All of GreenRoot's Comments + Replies

What do you mean by "made the world a worse place"? Worse than it was before democracy and liberalism started spreading, i.e. pre-1700s? Or worse today than it would have been today if democracy and liberalism hadn't spread? The first question seems easy (we're more peaceful and prosperous than the past), the second a nearly impossible counterfactual, depending heavily on what government systems and philosophies we'd have instead.

4Jack
I admit to not being clear what the claim is myself. I'm responding to to something that is routinely implied-- and implicit in a lot of reactionary rhetoric-- but for which I have never seen an extended defense. Steel-manning would recommend the second choice-- but then, people in this thread are defending the former interpretation (at least in limited circumstances). There might be good ways of evaluating the counterfactual claim. For example, we might examine measures we wouldn't expect technological changes to alter-- and see if monarchies performed better by those measures. Though of course-- the extent to which a government encourages or discourages innovation and economic growth is central to the question.

Stories are a huge way we make sense of the world. Adding a narrative sequence to the post did helped me keep track of the ideas and how they fit together.

Is histocracy compatible with a secret ballot? (And for that matter, is futarchy?)

And as a separate question, would it be a good idea to keep voters' individual reliability scores secret, too? If a voter is known to have an accurate record and her opinion is public before a vote, couldn't she get overweighted, because she'll sway others' votes as well as getting more weight in the vote sum?

2Alicorn
Would also be a target for focused lobbying/filtered argumentation.

It's broken for me too, in exactly the way you describe. One of the variants on the error page invites me to buy a reddit t-shirt.

GreenRoot180

I participated in the IB diploma program in 1997, in Texas. My experience was better than KPier's in several ways. I think having a skilled and experienced teacher makes all the difference. Mine wasn't a LessWrong style rationalist, but she had experience with teaching philosophy, so we got past initial naive intuitions on most of the class topics relatively soon, and I witnessed basic changes in attitude toward the nature of language and knowledge in both me and several of my classmates.

In retrospect, I think the best thing that could have been added w... (read more)

When I came last week (hadn't checked here a while) and didn't see anybody there, I though the regular meeting was defunct. I'm glad to see it's still going. See y'all this evening!

I will attend most of the weekly Irvine meetups, at least through the end of July.

Zip code correction:

501 West 15th Street, Austin, TX 79701

Should be

501 West 15th Street, Austin, TX 78701

0NMJablonski
You're absolutely correct. Fixed.

Isn't this already implemented, as the Anti-Kibitzer in the preferences section?

3curiousepic
I suppose so, though I was envisioning a more convenient and instantaneous toggle for certain situations times when you think karma might be heavily affecting your judgement. Not a big priority.
GreenRoot140

Drop the little skyline/boat grayscale image (mini-landscape.gif) that appears at the bottom of each top-level post. Original mention. Seems to have no purpose, and doesn't really fit the design theme.

1matt
It was an early draft of the map vs territory theme that became the site header, which we intended to finish but forgot about and published without further thought. Whoops.

Another by the same guy, more general in scope, and (in my opinion) more inspiring toward rationality: Why Didn't Anybody Tell Me?

Thanks for the (potentially) very useful post. Upvoted with pleasure, as the best thing in while fitting the criterion: "I'd like to see more posts like this on LessWrong."

Vivo ahora en California, pero mi esposa y yo nos mudamos a España en Augusto (todavía no hemos decidido cual ciudad). Viviremos allí por un año.

0Raw_Power
¡Guay! ¿A qué ciudad en concreto?

I'll be coming. Thanks for putting this together again, Jennifer.

I suggest two topics:

0JenniferRM
Jimmy handled the post, which is a big part of the work. I think we're getting enough social momentum and have infrastructure in place so these are easier to make happen than they used to be :-) I'd totally be up for a conversation about how to develop a more cohesive and active community. I've been hesitant to force things into any particular shape because I've wanted "what makes them rewarding" to bubble up from the participants rather than me imposing a lot of theory-driven schemes on the process.

I won't attend this one (too far from Irvine), but thanks for setting up that mailing list. Now I don't have to worry about missing a meetup via not checking the site for a while.

A very thought-provoking and well-written article. Thanks!

Your biggest conceptual jump seems to be reasoning about the subjective experience of hyperintelligences by analogy to human experiences. That is, and experience of some thought/communication speed ratio for a hyperintelligence would be "like" a human experience of that same ratio. But hyperintelligences aren't just faster. I think they'd probably be very very different qualitatively. Who knows if the costs / benefits of time-consuming communication will be perceived in similar or even recognizable ways?

-2jacob_cannell
Thanks, I think the time dilation issue is not typically considered in visions of future AGI society and could prove to be a powerful constraint. I agree they will probably think differently, if not immediately then eventually as the space of mind architectures is explored. Still we can analyze the delay factor from an abstract computational point of view and reach some conclusions without getting into specific qualitative features of what certain types of thought are "like". I find it hard to estimate likelihoods of different types of qualitative divergences from human-like mind architectures. On the one hand we have the example of early cells such as bacteria which radiated into a massive array of specialized forms, but life is all built around variations of a few old general designs for cells. So are human minds like that? Is that the right analogy? On the other hand we can see human brain architecture as just one particular point in a vast space of possibility.
6Desrtopa
jacob_cannell has gone on record as anticipating that strong AI will actually be designed by circuit simulation of the human brain. This explains why so many of his posts and comments have such a tendency to anthropomorphize AI, and also, I think, why they tend to be heavy on the interesting ideas, light on the realistic scenarios.

I won't be coming to this one; it's too far for me. I'll see y'all when we gather again in Orange County.

Great! I'll be there with p ≈ 0.9.

Possibly, but probably not. I have a young baby at home, so I can't be away for very long. The issue for me isn't transportation availability, but transportation time. I live about a mile from the IHOP.

If there's no better basis for choosing than the most convenience for the most people, my vote is for the IHOP near UCI, which is super-convenient for me. If it's there, I could come; if not, I'd very likely have to miss it.

2mindviews
I'll make a weak vote for the IHOP near UCI. It's easy to get to, has free parking, and seemed to work reasonably well for the last meetup.
2JGWeissman
Would you be able to attend at other locations if a ride were available?

I haven't talked about how to practice it yet. I was planning on doing that in another post that uses the conceptual framework of this one. Do you think it should all be a single post?

Yes, or else posted very soon. In any case, if the content ends up separate, please link each post to the other.

Great idea for a post. I've really enjoyed reading the comments and discussion they generated.

Does it make sense to speak of probabilities only when you have numerous enough trials?

No, probability theory also has non-frequency applications.

Can we speak of probabilities for singular, non-repeating events?

Yes. This is the core of a Bayesian approach to decision making. The usual interpretation is that the probabilities reflect your state of knowledge about events rather than frequencies of actual event outcomes. Try starting with the LW wiki article on Baesian probability and the blog posts linked therefrom.

0AnlamK
Obviously, this needs more discussion but the kind of thought I was trying to motivate was the following: How is that saying a non-repeating singular event has a very small probability of occurring different from saying it will not happen? This was motivated by the lottery paradox. Questions like, when you buy a lottery ticket, you don't believe you will win, so why are you buying it? Examples like these sort of pull my intuitions towards thinking no, it doesn't make sense to speak of probabilities for certain events.
3Kaj_Sotala
Assigning a non-repeating event the probability P means that, for a well-calibrated agent, if you assign 100 different things this probability then 100 * P of them will actually occur. I believe this is a standard interpretation of Bayesian probability, and it puts things in terms of frequencies of actual event outcomes. ETA: Alternatively, one may think of Bayesian probability as the answer to the question "if I believed this statement, then in which fraction P of all plausible worlds in which I ended up with this information would I be correct"?

It sort of seems like a critique of the terminology if dark arts tend not to be deployed by the dark side.

I agree. I think the dark side terminology is based on the "dark side of the force" from Star Wars, which has connotations of a personal fall into temptation, and the dark arts refers to magic of evil intent or effect, perhaps from Harry Potter, where it is used by evil but not self-deceiving villains. This could explain the inconsistency.

I think you have really helped to clarify the go side of this analogy, and I'm grateful for your description of sabaki play and what makes it different from trick moves. I think the connection you draw to rationality and debate are pretty good.

I'm not sure about this, but I think there's another sense in which the term "dark arts" is used on LessWrong: using one's knowledge of common cognitive biases and other rationality mistakes to get people to do or believe something. That is, fooling others, not fooling yourself. For the go analogy, I think... (read more)

Small advantages escalate

Actually, one thing I enjoy about go is that small advantages don't escalate, at least not nearly as much as they do in chess. In go, if you make a mistake early that puts you behind by, say, 30-40 points, the place where you made that mistake usually interacts with the rest of the board little enough that you're not hugely disadvantaged elsewhere, and if you play better in the time and space that is left, you can catch up. But as you say about chess, I'm not sure if this is a very generalizable idea, at least when it comes to rationality.

4wedrifid
For most practical situations I would suggest that it does generalise. Humans have relatively little ability to compound on success in a drastic manner. Exceptions of course include situations such as if Smily and Clippy were created at the same time on the same planet. Clippy getting the first week wrong could well leave tiling the universe with paperclips instead of molecular smiley faces is completely beyond his grasp.

To become good at poker it's crucial to be able to distinguish between bad luck and play mistakes. You have to keep your cool when your opponent makes bad moves and wins anyway....In life, we are very often faced with situations where we have to analyze to what extent something is the result of our own actions and to what extent it is the result of factors outside our control.

I think this sounds like a valuable lesson to learn, and as you say, the kind of thing you couldn't get from a deterministic game. And as with go, I suspect that some lessons from... (read more)

0swapnil
"quantifying your beliefs" - non-analytically, because analysis is time consuming.
3Apprentice
I'd love to see such a post too but I don't really have enough experience with poker to write it myself. My gamer friends and I mostly play alternating obscure boardgames - we like exploring a ruleset for ourselves more than we enjoy improving our skill at games that already have a well understood theory. Poker does provide a very visceral lesson in 'sunk costs', I'll say that.

There's an interesting essay by William Pinckard that contrasts the philosophical perspectives of the gameplay of three ancient games; backgammon, chess, and go, which says in summary: backgammon is man-vs-fate, chess is man-vs-man, and go is man-vs-self.

What's your playing strength in Go? The article reads a bit like it's either too much targeted at people without understanding of go or is written without by someone with a playing strength >5 kyu?

I'm about 12k on KGS. I definitely aimed the article at people who knew nothing about go, but I think it's also interesting that you could tell that I'm not a very strong player myself. I would be interested to know if you have found generalizable lessons which only came after you achieved a deeper understanding of the game.

But if the two players disagr

... (read more)
0ChristianKl
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/ssi/lai_go_chinese_strategy.pdf is a fine report that deals with transfering Go concept to thinking about military strategy. Strategy is about thinking "What should I do?", while rationality is about thinking "What should I believe?". I think the two questions are similar enough that one can transfer a lot of what David Lei writes.
1ChristianKl
In practice when the situation can be played out one usually plays it out till the opponent is convinced. There are however situations where you can't play it out. Under Japanese rules certain local shapes are per definition dead when the game ends. Bent for in the Corner is one example. If there are nonremoveable ko threads on the board those shapes don't die in Chinese rules or other rule sets that require playing out.
1TobyBartels
No, it's only the Wikipedia rule set which says this. Then the article says So none of the rule sets used in practice agree with Wikipedia's Rule 9. This is from lower down on Wikipedia (more there): So if neither player is good at distinguishing live from dead, then both may lose! (So much for a zero-sum game.) I am not fond of this feature of the Japanese rules; I much prefer the idea that one solves disagreements by playing them out. But then I am an even weaker player than you, so what do I know? (^_^)

I think you're right that most goal-directed activity, especially formalized pursuits like abstract board games, encourages rational thinking. Nevertheless, I have gotten the feeling that go is particularly good in this regard, at least in my experience. I played chess for a long time, and have tried many other types of formal table and online games, and of them all, go seems to have the strongest tendency to show me how bad habits of thinking work against me.

I would love to see more articles like this one explicitly illustrating how other activities can... (read more)

OK, I see, thanks for explaining it. I'd never really heard of this difference before. I'd have to say that the more subtle moves that risk only a little and feel out your opponent sound more akin to the "dark arts" in rationality.

3JenniferRM
This line of discussion is interesting to me because if the analogy holds, then it implies that what this community calls "the dark side" vs "the dark arts" are very different from each other despite the surface similarity of the terminology. The dark side, as I understand it, is what you get when someone decides that beliefs have some value other than that derived via a correspondence theory of truth. Then they twist their mind into a pretzel and emotionally freak out when you show them evidence which violates their semi-consciously constructed "useful delusions". This is like the recovering alcoholic who has a belief that Jesus will personally intervene in their lives to give them strength where the belief powers their decision not to drink alcohol. The analogy in go would be a "trick play" where seemingly solid arguments (or lines of play) can "destroy the situation" for the person relying on the trick, but in the absence of solid refutation the move might win the game. The dark arts that you seem to be referring to just now as "subtle moves" seem to be analogous to go concepts like sabaki play, which is relatively light in the sense of putting stones on the board that are loosely connected, easy to sacrifice, but generally well placed, so that if they are attacked clumsily the other player can develop a position that is too large to sacrifice, too expensive to defend, and/or inefficient. The epistemic equivalent to sabaki play might be "sophistry", where someone is known to be highly skilled at argument and therefore it somehow "counts less" when they win because all their "fancy words" lead to a victory for reasons that are not obvious to people who disagree and/or haven't studied rhetoric. The place the analogy breaks down might be that in go "sabaki play" is in some sense simply good play, whereas in argument people have a sense (justified or not) that sophisticated argumentation is somehow "dirty". Perhaps in go the difference between trick play and sabak

Again, thank you. I've made another fix. As you can see, life and death problems are not my strength!

The "dark side" has an analogy in go. It is tempting to play moves that you know don't work because you think your opponent won't be able to figure out the correct response. It is usually not obvious to beginners that doing this is really holding them back.

Good point! I thought about including this connection between trick moves and the dark arts, actually. They don't seem quite parallel to me, but there are definitely similarities. If anybody is interested, you can read more about trick moves here.

0realitygrill
It seems to me that learning trick moves and the dark arts strengthens your overall understanding and ability, relative to just learning the proper standard moves (honte) and reasoning. Yes, both in Go and real life.
5lavalamp
Trick moves are a little more subtle than what I was talking about. A "trick move" in go usually has a refutation that is only a few points worse than optimal play, but if the opponent falls for the trick it can be devastating. (IOW, you risk a few points for the chance of making a lot of points.) These moves have their place in handicap go (and to some extent, even games where you are feeling out the level of your opponent). I was thinking of the less well thought out moves that beginners to medium level players play, hoping that their opponent won't see the crushing refutation. (They're risking large amounts of points for no apparent reason, often.)

it contains approximately 10,000 times the maximum safe dosage of in principle.

Great quote.

One aspect of go which is present on LW but not true about rationality in general (and so not part of the article) is a culture of welcoming and mentoring. Good players are honored by teaching beginners, and the handicap system facilitates interesting teaching games. You should not worry about bothering (go playing) humans with any lack of sophistication. Not all players have this attitude, of course, but surprisingly many do. The place on the internet I've found best reflects this welcoming culture of go is the Kiseido Go Server.

Also, I should note th... (read more)

2realitygrill
I agree. KGS is very friendly, and I certainly managed to make 15k before buying any books. The computer is just for getting some very raw mechanics down. Do it a max of maybe 30 times and start playing humans! I'm about 2k now and I still suck at playing Igowin on 9x9.

Thanks for the feedback. You're right: for players with more than beginning skill, I agree that Fig 3 is alive (and Peter de Blanc is right that Fig 2 is not "unconditionally alive") in the original versions of the figures. I've revised Figures 2 and 3 accordingly. (So the rest of you shouldn't worry if this comment thread seems confusing! If you're interested, the original versions are here and here.)

In choosing examples, I was aiming for arrangements that visually conveyed the three states of close surrounding, surrounding with internal stru... (read more)

2Perplexed
White is still alive in the modified figure 3. Sorry. One full eye and two half eyes.

This is a nice observation, and I think it's true about both go and rationality. Wish I'd thought of it for the post!

Yes, this is true, but it's also true that some kinds of imitation can take you far even if you don't understand them. Personally, I try to play with good shape, I have seen it pay off, but I don't understand most of ways that this helps me. A good parallel in rationality might be learning self doubt. This can help, even if one doesn't know the myriad ways people have of fooling themselves which it is intended to thwart.

1BeanSprugget
I don't know anything about Go. But the fact that following it helps you reminds me of In praise of fake frameworks: while "good shape" isn't fully accurate at calculating the best move, it's more "computationally useful" for most situations (similar to calculating physics with Newton's laws vs general relativity and quantum mechanics). (The author also mentions "ki", which makes no sense from a physics perspective, to get better at aikido.) I think it's just important to remember that the "model" is only a map for the "reality" (the rules of the game).
5realitygrill
This phenomenon is extremely frustrating to me, but I don't pretend to not take advantage of it. Part of the reason to play shape is that it's generally recognized as efficient structure; another is that it closes down options - you prune the search tree towards well-understood structures and don't have to worry or expend as much mental energy reading.

A couple thoughts on places to look for ideas, places where people have probably been thinking about similar challenges:

  • Interstellar Travel There's a lot of speculation about feasibility here, and I think people generally assume the need for some sort of long-term, low-power cryogenic preservation. They do assume access to interstellar vacuum, though.
  • DNA "arks" and similar biodiversity libraries. I haven't heard of anything in this space looking at zero- or low-maintenance preservation, but maybe there's a paranoid fringe?
1Roko
And presumably also interstellar temperatures of 3 degrees above absolute zero!

I see what you mean. It's a matter of what threat you have in mind. I'm thinking mainly of the hostility of a pretty-much intact society to cryonics, and how to take your idea of protecting preserved people by using the notion of "respect for the dead" further, also incorporating the idea of honoring the dead by maintaining shrines/graves, etc.

You're totally right that if there's a global depression or civilizational collapse, then the threat of thawing comes more from inability to maintain rather than unwillingness or opposition.

Maybe it would... (read more)

... and a ΔT of 220 °C ...

With liquid nitrogen at -196°C and the average temp in the places you suggest well below freezing (A few minutes of googling suggests it wouldn't be hard to find an average annual temp of -20°C.), I think you could use a more-optimistic ΔT of 175°.

4Roko
There is a good idea along these lines, though. Have an outer shell cooled by dry ice, which takes about 6 times more heat per unit volume than nitrogen to heat from solid to gas at ambient temperature. The dry ice sublimes at -78C. If you do this, the ΔT that the dry ice sees matters, so building the facility somewhere with a very cold winter temperature makes sense.
4Roko
Sure, you could do that. You only gain a factor of 1.25 for that, though.

Why limit yourself to no maintenance at all in your feasibility speculations? Tending graves is common across cultures. As long as you're spinning a tank of liquid nitrogen as a "grave", why not spin a nitrogen topoff as equivalent to keeping the grass trimmed or bringing fresh flowers?

7Roko
Because if the shit hits the fan and cryo companies go bust, who can you rely on to pay $5000 for a tanker to come every few years? I don't even think I'd rely on my kids to do that, every year without fail, even if there's a major depression and their own kids are going hungry. And if the shit really hits the fan (civilizational collapse) then there will be no liquid nitrogen.

Does anybody know what is depicted in the little image named "mini-landscape.gif" at the bottom of each top level post, or why it appears there?

0matt
It was an early draft of the map vs territory theme that became the site header, which we intended to finish but forgot about.
1Kazuo_Thow
Part of the San Francisco skyline, maybe?
1cousin_it
Thanks. This is the first time I ever noticed this. Absolutely no idea what it is or why it's there. Talk about selective blindness!

that's much better than the nothing that will befall those who would otherwise have been totally lost

I'm curious to know why you make this judgment. I imagine future people choosing between making a new person and making an as-similar-as-a-relative copy of a preserved person. In both cases, one additional person gets to exist. In both cases, that person is not somebody who has ever existed before. In neither case case does a future person get to revive a loved one, because the result will only be somebody similar to that loved one. Reviving the pre... (read more)

GreenRoot180

Thanks for the well-written article. I enjoyed the analogy between statistical tools and intuition. I'm used to questioning the former, but more often than not I still trust my intuition, though now that you point it out, I'm not sure why.

xv15290

You shouldn't take this post as a dismissal of intuition, just a reminder that intution is not magically reliable. Generally, intuition is a way of saying, "I sense similarities between this problem and other ones I have worked on. Before I work on this problem, I have some expectation about the answer." And often your expectation will be right, so it's not something to throw away. You just need to have the right degree of confidence in it.

Often one has worked through the argument before and remembers the conclusion but not the actual steps ... (read more)

I do know why I trust my intuitions as much as I do. My intuitions are partly the result of natural selection and so I can expect that they can be trusted for the purposes of surviving and reproducing. In domains that closely resemble the environment where this selection process took place I trust my intuition more, in domains that do not resemble that environment I trust my intuition less.

Black box or not, the fact that we are here is good evidence that they (our intuitions) work (on net).

I would very much like to see a cannon develop for knowledge that LWers generally agree upon

LW is working on it, and you can help!

7Richard_Kennaway
I'd like to see a picture of this LW cannon!

This is an interesting way of thinking about citizenship and immigration, one which I think is useful. I don't think I've ever thought about the way other countries' immigration rules regard me. Thanks for the new thought.

This is a very well written post which I enjoyed reading quite a bit. The writing is clear, the (well cited!) application of ideas developed on LW to the problem is great to support further building on them, and your analysis of the conventional wisdom regarding disease and blameworthiness as a consequence of a deontologist libertarian ethics rang true for me and helped me to understand my own thinking on the issue better.

Thanks for the care you put into this post.

This is some of the best writing on online societies I've ever read. Thanks for link and excerpt. I think this is worthy of a top-level post (if we want top-levels to ever go meta), because I'm worried for LessWrong.

GreenRoot150

However, despite these legal changes, it's not correct to say that the ring doesn't cost the proposer anything.

You've changed my mind: there is a real cost to the ring. I considered the ring a thing equal in value to its price but didn't think it through enough to realize that after it's bought it only retains much value (as sentimental value to the couple) if the proposal succeeds. Thanks for the links; I had no idea diamonds were so over-priced.

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