Hello rationality friends!  I have a question that I bet some of you have thought about...

I hear lots of people saying that classical coin flips are not "quantum random events", because the outcome is very nearly determined by thumb movement when I flip the coin.  More precisely, one can stay that the state of my thumb and the state of the landed coin are strongly entangled, such that, say, 99% of the quantum measure of the coin flips outcomes my post-flip thumb observes all land heads.

First of all, I've never actually seen an order of magnitude estimate to support this claim, and would love it if someone here can provide or link to one!

Second, I'm not sure how strongly entangled my thumb movement is with my subjective experience, i.e., with the parts of my brain that consciously process the decision to flip and the outcome.  So even if the coin outcome is almost perfectly determined by my thumb, it might not be almost perfectly determined by my decision to flip the coin.

For example, while the thumb movement happens, a lot of calibration goes on between my thumb, my motor cortex, and my cerebellum (which certainly affects but does not seem to directly process conscious experience), precisely because my motor cortex is unable to send, on its own, a precise and accurate enough signal to my thumb that achieves the flicking motion that we eventually learn to do in order to flip coins.  Some of this inability is due to small differences in environmental factors during each flip that the motor cortex does not itself process directly, but is processed by the cerebellum instead.  Perhaps some of this inability also comes directly from quantum variation in neuron action potentials being reached, or perhaps some of the aforementioned environmental factors arise from quantum variation.

Anyway, I'm altogether not *that* convinced that the outcome of a coin flip is sufficiently dependent on my decision to flip as to be considered "not a quantum random event" by my conscious brain.  Can anyone provide me with some order of magnitude estimates to convince me either way about this?  I'd really appreciate it!

ETA: I am not asking if coin flips are "random enough" in some strange, undefined sense.  I am actually asking about quantum entanglement here. In particular, when your PFC decides for planning reasons to flip a coin, does the evolution of the wave function produce a world that is in a superposition of states (coin landed heads)⊗(you observed heads) + (coin landed tails)⊗(you observed tails)?  Or does a monomial state result, either (coin landed heads)⊗(you observed heads) or (coin landed tails)⊗(you observed tails) depending on the instance?

At present, despite having been told many times that coin flips are not "in superpositions" relative to "us", I'm not convinced that there is enough mutual information connecting my frontal lobe and the coin for the state of the coin to be entangled with me (i.e. not "in a superposed state") before I observe it. I realize this is somewhat testable, e.g., if the state amplitudes of the coin can be forced to have complex arguments differing in a predictable way so as to produce expected and measurable interference patterns. This is what we have failed to produce at a macroscopic level in attempts to produce visible superpositions.  But I don't know if we fail to produce messier, less-visibly-self-interfering superpositions, which is why I am still wondering about this...

Any help / links / fermi estimates on this will be greatly appreciated!

If you have friends or family you'd like to get thinking about cosmology and the like, this might be a nice documentary to stir up curiosity.  Despite clearly being aimed at a general audience, I thought this documentary -- including interviews of Tegmark and Bostrom --- did a surprisingly good job of talking about the beginning of the universe and our place in it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyH2D4-tzfM

Also, even though I've had all these thoughts before, it still makes me more emotionally motivated to live long enough to see scientific advances on these questions.

I bet most people here have realized this explicitly or implicitly, but this comment has inspired me to write a short, linkable summary of this error pattern, with a name:

The Relation Projection Fallacy: a denotational error whereby one confuses an n-ary relation for an m-ary relation, where usually m<n.

Example instance: "Life has no purpose."

This is a troublesome phrase.  Why?  If you look at unobjectionable uses of the concept <purpose> --- also referenced by synonyms like "having a point" --- it is in fact a ternary relation.

Example non-instance: "The purpose of a doorstop is to stop doors."

Here, one can query "to whom?" and be returned the context "to the person who made it" or "to the person who's using it", etc.  That is, the full denotation of "purpose" is always of the form "The purpose of X to Y is Z," where Y is often implicit or can take a wide range of values.

This has nothing to do with connotation... it's just how the concept <purpose> typically works as people use it.  But to flog a dead horse, the purpose of a doorstop to a cat may be to make an amusing sound as it glides across the floor after the cat hits it.  The value of Y always matters.  There is no "true purpose" stored anywhere inside the doorstop, or even in the combination of the doorstop and the door it is stopping.  To think otherwise is literally projecting, in the mathematical sense, a ternary relation, i.e., a subset of a product of three sets (objects)x(agents)x(verbs), into a product of two sets, (objects)x(verbs).  But people often do this projection incorrectly, by either searching for a purpose that is intrinsic to the Doorstop or to Life, or by searching for a canonical value of "Y" like "The Great Arbiter of Purpose", both of which are not to be found, at least to their satisfaction when they utter the phrase "Life has no purpose."

Likewise, the relation "has a purpose" is typically a binary relation, because again, we can always ask "to whom?".  "<That doorstop> has a purpose to <me>."

In some form, this realization is of course the cause of many schools of thought taking the name "relativist" on many different issues.  But I find that people over-use the phrase "It's all relative" to connote "It's all meaningless" or "there is no answer".  Which is ironic, because meaning itself is a ternary relation!  Its typical denotation is of the form "The meaning of X to Y is Z", like in

• "The meaning of <the sound 'owe'> to <French people> is <liquid water>" or
• "The meaning of <that pendant> to <your mother> is <a certain undescribed experience of sentimentality>".

Realizing this should NOT result in a cascade of bottomless relativism where nothing means anything!  In fact, the first time I had this thought as a kid, I arrived at the connotationally pleasing conclusion "My life can have as many purposes as there are agents for it to have a purpose to."

Indeed, the meaning of <"purpose"> to <humans> is <a certain ternary functional relationship between objects, agents, and verbs>, and the meaning of <"meaning"> to <humans> is <a certain ternary relationship between syntactic elements, people generating or perceiving them, and referents>. 

When I found LessWrong, I was happy to find that Eliezer wrote on almost exactly this realization in 2-Place and 1-Place Words, but sad that the post had few upvotes -- only 14 right now.  So in case it was too long, or didn't have a snappy enough name, I thought I'd try giving the idea another shot.

ETA: In the special case of talking to someone wondering about the purpose of life, here is how I would use this observation in the form of an argument:

First of all, you may be lacking satisfaction in your life for some reason, and framing this to yourself in philosophical terms like "Life has no purpose, because <argument>."  If that's true, it's quite likely that you'd feel differently if your emotional needs as a social primate were being met, and in that sense the solution is not an "answer" but rather some actions that will result in these needs being met.  

Still, that does not address the <argument>.  So because "What is s the purpose of life?" may be a hard question, let's look at easier examples of purpose and see how they work.  Notice how they all have someone the purpose is to?  And how that's missing in your "purpose of life" question?  Because of that, you could end up feeling one of two ways: 

 (1) Satisfied, because now you can just ask "What could be the purpose of my life to <my friends, my family, myself, the world at large, etc>", and come up with answers, or 

 (2) Unsatisfied, because there is no agent to ask about such that the answer would seem important enough to you.

And I claim that whether you end up at (1) or (2) is probably more a function of whether your social primate emotional needs are being met than any particular philosophical argument.

That being said, if you believe this argument, the best thing to do for someone lacking a sense of purpose is probably not to just say the argument, but to help them start satisfying their emotional needs, and have this argument mainly to satisfy their sense of curiosity or nagging intellectual doubts about the issue.

Related to: Cached selves, Why you're stuck in a narrative, The curse of identity

Outline: Some back-story, Pondering the mechanics of self-image, The role of narrative, Narrative as a medium for self-communication.

tl;dr: One can have a self-image that causes one to neglect the effects of self-image. And, since we tend to process our self-images somewhat in the context of a narrative identity, if you currently make zero use of narrative in understanding and affecting how you think about yourself, it may be worth adjusting upward. All this seems to have been the case for me, and is probably part of what makes HPMOR valuable.

Some back-story

Starting when I was around 16 and becoming acutely annoyed with essentialism, I prided myself on not being dependent on a story-like image of myself. In fact, to make sure I wasn't, I put a break command in my narrative loop: I drafted a story in my mind about a hero who was able to outwit his foes by being less constrained by narrative than they were, and I identified with him whenever I felt a need-for-narrative coming on. Batman's narrator goes for something like this in the Dark Knight when he <select for spoiler-> abandons his heroic image to take the blame for Harvey Dent's death.

I think this break command was mostly a good thing. It helped me to resolve cognitive dissonance and overcome the limitations of various cached selves, and I ended up mostly focussed on whether my beliefs were accurate and my desires were being fulfilled. So I still figure it's a decent first-order correction to being over-constrained by narrative.

But, I no longer think it's the only decent solution. In fact, understanding the more subtle mechanics of self-image — what affects our self schemas, what they affect, and how — was something I neglected for a long time because I saw self-image as a solved problem. Yes, I developed a cached view of myself as unaffected by self-image constraints. I would have been embarassed to notice such dependencies, so I didn't. The irony, eh?

I'm writing this because I wouldn't be surprised to find others here developing, or having developed, this blind spot...

Hey rationality friends, I just made this FAQ for the credence calibration game.  So if you have people you'd like to introduce to it --- for example, to get them used to thinking of belief strengths as probabilities --- now is a good time :)

Summary:  People often say that voting is irrational, because the probability of affecting the outcome is so small. But the outcome itself is extremely large when you consider its impact on other people. I estimate that for most people, voting is worth a charitable donation of somewhere between $100 and $1.5 million. For me, the value came out to around $56,000.

Moreover, in swing states the value is much higher, so taking a 10% chance at convincing a friend in a swing state to vote similarly to you is probably worth thousands of expected donation dollars, too.

I find this much more compelling than the typical attempts to justify voting purely in terms of signal value or the resulting sense of pride in fulfilling a civic duty. And voting for selfish reasons is still almost completely worthless, in terms of direct effect. If you're on the way to the polls only to vote for the party that will benefit you the most, you're better off using that time to earn $5 mowing someone's lawn. But if you're even a little altruistic... vote away!

Time for a Fermi estimate

Below is an example Fermi calculation for the value of voting in the USA. Of course, the estimates are all rough and fuzzy, so I'll be conservative, and we can adjust upward based on your opinion.

I'll be estimating the value of voting in marginal expected altruistic dollars, the expected number of dollars being spent in a way that is in line with your altruistic preferences.¹ If you don't like measuring the altruistic value of the outcome in dollars, please consider making up your own measure, and keep reading. Perhaps use the number of smiles per year, or number of lives saved. Your measure doesn't have to be total or average utilitarian, either; as long as it's roughly commensurate with the size of the country, it will lead you to a similar conclusion in terms of orders of magnitude.

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/Potter.html

Somebody hasn't heard of HPMOR...

Does anybody know where to find a large database of statements that are roughly 50% likely to be true or false?  These would be used for confidence calibration / Bayesian updating exercises for CMR/HRP.

One way to make such a database would be to buy a bunch of trivia games with True/False questions, and type each statement and its negation into a computer.  A problem with this might be that trivia questions are selected to have surprising/counterintuitive truth values; I'm not sure if that's true.  I'd be happy to acquire an already-made database of this form, but ideally I'd like statements that are "more neutral" in terms of how counterintuitive they are.

Any thoughts on where we might find a database like this to use/buy?

Thanks for any help!

Revision: We actually want a database of two-choice answer questions. This way, the player won't get trained on a base rate of 50% of statements in the world being true... they'll just get trained that when there are two possible answers, one is always true.  In the end, the database should look something like this (warning: I made up the "correct" answers):

Question: "Which is diagnosed more often in America (2011)?"; 
Answers: (a) "the cold", (b) allergies"; 
Correct Answer: (a); 
Tags: {medical}

Question: "Which city has a higher average altitude?"; 
Answers: (a) "Chicago", (b) "Las Vegas"; 
Correct Answer: (a)
Tags: {geography}

Question: "Who sold more albums while living"?; 
Answers: (a) "Michael Jackson", (b) "Elvis Presley"; 
Correct Answer: (b)
Tags: {history, pop-culture, music}

Question: "Was the price of IBM stock higher or lower at the start of the month after the Berlin wall fell, compared with the start of the previous month?"; 
Answers: (a) "higher", (b) "lower"; 
Correct Answer: (a)
Tags: {history, finance}

Hi all,

I just wanted to loudly recommend the position to design and write rationality curriculum --- to anyone who is interested --- as a potential way to make yourself more awesome.  After helping teach mini-camp last year, I definitely experienced a huge increase in motivation for my own research, and in turn, productivity.  Somehow, giving serious thought to rationality advice for a large group and *actually delivering it* made be internalize even more deeply some things I thought I'd already absorbed completely. 

... and my sense that more is possible is still tingling :)

So yeah, definitely give it a shot if you think you might be good at it!

Yep, I'm saying that without hard data.  But I was there.  So let me say it again, in response to numerous comments I've seen complaining that no judgement should be passed until a quantitative analysis confirms it:

Mini-camp was awesome.  Note that mini-camp was far from the first time I've travelled to an event to surround myself with like-minded peers working toward common goals...  I find such events events extremely motivating and enjoyable, which is why I've been to many such workshops, inside and outside academia (~3 per year for the past 10 years).

Yet mini-camp is still topping my charts.  Specifically, the camp is tied for the title of the most life-altering workshop-like event of my life, and the tie is with the workshop that got me onto my PhD topic (graphical causal modelling), so that's saying something.

In particular, I've been visibly-to-myself-and-others more motivated and hard-working since the camp.  I've had more energy for learning and adaptation, and I find Luke to have been a highly inspiring input to that result.

(I'm talking about Luke because his position is the one being discussed right now, but I got a lot of really inspiring ideas and motivation from Anna before, during, and after the camp as well.)

Hard data will be great to have, but it's hard to get, especially certifiably causal data (though the prospect is not hopeless, with enough conditional independence tests), especially since the camp was planned and executed on short notice.  

In the meantime, let's do a little Bayes.  First, assign priors to how well you expect a week-long sustained interaction between growth-oriented rationalists to go.  (If your prior is something like 80%[failure], I'd like to know where you're getting your growth-oriented rationalists).  Now which of the following theories, "failure" or "success", assigns a higher likelihood to the following observations?

-----

1. People wrote these: 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AnoM_ZsIBBwEdGNicUMzRkNJNzRKLVpEb2RxZzU3V0E

In particular, 

“The week I spent in minicamp had by far the highest density of fun and learning I have ever experienced. It's like taking two years of college and condensing it to a week: you learn just as much and you have just as much fun. The skills I've learned will help me set and achieve my own life goal, and the friends I've made will help me get there.” --Alexei

“This was an intensely positive experience. This was easily the most powerful change self-modification I've ever made, in all of the social, intellectual, and emotional spheres. I'm now a more powerful person than I was a week ago -- and I can explain exactly how and why this is true.

At mini-camp, I've learned techniques for effective self-modification -- that is, I have a much deeper understanding of how to change my desires, gather my willpower, channel my time and cognitive resources, and model and handle previously confusing situations. What's more, I have a fairly clear map of how to build these skills henceforth, and how to inculcate them in others. And all this was presented in such a way that any sufficiently analytical folk -- anyone who has understood a few of the LW sequences, say -- can gain in extreme measures.” --Matt Elder / Fiddlemath

“I expected a week of interesting things and some useful tools to take away. What I got was 8 days of constant, deep learning, challenges to my limits that helped me grow. I finally grokked that I can and should optimize myself on every dimension I care about, that practice and reinforcement can make me a better thinker, and that I can change very quickly when I'm not constrained by artificial barriers or stress.

I would not recommend doing something like this right before another super-busy week, because I was learning at 100% of capacity and will need a lot of time to unpack all the things I learned and apply them to my life, but I came away with a clear plan for becoming better. It is now a normal and easy thing for me to try things out, test my beliefs, and self-improve. And I'm likely to be much more effective at making the world a better place as well, by prioritizing without fear.

The material was all soundly-researched and effectively taught, with extremely helpful supplemental exercises and activities. The instructors were very helpful in and out of session. The other participants were excited, engaged, challenging, and supportive.

I look forward to sharing what I've learned with my local Lesswrong meetup and others in the area. If that's even 1/4 as awesome as my time at the Mini-Camp, it will make our lives much better.” --Ben Hoffman / Benquo

“I really can't recommend this camp enough! This workshop broke down a complex and intertwined set of skills labelled in my brain as "common sense" and distinguished each part so that I could work on them separately. Sessions on motivation, cognition, and what habits to build to not fool yourself were particularly helpful. This camp was also the first example that I've seen of people taking current cognitive science and other research, decoding it, and showing people what's been documented to work so that they can use it too. It feels to me now as though the coolest parts of the sequences have been given specific exercises and habits to build off of. This camp, and the people in it, have changed my path for the better.” --David Jones / TheDave

2. I wrote this post.

3. Eliezer wants to keep Luke as a permanent hire.

4. Whatever other comments you've seen/heard about the camp from people who attended.

-----

Is this a biased sample?  Probably.  Is it hard data?  Easy to quantify?  Not so much.  Might this be a big conspiracy by Luke-originating ninja bloggers?  Perhaps.  But really... which theory assigns the higher likelihood here?  Success, or failure?

Lets allow the arguments that can be made about the minicamp be made, rather than ritualistically abstaining from decision-making until numbers show up.

That, and I really hope Luke stays with SingInst :)