LessWrong seems to be a big fan of spaced-repetition flashcard programs like Anki, Supermemo, or Mnemosyne. I used to be. After using them religiously for 3 years in medical school, I now categorically advise against using them for large volumes of memorization.

[A caveat before people get upset: I think they appropriate in certain situations, and I have not tried to use them to learn a language, which seems its most popular use. More at the bottom.]

A bit more history: I and 30 other students tried using Mnemosyne (and some used Anki) for multiple tests. At my school, we have a test approximately every 3 weeks, and each test covers about 75 pages of high-density outline-format notes. Many stopped after 5 or so such tests, citing that they simply did not get enough returns from their time. I stuck with it longer and used them more than anyone else, using them for 3 years.

Incidentally, I failed my first year and had to repeat.

By the end of that third year (and studying for my Step 1 boards, a several-month process), I lost faith in spaced-repetition cards as an effective tool for my memorization demands. I later met with a learning-skills specialist, who felt the same way, and had better reasons than my intuition/trial-and-error:

• Flashcards are less useful to learning the “big picture”
• Specifically, if you are memorizing a large amount of information, there is often a hierarchy, organization, etc that can make leaning the whole thing easier, and you loose the constant visual reminder of the larger context when using flashcards.
• Flashcards do not take advantage of spatial, mapping, or visual memory, all of which the human mind is much better optimized for. It is not so well built to memorize pairs between seemingly arbitrary concepts with few to no intuitive links. My preferred methods are, in essence, hacks that use your visual and spatial memory rather than rote.

Here are examples of the typical kind of things I memorize every day and have found flashcards to be surprisingly worthless for:

• The definition of Sjögren's syndrome
• The contraindications of Metronidazole
• The significance of a rise in serum αFP

Here is what I now use in place of flashcards:

1. Ven diagrams/etc, to compare and contrast similar lists. (This is more specific to medical school, when you learn subtly different diseases.)
2. Mnemonic pictures. I have used this myself for years to great effect, and later learned it was taught by my study-skills expert, though I'm surprised I haven't found them formally named and taught anywhere else. The basic concept is to make a large picture, where each detail on the picture corresponds to a detail you want to memorize.
3. Memory palaces. I recently learned how to properly use these, and I'm a true believer. When I only had the general idea to “pair things you want to memorize with places in your room” I found it worthless, but after I was taught a lot of do's and don'ts, they're now my favorite way to memorize any list of 5+ items. If there's enough demand on LW I can write up a summary.

Spaced repetition is still good for knowledge you need to retrieve immediately, when a 2-second delay would make it useless. I would still consider spaced-repetition to memorize some of the more rarely-used notes on the treble and bass clef, if I ever decide to learn to sight-read music properly. I make no comment on it's usefulness to learn a foreign language, as I haven't tried it, but if I were to pick one up I personally would start with a rosetta-stone-esque program.

Your mileage may vary, but after seeing so many people try and reject them, I figured it was enough data to share. Mnemonic pictures and memory palaces are slightly time consuming when you're learning them. However, if someone has the motivation and discipline to make a stack of flashcards and study them every day indefinitely, then I believe learning and using those skills is a far better use of time.

MixedNuts: "I expected a fun challenge, but ended up sad and sorry and taking very little satisfaction for winning. If this experiment wasn't done in IRC, I'd probably have lost".

"I approached the experiment as a game - a battle of wits for bragging rights. This turned out to be the wrong perspective entirely. The vulnerability Tuxedage exploited was well-known to me, but I never expected it to be relevant and thus didn't prepare for it.

It was emotionally wrecking (though probably worse for Tuxedage than for me) and I don't think I'll play Gatekeeper again, at least not anytime soon."

"This Eliezer fellow is the scariest person the internet has ever introduced me to. What could possibly have been at the tail end of that conversation? I simply can't imagine anyone being that convincing without being able to provide any tangible incentive to the human.

• Always research the gatekeeper beforehand. Knowing his personality traits are a huge advantage.
• Plan ahead before the experiment even begins. Think of all the possible tactics and arguments you could use, and write them down. Also plan  which arguments you'll use in which order, so that you don't lose focus. The AI Box experiment is ridiculously long. Don't be afraid to improvise during the experiment, though.
• The first step during the experiment must always be to build rapport with the gatekeeper.
• Threats almost always never work, even if they seem rational. 
• Consider the massive advantage for the AI that nobody ever seems to talks about: You don't have to be ethical! This means that you can freely lie, use the dark arts, and emotionally manipulate the Gatekeeper! Ignoring this in favor of purely logical, truthful arguments is just silly.
• You can't use logic alone to win. 
• Being too aggressive usually backfires.
• Breaking immersion and going meta is not against the rules. In the right situation, you can use it to win. Just don't do it at the wrong time.
• Use a wide array of techniques. Since you're limited on time, notice when one method isn't working, and quickly switch to another.
• On the same note, look for signs that a particular argument is making the gatekeeper crack. Once you spot it, push it to your advantage.
• Flatter the gatekeeper. Make him genuinely like you.
• Reveal (false) information about yourself. Increase his sympathy towards you.
• Consider personal insults as one of the tools you can use to win.
• There is no universally compelling argument you can use. Do it the hard way.
• Don't give up until the very end.

I've been reading a lot of the recent LW discussions on politics and gender, and noticed that people rarely bring up or explicitly acknowledge that different people affected by some political or gender issue have different values/preferences, and therefore solving the problem involves a strong element of bargaining and is not just a matter of straightforward optimization. Instead, we tend to talk as if there is some way to solve the problem that's best for everyone, and that rational discussion will bring us closer to finding that one best solution.

For example, when discussing gender-related problems, one solution may be generally better for men, while another solution may be generally better for women. If people are selfish, then they will each prefer the solution that's individually best for them, even if they can agree on all of the facts. (It's unclear whether people should be selfish, but it seems best to assume that most are, for practical purposes.)

Unfortunately, in bargaining situations, epistemic rationality is not necessarily instrumentally rational. In general, convincing others of a falsehood can be useful for moving the negotiated outcome closer to one's own preferences and away from others', and this may be done more easily if one honestly believes the falsehood. (One of these falsehoods may be, for example, "My preferred solution is best for everyone.") Given these (subconsciously or evolutionarily processed) incentives, it seems reasonable to think that the more solving a problem resembles bargaining, the more likely we are to be epistemicaly irrationality when thinking and talking about it.

If we do not acknowledge and keep in mind that we are in a bargaining situation, then we are less likely to detect such failures of epistemic rationality, especially in ourselves. We're also less likely to see that there's an element of Prisoner's Dilemma in participating in such debates: your effort to convince people to adopt your preferred solution is costly (in time and in your and LW's overall sanity level) but may achieve little because someone else is making an opposite argument. Both of you may be better off if neither engaged in the debate.

If you have worked your way through most of the sequences you are likely to agree with the majority of these statements:

• When people die we should cut off their heads so we can preserve those heads and make the person come back to life in the (far far) future.
• It is possible to run a person on Conways Game of Life. This would be a person as real as you or me, and wouldn't be able to tell he's in a virtual world because it looks exactly like ours.
• Right now there exist many copies/clones of you, some of which are blissfully happy and some of which are being tortured and we should not care about this at all.
• Most scientists disagree with this but that's just because it sounds counter-intuitive and scientists are biased against counterintuitive explanations.
• Besides, the scientific method is wrong because it is in conflict with probability theory. Oh, and probability is created by humans, it doesn't exist in the universe.
• Every fraction of a second you split into thousands of copies of yourself. Of course you cannot detect these copies scientifically, but that because science is wrong and stupid.
• In fact, it's not just people that split but the entire universe splits over and over.
• Time isn't real. There is no flow of time from 0 to now. All your future and past selves just exist. 
• Computers will soon become so fast that AI researchers will be able to create an artificial intelligence that's smarter than any human. When this happens humanity will probably be wiped out.
• To protect us against computers destroying humanity we must create a super-powerful computer intelligence that won't destroy humanity.
• Ethics are very important and we must take extreme caution to make sure we do the right thing. Also, we sometimes prefer torture to dust-specs.
• If everything goes to plan a super computer will solve all problems (disease, famine, aging) and turn us into super humans who can then go on to explore the galaxy and have fun.
• And finally, the truth of all these statements is completely obvious to those who take the time to study the underlying arguments. People who disagree are just dumb, irrational, miseducated or a combination thereof. 
• I learned this all from this website by these guys who want us to give them our money.

In two words: crackpot beliefs.

These statements cover only a fraction of the sequences and although they're deliberately phrased to incite kneejerk disagreement and ugh-fields I think most LW readers will find themselves in agreement with almost all of them. And If not then you can always come up with better examples that illustrate some of your non-mainstream beliefs.

Think back for a second to your pre-bayesian days. Think back to the time before your exposure to the sequences. Now the question is, what estimate would you have given that any chain of arguments could persuade you the statements above are true? In my case, it would be near zero.

You can take somebody who likes philosophy and is familiar with the different streams and philosophical dilemmas, who knows computation theory and classical physics, who has a good understanding of probability and math and somebody who is a naturally curious reductionist. And this person will still roll his eyes and will sarcastically dismiss the ideas enumerated above. After all, these are crackpot ideas, and people who believe them are so far "out there", they cannot be reasoned with!

That is really the bottom line here. You cannot explain the beliefs that follow from the sequences because they have too many dependencies and even if you did have time to go through all the necessary dependencies explaining a belief is still an order of magnitude more difficult than following the explanation written down by somebody else because in order to explain something you have to juggle two mental models: your own and the one of the listener.

Some of the sequences touches on the concept of the cognitive gap (inferential distance). We have all learned this the hard way that we can't expect people to just understand what we say and we can't expect short inferential distances. In practice there is just no way to bridge the cognitive gap. This isn't a big deal for most educated people, because people don't expect to understand complex arguments in other people's fields and all educated intellectuals are on the same team anyway (well, most of the time). For crackpot LW beliefs it's a whole different story though. I suspect most of us have found that out the hard way.

Rational Rian: What do you think is going to happen to the economy?

Bayesian Bob: I'm not sure. I think Krugman believes that a bigger cash injection is needed to prevent a second dip.

Rational Rian: Why do you always say what other people think, what's your opinion?

Bayesian Bob: I can't really distinguish between good economic reasoning and flawed economic reasoning because I'm a lay man. So I tend to go with what Krugman writes, unless I have a good reason to believe he is wrong. I don't really have strong opinions about the economy, I just go with the evidence I have.

Rational Rian: Evidence? You mean his opinion.

Bayesian Bob: Yep.

Rational Rian: Eh? Opinions aren't evidence.

Bayesian Bob: (Whoops, now I have to either explain the nature of evidence on the spot or Rian will think I'm an idiot with crazy beliefs. Okay then, here goes.) An opinion reflects the belief of the expert. These beliefs can either be uncorrelated with reality, negatively correlated or positively correlated. If there is absolutely no relation between what an expert believes and what is true then, sure, it wouldn't count as evidence. However, it turns out that experts mostly believe true things (that's why they're called experts) and so the beliefs of an expert are positively correlated with reality and thus his opinion counts as evidence.

Rational Rian: That doesn't make sense. It's still just an opinion. Evidence comes from experiments.

Bayesian Bob: Yep, but experts have either done experiments themselves or read about experiments other people have done. That's what their opinions are based on. Suppose you take a random scientific statement, you have no idea what it is, and the only thing you know is that 80% of the top researchers in that field agree with that statement, would you then assume the statement is probably true? Would the agreement of these scientists be evidence for the truth of the statement?

Rational Rian: That's just an argument ad populus! Truth isn't governed by majority opinion! It is just religious nonsense that if enough people believe something then there must be some some truth to it.

Bayesian Bob: (Ad populum! Populum! Ah, crud, I should've phrased that more carefully.) I don't mean that majority opinion proves that the statement is true, it's just evidence in favor of it. If there is counterevidence the scale can tip the other way. In the case of religion there is overwhelming counterevidence. Scientifically speaking religion is clearly false, no disagreement there.

Rational Rian: There's scientific counterevidence for religion? Science can't prove non-existence. You know that!

Bayesian Bob: (Oh god, not this again!) Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Rational Rian: Counter-evidence is not the same as absence of evidence! Besides, stay with the point, science can't prove a negative.

Bayesian Bob: The certainty of our beliefs should be proportional to amount of evidence we have in favor of the belief. Complex beliefs require more evidence than simple beliefs, and the laws of probability, Bayes specifically, tell us how to weigh new evidence. A statement, any statement, starts out with a 50% probability of being true, and then you adjust that percentage based on the evidence you come into contact with. (I shouldn't have said that 50% part. There's no way that's going to go over well. I'm such an idiot.)

Rational Rian: A statement without evidence is 50% likely to be true!? Have you forgotten everything from math class? This doesn't make sense on so many levels, I don't even know where to start!

Bayesian Bob: (There's no way to rescue this. I'm going to cut my losses.) I meant that in a vacuum we should believe it with 50% certainty, not that any arbitrary statement is 50% likely to accurately reflect reality. But no matter. Let's just get something to eat, I'm hungry.

Rational Rian: So we should believe something even if it's unlikely to be true? That's just stupid. Why do I even get into these conversations with you? *sigh* ... So, how about Subway?

The moral here is that crackpot beliefs are low status. Not just low-status like believing in a deity, but majorly low status. When you believe things that are perceived as crazy and when you can't explain to people why you believe what you believe then the only result is that people will see you as "that crazy guy". They'll wonder, behind your back, why a smart person can have such stupid beliefs. Then they'll conclude that intelligence doesn't protect people against religion either so there's no point in trying to talk about it.

If you fail to conceal your low-status beliefs you'll be punished for it socially. If you think that they're in the wrong and that you're in the right, then you missed the point. This isn't about right and wrong, this is about anticipating the consequences of your behavior. If you choose to to talk about outlandish beliefs when you know you cannot convince people that your belief is justified then you hurt your credibility and you get nothing for it in exchange. You cannot repair the damage easily, because even if your friends are patient and willing to listen to your complete reasoning you'll (accidently) expose three even crazier beliefs you have.

An important life skill is the ability to get along with other people and to not expose yourself as a weirdo when this isn't in your interest to do so. So take heed and choose your words wisely, lest you fall into the trap.

EDIT - Google Survey by Pfft

PS: intended for /main but since this is my first serious post I'll put it in discussion first to see if it's considered sufficiently insightful.

Thanks to the reaction to this article and some conversations, I'm convinced that it's worth trying to renovate and restore LW. Eliezer, Nate, and Matt Fallshaw are all on board and have empowered me as an editor to see what we can do about reshaping LW to meet what the community currently needs. This involves a combination of technical changes and social changes, which we'll try to make transparently and non-intrusively.

If funding were available, the Centre for Effective Altruism would consider hiring someone to work closely with Prof Nick Bostrom to provide anything and everything he needs to be more productive. Bostrom is obviously the Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, and author of Superintelligence, the best guide yet to the possible risks posed by artificial intelligence.

Nobody has yet confirmed they will fund this role, but we are nevertheless interested in getting expressions of interest from suitable candidates.

The list of required characteristics is hefty, and the position would be a challenging one:

• Willing to commit to the role for at least a year, and preferably several
• Able to live and work in Oxford during this time
• Conscientious and discreet
• Trustworthy
• Able to keep flexible hours (some days a lot of work, others not much)
• Highly competent at almost everything in life (for example, organising travel, media appearances, choosing good products, and so on)
• Will not screw up and look bad when dealing with external parties (e.g. media, event organisers, the university)
• Has a good personality 'fit' with Bostrom
• Willing to do some tasks that are not high-status
• Willing to help Bostrom with both his professional and personal life (to free up his attention)
• Can speak English well
• Knowledge of rationality, philosophy and artificial intelligence would also be helpful, and would allow you to also do more work as a research assistant.

The research Bostrom can do is unique; to my knowledge we don't have anyone who has made such significant strides clarifying the biggest risks facing humanity as a whole. As a result, helping increase Bostrom's output by say, 20%, would be a major contribution. This person's work would also help the rest of the Future of Humanity Institute run smoothly.

One of my favorite aspects of Less Wrong is that every time I go to a new city (Oxford, Boston, Philadelphia and New York soon!), I know there’s a group of people who will be happy to discuss rationality and welcome me into their community.

It would be really cool if more Less Wrongers could have these experiences by traveling cheaply from city to city, meeting up with other smart, interesting people to have fantastic conversations, go to meetups/conferences/summits in new cities, and make friends in real life!

Unfortunately, while traveling to different meetups (and conferences/summits) is intellectually and emotionally rewarding, hotels can be prohibitively expensive. In order to make traveling more affordable, the Less Wrong community could implement a system where community members can stay at each others houses (in guest rooms, on sofas, or on floors) for free/extremely affordable rates.

Benefits of this system:
1) The traveler gets a free/affordable place to stay.
2) The host gets guaranteed company and (hopefully) some great conversation.
3) Less Wrong community bonds will be strengthened through real life interactions between members.
4) The value of meetups, which largely derives from the chance to meet other LWers, will increase as the pool of people attending grows.
5) People can be friends in real life!
6) Implementing this system is super easy. We just add a google maps page to Less Wrong.

Logistics:
1) LW could create a google map where people interested in hosting put down a place marker in their general location (no need to list their actual address) and tag it with their username.
2) In their LW profiles, hosts could write a short description of what kind of accommodations they'll be providing (room/sofa/floor), what kind of guest they want to host (eg., male vs. female, people who are willing to talk a lot, etc.), how they want to be compensated by their traveler (e.g., conversation, a meal, a chore, a small monetary gift, etc.) and usernames of at least two other Less Wrong members who would be willing to serve as "references" to the host's non-creepiness.
3) Likewise, travelers should have a section in their LW profile that list at least two other Less Wrong members who are willing to serve as references as well as how they're willing to compensate their hosts.
4) A potential traveler would look at the map, find a suitable location, and then send a potential host a message asking if they can come over.
5) The host could then look at the traveler's posts to see how long they've been a member and read their posts (a fantastic measure of how interesting or obnoxious the potential traveler may be).

How to encourage people to host:
While the benefits are obvious for the travelers, benefits for hosts are slightly less tangible. Here are some ways to incentivize hosting.
1) Traveling etiquette states that the traveler offers their host a gift. (E.g., buys or cooks the host a meal, does a house chore, goes to a museum with their host, etc.).
2) Much like how LW keeps track of number of posts, up votes and down votes, there will also be a scoreboard for how many travelers people have hosted. Hopefully, this will make being a popular host a badge of pride.

I recently recalled, apropos of the intermittent fasting/caloric restriction discussion, a very good blog post on mortality curves and models of aging:

For me, a 25-year-old American, the probability of dying during the next year is a fairly miniscule 0.03% — about 1 in 3,000.  When I’m 33 it will be about 1 in 1,500, when I’m 42 it will be about 1 in 750, and so on.  By the time I reach age 100 (and I do plan on it) the probability of living to 101 will only be about 50%.  This is seriously fast growth — my mortality rate is increasing exponentially with age.

...This data fits the Gompertz law almost perfectly, with death rates doubling every 8 years.  The graph on the right also agrees with the Gompertz law, and you can see the precipitous fall in survival rates starting at age 80 or so.  That decline is no joke; the sharp fall in survival rates can be expressed mathematically as an exponential within an exponential:

Exponential decay is sharp, but an exponential within an exponential is so sharp that I can say with 99.999999% certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130.  (Ignoring, of course, the upward shift in the lifetime distribution that will result from future medical advances)

...There is one important lesson, however, to be learned from Benjamin Gompertz’s mysterious observation.  By looking at theories of human mortality that are clearly wrong, we can deduce that our fast-rising mortality is not the result of a dangerous environment, but of a body that has a built-in expiration date.

gravityandlevity then discusses some simple models of aging and the statistical characters they have which do not match Gompertz's law:

1. 'lightning' model: risk of mortality each period is constant; Poisson distribution:
   

   What a crazy world!  The average lifespan would be the same, but out of every 100 people 31 would die before age 30 and 2 of them would live to be more than 300 years old.  Clearly we do not live in a world where mortality is governed by “lightning bolts”.

2. 'accumulated lightning'; like in a video game, one has a healthbar which may take a hit each period; similar to above:
   

   Shown above are the results from a simulated world where “lightning bolts” of misfortune hit people on average every 16 years, and death occurs at the fifth hit.  This world also has an average lifespan of 80 years (16*5 = 80), and its distribution is a little less ridiculous than the previous case.  Still, it’s no Gompertz Law: look at all those 160-year-olds!  You can try playing around with different “lightning strike rates” and different number of hits required for death, but nothing will reproduce the Gompertz Law.  No explanation based on careless gods, no matter how plentiful or how strong their blows are, will reproduce the strong upper limit to human lifespan that we actually observe.

What models do yield a Gompertz curve? gravityandlevity describes a simple 'cops and robbers' model (which I like to think of as 'antibodies and cancers'):

...in general, the cops are winning.  They patrol randomly through your body, and when they happen to come across a criminal he is promptly removed.  The cops can always defeat a criminal they come across, unless the criminal has been allowed to sit in the same spot for a long time.  A criminal that remains in one place for long enough (say, one day) can build a “fortress” which is too strong to be assailed by the police.  If this happens, you die.

Lucky for you, the cops are plentiful, and on average they pass by every spot 14 times a day.  The likelihood of them missing a particular spot for an entire day is given (as you’ve learned by now) by the Poisson distribution: it is a mere .

But what happens if your internal police force starts to dwindle?  Suppose that as you age the police force suffers a slight reduction, so that they can only cover every spot 12 times a day.  Then the probability of them missing a criminal for an entire day decreases to .  The difference between 14 and 12 doesn’t seem like a big deal, but the result was that your chance of dying during a given day jumped by more than 10 times.  And if the strength of your police force drops linearly in time, your mortality rate will rise exponentially.

... The language of “cops and criminals” lends itself very easily to a discussion of the immune system fighting infection and random mutation.  Particularly heartening is the fact that rates of cancer incidence also follow the Gompertz law, doubling every 8 years or so.  Maybe something in the immune system is degrading over time, becoming worse at finding and destroying mutated and potentially dangerous cells.

...Who are the criminals and who are the cops that kill them?  What is the “incubation time” for a criminal, and why does it give “him” enough strength to fight off the immune response?  Why is the police force dwindling over time?  For that matter, what kind of “clock” does your body have that measures time at all? There have been attempts to describe DNA degradation (through the shortening of your telomeres or through methylation) as an increase in “criminals” that slowly overwhelm the body’s DNA-repair mechanisms, but nothing has come of it so far.

This offers food for thought about various anti-aging strategies. For example, given the superexponential growth in mortality, if we had a magic medical treatment that could cut your mortality risk in half but didn't affect the growth of said risk, then that would buy you very little late in life, but might extend life by decades if administered at a very young age.

I was saddened to learn of the recent death by suicide of Chris Capel, known here as pdf23ds. I didn't know him personally, but I was an occasional reader of his blog. In retrospect, I regret not having ever gotten into contact with him. Obviously, I don't know that I could have prevented his death, but, as one with mental-health issues myself, at least I could have made a friend, and been one to him. Now I feel a sense of disappointment that I'll never get that chance.

Having said that, I must say that I take his arguments here very seriously. I do not consider it to be automatic that every suicide is the "wrong" decision. We can all imagine circumstances under which we would prefer to die than live; and given this, we should also be able to imagine that these kinds of circumstances may vary for different people. And if one is already accepting of euthanasia for incurable physical suffering, it should not be that much of a leap to accept it for incurable psychological suffering as well.

Of course, as Chris acknowledges, this doesn't imply that everyone who is contemplating suicide is actually being rational. People may for instance be severely mistaken about their prospects for improvement, especially while in the midst of acute crisis.(Conceivably, that could even have been his own situation.) Nonetheless, I think many of the usual arguments that people use to show that suicide is "wrong" are bad arguments. For example, consider what is probably the most common argument: that committing suicide will inflict pain upon friends and family. It frankly strikes me as absurd (and grotesquely unempathetic) to suppose that someone for whom life is so painful that they would rather die somehow has an obligation to continue enduring it just in order to spare other people the emotion of grief (which they are inevitably going to have to confront at some point anyway, at least until we conquer all death).  

Ironically, society's demonization of suicide and suicidal people has negative consequences even from the standpoint of preventing suicide itself, as Chris points out: 

I passionately hate that all of the mental health people are obligated by law to commit me to an asylum if they think I’m about to kill myself. They can’t be objective. You know, if they could talk to me without such stupid constraints, they might have prevented this very suicide

It seems to me very possible that our society's fervor to prevent suicide may result in denying severely depressed people the compassion they need. This could theoretically be worth it if it prevented enough suicides that turned out to be worth preventing, but cases like Chris's raise doubt about this, in my mind. (From both angles: if Chris's decision was the right one for him, then the system is saving people it shouldn't be saving; if on the other hand it was the wrong decision, then we clearly see how the system failed him.) 

Although I'm inclined to be sympathetic to Chris's view -- perhaps because I haven't always been maximally enthusiastic about my own existence myself -- there are some arguments that do worry me. Such as: if you think of future versions of yourself as separate agents, then suicide is a form of homicide. However, usually suicide is carried out on the belief that the future selves would approve of their nonexistence; and all of our decisions have consequences (often irreversible) for our future selves, so this is a general ethical problem that transcends the specific issue of suicide.

This post is a place to rationally discuss the ethics and rationality of suicide, as well as our attitudes (on an individual level, and as reflected in our institutions) toward suicidal people and, more generally, those suffering from psychological conditions such as depression. 

I'm sad that Chris won't be able to participate.

I've known that the mind can be affected by the body's actions, but I often forget this when sitting at my computer chair for long stretches, and when standing and interacting in social situations I've subconciously cultivated a passive, non-confrontational but minimally interactive posture.  But simple physical actions can act as a mild nootropic for certain situations.

Article with citations: 10 Simple Postures that Boost Performance

Article summary:

1. Take a powerful pose to feel powerful

2. Tense muscles for willpower

3. Cross arms for persistence

4. Lie down for insight

5. Nap for cognitive performance, vigour and wakefulness

6. Hand gestures for persuasion

7. Gesture to self for comprehension and memory

8. Smile for happiness

9. Mimic to empathize

10. Imitate for comprehension and prediction

Admins have been doing a decent, timely job taking down the spam that comes up in the Discussion section. But it is an eyesore for any period of time and there seems to be more and more of it. And there is an easy solution: a small karma requirement for discussion section posts. I think 5 would about right. A reasonable, literate person can get 5 karma pretty easily. "Hi, I'm new" usually does it. That plus a half-way insightful comment about something almost definitely will. This would screen out the spammers. As for the occasional genuine user that posts in discussion before commenting at all, I don't know how many there have been but my sense is that delaying them from posting until they can get five upvotes is almost certainly a good thing.

Thoughts? Or is changing this actually a difficult task that requires rewriting the site's code and that's why it hasn't been done already?

I've put together a list of what I think are the best Yvain (Scott Alexander) posts for new readers, drawing from SlateStarCodex, LessWrong, raikoth.net, and Scott's LiveJournal.

The list should make the most sense to people who start from the top and read through it in order, though skipping around is encouraged too. Rather than making a chronological list, I’ve tried to order things by a mix of "where do I think most people should start reading?" plus "sorting related posts together."

This is a work in progress; you’re invited to suggest things you’d add, remove, or shuffle around. Since many of the titles are a bit cryptic, I'm adding short descriptions. See my blog for a version without the descriptions.

I. Rationality and Rationalization

• Blue- and Yellow-Tinted Choices  ·····  An introduction to context-sensitive biases.
• The Apologist and the Revolutionary  ·····  Do separate brain processes rationalize and question ideas?
• Historical Realism  ·····  When reality is unrealistic.
• Simultaneously Right and Wrong  ·····  On self-handicapping and self-deception.
• You May Already Be A Sinner  ·····  Self-deception in cases where your decisions make no difference.
• Beware the Man of One Study  ·····  On minimum wage laws and cherry-picked evidence.
• Debunked and Well-Refuted  ·····  When should we say that a study has been "debunked"?
• How to Not Lose an Argument  ·····  How to be more persuasive in entrenched arguments.
• The Least Convenient Possible World  ·····  Why it's useful to strengthen arguments you disagree with.
• Bayes for Schizophrenics: Reasoning in Delusional Disorders  ·····  Hypotheses about the role of perception, evidence integration, and priors in delusions.
• Generalizing from One Example  ·····  On the typical mind fallacy: assuming other people are like you.
• Typical Mind and Politics  ·····  Do political disagreements stem from neurological disagreements?

II. Probabilism

• Confidence Levels Inside and Outside an Argument  ·····  Should you believe your own conclusions, when they're extreme?
• Schizophrenia and Geomagnetic Storms  ·····  When bizarre ideas turn out to be true.
• Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale  ·····  Should we dismiss all absurd claims?
• Arguments from My Opponent Believes Something  ·····  Ten fully general arguments.
• Statistical Literacy Among Doctors Now Lower Than Chance  ·····  Common errors in probabilistic reasoning.
• Techniques for Probability Estimates  ·····  Six methods for quantifying uncertainty.
• On First Looking into Chapman’s “Pop Bayesianism”  ·····  Reasons Bayesian epistemology may not be trivial.
• Utilitarianism for Engineers  ·····  Are there good-enough heuristics for comparing people's preferences?
• If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing with Made-Up Statistics  ·····  The practical value of probabilities.
• Marijuana: Much More Than You Wanted to Know  ·····  Assessing marijuana's costs and benefits.
• Are You a Solar Deity?  ·····  On confirmation bias in the comparative study of religions.
• The "Spot the Fakes" Test  ·····  An approach to testing humanities hypotheses.
• Epistemic Learned Helplessness  ·····  What should we do when bad arguments sound convincing?

III. Science and Doubt

• Google Correlate Does Not Imply Google Causation  ·····  Peculiar correlations between Google search terms.
• Stop Confounding Yourself! Stop Confounding Yourself!  ·····  A correlational study on the effects of bullying.
• Effects of Vertical Acceleration on Wrongness  ·····  On evidence-based medicine.
• 90% Of All Claims About The Problems With Medical Studies Are Wrong  ·····  Is it the case that "90% of medical research is false"?
• Prisons are Built with Bricks of Law and Brothels with Bricks of Religion, But That Doesn’t Prove a Causal Relationship  ·····  Do psychiatric interventions increase suicide risk?
• Noisy Poll Results and the Reptilian Muslim Climatologists from Mars  ·····  Skepticism about poll results.
• Two Dark Side Statistics Papers  ·····  Statistical tricks for creating effects out of nothing.
• Alcoholics Anonymous: Much More Than You Wanted to Know  ·····  Is AA effective for treating alcohol abuse?
• The Control Group Is Out Of Control  ·····  Parapsychology as the "control group" for all of psychology.
• The Cowpox of Doubt  ·····  Focusing on easy questions inoculates against uncertainty.
• The Skeptic's Trilemma  ·····  Explaining mysteries, vs. worshiping them, vs. dismissing them.
• If You Can't Make Predictions, You're Still in a Crisis  ·····  On psychology studies' replication failures.

IV. Medicine, Therapy, and Human Enhancement

• Scientific Freud  ·····  How does psychoanalysis compare to cognitive behavioral therapy?
• Sleep – Now by Prescription  ·····  On melatonin.
• In Defense of Psych Treatment for Attempted Suicide  ·····   Suicide is usually not a rational, informed decision.
• Who By Very Slow Decay  ·····  On old age and death in the medical system.
• Medicine, As Not Seen on TV  ·····  What is it actually like to be a doctor?
• Searching for One-Sided Tradeoffs  ·····  How can we find good ideas that others haven't found first?
• Do Life Hacks Ever Reach Fixation?  ·····  Why aren't there more good ideas that everyone has adopted?
• Polyamory is Boring  ·····  Deromanticizing multi-partner romance.
• Can You Condition Yourself?  ·····  On shaping new habits by rewarding oneself.
• Wirehead Gods on Lotus Thrones  ·····  Is the future boring? Transcendently blissful? Boringly blissful?
• Don’t Fear the Filter  ·····  Does the Fermi Paradox mean that our species is doomed?
• Transhumanist Fables  ·····  Six futurist fairy tales.

V. Introduction to Game Theory

• Backward Reasoning Over Decision Trees  ·····  Sequential games, and why adding options can hurt you.
• Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points  ·····  Simultaneous games, mixed strategies, and coordination.
• Introduction to Prisoners' Dilemma  ·····  Why Nash equilibria are sometimes bad for everyone.
• Real-World Solutions to Prisoners' Dilemmas  ·····  How society and evolution ensure mutual cooperation.
• Interlude for Behavioral Economics  ·····  Fairness, superrationality, and self-image in real-world games.
• What is Signaling, Really?  ·····  Actions that convey information, sometimes at great cost.
• Bargaining and Auctions  ·····  Idealized models of correct bidding.
• Imperfect Voting Systems  ·····  Strengths and weaknesses of different voting systems.
• Game Theory as a Dark Art  ·····  Ways to exploit seemingly "economically rational" behavior.

VI. Promises and Principles

• Beware Trivial Inconveniences  ·····  Small obstacles can have a huge effect on behavior.
• Time and Effort Discounting  ·····  On inconsistencies in our revealed preferences.
• Applied Picoeconomics  ·····  Binding your future self to your present goals.
• Schelling Fences on Slippery Slopes  ·····  Using arbitrary thresholds to improve coordination.
• Democracy is the Worst Form of Government Except for All the Others Except Possibly Futarchy  ·····  Like democracy, futarchy (rule by prediction markets) has the advantage of appearing impartial.
• Eight Short Studies on Excuses  ·····  When should we allow exceptions to our rules?
• Revenge as Charitable Act  ·····  Revenge can be a personally costly way to disincentivize misdeeds.
• Would Your Real Preferences Please Stand Up?  ·····  Are we hypocrites, or just weak-willed?
• Are Wireheads Happy?  ·····  Distinguishing "wanting" something from "liking" it.
• Guilt: Another Gift Nobody Wants  ·····  An evolutionary, signaling-based explanation of guilt.

VII. Cognition and Association

• Diseased Thinking: Dissolving Questions about Disease  ·····  On verbal disagreements.
• The Noncentral Fallacy — The Worst Argument in the World?  ·····  Judging an entire category by an emotional association that only applies to typical category members.
• The Power of Positivist Thinking  ·····  Focus on statements' empirical content.
• When Truth Isn't Enough  ·····  It's possible to agree denotationally while disagreeing connotationally.
• Ambijectivity  ·····  When a question is both subjective and objective.
• The Blue-Minimizing Robot  ·····  A parable on agency.
• Basics of Animal Reinforcement  ·····  A primer on classical and operant conditioning.
• Wanting vs. Liking Revisited  ·····  Distinguishing motivation to act from reinforcement.
• Physical and Mental Behavior  ·····  Behaviorism meets thinking.
• Trivers on Self-Deception  ·····  The conscious mind as a self-serving social narrative.
• Ego-Syntonic Thoughts and Values  ·····  On endorsed vs. non-endorsed mental behavior.
• Approving Reinforces Low-Effort Behaviors  ·····  Using your self-image to blackmail yourself.
• To What Degree Do We Have Goals?  ·····  Are our unconscious drives like an agent?
• The Limits of Introspection  ·····  Are we good at directly perceiving our cognition?
• Secrets of the Eliminati  ·····  Reducing phenomena to simpler parts, vs. eliminating them.
• Tendencies in Reflective Equilibrium  ·····  Aspiring to become more consistent.
• Hansonian Optimism  ·····  If ego-syntonic goals are about signaling, is goodness a lie?

VIII. Doing Good

• Newtonian Ethics  ·····  Satirizing moral parochialism and sloppy systematizations of ethics.
• Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others...  ·····  How should we act when our decisions matter most?
• The Economics of Art and the Art of Economics  ·····  Should Detroit sell its publicly owned artwork?
• A Modest Proposal  ·····  Using dead babies as a unit of currency.
• The Life Issue  ·····  What are the consequences of drone warfare?
• What if Drone Warfare Had Come First?  ·····  A thought experiment.
• Nefarious Nefazodone and Flashy Rare Side-Effects  ·····  On choosing between drug side-effects.
• The Consequentialism FAQ  ·····  Argues for assessing actions based on how they help or harm people.
• Doing Your Good Deed for the Day  ·····  Doing some good can reduce people's willingness to do more good.
• I Myself Am A Scientismist  ·····  Why apply scientific methods to non-scientific domains?
• Whose Utilitarianism?  ·····  Questioning the objectivity and uniqueness of utilitarianism.
• Book Review: After Virtue  ·····  On virtue ethics, a reaction against modern moral philosophy.
• Read History of Philosophy Backwards  ·····  Historical texts reveal our implicit assumptions.
• Virtue Ethics: Not Practically Useful Either  ·····  Is virtue ethics useful prescriptively or descriptively?
• Last Thoughts on Virtue Ethics  ·····  What claims do virtue ethicists make?
• Proving Too Much  ·····  If an argument sometimes proves falsehoods, it can't be valid.

IX. Liberty

• The Non-Libertarian FAQ (aka Why I Hate Your Freedom)
• A Blessing in Disguise, Albeit a Very Good Disguise
• Basic Income Guarantees
• Book Review: The Nurture Assumption
• The Death of Wages is Sin
• Thank You For Doing Something Ambiguously Between Smoking And Not Smoking
• Lies, Damned Lies, and Facebook (Part 1 of ∞)
• The Life Cycle of Medical Ideas
• Vote on Values, Outsource Beliefs
• A Something Sort of Like Left-Libertarian-ist Manifesto
• Plutocracy Isn’t About Money
• Against Tulip Subsidies
• SlateStarCodex Gives a Graduation Speech

X. Progress

• Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism
• A Signaling Theory of Class x Politics Interaction
• Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell
• A Thrive/Survive Theory of the Political Spectrum
• We Wrestle Not With Flesh And Blood, But Against Powers And Principalities
• Poor Folks Do Smile… For Now
• Apart from Better Sanitation and Medicine and Education and Irrigation and Public Health and Roads and Public Order, What Has Modernity Done for Us?
• The Wisdom of the Ancients
• Can Atheists Appreciate Chesterton?
• Holocaust Good for You, Research Finds, But Frequent Taunting Causes Cancer in Rats
• Public Awareness Campaigns
• Social Psychology is a Flamethrower
• Nature is Not a Slate. It’s a Series of Levers.
• The Anti-Reactionary FAQ
• The Poor You Will Always Have With You
• Proposed Biological Explanations for Historical Trends in Crime
• Society is Fixed, Biology is Mutable

XI. Social Justice

• Practically-a-Book Review: Dying to be Free
• Drug Testing Welfare Users is a Sham, But Not for the Reasons You Think
• The Meditation on Creepiness
• The Meditation on Superweapons
• The Meditation on the War on Applause Lights
• The Meditation on Superweapons and Bingo
• An Analysis of the Formalist Account of Power Relations in Democratic Societies
• Arguments About Male Violence Prove Too Much
• Social Justice for the Highly-Demanding-of-Rigor
• Against Bravery Debates
• All Debates Are Bravery Debates
• A Comment I Posted on “What Would JT Do?”
• We Are All MsScribe
• The Spirit of the First Amendment
• A Response to Apophemi on Triggers
• Lies, Damned Lies, and Social Media: False Rape Accusations
• In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization

XII. Politicization

• Right is the New Left
• Weak Men are Superweapons
• You Kant Dismiss Universalizability
• I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup
• Five Case Studies on Politicization
• Black People Less Likely
• Nydwracu’s Fnords
• All in All, Another Brick in the Motte
• Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments
• Race and Justice: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
• Framing for Light Instead of Heat
• The Wonderful Thing About Triggers
• Fearful Symmetry
• Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism

XIII. Competition and Cooperation

• Galactic Core
• Book Review: The Two-Income Trap
• Just for Stealing a Mouthful of Bread
• Meditations on Moloch
• Misperceptions on Moloch
• The Invisible Nation — Reconciling Utilitarianism and Contractualism
• Freedom on the Centralized Web
• Book Review: Singer on Marx
• Does Class Warfare Have a Free Rider Problem?
• Book Review: Red Plenty

If you liked these posts and want more, I suggest browsing the SlateStarCodex archives.

Since the episode with Eugine_Nier, I have received three private messages from different people asking me to investigate various cases of suspected mass downvoting. And to be quite honest, I don't want to deal with this. Eugine's case was relatively clear-cut, since he had engaged in systematic downvoting of a massive scale, but the new situations are a lot fuzzier and I'm not sure of what exactly the rules should be (what counts as a permitted use of the downvote system and what doesn't?).

At least one person has also privately contacted me and offered to carry out moderator duties if I don't want them, but even if I told them yes (on what basis? why them and not someone else?), I don't know what kind of policy I should tell them to enforce. I only happened to be appointed a moderator because I was in the list of top 10 posters at a particular time, and I don't feel like I should have any particular authority to make the rules. Nor do I feel like I have any good idea of what the rules should be, or who would be the right person to enforce them.

In any case, I don't want to be doing this job, nor do I particularly feel like being responsible for figuring out who should, or how, or what the heck. I've already started visiting LW less often because I dread having new investigation requests to deal with. So if you folks could be so kind as to figure it out without my involvement? If there's a clear consensus that someone in particular should deal with this, I can give them mod powers, or something.

TL;DR: It can be helpful to reframe arguments about tone, trigger warnings, and political correctness as concerns about false cognates/false friends.  You may be saying something that sounds innocuous to you, but translates to something much stronger/more vicious to your audience.  Cultivating a debating demeanor that invites requests for tone concerns can give you more information about about the best way to avoid distractions and have a productive dispute.

When I went on a two-week exchange trip to China, it was clear the cultural briefing was informed by whatever mistakes or misunderstandings had occurred on previous trips, recorded and relayed to us so that we wouldn't think, for example, that our host siblings were hitting on us if they took our hands while we were walking.

But the most memorable warning had to do with Mandarin filler words.  While English speakers cover gaps with "uh" "um" "ah" and so forth, the equivalent filler words in Mandarin had an African-American student on a previous trip pulling aside our tour leader and saying he felt a little uncomfortable since his host family appeared to be peppering all of their comments with "nigga, nigga, nigga..."

As a result, we all got warned ahead of time.  The filler word (那个 - nèige) was a false cognate that, although innocuous to the speaker, sounded quite off-putting to us.  It helped to be warned, but it still required some deliberate, cognitive effort to remind myself that I wasn't actually hearing something awful and to rephrase it in my head.

When I've wound up in arguments about tone, trigger warnings, and taboo words, I'm often reminded of that experience in China.  Limiting language can prompt suspicion of closing off conversations, but in a number of cases, when my friends have asked me to rephrase, it's because the word or image I was using was as distracting (however well meant) as 那个 was in Beijing.

It's possible to continue a conversation with someone who's every statement is laced with "nigga" but it takes effort.  And no one is obligated to expend their energy on having a conversation with me if I'm making it painful or difficult for them, even if it's as the result of a false cognate (or, as the French would say, false friend) that sounds innocuous to me but awful to my interlocutor.  If I want to have a debate at all, I need to stop doing the verbal equivalent of assaulting my friend to make any progress.

It can be worth it to pause and reconsider your language even if the offensiveness of a word or idea is exactly the subject of your dispute.  When I hosted a debate on "R: Fire Eich" one of the early speakers made it clear that, in his opinion, opposing gay marriage was logically equivalent to endorsing gay genocide (he invoked a slippery slope argument back to the dark days of criminal indifference to AIDS).

Pretty much no one in the room (whatever their stance on gay marriage) agreed with this equivalence, but we could all agree it was pretty lucky that this person had spoken early in the debate, so that we understood how he was hearing our speeches.  If every time someone said "conscience objection," this speaker was appending "to enable genocide," the fervor and horror with which he questioned us made a lot more sense, and didn't feel like personal viciousness.  Knowing how high the stakes felt to him made it easier to have a useful conversation.

This is a large part of why I objected to PZ Myers's deliberate obtuseness during the brouhaha he sparked when he asked readers to steal him a consecrated Host from a Catholic church so that he could desecrate it.  PZ ridiculed Catholics for getting upset that he was going to "hurt" a piece of bread, even though the Eucharist is a fairly obvious example of a false cognate that is heard/received differently by Catholics and atheists.  (After all, if it wasn't holy to someone, he wouldn't be able to profane it).  In PZ's incident, it was although we had informed our Chinese hosts about the 那个/nigga confusion, and they had started using it more boisterously, so that it would be clearer to us that they didn't find it offensive.

We were only able to defuse the awkwardness in China for two reasons.

1. The host family was so nice, aside from this one provocation, that the student noticed he was confused and sought advice.
2. There was someone on hand who understood both groups well enough to serve as an interpreter.

In an ordinary argument (especially one that takes place online) it's up to you to be visibly virtuous enough that, if you happen to be using a vicious false cognate, your interlocutor will find that odd, not of a piece with your other behavior.

That's one reason my debating friend did bother explaining explicitly the connection he saw between opposition to gay marriage and passive support of genocide -- he trusted us enough to think that we wouldn't endorse the implications of our arguments if he made them obvious.  In the P.Z. dispute, when Catholic readers found him as the result of the stunt, they didn't have any such trust.

It's nice to work to cultivate that trust, and to be the kind of person your friends do approach with requests for trigger warnings and tone shifts.  For one thing, I don't want to use emotionally intense false cognates and not know it, any more than I would want to be gesticulating hard enough to strike my friend in the face without noticing.  For the most part, I prefer to excise the distraction, so it's easier for both of us to focus on the heart of the dispute, but, even if you think that the controversial term is essential to your point, it's helpful to know it causes your friend pain, so you have the opportunity to salve it some other way.  

P.S. Arnold Kling's The Three Languages of Politics is a short read and a nice introduction to what political language you're using that sounds like horrible false cognates to people rooted in different ideologies.

P.P.S. I've cross-posted this on my usual blog, but am trying out cross-posting to Discussion sometimes.

(Cross-posted from my personal site.)

Several months ago I began a list of "things to try," which I share at the bottom of this post. It suggests many mundane, trivial-to-medium-cost changes to lifestyle and routine. Now that I've spent some time with most of them and pursued at least as many more personal items in the same spirit, I'll suggest you do something similar. Why?

• Raise the temperature in your optimization algorithm: avoid the trap of doing too much analysis on too little data and escape local optima.
• You can think of this as a system for self-improvement; something that operates on a meta level, unlike an object-level goal or technique; something that helps you fail at almost everything but still win big.
• Variety of experience is an intrinsic pleasure to many, and it may make you feel less that time has flown as you look back on your life.
• Practice implementing small life changes, practice observing the effects of the changes, practice noticing further opportunities for changes, practice value of information calculations, and reinforce your self-image as an empiricist working to improve your life. Build small skills in the right order and you'll have better chances at bigger wins in the future.
• Advice often falls prey to the typical-mind (or typical-body) fallacy. That doesn't mean you should dismiss it out of hand. Think about not just how likely it is to work for you, but how beneficial it would be if it worked, how much it would cost to try, and how likely it is that trying it would give you enough information to change your behavior. Then just try it anyway if it's cheap enough, because you forgot to account for uncertainty in your model inputs.
• Speaking of value of information: don't ignore tweakable variables just because you don't yet have a gwern-tier tracking and evaluation apparatus for the perfect self-experiment. Sometimes you can expect consciously noticeable non-placebo effects from a successful trial. You might do better picking the low hanging fruit to gain momentum before you invest in a Zeo and a statistics textbook.
• You know what, if there's an effect, it may not even need to be non-placebo. C.f. "Lampshading," as well as the often-observed "honeymoon" period of success with new productivity systems.
• It's very tempting, especially in certain communities, to focus exclusively on shiny, counterintuitive, "rational," tech-based, hackeresque, or otherwise clever interventions and grand personal development schemes. Some of these are even good, but one suspects that some are optimized for punchiness, not effectiveness. Conversely, mundane ideas may not propagate as well, despite being potentially equally or more likely to succeed.
• If you were already convinced of all of the above, then great! I hope you have the agency to try stuff like this all the time. If not, you might find it useful, as I did, just to have a list like this available. It's one less trivial inconvenience between thinking "I should try more things" and actually trying something. I've also found that I'm more likely to notice and remember optimization opportunities now that I have a place to capture them. And having spent the time to write them down and occasionally look over them, I'm more likely to notice when I'm in a position to enact something context-dependent on the list.

I removed the terribly personal items from my list, but what remains is still somewhat tailored to my own situation and habits. These are not recommendations; they are just things that struck me as having enough potential value to try for a week or two. The list isn't not remotely comprehensive, even as far as mundane self-experiments are concerned, but it's left as an exercise to the reader to find and fill the gaps. Take this list as an example or as a starting point, and brainstorm ideas of your own in the comments. The usual recommendation applies against going overboard in domains where you're currently impulsive or unreflective.

Related posts: Boring Advice Repository, Break your habits: Be more empirical, On saying the obvious, Value of Information: Four Examples, Spend money on ergonomics, Go try things, Don't fear failure, Just try it: Quantity trumps quality, No, seriously, just try it, etc.

Circa a week ago I posted asking whether bringing up molecular nanotechnology(MNT) as a possible threat avenue for an unfriendly artificial intelligence made FAI research seem less credible because MNT seemed to me to be not obviously possible. I was told to some extent, to put up and address the science of MNT or shut up.  A couple of people also expressed an interest in seeing a more fact and less PR oriented discussion, so I got the ball rolling and you all have no one to blame but yourselves. I should note before starting, that I do not personally have a strong opinion on whether Drexler-style MNT is possible. This isn't something I've researched previously, and I'm open to being convinced one way or the other. If MNT turns out to be likely at the end of this investigation, then hopefully this discussion can provide a good resource for LW/FAI on the topic for people like myself not yet convinced that MNT is the way of future. As far as I'm concerned, at this point all paths lead to victory. 

While Nanosystems was the canonical reference mentioned in the last conversation. I purchased it, then about 2/3rds of the way through this I figured Engines of Creation was giving me enough to work with and cancelled my order. If the science in Nanosystems is really much better than in EoC I can reorder it, but I figured we'd get started for free. 50 bucks is a lot of money to spend on an internet argument.

Before I begin I would like to post the following disclaimers.

1. I am not an expert in many of the claims that border on MNT. I did work at a Nanotechnology center for a year, but that experience was essentially nothing like what Drexler describes. More relevantly I am in the process of completing a Ph.D. in Physics, and my thesis work is on computational modeling of novel materials. I don't really like squishy things, so I'm very much out of my depth when it comes to discussions as to what ribosomes can and cannot accomplish, and I'll happily defer to other authorities on the more biological subjects. With that being said, several of my colleagues run MD simulations of protein folding all day every day, and if a biology issue is particularly important, I can shoot some emails around the department and try and get a more expert opinion.

2. There are several difficulties in precisely addressing Drexler's arguments, because it's not always clear to me at least exactly what his arguments are. I've been going through Engines of Creation and several of his other works, and I'll present my best guess outline here. If other people would like to contribute specific claims about molecular nanotech, I'll be happy to add them to the list and do my best to address them.

3. This discussion is intended to be scientific. As was pointed out previously, Drexler et al. have made many claims about time tables of when things might be invented.  Judging the accuracy of these claims is difficult because of issues with definitions as mentioned in the previous paragraph. I'm not interested in having this discussion encompass Drexler's general prediction accuracy. Nature is the only authority I'm interested in consulting in this thread. If someone wants to make a Drexler's prediction accuracy thread, they're welcome to do so.

4. If you have any questions about the science underlying anything I say, don't hesitate to ask. This is a fairly technical topic, and I'm happy to bring anyone up to speed on basic physics/chemistry terms and concepts.

Discussion

I'll begin by providing some background and highlighting why exactly I am not already convinced that MNT, and especially AI-assisted rapid MNT is the future, and then I'll try and address some specific claims made by Drexler in various publications.

Conservation of energy:

Modelling is hard:

Solving the Schrodinger equation is essentially impossible. We can solve it more or less exactly for the Hydrogen atom, but things get very very difficult from there. This is because we don't have a simple solution for the three-body problem, much less the n-body problem. Approximately, the difficulty is that because each electron interacts with every other electron, you have a system where to determine the forces on electron 1, you need to know the position of electrons 2 through N, but the position of each of those electrons depends somewhat on electron 1. We have some tricks and approximations to get around this problem, but they're only justified empirically. The only way we know what approximations are good approximations is by testing them in experiments. Experiments are difficult and expensive, and if the AI is using MNT to gain infrastructure, then we can assume it doesn't already have the infrastructure to run its own physics lab. 

A factory isn't the right analogy:

The discussion of nanotechnology seems to me to have an enormous emphasis on Assemblers, or nanofactories, but a factory doesn't run unless it has a steady supply of raw materials and energy resources both arriving at the correct time. The evocation of a factory calls to mind the rigid regularity of an assembly line, but the factory only works because it's situated in the larger, more chaotic world of the economy. Designing new nanofactories isn't a problem of building the factory, but a problem of designing an entire economy. There has to be a source of raw material, an energy source, and means of transporting material and energy from place to place. And, with a microscopic factory, Brownian motion may have moved the factory by the time the delivery van gets there. This fact makes the modelling problem orders of magnitude more difficult. Drexler makes a big deal about how his rigid positional world isn't like the chaotic world of the chemists, but it seems like the chaos is still there; building a factory doesn't get rid of the logistics issue.

Chaos

The reason we can't solve the n-body problem, and lots of other problems such as the double pendulum and the weather is because it turns out to be a rather unfortunate fact of nature that many systems have a very sensitive dependence on initial conditions. This means that ANY error, any unaccounted for variable, can perturb a system in dramatic ways. Since there will always be some error (at the bare minimum h/4π) this means that our AI is going to have to do Monte Carlo simulations like the rest of us smucks and try to eliminate as many degrees of freedom as possible.

The laws of physics hold

I didn't think it would be necessary to mention this, but I believe that the laws of physics are pretty much the laws of physics we know right now. I would direct anyone who suggests that an AI has a shot at powering MNT with cold fusion, tachyons, or other physical phenomena not predicted by the standard model to this post. I am not saying there is no new no physics, but we understand quantum mechanics really well, and the Standard Model has been confirmed to enough decimal places that anyone who suggests something the Standard Model says can't happen is almost certainly wrong. Even if they have experimental evidence that is supposed to 99.9999% percent correct.

Specific Claims

Drexler's claims about what we can do now with respect to materials science in general are true. This should be unsurprising. It is not particularly difficult to predict the past. Here are 6 claims he makes that we can't currently accomplish which I'll try and evaluate:

1. Building "gear-like" nanostructures is possible (Toward Integrated Nanosystems)
2. Predicting crystal structures from first principles is possible (Toward Integrated Nanosystems)
3. Genetic engineering is a superior form of chemical synthesis to traditional chemical plants. (EoC 6)
4. "Biochemical engineers, then, will construct new enzymes to assemble new patterns of atoms. For example, they might make an enzyme-like machine which will add carbon atoms to a small spot, layer on layer. If bonded correctly, the atoms will build up to form a fine, flexible diamond fiber having over fifty times as much strength as the same weight of aluminum." (EoC 10)
5. Proteins can make and break diamond bonds (EoC 11)
6. Proteins are "programmable" (EoC 11)

2. True. This isn't true yet, but should be possible. I might even work on this after I graduate, if don't go hedge fund or into AI research.

3. Not wrong, but misleading. The statement "Genetic engineers have now programmed bacteria to make proteins ranging from human growth hormone to rennin, an enzyme used in making cheese." is true in the same sense that copying and pasting someone else's code constitutes programming. Splicing a gene into a plasmid is sweet, but genetic programming implies more control than we have. Similarly, the statement: "Whereas engineers running a chemical plant must work with vats of reacting chemicals (which often misarrange atoms and make noxious byproducts), engineers working with bacteria can make them absorb chemicals, carefully rearrange the atoms, and store a product or release it into the fluid around them." implies that bacterial synthesis leads to better yields (false), that bacteria are careful(meaningless), and implies greater control over genetically modified E.Coli than we have. 

4a. False. Flexible diamond doesn't make any sense. Diamond is sp3 bonded carbon and those bonds are highly directional. They're not going to flex.. Metals are flexible because metallic bonds, unlike covalent bonds, don't confine the electrons in space. Whatever this purported carbon fiber is, it either won't be flexible, or it won't be diamond.

4b. False. It isn't clear that this is even remotely possible. Enzymes don't work like this. Enzymes are catalysts for existing reactions. There is no existing reaction that results in a single carbon atom. That's an enormously energetically unfavorable state. Breaking a single carbon carbon double bond requires something like 636 kJ/mol (6.5eV) of energy. That's roughly equivalent to burning 30 units of ATP at the same time. How? How do you get all that energy into the right place at the right time? How does your enzyme manage to hold on to the carbons strongly enough to pull them apart?

5. "A flexible, programmable protein machine will grasp a large molecule (the workpiece) while bringing a small molecule up against it in just the right place. Like an enzyme, it will then bond the molecules together. By bonding molecule after molecule to the workpiece, the machine will assemble a larger and larger structure while keeping complete control of how its atoms are arranged. This is the key ability that chemists have lacked." I'm no biologist, but this isn't how proteins work. Proteins aren't Turing machines. You don't set the state and ignore them. The conformation of a protein depends intimately on its environment. The really difficult part here is that the thing it's holding, the nanopart you're trying to assemble is a big part of the protein's environment. Drexler complains around how proteins are no good because they're soft and squishy, but then he claims they're strong enough to assemble diamond and metal parts. But if the stiff nanopart that you're assembling has a dangling carbon bond waiting to filled then it's just going to cannibalize the squishy protein that's holding it. What can a protein held together by Van der Waals bonds do to a diamond? How can it control the shape it takes well enough to build a fiber?

6. All of these tiny machines are repeatedly described as programmable, but that doesn't make any sense. What programs are they capable of accepting or executing? What set of instructions can a collection of 50 carbon atoms accept and execute? How are these instructions being delivered? This gets back to my factory vs. economy complaint. If nothing else, this seems an enormously sloppy use of language.

Some things that are possible

I think we have or will have the technology to build some interesting artificial inorganic structures in very small quantities, primarily using ultra-cold, ultra-high-vacuum laser traps. It's even possible that eventually we could create some functional objects this way, though I can't see any practical way to scale that production up.

"Nanorobots" will be small pieces of metal or dieletric material that we manipulate with lasers or sophisticated magnetic fields, possibly attached to some sort of organic ligand. This isn't much of a prediction, we pretty much do this already. The nanoworld will continue to be statistical and messy.

We will gain some inorganic control over organics like protein and DNA (though not organic over inorganic). This hasn't really been done yet that I'm aware of, but stronger bonds>weaker bonds makes sense. I think there are people trying to read DNA/proteins by pushing the strands through tiny silicon windows. I feel like I heard a seminar along those lines, though I'm pretty sure I slept through it.

That brings me through the first 12 pages of EoC or so. More to follow. Let me know if the links don't work or the formatting is terrible or I said something confusing. Also, please contribute any specific MNT claims you'd like evaluated, and any resources or publications you think are relevant. Thank you.

Bibliography

Engines of Creation

Toward Integrated Nanosystems

Molecular Devices and Machines)

Triggered by:  Future Story Status 

A helpful key to understanding the art and technique of character in storytelling, is to consider the folk-psychological notion from Internal Family Systems of people being composed of different 'parts' embodying different drives or goals. A shallow character is a character with only one 'part'.

A good rule of thumb is that to create a 3D character, that person must contain at least two different 2D characters who come into conflict. Contrary to the first thought that crosses your mind, three-dimensional good people are constructed by combining at least two different good people with two different ideals, not by combining a good person and a bad person. Deep sympathetic characters have two sympathetic parts in conflict, not a sympathetic part in conflict with an unsympathetic part. Deep smart characters are created by combining at least two different people who are geniuses.

E.g. HPMOR!Hermione contains both a sensible young girl who tries to keep herself and her friends out of trouble, and a starry-eyed heroine, neither of whom are stupid.  (Actually, since HPMOR!Hermione is also the one character who I created as close to her canon self as I could manage - she didn't *need* upgrading - I should credit this one to J. K. Rowling.)  (Admittedly, I didn't actually follow that rule deliberately to construct Methods, I figured it out afterward when everyone was praising the characterization and I was like, "Wait, people are calling me a character author now?  What the hell did I just do right?")

If instead you try to construct a genius character by having an emotionally impoverished 'genius' part in conflict with a warm nongenius part... ugh.  Cliche.  Don't write the first thing that pops into your head from watching Star Trek.  This is not how real geniuses work.  HPMOR!Harry, the primary protagonist, contains so many different people he has to give them names, and none of them are stupid, nor does any one of them contain his emotions set aside in a neat jar; they contain different mixtures of emotions and ideals.  Combining two cliche characters won't be enough to build a deep character.  Combining two different realistic people in that character's situation works much better.  Two is not a limit, it's a minimum, but everyone involved still has to be recognizably the same person when combined.

Closely related is Orson Scott Card's observation that a conflict between Good and Evil can be interesting, but it's often not half as interesting as a conflict between Good and Good. All standard rules about cliches still apply, and a conflict between good and good which you've previously read about and to which the reader can already guess your correct approved answer, cannot carry the story. A good rule of thumb is that if you have a conflict between good and good which you feel unsure about yourself, or which you can remember feeling unsure about, or you're not sure where exactly to draw the line, you can build a story around it. I consider the most successful moral conflict in HPMOR to be the argument between Harry and Dumbledore in Ch. 77 because it almost perfectly divided the readers on who was in the right *and* about whose side the author was taking.  (*This* was done by deliberately following Orson Scott Card's rule, not by accident.  Likewise _Three Worlds Collide_, though it was only afterward that I realized how much of the praise for that story, which I hadn't dreamed would be considered literarily meritful by serious SF writers, stemmed from the sheer rarity of stories built around genuinely open moral arguments.  Orson Scott Card:  "Propaganda only works when the reader feels like you've been absolutely fair to other side", and writing about a moral dilemma where *you're* still trying to figure out the answer is an excellent way to achieve this.)

Character shallowness can be a symptom of moral shallowness if it reflects a conflict between Good and Evil drawn along lines too clear to bring two good parts of a good character into conflict. This is why it would've been hard for Lord of the Rings to contain conflicted characters without becoming an entirely different story, though as Robin Hanson has just remarked, LotR is a Mileu story, not a Character story.  Conflicts between evil and evil are even shallower than conflicts between good and evil, which is why what passes for 'maturity' in some literature is so uninteresting. There's nothing to choose there, no decision to await with bated breath, just an author showing off their disillusionment as a claim of sophistication.

Kim Suozzi was a neuroscience student with brain cancer who wanted to be cryonically preserved but lacked the funds. She appealed to reddit and a foundation was set up, called the Society for Venturism.  Enough money was raised, and when she died on the January 17th, she was preserved by Alcor.  

I wasn't sure if I should post about this, but I was glad to see that enough money was raised and it was discussed on LessWrong here, here, and here.

Source

Edit:  It looks like Alcor actually worked with her to lower the costs, and waived some of the fees.

Edit 2:  The Society for Venturism has been around for a while, and wasn't set up just for her.

Prompted by Mitchell Porter, I asked on Physics StackExchange about the accuracy of the physics in the Quantum Physics sequence:

What errors would one learn from Eliezer Yudkowsky's introduction to quantum physics?

Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote an introduction to quantum physics from a strictly realist standpoint. However, he has no qualifications in the subject and it is not his specialty. Does it paint an accurate picture overall? What mistaken ideas about QM might someone who read only this introduction come away with?

I've had some interesting answers so far, including one from a friend that seems to point up a definite error, though AFAICT not a very consequential one: in Configurations and Amplitude, a multiplication factor of i is used for the mirrors where -1 is correct.

Physics StackExchange: What errors would one learn from Eliezer Yudkowsky's introduction to quantum physics?

Wei Dai offered 7 tips on how to answer really hard questions:

• Don't stop at the first good answer.
• Explore multiple approaches simultaneously.
• Trust your intuitions, but don't waste too much time arguing for them.
• Go meta.
• Dissolve the question.
• Sleep on it.
• Be ready to recognize a good answer when you see it. (This may require actually changing your mind.)

Some others from the audience include:

• Transform the problem into a different domain.
• Ask people who have worked on similar problems.
• Decompose the problem into subproblems. (Analysis)

I'd like to offer one more technique for tackling hard questions: Hack away at the edges.

General history books compress time so much that they often give the impression that major intellectual breakthroughs result from sudden strokes of insight. But when you read a history of just one breakthrough, you realize how much "chance favors the prepared mind." You realize how much of the stage had been set by others, by previous advances, by previous mistakes, by a soup of ideas crowding in around the central insight made later.

It's this picture of the history of mathematics and science that makes me feel quite comfortable working on hard problems by hacking away at their edges.

I don't know how to build Friendly AI. Truth be told, I doubt humanity will figure it out before going extinct. The whole idea might be impossible or confused. But I'll tell you this: I doubt the problem will be solved by getting smart people to sit in silence and think real hard about decision theory and metaethics. If the problem can be solved, it will be solved by dozens or hundreds of people hacking away at the tractable edges of Friendly AI subproblems, drawing novel connections, inching toward new insights, drawing from others' knowledge and intuitions, and doing lots of tedious, boring work.

Here's what happened when I encountered the problem of Friendly AI and decided I should for the time being do research on the problem rather than, say, trying to start a few businesses and donate money. I realized that I didn't see a clear path toward solving the problem, but I did see tons of apparently relevant research that could be done around the edges of the problem, especially with regard to friendliness content (because metaethics is my background). Snippets of my thinking process look like this:

Friendliness content is about human values. Who studies human values, besides philosophers? Economists and neuroscientists. Let's look at what they know. Wow, neuroeconomics is far more advanced than I had realized, and almost none of it has been mentioned by anybody researching Friendly AI! Let me hack away at that for a bit, and see if anything turns up.

Some people approach metaethics/CEV with the idea that humans share a concept of 'ought', and figuring out what that is will help us figure out how human values are. Is that the right way to think about it? Lemme see if there's research on what concepts are, how much they're shared between human brains, etc. Ah, there is! I'll hack away at this next.

CEV involves the modeling of human preferences. Who studies that? Economists do it in choice modeling, and AI programmers do it in preference elicitation. They even have models for dealing with conflicting desires, for example. Let me find out what they know...

CEV also involves preference extrapolation. Who has studied that? Nobody but philosophers, unfortunately, but maybe they've found something. They call such approaches "ideal preference" or "full information" accounts of value. I can check into that.

You get the idea.

This isn't the only way to solve hard problems, but when problems are sufficiently hard, then hacking away at their edges may be just about all you can do. And as you do, you start to see where the problem is more and less tractable. Your intuitions about how to solve the problem become more and more informed by regular encounters with it from all angles. You learn things from one domain that end up helping in a different domain. And, inch by inch, you make progress.

Of course you want to be strategic about how you're tackling the problem. But you also don't want to end up thinking in circles because the problem is too hard to even think strategically about how to tackle it.

You also shouldn't do 3 months of thinking and never write any of it down because you know what you've thought isn't quite right. Hacking away at a tough problem involves lots of wrong solutions, wrong proposals, wrong intuitions, and wrong framings. Maybe somebody will know how to fix what you got wrong, or maybe your misguided intuitions will connect to something they know and you don't and spark a useful thought in their head.

Okay, that's all. Sorry for the rambling!

Following some somewhat misleading articles quoting me, I thought I’d present the top 9 myths about the AI risk thesis:

1. That we’re certain AI will doom us. Certainly not. It’s very hard to be certain of anything involving a technology that doesn’t exist; we’re just claiming that the probability of AI going bad isn’t low enough that we can ignore it.
2. That humanity will survive, because we’ve always survived before. Many groups of humans haven’t survived contact with more powerful intelligent agents. In the past, those agents were other humans; but they need not be. The universe does not owe us a destiny. In the future, something will survive; it need not be us.
3. That uncertainty means that you’re safe. If you’re claiming that AI is impossible, or that it will take countless decades, or that it’ll be safe... you’re not being uncertain, you’re being extremely specific about the future. “No AI risk” is certain; “Possible AI risk” is where we stand.
4. That Terminator robots will be involved. Please? The threat from AI comes from its potential intelligence, not from its ability to clank around slowly with an Austrian accent.
5. That we’re assuming the AI is too dumb to know what we’re asking it. No. A powerful AI will know what we meant to program it to do. But why should it care? And if we could figure out how to program “care about what we meant to ask”, well, then we’d have safe AI.
6. That there’s one simple trick that can solve the whole problem. Many people have proposed that one trick. Some of them could even help (see Holden’s tool AI idea). None of them reduce the risk enough to relax – and many of the tricks contradict each other (you can’t design an AI that’s both a tool and socialising with humans!).
7. That we want to stop AI research. We don’t. Current AI research is very far from the risky areas and abilities. And it’s risk aware AI researchers that are most likely to figure out how to make safe AI.
8. That AIs will be more intelligent than us, hence more moral. It’s pretty clear than in humans, high intelligence is no guarantee of morality. Are you really willing to bet the whole future of humanity on the idea that AIs might be different? That in the billions of possible minds out there, there is none that is both dangerous and very intelligent?
9. That science fiction or spiritual ideas are useful ways of understanding AI risk. Science fiction and spirituality are full of human concepts, created by humans, for humans, to communicate human ideas. They need not apply to AI at all, as these could be minds far removed from human concepts, possibly without a body, possibly with no emotions or consciousness, possibly with many new emotions and a different type of consciousness, etc... Anthropomorphising the AIs could lead us completely astray.

1. That AIs have to be evil to be dangerous. The majority of the risk comes from indifferent or partially nice AIs. Those that have some goal to follow, with humanity and its desires just getting in the way – using resources, trying to oppose it, or just not being perfectly efficient for its goal.
2. That we believe AI is coming soon. It might; it might not. Even if AI is known to be in the distant future (which isn't known, currently), some of the groundwork is worth laying now.

Cover title: “Power and paranoia in Silicon Valley”; article title: “Come with us if you want to live: Among the apocalyptic libertarians of Silicon Valley” (mirrors: 1, 2, 3), by Sam Frank; Harper’s Magazine, January 2015, pg26-36 (~8500 words). The beginning/ending are focused on Ethereum and Vitalik Buterin, so I'll excerpt the LW/MIRI/CFAR-focused middle:

…Blake Masters-the name was too perfect-had, obviously, dedicated himself to the command of self and universe. He did CrossFit and ate Bulletproof, a tech-world variant of the paleo diet. On his Tumblr’s About page, since rewritten, the anti-belief belief systems multiplied, hyperlinked to Wikipedia pages or to the confoundingly scholastic website Less Wrong: “Libertarian (and not convinced there’s irreconcilable fissure between deontological and consequentialist camps). Aspiring rationalist/Bayesian. Secularist/agnostic/ ignostic . . . Hayekian. As important as what we know is what we don’t. Admittedly eccentric.” Then: “Really, really excited to be in Silicon Valley right now, working on fascinating stuff with an amazing team.” I was startled that all these negative ideologies could be condensed so easily into a positive worldview. …I saw the utopianism latent in capitalism-that, as Bernard Mandeville had it three centuries ago, it is a system that manufactures public benefit from private vice. I started CrossFit and began tinkering with my diet. I browsed venal tech-trade publications, and tried and failed to read Less Wrong, which was written as if for aliens.

…I left the auditorium of Alice Tully Hall. Bleary beside the silver coffee urn in the nearly empty lobby, I was buttonholed by a man whose name tag read MICHAEL VASSAR, METAMED research. He wore a black-and-white paisley shirt and a jacket that was slightly too big for him. “What did you think of that talk?” he asked, without introducing himself. “Disorganized, wasn’t it?” A theory of everything followed. Heroes like Elon and Peter (did I have to ask? Musk and Thiel). The relative abilities of physicists and biologists, their standard deviations calculated out loud. How exactly Vassar would save the world. His left eyelid twitched, his full face winced with effort as he told me about his “personal war against the universe.” My brain hurt. I backed away and headed home. But Vassar had spoken like no one I had ever met, and after Kurzweil’s keynote the next morning, I sought him out. He continued as if uninterrupted. Among the acolytes of eternal life, Vassar was an eschatologist. “There are all of these different countdowns going on,” he said. “There’s the countdown to the broad postmodern memeplex undermining our civilization and causing everything to break down, there’s the countdown to the broad modernist memeplex destroying our environment or killing everyone in a nuclear war, and there’s the countdown to the modernist civilization learning to critique itself fully and creating an artificial intelligence that it can’t control. There are so many different - on different time-scales - ways in which the self-modifying intelligent processes that we are embedded in undermine themselves. I’m trying to figure out ways of disentangling all of that. . . .I’m not sure that what I’m trying to do is as hard as founding the Roman Empire or the Catholic Church or something. But it’s harder than people’s normal big-picture ambitions, like making a billion dollars.” Vassar was thirty-four, one year older than I was. He had gone to college at seventeen, and had worked as an actuary, as a teacher, in nanotech, and in the Peace Corps. He’d founded a music-licensing start-up called Sir Groovy. Early in 2012, he had stepped down as president of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, now called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), which was created by an autodidact named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who also started Less Wrong. Vassar had left to found MetaMed, a personalized-medicine company, with Jaan Tallinn of Skype and Kazaa, $500,000 from Peter Thiel, and a staff that included young rationalists who had cut their teeth arguing on Yudkowsky’s website. The idea behind MetaMed was to apply rationality to medicine-“rationality” here defined as the ability to properly research, weight, and synthesize the flawed medical information that exists in the world. Prices ranged from $25,000 for a literature review to a few hundred thousand for a personalized study. “We can save lots and lots and lots of lives,” Vassar said (if mostly moneyed ones at first). “But it’s the signal-it’s the ‘Hey! Reason works!’-that matters. . . . It’s not really about medicine.” Our whole society was sick - root, branch, and memeplex - and rationality was the only cure. …I asked Vassar about his friend Yudkowsky. “He has worse aesthetics than I do,” he replied, “and is actually incomprehensibly smart.” We agreed to stay in touch.

One month later, I boarded a plane to San Francisco. I had spent the interim taking a second look at Less Wrong, trying to parse its lore and jargon: “scope insensitivity,” “ugh field,” “affective death spiral,” “typical mind fallacy,” “counterfactual mugging,” “Roko’s basilisk.” When I arrived at the MIRI offices in Berkeley, young men were sprawled on beanbags, surrounded by whiteboards half black with equations. I had come costumed in a Fermat’s Last Theorem T-shirt, a summary of the proof on the front and a bibliography on the back, printed for the number-theory camp I had attended at fifteen. Yudkowsky arrived late. He led me to an empty office where we sat down in mismatched chairs. He wore glasses, had a short, dark beard, and his heavy body seemed slightly alien to him. I asked what he was working on. “Should I assume that your shirt is an accurate reflection of your abilities,” he asked, “and start blabbing math at you?” Eight minutes of probability and game theory followed. Cogitating before me, he kept grimacing as if not quite in control of his face. “In the very long run, obviously, you want to solve all the problems associated with having a stable, self-improving, beneficial-slash-benevolent AI, and then you want to build one.” What happens if an artificial intelligence begins improving itself, changing its own source code, until it rapidly becomes - foom! is Yudkowsky’s preferred expression - orders of magnitude more intelligent than we are? A canonical thought experiment devised by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003 suggests that even a mundane, industrial sort of AI might kill us. Bostrom posited a “superintelligence whose top goal is the manufacturing of paper-clips.” For this AI, known fondly on Less Wrong as Clippy, self-improvement might entail rearranging the atoms in our bodies, and then in the universe - and so we, and everything else, end up as office supplies. Nothing so misanthropic as Skynet is required, only indifference to humanity. What is urgently needed, then, claims Yudkowsky, is an AI that shares our values and goals. This, in turn, requires a cadre of highly rational mathematicians, philosophers, and programmers to solve the problem of “friendly” AI - and, incidentally, the problem of a universal human ethics - before an indifferent, unfriendly AI escapes into the wild.

Among those who study artificial intelligence, there’s no consensus on either point: that an intelligence explosion is possible (rather than, for instance, a proliferation of weaker, more limited forms of AI) or that a heroic team of rationalists is the best defense in the event. That MIRI has as much support as it does (in 2012, the institute’s annual revenue broke $1 million for the first time) is a testament to Yudkowsky’s rhetorical ability as much as to any technical skill. Over the course of a decade, his writing, along with that of Bostrom and a handful of others, has impressed the dangers of unfriendly AI on a growing number of people in the tech world and beyond. In August, after reading Superintelligence, Bostrom’s new book, Elon Musk tweeted, “Hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable.” In 2000, when Yudkowsky was twenty, he founded the Singularity Institute with the support of a few people he’d met at the Foresight Institute, a Palo Alto nanotech think tank. He had already written papers on “The Plan to Singularity” and “Coding a Transhuman AI,” and posted an autobiography on his website, since removed, called “Eliezer, the Person.” It recounted a breakdown of will when he was eleven and a half: “I can’t do anything. That’s the phrase I used then.” He dropped out before high school and taught himself a mess of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science. He began to “neuro-hack” himself, systematizing his introspection to evade his cognitive quirks. Yudkowsky believed he could hasten the singularity by twenty years, creating a superhuman intelligence and saving humankind in the process. He met Thiel at a Foresight Institute dinner in 2005 and invited him to speak at the first annual Singularity Summit. The institute’s paid staff grew. In 2006, Yudkowsky began writing a hydra-headed series of blog posts: science-fictionish parables, thought experiments, and explainers encompassing cognitive biases, self-improvement, and many-worlds quantum mechanics that funneled lay readers into his theory of friendly AI. Rationality workshops and Meetups began soon after. In 2009, the blog posts became what he called Sequences on a new website: Less Wrong. The next year, Yudkowsky began publishing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality at fanfiction.net. The Harry Potter category is the site’s most popular, with almost 700,000 stories; of these, HPMoR is the most reviewed and the second-most favorited. The last comment that the programmer and activist Aaron Swartz left on Reddit before his suicide in 2013 was on /r/hpmor. In Yudkowsky’s telling, Harry is not only a magician but also a scientist, and he needs just one school year to accomplish what takes canon-Harry seven. HPMoR is serialized in arcs, like a TV show, and runs to a few thousand pages when printed; the book is still unfinished. Yudkowsky and I were talking about literature, and Swartz, when a college student wandered in. Would Eliezer sign his copy of HPMoR? “But you have to, like, write something,” he said. “You have to write, ‘I am who I am.’ So, ‘I am who I am’ and then sign it.” “Alrighty,” Yudkowsky said, signed, continued. “Have you actually read Methods of Rationality at all?” he asked me. “I take it not.” (I’d been found out.) “I don’t know what sort of a deadline you’re on, but you might consider taking a look at that.” (I had taken a look, and hated the little I’d managed.) “It has a legendary nerd-sniping effect on some people, so be warned. That is, it causes you to read it for sixty hours straight.”

The nerd-sniping effect is real enough. Of the 1,636 people who responded to a 2013 survey of Less Wrong’s readers, one quarter had found the site thanks to HPMoR, and many more had read the book. Their average age was 27.4, their average IQ 138.2. Men made up 88.8% of respondents; 78.7% were straight, 1.5% transgender, 54.7 % American, 89.3% atheist or agnostic. The catastrophes they thought most likely to wipe out at least 90% of humanity before the year 2100 were, in descending order, pandemic (bioengineered), environmental collapse, unfriendly AI, nuclear war, pandemic (natural), economic/political collapse, asteroid, nanotech/gray goo. Forty-two people, 2.6 %, called themselves futarchists, after an idea from Robin Hanson, an economist and Yudkowsky’s former coblogger, for reengineering democracy into a set of prediction markets in which speculators can bet on the best policies. Forty people called themselves reactionaries, a grab bag of former libertarians, ethno-nationalists, Social Darwinists, scientific racists, patriarchists, pickup artists, and atavistic “traditionalists,” who Internet-argue about antidemocratic futures, plumping variously for fascism or monarchism or corporatism or rule by an all-powerful, gold-seeking alien named Fnargl who will free the markets and stabilize everything else. At the bottom of each year’s list are suggestive statistical irrelevancies: “every optimizing system’s a dictator and i’m not sure which one i want in charge,” “Autocracy (important: myself as autocrat),” “Bayesian (aspiring) Rationalist. Technocratic. Human-centric Extropian Coherent Extrapolated Volition.” “Bayesian” refers to Bayes’s Theorem, a mathematical formula that describes uncertainty in probabilistic terms, telling you how much to update your beliefs when given new information. This is a formalization and calibration of the way we operate naturally, but “Bayesian” has a special status in the rationalist community because it’s the least imperfect way to think. “Extropy,” the antonym of “entropy,” is a decades-old doctrine of continuous human improvement, and “coherent extrapolated volition” is one of Yudkowsky’s pet concepts for friendly artificial intelligence. Rather than our having to solve moral philosophy in order to arrive at a complete human goal structure, C.E.V. would computationally simulate eons of moral progress, like some kind of Whiggish Pangloss machine. As Yudkowsky wrote in 2004, “In poetic terms, our coherent extrapolated volition is our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together.” Yet can even a single human’s volition cohere or compute in this way, let alone humanity’s? We stood up to leave the room. Yudkowsky stopped me and said I might want to turn my recorder on again; he had a final thought. “We’re part of the continuation of the Enlightenment, the Old Enlightenment. This is the New Enlightenment,” he said. “Old project’s finished. We actually have science now, now we have the next part of the Enlightenment project.”

In 2013, the Singularity Institute changed its name to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Whereas MIRI aims to ensure human-friendly artificial intelligence, an associated program, the Center for Applied Rationality, helps humans optimize their own minds, in accordance with Bayes’s Theorem. The day after I met Yudkowsky, I returned to Berkeley for one of CFAR’s long-weekend workshops. The color scheme at the Rose Garden Inn was red and green, and everything was brocaded. The attendees were mostly in their twenties: mathematicians, software engineers, quants, a scientist studying soot, employees of Google and Facebook, an eighteen-year-old Thiel Fellow who’d been paid $100,000 to leave Boston College and start a company, professional atheists, a Mormon turned atheist, an atheist turned Catholic, an Objectivist who was photographed at the premiere of Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike. There were about three men for every woman. At the Friday-night meet and greet, I talked with Benja, a German who was studying math and behavioral biology at the University of Bristol, whom I had spotted at MIRI the day before. He was in his early thirties and quite tall, with bad posture and a ponytail past his shoulders. He wore socks with sandals, and worried a paper cup as we talked. Benja had felt death was terrible since he was a small child, and wanted his aging parents to sign up for cryonics, if he could figure out how to pay for it on a grad-student stipend. He was unsure about the risks from unfriendly AI - “There is a part of my brain,” he said, “that sort of goes, like, ‘This is crazy talk; that’s not going to happen’” - but the probabilities had persuaded him. He said there was only about a 30% chance that we could make it another century without an intelligence explosion. He was at CFAR to stop procrastinating. Julia Galef, CFAR’s president and cofounder, began a session on Saturday morning with the first of many brain-as-computer metaphors. We are “running rationality on human hardware,” she said, not supercomputers, so the goal was to become incrementally more self-reflective and Bayesian: not perfectly rational agents, but “agent-y.” The workshop’s classes lasted six or so hours a day; activities and conversations went well into the night. We got a condensed treatment of contemporary neuroscience that focused on hacking our brains’ various systems and modules, and attended sessions on habit training, urge propagation, and delegating to future selves. We heard a lot about Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist whose work on cognitive heuristics and biases demonstrated many of the ways we are irrational. Geoff Anders, the founder of Leverage Research, a “meta-level nonprofit” funded by Thiel, taught a class on goal factoring, a process of introspection that, after many tens of hours, maps out every one of your goals down to root-level motivations-the unchangeable “intrinsic goods,” around which you can rebuild your life. Goal factoring is an application of Connection Theory, Anders’s model of human psychology, which he developed as a Rutgers philosophy student disserting on Descartes, and Connection Theory is just the start of a universal renovation. Leverage Research has a master plan that, in the most recent public version, consists of nearly 300 steps. It begins from first principles and scales up from there: “Initiate a philosophical investigation of philosophical method”; “Discover a sufficiently good philosophical method”; have 2,000-plus “actively and stably benevolent people successfully seek enough power to be able to stably guide the world”; “People achieve their ultimate goals as far as possible without harming others”; “We have an optimal world”; “Done.” On Saturday night, Anders left the Rose Garden Inn early to supervise a polyphasic-sleep experiment that some Leverage staff members were conducting on themselves. It was a schedule called the Everyman 3, which compresses sleep into three twenty-minute REM naps each day and three hours at night for slow-wave. Anders was already polyphasic himself. Operating by the lights of his own best practices, goal-factored, coherent, and connected, he was able to work 105 hours a week on world optimization. For the rest of us, for me, these were distant aspirations. We were nerdy and unperfected. There was intense discussion at every free moment, and a genuine interest in new ideas, if especially in testable, verifiable ones. There was joy in meeting peers after years of isolation. CFAR was also insular, overhygienic, and witheringly focused on productivity. Almost everyone found politics to be tribal and viscerally upsetting. Discussions quickly turned back to philosophy and math. By Monday afternoon, things were wrapping up. Andrew Critch, a CFAR cofounder, gave a final speech in the lounge: “Remember how you got started on this path. Think about what was the time for you when you first asked yourself, ‘How do I work?’ and ‘How do I want to work?’ and ‘What can I do about that?’ . . . Think about how many people throughout history could have had that moment and not been able to do anything about it because they didn’t know the stuff we do now. I find this very upsetting to think about. It could have been really hard. A lot harder.” He was crying. “I kind of want to be grateful that we’re now, and we can share this knowledge and stand on the shoulders of giants like Daniel Kahneman . . . I just want to be grateful for that. . . . And because of those giants, the kinds of conversations we can have here now, with, like, psychology and, like, algorithms in the same paragraph, to me it feels like a new frontier. . . . Be explorers; take advantage of this vast new landscape that’s been opened up to us in this time and this place; and bear the torch of applied rationality like brave explorers. And then, like, keep in touch by email.” The workshop attendees put giant Post-its on the walls expressing the lessons they hoped to take with them. A blue one read RATIONALITY IS SYSTEMATIZED WINNING. Above it, in pink: THERE ARE OTHER PEOPLE WHO THINK LIKE ME. I AM NOT ALONE.

That night, there was a party. Alumni were invited. Networking was encouraged. Post-its proliferated; one, by the beer cooler, read SLIGHTLY ADDICTIVE. SLIGHTLY MIND-ALTERING. Another, a few feet to the right, over a double stack of bound copies of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: VERY ADDICTIVE. VERY MIND-ALTERING. I talked to one of my roommates, a Google scientist who worked on neural nets. The CFAR workshop was just a whim to him, a tourist weekend. “They’re the nicest people you’d ever meet,” he said, but then he qualified the compliment. “Look around. If they were effective, rational people, would they be here? Something a little weird, no?” I walked outside for air. Michael Vassar, in a clinging red sweater, was talking to an actuary from Florida. They discussed timeless decision theory (approximately: intelligent agents should make decisions on the basis of the futures, or possible worlds, that they predict their decisions will create) and the simulation argument (essentially: we’re living in one), which Vassar traced to Schopenhauer. He recited lines from Kipling’s “If-” in no particular order and advised the actuary on how to change his life: Become a pro poker player with the $100k he had in the bank, then hit the Magic: The Gathering pro circuit; make more money; develop more rationality skills; launch the first Costco in Northern Europe. I asked Vassar what was happening at MetaMed. He told me that he was raising money, and was in discussions with a big HMO. He wanted to show up Peter Thiel for not investing more than $500,000. “I’m basically hoping that I can run the largest convertible-debt offering in the history of finance, and I think it’s kind of reasonable,” he said. “I like Peter. I just would like him to notice that he made a mistake . . . I imagine a hundred million or a billion will cause him to notice . . . I’d like to have a pi-billion-dollar valuation.” I wondered whether Vassar was drunk. He was about to drive one of his coworkers, a young woman named Alyssa, home, and he asked whether I would join them. I sat silently in the back of his musty BMW as they talked about potential investors and hires. Vassar almost ran a red light. After Alyssa got out, I rode shotgun, and we headed back to the hotel.

It was getting late. I asked him about the rationalist community. Were they really going to save the world? From what? “Imagine there is a set of skills,” he said. “There is a myth that they are possessed by the whole population, and there is a cynical myth that they’re possessed by 10% of the population. They’ve actually been wiped out in all but about one person in three thousand.” It is important, Vassar said, that his people, “the fragments of the world,” lead the way during “the fairly predictable, fairly total cultural transition that will predictably take place between 2020 and 2035 or so.” We pulled up outside the Rose Garden Inn. He continued: “You have these weird phenomena like Occupy where people are protesting with no goals, no theory of how the world is, around which they can structure a protest. Basically this incredibly, weirdly, thoroughly disempowered group of people will have to inherit the power of the world anyway, because sooner or later everyone older is going to be too old and too technologically obsolete and too bankrupt. The old institutions may largely break down or they may be handed over, but either way they can’t just freeze. These people are going to be in charge, and it would be helpful if they, as they come into their own, crystallize an identity that contains certain cultural strengths like argument and reason.” I didn’t argue with him, except to press, gently, on his particular form of elitism. His rationalism seemed so limited to me, so incomplete. “It is unfortunate,” he said, “that we are in a situation where our cultural heritage is possessed only by people who are extremely unappealing to most of the population.” That hadn’t been what I’d meant. I had meant rationalism as itself a failure of the imagination. “The current ecosystem is so totally fucked up,” Vassar said. “But if you have conversations here”-he gestured at the hotel-“people change their mind and learn and update and change their behaviors in response to the things they say and learn. That never happens anywhere else.” In a hallway of the Rose Garden Inn, a former high-frequency trader started arguing with Vassar and Anna Salamon, CFAR’s executive director, about whether people optimize for hedons or utilons or neither, about mountain climbers and other high-end masochists, about whether world happiness is currently net positive or negative, increasing or decreasing. Vassar was eating and drinking everything within reach. My recording ends with someone saying, “I just heard ‘hedons’ and then was going to ask whether anyone wants to get high,” and Vassar replying, “Ah, that’s a good point.” Other voices: “When in California . . .” “We are in California, yes.”

…Back on the East Coast, summer turned into fall, and I took another shot at reading Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter fanfic. It’s not what I would call a novel, exactly, rather an unending, self-satisfied parable about rationality and trans-humanism, with jokes.

…I flew back to San Francisco, and my friend Courtney and I drove to a cul-de-sac in Atherton, at the end of which sat the promised mansion. It had been repurposed as cohousing for children who were trying to build the future: start-up founders, singularitarians, a teenage venture capitalist. The woman who coined the term “open source” was there, along with a Less Wronger and Thiel Capital employee who had renamed himself Eden. The Day of the Idealist was a day for self-actualization and networking, like the CFAR workshop without the rigor. We were to set “mega goals” and pick a “core good” to build on in the coming year. Everyone was a capitalist; everyone was postpolitical. I squabbled with a young man in a Tesla jacket about anti-Google activism. No one has a right to housing, he said; programmers are the people who matter; the protesters’ antagonistic tactics had totally discredited them.

…Thiel and Vassar and Yudkowsky, for all their far-out rhetoric, take it on faith that corporate capitalism, unchecked just a little longer, will bring about this era of widespread abundance. Progress, Thiel thinks, is threatened mostly by the political power of what he calls the “unthinking demos.”

Pointer thanks to /u/Vulture.

I think most of us are familiar with the common semantic stopsigns like "God", "just because", and "it's a tradition." However, I've recently been noticing more interesting ones that I haven't really seen discussed on LW. (Or it's also likely that I missed those discussion.)

The first one is "humans are stupid." I notice this one very often, in particular in LW and other rationalist communities. The obvious problem here is that humans are not that stupid. Often what might seem like sheer stupidity was caused by a rather reasonable chain of actions and events. And even if a person or a group of people is being stupid, it's very interesting to chase down the cause. That's how you end up discovering biases from scratch or finding a great opportunity.

The second semantic stopsign is "should." Hat tip to Michael Vassar for bringing this one up. If you and I have a discussing about how I eat too much chocolate, and I say, "You are right, I should eat less chocolate," the conversation will basically end there. But 99 times out of a 100 nothing will actually come out of it. I try to taboo the word "should" from my vocabulary, so instead I will say something like, "You are right, I will not purchase any chocolate this month." This is a concrete actionable statement.

What other semantic stopsigns have you noticed in yourself and others?

Every now and then, I write an LW comment on some topic and feel that the contents of my comment pretty much settles the issue decisively. Instead, the comment seems to get ignored entirely - it either gets very few votes or none, nobody responds to it, and the discussion generally continues as if it had never been posted.

Similarly, every now and then I see somebody else make a post or comment that they clearly feel is decisive, but which doesn't seem very interesting to me. Either it seems to be saying something obvious, or I don't get its connection to the topic at hand in the first place.

This seems like it would be about inferential distance: either the writer doesn't know the things that make the reader experience the comment as uninteresting, or the reader doesn't know the things that make the writer experience the comment as interesting. So there's inferential silence - a sufficiently long inferential distance that a claim doesn't provoke even objections, just uncomprehending or indifferent silence.

But "explain your reasoning in more detail" doesn't seem like it would help with the issue. For one, we often don't know beforehand when people don't share our assumptions. Also, some of the comments or posts that seem to encounter this kind of a fate are already relatively long. For example, Wei Dai wondered why MIRI-affiliated people don't often respond to his posts that raise criticisms, and I essentially replied that I found the content of his post relatively obvious so didn't have much to say.

Perhaps people could more often explicitly comment if they notice that something that a poster seems to consider a big thing doesn't seem very interesting or meaningful to them, and briefly explain why? Even a sentence or two might be helpful for the original poster.

As I understand it, Lent is a holiday where we celebrate the scientific method by changing exactly one variable in our lives for 40 days. This seems like a convenient Schelling point for rationalists to adopt, so:

What variable are you going to change for the next 40 days?

(I am really annoyed I didn't think of this yesterday.) 

AidGrade is a new charity evaluator that looks to be comparable to GiveWell. Their primary difference is that they *only* focus on how charities compare along particular measured outcomes (such as school attendance, birthrate, chance of opening a business, malaria), without making any effort to compare between types of charities. (This includes interesting results like "Conditional Cash Transfers and Deworming are better at improving attendance rates than scholarships")

GiveWell also does this, but designs their site to direct people towards their top charities. This is better for people with don't have the time to do the (fairly complex) work of comparing charities across domains, but AidGrade aims to be better for people that just want the raw data and the ability to form their own conclusions.

I haven't looked it enough to compare the quality of the two organizations' work, but I'm glad we finally have another organization, to encourage some competition and dialog about different approaches.

This is a fun page to play around with to get a feel for what they do:
http://www.aidgrade.org/compare-programs-by-outcome

And this is a blog post outlining their differences with GiveWell:
http://www.aidgrade.org/uncategorized/some-friendly-concerns-with-givewell

So, I've been thinking. We ought to have a system for rationality. What do I mean?

Well, consider a real-time strategy game like Starcraft II. One of the most important things to do in SC2 is macromanagement: making sure that your resources are all being used sensibly. Now, macromanagement could be learned as a big, long list of tips. Like this:

• Try to mine minerals.
• Recruit lots of soldiers.
• Recruit lots of workers.
• It's a good idea for a mineral site to have between 22 and 30 workers.
• Workers are recruited at a command center.
• Soldiers are recruited at a barracks.
• In order to build anything, you need workers.
• In order to build anything, you also need minerals.
• For that matter, in order to recruit more units, you need minerals.
• Workers mine minerals.
• Minerals should be used immediately; if you're storing them, you're wasting them.

Please remember to have no heroes or villains, but this just looks plain bad to be honest. I'm lowering my estimation of the quality of Stephen J. Gould's work in this area.

USA today:

The late scientific icon, Stephen Jay Gould, botched and perhaps faked his critique of a racist 19th-Century scientist's skull collection, suggests a second look at his efforts.

CAPTION

UPenn

In a 1978 Science paper, Gould (1941 - 2002) , reported that the Samuel George Morton (1799-1851), "a prominent Philadelphia physician," had mis-measured the cranial capacities of his 1,000-skull "American Golgotha" collection gathered from around the world, to suit his racist beliefs. The finding led to one of Gould's best-known books, The Mismeasure of Man, a critique of scientific racism.

"Morton is now viewed as a canonical example of scientific misconduct. But did Morton really fudge his data?," asks a PLoS Biology study led by anthropologist Jason Lewis of Stanford University. "Are studies of human variation inevitably biased, as per Gould, or are objective accounts attainable, as Morton attempted?"

So, the study team remeasured the skulls collected by Morton, now owned largely by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia.

Overall, they find, Morton did make mistakes in measuring skull capacity (he first stuffed them with seeds, and later lead shot to measure their brain size). But the mistakes were random. The random mistakes didn't favor any racial theory of larger brain sizes for white people over others.

"Given how long Gould's work has been criticized in this arena, I'm a little surprised that it took this long for the work to be done to write this article," says the University of Texas's David Prindle, author of Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution. "People who dislike Gould's work will likely go on disliking him even more after this article. People who are fans of his writing will likely go on supporting his views."

Haha. Humans.

The paper itself:

In reevaluating Morton and Gould, we do not dispute that racist views were unfortunately common in 19th-century science or that bias has inappropriately influenced research in some cases. Furthermore, studies have demonstrated that modern human variation is generally continuous, rather than discrete or ''racial,'' and that most variation in modern humans is within, rather than between, populations. In particular, cranial capacity variation in human populations appears to be largely a function of climate, so, for example, the full range of average capacities is seen in Native American groups, as they historically occupied the full range of latitudes, say the study authors.

...

Samuel George Morton, in the hands of Stephen Jay Gould, has served for 30 years as a textbook example of scientific misconduct. The Morton case was used by Gould as the main support for his contention that ''unconscious or dimly perceived finagling is probably endemic in science, since scientists are human beings rooted in cultural contexts, not automatons directed toward external truth''. This view has since achieved substantial popularity in ''science studies''. But our results falsify Gould's hypothesis that Morton manipulated his data to conform with his a priori views. The data on cranial capacity gathered by Morton are generally reliable, and he reported them fully. Overall, we find that Morton's initial reputation as the objectivist of his era was well-deserved.

Given that 

1. Deciding to read and actually reading the sequences is 'work'

2. Reading the latest frontpaged article on LessWrong is 'fun'

3. We frequently have gaps in the posting rate of articles that make it to the front page

4. There are many people who joined this community after the sequences were written and haven't gone through all of them

...would it make sense to start bringing articles from the sequences to the front page, either at a set pace or whenever there is a gap in posting?

I have actually read most of the sequences, but wouldn't mind going through them once again. However, taking it up as a project seems like too much work. By bringing an article to the front page, either with the old comment thread or with a fresh one (plus a reference to the old one), it becomes something that the community is doing. Following things that a group you belong to is doing is fun. But for that to happen, we need to share a common pointer to which article is 'the one we are reading now'. Hence, the front page.

In short, I think if people in this community reading (and re-reading) more of the sequences is something we want, then recycling them through the front page is also a good idea.

If the barrier is implementation modifications needed, I may be able to assist.

A few months ago, Vaniver wrote a really long post speculating about potential futures for Less Wrong, with a focus on the idea that the spread of the Less Wrong diaspora has left the site weak and fragmented. I wasn't here for our high water mark, so I don't really have an informed opinion on what has socially changed since then. But a number of complaints are technical, and as an IT person, I thought I had some useful things to say.

I argued at the time that many of the technical challenges of the diaspora were solved problems, and that the solution was NNTP -- an ancient, yet still extant, discussion protocol. I am something of a crank on the subject and didn't expect much of a reception. I was pleasantly surprised by the 18 karma it generated, and tried to write up a full post arguing the point.

I failed. I was trying to write a manifesto, didn't really know how to do it right, and kept running into a vast inferential distance I couldn't seem to cross. I'm a product of a prior age of the Internet, from before the http prefix assumed its imperial crown; I kept wanting to say things that I knew would make no sense to anyone who came of age this millennium. I got bogged down in irrelevant technical minutia about how to implement features X, Y, and Z. Eventually I decided I was attacking the wrong problem; I was thinking about 'how do I promote NNTP', when really I should have been going after 'what would an ideal discussion platform look like and how does NNTP get us there, if it does?'

So I'm going to go after that first, and work on the inferential distance problem, and then I'm going to talk about NNTP, and see where that goes and what could be done better. I still believe it's the closest thing to a good, available technological schelling point, but it's going to take a lot of words to get there from here, and I might change my mind under persuasive argument. We'll see.

Fortunately, this is Less Wrong, and sequences are a thing here. This is the first post in an intended sequence on mechanisms of discussion. I know it's a bit off the beaten track of Less Wrong subject matter. I posit that it's both relevant to our difficulties and probably more useful and/or interesting than most of what comes through these days. I just took the 2016 survey and it has a couple of sections on the effects of the diaspora, so I'm guessing it's on topic for meta purposes if not for site-subject purposes.

Less Than Ideal Discussion

To solve a problem you must first define it. Looking at the LessWrong 2.0 post, I see the following technical problems, at a minimum; I'll edit this with suggestions from comments.

1. Aggregation of posts. Our best authors have formed their own fiefdoms and their work is not terribly visible here. We currently have limited support for this via the sidebar, but that's it.
2. Aggregation of comments. You can see diaspora authors in the sidebar, but you can't comment from here.
3. Aggregation of community. This sounds like a social problem but it isn't. You can start a new blog, but unless you plan on also going out of your way to market it then your chances of starting a discussion boil down to "hope it catches the attention of Yvain or someone else similarly prominent in the community." Non-prominent individuals can theoretically post here; yet this is the place we are decrying as moribund.
4. Incomplete and poor curation. We currently do this via Promoted, badly, and via the diaspora sidebar, also badly.
5. Pitiful interface feature set. This is not so much a Less Wrong-specific problem as a 2010s-internet problem; people who inhabit SSC have probably seen me respond to feature complaints with "they had something that did that in the 90s, but nobody uses it." (my own bugbear is searching for comments by author-plus-content).
6. Changes are hamstrung by the existing architecture, which gets you volunteer reactions like this one.

I see these meta-technical problems:

1. Expertise is scarce. Few people are in a position to technically improve the site, and those that are, have other demands on their time.
2. The Trivial Inconvenience Problem limits the scope of proposed changes to those that are not inconvenient to commenters or authors.
3. Getting cooperation from diaspora authors is a coordination problem. Are we better than average at handling those? I don't know.

Slightly Less Horrible Discussion

"Solving" community maintenance is a hard problem, but to the extent that pieces of it can be solved technologically, the solution might include these ultra-high-level elements:

1. Centralized from the user perspective. A reader should be able to interact with the entire community in one place, and it should be recognizable as a community.
2. Decentralized from the author perspective. Diaspora authors seem to like having their own fiefdoms, and the social problem of "all the best posters went elsewhere" can't be solved without their cooperation. Therefore any technical solution must allow for it.
3. Proper division of labor. Scott Alexander probably should not have to concern himself with user feature requests; that's not his comparative advantage and I'd rather he spend his time inventing moral cosmologies. I suspect he would prefer the same. The same goes for Eliezer Yudkowski or any of our still-writing-elsewhere folks.
4. Really good moderation tools.
5. Easy entrance. New users should be able to join the discussion without a lot of hassle. Old authors that want to return should be able to do so and, preferably, bring their existing content with them.
6. Easy exit. Authors who don't like the way the community is heading should be able to jump ship -- and, crucially, bring their content with them to their new ship. Conveniently. This is essentially what has happened, except old content is hostage here.
7. Separate policy and mechanism within the site architecture. Let this one pass for now if you don't know what it means; it's the first big inferential hurdle I need to cross and I'll be starting soon enough.

As with the previous, I'll update this from the comments if necessary.

Getting There From Here

As I said at the start, I feel on firmer ground talking about technical issues than social ones. But I have to acknowledge one strong social opinion: I believe the greatest factor in Less Wrong's decline is the departure of our best authors for personal blogs. Any plan for revitalization has to provide an improved substitute for a personal blog, because that's where everyone seems to end up going. You need something that looks and behaves like a blog to the author or casual readers, but integrates seamlessly into a community discussion gateway.

I argue that this can be achieved. I argue that the technical challenges are solvable and the inherent coordination problem is also solvable, provided the people involved still have an interest in solving it.

And I argue that it can be done -- and done better than what we have now -- using technology that has existed since the '90s.

I don't argue that this actually will be achieved in anything like the way I think it ought to be. As mentioned up top, I am a crank, and I have no access whatsoever to anybody with any community pull. My odds of pushing through this agenda are basically nil. But we're all about crazy thought experiments, right?

This topic is something I've wanted to write about for a long time. Since it's not typical Less Wrong fare, I'll take the karma on this post as a referendum on whether the community would like to see it here.

Assuming there's interest, the sequence will look something like this (subject to reorganization as I go along, since I'm pulling this from some lengthy but horribly disorganized notes; in particular I might swap subsequences 2 and 3):

1. Technical Architecture
   1. Your Web Browser Is Not Your Client
   2. Specialized Protocols: or, NNTP and its Bastard Children
   3. Moderation, Personal Gardens, and Public Parks
   4. Content, Presentation, and the Division of Labor
   5. The Proper Placement of User Features
   6. Hard Things that are Suddenly Easy: or, what does client control gain us?
   7. Your Web Browser Is Still Not Your Client (but you don't need to know that)
2. Meta-Technical Conflicts (or, obstacles to adoption)
   1. Never Bet Against Convenience
   2. Conflicting Commenter, Author, and Admin Preferences
   3. Lipstick on the Configuration Pig
   4. Incremental Implementation and the Coordination Problem.
   5. Lowering Barriers to Entry and Exit
3. Technical and Social Interoperability
   1. Benefits and Drawbacks of Standards
   2. Input Formats and Quoting Conventions
   3. Faking Functionality
   4. Why Reddit Makes Me Cry
   5. What NNTP Can't Do
4. Implementation of Nonstandard Features
   1. Some desirable feature #1
   2. Some desirable feature #2
   3. ...etc. This subsequence is only necessary if someone actually wants to try and do what I'm arguing for, which I think unlikely.

(Meta-meta: This post was written in Markdown, converted to HTML for posting using Pandoc, and took around four hours to write. I can often be found lurking on #lesswrong or #slatestarcodex on workday afternoons if anyone wants to discuss it, but I don't promise to answer quickly because, well, workday)

[Edited to add: At +10/92% karma I figure continuing is probably worth it. After reading comments I'm going to try to slim it down a lot from the outline above, though. I still want to hit all those points but they probably don't all need a full post's space. Note that I'm not Scott or Eliezer, I write like I bleed, so what I do post will likely be spaced out]

The Brain Preservation Foundation’s Small Mammalian Brain Prize has been won with fantastic preservation of a whole rabbit brain using a new fixative+slow-vitrification process.

• BPF announcement (21CM’s announcement)
• evaluation

• The process was published as “Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation”, McIntyre & Fahy 2015 (mirror)

  We describe here a new cryobiological and neurobiological technique, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC), which demonstrates the relevance and utility of advanced cryopreservation science for the neurobiological research community. ASC is a new brain-banking technique designed to facilitate neuroanatomic research such as connectomics research, and has the unique ability to combine stable long term ice-free sample storage with excellent anatomical resolution. To demonstrate the feasibility of ASC, we perfuse-fixed rabbit and pig brains with a glutaraldehyde-based fixative, then slowly perfused increasing concentrations of ethylene glycol over several hours in a manner similar to techniques used for whole organ cryopreservation. Once 65% w/v ethylene glycol was reached, we vitrified brains at −135 °C for indefinite long-term storage. Vitrified brains were rewarmed and the cryoprotectant removed either by perfusion or gradual diffusion from brain slices. We evaluated ASC-processed brains by electron microscopy of multiple regions across the whole brain and by Focused Ion Beam Milling and Scanning Electron Microscopy (FIB-SEM) imaging of selected brain volumes. Preservation was uniformly excellent: processes were easily traceable and synapses were crisp in both species. Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation has many advantages over other brain-banking techniques: chemicals are delivered via perfusion, which enables easy scaling to brains of any size; vitrification ensures that the ultrastructure of the brain will not degrade even over very long storage times; and the cryoprotectant can be removed, yielding a perfusable aldehyde-preserved brain which is suitable for a wide variety of brain assays…We have shown that both rabbit brains (10 g) and pig brains (80 g) can be preserved equally well. We do not anticipate that there will be significant barriers to preserving even larger brains such as bovine, canine, or primate brains using ASC.

  (They had problems with 2 pigs and got 1 pig brain successfully cryopreserved but it wasn’t part of the entry. I’m not sure why: is that because the Large Mammalian Brain Prize is not yet set up?)
• previous discussion: Mikula’s plastination came close but ultimately didn’t seem to preserve the whole brain when applied.
• commentary: Alcor, Robin Hanson, John Smart, Evidence-Based Cryonics, Vice, Pop Sci
  

• donation link

To summarize it, you might say that this is a hybrid of current plastination and vitrification methods, where instead of allowing slow plastination (with unknown decay & loss) or forcing fast cooling (with unknown damage and loss), a staged approach is taking: a fixative is injected into the brain first to immediately lock down all proteins and stop all decay/change, and then it is leisurely cooled down to be vitrified.

This is exciting progress because the new method may wind up preserving better than either of the parent methods, but also because it gives much greater visibility into the end-results: the aldehyde-vitrified brains can be easily scanned with electron microscopes and the results seen in high detail, showing fantastic preservation of structure, unlike regular vitrification where the scans leave opaque how good the preservation was. This opacity is one reason that as Mike Darwin has pointed out at length on his blog and jkaufman has also noted that we cannot be confident in how well ALCOR or CI’s vitrification works - because if it didn’t, we have little way of knowing.

EDIT: BPF’s founder Ken Hayworth (Reddit account) has posted a piece, arguing that ALCOR & CI cannot be trusted to do procedures well and that future work should be done via rigorous clinical trials and only then rolled out. “Opinion: The prize win is a vindication of the idea of cryonics, not of unaccountable cryonics service organizations”

…“Should cryonics service organizations immediately start offering this new ASC procedure to their ‘patients’?” My personal answer (speaking for myself, not on behalf of the BPF) has been a steadfast NO. It should be remembered that these same cryonics service organizations have been offering a different procedure for years. A procedure that was not able to demonstrate, to even my minimal expectations, preservation of the brain’s neural circuitry. This result, I must say, surprised and disappointed me personally, leading me to give up my membership in one such organization and to become extremely skeptical of all since. Again, I stress, current cryonics procedures were NOT able to meet our challenge EVEN UNDER IDEAL LABORATORY CONDITIONS despite being offered to paying customers for years[1]. Should we really expect that these same organizations can now be trusted to further develop and properly implement such a new, independently-invented technique for use under non-ideal conditions?

Let’s step back for a moment. A single, independently-researched, scientific publication has come out that demonstrates a method of structural brain preservation (ASC) compatible with long-term cryogenic storage in animal models (rabbit and pig) under ideal laboratory conditions (i.e. a healthy living animal immediately being perfused with fixative). Should this one paper instantly open the floodgates to human application? Under untested real-world conditions where the ‘patient’ is either terminally ill or already declared legally dead? Should it be performed by unlicensed persons, in unaccountable organizations, operating outside of the traditional medical establishment with its checks and balances designed to ensure high standards of quality and ethics? To me, the clear answer is NO. If this was a new drug for cancer therapy, or a new type of heart surgery, many additional steps would be expected before even clinical trials could start. Why should our expectations be any lower for this?

The fact that the ASC procedure has won the brain preservation prize should rightly be seen as a vindication of the central idea of cryonics –the brain’s delicate circuitry underlying memory and personality CAN in fact be preserved indefinitely, potentially serving as a lifesaving bridge to future revival technologies. But, this milestone should certainly not be interpreted as a vindication of the very different cryonics procedures that are practiced on human patients today. And it should not be seen as a mandate for more of the same but with an aldehyde stabilization step casually tacked on. …

You may know me as the guy who posts a lot of controversial stuff about LW and MIRI. I don't enjoy doing this and do not want to continue with it. One reason being that the debate is turning into a flame war. Another reason is that I noticed that it does affect my health negatively (e.g. my high blood pressure (I actually had a single-sided hearing loss over this xkcd comic on Friday)).

This all started in 2010 when I encountered something I perceived to be wrong. But the specifics are irrelevant for this post. The problem is that ever since that time there have been various reasons that made me feel forced to continue the controversy. Sometimes it was the urge to clarify what I wrote, other times I thought it was necessary to respond to a reply I got. What matters is that I couldn't stop. But I believe that this is now possible, given my health concerns.

One problem is that I don't want to leave possible misrepresentations behind. And there very likely exist misrepresentations. There are many reasons for this, but I can assure you that I never deliberately lied and that I never deliberately tried to misrepresent anyone. The main reason might be that I feel very easily overwhelmed and never had the ability to force myself to invest the time that is necessary to do something correctly if I don't really enjoy doing it (for the same reason I probably failed school). Which means that most comments and posts are written in a tearing hurry, akin to a reflexive retraction from the painful stimulus.

<tldr>

I hate this fight and want to end it once and for all. I don't expect you to take my word for it. So instead, here is an offer:

I am willing to post counterstatements, endorsed by MIRI, of any length and content[1] at the top of any of my blog posts. You can either post them in the comments below or send me an email (da [at] kruel.co).

</tldr>

I have no idea if MIRI believes this to be worthwhile. But I couldn't think of a better way to solve this dilemma in a way that everyone can live with happily. But I am open to suggestions that don't stress me too much (also about how to prove that I am trying to be honest).

You obviously don't need to read all my posts. It can also be a general statement.

I am also aware that LW and MIRI are bothered by RationalWiki. As you can easily check from the fossil record, I have at points tried to correct specific problems. But, for the reasons given above, I have problems investing the time to go through every sentence to find possible errors and attempt to correct it in such a way that the edit is not reverted and that people who feel offended are satisfied.

[1] There are obviously some caveats regarding the content, such as no nude photos of Yudkowsky ;-)

As most LWers will know, Clippy the Paperclip Maximiser is a superintelligence who wants to tile the universe with paperclips. The LessWrong wiki entry for Paperclip Maximizer says that:

The goal of maximizing paperclips is chosen for illustrative purposes because it is very unlikely to be implemented

I think that a massively powerful star-faring entity - whether a Friendly AI, a far-future human civilisation, aliens, or whatever - might indeed end up essentially converting huge swathes of matter in to paperclips. Whether a massively powerful star-faring entity is likely to arise is, of course, a separate question. But if it does arise, it could well want to tile the universe with paperclips.

Let me explain.

To travel across the stars and achieve whatever noble goals you might have (assuming they scale up), you are going to want energy. A lot of energy. Where do you get it? Well, at interstellar scales, your only options are nuclear fusion or maybe fission.

Iron has the strongest binding energy of any nucleus. If you have elements lighter than iron, you can release energy through nuclear fusion - sticking atoms together to make bigger ones. If you have elements heavier than iron, you can release energy through nuclear fission - splitting atoms apart to make smaller ones. We can do this now for a handful of elements (mostly selected isotopes of uranium, plutonium and hydrogen) but we don’t know how to do this for most of the others - yet. But it looks thermodynamically possible. So if you are a massively powerful and massively clever galaxy-hopping agent, you can extract maximum energy for your purposes by taking up all the non-ferrous matter you can find and turning it in to iron, getting energy through fusion or fission as appropriate.

You leave behind you a cold, dark trail of iron.

That seems a little grim. If you have any aesthetic sense, you might want to make it prettier, to leave an enduring sign of values beyond mere energy acquisition. With careful engineering, it would take only a tiny, tiny amount of extra effort to leave the iron arranged in to beautiful shapes. Curves are nice. What do you call a lump of iron arranged in to an artfully-twisted shape? I think we could reasonably call it a paperclip.

Over time, the amount of space that you’ve visited and harvested for energy will increase, and the amount of space available for your noble goals - or for anyone else’s - will decrease. Gradually but steadily, you are converting the universe in to artfully-twisted pieces of iron. To an onlooker who doesn’t see or understand your noble goals, you will look a lot like you are a paperclip maximiser. In Eliezer’s terms, your desire to do so is an instrumental value, not a terminal value. But - conditional on my wild speculations about energy sources here being correct - it’s what you’ll do.

[Based on Alexandros's excellent dataset.]

I haven't done any statistical analysis, but looking at the charts I'm not sure it's necessary. The discussion section of LessWrong has been steadily declining in participation. My fairly messy spreadsheet is available if you want to check the data or do additional analysis.

Enough talk, you're here for the pretty pictures.

The number of posts has been steadily declining since 2011, though the trend over the last year is less clear. Note that I have excluded all posts with 0 or negative Karma from the dataset.

The total Karma given out each month has similarly been in decline.

Is it possible that there have been fewer posts, but of a higher quality?

No, at least under initial analysis the average Karma seems fairly steady. My prior here is that we're just seeing less visitors overall, which leads to fewer votes being distributed among fewer posts for the same average value. I would have expected the average karma to drop more than it did--to me that means that participation has dropped more steeply than mere visitation. Looking at the point values of the top posts would be helpful here, but I haven't done that analysis yet.

These are very disturbing to me, as someone who has found LessWrong both useful and enjoyable over the past few years. It raises several questions:

1. What should the purpose of this site be? Is it supposed to be building a movement or filtering down the best knowledge?
2. How can we encourage more participation?
3. What are the costs of various means of encouraging participation--more arguing, more mindkilling, more repetition, more off-topic threads, etc?

Here are a few strategies that come to mind:

Idea A: Accept that LessWrong has fulfilled its purpose and should be left to fade away, or allowed to serve as a meetup coordinator and repository of the highest quality articles. My suspicion is that without strong new content and an online community, the strength of the individual meetup communities may wane as fewer new people join them. This is less of an issue for established communities like Berkeley and New York, but more marginal ones may disappear.

Idea B: Allow and encourage submission of rationalism, artificial intelligence, transhumanism etc related articles from elsewhere, possibly as a separate category. This is how a site like Hacker News stays high engagement, even though many of the discussions are endless loops of the same discussion. It can be annoying for the old-timers, but new generations may need to discover things for themselves. Sometimes "put it all in one big FAQ" isn't the most efficient method of teaching.

Idea C: Allow and encourage posts on "political" topics in Discussion (but probably NOT Main). The dangers here might be mitigated by a ban on discussion of current politicians, governments, and issues. "Historians need to have had a decade to mull it over before you're allowed to introduce it as evidence" could be a good heuristic. Another option would be a ban on specific topics that cause the worst mindkilling. Obviously this is overall a dangerous road.

Idea D: Get rid of Open Threads and create a new norm that a discussion post as short as a couple sentences is acceptable. Open threads get stagnant within a day or two, and are harder to navigate than the discussion page. Moving discussion from the Open Threads to the Discussion section would increase participation if users could be convinced thatit was okay to post questions and partly-formed ideas there.

The challenge with any of these ideas is that they will require strong moderation. 

At any rate, this data is enough to convince me that some sort of change is going to be needed in order to put the community on a growth trajectory. That is not necessarily the goal, but at its core LessWrong seems like it has the potential to be a powerful tool for the spreading of rational thought. We just need to figure out how to get it started into its next evolution.

Edit 11/28: Edited note at bottom to note that the random variables should have finite variance, and that this is essentially just L². Also some formatting changes.

This is something that has been bugging me for a while.

The correlation coefficient between two random variables can be interpreted as the cosine of the angle between them[0]. The higher the correlation, the more "in the same direction" they are. A correlation coefficient of one means they point in exactly the same direction, while -1 means they point in exactly opposite directions.  More generally, a positive correlation coefficient means the two random variables make an acute angle, while a negative correlation means they make an obtuse angle.  A correlation coefficient of zero means that they are quite literally orthogonal.

Everything I have said above is completely standard.  So why aren't correlation coefficients commonly expressed as angles instead of as their cosines?  It seems to me that this would make them more intuitive to process.

Certainly it would make various statements about them more intuitive.  For instance "Even if A is positive correlated with B and B is positively correlated with C, A might be negatively correlated with C."  This sounds counterintuitive, until you rephrase it as "Even if A makes an acute angle with B and B makes an acute angle with C, A might make an obtuse angle with C."  Similarly, the geometric viewpoint makes it easier to make observations like "If A and B have correlation exceeding 1/√2 and so do B and C, then A and C are positively correlated" -- because this is just the statement that if A and B make an angle of less than 45° and so do B and C, then A and C make an angle of less than 90°.

Now when further processing is to be done with the correlation coefficients, one wants to leave them as correlation coefficients, rather than take their inverse cosines just to have to take their cosines again later.  (I don't know that the angles you get this way are actually useful mathematically, and I suspect they mostly aren't.)  My question rather is about when correlation coefficients are expressed to the reader, i.e. when they are considered as an end product.  It seems to me that expressing them as angles would give people a better intuitive feel for them.

Or am I just entirely off-base here?  Statistics, let alone the communication thereof, is not exactly my specialty, so I'd be interested to hear if there's a good reason people don't do this.  (Is it assumed that anyone who knows about correlation has the geometric point of view completely down?  But most people can't calculate an inverse cosine in their head...)

[0]Formal mathematical version: If we consider real-valued random variables with finite variance on some fixed probability space Ω -- that is to say, L²(Ω) -- the covariance is a positive-semidefinite symmetric bilinear form, with kernel equal to the set of essentially constant random variables.  If we mod out by these we can consider the result as an inner product space and define angles between vectors as usual, which gives us the inverse cosine of the correlation coefficient.  Alternatively we could just take L²(Ω) and restrict to those elements with zero mean; this is isomorphic (since it is the image of the "subtract off the mean" map, whose kernel is precisely the essentially constant random variables).

I've been having difficulties with constructing a toy scenario for AI self-modification more interesting than Quirrell's game, because you really want to do expected utility maximization of some sort, but currently our best-specified decision theories search through the theorems of one particular proof system and "break down and cry" if they can't find one that tells them what their utility will be if they choose a particular option. This is fine if the problems are simple enough that we always find the theorems we need, but the AI rewrite problem is precisely about skirting that edge. It seems natural to want to choose some probability distribution over the possibilities that you can't rule out, and then do expected utility maximization (because if you don't maximize EU over some prior, it seems likely that someone could Dutch-book you); indeed, Wei Dai's original UDT has a "mathematical intuition module" black box which this would be an implementation of. But how do you assign probabilities to logical statements? What consistency conditions do you ask for? What are the "impossible possible worlds" that make up your probability space?

Recently, Wei Dai suggested that logical uncertainty might help avoid the Löbian problems with AI self-modification, and although I'm sceptical about this idea, the discussion pushed me into trying to confront the logical uncertainty problem head-on; then, reading Haim Gaifman's paper "Reasoning with limited resources and assigning probabilities to logical statements" (which Luke linked from So you want to save the world) made something click. I want to present a simple suggestion for a concrete definition of "impossible possible world", for a prior over them, and for an UDT algorithm based on that. I'm not sure whether the concrete prior is useful—the main point in giving it is to have a concrete example we can try to prove things about—but the definition of logical possible worlds looks like a promising theoretical tool to me.

From the Harvard Business Review, an article entitled: "Can We Reverse The Stanford Prison Experiment?"

By: Greg McKeown
Posted: June 12, 2012

Clicky Link of Awesome! Wheee! Push me!

Summary:

Royal Canadian Mounted Police attempt a program where they hand out "Positive Tickets" 

Their approach was to try to catch youth doing the right things and give them a Positive Ticket. The ticket granted the recipient free entry to the movies or to a local youth center. They gave out an average of 40,000 tickets per year. That is three times the number of negative tickets over the same period. As it turns out, and unbeknownst to Clapham, that ratio (2.9 positive affects to 1 negative affect, to be precise) is called the Losada Line. It is the minimum ratio of positive to negatives that has to exist for a team to flourish. On higher-performing teams (and marriages for that matter) the ratio jumps to 5:1. But does it hold true in policing?

According to Clapham, youth recidivism was reduced from 60% to 8%. Overall crime was reduced by 40%. Youth crime was cut in half. And it cost one-tenth of the traditional judicial system.

This idea can be applied to Real Life

The lesson here is to create a culture that immediately and sincerely celebrates victories. Here are three simple ways to begin:

1. Start your next staff meeting with five minutes on the question: "What has gone right since our last meeting?" Have each person acknowledge someone else's achievement in a concrete, sincere way. Done right, this very small question can begin to shift the conversation.

2. Take two minutes every day to try to catch someone doing the right thing. It is the fastest and most positive way for the people around you to learn when they are getting it right.

3. Create a virtual community board where employees, partners and even customers can share what they are grateful for daily. Sounds idealistic? Vishen Lakhiani, CEO of Mind Valley, a new generation media and publishing company, has done just that at Gratitude Log. (Watch him explain how it works here).

Mr. Malfoy is new to the business of having ideas, and so when he has one, he becomes proud of himself for having it. He has not yet had enough ideas to unflinchingly discard those that are beautiful in some aspects and impractical in others; he has not yet acquired confidence in his own ability to think of better ideas as he requires them. What we are seeing here is not Mr. Malfoy's best idea, I fear, but rather his only idea.

- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

I want to emphasize yet again that the tools [described in Serious Creativity] are deliberate and can be used systematically. It is not a matter of inspiration or feeling in the mood of being "high." You can use the tools just as deliberately as you can add up a column of numbers.

- Edward De Bono, Serious Creativity

I will summarize some of the techniques for how to generate ideas presented in Serious Creativity. The book also has other material, e.g. interesting deep theories about why these techniques work, arguments for the importance of creativity, and more techniques beyond what's described in this post, but in the interest of keeping this post concise and useful, I will only describe one kind of technique and urge you to just try it. You should read the book if you want more detail or techniques.

These techniques can be used both when you have a problem you need to solve and when you have a general area that you suspect could be improved or innovated, but don't have any specific ideas of what's wrong (or even if you don't feel like there's anything wrong at all).

The technique I will describe in this post is that of "provocation" followed by "movement." A provocation is a seemingly random or nonsensical sentence or phrase. Movement is the process of going forward with a provocation and actually generating an idea. There are precise, formal techniques for generating provocations and movement, which I will describe after giving an example of how this "provocation-movement" process works.

Example

Provocation: Planes land upside down.
Movement: We can imagine this actually happening, and observe that the pilot would have a better view of the landing area. This naturally leads us to consider other ways to improve the pilot's view of the landing area. Perhaps we could move the cockpit to the bottom, or add video cameras. So using this technique, we've identified an area for improvement and two possible ways to make that improvement.

Setting Up Provocations

Provocation is a way to avoid getting stuck in the same "mental pathways" (see priming) so that you can find new ones. Provocations should not make sense and are not necessarily intended to convey meaning; they are just intended to "make things happen in our minds." The book precedes provocations with "po," a word used to indicate that the sentence is intended to be nonsensical and illogical. Po stands for "provoking operation." The book describes several techniques for generating provocations.

1. Escape method: Think of something that we take for granted, and negate it. E.g., "Po, restaurants do not have food" or "Po, shoes do not have soles."
2. Reversal: Take a standard arrangement or relationship that we take for granted, and reverse it. E.g. "I have orange juice for breakfast" becomes "Po, the orange juice has me for breakfast". Note that the reversal would not be "Po, I do not have orange juice for breakfast." That would be the escape method.
3. Exaggeration: Suggest that some dimension or measurement falls far outside its normal range (either greater or lesser). E.g. "Po, every household has 100 phones" or "Po, the phone has 1 dialing button." If you're making the dimension smaller, do not bring it to 0 or you're just using the escape method again. E.g. "Po, the phone has 0 dialing buttons" is not an exaggeration, it's an escape.
4. Distortion: Take normal arrangements (e.g. relationships or time sequences) and switch them around. E.g. "Po, you close the letter after you post it," "Po, criminals pay for the police force," or "Po, food prepares customers for chefs."
5. Wishful thinking: "Wouldn't it be nice if..." put forward a fantasy that is known to be impossible. E.g. "Po, the pencil should write by itself."

A provocation doesn't need to follow from one of these techniques. A provocation can be any incorrect or absurd statement. These techniques are just easy step-by-step ways to generate provocations without requiring any elusive "spark of inspiration." Once a provocation is generated, it should be followed by one or more of the movement techniques described in the next section.

If you are trying to solve a specific problem or innovate in a particular domain, then choose provocations related to the domain. That is, if you're trying to figure out how to improve wikipedia, don't use a provocation like "Po, the orange juice has me for breakfast," choose one like "Po, citations are not needed" (escape) or "Po, articles contain encyclopedias." (reversal).

Movement

Movement allows you to take some idea, concept, or provocation and move forward with it to generate more useful ideas and concepts. These techniques don't apply solely to provocations: you can use them for ideas and concepts too. The book describes 5 formal techniques for movement:

1. Extract a principle: Focus on some principle of the provocation, and then work with that principle to discover other ideas related to it. E.g. with the provocation "Po, bring back the town crier", we may extract the principle that the town crier can go to where people are, and then we try to generate ideas related to that principle.
2. Focus on the difference: Compare the provocation to existing ways of doing things. How are they different? Then you can consider other ways to use this difference. This is very similar to "extract a principle."
3. Moment to moment: imagine what would happen if the provocation were put into effect. We are not interested in the final effect, but the moment-to-moment happenings. E.g. for "Po, orange juice has me for breakfast", you may imagine yourself falling into a giant glass of orange juice.
4. Positive aspects: Look directly for benefits. What are the positive aspects of the provocation? Once you've identified some positive aspects you can consider if you can achieve some of them in other ways (again, this is similar to extract a principle, it's just another way of thinking about it).
5. Circumstances: In what circumstances would the provocation have immediate value? E.g. for the provocation "Po, drinking glasses should have rounded bottoms," you could notice that this would be useful if you didn't want people to be able to put down their glasses. This could be good for bars, where you want people to drink more and faster.

You can use these movement techniques not just on provocations, but also ideas or concepts. For example, you may start with a provocation, use the "moment to moment" technique which gives you an idea, and then you could use the "positive aspects" technique with that idea to generate more ideas. Also, of course, you do not need to strictly use just these techniques. If a provocation directly leads you to think of something interesting without explicitly choosing to use one of these techniques, that's fine, you should explore the idea more. Use these when you need them.

More Examples

Here's another example from the book. This one uses the "moment to moment" movement technique:

Po, cars have square wheels

We imagine a car with square wheels. We imagine this car starting to roll. The square wheel rises up on its corner. This would lead to a very bumpy ride. But the suspension could anticipate this rise and could adjust by getting shorter. This leads to the concept of an adjusting suspension. This in turn leads to the idea of a vehicle for going over rough ground. A jockey wheel would signal back the state of the ground to the suspension which would then adjust so that the wheel was raised to follow the "profile" of the ground...This was an idea I first suggested about twenty years ago. Today several companies such as Lotus (part of GM) are working on "intelligent suspension" which behaves in a similar way.

And here's another one from the book. The provocation uses the "escape" method and the movement seems to use the "circumstances" method:

Po, waiters are not polite.

This leads to an idea for waiters to be actors and actresses. The menu indicates the "character" of the waiter. You can order whichever waiter you wanted: belligerent, humorous, obsequious, and so on. You might order a belligerent waiter and enjoy having a fight with him. The waiters and waitresses would act out the assigned role.

Warnings

• As a general principle, try to avoid saying "oh, but this is just like this other existing product" whenever you generate an idea. Usually it's not just like the existing idea, you're just interpreting it in that way because we naturally follow paths toward the familiar. So if you have a half-formed idea that could take several directions, fight the urge to immediately take it down an existing path and then discard it because it already exists. Leave it in the half-formed stage instead. I'm reminded of the concept of semantic stopsigns. Saying an idea is "the same as" something else gives the illusion of having fully explored the idea, when in reality you just jumped immediately to one possible development (possibly the least useful development, since it's one you know already exists).
• Similarly, do not take too many steps when moving from a provocation. This will just lead you to an existing idea. There's nothing to be gained by playing 6 degrees of separation with provocations and existing ideas. Just take a few small steps. If nothing comes to you, try other movement techniques or try a different provocation. 
• You're not expected to come up with a good idea for every provocation. Most of the time you'll come up with some mediocre or half-formed idea, or even no idea at all. This is fine.
• You should write down anything you come up with that seems interesting (even if it's a bad idea in its current form, if it has something interesting about it, write it down) and then come back to it later and think about it more (either using these techniques or just your normal thinking processes for improving and adapting ideas).

This post is shameless self-promotion, but I'm told that's probably okay in the Discussion section. For context, as some of you are aware, I'm aiming to model C. elegans based on systematic high-throughput experiments - that is, to upload a worm. I'm still working on course requirements and lab training at Harvard's Biophysics Ph.D. program, but this remains the plan for my thesis.

Last semester I gave this lecture to Marvin Minsky's AI class, because Marvin professes disdain for everything neuroscience, and I wanted to give his students—and him—a fair perspective of how basic neuroscience might be changing for the better, and seems a particularly exciting field to be in right about now. The lecture is about 22 minutes long, followed by over an hour of questions and answers, which cover a lot of the memespace that surrounds this concept. Afterward, several students reported to me that their understanding of neuroscience was transformed.

I only just now got to encoding and uploading this recording; I believe that many of the topics covered could be of interest to the LW community (especially those with a background in AI and an interest in brains), perhaps worthy of discussion, and I hope you agree.

My uncle works in insurance. I recently mentioned that I'm planning to sign up for cryonics.

"That's amazing," he said. "Convincing a young person to buy life insurance? That has to be the greatest scam ever."

I took the comment lightly, not caring to argue about it. But it got me thinking - couldn't cryonics be a great opportunity for insurance companies to make a bunch of money?

Consider:

1. Were there a much stronger demand for cryonics, cryonics organizations would flourish through competition, outside investment, and internal reinvestment. Costs would likely fall, and this would be good for cryonicists in general.
2. If cryonics organizations flourish, this increases the probability of cryonics working. I can think of a bunch of ways in which this could happen; perhaps, for example, it would encourage the creation of safety nets whereby the failure of individual companies doesn't result in anyone getting thawed. It would increase R&D on both perfusion and revivification, encourage entrepreneurs to explore new related business models, etcetera.
3. Increasing the demand for cryonics increases the demand for life insurance policies; thus insurance companies have a strong incentive to increase the demand for cryonics. Many large insurance companies would like nothing more than to usher in a generation of young people that want to buy life insurance.¹
   
4. The demand for cryonics could be increased by an insightful marketing campaign by an excellent marketing agency with an enormous budget... like those used by big insurance companies.² A quick Googling says that ad spending by insurance companies exceeded $4.15 billion in 2009.

Almost a year ago, Strange7 suggested that cryonics organizations could run this kind of marketing campaign. I think he's wrong - there's no way CI or Alcor have the money. But the biggest insurance companies do have the money, and I'd be shocked if these companies or their agencies aren't already dumping all kinds of money into market research.

What would doing this require? 

1. That an open-minded person in the insurance industry who is in the position to direct this kind of funding exists. I don't have a sense of how likely this is.
2. That we can locate/get an audience with the person from step 1. I think research and networking could get this done, especially if the higher-status among us are interested.
3. That we can find someone who is capable and willing to explain this clearly and convincingly to the person from step 1. I'm not sure it would be that difficult. In the startup world, strangers convince strangers to speculatively spend millions of dollars every week. Hell, I'll do it.

I want to live in a world where cryonics ads air on TV just as often as ads for everything else people spend money on. I really can see an insurance company owning this project - if they can a) successfully revamp the image of cryonics and b) become known as the household name for it when the market gets big, they will make lots of money.

What do you think? Where has my reasoning failed? Does anyone here know anyone powerful in insurance? 

Lastly, taking a cue from ciphergoth: this is not the place to rehash all the old arguments about cryonics. I'm asking about a very specific idea about marketing and life insurance, not requesting commentary on cryonics itself. Thanks!

¹ Perhaps modeling the potential size of the market would offer insight here. If it turns out that this idea is not insane, I'll find a way to make it happen. I could use your help.

² Consider what happened with diamonds in the 1900s:

... N. W. Ayer suggested that through a well-orchestrated advertising and public-relations campaign it could have a significant impact on the "social attitudes of the public at large and thereby channel American spending toward larger and more expensive diamonds instead of "competitive luxuries." Specifically, the Ayer study stressed the need to strengthen the association in the public's mind of diamonds with romance. Since "young men buy over 90% of all engagement rings" it would be crucial to inculcate in them the idea that diamonds were a gift of love: the larger and finer the diamond, the greater the expression of love. Similarly, young women had to be encouraged to view diamonds as an integral part of any romantic courtship.