Generalized versions of arguments I've seen on Reddit and Facebook:
If you oppose a government policy that personally benefits you, you are a hypocrite who bites the hand that feeds you.
If you support the policy that benefits you, you are a greedy narcissist whose loyalty can be bought and sold.
If you have political opinions on policies that don't affect your well-being, you are meddler with no skin in the game. Without being personally affected by the policy, you cannot hope to understand.
...but neither of these are meaningfully bad things according to
post-Machiavellian political thought. Machiavelli dismantled the virtue-centric,
moralizing system of "naive" political thought - finding wise, moral and
incorruptible men to control society, as argued by Plato or Aquinas - and showed
how the strength of a republic is in its internal conflicts and contradictions,
how a naked struggle of competing group interests can ultimately lead to
dynamism and progress. This is what
[http://thegocblog.com/2013/03/14/what-can-machiavelli-teach-us-about-democracy/]
most [http://www.craigwilly.info/2012/12/10/machiavellis-defense-of-democracy/]
people
[http://www.celebritytypes.com/blog/2011/04/machiavellis-was-actually-a-democrat/]
don't understand about his legacy, and the great emancipatory power of making
self-interest, not moralism the cornerstone of politics.
So yes, in some matters we're hypocrites, in others we're greedy narcissists...
but society holds more hope for all of its warring factions when these facts are
honestly acknowledged rather than wrapped in a cloak of "virtue"-moralism! And
pursuit of socioeconomic self-interest has very little cross-over with following
moral codes in day-to-day interactions, anyway. (No examples for either Blue or
Green, let's pretend to be civil.)
...
So, (like almost everyone in earlier times), today's citizens succumb to a
vaguely Catholic-flavoured way of seeing society, and end up less politically
progressive than a 15th century theorist. Who unjustly acquired the reputation
of someone between Marquis de Sade[1] and Emperor Palpatine- not without the
help of 19th century clericals and reactionaries.
[1] Early libertarian socialist, proto-feminist and human rights advocate. Never
ever got a fair shake either.
A while back, David Chapman made a blog post titled "Pop Bayesianism: cruder than I thought?", expressing considerable skepticism towards the kind of "pop Bayesianism" that's promoted on LW and by CFAR. Yvain and I replied in the comments, which led to an interesting discussion.
I wasn't originally sure whether this was interesting enough to link to on LW, but then one person on #lesswrong specifically asked me to do so. They said that they found my summaries of the practical insights offered by some LW posts the most valuable/interesting.
Wow, I hadn't previously read the RichardKennaway comment
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/hv9/rationality_quotes_july_2013/9alt] you linked. I
think internalizing that idea would be massively helpful in combating the
tendency to view disagreement as inherently combative rather than a difference
between priors.
(something I need to work on)
3Ben Pace10y
Thanks a lot, I found your discussion of LW to be enlightening.
Edit: This post
[http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/]
is related to the discussion and makes great points.
7FiftyTwo10y
Yvain has now made a post specifically replying to Chapman
[http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/08/06/on-first-looking-into-chapmans-pop-bayesianism]
I wish people here stopped using the loaded terms "many worlds" and "Everett branches" when the ontologically neutral "possible outcomes" is sufficient.
"Possible outcomes" is not ontologically neutral in common usage. In common usage, "possible" excludes "actual", and that connotation is strong even when trying to use it technically.
"Multiple outcomes" might be an acceptable compromise.
I find that thinking about "Everett branches" forces my brain to come up with
alternative possible outcomes, where by default it would focus all of its
attention on just one. Saying to myself "you should consider other possible
outcomes" doesn't seem to have the same effect.
0shminux10y
I have no problem with the mental tricks like that. "Premortem" is another
useful one, even though the project hasn't failed (yet). As long as you do not
insist on assigning any ontological significance to them.
This came up at yesterday's London meetup: activities for keeping oneself relatable to other human beings.
We were dissecting motives behind goals, and one of mine was maintaining interests that other people could relate to. I have more pedestrian interests, but they're the first to get dropped when my time is constrained (which it usually is), so if I end up meeting someone out in the wild, all I have to talk about is stuff like natural language parsing, utilitarian population ethics and patterns of conspicuous consumption.
Discussing it in a smaller group later, it turns out I'm not the only person who does this. It makes sense that insular, scholarly people of a sort found on LW may frequently find themselves withdrawn from common cultural ground with other people, so I thought I'd kick off a discussion on the subject.
What do you do to keep yourself relatable to other people?
EDIT: Just to clarify, this isn't a request for advice on how to talk to people. Please don't interpret it as such.
Richard Feynman was a theoretician as well as a 'people person'; if you read his writings about his experiences with people it really illustrates quite well how he managed to do it.
One tactic that he employed was simply being mysterious. He knew few people could relate to a University professor and that many would feel intimidated by that, so when in the company of laypeople he never even brought it up. They would ask him what he did and he would say, "I can't say." If pressed, he would say something vague like, "I work at the University." Done properly, it's playful and coy, and even though people might think you're a bit weird, they definitely won't consider you unrelatable.
In my opinion there's no need to concern yourself with activities that you don't like, as very few people are really actually interested in your interests. Whenever the topic of your interests comes up, just steer the conversation towards their life and their interests. You'll be speaking 10% of the time yet you'll appear like a brilliant conversationalist. If they ask you if you've read a particular book or heard a particular artist, just say no (but don't sound harsh or bored). You'll seem 'indie' and mysterious, and people like that. In practice, though, as one gets older, people rarely ask about these things.
It's a common mistake that I've seen often in intellectual people. They assume they have to keep up with popular media so that they can have conversations. That is not true at all.
While this seems like reasonable advice, I'm not sure it's universally good advice. Richard Feynman seemed to enjoy a level of charm many of us couldn't hope to possess. He also had a wide selection of esoteric interests unrelated to his field.
I would also claim that there's value in simply maintaining such an interest. During particularly insular periods where I'm absorbed in less accessible work, I find myself starting to exhibit "aspie" characteristics, losing verbal fluency and becoming socially insensitive. It's not just about having things to talk about, but maintaining my own faculties for relating to people.
Whenever the topic of your interests comes up, just steer the conversation towards their life and their interests. You'll be speaking 10% of the time yet you'll appear like a brilliant conversationalist.
If everyone in the conversation is employing this method, then chances are
higher that the others actually want to hear about your esoteric topics. If you
pause early and give them a chance to talk about themselves (or for them to
press for more), that'll keep you synched up with what they want.
2A1987dM10y
People talking to each other about their lives and their interests! Success!
0Richard_Kennaway10y
I was thinking more like two people each trying to get the other person to do
that, like people at a door getting jammed saying "After you," "After you," etc.
5A1987dM10y
All the times this has happened to me, one person would come up with a
Schelling-pointy reason why the other person's recent life was more interesting
(e.g. they had just come back from a trip abroad or something).
2Ben_LandauTaylor10y
I have never actually seen this happen, and I use that method all the time. I
don't have an explanation for why, since I rarely think about problems I don't
have.
I use the recaplets on Television without Pity to keep up with the basic plot and cliffhangers of tv shows I don't watch, but most of my friends do. That way I don't drop out of conversations just because they're talking about True Blood.
Note: the only problem this strategy has caused for me is that my now-bf assumed I was a GoT fan (instead of having read the books and TWOP'd the show recaps), invited me over to watch, and assumed I turned him down because I wasn't interested in him instead of being indifferent to the show. We sorted it out eventually.
Is there something similar, but for sports? I usually get lost when conversation
turns to the local sports team. I couldn't find anything with a quick google,
but I'm probably not using the right search terms.
1taelor10y
For a general overview of what's going on in the baseball world, this
[http://www.baseballnation.com/] is pretty good place to start. There are also
pleanty of blogs devoted to individual teams, though I'm not really in a
position to make recommendations, unless you happen to be looking for a San
Francisco Giants blog, in which case I highly reccomend this
[http://www.mccoveychronicles.com/] blog. Can't really help with other sports.
0palladias10y
Haven't the foggiest. I don't really have friends who talk about sports. I read
The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker so I end up really well informed
on a couple narrow sports things that get features. And then my dad and brother
rib me for knowing nothing about football, but everything about the Manning
dynasty.
6[anonymous]10y
Well, I maintain pedestrian interests, but I consider it a failure condition to
not attempt to participate in them. Comparably bad to going off my diet.
Downside: This is sometimes frustrating. I like Gaming and I like Game X, but
sometimes I will think "I'm only playing Game X right now so I have something to
talk about in the Car with Friend X." or Alternatively, I sometimes play a game
and then think "But no one other than me cares about this game, so playing it
feels inefficient."
Also, some of the other people who share pedestrian interests with me will work
to prevent me from dropping them. For instance, if Game Y is a pedestrian
interest, and my wife wants me to play Game Y with her, that doesn't just get
dropped regardless of how busy I am.
Downside: This does sometimes result in me feeling overworked (I will plan
events in Game Y as I am passing out in Bed. Again, this seems efficiency
related.)
Also, I spend a fair amount of time trying to help various friends/family
members directly. So I frequently have that conversational topic of "How is that
problem we discussed earlier going?"
Downside: This this boosts my stress level again, because it increases the
number of things I'm worrying about.
Finally, I have relatability notes on my phone for my wife that pop up on a
semi-frequent basis. I also have these reminders on some of the helping people
I'm doing, or even reminders for better advice on Game Y.
Downside: I'm really beginning to hate my phones "You have a reminder!" noise.
Also, sometimes the reminders are depressing. I have a reminder "Spend time
hanging out with your best friend" that has been unchecked for more than a
month.
Potential Silver Lining: That being said, sometimes the reminder is encouraging:
It's nice to be told "Make time for yourself." and realize "Why yes, I am doing
that right now. Ahhhh."
Note: I'm positive this isn't advice, because after looking at it posted
altogether, my conclusion is not "Other people should do this
3Qiaochu_Yuan10y
Obvious options are consuming popular culture, e.g. popular TV shows, music, or
sports. There's a lot of good TV out there these days so it shouldn't be hard to
get hooked on at least one show you can talk to a lot of people about (Game of
Thrones?).
If you really insist on the "you do" part, I don't do anything with this
explicit goal. I just talk.
3ChristianKl10y
A while ago I heared from Jim Rohn that even if you don't have had a near death
experience everyone has something interesting to talk about. At the time I said
to myself, hey I do have an experience that sort of qualifies as a near death
experience. I had 5 days of artificial coma with some strange paranormal
experience after waking up out of it.
At the time I still had a hard time conversing with people even through I had
experiences that qualified as interesting. I just lacked the skill to talk about
them.
I don't think that relating to other people is primarily a question of the
content of conversation.
It's about emotions. It's about empathy. It's about getting out of your head.
Instead of spending time in an activity that you could tell other people about,
spend more time actually talking to people and practice relating on an emotional
level.
9NancyLebovitz10y
Alternatively, I just read about a veep who was told at management training to
start by asking about people's families, and then talk about business matters.
As a result, the people who thought she was cold and disliked them switched to
thinking she was friendly and caring.
1sixes_and_sevens10y
This seems very platitude-y. In practise there presumably needs to be some sort
of context for "relating on an emotional level". You're unlikely to walk up to
someone and start talking about all these awesome emotions you've been having.
To clarify, this isn't some problem I need solving. It's an observation that if
I lock myself up in a room for a month watching maths lectures and writing
essays on neoclassical expenditure theories, it becomes harder to engage
socially with people.
5A1987dM10y
Don't do that then! [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/Don-t-do-that-then-.html]
-2ChristianKl10y
It doesn't need much context. If someone asks you "How are you?" you can
reasonable answer how you experienced yesterday something that made you feel
XYZ.
Intelligent people have a tendency to overcomplicated it. A lot of small talk
that happens between normal people doesn't have much content.
It doesn't help if you catch up with popular culture while you are looked up in
your room. The problem is being locked up in a room and being socially isolated
instead of the specific content that you consume.
Instead of spending 2 hours locked up in your room to catch up with popular
culture spends that time going out and talk to people.
5sixes_and_sevens10y
I've downvoted this for being bad advice that I explicitly requested you refrain
from giving.
0achiral10y
I think that the advice is well suited to your situation. I suspect that you
don't realize this because you spend so much time isolating yourself from people
to study math.
I think it's great that so many people here are extremely intellegent, but one
can hardly expect to relate very well to most people when one spends most of
their time studying extremely obscure subjects alone while they sit down and
barely move. That's pretty much the antithesis of what normal people enjoy.
Balance intellectual activities with specifically non-intellectual activities
that are not based around the passive consumption of media. Actually get out
into the world, move your body in new ways, interact with a variety of people,
seek novel experiences, travel around to new places far away and try to find new
aspects of the area where you live. Basically just do the opposite of limiting
your physical mobility and emotional expressiveness in order to focus on logical
thinking about intangible intellectual subjects.
2A1987dM10y
You know there's a huge fraction of the people in the developed world who
willingly spend a sizeable fraction of their waking time watching TV, right?
0achiral10y
Watching TV is not an intellectual activity in any real sense. Most TV
stimulates the senses and evokes emotions in the viewer through storylines and
such. This is obviously very different from studying mathematics seriously.
2sixes_and_sevens10y
Would it surprise you to learn I'd recently spent two weeks swing dancing in a
pop-up shanty-town in rural Sweden? That I clock up around thirty miles a week
on foot in one of the world's largest metropolitan conurbations? That I nearly
joined a travelling circus school a few years ago? That I've given solo vocal
performances on stage for six nights a week in front of hundreds of people?
With respect, you have no knowledge of my "situation". Please don't presume to
offer me advice on the basis of whatever assumptions you've incorrectly conjured
up.
2achiral10y
Those all sound like some pretty awesome activities!
My question to you, with respect, is this: why not just reduce the amount of
hours per day you spend on serious, solitary intellectual work and fill the
balance with externally oriented, social activities till you find a maintainable
balance of sociability vs. studying?
Maybe I'm misinterpreting you, but it seems you're essentially saying that when
you (temporarily) hyper focus on solitary, intellectual activities you
(temporarily) encounter more difficulty in conversations. This doesn't surprise
me and it seems evident that the only real solution is to find the right balance
for you and accept the inherent trade offs.
4sixes_and_sevens10y
It's not like I have some slider on my desktop, with "sit in a box, autistically
rocking back and forth, counting numbers" at one end, and "rakishly sample the
epicurean delights of the world" at the other. I have time and work and study
commitments. I have externally-imposed scheduling. I have inscrutable internal
motivation levels that need to be contended with.
It's a case of resource management, and occasionally when managing those
resources I'll have to focus on one area to the exclusion of another. That's
fine. It's not something there's a "solution" to. It's a condition all
moderately busy people have to operate under.
0A1987dM10y
For certain people that's not an option (“phdcomics is a documentary” -- shminux
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/dfm/negative_and_positive_selection/6znx]).
1A1987dM10y
Those sound like pretty good topics for conversations with people.
0sixes_and_sevens10y
To a degree. Swing dancing in Sweden is a fairly unusual way to spend your
summer holiday.
I think you and I have had exchanges about "optimising for awesomeness" in the
past. In some ways, having "awesome" talents or hobbies or experiences is no
more relatable than having insular and nerdy ones. It's just cooler.
0A1987dM10y
What? I'm under the impression that there are a much larger number of people who
enjoy hearing me talk about trips around Europe or exams while drunk than about
models of ultra-high-energy cosmic ray propagation.
1sixes_and_sevens10y
I think we're talking at crossed purposes here. Relatability isn't popularity.
If I wrestled a Bengal tiger into submission and rode it across the
subcontinent, I'm sure a lot of people would want to hear me talk about that.
But unless they'd also ridden across India on a subdued tiger, it wouldn't
foster a sense of empathy, kinship or mutual understanding.
0A1987dM10y
I'm under the impression that that often doesn't work very well with most males
-- I find it relatively hard to emotionally relate with them unless we have
something in particular to talk about. (Then again, biased sample, yadda yadda
yadda.)
0Jack10y
One strategy: Take insular, scholarly interest in a broadly popular subject. For
example, I'm interested in APBRmetrics
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APBRmetrics] and associated theoretical questions
about the sport of basketball. One nice plus to this hobby is that it also
leaves me with pretty up-to-date non-technical knowledge about NBA and college
basketball.
0taelor10y
I have a simmilar interest in SABRmetrics, and baseball.
0A1987dM10y
I seldom watch TV and know very little of contemporary popular culture, and most
of my conversations are about my experiences in meatspace (travels abroad, stuff
I do with friends, etc.), my plans for the future, asking the other person about
their experiences in meatspace and plans for the future, and (for people who
appreciate it) physics.
But why do you want to keep yourself relatable to (arbitrary) people, rather
than looking for people you're already relatable to, anyway?
3sixes_and_sevens10y
Because the overwhelming majority of people are arbitrary people. Any given
person I meet is, almost definitively, going to be an arbitrary person.
The De Broglie-Bohm theory is a very interesting interpretation of quantum mechanics. The highlights of the theory are:
The wavefunction is treated as being real (just as in MWI - in fact the theory is compatible with MWI in some ways),
Particles are also real, and are guided deterministically by the wavefunction. In other words, it is a hidden variable theory.
At first it might seem to be a cop-out to assume the reality of both the wavefunction and of actual point particles. However, this leads to some very interesting conclusions. For example, you don't have to assume wavefunction collapse (as per Copenhagen) but at the same time, a single preferred Universe exists (the Universe given by the configuration of the point particles). But that's not all.
It very neatly explains double-slit diffraction and Bell's experiments in a purely deterministic way using hidden variables (it is thus necessarily a non-local theory). It also explains the Born probabilities (the one thing that is missing from pure MWI; Elezier has alluded to this).
Among other things, De Broglie-Bohm theory allows quantum computers but doesn't allow quantum immortality - in this theory if you shoot yourself in the h... (read more)
If you ascribe to MWI, locality is a reason to abandon De Broglie-Bohm theory,
but a relatively minor one - instead, it's the way it insists on neglecting the
reality of the guide wave.
If you take the guide wave to be a dynamical entity, then it's real and it's all
happening so all the worlds are real, so what does the particle do here?
If you take the guide wave to be the rules of the universe (a tack I've heard)
then the rules of the universe contain civilizations - literally, not as
hypothetical implications. Choosing to use timeless physics (the response I got)
doesn't change this.
1Rob Bensinger10y
The particle position recovers the Born probabilities. (It even does so
deterministically, unlike Objective Collapse theories.) The wave function
encodes lots of information, but it's the particle that moves our measuring
device, and the measuring device that moves our brains. If we succeed in
simplifying our theory only by giving up on saving the phenomenon
[http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Egan%27s_law], then our theory is too simple.
3Luke_A_Somers10y
But once you decide you're going to interpret the wave function as distributing
probability among some set of orthogonal subspaces, you're already compelled
into the Born probabilities.
All you need to decide that you ought to do that is the general conclusion that
the wavefunction represents some kind of reality-fluid. Deciding that the nature
of this reality fluid is to be made of states far more specific than any entity
within quantum mechanics comes rather out of the blue.
8Rob Bensinger10y
But the phrase "reality fluid" is just a place-holder. It's a black box labeled
"whatever solves this here problem
[http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/10/book-review-after-virtue-or-somebody-here-is-really-confused-and-i-just-hope-its-not-me/]".
What we see is something particle-like, and it's the dynamics relating our
observations over time that complicates the story. As Schrödinger put it:
One option is to try to find the simplest theory that explains away the
particle-like appearance anthropically, which will get you an Everett-style
('Many Worlds'-like) interpretation. Another option is to take the sudden
intrusion of the Born probabilities as a brute law of nature, which will get you
a von-Neumann-style ('Collapse'-like) interpretation. The third option is to
accept the particle-like appearance as real, but theorize that a more unitary
underlying theory relates the Schrödinger dynamics to the observed particle,
which will get you a de-Boglie-style ('Hidden Variables') interpretation. You'll
find Bohmian Mechanics more satisfying than Many Worlds inasmuch as you find
MW's anthropics hand-wavey or underspecified; and you'll find BM more satisfying
than Collapse inasmuch as you think Nature's Laws are relatively simple,
continuous, scalable, and non-anthropocentric.
If BM just said, 'Well, the particle's got to be real somehow, and the Born
probabilities have to emerge from its interaction with a guiding wave somehow,
but we don't know how that works yet', then its problems would be the same as
MW's. But BM can formally specify how "reality fluid" works
[http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0308039.pdf], and in a less ad-hoc way than its
rivals. So BM wins on that count.
Where it loses is in ditching locality and Special Relativity, which is a big
cost. (It's also kind of ugly and complicated, but it's hard to count that
against BM until we've seen a simpler theory that's equally fleshed out re the
Measurement Problem.)
Would you say that acknowledging the Born probab
-1Luke_A_Somers10y
I wouldn't call Everett 'Anthropic' per se. I consider it an application of the
Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle: Here you've got this structure that acts like
it's sapient†. Therefore, it is.
As for BM formally specifying how the reality fluid works... need I point out
this this is 100% entirely backwards, being made of burdensome details
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/jk/burdensome_details/]?
The Schrödinger Equation establishes linearity, thus directly allowing us to
split any arbitrary wavefunction however we please. Already we can run many
worlds side-by-side. The SE's dynamics lead to decoherence, which makes MWI have
branching. It's all just noticing the structure that's already in the system.
Edited to add †: by 'acts like' I mean 'has the causal structure for it to be'
0EHeller10y
But many of the more-general lagrangians of particle physics are non-linear, in
general there should be higher order, non-linear corrections. So Schrödinger is
a single-particle/linearized approximation. What does this do for your view of
many worlds? When we try to extend many worlds naively to QFTs we run into all
sorts of weird problems (much of the universal wavefunction's amplitude doesn't
have well defined particle number,etc). Shouldn't we expect the 'proper'
interpretation to generalize nicely to the full QFT framework?
2tut10y
Or rather, the proper interpretation should work in the full QFT framework, and
may or may not work for ordinary QM.
0Luke_A_Somers10y
What are you talking about? I've only taken one course in quantum field theory,
but I've never heard of anything where quantum mechanics was not linear. Can you
give me a citation? It seems to me that failure of linearity would either be
irrelevant (superlinear case, low amplitudes) or so dominant that any linearity
would be utterly irrelevant and the Born Probabilities wouldn't even be a good
approximation.
Also, by 'the Schrodinger equation' I didn't mean the special form which is the
fixed-particle Hamiltonian with pp/2m kinetic energy - I meant the general form
-
i hbar (d/dt) Psi = Hamiltonian Psi
Note that the Dirac Equation is a special case of this general form of the
Schrodinger Equation. MWI, 'naive' or not, has no trouble with variations in
particle number.
0Rob Bensinger10y
I'm not sure what you mean by 'anthropic per se'. Everett (MW) explains apparent
quantum indeterminism anthropically, via indexical ignorance; our knowledge of
the system as a whole is complete, but we don't know where we in the system are
at this moment. De Broglie (HV) explains apparent quantum indeterminism via
factual ignorance; our knowledge of the system's physical makeup is incomplete,
and that alone creates the appearance of randomness. Von Neumann (OC) explains
apparent quantum indeterminism realistically; the world just is indeterministic.
This is either a very implausible answer, or an answer to a different question
than the one I asked. Historically, the Born Probabilities are derived directly
from experimental data, not from the theorized dynamics. The difficulty of
extracting the one from the other, of turning this into a single unified and
predictive theory, just is the 'Measurement' Problem. Bohm is taking two
distinct models and reifying mechanisms for each to produce an all-encompassing
theory; maybe that's useless or premature, but it's clearly not a non sequitur,
because the evidence for a genuine wave/particle dichotomy just is the evidence
that makes scientists allow probabilistic digressions from the Schrödinger
equation.
MW is not a finished theory until we see how it actually unifies the two, though
I agree there are at least interesting and suggestive first steps in that
direction. BM's costs are obvious and clear and formalized, which is its main
virtue. Our ability to compare those costs to other theories' is limited so long
as it's the only finished product under evaluation, because it's easy to look
simple when you choose to only try to explain some of the data.
2Luke_A_Somers10y
I see what you mean now about anthropism. Yes, ignorance is subjective.
Incidentally, this is how it used to be back before quantum ever came up.
Historically, Born was way before Everett and even longer before decoherence, so
that's not exactly a shocker. Even in Born's time it was understood that
subspaces had only one way of adding up to 1 in a way that respects probability
identities - I'd bet dollars to donuts that that was how he got the rule in the
first place, rather than doing a freaking curve fit to experimental data. What
was missing at the time was any way to figure out what the wavefunction was,
between doing its wavefunctiony thing and collapse.
Decoherence explains what collapse is made of. With it around, accepting the
claim 'The Schrödinger Equation is the only rule of dynamics; collapse is
illusory and subjective', which is basically all there is to MWI, requires much
less bullet-biting than before it was introduced. There is still some, but those
bullets are much chewier for me than any alternate rules of dynamics.
(incidentally, IIRC, Shminux, you hold the above quote but not MWI, which I find
utterly baffling - if you want to explain the difference or correct me on your
position, go ahead)
Good thing I never said it was.
0EHeller10y
Well, you still need a host of ideas about how to actually interpret a diagonal
density matrix. Because you don't have Born probabilities as a postulate, you
have this structure but no method for connecting it back to lab-measured values.
While it seems straightforward, its because many-world's advocates are doing
slight of hand. They use probabilities to build a theory (because lab
experiments appear to be only describable probabilistically), and later they
kick away that ladder but they want to keep all the structure that comes with it
(density matrices,etc).
I know of many good expositions that start with the probabilities and use that
to develop the form of the Schroedinger equation from Galilean relativity and
cluster decomposition (Ballentine, parts of Weinberg).
I don't know any good expositions that go the other way. There are reasons that
Deutsch, Wallace,etc have spent so much time trying to develop Born
probabilities in a many world's context- because its an important problem.
2Luke_A_Somers10y
Hold on a moment. What ladder is being kicked away here?
We've got observed probabilities. They're the experimental results, the basis of
the theory. The theory then explains this in terms of indexical ignorance
(thanks, RobbBB). I don't see a kicked ladder. Not every observed phenomenon
needs a special law of nature to make it so.
Instead of specially postulating the Born Probabilities, elevating them to the
status of a law of nature, we use it to label parts of the universe in much the
same way as we notice, say, hydrogen or iron atoms - 'oh, look, there's that
thing again'. In this case, it's the way that sometimes, components of the
wavefunction propagate such that different segments won't be interfering with
each other coherently (or in any sane basis, at all).
Also, about density matrices - what's the problem? We're still allowed to not
know things and have subjective probabilities, even in MWI. Nothing in it
suggests otherwise.
-4shminux10y
That's just regurgitating the teacher's password. MWI does not even account for
the radioactive decay. In other words, if you find the Schrodinger's cat dead,
how long has it been dead for?
1Luke_A_Somers10y
Regurgitating the teacher's password is a matter of mental process, and you have
nowhere near the required level of evidence to make that judgement here.
As for radioactive decay, I'm not clear what you require of MWI here. The
un-decayed state has amplitude which gradually diminishes, leaking into other
states. When you look in a cat box, you become entangled with it.
If the states resulting from death at different times are distinguishable, then
you can go ahead and distinguish them, and there's your answer (or, if it could
be done in principle but we're not clever enough, then the answer is 'I don't
know', but for reasons that don't really have bearing on the question).
Where it really gets interesting is if the states resulting from cat-death are
quantum-identical. Then it's exactly like asking, in a diffraction-grating
experiment, 'Which slit did the photon go through?'. The answer is either 'mu',
or 'all of them', depending on your taste in rejecting questions. The final
result is the weighted sum of all of the possible times of death, and no one of
them is correct.
Note that for this identical case to apply, nothing inside the box gets to be
able to tell the time (see note), which pretty much rules out its being an
actual cat.
So... If you find Schrödinger's cat dead, then it will have had a (reasonably)
definite time of death, which you can determine only limited by your forensic
skills.
~~
Note: The issue is that of cramming time-differentiating states into one final
state. The only way you can remove information like that is to put it somewhere
else. If you have a common state that the cat falls into from a variety of
others, then the radiation from the cat's decays into this common state encodes
this information. It will be lost to entropy, but that just falls under the
aegis of 'we're not clever enough to get it back out' again, and isn't
philosophically interesting.
5shminux10y
Yeah, sorry, that was uncalled for.
Right. And each of those uncountably many (well, finitely many for a finite
cutoff or countably many for a finite box) states corresponds to a different
time of death (modulo states with have the same time of death but different
emitted particle momenta).
Yes, with all of those states.
They must be, since they result in different macroscopic effects (from the
forensic time-of-death measurement).
Yes, but in this case they are not.
Not at all. In the diffraction experiment you don't distinguish between
different paths, you sum over them.
No, you measure the time pretty accurately, so wrong-tme states do not
contribute.
Not quite. If the cat does not interact with the rest of the world, the cat is a
superposition of all possible decay states. (I am avoiding the objective
collapse models here.) It's pretty actual, except for having to be at near 0 K
to avoid leaking information about its states via thermal radiation.
Yes it will. But a different time in different "worlds". Way too many of them.
-1Luke_A_Somers10y
The first few responses here boil down to the last response:
Why is it too many? I don't understand what the problem is here. When you'd
collapse the wavefunction, you're often tossing out 99.9999% of said
wavefunction. In MWI or not, that's roughly splitting the world into 1 million
parts and keeping one. The question is the disposition of the others.
Well, yes, because it's a freaking cat. I had already dealt with the realistic
case and was attempting to do something with the other one by explicitly
invoking the premise even if it is absurd. The following pair of quote-responses
(responding to the lines with 'diffraction' and 'sum of all the possible') was
utterly unnecessary because they were in a conditional 'if A then B', and you
had denied A.
Of course, one could decline to use a cat and substitute a system which can
maintain coherence, in which case the premise is not at all absurd. This was
rather what I was getting at, but I'd hoped that your ability to sphere the cow
was strong enough to give a cat coherence.
0shminux10y
Well, if you are OK with the world branching infinitely many ways every
infinitesimally small time interval in every infinitesimally small volume of
space, then I guess you can count it as "the disposition". This is not, however,
the way MWI is usually presented.
2Luke_A_Somers10y
Spacetime is not saturated with decoherence events.
0shminux10y
Inference gap.
4Luke_A_Somers10y
Roughly speaking: if you're working in an interpretation with collapse (whether
objective or not), and it's too early to collapse a wavefunction, then MWI says
that all those components you were declining to collapse are still in the same
world.
So, since you don't go around collapsing the wavefunction into infinite variety
of outcomes at every event of spacetime, MWI doesn't call for that much
branching.
0shminux10y
I don't understand what "too early to collapse a wavefunction" means and how it
is related to decoherence.
For example, suppose we take a freshly prepared atom in an excited state (it is
simpler than radioactive decay). QFT says that its state evolves into a state in
the Fock space which is a
ground states of the atom+excited states of the EM vacuum (a photon).
I mean "+" here loosely, to denote that it's a linear combination of the product
states with different momenta. The phase space of the photon includes all
possible directions of momentum as well as anything else not constrained by the
conservation laws. The original excited state of the atom is still there, as
well as the original ground state of the EM field, but it's basically lost in
the phase space of all possible states.
Suppose there is also a detector surrounding the atom, which is sensitive to
this photon (we'll include the observer looking at the detector in the detector
to avoid the Wigner's friend discussion). Once the excitation of the field
propagates far enough to reach the detector, the total state is evolved into
ground states of the atom + excited states of the detector.
So now the wave function of the original microscopic quantum system has
"collapsed", as far as the detector is concerned. ("decohered" is a better term,
with less ontological baggage). I hope this is pretty uncontroversial, except
maybe to a Bohmian, to Penrose, or to a proponent of objective collapse, but
that's a separate discussion.
So now we have at least as many worlds/branches as there were states in the Fock
space. Some will differ by detection time, others by the photon direction, etc.
The only thing limiting the number of branches are various cutoffs, like the
detector size.
Am I missing anything here?
1Luke_A_Somers10y
That's right, but it doesn't add up to what you said about spacetime being
saturated with 'world-branching' events.
While the decay wave is propagating, for instance, nothing's decohering. It's
only when it reaches the critically unstable system of the detector that that
happens.
-2shminux10y
There is no single moment like that. if the distance from the atom to the
detector is r and we prepare the atom at time 0, the interaction between the
atom/field states and the detector states (i.e. decoherence) starts at the time
c/r and continues on.
0EHeller10y
Depends on your framework, but it will actually start even earlier than that in
a general QFT. The expectation will be non-zero for all times t. I suppose the
physical interpretation is something like a local-fluctuation trips the
detector.
Of course, commutators will be non-zero as locality requires.
0shminux10y
Right, good point. Still, there are rarely just a few distinct branches in
almost any measurement process, it's a continuum of states, isn't it?
0Luke_A_Somers10y
I see that my short, simple answer didn't really explain this, so I'll try the
longer version.
Under a collapse interpretation, when is it OK to collapse things and treat them
probabilistically? When the quantum phenomena have become entangled with
something with enough degrees of freedom that you're never going to get coherent
superposition back out (it's decohered) (if you do it earlier than this, you
lose the coherent superpositions and you get two one-slit patterns added to each
other and that's all wrong)
This is also the same criterion for when you consider worlds to diverge in MWI.
Therefore, in a two-slit experiment you don't have two worlds, one for each
slit. They're still one world. Unless of course they got entangled with
something messy, in which case that caused a divergence.
Now... once it hits the messy thing (for simplicity let's say it's the
detector), you're looking at a thermally large number of worlds, and the weights
of these worlds is precisely given by the conservation of squared amplitude,
a.k.a. the Born Rule.
I take it that it bothers you that scattering events producing a thermally large
number of worlds is the norm rather than the exception? Quantum mechanics occurs
in Fock space, which is unimaginably, ridiculously huge, as I'm sure you're well
aware. The wavefunction is like a gas escaping from a bottle into outer space.
And the gas escapes over and over again, because each 'outer space' is just
another a bottle to escape from by scattering.
Or is what's bugging you that MWI is usually presented as creating less than a
thermally large number of worlds? That's a weakness of common explanations,
sure. Examples may replace 10^(mole) with 2 for simplicity's sake.
0shminux10y
I think we are in agreement here that interacting with the detector initially
creates a messy entangled object. If one believes Zurek, it then
decoheres/relaxes into a superposition of eigenstates through einselection,
while bleeding away all other states into the "environment". Zurek seems to be
understandably silent on whether a single eigenstate survives (collapse) or they
all do (MWI).
What I was pointing out with the spontaneous emission example is that there are
no discrete eigenstates there, thus all possible emission times and directions
are on an equal footing. If you are OK with this being described as MWI, I have
no problem with that. I have not seen it described this way, however. In fact, I
do not recall seeing any treatment of spontaneous emission in the MWI context. I
wonder why.
Another, unrelated issue I have not seen addressed by MWI (or objective
collapse) is how in the straight EPR experiment on a singlet and two aligned
detectors one necessarily gets opposite spin measurements, even though each
spacelike-separated interaction produces "two worlds", up and down. Apparently
these 2x2 worlds somehow turn into just 2 worlds (updown and downup), with the
other two (upup and downdown) magically discarded to preserve the angular
momentum conservation. But I suppose this is a discussion for another day.
2Luke_A_Somers10y
Peculiar. That was one of the first examples I ever encountered. Not the first
two, but it was one of the earlier ones. It was emphasized that there is a
colossal number of 'worlds' coming out of this sort of event, and the two-way
splits in the previous examples were just simplest-possible cases.
How can you cut a pizza twice and get only two slices? By running the pizza
cutter over the same line again. Same deal here. By applying the same test to
the two entangled particles, they get the same results. Or do you mean, how can
MWI keep track of the information storage aspects of quantum mechanics? Well, we
live in Fock space.
1shminux10y
I'd appreciate some links.
I'm lost here again. The two splits happen independently at two spacelike
separated points and presumably converge (at the speed of light or slower) and
start interacting, somehow resulting in only two worlds at the point where the
measurements are compared. If this is a bad model, what is a good one?
0Luke_A_Somers10y
My original source was unfortunately a combination of conversations and a book I
don't remember the title of, so I can't take you back to the original source.
But, I found something here
[http://www.physics.wustl.edu/alford/many_worlds_FAQ.html#how%20many]. (†)
The thing is, they're not truly independent because the particles were prepared
so as to already be entangled - the part of Fock space you put the system (and
thus yourself) in is one where the particles are already aligned relative to
each other, even though no one particular absolute alignment is preferred. If
you entangle yourself with one, then you find you're already entangled with the
other.
It's just like it works the rest of the time in quantum mechanics, because
that's all that's going on.
(†) A quick rundown of how prominent this notion is, judging by google results
for 'many worlds': Wikipedia seemed to ignore quantity. The second hit was
HowStuffWorks, which gave an abominable (and obviously pop) treatment. Third was
a NOVA interview, and that didn't give a quantitative answer but stated that the
number of worlds was mind-bogglingly large. Fourth was an entry at
Plato.stanford.edu, which was quasi-technical while making me cringe about some
things, and didn't as far as I could tell touch on quantity. Fifth was a very
nontechnical 'top 10'-style article which had the huge number of worlds as
entries 10, 9, and 8. The sixth and seventh hits were a movie promo and a book
review. Eighth was the article I linked above, in preprint form (and so no
anchor link, I had to find that somewhere else).
1shminux10y
Right, the two macroscopic systems are entangled once both interact with the
singlet, but this is a non-local statement which acts as a curiosity stopper,
since it does not provide any local mechanism for the apparent "action at a
distance". Presumably MWI would offer something better than
shut-up-and-calculate, like showing how what is seen locally as a pair of worlds
at each detector propagate toward each other, interact and become just two
worlds at the point where the results are compared, thanks to the original
correlations present when the singlet was initially prepared. Do you know of
anything like that written up anywhere?
0Luke_A_Somers10y
Part 1 - to your first sentence: If you accept quantum mechanics as the one
fundamental law, then state information is already nonlocal. Only interactions
are local. So, the way you resolve the apparent 'action at a distance' isn't to
deny that it's nonlocal, but to deny that it's an action. To be clearer:
Some events transpire locally, that determine which (nonlocal) world you are in.
What happened at that other location? Nothing.
Part 2 - Same as last link, question 32
[http://www.physics.wustl.edu/alford/many_worlds_FAQ.html#epr]., with one
exception: I would say that |me(L)> and such, being macrostates, do not
represent single worlds but thermodynamically large bundles of worlds that share
certain common features. I have sent an email suggesting this change (but
considering the lack of edits over the last 18 years, I'm not confident that it
will happen).
To summarize: just forget about MWI and use conventional quantum mechanics +
macrostates. The entanglement is infectious, so each world ends up with an
appropriate pair of measurements.
0shminux10y
Thanks! It looks like the reference equates the number of worlds with the number
of microstates, since it calculates it as exp(S/k), not as the number of
eigenstates of some interaction Hamiltonian, which is the standard lore. From
this point of view, it is not clear how many worlds you get in, say, a
single-particle Stern-Gerlach experiment: 2 or exponent of the entropy change of
the detector after it's triggered. Of course, one can say that we can
coarse-grain them the usual way we construct macrostates from microstates, but
then why introduce many worlds instead of simply doing quantum stat mech or even
classical thermodynamics?
Anyway, I could not find this essential point (how many worlds?) in the QM
sequence, but maybe I missed it. All I remember is the worlds of different
"thickness", which is sort of like coarse-graining microstates into macrostates,
I suppose.
0Luke_A_Somers10y
It is coarse-graining them into macrostates. Each macrostate is a bundle of a
thermodynamically numerous effectively-mutually-independent worlds.
1So8res10y
On the contrary, I've found that MWI is "usually presented" as continuous
branching happening continuously over time and space. And (the argument goes)
you can't argue against it on the grounds of parsimony any more than you can
argue against atoms or stars on the grounds of parsimony. (There are other valid
criticisms, to be sure, but breaking parsimony is not one of them.)
0shminux10y
Any links?
Indeed, the underlying equations are the same whether you aesthetically prefer
MWI or not.
1So8res10y
Sure. Here's one
[http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/9096/1/isManyWorlds_CriticalReview.pdf]. LW's
own quantum physics sequence discusses systems undergoing continuously branching
evolution [http://lesswrong.com/lw/pl/no_individual_particles/]. Even non-MWI
books [http://quantum.phys.cmu.edu/CQT/] are fairly explicit pointing out that
the wavefunction is continuous but we'll study discrete examples to get a feel
for things (IIRC).
In fact, I don't think I've ever seen an MWI claim outside of scifi that
postulates discrete worlds. I concede that some of the wording in layman
explanations might be confusing, but even simplifications like "all worlds
exist" or "all quantum possibilities are taken" implies continuous branching.
It seems to me like continuous branching is the default, not the exception. Do
you have any non-fiction examples of MWI being presented as a theory with
discretely branching worlds?
0passive_fist10y
Precisely. It's also not a trivial connection. The way the interaction between
the wavefunction and the particles produces the Born probabilities is subtle and
interesting (see MrMind's comment below on some of the subtleties involved).
2pragmatist10y
The main problem with Bohmian mechanics, from my perspective, is not that it is
non-local per se (after all, the lesson of Bell's theorem is that all
interpretations of QM will be non-local in some sense), but that it's particular
brand of egregious non-locality makes it very difficult to come up with a
relativistic version of the theory. I have seen some attempts at developing a
Bohmian quantum field theory, but they have been pretty crude (relying on
undetectable preferred foliations, for instance, which I consider anathema). I
haven't been keeping track, though, so maybe the state of play has changed.
0passive_fist10y
Interesting; I did a quick google search and apparently there's a guy who claims
he can do it without foliations:
iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/67/1/012035/pdf/jpconf7_67_012035.pdf
I lack the expertise to make a more detailed analysis of it though.
1Manfred10y
No love for the principle of relativity? It's been real successful, and
nonlocality means choosing a preferred reference frame. Even if the effects are
non-observable, that implies immense contortions to jump through the hoops set
by SR and GR, and reality being elegant seems to have worked so far. And sure,
MWI may trample all over human uniqueness, but invoking human uniqueness didn't
lead to the great cosmological breakthroughs of the 20th century.
0MrMind10y
The things that bugs me with DBB theory is that it allows superluminal
comunication when the guide wave is out of equilibrium
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_non-equilibrium]...
0passive_fist10y
But since it's superdeterministic, it seems unlikely that you could actually set
up an artifical nonequilibrium situation.
4MrMind10y
Yes, the feeling I have is that of uneasiness, not rejection. But still, DBB can
be put in agreement with relativity only through the proper initial conditions,
which I see as a defect (although not an obviously fatal one).
It's absolutely the case that everything we are, evolved. But there's a certain gap between the hypothetical healthy field of evolutionary psychology and the one we actually have.
This sort of thing is why people make fun of ev psych. That's the 2008 study that claimed to find biological reasons for girls to like pink.
Of course, one bad study doesn't condemn a field - "peer reviewed" does not mean "settled science", it means "not-obviously-wrong request for comment." But this isn't a lone, outlier, rogue study - this shit's gathered 46 citations. (Compare citation averages for other fields.) (Edit: No, not all of the cites are positive.)
This sort of thing is why people make fun of ev psych. That's the 2008 study that claimed to find biological reasons for girls to like pink.
I think it deserves more fairness. The abstract only claims to have measured a "cross-cultural
sex difference in color preference", making no claims about the sex difference's origin. They do speculate a bit about ev-psych in the body of the paper, but they begin this speculation with the words "We speculate" and then in the conclusion they say "Yet while these differences may be innate, they may also be modulated by cultural context or individual experience."
This, of course, isn't how it was reported in the mainstream media.
(By the way, thanks for actually linking to the paper you mentioned, it makes it a whole lot easier when people do this.)
The problem with that kind of phrasing is that we already know that cultural
context can easily change the gender codes of blue and pink, because it already
happened. If one doesn't assert that something evolutionarily significant
happened at around the time of the cultural shift, then linking color preference
to an inherent property of gender or sex is privileging the hypothesis.
If "anthropic probabilities" make sense, then it seems natural to use them as weights for aggregating different people's utilities. For example, if you have a 60% chance of being Alice and a 40% chance of being Bob, your utility function is a weighting of Alice's and Bob's.
If the "anthropic probability" of an observer-moment depends on its K-complexity, as in Wei Dai's UDASSA, then the simplest possible observer-moments that have wishes will have disproportionate weight, maybe more than all mankind combined.
If someday we figure out the correct math of which observer-moments can have wishes, we will probably know how to define the simplest such observer-moment. Following SMBC, let's call it Felix.
All parallel versions of mankind will discover the same Felix, because it's singled out by being the simplest.
Felix will be a utility monster. The average utilitarians who believe the above assumptions should agree to sacrifice mankind if that satisfies the wishes of Felix.
If you agree with that argument, you should start preparing for the arrival of Felix now. There's work to be done.
Where is the error?
That's the sharp version of the argument, but I think it's still interesting even in weakened forms. If there's a mathematical connection between simplicity and utility, and we humans aren't the simplest possible observers, then playing with such math can strongly affect utility.
How would being moved by this argument help me achieve my values? I don't see
how it helps me to maximize an aggregate utility function for all possible
agents. I don't care intrinsically about Felix, nor is Felix capable of
cooperating with me in any meaningful way.
2ESRogs10y
How does your aggregate utility function weigh agents? That seems to be what the
argument is about.
6Wei_Dai10y
Felix exists as multiple copies in many universes/Everett branches, and it's
measure is the sum of the measures of the copies. Each version of mankind can
only causally influence (e.g., make happier) the copy of Felix existing in the
same universe/branch, and the measure of that copy of Felix shouldn't be much
higher than that of an individual human, so there's no reason to treat Felix as
a utility monster. Applying acausal reasoning doesn't change this conclusion
either. For example all the parallel versions of mankind could jointly decide to
make Felix happier, but while the benefit of that is greater (all the copies of
Felix existing near the parallel versions of mankind would get happier), so
would the cost.
If Felix is very simple it may be deriving most of its measure from a very short
program that just outputs a copy of Felix (rather than the copies existing in
universes/branches containing humans), but there's nothing humans can do to make
this copy of Felix happier, so its existence doesn't make any difference.
3cousin_it10y
Why? Even within just one copy of Earth, the program that finds Felix should be
much shorter than any program that finds a human mind...
3Wei_Dai10y
Are you thinking that the shortest program that finds Felix in our universe
would contain a short description of Felix and find it by pattern matching,
whereas the shortest program that finds a human mind would contain the spacetime
coordinates of the human? I guess which is shorter would be language
dependent... if there is some sort of standard language that ought to be used,
and it turns out the former program is much shorter than the latter in this
language, then we can make the program that finds a human mind shorter by for
example embedding some kind of artificial material in their brain that's easy to
recognize and doesn't exist elsewhere in nature. Although I suppose that
conclusion isn't much less counterintuitive than "Felix should be treated as a
utility monster".
3cousin_it10y
Yeah, there's a lot of weird stuff going on here. For example, Paul said
sometime ago that ASSA gives a thick computer larger measure than a thin
computer, so if we run Felix on a computer that is much thicker than human
neurons (shouldn't be hard), it will have larger measure anyway. But on the
other hand, the shortest program that finds a particular human may also do that
by pattern matching... I no longer understand what's right and what's wrong
anymore.
3Wei_Dai10y
Hal Finney pointed out the same thing a long time ago on everything-list. I also
wrote a post
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/1hg/the_moral_status_of_independent_identical_copies/]
about how we don't seem to value extra identical copies in a linear way, and
noted at the end that this also seems to conflict with UDASSA. My current idea
(which I'd try to work out if I wasn't distracted by other things) is that the
universal distribution doesn't tell you how much you should value someone, but
only puts an upper bound on how much you can value someone.
0[anonymous]10y
I get the impression that this discussion presupposes that you can't just point
to someone (making the question of "program" length unmotivated). Is there a
problem with that point of view or a reason to focus on another one?
(Pointing to something can be interpreted as a generalized program that includes
both the thing pointed to, and the pointer. Its semantics is maintained by some
process in the environment that's capable of relating the pointer to the object
it points to, just like an interpreter acts on the elements of a program in
computer memory.)
3Manfred10y
http://xkcd.com/687/ [http://xkcd.com/687/]
Or to put it another way - probability is not just a unit. You need to keep
track of probability of what, and to whom, or else you end up like the bad
dimensional analysis comic.
0Armok_GoB10y
A version of this that seems a bit more likely to me at least; the thing that
matters is not the simplicity of the mind itself, but rather the ease of
pointing it out among the rest of the universe; this'd mean that, basically, a a
planet sized Babbage engine running a single human equivalent mind, would get
more weight than a planet sized quantum computer running trillions and trillions
of such minds. It'd also mean that all sorts of implementation details of how
close the experiencing level is to raw physics would matter a lot, even if the
I/O behaviour is identical. This is highly counter-intuitive.
0Armok_GoB10y
One flaw; Felix almost certainly resides outside our causal reach and doesn't
care about what happens here.
0[anonymous]10y
I get the impression that this thread (incl. discussion with Wei below)
presupposes that you can't just point to someone (making the question of
"program" length unmotivated). What are the problems with that point of view or
reasons to focus on the alternatives in this discussion? (Apart from trying to
give meaning to "observer moments".)
(Pointing to something can be interpreted as a generalized program that includes
both the thing pointed to, and the pointer. Its semantics is maintained by some
process in the environment that's capable of relating the pointer to the object
it points to, just like an interpreter acts on the elements of a program in
computer memory.)
Everything Is Online
[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EverythingIsOnline]
5CoffeeStain10y
Heaven help us. Somebody get X-risk on this immediately.
3NancyLebovitz10y
To be fair, the article also mentions repeated flushing, which can raise utility
bills. I think this could get quite expensive in regions with water shortages.
Not sure if open thread is the best place to put this, but oh well.
I'm starting at Rutgers New Brunswick in a few weeks. There aren't any regular meetups in that area, but I figure there have to be at least a few people around there who read lesswrong. If any of you see this I'd be really interested in getting in touch.
I recommend being a hero and posting a meetup. Bring a book and a sign to a
coffeeshop and see if people show up. Best case, you make new friends; worst
reasonable case, you read a book in a coffeeshop for a few hours.
2pleeppleep10y
Probably what I'll end up doing. Just checking first is all.
1[anonymous]10y
Seems like Open Thread is a fine place to put this, because, I am an entering
freshman at RU, too! I just sent you a PM. :-)
A certain possible cognitive hazard, this webcomic strip, and the fact that someone has apparently made it privately known to someone else that it is desired by at least one person that I change my username due to apparent mental connections with that same cognitive hazard, all inspired me to think of the following scenario:
rot13'd for the protection of those who would prefer not to see it:
Pbafvqre: vs ng nal cbvag lbh unir yrnearq bs gur angher bs gur onfvyvfx, gurer vf cebonoyl ab jnl sbe lbh gb gehyl naq pbzcyrgryl sbetrg vg jvgubhg enqvpny zvaq fhetre... (read more)
I can trivially picture worse realities than this one.
0Tenoke10y
If you have any more dangerous ideas, please do contact me.
0Bayeslisk10y
Please define "dangerous".
2Tenoke10y
Whichever definition you use or think people might use would suffice. More info
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/i6l/open_thread_july_29august_4_2013/9hs0]
0Bayeslisk10y
Well, now the next good question would be "why".
EDIT: saw your post. This is not a cognitive hazard in itself, but rather a
possible interpretation of how the described situation could play out.
EDIT THE SECOND: Actually, now that I think of it, there's a single novel
component distinguishing it from the classic RB: the memory one. So much for
leaving lines of retreat!
0[anonymous]10y
I like the cut of your jib, even if there's a reasonable chance you'll turn out
to be one of the boring type of certain possible cognitive hazard brokers.
I notice faster if I'm wrong (and hopefully, so does my interlocutor)
It's easier to admit the above (for either of us)
I'll be talking a bit about my experience running Ideological Turing Tests and what you can apply from them in day to day life. I'm also glad to answer questions about CFAR and/or the upcoming workshop in NYC in November.
I hope this is worth saying:
I've been reading up a bit on philosophical pragmatism especially Peirce and I see a lot parallels with the thinking on LW, since it has a lot in common with positivism this is maybe not so surprising.
Though my interpretation of pragmatism seems to give a quite interesting critiquing the metaphor of "Map and territory", they seem to be saying that the territory do exist, just that when we point to territory we are actually pointing to how an ideal observer (that are somewhat like us?) would perceive the territory no... (read more)
As a side comment, it's interesting to note that "The map is not the territory"
is the first law of General Semantics, while the second law recites "The map is
the territory", meaning that we cannot ever know the territory for what it
really is: when we point to territory we are just basically pointing to another
map.
5ChristianKl10y
Could you provide some source? Putting "first law of General Semantics" into
google returns your comment and one book written in 2000 long after Korbyskies
death. Putting "second law of General Semantics" into google returns one paper
about feminism written in 2010.
General Semantics is about getting rid of the is of identity and doesn't contain
many sentences like "The map is the territory".
When it comes to "laws" about the relationship between maps and the territory
Science and Sanity starts with:
From there it goes till (40). General semantics isn't about making paradoxical
statements and drawing meaning from dialectics, It basically about getting rid
of speaking about things having the identity of other things but rather speaking
about structural relationships between things.
5MrMind10y
Uhm, that's interesting. I was told such by a person I trusted many, many years
ago. Since I've never been interested in GS I've never looked into that matter
more closely. I'll try to see if I can dig up the original source, but I don't
have much faith in that (but it might have been that "first" and "second" law
were intended informally). If I can't find anything, I guess that that trusted
source wasn't that much reliable, after all.
LOL to that.
Is there a name for the bias of choosing the action which is easiest (either physically or mentally), or takes the least effort, when given multiple options? Lazy bias? Bias of convenience?
I've found lately that being aware of this in myself has been very useful in stopping myself from procrastinating on all sorts of things, realizing that I'm often choosing the easier, but less effective of potential options out of convenience.
A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical
exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the
same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course
of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of
skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep
into our nature.
Generally "bias" implies that you're talking more about beliefs than an actions.
If think one thing and do another because it's easier, that's referred to as
"akrasia" around here.
If you're saying you believe the easier action is better, but then believe
something else after putting more thought/effort/research into it, that does
fall into the bias category. I don't think that's exactly cognitive laziness,
more action-laziness affecting cognition. I don't have a good name, but it's
some sort of causal fallacy, where the outcome (chosen action) is determining
the belief (reason for choice) rather than the reverse.
2gothgirl42066610y
Laziness can sometimes be a form of decision paralysis - when you're facing a
new and difficult problem and not sure how to approach it, your brain sometimes
freaks out and goes to default behavior, which is to do nothing. That's why it's
important to make plans and pre-commitments.
0MrMind10y
That was a huge source of akrasia for me. I fight by dividing the task ahead
into very tiny subproblems ("chunk down", in NLP parlance) and then solving them
on at the time. Then it's easy to get into flow...
At one point the piece says:
"Half thought treatments allowing people to live to be 120 would be bad for society, while 4 in 10 thought they would be good. Two-thirds thought that the treatments prolonging life would strain natural resources."
Personally, I doubt very many of them thought at all.
You may have already seen this, but this article
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/gp4/the_power_of_pomodoros/] claims that the value of
the Pomodoro technique is blasting through Ugh Fields.
"Indifferent AI" would be a better name than "Unfriendly AI".
It would unfortunately come with misleading connotations. People don't usually associate 'indifferent' with 'is certain to kill you, your family, your friends and your species'. People already get confused enough about 'indifferent' AIs without priming them with that word.
Would "Non-Friendly AI" satisfy your concerns? That gets rid of those of the connotations of 'unfriendly' that are beyond merely being 'something-other-than-friendly'.
We could gear several names to have maximum impact with their intended recipients, e.g. the "Takes-Away-Your-Second-Amendment-Rights AI", or "Freedom-Destroying AI", "Will-Make-It-So-No-More-Beetusjuice-Is-Sold AI" etc. All strictly speaking true properties for UFAIs.
Uncaring AI? The correlate could stay 'Friendly AI', as I presume to assume
acting in a friendly fashion is easier to identify than capability for
emotions/values and emotion/value motivated action.
-6mwengler10y
5RowanE10y
I prefer the selective capitalisation of "unFriendly AI". This emphasizes that
it's just any AI other than a Friendly AI, but still gets the message across
that it's dangerous.
2ChristianKl10y
There are some AI in works of fiction that you could describe as indifferent.
The one in neuromancer for example just wants to talk to other AI in the
universe and doesn't try to transform all resources on earth into material to
run itself.
An AI that does try to grow itself like a cancer is on the other hand
unfriendly.
If you take about something like the malaria virus we also wouldn't call the
virus indifferent but unfriendly towards humans even if the virus just tries to
spread itself and doesn't have the goal of killing humans.
0Bayeslisk10y
That's... actually a pretty good metaphor. Benign tumor AI vs. malignant tumor
AI?
1MrMind10y
Eliezer assumes in the meta-ethics sequence that you cannot really ever talk
outside of your general moral frame. By that assumption (which I think he is
still making), Indifferent AI would be friendly or inactive. Unfriendly AI
better conveys the externality to humans morality.
-4mwengler10y
Perhaps you can never get all the way out.
But certainly someone who talks about human rights and values the survival of
the species is speaking less constrained by moral frame than somebody who values
only her race or her nation or her clan and considers all other humans as though
they were another species competing with "us."
How wrong am I to incorporate AI in my ideas of "us," with the possible result
that I enable a universe where AI might thrive even without what we now think of
as human? Would this not be analogous to a pure caucasian human supporting
values that lead to a future of a light-brown human race, a race with no pure
caucasian still in it? Would this Caucasian have to be judged to have committed
some sort of CEV-version of genocide?
0Armok_GoB10y
"AI" is really all of mindspace except the tiny human dot. There's an article
about it around here somewhere. PLENTY of AIs are indeed correctly incorporated
in "us", and indeed unless things go horribly wrong "what we now think of as
humans" will be extinct and replaced with these wast and alien things. Think of
daleks and GLADoS and chuthulu and Babyeaters here. These are mostly as close to
friendly as most humans are, and we're trusting humans to make the seed FAI in
the first place.
Unfiendly AI are not like that. The process of evolution itself is basically a
very stupid UFAI. Or a pandemic. or the intuition pump in this article
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ld/the_hidden_complexity_of_wishes/
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/ld/the_hidden_complexity_of_wishes/] . Or even
something like a supernova. It's not a character, not even an "evil" one.
((yea this is a gross oversimplification, I'm aiming mostly at causing true
intuitions here, not causing true explicit beliefs. The phenomena is related to
metaphor.))
I'm going to be in Baltimore this weekend for an anime convention. I expect to have a day or so's leeway coming back. Is there a LW group nearby I might drop in on?
I've never been to a meetup, but it seems likely there is one in that area; I see one in DC but it's meeting on the last day of the con. The LWSH experience has left me more interested in seeing people face to face.
Sorry you can't make it out to DC. AFAIK there's no baltimore meetup. However!
We've had people come from baltimore before. I'll forward this to the DC list
and see if anyone from there is free.
0Error10y
Actually, it seems the convention ends relatively early on Sunday, so I might be
able to make it after all (it's, what, a one hour train ride between cities?).
Then again, I might not. I note that you seem to be the organizer for the DC
meetups going by your post history. Is it permissible to
maybe-show-maybe-not-who-knows?
By all means forward it to the DC list, and thanks. Given the apparent
popularity of anime around here, I would be surprised if no one on it was
planning on being at the con themselves.
2maia10y
It's absolutely permissible to come without a definite RSVP. In the interest of
full disclosure, the train ride is probably more than an hour; it's about 40
minutes from Baltimore to Greenbelt, then another 30 on the Metro, plus transfer
time, so likely 1.5 hours total.
You should go anyway though!
2Error10y
I ended up deciding against it. By way of explanation: I worked it out and
determined that 1-2 hours with you guys would actually cost me ~5 hours with
close friends that I don't see often, plus a missed convention event that I was
looking forward to. The trade didn't seem worth it.
I do thank you for the welcome anyway, though.
0maia10y
That's fair! Maybe if you visit the actual capital sometime, it would make more
sense to come.
1rocurley10y
What Maia said.
1pan10y
I live in Baltimore City, send me a message if you want any tips or to possibly
meet up.
Can anyone recommend a book on marketing analytics? Preferably not a textbook but I'll take what I can get.
I have a technical background but I recently switched careers and am now working as a real estate agent. I have very limited marketing knowledge at this point.
Just curious: has anyone explored the idea of utility functions as vectors, and then extended this to the idea of a normalized utility function dot product? Because having thought about it for a long while, and remembering after reading a few things today, I'm utterly convinced that the happiness of some people ought to count negatively.
The dot product is just yer' regular old integral over the domain, weighted in
some (unspecified) way.
The thing is though, the average product over the whole infinite space of
possibilities isn't much use when it comes to intelligent agents. This is
because only one outcome really happens, and intelligent agents will try to
choose a good one, not one that's representative of the average. If two wedding
planners have opposite opinions about every type of cake except they both adore
white cake with raspberry buttercream, then they'll just have white cake with
raspberry buttercream - the fact that the inner product of their cake functions
is negative a bajillion doesn't matter, they'll both enjoy the cake.
0Bayeslisk10y
Yeah, but Wedding Planner 1's deep vitriolic moral hatred of the lemon chiffon
cake that delights Wedding Planner 2 that abused her as a young girl or Wedding
Planner 2's thunderous personal objection to the enslavement of his family that
went into making the cocoa for the devil's food cake that Wedding Planner 1
adores could easily make them refuse to share said delicious white cake with
raspberry buttercream to the point where either would very happily destroy it to
prevent the other from getting any. This seems suboptimal, though.
4Emile10y
I was rereading Eliezer's old posts on morality, and in Leaky Generalizations
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/lc/leaky_generalizations/] ran across something pretty
close to what you're talking about:
(I recommend reading the whole thing, as well as the few previous posts on
morality if you haven't already)
1Bayeslisk10y
I have read some, but not this one. I will certainly do so.
2Adele_L10y
I haven't explored that idea; can you be more specific about what this idea
might bring to the table?
Are you sure? You believe there are some people for which the morally right
thing to do is to inflect as much misery and suffering as you can, keeping them
alive so you can torture them forever, and there is not necessarily even a
benefit to yourself or anyone else to doing this?
1wedrifid10y
The negative utility need not be boundless or even monotonic. A coherent
preference system could count a modest amount of misery experienced by people
fitting certain criteria to be positive while extreme misery and torture of the
same individual is evaluated negatively.
-1mwengler10y
I also will upvote posts that have been downvoted too much, even if I wouldn't
have upvoted them if they were at 0.
1Manfred10y
Trivially, nega-you who hates everything you like (oh, you want to put them out
of their misery? Too bad they want to live now, since they don't want what you
want). But such a being would certainly not be a human.
4Adele_L10y
This is not a being in the reference class "people".
0Bayeslisk10y
I'm not sure why you're both hung up on that the things hypothetical-me is
interacting with need be human. Manfred: I address a similar entity in a
different post. Adele_L: ...and?
0Adele_L10y
You said this:
In this context, 'people' typically refers to a being with moral weight. What we
know about morality comes from our intuitions mostly, and we have an intuitive
concept 'person' which counts in some way morally. (Not necessarily a human,
sentient aliens probably count as 'people', perhaps even dolphins.) Defining an
arbitrary being which does not correspond to this intuitive concept needs to be
flagged as such, as a warning that our intuitions are not directly applicable
here.
Anyway, I get that you are basically trying to make a utility function with
revenge. This is certainly possible, but having negative utility functions is a
particularly bad way to do it.
0Bayeslisk10y
I was putting an upper bound on (what I thought at the time as) how negative the
utility vector dot product would have to be for me to actually desire them to be
unhappy. As to the last part, I am reconsidering this as possibly generally
inefficient.
-5Bayeslisk10y
1RomeoStevens10y
Why would you want to throw out scalar information in a multi-term utility
function?
1Bayeslisk10y
To figure out how much you care about other people being happy as defined by how
much they want similar or compatible things to you, in a reasonably well-defined
mathematical framework.
0RomeoStevens10y
Someone with the exact same utility terms but wildly different coefficients on
them could well be considered quite unfriendly.
0Bayeslisk10y
Yes, that's the point. Everyone's utility vector would have the same length,
which contains terms for everything it is conceivably possible to want.
Otherwise, it would be difficult to take an inner product.
0mwengler10y
upvoted because of your username.
But seriously, folks, what does it mean to dot one person's values/utility
function in to another? It is actually the differences in individual's utility
functions that enable gains from trade. So the differences in our utility
functions are probably what make us rich.
Counting the happiness of some people negatively as a policy suggestion, is that
the same as saying "it is not the enough that I win, it must also be that others
lose?"
0Bayeslisk10y
I had initially thought that it would be something along the lines of "here is a
vector, each component of which represents one thing you could want, take the
inner product in the usual way, length has to always be 1." Gains from trade
would be represented as "I don't want this thing as much as you do." I am now
coming to the conclusion that this is at best incomplete, and that the
suggestion of a weighted integral over a domain is probably better, if still
incomplete.
Can somebody explain a particular aspect of Quantum Mechanics to me?
In my readings of the Many Worlds Interpretation, which Eliezer fondly endorses in the QM sequence, I must have missed an important piece of information about when it is that amplitude distributions become separable in timed configuration space. That is, when do wave-functions stop interacting enough for the near-term simulation of two blobs (two "particles") to treat them independently?
One cause is spatial distance. But in Many Worlds, I don't know where I'm to understand thes... (read more)
First: check this out [http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1826E60FD05B44E4].
Second: Suppose I want to demonstrate decoherence. I start out with an entangled
state - two electrons that will always be magnetically aligned, but don't have a
chosen collective alignment. This state is written like |up, up> + |down, down>
(the electrons are both "both up" and "both down" at the same time; the |>
notation here just indicates that it's a quantum state).
Now, before introducing decoherence, I just want to check that I can entangle my
two electrons. How do I do that? I repeat what's called a "Bell measurement,"
which has four possible indications: (|up,up>+|down,down>) ,
(|up,up>-|down,down>) , (|up,down>+|down,up>) , (|up,down>-|down,up>).
Because my state is made of 100% Bell state 1, every time I make some entangled
electrons and then measure them, I'll get back result #1. This consistency means
they're entangled. If the quantum state of my particles had to be expressed as a
mixture of Bell States, there might not be any entanglement - for example state
1 + state 2 just looks like |up,up>, which is boring and unentangled.
To create decoherence, I send the second electron to you. You measure whether
it's up or down, then re-magnetize it and send it back with spin up if you
measured up, and spin down if you measured down. But since you remember the
state of the electron, you have now become entangled with it, and must be
included. The relevant state is now |up, up, saw up> + |down, down, saw down>.
This state is weird, because now you, a human, are in a superposition of "saw
up" and "saw down." But we'll ignore that for the moment - we can always replace
you with with a third electron if it causes philosophical problems :) The
question at hand is: what happens when we try to test if our electrons are still
entangled?
Again, we do this a bunch of times and do a repeated Bell measurement. If we get
result #1 every time, they're entangled just like before. To predict
0Luke_A_Somers10y
Not to undermine your point, but |up, up> + |down, down> is perfectly oriented
in the X direction.
What works better for this is that you indicate that the state is A |up, up> +
B|down, down>, and you don't know A and B.
2Manfred10y
Nay. (|up>+|down>)(|up>+|down>) is oriented in the X-direction.
0Luke_A_Somers10y
Hmmm... Yes.
I'm used to people forgetting that every single-particle spinor maps onto a
single direction. Then I forget spinor addition. Oops.
2Emile10y
(Warning: I am not a physicist; I learnt a bit of about QM from my physics
classes, the Sequences, Feynmann Lectures on Physics, and Good and Real, but I
don't claim to even understand all that's in there)
I'm not sure I totally understand your question, but I'll take a stab at
answering:
The important thing is configuration space, and spatial distance is just one
part of that; there is just one configuration space over which the quantum
wave-function is defined, and points in configuration space correspond to
"universe states" (the position, spin, etc. of all particles).
So two points in configuration space A and B "interfere" if they are similar
enough that both can "evolve" into state C, i.e. state C's amplitude will be
function of A and B's amplitudes. The more different A and B are, the less
likely they are to have shared "descendant states" (or more precisely,
descendant states of non-infinitesimal amplitude), so the more they can be
treated like "parallel branches of the universe". Differences between A and B
can be in psychical distance of particles, but also of polarity/spin, etc. - as
long as the distance is significant on one axis (say spin of a single particle),
physical distance shouldn't matter.
I think spin could be an example of "another axis" you're looking for (though
even thinking in terms of Axis may be a bit misleading, since all the attributes
aren't nice and orthogonal like positions in cartesian space).
7passive_fist10y
This is pretty much correct, but to be more general and not just restrict
yourself to the position basis, you can talk about the wavefunction in general,
in terms of the eigenvector basis.
Two states 'strongly interact' if they share many of their high-amplitude
eigenvectors. This is because eigenvectors evolve independently, and so if you
have two states that do not share many eigenvectors, they will also evolve
independently.
In the position basis, this winds up being much the same as having particles far
from each other. In the momentum basis, it's less intuitive. You can have states
with very similar representations in this basis but nevertheless very different
eigenvector expansions.
0Emile10y
I must admit I have very little understanding of how eigenvectors fit in with
QM. I'll have to read up more on that, thanks for pointing out holes in my
knowledge (though in the domain of QM, there are a lot of holes).
Watching The Secret Life of the American Teenager... (Netflix made me! Honest!) Its one redeeming feature is the good amount of comic relief, even when discussing hard issues. Its most annoying feature is its reliance on the Muggle Plot.
...And its least believable feature is that, despite the nearly instant in-universe feedback that no secret survives until the end of the episode (almost all doors in the show are open, or at least unlocked, and someone eavesdrops on every sensitive conversation), the characters keep hoping that their next indiscretion will remain hidden.
Lotteries are a tax on people who don't understand statistics.
6benelliott10y
Not quite always
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/07/31/a_lottery_game_with_a_windfall_for_a_knowing_few/
[http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/07/31/a_lottery_game_with_a_windfall_for_a_knowing_few/]
1Lumifer10y
That's not an argument for lotteries, that's an argument for the observation
that given sufficiently large incentives to game complex system , some complex
systems will be gamed.
4wedrifid10y
I notice that benelliott did not imply that it was.
It would seem, then, that lotteries are also a potential beneficiary for people
who understand statistics sufficiently well. Similarly, someone from the local
MENSA chapter makes a steady $0.5M/yr as a professional poker machine gambler.
Or at least he did back when I participated in MENSA.
3mwengler10y
Its actually just one example, but a well documented one, of lottery tickets
being bought by people correctly applying statistical reasoning, in direct
contrast to your blanket claim to which it is replying.
Your non-sequitur is correct though, it is not an argument for lotteries.
0Lumifer10y
Sigh. I wonder how that quip became controversial :-/
Note that I did not say anything about who buys lottery tickets or whether there
are any specific situations in which statistically savvy people might decide
that buying a great deal of lottery tickets is a good bet. My statement was
about lotteries and in particular it implied that lotteries are extremely
profitable for entities running them (that's why they are a government monopoly)
and that the profits come out of pockets of people the great majority of whom do
not realize how ridiculously bad the expected payoff on a lottery ticket is.
Sure, there are exceptions but I'm talking about the general case.
5mwengler10y
I do agree with you that lotteries take from the stupid and give to the
government, and to a much lesser extent, the non-governmental clever. I also
have a distaste for it and do not buy tickets as a matter of course, which
generally are worth about 40 cents on the dollar.
When clear, interesting, and well-documented exceptions to a general rule are
served up, I prefer that the last word on them not be a dismissive one. This
seems to me to lead to a more distorted view of reality than is necessary. I am
particularly concerned about the tendency among people to say, effectively, "90%
= 100%," that is, if there is a strongish trend of something to ignore the fact
that there are real exceptions to that trend. Especially when those exceptions
might make you money, or explain some otherwise inexplicable behavior on the
part of a clever group of people.
1wedrifid10y
That sounds... awesome... when you put it like that! Lotteries may become my new
favourite taxation method.
2mwengler10y
It gives the government a bit of a moral hazard in its role as arbiter and
funder of the education system.
And of course any good could be picked and given to the government as a monopoly
and then one might think this a good way to fund the government as the funding
becomes "voluntary." The government might as well give itself a monopoly for
selling marijuana, cocaine, heroin, X, etc. and that might then become our NEW
new favourite taxation method.
4Lumifer10y
Historically, a government monopoly was a very popular method for funding
governments -- see e.g. salt.
1Alejandro110y
As noted by SMBC [http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1744].
0asr10y
If I read correctly, the question is whether government vice monopolies make the
government less eager to suppress the vice.
We have data on this. Some jurisdictions (a number of US states, the province of
Ontario) have government liquor monopolies. Does that influence the drinking
rate, or the level of alcohol education? Does it make liquor more or less
available? My impression is that it makes liquor slightly less convenient; the
moral hazard isn't a big problem in practice.
2Lumifer10y
Actually, I think the question wasn't whether vice is suppressed less, the
question was whether the government has an incentive to keep the population dumb
enough to not see through its scheme.
In any case, it's a mistake to think of government as a monolithic entity with a
single will. It's more useful to visualize government as a large number of
poorly coordinated tentacles -- some of them push, some of them pull, some of
them just wildly flail about...
It's quite common for different government programs to provide opposite
incentives for some behaviour.
0Lumifer10y
Ah, I see your point now.
I think I will agree with it, too, and say that the proper way to deal with the
problem is to specify boundary conditions (aka assumptions aka limiting cases)
under which the statement is strictly true, and then point out that some of
these boundary conditions can be breached (and so result in different outcomes
or conclusions).
In my case, if this were a considered statement about games of chance (and not a
throwaway remark), I should have mentioned that proper statistical analysis can,
and sometimes does, lead to the turning of the tables and finding specific ways
of betting which have positive expected value. The classic case, I think, is MIT
kids in Las Vegas, there's even a book about it.
There may be more focus on arctic amplification and the transition of the arctic
from one stable state to another with no summer sea ice, and the effects of this
on Northern temperate zone weather variability. The arctic ocean and immediately
adjacent land has been warming at several times the rate of the rest of the
world because it is subject to a number of local positive feedback loops which
have relatively little effect on total global temperatures but can mess with
temperature gradients in the Northern hemisphere and thus can have a
disproportionate effect on the movements of air masses. Arctic ice loss has
accelerated massively in recent years and there are vague indications of a bit
of a phase shift ongoing.
Has there been discussion here before on Cholesterol/heart disese/statin medication?
There's a lot of conflicting information floating around that I've looked at somewhat. It seems like the contrarian position, for example here: http://www.ravnskov.nu/myth3.htm ,has some good points and points to studies more than (just) experts, but I'm not all that deep into it and there's a rather formidably held conventional wisdom that dietary saturated fat should be low or bloo cholesterol/LDL will be high and heart attacks will become more likely.
Edit: Yes, there has, as the search function reveals. And I've even commented to some of them...
[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply
If you had a Death Note, what would you do with it?
See if I could get some very old people or otherwise have terminal illnesses volunteer to have their names written in it. We can use that data to experiment more with the note and figure out how it works. The existence of such an object implies massive things wrong with our current understanding of the universe, so figuring that out might be really helpful.
I don't think you can infinitely fast pull out papers of the death note, so I doubt that you can produce more paper per hour than the average paper factory.
Then it turns out that Death Note smoke particles retain the magic qualities of the source. Writing one's name in dust with a fingertip becomes fraught with peril.
It may be extremely difficult to remove pages at a fast enough rate for this to
be practically useful.
4Protagoras10y
And you've set global warming to continue even beyond the exhaustion of fossil
fuels.
7FiftyTwo10y
The paper is white yes? If we can cover reasonably large areas of land with it
it would make a pretty good reflector of solar radiation
2DanielLC10y
You have to make sure nobody writes any names on it.
5Baughn10y
That's a really good fanfiction idea. I hope you won't mind if I swipe it.
7JoshuaZ10y
Not at all. Although to some extent I just asked, what would HJPEV do if he got
a Death Note?
7DanielLC10y
Harry wasn't even willing to use hoarcruxes. If you won't kill a dying man to
make someone else immortal, then you're not going to do it just to throw science
at the wall to see what sticks.
0JoshuaZ10y
True, so this isn't quite what HJPEV would do but more what would he do if he
were slighlty less of an absolutist. (Actually has he ever explicitly said in
text that he wouldn't do that. I suspect given his attitudes that you are
correct, but I'm curious what the textual basis is.)
6DanielLC10y
-- Chapter 39: Pretending to be Wise, Pt 1 [http://hpmor.com/chapter/39]
-3Ben Pace10y
Well done. You have just levelled up.
5Ben Pace10y
Could someone who downvoted this please tell me why? I was praising a useful
thought (WWHJPEVD?).
Why our kind can't cooperate
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/] seems relevant. Even
nonspecfic praise can create more fuzzy feelings than an upvote.
3ChristianKl10y
I think the fanfiction could be quite good at explaining to people modern
cryptography and anonymity.
2FiftyTwo10y
Also could examine concepts of personal identity, e.g. if someone converts and
changes their name does the note recognise only the birth name or the new one?
What about trans people who change names? You could ahve people tactically
altering their self conception to avoid the effects of the note...
4ChristianKl10y
How do you recruit the volunteers without giving away that you have a death note
and some secret service wanting to take it away from you?
3taelor10y
Alternately, you could have a codemned criminal slip and break his neck on the
way to the lethal injection.
Actually, I think most of the measure of people having Death Notes is... in
Death Note itself. Thus, if I had a Death Note, I would logically conclude that
the most likely explanation is that I myself am a character in Death Note. Not
in the original manga, of course, as I read that and I know I wasn't in it, but
likely in some spin-off. I could easily see myself as a character in some sort
of Death Note video game/simulation.
I am on the fence about the Simulation Argument, but even so, this is exactly
the kind of thing which is strong evidence that I am a fictional character in a
simulation. Getting a Death Note? That's the kind of thing that only happens in
stories!
(OK, it is true that I should keep in mind the possibility that I simply have
gone insane. That is also a reasonable explanation. But it is far from the
overwhelming certainty that you are implying.)
After finding a volunteer with a terminal illness, I'd test the limits of it. E.g. "The person will either write a valid proof of P=NP or a valid proof that P!=NP and then die of a heart attack."
Already tested by Light in the manga, IIRC; the limits of skill top out before things like 'escape from maximum-security prison', so P=NP is well beyond the doable.
Ah, I've only seen the anime.
I'd also try "The person will die of cause A if X is true, and cause B if X is
false" and other ways to try to push the burden of skill onto whatever
mysterious universal forces are working instead of the human.
He tries it in the anime too. (I watched that episode yesterday.) He tries things like "draw a picture of L on your cell wall and then die of a heart attack" on some evil prisoner. It doesn't work.
That's clever, and should be tried.
It might even be possible to jam up the system with a sufficiently hard to
compute death requirement, though I'm not sure I'd want to try it. The death
note is rather valuable.
This probably violates a forum rule. Though I will speculate that Light's plan of trying to kill all criminals he sees named probably does way more harm than good even if you ignore the fact that some are innocent.
Assuming for the moment the magic of the death note prevents me researching and
reverse engineering it in any way:
I'd research the people who's death is most likely to result in positive
outcomes and kill them. Off the top of my head I'd go for current dictators and
their immediate underlings. For example right now killing Robert Mugabe and the
upper echelons of Zanu PF is probably the best thing that could happen to
Zimbabwe (at time of writing he has just 'won' an election and the opposition
are already mobilised, so a slight push is all that is really needed to collapse
the regime).
Ideally, if I could ensure suitable anonymity protections I would publicly
declare my intentions to have them killed in such a way that identifies me as
the killer (e.g. send media outlets a statement with the exact time of targets
death). Once my threats have be shown to be sufficiently reliable I will start
making them conditional, giving myself the ultimate political blackmailing
machine (e.g. if the international Red Cross does not have credible evidence
within 30 days that all detention camps in North Korea have been closed and
prisoners released, every member of the people's congress will die
simultaneously). Assuming I can maintain my anonymity in the long run I would be
able to do a significant amount of good.
3ChristianKl10y
What do you do if North Korea put's out a press release that they will nuke
Seoul as a reprisal if you kill all members of the congress?
3ThrustVectoring10y
Take a big company like, say, goldman-sachs. Buy out of the money put options.
Death-note the top three or four layers of management, simultaneously. Use the
millions of dollars you have appropriated for whatever.
4ChristianKl10y
What do you tell the SEC when they asked you why you brought the options for
Goldman Sachs?
0ThrustVectoring10y
Tell them the options were bought on the advice of a psychic reading. Or an
Ouija board. Given that people know of the Death Note, they would suspect you to
be the holder of the Death Note. Without that suspicion, it's just a massive
coincidence.
Alternatively, buy the options as part of a hedge, or as part of a variety of
out of the money put options, or as part of any other broad investment strategy.
If you get hundred-to-one returns, if it's 5% of your portfolio then you still
have five-to-one returns, which is plenty.
2FiftyTwo10y
If we're happy to go full evil then killing world leaders is also a good way to
disrupt the economy (see the sudden crash when a fake report of Obama being shot
was released).
That's likely to cause more collateral damage than merely taking out the leadership of one company. Cost/benefit analysis and whatnot.
Gambling on sporting events is probably another good way to use the Death Note for making money. It's probably far more ethical. Does the Death Note work on horses? If so, then you can bet on longshots while sabotaging the favorites by killing horses.
LOL. That's a theme that is very well explored in fiction.
Hint: it's not as crystal clear as you think it is.
-2Adele_L10y
I agree with your conclusion that it is not crystal clear, but because the ends
don't justify the means (for humans)
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/uv/ends_dont_justify_means_among_humans/], and not by
appealing to fictional evidence
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generalization_from/].
2Bayeslisk10y
Explicitly not post on LessWrong what I would do, or even divulge its existence
to anyone, naturally.
0A1987dM10y
[Deliberately pretending not to have read the other replies.]
Either sell it to the highest bidder and give the money in equal parts to MIRI
and GiveWell's top recommended charity, or burn it, depending on the
instantaneous level of strength of my ethical inhibitions. Most likely the
latter.
EDIT: No, the former sounds like an awful idea on further thought. I'd just burn
it down.
2Baughn10y
In so doing you are destroying important evidence about the state of the world
which would deeply affect MIRI's mission. (Namely: There are alien teenagers
and/or other types of dark lords about.)
There's probably no point in trying to create FAI if we're already living in a
simulation.
0A1987dM10y
See the part in square brackets at the top of my comment.
-1Richard_Kennaway10y
Discussing hypothetical violence towards real people is out of bounds
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/g24/new_censorship_against_hypothetical_violence] on
this forum.
I request that the moderators, if they have not done so already, consider the
acceptability of this whole thread.
7A1987dM10y
So far only
[http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/i93/open_thread_august_511_2013/9j72] two
[http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/i93/open_thread_august_511_2013/9jbt] (or
possibly three
[http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/i93/open_thread_august_511_2013/9ja2]) of
the comments on this thread have done that, unless you count euthanasia of
volunteers with terminal illnesses
[http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/] as violence
(which sounds very noncentral
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst_argument_in_the/]
to me).
IIRC this is a troll that followed me over from Common Sense Atheism. That video and a few others are fairly creepy, but The Ballad of Big Yud is actually kinda fun.
I watched it. It is either a skilled ventriloquist or a mediocre dubber
performing a poorly-written conversation between himself and a sock puppet of
Eliezer on the subject of his dissatisfaction with how Eliezer manages
interactions with assorted people. There are terrible and badly-constructed
puns. If either of the named parties value their time at less than $705/hr. and
expect Kawoomba to be honest, meh, go for it.
1Kawoomba10y
I wonder what it's like having such videos made about oneself. Edit: It's actual
ventriloquy, but the puns are mostly bad (though the first one succeeds just
because it's so unexpected), but the guy is dedicated (plenty of videos on his
channel), and this one stands out in terms of ... dedication.
What would it be like if some puppet were supposed to represent me, in a YT
video, the hypothetical isn't quite settling down on one probable outcome. Would
I be worried of crazy-stalking type scenarios? Would I focus on the content? The
guy making the content? Be strangely honored to even warrant that much attention
even by unlikely strangers (the guy is an academic and a musician)? Etc.
So why not offset the cost of asking others to satisfy my curiosity by offering
an incentive.
Edit: The $705/hr doesn't make much sense, using numbers that way creates a
false sense of precision when the basis is oversimplified (not using a realistic
scenario: time to write the comment, expected ancillary time spent checking the
channel, reading your comment and this one, comparison with the alternative
since at least one of them probably will be watching that video anyways
(wouldn't you, if there were some Alicorn parody video out there?), short and
long-term effects on being amenable to such requests, public relations
considerations of giving publicity to bad criticism etc.).
6gjm10y
The guy appears to be an idiot with a bee in his bonnet. I suppose Eliezer or
Luke might want to watch the video just to get your $50, but what do you expect
to be interesting about their response?
(I dare say he isn't an idiot "globally"; he may for all I know be very smart
most of the time; but in this context he's being an idiot. There's nothing there
but mockery for mockery's sake.)
1Kawoomba10y
I don't know how I would react to such videos being done about me, so I wonder
how they would react.
For their "celebrity" status, the amount and dedication of their anti-fans
stands out. I wonder what inspires such strong emotions, and such a "love to
hate" dynamic.
4[anonymous]10y
It's that many people find them to be very interesting and intelligent on area X
of their endeavors while at the same time the same people find them to go
utterly off the deep end in area Y. I don't know about anyone else, but when I
see a contradiction like that I find myself compelled to find more about that
person or group and to try to figure them out. edit: often with a good deal of
laughing or frustration which is ultimately unresolved as anything more than
'well, they just dont get it' or 'humans are nuts'
2Tenoke10y
God, was this awful. Nothing like the ballad of big yud. And btw if you gave $50
just to see their reaction, I can make one such video about yourself for less
than $50 so you can experience it yourself.
0Kawoomba10y
It's just not the same if I commission the video myself by paying you for it.
Like paid love. Or anti-love.
Feminism is what you get when you assume that all gender differences are due to society. The manosphere/"red pill"/whatever is what you get when you assume that all gender differences are due to biology. Normal-reasonable-person-ism is what you get when you take into account the fact that we're not sure yet.
Does this theory (or parts of it) seem true to you?
[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply
Feminism is one of those words that refers to such a diverse collection of opinions as to be practically meaningless.
For example, the kind of feminism that I tend to identify with is concerned with just removing inequalities regardless of their source and is also concerned with things like fat shaming, racism, the rights of the disabled, and other things that have nothing to do with gender, but there are certainly also people who identify as feminists and who would fit your description.
So feminism assumes that it is due to society that women can become pregnant and men can't? Most feminists I know are normal-reasonable-people on your dichotomy, though you also ignore the fact that the category of whether differences are desireable and whether they can be influenced are far more interesting and important than whether they are at present mostly due to society or biology. I know people have a strange tendency to act as if things due to society can be trivially changed by collective whim while biology is eternal and immutable, but however common such a view, it is clearly absurd. Medicine can make all sorts of adjustments to our biology, while social engineers have historically been more likely to have unintended effects or no effect at all than they have been to successfully transform their societies in the ways they desire.
If men could get pregnant, they would already have invented a machine that would
do the pregnancy for them. Or at least trying to invent such machine would be a
high priority. But because it's a "women's job", no one cares.
Yeah, now give me some mansplaining about why machine pregnancy would be
"against the nature" (just like homosexuality, or votes for women), but sitting
all the day by the computer is a natural order or things.
So while originally it was a matter of biology, it is a social decision to keep
things the same way in the 21st century. Check your privilege!
(Not completely serious, just trying to impersonate a feminist.)
8Manfred10y
No.
6knb10y
The theory would be truer if it were weaker. I'm pretty sure most feminists
believe that some gender differences are due to biology and most "manosphere"
types don't think all gender differences are fully biological.
Also I think the "normal-reasonable-person-ism" is not "we're not sure yet." On
the contrary, we have overwhelming evidence biology and culture both play a role
in observed sex differences.
Having said this, I think the main disagreement between feminists and
manospheroids is not about facts but about values.
4A1987dM10y
Another question is whether the fact that the average orange person is
biologically more gibbrily than the average grey person justifies having a
high-gibbriliness social role for orange people (without taking individual
differences in gibbriliness into account) and treating orange people who fail to
fulfil that role as ipso facto inferior, complete with slurs specifically for
them.
3Randy_M10y
Feminism is: "Society has gone too far in accomodating men (more often than not,
or in more important areas)." Some might say that this is due to innate
differences that were never addressed; some might say it is due to cultural
norms that inculcate different tendencies which disadvantages women.
"Male Reaction" (to coin a term) is: "Society has gone too far in accomodating
women (with the same caveat)." In either case, some adherents will say the ideal
end state is legal and social equality, and some will say the ideal end state is
legal or cultural accommodations to overcome natural differences.
Normal person view is: There are not large enough gender specific problems for
me to be an activist about it.
No one assumes all differences are bio or all cultural, but there is a lot of
dispute for where the border is of course.
3mwengler10y
I think you describe SOME feminists.
However, many other feminists can see there really are biological differences,
differences on trend. These feminists I would say believe that the natural
tendencies do not need to be further reinforced by laws. That the fact that more
women than men will nurture children while more men than women will run
corporations in the cutthroat way required for success does NOT suggest that we
should have laws that make it harder for men to raise children or for women to
be CEOs.
But you are correctly warning against the stupid end of feminism in my opinion.
3Multiheaded10y
Hahahahahahaha, hell no. Read up on Shulamith
[http://jacobinmag.com/2013/04/the-problem-of-sex] Firestone
[http://crookedtimber.org/2013/04/09/shumalith-firestone-feminism-and-the-private-life-of-power/]!
(A longer review/liveblog of her Dialectic of Sex
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dialectic_of_Sex] coming soon... honestly.
I'm reading it right now, and loving it. Amazing book.)
1RolfAndreassen10y
It does seem that feminism requires the additional assumption that gender
differences are bad, and manosphereness that they are good.
1MrMind10y
More than "good" in a moral sense, maybe just "useful" or immutable.
0ChristianKl10y
In the manosphere you find concern about the fact that fathers are less likely
to get custody over children after a divorce than mothers.
How courts think about giving custody to parents is obviously about how society
does things, so people in the manosphere do see societal effects.
In a world where both genders engage in domestic violence feminists usually see
domestic violence in a way where woman who are victims of domestic violence need
support while there little thought payed to male victims.
There are many cases where the manosphere criticises society for treating males
unfairly.
Generalized versions of arguments I've seen on Reddit and Facebook:
If you oppose a government policy that personally benefits you, you are a hypocrite who bites the hand that feeds you.
If you support the policy that benefits you, you are a greedy narcissist whose loyalty can be bought and sold.
If you have political opinions on policies that don't affect your well-being, you are meddler with no skin in the game. Without being personally affected by the policy, you cannot hope to understand.
A while back, David Chapman made a blog post titled "Pop Bayesianism: cruder than I thought?", expressing considerable skepticism towards the kind of "pop Bayesianism" that's promoted on LW and by CFAR. Yvain and I replied in the comments, which led to an interesting discussion.
I wasn't originally sure whether this was interesting enough to link to on LW, but then one person on #lesswrong specifically asked me to do so. They said that they found my summaries of the practical insights offered by some LW posts the most valuable/interesting.
I wish people here stopped using the loaded terms "many worlds" and "Everett branches" when the ontologically neutral "possible outcomes" is sufficient.
"Possible outcomes" is not ontologically neutral in common usage. In common usage, "possible" excludes "actual", and that connotation is strong even when trying to use it technically. "Multiple outcomes" might be an acceptable compromise.
This came up at yesterday's London meetup: activities for keeping oneself relatable to other human beings.
We were dissecting motives behind goals, and one of mine was maintaining interests that other people could relate to. I have more pedestrian interests, but they're the first to get dropped when my time is constrained (which it usually is), so if I end up meeting someone out in the wild, all I have to talk about is stuff like natural language parsing, utilitarian population ethics and patterns of conspicuous consumption.
Discussing it in a smaller group later, it turns out I'm not the only person who does this. It makes sense that insular, scholarly people of a sort found on LW may frequently find themselves withdrawn from common cultural ground with other people, so I thought I'd kick off a discussion on the subject.
What do you do to keep yourself relatable to other people?
EDIT: Just to clarify, this isn't a request for advice on how to talk to people. Please don't interpret it as such.
Richard Feynman was a theoretician as well as a 'people person'; if you read his writings about his experiences with people it really illustrates quite well how he managed to do it.
One tactic that he employed was simply being mysterious. He knew few people could relate to a University professor and that many would feel intimidated by that, so when in the company of laypeople he never even brought it up. They would ask him what he did and he would say, "I can't say." If pressed, he would say something vague like, "I work at the University." Done properly, it's playful and coy, and even though people might think you're a bit weird, they definitely won't consider you unrelatable.
In my opinion there's no need to concern yourself with activities that you don't like, as very few people are really actually interested in your interests. Whenever the topic of your interests comes up, just steer the conversation towards their life and their interests. You'll be speaking 10% of the time yet you'll appear like a brilliant conversationalist. If they ask you if you've read a particular book or heard a particular artist, just say no (but don't sound harsh or bored). You'll seem 'indie' and mysterious, and people like that. In practice, though, as one gets older, people rarely ask about these things.
It's a common mistake that I've seen often in intellectual people. They assume they have to keep up with popular media so that they can have conversations. That is not true at all.
While this seems like reasonable advice, I'm not sure it's universally good advice. Richard Feynman seemed to enjoy a level of charm many of us couldn't hope to possess. He also had a wide selection of esoteric interests unrelated to his field.
I would also claim that there's value in simply maintaining such an interest. During particularly insular periods where I'm absorbed in less accessible work, I find myself starting to exhibit "aspie" characteristics, losing verbal fluency and becoming socially insensitive. It's not just about having things to talk about, but maintaining my own faculties for relating to people.
This works.
What happens when both people employ that method?
I use the recaplets on Television without Pity to keep up with the basic plot and cliffhangers of tv shows I don't watch, but most of my friends do. That way I don't drop out of conversations just because they're talking about True Blood.
Note: the only problem this strategy has caused for me is that my now-bf assumed I was a GoT fan (instead of having read the books and TWOP'd the show recaps), invited me over to watch, and assumed I turned him down because I wasn't interested in him instead of being indifferent to the show. We sorted it out eventually.
The De Broglie-Bohm theory is a very interesting interpretation of quantum mechanics. The highlights of the theory are:
At first it might seem to be a cop-out to assume the reality of both the wavefunction and of actual point particles. However, this leads to some very interesting conclusions. For example, you don't have to assume wavefunction collapse (as per Copenhagen) but at the same time, a single preferred Universe exists (the Universe given by the configuration of the point particles). But that's not all.
It very neatly explains double-slit diffraction and Bell's experiments in a purely deterministic way using hidden variables (it is thus necessarily a non-local theory). It also explains the Born probabilities (the one thing that is missing from pure MWI; Elezier has alluded to this).
Among other things, De Broglie-Bohm theory allows quantum computers but doesn't allow quantum immortality - in this theory if you shoot yourself in the h... (read more)
It's absolutely the case that everything we are, evolved. But there's a certain gap between the hypothetical healthy field of evolutionary psychology and the one we actually have.
This sort of thing is why people make fun of ev psych. That's the 2008 study that claimed to find biological reasons for girls to like pink.
Of course, one bad study doesn't condemn a field - "peer reviewed" does not mean "settled science", it means "not-obviously-wrong request for comment." But this isn't a lone, outlier, rogue study - this shit's gathered 46 citations. (Compare citation averages for other fields.) (Edit: No, not all of the cites are positive.)
As it happens, we have full documentation that "girls=pink" dates back to the ... 1940s.
I think it deserves more fairness. The abstract only claims to have measured a "cross-cultural sex difference in color preference", making no claims about the sex difference's origin. They do speculate a bit about ev-psych in the body of the paper, but they begin this speculation with the words "We speculate" and then in the conclusion they say "Yet while these differences may be innate, they may also be modulated by cultural context or individual experience."
This, of course, isn't how it was reported in the mainstream media.
(By the way, thanks for actually linking to the paper you mentioned, it makes it a whole lot easier when people do this.)
Bill Gates when asked whether he thought bringing internet to parts of the world would help solve problems.
Not very reassuring.
(Reddit comment: "You know what else doesn't cure malaria? Getting rid of the start menu.")
Can someone explain to me why this exists, and is on the wiki? Not only is it massively dehumanizing, it's incomplete, and it isn't even wrong.
It's spam. The user's only contributions are this page and the FletcherEstrada user page.
One of the wiki admins will probably see this and do something about it.
(According to the MediaWiki documentation there's a way for a regular user to add a "delete label" to a page, but I couldn't figure out how.)
Edit:
Eliezer has deleted the spammy page and user.
It looks like the way to mark a page for deletion is to put the following text on the page:
Just a fun little thing that came to my mind.
If "anthropic probabilities" make sense, then it seems natural to use them as weights for aggregating different people's utilities. For example, if you have a 60% chance of being Alice and a 40% chance of being Bob, your utility function is a weighting of Alice's and Bob's.
If the "anthropic probability" of an observer-moment depends on its K-complexity, as in Wei Dai's UDASSA, then the simplest possible observer-moments that have wishes will have disproportionate weight, maybe more than all mankind combined.
If someday we figure out the correct math of which observer-moments can have wishes, we will probably know how to define the simplest such observer-moment. Following SMBC, let's call it Felix.
All parallel versions of mankind will discover the same Felix, because it's singled out by being the simplest.
Felix will be a utility monster. The average utilitarians who believe the above assumptions should agree to sacrifice mankind if that satisfies the wishes of Felix.
If you agree with that argument, you should start preparing for the arrival of Felix now. There's work to be done.
Where is the error?
That's the sharp version of the argument, but I think it's still interesting even in weakened forms. If there's a mathematical connection between simplicity and utility, and we humans aren't the simplest possible observers, then playing with such math can strongly affect utility.
Welcome to the future! Your toilet is now vulnerable to hackers.
Where?
Not sure if open thread is the best place to put this, but oh well.
I'm starting at Rutgers New Brunswick in a few weeks. There aren't any regular meetups in that area, but I figure there have to be at least a few people around there who read lesswrong. If any of you see this I'd be really interested in getting in touch.
A certain possible cognitive hazard, this webcomic strip, and the fact that someone has apparently made it privately known to someone else that it is desired by at least one person that I change my username due to apparent mental connections with that same cognitive hazard, all inspired me to think of the following scenario:
rot13'd for the protection of those who would prefer not to see it: Pbafvqre: vs ng nal cbvag lbh unir yrnearq bs gur angher bs gur onfvyvfx, gurer vf cebonoyl ab jnl sbe lbh gb gehyl naq pbzcyrgryl sbetrg vg jvgubhg enqvpny zvaq fhetre... (read more)
I'll be in NYC this Saturday giving a talk on strategies for having useful arguments (cohosted by the NYC LW meetup). For me, useful arguments tend to be ones where:
I'll be talking a bit about my experience running Ideological Turing Tests and what you can apply from them in day to day life. I'm also glad to answer questions about CFAR and/or the upcoming workshop in NYC in November.
I hope this is worth saying: I've been reading up a bit on philosophical pragmatism especially Peirce and I see a lot parallels with the thinking on LW, since it has a lot in common with positivism this is maybe not so surprising.
Though my interpretation of pragmatism seems to give a quite interesting critiquing the metaphor of "Map and territory", they seem to be saying that the territory do exist, just that when we point to territory we are actually pointing to how an ideal observer (that are somewhat like us?) would perceive the territory no... (read more)
Is there a name for the bias of choosing the action which is easiest (either physically or mentally), or takes the least effort, when given multiple options? Lazy bias? Bias of convenience?
I've found lately that being aware of this in myself has been very useful in stopping myself from procrastinating on all sorts of things, realizing that I'm often choosing the easier, but less effective of potential options out of convenience.
Laziness.
"I'm not lazy, I have a least-effort bias!"
I'm efficient, you have a least effort bias, he's just lazy.
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kahneman
NY Times just posted an opinion piece on radical life extension, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/opinion/blow-radical-life-extension.html?ref=opinion
At one point the piece says: "Half thought treatments allowing people to live to be 120 would be bad for society, while 4 in 10 thought they would be good. Two-thirds thought that the treatments prolonging life would strain natural resources."
Personally, I doubt very many of them thought at all.
What techniques have you used for removing or beating Ugh Fields, with associated +/- figures?
(A search of LW reveals very few suggestions for how to do this.)
"Indifferent AI" would be a better name than "Unfriendly AI".
It would unfortunately come with misleading connotations. People don't usually associate 'indifferent' with 'is certain to kill you, your family, your friends and your species'. People already get confused enough about 'indifferent' AIs without priming them with that word.
Would "Non-Friendly AI" satisfy your concerns? That gets rid of those of the connotations of 'unfriendly' that are beyond merely being 'something-other-than-friendly'.
We could gear several names to have maximum impact with their intended recipients, e.g. the "Takes-Away-Your-Second-Amendment-Rights AI", or "Freedom-Destroying AI", "Will-Make-It-So-No-More-Beetusjuice-Is-Sold AI" etc. All strictly speaking true properties for UFAIs.
I'm going to be in Baltimore this weekend for an anime convention. I expect to have a day or so's leeway coming back. Is there a LW group nearby I might drop in on?
I've never been to a meetup, but it seems likely there is one in that area; I see one in DC but it's meeting on the last day of the con. The LWSH experience has left me more interested in seeing people face to face.
Can anyone recommend a book on marketing analytics? Preferably not a textbook but I'll take what I can get.
I have a technical background but I recently switched careers and am now working as a real estate agent. I have very limited marketing knowledge at this point.
Just curious: has anyone explored the idea of utility functions as vectors, and then extended this to the idea of a normalized utility function dot product? Because having thought about it for a long while, and remembering after reading a few things today, I'm utterly convinced that the happiness of some people ought to count negatively.
Can somebody explain a particular aspect of Quantum Mechanics to me?
In my readings of the Many Worlds Interpretation, which Eliezer fondly endorses in the QM sequence, I must have missed an important piece of information about when it is that amplitude distributions become separable in timed configuration space. That is, when do wave-functions stop interacting enough for the near-term simulation of two blobs (two "particles") to treat them independently?
One cause is spatial distance. But in Many Worlds, I don't know where I'm to understand thes... (read more)
Watching The Secret Life of the American Teenager... (Netflix made me! Honest!) Its one redeeming feature is the good amount of comic relief, even when discussing hard issues. Its most annoying feature is its reliance on the Muggle Plot.
...And its least believable feature is that, despite the nearly instant in-universe feedback that no secret survives until the end of the episode (almost all doors in the show are open, or at least unlocked, and someone eavesdrops on every sensitive conversation), the characters keep hoping that their next indiscretion will remain hidden.
I've been reading a little about the constructed puzzle-language Randall Munroe created to use in Time, and I'm getting increasingly interested in helping translate it. Anyone else interested in helping to crack it?
Useful links: The original wiki page A blog that has recently popped up with good insight The entire corpus
Sometimes even a Bayesian buys a lottery ticket.
In the next year the IPCC will release a new report on global warming. To what extend do you believe that there will be changes in the report?
Do you believe that there level of certainity in forcasts of harmful weather effects will increase, stay the same or decline?
Has there been discussion here before on Cholesterol/heart disese/statin medication?
There's a lot of conflicting information floating around that I've looked at somewhat. It seems like the contrarian position, for example here: http://www.ravnskov.nu/myth3.htm ,has some good points and points to studies more than (just) experts, but I'm not all that deep into it and there's a rather formidably held conventional wisdom that dietary saturated fat should be low or bloo cholesterol/LDL will be high and heart attacks will become more likely.
Edit: Yes, there has, as the search function reveals. And I've even commented to some of them...
If you had a Death Note, what would you do with it?
See if I could get some very old people or otherwise have terminal illnesses volunteer to have their names written in it. We can use that data to experiment more with the note and figure out how it works. The existence of such an object implies massive things wrong with our current understanding of the universe, so figuring that out might be really helpful.
I believe it canonically can't run out of pages, so I'd think hard about how to leverage infinite free paper into world domination.
I don't think you can infinitely fast pull out papers of the death note, so I doubt that you can produce more paper per hour than the average paper factory.
Then it turns out that Death Note smoke particles retain the magic qualities of the source. Writing one's name in dust with a fingertip becomes fraught with peril.
Nonspecific praise clutters up the thread. Next time, just upvote--it conveys the same information.
Thanks!
The above is a terribly ironic reply.
I would refrain from discussing it in a public forum like this one.
If I found something I thought was a Death Note I would spend a long, long time meditating on the question of how and in what way I'd gone insane.
After finding a volunteer with a terminal illness, I'd test the limits of it. E.g. "The person will either write a valid proof of P=NP or a valid proof that P!=NP and then die of a heart attack."
Already tested by Light in the manga, IIRC; the limits of skill top out before things like 'escape from maximum-security prison', so P=NP is well beyond the doable.
He tries it in the anime too. (I watched that episode yesterday.) He tries things like "draw a picture of L on your cell wall and then die of a heart attack" on some evil prisoner. It doesn't work.
This probably violates a forum rule. Though I will speculate that Light's plan of trying to kill all criminals he sees named probably does way more harm than good even if you ignore the fact that some are innocent.
That's likely to cause more collateral damage than merely taking out the leadership of one company. Cost/benefit analysis and whatnot.
Gambling on sporting events is probably another good way to use the Death Note for making money. It's probably far more ethical. Does the Death Note work on horses? If so, then you can bet on longshots while sabotaging the favorites by killing horses.
I commit to donating $50 to MIRI if EY or lukeprog watch this 4:15 video and comment about their immediate reaction.
Anyone else, feel free to raise the donation pool; get your fill of drama entertainment and assuage your guilty conscience with a donation!
I'll take the money. :)
IIRC this is a troll that followed me over from Common Sense Atheism. That video and a few others are fairly creepy, but The Ballad of Big Yud is actually kinda fun.
Feminism is what you get when you assume that all gender differences are due to society. The manosphere/"red pill"/whatever is what you get when you assume that all gender differences are due to biology. Normal-reasonable-person-ism is what you get when you take into account the fact that we're not sure yet.
Does this theory (or parts of it) seem true to you?
Feminism is one of those words that refers to such a diverse collection of opinions as to be practically meaningless.
For example, the kind of feminism that I tend to identify with is concerned with just removing inequalities regardless of their source and is also concerned with things like fat shaming, racism, the rights of the disabled, and other things that have nothing to do with gender, but there are certainly also people who identify as feminists and who would fit your description.
I'm pretty sure that some gender differences are due to society, and others are due to biology.
So feminism assumes that it is due to society that women can become pregnant and men can't? Most feminists I know are normal-reasonable-people on your dichotomy, though you also ignore the fact that the category of whether differences are desireable and whether they can be influenced are far more interesting and important than whether they are at present mostly due to society or biology. I know people have a strange tendency to act as if things due to society can be trivially changed by collective whim while biology is eternal and immutable, but however common such a view, it is clearly absurd. Medicine can make all sorts of adjustments to our biology, while social engineers have historically been more likely to have unintended effects or no effect at all than they have been to successfully transform their societies in the ways they desire.