All of SforSingularity's Comments + Replies

I was on Robert Wright's side towards the end of this debate when he claimed that there was a higher optimization process that created natural selection for a purpose.

The purpose of natural selection, fine-tuning of physical constants in our universe, and of countless other detailed coincidences (1) was to create me. (Or, for the readers of this comment, to create you)

The optimization process that optimized all these things is called anthropics. Its principle of operation is absurdly simple: you can't find yourself in a part of the universe that can't cr... (read more)

1) if something very bad is about to happen to you, what's your credence that you're in a rescue sim and have nothing to fear?

I'd give that some credence, though note that we've talking about subjective anticipation, which is a piece of humanly-compelling nonsense.

However, if you approach them with a serious deal where some bias identified in the lab would lead them to accept unfavorable terms with real consequences, they won't trust their unreliable judgments, and instead they'll ask for third-party advice and see what the normal and usual way to handle such a situation is. If no such guidance is available, they'll fall back on the status quo heuristic. People hate to admit their intellectual limitations explicitly, but they're good at recognizing them instinctively before they get themselves into trouble by rely

People hate to admit their intellectual limitations explicitly, but they're good at recognizing them instinctively before they get themselves into trouble by relying on their faulty reasoning too much.

Yeah... this is what Bryan Caplan says in The Myth of the Rational Voter

There is a point I am trying to make with this: the human race is a collective where the individual parts pretend to care about the whole, but actually don't care, and we (mostly) do this the insidious way, i.e. using lots of biased thinking. In fact most people even have themselves fooled, and this is an illusion that they're not keen on being disabused of.

The results... well, we'll see.

Look, maybe it does sound kooky, but people who really genuinely cared might at least invest more time in finding out how good its pedigree was. On the other hand, people who just wanted an excuse to ignore it would say "it's kooky, I'm going to ignore it".

But one could look at other cases, for example direct donation of money to the future (Robin has done this).

Or the relative lack of attention to more scientifically respectable existential risks, or even existential risks in general. (Human extinction risk, etc).

As you grow up, you start to see that the world is full of waste, injustice and bad incentives. You try frantically to tell people about this, and it always seems to go badly for you.

Then you grow up a bit more, get a bit wise, and realize that the mother-of-all-bad-incentives, the worst injustice, and the greatest meta-cause of waste ... is that people who point out such problems get punished, (especially) including pointing out this problem. If you are wise, you then become an initiate of the secret conspiracy of the successful.

Discuss.

Think about it in evolutionary terms. Roughly speaking, taking the action of attempting to kill someone is risky. An attractive female body is pretty much a guaranteed win for the genes concerned, so it's pointless taking risks. [Note: I just made this up, it might be wrong, but definitely look for an evo-psych explanation]

This explanation also accounts for the lower violent crime rate amongst women, since women are, from a gene's point of view, a low risk strategy, whereas violence is a risky business: you might win, but then again, you might die.

It would also predict, other things equal, lower crime rates amongst physically attractive men.

I had heard about the case casually on the news a few months ago. It was obvious to me that Amanda Knox was innocent. My probability estimate of guilt was around 1%. This makes me one of the few people in reasonably good agreement with Eli's conclusion.

I know almost nothing of the facts of the case.

I only saw a photo of Amanda Knox's face. Girls with cute smiles like that don't brutally murder people. I was horrified to see that among 300 posts on Less Wrong, only two mentioned this, and it was to urge people to ignore the photos. Are they all too PC or so... (read more)

Yes, but you can manipulate whether the world getting saved had anything to do with you, and you can influence what kind of world you survive into.

If you make a low-probability, high reward bet that and really commit to donating the money to an X-risks organization, you may find yourself winning that bet more often than you would probabilistically expect.

In general, QI means that you care about the nature of your survival, but not whether you survive.

the singularity institute's budget grows much faster than linearly with cash. ... sunk all its income into triple-rollover lottery tickets

I had the same idea of buying very risky investments. Intuitively, it seems that world-saving probability is superlinear in cash. But I think that the intuition is probably incorrect, though I'll have to rethink now that someone else has had it.

Another advantage of buying triple rollover tickets is that if you adhere to quantum immortality plus the belief that uFAI reliably kills the world, then you'll win the lottery in all the worlds that you care about.

I think that this is a great idea. I often find myself ending a debate with someone important and rational without the sense that our disagreement has been made explicit, and without a good reason for why we still disagree.

I suspect that if we imposed a norm on LW that said: every time two people disagree, they have to write down, at the end, why they disagree, we would do better.

That is plausible.

we disagree about what reply we would hear if we asked a friendly AI how to talk and think about morality in order to maximize human welfare as construed in most traditional utilitarian senses.

Surely you should both have large error bars around the answer to that question in the form of fairly wide probability distributions over the set of possible answers. If you're both well-calibrated rationalists those distributions should overlap a lot. Perhaps you should go talk to Greene? I vote for a bloggingheads.

people should do different things.

Whose version of "should" are you using in that sentence? If you're using the EY version of "should" then it is not possible for you and Greene to think people should do different things unless you and Greene anticipate different experimental results...

... since the EY version of "should" is (correct me if I am wrong) a long list of specific constraints and valuators that together define one specific utility function U humanmoralityaccordingtoEY. You can't disagree with Greene over what the concrete result of maximizing U humanmoralityaccordingtoEY is unless one of you is factually wrong.

Correct. I'm a moral cognitivist;

I think you're just using different words to say the same thing that Greene is saying, you in particular use "should" and "morally right" in a nonstandard way - but I don't really care about the particular way you formulate the correct position, just as I wouldn't care if you used the variable "x" where Greene used "y" in an integral.

You do agree that you and Greene are actually saying the same thing, yes?

Alicorn, I hereby award you 10 points. These are redeemable after the singularity for kudos, catgirls and other cool stuff.

For example, having a goal of not going outside its box.

It would be nice if you could tell an AI not to affect anything outside its box.

10 points will be awarded to the first person who spots why "don't affect anything outside your box" is problematic.

Great meetup; conversation was had about the probability of AI risk. Initially I thought that the probability of AI disaster was close to 5%, but speaking to Anna Salamon convinced me that it was more like 60%.

Also some discussion about what strategies to follow for AI friendliness.

I'm traveling to the west coast especially for this. Hoping to see you all there.

ungrounded beliefs can be adopted voluntarily to an extent.

I cannot do this, and I don't understand anyone who can. If you consciously say "OK, it would be really nice to believe X, now I am going to try really hard to start believing it despite the evidence against it", then you already disbelieve X.

Since we can imagine a continuous sequence of ever-better-Roombas, the notion of "has beliefs and values" seems to be a continuous one, rather than a discrete yes/no issue.

Does that have implication for self-awareness and consciousness?

Yes, I think so. One prominent hypothesis is that the reason that we evolved with consciousness is that there has to be some way for us to take an overview of the process of us, our goals, and the environment, and the way in which we think that our effort is producing achievement of goals. We need this so that we can do this whole "I am failing to achieve my goals?" check. Why this results in "experience" is not something I am going to attempt in this post.

As I said,

With the superRoomba, the pressure that the superRoomba applies to the environment doesn't vary as much with the kind of trick you play on it; it will eventually work out what changes you have made, and adapt its strategy so that you end up with a clean floor.

This criterion seems to separate an "inanimate" object like a hydrogen atom or a pebble bouncing around the world from a superRoomba.

See heavily edited comment above, good point.

Clearly these are two different things; the real question you are asking is in what relevant way are they different, right?

First of all, the Roomba does not "recognize" a wall as a reason to stop going forward. It gets some input from its front sensor, and then it turns to the right.

So what is the relevant difference between the Roomba that gets some input from its front sensor, and then it turns to the right., and the superRoomba that gets evidence from its wheels that it is cleaning the room, but entertains the hypothesis that maybe someone ha... (read more)

If, however, you programmed the Roomba not to interpret the input it gets from being in midair as an example of being in a room it should clean

then you would be building a beliefs/desires distinction into it.

The difference is between the Roomba spinning and you working for nothing is that if you told the Roomba that it was just spinning its wheels, it wouldn't react. It has no concept of "I am failing to achieve my goals". You, on the other hand, would investigate; prod your environment to check if it was actually as you thought, and eventually you would update your beliefs and change your behaviors.

Would you claim the dog has no belief/value distinction?

Actually, I think I would. I think that pretty much all nonhuman animals would also don't really have the belief/value distinction.

I think that having a belief/values distinction requires being at least as sophisticated as a human. There are cases where a human sets a particular goal and then does things that are unpleasant in the short term (like working hard and not wasting all day commenting on blogs) in order to obtain a long-term valuable thing.

An agent using UDT doesn't necessarily have a beliefs/values separation,

I am behind on your recent work on UDT; this fact comes as a shock to me. Can you provide a link to a post of yours/provide an example here making clear that UDT doesn't necessarily have a beliefs/values separation? Thanks.

One possible response here: We could consider simple optimizers like amoeba or Roomba vacuum cleaners as falling into the category: "mind without a clear belief/values distinction"; they definitely do a lot of signal processing and feature extraction and control theory, but they don't really have values. The Roomba would happily sit with wheels lifted off the ground thinking that it was cleaning a nonexistent room.

Is it possible that the dichotomy between beliefs and values is just an accidental byproduct of our evolution, perhaps a consequence of the specific environment that we’re adapted to, instead of a common feature of all rational minds?

In the normal usage, "mind" implies the existence of a distinction between beliefs and values. In the LW/OB usage, it implies that the mind is connected to some actuators and sensors which connect to an environment and is actually doing some optimization toward those values. Certainly "rational mind" ent... (read more)

Thought they nearly discovered my true identity....

The meetup has been good fun. Much conversing, coffee, and a restaurant meal.

It would be an evolutionary win to be interested in things that the other gender is interested in.

Why? I think that perhaps your reasoning is that you date someone based upon whether they have the same interests as you. But I suspect that this may be false - i.e. we confabulate shared interests as an explanation, where the real explanation is status or looks.

Upvoted. I came to exactly the same conclusion. Men are extremophiles, and in (7), Eliezer explained why.

As to Anna's point below, we should ask how much good can be expected to accumulate from trying to go against nature here, versus how difficult it will be. I.e. spending effort X on attracting more women to LW must be balanced against spending that same effort on something else.

If high intellectual curiosity is a rare trait in males and a very rare one in females, then given that you are here this doesn't surprise me. You are more intellectually curious than most of the men I have met, which is itself a high intellectual curiosity sample.

his group feels "cliquey". There are a lot of in-phrases and technical jargon

every incorrect comment is completely and utterly destroyed by multiple people.

These apply to both genders...

The obvious evolutionary psychology hypothesis behind the imbalanced gender ratio in the iconoclastic community is the idea that males are inherently more attracted to gambles that seem high-risk and high-reward; they are more driven to try out strange ideas that come with big promises, because the genetic payoff for an unusually successful male has a much higher upper bound than the genetic payoff for an unusually successful female. ... a difference as basic as "more male teenagers have a high cognitive temperature" could prove very hard to ad

psychology, yes, definitely. Bio, I do not know, but I would like to see what it looks like for evo psych.

Upvoted for a sensible analysis of the problem. Want girls? Go get them. My experience is that a common mistake amongst academically inclined people is to expect reality to reward them for doing the right thing - for example men on LW may (implicitly, without realizing that they are doing it) expect attractive, eligible women to be abundant in the risk-mitigation movement, because mitigating existential risks is the right* thing to do, and the universe is a just place which rewards good behavior.

The reality of the situation is that a male who spends time ... (read more)

(Also, if anybody knows or can estimate, are the gender ratios similar in the relevant areas of academia?)

All male biased as far as I know. (Math, philosophy, AI/CS)

typo. thanks for pointing out.

I assign a 99.9% probability to there being more male readers than female readers of LW, The most recent LW meetup that I attended had a gender ratio of roughly 20:1 male:female.

Males who feel that they are competing for a small pool of females will attempt to gain status over each other, diminishing the amount of honest, rational dialogue, and replacing it with oneupmanship.

Hence the idea of mixing LW - in its current state - with dating may not be good.

However, there is the possibility of re-framing LW it so that it appeals more to women. Perhaps we... (read more)

a truly remarkable observation: quantum measure seems to behave in a way that would avoid this trilemma completely

Which is why Roger Penrose is so keen to show that consciousness is a quantum phenomenon.

"Singleton

A world government or superpower imposes a population control policy over the whole world."

• it has to be stable essentially forever. It seems to me that no human government could achieve this, because of the randomness of human nature. Therefore, only an AI would suffice.

I've observed far more clannishness among children than political perspicuity

but what about the relative amounts in children vs adults?

A priori we should expect children to be genuine knowledge seekers, because in our EEA there would have been facts of life (such as which plants we poisonous) that were important to know early on. Our EEA was probably sufficiently simple and unchanging that once you were an adult there were few new abstract facts to know.

This "story" explains why children ask adults awkward questions about politics, often displaying a wisdom apparently beyond their age. In reality, they just haven't traded in their curiosity for signalling yet.

At least, that is one possible hypothesis.

I do sometimes wonder what proportion of people who think about political matters are asking questions with genuine curiosity, versus engaging in praise for the idea that they and their group have gone into a happy death spiral about.

I suspect that those who ask with genuine curiosity are overwhelmingly chlidren.

EDIT: Others disagree that children are more genuinely curious. Perhaps it's just the nerds who ask genuine questions then?

Great! now that we've both signalled our allegiance to the h+ ideology, would you like to mate with me!?

for an explanation of why I call this "Hansonian", see, for example, this. Hanson has lots of posts on how charity, ideology, etc is all about affiliating with a tribe and finding mates.