Donation tradeoffs in conscientious objection

0 p4wnc6 27 December 2012 05:23PM

Suppose that you believe larger scale wars than current US military campaigns are looming in the next decade or two (this may be highly improbable, but let's condition on it for the moment). If you thought further that a military draft or other forms of conscription might be used, and you wanted to avoid military service if that situation arose, what steps should you take now to give yourself a high likelihood of being declared a conscientious objector?

I don't have numbers to back any of this up, but I am in the process of compiling them. My general thought is to break down the problem like so: Pr(serious injury or death | conscription) * Pr(conscription | my conscientious objector behavior & geopolitical conditions ripe for war) * Pr(geopolitical conditions ripe for war), assuming some conscientious objector behavior (or mixture distribution over several behaviors).

If I feel that Pr(serious injury or death | conscription) and Pr(geopolitical conditions ripe for war) are sufficiently high, then I might be motivated to pay some costs in order to drive Pr(conscription | my conscientious objector behavior) very low.

There's a funny bit in the American version of the show The Office where the manager, Michael, is concerned about his large credit card debt. The accountant, Oscar, mentions that declaring bankruptcy is an option, and so Michael walks out into the main office area and yells, "I DECLARE BANKRUPTCY!"

In a similar vein, I don't think that draft boards will accept the "excuse" that a given person has "merely" frequently expressed pacifist views. So if someone wants to robustly signal that she or he is a conscientious objector, what to do? In my ~30 minutes of searching, I've found a few organizations that, on first glance, look worthy of further investigation and perhaps regular donations.

Here are the few I've focused on most:

Center on Conscience and War

Coffee Strong

War-Resister's International

 

The problems I'm thinking about along these lines include:

  1. Whether or not the donation cost is worth it. There's no Giving What We Can type measure for this as far as I can tell, and even though I know from family experience that veteran mental illness can be very bad, I'm not convinced that donations to the above organizations provide a lot of QALY bang for the buck.
  2. Another component of bang for the buck is how much the donation will credibly signal that I actually am a serious conscientious objector. If I donate and then a draft board chooses to ignore it, it would be totally wasted. But if I think that 'going to war' is highly correlated with very significant negative outcomes, then just as with cryonics, I might feel that such costs are worth it even for a small probability of avoiding a combat environment.
  3. Even assuming that I resolve 1 & 2, there's the problem of trading off these donations with other donations that I make. In a self-interest line of thinking, I might forego my current donations to places like SIAI or Against Malaria because, good as those are, they may not offer the same shorter term benefits to me as purchasing a conscientious objector signal.

 

I'm curious if others have thought about this. Good literature references are welcome. My plan is to compile statistics that let me make reasonable estimates of the different conditional probabilities.

 

Addendum

Several people seem very concerned with the signal faker aspect of this question. I don't understand the preoccupation with this and feel tired of trying to justify the question to people who only care about the signal faker aspect. So I'll just add this copy of one of my comments from below. Hopefully this gives some additional perspective, though I don't expect it to change anyone's mind. I still stand by the post as-is: it's asking about a conditional question based on sincere belief. Even if the answer would be of interest to fakers too, that alone doesn't make that explanation more likely and even if that explanation was more likely it doesn't make the question unworthy of thoughtful answers.

Here's the promised comment:

... my question is conditional. Assume that you already sincerely believe in conscientious objection, in the sense of personal ideology such that you could describe it to a draft board. Now that we're conditioning on that, and we assume already that your primary goal is to avoid causing harm or death... then further ask what behaviors might be best to generate the kinds of signals that will work to convince a draft board. Merely having actual pacifist beliefs is not enough. Someone could have those beliefs but then do actions that poorly communicate them to a draft board. Someone else could have those beliefs and do behaviors that more successfully communicate them to draft boards. And to whatever extent there are behaviors outside of the scope of just giving an account of one's ideology I am asking to analyze the effectiveness.

I really think my question is pretty simple. Assume your goal is genuine pacifism but that you're worried this won't convince a draft board. What should you do? Is donation a good idea? Yes, these could be questions a faker would ask. So what? They could also be questions a sincere person would ask, and I don't see any reason for all the downvoting or questions about signal faking. Why not just do the thought experiment where you assume that you are first a sincere conscientious objector and second a person concerned about draft board odds?

Stated another way:

1) Avoiding combat where I cause harm or death is the first priority, so if I have to go to jail or shoot myself in the foot to avoid it, so be it and if it comes to that, it's what I'll do. This is priority number one.

2) I can do things to improve my odds of never needing to face the situation described in (1) and to the extent that the behaviors are expedient (in a cost-benefit tradeoff sense) to do in my life, I'd like to do them now to help improve odds of (1)-avoidance later. Note that this in no way conflicts with being a genuine pacifist. It's just common sense. Yes, I'll avoid combat in costly ways if I have to. But I'd also be stupid to not even explore less costly ways to invest in combat-avoidance that could be better for me.

3) To the extent that (2) is true, I'd like to examine certain options, like donating to charities that assist with legal issues in conscientious objection, or which extend mental illness help to affected veterans, for their efficacy. There is still a cost to these things and given my conscientious objection preferences, I ought to weigh that cost.

 

[LINK] stats.stackexchange.com question about Shalizi's Bayesian Backward Arrow of Time paper

3 p4wnc6 16 May 2012 03:58PM

Link to the Question

I haven't gotten an answer on this yet and I set up a bounty; I figured I'd link it here too in case any stats/physics people care to take a crack at it.

An exercise in really going through with it

23 p4wnc6 23 April 2012 11:17PM

I'm re-posting a small bit of writing from my blog that was inspired by reading some recent discussions about cryonics on LW. I'm by no means a skillful fiction writer, but I found it emotionally rewarding to write this and really try to mentally simulate what it would be like to choose cryocide if I was cognizant of my own quickly approaching mental decline.

Constructive comments are welcome.



An exercise in really going through with it:

Well, this is it. You had thought it would be more like a retirement party all those months ago when you first suggested the idea. The truth is, you had to frame it that way to get your daughter to go along with it. Thank god she's of a different generation, one with ubiquitous electronics; everyone's a software developer. She understands that the weirdness of your request isn't something to be afraid of, but she's human after all. She still wants to show that she cares. Yes, you had to say it was like a retirement party. Good thing you were an accomplished scientist, a person whose understanding and reputation on matters like this had to be respected. It was the only way to trick them all into respecting your wishes... wishes that fly in the face of everyone who loves you.

You wonder how long cake will be a thing. We have hydrogen-powered cars and technology has cut our work weeks to 25 hours, and yet we still celebrate occasions with cake. It seems like such a foolish thing, knowing what will happen tomorrow. And yet it's still so human. It reminds you of your own childhood which seems long gone. Everyone around you was big and in charge and when there was a cake at something it meant it was a Big Deal. And here you are, surrounded by pictures of yourself. People are giving short speeches about your accolades. People are giving short speeches about morally questionable things you once did to goof off. And everyone is laughing in that very plastic it's-ok-to-laugh-at-questionable-things-because-we're-at-an-event sort of way.

But their guts get hit by gravity as the evening wears on. You are going to die, after all. For all their moralizing, all their pseudo-respect for your wishes, all their sophisticated rational utility calculations, they can only contort their facial muscles to provide paltry masks for their visceral uneasiness. The ones who traveled here, not your family, just want to say their goodbyes and head home, and remark to each other in the car that it's such a sad situation, that they hope it never comes to this for them. Your family members' contorted facial disguises are the flimsiest of all. They are obviously terrified, as are you. You suffer momentary flashes of anger that a recounting of the social prevalence of cake will probably be among your final thoughts.

The party dies down. People say hilariously insufficient goodbyes to you. Some wish you well. They just want to leave. Your family cleans up the mess and puts leftovers into a refrigerator. They sit with you in the family room. You look at photo albums with them and everyone just cries. You tell stories about your own long-dead parents and how, compared to them, you're making such a better decision. You hope your children will make a similar one.

It gets late and you become tired. Your children cry and they do not want you to go to bed. In an act of extreme sentimentality, you offer to tuck them each into bed, in some sort of silly and needless gesture to impart a final happy memory. You tell them how proud you are. You love them very much. But the truth is, on those days when you can't recognize them, how could you even tell if you loved them? And on the days when you wake up and your memory returns, you are terrified. This way, you tell them, you can remember them forever. They just cry and they do not understand. But they respect your wishes.

You change into more comfortable clothes. You lay down. Not even the looming injection can keep your tired bones from wanting a good night's sleep. Your mind is racing. You'll actually have to go through with it. If you can just force yourself to think about something else for now then you can fall asleep. You think about your wife. You can't bear a life in which you cannot even treasure her memory. She can only be fully gone if you cannot remember her, you tell yourself. You set your rationalization engine to work and you fall asleep.

This is it. You arranged for an attendant to pick you up early, before the others could awaken. You ride silently in a car with hard, unworn seats. You study the landscape, mind racing, for the last time. Why is there always so much graffiti and trash along the embankments of railroad tracks? Why are there always soda bottles and shopping carts and ugly rocks stained the color of a lifelong coffee-drinker's teeth?

They wheel you in the door in your wheelchair. Everything has a sobering sterility. It doesn't smell like life or the world. There are no forms to sign, you made sure of that. Just straight to business. Your heart is racing as they help you change into a gown. They don't even bother checking your vital signs. They show you what will happen to your body just afterwards. You'll be wheeled down the hall to a preservation lab. They will replace the blood in your body with a specially developed protectant liquid that will prevent cellular decay for up to hundreds of years. If you weren't a scientist the whole thing would be morbid, and it almost is anyway.

You try to imagine that it's just like going to sleep. They're just putting you under for a looong operation, you try to tell yourself. It does not stop your racing heart. But the injection will.

The time finally comes. They wheel you into an operating room with a chairlike apparatus. It is tilted back about forty-five degrees. Your last sights and sensory experiences are the following: unpleasant fluorescent lighting against a backdrop of a perfectly white tiled ceiling; a smell that vaguely reminds you of the polish the dentist uses when you come in for cleanings; air-conditioned air chilly enough to give you goosebumps. Various technicians and doctors reassuring you that everything will be OK as they move instrument tables around; the taste of your own mouth, sterile from the morning's toothbrushing but with a small hint of the coffee you drank.

The hospital you are in now does this same procedure hundreds of times per month, you remark to yourself. It's not so unusual. Don't be a coward. Fulfill your duty.

An officer from the county coroner's office stands in front of you and requests that you attest to some things. You make your wishes clear and it satisfies him. Your heart is racing.

An attendant tilts your head back and places an oxygen mask over your face. The reality is terrifying; your heart is pounding. You don't want your last sights to be of a pristine white hospital ceiling, but the oxygen does its job and you calm down. You think about your children and the wonderful lives they will lead, free of burden. You are happy that you can remember their faces and all the irreplaceable memories of their growth. You don't want to have a brain that doesn't include a photo album of their lives.

The attendant asks you to count backwards from 10, and you play along until you get to 7. Your mind is too preoccupied with the thought that you love your children and that they will have wonderful lives. You wish you could be there with them... but this is... for the... best...

Andrew Gelman on "the rhetorical power of anecdotes"

5 p4wnc6 23 April 2012 05:04PM

Andrew Gelman has a post up today discussing a particularly illustrative instance of narrative fallacy involving the recent plagiarism discussion surrounding Karl Weick. I think there are also some interesting lessons in there about generalizing from fictional evidence.

In particular, Gelman says, "Setting aside [any] issues of plagiarism and rulebreaking, I argue that by hiding the source of the story and changing its form, Weick and his management-science audience are losing their ability to get anything out of it beyond empty confirmation."

I am wondering if anyone has explicitly looked into connections between generalizing from fictional evidence and confirmation bias. It sounds intuitively plausible that if you are going to manipulate fictional evidence for your purposes, you'll almost always come out believing the evidence has confirmed your existing beliefs. I would be highly interested in documented accounts where the opposite has happened and fictional evidence actually served as a correction factor.

For what it's worth, I personally enjoy a watered-down version of the moral that Weick attempts to manipulate from the story that's discussed in Gelman's post. My high school math teacher used to always say to us, "When you don't know what to do, do something." I think he said it because he was constantly pissed about questions left completely blank on his math exams, and wanted students to write down scribblings or ideas so he could at least give them some partial credit, but it has been more motivational than that for me.

Looking for reductionism help

3 p4wnc6 06 April 2012 06:34AM

I have read the sequences on reductionism and quantum physics some time ago now and I was hoping for some help finding the right places to go back and re-read there to address a question. If the way I describe my question reveals other ignorance on my part, please feel free to add comments above and beyond sequence references.

When trying to talk a little about reductionism, most (non-LW) people I speak to seem to want to play the following game:

What's an airplane made out of? Molecules and atoms that comprise materials like metal, plastic, glass, rubber, etc. What are molecules and atoms made out of? Well, molecules are collections of atoms bonded together, and atoms are made up of three basic particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. What are basic particles made out of? Well, here things start to get a little more dicey. Some of the basic particles are known to be made up of even smaller sub-atomic elementary particles, such as quarks, leptons, and bosons. Some of the basic particles are examples of these elementary particles. Well, what's an elementary particle made of? Well, that's a pretty tough one, but basically there's this sort of fabric of stuff underlying everything called quantum amplitude, and a certain configuration of quantum amplitude corresponds to an elementary particle. So what's quantum amplitude made up of? Well, I'm not sure that is a coherent question. It just sort of is. A ha! I've caught you. So ultimately way down at the bottom of it all, you're telling me that some something "just exists" (i.e. is ontologically basic). But then why do you call it reductionism if it ultimately boils down to a Platonistic ideal of quantum amplitude (no one actually says this, but it's my translation of the objections I tend to face).

Is it more or less right to say that, as far as we can tell, the only reasonable thing to which we can attribute ontologically basic status is quantum amplitude? Given that amplitude is a mathematical device that allows calculation of probability, and probability describes my ignorance about the world (i.e. my best guess as to what the territory is, as opposed to the actual territory), do we view quantum amplitude as some sort of pre-states-of-knowledge concept? How does that mesh up with "what is an elementary particle made of?" It makes me want to call it "the residue of intrinsic uncertainty" or something, but why would that "really exist?" I don't think that my uncertainty about tomorrow's weather "really exists" in any Platonistic way.

How do you explain to people that reductionism = (reduce until you have good reason not to); am I even right to say that or is this a harmful oversimplification?

Chess Analyst "solves" King's Gambit

5 p4wnc6 03 April 2012 11:36PM

Edit: it was unfortunately a prank. I definitely checked the date of the article (which is dated Apr. 2), before posting on it. Kind of mean to make an April Fool's prank after April Fool's. I didn't realize I'd have a chance to practice what I preach so soon.

I guess I need to just say oops.

 

Original Post:

Chess analyst Vasik Rajlich had some big news today: solving the King’s Gambit.

I know that this doesn’t add much new to the complexity theory aspects of games like chess, but I would say it’s a beautiful result, very much like the recent improvement on the complexity of matrix multiplication, and it certainly emphasizes the role computation plays as the King’s Gambit is a pretty popular, classical opening. By most any human standard it’s a respectable opening, and yet we can conclusively say it is unequivocally bad for White assuming two rational players.

I wrote up a short blurb about it at my blog.

New paper on Bayesian philosophy of statistics from Andrew Gelman

10 p4wnc6 10 March 2012 04:30PM

Andrew Gelman recently linked a new article entitled "Induction and Deduction in Bayesian Data Analysis." At his blog, he also described some of the comments made by reviewers and his rebuttle/discussion to those comments. It is interesting that he departs significantly from the common induction-based view of Bayesian approaches. As a practitioner myself, I am happiest about the discussion on model checking -- something one can definitely do in the Bayesian framework but which almost no one does. Model checking is to Bayesian data analysis as unit testing is to software engineering.

Added 03/11/12
Gelman has a new blog post today discussing another reaction to his paper and giving some additional details. Notably:

The basic idea of posterior predictive checking is, as they say, breathtakingly simple: (a) graph your data, (b) fit your model to data, (c) simulate replicated data (a Bayesian can always do this, because Bayesian models are always “generative”), (d) graph the replicated data, and (e) compare the graphs in (a) and (d). It makes me want to scream scream scream scream scream when statisticians’ philosophical scruples stop them from performing these five simple steps (or, to be precise, performing the simple steps (a), (c), (d), and (e), given that they’ve already done the hard part, which is step (b)).
 

 

Random personal thoughts on workload pessimism as a procrastination problem

5 p4wnc6 02 March 2012 09:06PM

I am in one of those moods where I feel extremely burned out and apathetic. What I am noticing about my feelings right now is that there is no short term reward system that could possibly motivate me. I don't want any candy, food, soda, coffee, alcohol, nor even money, entertainment, sexual excitement, sleep, exercise, or play of any kind. I know that's not an exhaustive list of potential short term rewards, but it's fairly exhaustive for the kinds of things that I could reasonably bring about in my own life in the short term. The thing right now that makes me feel bad is the idea that my future work time horizon (FWTH), the perceived amount of future time that will have to be devoted to doing work, is very full. Whenever I perceive a full FWTH, it causes my mind to recoil and become extremely apathetic.

 

It seems to me that the only kind of reward system that motivates me to feel productive is having completely unabated free time: large blocks of time with literally no named obligations. I'm sure this is not profound or new, but it is interesting to me that this seems to be a dominant part of my psyche. If I think that my marginal effort put towards work right this minute will yield a large expanse of completely and utterly free time in the reasonably near future, then I feel very motivated to work hard. If I perceive that, no matter how hard I work right this minute, my future schedule is already bloated with work that I have yet to even get started on, then I feel very tired, cranky, and just want to lay in bed apathetically and watch cartoons on repeat.

 

I don't know a good method for dealing with this sort of procrastination effect. It doesn't seem to fit into the normal procrastination equation, but at first approximation there are a few ways that it might. One is that I could be very impulsive about free time. Given that I have been a grad student for the past 3 years, this is plausible. As a grad student, the time when I can truly relax and unwind from work is very random and scattered, and often even when I think that I have legitimate relaxation time, I am interrupted by email requests for work that needs to be done right away, or the revelation of a new, difficult homework assignment that will create very negative consequences if I don't start working diligently on it immediately. Even my undergraduate college life was stressful in this random fashion, and it seems to have taken a great toll on me. I behave almost like an abused puppy, never sure whether I can actually embrace relaxation time or not; perpetually tense that the next work discharge from the Poisson processes governing my workload is going to happen when I'm not mentally ready to receive it.

 

This could be an impulsiveness effect, making me impatient regarding the next opportunity to have fun and relaxation. Alternatively, it could be a reward or delay problem. There are times in life where obligations are far away. The problem seems to be that they are extremely rare for me and that my personality is extremely sensitive to any potential thoughts on work. People have suggested that I attempt different exercise habits, and possibly meditation, in order to overcome this. I have earnestly tried these things many times, including reading many books and articles on them. So far at least, no specific mental relaxation technique has provided even the slightest benefit. If I perceive that there's no short term end to my work, which can be followed by a completely obligation-free period of time, then it overrides everything else and creates a strong feeling of apathy. But then, how do you create short-term rewards that function essentially like full out vacations? That doesn't seem like a plausible thing to hope for, yet it seems like the only thing which could possibly function as a reward. How do you shorten the delay, on a weekly basis, of large expanses of completely obligation-free time?

 

How do you set up such things as rewards in the first place? That seems like a reward that just logically cannot exist in the modern working environment, but at the same time it seems pretty obvious that a lot of human beings would be psychologically adapted to strongly desire such a reward and that at least some percentage would have trouble functioning properly without the strong possibility of that reward in the short term.

 

This is more or less just me trying to write down and articulate how I feel. No comments or advice is being solicited, but if anything comes to mind (that avoids the "you should really meditate; it will help you so much" mantra that has repeatedly not worked for me in the past), it is appreciated.

[Link] New paper: "The quantum state cannot be interpreted statistically"

9 p4wnc6 18 November 2011 06:13PM

From a recent paper that is getting non-trivial attention...

"Quantum states are the key mathematical objects in quantum theory. It is therefore surprising that physicists have been unable to agree on what a quantum state represents. There are at least two opposing schools of thought, each almost as old as quantum theory itself. One is that a pure state is a physical property of system, much like position and momentum in classical mechanics. Another is that even a pure state has only a statistical significance, akin to a probability distribution in statistical mechanics. Here we show that, given only very mild assumptions, the statistical interpretation of the quantum state is inconsistent with the predictions of quantum theory. This result holds even in the presence of small amounts of experimental noise, and is therefore amenable to experimental test using present or near-future technology. If the predictions of quantum theory are confirmed, such a test would show that distinct quantum states must correspond to physically distinct states of reality."

From my understanding, the result works by showing how, if a quantum state is determined only statistically by some true physical state of the universe, then it is possible for us to construct clever quantum measurements that put statistical probability on outcomes for which there is literally zero quantum amplitude, which is a contradiction of Born's rule. The assumptions required are very mild, and if this is confirmed in experiment it would give a lot of justification for a phyicalist / realist interpretation of the Many Worlds point of view.

More from the paper:

"We conclude by outlining some consequences of the result. First, one motivation for the statistical view is the obvious parallel between the quantum process of instantaneous wave function collapse, and the (entirely non-mysterious) classical procedure of updating a probability distribution when new information is acquired. If the quantum state is a physical property of a system -- as it must be if one accepts the assumptions above -- then the quantum collapse must correspond to a real physical process. This is especially mysterious when two entangled systems are at separate locations, and measurement of one leads to an instantaneous collapse of the quantum state of the other.

In some versions of quantum theory, on the other hand, there is no collapse of the quantum state. In this case, after a measurement takes place, the joint quantum state of the system and measuring apparatus will contain a component corresponding to each possible macroscopic measurement outcome. This is unproblematic if the quantum state merely reflects a lack of information about which outcome occurred. But if the quantum state is a physical property of the system and apparatus, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that each marcoscopically different component has a direct counterpart in reality.

On a related, but more abstract note, the quantum state has the striking property of being an exponentially complicated object. Specifically, the number of real parameters needed to specify a quantum state is exponential in the number of systems n. This has a consequence for classical simulation of quantum systems. If a simulation is constrained by our assumptions -- that is, if it must store in memory a state for a quantum system, with independent preparations assigned uncorrelated states -- then it will need an amount of memory which is exponential in the number of quantum systems.

For these reasons and others, many will continue to hold that the quantum state is not a real object. We have shown that this is only possible if one or more of the assumptions above is dropped. More radical approaches[14] are careful to avoid associating quantum systems with any physical properties at all. The alternative is to seek physically well motivated reasons why the other two assumptions might fail."

On a related note, in one of David Deutsch's original arguments for why Many Worlds was straightforwardly obvious from quantum theory, he mentions Shor's quantum factoring algorithm. Essentially he asks any opponent of Many Worlds to give a real account, not just a parochial calculational account, of why the algorithm works when it is using exponentially more resources than could possibly be classically available to it. The way he put it was: "where was the number factored?"

I was never convinced that regular quantum computation could really be used to convince someone of Many Worlds who did not already believe it, except possibly for bounded-error quantum computation where one must accept the fact that there are different worlds to find one's self in after the computation, namely some of the worlds where the computation had an error due to the algorithm itself (or else one must explain the measurement problem in some different way as per usual). But I think that in light of the paper mentioned above, Deutsch's "where was the number factored" argument may deserve more credence.

Added: Scott Aaronson discusses the paper here (the comments are also interesting).

Any thoughts on how to locate job opportunities in Europe for US Citizen?

0 p4wnc6 07 November 2011 11:39PM

I am a graduate student in the U.S. nearing the completion of my master's degree in applied mathematics. I am looking for jobs at the master's degree level that involve working on large data sets, doing machine learning, scientific computing, etc. I don't want to be a software developer per se, but I don't mind doing software development among other scientific tasks.

For comparison, I used to work at MIT Lincoln Laboratory as an assistant radar analyst. It was a very very good mix of theoretical work, algorithmic development, and plain software development. I'm looking for similar institutions in Europe that are looking to hire full-time employees at the master's degree level. I've considered CERN (and may still apply there) but it appears to be either too much purely experimental physics or plain software development for me.

How do I locate these kinds of institutions, and what processes should I undertake to find such a job in Europe? What kinds of things should I look for in terms of job security, visa issues (I am only a US citizen), etc? I have worked for an extended time in Paris once before and loved living there (it was as a visiting research assistant as part of my current grad program). I'm looking to replicate that experience but in a full-time, non-student position.

Note: I've already done the standard many hours of Googling to find obvious job search web pages and this has proved extremely unsuccessful. My university career services office also said they do not support overseas job searching beyond whatever is listed in their web recruiting interface. All of the jobs that are overseas in that interface are banking-related, which is a field I want to avoid. 

 

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