All of rhollerith's Comments + Replies

Let us briefly review the discussion up to now since many readers use the the comments page which does not provide much context. rwallace has been arguing that AI researchers are too concerned (or will become too concerned) about the existential risk from reimplementing EURISKO and things like that.

You have mentioned two or three times, rwallace, that without more advanced technology, humans will eventually go extinct. (I quote one of those 2 or 3 mentions below.) You mention that to create and to manage that future advanced technology, civilization w... (read more)

rwallace has been arguing the position that AI researchers are too concerned (or will become too concerned) about the existential risk from UFAI. He writes that

we need software tools smart enough to help us deal with complexity.

rwallace: can we deal with complexity sufficiently well without new software that engages in strongly-recursive self-improvement?

Without new AGI software?

One part of the risk that rwallace says outweighs the risk of UFAI is that

we remain confined to one little planet . . . with everyone in weapon range of everyone else

The ... (read more)

I agree that introspection certainly can be a valid tool.

I have a strong pain signal from lost money and from lost time. To the extent that I can introspect on the workings of my insula, I think that this is one impulse for me, rather than two as Yvain describes - one for time and one for money.

The most parsimonious explanation of what you observe is that it is human nature to be overconfident of the results of introspection.

When I wrote that "it is never in the financial self-interest of any [self-help] practitioner to do the hard long work to collect evidence that would sway a non-gullible client," I referred to long hard work many orders of magnitude longer and harder than posting a link to a web page. Consequently, your pointing out that you post links to web pages even when it is not in your financial self-interest to do so does not refute my point. I do not maintain that you should do the long hard work to collect evidence that would sway a non-guillible clie... (read more)

Previously in this thread I opined as follows on the state of the art in self help: there are enough gullible prospective clients that it is never in the financial self-interest of any practitioner to do the hard long work to collect evidence that would sway a non-guillible client.

PJ Eby took exception as follows:

you ignored the part where I just gave somebody a pointer to somebody else's work that they could download for free

Lots of people offer pointers to somebody else's writings. Most of those people do not know enough about how to produce lasting... (read more)

Previously in this thread: PJ Eby asserts that the inability to refrain from conveying contempt is a common and severe interpersonal handicap. Nazgulnarsil replies, "This is my problem. . . . I can't hide the fact that I feel contempt for the vast majority of the people around me (including desirable partners)."

I probably have the problem too. Although it is rare that I am aware of feeling contempt for my interlocutor, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that messages (mostly nonverbal) conveying contempt are present in my face-to-face co... (read more)

I changed the title of my post from "Mate selection for the male rationalist" to "Mate selection for the men here".

We differ in that respect, perhaps because I have had more time slowly to shape my emotional responses to women.

BTW it would be great to have all my writings subjected to examination by the community to determine whether the writings use probability distributions, utility functions and the language of causality correctly and sensibly.

HughRistik writes, "I recommend women who are high in Openness to Experience."

My two most personally-useful long-term relationships have been with women high in Openness to Experience. The Wikipedia article says that this trait is normally distributed, so I will add that both women were definitely in the top quartile in this trait and probably at least a standard deviation above the mean.

HughRistik, since we seem to see things similarly, maybe we should talk.

Contact rhollerith

Yes, but there is a sense of the word "rationalist" that makes HughRistik's quote (and my post) make sense. Something like "strongly motivated to learn science and the art of rationality" or "the kind of person you become if for the last 20 years you have been strongly motivated to . . ."

This post assumes that the reader wants a long-term relationship.

Post edited to make the assumption explicit.

dclayh, I have replied to you privately.

Specifically, the first likely google hit for "dclayh" is a Livejournal user of that name, so I used Livejournal to send a private message to that user.

Contact rhollerith

The following comments are evidence that female rationality is important to at least some male rationalists. Note that the first comment was upvoted by 7 readers.

I know I would love to have my next girlfriend be a rationalist (if only to avoid my most recent failure mode)

http://lesswrong.com/lw/ap/of_gender_and_rationality/7me by MBlume

But she loves magical thinking, she is somewhat averse to expected-utility calculations, my atheism, etc. . . . We love each other but are scared that our differences may be too great.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/zj/open... (read more)

I am pretty sure that most strong male rationalists are better off learning how the typical woman thinks than holding out for a long-term relationship with a strong female rationalist. Since this point is probably of general interest, I put it in a top-level post.

Converting her to your worldview sounds like a bad idea in general. An additional consideration that applies in your particular situation is that converting a helping professional from deontologism to consequentialism will more likely than not make her less effective at work (because helping pro... (read more)

Status seekers probably greatly outnumber true altruists.

But you should tend to keep the status seekers out of positions of great responsibility IMHO even if doing so greatly reduces the total number of volunteers working on existential risks.

My tentative belief that status seekers will not do as good a job BTW stems from (1) first-hand observation and second-hand observation of long-term personal performance as a function of personal motivation in domains such as science-learning, programming, management and politics and (2) a result from social psycholo... (read more)

I am in tentative agreement with Moldbug's main points. But like patrissimo says, some of his claims are overly sweeping. Unlike patrissimo, I have no significant personal stake in Moldbug's being right aside from the stake we all have in the health of the state and the society in which we live.

Helping to rescue marine mammals is a more effective way for a straight guy to signal high status to prospective sex partners than addressing existential risks is. I always considered that a feature, not a bug, because I always thought that people doing something to signal status do not do as good a job as people motivated by altruism, a desire to serve something greater than oneself or a sense of duty -- or even people motivated by a salary.

"I get up most easily when I've slept enough. . . Does anyone else have the same experience?"

I am going to go out on a limb and say that most of us have that experience.

JGWeissman writes, "I don't see what you gain by this strategy that justifies the decrease in correlation between a comments displayed karma score and the value the community assigns it that occurs when you down vote a comment not because it is a problem, but because the author had written other comments that are a problem."

Vladimir Nesov writes, "If you are downvoting indiscriminately, not separating the better comments from the worse ones, without even bothering to understand them, you are abusing the system."

Anna writes, "This h... (read more)

A normally good contributor's having a bad day is not going to be enough to trigger any downvoting of any of his comments under the policy I contemplate. Th policy I contemplate makes use of a general skill that I hypothesize that most participants on this site have: the ability to reserve judgement on someone till one has seen at least a dozen communications from that person and then to make a determination as to whether the person is worth continuing to pay attention to.

The people who have the most to contribute to a site like this are very busy. As El... (read more)

Now, if you have the habit of reading through someone's comments all at one time and judge each comment for its own value

No, that's not what I have been contemplating.

"A commenter's karma means nothing," is a bit of an overstatement because you need 20 karma to post. Also, most commenters are probably aware of changes in their karma. And if I reduce a person's karma by 20 or 30 points, I would send him a private message to explain.

What I propose reduces the informativeness of a comment's point score but more-or-less maintains the informative... (read more)

conchis, I have been reading your comments for at least 12 months on Overcoming Bias and have accumulated no negative feeling or opinion about you, so please do not think that what I am going to say is directed at you.

I have been thinking of adopting this strategy of occasionally giving a participant 20 or 30 or so downvotes all at once rather than frequently giving a comment a single downvote because I judge moderation of coment-writers (used, e.g., on SL4 back before 2005 and again in recent months, when a List Sniper has been active, during which times ... (read more)

A system of valuing things is a definition. I have defined a system and said, "Oh, by the way, this system has my loyalty."

It is possible that the system is ill-defined, that is, that my definition contradicts itself, does not apply to the reality we find ourselves in, or differs in some significant way from what I think it means. But your appeal to general relativity does not show the ill-definedness of my system because it is possible to pick the time dimension out of spacetime: the time dimension it is treated quite specially in general rela... (read more)

Imagine that you were somehow shown a magically 100% sound, 100% persuasive proof that you could not have permanent effect on reality, and that the entire multiverse would eventually end.

I agree with you, Anna, that in that case the concept of my aims does not cease to be predictively useful. (Consequently, I take back my "then I have no preferences" .) It is just that I have not devoted any serious brain time to what my aims might be if knew for sure I cannot have a permanent effect. (Nor does it bother me that I am bad at predicting wha... (read more)

Anna, you are incorrect in guessing that my statement of preference is less than extremely useful for an outside observer to predict my actual behavior.

In other words, the part of me that is loyal to the intellectual framework is very good at getting the rest of me to serve the framework.

The rest of this comment consists of more than most readers probably want to know about my unusual way of valuing things.

I am indifferent to impermanent effects. Internal experiences, mine and yours, certainly qualify as impermanent effects. Note though that internal exp... (read more)

I am worried, Kennaway, that our conversation about my way of valuing things will distract you from what I wrote below about the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder from a surgical procedure. Your scenario is less than ideal for exploring what intrinsic value people assign to internal experience: it is better to present people with a choice of being killed painlessly and being killed after 24 hours of intense pain and then asking what benefit to their best friend or to humanity would induce them to choose the intense pain.

I am not completely indifferent to being tortured, so in your hypothetical, Kennaway, I will try to get Ming to let me go because in your hypothetical I know I cannot have a permanent effect on reality.

But when faced with a choice between having a positive permanent effect on reality and avoiding being tortured I'll always choose having the permanent effect if I can.

Almost everybody gives in under torture. Almost everyone will eventually tell an interrogator skilled in torture everything they know, e.g., the passphrase to the rebel mainframe. Since I hav... (read more)

The following conclusions come from a book on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) called Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine, who treats PTSD for a living. I have a copy of this book, which I hereby offer to loan to Richard Kennaway if I do not have to pay to get it to him and to get it back from him.

Surgical procedures are in the opinion of Peter Levine a huge cause of PTSD.

According to Levine, PTSD is caused by subtle damage to the brain stem. Since in contrast episodic memory seems to have very little to do with the brain stem, the fact that one has n... (read more)

I am not completely surprised to learn that your not getting the point was intentional, Newport, because your comments are usually good.

Do you consider it a "leap of imagination that few are capable of" to ask people here to indicate how much they value internal experience compared to how much they value external reality?

Kennaway's reason for asking the questions is probably to get at how much people prefer to avoid negative internal experiences relative to negative effects on external reality, which parenthetically is the main theme of my blog on the ethics of superintelligence. If so, then he wants you to assume that you can trust Ming 100% to do what he says -- and he also wants you to assume that Ming's evil geniuses can somehow compensate you for the fact that you could have done something else with the 24 hours during which you were experiencing the unimaginably intense pain, e.g., by using a (probably imposible in reality) time machine to roll back the clock by 24 hours.

I am in essential agreement with MBlume. It is more likely than not that the space-time continuum we find ourselves in will support life and intelligence for only a finite length of time. But even if that is the case, there might be another compartment of reality beyond our space-time continuum that can support life or intelligence indefinitely. If I affect that other compartment (even if I merely influence someone who influences someone who communicates with the other compartment) then my struggling comes to more than nothing.

If on the other hand, there really is no way for me or my friends to have a permanent effect on reality, then I have no preference for what happens.

I choose (b) without hesitation. There is not some counter or accumulator somewhere that is incremented any time someone has a positive experience and decremented every time someone has a negative experience.

EDIT. To answer Kennaway's second question, there is no way to attenuate (a) to make me prefer it to (b). I'd choose (b) even if the alternative was a dust speck in my eye or a small scratch on my skin because the dust speck and the scratch have a nonzero probability of negatively affecting my vision or my health.

Phil, things like cables and phone lines going to houses are "natural monopolies" in that it costs so much to install them that competitors probably can never get started. In fact, if the technology to deliver video over phone lines were available or anticipated when cable TV was building out in the 70s, the owner of the phone lines (pre-breakup AT&T) could probably have stopped the new cable TV companies from ever getting off the ground (by using the fact that AT&T has already paid for its pipe to the home to lowball the new companies).... (read more)

If I were you, I would not cancel your projects till you have tried having your business partners in the room with you when you are working. (Maybe you have.)

Unlike roland and gworley, my experience is that my current romantic partner helps me substantially in my fight against procrastination.

Specifically, my diet is better than it would be if she did not express her opinions on my diet and if I were not motivated to avoid disappointing her. (Both of us have similar chronic health problems, including food allergies.)

Also, she regularly prods me to start a medical treatment that I have been putting off for the last couple of years. Although I have not yet started the treatment, it is pretty clear that I will s... (read more)

Molloy did not mention verifying the numbers (by, e.g., calling them) so he probably did not verify them.

John T. Molloy once paid actors to go into bars and try to get women's phone numbers. One group of actors he asked to act confident. A second group of actors he asked to act arrogant. The actors asked to act arrogant were more successful. (Described in Molloy's 1975 book Dress for Success.)

Of course, as Alicorn says, the population of women who go to bars and talk to strange men might not be representative of all single women.

I have copies of The Structure of Magic, Volumes I and II (Hardcover, 1975) to give away. If you want them, please contact me privately. Preference given to those who will either travel to my home in San Rafael, CA, to pick them up or who will attend the next OB/LW meetup in the Bay Area (because then I do not have to pay shipping costs).

The fact that I own the volumes should not be taken as endorsement of them. In fact, I tend to suspect that Eliezer and those about as smart, knowledgable and committed to understanding intelligence are better off not wasting their time on NLP and that they should stick to ev psy and hard cognitive science and neuroscience instead.

Agree. And pjeby's comments are long which makes it a little tedious for me to scroll past them.

Intriguing idea, whpearson.

The biggest hurdle to the adoption of such a system is probably the fact that most current traders probably do not have enough programming skill to trade in such a system without incurring significant costs by starting lots of bots and probably do not have enough programming skill to extract more than a small fraction of the information revealed by such a system. One way to get over that hurdle is to target your new market at programmers and allied occupations (like project managers). Programmers and allied occupations could us... (read more)

Heck yeah, I want to see it. I suggest adopting Eliezer's modus operandi of using a lot of words. And every time you see something in your draft post that might need explanation, post on that topic first.

Bongo asks me what is it then that I desire nowadays?

And my answer is, pretty much the same things everyone else desires! There are certain things you have to have to remain healthy and to protect your intelligence and your creativity, and getting those things takes up most of my time. Also, even in the cases where my motivational structure is different from the typical, I often present a typical facade to the outside world because typical is comfortable and familiar to people whereas atypical is suspicious or just too much trouble for people to learn.

Bo... (read more)

Nesov points out that Eliezer picks and chooses rather than identifying with every shard of his desire.

Fair enough, but the point remains that it is not too misleading to say that I identify with fewer of the shards of human desire than Eliezer does -- which affects what we recommend to other people.

I think people exist who will make the personal sacrifice of going to jail for a long time to prevent the nuke from going off. But I do not think people exist who will also sacrifice a friend. But under American law that is what a person would have to do to consult with a friend on the decision of whether to torture: American law punishes people who have foreknowledge of certain crimes but do not convey their foreknowledge to the authorities. So the person is faced with making what may well be the most important decision of their lives without help fro... (read more)

Most mystics reject science and rationality (and I think I have a pretty good causal model of why that is) but there have been scientific rational mystics, e.g., physicist David Bohm. I know of no reason why a person who starts out committed to science and rationality should lose that commitment through mystical training and mystical experience if he has competent advice.

My main interest in mystical experience is that it is a hole in the human motivational system -- one of the few ways for a person to become independent from what Eliezer calls the thousan... (read more)

I agree with every sentence in this post. (And I read it twice to make sure.)

There are many benefits to surrounding yourself with extremely bright rationalists and scientific generalists. But I wonder if Eliezer has been too successful in sparing himself from the tedium and the trouble of interacting with and observing the common run of scientifically-illiterate irrational not-particularly-bright humanity. If he had been forced to spend a few years in an ordinary American high school or in an ordinary workplace -- or even if he had had lengthy dealings with a few of the many community activists of the San Francisco Bay Area where... (read more)

Sure does. Thanks.