I have just donated $10,000 to the Immortality Bus, which was the most rational decision of my life

0 turchin 18 July 2015 01:13PM

I have non-zero probability to die next year. In my age of 42 it is not less than 1 per cent, and probably more. I could do many investment which will slightly lower my chance of dying – from healthy life style to cryo contract.  And I did many of them.

From economical point of view the death is at least loosing all you capital.

If my net worth is something like one million (mostly real estate and art), and I have 1 per cent chance to die, it is equal to loosing 10 k a year. But in fact more, because death it self is so unpleasant that it has large negative monetary value. And also I should include the cost of lost opportunities.

Once I had a discussion with Vladimir Nesov about what is better: to fight to immortality, or to create Friendly AI which will explain what is really good. My position was that immortality is better because it is measurable, knowable, and has instrumental value for most other goals, and also includes prevention of worst thing on earth which is the Death. Nesov said (as I remember) that personal immortality does not matter as much total value of humanity existence, and more over, his personal existence has no much value at all. All what we need to do is to create Friendly AI. I find his words contradictory because if his existence does not matter, than any human existence also doesn’t matter, because there is nothing special about him.

But later I concluded that the best is to make bets that will raise the probability of my personal immortality, existential risks prevention and creation of friendly AI simultaneously. Because it is easy to imagine situation where research in personal immortality like creation technology for longevity genes delivery will contradict our goal of existential risks reduction because the same technology could be used for creating dangerous viruses.

The best way here is invest in creating regulating authority which will be able to balance these needs, and it can’t be friendly AI because such regulation needed before it will be created.

That is why I think that US needs Transhumanist president. A real person whose value system I can understand and support. And that is why I support Zoltan Istvan for 2016 campaign.

Me and Exponential Technologies Institute donated 10 000 USD for Immortality bus project. This bus will be the start of Presidential campaign for the writer of “Transhumanist wager”. 7 film crews agreed to cover the event. It will create high publicity and cover all topics of immortality, aging research, Friendly AI and x-risks prevention. It will help to raise more funds for such type of research. 

 

Inaugral bump thread (12th July to 19th July)

5 Clarity 12 July 2015 06:49AM

Recently I came across the Akrasia Tactics Review article, then a 'bump' thread which spread the relevant content over multiple places, making tracking the content harder. It's apparent that some people believe some Lesswrong articles may be undervalued by the community (after factoring in karma as an indication of the community's appraisal)

 

Bump threads crowd out new articles and may annoy the more comprehensive or more experienced readers. This article is prototype for a regular (or whenever anyone else wants to take the initiative to start one) discussion board thread where people can lobby for increased visitation to articles of their interest. Don't make the threads run for too long - 1 week as a guide. Tag them with bump_thread

 

Future thread starters should not suggest an article in the initial discussion post, as I have. Although, this is useful as a guide for what I have in mind.

Why you should consider buying Bitcoin right now (Jan 2015) if you have high risk tolerance

4 Ander 13 January 2015 08:02PM

LessWrong is where I learned about Bitcoin, several years ago, and my greatest regret is that I did not investigate it more as soon as possible, that people here did not yell at me louder that it was important, and to go take a look at it.  In that spirit, I will do so now.

 

First of all, several caveats:

* You should not go blindly buying anything that you do not understand.  If you don't know about Bitcoin, you should start by reading about its history, read Satoshi's whitepaper, etc.  I will assume that hte rest of the readers who continue reading this have a decent idea of what Bitcoin is.

* Under absolutely no circumstances should you invest money into Bitcoin that you cannot afford to lose.  "Risk money" only!  That means that if you were to lose 100% of you money, it would not particularly damage your life.  Do not spend money that you will need within the next several years, or ever.  You might in fact want to mentally write off the entire thing as a 100% loss from the start, if that helps.

* Even more strongly, under absolutely no circumstances whatsoever will you borrow money in order to buy Bitcoins, such as using margin, credit card loans, using your student loan, etc.  This is very much similar to taking out a loan, going to a casino and betting it all on black on the roulette wheel.  You would either get very lucky or potentially ruin your life.  Its not worth it, this is reality, and there are no laws of the universe preventing you from losing.

* This post is not "investment advice".

* I own Bitcoins, which makes me biased.  You should update to reflect that I am going to present a pro-Bitcoin case.

 

So why is this potentially a time to buy Bitcoins?  One could think of markets like a pendulum, where price swings from one extreme to another over time, with a very high price corresponding to over-enthusiasm, and a very low price corresponding to despair.  As Warren Buffett said, Mr. Market is like a manic depressive.  One day he walks into your office and is exuberant, and offers to buy your stocks at a high price.  Another day he is depressed and will sell them for a fraction of that. 

The root cause of this phenomenon is confirmation bias.  When things are going well, and the fundamentals of a stock or commodity are strong, the price is driven up, and this results in a positive feedback loop.  Investors receive confirmation of their belief that things are going good from the price increase, confirming their bias.  The process repeats and builds upon itself during a bull market, until it reaches a point of euphoria, in which bad news is completely ignored or disbelieved in.

The same process happens in reverse during a price decline, or bear market.  Investors receive the feedback that the price is going down => things are bad, and good news is ignored and disbelieved.  Both of these processes run away for a while until they reach enough of an extreme that the "smart money" (most well informed and intelligent agents in the system) realizes that the process has gone too far and switches sides. 

 

Bitcoin at this point is certainly somewhere in the despair side of the pendulum.  I don't want to imply in any way that it is not possible for it to go lower.  Picking a bottom is probably the most difficult thing to do in markets, especially before it happens, and everyone who has claimed that Bitcoin was at a bottom for the past year has been repeatedly proven wrong.  (In fact, I feel a tremendous amount of fear in sticking my neck out to create this post, well aware that I could look like a complete idiot weeks or months or years from now and utterly destroy my reputation, yet I will continue anyway).

 

First of all, lets look at the fundamentals of Bitcoin.  On one hand, things are going well. 

 

Use of Bitcoin (network effect):

One measurement of Bitcoin's value is the strenght of its network effect.  By Metcalfe's law, the value of a network is proporitonal to the square of the number of nodes in the network. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

Over the long term, Bitcoin's price has generally followed this law (though with wild swings to both the upside and downside as the pendulum swings). 

In terms of network effect, Bitcoin is doing well.

 

Bitcoin transactions are hitting all time highs:  (28 day average of number of transactions).

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popular?timespan=2year&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=28&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

 

Number of Bitcoin addresses are hitting all time highs:

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-unique-addresses?timespan=2year&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=28&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

 

Merchant adoption continues to hit new highs:

BitPay/Coinbase continue to report 10% monthly growth in the number of merchants that accept Bitcoin.

Prominent companies that began accepting Bitcoin in the past year include: Dell, Overstock, Paypal, Microsoft, etc.

 

On the other hand, due to the sustained price decline, many Btcoin businesses that started up in the past two years with venture capital funding have shut down.  This is more of an effect of the price decline than a cause however.  In the past month especially there has been a number of bearish news stories, such as Bitpay laying off employees, exchanges Vault of Satoshi and CEX.io deciding to shut down, exchange Bitstamp being hacked and shut down for 3 days, but ultimately is back up without losing customer funds, etc.

 

The cost to mine a Bitcoin is commonly seen as one indicator of price.   Note that the cost to mine a Bitcoin does not directly determine the *value* or usefulness of a Bitcoin.   I do not believe in the labor theory of value: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

However, there is a stabilizing effect in commodities, in which over time, the price of an item will often converge towards the cost to produce it due to market forces. 

 

If a Bitcoin is being priced at a value much greater than the cost (in mining equipment and electricity) to create it, people will invest in mining equipment.  This results in increased 'difficulty' of mining and drives down the amount of Bitcoin that you can create with a particular piece of mining equipment.  (The amount of Bitcoins created is a fixed amount per unit of time, and thus the more mining equipment that exists, the less Bitcoin each miner will get).

If Bitcoin is being priced at a value below the cost to create it, people will stop investing in mining equipment.  This may be a signal that the price is getting too low, and could rise.

 

Historically, the one period of time where Bitcoin was priced significantly below the cost to produce it was in late 2011.  It was noted on LessWrong.  The price has not currently fallen to quite the same extent as it did back then (which may indicate that it has further to fall), however the current price relative to the mining cost indicates we are very much in the bearish side of the pendulum.

 

It is difficult to calculate an exact cost to mine a Bitcoin, because this depends on the exact hardware used, your cost of electricity, and a prediction of the future difficulty adjustments that will occur.  However, we can make estimates with websites such as http://www.vnbitcoin.org/bitcoincalculator.php

According to this site, every available Bitcoin miner will never give you back as much money as it cost, factoring in the hardware cost and electricity cost.   Upcoming more efficient miners which have not yet released yet are estimated to pay off in about a year, if difficulty grows extremely slowly, and that is for upcoming technology which has not yet even been released. 

 

There are two important breakpoints when discussing Bitcoin mining profitability.  The first is the point at which your return is enough that it pays for both the electricity and the hardware.  The second is the point at which you make more than your electricity costs, but cannot recover the hardware cost.

 

For example, lets say Alice pays $1000 on Bitcoin mining equipment.  Every day, this mining equipment can return $10 worth of Bitcoin, but it costs $5 of electricity to run.  Her gain for the day is $5, and it would take 200 days at this rate before the mining equipment paid for itself.  Once she has made the decision to purchase the mining equipment, the money spent on the miner is a sunk cost.  The money spent on electricity is not a sunk cost, she continues to have the decision every day of whether or not to run her mining equipment.  The optimal decision is to continue to run the miner as long as it returns more than the electricity cost. 

Over time, the payout she will receive from this hardware will decline, as the difficulty of mining Bitcoin increases.  Eventually, her payout will decline below the electricity cost, and she should shut the miner down.  At this point, if her total gain from running the equipment was higher than the hardware cost, it was a good investment.  If it did not recoup its cost, then it was worse than simply spending the money buying Bitcoin on an exchange in the first place.

 

This process creates a feedback into the market price of Bitcoins.  Imagine that Bitcoin investors have two choices, either they can buy Bitcoins (the commodity which has already been produced by others), or they can buy miners, and produce Bitcoins for themself.   If the Bitcoin price falls sufficiently that mining equipment will not recover its costs over time, investment money that would have gone into miners instead goes into Bitcoin, helping to support the price.  As you can see from mining cost calculators, we have passed this point already.  (In fact, we passed it months ago already).

 

The second breakpoint is when the Bitcoin price falls so low that it falls below the electricity cost of running mining equipment.  We have passed this point for many of the less efficient ways to mine.  For example, Cointerra recently shut down its cloud mining pool because it was losing money.  We have not yet passed this point for more recent and efficient miners, but we are getting fairly close to it. Crossing this point has occurred once in Bitcoin's history, in late 2011 when the price bottomed out near $2, before giving birth to the massive bull run of 2012-2013 in which the price rose by a factor of 500.

 

Market Sentiment: 

I was not active in Bitcoin back in 2011, so I cannot compare the present time to the sentiment at the November 2011 bottom.  However, sentiment currently is the worst that I have seen by a significant margin. Again, this does not mean that things could not get much, much worse before they get better!  After all, sentiment has been growing worse for months now as the price declines, and everyone who predicted that it was as bad as it could get and the price could not possibly go below $X has been wrong.  We are in a feedback loop which is strongly pumping bearishness into all market participants, and that feedback loop can continue and has continued for quite a while.

 

A look at market indicators tells us that Bitcoin is very, very oversold, almost historically oversold.  Again, this does not mean that it could not get worse before it gets better. 

 

As I write this, the price of Bitcoin is $230.  For perspective, this is down over 80% from the all time high of $1163 in November 2013.  It is still higher than the roughly $100 level it spent most of mid 2013 at.

* The average price of a Bitcoin since the last time it moved is $314.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/2ez90b/and_the_average_bitcoin_cost_basis_is/

The current price is a multiple of .73 of this price.  This is very low historically, but not the lowest it has ever ben.  THe lowest was about .39 in late 2011. 

 

* Short interest (the number of Bitcoins that were borrowed and sold, and must be rebought later) hit all time highs this week, according to data on the exchange Bitfinex, at more than 25000 Bitcoins sold short:

http://www.bfxdata.com/swaphistory/totals.php

 

* Weekly RSI (relative strength index), an indicator which tells if a stock or commodity is 'overbought' or 'oversold' relative to its history, just hit its lowest value ever.

 

Many indicators are telling us that Bitcoin is at or near historical levels in terms of the depth of this bear market.  In percentage terms, the price decline is surpassed only by the November 2011 low.  In terms of length, the current decline is more than twice as long as the previous longest bear market.

 

To summarize: At the present time, the market is pricing in a significant probability that Bitcoin is dying.

But there are some indicators (such as # of transactions) which say it is not dying.  Maybe it continues down into oblivion, and the remaining fundamentals which looked bullish turn downwards and never recover.  Remember that this is reality, and anything can happen, and nothing will save you.

 

 

Given all of this, we now have a choice.  People have often compared Bitcoin to making a bet in which you have a 50% chance of losing everything, and a 50% chance of making multiples (far more than 2x) of what you started with. 

There are times when the payout on that bet is much lower, when everyone is euphoric and has been convinced by the positive feedback loop that they will win.  And there are times when the payout on that bet is much higher, when everyone else is extremely fearful and is convinced it will not pay off. 

 

This is a time to be good rationalists, and investigate a possible opportunity, comparing the present situation to historical examples, and making an informed decision.   Either Bitcoin has begun the process of dying, and this decline will continue in stages until it hits zero (or some incredibly low value that is essentially the same for our purposes), or it will live.  Based on the new all time high being hit in number of transactions, and ways to spend Bitcoin, I think there is at least a reasonable chance it will live.  Enough of a chance that it is worth taking some money that you can 100% afford to lose, and making a bet.  A rational gamble that there is a decent probability that it will survive, at a time when a large number of others are betting that it will fail.

 

And then once you do that, try your hardest to mentally write it off as a complete loss, like you had blown the money on a vacation or a consumer good, and now it is gone, and then wait a long time.

 

 

Private currency to generate funds for effective altruism

1 Stefan_Schubert 14 February 2014 12:00AM

In the last few years we have seen two interesting revolutionary ideas on how to change the monetary system. The first is Bitcoin: the most well-known peer-to-peer currency. It has been wildly debated recently and I won't go into the detail of allegations of use in criminal activities etc (for one thing, I don't know much about it). My interest is rather in the money creation part. The people who run the Bitcoin software are rewarded for their work with new Bitcoins - a process called mining. Now the pace at which new Bitcoins are mined is limited, which means that Bitcoin creation is a zero-sum game: the more one miner contributes to the Bitcoin software, the less Bitcoins other miners get. Unsurprisingly, this has led to an arms race: miners spend nearly as much on running the software as they get back in form of new Bitcoins.

The second idea is the Chicago Plan, which was debated already in the 30's, after the great crash of 1929, but which recently was resurrected by Michael Kumhof (senior economist at IMF, of all places). The central idea of the Chicago Plan is to abolish fractional reserve banking - the system by which private banks in effect create money out of thin air. Instead of lending out most of the depositors' money, banks would effectively have to let them stay in the bank. 

Instead money would be created by the central bank/government, a process that would generate a massive seignorage for the government. According to Kumhof, it would also have other beneficial effects, such as killing off the "boom-and-bust"-cycles which he thinks fractional reserve banking are mostly responsible for, and diminishing the wasteful parts of the financial sector.

Kumhof ideas' have not been well received. Overall, it is remarkable how little reform there has been of the financial and monetary system given that the world had a major financial meltdown 2008 (and was close to an even greater one, in my understanding). Governments won't challenge the financial system radically in the near future, that's for sure.

Instead radical reforms can only come from private hands. Let us now compare the two ideas. In the Bitcoin system money is created by private hands, but in wasteful ways, which effectively means that there is very little seignorage. Under the Chicago plan, money is created by the government in much more efficient ways, which leads to a large seignorage. Now my idea is to take the best part of both of these ideas: let a private player - more exactly, an altruistic organization such as CEA - produce the money centrally, Chicago plan-like, and let the seignorage be used for altruistic purposes. (Of course, there would be some costs of running the system, but if the system was sufficiently large, these would be negligible in relation to the seignorage.)

If the altruistic organization that did this had a sufficiently good reputation, chances are greater that people would trust the system. Of course, it would try to stop the currency from being used to launder money, drug trade etc. 

Generally, people would be suspicious of private currencies where the central authority collected a seignorage, but if this seignorage was used for charitable and other altruistic purposes (and people really trusted that that would be the case), this would, I hope, be less of a problem.

What do you think? I'd be happy to get comments from people who know more about the Bitcoin system, since I don't really know it (though I find it interesting). Perhaps there is some info concerning Bitcoins that tells against this proposal; if so, I'd be interested in that.

To the folks who met in Princeton Saturday 11/16/2013

-3 HalMorris 18 November 2013 01:19PM

It was nice to be with some new people, and you seem like some interesting seekers after truth.  I'm Hal, the guy who could be grandfather to at least some of you.

I have a web site at therealtruthproject.blogspot.com.

Looking for the best thinking about
the truth, whatever it may turn out to be, and by effective ongoing practices that reveal more of the truth as needed.

That's an attempt to sum up what "Practical Epistemology" means to me.  I approached LW because I thought I'd find some encouragement among people who seem concerned about rational thinking, albeit I don't think it's enough.
It will take changing the way the world looks to the vast majority of people who never think of  joining groups to ponder the "methods of rationality" to make the world more safe, rational, and happy; that's why the phrase "Truth Project" came into my head several years ago, even if the "project" is nothing more than one guy reading and reading (and learning about social epistemology, memetics, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, chimpanzees vs bonobos, Why Nations Fail, The Idea of Justice. positive interventions in the economies of Bangladesh, etc.) and wondering how in the hell to make such a thing work.  It may sound arrogantly audacious, or crack-pot-ish just to state it, but other people buy lottery tickets.

If nothing else, this could be a starting point for more conversation, if not with me, with the other person who sat next to you.

Optimizing optimizing LessWrong

-4 [deleted] 15 August 2013 09:20PM

Our optimization process sucks.

Every now and then someone makes up a thread concerning the optimization of LW, we have a nice discussion, one or the other idea gets a number of upvotes, sometimes quite a lot, but in the end, nothing happens.

What's more, it is predictable that nothing will happen, which kills the motivation to contribute.

  • The LW staff (those who hold the authority to implement major changes!) needs to commit a considerable amount of time for the optimization of LW. If necessary, hire someone and make his main job LW optimization.
  • The people contributing to optimization threads need to get serious feedback from the staff. It is just frustrating to feel that those who are in charge of implementing changes will not even take the time to think my arguments through.

It is just a tragic waste to put so much time and effort into LW, and about nothing into optimizing it.

Cold fusion: real after all?

-3 ahbwramc 17 April 2013 07:27PM

TL,DR: cold fusion is real, apparently. Yes, really - cold fusion. I know. I wouldn't have thought so either.

-  -  -

The point of this post is basically to promote to your attention the hypothesis that cold fusion is a real physical phenomenon. For those of you not in the know, this very much flies in the face of current scientific consensus (something I'm not usually in the habit of opposing). In this case though the evidence seems to be quite straightforwardly in favour of the cold fusion advocates.

[Note: most researchers working in this area don't like the term cold fusion; partially because of the negative scientific connotations it drudges up, and partially because fusion might not be an accurate description of what's going on physically. The two preferred terms seem to be low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) and lattice-assisted nuclear reactions (LANR). I use cold fusion in this piece mainly for convenience and name-brand recognition]

Quick background - in 1989 Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, leading electrochemists of their day, announced a truly startling discovery: a tabletop apparatus of theirs had produced anomalous heat that was (according to them) orders of magnitude beyond what could be produced by chemical effects alone. The only process that can produce heat like that is a nuclear reaction, but such reactions were thought to be impossible at such low temperatures. Thinking they had discovered a new source of energy, Pons and Fleischmann were justifiably excited and hurried to publish their results. In the subsequent months a huge number of researchers tried to replicate their findings, with most being unable to do so. Of the few scientists who did get positive results, some later retracted their work, and others were criticized for sloppy experimental design. To make matters worse, errors and exaggerations were found in Pons and Fleischmann's original paper. Very quickly the scientific community as a whole had cold fusion pegged as "pathological science", and most researchers forgot about the whole affair and went back to their normal, non-energy-crisis-solving work. Pons and Fleischmann, disgraced, ended up quietly leaving the country to continue their work elsewhere, and that was the end of the cold fusion story, as far as most people were concerned. [1]

Here's where it gets interesting. Naturally, the prospect of solving the world's energy problems proved very alluring to people, so a small number of researchers continued their work with cold fusion. During the 90's some of this work was published in peer-reviewed journals, although this became less and less common as the decade wore on. As far as I know, no mainstream peer-reviewed scientific journal currently accepts cold fusion papers for consideration. Undeterred, cold fusion researchers continued their work; research was published at conferences devoted to cold fusion, self-organized by researchers in the field. This work was generally not peer-reviewed, and much of it (I think most cold fusion researchers would be willing to admit) was not of the highest quality, scientifically. Much - but not all, mind you. There were some researchers at respected universities (including MIT) that conducted very rigorous and high quality studies. Anyway, together this motley band of hobbyists, engineers and scientists, over the last twenty years or so, has found...well, something. Sometimes. If you squint right.

Basically there are a huge number of scattered reports of cold fusion occurring, but reproducibility is a big problem. Some people find low levels of excess heat. Some people find nothing. Some people, when conditions are "just right", report extremely high levels of excess heat. There are even a few cases where explosions occurred and labs have been "blown up" [2]. The sheer volume of claims might be enough to be suggestive that something was going on, all things being equal. But of course, all things aren't really equal in this case; given the initial inability of expert scientists to replicate the original findings in 1989, and the non-peer-reviewed nature of most cold fusion work nowadays, we have every reason to be extra skeptical of reports of cold fusion. Extraordinary claims and all that.

This is why I've taken what I consider to be the two strongest pieces of evidence for cold fusion and provided them below. As I mentioned before, there are some scientists doing rigorous, very well controlled experiments at research universities, and they consistently find that cold fusion is occurring. So, without further ado, here's my proof:

1. Mitchell Swartz's experiments

If you have the time, I would strongly suggest you watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e38Y7HxD_5Y. It's part of a lecture from a multi-week cold fusion course put on by Swartz and others at MIT in January. It's 40 minutes long (and only the first part of five videos actually) but well worth your time. In it Swartz basically makes his case for cold fusion.

I suppose I should stop here to briefly describe what a typical cold fusion experiment looks like. The standard design uses a simple piece of metal, usually Palladium or Nickel. Heavy water (Deuterium) is forced into the lattice of atoms that make up the metal by applying an electric field. Once a high enough loading of Deuterium is achieved in the metal lattice, what (purportedly) happens is that two Deuterons combine in a nuclear reaction to produce a single Helium(4) nucleus, plus heat. The idea is that the lattice of metal atoms is mediating the nuclear reaction in some way, making it occur at far lower temperatures than would normally be possible. Typically these experiments are done with the apparatus fully immersed in heavy water, and what you do is check for excess heat by setting up a calorimeter around the experiment. You can easily measure how much electrical energy you're putting into the system; if the calorimeter is reading higher energies than that coming out, you know cold fusion is taking place (well, that's not entirely accurate - you know some process is producing extra energy, but you don't know what it is. The reason we can confidently say it's nuclear in origin is because the energy densities involved are well beyond what could be produced by a simple chemical reaction).

Anyway, if you can't watch the video, here's what Swartz has found:

-Consistently measures output energy in the range of 200-400% of input energy (!)

-Excess heat is well above noise level for calorimeter

-Calorimeter is very well calibrated - when heat is fed into system via simple ohmic resistor, measured output heat exactly matches input energy

-Chemical control experiments fail (ie using non-cold-fusion-active metals and loading materials gives no excess heat)

-Two calorimeters (each of which have several redundant ways of measuring heat anyway) were built, just to be sure; same results

-Excess heat generation occurs for days or even weeks continuously

-He(4) production is observed, with amounts commensurate with heat production

Mind you, this is not just a one-off experiment - he's been getting results like this for ten years or more. If you watch the video, I think you'll agree that it's a very well-controlled and well-calibrated experiment. It certainly looks that way, anyway, to my semi-informed eyes as a physics grad student (although if there are any actual experimentalists reading this who are more informed than I, I would love to hear from you - please, attack it to bits). In my eyes the only two reasonable explanations for Swartz's results are (i) cold fusion being real, and (ii) active fraud. Fraud is of course possible, but I think unlikely given what other groups have found.

Oh, and if you can't watch the video, here's a 2009 paper you can read by Swartz: http://world.std.com/~mica/Swartz-SurveyJSE2009.pdf. It's less focused on his own research and more of a survey of cold fusion research in general, but he does talk about his own results in Section 4. Certainly worth a look.

2. Yasuhiro Iwamura's transmutation work at Mitsubishi

In one of those strange quirks of fate, for some reason or another scientists in Japan ended up being particularly open to cold fusion claims [3]. There are currently several researchers in Japan, some at universities and some at different companies, who are looking in to cold fusion. I link you here to a particularly interesting paper by Iwamura, who works for a research division of Mitsubishi: http://newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ANS2012W/2012Iwamura-ANS-LENR-Paper.pdf

Iwamura uses a slightly different setup for Swartz, but the basic idea is the same: Deuterium is permeated through a Palladium lattice, magic happens, heat comes out, etc. The main difference in this experiment is that Iwamura is not actually looking for excess heat production. He's instead looking for transmutation of elements, which also has been reported to happen in certain cold fusion experiments. To do this a layer of some other material, in this case Cesium, is added on top of the Palladium, and - in a process that no one fully understands yet - that material is transmuted into an entirely different element. So just in case unlimited clean energy wasn't enough for you, we now also have just straight-up alchemy happening (I for one can't fathom why scientists are skeptical of cold fusion).

But, prior probabilities be damned, Iwamura has actually gone and done this! In his experiments he does time-resolved XPS spectroscopy, and observes Praseodymium being created in the apparatus while the total amount of Cesium goes down with time - elemental transmutation (!)

This work is particularly strong evidence for two reasons, I think:

One, because the claim involves detecting elements, it's inherently more plausible than any claims to do with excess heat. Calorimetry can be difficult, and it's easy for a skeptic to claim that the experimenter simply made a mistake in measuring the excess heat (mind you in the case above I think the calorimetry is well done and that there wasn't a mistake, but that isn't always the case). In contrast to calorimetry, detecting elements is very straightforward. There are many independent ways to do it, and it's all rather black and white; either you find an element, or you don't. If you do find a new element, then have something of a smoking gun - it's very difficult to explain how a new element could just appear in your experiment without invoking nuclear processes. The standard skeptic's reply to experiments like this is basically to say "contamination," and wave their hands. That is, they posit that the transmuted element in question was already present in the Palladium lattice at the start of the experiment (perhaps concentrate somewhere so it wasn't detected initially). I find this a less than compelling argument, to say the least - really, the experiment just happens to be contaminated with Praseodymium, of all things? And the contamination is such that the Praseodymium gradually appears to the detector over time, at the same rate that Cesium disappears? And when experiments without Cesium are run, the Praseodymium is mysteriously absent? What a strange coincidence.

Sarcasm aside, though, the experimenters are well aware of this argument, and have a very good explanation for why it couldn't be contamination - namely, isotope ratios. Essentially the distribution of isotope frequencies for the transmuted elements they find are different from the natural isotope frequencies for the same element. Hence, the experiment couldn't have simply been contaminated with the natural version of that element.

The second reason this research counts as strong evidence is that...well, it's actually been replicated. This was particularly bizarre for me to discover upon reading about cold fusion - I was under the impression that there were no clear-cut replications of any cold fusion experiments, anywhere. That's apparently not true though - researchers at Toyota have redone Iwamura's experiment and also find Praseodymium being created. Unfortunately it was presented at a conference, and there doesn't seem to be an associated paper. Here's a link to an article though that describes the replication, though, containing some slides with the Toyota researchers results: http://news.newenergytimes.net/2012/12/06/mitsubishi-reports-toyota-replication/. The article also mentions researchers at two universities (Osaka and Iwate) reporting similar findings.

So to sum up: simple elemental detection experiment. Transmuted elements found. Control experiments fail. Multiple confirmations. Combined with the high-quality excess heat measurements of Swartz above, I feel very confident in concluding that cold fusion is a real physical phenomenon. For an additional bit of low-weight evidence, though, I submit to you also the fact that NASA, of all organizations, has an active cold fusion program: see http://futureinnovation.larc.nasa.gov/view/articles/futurism/bushnell/low-energy-nuclear-reactions.html. To be honest I think that article overhypes the current situation; yes, cold fusion appears to be real, but I find the assertion that multiple groups have already achieved kilowatt-level heat production to be very suspect, based on what I've read. Regardless, the fact that NASA is treating this seriously and actively doing cold fusion research might serve as further evidence for skeptical readers.

This concludes my case.

Now, despite the (I think) fairly convincing picture I've painted here, we are still left with the nagging question of why so many early cold fusion experiments failed, and why so many continue to fail today. It seems clear that, real effect or no, cold fusion experiments have unusually low reproducibility. Shouldn't this count against it somehow? In the words of one skeptic, nuclear physicist Richard Garwin,

"It's absurd to claim that experiments that seem to support cold fusion are valid, while those that don't are flawed."

I think Garwin misses the point here, though. What cold fusion advocates are looking for is an existence proof. They just have to show that there exists some set of experimental conditions for which cold fusion occurs. Or, to flip the quantifiers (as PhilGoetz might put it ;), they are trying to disprove the hypothesis that for all sets of experimental conditions, cold fusion never occurs. Looking at it that way, of course a few experiments would be sufficient to make the case - it's just standard Popperian falsification. When you're dealing with "for all" statements, its one strike and you're out.

Or, to put it in Bayesian terms: the probability of getting negative experimental results, conditional on cold fusion being true, is not that low. If cold fusion is true, then somewhere in the experimental parameter space there must be a region where it occurs. But that says nothing about the size of the region; it's fairly easy to imagine experimenters setting out to demonstrate cold fusion and missing some unknown key aspect of the design, giving a negative result. One doesn't even have to posit any experimental error - they're simply looking in the wrong place. On the other hand, the probability of getting positive results in a well-designed, well-controlled experiment, conditional on cold fusion being false, is extremely low. It's basically equal to the probability that the experimenter screwed up the measurement, which can be made vanishingly low with proper controls and replications.

With all that said, of course, it would still be nice to know where exactly previous cold fusion researchers were going wrong. Mitchell Swartz, incidentally, thinks he has this figured out. He's identified a number of necessary conditions for cold fusion that are frequently absent from failed experiments and present in successful ones. The two main culprits seem to insufficient loading of Deuterium in the metal lattice, and a non-optimal (too high or too low) level of electrical driving of the system. I have no idea if he's right about the particulars, of course. But it certainly doesn't seem implausible that this will all be sorted out in the near future, and what seemed like irreproducibility will simply turn out to be the result of an underlying, thus far opaque, pattern.

Huh, this turned out much longer than I expected. I guess I'll close by noting that this topic seems like an almost perfect candidate for confirmation bias; who wouldn't want to believe in a cheap, unlimited, carbon and radiation-free energy source? That's part of the reason I made this post; what I'd really like is for people to a) pick apart this post, looking for flaws in my logic/arguments, and b) look into this whole cold fusion thing independently, and see if they reach the same conclusions. I'm very interested in getting this right, for obvious reasons, and I think at the very least I've made a sufficiently interesting case that doing some research online would be worth it. I don't think I really need to mention the almost mind-boggling impact cold fusion would have, if it turned out to be real and exploitable.

I'm cautiously optimistic about the future right now, LW.

References:

[1] This is standard history, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion

[2] http://news.newenergytimes.net/2013/02/22/lenr-nasa-widom-larsen-nuclear-reactor-in-your-basement/ 

Relevant quote: "The explosions are difficult to keep secret. Most people who have been around the field know of them: Fleischmann and Pons in Utah, unidentified researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a group at SRI International, Tadahiko Mizuno in Japan, Jean-Paul Biberian in France, and another situation in a Russian lab a few years ago.

The only lab that may have blown up was the one in Russia. In the other situations, the experiment, not the lab, blew up. SRI International researcher Andy Riley was killed, and Michael McKubre was wounded. Mizuno lost his hearing for a week and came very close to sustaining severe injuries."

[3] http://coldfusioninformation.com/countries/cold-fusion-japan/

 

CEA does not seem to be credibly high impact

10 Jonathan_Lee 21 February 2013 10:29AM

I am highly grateful to Alexey Morgunov and Adam Casey for reviewing and commenting on an earlier draft of this post, and pestering me into migrating the content from many emails to a somewhat coherent post.

Will Crouch has posted about the Centre for Effective Altruism and in a follow up post discussed questions in more detail. The general sense of the discussion of that post was that the arguments were convincing and that donating to CEA is a good idea. Recently, he visited Cambridge, primarily to discuss 80,000 hours, and several Cambridge LWers spoke with him. These discussions caused a number of us to substantially downgrade our estimates of the effectiveness of CEA, and made our concerns more concrete.

continue reading »

Is Getting More Utilons Your True Acceptance??

-3 diegocaleiro 05 February 2013 09:26PM

Meta: Inspired by The Least Convenient Possible World I asked the person who most criticized my previous posts help on writing a new one, since that seemed very inconvenient, specially because the whole thing was already written. He agreed and suggested I begin by posting only a part of it here, and wait for the comments to further change the rest of the text. So here is the beggining and one section, and we'll see how it goes from there. I have changed the title to better reflect the only section presented here.

 

This post will be about how random events can preclude or steal attention from the goals you set up to begin with, and about how hormone fluctuation inclines people to change some of their goals with time. A discussion on how to act more usefully given that follows, taking in consideration likelihood of a goal's success in terms of difficulty and lenght.

Through it I suggest a new bias, Avoid-Frustration bias, which is composed of a few others:

A Self-serving bias in which Loss aversion manifests by postponing one's goals, thus avoiding frustration through wishful thinking about far futures, big worlds, immortal lives, and in general, high numbers of undetectable utilons.

It can be thought of a kind of Cognitive Dissonance, though Cognitive Dissonance doesn't to justice to specific properties and details of how this kind, in particular, seems to me to have affected the lives of Less-Wrongers, Transhumanists and others. Probably in a good way, more on that later.

Sections will be:

  1. What Significantly Changes Life's Direction (lists)

  2. Long Term Goals and Even Longer Term Goals

  3. Proportionality Between Goal Achievement Expected Time and Plan Execution Time

  4. A Hypothesis On Why We Became Long-Term Oriented

  5. Adapting Bayesian Reasoning to Get More Utilons

  6. Time You Can Afford to Wait, Not to Waste

  7. Reference Classes that May Be Avoid-Frustration Biased

  8. The Road Ahead

[Section 4 is shown here]

4 A Hypothesis On Why We Became Long-Term Oriented

 

For anyone who rejoiced the company of the writings of Derek Parfit, George Ainslie, or Nick Bostrom, there are a lot of very good reasons to become more long-term oriented. I am here to ask you about those reasons: Is that you true acceptance?

 

It is not for me. I became longer term oriented because of different reasons. Two obvious ones are genetics expressing in me the kind of person that waits a year for the extra marshmallow while fantasyzing about marshmallow worlds and rocking horse pies, and secondly wanting to live thousands of years. But the one I'd like to suggest that might be relevant to some here is that I was very bad at making people who were sad or hurt happy. I was not, as they say, empathic. It was a piece of cake bringing folks from neutral state to joy and bliss. But if someone got angry or sad, specially sad with something I did, I would be absolutely powerless about it. This is only one way of not being good with people, a people's person etc... So my emotional system, like the tale's Big Bad Wolf blew, and blew, and blew, until my utilons were confortably sitting aside in the Far Future, where none of them could look back at my face, cry, and point to me as the tears cause.

 

Paradoxically, though understandably, I have since been thankful for that lack of empathy towards those near. In fact, I have claimed, where I forget, that it is the moral responsibility of those with less natural empathy of the giving to beggars kind to care about the far future, since so few are within this tiny psychological mindspace of being able to care abstractly while not caring that much visibly/emotionally. We are such a minority that foreign aid seems to be the thing that is more disproportional in public policy between countries (Savulescu, J - Genetically Enhance Humanity of Face Extinction 2009 video). Like the whole minority of billionnaires ought to be more like Bill Gates, Peter Thiel and Jaan Tallinn, the minority of underempathic folk ought to be more like an economist doing quantitative analysis to save or help in quantitative ways.

 

So maybe your true acceptance of Longterm, like mine, was something like Genes + Death sucks + I'd rather interact with people of the future whose bots in my mind smile, than those actually meaty folk around me, with all their specific problems, complicated families and boring christian relashionship problems. This is my hypothesis. Even if true, notice it does not imply that Longterm isn't rational, after all Parfit, Bostrom and Ainslie are still standing, even after careful scrutiny.

[Ideas on how to develop other sections are as appreciated as commentary on this one]

Cargo Cult Language

-1 SaidAchmiz 05 February 2012 09:32PM

 

A cargo cult is a religious practice based on imitating the behavior of more-advanced societies, without understanding its true nature or purpose, in the hope of receiving the apparent benefit of that behavior. Members of cargo cults — which have sprung up in a number of tribal societies following their interaction with modern cultures — build crude imitations of airstrips, radio towers, and the like, under the misapprehension that it’s these rituals that magically attract airplanes full of material wealth (“cargo”) to land and deliver their goods.

The term has since been applied in other contexts. Richard Feynman spoke about “cargo cult science”, when scientists conduct research that superficially resembles the scientific method without any of the integrity and rigor that makes it a successful method of inquiry, and there is also “cargo cult programming”, when programmers include code in their programs without understanding its purpose, merely because they’ve seen it used in examples or the programs of more experienced coders.

I now want to extend the metaphor to a certain sort of error in language use. Call it cargo cult language: using words or phrases, usually incorrectly, with no understanding of the origin of the words or their exact meaning, merely on the basis of having heard such constructions elsewhere in similar contexts.

Do not mistake my point for pedantic railing against mangled grammar, spelling, or pronunciation. Before I elaborate or provide examples, I’d like to distinguish the thing I’m talking about from two related, but subtly different, problems.

The first is errors of grammar or usage: their/there/they’re; would of/could of/should of; can’t hardly; alot. In each case, the speaker or writer almost certainly knows what they mean to say; they are simply mistaken about the correct way to say it. Furthermore, the reader or listener is also unlikely to be confused for any longer than the time it takes to do a mental double-take at the misused word; the context almost always resolves the ambiguities created by such errors.

The second related but distinct problem is the sort of thing which George Orwell criticized in his essay “Politics and the English Language”. Orwell wrote of stale, overused phrases, clichés, and metaphors which take the place of clear language, and which can “construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent”. In such cases, the speaker or writer either has no precise meaning in mind, or wants, in some vague way, to say something, but lacks the command of language to say it clearly, without resorting to prefabricated phrases which convey nothing of substance.

What am I talking about, then?

 

comprise/compose/constitute

These three words are often confused, with “comprise” being the most common offender as an erroneous replacement for the other two. Phrases like “is comprised of” are obviously wrong, but there are also constructions such as “X comprises Y”, which are grammatically correct, but whose meaning is inverted if the writer’s intended meaning was “compose”. The cause of this sort of error seems to be a perception that “comprise” is a “fancier” word that has the same meaning as the other two.

 

accurate/precise

These two words don’t mean the same thing, but are often used interchangeably. Parsing a sentence that contains one of these often requires the reader to make some inference about the writer’s background: a scientist who says “precise” means something quite different than if she were to say “accurate”, but your average news reporter is probably not packing any special meaning into his word choice when he says that something is “precisely correct”.

 

”exponential increase”

Is the increase actually exponential rather than, say, polynomial, or does the speaker simply mean “fast growth”? It’s often the latter; people say “exponential” because they’ve heard the term used, somewhere, to describe fast growth, and it did not occur to them that it might have a very specific meaning. (We could also blame rampant innumeracy for this one.)

 

”exception that proves the rule”

This example comes closest to falling into the Orwellian category I mentioned earlier, since the phrase is certainly a tired cliché, but it does have a concrete meaning: an exception which, by its existence, serves to underscore the rule. A sign that says “free parking on Sundays” does not have to add “parking costs money on other days” because the exception proves the rule.1  The other usage, seemingly more common these days despite being quite nonsensical, takes the phrase to refer to any exception. It is clear in such cases that the speaker simply has no idea why they are using the phrase; imitation without understanding.

 

Cargo cult language can be distinguished from simple errors of grammar, usage, or style by considering the question: “What do you mean by that?” With a grammar error, the reader or listener almost always does knows what is meant. At most, there’s a double-take, a mental stumble as the erroneous construction is parsed; but the meaning is usually not obscured. Use of cargo cult language, on the other hand, can introduce genuine ambiguities and block comprehension, especially because it often isn’t clear whether the speaker really knows what he’s saying and means to say it or is simply parroting.

In the Orwellian case, the words have lost their meaning, becoming empty platitudes. In the case of cargo cult language, on the other hand, the words do have a meaning, but the meaning is not what the speaker thinks; or he doesn’t know the meaning, only using the phrase because he’s heard it said in a similar context.

In my experience, cargo cult language turns up most often in technical conversations, and I do not think it is coincidence that the term “cargo cult” originated in the context of modern technology as seen by less-advanced societies, nor that its other two most common uses come from science and computer programming. It is related, I think, to the phenomena of science as attire and fake explanations; an attitude of magical thinking toward technical matters that treats the language of science and technology as a sort of ritual, in which you invoke certain phrases to lend authority to what you’re saying, and where knowing exactly what the words mean is of secondary importance at best.

Cargo cult language is not limited to technical discourse, naturally. I suspect that most Internet debates are rife with examples, no matter the topic. In each case, it impedes comprehension, by making the reader doubt his understanding of what’s being said, or, worse, by creating the illusion of transparency. Frustratingly, asking for clarification is often unhelpful; there’s a clear loss of status in admitting that you have no idea what you’re saying and are just parroting words to sound smart. Thus “hmm, is that really what you meant to say?” is often met with absurd arguments to the effect that no, this phrasing is not nonsensical after all, these words mean what I want them to, and who the hell are you to try to legislate usage, anyway?

A reasonable position to take, perhaps, if your interlocutor is merely insisting on adherence to some grammatical or stylistic standard. The tragedy of cargo cult language, however, is that there is a difference in meaning between the correct usage and the wrong one, and a loss of accuracy due to conflating them. Fail to recognize this at your own peril.

 

1 There is also a secondary meaning: sometimes what at first seems to be an exception turns out, upon examination, to be an instance of the rule after all, thus confirming that there are no real exceptions and that the rule holds for all cases. “Proves” in such cases means something like “tests”, as in “proving ground”. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule) This is still completely different from the erroneous usage.

 

View more: Next