Over at Scott Adams' Blog you can find a very fine example of using the 'Rationality Engine' to solve the social problem of assisted dying.

The purpose of this post is to provide basic information about the LSAT including the format  of the test and a few sample questions. I also wanted to bring light to some research that has found LSAT preparation to alter brain structure in ways that strengthen hypothesized "reasoning pathways". These studies have not been discussed here before; I thought they were interesting and really just wanted to call your collective attention to them.

I really like taking tests; I get energized by intense race-against-the-clock problem solving and, for better or worse, I relish getting to see my standing relative to others when the dust settles. I like the the purity of the testing situation --how conditions are standardized in theory and more or less the same for all comers. This guilty pleasure has played no small part in the course my life has taken: I worked as a test prep tutor for 3 years and loved every minute of it, I met my wife through academic competitions in high school, and I am a currently a graduate student doing lots of coursework in psychometrics.

Well, my brother-in-law is a lawyer, and when we chat the topic of the LSAT has served as some conversational common ground. Since I like taking tests for fun, he suggested I give it a whirl because he thought it was interesting and felt like it was a fair assessment of one's logical reasoning ability. So I did, I took a practice test cold a couple Saturdays ago and I was very impressed. Here the one I took. (This is a full practice exam provided by the test-makers; it's also like the top google result for "LSAT practice test".) I wanted to post here about it because the LSAT hasn't been discussed very much on this site and I thought that some of you might find it useful to know about.

A brief run-down of the LSAT:

The test has four parts: two Logical Reasoning sections, a Critical Reading section (akin to SAT et al.), and an Analytical Reasoning, or "logic games", section. Usually when people talk about the LSAT, the logic games get emphasized because they are unusual and can be pretty challenging (the only questions I missed were of this type; I missed a few and I ran out of time). Essentially, you get a premise and a bunch of conditions from which you are required to draw conclusions. Here's an example:

A cruise line is scheduling seven week-long voyages for the ship Freedom. 
Each voyage will occur in exactly one of the first seven weeks of the season: weeks 1 through 7. 
Each voyage will be to exactly one of four destinations:Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Martinique, or Trinidad. 
Each destination will be scheduled for at least one of the weeks. 
The following conditions apply: Jamaica will not be its destination in week 4. 
Trinidad will be its destination in week 7. Freedom will make exactly two voyages to Martinique, 
and at least one voyage to Guadeloupe will occur in some week between those two voyages. 
Guadeloupe will be its destination in the week preceding any voyage it makes to Jamaica. 
No destination will be scheduled for consecutive weeks.

11. Which of the following is an acceptable schedule of destinations in order from week 1 through week 7?

(A) Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Martinique, Trinidad,Guadeloupe, Martinique, Trinidad
(B) Guadeloupe, Martinique, Trinidad, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Trinidad
(C) Jamaica, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Trinidad
(D) Martinique, Trinidad, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Trinidad
(E) Martinique, Trinidad, Guadeloupe, Trinidad, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Martinique

Clearly, this section places a huge burden on working memory and is probably the most g-loaded of the four. I'd guess that most LSAT test prep is about strategies for dumping this burden into some kind of written scheme that makes it all more manageable. But I just wanted to show you the logic games for completeness; what I was really excited by were the Logical Reasoning questions (sections II and III). You are presented with some scenario containing a claim, an argument, or a set of facts, and then asked to analyze, critique, or to draw correct conclusions. Here are most of the question stems used in these sections:

Which one of the following most accurately expresses the main conclusion of the economist’s argument?
Which one of the following uses flawed reasoning that most closely resembles the flawed reasoning in the argument?
Which one of the following most logically completes the argument?
The reasoning in the consumer’s argument is most vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that the argument...
The argument’s conclusion follows logically if which one of the following is assumed?
Which one of the following is an assumption required by the argument?

Heyo! This is exactly the kind of stuff I would like to become better at! Most of the questions were pretty straightforward, but the LSAT is known to be a tough test (score range: 120-180, 95th %ile: ~167, 99th %ile: ~172) and these practice questions probably aren't representative. What a cool test though! Here's a whole question from this section, superficially about utilitarianism:

3. Philosopher: An action is morally right if it would be reasonably expected
to increase the aggregate well-being of the people affected by it. An action
is morally wrong if and only if it would be reasonably expected to reduce the 
aggregate well-being of the people affected by it. Thus, actions that would 
be reasonably expected to leave unchanged the aggregate well-being of the
people affected by them are also right.

The philosopher’s conclusion follows logically if which one of the following is assumed?

(A) Only wrong actions would be reasonably expected to reduce the aggregate 
 well-being of the people affected by them.
(B) No action is both right and wrong.
(C) Any action that is not morally wrong is morally right.
(D) There are actions that would be reasonably expected to leave unchanged the
  aggregate well-being of the people affected by them.
(E) Only right actions have good consequences.

Also, the LSAT is a good test, in that it measures well one's ability to succeed in law school. Validity studies boast that “LSAT score alone continues to be a better predictor of law school performance than UGPA [undergraduate GPA] alone.” Of course, the outcome variable can be regressed on both predictors and account for more of the variance than either one taken singly, but it is uncommon for a standardized test to beat prior GPA in predicting a students future GPA.

Intensive LSAT preparation and neuroplasticity:

In two recent studies (same research team), learning to reason in the logically formal way required by the LSAT was found to alter brain structure in ways consistent with literature reviews of the neural correlates of logical reasoning. Note: my reading of these articles was pretty surface-level; I do not intend to provide a thorough review, only to bring them to your attention.

These researchers recruited pre-law students enrolling in an LSAT course and imaged their brains at rest using fMRI both before and after 3 months of this "reasoning training". As controls, they included age- and IQ-matched pre-law students intending to take LSAT in the future but not actively preparing for it.

The LSAT-prep group was found to have significantly increased connectivity between parietal and prefrontal cortices and the striatum, both within the left hemisphere and across hemispheres. In the first study, the authors note that

These experience-dependent changes fall into tracts that would be predicted by prior work showing that reasoning relies on an interhemispheric frontoparietal network (for review, see Prado et al., 2011). Our findings are also consistent with the view that reasoning is largely left-hemisphere dominent (e.g., Krawczyk, 2012), but that homologous cortex in the right hemisphere can be recruited as needed to support complex reasoning. Perhaps learning to reason more efficiently involves recruiting compensatory neural circuitry more consistently.

And in the second study, they conclude

An analysis of pairwise correlations between brain regions implicated in reasoning showed that fronto-parietal connections were strengthened, along with parietal-striatal connections. These findings provide strong evidence for neural plasticity at the level of large-scale networks supporting high-level cognition.

I think this hypothesized fronto-parietal reasoning network is supposed to go something like this:

The LSAT requires a lot of relational reasoning, the ability to compare and combine mental representations. The parietal cortex holds individual relationships between these mental representations (A->B, B->C), and the prefrontal cortex integrates this information to draw conclusions (A->B->C, therefore A->C). The striatum's role in this network would be to monitor the success/failure of reward predictions and encourage flexible problem solving. Unfortunately, my understanding here is very limited. Here are several reviews of this reasoning network stuff (I have not read any; just wanted to share them): Hampshire et al. (2011), Prado et al. (2011), Krawczyk (2012).

I hope this was useful information! According to the 2013 survey, only 2.2% of you are in law-related professions, but I was wondering (1) if anyone has personal experience studying for this exam, (2) if they felt like it improved their logical reasoning skills, and (3) if they felt that these effects were long-lasting. Studying for this test seems to have the potential to inculcate rationalist habits-of-mind; I know it's just self-report, but for those who went on to law school, did you feel like you benefited from the experience studying for the LSAT? I only ask because the Law School Admission Council, a non-profit organization made up of 200+ law schools, seems to actively encourage preparation for the exam, member schools say it is a major factor in admissions, preparation tends to increase performance, and LSAT performance is correlated moderately-to-strongly with first year law school GPA (r= ~0.4).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drum continues by talking about possible economic ramifications.

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

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

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

Excerpts from literature on robotic/self-driving/autonomous cars with a focus on legal issues, lengthy, often tedious; some more SI work. See also Notes on Psychopathy.

Having read through all this material, my general feeling is: the near-term future (1 decade) for autonomous cars is not that great. What's been accomplished, legally speaking, is great but more limited than most people appreciate. And there are many serious problems with penetrating the elaborate ingrown rent-seeking tangle of law & politics & insurance. I expect the mid-future (+2 decades) to look more like autonomous cars completely taking over many odd niches and applications where the user can afford to ignore those issues (eg. on private land or in warehouses or factories), with highways and regular roads continuing to see many human drivers with some level of automated assistance. However, none of these problems seem fatal and all of them seem amenable to gradual accommodation and pressure, so I am now more confident that in the long run we will see autonomous cars become the norm and human driving ever more niche (and possibly lower-class). On none of these am I sure how to formulate a precise prediction, though, since I expect lots of boundary-crossing and tertium quids. We'll see.

The budget stalemate in the US Congress was caused entirely by blocks of voters and representatives that coalesced around strong sets of opinions that few people would have come up with on their own, and by political party leaders forcing representatives in their parties to toe the party line.  Politics isn't the mind killer.  Political parties are the mind-killer.

Parties are also notorious for obliterating information in elections, as well as for encouraging voters to vote sans information.  If you went to your polling place and saw a list of candidates, none of whom you'd heard of before, you might rightly refrain from voting and polluting the signal with your noise.  Knowing party affiliations makes people think they have enough information to vote.

For discussion:

• What other disadvantages are provided by the existence of political parties?
• Do political parties provide us with any advantages at all?
• If so, do the benefits outweigh the disadvantages?
• How might we go about disenfranchising political parties?

We want the freedom to form groups that promote political concerns.  But it would be possible to keep these groups at a greater distance from elected representatives.  Candidates for office could be forbidden from endorsing a particular party.  The Congress could be forbidden from basing any procedural rules on party affiliation.  Political parties could be forbidden from making large donations to election campaigns, or sponsoring advertising.  That's not so different from what we do today with religious groups, which are not much different from political parties.

Political parties are currently officially part of Congress' operation, even though they're not in the constitution.  There are all sorts of Congressional rules specifying how the parties interact, who gets to choose committee members, who runs the House and Senate floors, etc.  A party leader can punish a representative who doesn't toe the line with many incentives and disincentives.

Make that illegal.  Make persecuting a representative for party-based reasons have the same legal standing as persecuting a representative for religious reasons.

I will ignore comments saying "you're an intellectual dreamer", for the usual reasons.

Completely artificial intelligence is hard.  But we've already got humans, and they're pretty smart - at least smart enough to serve some useful functions.  So I was thinking about designs that would use humans as components - like Amazon's Mechanical Turk, but less homogenous.  Architectures that would distribute parts of tasks among different people.

Would you be less afraid of an AI like that?  Would it be any less likely to develop its own values, and goals that diverged widely from the goals of its constituent people?

Because you probably already are part of such an AI.  We call them corporations.

Corporations today are not very good AI architectures - they're good at passing information down a hierarchy, but poor at passing it up, and even worse at adding up small correlations in the evaluations of their agents.  In that way they resemble AI from the 1970s.  But they may provide insight into the behavior of AIs.  The values of their human components can't be changed arbitrarily, or even aligned with the values of the company, which gives them a large set of problems that AIs may not have.  But despite being very different from humans in this important way, they end up acting similar to us.

Corporations develop values similar to human values.  They value loyalty, alliances, status, resources, independence, and power.  They compete with other corporations, and face the same problems people do in establishing trust, making and breaking alliances, weighing the present against the future, and game-theoretic strategies.  They even went through stages of social development similar to those of people, starting out as cutthroat competitors, and developing different social structures for cooperation (oligarchy/guild, feudalism/keiretsu, voters/stockholders, criminal law/contract law).  This despite having different physicality and different needs.

It suggests to me that human values don't depend on the hardware, and are not a matter of historical accident.  They are a predictable, repeatable response to a competitive environment and a particular level of intelligence.

As corporations are larger than us, with more intellectual capacity than a person, and more complex laws governing their behavior, it should follow that the ethics developed to govern corporations are more complex than the ethics that govern human interactions, and a good guide for the initial trajectory of values that (other) AIs will have.  But it should also follow that these ethics are too complex for us to perceive.