Related to: Hold Off On Proposing Solutions, Logical Rudeness

Politics is sometimes hard to discuss. Partly since most of us seem to unconsciously take political matters with the same degree of seriousness as our forefathers used to, because we use the same mode of thought as they used to. Back then, a bad political choice or alliance, could mean death, while the normal cost today in a democratic society might be ridicule for having supported the losing team or position.

Nevertheless, politics should be taken seriously. Bad politics means that it'll take longer for us humans to reach world peace, an end to hunger and disease, and favourable conditions so that no one will create an unfriendly AI. Therefore, discussing  politics is vital so that, someday, some collective actions could be performed to alter the political course for the better.

But what should that collective action be? - what should the new course(s) be? - and who should do it? - and what does "for the better" imply? To engage in politics one needs to be able to give some (implicit or explicit) answers to these questions. This can be done, and in so doing one has constructed a political ideology - which might be similar to existing ideologies or it might be different.

A political ideology might be constructed in various ways. In this and a few more posts I will propose one way of doing that. These posts might be seen as a tutorial in constructing a political ideology. In these posts I will not suggest an answer to what the best political system should be, nor will I follow my own instructions. But if one should follow these instructions I believe that one can answer the questions mentioned above.

Political ideologies might be constructed in various other ways. The one I discuss in my following posts is based on two principles: (1) that one should not propose an answer until one has thought about the question extensively, and (2) that one should consider the most important questions first.

Before writing the next post, here are the points I will discuss in each of them - I will write the posts as an instruction manual so I'll address you, dear reader, through them out:

• what is politics, what is the goal of engaging in politics?
• what are your most highly valued political goals?
• what facts (and interpretations) can explain most societal features, what facts/interpretations will damn most societies as not ideal?
• how much does it cost to engage in political action?
• what are the most important facts concerning political strategies?
• some thoughts on alliances, representatives and conspiracies.
• some thoughts on discussing politics generally.

Next post "The Domain of Politics"

A fun comic about seashells and Bayes' Theorem. http://xkcd.com/1236/

P/S/A:  There are single sentences which can create life-changing amounts of difference.

• P/S/A:  If you're not sure whether or not you've ever had an orgasm, it means you haven't had one, a condition known as primary anorgasmia which is 90% treatable by cognitive-behavioral therapy.
• P/S/A:  The people telling you to expect above-trend inflation when the Federal Reserve started printing money a few years back, disagreed with the market forecasts, disagreed with standard economics, turned out to be actually wrong in reality, and were wrong for reasonably fundamental reasons so don't buy gold when they tell you to.
• P/S/A:  There are many many more submissive/masochistic men in the world than there are dominant/sadistic women, so if you are a woman who feels a strong temptation to command men and inflict pain on them, and you want a large harem of men serving your every need, it will suffice to state this fact anywhere on the Internet and you will have fifty applications by the next morning.
• P/S/A:  Most of the personal-finance-advice industry is parasitic and/or self-deluded, and it's generally agreed on by economic theory and experimental measurement that an index fund will deliver the best returns you can get without huge amounts of effort.
• P/S/A:  If you are smart and underemployed, you can very quickly check to see if you are a natural computer programmer by pulling up a page of Python source code and seeing whether it looks like it makes natural sense, and if this is the case you can teach yourself to program very quickly and get a much higher-paying job even without formal credentials.

A passing thought: "... it's beneath my dignity as a human being to be scared of anything that isn't smarter than I am" (-- HJPEV) likely applies equally well to superintelligences. Similarly, "It really made you appreciate what millions of years of hominids trying to outwit each other - an evolutionary arms race without limit - had led to in the way of increased mental capacity." (-- ditto) suggests that one of the stronger spurs for superintelligences becoming as super-intelligent as possible could very well be the competition as they try to outwit each other.

Thus, instead of ancestor simulations being implemented simply out of historical curiosity, a larger portion of such simulations may arise as one super-intelligence tries to figure out another by working out how its competitor arose in the first place. This casts a somewhat different light on how such simulations would be built and treated, then the usual suggestion of university researchers or over-powered child-gods playing Civilization-3^^^3.

* Assume for a moment that you're in the original, real (to whatever degree that word has meaning) universe, and you're considering the vast numbers of copies of yourself that are going to be instantiated over future eons. Is there anything that the original you can do, think, or be which could improve your future copies' lives? Eg, is there some pre-commitment you could make, privately or publicly?

* Assume for a moment that you're in one of the simulated universes. Is there anything you can do that would make your subjective experience any different from what your original experienced?

* Assume for a moment that you're a super-intelligence, or at least a proto-super-intelligence, considering running something that includes an ancestor simulation. Is there anything which the original people, or the simulated versions, could do or have done, which would change your mind about how to treat the simulated people?

* Assume for a moment that you're in one of the simulated universes... and due to battle damage to a super-intelligence, you accidentally are given root access and control over your whole universe. Taking into account Reedspacer's Lower Bound, and assuming an upper bound of not being able to noticeably affect the super-battle, what would you do with your universe?

Do not read this if you don't know anything about this Tim Ferriss person

I suspect anyone here is less different from Tim Ferriss than they'd like to be able to justifiably claim (see here, here, here, here). 

I don't mean Tim the Result. Results are clouded by what has been brought to attention in one of the 2009/2010 rationality quotes here

Were it possible to trace the succession of ideas in the mind of Sir Isaac Newton, during the time that he made his greatest discoveries, I make no doubt but our amazement at the extent of his genius would a little subside. But if, when a man publishes his discoveries, he either through a design, or through habit, omit the intermediary steps by which he himself arrived at them, it is no wonder that his speculations confound them, and that the generality of mankind stand amazed at his reach of thought. If a man ascend to the top of a building by the help of a common ladder, but cut away most of the steps after he has done with them, leaving only every ninth of tenth step, the view of the ladder, in the condition which he has pleased to exhibit it, gives us a prodigious, but unjust view of the man who could have made use of it. But if he had intended that any body should follow him, he should have left the ladder as he constructed it, or perhaps as he found it, for it might have been a mere accident that threw it in his way... I think that the interests of science have suffered by the excessive admiration and wonder with which several first rate philosophers are considered, and that an opinion of the greater equality of mankind, in point of genius, and power of understanding, would be of real service in the present age." - Joseph Priestly, The History and present State of Electricity

I mean Tim the method.

The varieties of achievements he's done are behaviourally distinct from living normal life. They are not so complicated to learn though. 

I invite you to ask the following question: What is one thing he's done I haven't that probably I could do, and what is the explanation I invented to myself for not having done it? Do I truly believe this explanation? Think for a minute before reading more

When I ask this to friends who read some of his stuff, I see three kinds of answers:

This is impossible for anyone who doesn't have property X (where X is always a fixed characteristic, like place of birth, blondness, impeccable genetic motivation)

We have very different values, and there is no point in trying that about which I don't care - interestingly, with every new book, there are more interests on the table to be considered "not my values", but no one suddenly came to me and said: Wow, finally he cares about throwing knives! I have reason to try after all. Are my friends values narrowing in proportion to Tim's expansions?

There are a lot of people who don't want to have more money, learn languages, work less, or travel a lot, but there are much fewer people who besides all of those don't want to exercise effectively, learn quickly, improve their sex lives, throw knives, memorize card decks, program, dance tango, become an angel investor, be famous, write books, cook well, get thinner, read quicker, contact interesting people, outsource boring stuff and so on...

The third kind is personal attack. People claim he has property E, which makes him Evil, and his evil either is proof of the falsity of his accomplishments, or is proof that emulating Tim means you are a dark creature who shall not pass through the gates of heaven. The most interesting E's are "He's a brilliant marketing man, selling profitable lies, but marketing is Evil." "He doesn't understand survivor bias, and how lucky he was, and has not read outliers to know it takes min4000 hours to get good at stuff" "He's a good looking ivy league blonde, this makes him evil" (this girl probably had in mind Nietzsche's lamb morality, from Genealogy of Morals).

What is one thing he's done you haven't that probably you could do, and what is the explanation you invented to yourself for not having done it? Do you truly believe this explanation? Would your best rationalist friend truly believe that explanation?

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.

Money is one measure of social status. People compare themselves favorably or unfavorably to others in their social circles based on their wealth and their earning power, and signals thereof, and compare their social circles favorably or unfavorably with other social circles based on the average wealth of people in the social circles. Humans crave social status, and this is one of people’s motivations for making money. 

Effective altruists attempt to quantify “amount of good done” and maximize it. Once this framing is adopted, “amount of good done” becomes a measure of social status in the same way that money is. Most people who aspire to be effective altruists will be partially motivated by a desire to matter more than other people, in the sense of doing more good. People who join the effective altruism movement may do so partially out of a desire to matter more than people who are not in the movement. 

Harnessing status motivations for the sake of doing the most good can have profound positive impacts. But under this paradigm, effective altruists will generally be motivated to believe that they’re doing more good than other people are. This motivation is not necessarily dominant in any given case, but it’s sufficiently strong to be worth highlighting.

With this in mind, note that effective altruists will be motivated to believe that the activities that they themselves are capable of engaging in have higher value than they actually do, and that activities that others are engaged in have lower value than they actually do. Without effort to counterbalance this motivation, effective altruists’ views of the philanthropic landscape will be distorted, and they’ll be apt to bias others in favor of the areas that use their own core competencies.

I worry that the effective altruist community hasn’t taken sufficient measures to guard against this issue. In particular, I’m not aware of any overt public discussion of it. Independently of whether or not there are examples of public discussion that I’m unaware of, the fact that I’m not aware of any suggests that any discussion that has occurred hasn’t percolated enough.

I’ll refrain from giving specific examples that I see as causes for concern, on account of political sensitivity. The effective altruist community is divided into factions, and Politics is the Mind-Killer. I believe that there are examples of each faction irrationally overestimating the value of their activities, and/or irrationally undervaluing the value of other faction's activities, and I believe that in each case, motivated reasoning of the above type may play a role.

I request that commenters not discuss particular instances in which they believe that this has occurred, or is occurring, as I think that such discussion would reduce collaboration between different factions of the effective altruist community. 

The effective altruist movement is in early stages, and it’s important to arrive at accurate conclusions about effective philanthropy as fast as possible. At this stage in time, it may be that the biggest contribution that members of the community can make is to engender and engage in an honest and unbiased discussion of how best to make the world a better place.

I don't have a very definite proposal for how this can be accomplished. I welcome any suggestions. For now, I would encourage effective altruist types to take pride in being self-skeptical when it comes to favorable assessments of their potential impact relative to other effective altruist types, or relative to people outside of the effective altruist community.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Vipul Naik and Nick Beckstead for feedback on an earlier draft of this post.

Note: I formerly worked as a research analyst at GiveWell. All views here are my own.

I cross-posted this article to http://www.effective-altruism.com/

It's well-established that 0 decibans means 1:1 odds or 50% confidence; that 10 decibans means 10:1 odds; that -10 decibans means 1:10 odds; and that fractional numbers of decibans have similar meaning.

Does it make sense to talk about "i decibans", or "10 + 20i decibans"? If so, what does that actually mean?

I would appreciate it very much if anyone would take a close look at this-- it looks sound to me, but it also appeals to my prejudices.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=E42TQNWhW3w#!

My comments are in square brackets. Everything else is my notes on the Jamie Timmons lecture from the video.

Short version: 12% of people become less healthy from exercise. 20% of people get nothing from exercise. This is a matter of genetics, not doing exercise wrong.

****

Ask a hundred people about exercise, you'll get a wide range of answers about what exercise is and what good it might do for health, and the same for health professionals.

You need to focus on the evidence that exercise affects particular health outcomes. Weight and health are not strongly correlated. BMI is problematic.

There's a recommendation for 150 minutes of exercise/week, but this isn't sound. People who *report* being active have better health. People who are fitter have better health. These are not evidence that having a person with low activity take up exercise will make them healthier.

Nothing but a supervised intervention study is good enough.

Improved lifestyle is better than Metformin for preventing diabetes. (Studies) Exercise + diet modification has a powerful effect of preventing and slowing the progression of Type II diabetes. People with Type II have more cardiovascular disease (heart attacks and strokes). However, it doesn't follow that the lifestyle changes which help with Type II will also help with CVD. [I'm surprised]

Diabetes doesn't kill, CVD does, and a major motivation for the NHS to care is that CVD is expensive.

[9:45] Two studies which find that lifestyle intervention has no effect on CVD in diabetics. [11:00] One study which found that lifestyle intervention prevents Type II but doesn't affect microvascular disease (blindness and ulcers). [I'm not sure what this means. Maybe people can have the ill effects of Type II without the disease showing up in their blood sugar levels?] There are no supervised exercise-only intervention studies which show that exercise prevents long term disease progression.

[13:00] The usual advice on exercise from the NHS (pretty similar in the US): Aerobic exerise must raise your heart rate and make you sweat to be benefiscial. The more exercise you do, the better. Do a minimum of 150 minutes/week of aerobic exercise + strength training. If you do more than 150 minutes/week, you'll gain even more health benefits. Using a skipping rope is an example of vigorous intensity exercise. People aren't following this advice, and a major factor is the amount of time required. The advice is based on best guesses.

[15:55] Exercise will increase aerobic capacity in 80% of people (lowers all-cause mortality), improve insulin action in 65% of people (lowers type II diabetes by 50%), reduce blood pressure in >55% of people (lowers strokes 25%), increase good cholesterol in 70% of people (less vascular disease), promote muscle and bone mass (? less fractures and 'aging')

[17:40] Exercise response graphs. The average person gets a 15% increase in aerobic capacity, but a few get less capacity if they exercise. Insulin response-- average of 20% improvement. Some people get better, some get worse. A high proportion, maybe the majority, have little or no change. The people in this chart were doing 150 minutes/week of supervised exercise.

[20:00] High-intensity exercise is exercise which depends on stored energy, there's no way to take in enough oxygen to contribute. An athlete might be able to continue for 10 minutes. The average person can continue for more like 30 seconds to one minute.

[22:00] Experiments with high-intensity/rest intervals: 3 x 20 seconds of high intensity. [25:00] Charts showing flattened glucose spike (there probably was a peak, but the test missed the moment) and less isulin in the blood after only two weeks of 6 x 30 seconds interval training (total 7 minutes).

[30:54] "Advice has been based on what epidemiology methods can detect, not what is actually important or required." Health questionaires don't include things like 20 seconds of running for the bus.

[33:00] Ten days of bed rest will make healthy people insulin resistant.

[35:00] It looks as though modern hunter gatherers expend about as much energy/mass as Americans on the east coast do. [I found I could make sense out of the graphs by using full screen.] This evidence suggests that people are eating more rather than moving less. The evidence for 7 minutes of HIIT three times a week isn't completely solid, but it's at least as good as the evidence for 150 minutes/week.

[38:36] ..... Epidemiology of a sort-- evidence that eating chocolate makes it more likely to get a Nobel prize. Beautiful corelation! The Swiss eat the most chocolate and get the most prizes. The Swedes are an outlier-- they don't eat as much chocolate as they should to get so many prizes. That the prize is given in Sweden might have something to do with this. Cocoa has flavenols which slow age-related cognitive decline, but the corelation is probably just a coincidence.

[40:00] 12% of healthy people make their blood pressure **higher** by exercising 150 minutes a week. 20% get little or no improvement. [42:00] Graphs of low responders for aerobic capacity, muscle mass, and insulin sensitivity. Exercise does slow progression of diabetes on the average, but that doesn't apply to all individuals.

[44:47] There's no obvious indicator to tell high responders from low responders in advance. You have to either check the genes or track the results of exercise. [45:00] Finding non- or adverse responders: change in aerobic fitness is 60% genetic, insulin sensitivity is 40% genetic, strength is 50% genetic. These are estimates from family studies, including twin studies. There are 10 million genes variants which might have at least a 5% effect.

[47:35] There's a group of 27 genes which together can 'predict' gains in VO2max. It isn't necessary to understand how the genes work to create their effect as long as that effect is predictable, and it's possible that we will never understand something so complex. There may be drug combinations which can make exercise safe and effective for non-adaptors. There's research happening. It's possible to breed rats which are better at responding to training.

[53:52] A life-style program will *on average* reduce the risk of developing type II diabetes. We *don't know* whether exercise-training on its own will reduce heart-disease, angina, etc. It does improve risk factors and symptoms. If *you* have a risk-factor for ill-health, we *can not* be sure that exercise will help. (12% *adverse* responders, 20% no effect)

[57:00]Public health (what advice should the government give?): 1 minute a day of high-intensity sprint cycling reduces major risk factors. [For what proportion of people?] People tend to like brief high intensity exercise better than longer low intensity exercise. North American study: 150 minutes/week of exercise increase one's carbon footprint by 15% (food, laundry, showers).

Safety: 2 million marathoners have been studied. Very low fatalities. HIIT isn't likely to be more dangerous. [Ack! Ack! Ack! What happened to all the care about evidence? Marathoning isn't sprinting. Fatalities during the race aren't the only thing that can go wrong. People who do marathons aren't randomly selected.]

HIIT has be done safely by medically supervised diabetes and heart failure patients. It would take a billion dollars to do a thorough supervised intervention study. Some pieces of it have been done. This is much less than big drug companies spend, without much results. The current hope is finding the gene markers and then useful drugs for non and adverse responders. There are no average people!

**** http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/242498.php

Summary of a TV show which has more details about High Intensity Interval Training.

My main objection to Coherent Extrapolated Volition (CEV) is the "Extrapolated" part. I don't see any reason to trust the extrapolated volition of humanity - but this isn't just for self centred reasons. I don't see any reason to trust my own extrapolated volition. I think it's perfectly possible that my extrapolated volition would follow some scenario like this:

1. It starts with me, Armstrong 1.  I want to be more altruistic at the next level, valuing other humans more.
2. The altruistic Armstrong 2 wants to be even more altruistic. He makes himself into a perfectly altruistic utilitarian towards humans, and increases his altruism towards animals.
3. Armstrong 3 wonders about the difference between animals and humans, and why he should value one of them more. He decided to increase his altruism equally towards all sentient creatures.
4. Armstrong 4 is worried about the fact that sentience isn't clearly defined, and seems arbitrary anyway. He increase his altruism towards all living things.
5. Armstrong 5's problem is that the barrier between living and non-living things isn't clear either (e.g. viruses). He decides that he should solve this by valuing all worthwhile things - is not art and beauty worth something as well?
6. But what makes a thing worthwhile? Is there not art in everything, beauty in the eye of the right beholder? Armstrong 6 will make himself value everything.
7. Armstrong 7 is in turmoil: so many animals prey upon other animals, or destroy valuable rocks! To avoid this, he decides the most moral thing he can do is to try and destroy all life, and then create a world of stasis for the objects that remain.

There are many other ways this could go, maybe ending up as a negative utilitarian or completely indifferent, but that's enough to give the flavour. You might trust the person you want to be, to do the right things. But you can't trust them to want to be the right person - especially several levels in (compare with the argument in this post, and my very old chaining god idea). I'm not claiming that such a value drift is inevitable, just that it's possible - and so I'd want my initial values to dominate when there is a large conflict.

Nor do I give Armstrong 7's values any credit for having originated from mine. Under torture, I'm pretty sure I could be made to accept any system of values whatsoever; there are other ways that would provably alter my values, so I don't see any reason to privilege Armstrong 7's values in this way.

"But," says the objecting strawman, "this is completely different! Armstrong 7's values are the ones that you would reach by following the path you would want to follow anyway! That's where you would get to, if you started out wanting to be more altruistic, had control over you own motivational structure, and grew and learnt and knew more!"

"Thanks for pointing that out," I respond, "now that I know where that ends up, I must make sure to change the path I would want to follow! I'm not sure whether I shouldn't be more altruistic, or avoid touching my motivational structure, or not want to grow or learn or know more. Those all sound pretty good, but if they end up at Armstrong 7, something's going to have to give."