Loleliezers
Previously: Eliezer Yudkowsky facts, and Kevin's prediction.
A bit of silliness for the day. Below the fold to spare those with delicate sensibilities.
Karma Changes
As recently (re-)suggested by Kaj Sotala, posts now have much larger effects on karma than comments: Each up or down vote on a post is worth 10 karma.
Negative votes on posts have had karma effects all along, but for some reason Reddit's code imposed a display cap (not an actual cap) of 0. This violates a basic user interface principle: things with important effects should have visible effects. Since this just got 10x more important, we now show negative post totals rather than "0". This also provides some feedback to posters that was previously missing. Note that downvoting a post costs 10 karma from your downvote cap of 4x current karma.
The minimum karma to start posting has been raised to 50.
Thanks to our friends at Tricycle for implementing this request!
If reason told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?
In reply to Eliezer's Contrarian Status Catch 22 & Sufficiently Advanced Sanity. I accuse Eliezer of encountering a piece of Advanced Wisdom.
Unreason is something that we should fight against. Witch burnings, creationism & homeopathy are all things which should rightly be defended against for society to advance. But, more subtly, I think reason is in some ways, is also a dangerous phenomena that should be guarded against. I am arguing not against the specific process of reasoning itself, it is the attitude which instinctually reaches for reason as the first tool of choice when confronting a problem. Scott Aaronson called this approach bullet swallowing when he tried to explain why he was so uncomfortable with it. Jane Galt also rails against reason when explaining why she does not support gay marriage.
December 2009 Meta Thread
This post is a place to discuss meta-level issues regarding Less Wrong. Such posts may or may not be the unique venue for such discussion in the future.
Open Thread: October 2009
Hear ye, hear ye: commence the discussion of things which have not been discussed.
As usual, if a discussion gets particularly good, spin it off into a posting.
(For this Open Thread, I'm going to try something new: priming the pump with a few things I'd like to see discussed.)
Utilons vs. Hedons
Related to: Would Your Real Preferences Please Stand Up?
I have to admit, there are a lot of people I don't care about. Comfortably over six billion, I would bet. It's not that I'm a callous person; I simply don't know that many people, and even if I did I hardly have time to process that much information. Every day hundreds of millions of incredibly wonderful and terrible things happen to people out there, and if they didn't, I wouldn't even know it.
On the other hand, my professional goals deal with economics, policy, and improving decision making for the purpose of making millions of people I'll never meet happier. Their happiness does not affect my experience of life one bit, but I believe it's a good thing and I plan to work hard to figure out how to create more happiness.
This underscores an essential distinction in understanding any utilitarian viewpoint: the difference between experience and values. One can value unweighted total utility. One cannot experience unweighted total utility. It will always hurt more if a friend or loved one dies than if someone you never knew in a place you never heard of dies. I would be truly amazed to meet someone who is an exception to this rule and is not an absolute stoic. Your experiential utility function may have coefficients for other people's happiness (or at least your perception of such), but there's no way it has an identical coefficient for everyone everywhere, unless that coefficient is zero. On the other hand, you probably care in an abstract way about whether people you don't know die or are enslaved or imprisoned, and may even contribute some money or effort to prevent such from happening. I'm going to use "utilons" to refer to value utility units and "hedons" to refer to experiential utility units; I'll demonstrate that this is a meaningful distinction shortly, and that we value utilons over hedons explains much of our moral reasoning appearing to fail.
An Alternative Approach to AI Cooperation
[This post summarizes my side of a conversation between me and cousin_it, and continues it.]
Several people here have shown interest in an approach to modeling AI interactions that was suggested by Eliezer Yudkowsky: assume that AIs can gain common knowledge of each other's source code, and explore the decision/game theory that results from this assumption.
In this post, I'd like to describe an alternative approach*, based on the idea that two or more AIs may be able to securely merge themselves into a joint machine, and allow this joint machine to make and carry out subsequent decisions. I argue that this assumption is as plausible as that of common knowledge of source code, since it can be built upon the same technological foundation that has been proposed to implement common knowledge of source code. That proposal, by Tim Freeman, was this:
Entity A could prove to entity B that it has source code S by
consenting to be replaced by a new entity A' that was constructed by a
manufacturing process jointly monitored by A and B. During this
process, both A and B observe that A' is constructed to run source
code S. After A' is constructed, A shuts down and gives all of its
resources to A'.
Notice that the same technology can be used for two AIs to merge into a single machine running source code S (which they both agreed upon). All that needs to be changed from the above process is for B to also shut down and give all of its resources to A' after A' is constructed. Not knowing if there is a standard name for this kind of technology, I've given it the moniker "secure joint construction."
Timeless Decision Theory: Problems I Can't Solve
Suppose you're out in the desert, running out of water, and soon to die - when someone in a motor vehicle drives up next to you. Furthermore, the driver of the motor vehicle is a perfectly selfish ideal game-theoretic agent, and even further, so are you; and what's more, the driver is Paul Ekman, who's really, really good at reading facial microexpressions. The driver says, "Well, I'll convey you to town if it's in my interest to do so - so will you give me $100 from an ATM when we reach town?"
Now of course you wish you could answer "Yes", but as an ideal game theorist yourself, you realize that, once you actually reach town, you'll have no further motive to pay off the driver. "Yes," you say. "You're lying," says the driver, and drives off leaving you to die.
If only you weren't so rational!
This is the dilemma of Parfit's Hitchhiker, and the above is the standard resolution according to mainstream philosophy's causal decision theory, which also two-boxes on Newcomb's Problem and defects in the Prisoner's Dilemma. Of course, any self-modifying agent who expects to face such problems - in general, or in particular - will soon self-modify into an agent that doesn't regret its "rationality" so much. So from the perspective of a self-modifying-AI-theorist, classical causal decision theory is a wash. And indeed I've worked out a theory, tentatively labeled "timeless decision theory", which covers these three Newcomblike problems and delivers a first-order answer that is already reflectively consistent, without need to explicitly consider such notions as "precommitment". Unfortunately this "timeless decision theory" would require a long sequence to write up, and it's not my current highest writing priority unless someone offers to let me do a PhD thesis on it.
However, there are some other timeless decision problems for which I do not possess a general theory.
For example, there's a problem introduced to me by Gary Drescher's marvelous Good and Real (OOPS: The below formulation was independently invented by Vladimir Nesov; Drescher's book actually contains a related dilemma in which box B is transparent, and only contains $1M if Omega predicts you will one-box whether B appears full or empty, and Omega has a 1% error rate) which runs as follows:
Suppose Omega (the same superagent from Newcomb's Problem, who is known to be honest about how it poses these sorts of dilemmas) comes to you and says:
"I just flipped a fair coin. I decided, before I flipped the coin, that if it came up heads, I would ask you for $1000. And if it came up tails, I would give you $1,000,000 if and only if I predicted that you would give me $1000 if the coin had come up heads. The coin came up heads - can I have $1000?"
Sayeth the Girl
Disclaimer: If you are prone to dismissing women's complaints of gender-related problems as the women being whiny, emotionally unstable girls who see sexism where there is none, this post is unlikely to interest you.
For your convenience, links to followup posts: Roko says; orthonormal says; Eliezer says; Yvain says; Wei_Dai says
As far as I can tell, I am the most active female poster on Less Wrong. (AnnaSalamon has higher karma than I, but she hasn't commented on anything for two months now.) There are not many of us. This is usually immaterial. Heck, sometimes people don't even notice in spite of my girly username, my self-introduction, and the fact that I'm now apparently the feminism police of Less Wrong.
My life is not about being a girl. In fact, I'm less preoccupied with feminism and women's special interest issues than most of the women I know, and some of the men. It's not my pet topic. I do not focus on feminist philosophy in school. I took an "Early Modern Women Philosophers" course because I needed the history credit, had room for a suitable class in a semester when one was offered, and heard the teacher was nice, and I was pretty bored. I wound up doing my midterm paper on Malebranche in that class because we'd covered him to give context to Mary Astell, and he was more interesting than she was. I didn't vote for Hilary Clinton in the primary. Given the choice, I have lots of things I'd rather be doing than ferreting out hidden or less-than-hidden sexism on one of my favorite websites.
Unfortunately, nobody else seems to want to do it either, and I'm not content to leave it undone. I suppose I could abandon the site and leave it even more masculine so the guys could all talk in their own language, unimpeded by stupid chicks being stupidly offended by completely unproblematic things like objectification and just plain jerkitude. I would almost certainly have vacated the site already if feminism were my pet issue, or if I were more easily offended. (In general, I'm very hard to offend. The fact that people here have succeeded in doing so anyway without even, apparently, going out of their way to do it should be a great big red flag that something's up.) If you're wondering why half of the potential audience of the site seems to be conspicuously not here, this may have something to do with it.
Controlling your inner control circuits
On the topic of: Control theory
Yesterday, PJ Eby sent the subscribers of his mailing list a link to an article describing a control theory/mindhacking insight he'd had. With his permission, here's a summary of that article. I found it potentially life-changing. The article seeks to answer the question, "why is it that people often stumble upon great self-help techniques or productivity tips, find that they work great, and then after a short while the techniques either become ineffectual or the people just plain stop using them anyway?", but I found it to have far greater applicability than just that.
Richard Kennaway already mentioned the case of driving a car as an example where the human brain uses control systems, and Eby mentioned another: ask a friend to hold their arm out straight, and tell them that when you push down on their hand, they should lower their arm. And what you’ll generally find is that when you push down on their hand, the arm will spring back up before they lower it... and the harder you push down on the hand, the harder the arm will pop back up! That's because the control system in charge of maintaining the arm's position will try to keep up the old position, until one consciously realizes that the arm has been pushed and changes the setting.
Control circuits aren't used just for guiding physical sequences of actions, they also regulate the workings of our mind. A few hours before typing out a previous version of this post, I was starting to feel restless because I hadn't accomplished any work that morning. This has often happened to me in the past - if, at some point during the day, I haven't yet gotten started on doing anything, I begin to feel anxious and restless. In other words, in my brain there's a control circuit monitoring some estimate of "accomplishments today". If that value isn't high enough, it starts sending an error signal - creating a feeling of anxiety - in an attempt to bring that value into the desired range.
The problem with this is that more often than not, that anxiety doesn't push me into action. Instead I become paralyzed and incapable of getting anything started. Eby proposes that this is because of two things: one, the control circuits are dumb and don't actually realize what they're doing, so they may actually take counter-productive action. Two, there may be several control circuits in the brain which are actually opposed to each other.
Here we come to the part about productivity techniques often not working. We also have higher-level controllers - control circuits influencing other control circuits. Eby's theory is that many of us have circuits that try to prevent us from doing the things we want to do. When they notice that we've found a method to actually accomplish something we've been struggling with for a long time, they start sending an error signal... causing neural reorganization, eventually ending up at a stage where we don't use those productivity techniques anymore and solving the "crisis" of us actually accomplishing things. Moreover, these circuits are to a certain degree predictive, and they can start firing when they pick up on a behavior that only even possibly leads to success - that's when we hear about a great-sounding technique and for some reason never even try it. A higher-level circuit, or a lower-level one set up by the higher-level circuit, actively suppresses the "let's try that out" signals sent by the other circuits.
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