effort.

From a conversation with Ken Witwer:

Dr. Witwer published a study in Clinical Chemistry examining 127 papers that had been published in between July 2011 and April 2012 in journals that ostensibly require that researchers deposit their microarray data. He found that the data was not submitted for almost 60% of papers, and that data for 75% of papers were not in a format suitable for replication.

The above remarks give the impression that the problems are deeply entrenched and mutually reinforcing. On first glance, it seems that while one might be able to make incremental improvements (such as funding a journal that publishes replications), prospects for big improvements are very poor. But I became more hopeful after learning more.

The Rising Sea

The great mathematician Alexander Grothendieck wrote about two approaches to solving a difficult problem:

If you think of a theorem to be proved as a nut to be opened, so as to reach “the nourishing flesh protected by the shell”, then the hammer and chisel principle is: “put the cutting edge of the chisel against the shell and strike hard. If needed, begin again at many different points until the shell cracks—and you are satisfied”.

[…]

I can illustrate the second approach with the same image of a nut to be opened. The first analogy that came to my mind is of immersing the nut in some softening liquid, and why not simply water? From time to time you rub so the liquid penetrates better, and otherwise you let time pass. The shell becomes more flexible through weeks and months—when the time is ripe, hand pressure is enough, the shell opens like a perfectly ripened avocado!

A different image came to me a few weeks ago. The unknown thing to be known appeared to me as some stretch of earth or hard marl, resisting penetration … the sea advances insensibly in silence, nothing seems to happen, nothing moves, the water is so far off you hardly hear it …. yet it finally surrounds the resistant substance.

When a nut seems too hard to crack, it’s wise to think about the second method that Grothendieck describes.

Alternative Metrics

I was encouraged by GiveWell’s subsequent conversations, with David Jay and Jason Priem, which suggest a “rising sea” type solution to the cluster of apparently severe problems with biomedical research.

In brief, the idea is that it may be possible to create online communities and interfaces that can be used to generate measures of how valuable researchers find research outputs, and which could be used for funding and tenure decisions, thereby rewarding producing the research outputs that other researchers find most valuable. If incentives become aligned with producing valuable research, the whole system will shift accordingly, greatly reducing the existing inefficiencies.

From a conversation with Jason Priem

Historically, the academic community has filtered academic outputs for interest by peer review and, more specifically, the prestige of the journals where papers are published. This model is inadequate relative to filtering mechanisms that are now in principle possible using the Internet.

It is now possible to use the web to measure the quality and impact of an academic output via alternative metrics (altmetrics) such as

• How many people downloaded it
• How much it has been discussed on Twitter
• How many websites link to it
• The caliber of the scientists who have recommended it
• How many people have saved it in a reference manager like Mendeley or Zotero

This is similar to how Google generates a list of webpages corresponding to a search term, since you can benefit from PageRank-type algorithms that foreground popular  content in an intelligent fashion.

[…]

There’s been a significant amount of interest from funders and administrators in more nuanced and broader measures of researcher impact than their journal publication record. […] Algorithmically generated rankings of researchers’ influence as measured by the altmetrics mentioned previously could be an input into hiring, tenure, promotion, and grant decisions. ImpactStory and other providers of alternative metrics could help researchers’ aggregate their online impact so that they can present good summaries of it to administrators and funders. 

From a conversation with David Jay

Commenting systems could potentially be used to create much more useful altmetrics. Such altmetrics could be generated for a scientific output by examining the nature of the comments that scientists make about it, weighting the comments using factors such as the number of upvotes that a comment receives and how distinguished the commenter is.

The metrics generated would be more informative than a journal publication record, because commenters give more specific feedback than the acceptance/rejection of a paper submitted to a given journal does.

[…]

If scientists were to routinely use online commenting systems to discuss scientific outputs, it seems likely that altmetrics generated from them would be strong enough for them to be used for hiring, promotion and grant-making decisions (in conjunction with, or in place of, the traditional metric of journal publication record).

[…]

David Jay envisages a future in which there is [...] A website which collects analytics from other websites so as to aggregate the impact of individual researchers, both for their own information and for use by hiring/promotion/grant committees.

The viability of this approach remains to be seen, but it could work really well, and illustrate a general principle.

About the author: I worked as a research analyst at GiveWell from April 2012 to May 2013. All views expressed here are my own.

I'm looking for research on the frequency with which survey participants answer questions without reading them. I'd greatly appreciate any references.

The past few days have seen an increase of chatter concerning retirement and financial planning. One of us is even putting out a prospectus for a rational financial planning sequence. Some others have derided the concept of saving for retirement, as there is a probability of death before that time.

I am of the Extreme Early Retirement group. The idea is to save and invest 60-90% of your income, and you will have enough money to retire within a decade rather than four decades of the normal working career. This requires you to exercise your frugality muscle (such as cutting cable, biking to work, eating out less), but due to hedonistic adaptation, you will come out no less unhappy.

The sequences have already spoken on how spending money does not make us happier (after our basic needs are met). A Rational Financial plan should take this into account, even if a majority of people would not want to consider it.

I am just a beginner, so I linked the two big names in EEA, Mr. Money Mustache and Early Retirement Extreme. You can find their journeys towards financial independence here and here.

ERE is an austerity heavyweight, while MMM lives a pretty luxurious lifestyle, but still spends much less than his former coworkers. He just spends on what is important to him, such as travelling with his family and eating organic food, and not on anything frivolous, such as cable or eating out. He lives very far from a deprived lifestyle which the average person would shy away from. It takes a paradigm shift and some grit, but the people of LessWrong are not the type to reject munchkin ideas because it takes a little bit of mental effort.

If I were to make a compilation of posts for a Rational Financial Planning sequence, it will go as such…

How Little Money you need to Retire ?
Basic Retirement Math
Rationalist Spending 
Maximizing Utilons per Dollar
Utilons Free Of Charge
Investing Rationally Basics

These are just the basics. Investment advice is scare, and the above does not talk about many fianacial aspects, such as insurance, children, career choice. The authors do speak about them on their blog’s, but I omitted them for brevity. Read and follow these posts however, and you will be better off than 90% of your peers, and well on the road to Extreme Early Retirement.

[Edit] This idea of cutting your expenses and maximizing your savings obviously do not apply only to early retirement. Other financial goals, such as saving for a house, building up capital for a business, or giving more money to charity all will be more quickly accomplished if you learn to cut excesses from your life. The driving idea is the cost to live is very small, you are not made any happier by spending money on the extras, and you should put this money where it matters to you the most.

Petruchio

About six months ago, Julian Barbour did a introductory-level talk, attempting to explain the ideas in his book 'The End of Time'. The topic of his book, Yudkowsky has blogged about several times, but to the non-mathsy non-physicists, this talk might be a good introduction. It's very easygoing, and has also persuaded me to buy his book.

http://ww3.tvo.org/video/185595/julian-barbour-does-time-exist

If someone has already linked it, please say so.

Yudkowsky's related posts can mostly be found by typing 'Julian Barbour' in the search bar.

http://www.epjournal.net/blog/2013/05/are-all-dictator-game-results-artifacts/

You walk into a laboratory, and you read a set of instructions that tell you that your task is to decide how much of a $10 pie you want to give to an anonymous other person who signed up for the experimental session.

This describes, more or less, the Dictator Game, a staple of behavioral economics with a history dating back more than a quarter of a century. The Dictator Game (DG) might not be the drosophila melanogaster of behavioral economics – the Prisoner’s Dilemma can lay plausible claim to that prized analogy – but it could reasonably aspire to an only slightly more modest title, perhaps the e. coli of the discipline. Since the original work, more than 20,000 observations in the DG have been reported.

[...]

How much would participants in a Dictator Game give to the other person if they did not know they were in a Dictator Game study? Simply following me around during the day and recording how much cash I dispense won’t answer this question because in the DG, the money is provided by the experimenter. So, to build a parallel design, the method used must move money to subjects as a windfall so that we can observe how much of this “house money” they choose to give away.

And that is what Winking and Mizer did in a paper now in press and available online (paywall) in Evolution and Human Behavior, using participants, fittingly enough, in Las Vegas. Here’s what they did. Two confederates were needed. The first, destined to become the “recipient,” was occupied on a phone call near a bus stop in Vegas. The second confederate approached lone individuals at the bus stop, indicated that they were late for a ride to the airport, and asked the subject if they wanted the $20 in casino chips still in the confederate’s possession, scamming people into, rather than out of money, in sharp contradiction of the deep traditions of Las Vegas. The question was how many chips the fortunate subject transferred to the nearby confederate.

[...]

In a second condition, the confederate with the chips added a comment to the effect that the subject could “split it with that guy however you want,” indicating the first confederate. This condition brings the study a bit closer, but not much closer, to lab conditions, In a third condition, subjects were asked if they wanted to participate in a study, and then did so along the lines of the usual DG, making the treatment considerably closer to traditional lab-based conditions.

The difference between the first two treatments and the third treatments is interesting, but, as I said at the beginning, the DG should be thought of as a measuring tool. Figure 1 shows how many chips people give away in the DG in the three treatments. In conditions 1 and 2, the number of people (out of 60) who gave at least one chip to the second confederate was… zero. To the extent you think that this method answers the question, how much Dictator Game giving is due to people knowing they’re in an experiment, the answer is, “all of it.”

Link to paper (paywalled).

What follows is a rough outline for a possible rational financial planning sequence that was inspired by some other recent discussion here. I'm not sure how useful this would be to how many people. I know there are some LessWrongers who would enjoy and learn from this; but I don't know if there are 5, 50, or 500. If you'd like to read it, let me know. If 500 people tell me they can't wait for this, I'll probably write it. If 5 people say maybe they'll glance at it, then probably not.

Part I: Preliminaries:

    Financial Rationality
    Multiplying uncertainties
    The inside and outside views
    Interpolation is reliable; extrapolation isn't

Part II: This is important:

• Why to save for retirement
• Dying alone in a hole: the story of Jane.   
• Why compound interest is cool
• 65-year old you will not want to live like a grad student
• 65-year old you will not want to work like 35-year old you
• Existential risk does not defeat personal risk
• Existential success does not defeat personal risk

Part III: Analyzing Your Life

    (This section needs a lot more fleshing out, and thought)

    Personal satisfaction and happiness: do what you love, and adjust your financial expectations accordingly
    How much do you need to retire?
    When do you want to retire?
    How much do you need to live on today?
    Big expenses you need to plan for
    Increasing Income
    College the best financial decision you'll ever make or the worst?
    Choosing a career: what is your comparative advantage?
    Switching careers
    Career Decisions
        equity vs salary; steady singles or home run hitter
        employee or owner
    Career Tactics
        Salary negotiation
        promotion
        when to change jobs
    Cutting Expenses
    Save more tomorrow
    Inheritance

Part IV: The Practical How-to Advice:

Emergency Cash
Credit cards: the good, the bad, and the criminal
Banking
Where to save (tax advantaged accounts)
The importance of fees
401K matching: the highest return you'll ever see
Social Security
Pensions
What to invest in (index funds)
    diversification
    stock vs bond funds
    domestic vs. international
    target retirement funds
    Comic books are not a retirement plan (but a comic book store might be)
   
Avoiding hucksters and doomsayers
Investment Advisors
What if the shit hits the fan?
Can smart, rational investors beat the market?
Good debt; bad debt
Cars and other expensive purchases
Cutting out the middleman: making money on Craig's list, amazon, eBay and AirB&B
Buying a house
Renting vs. owning a house; rental parity
Student loans
Health Insurance
Life Insurance
Auto Insurance
Your Spouse: the most important financial decision you'll ever make
    Diamonds are forever, but most women would rather have a house.
    One or two incomes?
    Live longer, be happier, get married

Children
Charity

If there are any topics you'd like to see covered that aren't here (wills? lawyers? the financial press?), let me know. Similarly, if you think there's a section that doesn't belong and should be dropped, let me know that too.

One caveat: while some sections are fairly generic, others will be very U.S. centric. The most specific advice will not be applicable to non-U.S. citizens and residents. That does limit the audience, but there's not too much I can do about that. Perhaps if it's successful I can seek out co-authors to do UK, Canadian, or other country editions.

A question for people who are interested in financial planning material: If this were available as a complete book (electronic and paper) today, how likely do you think it is that you would buy this book instead of one of the other available books on the subject? What would you pay for such a book?  If this were available as both a book and a sequence on LessWrong, how might that change your decision?

For now, this discussion thread is just a minimum viable product (MVP) to find out if a sequence is worth the time it would take me to complete. If the MVP pans out, I'll write and post one or two of these chapters to further gauge interest. If the MVP doesn't look promising, I'll drop it and move on to my next book idea.

According to a recent press release from UC Berkeley’s School of Law:

Overheated: The Human Cost of Climate Change predicts a grim future for billions of people in this century. It is a factual account of a staggering toll, based on hard data […] “Climate change is the most important problem facing the international community in the 21^st century,” Guzman said.

Guzman's view is shared by many.

While I have not read Guzman’s book, I have read GiveWell’s summary of the IPCC, as well as notes on GiveWell’s conversations with climate change experts. Based on these, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that while climate change is an important issue, it’s unlikely to be the most important issue, though there is uncertainty, owing to poorly understood tail risk. 

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: To-do lists and other systems

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: To-do lists and other systems

Rob Rhinehart's food replacement Soylent now has a crowdfunding campaign.

Soylent frees you from the time and money spent shopping, cooking and cleaning, puts you in excellent health, and vastly reduces your environmental impact by eliminating much of the waste and harm coming from agriculture, livestock, and food-related trash.

If you're interested in one or more of these benefits, send in some money! There is also a new blog post.

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup

OK, so it covers only a few human occupations:

• Trivia games (we all know about that one)
• Clinical diagnosis
• Banking advisor
• and now a call center grunt

But the list is steadily growing.

Now, connect it with a self-driving AI, and your cab e-driver can make small talk, advise on a suspicious skin lesion, evaluate your investment portfolio and help you fix an issue with your smartphone, all while cheaply and efficiently getting you to your destination.

How long until it can evaluate verbal or written customer requirements and write better routine software than your average programmer?

It's been a productive conversation on my post criticising the Turing test. I claimed that I wouldn't take the Turing test as definitive evidence of general intelligence if the agent was specifically optimised on the test. I was challenged as to whether I had a different definition of thinking than "able to pass the Turing test". As a consequence of that exchange, I think I do.

Truly general intelligence is impossible, because of various "no free lunch" theorems, that demonstrate that no algorithm can perform well in every environment (intuitively, this makes sense: a smarter being could always design an environment that specifically penalises a particular algorithm). Nevertheless, we have the intuitive definition of a general intelligence as one that performs well in most (or almost all) environments.

I'd like to reverse that definition, and define a general intelligence as one that doesn't perform stupidly in a novel environment. A small change of emphasis, but it gets to the heart of what the Turing test is meant to do, and why I questioned it. The idea of the Turing test is to catch the (putative) AGI performing stupidly. Since we can't test the AGI on every environment, the idea is to have the Turing test be as general as possible in potential. If you give me the questions in advance, I can certainly craft an algorithm that aces that test; similarly, you can construct an AGI that would ace any given Turing test. But since the space of reasonable conversations is combinatorially huge, and since the judge could potentially pick any element from within that, the AGI could not just have a narrow list of responses: it would have to be genuinely generally intelligent, so that it would not end up being stupid on the particular conversation it was in.

That's the theory, anyway. But maybe the space of conversations isn't as vast as all that, especially if the AGI has some simple classification algorithms. Maybe the data on the internet today, combined with some reasonably cunning algorithms, can carry a conversation as well as a human. After all, we are generating examples of conversations by the millions every hour of every day.

Which is why I emphasised testing from outside the domain of competence of the AGI. You need to introduce it to a novel environment, and give it the possibility of being stupid. If the space of human conversations isn't large enough, you need to move to the much larger space of real-world problem solving - and pick something from it. It doesn't matter what it is, simply that you have the potential of picking anything. Hence only a general intelligence could be confident, in advance, of coping with it. That's why I emphasised not saying what your test was going to be, and changing the rules or outright cheating: the less restrictions you allow on the potential test, the more informative the actual test is.

A related question, of course, is whether humans are generally intelligent. Well, humans are stupid in a lot of domains. Human groups augmented by data and computing technology, and given enough time, are much more generally intelligent that individual humans. So general intelligence is a matter of degree, not a binary classification (though it might be nearly binary for some AGI designs). Thus whether you call humans generally intelligent is a matter of taste and emphasis.

Discussion article for the meetup : Fermi Estimates in Chicago

Discussion article for the meetup : Fermi Estimates in Chicago

Software developers have to repeatedly and continually learn massive number of new concepts, procedures and techniques related to the latest languages, frameworks and technologies up and down the stack.

The best way to learn would of course be to continuously read books in the spare time one isn't solving problems on the job and apply that knowledge.

I personally find reading books too time consuming for me. Books are presented in a depth first fashion, delving into multiple areas in depth one by one. This is not ideal for becoming productive quickly. There is no explicit ordering of how necessary / frequent a particular concept / technique is either.

What other sources of information / classes of sources are highest yield for picking up new technologies quickly [In the sense of getting productive fast].

An example of a high yield resources are well made slide decks. As an example, a slide deck on a language(e.g. javascript) made for experienced developers new to the language is much faster to process than a book. I can absorb the major features of the language, the syntax etc from a good slide deck in a fraction of the time it would take to read the introductory chapter of a book.

Any general comments (or specific sources) on how one would go about learning a new tech stack quickly would help too.

My current stack is linux, apache, python, django, dynamo, js, backbone

http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_singer_the_why_and_how_of_effective_altruism.html

If you're lucky enough to live without want, it's a natural impulse to be altruistic to others. But, asks philosopher Peter Singer, what's the most effective way to give? He talks through some surprising thought experiments to help you balance emotion and practicality -- and make the biggest impact with whatever you can share. Sometimes controversial, always practical ethicist Peter Singer stirs public debate about morality, from animal welfare to global poverty.

Discussion article for the meetup : RTLW Meetup: Contra Dance!

Discussion article for the meetup : RTLW Meetup: Contra Dance!

Discussion article for the meetup : Buffalo LW Thursday meetup

Discussion article for the meetup : Buffalo LW Thursday meetup

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Probabilistic Graphical Models, Take 2!

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Probabilistic Graphical Models, Take 2!

A common mistake people make with utility functions is taking individual utility numbers as meaningful, and performing operations such as adding them or doubling them.  But utility functions are only defined up to positive affine transformation.

Talking about "utils" seems like it would encourage this sort of mistake; it makes it sound like some sort of quantity of stuff, that can be meaningfully added, scaled, etc.  Now the use of a unit -- "utils" -- instead of bare real numbers does remind us that the scale we've picked is arbitrary, but it doesn't remind us that the zero we've picked is also arbitrary, and encourages such illegal operations as addition and scaling.  It suggests linear, not affine.

But there is a common everyday quantity which we ordinarily measure with an affine scale, and that's temperature.  Now, in fact, temperatures really do have an absolute zero (and if you make sufficient use natural units, they have an absolute scale, as well), but generally we measure temperature with scales that were invented before that fact was recognized.  And so while we may have Kelvins, we have "degrees Fahrenheit" or "degrees Celsius".

If you've used these scales long enough you recognize that it is meaningless to e.g. add things measured on these scales, or to multiply them by scalars.  So I think it would be a helpful cognitive reminder to say something like "degrees utility" instead of "utils", to suggest an affine scale like we use for temperature, rather than a linear scale like we use for length or time or mass.

The analogy isn't entirely perfect, because as I've mentioned above, temperature actually can be measured on a linear scale (and with sufficient use of natural units, an absolute scale); but the point is just to prompt the right style of thinking, and in everyday life we usually think of temperature as an (ordered) affine thing, like utility.

As such I recommend saying "degrees utility" instead of "utils".  If there is some other familiar quantity we also tend to use an affine scale for, perhaps an analogy with that could be used instead or as well.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323372504578466992305986654.html

Apparently a hedge fundie made 4 billion and is giving most of it away to what the WSJ describes as a "moneyball" approach to giving.

Jonathan Birch recently published an interesting critique of Bostrom's simulation argument.  Here's the abstract:

Nick Bostrom’s ‘Simulation Argument’ purports to show that, unless we are confident that advanced ‘posthuman’ civilizations are either extremely rare or extremely rarely interested in running simulations of their own ancestors, we should assign significant credence to the hypothesis that we are simulated. I argue that Bostrom does not succeed in grounding this constraint on credence. I first show that the Simulation Argument requires a curious form of selective scepticism, for it presupposes that we possess good evidence for claims about the physical limits of computation and yet lack good evidence for claims about our own physical constitution. I then show that two ways of modifying the argument so as to remove the need for this presupposition fail to preserve the original conclusion. Finally, I argue that, while there are unusual circumstances in which Bostrom’s selective scepticism might be reasonable, we do not currently find ourselves in such circumstances. There is no good reason to uphold the selective scepticism the Simulation Argument presupposes. There is thus no good reason to believe its conclusion.

The paper is behind a paywall, but I have uploaded it to my shared Dropbox folder, here.

EDIT: I emailed the author and am glad to see that he's decided to participate in the discussion below.

The Register talks to Google's Alfred Spector:

Google's approach toward artificial intelligence embodies a new way of designing and running complex systems. Rather than create a monolithic entity with its own modules for reasoning about certain inputs and developing hypotheses that let it bootstrap its own intelligence into higher and higher abstractions away from base inputs, as other AI researchers did through much of the 60s and 70s, Google has instead taken a modular approach.

"We have the knowledge graph, [the] ability to parse natural language, neural network tech [and] enormous opportunities to gain feedback from users," Spector said in an earlier speech at Google IO. "If we combine all these things together with humans in the loop continually providing feedback our systems become ... intelligent."

Spector calls this his "combination hypothesis", and though Google is not there yet – SkyNet does not exist – you can see the first green buds of systems that have the appearance of independent intelligence via some of the company's user-predictive technologies such as Google Now, the new Maps and, of course, the way it filters search results according to individual identity.

(Emphasis mine.) I don't have a transcript, but there are videos online. Spector is clearly smart, and apparently he expects an AI to appear in a completely different way than Eliezer does. And he has all the resources and financing he wants, probably 3-4 orders of magnitude over MIRI's. His approach, if workable, also appears safe: it requires human feedback in the loop. What do you guys think?

Discussion article for the meetup : [Cambridge] Sunk Cost Kata

Discussion article for the meetup : [Cambridge] Sunk Cost Kata

Discussion article for the meetup : First Bristol meetup

Discussion article for the meetup : First Bristol meetup

I'm reading Nurture Shock by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman. Several things in the book, esp. the chapter on "Tools of the Mind", an intriguing education program, suggest that our education of young children not only isn't very good even when evaluated using tests that the curriculum was designed for, it's worse than just letting kids play. (My analogy and interpretation—don't blame this on the Tools people—is that conventional education may be like a Soviet five-year plan, trying to force children to acquire skills & knowledge that they would have been motivated to learn on their own if there weren't a school, and that early education shouldn't focus entirely on teaching specific facts, but also on teaching how to think, form abstractions, and control impulses.)

Say they're going to play fireman. The Tools teacher teaches the kids about what firemen do and what happens in a fire, and gives the kids different roles to play, then lets them play. They teach facts not because the facts are important, but to make the play session longer and more complicated.  Tools does well in increasing test scores, but even better at reducing disruptive behavior. [1]

Tools has a variety of computer games that are designed to get kids to exercise particular cognitive skills, like focusing on something while being aware of background events. But the games often sound like more-boring ways of teaching kids the same things that video-games teach them.

Tools did no better than the existing curriculum on certain metrics in a recent larger study. But it didn't perform worse, either.

The first study you do with any biological intervention is to compare the intervention to a control group that has no intervention. But in education, AFAIK no one has ever done this. Everyone uses the existing curriculum as the control.

Whatever country you're in, what metrics do you use, and what evidence do you have that your schools are better than nothing at all?

There may be some things that you need to sit kids down and force them to learn—say, arithmetic, math, and typing—but I kinda doubt it's more than 20% of the grade school curriculum. I spent a lot of time practicing penmanship, futilely trying to memorizing the capitals and chief exports of all fifty states, and studying the history of Thanksgiving and the American Revolution over and over again.[2] We could have a short-hours classroom hours control group, where kids spend a few hours a day learning those few facts they need to know, and the rest of the time playing.

ADDED: There is one kind of control--kids who've not gone to pre-school vs. kids who went to pre-school, or who went to Head Start.

[1] I fear somebody is going to complain that disruptive behavior is what we need to teach children so they can innovate and question authority. Open to discussion, but if it worked that way, we'd be overwhelmed with innovators and independent thinkers today.

[2] I actually learned the names of all the states from a song, and learned where they are from a jigsaw puzzle.

This article is just some major questions concerning morality, then broken up into sub-questions to try to assist somebody in answering the major question; it's not a criticism of any morality in particular, but rather what I hope is a useful way to consider any moral system, and hopefully to help people challenge their own assumptions about their own moral systems.  I don't expect responses to try to answer these questions; indeed, I'd prefer you don't.  My preferred responses would be changes, additions, clarifications, or challenges to the questions or to the objective of this article.

First major question: Could you morally advocate other people adopt your moral system?

This isn't as trivial a question as it seems on its face.  Take a strawman hedonism, for a very simple example.  Is a hedonist's pleasure maximized by encouraging other people to pursue -their- pleasure?  Or would it be better served by convincing them to pursue other people's (a class of people of which our strawman hedonist is a member) pleasure?

It's not merely selfish moralities which suffer meta-moral problems.  I've encountered a few near-Comtean altruists who will readily admit their morality makes them miserable; the idea that other people are worse off than them fills them with a deep guilt which they cannot resolve.  If their goal is truly the happiness of others, spreading their moral system is a short-term evil.  (It may be a long-term good, depending on how they do their accounting, but non-moral altruism isn't actually a rare quality, so I think an honest accounting would suggest their moral system doesn't add much additional altruism to the system, only a lot of guilt about the fact that not much altruistic action is taking place.)

Note: I use the word "altruism" here in its modern, non-Comtean sense.  Altruism is that which benefits others.

Does your moral system make you unhappy, on the whole?  Does it, like most moral systems, place a value on happiness?  Would it make the average person less or more happy, if they and they alone adopted it?  Are your expectations of the moral value of your moral system predicated on an unrealistic scenario of universal acceptance?  Maybe your moral system isn't itself very moral.

Second: Do you think your moral system makes you a more moral person?

Does your moral system promote moral actions?  What percentage of your actions concerning your morality are spent feeling good because you feel like you've effectively promoted your moral system, rather than promoting the values inherent in it?

Do you behave any differently than you would if you operated under a "common law" morality, such as social norms and laws?  That is, does your ethical system make you behave differently than if you didn't possess it?  Are you evaluating the merits of your moral system solely on how it answers hypothetical situations, rather than how it addresses your day-to-day life?

Does your moral system promote behaviors you're uncomfortable with and/or could not actually do, such as pushing people in the way of trolleys to save more people?

Third: Does your moral system promote morality, or itself as a moral system?

Is the primary contribution of your moral system to your life adding outrage that other people -don't- follow your moral system?  Do you feel that people who follow other moral systems are immoral even if they end up behaving in exactly the same way you do?  Does your moral system imply complex calculations which aren't actually taking place?  Is the primary purpose of your moral system encouraging moral behavior, or defining what the moral behavior would have been after the fact?

Considered as a meme or memeplex, does your moral system seem better suited to propagating itself than to encouraging morality?  Do you think "The primary purpose of this moral system is ensuring that these morals continue to exist" could be an accurate description of your moral system?  Does the moral system promote the belief that people who don't follow it are completely immoral?

Fourth: Is the major purpose of your morality morality itself?

This is a rather tough question to elaborate with further questions, so I suppose I should try to clarify a bit first: Take a strawman utilitarianism where "utility" -really is- what the morality is all about, where somebody has painstakingly gone through and assigned utility points to various things (this is kind of common in game-based moral systems, where you're just accumulating some kind of moral points, positive or negative).  Or imagine (tough, I know) a religious morality where the sole objective of the moral system is satisfying God's will.  That is, does your moral system define morality to be about something abstract and immeasurable, defined only in the context of your moral system?  Is your moral system a tautology, which must be accepted to even be meaningful?

This one can be difficult to identify from the inside, because to some extent -all- human morality is tautological; you have to identify it with respect to other moralities, to see if it's a unique island of tautology, or whether it applies to human moral concerns in the general case.  With that in mind, when you argue with other people about your ethical system, do they -always- seem to miss the point?  Do they keep trying to reframe moral questions in terms of other moral systems?  Do they bring up things which have nothing to do with (your) morality?

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

By now the Trolley Problem is well known amongst moral philosophers and LessWrong readers. In brief, there's a trolley hurtling down the tracks. The dastardly villain Snidely Whiplash has tied five people to the tracks. You have only seconds to act. You can save the five people by throwing a switch and transferring the trolley to another track. However the evil villain has tied a sixth person to the alternate track. Should you throw the switch?

When first presented with this problem, almost everyone answers yes. Sacrifice the one to save five. It's not a very hard choice.

Now comes the hard question. There is no switch or alternate track. The trolley is still coming down the tracks, and there are still five people tied to it. You are instead standing on a bridge over the tracks. Next to you is a fat man. If you push the man onto the tracks, the trolley car will hit him and derail, saving the five people; but the fat man will die. Do you push him?

This is a really hard problem. Most people say no, they don't push. But really what is the difference here? In both scenarios you are choosing to take one life in order to save five. It's a net gain of four lives. Especially if you call yourself a utilitarian, as many folks here do, how can you not push? If you do push, how will you feel about that choice afterwards?

Try not to Kobayashi Maru this question, at least not yet. I know you can criticize the scenario and find it unrealistic. For instance, you may say you won't push because the man might fight back, and you'd both fall but not till after the trolley had passed so everyone dies. So imagine the fat man in a wheelchair, so he can be lightly rolled off the bridge. And if you're too socially constrained to consider hurting a handicapped person, maybe the five people tied to the tracks are also in wheelchairs. If you think that being pushed off a bridge is more terrifying than being hit by a train, suppose the fat man is thoroughly anesthetized. Yes, this is an unrealistic thought experiment; but please play along for now.

Have your answer? Good. Now comes the third, final, and hardest question; especially for anybody who said they'd push the fat man. There is still no switch or alternate track. The trolley is still coming down the tracks, and there are still five people tied to it. You are still standing on a bridge over the tracks. But this time you're alone and the only way to stop the train is by jumping in front of it yourself. Do you jump? If you said yes, you would push the fat man; but you won't jump. Why?

Do you have a moral obligation to jump in front of the train? If you have a moral obligation to push someone else, don't you have a moral obligation to sacrifice yourself as well? or if you won't sacrifice yourself, how can you justify sacrificing someone else? Is it morally more right to push someone else than jump yourself? I'd argue the opposite...

Realistically you may not be able to bring yourself to jump. It's not exactly a moral decision. You're just not that brave. You accept that it's right for you to jump, and accept that you're not that moral. Fine. Now imagine someone is standing next to you, a skinny athletic person who's too small to stop the train themselves but strong enough to push you over into the path of the trolley. Do you still think the correct answer to the trolley problem is to push?

If we take it seriously, this is a hard problem. The best answer I know is Rawlsianism. You pick your answer in ignorance of who you'll be in the problem. You don't know whether you're the pusher, the pushed, or one of the people tied to the tracks. In this case, the answer is easy: push! There's a 6/7 chance you'll survive so the selfish and utilitarian answers converge.

We can play other variants. For instance, suppose Snidely kidnaps you and says "Tomorrow I'm going to flip a coin. Heads I'll put you on the tracks with 4 other people (and put a different person on the bridge next to the pusher). Tails I'll put you on the bridge next to a pusher." Should the pusher push? Actually that's an easy one because you don't know where you'll end up so you might as well save the four extra people in both scenarios. Your expected value is the same and everyone else's is increased by pushing.

Now imagine Snidely says instead he'll roll a die. If it comes up 1-5, he puts six people including you on the track. If it comes up 6, he lets you go and puts the other five people on the track. However if you agree to be tied to the track without a roll, without even a chance of escape, he'll let the other five people go. What now? Suppose he rolls two dice and they both have to come up 6 for you to go free; but he'll still let everyone else go if you agree. Will you save the other five people at the cost of a 1/36 chance of saving your own life? How about three dice? four? How many dice must Snidely roll before you think the chance of saving your own life is outweighed by the certainty of saving five others? 

Do you have your answers? Are you prepared to defend them? Good. Comment away, and you can even Kobayashi Maru the scenario or criticize the excessively contrived hypotheticals I've posed here. But be forewarned, in part 2 I'm going to show you an actual, non-hypothetical scenario where this problem becomes very real; indeed a situation I know many LessWrong readers are facing right now; and yes, it's a matter of life and death.

Update: It now occurs to me that the scenario can be tightened up considerably. Forget the bridge and the fat man. They're irrelevant details. Case 1 is as before. 5 people on one track, 1 on another. Pull the switch to save the 5 and kill the 1. Still not a hard problem.

Case 2: same as before, except this time you are standing next to the one person tied to the track who will be hit by the trolley if you throw the switch. And they are conscious, can talk to you, and see what you're doing. No one else will know what you did. Does this change your answer, and if so why?

Case 3: same as before, except this time you are the one person tied to the track who will be hit by the trolley if you throw the switch.

Folks here are being refreshingly honest. I don't think anyone has yet said they would throw the switch in case 3, and most of us (myself included) are simply admitting we're not that brave/altruistic/suicidal (assuming the five people on the other track are not our friends or family). So let's make it a little easier. Suppose in case 3 someone else, not you, is tied to the track but can reach the switch. What now?

Update 2: Case 4: As in case 3, you are tied to the track, five other unrelated people are tied to the opposite track, and you have access to a switch that will cause the trolley to change tracks. However now the trolley is initially aimed at you. The five people on the other track are safe unless you throw the switch. Is there a difference between throwing the switch in this case, and not throwing the switch in Case 3?

This case also raises the interesting question of legality. If there are any lawyers in the room, do you think a person who throws the switch in case 4--that is, saves themselves at the cost of five other lives--could be convicted of a crime? (Of course, the answer to this one may vary with jurisdiction.) Are there any actual precedents of cases like this?

Despite recent strides in my productivity habits, I still catch myself procrastinating at work more often than I'd like.  It's not that I make a conscious decision to put off a project; it just feels as though I wake up 20 minutes later and realize that nothing got accomplished. (Or, to avoid the passive voice and take much-deserved responsibility, I "realize that I haven't accomplished anything".)

I've been looking for techniques to improve, and got a lot out of LukeProg's articles on How to Beat Procrastination and My Algorithm for Beating Procrastination, based on Piers Steel's The Procrastination Equation.

But I also wanted a way to put the principles to use with the lowest activation cost possible.  I can't expect unmotivated future-me to be too cooperative; I need to provide him with an easy path to get in flow.

So! I developed a 10-Step Productivity Checklist, pulling the concepts from Luke's articles and adding a couple points that are important for me.  Now whenever I notice myself being unproductive I have a much easier time following the steps one by one until I get back in a good mindset to work.

Productivity Checklist:

1. What is the task? Make sure you're going to focus on one thing at a time.

2. Do you have something to drink? Get yourself some tea, coffee, or water.
   

3. Are distractions closed? Shut the door, quit Tweetdeck, close the Facebook and Gmail tabs, and set skype to "Do not disturb."

4. What music will you listen to inspire yourself to be productive or get in flow? Put on a good instrumental playlist! (I love video game soundtracks, further notes in comments.)

5. Why are you doing this task?  Trace the value until you feel the benefit.

6. What are the parts to this task?  Break things down as much as you can, until they're physical actions if possible.

7. What are some ways to gamify the task?  Try to have fun with it!

8. What are some rewards you can offer yourself for completing sections of the task? Smiling, throwing your arms up in the air and proclaiming victory, or M&M's all count.

9. What's an achievable goal for this sitting? Set a reasonable expectation for yourself.

10. How long will you work until you take a break?  Set a timer and commit to focusing.

Get into flow!

I'd love to hear from you:

• Whether these are useful
• Any ideas for good ways to enact these steps
• Steps that should be added/removed/tweaked
• Whether there are other posts/resources that you've found valuable

I hope this helps you as much as it's helping me, and that together we can make it even better!

Discussion article for the meetup : Tel Aviv, Israel Meetup - Goal Clarification with special guest Cat from CFAR

Discussion article for the meetup : Tel Aviv, Israel Meetup - Goal Clarification with special guest Cat from CFAR

Discussion article for the meetup : London Meetup: 26th May

Discussion article for the meetup : London Meetup: 26th May