All of AlanCrowe's Comments + Replies

My take on the conflict theory analysis is that the reserve army of brutal thugs is a valuable resource for avant-garde revolutionaries. Think 1917 Russian revolution. Its was a close run thing with a brutal civil war. Typically the avant-garde don't have the numbers. They may win power, but not have the numbers to hold on to it. They need to put boots on the necks of counter-revolutionaries. Since their tests for counter-revolutionariness have too many false negatives, they have to go large and put boots on the necks of the general population. Where do th... (read more)

You are over-simplifying Bayesian reasoning. Giving partial credence to propositions doesn't work; numerical values representing partial credence must be attached to the basic conjunctions. 

For example, if the propositions are A, B, and C, the idea for coping with incomplete information that every-one has, is to come up with something like P(A)=0.2, P(B)=0.3, P(C)=0.4 This doesn't work.

One has to work with the conjunctions and come up with something like 

P(A and B and C) = 0.1

P(A and B and not C) = 0.1

P(A and not B and C) = 0.1

P(A and not B and n... (read more)

I started going barefoot in the streets of Edinburgh in February 2000. Eventually I wrote a little web page explaining myself. I didn't want to duplicate what was on the Society For Barefoot Living website, so I narrowed my focus to a single aspect. Twenty four years later, I still go barefoot nearly all the time. Rescuing the text to paste it here, I notice that it has stood the test of time very well :-)

Hard surfaces

Modern life involves much walking on hard surfaces, pavements, reinforced concrete floors, steel decking, and it is worth pondering whether ... (read more)

This reminds me of a passage in Richard Feynman's memoir "What do you care what other people think?". Four pages into the chapter Gumshoes, (page 163 in the Unwin Paperback edition):

Then this business of Thiokol changing its position came up. Mr. Rogers and Dr. Ride were asking two Thiokol managers, Mr. Mason and Mr. Lund, how many people were against the launch, even at the last moment.

"We didn't poll everyone," says Mr. Mason.

"Was there a substantial number against the launch, or just one or two?"

"There were, I would say, probably five or six... (read more)

From the perspective of 2023, censorship looks old fashioned; new approaches create popular enthusiasm around government narratives.

For example, the modern way for the Chinese to handle Tiananmen Square is to teach the Chinese people about it, how it is an American disinformation campaign that aims to destabilize the PRC by inventing a massacre that never happened, and this is a good example of why you should hate America.

Of course there are conspiracy theorist who say that it actually happened and the government covered it up. What happened to... (read more)

I think that this is especially bad for science because science doesn't have anything equivalent to test and analyze before the medals are handed out. Peer review isn't an adversarial process aimed at detecting fraud. Anti-fraud in science is entirely based on your published papers being analogous to the stored urine samples; you are vulnerable to people getting round to checking, maybe, one day, after you've spent the grant money. If we can translate across from the Olympic experience we are saying that that kind of delayed anti-fraud measure works especially poorly with humans.

My analysis saw the fundamental problem as the yearning for consensus. What was signal? What was noise? Who was trolling? Designers of forum software go wrong when they believe that these are good, one place questions with actual one place answers. The software is designed in the hope that its operation will yield these answers.

My suggestion, Outer Circle got discussed on Hacker News under the title Saving forums from themselves with shared hierarchical white lists and I managed to flesh out the ideas a little.

Then my frail health got even worse and I never did anything more :-(

I think there are ordering constraints on the sequence of technological advances involved. One vision of how revival works goes like this: start with a destructive, high resolution scan of the body, then cure illness and death computationally, by processing the data from the scan. Finally use advanced nano-technology to print out a new, well body.

Although individual mammalian cells can be thawed, whole human bodies are not thawable. So the nano-technology has to be warm as well as macroscopic. Also a warm, half printed body is not viable, so printing has t... (read more)

One problem is that most people think we are always in the short run. No matter how many times you teach students that tight money raises rates in the short run (liquidity effect) and lowers them in the long run (income and Fisher effects), when the long run actually comes around they will still see the fall in interest rates as ECB policy "easing". And this is because most people think the term "short run" is roughly synonymous with "right now." It's not. Actually "right now" we see the long run effects of policies

The quote is easier to understand if you are familiar with Bradshaw.

A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform.

Freder... (read more)

Stories always outlasted their usefulness.

That is an interesting thought. When I try to ground it in contemporary reality my thoughts turn to politics. Modern democratic politics is partly about telling stories to motivate voters, but which stories have outlasted their usefulness? Any answer is likely to be contentious.

Turning to the past, I wrote a little essay suggesting that stories of going back to nature to live in a recent golden age when life was simpler may serve as examples of stories that have outlasted their usefulness by a century.

I took the survey. Started on the BSRI but abandoned it because I found the process of giving vague answers to vague questions distressing.

I don't see what to do about gaps in arguments. Gaps aren't random. There are little gaps where the original authors have chosen to use their limited word count on other, more delicate, parts of their argument, confident that charitable readers will be happy to fill the small gaps themselves in the obvious ways. There are big gaps where the authors have gone the other way, tip toeing around the weakest points in their argument. Perhaps they hope no-one else will notice. Perhaps they are in denial. Perhaps there are issues with the clarity of the logical st... (read more)

Plus a social mechanism that turns follow-your-dreams versus be-sensible into a hard choice that doesn't much matter.

Also, we can look at the mechanism and see that it affects some people more than others. If you have a common dream, such as being a poet or a novelist, the mechanism is hard at work, flattening the plateau. An example of an uncommon dream is harder to come by.

Once upon a time (1960?) the electric guitar was new. If you formed a band playing electric guitars you would encounter two kinds of opposition. One is "don't be a musician, too ... (read more)

One interesting idea in this space is Compensating Differentials. There is a mismatch between the jobs that people want to do and the jobs that need doing. Wage differences help to reduce the mismatch.

When an ordinary persons tries to optimize their life they face a trade-off. Stick to the line of work they like, which too many other people also like, and be poorly paid, or try something worse for more money. Non-ordinary persons may strike it lucky, finding that they personally like a line of work which is necessary and unpopular and thus well paid. The c... (read more)

Discussed here

I think there is a tale to tell about the consumer surplus and it goes like this.

Alice loves widgets. She would pay $100 for a widget. She goes on line and finds Bob offering widgets for sale for $100. Err, that is not really what she had in mind. She imagined paying $30 for a widget, and feeling $70 better off as a consequence. She emails Bob: How about $90?

Bob feels like giving up altogether. It takes him ten hours to hand craft a widget and the minimum wage where he lives is $10 an hour. He was offering widgets for $150. $100 is the absolute minimum. Bo... (read more)

I read your link. Here is what I got from it.

There are three ways to write a novel.

1)Hemingway/Melville: Do stuff, write about it.

2)Kaleidoscope: Study literature at university. Read more novels. Go to writers' workshops. Read yet more novels. Write a million words of juvenilia. Read even more novels. Create mash-up master piece.

3)Irish: Sit in public house, drinking. Write great Irish Novel. How? Miraculously!

Beckett propagandizes against the Irish way, saying "My character, Krapp, tried the Irish way. He tried to helped the miracle along with lots of self-obsession. It worked out badly for him; it will work out badly for you."

That helps me. In his book Quantum Reality, Nick Herbert phrases it this way:

The Everett multiverse violates the CFD assumption because although such a world has plenty of contrafactuality, it is short on definiteness.

which is cutely aphoristic, but confused me. What does contrafactuality even mean in MWI?

Pointing out that MWI rejects factual definiteness clears things up nicely.

My health is very poor. A fleshed out version might run to 25 000 words. I'm not going to manage that. Worse than that, I don't really know how to write. They say one needs to write a million words to be any good, so the full project, learn to write, then come back and flesh it out, runs to 1 025 000 words.

Please have a go at fleshing it out yourself.

Even if you never publish it, you will have to commit to views about personal identity and how and well it survives the passage of decades. Perhaps, in thirty years time, you will rediscover your completed man... (read more)

The actions of the main participants are consistent with their incentives. The owners of the archiving company dodge scandal and ruin by covering up the fact that they have lost Bill's tape "That was unthinkable.". The employees of the archiving company play along with doctoring Fred-minus30's tape "with a bit of manual fixing of uncorrectable errors." and get to keep their jobs.

Fred-minus30 faces the harsh reality of the law that says "There can be only one." He has read his share of hologram-horror and hologram-thriller. He ... (read more)

I think that is the right question and plunge ahead giving a specific answer, basically that "the self" is an instinct, not a thing.

The self is the verbal behaviour that results from certain instincts necessary to the functioning of a cognitive architecture with intelligence layered on top of a short term reward system. We can notice how slightly different instincts give rise to slightly different senses of self and we can ask engineers' questions about which instincts, and hence which sense-of-self, give the better functioning cognitive archit

Each compartment has its own threshold for evidence.

The post reminded me of Christians talking bravely about there being plenty of evidence for their beliefs. How does that work?

• When evidence is abundant we avoid information overload by raising the threshold for what counts as evidence. We have the luxury of taking our decisions on the basis of good quality evidence and the further luxury of dismissing mediocre evidence as not evidence at all.

• Evidence is seldom abundant. Usually we work with a middling threshold for evidence, doing the best we can wit

As Eilenberg-Mac Lane first observed, "category" has been defined in order to be able to define "functor" and "functor" has been defined in order to be able to define "natural transformation".

Saunders Mac Lane, Categories for the Working Mathematician

That doesn't seem to be strictly true.

It goes against the spirit of "15 words" to insist on strict truth. The merit of the quote lies in the fourth clause.

or they have a common effect you're conditioning on.

That's the big surprise. The point of boiling it down to "15 words" is to pick which subtlety makes it into the shortest formulation.

In Beyond Freedom and Dignity Skinner writes (page 21)

A more important reason is that the inner man seems at times to be directly observed. We must infer the jubilance of a falling body, but can we not feel our own jubilance? We do, indeed, feel things inside our own skin, but we do not feel the things which have been invented to explain behaviour. The possessed man does not feel the possessing demon and may even deny that one exists. The juvenile delinquent does not feel his disturbed personality. The intelligent man does not feel his intelligence or th

This example pushed me into formulating Crowe's Law of Sarcastic Dismissal: Any explanation that is subtle enough to be correct is turbid enough to make its sarcastic dismissal genuinely funny.

Skinner had a subtle point to make, that the important objection to mentalism is of a very different sort. The world of the mind steals the show. Behaviour is not recognized as a subject in its own right.

I think I grasped Skinner's point after reading something Feynman wrote on explanations in science. You can explain why green paint is green by explaining that paint... (read more)

Readers don't know what your post is about. Your comment explains "My goal ..." but that should be the start of the post, orienting the reader.

How does your hypothetical help identify possible dangling units? You've worked it out in your head. That should be the second part of post, working through the logic, here is my goal, here is the obstacle, here is how I get round it.

For the most part the objects which approve themselves to us are not so much the award of well-deserved certificates --- which is supposed by the mass of unthinking people to be the main object --- but to give people something definite to work for; to counteract the tendency to sipping and sampling which so often defeats the aspirations of gifted beings,...

--- Sir Hubert Parry, speaking to The Royal College of Music about the purpose of music examinations

Initially I thought this a wonderful quote because, looking back at my life, I could see several def... (read more)

Any examples of total recursive functions that are not primitive recursive and do not violently explode?

The set of primitive recursive functions is interesting because it is pretty inclusive, (lots of functions have a primitive recursive implementation) and primitive recursive functions always terminate. I'm interested in trying to implement general purpose machine learning by enumerating primitive recursive functions. Which raises the question of just how general the primitive recursive functions really are.

Ackermann's function gives an example of what yo... (read more)

It is an important topic, but the Institute of Economic Affairs landing page that you link to is pretty lame.

Emphasizing "Evidence" gives one a hefty shove towards evidence that is quick and easy to gather.

QUICK The IEA say

A disregard for substitution effects.

but the actual problem is that substitution takes time. If you want to gather evidence about substitution effects you have to be patient. "Evidence based policy making" is biased towards fast-evidence, to accommodate the urgency of policy making. So of course substitution eff... (read more)

Do you have evidence in the other direction?

No. I think one typically has to come up with a brutally truncated approximation to actually Bayesian reasoning. For example, if you have n propositions, instead of considering all 2^ n basic conjunctions, ones first idea is to assume that they are all independent. Typically that is a total failure; the independence assumption abolishes the very interactions that were of interest. So one might let proposition n depend on proposition n-1 and reinvent Markov models.

I don't see much hope of being able to anticipa... (read more)

You've put your finger on a weakness of my optimistic vision. If the guesses are calling it 90% of the time, they significantly extend the feasible depth of search. But 60:40? Meh! There is a lot of room for the insights to fail to be sharp enough, which turns the Bayesian stuff into CPU-cycle wasting overhead.

Current theorem provers don't have a "sense of direction".

From the description of Polya's Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning: Vol. II: Patterns of Plausible Inference:

This is a guide to the practical art of plausible reasoning, particularly in mathematics but also in every field of human activity. Using mathematics as the example par excellence, Professor Polya shows how even that most rigorous deductive discipline is heavily dependent on techniques of guessing, inductive reasoning, and reasoning by analogy. In solving a problem, the answer mu

Madmen we are, but not quite on the pattern of those who are shut up in a madhouse. It does not concern any of them to discover what sort of madness afflicts his neighbor, or the previous occupants of his cell; but it matters very much to us. The human mind is less prone to go astray when it gets to know to what extent, and in how many directions, it is itself liable to err, and we can never devote too much time to the study of our aberrations.

Bernard de Fontenelle,1686

Found in book review

I'm not connected to the Singularity Institute or anything, so this is my idiosyncratic view.

Think about theorem provers such as Isabelle or ACL2. They are typically structured a bit like an expert system with a rule base and an inference engine. The axioms play the role of rule base and the theorem prover plays the role of the inference engine. While it is easy to change the axioms, this implies a degree of interpretive overhead when it come to trying to prove a theorem.

One way to reduce the interpretative overhead is to use a partial evaluator to special... (read more)

I don't find either example convincing about the general point. Since I'm stupid I'll fail to spot that the mouse example uses fictional evidence and is best ignored

We are all pretty sick of seeing a headline "Cure for Alzheimer's disease!!!" and clicking through to the article only to find that it is cured in mice, knock-out mice, with a missing gene, and therefore suffering from a disease a little like human Alzheimer. The treatment turns out to be injecting them with the protein that the missing gene codes for. Relevance to human health: zero.... (read more)

The corollary is more useful than the theorem:-) If I wish to be less of a dumbass, it helps to know what it looks like from the inside. It looks like bad luck, so my first job is to learn to distinguish bad luck from enemy action. In Eliezer's specific example that is going to be hard because I need to include myself in my list of potential enemies.

these blogs succeed ... because they ... exclude comments whose quality falls below a certain threshold.

I see an opportunity for philanthropy. Identity the elite people that one hopes will blog, and then pay for somebody else to do the comment moderation for them.

The problem I foresee is that this turns out to be big-money philanthropy. Who do you hire as your moderator? They probably need a PhD in mathematics, and the right personality: agreeable yet firm. People like that have lots of well paid options in which they are not playing second fiddle. The ... (read more)

One thing that I've tried with Google is using it to write stories. Start by searching on "Fred was bored and". Pick slightly from the results and search on "was bored and slightly". Pick annoyed from the search results and search on "bored and slightly annoyed"

Trying this again just now reminds me that I let the sentence fragment grow and grow until I was down to, err, ten? hits. Then I took the next word from a hit that wasn't making a literal copy, and deleted enough leading words to get the hit count back up.

Anyway, it see... (read more)

The human brain is subject to glitches, such as petit mal, transient ischaemic attack, or misfiling a memory of a dream as a memory of something that really happened.

There is a lot of scope for a cheap simulation to produce glitches in the matrix without those glitches spoiling the results of the simulation. The inside people notice something off and just shrug. "I must have dreamt it" "I had a petit mal." "That wasn't the simulators taking me off line to edit a glitch out of my memory, that was just a TIA. I should get my blood pr... (read more)

The post doesn't do justice to the subtlety of Turing's insight. The Turing test is two-faced in that the interrogator is addressing two contestants, the computer and the human. He doesn't know which is which, but he hopes that comparing their answers will reveal their identities. But the Turing test is two-faced in a second way.

Turing hopes that the test will satisfy its audience, but that audience contains two groups. There is a pro-AI group. Some of them will have been involved in writing the initial source code of the AI that is taking the test. They a... (read more)

Good point! I've totally failed to think about multiple laws interacting.

There would have to be a two sided test. A tort of ineffectiveness by which the plaintiff seeks relief from a law that fails to achieve the goals laid out for it. A tort of under-ambition by which the plaintiff seeks relief from a law that is immune from the tort of ineffectiveness because the formally specified goals are feeble.

Think about the American experience with courts voiding laws that are unconstitutional. This often ends up with the courts applying balancing tests. It can end up with the court ruling that yes, the law infringes your rights, but o... (read more)

I fear that I've missed your point, but here is my runnable toy model written in Common Lisp

(defun x () (random 1.0))
(defun y () (random 1.0))
(defun z () (random 1.0))

(defun x-y () (- (x) (y)))
(defun y-z () (- (y) (z)))
(defun z-x () (- (z) (x)))

(defparameter diffs (list (x-y) (y-z) (z-x)))

(reduce #'+ diffs) => -0.42450535

The variable diffs get set to a list of the three estimates. Adding them up we get -0.424. What has gone wrong?

X, Y, and Z are all 1/2. But they are tricky to measure. (defun x () (random 1.0)) is modelling the idea that whe... (read more)

That clashes in an interesting way with the recent post on Privileging the Question. Let us draw up our own, independent list of things that matter. There will be some, high up our list, about which our culture has no particular belief. Our self imposed duty is to find out whether they are true or not, leaving less important, culturally prominent beliefs alone.

Culture changes and many prominent beliefs of our culture will fade away, truth unchecked, before we are through with more urgent matters.