All of Bayeslisk's Comments + Replies

On the advice of a new friend, I think that i will be coming to this, but will need some help navigating, since I currently live in Chicago and have been to Ann Arbor exactly once in my life 5 years ago.

0torekp
Hi Paul, I'm the other Paul (the p in torekp stands for Paul). Glad you made it.

Oh, good. I got this too. With XOR. Contrary to other repliers, it seems to me like XOR is a simpler primitive than "the presence/absence of shapes forms a rectangle". It's more easily generalizable and doesn't rely on the existence of other patterns. As a cute curiosity, by the way, the XOR-ing works both vertically and horizontally.

1Good_Burning_Plastic
I did it with horizontal XOR, and I didn't notice the vertical XOR or the rectangles (which, if you think about it, are a consequence of the two XORs) until I read the comments.
0Douglas_Knight
The rectangle pattern is more complicated than the horizontal XOR pattern. But the rectangle pattern is the full pattern and the horizontal XOR isn't. The full pattern is the combination of both horizontal and vertical XOR patterns. You can get the answer without seeing the full pattern, just seeing the horizontal XOR pattern. The full pattern, either in rectangle form or both XORs doesn't help you get the answer, but it is useful check.

I was slightly late, unfortunately, but filled out the whole thing anyway.

Oh, cool. I've found the distinction to be a very useful one to make.

I don't think I understand what you mean by privative. Is it something like the difference between "na'e" and "to'e" in Lojban? For reference: {mi na'e djica} would mean "I other-than want", and {mi to'e djica} would mean "I opposite-of want".

0Richard_Kennaway
That's pretty much it. Privative "not" would be "to'e". The English "not" covers both senses according to context, but "not want" is always privative and some lengthier phrase has to be used to express absence of wanting. Or not so lengthy, e.g. "meh".

LW Adirondack? I'm from Albany, and would show up if the time was right. I'm away at college at the moment.

1Ixiel
Greenfield Center, just North of Saratoga. I'm not ambitious enough to run a meeting but I'd attend one.

I am unfortunately engaged all that day and thus will be unlikely to be able to show up.

0Larks
That is quite alright.

Thanks! I'll have a read through this.

0BloodyShrimp
I decided I should actually read the paper myself, and... as of page 7, it sure looks like I was misrepresenting Aaronson's position, at least. (I had only skimmed a couple Less Wrong threads on his paper.)

Can you give me some examples of what some people think constitutes Knightian uncertainty? Also: what do they mean by "you"? They seem to be postulating something supernatural.

1BloodyShrimp
Again, I'm not a good choice for an explainer of this stuff, but you could try http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1438

That seems eminently exploitable and consequently extremely dangerous. Safety and unexpected delight lie in unpredictability.

These are both pretty much exactly what I'm thinking of! The feeling that someone (or you!) is/are a terrifyingly predictable black box.

0DanielLC
My goal in life is to become someone so predictable that you can figure out what I'll do just by calculating what choice would maximize utility.

In mine, too, at least for the first few seconds. Otherwise, knowing I had already responded a certain way, I would probably respond differently.

Sort of in the sense of human minds being more like fixed black boxes that one might like to think. What's Knightian free will, though?

0BloodyShrimp
Knightian uncertainty is uncertainty where probabilities can't even be applied. I'm not convinced it exists. Some people seem to think free will is rescued by it; that the human mind could be unpredictable even in theory, and this somehow means it's "you" "making choices". This seems like deep confusion to me, and so I'm probably not expressing their position correctly. Reductionism could be consistent with that, though, if you explained the mind's workings in terms of the simplest Knightian atomic thingies you could.

Has anyone else had one of those odd moments when you've accidentally confirmed reductionism (of a sort) by unknowingly responding to a situation almost identically to the last time or times you encountered it? For my part, I once gave the same condolences to an acquaintance who was living with someone we both knew to be very unpleasant, and also just attempted to add the word for "tomato" in Lojban to my list of words after seeing the Pomodoro technique mentioned.

2BloodyShrimp
This doesn't seem related to reductionism to me, except in that most reductionists don't believe in Knightian free will.
3mwengler
A freaky thing I once saw... when my daughter was about 3 there were certain things she responded to verbally, I can't remember what the thing was in this example, but something like me asking here "who is your rabbit?" and her replying "Kisses" (which was the name of her rabbit). I had videoed some of this exchange and was playing it on a TV with her in the room. I was appalled to hear her responding "Kisses" upon hearing me on the TV saying "who is your favorite rabbit." Her response was extremely similar to her response on the video, tremendous overlap in timing tone and inflection. Maybe 20 to 50 ms off in timing (almost sounded like unison). I really had the sense that she was a machine and it did not feel good.
2NancyLebovitz
In my case, it seems more likely that the other person will remember that I'd said the same thing before.

The problem is that knowing how well you cook doesn't really affect who should cook past a certain basic point of competence, as far as I can tell.

No, empty praise is still worthless, because Said's cooking and baking not perfect, and there is with near certainty some small flaw, some awkward stylistic choice that could use improvement. Best is the gentle nitpicking of these flaws with a prepended (This is amazing, but) and with the consequent inference that the bread/food/what have you is actually already REALLY GOOD.

0Mestroyer
There is value to knowing the quality of your work apart from knowing ways to improve it. For example, "Should I personally cook something for this upcoming potluck, or should I let my spouse do it?"
0Said Achmiz
I agree with your point but I think you may have misunderstood Mestroyer's comment (totally understandable, as I found his comment difficult to parse, myself). I take from your response that you interpret Mestroyer as referring to a scenario where there's nothing in my work to criticize, and I ask for feedback and receive praise, and correctly interpret the absence of criticism as evidence for there being nothing to criticize. I don't actually think that's the scenario Mestroyer had in mind, based on his second paragraph. (Or was it? If so, then he ought to adjust his terminology, because the term "empty praise" is not appropriate in that context.)

Also, my instinct for a scoring rule is min(estimation/true, true/estimation) for a scale of [0, 1].

I have a delightful idea for the Paranoid estimation game, and I have a scenario picked out. This should be fun. :3

0Bayeslisk
Also, my instinct for a scoring rule is min(estimation/true, true/estimation) for a scale of [0, 1].
0ArthurTheWort
Sharing what I find to be obvious and is my own internalized "common sense" is a philanthropic donation of the mind that for many years I was too selfish to be able to do. I personally have benefitted from the perusal of many blogs, finding help for both my personal and professional life and finally have come to accept that to give back to the minds around me will benefit myself and everyone else which will in turn benefit myself. I will throw out this tidbit of discovery now... Greatness is a function of effort. Huge projects that dwarf all before it are not greater than the smallest project of one careful person's craft.

You don't really need to figure out who the Right Thinking People are. You just need to figure out who the Horrendously Completely Almost-Unassailably Wrong Thinking People are.

Sorry for the necromancy - I'd call Guess cultures Hint, Subtle, or Infer/Imply/Implicit cultures, and Ask cultures Blurt, Overt, or Explicit cultures, for the full range of connotation.

From field experience as a Korean-American and thus someone closer in many situations to Ask, (or even TELL!) I have found a lot of success on just pretending to be endearingly forthright: making a big show of asking all the other people whether they want the last dumpling a couple of times, asking whether they're sure, etc. The fact that my uncle, my mother, and I are similar in this and that they will often take me up on this to split/outright take the dumpling, showing clearly that I am, indeed, serious about my ask, helps too.

I know that. I was commenting that the LWer was apparently not a Communist as one might expect, which I found slightly funny.

Yes, and this was why I did not include them.

I agree. This was clearly the object of furious guessing and second-guessing. :V

I don't know if this is the LW hug or something but I'm having trouble downloading the xls. Also, will update with what the crap my passphrase actually means, because it's in Lojban and mildly entertaining IIRC.

EDIT: Felt like looking at some other entertaining passphrases. Included with comment.

sruta'ulor maftitnab {mine! scarf-fox magic-cakes!(probably that kind)}

Afgani-san Azerbai-chan {there... are no words}

DEFECTORS RULE

do mlatu {a fellow lojbanist!}

lalxu daplu {and another?}

telephone fonxa {and another! please get in contact with me. please.}

xagfu'a ... (read more)

0sanxiyn
You missed lalxu daplu.
2philh
The following passphrases were repeated (two occurances each, the only entry that occured more than twice was the blank one): Bagel bites EFFulgent shackles Kissing bobbies mimsy borogoves SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE If we go case-insensitive, there was also 'No thanks' and 'no thanks'; and 'TWO WORD' and 'Two Word'. (The first three of those came next to each other, so they were probably just multiple entries.)
3Said Achmiz
Actual translation: INDESTRUCTIBLE UNION (It's from the national anthem of the U.S.S.R.)

This seems like a really good idea, except that defecting is easy and appealing, Guess people will (as you pointed out) lose their shit, and worst of all, people just seem to get weirded out by the making explicit of things like actually understanding other people, or honestly talking about the full set of preferences - especially socially awkward ones. That said, I'd like to be able to do this with people.

This seems interesting and mostly correct. I will think about this more and write something about it when I have thought enough.

No, I know that the colon is not transplanted; the flora is. Hence the (?). Also, it hopefully doesn't get processed but rather survives to colonize the gut. Further, an enema would probably be far more effective, given its lack of strong acid and pepsin designed to kill the flora.

Good point. I doubt that that extends to abandoning food altogether, though.

Oh, makes sense. That's not food, though; that's a very easy organ(?) transplant.

0ChristianKl
You don't transplant the organ but the feces. They get processed in the intestine. Stuff that enters the body to be processed in the intestine is food for some definition of "food". But once you accept the goal to get feces into the gut, the way is only a detail that's open to change.

What are fecal implents?

Few people do, and I doubt that it will catch on; spirulina can also be grown on runoff fertilizer, which will probably sound more appealing to most people.

0ChristianKl
Sorry, typo. Should be fecal implants or stool transplants. Sounding appealing is a question of marketing. Plenty of people prefer organic food that grown with feces of animals over food grown with "chemical" fertilizer. They even pay more money for the product. I also think you underrate the cost of fertilizer for some poor biohacker in Neirobi who has plenty of access to empty bottles. Human urine should also be pretty cheap to buy in third world megacities. Access to cheap natural gas and oil is also central for the current way of doing agriculture. Without having access to those resources for cheap prices resource reuse might be a bigger deal.
2Lumifer
I think the parent post means fecal transplants which are a way to reseed the gut biota with something hopefully more suitable.

Absent mass mind uploading, I doubt that food in some relatively recognizable form will ever die out, or that we will ever find it economically feasible to eat food known to be made from human waste. Sunlight and feedstock are cheap, people get squicked easily, and stuff that's stuck around for a long time is likely to continue sticking around. You may as well say we'll outgrow a need for fire, language, or tools; indeed, I'd believe any of those over the total abandonment of food.

0ChristianKl
Fecal implants do seem to have some health benefits. There are people who do drink their own urine. Spirilina can be grown on urine. Algae also have the advantage that they are signal cell organism with means that it's easy to introduce new genes into them via DIY-bio efforts. That means you can easily change the way the stuff tastes and let it produce vitamins and other substances. If you want a cheap source of THC you can transplant the relevant genes needed to produce the THC into an algae and grow it at home in a way that isn't as easily discovered as growing hemp. You can trade different algae species and get more interesting compounds than THC.

That's something a little different - I think that's already talked about here. Maybe under the Hindsight Bias? At any rate, I'm not talking about looking back; I'm talking about looking from within. The march of history is almost always too slow to see, and even with a significant speedup it'd still probably seem "normal". Only right at the end would it be clear that a Singularity is occurring.

But these are not, seemingly, as different as, say, the discovery of LSD. Or psychotropics. Or the establishment of homosexuality as relatively innate. Or the invention of the car, or the very first creation of a constructed language.

-2Eugine_Nier
When did this actually happen? All the arguments I've boil down to either the "it shows up on brain scans and is thus innate" fallacy, or if you don't agree it's innate you must be an EVIL HOMOPHOBE!!!11!!
7ChristianKl
The invention of the car wasn't that big a deal. At the beginning it wasn't clear that cars are all that great. It took time for people to figure out that cars are much more awesome than horse carts. I think you underrate the effects of legalizing LSD. If you say you legalize all drugs, you have to ask yourself questions such as why pharma company pay a lot of money for clinical trials when all substances can be legally sold. As a society you have to answer those questions. As far as the establishment that homoesexuality is relatively innate, I think you have to keep in mind how vague the term homosexuality happens to be. At the moment homosexuality seems to be an identity label. To me it's not clear that this will be the case in 200 years. A lot of men who fuck other men in prisons don't see themselves as homosexual. Plenty of people who report that they had pleasureable sex with a person of the same sex don't label themselves as homosexual. There are also a lot of norms about avoiding physical contact with other people. A therapist is supposed to work on the mind and that doesn't mean just hugging a person for a minute. I can imagine a society in which casual touches between people are a lot more intimate than they are nowadays and behavior between males that a conversative American would label as homosexual would be default social behavior between friends. If you run twin studies you find that being overweight has a strong genetic factor. The same goes for height. Yet the average of both changed a lot during the last two hundred years. The notion of something being innate might even be some rest of what Nietzsche called the God in the grammar. It might not be around in 100 years anymore as it exists nowadays.

Something's brewing in my brain lately, and I don't know what. I know that it centers around:

-People were probably born during the Crimean War/US Civil War/The Boxer Rebellion who then died of a heart attack in a skyscraper/passenger plane crash/being caught up in, say WWII.

-Accurate descriptions of people from a decade or two ago tend to seem tasteless. (Casual homophobia) Accurate descriptions of people several decades ago seem awful and bizarre. (Hitting your wife, blatant racism) Accurate descriptions of people from centuries ago seem alien in their fl... (read more)

0NancyLebovitz
Vinge said something of the sort-- that the Singularity would be unimaginable from its past, but after the Singularity (he's assuming one which includes humans), the path to the Singularity will be known, and it will seem quite plausible.
4passive_fist
The problem is that human social mores seem to change on the order of 20-40 years which is consistent with the amount of time it takes a new generation of people to take the helm and for the old generation to die out. I have personally seen extreme societal change within my own country of origin, change that happened in only the span of 30 years. In comparison, Western culture over this same time has seemed almost stagnant (despite the fact that it, too, has undergone massive changes such as acceptance of homosexuality). However, by some estimates, we are already just 20-40 years away from the singularity (2035-2055). This seems like too short a time for human culture to adapt to the massive level that is required. For instance, consider a simple thing like food. Right now, the idea of eating meat that has been grown in a lab seems unsettling and strange to many people. Now consider what future technology will enable, step-by-step: * Food produced by nanotech with simple feedstock, with no slow and laborious cell growth required. * Food produced by nanotech with household waste, including urine and feces (possibly the feces of other people as well), thus creating a self-contained system. * Changing human biochemistry so that waste is simply recycled inside our bodies, requiring no food at all, and just an energy source plus some occasional supplements. * Uploading brains. Food becomes an archaic concept. There is likely to not be a very large span of time between each of these steps.
7ChristianKl
I do expect the future to be different. I could imagine a future where people see illegalizing LSD as strange as illegalizing homosexuality. I can imagine that Google's rent an AI car service will completely remove personal ownership of cars in a few decades. This removes cars as status symbols with means that they will be built on other design criteria like energy efficiency. I can imagine a constructed language possibly overtaking English. There are a lot of other things that are more vague.

IMO, even E is problematic: where did the torture-information come from in the first place?

0lukstafi
Reminds me of the error -- on charitable reading, of the characters, but perhaps of the author -- in "Permutation City". There's no such a thing as out-of-order simulation.

Yes, that was what I was getting at. Like I said elsewhere - game theory is not evil. It's just horrifyingly neutral. I am not using inhuman as bad; I am using inhuman as unfriendly.

1Lumifer
Then you must be horrified by all science.
7asr
The observation being made, I believe, is that the most prominent examples in the 20th century of mass death due to famine were caused by economic and political systems very far from the Austrian school economics. There's a longish list of mass starvation due to Communist governments. Is there an example of Austrian economists giving advice that led to a major famine, or that would have led to famine? I cannot offhand think of an example of anybody advocating "letting millions of people starve because the precious Market might be upset."
3Lumifer
You said "letting millions of people starve". There were not that many cases of millions of people starving during the last hundred years.

That is actually not true at all. I was actually planning on abandoning this trainwreck of an attempt at dissent. But since you're so nice:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Corporation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Schelling#The_Strategy_of_Conflict_.281960.29

0mwengler
Apparently I was right to one box all along! Thanks!

OK, I think I was misunderstood and also tired and phrased things poorly. Game theory itself is not a bad thing; it is somewhat like a knife, or a nuke. It has no intrinsic morality, but the things it seems to tend to be used for, for several reasons, wind up being things that eject negative externalities like crazy.

Yes, but this seems to be most egregious when you advocate letting millions of people starve because the precious Market might be upset.

3Viliam_Bur
Millions of people did starve for reasons completely opposed to free markets. Besides the fact that maximizing a non-Friendly function leads to horrible results (whether the system being maximized is the Market, the Party, the Church, or... whatever), what exactly are you trying to say? Do you think that markets create more horrible results than those other options? Do you have any specific evidence for that? In that case it would be probably better to discuss the specific thing, before moving to a wide generalization.
2Lumifer
Yes. I suspect you're looking at it with a rather biased view. Sigh. You made a cobman -- one constructed of mud and straw. Congratulations.
5asr
Who precisely are you thinking of, who advocated allowing mass starvation for this reason?

I guess I'm mostly reacting to RAND and its ilk, having read the article about Schelling's book (which I intend to buy), and am thinking of market failures, as well.

3mwengler
OK Mr Bayeslisk, I am one boxing you. I am upvoting this post now knowing that you predicted I would upvote it and intended all along to include or add some links to the above post so I don't have to do a lot of extra work to figure out what RAND is and what book you are talking about.
3Lumifer
Are you thinking of failures of market alternatives as well?

Nonhuman agents use X -> X does not necessarily and pretty likely does not preserve human values -> your overuse of X will cause you not to preserve human values. Being a jerk in a style of Cthulhu I use to mean being a jerk incidentally. Eyesight is not a means of interacting with people, and maximization is not a bad thing if you maximize for the right things, which game theory does not necessarily do.

0[anonymous]
The appeal to probability doesn't work here, since you're not drawing at random from X.
2Eugine_Nier
Try replacing "game theory" with "science" or "rationality" in your rant. Do you still agree with it?

I have a strong desire to practice speaking in Lojban, and I imagine that this is the second-best place to ask. Any takers?

0[anonymous]
.i'enai
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