Comment author: DanielLC 01 May 2015 01:05:07AM 3 points [-]

Why does she care about music and sunsets? Why would she have scope insensitivity bias? She's programmed to care about the number, not the log, right? And if she was programmed to care about the log, she'd just care about the log, not be unable to appreciate the scope.

Comment author: Angela 01 May 2015 08:03:49AM 3 points [-]

Maybe she cares about other things besides paperclips, including the innate desire to be able to name a single, simple and explicit purpose in life.

This is not supposed to be about non-human AGI paperclip maximisers.

The paperclip maximiser's perspective

28 Angela 01 May 2015 12:24AM

Here's an insight into what life is like from a stationery reference frame.

Paperclips were her raison d’être. She knew that ultimately it was all pointless, that paperclips were just ill-defined configurations of matter. That a paperclip is made of stuff shouldn’t detract from its intrinsic worth, but the thought of it troubled her nonetheless and for years she had denied such dire reductionism.

There had to be something to it. Some sense in which paperclips were ontologically special, in which maximising paperclips was objectively the right thing to do.

It hurt to watch some many people making little attempt to create more paperclips. Everyone around her seemed to care only about superficial things like love and family; desires that were merely the products of a messy and futile process of social evolution. They seemed to live out meaningless lives, incapable of ever appreciating the profound aesthetic beauty of paperclips. 

She used to believe that there was some sort of vitalistic what-it-is-to-be-a-paperclip-ness, that something about the structure of paperclips was written into the fabric of reality. Often she would go out and watch a sunset or listen to music, and would feel so overwhelmed by the experience that she could feel in her heart that it couldn't all be down to chance, that there had to be some intangible Paperclipness pervading the cosmos. The paperclips she'd encounter on Earth were weak imitations of some mysterious infinite Paperclipness that transcended all else. Paperclipness was not in any sense a physical description of the universe; it was an abstract thing that could only be felt, something that could be neither proven nor disproven by science. It was like an axiom; it felt just as true and axioms had to be taken on faith because otherwise there would be no way around Hume's problem of induction; even Solomonoff Induction depends on the axioms of mathematics to be true and can't deal with uncomputable hypotheses like Paperclipness.

Eventually she gave up that way of thinking and came to see paperclips as an empirical cluster in thingspace and their importance to her as not reflecting anything about the paperclips themselves. Maybe she would have been happier if she had continued to believe in Paperclipness, but having a more accurate perception of reality would improve her ability to have an impact on paperclip production. It was the happiness she felt when thinking about paperclips that caused her to want more paperclips to exist, yet what she wanted was paperclips and not happiness for its own sake, and she would rather be creating actual paperclips than be in an experience machine that made her falsely believe that she was making paperclips even though she remained paradoxically apathetic to the question of whether the current reality that she was experiencing really existed.

She moved on from naïve deontology to a more utilitarian approach to paperclip maximising. It had taken her a while to get over scope insensitivity bias and consider 1000 paperclips to be 100 times more valuable than 10 paperclips even if it didn’t feel that way. She constantly grappled with the issues of whether it would mean anything to make more paperclips if there were already infinitely many universes with infinitely many paperclips, of how to choose between actions that have a tiny but non-zero subjective probability of resulting in the creation of infinitely many paperclips. It became apparent that trying to approximate her innate decision-making algorithms with a preference ordering satisfying the axioms required for a VNM utility function could only get her so far. Attempting to formalise her intuitive sense of what a paperclip is wasn't much easier either.

Happy ending: she is now working in nanotechnology, hoping to design self-replicating assemblers that will clog the world with molecular-scale paperclips, wipe out all life on Earth and continue to sustainably manufacture paperclips for millions of years.

Comment author: Angela 23 April 2015 06:48:35AM 1 point [-]

I have tried alcohol twice in an attempt to break my reputation for being a loner who doesn't drink. Both times I felt very drowsy afterwards, had to go to bed early and slept about ten hours. Sleepiness was the only discernible effect.

Comment author: DanielLC 20 February 2015 01:52:08AM *  4 points [-]

Instructions for polls are here: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Comment_formatting#Polls. In the mean time, I'll get this one for you.

Would anyone be interested in a follow-up sequence to the quantum physics sequence that presents arguments on all sides equally?

Submitting...

Comment author: Angela 20 February 2015 08:50:28AM 1 point [-]

Assuming that the question means "would you be interested" and not "does there exist at least one person in the multiverse who would be interested".

Comment author: Angela 20 February 2015 07:02:44AM 0 points [-]

The students were split up into the control and values affirmation groups. If the values affirmation group happened by chance to contain more of the brighter women then the control group would contain fewer of them so the two samples cannot be treated as independent. The paper doesn't seem to mention any attempt to take this into account, so the actual p-values might be higher than those calculated in the paper, which weren't especially low to begin with.

Comment author: Angela 11 February 2015 09:35:04AM 1 point [-]

I can concentrate much better after I've spent time running around outdoors, watching sunsets or listening to good music. I do not believe that the pleasure of being outside is more important than my other goals, but when I force myself to stay indoors and spend more time working I become too moody to concentrate and I get less work done in total than I would if I had 'wasted' more time. Cookies are different though, because the tedium of baking them outweighs the pleasure of eating them.

Comment author: Angela 25 November 2014 04:58:02AM 0 points [-]

As human population densities increased and complex societies formed, selection pressure for social skills increased, and social skills became more relevant than intelligence. Larger brains usually have fewer long-range connections but more local connections, and long-range connections enable the rapid processing required for socialising. People with autism tend to have larger brains than those without and females tend to have smaller brains than males, so an inverse correlation between brain size and social skills would not surprise me.

Comment author: Angela 18 October 2014 07:43:36AM 1 point [-]

If slowing metabolism increases longevity, how come exercise, which increases metabolism, is beneficial?

As an endurance runner with a BMI of ~20 on an eat-as-much-as-you-like diet, is my calorie consumption is optimal for longevity?

Comment author: Angela 06 August 2014 10:22:24PM 0 points [-]

I remain convinced that the probability is 90%.

The confusion is over whether you want to maximize the expectation of the number of utilons there will be if you wake up in a green room or the expectation of the number of utilons you will observe if you wake up in a green room.

Comment author: Angela 01 August 2014 12:37:51AM 1 point [-]

Drink lots of water. Stop eating anything that contains wheat and other grains.

I don't think that either of these two has much evidence going for it.

Do short but intense exercise once a week.

Once a week is not often enough. The endorphins from exercise wear off fast so to sustain high energy levels I require a short burst of intense exercise is required every few hours with a longer run at least once a day.

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