= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
META: Tiered Discussions
(Edit: It seems lots of people thought this was a terrible idea. I'm keeping the post as it was, though, mostly because I still think it's an interesting experiment and it ought to have been tried at least once somewhere on this site. Also, blah blah something about preserving the historical record so that earlier comments still make sense, whatever.)
You aren't allowed to know what this post says unless you can figure out what LW post this sentence is a clever reference to. The URL of that post is the CAST5 symmetric key for this one. Please help downvote spoilers into oblivion.
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Room for rent in North Berkeley house
Hi Less Wrong. I am moving into a 5 bedroom house in North Berkeley with Mike Blume and Emil Gilliam. We have an extra bedroom available.
It's located in the Gourmet Ghetto neighborhood (because we can afford to eat at Chez Pannise when we aren't busy saving the world, right? I didn't think so) and is about 1/2 mile from the Downtown Berkeley and North Berkeley BART stations. From Downtown Berkeley to Downtown SF via BART, it is a painless 25 minute commute. The bedroom is unfurnished and available right now. Someone willing to commit to living there for one year is preferred, but willing to consider six month or month to month leases.
I'm open to living with a wide range of people and tend to be extremely tolerant of people's quirks. I am not tolerant to drama, so I am open to living with anyone that will not bring any sort of unneeded conflict to my living space.
~$750/month+utilities. Easy street parking available.
Feel free to ask questions via email (kfischer @# gmail %# com) or in the comments here.
And before any of you pedants downvote me because "Less Wrong is not Craigslist", this is kind of like a year long Less Wrong meetup.
How to always have interesting conversations
One of the things that makes Michael Vassar an interesting person to be around is that he has an opinion about everything. If you locked him up in an empty room with grey walls, it would probably take the man about thirty seconds before he'd start analyzing the historical influence of the Enlightenment on the tradition of locking people up in empty rooms with grey walls.
Likewise, in the recent LW meetup, I noticed that I was naturally drawn to the people who most easily ended up talking about interesting things. I spent a while just listening to HughRistik's theories on the differences between men and women, for instance. There were a few occasions when I engaged in some small talk with new people, but not all of them took very long, as I failed to lead the conversation into territory where one of us would have plenty of opinions.
I have two major deficiencies in trying to mimic this behavior. One, I'm by nature more of a listener than speaker. I usually prefer to let other people talk so that I can just soak up the information being offered. Second, my native way of thought is closer to text than speech. At best, I can generate thoughts as fast as I can type. But in speech, I often have difficulty formulating my thoughts into coherent sentences fast enough and frequently hesitate.
Both of these problems are solvable by having a sufficiently well built-up storage of cached thoughts that I don't need to generate everything in real time. On the occasions when a conversations happens to drift into a topic I'm sufficiently familiar with, I'm often able to overcome the limitations and contribute meaningfully to the discussion. This implies two things. First, that I need to generate cached thoughts in more subjects than I currently have. Seconds, that I need an ability to more reliably steer conversation into subjects that I actually do have cached thoughts about.
Late Great Filter Is Not Bad News
But I hope that our Mars probes will discover nothing. It would be good news if we find Mars to be completely sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit.
Conversely, if we discovered traces of some simple extinct life form—some bacteria, some algae—it would be bad news. If we found fossils of something more advanced, perhaps something looking like the remnants of a trilobite or even the skeleton of a small mammal, it would be very bad news. The more complex the life we found, the more depressing the news of its existence would be. Scientifically interesting, certainly, but a bad omen for the future of the human race.
— Nick Bostrom, in Where Are They? Why I hope that the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing
This post is a reply to Robin Hanson's recent OB post Very Bad News, as well as Nick Bostrom's 2008 paper quoted above, and assumes familiarity with Robin's Great Filter idea. (Robin's server for the Great Filter paper seems to be experiencing some kind of error. See here for a mirror.)
Suppose Omega appears and says to you:
(Scenario 1) I'm going to apply a great filter to humanity. You get to choose whether the filter is applied one minute from now, or in five years. When the designated time arrives, I'll throw a fair coin, and wipe out humanity if it lands heads. And oh, it's not the current you that gets to decide, but the version of you 4 years and 364 days from now. I'll predict his or her decision and act accordingly.
I hope it's not controversial that the current you should prefer a late filter, since (with probability .5) that gives you and everyone else five more years of life. What about the future version of you? Well, if he or she decides on the early filter, that would constitutes a time inconsistency. And for those who believe in multiverse/many-worlds theories, choosing the early filter shortens the lives of everyone in half of all universes/branches where a copy of you is making this decision, which doesn't seem like a good thing. It seems clear that, ignoring human deviations from ideal rationality, the right decision of the future you is to choose the late filter.
Creating a Less Wrong prediction market
I will bet 500 karma that a funny picture thread will appear on Less Wrong within one year. If anyone is interested in the bet, we can better define terms.
Right now the LW software doesn't support karma transfers. Until it does and we can develop a more robust prediction market, let's just record the karma transfers on the wiki page that already exists for this purpose.
I will also give 100 karma to anyone that donates $10 to the SIAI before the current fundraising campaign is over.
10,000 karma for the first person with a karma transfer source code patch?
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.
Hamster in Tutu Shuts Down Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider was shut down yesterday by a hamster in a tutu, weary scientists announced.
The Large Hadron Collider is the successor to the earlier Superconducting Super Collider, which was shut down by the US House of Representatives in 1993 after 14 miles of tunnel had been constructed at a cost of $2 billion. Since its inception, the Large Hadron Collider has been plagued by construction delays, dead technicians, broken magnet supports, electrical faults, helium containment failures, vacuum leaks, birds with baguettes, terrorists, ninjas, pirates, supervillains, hurricanes, asteroids, cosmic energy storms, and a runaway train. On one occasion it was discovered that the entire 17-mile circular tunnel had been built upside-down due to a sign error in the calculations, and the whole facility had to be carefully flipped by a giant spatula.
Cookies vs Existential Risk
I've been thinking for a while now about the possible trade-offs between present recreation and small reductions in existential risk, and I've finally gotten around to a (consequentialist) utilitarian analysis.
ETA: Most of the similar mathematical treatments I've seen assume a sort of duty to unrealized people, such as Bostrom's "Astronomical Waste" paper. In addition to avoiding that assumption, my aim was to provide a more general formula for someone to use, in which they can enter differing beliefs and hypotheses. Lastly I include 3 examples using widely varying ideas, and explore the results.
Let's say that you've got a mind to make a batch of cookies. That action has a certain amount of utility, from the process itself and/or the delicious cookies. But it might lessen (or increase) the chances of you reducing existential risk, and hence affect the chance of existential disaster itself. Now if these cookies will help x-risk reduction efforts (networking!) and be enjoyable, the decision is an easy one. Same thing if they'll hurt your efforts and you hate making, eating, and giving away cookies. Any conflict arises when cookie making/eating is in opposition to x-risk reduction. If you were sufficiently egoist then risk of death would be comparable to existential disaster, and you should consider the two risks together. For readability I’ll refer simply to existential risk.
The question I'll attempt to answer is: what reduction in the probability of existential disaster makes refraining from an activity an equally good choice in terms of expected utility? If you think that by refraining and doing something else you would reduce the risk at least that much, then rationally you should pursue the alternative. If refraining would cut risk by less than this value, then head to the kitchen.
Pain
Some time ago, I came across the All Souls College philosophy fellowship exam. It's interesting reading throughout, but one question in particular brought me up short when I read it.
What, if anything, is bad about pain?
The fact that I couldn't answer this immediately was fairly disturbing. Approaching it from the opposite angle was much simpler. It is in fact trivially easy to say what is good about pain. To do so, all you need to do is look at the people who are born without the ability to feel it: CIPA patients. You wouldn't want your kid saddled with this condition, unless for some reason you'd find it welcome for the child to die (painlessly) before the age of three, and if that fate were escaped, to spend a lifetime massively inconvenienced, disabled, and endangered by undetected and untreated injuries and illnesses great and small.
But... what, if anything, is bad about pain?
I don't enjoy it, to be sure, but I also don't enjoy soda or warm weather or chess or the sound of vacuum cleaners, and it seems that it would be a different thing entirely to claim that these things are bad. Most people don't enjoy pain, but most people also don't enjoy lutefisk or rock climbing or musical theater or having sex with a member of the same sex, and it seems like a different claim to hold that lutefisk and rock climbing and musical theater and gay sex are bad. And it's just not the case that all people don't enjoy pain, so that's an immediate dead end.
So... what, if anything, is bad about pain?
Can chess be a game of luck?
Gil Kalai, a well known mathematician, has this to say on the topic of chess and luck:
http://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2009/07/05/chess-can-be-a-game-of-luck/
I didn't follow his argument at all, but it seems like something other LW posters may understand, so I decided to post it here. Do comment on his arguments if you agree or disagree with him.
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