Newest Submissions - Less Wrong Discussion

General intelligence test: no domains of stupidity

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:04:59 +0000

Submitted by Stuart_Armstrong • 2 votes • 2 comments

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.

2 comments

Meetup : Fermi Estimates in Chicago

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:47:11 +0000

Submitted by Nic_Smith • 0 votes • 0 comments

Discussion article for the meetup : Fermi Estimates in Chicago

WHEN: 25 May 2013 03:00:59PM (-0500)

WHERE: 1 S Franklin, Chicago, IL

We'll be meeting at Argo Tea to discuss and practice Fermi estimates. When should they be used, and what considerations go into them? How many piano tuners ARE in Chicago?

Discussion article for the meetup : Fermi Estimates in Chicago

0 comments

High yield information sources for Software Development

Tue, 21 May 2013 06:59:10 +0000

Submitted by rationalnoob • 0 votes • 6 comments

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

6 comments

[TED Talk] Peter Singer on Effective Altruism

Tue, 21 May 2013 04:06:28 +0000

Submitted by peter_hurford • 6 votes • 3 comments

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.

3 comments

Meetup : RTLW Meetup: Contra Dance!

Mon, 20 May 2013 17:56:59 +0000

Submitted by therufs • 5 votes • 5 comments

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

WHEN: 23 May 2013 06:50:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: 100 N Greensboro St, Carrboro NC 27510

In lieu of our regular coffee and discussion, this week's meetup will be held at the Century Center in Carrboro, where A GREAT DANCE will be taking place.

If you're a new dancer, there will be an intro lesson at 7 that will cover much of what you'll need to know. Try to arrive by about 6:50.

If you can't arrive in time for the lesson or find you are running late, please come dance anyway! Ruthan, David, Evan, or any other experienced dancer will be happy to help you.

You will need:
* $10 for admission
* Your dancing feet, in smooth-soled shoes, flat or low-heeled. (A few brave people do dance barefoot.)

You might also like to have:
* A water bottle
* An extra shirt or two if you're given to sweating profusely
* A twirly skirt
* A brace or wrap for any problematic joints (if only to signal to other dancers that they should make a point of being gentle)

The dance will run til 10:30, but staying the whole time isn't a requirement. Dancers often partake of potables and comestibles at a local establishment afterwards, though this will be subject to what's open late on a Thursday.

Requisite link to RTLW listserv: http://groups.google.com/group/rtlw Comment here or there if you're interested in a carpool!

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

5 comments

Meetup : Buffalo LW Thursday meetup

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:35:36 +0000

Submitted by StonesOnCanvas • 1 votes • 0 comments

Discussion article for the meetup : Buffalo LW Thursday meetup

WHEN: 23 May 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: University at Buffalo- North Campus 31 Capen Hall

Buffalo-area Less Wrong meetups on the first Sunday and Third Thursday of every month, in 31 Capen Hall at the University at Buffalo - North Campus.

Hey all, We're going to be talking about inferential distance. We'll have a few articles to demonstrate the idea and how it effects arguments (and perhaps what you could do if you notice its happening to you). As always, don't worry if you haven't read the article, we'll either read it beforehand or give a short cliff notes version of it.

PS. James is doing a lot of the organizing for this one, so we should all give him major brownie points for it!

Discussion article for the meetup : Buffalo LW Thursday meetup

0 comments

Meetup : West LA Meetup - Probabilistic Graphical Models, Take 2!

Sun, 19 May 2013 16:39:29 +0000

Submitted by nickernst • 0 votes • 0 comments

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

WHEN: 22 May 2013 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE: 10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064

When: 7:00pm Wednesday, May 22nd.

Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".

Parking is free for 3 hours.

Lecture/Discussion: Graphs can make understanding causality very intuitive and easy. They are also a powerful tool for doing more complicated modeling. I will introduce PGMs as a concept, and show a few examples where they can be useful.

No prior knowledge of or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessible and useful to everyone who values thinking for themselves. There will be open general conversation until 7:30, and that's always a lot of good, fun, intelligent discussion!

I will bring a whiteboard with Bayes' Theorem written on it.

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

0 comments

Terminology suggestion: Say "degrees utility" instead of "utils" to prompt affine thinking

Sun, 19 May 2013 08:03:05 +0000

Submitted by Sniffnoy • 10 votes • 33 comments

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.

33 comments

[LINK] Evidence-based giving by Laura and John Arnold Foundation

Sat, 18 May 2013 19:47:43 +0000

Submitted by brilee • 3 votes • 9 comments

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.

9 comments

[Paper] On the 'Simulation Argument' and Selective Scepticism

Sat, 18 May 2013 18:31:10 +0000

Submitted by benthamite • 10 votes • 53 comments

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.

53 comments

LINK: Google research chief: 'Emergent artificial intelligence? Hogwash!'

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:45:45 +0000

Submitted by shminux • 7 votes • 42 comments

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?

42 comments

Meetup : [Cambridge] Sunk Cost Kata

Fri, 17 May 2013 17:57:27 +0000

Submitted by ModusPonies • 2 votes • 4 comments

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

WHEN: 19 May 2013 02:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: 21 Ames St, Cambridge, MA

We'll present the Center for Applied Rationality's material on sunk costs and go over their exercises on how to apply this knowledge in daily life.

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups are on the first and third Sunday of every month at 2pm in the MIT Whitaker Building (21 Ames St, Bldg 56), room 180. Room number subject to change based on availability. Signs will be posted with the actual room number. The side doors are sometimes locked; if so, you can get in through the main door at 25 Ames St.

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

4 comments

Meetup : First Bristol meetup

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:52:53 +0000

Submitted by Benja • 3 votes • 10 comments

Discussion article for the meetup : First Bristol meetup

WHEN: 25 May 2013 03:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE: Friska Queens Road (on the Clifton triangle), Bristol

Back in 2010, Bristol had 4000+ unique LW visitors, but we've never had a meetup -- let's try and see what happens! I'll be in the Friska on Queens Road (on the Clifton triangle, right next to the university campus) on Saturday the 25th at 3pm, with a LessWrong sign and a paperback of HPMOR. Anyone going to join me? :-)

Discussion article for the meetup : First Bristol meetup

10 comments

Education control?

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:32:55 +0000

Submitted by PhilGoetz • 10 votes • 29 comments

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.

[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.

29 comments

Morality should be Moral

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:26:03 +0000

Submitted by OrphanWilde • 8 votes • 48 comments

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?

48 comments

Weekly LW Meetups: Atlanta, Austin, Moscow, Ottawa, Vancouver

Fri, 17 May 2013 14:53:14 +0000

Submitted by FrankAdamek • 0 votes • 0 comments

This summary was posted to LW main on May 10th. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

If you missed the deadline and wish to have your meetup featured, you can reach me on gmail at frank dot c dot adamek.

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

Whether or not there's currently a meetup in your area, you can sign up to be notified automatically of any future meetups. And if you're not interested in notifications you can still enter your approximate location, which will let meetup-starting heroes know that there's an interested LW population in their city!

If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here, or has become regular and isn't listed as such, let me know!

Want to help out the common good? If one of the meetups listed as regular has become inactive, let me know so we can present more accurate information to newcomers.

0 comments

Open thread, May 17-31 2013

Fri, 17 May 2013 13:47:27 +0000

Submitted by PhilipL • 2 votes • 151 comments

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

151 comments

The Unselfish Trolley Problem

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:51:56 +0000

Submitted by elharo • 5 votes • 112 comments

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?

112 comments

10-Step Anti-Procrastination Checklist

Fri, 17 May 2013 01:59:51 +0000

Submitted by JesseGalef • 24 votes • 34 comments

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:

What is the task? Make sure you're going to focus on one thing at a time.
Do you have something to drink? Get yourself some tea, coffee, or water.
Are distractions closed? Shut the door, quit Tweetdeck, close the Facebook and Gmail tabs, and set skype to "Do not disturb."
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.)
Why are you doing this task? Trace the value until you feel the benefit.
What are the parts to this task? Break things down as much as you can, until they're physical actions if possible.
What are some ways to gamify the task? Try to have fun with it!
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.
What's an achievable goal for this sitting? Set a reasonable expectation for yourself.
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!

34 comments

Meetup : Tel Aviv, Israel Meetup - Goal Clarification with special guest Cat from CFAR

Thu, 16 May 2013 16:04:31 +0000

Submitted by SoftFlare • 6 votes • 10 comments

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

WHEN: 23 May 2013 07:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE: TBA, In central Tel Aviv

For the first time in something like forever there will be a rationality meetup in Tel Aviv, Israel. It'll be a great chance to meet your fellow LWers from Israel.

We will be joined by very special guest Cat from CFAR who will talk about Goal Clarification - a useful technique for increasing productivity.

Please email me @ hochbergg@gmail.com about your RSVP.

If you are a LWer from Israel who'd would have liked to come, but can't due to scheduling constraints, please email me as well so we can stay in touch :)

Gal Hochberg

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

10 comments

Meetup : London Meetup - 26th May

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:51:46 +0000

Submitted by sixes_and_sevens • 3 votes • 0 comments

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

WHEN: 26 May 2013 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE: Holborn, London, WC2B 6BG

One of our fortnightly meetups. This will be held in the Shakespeare's Head by Holborn tube station. Turn left out of the station exit, and it's <100m on your left.

We're in the process of changing the format of meetups, so they alternate between designated "social" and "practical" gatherings. This will be the last undesignated meetup.

One of our number will have recently returned from the May CFAR Rationality Minicamp, and has volunteered to provide an AMA-style discussion on the experience.

We have a Google Group. Why not join it?

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

0 comments

Meetup : Bielefeld Meetup May 22nd

Thu, 16 May 2013 09:50:19 +0000

Submitted by Just_existing • 0 votes • 0 comments

Discussion article for the meetup : Bielefeld Meetup May 22nd

WHEN: 22 May 2013 07:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE: Grill/Bar Verve, Klosterplatz 13, Bielefeld

We are meeting once again in Bielefeld.

The topics of this evening are not yet determined, but will be in the next days, or develop during the meetup. Highly interesting talk can be expected.

If you live in the area consider dropping by :)

Discussion article for the meetup : Bielefeld Meetup May 22nd

0 comments

Meetup : [Moscow] Belief cleaning

Thu, 16 May 2013 06:09:03 +0000

Submitted by Yuu • 0 votes • 0 comments

Discussion article for the meetup : [Moscow] Belief cleaning

WHEN: 26 May 2013 04:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE: Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

Please use the following guide to get to the meetup: link. You need the second revolving door with the sign “Yandex Money” in Russian. We will meet you at 15:45 MSK with “LW” sign. And we will also check the entrance at 16:00 and 16:10, so please do not be late.

Main topics:

Epistemic Spring Cleaning: we will do exercise to find and change old unnecessary beliefs.
Prediction markets. We will have another round of predictions, you can find the discussion and bets table on the Russian forum.
Game session: the Resistance. You can find rules here, in Russian.

If you are going for the first time, you can fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information. You can also use personal messages here, or drop a message at lw@lesswrong.ru to contact me for any reason.

Reports from previous sessions can be found here, in Russian, now with photos

Discussion article for the meetup : [Moscow] Belief cleaning

0 comments

Meetup : Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 65-68

Thu, 16 May 2013 04:27:12 +0000

Submitted by therufs • 0 votes • 0 comments

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 65-68

WHEN: 18 May 2013 12:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: 726 Rigsbee Avenue, Durham NC 27701

Meet at Fullsteam (address above) for discussion of HPMoR chapters 65-68!

We may be recognizeable by our large spiral-bound tome, but the likely absence of other groups will probably make us easy to spot.

Bring coffee and/or food as you are inclined; tell the list if you'd like a ride: http://groups.google.com/group/rtlw

See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 65-68

0 comments

Group Rationality Diary, May 16-31

Thu, 16 May 2013 04:12:36 +0000

Submitted by therufs • 4 votes • 12 comments

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for May 16-31.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating!

Immediate past diary

Rationality Diaries archive

12 comments

Why is it rational to invest in retirement? I don't get it.

Thu, 16 May 2013 01:28:42 +0000

Submitted by diegocaleiro • 18 votes • 105 comments

I know I said I'd be gone... but this was just a comment originally, and I noticed it may actually be relevant.

Elharo said in Munchkin Ideas:

Put as much money as you can afford into tax advantaged retirement accounts. In the U.S. that means 401K, 403b, IRA, SEP, etc.

I'm interested in the following:

Why should people invest in retirement? Or, instead, why should someone invest as much as most do in retirement.

Few facts that make it a boggling question for me:

You are 10% to 20% likely to die before you enjoy even your first retirement year.

People adjust much more to harsh economical conditions than they believe they would. They remain happy, as many studies by Seligman and others show.

People who retire are only happier as retirees if they retired by choice (I lost the paper, sorry).

Most people here live in rich countries - darn, hate to be the exception! - , and their state would happily provide them with at least the maximal retirement plan legal in my country (aprox 2000 dollars/month). And surely would provide them with double the minimal (about 200/month) if they needed.

If you have descendants, they may support you in case you are still alive, and if you are not rich enough to keep a house, you have a good excuse to be in company of loved ones (you have nowhere else to go).

Last, but not least: That person is not even you that much anyway.

Given all that, I have no clue what the whole fuss about retirement plans, and being 60% of a rich old person with a crappy body is all about, specially if you are in the grave.

I mean, in the cryopreservation chamber, of course.

Edit: A related question not worth its own post, but maybe worth discussing, is Should inheritance "jump" a generation. Everyone inheriting from grandparents, instead of parents? Just the abstract ethical question. Regardless of implementation procedure.

105 comments

[LINK] Prizes and open source for drug research (proposed, and some politics)

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:23:32 +0000

Submitted by NancyLebovitz • 6 votes • 13 comments

Trying to get drug research to happen in spite of the drug companies:

The article also has rather a lot about US government opposition to the proposed treaty, which includes a requirement that member nations spend 0.01% of GDP annually on neglected diseases, and Bill Gates' opposition as well.

Is there any reason why non-profits aren't doing drug research?

Love's idea suggests the use of cash prizes -- rather than patents -- to incentivize research; say, $2 billion for an effective therapeutic drug for Chagas disease. A cure, once developed, proven, and awarded a prize, would then exist as open-access intellectual property, with manufacturers around the world competing to produce the drug in the most cost effective manner. Implementing the idea, Love said, "is effectively leveraging the power of the free market twice, once to produce the thing you want and then again to manufacture it as economically as possible." The concept is known as delinking.

*****

To combat the problem [of isolated research groups], the R&D treaty would create an observatory, an open platform for researchers in disparate corners of the globe to pool data and coordinate their work. Grants given to fund their studies would come with provisions requiring that the research exist on that public, cloud-based observatory.

*****

Love's concept of delinking is outlined in a proposal for an R&D treaty, which remains in limbo at the WHO in Geneva. It will have its fate decided in late May, at the annual World Health Assembly (WHA), the democratic forum of members states that governs the WHO.

*****

Scannell worked as a consultant in the drug industry and then as an equity analyst, but quit last year to team up with Young once more at small biotech firm Scannell described as "heretical." The company is called e-Therapeutics, and its approaching drug design via the pair's background in networks. "Go back to how the drug industry says it discovers drugs. It looks for individual targets and then it optimizes drugs for high affinity binding on that target," Scannell said. The strategy, to Scannell's and Young's eyes, fails to take into account the complexity of biological systems.

"If you look at the structure of protein-protein interaction networks in cells, or the metabolic networks, these have been designed by evolution to be robust. You've got feedback loops, you've got parallel pathways, you've got redundancies. And what that says is, if you start your search process looking for an individual molecular component you want to perturb to influence a disease, probably evolution has designed your cell that, if you perturb that component, nothing is going to happen." Given the approach, Scannell said, "Maybe it shouldn't be surprising that 95 percent of drugs going into clinical trials fail."

"Historically, you can make a very strong case that the way drugs were discovered when it was cheap and easy -- you can't do all this now because of the regulators, but some of this you might be able to do -- was essentially through broad phenotypic screening, very often in man," Scannell said. "Drugs were regarded as potential tools that might do something useful, and then people essentially searched for uses for the tool. And today we do the exact opposite. Which is we say, we want something that cures Alzheimer's disease, let's design something that cures Alzheimer's disease, and frankly that just doesn't work."

*****

"He [Bill Gates] slowly, as Foundation and as a philanthropist, is being drawn into more open-source policies," Love said. "If you look at the licensing he does on his own government-funded research, he has experienced a little bit of frustration when he doesn't get sufficient openness in the research he's funded himself, so he's begin to put things that much very much like open-source provisions in his own licenses," Love said. "That has been progress, and people have noticed that. It used to be that if you applied to the program to fund libraries -- I know somebody that did this -- she was told you had to eliminate the words 'open-source' because they couldn't fund anything that had even the words."

13 comments

Crash problems for total futarchy

Wed, 15 May 2013 10:41:59 +0000

Submitted by Stuart_Armstrong • 7 votes • 13 comments

Futarchy holds great promise for dealing with all the morass of poor decision making in our governments and corporations. For those who haven't heard of it, the main concept is to use betting markets, where people place bets on the expected outcome of a policy, and the decision-makers choose the policy that the market decrees is most likely to achieve their desired outcomes. Robin Hanson summarises it as "Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs".

The approach, however, could lead to problems in a large financial crisis. When a large financial bubble bursts, many things change: liquidity, risk aversion, volatility, the competence of the average investor. If the betting markets are integrated into the general market (which they would be), then they would be affected in the same way. So at precisely the moment when decision makers need the best results, their main tools would be going haywire.

This would be even worse if they'd been depending on the betting markets for their decisions, operating merely as overseers. At that point, they may have lost the ability to make effective decision entirely.

Since isolating the betting markets from the swings of the rest of the market is unrealistic/impossible/stupid, we should aim for a mixed governance model - one where betting markets play an integral part, but where the deciders still have experience making their own decisions and overriding the betting markets with some regularity.

13 comments

Kevin Drum's Article about AI and Technology

Wed, 15 May 2013 07:38:18 +0000

Submitted by knb • 20 votes • 30 comments

Kevin Drum has an article in Mother Jones about AI and Moore's Law:

THIS IS A STORY ABOUT THE FUTURE. Not the unhappy future, the one where climate change turns the planet into a cinder or we all die in a global nuclear war. This is the happy version. It's the one where computers keep getting smarter and smarter, and clever engineers keep building better and better robots. By 2040, computers the size of a softball are as smart as human beings. Smarter, in fact. Plus they're computers: They never get tired, they're never ill-tempered, they never make mistakes, and they have instant access to all of human knowledge.

The result is paradise. Global warming is a problem of the past because computers have figured out how to generate limitless amounts of green energy and intelligent robots have tirelessly built the infrastructure to deliver it to our homes. No one needs to work anymore. Robots can do everything humans can do, and they do it uncomplainingly, 24 hours a day. Some things remain scarce—beachfront property in Malibu, original Rembrandts—but thanks to super-efficient use of natural resources and massive recycling, scarcity of ordinary consumer goods is a thing of the past. Our days are spent however we please, perhaps in study, perhaps playing video games. It's up to us.

Although he only mentions consumer goods, Drum presumably means that scarcity will end for services and consumer goods. If scarcity only ended for consumer goods, people would still have to work (most jobs are currently in the services economy).

Drum explains that our linear-thinking brains don't intuitively grasp exponential systems like Moore's law.

Suppose it's 1940 and Lake Michigan has (somehow) been emptied. Your job is to fill it up using the following rule: To start off, you can add one fluid ounce of water to the lake bed. Eighteen months later, you can add two. In another 18 months, you can add four ounces. And so on. Obviously this is going to take a while.

By 1950, you have added around a gallon of water. But you keep soldiering on. By 1960, you have a bit more than 150 gallons. By 1970, you have 16,000 gallons, about as much as an average suburban swimming pool.

At this point it's been 30 years, and even though 16,000 gallons is a fair amount of water, it's nothing compared to the size of Lake Michigan. To the naked eye you've made no progress at all.

So let's skip all the way ahead to 2000. Still nothing. You have—maybe—a slight sheen on the lake floor. How about 2010? You have a few inches of water here and there. This is ridiculous. It's now been 70 years and you still don't have enough water to float a goldfish. Surely this task is futile?

But wait. Just as you're about to give up, things suddenly change. By 2020, you have about 40 feet of water. And by 2025 you're done. After 70 years you had nothing. Fifteen years later, the job was finished.

He also includes this nice animated .gif which illustrates the principle very clearly.

Drum continues by talking about possible economic ramifications.

Until a decade ago, the share of total national income going to workers was pretty stable at around 70 percent, while the share going to capital—mainly corporate profits and returns on financial investments—made up the other 30 percent. More recently, though, those shares have started to change. Slowly but steadily, labor's share of total national income has gone down, while the share going to capital owners has gone up. The most obvious effect of this is the skyrocketing wealth of the top 1 percent, due mostly to huge increases in capital gains and investment income.

Drum says the share of (US) national income going to workers was stable until about a decade ago. I think the graph he links to shows the worker's share has been declining since approximately the late 1960s/early 1970s. This is about the time US immigration levels started increasing (which raises returns to capital and lowers native worker wages).

The rest of Drum's piece isn't terribly interesting, but it is good to see mainstream pundits talking about these topics.

30 comments

Adjusting Effort to Barely Meet Standards

Wed, 15 May 2013 03:08:06 +0000

Submitted by SapientPearwood • 6 votes • 16 comments

There is sometimes an observed inverse correlation between a student's inherent talent/intelligence and the amount of effort expended. The trend is one that I see everywhere in high school. Smart students just sort of shrug and coast by to get an acceptable grade. Or, on the other side, students that don't grasp material as quickly give it an extra push, knowing that it will take some work in order to get the grades they want.

The similarity between the two is that both types of students are adjusting the amount of work they need to put in, based on the given standard. Given an average, or a benchmark to aim at, they just figure out how much work they need to put in. Students find the equilibrium, the balance between their intelligence and the work they have to put in, that allows them to scrape by.

For students that have less inherent talent in a particular subject, this may be an incentive to improve. But for the students that are never challenged in school, who easily fly through classes that do not provide the adequate learning environment, this drills into their minds that they don't need to work hard.

And this lesson is definitely not desirable to teach to bright students. Some are never exposed to anything besides the monotony and apparent irrelevance of schoolwork (When will we ever use this in the real world?) and fall into the habit of filing everything new under the "pay attention only enough to scrape by" category of their minds. So, when faced with something like, say, global existential risk, the weight of the subject is ignored.

Of course, there are many other factors involved. It isn't that everyone has been trained to adjust to put in minimal work based on an average. If that was the case, then all smart students in public school would be slackers. On a larger scale, then there would be no deviations on either side - everyone would just fall exactly on the average line.

So there is clearly something that lets some people ignore the average. Most motivated and thoughtful people probably don't pay attention to what is considered typical or the standard, anyway. But for many students, a certain test score is a signal to just stop.

Back to the larger scale, now. The problem of using an external standard doesn’t apply only to high school students. There are a multitude of other areas in life, areas in which it is easy to reach a certain point that serves as a mental stopping point.

This may help to account for people that find themselves in an unsatisfying job, wondering why they’re unhappily stuck – based on the standards of salary and stability, the job could look fine. One level further, if meeting a standard is the sole basis of effort, then the job certainly could be done – but without creativity or innovation.

If the goal becomes to reach a certain average, then you could go checkmark, checkmark, checkmark down the row of criteria, without really getting anywhere, or doing anything meaningful. Who creates those standards in the first place? Are they actually a good measure of effectiveness, usefulness, or mastery? Basing work and effort on external stimulus will not compare to having the internal source of motivation, desire, or cause.

One last note: the TED talk and this post have focused on the concept of hard work, or "grit." It is worth pointing out that there is a difference between just working hard, possibly ineffectively and working smarter. It doesn't help to do the same thing over and over again and wonder why the results aren't getting better. Real improvement takes some reflection - identifying weak areas, prioritizing, etc. Though this is probably commonly known, it is a vital distinction to keep in mind with the subject this discussion.

Edit: The links to this TED talk (and an older version here) were originally featured at the very beginning of the post. Since the talk wasn't relevant in any way, except for a single remark, I removed the links from the prominent focus to increase clarity.

16 comments

Improving Cryonics - Regulations and Ethical Considerations

Tue, 14 May 2013 21:54:48 +0000

Submitted by jennabouche • 1 votes • 16 comments

Here is my understanding - correct me if I'm wrong:

Cryonics is only allowed once a person is determined legally dead: when the heart stops beating.

One of the reasons why they have to be dead seems to be that the majority of the population consider cryonics to be a death-sentence, as there is no guarantee at this time that subjects can be revived - regardless of if there's a cure for whatever ailment caused a person's death.

It is difficult at this time to improve the revitalizing process as the patients - or clients - are incapable of surviving as their body was already in the process of shutting down, and we do not have the technology to bring them fully back.

Now, to some conjecturing.

We might be able to more reasonably test the effectiveness of procedures to revive current patients if we had healthier people, ones not yet at death's door.

Here's where the ethical dilemma hits home: we could use people who are in good health, here defined as 'not terminally-ill or otherwise dying from health complications in the near future,' who are already intending to end their life. Simply stated, those who are suicidal.

For all intensive purposes they would cease to exist, which would be part of the appeal to that subgroup. At this time there is a probability of them dying from the procedure, which should be ok as they were self-destructing anyway. And if they don't die, they get the chance to reflect on their life or go at it again. In this way their death would be more beneficial to the whole.

The benefits to this would be the additional research into the effects of cryonics on the body and how to develop a procedure to guarantee that you CAN be revived once put under.

I am aware of a couple of problems: legal complications, how to find willing participants, etc., and am thinking of ways to resolve that.

I've just been thinking about this for the past week or so and wanted additional insight. Thoughts?

***On Suicide

For those opposed to suicide: this idea does not encourage people to kill themselves. Rather, it provides those who are already intent upon ending their existence a means to do so more honorably.

In case people have not read it, I recommend Schopenhauer's Essay on Suicide, found here: http://www.egs.edu/library/arthur-schopenhauer/articles/essays-of-schopenhauer/on-suicide/

16 comments

Meetup : Paris Meetup: Sunday, May 26.

Tue, 14 May 2013 20:27:45 +0000

Submitted by Emile • 1 votes • 8 comments

Discussion article for the meetup : Paris Meetup: Sunday, May 26.

WHEN: 26 May 2013 02:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE: Café des Arts et Métiers‎, 51 Rue Turbigo, Paris

The next Paris Meetup will be Sunday, May 26, at the Café des Arts et Métiers opposite the Museum. We have several guests of honor! Cat should be around, and loup-vaillant is coming up from the south!

Discussion article for the meetup : Paris Meetup: Sunday, May 26.

8 comments

Avoiding the emergency room

Tue, 14 May 2013 20:23:54 +0000

Submitted by NancyLebovitz • 7 votes • 65 comments

Diana Hsieh interviews Dr. Doug McGuff about avoidable injuries and deaths.

He's an emergency room physician in South Carolina, so he's pretty much just talking about what he's seen-- different regions have different characteristic injuries.

He says that you're safest in the largest car you can afford, which raises some interesting ethical issues.

There's a fair amount about the risks of getting overfocused on getting something done. This adds tremendously to the hazards of using ladders.

Also, did you know trees can go sproing? One of hazards of chainsaws is that a good bit of energy might be stored in a twisted tree trunk. Don't just know your physics, apply it!

More generally, there are machines and situations (ATVs, chainsaws, airplanes, skiing, etc.) which tend to make people feel more competent than they are.

On the other hand, injuries from rock climbing and horseback riding are less common than you might think. I don't know why the ancestral environment didn't give people a reflexive distaste against diving into water. Perhaps people back then had too much sense to dive much.

One of the pieces of advice-- to get out of stressful relationships-- is too general. This is mostly a good idea, but from what I've read, leaving a violent relationship can lead to more risk of violence. It's still a good idea to leave, but it's important to leave cautiously.

Both McGuff and Hsieh are objectivists, so some of the discussion might be in mind-killer territory.

Edited to add: It's possible that objectivism would be better discussed under a new post. It's certain that there's a bunch of interesting material in the podcast, and avoidable accidents are worth discussing.

Topic list:

“Black swans” of health and “The Dirty Dozen”
#1: Driving a car or motorcycle
#2: Riding an ATV
#3: Biking or jogging on public roads
#4: Flying a plane or helicopter yourself
#5: Getting into a fight
#6: Lighting a gas grill
#7: Diving into water
#8: Using ladders and chainsaws
#9: Retiring and building your dream house
#10: Allowing yourself to be forced into a car or trunk at gunpoint
#11: Staying in stressful relationships
#12: Winning the lottery
Dr. McGuff’s history with risky sports
The risks of other sports
How to survive the ER

65 comments

The impact of whole brain emulation

Tue, 14 May 2013 19:59:11 +0000

Submitted by jkaufman • 3 votes • 24 comments

At some point in the future we may be able to scan someone's brain at very high resolution and "run" them on a computer. [1] When I first heard this as a teenager I thought it was interesting but not hugely important. Running people faster or slower and keeping backups came immediately to mind, and Wikipedia adds space travel, but those three by themselves don't seem like they change that much. Thinking speed doesn't seem to be major limiting factor in coming up with good ideas, we generally only restore from backups in cases of rare failure, and while space travel would dramatically affect the ability of humans to spread [2] it doesn't sound like it changes the conditions of life.

This actually undersells emulation by quite a lot. For example "backups" let you repeatedly run the same copy of a person on different information. You can find identify a person when they're at their intellectual or creative best, and give them an hour to think about a new situation. Add in potentially increased simulation speed and parallelism, and you could run lots of these ones looking into all sorts of candidate approaches to problems.

With emulations you can get around the mental overhead of keeping all your assumptions about a direction of thought in your mind at once. I might not know if X is true, and spend a while thinking about what should happen if it's true and another while about what if it's not, but it's hard for me to get past the problem that I'm still uncertain about X. With an emulation that you can reset to a saved state however, you could have multiple runs where you give some emulations a strong assurance that X is true and some a strong assurance that X is false

You can also run randomized controlled trials where the experimental group and the control group are the same person. This should hugely bring down experimental cost and noise, allowing us to make major and rapid progress in discovering what works in education, motivation, and productivity.

(Backups stop being about error recovery and fundamentally change the way an emulation is useful.)

These ideas aren't new here [3] but I don't see them often in discussions of the impact of emulating people. I also suspect there are many more creative ways of using emulation; what else could you do with it?

[1] I think this is a long way off but don't see any reasons why it wouldn't be possible.

[2] Which has a big effect on estimates of the number of future people.

[3] I think most of these ideas fo back to Carl Schulman's 2010 Whole Brain Emulation and the Evolution of Superorganisms.

I also posted this on my blog

24 comments

Megameetup Announcement: Boston, July 13-14

Tue, 14 May 2013 17:42:29 +0000

Submitted by ModusPonies • 3 votes • 4 comments

On the weekend of July 13-14, the Boston community will be hosting a megameetup. Everyone who can make the trip is strongly encouraged to come. Details are being worked out, but I expect to have presentations, pairwise discussion, a prediction market game, and (weather permitting) running around outside.

If you think you might come, please leave a comment and a confidence estimate. For example, if you would bring two guests and are 75% certain you will come, your comment might contain "me +2, 75%." If you need a space to crash at night, send me a PM.

4 comments

Meetup : Berkeley: Munchkinism

Tue, 14 May 2013 04:25:21 +0000

Submitted by Nisan • 2 votes • 0 comments

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: Munchkinism

WHEN: 15 May 2013 07:30:00PM (-0700)

WHERE: Berkeley, CA

This week's meetup is about Munchkinism:

"A Munchkin is the sort of person who, faced with a role-playing game, reads through the rulebooks over and over until he finds a way to combine three innocuous-seeming magical items into a cycle of infinite wish spells. Or who, in real life, composes a surprisingly effective diet out of drinking a quarter-cup of extra-light olive oil at least one hour before and after tasting anything else. Or combines liquid nitrogen and antifreeze and life-insurance policies into a ridiculously cheap method of defeating the invincible specter of unavoidable Death. Or figures out how to build the real-life version of the cycle of infinite wish spells."

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

Come and bring your strange and zany ideas for exploiting the structure of reality at the expense of the Protestant work ethic. I suggest you look at this recent Less Wrong thread on Munchkinism beforehand, although it is not required:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/h9b/post_ridiculous_munchkin_ideas/

The meetup will begin on Wednesday at 7:30pm. For directions to Zendo, see the mailing list:

http://groups.google.com/group/bayarealesswrong

or call me at:

http://i.imgur.com/Vcafy.png

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: Munchkinism

0 comments

Reminder Memes

Mon, 13 May 2013 23:56:09 +0000

Submitted by Mass_Driver • -12 votes • 4 comments

EDIT: Apologies to anyone who wasted time with this; I did not intend it to go live. I left a draft post up on a computer that had an automatic system update; it must have posted as the window was terminated.

4 comments

[LINK] Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

Mon, 13 May 2013 18:27:34 +0000

Submitted by HaydnB • 4 votes • 3 comments

A new popular science book on existential risks and mass extinctions from Annalee Newitz, the founding editor of io9.com

It probably won't display the same rigour as Global Catastrophic Risks (Bostrom, Cirkovic et al.), but that was published five years ago and is a bit academic. A new book written in a popular, journalistic way seems pretty appealing - it might even be a good introduction for family/friends. Anyway I'm looking forward to reading it, and I expect enough other LWers will be interested in this news to warrant the post.

If anyone has any other existential risk book recommendations, please comment.

Tumblr

Amazon

Some reviews on goodreads

3 comments

Anyone live in or near Osaka?

Mon, 13 May 2013 14:43:27 +0000

Submitted by Crux • 1 votes • 0 comments

I'm currently located in Osaka, and will be here for the next few months. Anyone close enough to meet? Would be cool to meet some people from Less Wrong who live around here!

0 comments

The autopilot problem: driving without experience

Mon, 13 May 2013 12:42:57 +0000

Submitted by Stuart_Armstrong • 23 votes • 37 comments

Consider a mixed system, in which an automated system is paired with a human overseer. The automated system handles most of the routine tasks, while the overseer is tasked with looking out for errors and taking over in extreme or unpredictable circumstances. Examples of this could be autopilots, cruise control, GPS direction finding, high-frequency trading – in fact nearly every automated system has this feature, because they nearly all rely on humans "keeping an eye on things".

But often the human component doesn't perform as well as it should do – doesn't perform as well as it did before part of the system was automated. Cruise control can impair driver performance, leading to more accidents. GPS errors can take people far more off course than following maps did. When the autopilot fails, pilots can crash their planes in rather conventional conditions. Traders don't understand why their algorithms misbehave, or how to stop this.

There seems to be three factors at work here:

Firstly, if the automation performs flawlessly, the overseers will become complacent, blindly trusting the instruments and failing to perform basic sanity checks. They will have far less procedural understanding of what's actually going on, since they have no opportunity to exercise their knowledge.
This goes along with a general deskilling of the overseer. When the autopilot controls the plane for most of its trip, pilots get far less hands-on experience of actually flying the plane. Paradoxically, less efficient automation can help with both these problems: if the system fails 10% of the time, the overseer will watch and understand it closely.
And when the automation does fail, the overseer will typically lack situational awareness of what's going on. All they know is that something extraordinary has happened, and they may have the (possibly flawed) readings of various instruments to guide them – but they won't have a good feel for what happened to put them in that situation.

So, when the automation fails, the overseer is generally dumped into an emergency situation, whose nature they are going to have to deduce, and, using skills that have atrophied, they are going to have to take on the task of the automated system that has never failed before and that they have never had to truly understand.

And they'll typically get blamed for getting it wrong.

Similarly, if we design AI control mechanisms that rely on the presence of a human in the loop (such as tools AIs, Oracle AIs, and, to a lesser extent, reduced impact AIs), we'll need to take the autopilot problem into account, and design the role of the overseer so as not to deskill them, and not count on them being free of error.

37 comments