To whom it may concern:
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
(After the critical success of part II, and the strong box office sales of part III in spite of mixed reviews, will part IV finally see the June Open Thread jump the shark?)
Cleaning out my computer I found some old LW-related stuff I made for graphic editing practice. Now that we have a store and all, maybe someone here will find it useful:
You are magnificent.
(Alternate title for the LW tabloid — "The Rational Enquirer"?)
Why is LessWrong not an Amazon affiliate? I recall buying at least one book due to it being mentioned on LessWrong, and I haven't been around here long. I can't find any reliable data on the number of active LessWrong users, but I'd guess it would number in the 1000s. Even if only 500 are active, and assuming only 1/4 buy at least one book mentioned on LessWrong, assuming a mean purchase value of $20 (books mentioned on LessWrong probably tend towards the academic, expensive side), that would work out at $375/year.
IIRC, it only took me a few minutes to sign up as an Amazon affiliate. They (stupidly) require a different account for each Amazon website, so 5*4 minutes (.com, .co.uk, .de, .fr), +20 for GeoIP database, +3-90 (wide range since coding often takes far longer than anticipated) to set up URL rewriting (and I'd be happy to code this) would give a 'worst case' scenario of $173 annualized returns per hour of work.
Now, the math is somewhat questionable, but the idea seems like a low-risk, low-investment and potentially high-return one, and I note that Metafilter and StackOverflow do this, though sadly I could not find any information on the returns they see from this. So, is there any reason why nobody has done this, or did nobody just think of it/get around to it?
The entire world media seems to have had a mass rationality failure about the recent suicides at Foxconn. There have been 10 suicides there so far this year, at a company which employs more than 400,000 people. This is significantly lower than the base rate of suicide in China. However, everyone is up in arms about the 'rash', 'spate', 'wave'/whatever of suicides going on there.
When I first read the story I was reading a plausible explanation of what causes these suicides by a guy who's usually pretty on the ball. Partly due to the neatness of the explanation, it took me a while to realise that there was nothing to explain.
Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. It's even harder to achieve this when the fiction comes ready-packaged with a plausible explanation (especially one which fits neatly with your political views).
That's what I thought as well, until I read this post from "Fake Steve Jobs". Not the most reliable source, obviously, but he does seem to have a point:
Now I'm not entirely sure of the details, but if it's true that all the suicides in the recent cluster consisted of jumping off the Foxconn factory roof, that does seem to be more significant than just 15 employees committing suicide in unrelated incidents. In fact, it seems like it might even be the case that there are a lot more suicides than the ones we've heard about, and the cluster of 15 are just those who've killed themselves via this particular, highly visible, me... (read more)
Suicide and methods of suicide are contagious, FWIW.
keyword = "werther effect"
Marginal Revolution linked to A Fine Theorem, which has summaries of papers in decision theory and other relevant econ, including the classic "agreeing to disagree" results. A paper linked there claims that the probability settled on by Aumann-agreers isn't necessarily the same one as the one they'd reach if they shared their information, which is something I'd been wondering about. In retrospect this seems obvious: if Mars and Venus only both appear in the sky when the apocalypse is near, and one agent sees Mars and the other sees Venus, then they conclude the apocalypse is near if they exchange info, but if the probabilities for Mars and Venus are symmetrical, then no matter how long they exchange probabilities they'll both conclude the other one probably saw the same planet they did. The same thing should happen in practice when two agents figure out different halves of a chain of reasoning. Do I have that right?
ETA: it seems, then, that if you're actually presented with a situation where you can communicate only by repeatedly sharing probabilities, you're better off just conveying all your info by using probabilities of 0 and 1 as Morse code or whatever.
ETA: the paper works out an example in section 4.
I thought of a simple example that illustrates the point. Suppose two people each roll a die privately. Then they are asked, what is the probability that the sum of the dice is 9?
Now if one sees a 1 or 2, he knows the probability is zero. But let's suppose both see 3-6. Then there is exactly one value for the other die that will sum to 9, so the probability is 1/6. Both players exchange this first estimate. Now curiously although they agree, it is not common knowledge that this value of 1/6 is their shared estimate. After hearing 1/6, they know that the other die is one of the four values 3-6. So actually the probability is calculated by each as 1/4, and this is now common knowledge (why?).
And of course this estimate of 1/4 is not what they would come up with if they shared their die values; they would get either 0 or 1.
Here is a remarkable variation on that puzzle. A tiny change makes it work out completely differently.
Same setup as before, two private dice rolls. This time the question is, what is the probability that the sum is either 7 or 8? Again they will simultaneously exchange probability estimates until their shared estimate is common knowledge.
I will leave it as a puzzle for now in case someone wants to work it out, but it appears to me that in this case, they will eventually agree on an accurate probability of 0 or 1. And they may go through several rounds of agreement where they nevertheless change their estimates - perhaps related to the phenomenon of "violent agreement" we often see.
Strange how this small change to the conditions gives such different results. But it's a good example of how agreement is inevitable.
Don't take the adversarial attitude: "taking a stand", "against me". This leads to a broken mode of thought. Just study the concepts that will allow you to cut through semantic stopsigns and decide for yourself. Taking advice on an efficient way to learn may help as well.
Observation: The may open thread, part 2, had very few posts in the last days, whereas this one has exploded within the first 24 hours of its opening. I know I deliberately withheld content from it as once it is superseded from a new thread, few would go back and look at the posts in the previous one. This would predict a slowing down of content in the open threads as the month draws to a close, and a sudden burst at the start of the next month, a distortion that is an artifact of the way we organise discussion. Does anybody else follow the same rule for their open thread postings? Is there something that should be done to solve this artificial throttling of discussion?
Some sites have gone to an every Friday open thread; maybe we should do it weekly instead of monthly, too.
Amazingly, there really are domains in which socialism actually works. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the U.S. had privatized firefighting. It was horrible. After the American Civil War, firefighting was taken over by governments, and, astoundingly enough, things actually got better!
Is everyone missing the obvious subtext in the original article - that we already live in just such a world but the button is located not on the forehead but in the crotch?
I think my only other comment here has been "Hi." But, the webcomic SMBC has a treatment of the prisoner's dilemma today and I thought of you guys.
This is not a site that devotes a whole lot of space to debating religion. People aren't getting mean so much as they're using shorthand. It can save time, for atheists, not to explain why they're atheists over and over. Hence the links. The sequences are a pretty good expression of why the majority around here is atheist. They're the expansion of the shorthand. If you're anything like me, reading them will probably move some of your mental furniture around; even if not, you'll talk the lingo better.
So I've started drafting the very beginnings of a business plan for a Less Wrong (book) store-ish type thingy. If anybody else is already working on something like this and is advanced enough that I should not spend my time on this mini-project, please reply to this comment or PM me. However, I would rather not be inundated with ideas as to how to operate such a store yet: I may make a Less Wrong post in the future to gather ideas. Thanks!
My theory of happiness.
... (read more)Searle has some weird beliefs about consciousness. Here is his description of a "Fading Qualia" thought experiment, where your neurons are replaced, one by one, with electronics:
(J.R. Searle, The rediscovery of the mind, 1992, p. 66, quoted by Nick Bostrom here.)
This nightmarish passage made me really understand why the more imaginative people who do not subscribe to a computational theory of mind are afraid of uploading.
My main criticism of this story would be: What does Searle think is the physical manifestation of those panicked, helpless thoughts?
I don't have Searle's book, and may be missing some relevant context. Does Searle believe normal humans with unmodified brains can consciously affect their external behavior?
If yes, then there's a simple solution to this fear: do the experiment he describes, and then gradually return the test subject to his original, all-biological condition. Ask him to describe his experience. If he reports (now that he's free of non-biological computing substrate) that he actually lost his sight and then regained it, then we'll know Searle is right, and we won't upload. Nothing for Searle to fear.
But if, as I gather, Searle believes that our "consciousness" only experiences things and is never a cause of external behavior, then this is subject to the same criticism as Searle's support of zombies.
Namely: if Searle is right, then the reason he is giving us this warning isn't because he is conscious. Maybe in fact his consciousness is screaming inside his head, knowing that his thesis is false, but is unable to stop him from publishing his books. Maybe his consciousness is already blind, and has been blind from birth due to a rare developmental accident, and it doesn't know what words he types in his books at all. Why should we listen to him, if his words about conscious experience are not caused by conscious experience?
http://www.kk.org/quantifiedself/2010/05/eric-boyd-and-his-haptic-compa.php
The technology itself is pretty interesting; see also http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/esp.html
To the powers that be: Is there a way for the community to have some insight into the analytics of LW? That could range from periodic reports, to selective access, to open access. There may be a good reason why not, but I can't think of it. Beyond generic transparency brownie points, since we are a community interested in popularising the website, access to analytics may produce good, unforeseen insights. Also, authors would be able to see viewership of their articles, and related keyword searches, and so be better able to adapt their writing to the audience. For me, a downside of posting here instead of my own blog is the inability to access analytics. Obviously i still post here, but this is a downside that may not have to exist.
Occasionally someone will show up here and try to flame-bait us, not really arguing (or not responding to counterarguments) but just trying to provoke people with contrary opinions. (This is, after all, the Internet.) It's obvious from your other contributions that you're not doing that, but someone who'd only seen your two comments above might have wrongly assumed otherwise. I was explaining why the downvotes should be taken back, as it appears they were.
By the way, the mainstream view among Less Wrong readers is that any evidence we've seen for theism is far too weak to overcome the prior improbability of such a sneakily complex hypothesis (and that much of the evidence that we might expect from such a hypothesis is absent); but there are a few generally respected theists around here. The community norm on theism has more to do with how people conduct themselves in disputes than with the fact of disagreement— but you should be prepared for a lot of us to talk amongst ourselves as if atheism is a settled question,... (read more)
LW too focused on verbalizable rationality
This comment got me thinking about it. Of course LW being a website can only deal with verbalizable information(rationality). So what are we missing? Skillsets that are not and have to be learned in other ways(practical ways): interpersonal relationships being just one of many. I also think the emotional brain is part of it. There might me people here who are brilliant thinkers yet emotionally miserable because of their personal context or upbringing, and I think dealing with that would be important. I think a hollistic approach is required. Eliezer had already suggested the idea of a rationality dojo. What do you think?
New papers from Nick Bostrom's site.
This post is about the distinctions between Traditional and Bayesian Rationality, specifically the difference between refusing to hold a position on an idea until a burden of proof is met versus Bayesian updating.
Good quality government policy is an important issue to me (it's my Something to Protect, or the closest I have to one), and I tend to approach rationality from that perspective. This gives me a different perspective from many of my fellow aspiring rationalists here at Less Wrong.
There are two major epistemological challenges in policy advice, in addition to the normal difficulties we all have to deal with: 1) Policy questions fall almost entirely within the social sciences. That means the quality of evidence is much lower than it is in the physical sciences. Uncontrolled observations, analysed with statistical techniques, are generally the strongest possible evidence, and sometimes you have nothing but theory or professional instinct to work with.
2) You have a very limited time in which to find an answer. Cabinet Ministers often want an answer within weeks, a timeframe measured in months is luxurious. And often a policy proposal is too sensitive to discuss with the... (read more)
Forgive me if this is beating a dead horse, or if someone brought up an equivalent problem before; I didn't see such a thing.
I went through a lot of comments on dust specks vs. torture. (It seems to me like the two sides were miscommunicating in a very specific way, which I may attempt to make clear at some point.) But now I have an example that seems to be equivalent to DSvs.T, easily understandable via my moral intuition and give the "wrong" (i.e., not purely utilitarian) answer.
Suppose I have ten people and a stick. The appropriate infinite... (read more)
DSvsT was not directly an argument for utilitarianism, it was an argument for tradeoffs and quantitative thinking and against any kind of rigid rules, sacred values, or qualitative thinking which prevents tradeoffs. For any two things, both of which have some nonzero value, there should be some point where you are willing to trade off one for the other - even if one seems wildly less important than the other (like dust specks compared to torture). Utilitarianism provides a specific answer for where that point is, but the DSvsT post didn't argue for the utilitarian answer, just that the point had to be at less than 3^^^3 dust specks. You would probably have to be convinced of utilitarianism as a theory before accepting its exact answer in this particular case.
The stick-hitting example doesn't challenge the claim about tradeoffs, since most people are willing to trade off one person getting hit multiple times with many people each getting hit once, with their choice depending on the numbers. In a stadium full of 100,000 people, for instance, it seems better for one person to get hit twice than for everyone to get hit once. Your alternative rule (maximin) doesn't allow some tradeoffs, so it leads to implausible conclusions in cases like this 100,000x1 vs. 1x2 example.
I agree about Jaynes and the exactness of Bayesian inference. (I haven't read his Probability Theory fully, but I should definitely get to it sometime. I did got through the opening chapters however, and it's indeed mighty convincing.) Yet, I honestly don't see how either Jaynes or your comments answer my question in full, though I seen no significant disagreement with what you've written. Let me try rephrasing my question once more.
In natural sciences, when you characterize some quantity with a number, this number must make sense in some empirical way, te... (read more)
I have a theory: Super-smart people don't exist, it's all due to selection bias.
It's easy to think someone is extremely smart if you've only seen the sample of their most insightful thinking. But every time that happened to me, and I found that such a promising person had a blog or something like that, it universally took very little time to find something terribly brain-hurtful they've written there.
So the null hypothesis is: there's a large population of fairly-smart-but-nothing-special people, who think and publish their thought a lot. Because the best ... (read more)
I was thinking something similar just today:
Some people think out loud. Some people don't. Smart people who think out loud are perceived as "witty" or "clever." You learn a lot from being around them; you can even imitate them a little bit. They're a lot of fun. Smart people who don't think out loud are perceived as "geniuses." You only ever see the finished product, never their thought processes. Everything they produce is handed down complete as if from God. They seem dumber than they are when they're quiet, and smarter than they are when you see their work, because you have no window into the way they think.
In my experience, there are far more people who don't think out loud in math than in less quantitative fields. This may be part of why math is perceived as so hard; there are all these smart people who are hard to learn from, because they only reveal the finished product and not the rough draft. Rough drafts make things look feasible. Regular smart people look like geniuses if they leave no rough drafts. There may really be people who don't need rough drafts in the way that we mundanes do -- I've heard of historical figures like that, and those really are savants -- but it's possible that some people's "genius" is overstated just because they're cagey about expressing half-formed ideas.
You may be right about math. Reading the Polymath research threads (like this one) made me aware that even Terry Tao thinks in small and well-understood steps that are just slightly better informed than those of the average mathematician.
Per my upcoming "Explain Yourself!" article, I am skeptical about the concept of "tacit knowledge". For one thing, it puts up a sign that says, "Hey, don't bother trying to explain this in words", which leads to, "This is a black box; don't look inside", which leads to "It's okay not to know how this works".
Second, tacit knowledge often turns out to be verbalizable, questioning whether the term "tacit" is really calling out a valid cluster in thingspace[1]. For example, take the canonical exampl... (read more)
Awwwww, I'm not against you. I just think you're incorrect.
If you post on Less Wrong a lot, you'll eventually say something several posters will disagree with, and some of them will say so. Try not to interpret it as a personal attack - taking it personally makes it harder to rationally evaluate new arguments and evidence.
I wouldn't expect the karma system to be much of a problem, by the way. If I remember rightly, your karma can't go below 0, so you can continue posting comments even if it falls to zero.
Chill with the downvotes, guys. Houshalter's new, looks to be participating well in other threads, and is just stating a belief for the first time.
Houshalter, this is a tangent to the current... tangent. It might be better to discuss theism in its own Open Thread comment or within a past discussion on the topic.
On a related note, have you looked through the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence yet? Not to throw a short book's worth of stuff at you, but there's a lot of stuff taken for granted around here when discussing theism, the supernatural, and evidence for such.
The first two reasons only justify requiring that airlines carry liability insurance policies against the external damage that can be caused by by their planes and injuries/deaths of passengers. Then, the insurer would specify what protocols airlines must follow before the insurer will offer an affordable policy. Passengers would not have to make such judgments in that case.
Remember to look for the third alternative!
I don't understand the point you're making in 3.
ETA: Actually, you know what? This has devolved into a political debate. Not cool. Can we... (read more)
Note that general Less Wrong consensus is that religion in almost all forms is very wrong. It is a safe operating assumption to work with on LW, in that you don't need to go through the logic everytime to justify it. it probably isn't as safe a starting point as say the wrongness of a flat-earth, or the wrongness of phlogiston, but it is pretty safe.
Incidentally, note that the evidence strongly suggests that actively taking out your aggression actually increases rather than decreases stress and aggression levels. See for example, Berkowitz's 1970 paper "Experimental investigation of hostility catharsis" in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of My Self-Exploration by Seth Roberts.
This is an overview of his self-experiments (to improve his mood and sleep, and to lose weight), with arguments that self-experimentation, especially on the brain, is remarkably effective in finding useful, implausible, low-cost improvements in quality of life, while institutional science is not.
There's a lot about status and science (it took Roberts 10 years to start getting results, and it's just to risky to careers for scientists to take on projects which last that long), and some int... (read more)
How much personal contact and trust does it take to learn to ride a bicycle?
If it's not there in your judgment then, I'll continue.
Yes, but it certainly makes a difference in how many choices and alternatives regulation chokes off. Even if you belie... (read more)
Good article on the abuse of p-values: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/57091/title/Odds_are,_its_wrong
I've been reading the Quantum Mechanics sequence, and I have a question about Many-Worlds. My understanding of MWI and the rest of QM is pretty much limited to the LW sequence and a bit of Wikipedia, so I'm sure there will be no shortage of people here who have a better knowledge of it and can help me.
My question is this: why are the Born Probabilites a problem for MWI?
I'm sure it's a very difficult problem, I think I just fail to understand the implications of some step along the way. FWIW, my understanding of the Born Probabilities mainly clicks here:
... (read more)The surprising (or confusing, mysterious, what have you) thing is that quantum theory doesn't talk about a 30% probability of LEFT and a 70% probability of RIGHT; what it talks about is how LEFT ends up with an "amplitude" of 0.548 and RIGHT with an "amplitude" of 0.837. We know that the observed probability ends up being the square of the absolute value of the amplitude, but we don't know why, or how this even makes sense as a law of physics.
http://fora.tv/2010/05/22/Adam_Savage_Presents_Problem_Solving_How_I_Do_It
After more-or-less successfully avoiding it for most of LW's history, we've plunged headlong into mind-killer territory. I'm a little bit worried, and I'm intrigued to find out what long-time LWers, especially those who've been hesitant about venturing that direction, expect to see as a result over the next month or two.
It doesn't look encouraging. The discussions just don't converge, they meander all over the place and leave no crystalline residue of correct answers. (Achievement unlocked: Mixed Metaphor)
The point made in the discussion of traditional cities I linked is that living without a car can be a nightmare in places that were designed around cars but that many cities that were not designed around cars are very livable without them. I've lived in Vancouver for 7 years without a car quite happily and it's not even particularly pedestrian friendly compared to many European cities (though it is by North American standards). I only walk about 3-4 miles a day.
Are there any rationalist psychologists?
Also, more specifically but less generally relevant to LW; as a person being pressured to make use of psychological services, are there any rationalist psychologists in the Denver, CO area?
Simply responding with a Randian quote doesn't show that government doesn't work. Moreover, there are some things where government has worked well. At the most basic level, one needs governments to protect property rights, without which markets can't function. Similarly, various forms of pooled goods are useful (you are welcome to try to have roads run by private industry and see how well that works) But even beyond that, government policies are helpful for dealing with negative externalities. In particular, some forms of harm are by nature spread out and ... (read more)
The blog of Scott Adams (author of Dilbert) is generally quite awesome from a rationalist perspective, but one recent post really stood out for me: Happiness Button.
We already have these buttons on LessWrong... ;)
Pushing someone's happiness button is like doing them a favor, or giving them a gift. Do we have social customs that demand favors and gifts always be exchanged simultaneously? Well, there are some customs like that, but in general no, because we have memory and can keep mental score.
William Saletan at Slate is writing a series of articles on the history and uses of memory falsification, dealing mainly with Elizabeth Loftus and the ethics of her work. Quote from the latest article:
... (read more)This might be old news to everyone "in", or just plain obvious, but a couple days ago I got Vladimir Nesov to admit he doesn't actually know what he would do if faced with his Counterfactual Mugging scenario in real life. The reason: if today (before having seen any supernatural creatures) we intend to reward Omegas, we will lose for certain in the No-mega scenario, and vice versa. But we don't know whether Omegas outnumber No-megas in our universe, so the question "do you intend to reward Omega if/when it appears" is a bead jar guess.
Ok. It looks like someone just did a driveby and downvoted every single entry in this subthread by 1 (I noticed because I saw my karma drop by 13 points with about 5 minute span since my last click on a LW page, and then glancing through saw that a lot of entries in this thread (including many that are not mine) had a lower karma than they had been when I last looked at the thread this morning, with many comments at 0 now at -1). Can the person who did this please explain their logic?
I would have thought everyone here would have seen this by now, but I hadn't until today so it may be new to someone else as well:
Charlie Munger on the 24 Standard Causes of Human Misjudgment
http://freebsd.zaks.com/news/msg-1151459306-41182-0/
Hm, had you not noticed the sequences yet? The "sequences" button is next to the "about" button. There's quite a few more of them. :)
This was a general problem more connected to cleanliness as a whole in 19th century America. Read a history of old New York, and realize that it took multiple plagues before they even started discussing not having livestock roaming the city.
Of course they were slow. They were an efficient method of moving a lot of cargo. Each boat moved slowly, but the total cargo moved was a lot mor... (read more)
Thought I might pass this along and file it under "failure of rationality". Sadly, this kind of thing is increasingly common -- getting deep in education debt, but not having increased earning power to service the debt, even with a degree from a respected university.
Summary: Cortney Munna, 26, went $100K into debt to get worthless degrees and is deferring payment even longer, making interest pile up further. She works in an unrelated area (photography) for $22/hour, and it doesn't sound like she has a lot of job security.
We don't find out until... (read more)
One reason why the behavior of corporations and other large organizations often seems so irrational from an ordinary person's perspective is that they operate in a legal minefield. Dodging the constant threats of lawsuits and regulatory penalties while still managing to do productive work and turn a profit can require policies that would make no sense at all without these artificially imposed constraints. This frequently comes off as sheer irrationality to common people, who tend to imagine that big businesses operate under a far more laissez-faire regime than they actually do.
Moreover, there is the problem of diseconomies of scale. Ordinary common-sense decision criteria -- such as e.g. looking at your life history as you describe it and concluding that, given these facts, you're likely to be a responsible borrower -- often don't scale beyond individuals and small groups. In a very large organization, decision criteria must instead be bureaucratic and formalized in a way that can be, with reasonable cost, brought under tight control to avoid widespread misbehavior. For this reason, scalable bureaucratic decision-making rules must be clear, simple, and based on strictly defined ca... (read more)
For what it's worth, the credit score system makes a lot more sense when you realize it's not about evaluating "this person's ability to repay debt", but rather "expected profit for lending this person money at interest".
Someone who avoids carrying debt (e.g., paying interest) is not a good revenue source any more than someone who fails to pay entirely. The ideal lendee is someone who reliably and consistently makes payment with a maximal interest/principal ratio.
This is another one of those Hanson-esque "X is not about X-ing" things.
The analogy to sex is rough. From a historical and evolutionary perspective, sex is treated the way it is because it leads to gene replication and parenthood, not because it leads to pleasure. The lack of side effects from the buttons makes them more comparable to rubbing someone's back, smiling, or saying something nice to someone.
I dunno, this strikes me as a somewhat sex-negative attitude. Responding seriously to your question about the better things we could be doing, it strikes me that we people spend most of our time doing worthless things. We seldom really know whether we are happy, what it means to be happy, or how what we are doing might connect to somebody's future happiness.
If the buttons actually made people happy from time to time, it could be quite useful as a 'reality check.' People suspecting that X led to happiness could test and falsify their claim by seeing whet... (read more)
(Wherein I seek advice on what may be a fairly important decision.)
Within the next week, I'll most likely be offered a summer job where the primary project will be porting a space weather modeling group's simulation code to the GPU platform. (This would enable them to start doing predictive modeling of solar storms, which are increasingly having a big economic impact via disruptions to power grids and communications systems.) If I don't take the job, the group's efforts to take advantage of GPU computing will likely be delayed by another year or two. Th... (read more)
Should we buy insurance at all?
There is a small remark in Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making about insurance saying that all insurance has negative expected utility, we pay too high a price for too little a risk, otherwise insurance companies would go bankrupt. If this is the case should we get rid of all our insurances? If not, why not?
No -- Insurance has negative expected monetary return, which is not the same as expected utility. If your utility function obeys the law of diminishing marginal utility, then it also obeys the law of increasing marginal disutility. So, for example, losing 10x will be more than ten times as bad as losing x. (Just as gaining 10x is less than ten times as good as gaining x.)
Therefore, on your utility curve, a guaranteed loss of x can be better than a 1/1000 chance of losing 1000x.
ETA: If it helps, look at a logarithmic curve and treat it as your utility as a function of some quantity. Such a curve obeys diminishing marginal utility. At any given point, your utility increases less than proportionally going up, but more than proportionally going down.
(Incidentally, I acutally wrote an embarrasing article arguing in favor of the thesis roland presents, and you can still probably find on it the internet.... (read more)
You can't predict when you'll have to start paying.
Guided by Parasites: Toxoplasma Modified Humans
a ~20 minute (absolutely worth every minute) interview with, Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a leading researcher in the study of Toxoplasma & its effects on humans. This is a must see. Also, towards the end there is discussion of the effect of stress on telomere shortening. Fascinating stuff.
Issue Status: Closed.
Reason: As Designed.
I downvoted several of Houshalter's comments for containing multiple spelling and punctuation errors, though I'd upvote a well-written defense of theism.
None, and nobody. I got a bicycle and tried to ride it until I could ride it. It took about three weeks from never having sat on a bicycle to confidently mixing with heavy traffic. (At the age of 22, btw. I never had a bicycle as a child.)
The first line that JoshB quoted from Wikipedia is fine -- there is this class of knowledge -- but I don't agree with the second at all. Some things you can learn just by having a go untutored. Where an instructor is needed, e.g. in martial arts, the only trust required is enough confidence in the competence of the teacher to do as he says before you know why.
You're probably getting most downvotes because, as orthonormal said, you're going off a tangent to the current tangent, and with a somewhat adverserial stance.
Were telegraphs a bad idea? Horse-drawn plows? Why does the fact a technology was superseded mean that it's a terrible idea?
It does matter if one has guns (or SWAT teams) and the other relies on non-violent persuasion.
True and they wouldn't deserve it, but the truth is, there are a lot of really awesome effective drugs that either take forever to get approved, or don't get approved it at all. This kills people, too.
And there are a lot of diseases, like bronchitis, that are easy for a person to diagnose in themselves, and know that they need an antibiotic, but it costs a hundred dollars to see a doctor to tell him what he already knows so he can get the medicine, and if that's the difference between him paying the rent or not... and, hypothetically, he dies because it goes untreated.
It's more a propblem of political viability rather than anything else.
I think you're stuck in the mindset of 'if it wasn't for our government provided roads where would we drive our cars?'. Such a world would probably have fewer private cars and be arranged in such a way that many ordinary people could get by perfectly well without a car, as is the case in many European and Japanese cities.
This article might help you understand some of the hidden assumptions many Americans operate under. Note: this guy has some rather wacky ideas but his articles on 'traditional cities' are pretty interesting.
I'm not certain this comment will be coherent, but I would like to compose it before I lose my train of thought. (I'm in an atypical mental state, so I easily could forget the pieces when feeling more normal.) The writing below sounds rather choppy and emphatic, but I'm actually feeling neutral and unconvinced. I wonder if anyone would be able to 'catch this train' and steer it somewhere else perhaps..?
It's an argument for dualism. Here is some background:
I've always been a monist: believing that everything should be coherent from within this reality. Th... (read more)
In Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Quirrell talks about a list of the thirty-seven things he would never do as a Dark Lord.
Eliezer, do you have a full list of 37 things you would never do as a Dark Lord and what's on it?
Ah. I'm pretty sure it isn't a real list because of the number 37. 37 is one of the most common numbers for people to pick when they want to pick a small "random" number. Humans in general are very bad at random number generation. More specifically, they are more likely to pick an odd number, and given a specific range of the form 1 to n, they are most likely to pick a number that is around 3n/4. The really clear examples are from 1 to 4 (around 40% pick 3), 1 to 10 (I don't remember the exact number but I think it is around 30% that pick 7). and then 1 to 50 where a very large percentage will pick 37. The upshot is if you ever see an incomplete list claiming to have 37 items, you should assign a high probability that the rest of the list doesn't exist.
Ouch. I am burned.
What does 'consciousness' mean?
I'm having an email conversation with a friend about Nick Bostrom's simulation argument and we're now trying to figure out what the word "consciousness" means in the first place.
People here use the C-word a lot, so it must mean something important. Unfortunately I'm not convinced it means the same thing for all of us. What does the theory that "X is conscious" predict? If we encounter an alien, what would knowing that it was "conscious" or "not conscious" tell us? How about if we encou... (read more)
del
What's the deal with female nymphomaniacs? Their existence seems a priori unlikely.
Information processing isn't the whole story of what we care about. For example, the amount of energy available to societies and the per a capita energy availability both matter. (In fairness, Kurzweil has discussed both of these albeit not as extensively as information issues).
Another obvious metric to look at is average lifespan. This is one where one doesn't get an exponential curve. Now, if you assert that most humans will live to at least 50 and so look at life span - 50 in major countries over the last hundred years, then the data starts to look sli... (read more)
I was making a distinction between extreme bad judgment (as shown in the article) and moderately bad judgment and/or bad luck.
Your emphasis upthread seemed to be on how foolish that woman and her family were.
I tend to think that the right of exit is the ultimate and fundamental check on such abuses of power. This is why I favour decentralization / federalization / devolution as improvements to the status quo of increasing centralization of political power. I think that on more or less every level of government we would benefit from decentralization of power. City-wide bylaws on noise pollution are too coarse-grained for example. An entertainment district or an area popular with students should have different standards than a residential area with many working ... (read more)
So they're a terrible idea because of bad sanitation and child labor? In that case, the entire history of economic ideas is bad up until 1920-ish. They unquestionably achieved their goal of providing better transportation. Am I to infer that you believe that government run highways are wrong because there is trash strewn on the sides of the road?
I mean that recognizing the existence of a perceived problem does not need to lead automatically to considering ways that government can 'fix' it. Drug prohibition is a classic example here. Many people see that there are problems associated with drug use and jump straight to the conclusion that therefore there is a need for government to regulate drug use. Not every problem requires a government solution. The mindset that all perceived problems with the w... (read more)
This argument doesn't work. Just because you already have heavy regulation, doesn't justify having more regulation. Also, many libertarians would say that the solution should be to simply remove much of the heavy regulation of air travel.
Not necessarily. If you've ever been to Disney World, it's not like that. And hell, government roads in the states and Japan often dissolve into a complex and inefficient series of toll roads, at least in some areas.
I'm much more worried about uncompetitive practices, like powerful local monopolies and rent seeking behavior.
I'm not at all sure what any of this has to do with anything. I agree with the quoted section that having the government step in to regulate how much carryon luggage people can have is an example of people making bad assumptions about government. Indeed, this one is particularly stupid because it is economically equivalent to charging a higher price and then offering a discount for people who don't bring carryon luggage. And psych studies show that if anything people react more positively to things framed as a discount.
But I don't see what this has to do w... (read more)
That's a reference to Three Worlds Collide.
When it comes to government policy I tend to grade on a curve. I actually agree with you that the quality of government policy is generally quite poor. But it's not equally poor everywhere, and improving government's function (which will in some cases meaning having it do less) can do a lot of good for a lot of people.
I should also point out that choosing to take no action is still a policy decision. To give you an example, a few years a go some crazy woman pulled a knife on a plane, leading to a bit of an incident. There was a review of airline secu... (read more)
What did you take my claim to be? The example in the link is intended to illustrate the fact that the problem of politics is not one of figuring out better policy. It is an example of a policy that is universally agreed to be bad and yet has persisted for over 60 years, despite a brief period in which it was temporarily stamped out. The magnitude of the subsidy in this case may be small but there are many thousands of such bad policies, some of much greater individual magnitude, and they add up. The... (read more)
One of the hidden assumptions I was thinking of is the assumption that government built roads have been a net benefit for America. The highway system has been a large implicit subsidy for all kinds of business models and lifestyle choices that are not obviously optimal. America's dependence on oil and outsize energy demands are in large part a function of the incentives created by huge government expenditure on highways. Suburban sprawl, McMansions, retail parks and long commutes are all unintended consequences of the implicit subsidies inherent in large s... (read more)
In what way is this a useful response to James_K? What do you believe James_K is doing that he shouldn't be doing (or vice-versa), such that your comment is likely to lead him toward better action?
In A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation, Eliezer writes,
... (read more)Here's an interesting video.
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
There was actually at some point a theory that "babies are born knowing how to swim", and on one occasion at around age three, at a holiday resort the family was staying at, I was thrown into a swimming pool by a caretaker who subscribed to this theory.
It seems that after that episode nobody could get me to feel comfortable enough in water to get any good at swimming (in spite of summer vacations by the seaside for ten years straight, under the care of my grandad who taught me how to ride a bike). I only learned the basics of swimming, mostly by myself with verbal instruction from a few others, around age 30.
I look at conscious thought like a person trying to simultaneously ride multiple animals. Each animal can manage itself, if left to it's own devices it'll keep on walking in some direction, perhaps even a good one. The rider can devote different levels of attention to any given animal, but his level of control bottoms out at some point: he can't control the muscles of the animals, only the trajectory (and not always this).
One animal might be vision: it'll go on recognizing and paying attention to things unspurred, but the rider can rein the animal in and m... (read more)
Good points, but keep in mind snowboarding instructors aren't optimizing the same thing that a rationalist (in their capacity as a rationalist) is optimizing. If you just want to make money, quickly, and churn out good snowboarders, then use the best tools available to you -- you have no reason to convert the instruction into words where you don't have to.
But if you're approaching this as a rationalist, who wants to open the black box and understand why certain things work, then it is a tremendously useful exercise to try to verbalize it, and identify the... (read more)
I'm not sure I understand what exactly you have in mind. I am aware of the role of measure theory in the standard modern formalization of probability theory, and how it provides for a neat treatment of continuous probability distributions. However, what I'm interested in is not the math, but the meaning of the numbers in the real world.
Bayesians often make claims like, say, "I assign the probability of 0.2 to... (read more)
The question of whether an agent's interests are aligned with the principal's is largely orthogonal to the question of whether the agent achieves a positive return. The agent's expected return is more relevant.
I would suspect this has more to do with the skill of the student in translating verbal descriptions into motions. You can perfectly understand a series of motions to be executed under various conditions, without having the motor skill to assess the conditions and execute them perfectly in real-time.
There are a lot of problems with Myers-Briggs. For example, the test doesn't account for people saying things because they are considered socially good traits. Claims that Myers-Briggs is accurate seem often to be connected to the Forer effect. A paper which discusses these issues is Boyle's "Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI): Some psychometric limitations", 1995 Australian Psychologist 30, 71–74.
OK, so I suppose it doesn't take much personal contact and trust to acquire a skill of the bike-riding type. In particular if you're an autonomous enough learner, in particular if the skill is relatively basic.
The original assertion, though, was about personal contact and trust being required to transfer a skill of the bike-riding type, and perhaps one reason to make this assertion is that the usual method involves a parent dispensing encouragement and various other forms of help, vis-a-vis a child. (I learnt it from my grandfather, and have a lot of posit... (read more)
First I'd like to point out a good interview with Ray Kurzweil, which I found more enjoyable than a lot of his monotonous talks. http://www.motherboard.tv/2009/7/14/singularity-of-ray-kurzweil
As a follow-up, I am curious anyone attempted to mathematically model Ray's biggest and most disputed claim, which is the acceleration rate of technology. Most dispute the claim by pointing out that the data points are somewhat arbitrary and invoke data dredging. It would be interesting if the claim was based on a more of a model basis rather than basically a regressi... (read more)
I couldn't post a article due to lack of karma so I had to post here:P
I notice this site is pretty much filled with proponents of MWI, so I thought it'd be interresting to see if there are anyone on here who are actually against MWI, and if so, why?
After reading through some posts it seems the famous Probability, Preferred Basis and Relativity problems are still unsolved.
Are there any more?
I think the essays most directly related to the rectitude of religion are "Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable", which CronoDAS linked, and "Atheism = Untheism + Antitheism". That said, the real introduction to the sort of thinking that led most of us to reject religions are illuminated to an extent in the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions and Reductionism) sequences.
The system of canals built in the early 19th century in the United States allowed the settlement of the old west and the development of industry in the north east (by allowing grain from western farms to reach the east). Why do you consider them a terrible idea? They were one of the centerpieces of the American System, which was largely successful.
It's easier to move out? You are not born under a landlord. You do not swear fealty to the flag of the landlord. Nobody thinks the landlord should be able to draft you for civil service. The landlord cannot put you in jail for failing to pay rent. There's a long, long list of other differences where the landlord as government analogy breaks down. I'm surprised anyone still brings it up.
EDIT: Ha. You changed it. In reality, not necessarily that much, although it's nice to have extra governmental agency that you can choose to pay or not, and that is accountable to the government in a transparent way. Asking the government to regulate itself is almost as dumb as asking a logging company to regulate itself.
/me beats dead horse
Reinsurance.
I'd buy "main road incorporating rope suspension bridges" over "millionaire hiring people to throw themselves off cliffs", but I see what you mean.
It seems the pharma industry discovered the effect of PDE5 inhibitors on erectile dysfunction pretty much by accident. The stuff was initially developed to treat heart disease, initial tests showed it didn't work, but male test subjects reported a useful side effect. Reminds me of the story of post-it notes: the guy who developed them actually wanted to create the ultimate glue, but sadly the result of his best efforts didn't stick very well, so he just went ahead and commercialized what he had.
If big pharma is listening, I'd like to post a request for exercise pills.
Yes, this is true. We will need to assume that the button can analyze the context to determine how to provide happiness for the particular brain it's attached to.
My point is that happiness is not necessarily associated with accomplishment or objective improvement in oneself (though it can be). In such a situation, some people might not value this kind of detached happiness, but that doesn't mean it's not happiness.
Oh, really? How can I get a cheap, legal, repeatable dopamine rush to my brain?
Strange. I thought it made a good point, so I just upvoted it.
Mass_Driver appears to be one of the people who can be fooled all of the time since he judges politicians by what they say and how they present themselves rather than by what their actions say about their incentives and motivations. I did not intend to be ambiguous.
I agree with most of what you said. That's one of the reasons I gave the historical example of SO2. The claim being made by the person I was responding to was not a remark about net gain but the claim that regarding "Good quality government policy" that "There is no more evidence for that than there is for God" and then backing it up with an argument from irrelevant authority. So giving examples to show that's not the case accomplishes the basic goal.
If Omega* makes no reference to the original Omega, I don't understand why they have "opposite behavior with respect to my status as being counterfactually-muggable" (by the original Omega), which was your reason for inventing "duality" in the first place. I apologize, but at this point it's unclear to me that you actually have a proof of anything. Maybe we can take this discussion to email?
It's nice to know I've had an influence :)
As it happens, I'm pretty sceptical as to how much we can know as well. There's nothing like doing policy to gain an understanding of how messy it can be. While the social sciences have a less than wonderful record in developing knowledge (look at the record of development economics, as one example), and economic forecasting is still not much better than voodoo but it's not like there's another group out there with all the answers. We don't have all of the answers, or even most of them, but we're better than nothing, which is the only alternative.
Some things have to be shown, you have to sometimes take part in an activity to "get" it, learn by trial and error, get feedback pointing out mistakes that you are unaware of, etc...
The reason we shift probability weight away from the deceptive Omega is that, in the original problem, we are told that we believe Omega to be non-deceptive. The reasoning goes like this: If it looks like Omega and talks like Omega, then it might be Omega or Omega . But if it were Omega* , then it would be deceiving us, so it's most probably Omega.
In the original problem, we have no reason to believe that No-mega and friends are non-deceptive.
(But if we did, then yes, the dual of a non-deceptive agent would be deceptive, and so have lower prior probability... (read more)
Any recommendations for how much redundancy is needed to make ideas more likely to be comprehensible?
There's a general rule in writing that if you don't know how many items to put in a list, you use three. So if you're giving examples and you don't know how many to use, use three. Don't know if that helps, but it's the main heuristic I know that's actually concrete.
In fact, I can consider all crazy mind-reading reward/punishment agents at once: For every such hypothetical agent, there is its hypothetical dual, with the opposite behavior with respect to my status as being counterfactually-muggable (the one rewarding what the other punishes, and vice versa). Every such agent is the dual of its own dual; in the universal prior, being approached by an agent is about as likely as being approached by its dual; and I don't think I have any evidence that one agent will be more likely to appear than its dual. Thus, my total e... (read more)
You never have to decide in advance, to precommit. Precommitment is useful as a signal to those that can't follow your full thought process, and so you replace it with a simple rule from some point on ("you've already decided"). For Omegas and No-megas, you don't have to precommit, because they can follow any thought process.
It's not predictable when you'll have to start making payments.
I dont't know how much this will support your position, but: mid 1980s, Texas, USA, by my father.
And as I said above, it did take a while to learn, but afterward, my reaction was, "Wait -- all I have to do is keep in motion and I won't fall over. Why didn't he just say that all along?" That began my long history of encountering people who overestimate the difficulty of, or fail to simplify the process to teaching or justifying something.
ETA: Also, I haven't ridden a bike in over 15 years, so that might be a good test of whether my "just keep in motion" heuristic allows me to preserve the knowledge.
early 90s, US. I also had training wheels for a while first, which didn't actually teach me anything. I didn't learn until they were removed. And I also had someone running along for reassurance.