All of JamesPfeiffer's Comments + Replies

Rolling all 60 years of bets up into one probability distribution as in your example, we get:

  • 0,999999999998 chance of - 1 billion * cost-per-bet
  • 1 - 0,999999999998 - epsilon chance of 10^100 lives - 1 billion * cost-per-bet
  • epsilon chance of n * 10^100 lives, etc.

I think what this shows is that the aggregating technique you propose is no different than just dealing with a 1-shot bet. So if you can't solve the one-shot Pascal's mugging, aggregating it won't help in general.

1) We don't need an unbounded utility function to demonstrate Pascal's Mugging. Plain old large numbers like 10^100 are enough.

2) It seems reasonable for utility to be linear in things we care about, e.g. human lives. This could run into a problem with non-uniqueness, i.e., if I run an identical computer program of you twice, maybe that shouldn't count as two. But I think this is sufficiently murky as to not make bounded utility clearly correct.

0snarles
Like V_V, I don't find it "reasonable" for utility to be linear in things we care about. I will write a discussion topic about the issue shortly. EDIT: Link to the topic: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mv3/unbounded_linear_utility_functions/
1V_V
The scale is arbitrary. If your utility function is designed such that utility for common scenario are not very small compared to the maximum utility then you wouldn't have Pascal's Muggings. Does anybody really have linear preferences in anything? This seems at odds with empirical evidence.

Thanks for this. And thanks also for the pointer to Scott's guide.

Did you do any testing pre-pregnancy, i.e. for genetic matchup between you and your husband? And did you do any of the fetal testing mentioned e.g. for autism? Wondering about the cost-benefit on those.

juliawise100

He had testing for a genetic disease done due to his family history. I had whatever the slate of "early risk assessment" treating includes - what I remember is a blood test for cystic fibrosis and an ultrasound to look for signs of Down syndrome. All was covered by insurance. http://www.earlyriskassessment.com/

I'm not aware of prenatal testing for autism? We did both take the Baron-Cohen AQ quiz, which didn't think we were particularly likely to have autistic kids, though I'm not sure that's worth much.

I finished my math PhD thesis in September!

3gjm
What's it about?
-1DanielLC
Conservation laws are not forces. There are hypothetical patterns of force that would not conserve these things, but the way things normally move is not the only one. For example, if there were no forces, all the conservation laws will still work. Also, from what I understand, that's more a symmetry in the laws themselves, where the Pauli principle is a symmetry in the waveform being operated on.
2SilasBarta
That has a lot of explanatory power for why I linked Noether's Theorem the first time around.

Along with the other physics-related examples here, Richard Dawkins' pendulum video seems relevant here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bsk5yPFm5NM

I was like this from ages 12-18, perhaps? It started because quite a few people actually were mean to me, but my brain incorrectly extrapolated and assumed everyone was. The beginning of the end was when I started to do something that I had defined as the province of the liked-people (in this case, dating), though it took about two years to purge the habit.

Perhaps there is something you are similarly defining to imply likedness, and you can do that thing.

Monologues or disjointed verbal fragments. When I am mad at someone (hasn't really happened for a few years :) ) I get into dialogues with them, usually going in circles.

For a teaser, the part about singing logarithms looks cool.

Is this actually incorrect, though? As far as I know, people have problems and inadequacies. When they solve them, they move on to worrying about other things. It's probably a safe bet that the awesome people you're describing do as well.

What probably is wrong is that general awesomeness makes hidden bad stuff more likely.

My relevant life excerpt is similar to yours. The first two changed because of increased understanding of how humans coordinate and act socially. Not sure if there is a link to the third.

I have been thinking about "holding off on proposing solutions." Can anyone comment on whether this is more about the social friction involved in rejecting someone's solution without injuring their pride, or more about the difficulty of getting an idea out of your head once it's there?

If it's mostly social, then I would expect the method to not be useful when used by a single person; and conversely. My anecdote is that I feel it's helped me when thinking solo, but this may be wishful thinking.

0zero_call
You might think about the zen idea, in which the proposal of solutions is certainly held off, or treated differently. This is a very common idea in response to the tendency of solutions to precipitate themselves so ubiquitously.
2Oscar_Cunningham
Definitely the latter, even when I'm on my own, any subsequent ideas after my first one tend to be variations on my first solution, unless I try extra hard to escape its grip.
1torekp
Seconding Mitchell Porter's friendly attitude toward the Transactional Interpretation, I recommend this paper by Ruth Kastner and John Cramer.

I like the idea of the intermittent text messages. I pay for texts, so I modified it to send me email. I'm having them sent with a random delay of 60-179 minutes and only between 8am and 10pm. I'll see how it goes for a few days (possibly tweaking the parameters) and do an open thread comment with my experiences and the setup instructions.

5mattnewport
There's an app for that. Disclaimer: I have no idea whether this app is any good or not, haven't tried it myself.

I wasn't good at social skills until something like age 17, though they still go bad because of winter depression. Kids have different brains too; I would tell adolescents wondering to wait a few years. For me it was like a light came on and I could understand strangers.

[anonymous]100

I was a very bizarre child up to age 10 or so. Wouldn't look people in the eye, walked into walls, talked to myself, didn't make friends, etc. Now essentially none of that shows. I may have "had something" but it's moot at this point.

The only bizarre thing that remains is my near-pathological lack of spatial skills. I can't aim, throw, dance, or drive with anywhere near the ease of a normal person. (I wonder if it's improvable at all?)

I noticed something recently which might be a positive aspect of akrasia, and a reason for its existence.

Background: I am generally bad at getting things done. For instance, I might put off paying a bill for a long time, which seems strange considering the whole process would take < 5 minutes.

A while back, I read about a solution: when you happen to remember a small task, if you are capable of doing it right then, then do it right then. I found this easy to follow, and quickly got a lot better at keeping up with small things.

A week or two into it, I t... (read more)

3Leafy
Continuing on the "last responsible moment" comment from one of the other responders - would it not be helpful to consider the putting off of a task until the last moment as an attempt to gather the largest amount of information persuant to the task without incurring any penalty? Having poor focus and attention span I use an online todo-list for work and home life where I list every task as soon as I think of it, whether it is to be done within the next hour or year. The list soon mounts up, occassionally causing me anxiety, and I regularly have cause to carry a task over to the next day for weeks at a time - but what I have found is that a large number of tasks get removed because a change makes the task no longer necessary and a small proportion get notes added to them while they stay on the list so that the by the time the task gets actioned it has been enhanced by the extra information. By having everything captured I can be sure no task will be lost, but by procrastinating I can ensure the highest level of efficiency in the tasks that I do eventually perform. Thoughts?
3bogdanb
I suspect it’s just a figure of speech, but can you elaborate on what you meant by “evil” above?

the most extreme example is depressed people having an increased risk of suicide if an antidepressant lifts their akrasia before it improves their mood.

7Morendil
Good observations. Sometimes I procrastinate for weeks about doing something, generally non-urgent, only to have something happen that would have made the doing of it unnecessary. (For instance, I procrastinate about getting train tickets for a short trip to visit a client, and the day before the visit is due the client rings me to call it off.) The useful notion here is that it generally pays to defer action or decision until "the last responsible moment"; it is the consequence of applying the theory of options valuation, specifically real options, to everyday decisions. A top-level post about this would probably be relevant to the LW readership, as real options are a non-trivial instance of a procedure for decision under uncertainty. I'm not entirely sure I'm qualified to write it, but if no one else steps up I'll volunteer to do the research and write it up.

Hmm. What do we mean by weight? Mass * g?

Most of yours wouldn't come up in a search though.

0RobinZ
Which raises the question of what is an acceptable failure rate.

Evolving a threat response over a half-million years on the African savannah hasn't really left me with any good mechanisms for dealing with a threatening number.

PartiallyClips

Once management recognizes that there is something to measure, I think they do an OK job measuring it - secret shoppers come to mind. But there's something more subtle about when you take for granted that G = G* and don't even think to verbalize your true values, so can't measure them.

5NancyLebovitz
The secret shoppers are a variant of "the king going incognito"-- but not as good in some ways because they may be tasked with evaluating according to a checklist, and thus could still be trapped by G vs G*. I believe that the problem isn't that true values aren't verbalized, it's that they can't be fully verbalized. Language is too low-bandwidth to capture all the aspects of a situation. The point of a king going incognito isn't just to enforce existing, verbalized rules, it's to see how things are in the kingdom. It's a bit easier for a king than an AI because a king is more like a subject than an AI is like people.

I'll be there, possibly with another.

Based on my friends, the care/don't care dichotomy cuts orthogonally to the math/no math dichotomy. Most people, whether good or bad at math, can understand that the chances are the same. It's some other independent aspect of your brain that determines whether it intensely matters to you to do things "the right way" or if you can accept the symmetry of the situation. I hereby nominate some OCD-like explanation. I'd be interested in seeing whether OCD correlated with your friends' behavior.

As a data point, I am not OCD and don't care if you cut the deck.

2MrHen
I am more likely to be considered OCD than any of my friends in the example. I don't care if you cut the deck.

You don't think he's joking? That paragraph ends with

"They have no respect for the opinions of accepted experts and seldom quote Ovid in the original, so just don't bother to attend."