= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
The Need for Universal Experience Classes
In school we learn wonderful things like how to find integrals, solve equations, and how to calculate valence electrons of elements based on their atomic numbers. Because, obviously, they will be very important in our futures -- especially if we become artists, musicians, writers, actors, and business people.
We learn so much in school. Yet, when most people look at paintings they don’t truly understand them. When most people listen to music, they don’t really know what they’re hearing. Most people would fail simple music theory tests, even though many have listened to music most days of the week since they were babies!
Similarly, if you have working eyes, you should ask “Why do shadows look like they do? What color is snow, really? Can I predict the colors of different colored materials at different times of the day? If not, why? I have been seeing them for years, haven’t I?”
I think the problem here is that people can’t understand what is really important. Calculus, mechanical physics, chemistry, microiology, etc. are interesting to learn, perhaps. But, they are relatively advanced topics. People don’t use them in daily life unless they are professionals. Why not learn things that we think about every day instead of those that will frankly be useless to most?
Why don’t we learn how to understand our senses?
Learning about sight, sounds, thoughts, etc. should fit in somewhere in the first year of high school. Everyone needs to learn the physics of art and color (e.g. this and this), music theory, rationality, and logic.
For example, why should people start learning (or pretending to learn) philosophy, the art of thinking, in college? Should we be able to make life-changing decisions without even knowing how to spot errors in our thinking?
As a science researcher, I know first hand how hard it is to find a good balance between being well versed in worldly topics and being focused on a field in order to excel in it. But, both of these areas of study should not be called the true basics, in my opinion.
As president of my school's philosophy club, I took a different approach to teaching the basics of philosophy and thinking than traditional classes do. Instead of asking students to discuss the lives and ideas of famous Greek philosophers, I asked them to analyze their own lives and make their own philosophies. As expected, they were terrible at it at first. But, by the end of the year people began to actually think about the world around them.
So, my point is that we should -- in life and in school -- emphasize actual everyday thinking more.
The biggest challenge is that it takes so long!
Resources for quantum decision theory research
(pdf) http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/9411/9411073v1.pdf
(pdf) http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0710/0710.0435v3.pdf
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0612185
http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.2718
http://www.quantiki.org/wiki/Multipartite_entanglement
http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v100/i9/e090502
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1062335
http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v7/i8/p2333_1
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5390026
http://arxiv.org/find/gr-qc,quant-ph/1/au:+oppenheim/0/1/0/all/0/1
(pdf) http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/jono/articles/twowrongs-1783.pdf
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnum ber=5391327
I wrote out some paragraphs about how these are very incomplete and unordered but useful and blabla bla disclaimers and trading quantum information between superintelligences that'd seemingly been lost to the environment and trading between quantum branches and bla bla and how cosmological natural selection is relevant but Less Wrong ate it and I can't convince myself to rewrite it. So, here. My not-passive-agressive apologies for being schizotypal. The marginal cost of my efforts is probably higher than your model suggests, but I realize that nonetheless I'm promoting suboptimal norms for what does or doesn't get to count as a well-intentioned effort at communication. I accept all downvotes as justified.
How to detonate a technology singularity using only parrot level intelligence - new meetup.com group in Silicon Valley to design and create it
http://www.meetup.com/technology-singularity-detonator
9 people joined in the last 5 hours and the first meetup hasn't even happened yet. This is the meetup description, including technical designs and how it leads to singularity:
The plan is to detonate an intelligence explosion (leading to a technology-singularity) starting with an open-source Java artificial intelligence (AI) software which networks peoples' minds together through the internet using realtime interactive psychology of feedback loops between mouse movements and generated audio. "Technological singularity refers to the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than human intelligence through technological means." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity Computer programming is not required to join the group, but some kind of technical or abstract thinking skill is. We are going to make this happen, not talk about it endlessly like so many other AI groups do. Audivolv 0.1.7 is a very early and version of the user-interface. The final version will be a massively multiplayer audio game unlike any existing game. It will learn based on mouse movements in realtime instead of requiring good/bad buttons to train it. The core AI systems have not been created yet. Audivolv is just the user-interface for that. http://sourceforge.net/projects/audivolv The whole system will be 1 file you double-click to run and it works immediately on Windows, Mac, or Linux. This does not include Audivolv yet and has some parts that may be removed: http://sourceforge.net/projects/humanainet It must be a "Friendly AI", which means it will be designed not to happen like in the Terminator movies or similar science fiction. It will work toward more productive goals and help the Human species. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligence My plan to make that happen is for it to be made of many peoples' minds and many computers, so it is us. It becomes smarter when we become smarter. One of the effects of that will be to extremely increase Dunbar's Number, which is the number of people or organizations that a person can intelligently interact with before forgetting others. Dunbar's number is estimated around 150 today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
This only requires the AI be as smart as a parrot, since the people using the program do most of the thinking and the AI only organizes their thoughts statistically enough to decide who should connect to who else, in the way evolved code is traded (and verified to use only math so its safe) between computers automatically, in this massively multiplayer audio game. We will detonate a technology singularity using only the intelligence of a parrot plus the intelligence of people using the program. This is very surprising to most people who think huge grids of computers and experts are required to build Human intelligence in a machine. This is a shortcut, and will have much better results because it is us so it has no reason to act against us, like an AI made only of software may do.
Infrastructure
Communication between these programs through the internet will be done as a Distributed Hash Table. The most important part of that is each key (hash of some file bytes) has a well-defined distance to each other key, a distance(hash1,hash2) function, which proves the correct direction to search the network to find the bytes of any hash, or to statistically verify (but not certainly) that its not in the network. There may be a way to do it certainly, but for my purposes approximate searching will work.
In the same Distributed Hash Table, there will be public-keys, used like filenames or identities, whose content can be modified only by whoever has the private-key. If code evolves to include calculations based on your mouse movements and the mouse movements of 5 other people in realtime, then the numbers from those other mouse movements (between -1 and 1 for each of 2 dimensions, for each of 5 people) will be digitally-signed so everyone who uses the evolved code will know it is using the same people's continuing mouse movements instead of is a modified code. The code can be modified, but that would have a different hash and would be considered on its own merits instead of knowledge about the previous code and its specific connections to specific people. This will be done in realtime, not something to be saved and loaded later from a hard-drive. Each new mouse position (or a few of them sent at once) will be digitally-signed and broadcast to the network, the same as any other data broadcast to the network.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table
Similarly, but more fuzzy, the psychology of feedback loops between mouse movements and automatically evolving Java code, will be used as a distance function, and a second network organized that way, so you can search the network in the direction of other people whose psychology is more similar to your current state of mind and how you're using the program. This decentralized network will be searchable by your subconscious thoughts, because subconscious thoughts are expressed in how your mouse movements cause the code to evolve.
As you search this network automatically by moving your mouse, you will trade evolved code with those computers, always automatically verifying the code only uses math and no file-access or java.lang.System class or anything else not provably safe. You will experience the downloaded code as it gradually connects to the code evolved for your mouse movements, code which generates audio as 44100 audio amplitudes (number between -1 and 1) per second per speaker.
Some of the variables in the evolved code will be the hash of other evolved code. Each evolved code will have a hash, probably from the SHA-256 algorithm, so it could be a length 64 hex string written in the code. Each variable will be a number beween -1 and 1. No computer will have all the codes for all its variables, but for those it doesn't have, it will use them simply as a variable. If it has those codes, then there is an extra behavior of giving that code an amount of influence proportional to the value of the variable, or deleting the code if the variable becomes negative for too long. In that way, evolved code will decide which other evolved code to download and how much influence each evolved code should have on the array of floating point numbers in the local computer.
Since the decentralized network will be searched by psychology (instead of text or pixels in an image or other things search-engines know how to do today), and since its connected to each person's subconscious mind through mouse/music feedback loops, the effect will be a collective mind made of many people and computers. We are Human AI Net, do you want to be temporarily assimilated?
Alternative To Brain Implants
Statistically inputs and outputs to neurons subconsciously without extra hardware.
A neuron is a brain cell that connects to thousands of other neurons and slowly adjusts its electricity and chemical patterns as it learns.
An incorrect assumption has extremely delayed the creation of technology that transfers thoughts between 2 brains. That assumption is, to quickly transfer large amounts of information between a brain and a computer, you need hardware that connects directly to neurons.
Eyes and ears transfer a lot of information to a brain, but the other part of that assumption is eyes and ears are only useful for pictures and sounds that make sense and do not appear as complete randomness or whitenoise. People assume anything that sounds like radio static (a typical random sound) can't be used to transfer useful information into a brain.
Most of us remember what a dial-up-modem sounds like. It sounds like information is in it but its too fast for Humans to understand. That's true of the dial-up-modem sound only because its digital and is designed for a modem instead of for Human ears which can hear around 1500 tones and simultaneously a volume for each. The dial-up-modem can only hear 1 tone that oscillates between 1 and 0, and no volume, just 1 or 0. It gets 56000 of those 1s and 0s per second. Human ears are analog so they have no such limits, but brains can think at most at 100 changes per second.
If volume can have 20 different values per tone, then Human ears can hear up to 1500*100*log_base_2(20)=650000 bits of information per second. If you could take full advantage of that speed, you could transfer a book every few seconds into your brain, but the next bottleneck is your ability to think that fast.
If you use ears the same way dial-up-modems use a phone line, but in a way designed for Human ears and Human brains instead of computers, then your ears are much faster data transfer devices than brain implants, and the same is true for transferring information as random-appearing grids of changing colors through your eyes. We have computer speakers and screens for input to brains. We still have some work to do on the output speeds of mouse and keyboard, but there are electricity devices you can wear on your head for the output direction. For the input direction, eyes and ears are currently far ahead of the most advanced technology in their data speeds to your brain.
So why do businesses and governments keep throwing huge amounts of money at connecting computer chips directly to neurons? They should learn to use eyes and ears to their full potential before putting so much resources into higher bandwidth connections to brains. They're not nearly using the bandwidth they already have to brains.
Intuitively most people know how music can affect their subconscious thoughts. Music is a low bandwidth example. It has mostly predictable and repeated sounds. The same voices. The same instruments. What I'm talking about would sound more like radio static or whitenoise. You wouldn't know what information is in it from its sound. You would only understand it after it echoed around your neuron electricity patterns in subconscious ways.
Most people have only a normal computer available, so the brain-to-computer direction of information flow has to be low bandwidth. It can be mouse movements, gyroscope based game controllers, video camera detecting motion, or devices like that. The computer-to-brain direction can be high bandwidth, able to transfer information faster than you can think about it.
Why hasn't this been tried? Because science proceeds in small steps. This is a big step from existing technology but a small step in the way most people already have the hardware (screen, speakers, mouse, etc). The big step is going from patterns of random-appearing sounds or video to subconscious thoughts to mouse movements to software to interpret it statistically, and around that loop many times as the Human and computer learn to predict each other. Compared to that, connecting a chip directly to neurons is a small step.
Its a feedback loop: computer, random-appearing sound or video, ears or eyes, brain, mouse movements, and back to computer. Its very indirect but uses hardware that has evolved for millions of years, compared to low-bandwidth hardware they implant in brains. Eyes and ears are much higher bandwidth, and we should be using them in feedback loops for brain-to-brain and brain-to-computer communication.
What would it feel like? You would move the mouse and instantly hear the sounds change based on how you moved it. You would feel around the sound space for abstract patterns of information you're looking for, and you would learn to find it. When many people are connected this way through the internet, using only mouse movements and abstract random-like sounds instead of words and pictures, thoughts will flow between the brains of different people, thoughts that they don't know how to put into words. They would gradually learn to think more as 1 mind. Brains naturally learn to communicate with any system connected to them. Brains dont care how they're connected. They grow into a larger mind. It happens between the parts of your brain, and it will happen between people using this system through the internet.
Artificial intelligence software does not have to replace us or compete with us. The best way to use it is to connect our minds together. It can be done through brain implants, but why wait for that technology to advance and become cheap and safe enough? All you need is a normal computer and the software to connect our subconscious thoughts and statistical patterns of interaction with the computer.
Dial-up-modem sounds were designed for computers. These interactive sounds/videos would be designed for Human ears/eyes and the slower but much bigger and parallel way the data goes into brains. For years I've been carefully designing a free open-source software http://HumanAI.net - Human and Artificial Intelligence Network, or Human AI Net - to make this work. It will be a software that does for Human brains what dial-up-modems do for computers, and it will sound a little like a dial-up-modem at first but start to sound like music when you learn how to use it. I don't need brain implants to flow subconscious thoughts between your brains over internet wires.
Intelligence is the most powerful thing we know of. The brain implants are simply overkill, even if they become advanced enough to do what I'll use software and psychology to do. We can network our minds together and amplify intelligence and share thoughts without extra hardware. After thats working, we can go straight to quantum devices for accessing brains without implants. Lets do this through software and skip the brain implant paradigm. If it works just a little, it will be enough that our combined minds will figure out how to make it work a lot more. Thats how I prefer to start a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity We don't need businesses and militaries to do it first. We have the hardware on our desks. We're only missing the software. It doesn't have to be smarter than Human software. It just has to be smart enough to connect our subconscious thoughts together. The authorities have their own ideas about how we should communicate and how our minds should be allowed to think together, but their technology was obsolete before it was created. We can do everything they can do without brain implants, using only software and subconscious psychology. We don't need a smarter-than-Human software, or anything nearly that advanced, to create a technology singularity. Who wants to help me change the direction of Human evolution using an open-source (GNU GPL) software? Really, you can create a technology singularity starting from a software with the intelligence of a parrot, as long as you use it to connect Human minds together.
Those who aspire to perfection
A short reply to the Book of Eliezer and a comment on the Book of Luke.
No one wants to save the world. You must thoroughly research this. Those who think they truly think they want to truly want to save the world, in reality they're actually just horribly afraid of the consequences of not saving the world. And that is a world of difference.
Eliezer, you know that ridiculously strong aversion to lost purposes and sphexishness that you have?1 Sometimes, very rarely, other people have that too. And most often it is a double-negative aversion. I am sure you know as much as very nearly anyone what it feels like to work from the inside of a triple-negative motivation system by default, for fear of being as evil and imperfect as every other human in history, among other less noble fears. You quickly learn to go meta to escape the apparently impossible double-binds—if going meta isn't itself choosing a side—but by constantly moving vertically you never practice pushing to the left or to the right, or choosing which responsibility to sacrifice in the first place. And even if you could, why would you want to be evil?
And for this rare kind of person, telling them to stop obsessing over prudence or to just try to make marginal contributions, immediately gets pattern-matched to that ages-old adage: "The solution is easy, just shut up and be evil.". Luckily it is this kind of person we can make the most use of, when it comes to the big crunch time—if we're not already in it.
1We do not yet know how to teach this skill, and no one can be a truly aspiring rationalist without it, even if they can still aspire to perfection. That does mean I believe there are like maybe 5 truly aspiring rationalists in this community, a larger set of falsely aspiring rationalists, a further much larger set of of truly aspiring aspiring "rationalists", and a further much much larger set of falsely aspiring aspiring "rationalists". (3, 30, 300, 3000, say.) I don't think anyone thinks about this nearly enough, because no one has any affordance—no affordance to not not-think about it—especially not when they're thinking fuzzy happy thoughts about creating aspiring rationalists or becoming a rationalist.
My true rejection
Here's why I'm not going to give money to the SIAI any time soon.
Let's suppose that Friendly AI is possible. In other words, it's possible that a small subset of humans can make a superhuman AI which uses something like Coherent Extrapolated Volition to increase the happiness of humans in general (without resorting to skeevy hacks like releasing an orgasm virus).
Now, the extrapolated volition of all humans is probably a tricky thing to determine. I don't want to get sidetracked into writing about my relationship history, but sometimes I feel like it's hard to extrapolate the volition of one human.
If it's possible to make a Friendly superhuman AI that optimises CEV, then it's surely way easier to make an unFriendly superhuman AI that optimises a much simpler variable, like the share price of IBM.
Long before a Friendly AI is developed, some research team is going to be in a position to deploy an unFriendly AI that tries to maximise the personal wealth of the researchers, or the share price of the corporation that employs them, or pursues some other goal that the rest of humanity might not like.
And who's going to stop that happening? If the executives of Corporation X are in a position to unleash an AI with a monomaniacal dedication to maximising the Corp's shareholder value, it's probably illegal for them not to do just that.
If you genuinely believe that superhuman AI is possible, it seems to me that, as well as sponsoring efforts to design Friendly AI, you need to (a) lobby against AI research by any groups who aren't 100% committed to Friendly AI (pay off reactionary politicians so AI regulation becomes a campaign issue, etc.) (b) assassinate any researchers who look like they're on track to deploying an unFriendly AI, then destroy their labs and backups.
But SIAI seems to be fixated on design at the expense of the other, equally important priorities. I'm not saying I expect SIAI to pursue illegal goals openly, but there is such a thing as a false-flag operation.
While Michelle Bachmann isn't talking about how AI research is a threat to the US constitution, and Ben Goertzel remains free and alive, I can't take the SIAI seriously.
LW/OB Rationality Quotes, June 2011
I saw this article and thought "ah, that's what's been missing." There's many a bon mot posted here that's outside the domain of the usual rationality quotes thread. Overcoming Bias seems still to be excluded from those too, even if the two blogs have diverged.
So:
This is a thread for posting any interesting rationality-related quotes you've seen on LW/OB.
- Please post all quotes separately (so that they can be voted up/down separately) unless they are strongly related/ordered.
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not post quotes that are NOT comments/posts on LW/OB - there is a separate thread for this.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per thread, please.
(You may care to check the previous posts for duplicates.)
Torture Simulated with Flipbooks
What if the brain of the person you most care about were scanned and the entirety of that person's mind and utility function at this moment were printed out on paper, and then several more "clock ticks" of their mind as its states changed exactly as they would if the person were being horribly tortured were printed out as well, into a gigantic book? And then the book were flipped through, over and over again. Fl-l-l-l-liiiiip! Fl-l-l-l-liiiiip!
Would this count as simulated torture? If so, would you care about stopping it, or is it different from computer-simulated torture?
List of compartmentalized people (who both win and fail at truth-seeking)
Following up on an impromptu list XiXiDu made of famous recent scientists & thinkers who also held quite odd beliefs, I've created a wiki article with that list & a few other people.
This Discussion is posted for feedback on a few points:
- Is this a good idea in the first place? I feel vaguely uneasy, like it could be taken as a 'hit list' or a list of inviolable norms.
- What's a better name? 'Irrationalists' is a bad name but the only half-way self-explanatory one I could think of at the moment.
- Who's missing? There are currently only 8 people on the list right now.
- Is it reasonable to limit the list temporally only to people who lived in the 20th century & later, and so had access to all the data and philosophy done then that we take for granted?
- I added in a few 'See Alsos' that I could think of; are there more germane wiki articles? Especially LW articles? (I know Aumann in particular has been discussed occasionally by Eliezer - worth linking directly?)
[POLL] Slutwalk
I recently heard about the upcoming event (or set of events) Slutwalk. I realize that this is somewhat political and may have some mind-killing effects, but my main interest is in the Less Wrong reaction to the idea. From the wikipedia page[1]:
The "Toronto Slut Walk" refers to a protest held on April 3, 2011 in Toronto. Protesters walked from Queen's Park (Toronto) to the Toronto Police Headquarters located on Central Street [1]. These protesters were dressed in revealing clothing and holding signs in order to reject the belief that female rape victims are "asking for it"[2]. They marched in response to remarks made by a Toronto police officer and judge. Women are also organizing other "slut walks" around Canada and the United States[3][4], including one scheduled for August 20th, 2011 in New York City[5].
Before continuing to read, please answer the poll below as to how you feel about the idea of the "Slutwalk."
I have many friends who are involved with the Slutwalk and my first impression is that it is a good idea; that framing and terminology, if not a strong part of policy decisions, can have large effects on personal wellbeing. Also that while dressing more modestly may have some effect on sexual assault, having an authority put any onus of a crime on a victim harshly reduces the disincentive for perpetrators.
On the other hand, I have been known to be clueless before in matters of activism, and I recall that Robin Hanson has made cutting remarks about protest being about attracting mates and making a show of identifying with groups, and this certainly seems like it could fit that description to a T. So I am curious what others' reactions are.
This is a political issue, and we all know politics is the mind-killer, so I would mostly like to see what people think of this idea; specifically whether it is controversial, heavily supported, or heavily disapproved of.
I will attempt to reformat if I can figure out how to work the formatting.
EDIT: Rephrased poll options and removed references to clusters, at popular request.
References:
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