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On Making Things

11 Gram_Stone 05 March 2016 03:26AM

(Content note: This is basically just a story about how I accidentally briefly made something that I find very unfun into something very fun, for the sake of illustrating how surprising it was and how cool it would be if everyone could do things like this more often and deliberately. You also might get a kick out of this story in the way that you might get a kick out of How It's Made, or many of Swimmer963's posts on swimming and nursing, or Elo's post on wearing magnetic rings. If none of that interests you, then you might consider backing out now.)

I'm learning math under the tutelage of a friend, and I go through a lot of paper. I write a lot of proofs so there can be plenty of false starts. I could fill a whole sheet of paper, decide that I only need one result to continue on my way, and switch to a blank sheet. Since this is how I go about it, I thought that a whiteboard would be a really good idea. The solution is greater surface area and practical erasure.

I checked Amazon; whiteboards are one of those products with polarized reviews. I secretly wondered if ten percent of all whiteboards manufactured don't just immediately permanently stain. Maybe I was being a little risk-averse, but I decided to hold off on buying one.

Then I remembered that I make signs for a living, and I realized that I could probably just make a whiteboard myself.

I had a good rapport with my supervisor. I have breaks and lunch time, and the boundaries are kind of fuzzy, so the time wouldn't be an issue. I didn't have to print anything, so I wouldn't be taking up time on the printers or using ink.

Maybe everyone knows what 'vinyl' is and I don't need to explain this, but the stuff that 'PVC pipes' (PVC stands for polyvinyl chloride) are made out of can be formed into thin elastic sheets. Manufacturers apply adhesive and paper backing to these sheets and sell them to people so they can pull off the paper and stick the vinyl to stuff. You can print on some of it too. It comes on long rolls, typically 54 in. or 60 in., sort of like tape or paper towels. If you ever see a vehicle that belongs to a business with all sorts of art all over it, then it's probably printed on vinyl.

It's kind of hard to print on a really short roll without everything going horribly awry, so we have tons of rolls with like 10 ft. by 54 in. sheets on them that just get thrown away.

If you scratch a vinyl print, the ink will come right off. So we laminate the vinyl before we apply it. Most of our products are laminated with a laminate by the enigmatic name of '8518', but today we happened to be using a very particular and rarely used dry erase laminate. So naturally I ran one of those extra sheets of vinyl through the laminator after I finished the job that I was really supposed to be doing.

And we keep these things called 'drops', which are just sheets of substrate material, stuff that you might apply vinyl to or print on, that were cut off from other things that were made into signs, and then never touched again. Sometimes you can make a sign out of one. People forget about them and don't like to use them because they're usually dirtier and more damaged than stock substrate, so we have a ton of them. It might be corrugated plastic (like cardboard, but plastic), or foamboard (two pieces of paper glued to a sheet of foam), or much thicker, non-elastic PVC.

And this is when I started to think that this was becoming a kind of important experience.

I looked at the drops lined up on the shelf. I definitely didn't want to use foamboard; it's extremely fragile, you can't pull the vinyl off if you mess up, it would dent when I pressed too hard with the marker, and it most generally sucks in every way possible except cost. Corrugated plastic is also quite fragile, and it has linear indentations between the flutes that vinyl would conform to; I wanted the board to be flat. PVC is a better alternative than both, but drops can sit for a long time, and large sheets of PVC warp under their own weight; I wanted a relatively large board and I didn't want it to be warped. So I went for a product that we refer to as 'MaxMetal'; two sheets of aluminum sandwiched around a thicker sheet of plastic. It's much harder to warp, and I could be confident that it would be a solid writing surface. PVC is solid, but it's not metal.

I was looking through the MaxMetal drops, trying to find the right one, realizing that I hadn't decided what dimensions I wanted the board to be, and I felt a little jump in my chest. That was me finally noticing how much fun I was having. And immediately after that, I realized that even though I had implicitly expected to do everything that I had done, I was surprised at how much fun I was having. I had failed to predict how much fun I would have doing those things. It seemed like something worth fixing.

I finally chose a precisely cut piece that was approximately 30 in. wide by 24 in. high. And then I made the board. I separated some of the vinyl from the backing, and I cut off a strip of backing, and I applied part of the vinyl sheet to one edge of the board. I put the end of the sheet with the strip of stuck vinyl between two mechanical rollers, left the substrate flat, flipped the vinyl sheet over the top of the machine and past the top of the substrate sheet, pulled up more of the backing, and rolled it through to press the two sheets together while I pulled the backing off of the vinyl. I put the product on a table, turned it upside down, cut off the excess vinyl with my trusty utility knife, and rounded the corners off by half an inch for safety and aesthetics. I took an orange Expo marker to it, and made a giant signature, and it worked. A microfiber rag erased it just fine even after letting it sit for half an hour. I cut off some super heavy duty, I-promise-this-is-safe double-sided tape, rolled it up, and took it home, so I could mount the board to my bedroom wall. I made a pretty snazzy whiteboard for myself. It was cool.

There probably aren't a lot of signmakers on LessWrong, but there are a lot of programmers. I don't see them talk about this experience a lot, but I figure it's pretty similar; what it feels like to use something that you made, or watch it work. And I'm sure there are other people with other things.

But it seems worth saying explicitly, "Maybe you should make stuff because it's fun."

That was my main explanation for how fun it was, for awhile. But there were a lot of other things when I thought about it more.

I technically had to solve problems, but they were relatively simple and rewarding to solve.

It felt a little forbidden, doing something creative for yourself at work when you're really only there to stay alive. Even a lame taboo is usually a nice kick.

And my time was taken up by responsibility, I was doing real work between all of those steps, so I could look forward to the next step in the creation process while doing something that I normally drag myself through. The day flew by when I started making that thing. When could I fit in some time for my whiteboard?

And it was fun because the meta-event was interesting; I never thought that I could do exactly the same work activity, and a small context change would change it from boring, old work to fun. I was laminating vinyl and fetching drops and rounding corners, but it wasn't for a vehicle wrap, or a sign, or a magnet; it was for my whiteboard, and that changed everything. I was glad that I noticed that, and hopeful that I could find a way to deliberately apply it in the future.

And I was using non-universal, demanded skills, that many people could acquire, but not instantly. It was cool to feel like I was being resourceful in a very particular way that most people never would.

And there weren't too many choices, and the choices weren't ambiguous. The dimensions of the board, including thickness, were limited to the dimensions of the drops, and I'd have to make very precise cuts through a hard material if I wanted a board that wasn't the size of an existing one. A whiteboard is mostly a plain white surface, there isn't much design to be done. I only had quarter-inch and half-inch corner rounders; it's one of those or square corners. What if I had more choices, either about the design of the board, or in a different domain with way more choices by default? I might be a human and regret every choice that I actually make because all of those other foregone choices combined are so much more salient.

And it seems helpful that the whiteboard was being made for a noble purpose: so that I could conserve paper and continue to study mathematics at the same time, and do so much more conveniently. I think it would have been less fun if I was making a whiteboard so that I could see what it's like to snap a whiteboard in half with cinder blocks and a bowling ball, or if I was making one because I just thought it would be cool to have one.

And instead of paying $30-$50, I paid nothing. It felt like I won.

I've thought for quite a while, but not on this level, that there should be an applied fun theory; that it seemed a bit strange that you wouldn't go further with the idea that you could find deliberate ways to make your world more fun, and try to make the present more fun, as opposed to just the distant future. And not in the way where you critically examine the suggestions that people usually generate when you ask for a list of activities that are popularly considered fun, but in the way where you predict that things are fun because you understand how fun works, and your predictions come true. Hopefully I offered up something interesting with respect to that line of inquiry.

But of course, fun seems like just the sort of thing that you could easily overthink. At the very least it's not the sort of domain where you want deep theories that don't generate practical advice for too long. But I still think it seems worth thinking about.

Australia wide - LessWrong meetup camp weekend of awesome!

3 Elo 31 March 2015 01:54AM

Posting here as a boost; not sure how "nearest meetup" listings work, and I want to pass this on to everyone in Australia/New Zeland.

http://lesswrong.com/meetups/1bt

 

Camp is super interesting; very much achieves the goal of meeting and hanging out with other brilliant lesswrong people.  Last year I made such good friends that I still consider them some of the closest I have ever made; even without talking to them for weeks at a time.  Although I also do tend to talk to them every other day usually.

There is also an opportunity to learn skills, this year's camp is themed around topics such as:

  • productivity
  • effectiveness
  • functioning successfully at life
  • Food, exercise, health, technology skills
  • How to win at life
  • Turbocharging training
  • High impact culture
  • Effective communication
  • CoZE

 

Its gonna be great, Please come along if you are in Australia!  Part of what makes camp so great is that so many LessWrong people come along and also enjoy the company of each other.

 

If you know someone who is not regularly on www.lesswrong.com and likely to miss this post - please make sure to direct them to here.

 

Any questions - send me a message. :)

Irrationality Game III

11 CellBioGuy 12 March 2014 01:51PM

The 'Irrationality Game' posts in discussion came before my time here, but I had a very good time reading the bits written in the comments section.  I also had a number of thoughts I would've liked to post and get feedback on, but I knew that being buried in such old threads not much would come of it.  So I asked around and feedback from people has suggested that they would be open to a reboot!

I hereby again quote the original rules:

Please read the post before voting on the comments, as this is a game where voting works differently.

Warning: the comments section of this post will look odd. The most reasonable comments will have lots of negative karma. Do not be alarmed, it's all part of the plan. In order to participate in this game you should disable any viewing threshold for negatively voted comments.

Here's an irrationalist game meant to quickly collect a pool of controversial ideas for people to debate and assess. It kinda relies on people being honest and not being nitpickers, but it might be fun.

Write a comment reply to this post describing a belief you think has a reasonable chance of being true relative to the the beliefs of other Less Wrong folk. Jot down a proposition and a rough probability estimate or qualitative description, like 'fairly confident'.

Example (not my true belief): "The U.S. government was directly responsible for financing the September 11th terrorist attacks. Very confident. (~95%)."

If you post a belief, you have to vote on the beliefs of all other comments. Voting works like this: if you basically agree with the comment, vote the comment down. If you basically disagree with the comment, vote the comment up. What 'basically' means here is intuitive; instead of using a precise mathy scoring system, just make a guess. In my view, if their stated probability is 99.9% and your degree of belief is 90%, that merits an upvote: it's a pretty big difference of opinion. If they're at 99.9% and you're at 99.5%, it could go either way. If you're genuinely unsure whether or not you basically agree with them, you can pass on voting (but try not to). Vote up if you think they are either overconfident or underconfident in their belief: any disagreement is valid disagreement.

That's the spirit of the game, but some more qualifications and rules follow.

If the proposition in a comment isn't incredibly precise, use your best interpretation. If you really have to pick nits for whatever reason, say so in a comment reply.

The more upvotes you get, the more irrational Less Wrong perceives your belief to be. Which means that if you have a large amount of Less Wrong karma and can still get lots of upvotes on your crazy beliefs then you will get lots of smart people to take your weird ideas a little more seriously.

Some poor soul is going to come along and post "I believe in God". Don't pick nits and say "Well in a a Tegmark multiverse there is definitely a universe exactly like ours where some sort of god rules over us..." and downvote it. That's cheating. You better upvote the guy. For just this post, get over your desire to upvote rationality. For this game, we reward perceived irrationality.

Try to be precise in your propositions. Saying "I believe in God. 99% sure." isn't informative because we don't quite know which God you're talking about. A deist god? The Christian God? Jewish?

Y'all know this already, but just a reminder: preferences ain't beliefs. Downvote preferences disguised as beliefs. Beliefs that include the word "should" are are almost always imprecise: avoid them.

That means our local theists are probably gonna get a lot of upvotes. Can you beat them with your confident but perceived-by-LW-as-irrational beliefs? It's a challenge!

Additional rules:

  • Generally, no repeating an altered version of a proposition already in the comments unless it's different in an interesting and important way. Use your judgement.
  • If you have comments about the game, please reply to my comment below about meta discussion, not to the post itself. Only propositions to be judged for the game should be direct comments to this post. 
  • Don't post propositions as comment replies to other comments. That'll make it disorganized.
  • You have to actually think your degree of belief is rational.  You should already have taken the fact that most people would disagree with you into account and updated on that information. That means that  any proposition you make is a proposition that you think you are personally more rational about than the Less Wrong average.  This could be good or bad. Lots of upvotes means lots of people disagree with you. That's generally bad. Lots of downvotes means you're probably right. That's good, but this is a game where perceived irrationality wins you karma. The game is only fun if you're trying to be completely honest in your stated beliefs. Don't post something crazy and expect to get karma. Don't exaggerate your beliefs. Play fair.
  • Debate and discussion is great, but keep it civil.  Linking to the Sequences is barely civil -- summarize arguments from specific LW posts and maybe link, but don't tell someone to go read something. If someone says they believe in God with 100% probability and you don't want to take the time to give a brief but substantive counterargument, don't comment at all. We're inviting people to share beliefs we think are irrational; don't be mean about their responses.
  • No propositions that people are unlikely to have an opinion about, like "Yesterday I wore black socks. ~80%" or "Antipope Christopher would have been a good leader in his latter days had he not been dethroned by Pope Sergius III. ~30%." The goal is to be controversial and interesting.
  • Multiple propositions are fine, so long as they're moderately interesting.
  • You are encouraged to reply to comments with your own probability estimates, but  comment voting works normally for comment replies to other comments.  That is, upvote for good discussion, not agreement or disagreement.
  • In general, just keep within the spirit of the game: we're celebrating LW-contrarian beliefs for a change!

I would suggest placing *related* propositions in the same comment, but wildly different ones might deserve separate comments for keeping threads separate.

Make sure you put "Irrationality Game" as the first two words of a post containing a proposition to be voted upon in the game's format.

Here we go!

EDIT:  It was pointed out in the meta-thread below that this could be done with polls rather than karma so as to discourage playing-to-win and getting around the hiding of downvoted comments.  If anyone resurrects this game in the future, please do so under that system  If you wish to test a poll format in this thread feel free to do so, but continue voting as normal for those that are not in poll format. 

Good luck, Mr. Rationalist

4 Stuart_Armstrong 29 April 2013 06:44PM

Is there any rationalist equivalent of "good luck"? I've tried a few variants, such as "work well", "knock them dead", "we're with you" and certain situation-specific phrasings, but haven't found anything that worked generally - though a hearty "may all the gods of Olympus be with you!" can serve. Not a vitally important point, but it would be nice to have something similarly supportive and yet accurate to say.

Population Ethics Shouldn't Be About Maximizing Utility

0 Ghatanathoah 18 March 2013 02:35AM

let me suggest a moral axiom with apparently very strong intuitive support, no matter what your concept of morality: morality should exist. That is, there should exist creatures who know what is moral, and who act on that. So if your moral theory implies that in ordinary circumstances moral creatures should exterminate themselves, leaving only immoral creatures, or no creatures at all, well that seems a sufficient reductio to solidly reject your moral theory.

-Robin Hanson

I agree strongly with the above quote, and I think most other readers will as well. It is good for moral beings to exist and a world with beings who value morality is almost always better than one where they do not. I would like to restate this more precisely as the following axiom: A population in which moral beings exist and have net positive utility, and in which all other creatures in existence also have net positive utility, is always better than a population where moral beings do not exist.

While the axiom that morality should exist is extremely obvious to most people, there is one strangely popular ethical system that rejects it: total utilitarianism. In this essay I will argue that Total Utilitarianism leads to what I will call the Genocidal Conclusion, which is that there are many situations in which it would be fantastically good for moral creatures to either exterminate themselves, or greatly limit their utility and reproduction in favor of the utility and reproduction of immoral creatures. I will argue that the main reason consequentialist theories of population ethics produce such obviously absurd conclusions is that they continue to focus on maximizing utility1 in situations where it is possible to create new creatures. I will argue that pure utility maximization is only a valid ethical theory for "special case" scenarios where the population is static. I will propose an alternative theory for population ethics I call "ideal consequentialism" or "ideal utilitarianism" which avoids the Genocidal Conclusion and may also avoid the more famous Repugnant Conclusion.

 

I will begin my argument by pointing to a common problem in population ethics known as the Mere Addition Paradox (MAP) and the Repugnant Conclusion. Most Less Wrong readers will already be familiar with this problem, so I do not think I need to elaborate on it. You may also be familiar with a even stronger variation called the Benign Addition Paradox (BAP). This is essentially the same as the MAP, except that each time one adds more people one also gives a small amount of additional utility to the people who already existed. One then proceeds to redistribute utility between people as normal, eventually arriving at the huge population where everyone's lives are "barely worth living." The point of this is to argue that the Repugnant Conclusion can be arrived at from "mere addition" of new people that not only doesn't harm the preexisting-people, but also one that benefits them.

The next step of my argument involves three slightly tweaked versions of the Benign Addition Paradox. I have not changed the basic logic of the problem, I have just added one small clarifying detail. In the original MAP and BAP it was not specified what sort of values the added individuals in population A+ held. Presumably one was meant to assume that they were ordinary human beings. In the versions of the BAP I am about to present, however, I will specify that the extra individuals added in A+ are not moral creatures, that if they have values at all they are values indifferent to, or opposed to, morality and the other values that the human race holds dear.

1. The Benign Addition Paradox with Paperclip Maximizers.

Let us imagine, as usual, a population, A, which has a large group of human beings living lives of very high utility. Let us then add a new population consisting of paperclip maximizers, each of whom is living a life barely worth living. Presumably, for a paperclip maximizer, this would be a life where the paperclip maximizer's existence results in at least one more paperclip in the world than there would have been otherwise.

Now, one might object that if one creates a paperclip maximizer, and then allows it to create one paperclip, the utility of the other paperclip maximizers will increase above the "barely worth living" level, which would obviously make this thought experiment nonalagous with the original MAP and BAP. To prevent this we will assume that each paperclip maximizer that is created has a slightly different values on what the ideal size, color, and composition of the paperclip they are trying to produce is. So the Purple 2 centimeter Plastic Paperclip Maximizer gains no addition utility from when the Silver Iron 1 centimeter Paperclip Maximizer makes a paperclip.

So again, let us add these paperclip maximizers to population A, and in the process give one extra utilon of utility to each preexisting person in A. This is a good thing, right? After all, everyone in A benefited, and the paperclippers get to exist and make paperclips. So clearly A+, the new population, is better than A.

Now let's take the next step, the transition from population A+ to population B. Take some of the utility from the human beings and convert it into paperclips. This is a good thing, right?

So let us repeat these steps adding paperclip maximizers and utility, and then redistributing utility. Eventually we reach population Z, where there is a vast amount of paperclip maximizers, a vast amount of many different kinds of paperclips, and a small amount of human beings living lives barely worth living.

Obviously Z is better than A, right? We should not fear the creation of a paperclip maximizing AI, but welcome it! Forget about things like high challenge, love, interpersonal entanglement, complex fun, and so on! Those things just don't produce the kind of utility that paperclip maximization has the potential to do!

Or maybe there is something seriously wrong with the moral assumptions behind the Mere Addition and Benign Addition Paradoxes.

But you might argue that I am using an unrealistic example. Creatures like Paperclip Maximizers may be so far removed from normal human experience that we have trouble thinking about them properly. So let's replay the Benign Addition Paradox again, but with creatures we might actually expect to meet in real life, and we know we actually value.

2. The Benign Addition Paradox with Non-Sapient Animals

You know the drill by now. Take population A, add a new population to it, while very slightly increasing the utility of the original population. This time let's have it be some kind animal that is capable of feeling pleasure and pain, but is not capable of modeling possible alternative futures and choosing between them (in other words, it is not capable of having "values" or being "moral"). A lizard or a mouse, for example. Each one feels slightly more pleasure than pain in its lifetime, so it can be said to have a life barely worth living. Convert A+ to B. Take the utilons that the human beings are using to experience things like curiosity, beatitude, wisdom, beauty, harmony, morality, and so on, and convert it into pleasure for the animals.

We end up with population Z, with a vast amount of mice or lizards with lives just barely worth living, and a small amount of human beings with lives barely worth living. Terrific! Why do we bother creating humans at all! Let's just create tons of mice and inject them full of heroin! It's a much more efficient way to generate utility!

3. The Benign Addition Paradox with Sociopaths

What new population will we add to A this time? How about some other human beings, who all have anti-social personality disorder? True, they lack the key, crucial value of sympathy that defines so much of human behavior. But they don't seem to miss it. And their lives are barely worth living, so obviously A+ has greater utility than A. If given a chance the sociopaths will reduce the utility of other people to negative levels, but let's assume that that is somehow prevented in this case.

Eventually we get to Z, with a vast population of sociopaths and a small population of normal human beings, all living lives just barely worth living. That has more utility, right? True, the sociopaths place no value on things like friendship, love, compassion, empathy, and so on. And true, the sociopaths are immoral beings who do not care in the slightest about right and wrong. But what does that matter? Utility is being maximized, and surely that is what population ethics is all about!

Asteroid!

Let's suppose an asteroid is approaching each of the four population Zs discussed before. It can only be deflected by so much. Your choice is, save the original population of humans from A, or save the vast new population. The choice is obvious. In 1, 2, and 3, each individual has the same level utility, so obviously we should choose which option saves a greater number of individuals.

Bam! The asteroid strikes. The end result in all four scenarios is a world in which all the moral creatures are destroyed. It is a world without the many complex values that human beings possess. Each world, for the most part, lack things like complex challenge, imagination, friendship, empathy, love, and the other complex values that human beings prize. But so what? The purpose of population ethics is to maximize utility, not silly, frivolous things like morality, or the other complex values of the human race. That means that any form of utility that is easier to produce than those values is obviously superior. It's easier to make pleasure and paperclips than it is to make eudaemonia, so that's the form of utility that ought to be maximized, right? And as for making sure moral beings exist, well that's just ridiculous. The valuable processing power they're using to care about morality could be being used to make more paperclips or more mice injected with heroin! Obviously it would be better if they died off, right?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say "Wrong."

Is this realistic?

Now, to fair, in the Overcoming Bias page I quoted, Robin Hanson also says:

I’m not saying I can’t imagine any possible circumstances where moral creatures shouldn’t die off, but I am saying that those are not ordinary circumstances.

Maybe the scenarios I am proposing are just too extraordinary. But I don't think this is the case. I imagine that the circumstances Robin had in mind were probably something like "either all moral creatures die off, or all moral creatures are tortured 24/7 for all eternity."

Any purely utility-maximizing theory of population ethics that counts both the complex values of human beings, and the pleasure of animals, as "utility" should inevitably draw the conclusion that human beings ought to limit their reproduction to the bare minimum necessary to maintain the infrastructure to sustain a vastly huge population of non-human animals (preferably animals dosed with some sort of pleasure-causing drug). And if some way is found to maintain that infrastructure automatically, without the need for human beings, then the logical conclusion is that human beings are a waste of resources (as are chimps, gorillas, dolphins, and any other animal that is even remotely capable of having values or morality). Furthermore, even if the human race cannot practically be replaced with automated infrastructure, this should be an end result that the adherents of this theory should be yearning for.2 There should be much wailing and gnashing of teeth among moral philosophers that exterminating the human race is impractical, and much hope that someday in the future it will not be.

I call this the "Genocidal Conclusion" or "GC." On the macro level the GC manifests as the idea that the human race ought to be exterminated and replaced with creatures whose preferences are easier to satisfy. On the micro level it manifests as the idea that it is perfectly acceptable to kill someone who is destined to live a perfectly good and worthwhile life and replace them with another person who would have a slightly higher level of utility.

Population Ethics isn't About Maximizing Utility

I am going to make a rather radical proposal. I am going to argue that the consequentialist's favorite maxim, "maximize utility," only applies to scenarios where creating new people or creatures is off the table. I think we need an entirely different ethical framework to describe what ought to be done when it is possible to create new people. I am not by any means saying that "which option would result in more utility" is never a morally relevant consideration when deciding to create a new person, but I definitely think it is not the only one.3

So what do I propose as a replacement to utility maximization? I would argue in favor of a system that promotes a wide range of ideals. Doing some research, I discovered that G. E. Moore had in fact proposed a form of "ideal utilitarianism" in the early 20th century.4 However, I think that "ideal consequentialism" might be a better term for this system, since it isn't just about aggregating utility functions.

What are some of the ideals that an ideal consequentialist theory of population ethics might seek to promote? I've already hinted at what I think they are: Life, consciousness, and activity; health and strength; pleasures and satisfactions of all or certain kinds; happiness, beatitude, contentment, etc.; truth; knowledge and true opinions of various kinds, understanding, wisdom... mutual affection, love, friendship, cooperation; all those other important human universals, plus all the stuff in the Fun Theory Sequence. When considering what sort of creatures to create we ought to create creatures that value those things. Not necessarily, all of them, or in the same proportions, for diversity is an important ideal as well, but they should value a great many of those ideals.

Now, lest you worry that this theory has any totalitarian implications, let me make it clear that I am not saying we should force these values on creatures that do not share them. Forcing a paperclip maximizer to pretend to make friends and love people does not do anything to promote the ideals of Friendship and Love. Forcing a chimpanzee to listen while you read the Sequences to it does not promote the values of Truth and Knowledge. Those ideals require both a subjective and objective component. The only way to promote those ideals is to create a creature that includes them as part of its utility function and then help it maximize its utility.

I am also certainly not saying that there is never any value in creating a creature that does not possess these values. There are obviously many circumstances where it is good to create nonhuman animals. There may even be some circumstances where a paperclip maximizer could be of value. My argument is simply that it is most important to make sure that creatures who value these various ideals exist.

I am also not suggesting that it is morally acceptable to casually inflict horrible harms upon a creature with non-human values if we screw up and create one by accident. If promoting ideals and maximizing utility are separate values then it may be that once we have created such a creature we have a duty to make sure it lives a good life, even if it was a bad thing to create it in the first place. You can't unbirth a child.5

It also seems to me that in addition to having ideals about what sort of creatures should exist, we also have ideals about how utility ought to be concentrated. If this is the case then ideal consequentialism may be able to block some forms of the Repugnant Conclusion, even if situations where the only creatures whose creation is being considered are human beings. If it is acceptable to create humans instead of paperclippers, even if the paperclippers would have higher utility, it may also be acceptable to create ten humans with a utility of ten each instead of a hundred humans with a utility of 1.01 each.

Why Did We Become Convinced that Maximizing Utility was the Sole Good?

Population ethics was, until comparatively recently, a fallow field in ethics. And in situations where there is no option to increase the population, maximizing utility is the only consideration that's really relevant. If you've created creatures that value the right ideals, then all that is left to be done is to maximize their utility. If you've created creatures that do not value the right ideals, there is no value to be had in attempting to force them to embrace those ideals. As I've said before, you will not promote the values of Love and Friendship by creating a paperclip maximizer and forcing it to pretend to love people and make friends.

So in situations where the population is constant, "maximize utility" is a decent approximation of the meaning of right. It's only when the population can be added to that morality becomes much more complicated.

Another thing to blame is human-centric reasoning. When people defend the Repugnant Conclusion they tend to point out that a life barely worth living is not as bad as it would seem at first glance. They emphasize that it need not be a boring life, it may be a life full of ups and downs where the ups just barely outweigh the downs. A life worth living, they say, is a life one would choose to live. Derek Parfit developed this idea to some extent by arguing that there are certain values that are "discontinuous" and that one needs to experience many of them in order to truly have a life worth living.

The Orthogonality Thesis throws all these arguments out the window. It is possible to create an intelligence to execute any utility function, no matter what it is. If human beings have all sorts of complex needs that must be fulfilled in order to for them lead worthwhile lives, then you could create more worthwhile lives by killing the human race and replacing them with something less finicky. Maybe happy cows. Maybe paperclip maximizers. Or how about some creature whose only desire is to live for one second and then die. If we created such a creature and then killed it we would reap huge amounts of utility, for we would have created a creature that got everything it wanted out of life!

How Intuitive is the Mere Addition Principle, Really?

I think most people would agree that morality should exist, and that therefore any system of population ethics should not lead to the Genocidal Conclusion. But which step in the Benign Addition Paradox should we reject? We could reject the step where utility is redistributed. But that seems wrong, most people seem to consider it bad for animals and sociopaths to suffer, and that it is acceptable to inflict at least some amount of disutilities on human beings to prevent such suffering.

It seems more logical to reject the Mere Addition Principle. In other words, maybe we ought to reject the idea that the mere addition of more lives-worth-living cannot make the world worse. And in turn, we should probably also reject the Benign Addition Principle. Adding more lives-worth-living may be capable of making the world worse, even if doing so also slightly benefits existing people. Fortunately this isn't a very hard principle to reject. While many moral philosophers treat it as obviously correct, nearly everyone else rejects this principle in day-to-day life.

Now, I'm obviously not saying that people's behavior in their day-to-day lives is always good, it may be that they are morally mistaken. But I think the fact that so many people seem to implicitly reject it provides some sort of evidence against it.

Take people's decision to have children. Many people choose to have fewer children than they otherwise would because they do not believe they will be able to adequately care for them, at least not without inflicting large disutilities on themselves. If most people accepted the Mere Addition Principle there would be a simple solution for this: have more children and then neglect them! True, the children's lives would be terrible while they were growing up, but once they've grown up and are on their own there's a good chance they may be able to lead worthwhile lives. Not only that, it may be possible to trick the welfare system into giving you money for the children you neglect, which would satisfy the Benign Addition Principle.

Yet most people choose not to have children and neglect them. And furthermore they seem to think that they have a moral duty not to do so, that a world where they choose to not have neglected children is better than one that they don't. What is wrong with them?

Another example is a common political view many people have. Many people believe that impoverished people should have fewer children because of the burden doing so would place on the welfare system. They also believe that it would be bad to get rid of the welfare system altogether. If the Benign Addition Principle were as obvious as it seems, they would instead advocate for the abolition of the welfare system, and encourage impoverished people to have more children. Assuming most impoverished people live lives worth living, this is exactly analogous to the BAP, it would create more people, while benefiting existing ones (the people who pay less taxes because of the abolition of the welfare system).

Yet again, most people choose to reject this line of reasoning. The BAP does not seem to be an obvious and intuitive principle at all.

The Genocidal Conclusion is Really Repugnant

There is nearly nothing repugnant than the Genocidal Conclusion. Pretty much the only way a line of moral reasoning could go more wrong would be concluding that we have a moral duty to cause suffering, as an end in itself. This means that it's fairly easy to counter any argument in favor of total utilitarianism that argues the alternative I am promoting has odd conclusions that do not fit some of our moral intuitions, while total utilitarianism does not. Is that conclusion more insane than the Genocidal Conclusion? If it isn't, total utilitarianism should still be rejected.

Ideal Consequentialism Needs a Lot of Work

I do think that Ideal Consequentialism needs some serious ironing out. I haven't really developed it into a logical and rigorous system, at this point it's barely even a rough framework. There are many questions that stump me. In particular I am not quite sure what population principle I should develop. It's hard to develop one that rejects the MAP without leading to weird conclusions, like that it's bad to create someone of high utility if a population of even higher utility existed long ago. It's a difficult problem to work on, and it would be interesting to see if anyone else had any ideas.

But just because I don't have an alternative fully worked out doesn't mean I can't reject Total Utilitarianism. It leads to the conclusion that a world with no love, curiosity, complex challenge, friendship, morality, or any other value the human race holds dear is an ideal, desirable world, if there is a sufficient amount of some other creature with a simpler utility function. Morality should exist, and because of that, total utilitarianism must be rejected as a moral system.

 

1I have been asked to note that when I use the phrase "utility" I am usually referring to a concept that is called "E-utility," rather than the Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility that is sometimes discussed in decision theory. The difference is that in VNM one's moral views are included in one's utility function, whereas in E-utility they are not. So if one chooses to harm oneself to help others because one believes that is morally right, one has higher VNM utility, but lower E-utility.

2There is a certain argument against the Repugnant Conclusion that goes that, as the steps of the Mere Addition Paradox are followed the world will lose its last symphony, its last great book, and so on. I have always considered this to be an invalid argument because the world of the RC doesn't necessarily have to be one where these things don't exist, it could be one where they exist, but are enjoyed very rarely. The Genocidal Conclusion brings this argument back in force. Creating creatures that can appreciate symphonies and great books is very inefficient compared to creating bunny rabbits pumped full of heroin.

3Total Utilitarianism was originally introduced to population ethics as a possible solution to the Non-Identity Problem. I certainly agree that such a problem needs a solution, even if Total Utilitarianism doesn't work out as that solution.

4I haven't read a lot of Moore, most of my ideas were extrapolated from other things I read on Less Wrong. I just mentioned him because in my research I noticed his concept of "ideal utilitarianism" resembled my ideas. While I do think he was on the right track he does commit the Mind Projection Fallacy a lot. For instance, he seems to think that one could promote beauty by creating beautiful objects, even if there were no creatures with standards of beauty around to appreciate them. This is why I am careful to emphasize that to promote ideals like love and beauty one must create creatures capable of feeling love and experiencing beauty.

5My tentative answer to the question Eliezer poses in "You Can't Unbirth a Child" is that human beings may have a duty to allow the cheesecake maximizers to build some amount of giant cheesecakes, but they would also have a moral duty to limit such creatures' reproduction in order to spare resources to create more creatures with humane values.

EDITED: To make a point about ideal consequentialism clearer, based on AlexMennen's criticisms.

A Series of Increasingly Perverse and Destructive Games

11 nigerweiss 14 February 2013 09:22AM

Related to: Higher Than the Most High

 

The linked post describes a game in which (I fudge a little), Omega comes to you and two other people, and ask you to tell him an integer.  The person who names the largest integer is allowed to leave.  The other two are killed.

This got me thinking about variations on the same concept, and here's what I've come up, taking that game to be GAME0.  The results are sort of a fun time-waster, and bring up some interesting issues.  For your enjoyment...

 

THE GAMES:

GAME1: Omega takes you and two strangers (all competent programmers), and kidnaps and sedates you.  You awake in three rooms with instructions printed on the wall explaining the game, and a computer with an operating system and programming language compiler, but no internet.  Food, water, and toiletries are provided, but no external communication.  The participants are allowed to write programs on the computer in a language that supports arbitrarily large numerical values.  The programs are taken by Omega and run on a hypercomputer in finite time (this hypercomputer can resolve the halting problem and infinite loops, but programs that do not eventually halt return no output).  The person who wrote the program with the largest output is allowed to leave.  The others are instantly and painlessly killed.  In the event of a tie, everyone dies.  If your program returns no output, that is taken to be zero.    

GAME2: Identical to GAME1, except that each program you write has to take two inputs, which will be the text of the other players' programs (assume they're all written in the same language).  The reward for outputting the largest number apply normally.  

GAME3: Identical to Game2, except that while you are sedated, Omega painlessly and imperceptibly uploads you.  Additionally, the instructions on the wall now specify that your program must take four inputs - blackbox functions which represent the uploaded minds of all three players, plus a simulation of the room you're in, indistinguishable from the real thing.  We'll assume that players can't modify or interpret the contents of their opponents' brains.  The room function take an argument of a string (which controls the text printed on the wall, and outputs whatever number the person in the simulation's program returns).

 

In each of these games, which program should you write if you wish to survive?  

 

SOME DISCUSSION OF STRATEGY: 

GAME1: Clearly, the trivial strategy (implement the Ackerman or similar fast-growing functions and generate some large integer), gives no better than random results, because it's the bare minimal strategy anyone will employ, and your ranking in the results, without knowledge of your opponents is entirely up to chance / how long you're willing to sit there typing nines for your Ackermann argument.

A few alternatives for your consideration:

1: if you are aware of an existence hypothesis (say, a number with some property which is not conclusively known to exist and could be any integer), write a program that brute-force tests all integers until it arrives at an integer which matches the requirements, and use this as the argument for your rapidly-growing function.  While it may never return any output, if it does, the output will be an integer, and the expected value goes towards infinity.  

2: Write a program that generates all programs shorter than length n, and finds the one with the largest output.  Then make a separate stab at your own non-meta winning strategy.  Take the length of the program you produce, tetrate it for safety, and use that as your length n.  Return the return value of the winning program.

On the whole, though, this game is simply not all that interesting in a broader sense.  

GAME2: This game has its own amusing quirks (primarily that it could probably actually be played in real life on a non-hypercomputer), however, most of its salient features are also present in GAME3, so I'm going to defer discussion to that.  I'll only say that the obvious strategy (sum the outputs of the other two players' programs and return that) leads to an infinite recursive trawl and never halts if everyone takes it.  This holds true for any simple strategy for adding or multiplying some constant with the outputs of your opponents' programs.    

 

GAME3: This game is by far the most interesting.  For starters, this game permits acausal negotiation between players (by parties simulating and conversing with one another).  Furthermore, anthropic reasoning plays a huge role, since the player is never sure if they're in the real world, one of their own simulations, or one of the simulations of the other players.  

Players can negotiate, barter, or threaten one another, they can attempt to send signals to their simulated selves (to indicate that they are in their own simulation and not somebody else's).  They can make their choices based on coin flips, to render themselves difficult to simulate.  They can attempt to brute-force the signals their simulated opponents are expecting.  They can simulate copies of their opponents who think they're playing any previous version of the game, and are unaware they've been uploaded.  They can simulate copies of their opponents, observe their meta-strategies, and plan around them.  They can totally ignore the inputs from the other players and play just the level one game.  It gets very exciting very quickly.  I'd like to see what strategy you folks would employ.  

 

And, as a final bonus, I present GAME4 :  In game 4, there is no Omega, and no hypercomputer.  You simply take a friend, chloroform them, and put them in a concrete room with the instructions for GAME3 on the wall, and a linux computer not plugged into anything.  You leave them there for a few months working on their program, and watch what happens to their psychology.  You win when they shrink down into a dead-eyed, terminally-paranoid and entirely insane shell of their former selves.  This is the easiest game.  

 

Happy playing!   

 

 

NKCDT: The Big Bang Theory

-12 [deleted] 10 November 2012 01:15PM

Hi, Welcome to the first Non-Karmic-Casual-Discussion-Thread.

This is a place for [purpose of thread goes here].

In order to create a causal non karmic environment for every one we ask that you

-Do not upvote or downvote any zero karma posts

-If you see a vote with positive karma, downvote it towards zero, even if it’s a good post

-If you see a vote with negative karma, upvote it towards zero, even if it’s a weak post

-Please be polite and respectful to other users

-Have fun!”

 

 

This is my first attempt at starting a casual conversation on LW where people don't have to worry about winning or losing points, and can just relax and have social fun together.

 

So, Big Bang Theory. That series got me wondering. It seems to be about "geeks", and not the basement-dwelling variety either; they're highly successful and accomplished professionals, each in their own field. One of them has been an astronaut, even. And yet, everything they ever accomplish amounts to absolutely nothing in terms of social recognition or even in terms of personal happiness. And the thing is, it doesn't even get better for their "normal" counterparts, who are just as miserable and petty.

 

Consider, then; how would being rationalists would affect the characters on this show? The writing of the show relies a lot on laughing at people rather than with them; would rationalist characters subvert that? And how would that rationalist outlook express itself given their personalities? (After all, notice how amazingly different from each other Yudkowsky, Hanson, and Alicorn are, just to name a few; they emphasize rather different things, and take different approaches to both truth-testing and problem-solving).

Note: this discussion does not need to be about rationalism. It can be a casual, normal discussion about the series. Relax and enjoy yourselves.

 

But the reason I brought up that series is that its characters are excellent examples of high intelligence hampered by immense irrationality. The apex of this is represented by Dr. Sheldon Cooper, who is, essentially, a complete fundamentalist over every single thing in his life; he applies this attitude to everything, right down to people's favorite flavor of pudding: Raj is "axiomatically wrong" to prefer tapioca, because the best pudding is chocolate. Period. This attitude makes him a far, far worse scientist than he thinks, as he refuses to even consider any criticism of his methods or results. 

 

A place for casual, non-karmic discussion for lesswrongers?

19 [deleted] 04 November 2012 06:50PM

I have never been on a Lesswrong meetup because they tend to take place too far away from my range in terms of distance and budget. Because of that, I don't know if those perform this function to everyone's satisfaction in such a way that what I'm suggesting here doesn't seem worth the effort. I hear that they're a lot of fun, and involve quite a bit of silliness, though; I find those cruelly lacking on Lesswrong proper, whether it be in main posts or discussion posts, and their relevant threads. 

That's why I think it would be nice to have a forum, a place to have normal discussions, where you don't have to watch that you don't say anything stupid or out-of-line lest you unexpectedly lose karma. A place to exchange jokes, frivolities, and entertainment. A place to talk about stuff that isn't rationality or singularity-related. A place to relax and enjoy the company of like-minded folks. A place to take a more personal approach to communication, with sequential rather than branching conversations. A place to make and be friends.

Don't you think having that would be nice?

EDIT: Also, if this place does already exist and I'm not aware of it, I humbly request that you provide me a link, for which I would be most grateful.

Random LW-parodying Statement Generator

59 Armok_GoB 11 September 2012 07:57PM

So, I were looking at this, and then suddenly this thing happened.

EDIT:

New version! I updated the link above to it as well. Added LOADS and LOADS of new content, although I'm not entirely sure if it's actually more fun (my guess is there's more total fun due to varity, but that it's more diluted).

I ended up working on this basically the entire day to day, and implemented practically all my ideas I have so far, except for some grammar issues that'd require disproportionately much work. So unless there are loads of suggestions or my brain comes up with lots of new ideas over the next few days, this may be the last version in a while and I may call it beta and ask for spell-check. Still alpha as of writing this thou.

Since there were some close calls already, I'll restate this explicitly: I'd be easier for everyone if there weren't any forks for at least a few more days, even ones just for spell-checking. After that/I move this to beta feel more than free to do whatever you want.

Thanks to everyone who commented! ^_^

old Source, old version, latest source

Credits: http://lesswrong.com/lw/d2w/cards_against_rationality/ , http://lesswrong.com/lw/9ki/shit_rationalists_say/ , various people commenting on this article with suggestions, random people on the bay12 forums that helped me with the engine this is a descendent from ages ago.

Irrationality Game II

13 [deleted] 03 July 2012 06:50PM

I was very interested in the discussions and opinions that grew out of the last time this was played, but find digging through 800+ comments for a new game to start on the same thread annoying. I also don't want this game ruined by a potential sock puppet (whom ever it may be). So here's a non-sockpuppetiered Irrationality Game, if there's still interest. If there isn't, downvote to oblivion!

The original rules:


Please read the post before voting on the comments, as this is a game where voting works differently.

Warning: the comments section of this post will look odd. The most reasonable comments will have lots of negative karma. Do not be alarmed, it's all part of the plan. In order to participate in this game you should disable any viewing threshold for negatively voted comments.

Here's an irrationalist game meant to quickly collect a pool of controversial ideas for people to debate and assess. It kinda relies on people being honest and not being nitpickers, but it might be fun.

Write a comment reply to this post describing a belief you think has a reasonable chance of being true relative to the the beliefs of other Less Wrong folk. Jot down a proposition and a rough probability estimate or qualitative description, like 'fairly confident'.

Example (not my true belief): "The U.S. government was directly responsible for financing the September 11th terrorist attacks. Very confident. (~95%)."

If you post a belief, you have to vote on the beliefs of all other comments. Voting works like this: if you basically agree with the comment, vote the comment down. If you basically disagree with the comment, vote the comment up. What 'basically' means here is intuitive; instead of using a precise mathy scoring system, just make a guess. In my view, if their stated probability is 99.9% and your degree of belief is 90%, that merits an upvote: it's a pretty big difference of opinion. If they're at 99.9% and you're at 99.5%, it could go either way. If you're genuinely unsure whether or not you basically agree with them, you can pass on voting (but try not to). Vote up if you think they are either overconfident or underconfident in their belief: any disagreement is valid disagreement.

That's the spirit of the game, but some more qualifications and rules follow.

If the proposition in a comment isn't incredibly precise, use your best interpretation. If you really have to pick nits for whatever reason, say so in a comment reply.

The more upvotes you get, the more irrational Less Wrong perceives your belief to be. Which means that if you have a large amount of Less Wrong karma and can still get lots of upvotes on your crazy beliefs then you will get lots of smart people to take your weird ideas a little more seriously.

Some poor soul is going to come along and post "I believe in God". Don't pick nits and say "Well in a a Tegmark multiverse there is definitely a universe exactly like ours where some sort of god rules over us..." and downvote it. That's cheating. You better upvote the guy. For just this post, get over your desire to upvote rationality. For this game, we reward perceived irrationality.

Try to be precise in your propositions. Saying "I believe in God. 99% sure." isn't informative because we don't quite know which God you're talking about. A deist god? The Christian God? Jewish?

Y'all know this already, but just a reminder: preferences ain't beliefs. Downvote preferences disguised as beliefs. Beliefs that include the word "should" are are almost always imprecise: avoid them.

That means our local theists are probably gonna get a lot of upvotes. Can you beat them with your confident but perceived-by-LW-as-irrational beliefs? It's a challenge!

Additional rules:

  • Generally, no repeating an altered version of a proposition already in the comments unless it's different in an interesting and important way. Use your judgement.
  • If you have comments about the game, please reply to my comment below about meta discussion, not to the post itself. Only propositions to be judged for the game should be direct comments to this post. 
  • Don't post propositions as comment replies to other comments. That'll make it disorganized.
  • You have to actually think your degree of belief is rational.  You should already have taken the fact that most people would disagree with you into account and updated on that information. That means that  any proposition you make is a proposition that you think you are personally more rational about than the Less Wrong average.  This could be good or bad. Lots of upvotes means lots of people disagree with you. That's generally bad. Lots of downvotes means you're probably right. That's good, but this is a game where perceived irrationality wins you karma. The game is only fun if you're trying to be completely honest in your stated beliefs. Don't post something crazy and expect to get karma. Don't exaggerate your beliefs. Play fair.
  • Debate and discussion is great, but keep it civil.  Linking to the Sequences is barely civil -- summarize arguments from specific LW posts and maybe link, but don't tell someone to go read something. If someone says they believe in God with 100% probability and you don't want to take the time to give a brief but substantive counterargument, don't comment at all. We're inviting people to share beliefs we think are irrational; don't be mean about their responses.
  • No propositions that people are unlikely to have an opinion about, like "Yesterday I wore black socks. ~80%" or "Antipope Christopher would have been a good leader in his latter days had he not been dethroned by Pope Sergius III. ~30%." The goal is to be controversial and interesting.
  • Multiple propositions are fine, so long as they're moderately interesting.
  • You are encouraged to reply to comments with your own probability estimates, but  comment voting works normally for comment replies to other comments.  That is, upvote for good discussion, not agreement or disagreement.
  • In general, just keep within the spirit of the game: we're celebrating LW-contrarian beliefs for a change!

Enjoy!

 

The Fiction Genome Project

12 [deleted] 29 June 2012 11:19AM

The Music Genome Project is what powers Pandora. According to Wikipedia:

 

The Music Genome Project was first conceived by Will Glaser and Tim Westergren in late 1999. In January 2000, they joined forces with Jon Kraft to found Pandora Media to bring their idea to market.[1] The Music Genome Project was an effort to "capture the essence of music at the fundamental level" using almost 400 attributes to describe songs and a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them. Under the direction of Nolan Gasser, the musical structure and implementation of the Music Genome Project, made up of 5 Genomes (Pop/Rock, Hip-Hop/Electronica, Jazz, World Music, and Classical), was advanced and codified.

 

A given song is represented by a vector (a list of attributes) containing approximately 400 "genes" (analogous to trait-determining genes for organisms in the field of genetics). Each gene corresponds to a characteristic of the music, for example, gender of lead vocalist, level of distortion on the electric guitar, type of background vocals, etc. Rock and pop songs have 150 genes, rap songs have 350, and jazz songs have approximately 400. Other genres of music, such as world and classical music, have 300–500 genes. The system depends on a sufficient number of genes to render useful results. Each gene is assigned a number between 1 and 5, in half-integer increments.[2]

 

Given the vector of one or more songs, a list of other similar songs is constructed using a distance function. Each song is analyzed by a musician in a process that takes 20 to 30 minutes per song.[3] Ten percent of songs are analyzed by more than one technician to ensure conformity with the in-house standards and statistical reliability. The technology is currently used by Pandora to play music for Internet users based on their preferences. Because of licensing restrictions, Pandora is available only to users whose location is reported to be in the USA by Pandora's geolocation software.[4]

 

 

Eminent lesswronger, strategist, and blogger, Sebastian Marshall,  wonders:

 

Personally, I was thinking of doing a sort of “DNA analysis” of successful writing. Have you heard of the Music Genome Project? It powers Pandora.com.

 

So I was thinking, you could probably do something like that for writing, and then try to craft a written work with elements known to appeal to people. For instance, if you wished to write a best selling detective novel, you might do an analysis of when the antagonist(s) appear in the plot for the first time. You might find that 15% of bestsellers open with the primary antagonist committing their crime, 10% have the antagonist mixed in quickly into the plot, and 75% keep the primary antagonist a vague and shadowy figure until shortly before the climax.

 

I don’t know if the pattern fits that – I don’t read many detective novels – but it would be a bit of a surprise if it did. You might think, well, hey, I better either introduce the antagonist right away having them commit their crime, or keep him shadowy for a while.

 

 

Or, to use an easier example – perhaps you could wholesale adopt the use of engineering checklists into your chosen discipline? It seems to me like lots of fields don’t use checklists that could benefit tremendously from them. I run this through my mind again and again – what kind of checklist could be built here? I first came across the concept of checklists being adopted in surgery from engineering, and then having surgical accidents and mistakes go way down.

 

Some people at TV Tropes came across that article, and thought that their wiki's database might be a good starting point to make this project a reality. I came here to look for the savvy, intelligence, and level of technical expertise in all things AI and NIT that I've come to expect of this site's user-base, hoping that some of you might be interested in having a look at the discussion, and, perhaps, would feel like joining in, or at least sharing some good advice.

Thank you. (Also, should I make this post "Discussion" or "Top Level"?)

Mapping Fun Theory onto the challenges of ethical foie gras

34 HonoreDB 07 December 2011 08:47PM

Foie gras, the delicacy made from the liver of a very fat goose (or sometimes duck), is believed to be unethical and is therefore frequently banned.  For a long time, it was believed that the only way to properly fatten a goose is to continually force-feed it through a tube over several weeks, which is probably a highly unpleasant experience, although it's difficult to tell.  Recently, Spanish farmer Eduardo Sousa revealed that under highly specific conditions, you can get geese to fatten themselves voluntarily.

Geese will instinctively gorge themselves when winter is coming on.  Eat a goose right after it's fattened itself up for the winter, and you get a delicious treat that died happy.  The problem is that geese will only do this if they believe food may become scarce during the winter (or their instinct to gorge only kicks in when the environment is such that that would be a reasonable inference; it's not clear whether it's the goose or evolution doing the analysis).  If they realize that food will remain available during the winter, they eat normally.  And there are quite a few possible clues--farmers trying to replicate Sousa's setup have discovered that cheating on any part leads to unfatted livers.

  • Even as chicks, geese cannot be handled by a human, or encounter other geese who have been.
  • There can be no visible fences.
  • Geese cannot be "fed," rather a variety of food must be distributed randomly throughout a large space, with the placement constantly changing, so that the geese happen to come across it.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, these constraints are similar to those we imagine a superior intelligence would operate under, if trying to get us to voluntarily gorge ourselves on utility.  A central challenge is to satisfy drives that were designed for scarcity, while actually maintaining an environment of abundance.

 

King Under The Mountain: Adventure Log + Soundtrack

56 Yvain 25 November 2011 10:29PM

With the help of many dedicated Less Wrongers (players muflax, Karl, Charlie, and Emile; musicians Mike Blume and Alicorn, technical support Ari Rahikkala) we have successfully completed what is, as far as I know, the first actual Dungeons and Discourse adventure anywhere. Except we're not calling it that, because I don't have the rights to use that name. Though it's not precisely rationality related, I hope it is all right if I post a summary of the adventure by popular demand.

Also, at some point it turned into a musical. The first half of the songs are only available as lyrics at the moment, but Alicorn and MBlume very kindly produced the second half as real music, which I've uploaded to YouTube and linked at the bottom of this post (skip to it now).

THE ADVENTURE

BACKGROUND

The known world has many sects and religions, but all contain shadowy legends of two primeval deities: Sophia, Goddess of Wisdom; and Aleithos, God of Truth. When Sophia announced her plan to create thinking, rational beings, Aleithos objected, declaring that they would fall into error and produce endless falsehoods. Sophia ignored her brother's objections and created humankind, who named the world after their goddess-mother. But Aleithos' fears proved well-founded: humankind fell into error and produced endless falsehoods, and their clamor drove the God of Truth insane.

The once mighty Aleithos fell from heaven, and all of his angelic servants turned into Paradox Beasts, arachnoid monstrosities that sought and devoured those who challenged the laws of logic. Over centuries, most of the Paradox Beasts were banished, but Aleithos himself remained missing. And though thousands of seekers set off to all the corners of the world in search of Truth, the Mad God keeps his own counsel, if He still even exists at all.

The Truth God's madness had one other effect; the laws of physics, once inviolable, turned fluid, and those sufficiently advanced in the study of Truth gained apparently magical abilities. With knowledge literally being power, great philosophers and scientists built mighty cities and empires.

In the middle of the Cartesian Plain at the confluence of the rivers Ordinate and Abcissa stands the mightiest of all, the imperial city of Origin. At the very center of the city stands the infinitely tall Z-Axis Tower, on whose bottom floor lives the all-seeing Wizard of 0=Z. Surrounding the Tower are a host of colleges and universities that attract the greatest scholars from all over Origin, all gathered in service to the great project to find Truth.

Into the city comes Lady Cerune Russell, an exotic noblewoman from far-off parts seeking great thinkers to join her on a dangerous adventure. Four scholars flock to her banner. Nomophilos the Elder the Younger (Emile) is a political scientist studying the central role of laws in creating a just society. Phaidros (muflax) is a zealous Protestant theologian trying to meld strains of thought as disparate as Calvinism, Gnosticism, and W.L. Craig's apologetics. Ephraim (Charlie) is a Darwinian biologist with strong leftist sympathies and an experimental streak that sometimes gets him in trouble. And Macx (Karl) is a quiet but very precise logician with a talent for puzzles.

Cerune explains to the Original scholars that she is the last living descendant of Good King Bertrand, historic ruler of the land of Russellia far to the west. Russellia was the greatest nation in the world until two hundred years ago, when a cataclysm destroyed the entire kingdom in a single day and night. Now the skies above Russellia are dark and filled with choking ash, monsters roam its plains, and the Good King is said to be locked in a magical undying sleep deep beneath the Golden Mountain in the kingdom's center. Though many have traveled to Russellia in search of answers, none have returned alive; Cerune, armed with secret information from the Turing Oracle which she refuses to share, thinks she can do better. The four Originals agree to protect her as she makes the dangerous journey to the Golden Mountain to investigate the mysterious disaster and perhaps lift the curse. Cerune gives them a day in Origin to prepare for the journey.

CHAPTER ONE: ORIGIN

The party skip the city's major attractions, including the Z-Axis Tower and the Hagia Sophia, in favor of more academic preparations: a visit to the library to conduct research, and a shopping trip to Barnes & Aristoi Booksellers, where they purchase reading material for the journey ahead. Here, they find a map of the lands on the road to Russellia, including the unpleasant-sounding Slough of Despotism and the Shadow City of Xar-Morgoloth, whose very name inexplicably chills the air when spoken aloud. After a long discussion on how this thermodynamic-defying effect could probably be used to produce unlimited free energy, they return to more immediate matters and head to the armory to pick up some weapons - a trusty isoceles triangle for Nomophilos, a bow for Macx - before the stores close for the evening. After a final night in Origin, they meet Cerune at the city gates and set off.

They originally intend to stick to the course of the Abcissa, but it is flooding its banks and Cerune recommends crossing the river into Platonia at the Pons Asinorum. After being attacked by a Euclidean Elemental charged with letting no one enter who does not know geometry, they reach the other bank and find a strange old man, raving incomprehensibly. His turns of phrase start to make sense only after the party realizes that he is speaking as if he - and all objects - have no consistent identity.

In his roundabout way, he identifies himself as Heraclitus, the Fire Mage, one of the four great Elemental Mages of Platonia. Many years ago, he crossed into Origin on some errand, only to be ambushed by his arch-enemy, the Water Mage Thales. Thales placed a curse on Heraclitus that he could never cross the same river twice, trapping him on the wrong side of the Abcissa and preventing his return to Platonia. In order to dispel the curse, Heraclitus finds a loophole in the curse: he convinces himself that objects have no permanent identity, and so he can never cross the same river twice since it is not the same river and he is not the same man. Accepting this thesis, he crosses the Abcissa without incident - only to find that his new metaphysics of identity prevents him from forming goals, executing long-term plans, or doing anything more complicated than sitting by the riverbank and eating the fish that swim by.

This sets off a storm of conversation, as each member of the party tries to set Heraclitus right in their own way; Phaidros by appealing to God as a final arbiter of identity, Macx and Nomophilos by arguing that duty is independent of identity and that Heraclitus has a duty to his family and followers. Unfortunately, they make a logical misstep and end out convincing Heraclitus that it is illogical from his perspective to hold conversation; this ends the debate. And as the five philosophers stand around discussing what to do, they are ambushed by a party of assassins, who shoot poisoned arrows at them from a nearby knoll.

Outnumbered and outflanked, the situation seems hopeless, until Macx notices several of the attackers confused and unwilling to attack. With this clue, he identifies them as Buridan's Assassins, who in the presence of two equally good targets will hesitate forever, unable to choose: he yells to his friends to stand with two or more adventurers equidistant from each assassin, and sure enough, this paralyzes the archers and allows the party some breathing space.

But when a second group of assassins arrives to join the first, the end seems near - until Heraclitus, after much pondering, decides to accept his interlocutors' arguments for object permanence and joins in the battle. His fire magic makes short work of the remaining assassins, and when the battle is over, he thanks them and gives a powerful magic item as a gift to each. Then he disappears in a burst of flame after warning his new friends to beware the dangers ahead.

The party searches the corpses of the assassins - who all carry obsidian coins marked PLXM - and then camp for the night on the fringe of the Slough of Despotism.

CHAPTER TWO: THE SLOUGH OF DESPOTISM


The Slough of Despotism is a swamp unfortunately filled with allegators, giant reptiles who thrive on moral superiority and on casting blame. They accuse our heroes of trespassing on their property; our heroes counter that the allegators, who do not have a state to enforce property rights, cannot have a meaningful concept of property. The allegators threaten to form a state, but before they can do so the party manages to turn them against each other by pointing out where their property rights conflict; while the allegators argue, the adventurers sneak off.

They continue through the swamp, braving dense vegetation, giant snakes, and more allegators (who are working on the whole state thing; the party tells them that they're too small and disorganized to be a real state, and that they would have to unite the entire allegator nation under a mutually agreed system of laws) before arriving at an old barrow tomb. Though four of the five adventurers want to leave well enough alone, Ephraim's experimental spirits gets the better of him, and he enters the mound. Its local Barrow Wight has long since departed, but he has left behind a suit of Dead Wight Mail, which confers powerful bonuses on Conservatives and followers of the Right-Hand Path. Nomophilos, the party's Conservative, is all set to take the Mail when Phaidros objects that it is morally wrong to steal from the dead; this sparks a fight that almost becomes violent before Nomo finally backs down; with a sigh of remorse, he leaves the magic item where he found it.

Beyond the barrow tomb lies the domain of the Hobbesgoblins, the mirror image of the Allegators in that they have a strong - some might say dictatorial - state under the rule of their unseen god-king, Lord-Over-All. They are hostile to any foreigners who refuse to swear allegiance to their ruler, but after seeing an idol of the god-king - a tentacled monstrosity bearing more than a passing resemblance to Cthulhu - our heroes are understandably reluctant to do so. As a result, the Hobbesgoblins try to refuse them passage through their capital city of Malmesbury on the grounds that, without being subordinated to Lord-Over-All or any other common ruler, the adventurers are in a state of nature relative to the Hobbesgoblins and may rob, murder, or otherwise exploit them. The Hobbesgoblins don't trust mere oaths or protestations of morality - but Nomophilos finally comes up with a compromise that satisfies them. He offers them a hostage in return for their good behavior, handing them his pet tortoise Xeno. This satisfies the Hobbesgoblins as assurance of their good behavior, and the party passes through Malmesbury without incident.

On the far side of Malmesbury they come to a great lake, around which the miasmas of the swamp seem to swirl expectantly. On the shore of the lake lives Theseus with his two ships. Theseus tells his story: when he came of age, he set off on a trading expedition upon his father's favorite ship. His father made him swear to return the ship intact, but after many years of travel, Theseus realized that every part of the ship had been replaced and repaired, so that there was not a single piece of the ship that was the same as when it had left port. Mindful of his oath, he hunted down the old pieces he had replaced, and joined them together into a second ship. But now he is confused: is it the first or the second ship which he must return to his father?

The five philosophers tell Theseus that it is the first ship: the ship's identity is linked to its causal history, not to the matter that composes it. Delighted with this answer, he offers the second ship to the adventurers, who sail toward the far shore.

Halfway across the lake, they meet an old man sitting upon a small island. He introduces himself as Thomas Hobbes, and says that his spies and secret police have told him everything about the adventurers since they entered the Slough. Their plan to save Russellia is a direct threat to his own scheme to subordinate the entire world under one ruler, and so he will destroy them. When the party expresses skepticism, his "island" rises out of the water and reveals itself to be the back of the monstrous sea creature, Leviathan, the true identity of the Hobbesgoblins' Lord-Over-All. After explaining his theory of government ("Let's Hear It For Leviathan", lyrics only) Hobbes and the monster attack for the game's first boss battle. The fight is immediately plagued by mishaps, including one incident where Phaidros's "Calvin's Predestined Hellfire" spell causes Hobbes to briefly turn into a Dire Tiger. When one of Leviathan's tentacles grab Cerune, she manifests a battle-axe of magic fire called the Axe of Separation and hacks the creature's arm off. She refuses to explain this power, but inspired by the small victory the party defeat Hobbes and reduce Leviathan into a state of Cartesian doubt; the confused monster vanishes into the depths, and the adventurers hurry to the other side and out of the Slough.

CHAPTER THREE: THE SHADOW CITY

Although our heroes make good time, they soon spot a detachment of Hobbesgoblins pursuing them. Afraid the goblins will be angry at the defeat of their god, the party hides; this turns out to be unnecessary, as the goblins only want Ephraim - the one who actually dealt the final blow against Leviathan - to be their new Lord-Over-All. Ephraim rejects the positions, and the party responds to the goblins' desperate pleading by suggesting a few pointers for creating a new society - punishing violence, promoting stability, reinforcing social behavior. The Hobbesgoblins grumble, but eventually depart - just in time for the party to be attacked by more of Buridan's Assassins. These killers' PLXM coins seem to suggest an origin in Xar-Morgoloth, the Shadow City, and indeed its jet-black walls now loom before them. But the city sits upon the only pass through the Central Mountains, so the party reluctantly enters.

Xar-Morgoloth turns out to be a pleasant town of white-washed fences and laughing children. In search of an explanation for the incongruity the five seek out the town's spiritual leader, the Priest of Lies. The Priest explains that although Xar-Morgoloth is superficially a nice place, the town is evil by definition. He argues that all moral explanations must be grounded in base moral facts that cannot be explained, whether these be respect for others, preference of pleasure over pain, or simple convictions that murder and theft are wrong. One of these base level moral facts, he says, is that Xar-Morgoloth is evil. It is so evil, in fact, that it is a moral imperative to keep people out of the city - which is why he sent assassins to scare them off.

Doubtful, the party seeks the mysterious visiting philosopher whom the Priest claimed originated these ideas: they find Immanuel Kant living alone on the outskirts of the city. Kant tells his story: he came from a parallel universe, but one day a glowing portal appeared in the sky, flinging him into the caves beyond Xar-Morgoloth. Wandering into Xar-Morgoloth, he tried to convince the citizens of his meta-ethical theories, but they insisted they could ground good and evil in basic moral intuitions instead. Kant proposed that Xar-Morgoloth was evil as a thought experiment to disprove them, but it got out of hand.

When our heroes challenge Kant's story and blame him for the current state of the city, Kant gets angry and casts Parmenides' Stasis Hex, freezing them in place. Then he announces his intention to torture and kill them all. For although in this world Immanuel Kant is a moral philosopher, in his own world (he explains) Immanuel Kant is a legendary villain and figure of depravity ("I'm Evil Immanuel Kant", lyrics only). Cerune manifests a second magic weapon, the Axe of Choice, to break the Stasis Hex, and the party have their second boss battle, which ends in defeat for Evil Kant. Searching his home, they find an enchanted Parchment of Natural Law that causes the chill in the air whenever the city's name is spoken.

Armed with this evidence, they return to the Priest of Lies and convince him that his moral theory is flawed. The Priest dispels the shadow over the city, recalls his assassins, and restores the town name to its previous non-evil transliteration of Summerglass. He then offers free passage through the caverns that form the only route through the Central Mountains.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE CAVERNS OF ABCISSA

Inside the caverns, which are nearly flooded by the overflowing Abcissa River, the party encounter an army of Water Elementals, leading them to suspect that they may be nearing the headquarters of Heraclitus' arch-enemy, Thales. The Water Elementals are mostly busy mining the rock for gems and magic artifacts, but one of them is sufficiently spooked by Phaidros to cast a spell on him, temporarily turning him to water. This is not immediately a disaster - Phaidros assumes a new form as a water elemental but keeps his essential personality - except that in an Ephraimesque display of overexperimention, Phaidros wonders what would happen if he temporarily relaxed the morphogenic field that holds him in place - as a result, he loses his left hand, a wound which stays in place when he reverts back to his normal form a few hours later. A resigned Phaidros only quotes the Bible: ("And if your hand offend you, cut it off: it is better for you to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell" - Mark 9:43) and trusts in the Divine plan.

The Caverns of Abcissa are labyrinthine and winding, but eventually the party encounters a trio who will reappear several times in their journey: Ruth (who tells the truth), Guy (who'll always lie) and Clancy (who acts on fancy). These three have a habit of hanging around branching caverns and forks in the road, and Ephraim solves their puzzle thoroughly enough to determine what route to take to the center of the cave system.

Here, in a great cavern, lives a civilization of cave-men whose story sounds a lot like Evil Kant's - from another world, minding their own business until a glowing portal appeared in the sky and sucked them into the caves. The cave-men are currently on the brink of civil war after one of their number, Thag, claims to have visited the mythical "outside" and discovered a world of magic and beauty far more real than the shadows dancing on the walls of their cavern. Most of the other cave-men, led by the very practical Vur, have rejected his tale, saying that the true magic and beauty lies in accepting the real, in-cave world rather than chasing after some outside paradise - but a few of the youth have flocked to Thag's banner, including Antil, a girl with mysterious magic powers.

Only the timely arrival of the adventurers averts a civil war; the party negotiates a truce and offers to solve the dispute empirically - they will escort Vur and Antil with them through the caverns so that representatives of both sides can see whether or not the "outside" really exists. This calms most of the cave-men down, and with Vur and Antil alongside, they head onward to the underground source of the Abcissa - which, according to their research, is the nerve center of Thales' watery empire.

On the way, they encounter several dangers. First, they awake a family of hibernating bears, who are quickly dispatched but who manage to maul the frail Vur so severely that only some divine intervention mediated by Phaidros saves his life. Second, they come across a series of dimensional portals clearly linked to the stories related by Evil Kant and the cave-men. Some link directly to otherworldly seas, pouring their water into the Abcissa and causing the recent floods. Others lead to otherworldly mines and quarries, and are being worked by gangs of Water Elementals. After some discussion of the ethics of stranding the Water Elementals, the five philosophers decide to shut down as many of the portals as possible.

They finally reach the source of the Abcissa, and expecting a battle, deck themselves out in magic armor that grants immunity to water magic. As expected, they encounter Thales, who reveals the full scale of his dastardly plot - to turn the entire world into water. But his exposition is marred by a series of incongruities, including his repeated mispronunciations of his own name ("All is Water", lyrics only). And when the battle finally begins, the party dispatches Thales with minimal difficulty, and the resulting corpse is not that of a Greek philosopher at all, but rather that of Davidson's Swampman, a Metaphysical summon that can take the form of any creature it encounters and imitate them perfectly.

Before anyone has time to consider the implications of their discovery, they are attacked by the real Water Mage, who bombards them with powerful water spells to which their magic armor mysteriously offers no protection. Worse, the Mage is able to create dimensional portals at will, escaping attacks effortlessly. After getting battered by a series of magic Tsunamis that nearly kill several of the weaker party members, the adventurers are in dire straits.

Then the tide begins to turn. Antil manifests the power to go invisible and attack the Water Mage from an unexpected vantage. Cerune manifests another magic weapon, the Axe of Extension, which gives her allies the same powers over space as the Water Mage seems to possess. And with a little prompting from Cerune, Phaidros and Nomophilos realize the Water Mage's true identity. Magic armor doesn't grant protection from his water spells because they are not water at all, but XYZ, a substance physically identical to but chemically different from H2O. And his mastery of dimensional portals arises from his own origin in a different dimension, Twin Earth. He is Hilary Putnam ("All is Water, Reprise", lyrics only) who has crossed dimensions, defeated Thales, and assumed his identity in order to take over his watery empire and complete his world domination plot. With a last push of magic, the party manage to defeat Putnam, who is knocked into the raging Abcissa and drowned in the very element he sought to control.

They tie up the loose ends of the chapter by evacuating the Water Elementals from Twin Earth, leading the cave-men to the promised land of the Outside, and confronting Antil about her mysterious magic. Antil gives them the source of her power to turn invisible: the Ring of Gyges, which she found on the cave floor after an earthquake. She warns them never to use it, as it presents a temptation which their ethics might be unable to overcome.

CHAPTER FIVE: CLIMBING MOUNT IMPROBABLE

Now back on the surface, the party finds their way blocked by the towering Mount Improbable, which at first seems too tall to ever climb. But after some exploration, they find there is a gradual path sloping upward, and begin their ascent. They are blocked, however, by a regiment of uniformed apes: cuteness turns to fear when they get closer and find the apes have machine guns. They decide to negotiate, and the apes prove willing to escort them to their fortress atop the peak if they can prove their worth by answering a few questions about their religious beliefs.

Satisfied, the ape army lead them to a great castle at the top of the mountain where Richard Dawkins ("Beware the Believers", credit Michael Edmondson) and his snow leopard daemon plot their war against the gods themselves. Dawkins believes the gods to be instantiated memes - creations of human belief that have taken on a life of their own due to Aleithos' madness - and accuses them of causing disasters, poverty, and ignorance in order to increase humanity's dependence upon them and keep the belief that sustains their existence intact. With the help of his genetically engineered apes and a fleet of flying battleships, he has been waging war against all the major pantheons of polytheism simultaneously. Dawkins is now gearing up to attack his most implacable foe, Jehovah Himself, although he admits He has so far managed to elude him.

Hoping the adventurers will join his forces, he takes them on a tour of the castle, showing them the towering battlements, the flotilla of flying battleships, and finally, the dungeons. In these last are imprisoned Fujin, Japanese god of storms; Meretseger, Egyptian goddess of the flood, and even Ares, the Greek god of war (whom Dawkins intends to try for war crimes: not any specific war crime, just war crimes in general). When the party reject Dawkins' offer to join his forces (most vocally Phaidros, most reluctantly Ephraim) Dawkins locks them in the dungeons themselves.

They are rescued late at night by their old friend Theseus. Theseus lost his ship in a storm (caused by the Japanese storm god, Fujin) and joined Dawkins' forces to get revenge; he is now captain of the aerial battleships. Theseus loads the adventurers onto a flying battleship and deposits them on the far side of the mountain, where Dawkins and his apes will be unlikely to find them.

Their troubles are not yet over, however, for they quickly encounter a three man crusade consisting of Blaise Pascal, Johann Tetzel, and St. Augustine of Hippo (mounted, cavalry-style, upon an actual hippopotamus). The three have come, led by a divine vision, to destroy Dawkins and his simian armies as an abomination unto the Lord, and upon hearing that the adventurers have themselves escaped Dawkins, invite them to come along. But the five, despite their appreciation for Pascal's expository fiddle music ("The Devil and Blaise Pascal") are turned off by Tetzel's repeated attempts to sell them indulgences, and Augustine's bombastic preaching. After Phaidros gets in a heated debate with Augustine over the role of pacifism in Christian thinking, the two parties decide to go their separate ways, despite Augustine's fiery condemnations and Pascal's warning that there is a non-zero chance the adventurers' choice will doom them to Hell.

After another encounter with Ruth, Guy, and Clancy, our heroes reach the base of Mount Improbable and at last find themselves in Russellia.

CHAPTER SIX: THE PALL OVER RUSSELLIA

Russellia is, as the legends say, shrouded in constant darkness. The gloom and the shock of being back in her ancestral homeland are too much for Cerune, who breaks down and reveals her last few secrets. Before beginning the quest, she consulted the Turing Oracle in Cyberia, who told her to seek the aid of a local wizard, Zermelo the Magnificent. Zermelo gave her nine magic axes of holy fire, which he said possessed the power to break the curse over Russellia. But in desperation, she has already used three of the magic axes, and with only six left she is uncertain whether she will have the magic needed.

At that moment, Heraclitus appears in a burst of flame, seeking a debriefing on the death of his old enemy Thales. After recounting the events of the past few weeks, our heroes ask Heraclitus whether, as a Fire Mage, he can reforge the axes of holy fire. Heraclitus admits the possibility, but says he would need to know more about the axes, their true purpose, and the enemy they were meant to fight. He gives the party an enchanted matchbook, telling them to summon him by striking a match when they gather the information he needs.

Things continue going wrong when, in the midst of a discussion about large numbers, Phaidros makes a self-contradictory statement that summons a Paradox Beast. Our heroes stand their ground and manage to destroy the abomination, despite its habit of summoning more Paradox Beasts to its aid through its Principle of Explosion spell. Bruised and battered, they limp into the nearest Russellian city on their map, the town of Ravenscroft.

The people of Ravenscroft tell their story: in addition to the eternal darkness, Russellia is plagued by vampire attacks and by a zombie apocalypse, which has turned the population of the entire country, save Ravenscroft, into ravenous brain-eating zombies. Despite the burghers claiming the zombie apocalypse had been confirmed by no less a figure than Thomas Nagel, who passed through the area a century ago, our heroes are unconvinced: for one thing, the Ravenscrofters are unable to present any evidence that the other Russellians are zombies except for their frequent attacks on Ravenscroft - and the Ravenscrofters themselves attack the other towns as a "pre-emptive measure". But the Ravenscrofters remain convinced, and even boast of their plan to launch a surprise attack on neighboring Brixton the next day.

Suspicious, our heroes head to the encampment of the Ravenscroft army, where they are just in time to see Commander David Chalmers give a rousing oration against the zombie menace ("Flee! A History of Zombieism In Western Thought", credit Emerald Rain). They decide to latch on to Chalmers' army, both because it is heading the same direction they are and because they hope they may be able to resolve the conflict between Ravenscroft and Brixton before it turns violent.

They camp with the army in some crumbling ruins from the golden age of the Russellian Empire. Entering a ruined temple, they disarm a series of traps to enter a vault containing a legendary artifact, the Morningstar of Frege. They also encounter a series of statues and bas-reliefs of the Good King, in which he demonstrates his chivalry by swearing an oath to Aleithos that he will defend all those who cannot defend themselves. Before they can puzzle out the meaning of all they have seen, they are attacked by vampires, confirming the Ravenscrofters' tales; they manage to chase them away with their magic and a hare-brained idea of Phaidros' to bless their body water, turning it into holy water and burning them up from the inside.

The next morning, they sneak into Brixton before the main army, and find their fears confirmed: the Brixtonites are normal people, no different from the Russellians, and they claim that Thomas Nagel told them that they were the only survivors of the zombie apocalypse. They manage to forge a truce between Ravenscroft and Brixton, but to their annoyance, the two towns make peace only to attack a third town, Mountainside, which they claim is definitely populated by zombies this time. In fact, they say, the people of Mountainside openly admit to being zombies and don't even claim to have souls.

Once again, our heroes rush to beat the main army to Mountainside. There they find the town's leader, Daniel Dennett, who explains the theory of eliminative materialism ("The Zombies' Secret"). The party tries to explain the subtleties of Dennett's position to a bloodthirsty Chalmers, and finally all sides agree to drop loaded terms like "human" and "zombie" and replace them with a common word that suggests a fundamental humanity but without an internal Cartesian theater (one of our heroes suggests "NPC", and it sticks). The armies of the three towns agree to ally against their true common enemy - the vampires who live upon the Golden Mountain and kidnap their friends and families in their nighttime raids.

Before the attack, Nomophilos and Ephraim announce their intention to build an anti-vampire death ray. The theory is that places on the fringe of Russellia receive some sunlight, while places in the center are shrouded in endless darkness. If the towns of Russellia can set up a system of mirrors from their highest towers, they can reflect the sunlight from the borderlands into a central collecting mirror in Mountainside, which can be aimed at the vampires' hideout to flood it with daylight, turning them to ashes. Ephraim, who invested most of his skill points into techne, comes up with schematics for the mirror, and after constructing a successful prototype, Chalmers and Dennett sound the attack order.

The death ray takes out many of the vampires standing guard, but within their castle they are protected from its light: our heroes volunteer to infiltrate the stronghold, but are almost immediately captured and imprisoned - the vampires intend to sacrifice Cerune in a ritual to use her royal blood to increase their power. But the adventurers make a daring escape: arch-conservative Nomophilos uses the invisible hand of the marketplace to steal the keys out of the jailer's pocket, and Phaidros summons a five hundred pound carnivorous Christ metaphor to maul the guards. Before the party can escape the castle, they are confronted by the vampire lord himself, who is revealed to be none other than Thomas Nagel ("What Is It Like To Be A Bat?"). In the resulting battle, Nagel is turned to ashes and the three allied cities make short work of the remaining vampires, capturing the castle.

The next morning finds our heroes poring over the vampire lord's library. Inside, they find an enchanted copy of Godel Escher Bach (with the power to summon an identical enchanted copy of Godel Escher Bach) and a slew of books on Russellian history. Over discussion of these latter, they finally work out what curse has fallen over the land, and what role the magic axes play in its removal.

[spoiler alert; stop here if you want to figure it out for yourself]

The Good King's oath to defend those who could not defend themselves was actually more complicated than that: he swore an oath to the god Aleithos to defend those and only those who could not defend themselves. His enemies, realizing the inherent contradiction, attacked him, trapping Russell in a contradiction - if he defended himself, he was prohibited from doing so; if he did not defend himself, he was obligated to do so. Trapped, he was forced to break his oath, and the Mad God punished him by casting his empire into eternal darkness and himself into an endless sleep.

The nine axes of Zermelo the Magnificent embody the nine axioms of ZFC. If applied to the problem, they will allow set theory to be reformulated in a way that makes the paradox impossible, lifting the curse and waking the Good King.

Upon figuring out the mystery, the party strike the enchanted match and summon Heraclitus, who uses fire magic to reforge the Axes of Choice, Separation, and Extension. Thus armed, the party leave the Vampire Lord's castle and enter the system of caverns leading into the Golden Mountain.

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE KING UNDER THE MOUNTAIN


The party's travels through the cavern are quickly blocked by a chasm too deep to cross. Nomophilos saves the day by realizing that the enchanted copy of Godel Escher Bach creates the possibility of infinite recursion; he uses each copy of GEB to create another copy, and eventually fills the entire chasm with books, allowing the party to walk through to the other side.

There they meet Ruth, Clancy, and Guy one last time; the three are standing in front of a Logic Gate, and to open it the five philosophers must solve the Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever. In an epic feat that the bards will no doubt sing for years to come, Macx comes up with a solution to the puzzle, identifies each of the three successfully, and opens the Logic Gate.

Inside the gate is the Good King, still asleep after two centuries. His resting place is guarded by the monster he unleashed, a fallen archangel who has become a Queen Paradox Beast. The Queen summons a small army of Paradox Beast servants with Principle of Explosion, and the battle begins in earnest. Cerune stands in a corner, trying to manifest her nine magic axes, but Nomophilos uses his Conservative spell "Morning in America" to summon a Raygun capable of piercing the Queen Paradox Beast's armored exoskeleton. Macx summons a Universal Quantifier and attaches it to his Banish Paradox Beast spell to decimate the Queen's armies. Ephraim desperately tries to wake the Good King, while Phaidros simply prays.

After an intense battle, Cerune manifests all nine axes and casts them at the Queen Paradox Beast, dissolving the paradox and destroying the beast's magical defenses. The four others redouble their efforts, and finally manage to banish the Queen. When the Queen Paradox Beast is destroyed, Good King Bertrand awakens.

Bertrand is temporarily discombobulated, but eventually regains his bearings and listens to the entire adventure. Then he tells his story. The attack that triggered the curse upon him, he says, was no coincidence, but rather a plot by a sinister organization against whom he had been waging a shadow war: the Bayesian Conspiracy. He first encountered the conspiracy when their espionage arm, the Bayes Network, tried to steal a magic emerald of unknown origin from his treasury. Since then, he worked tirelessly to unravel the conspiracy, and had reached the verge of success - learning that their aim was in some way linked to a plan to gain the shattered power of the Mad God Aleithos for themselves - when the Conspiracy took advantage of his oath and managed to put him out of action permanently.

He is horrified to hear that two centuries have passed, and worries that the Bayesians' mysterious plan may be close to fruition. He begs the party to help him re-establish contact with the Conspiracy and continue figuring out their plans, which may be a dire peril to the entire world. But he expresses doubt that such a thing is even possible at this stage.

In a burst of flame, Heraclitus appears, announcing that all is struggle and that he has come to join in theirs. He admits that the situation is grim, but declares it is not as hopeless as it seems, because they do not fight alone. He invokes the entire Western canon as the inspiration they follow and the giants upon whose shoulders they stand ("Grand Finale").

Heraclitus, Good King Bertrand, and the five scholars end the adventure by agreeing to seek out the Bayesian Conspiracy and discover whether Russell's old adversaries are still active. There are nebulous plans to continue the campaign (subject to logistical issues) in a second adventure, Fermat's Last Stand.

MUSIC

LYRICS ONLY
Hobbes' Song: Let's Hear It For Leviathan
Kant's Song: I'm Evil Immanuel Kant
Thales' Song: All Is Water
Putnam's Song: All Is Water, Reprise

GOOD ARTISTS BORROW, GREAT ARTISTS STEAL
Dawkins' Song: Beware The Believers (credit: Michael Edmondson)
Chalmers' Song: Flee: A History of Zombieism In Western Thought (credit: Emerald Rain)

ORIGINAL ADAPTATIONS
Pascal's Song: The Devil and Blaise Pascal
Dennett's Song: The Zombies' Secret
Vampire Nagel's Song: What Is It Like To Be A Bat?
Heraclitus' Song: Grand Finale

Schroedinger's cat is always dead

-14 PhilGoetz 26 August 2011 05:58PM

Suppose you believe in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.  Schroedinger puts his cat in a box, with a device that has a 50% chance of releasing a deathly poisonous gas.  He will then open the box, and observe a live or dead cat, collapsing that waveform.

But Schroedinger's cat is lazy, and spends most of its time sleeping.  Schroedinger is a pessimist, or else an optimist who hates cats; and so he mistakes a sleeping cat for a dead cat with probability P(M) > 0, but never mistakes a dead cat for a living cat.

So if the cat is dead with probability P(D) >= .5, Schroedinger observes a dead cat with probability P(D) + P(M)(1-P(D)).

If observing a dead cat causes the waveform to collapse such that the cat is dead, then P(D) = P(D) + P(M)(1-P(D)).  This is possible only if P(D) = 1.

continue reading »

Things That Shouldn't Need Pointing Out

28 Alicorn 21 April 2011 01:13AM

Today I learned that you can toast marshmallows in the oven.

By "learned", I mean "I read a recipe which included as a step toasting marshmallows in the oven".  I didn't have to try it out to realize that this would obviously work.  It was plain as soon as I heard the idea.  And it shouldn't have needed pointing out.  I know how ovens work.  I am familiar with the marshmallow species of food.  I love roasted marshmallows while hating them in most other forms and often occurrently lament the difficulty of arranging open flames over which one may safely toast them.  I routinely try new things in the kitchen to get results I want.

And yet I read it, and was surprised.  And so were the people I reported this finding to.  It needed pointing out.

What other facts need pointing out, although they are plain on inspection?  What is the pattern behind these facts and a good way to find more?

On Pi day, we eat pie; On Tau day, we eat Taoists?

3 [deleted] 15 March 2011 01:43AM

I'd like to start by wishing everyone a Happy Pi day (even if for some of you it was yesterday).

Today, going about my usual Pi day celebration (which included pi(e) of the chocolate, cherry, apple, and movie variety), I stumbled across pi-protesters, who spoke of Tau-ism. For those who haven't heard, Tauist claim that Tau, represented by the Greek letter T, is the real circle constant. There's one proponent and his arguments here: http://tauday.com/

I read the article, saw the points that were made, and I've remained impartial (despite being a mathematics major). I can see Tau's usefulness; I can see why pi hasn't changed (and hardly would need to). So I decided to do something else: Present this claim to the LessWrong community, for those who are interested. What do you think?

Zendo-like Induction Game for Playing Online

8 Normal_Anomaly 03 January 2011 05:16PM

I recently encountered the inductive logic game Zendo 1, and it looks like a great game for aspiring rationalists. I’d like to play a game like it among the people on this forum. However, Zendo is very visual, with an emphasis on color and position of pieces, so it would be difficult to play over the Internet. So I’ve adapted the concept and rules of Zendo to a format that can be played in an LW thread.

 

The basic premise of Zendo is that of trying to figure out a rule by observing which entities do or do not comply with it. One player, the “Master,” devises a rule and presents one structure that does and one that does not comply. In the online version, these are strings of 1-digit numbers. For instance, the rule might be “at least 2 of the digits are odd.” Then “2 5 1 0 ” would satisfy the rule, and “8 3 2” would not. The rule can be any level of complexity and may concern anything about the numbers, like “The string must contain at least 4 digits” or “The sum of the first two digits must be greater than the sum of the last two” or whatever. It may not concern anything other than the string, such as the timestamp of the post.

 

Players take turns by proposing a string in reply to the comment with the first two strings, and saying either “Master” or “Mondo”. If the player says “Master,” the Master will reply to the comment containing the string and say “yes” if it complies with the rule and “no” if it does not. If the player says “Mondo,” all players have some amount of time to post a reply guessing whether or not the string will meet the rule before the Master judges it. Currently this time is 8 hours so everyone will have time to see it, but if this seems too long it can be shortened. Traditionally this is done by concealing a colored stone in one’s hand with nobody seeing anybody else’s guess until time is up, so if you want post your guess in rot13 surrounded by gobbledygook (e.g. fyqxwsfyxqwstfyxlrffyqxwsyfqxwtsfy). Please don’t read other people’s rot13. At the end of the time period, the Master will judge the string and give everyone who guessed correctly a guessing point.

 

At the end of your turn, after your string has been judged, you may spend one guessing point to reply to the “Guess the rule here.” comment and guess the rule. The Master may ask clarifying questions about ambiguities in the guess. When the Master is satisfied that e understands the guess, e will either pronounce the guesser the winner or provide a string satisfying the guess but not the true rule or vice versa. The guesser may guess until e wins or runs out of guessing points.

 

I’ve decided an initial rule, and started a game in the comments. To join the game, reply to the comment containing the first two strings. To comment on the merits or problems of the game, say that this shouldn’t have been posted, ask questions, or suggest changes to the rules, reply to “Meta stuff goes here.”

1: The link is broken. It's supposed to go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zendo_%28game%29 .

 

EDIT: The first game was fun, but time differences made it a bit chaotic. The second game will be attempted on IRC chat. To join, suggest a time, or volunteer to be Master, post a comment to that effect.

New Year's Resolutions

2 orthonormal 01 January 2011 03:50AM

It's perhaps a bit late to kick this off, but:

What are your resolutions for 2011, if you choose to make use of that Schelling point for self-improvement?

What do you read? What would "desk archeology" produce?

0 ThomasR 06 November 2010 03:13PM
I would like to do a kind of poll:
Which books/articles do you read now, which ones are on your reading list?
What would a "desk archeologist" find when digging up your desk?

Some links:

"A Stratigraphic Analysis of Desk Debris",
"Are we able to think clearly when surrounded by mess, asks Clive James":