All of Fly2's Comments + Replies

Ape trounces the best of the human world in memory competition

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-510260/Im-chimpion--Ape-trounces-best-human-world-memory-competition.html

In 1999 we hadn't experienced the dotcom crash or 911. Those events may have slowed consumer technology application by a few years. On the other hand, military robots, remotely piloted aircraft, and "social" software for tracking terrorist groups have seen accelerated development. Concerns about global warming and oil shortages will likely accelerate nanotech and biotech associated with energy production while reducing the pace of development in other fields. Computational power continues to increase by a factor of a thousand per decade. Biotech ... (read more)

Memories decay exponentially. This occurs both over time and over number of items to remember. Also, remembering requires brain attention. The vast majority of memories in a brain will never be activated sufficiently for conscious awareness. As memories accumulate, the fraction we actively access decreases.

The human mind is a flashlight that dimly illuminates the path behind. Moving forward, we lose sight of where we've been. Living a thousand years wouldn't make that flashlight any brighter.

Terren Suydam: "So genetics is not the whole story, and that's what I mean by group selection."

I use the term "multilevel selection" for what you are describing. I agree it has been important.

E.g., there has been selection between different species. Species with genomes that supported rapid adaptation to changing environments and that supported quick diversification when expanding into new niches spread far and wide. (Beetles have been extremely successful with around 350,000 known species.) Other specie branches died out. The genetic m... (read more)

Terren Suydam: "The first is that one has to adopt the group-selection stance."

(Technical jargon nitpick.)

In studying evolutionary biology, "group-selection" has a specific meaning, an individual sacrifices its own fitness in order to improve the group fitness. I.e., individual loss for a group gain. E.g., suppose you have a species that consists of many small family groups. Suppose a mutation produces a self-sacrificing individual in one of the groups. His fitness is slightly lower but his family group fitness is higher. His group tend... (read more)

Caledonian: "It is much, much more elegant - and more compatible with what we know about cognition - to hold that the complex systems are built out of smaller, simpler systems over which the complex has no control."

The brain has feedback loops to even the earliest processing stages. Thus, I might choose to look for a lost contact lens. With that goal in mind, my unconscious visual processing systems will be primed to recognize signals that could be a contact lens. (The feedback loops can be observed in the neural tissue. There are cognitive scien... (read more)

EY: "human cognitive psychology has not had time to change evolutionarily over that period"

Under selective pressures, human populations can and have significantly changed in less than two thousand years. Various behavioral traits are highly heritable. Genghis Khan spread his behavioral genotype throughout Asia. (For this discussion this is a nitpick but I dislike seeing false memes spread.)

re: FAI and morality

From my perspective morality is a collection of rules that make cooperative behavior beneficial. There are some rules that should apply to ... (read more)

"...if there was a pill that would make the function of the mirror neurons go away, in other words, a pill that would make you able to hurt people without feeling remorse or anguish, would you take it?"

The mirror neurons also help you learn from watching other humans. They help you intuit the feelings of others which makes social prediction possible. They help communication. They also allow you to share in the joy and pleasure of others...e.g., a young child playing in a park.

I would like more control over how my mind functions. At times it would... (read more)

roko: "Game theory doesn't tell you what you should do, it only tells you how to do it. E.g. in the classic prisoner's dilemma, defection is only an optimal strategy if you've already decided that the right thing to do is to minimize your prison sentence."

Survival and growth affect the trajectory of a particle in mind space. Some "ethical systems" may act as attractors. Particles interact, clumps interact, higher level behaviors emerge. A super AI might be able to navigate the density substructures of mind space guided by game theory. T... (read more)

"Are there morally justified terminal (not instrumental) values, that don't causally root in the evolutionary history of value instincts?"

Such a morality should confer survival benefit. E.g., a tit-for-tat strategy.

Suppose an entity is greedy. It tries to garner all resources. In one-on-one competitions against weaker enties it thrives. But other entities see it as a major threat. A stronger entity will eliminate it. A group of weaker entities will cooperate to eliminate it.

A super intelligent AI might deduce or discover that other powerful entit... (read more)

HA, Ben Jones

I appreciate the compliment and your interest in my views, however, for now, I would rather read what others have to say on this topic.

Vassar: "The neuropsychology of illusory decision procedures however is disturbing to a different disposition than the existence of a future."

Yes. HA's point about neuroscience and the illusion of "I" is largely orthogonal to EY's discussion concerning choice and determinism. However, the neuroscience that HA references is common knowledge in EY's peer group and is relevant to the topic under discussion...so why doesn't EY respond to HA's point?

(Consider an experiment involving the "hollow face" illusion. The mind's eye sees a... (read more)

For this discussion I use "consciousness" to refer to the mind's internal awareness of qualia. Consciousness may be an inherent property of whatever makes up the universe, i.e., even individual photons may have some essence of consciousness. Human type consciousness might then arise whenever sufficient elements group together in the right pattern. Other groupings into other patterns might generate other types of consciousness. Consciousness may have no purpose. Or perhaps certain types of consciousness somehow enhance intelligence and provide an ... (read more)

"So now we have a group of scientists who set out to test correlation A, but found correlation B in the data instead. Should they publish a paper about correlation B?"

Since you testing multiple hypotheses simultaneously, it is not comparable to Eliezer's example. Still, it is an interesting question...

Sure. The more papers you publish the better. If you are lucky the correlation may hold in other test populations and you've staked your claim on the discovery. Success is largely based on who gets credit.

Should a magazine publish papers reporting c... (read more)

Caledonian: "We have no end of fools who feel one way or another. How about giving people credit for doing what they think is right? Or even better, what they can demonstrate to be correct?"

I don't believe a person with an IQ around 125 and the skill to get elected POTUS is a fool. I respect intelligence and knowledge but those are not the only or even the most important traits necessary for leadership.

I don't really want to defend Bush. I just don't find him any worse than Clinton, Kerry, or Gore. I was also curious to see the reaction to my post. I found the concept of "Happy Death Spirals" interesting and wondered if it would be demonstrated on this thread.

"One application: If you find yourself in a group of people who tell consistently unfunny jokes about the Hated Enemy, it may be a good idea to head for the hills, before you start to laugh as well..."

Another step on the path to hermit mountain.

Robin: "Would jokes where Dilbert's pointy-headed boss says idiotic things be less funny if the boss were replaced by a co-worker? If so, does that suggest bosses are Hated Enemies, and Dilbert jokes bring false laughter?"

Not really...consider, "The inmates are running the asylum.", i.... (read more)

Stable population of asexual haploid bacteria considering only lethal mutations:
Let "G" be the genome string length in base pairs.
Let "M" be the mutations per base pair per division.
Let "numberOfDivisions" be the average number divisions a bacterium undergoes before dying.
Let "survivalFraction" be the probability that division produces another viable bacterium.

survivalFraction = (1 - M)**G. (Assuming mutation events are independent.)

1 = numberOfDivisions x survivalFraction. (Assuming population size is st... (read more)

Eliezer: "Fly, you've just postulated four copies of the same gene, so that one death will remove four mutations. But these four copies will suffer mutations four times as often. Unless I'm missing something, this doesn't increase the bound on how much non-redundant information can be supported by one death. :)"

Yeah, you are right. You only gain if the redundancy means that the fitness hit is sufficiently minor that more than four errors could be removed with a single death.

The "one death, one mutation" rule applies if the mutation imme... (read more)

I've been enjoying your evolution posts and wanted to toss in my own thoughts and see what I can learn.

"Our first lemma is a rule sometimes paraphrased as "one mutation, one death"."

Imagine that having a working copy of gene "E" is essential. Now suppose a mutation creates a broken gene "Ex". Animals that are heterozygous with "E" and "Ex" are fine and pass on their genes. Only homozygous "Ex" "Ex" result in a "death" that removes 2 mutations.

Now imagine that a duplic... (read more)