And I'm a bit worried that this kind of post falls under the new censorship laws.
My analysis:
Do your posts look like solicitation to possess illegal drugs with intend to distribute? (Hint: for anything short of "Please tell me where to buy drugs," the answer is probably no).
Could a malicious prosecutor convince a grand jury to indict Eliezer (or others) as co-conspirators based on what you have written? (Hint: probably not).
In short, you are probably fine. But I am not a "power" on LW.
Just to be clear, I doubt this is Eliezer's thought process. But I suspect it is a fairly accurate heuristic for what is and isn't acceptable.
I agree with your analysis. However, the fact that some people are expressing
concern that their comments might violate the new censorship policy suggests
that others might abstain, or have already abstained, from posting valuable
material to this forum, which in turn increases my credence that the censorship
policy does more harm than good.
7David_Gerard10y
"Avoid compartmentalisation
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/2q6/compartmentalization_in_epistemic_and/], but don't
talk about your results from doing so too loudly
[http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/g37/meta_deletion_policy/]."
In context, this 2010 post
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/2se/rational_terrorism_or_why_shouldnt_we_burn_down/]
(capture
[http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/File:Capture_d3f4851dc5da36fcbe4dae9992d74d2772191c41.png])
is interesting: current version is about deaths of tobacco company employees,
but it was changed after comments from the original, which was about slowing the
computer industry to slow AI progress.
2Pablo10y
Interesting. As far as I can see, though, the screencap shows the revised
version about deaths of tobacco company employees, not the original version.
0David_Gerard10y
Yes, the capture is recent.
0quiet10y
When in doubt, frame all drug talk as harm reduction.
7ChristianKl10y
The "Lesswrong censorship laws" speak of illegal violence. Possession of drugs
might be illegal but isn't violence.
0Jabberslythe10y
There are a lot of things that that didn't cover. Go for it!
0A1987dM10y
Have you read gwern [http://lesswrong.com/user/gwern]'s writings
[http://www.gwern.net/] (under “Practical”) about melatonin, modafinil,
nicotine, and other nootropics?
Just wanted to point out that many contributors to the site are afflicted by what I call "theoritis", a propensity to advance a theory despite being green amateurs in the subject matter, and then have the temerity to argue about it with the (clearly-non-stupid) experts in the field. The field in question can be psychology, neuroscience, physics, math, computer science, you name it.
It is rare that people consider a reverse situation first: what would I think of an amateur who argues with me in the area of my competence? For example, if you are an auto mechanic, would you take seriously someone who tells you how to diagnose and fix car issues without ever having done any repairs first? If not, why would you argue about quantum mechanics with a physicist, with a decision theorist about utility functions,or with a mathematician about first-order logic, unless that's your area of expertise? Of course, looking back it what I post about, I am no exception.
OK, I cannot bring myself to add philosophy to the list of "don't argue with the experts, learn from them" topics, but maybe it's because I don't know anything about philosophy.
I take non-programmers seriously about programming all of the time. That's
pretty much in the job description.
Just because I'm not stupid doesn't mean I'm not wrong. Indeed, it takes some
serious intelligence to be wrong in the worst kind of ways.
0whowhowho10y
About implementation, or about what to implement?
0OrphanWilde10y
In practice the two are, in my line of work, very difficult to separate. The
what is almost always the how. But both, out of practical necessity. When the
client insists on a particular implementation, that's the implementation you go
with.
0whowhowho10y
I would assume that's high-level -- "use Oracle, not MySQL"
0OrphanWilde10y
That's part of it, but no, that's not what I'm referring to. Client necessities
are client necessities.
"Encryption and file delivery need to be in separate process flows" would be
closer. (This sounds high-level, but in the scripting language I do most of my
work in, both of these are atomic operations.)
7Vladimir_Nesov10y
A relevant distinction that you are not making is between the questions that are
well-understood in the expert's area and the questions that are merely
associated with the expert's area (or are expert's own inventions), where we
have no particular reason to expect that the expert's position on the topic is
determined by its truth and not by some accident of epistemic misfortune. The
expert will probably know the content of their position very well, but won't
necessarily correctly understand the motivation for that position. (On the other
hand, someone sufficiently unfamiliar with the area might be unable to say
anything meaningful about the question.)
0bogus10y
Good point. Also, even when questions are well-understood by domain experts it
still can be very effective to argue about them, since this usually leads to the
clearest arguments and explanations. This is especially true since the social
norms on this site highly value truth-seeking, epistemic hygiene (including
basic intellectual honesty) and scholarship: in many other venues (including
some blogs), anti-expertise attitudes do lead to bad outcomes, but this does not
seem to apply much on LW.
3IlyaShpitser10y
Good post. It's EY's fault, imo. He set the norms.
0Kawoomba10y
Not exactly a green amateur, so how could he have set that norm? EDIT:
Retracted, you answered in another comment.
2private_messaging10y
I think philosophy does belong to the list if you are arguing some matters of
philosophy but not others. There is a common field to all mathematics-heavy
disciplines, that is mathematics, with huge overlaps, and there's no reason why
for example a physicist couldn't correctly critique bad mathematics of a
philosopher, even though most non philosophers or amateur philosophers really
should learn and not argue as a philosopher is a bit of an expert in
mathematics.
0whowhowho10y
I find that an odd statement. Why can't you assume by default that arguing with
an expert in X is bad for all X?
For some reason, theoritis is much worse with regard to philosophy than just
about anything else. Amateurs hardly ever argue with brain surgeons or particle
physicists. I think part of the reason for that is that brain surgeons and
particle physicists have manifest practical skills that others don't have. The
"skill" of philosophy consists of stating opinions and defending them, which
everyone can do to some extent. The amateurs are like people who think you can
write (well, at a a professional level) because you can type.
-1shminux10y
By default, yes. Let me try to articulate my perception of the difference
between philosophers and other experts. When I talk to a mathematician, or a
physicist, or a computer scientist, I can almost immediately see that their
level in their discipline is way above mine, because they bring up a standard
argument/calculation/proof which refutes my home-made ideas, and then extend
those ideas to a direction I never considered and show which of them are any
good. Talking to an expert willing to take you seriously is generally a humbling
experience. You see the depth of their knowledge and realize that arguing with
them instead of listening is a poor strategy. By the way, I noticed that I
sometimes also do that to people when I talk about my area of expertise.
Now, when I listen to a mainstream philosophical argument, I don't feel humbled
at all (with one or two exceptions), instead I want to scream "why are you
arguing about definitions? Especially the definitions you didn't even bother
formalizing?!?!" or "why do you rely on a premise you find "intuitive" or
"obvious", given that it's rather not obvious to others?" or "why do you
gleefully strawman someone else's argument instead of trying to salvage it?".
The exceptions are generally in the areas which can hardly be considered
philosophy, they are usually a part of mathematical logic, or computer science,
or physics, or psychology, which makes them (gasp!) testable, something
classical philosophers seem to shy away from. I don't normally get the feeling
of awe and respect when listening to a philosopher. They can sure cite a
multitude of sources and positions and reproduce some ancient arguments, but
many of these arguments look as outdated as Aristotle's ideas about physics, and
so only of historical interest.
Again, I'm no expert in the matters of philosophy, so my perspective might be
completely wrong, but that's the explanation why I did not add philosophers to
the list of experts in my original comment.
0whowhowho10y
Becuase phils. deal with abstract concepts, not things you can point at, and
because many phil. problems are caused by inconsistent definitions, as in the
when-a-tree falls problem.
Phils can and do stipulate.
Are there fields where people don't rely on intuitions?
Maybe they can't see how.
0Wei_Dai10y
Want to give some examples? I don't seem to recall seeing a lot of this myself.
5IlyaShpitser10y
Come on, Luke has a series of posts taking a shit on the entire discipline of
philosophy. Luke is not an expert on philosophy. EY says he isn't happy with
do(.) based causality while getting basic terminology in the field wrong, etc.
EY is not an expert on causal inference. If you disagree with Larry Wasserman on
a subject in stats, chances are it is you who is confused. etc. etc.
Communication and scholarship norms here are just awful.
If you want to see how academic disagreements ought to play out, stroll on over
to Scott's blog.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
edit: To respond to the grandparent: I think the answer is adopting mainstream
academic norms.
6Wei_Dai10y
shminux explicitly excluded philosophy, and I wasn't aware of the other two
examples you gave. Can you link to them so I can take a look? (ETA: Never mind,
I think I found them. ETA2: Actually I'm not sure. Re Wasserman, are you
referring to this
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/f7t/beyond_bayesians_and_frequentists/7q8x]?)
1whowhowho10y
I couldn't agree more. Mainstream academia is set of rationality skills and a
very case hardened one. Adding something extra, like cognitive science might be
good, but LW omits a lot of the academic virtues -- not blowing off about things
you don't know, making an attempt to answer objections, modesty, etc.
PS: Tenure is a great rationality-promoting institution because...left as an
exercise to the reader.
0bogus10y
Just for clarity, could you link to where EY does this? Also, it's fairly well
known in statistics that econometricians are unhappy with causal networks and
do(.), because causal networks cannot directly account for feedback-like or
cyclic phenomena, which are quite ubiquitous in econometric data (think supply
and demand factors co-determining price and quantity, or the influence of
expectations) - causal networks have to be acyclic. So there is a genuine
controversy here which is reflected in the literature.
7IlyaShpitser10y
This is precisely what I mean. Well known by whom? Not by me!
Causal networks can easily encode cycles (in fact in two separate ways -- via
unrolling the cycle a la dynamic Bayesian network, or via non-recursive, or
cyclic, structural equation models). Pearl's first picture of an SEM, Figure 1.5
in his book, shows a cyclic causal diagram representing supply and demand. See
google preview here: http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/BOOK-2K/
[http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/BOOK-2K/]
Here's a paper from as early as 1995 by Spirtes (there have been many more since
then) talking about cyclic causal models:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.35.1489
[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.35.1489]
Here's a logical axiomatization of counterfactual causality in cyclic models
(2000):
http://www.jair.org/papers/paper648.html
[http://www.jair.org/papers/paper648.html]
When you say causal networks cannot account for feedback or cyclic phenomena,
what exactly do you mean? Do you have any references for econometricians
abandoning do(.) in favor of something else? Or any reference for the
controversy? Note that SEM (which is likely what most econometricians use due to
their preference for instrumental variable methods) are a special case of do(.)
models.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As for EY, he was confused about the difference between a causal model and a
Bayesian network. This would be sort of comparable to going up to Scott and
saying "it seems incontrovertible to me that MWI is the correct interpretation
fo quantum mechanics. By the way, I got the definition of the Hamiltonian
wrong." One may be right, but the worry is right for the wrong reasons.
0bogus10y
OK, I managed to find the comment by Eliezer that you're probably referring to,
here
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/fpe/philosophy_needs_to_trust_your_rationality_even/7xzy].
But what Eliezer says in that comment is that do(.)-based causality cannot be
physically fundamental, which sounds right to me. And Pearl agrees with this,
insofar as he states (in Causality) that the correspondence between physical
causation (Pearl references the requirement that causes be in the past light
cone of their effects; albeit presumably we should also include the principle of
locality/"no action at a distance") and statistical causality analysis is a bit
of a mystery, and may say more about the way that people build models of the
world and talk about them than anything more fundamental.
As for the confusion between Bayesian networks and causal graphs, Pearl deals
with that in his book. Even before causal graphs were formally described, a lot
of the interest in Bayesian networks (which are represented as directed graphs)
was due to folks wanting to do causal analysis on them, if only informally. And
indeed, if all we're interested in is the correlation structure, then we're not
limited to Bayesian networks: we can use other kinds of graphical models, some
of which have better properties (such as Markov graphs).
I am suspending judgement about the feedbacks issue for now, even though I still
think it's important. The point is that you'd need to make the case that causal
diagrams can account in a reasonably straightforward way for all relevant uses
of SEM (including not just explicit feedback but also equilibrium relationships
more generally). Unless this is clearly shown, I don't think it's right to call
do(.)-based methods a generalization of SEM.
9IlyaShpitser10y
Structural equation models (SEMs) are a special (linear/Gaussian) case of the
non-parametric structural model (which uses do(.), or potential outcomes). This
is not even an argument we can have, it's standard math in the field. I don't
know where you learned that this is not the case, but whatever that source, it
is wrong.
It's fairly easy to verify: all non-parametric structural models do is replace
the linear mechanism function by an arbitrary function, and the Gaussian noise
term by an arbitrary noise term. It's fairly easy to derive that causal
regression coefficients in a SEM are simply interventional expected value
contrasts on the difference scale.
So if we have:
y = ax + epsilon, then
a = E[y | do(x = 1)] - E[y | do(x = 0)]
One can also think of regression coefficients as partial derivatives of the
interventional mean with respect to the intervened variable:
a = dE[y|do(x)]/dx
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cyclic causal models do not require either linearity or Gaussianity, although
these assumptions make certain things easier.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Part of the reason I post here is I love talking about this stuff, and while I
think I can learn much from the lesswrong community, I also can contribute my
expertise where appropriate. What is disheartening is arguing with non-experts
about settled issues. This reminds me of this episode where Judea asked me to
change something on the Wikipedia Bayesian network article, and I got into an
edit war with a resident Wikipedia edit camper. I am sure he was not an expert,
because he was reverting a wrong statement (and had more time than me..) I
adjusted my overall opinion of Wikipedia quality based on that :(.
2private_messaging10y
Arguing with experts on settled issue is a symptom of sloppiness which would be
particularly prominent in non-settled issues, though.
2IlyaShpitser10y
You would think so, but I don't think that's true. Think about the legions of
cranks trying to create perpetual motion machines, or settle the P/NP question,
etc. etc. Thermodynamics is fairly settled, the difficulty of the P/NP question
is fairly settled. Crankery is an easy attractor, apparently.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note: I am not calling anyone in this thread a crank, merely responding to the
general point that argument is evidence of an unsettled area. It's true, but the
evidence is surprisingly weak.
0private_messaging10y
No, I meant that if someone gets settled stuff wrong, that's usually due to
sloppiness, and said sloppiness is an utter horror in any less settled area.
It's like repeatedly falling off bicycle head first with the training wheels on.
Without training wheels its only worse.
0bogus10y
I agree that this is true of structural equation models, taken in a fairly
narrow sense. However, econometricians commonly generalize these to simultaneous
equation models, which include equations where one simply asserts an algebraic
equation involving variables, with no one variable having a privileged status of
being "determined", or an "outcome" of others. This means that do(.) cannot
carry over to such models in a straightforward way. And yes, this is standard
practice in econometrics when modeling equilibrium, feasibility constraints and
the like.
2IlyaShpitser10y
This is probably a good read also:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.29.1408
[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.29.1408]
To the extent that constraints are simply constraints and not a result of causal
structure, the model representing them is partly non-causal (so do(.) or some
other representation of causation is irrelevant for such constraints). To the
extent that constraints represent some consequence of graphical causal structure
I am not aware of a single example where a potential outcome model is not
appropriate. Do you have an example in mind?
In some sense if you have constraints that represent consequence of causality,
such as feedback, and there is no story relating them to
interventions/generative mechanisms, then I am not sure in what sense the model
is causal. I am not saying it is not possible, but the burden of proof is on
whoever proposed the model to clearly explain how causality works in it. There
is a lot of confusion in economics and sometimes even in stats about causality
(Judea is fairly unhappy with incoherence that many economics textbooks display
when discussing causation, actually).
-1BerryPick610y
Could this be because we have fewer philosophy experts (although there are a few
notable ones) than science experts?
Can someone who's familiar with Mencius Moldbug's writing briefly summarize his opinions? I've tried reading Unqualified Reservations but I find his writing long-winded. He also refers to a lot of background knowledge I just don't have, e.g. I don't know what I'm supposed to take away from him calling something Calvinist.
This is a tall order. Nearly everyone I talk to seems to while getting the same basic models emphasise wildly different things about them. Their updates on the matter also vary considerably everything from utterly changing their politics to just mentally noting that you can make smart arguments for positions very divergent from the modern political consensus. Lots of people dislike his verbose style.
That is certainly the reason I haven't read all of his material so far.
I think the best way to get a summary is to discuss him with people here who have been read him. They will likely learn things too. When its too political continue the discussion either in the politics thread or in private correspondence.
By the way: I was pondering Les Miserables not long ago in anticipation of the
movie, and realized that both the musical and the original novel are an exact
artistic/literary expression of what Moldbug calls Universalism (down to details
like the family lineage from Christianity (the bishop at the beginning) to
revolutionary politics). And the character of Javert summarizes perfectly
Moldbuggian philosophy, e.g. "I am the law and the law is not mocked!" Would you
agree?
5TimS10y
If we take the Javert = Moldbug metaphor seriously, how should we interpret
Javert's later conclusion that his earlier philosophy contains a hopeless
conflict between authority-for-its-own-sake and helping people live happier
lives?
3Alejandro110y
Well, the story is set up to favor Universalism. If Moldbug had written it,
probably it would have ended with Valjean concluding that his earlier philosophy
contained a hopeless conflict between rejecting authority and helping people
live happier lives.
6TimS10y
I'm smirking at the idea of a Moldbuggian story of the uprising of 1832
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Rebellion]. Revolutionists Get What They
Deserve or some-such. :)
But I don't think that story has room for the complex characters of Hugo's
story, narratively speaking. There's no room at all for Valjean, and Javert
becomes simply the protagonist to the evil antagonist Enjolras.
Ultimately, you asked if canon!Javert embodies Moldbug. As I suggested above, I
think the answer is no. He's a tragic figure - even Hugo would admit that > 75%
of the time, the king's law point toward a just outcome. But Javert was blind to
the fact that the king's law contained deep flaws.
I don't know if the passage survives the standard abridgements, but Javert
writes a note to his superiors
[http://books.google.com/books?ei=X43jUPKBBYKQ2AW3loHIBg&id=V2EtAAAAMAAJ&dq=les+miserables&jtp=243#v=onepage&q&f=false]
listing several minor injustices in the local prison system, immediately before
killing himself. Even after conversion, Javert fails to realize that he was the
only person who both (1) knew about the issues, and (2) cared about the
injustice. That episode, and Javert as a character, are deeply tragic in my
opinion.
And I can't imagine Moldbug caring about those issues at all. Obviously,
Moldbug's choices would be different - but I don't get the impression Moldbug
would think the minor injustices were even worth his attention if he were in
Javert's situation.
0Alejandro110y
Yes, in addition to the musical!Javert quote I included, I was going to include
"Crush those little schoolboys!"--but tried searching it and found I was
misremembering a different line.
You are certainly right that Javert is a more complex and tragic character than
a pure Inflexible Authoritarian Law archetype. I could shift a bit my statement
and say that the bare essence of Javert is that archetype, and that Hugo gives
him that depth because of the direction he wants to take the story and the
ideology it embodies.
From Moldbug's viewpoint LesMiz might be described as an Universalist tract that
stacks the deck by showing Valjean as saintlike instead of naive, and setting up
Javert's character and storyline to end in a forced alternative between
conversion and suicide, rather than the triumph he "deserves". (Like Chick
tracts, or to pick examples with more quality Chesterton's and Lewis' fictions,
stack the deck against the skeptic.) But I agree that such a description by
Moldbug would be too "reductionist' (to Moldbug's own ideology) and unfair to
the literary qualities of the work.
0[anonymous]10y
Moldbug is not beyond commenting recent events or culture, we may yet hear his
take on at least the movie if not the book itself. Also I'll do a search if he
perhaps hasn't already mentioned the book in a offhanded fashion.
2drethelin10y
It's a lesson about happens when you combine the virtuous with a pernicious
system of virtue. The liberal backlash against strong authoritarianism/belief in
the rule of law is one way of reacting to such a world. "The laws are evil,
therefore their enforcers are evil." The other side of this is people who
believe the laws are good and anyone who enforces them is good. Both views are
lacking nuance. Javert is someone who has spent his life believing that he is
good because he enforces the laws, which are good. He can't live with the idea
that he has been "bad" all along.
0[anonymous]10y
I will probably have to watch the movie or reread the book before commenting
since I recall the story only in vague outlines.
3FiftyTwo10y
Thanks thats a helpful summary.
Slightly related question, why are his views seemingly being suddenly discussed
a lot and taken semi-seriously on LessWrong?
7NancyLebovitz10y
It isn't a sudden change. As far as I know, Moldbug's ideas are a recurring
minor theme at LW.
4[anonymous]10y
Yes I think this is about right. An example is this
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/7cm/how_likely_is_peter_thiels_investment_into/]
discussion of Peter Thiel's support of seastading.
2[anonymous]10y
As NancyLebovitz said it isn't really a new thing, there was a recent discussion
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/fh4/why_is_mencius_moldbug_so_popular_on_less_wrong/]
on why talk of Moldbug's ideas is noticeable here.
0Qiaochu_Yuan10y
To be honest, I'm not terribly interested in discussing Moldbug (yet); I just
wanted to get a better sense of what other people mean when they call something
Moldbuggian. Thanks for the detailed response!
6Alejandro110y
I summarized very briefly my understanding of his political philosophy in this
comment [http://lesswrong.com/lw/fp5/2012_survey_results/80pr] a few weeks ago.
6Vaniver10y
If you've got a few hours, I found the Gentle Introduction
[http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified.html]
to be sufficiently gentle, but it does have nine parts and is written in his
regular style. I think the first part is strongly worth slogging through, in
part because his definition of "church" is a great one. I may write a short
summary of it at some point, but that's a nontrivial writing project.
5[anonymous]10y
Could you please clarify if you are unsure what he means when he calls a
position Calvinist (presumably Crypt-Calivinist or something like that) or are
you just unsure what Calvinism is?
The short and sufficient answer to the second is that this is a designation for
a bunch of Protestant Christians [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvinism] who
historically took themselves very seriously and have a reputation for being
dour. Take special note of the Five Points of Calvinism
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_points_of_Calvinism#Five_points_of_Calvinism].
The short and insufficient answer to the first is people who have ethical,
political and philosophical ideas that can't be justified by their declared
systems of ethics but can be perfectly well explained if you note the memeplexes
in their heads are descendent of highbrow American Protestantism of the previous
centuries. He goes into several things he considers indications of this and
points out they dislike this explanation very much and want to believe their
positions are the result of pure reason or Whiggish notions
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history] of history inching towards a
universal "true human morality".
2Qiaochu_Yuan10y
The former, but thanks for your clarification on both (I imagine your
clarification on the latter is a relevant connotation Moldbug wanted and that I
was largely ignorant of).
3ChristianKl10y
Moldbug has a variety of opinions that he expresses in his articles. Summarizing
all of them is therefore hard. I will try to list a few.
Moldbug reject the progressive project. That means that he's opposed to most
politicial ideas of Woodrow Wilson and presidents after Wilson.
Moldbug rejects modern democracy. He thinks that the US military should
orchestrate a coup d'état. After the coup d'état the US should split and every
state should have his own laws.
In the ideal case Moldbug wants that the states to be run like a stock company.
If that isn't possible Moldbug prefers the way Singapur and Qatar are governed
to the way the US is governed. According to him competition between a lot of
states that are governed like Singapur is better than a huge federal government.
5TimS10y
Your timeline starts too late. Moldbug rejects the Glorious Revolution
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Revolution].
I suspect that Moldbug thinks a military coup is only a means to an end. He
wants government rule on a for profit basis, with essentially no tolerance of
social disorder - other than vote with your feet (i.e. leaving). This is the
concept he calls "Patches."
2ChristianKl10y
Moldbug does reject it, I'm however not sure that he rejects all political
pre-20st century events. He seems to like corporations and corporations have
gotten much more legal rights than they had before the Glorious Revolution.
The few times I raised this question in the past, my comments were met with either indifference or hostility. I will try to raise it one more time in this open thread. If you think the question deserves a downvote, could you please, in addition to downvoting me, leave a brief comment explaining your rationale for doing so? I promise to upvote all comments providing such explanations.
So, here's the question: What is the reason for defining the class of beings whose volitions are to be coherently extrapolated as the class of present human beings? Why present and not also future (or past!)? Why human and not, say, mammals, males, or friends of Eliezer Yudkowsky?
Note that the question is not: Why should we value only present people? This way of framing the problem already assumes that "we" (i.e., present human beings) are the subjects whose preferences are to be accorded relevance in the process of coherent extrapolation, and that the interests of any other being (present or future, human or nonhuman) should matter only to the extent that "we" value them. What I am asking for, rather, is a justification of the assumption that only "our" preferences matter.
Luke lists "Why extrapolate the values of humans alone? What counts as a human? Do values converge if extrapolated?" as an open question in So You Want to Save the World.
Would the choice to extrapolate the values of humans alone be an unjustified act of speciesism, or is it justified because humans are special in some way — perhaps because humans are the only beings who can reason about their own preferences? And what counts as a human? The problem is more complicated than one might imagine (Bostrom 2006; Bostrom & Sandberg 2011). Moreover, do we need to scan the values of all humans, or only some? These problems are less important if values converge upon extrapolation for a wide variety of agents, but it is far from clear that this is the case (Sobel 1999, Doring & Steinhoff 2009).
Of course, the premise that "humans are the only beings who can reason about their own preferences" could only justify the conclusion that some human beings are special, since there are members of the human species who lack that ability. Similar objections could be raised against any other proposed candidate property. This has long been recognized by moral philosophers.
In our society we don't really respect the volition of those human beings. We
give them legal guardians who are supposed to decide in their interests instead
of letting them make their own decisions. We don't let them vote in our
elections.
-1ChristianKl10y
In our society we don't really respect the volition of those human beings. We
give them legal guardians who are supposed to decide in their interests instead
of letting them make their own decisions. We don't let them vote in our
elections.
3Pablo10y
That is not because we don't regard their preferences as valuable in themselves,
but simply because these beings lack the means to do the kinds of things that
would allow them to satisfy those preferences. In any case, CEV does not exclude
such humans from the class of creatures whose volitions are to be coherently
extrapolated.
3MTGandP10y
I see no reason to restrict our preference extrapolation to presently-existing
humans. CEV should extrapolate from all preferences, which includes the
preferences of all sentient beings, present and future. Any attempt to place
boundaries on this require justification.
Edit: You might say, "Why not also include rocks in our consideration?" Simple:
rocks don't have preferences. Sentient beings (including many non-human animals)
have preferences.
1tut10y
What if the majority of sentient beings are ants and beetles?
1MTGandP10y
If ants and beetles are sentient, then CEV should take their preferences into
account. It sounds like you're trying to use this as a reductio ad absurdum of
my claim, but I don't believe that works. If ants and beetles are sentient then
they deserve consideration, no matter how unintuitive that may seem.
4wedrifid10y
No it shouldn't.
Elaboration: Your 'should' claim indicates both that you have a preference for
CEV (if not all then at least up to the inclusion of ants and beetles if they
are sentient) and that you assert it as a tribal norm. Many others don't
implicitly instantiate CEV in that way and instead instantiate it to CEV. The
most common favored group being 'all humans'. To those people your unqualified
assertion would be interpreted as false.
0MTGandP10y
I addressed this point in my original comment
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/g66/open_thread_january_115_2013/87fx].
3TimS10y
I'm not sure that there is community consensus that "human beings currently
living" is the right reference class. Eliezer suggests that he thinks the right
reference class is all of humanity ever in this post
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/h5/archimedess_chronophone/].
If one assumes some kind of moral progress constraint and unpredictable future
values, CEV(living humans) seems like our future descendents would hate it.
Certainly, modern Westerners probably would hate CEV(Europeans-alive-in-1300).
But I'm a moral anti-realist
[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/], so I don't believe
there are constraints that cause moral progress - and don't expect
CEV(all-humans-ever) to output a morality.
6A1987dM10y
Some people would disagree.
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/f8x/rationality_quotes_november_2012/7tf4]
5TimS10y
Gwern collects some evidence against the proposition
[http://www.gwern.net/The%20Narrowing%20Circle]. The fact that people disagree
and think morality is timeless in some sense is not particularly strong evidence
when compared to results of competent historical analysis.
Of course, which historical analysis is considered credible is fairly
controversial.
2MichaelAnissimov10y
Part of the point of CEV is to make the extrapolation process good enough that
future beings X won't hate the extrapolation of arbitrary past group Y. The
extrapolation should be effective and broad enough that extrapolating from
humans in different parts of history would not appreciably change the outcome.
My guess would be that the extrapolation process itself would provide most of
the content, the starting reference class being a minor variable.
1TimS10y
It would be convenient if such a process could be proven to exist and rigorously
described.
Resolving that issue would do a lot to address the OPs concerns. Separately, it
would be a strong reason for me to reject moral anti-realism.
What evidence do we have that such convenient extrapolation is actually
possible?
3MichaelAnissimov10y
Resolving that issue is part of the overall goal of the SI, and a huge project.
I'm also a moral anti-realist, by the way. CEV should be starter-insensitive w/
respect to humans from different time periods. My reasons for why I think that
this is achievable in principle would be a whole post.
-1TimS10y
I'd be very interested in a theory that harmonized CEV with moral anti-realism.
And you seem to believe in a very strong form of extrapolation. I'm personally
skeptical that CEV(modern-humanity) would output anything, while you assert
CEV(modern-humanity) = CEV(ancient Greece). Surely you don't think CEV(Clippy) =
CEV(humanity).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
minor terminology note: I've always used CEV and (moral) extrapolation
interchangeably. If there's a reason I shouldn't do that, I'd appreciate an
explanatory pointer.
2Kaj_Sotala10y
Well, moral extrapolation is a broader category than CEV. CEV suggests, for
instance, that we should also take into account the social dynamics that would
influence the development of morality ("grown up farther together"), while you
could conceivably also have a moral extrapolation approach which considered that
irrelevant.
(One could also argue that it is the addition of social dynamics which helps
justify the notion of CEV(modern-humanity) = CEV(ancient Greece), given that it
was technological and social dynamics which got us from the
values-of-ancient-Greece to values-of-today. Of course, that presupposes a
deterministic view of history, which seems to me highly implausible. It also
opens the door for all kinds of nasty social dynamics.)
0MichaelAnissimov10y
.
3A1987dM10y
You can delete retracted comments if you reload the page.
6Nisan10y
But not if someone's replied to the comment.
2[anonymous]10y
No one else seems to be giving what is IMO the correct answer; I want the values
of a created FAI to match my own, extrapolated. ie moral selfishness.
I would actually prefer that the extrapolation seed be drawn only from SI
supporters (or ideally just me, but that's unlikely to fly), because I'm uneasy
about what happens if some of my values turn out to be memetic, and they get
swamped/outvoted by a coherent extrapolated deathist or hedonist memplex. Or if
you include, for example, uplifted sharks in the process.
0TimS10y
I too would prefer super AI to look to my values when deciding what to
implement.
But, given the existence of moral disagreement, I don't see why that deserves to
be labeled Friendly. And the whole point of CEV or similar process is to figure
out what is awesome for humanity. Implementing something other than what is
awesome for all of humanity is not Friendly.
If deathism really is what is awesome for all humanity, I expect a FAI to
implement deathism. But there's no particular reason to believe that deathism is
what is awesome for humanity.
1Pablo10y
Tim, your comment highlights the potential conflict between CEV and FAI that I
also mentioned previously. FAI is by definition not hostile to human beings,
whereas CEV might permit, or even require, the extinction of all humanity. This
may happen, for instance, if the process of coherent extrapolation shows that
humans value certain superior beings more than they value themselves, and if the
coexistence of humans and these beings is impossible.
When I pointed out this problem, both Kaj Sotala and Michael Anissimov replied
that CEV can never condone hostile actions towards humanity because FAI is
"defined as 'human-benefiting, non-human harming'". However, this reply just
proves my point, namely that there is a potential internal inconsistency between
CEV and FAI.
0TimS10y
Don't look at me to resolve that conflict. I think moral extrapolation is
unlikely to output anything coherent if the reference class is sufficiently
large to avoid the objections I raised above. And I can't think of any other
plausible candidate to produce Friendly instructions for an AI.
2NancyLebovitz10y
Slight sidetrack: By the time AI seems plausible, I think it's likely that the
human race will have done enough self-modification (computer augmentation,
biological engineering) that the question of what's human is going to be more
difficult than it is now.
0Pablo10y
By 'human', do you mean 'member of the species Homo sapiens' or something else?
0NancyLebovitz10y
I was thinking "member of the species Homo sapiens", but now that you mention
it, I'd assign a small probability to genetically modified humans which can't
interbreed with other humans. I don't have anything specific in mind, it's just
that if genetic modification becomes at all common, a lot of possibilities open
up, and some of the good ones might be incompatible with mutual
fertility....whatever that means under the circumstances.
1leplen10y
I would also like to see this discussion. It isn't terribly clear to me why the
extinction of the human race and its replacement with some non-human AI is an
inherently bad outcome. Why keep around and devote resources to human beings,
who at best can be seen as sort of a prototype of true intelligence, since
that's not really what they're designed for?
While imagining our extinction at the hands of our robot overlords seems
unpleasant, if you imagine a gradual cyborg evolution to a post-human world,
that seems scary, but not morally objectionable. Besides the Ship of Theseus,
what's the difference?
0Pablo10y
A long time ago, a different person who also happens to be named “Eliezer
Yudkowsky” said that, in the event of a clash between human beings and
superintelligent AIs, he would side with the latter. The Yudkowsky we all know
rejects this position, though it is not clear to me why.
6wedrifid10y
Not clear why? Because he likes people and doesn't want everyone he knows
(including himself), everyone he doesn't know and any potential descendants of
either to die? Doesn't that sound like a default position? Most people don't
want themselves to go extinct.
6MichaelAnissimov10y
"Superintelligent AIs" is not one thing, it's a class of quadrillions of
different possible things. The old Eliezer was probably thinking of one thing
when he referred to superintelligences. When you realize that SAIs are a
category of beings with more potential diversity than all species that have ever
lived, it's hard to side with them all as a group. You'd have to have poor
aesthetics to value them all equally.
0Pablo10y
Thanks for the clarification. My understanding is that (the current) Eliezer
doesn't merely claim that we shouldn't value all superintelligent AIs equally;
he makes the much stronger claim that, in a conflict between humans and AIs, we
should side with the former regardless of what kind of AI is actually involved
in this conflict. This stronger claim seems much harder to defend precisely in
light of the fact that the space of possible AIs is so vast. Surely there must
be some AIs in this heterogenous group whose survival is preferable to that of
creatures like us?
5Kaj_Sotala10y
I don't think he makes that claim: all of his arguments on the topic that I've
seen mainly refer to the kinds of AIs that seem likely to be built by humans at
this time, not hypothetical AIs that could be genuinely better than us in every
regard. E.g. here [http://lesswrong.com/lw/y3/value_is_fragile/]:
-2Pablo10y
That's helpful. I take it, then, that "friendly" AIs could in principle be quite
hostile to actual human beings, even to the point of causing the extinction of
every person alive. If this is so, I think it's misleading to use the locution
'friendly AI' to designate such artificial agents, and am inclined to believe
that many folks who are sympathetic to the goal of creating friendly AI wouldn't
be if they knew what was actually meant by that expression.
0MichaelAnissimov10y
Not "that doesn't sound quite right", but "that's completely wrong". Friendly AI
is defined as "human-benefiting, non-human harming".
6TheOtherDave10y
I would say that the defining characteristic of Friendly AI, as the term is used
on LW, is that it optimizes for human values.
On this view, if it turns out that human values prefer that humans be harmed,
then Friendly AI harms humans, and we ought to prefer that it do so.
-1MichaelAnissimov10y
That's not the proper definition... Friendly AI, according to current
guesses/theory [http://intelligence.org/files/CEV.pdf], would be an
extrapolation of human values. The extrapolation part is everything. I encourage
you to check out that linked document, the system it defines (though just a
rough sketch) is what is usually meant by "Friendly AI" around here. No one is
arguing that "human values" = "what we absolutely must pursue". I'm not sure
that creating Friendly AI, a machine that helps us, should be considered as
passing a moral judgment on mankind or the world. At least, it seems like a
really informal way of looking at it, and probably unhelpful as it's imbued with
so much moral valence.
1Pablo10y
Let's backtrack a bit.
I said:
Kaj replied:
I then said:
But now you reply:
It would clearly be wishful thinking to assume that the countless forms of AIs
that "could be genuinely better than us in every regard" would all act in
friendly ways towards humans, given that acting in other ways could potentially
realize other goals that this superior beings might have.
0Kaj_Sotala10y
That doesn't sound quite right either, given Eliezer's unusually strong
anti-death preferences. (Nor do I think most other SI folks would endorse it; I
wouldn't.)
ETA: Friendly AI was also explicitly defined as "human-benefiting" in e.g.
Creating Friendly AI:
Even though Eliezer has declared CFAI as outdated, I don't think that particular
bit is.
1TheOtherDave10y
As I understand Eliezer's current position, it is that the right thing to
optimize the universe for is the set of things humans collectively value (aka
"CEV(humanity)").
On this account the space of all possible optimizing systems (aka "AIs" or
"AGIs") can be divided into two sets: those which optimize for CEV(humanity)
(aka "Friendly AIs"), and those which optimize for something else (aka
"Unfriendly AIs").
And Friendly AIs are the right thing to "side with", as you put it here, because
CEV(humanity) is on this account the right thing to optimize for.
On this account, "why side with Friendly AI over Unfriendly?" is roughly
equivalent to asking "why do the right thing?"
The survival of creatures like us is entirely beside the point. Maybe
CEV(humanity) includes the survival of creatures like us and maybe it doesn't.
Now, you might ask, why is CEV(humanity) the right thing to optimize the
universe for, as opposed to something else? To which I think Eliezer's reply is
that this is simply what it means to be right; things are right insofar as they
correspond to what humans collectively value.
Some people (myself among them) find this an unconvincing argument. That said, I
don't think anyone has made a convincing argument that some specific other thing
is better to optimize for, either.
0MichaelAnissimov10y
No. The argument is more like that there's no source of complex value in the
world besides humans, and writing complex values line by line would take
thousands of years, so we are forced to use some combination and/or
extrapolation of human values, whether we want to or not.
2TheOtherDave10y
Hm.
If you have citations for EY articulating the idea that writing superior
nonhuman values would take too long to do, rather than that it's fundamentally
incoherent, I'd be interested. This would completely change my understanding of
the whole Metaethics Sequence.
0MichaelAnissimov10y
Whole brain emulation would basically be "copying" human values in a machine,
and would demonstrate that "writing" human values is possible. You could then
edit a couple morally relevant bits, and you'd be demonstrating that you could
"create" a human-like but slightly edited morality. Evaluating whether it is
"superior" by some metric would be a whole additional exercise, though.
I don't think the metaethics sequence implies that writing down values is
impossible, just that human values are very complex and messy.
0TheOtherDave10y
Sure, if we drop the idea of "superior," I agree completely that it's possible
(in principle) to write a set of values, and that the metaethics sequence does
not imply otherwise.
And, also, it implies -- well, it asserts -- that human values are very complex
and messy, as you say.
IIRC, it also asserts that human values are right. Which is why I think that on
EY's view, evaluating whether the "edited morality" you describe here is
superior to human values is not just an additional exercise, but an unnecessary
(and perhaps incoherent) one. On his view, I think we can know a priori that it
isn't.
Actually, now that I think about it more... when you say "there's no source of
complex value in the world besides humans", do you mean to suggest that aliens
with equally complex incompatible values simply can't exist, or that if they did
exist EY's conclusions would change in some way to account for them?
0MichaelAnissimov10y
I believe that EY definitively rejected the idea of there being an objective
morality back in 2003 or thereabouts. Unless I am forgetting something from the
metaethics sequence.
The whole point of CEV is to create a "superior" morality, though I think that
too value-loaded of a word to use; the better word is "extrapolated". The whole
idea of Friendly AI is to create a moral agent that continues to progress. So
I'm not sure why you're claiming that EY is claiming that the notion of moral
self-evaluation in AI is unnecessary. Isn't comparing possible, "better"
moralities to the current morality essential to the definition of "moral
progress" and therefore indispensable to building a Friendly AI?
To respond to your last statement, no to both. Of course aliens with equally
complex incompatible values can exist, and I'm sure they do in some faraway
place. Those aliens don't live here, though, so I'm not sure why we'd want to
build a Friendly AI for their values rather than our own. The idea of building a
Friendly AI is to ensure some kind of "metamoral continuity" through the
intelligence explosion.
0TheOtherDave10y
To some extent, I think we may be talking past each other when I talk about
values and you reply about moralities.
To clarify: would you say that this process you refer to of creating a different
"morality" (whether it's different by virtue of being superior or extrapolated
or something else is beside my point right now) keeps values fixed, or not?
0MichaelAnissimov10y
I think it depends on what is meant by "values". I would say that the values
change while the fundamental motivations are fixed, though Vladimir's response
makes me unsure about this. Another way of saying it is that supergoals are
fixed but the "Friendliness content" changes. (Though I haven't seen the phrase
"Friendliness content" around much lately, perhaps it's being discarded in favor
of more formal terms.)
Maybe another useful distinction would be between Friendliness structure and
content (see the CFAI entry on the wiki).
0TheOtherDave10y
I have to admit, the proliferation of terms in this discussion is making me less
and less clear that I understand what was being said when you corrected me
initially, despite several attempts to clarify it. So I'm going to suggest that
we roll back and try this again, keeping our working vocabulary as well-defined
as we can.
As I understand EY's account:
* He endorses building an optimization process (that is, a process that acts to
maximize the amount of some specified target) that uses as its target the set
of human terminal values (that is, the things that we want for their own
sake, rather than wanting because we believe they'll get us something else).
* He also endorses building this process in such a way that it will improve
itself as required so as to be able to exert superhuman optimizing power
towards its target. The term "Friendly AI" refers to processes of this sort
-- that is, self-improving superhuman optimization processes that use as
their target the set of human terminal values.
* He also endorses a particular process (building a seed AI that analyzes
humans) as a way of identifying the set of human terminal values. The term
"CEV" (or, sometimes, "CEV(humanity)") refers to the output of such an
analysis.
* He endorses all of this not only as pragmatic for our purposes, but also as
the morally right thing to do. Even if there's an equally complex species out
there whose terminal values differ from ours, on EY's account the morally
right thing to do is optimize the universe for our terminal values rather
than for theirs or for some compromise between the two. Members of that
species might believe that humans are wrong to do so, but if so they'll be
mistaken.
I understand that you believe I'm mistaken about some or all of the above.
I'm really not clear at this point on what you think is mistaken, or what you
think is true instead.
Can you edit the above to reflect where you think it's mistaken?
0MichaelAnissimov10y
The only part I disagree with strongly is the language of the last point.
Referring to CEV as "THE morally right thing to do" makes it seem as if it were
set in stone as the guaranteed best path to creating FAI, which it isn't. EY
argues that building Friendly AI instead of just letting the chips fall where
they may is the morally right thing to do, and I'd agree with that, but not that
CEV specifically is the right thing to do.
One general goal point for FAI is to target outcomes "at least as good" as those
which would be caused by benevolent human mind upload(s). So, the kind of "moral
development" that a community of uploads would undergo should be encapsulated
within a FAI. In fact, any beneficial area of the moral state space that would
be accessible starting from humans or any combination of humans and tools should
be accessible by a good FAI design. CEV is one such proposal towards such a
design.
As I understand it, yes, the thinking is to optimize for our terminal values
instead of this hypothetical alien species or some compromise of the two.
However, if values among different intelligent species converge given greater
intelligence, knowledge, and self-reflection, then we would expect our FAI to
have goals that converge with the alien FAI. If values do not converge, then we
would suppose our FAI to have different values than alien FAIs.
A "terminal value" might include carefully thinking through philosophical
questions such as this and designing the best goal content possible given these
considerations. So, if there are hypothetical alien values that seem "correct"
(or simply sufficiently desirable from the subjective perspective) to
extrapolated humanity, these values would be integrated into the CEV-output.
0TheOtherDave10y
I agree that EY does not assert that his proposed process for defining FAI's
optimization target (that is, seed AI calculating CEV) is necessarily the best
path to FAI, nor that that proposed process is particularly right. Correction
accepted.
And yes, I agree that on EY's account, given an alien species whose values
converge with ours, a system that optimizes for our terminal values also
optimizes for theirs.
Thanks.
0Vladimir_Nesov10y
FAI's goals should be fixed, unchanging (by initial design). I see three
possible things related to a FAI that could be described as involving a
"changing morality". First, it's possible that the definition of FAI's
unchanging goals could take the form where it makes sense to talk about some
process of change in provisional goals, but this process of change would be a
part of the definition of the unchanging result. For something like CEV, we
might say that CEV is the first stage that takes care of collecting initial data
from humans, tries to "extrapolate" goals from this data, decides on whether it
can formulate FAI's goals, and if successful runs a FAI with these (fixed)
goals.
Second, the world managed by FAI might contain agents with changing morality, if
the FAI decides that agents with changing morality are the right thing to create
or maintain, according to FAI's fixed morality.
And third, FAI itself might take significant time in understanding the logical
implications of the fixed definition of its morality, either in general or as
applied to particular (hypothetical) situations. Even mathematics with
elementary axioms that human mathematicians do is quite complicated. Useful
parts of the mathematics of human value might take billions of years to figure
out.
2leplen10y
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I'll offer a conjecture.
From my understanding, one of the fundamental assumptions of FAI is that there
is somehow a stable moral attractor for every AI that is in the local
neighborhood of its original goals, or perhaps only that this attractor is
possible. No matter how intelligent the machine gets, no matter how many times
it improves itself, it will consciously attempt to stay in the local
neighborhood of this point (ala the Gandhi murder pill analogy).
If an AI is designed with a moral attractor that is essentially random, and thus
probably totally antithetical to human values (such as paperclip manufacture),
then it's hard to be on the side of the machines. Giving control of the world
over to machine super-intelligences sounds like an okay idea if you imagine them
growing, doing science, populating the universe, etc., but if they just tear
apart the world to make paperclips in an exceptionally clever manner, then
perhaps it isn't such a good idea. This is to say, if the machines use their
intelligence to derive their morality, then siding with the machines is all well
and good, but if their morality is programmed from the start, and the machines
are merely exceptionally skilled morality executors, then there's no good reason
to be on the sides of the machines just because they execute their random
morality much more effectively.
I am fairly hesitant to agree with the idea of the moral attractor, along with
the goals of FAI in general. I understand the idea only through analogy, which
is to say not at all, and I have little idea what would dictate the peaks and
valleys of a moral landscape, or even the coordinates really. It also isn't
clear to me that a machine of such high intelligence would be incapable of
forming new value systems, and perhaps discarding its preference for paper clips
if there was no more paper to clip together.
While I'm exploring a very wide hypothesis space here about a person I know
essentially
0lsparrish10y
It sounds like extra work, and I'm not sure there would be a payoff. Presumably
a past person whose volition was coherently extrapolated would lose their racism
and other backwards attitudes, and thus be on par with a contemporary person's
coherently extrapolated volition. With future persons, the argument could be
made that their CEV can't be much different from a current person's for similar
reasons.
7TimS10y
That's a lot to presume. Gwern lists some reasons from history
[http://www.gwern.net/The%20Narrowing%20Circle] to think this statement is
unlikely to be true.
0Pablo10y
Even if we grant this assumption, this sort of argument clearly cannot be
generalized to justify the exclusion of nonhuman animals--who have preferences
that humans routinely disregard--from the class of beings whose volitions are to
be coherently extrapolated. Why not run CEV on all present sentient beings?
-1drethelin10y
No preferences "matter" except in relation to each other. The subset of humanity
that I value isn't decided by logic, but by my values and how they interact with
humans.
0Pablo10y
You say that you only value a subset of humanity. But this is irrelevant for
CEV, according to which we should extrapolate the preferences of all (present?)
humans, not just those of drethelin.
The test was a simple assessment of the subjects' ability to sit and then rise unaided from the floor. The assessment was performed in 2002 adults of both sexes and with ages ranging from 51 to 80 years. The subjects were followed-up from the date of the baseline test until the date of death or 31 October 2011, a median follow-up of 6.3 years.
Before starting the test, they were told: "Without worrying about the speed of movement, try to sit and then to rise from the floor, using the minimum support that you believe is needed."
As might be predicted, I'm putting in a little work on improving my ability at the test-- I have no idea whether this an example of Goodhart's Law.
A couple of quick points about "reflective equilibrium":
I just recently noticed that when philosophers (and at least some LWers including Yvain) talk about "reflective equilibrium", they're (usually?) talking about a temporary state of coherence among one's considered judgement or intuitions ("There need be no assurance the reflective equilibrium is stable—we may modify it as new elements arise in our thinking"), whereas many other LWers (such as Eliezer) use it to refer to an eventual and stable state of coherence, for example after one has considered all possible moral arguments. I've personally always been assuming the latter meaning, and as a result have misinterpreted a number of posts and comments that meant to refer to the former. This seems worth pointing out in case anyone else has been similarly confused without realizing it.
I often wonder and ask others what non-trivial properties we can state about moral reasoning (i.e., besides that theoretically it must be some sort of an algorithm). One thing that I don't think we know yet is that for any given human, their moral judgments/intuitions are guaranteed to converge to some stable and cohe
Another way to get several equilibria would be moral judgements whose
"correctness" depends on whether other people share them. I find it likely that
there would be some like that, since you get those in social norms and laws
(like, on which side of the road you drive, or whether you should address
strangers by their first or last name), and there's a bit of a fuzzy continuum
between laws, social norms, and morality.
Lead and crime Arguments that lead has a lot to do with crime levels, and discussion of why this has gotten so little attention.
Just to indulge in a little evolutionary psychology..... Punishing people and helping people are both strong drives, but spending a lot of money on lead abatement (the lead from gasoline is still in the soil, and it keeps coming back-- lead paint is still a problem, too) is pretty boring.
ETA: And worse, progress with lead abatement is literally invisible (you don't have a dam or a highway so it looks like you're doing something) and the good effects take some 15 or 20 years to be obvious.
The basic point is reasonable, but there are so many things that bother me about that article.
Drum's credulity varies a lot in this article. His lowest level is about where I stand. I have to wonder if that actually reflects his beliefs and the rest of it is forcing enthusiasm on himself because to reflect value rather than truth; that is, he is doing an expected value calculation. Certainly, he should be applauded for scope sensitivity.
Perhaps the biggest thing that bothers me is that Drum tries to have it both ways: small amounts of lead matter and big amounts of lead matter. It seems rather unlikely that this is true. Maybe 10μg/dL has a huge effect, but if so, I doubt that 20 has double that effect, and this ruins all the analysis of the first half of the article. This is important because there is a logical trade-off between saying that past lead reduction was useful and saying future lead reduction will be useful. In particular, Drum says that Kleiman says that if the US were to eliminate lead, it would reduce crime by 10%. Did he just make up this number, or does it come out of a model? I'd like to see the model because even if he pulled the model out of thin air, it forc... (read more)
There's a lot you can do to remediate lead and the bioavailable forms of it,
fortunately (been working on a garden in an urban area, and bioremediation is a
chief concern) -- it doesn't just have to involve removing it. Unfortunately,
it's still likely to be rather expensive and unglamorous, so it'll be a tough
sell as a point of policy.
0NancyLebovitz10y
The sexy project would be to figure out how to undo the effects of lead on
people years after they'd been exposed as children. I think succeeding at this
would wonderful, but I wouldn't put off cleaning up lead in the environment in
the meanwhile.
4[anonymous]10y
That'd be beyond "sexy"; the effects of lead poisoning on the central nervous
system are generally considered irreversible. I daresay anything that could
repair that sort of brain damage would have a whole host of other
applications...
0NancyLebovitz10y
International data about a connection between lead and crime
[http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/lead-and-crime-ill-be-melissa-harris-perry-show-sunday-10-am]
pdf [http://pic.plover.com/Nevin/Nevin2007.pdf]
less technical pdf
[http://ricknevin.com/uploads/The_Answer_is_Lead_Poisoning.pdf]
So I'm fairly new to LessWrong, and have being going through some of the older posts, and I had some questions. Since commenting on 4 year old posts was probably unlikely to answer those questions or to generate any new discussion, I thought posting here might be more appropriate. If this is not proper community etiquette, I'm happy to be corrected.
Specifically, I'm trying to evaluate how I understand and feel about this post:
The Level Above Mine
I have some very mixed feelings on this post, and the subject in general. (You might say I've noticed that I'm confused.) Sure. It's hard to evaluate reliably just how intelligent someone who is more intelligent than you is, just like a test that every student in a class aces doesn't allow you to identify which student knows the information the best, but doesn't the idea of a persistent ranking system, and the concern with it imply a belief in intelligence as a static factor?
Less Wrong is a diverse community, but I was by and large under the impression that it was biased towards a growth mindset. Indeed, it seems in many ways the raison d'etre of LW relies on the assumption that it is possible to improve your intelligence. I would further... (read more)
"Intelligence" seems to consist of multiple different systems, but there are many tasks which recruit several of those systems simultaneously. That said, this doesn't exclude the possibility of a hierarchy - in some people all of those systems could be working well, in some people all of them could be working badly, and most folks would be somewhere in between. (Which would seem to match the genetic load theory of intelligence.) But of course, this is a partially ordered set rather than a pure hierarchy - different people can have the same overall score, but have different capabilities in various subtasks.
IQ in childhood is predictive of IQ scores in adulthood, but not completely reliably; adult scores are more stable. There have been many interventions which aimed to increase IQ, but so far none of them has worked out.
IQ is one of the strongestgeneral predictors of life outcomes and work performance... but that "general" means that you can still predict performance on some specific task better via some other variable. Also, IQ is one of the best such predictors together with conscientiousness, which implies that hard work also matters a lot in life. We also kn... (read more)
In which case, if IQ is a good and stable predictor, then we are placing high
confidence in #1 if we know their IQ. Is IQ or test scores what we commonly base
intelligence assessments on?
If we can put high confidence in #1 via testing, can we still put high
confidence in it on based on a general impression or a conversation, or even on
the basis of mysterious evidence? e.g. This quote:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/ub/competent_elites/] "(Interesting question: If I'm
not judging Brooks by the goodness of his AI theories, what is it that made him
seem smart to me? I don't remember any stunning epiphanies in his presentation
at the Summit. I didn't talk to him very long in person. He just came across
as... formidable, somehow.)"
I mean, I would assume aura judgment is less effective than testing,
particularly at discriminating between levels above that of the aura judge, but
how much worse isn't clear to me. I'm particularly suspicious of it because
evaluating someone else's intelligence routinely involves a comparison with
myself, and I'm very uncertain I can make those comparisons without bias.
I appreciate your response immensely. I have almost no training in any sort of
cognitively focused science, and so my impressions about the constancy of
intelligence are largely drawn from my personal experience, which is obviously
an enormously impoverished data set. Your explanation and data does offer a
compelling reason to believe intelligence corresponds with some fixed aspect of
an individual, at least with some reasonable probability.
I can certainly think of exceptions, individuals with triple-digit SAT scores
that went on to pursue Ph.Ds,, but perhaps that does not mean the model is
wrong, as unlikely events do occur. Or perhaps the adult IQ doesn't stabilize
until sometimes after 25, and so they underwent a large IQ fluctuation in
college. Perhaps as I age and spend more time with older people, I'll become
more confident in predicting future intelligence from curren
4Kaj_Sotala10y
Intelligence is generally measured using either explicit IQ tests or performance
on tasks which are known to correlate reliably with IQ (such as SAT scores).
I think there was a study somewhere - it might have been discussed on this site,
but I couldn't find it on a quick search - where an audience listened to two
people have a conversation, and they knew that one of the people had been
allowed to pick a topic that he knew a lot about and the other person didn't.
Despite knowing that, the audience consistently thought that the person who'd
been allowed to pick the topic was more intelligent, as he had better things to
say about it. That would at least weakly suggest that people aren't very good at
controlling for irrelevant factors when estimating someone's intelligence.
7gwern10y
Found it: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4b/dont_revere_the_bearer_of_good_info/
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/4b/dont_revere_the_bearer_of_good_info/]
0gwern10y
If anyone knows what this study is, I'd be very interested to learn more about
it, since it sounds like it might be a falsification of my hypothesized
http://www.gwern.net/backfire-effect [http://www.gwern.net/backfire-effect]
EDIT: found it by accident, see sibling comment
0gwern10y
I don't think you can. A conversation or 'general impression' is going to be
based on interpersonal skills, and unless it is a highly technical conversation,
be based mostly on verbal sorts of skills. Asking whether an IQ test would be
less reliable than a conversation is a little like asking 'if we drop the SAT
Math section and just use Verbal, is that better than using both the Math and
Verbal sections?' No one item loads very heavily on g which is why IQ tests
typically have a bunch of subtests.
7drethelin10y
Why is it ridiculous to believe in mutants born with high anger levels?
1leplen10y
Following the line of reasoning in Correspondence Bias
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/hz/correspondence_bias/], because it's probably much
more likely that someone who seems to you to "be an angry person" has just had a
bad day.
According to our current understanding, significant mood altering mutations are
much less common than many other more probable causes of anger. This is one of
the reasons gene therapy is not typically suggested as part of treating anger
management issues.
6fubarobfusco10y
Wouldn't it be interesting if everyone had exactly equal hormonal tendencies
toward various emotions?
"This particular episode of angry behavior is not as strong of evidence that
this person has angry tendencies as my brain wants to treat it" is not the same
as "Angry tendencies do not exist at all."
-2leplen10y
Okay sure. I'm certainly not arguing that there is no variation in human
intelligence or emotional make-up. Indeed it is probably supremely likely that
there are indeed mutants born with "high anger levels", whatever that is
supposed to mean, While I am not a geneticist and can't speak for the genetic
complexity of that particular set of mutations, there's a lot of humans and it
seems like something in that vein is as least as likely in 1 in 5 billion, so
there's bound to be a couple of them around. It was sloppy writing I suppose,
but the implication wasn't that no mutants with high anger levels exist, just
that the hypothetical person in the example in all probability isn't one of
them. I was working within the framework of an existing metaphor, not making my
own original research claim about angry mutants.
I still feel like there's a large discrepancy between how anger and intelligence
are discussed in the two articles. I feel like intelligence is given an
ontological weight, that anger is not granted. If you met John Conway at a
summer camp, or better yet, some no-name kid who nonetheless carried on a
brilliant conversation with you, dazzling you with insights you'd never
imagined, would you also tell yourself, "This particular episode of intelligent
behavior is not as strong a piece of evidence that this person has intelligent
tendencies as my brain wants to treat it."? If you would, then when you read The
Level Above Mine [http://lesswrong.com/lw/ua/the_level_above_mine/] and the
following posts do you feel like that filter is being carefully applied? If you
would not, then why is there a difference between intelligence and anger?
9Risto_Saarelma10y
Maybe think animal taming, and the ways tame animals ended up different from
wild ones. Taming seems to work way too fast
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox] to rely on only new
mutations, so there's probably existing genetic variation on aggressiveness in
the starting population it can use.
There's also starting to be some research on actual high anger mutations in
humans [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A], which seem to be a
bit more common than 1 in 5 billion.
Anger is much more situational thing, so maybe you should talk about temperament
instead, as the relatively stable emotional makeup of person that affects how
easily they become angry. Having high intelligence can make you do behaviors
that are very improbable otherwise, like proving Fermat's conjecture. But there
can be many causes that lead to quite a similar fit of anger, both a large
stimulus and a calm temperament and a small stimulus and an anger-prone
temperament will work. So I don't see the problem with the argument. If I see
Alice proving Fermat's conjecture, Alice being very intelligent is the only
solid hypothesis I have. If I see Bob angrily kicking a vending machine, both
Bob having a hair-trigger temperament and Bob having had a very bad day are
plausible hypotheses.
0knb10y
Intelligence really is more fixed than "anger". Anger is an emotion, and even
people highly inclined toward anger are not angry all (or even most of) the
time. To put it plainly, you are more likely to come across a calm person
experiencing rage, than a mentally retarded person having a conversation at
Conway's level. Do you really doubt that?
2Viliam_Bur10y
I will start with: +1 for caring about the community etiquette
Intelligence (IQ) is more or less static. If you have a scientifically proven
method of increasing IQ, please post it here, and I am sure many people will try
it. But at this moment, LW is not about increasing human intelligence. It is
about increasing human rationality -- learning a better way to use the
intelligence (brain) we already have -- and about machine intelligence. A
hypothetical intelligent machine could increase its intelligence by changing its
code or adding new hardware. For humans, similar change would require surgery or
implants beyond our current knowledge.
How high is unnaturally high? The intelligence is on the Bell curve. One in two
persons has IQ above 100. One in ten has IQ above 115. One in fifty has IQ above
130; one in hundred above 135; one in thousand above 146; one in ten thousands
above 156... this is all within the Bell curve. It is possible to search for
people with this level of intelligence. (Speaking about someone with IQ 300,
that would be unnatural.)
The question is, how much real-world effect do these levels of intelligence
have. Clearly, intelligence is not enough to make people smart -- a person with
a high IQ can still believe and do stupid things. (This is why we usually don't
obsess about IQ, and discuss rationality instead.) On the other hand, some IQ
may be necessary for some outcome, or at least could make the same person get
the same outcome significantly faster. (This is easier to understand by
imagining people with very low IQs. Even the best rationality training is not
going to make them new Einsteins.) Being faster does not seem like a critical
difference, but for sufficiently complex tasks the difference between years and
decades, or maybe decades and centuries, can determine whether a human is able
or unable to ever complete the task.
In the article, Eliezer considers the alternative explanations. (Maybe Conway
had more opportunities to show his ma
4NancyLebovitz10y
Is it solid that IQ tests can distinguish between the intelligence we already
have, and our ability to use that intelligence?
0saturn10y
I'd just like to point out that a growth mindset is fully compatible with fixed
intelligence. Fixed intelligence doesn't mean that growth is impossible, only
that some people can grow faster than others.
0knb10y
There actually are mutants with high anger levels (read about Brunner's
syndrome). Less Wrong is not about improving human intelligence but rather human
rationality. The two are obviously distinct.
If you are asking these basic questions about intelligence, (i.e. proposing that
it can easily be changed) you simply need to read more about this topic.
They are repositories for quotes that resonate with and/or amuse us. It might be
a little too easy to get karma that way, admittedly, but I think they are nice
to have around.
7TimS10y
Sources of karma don't bother me. It just seems like the standards for voting in
that thread - both comments and replies - is really different than the rest of
the site. Not looser, but different.
It seems like I'm always surprised but the vote totals there - both upvotes and
downvotes, when I think I have a feel for what folks like in the rest of the
site.
3Jayson_Virissimo10y
One of their functions is to act as a kind of litmus test for local orthodoxy.
0TimS10y
This [http://lesswrong.com/lw/8n9/rationality_quotes_december_2011/5cnb] is
local orthodoxy?
0Qiaochu_Yuan10y
"X is a good test for Y" does not imply "every part of X reflects Y."
0TimS10y
I don't think you and Jayson are agreeing.
1ChristianKl10y
I don't think it's a test for orthodoxy. Take the quote
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/8n9/rationality_quotes_december_2011/5ebu]: "To see is
to forget the name of the thing one sees.” ― Paul Valéry with 13 upvotes while I
write it.
The position that gets articulated in that quote isn't orthodox on LessWrong.
There are a bunch of quotes that are interesting instead of just making an
orthodox point.
0TimS10y
I don't think that quote is irrational, for basically the reasons TheOtherDave
said.
2ChristianKl10y
I didn't claim that it's irrational. I claim that it's not orthodox rationality.
Take a quote [http://lesswrong.com/lw/8n9/rationality_quotes_december_2011/5h9b]
that makes a more orthodox point: "The social sciences are largely hokum."
--Sheldon Cooper
That quote is voted -2. That quote makes a point in which many members of the
community believe but it doesn't make that point in a way that's interesting.
0TimS10y
I think your original quote is rational, as this community defines the term. I
think the Big Bang Theory quote is not rational - in part because of denotative
implications.
I think Jabberslythe is probably right when he says
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/g66/open_thread_january_115_2013/87el] the purpose is
celebrating in-group feelings. I'm not sure I approve
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/lt/the_robbers_cave_experiment/] of that purpose.
0Jabberslythe10y
They trigger the ingroup fuzzies really well for me. I think quotes inspire me
as well sometimes and it's otherwise hard to find quotes that inspire in the
right direction.
0Douglas_Knight10y
The purpose is clearly articulated in the first one
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/mv/rationality_quotes_1/].
hover text [http://lesswrong.com/lw/b0/antirationality_quotes/]
Random idea inspired by the politics thread: Could we make a list of high quality expressions of various positions?
People who wished to better understand other views could then refer to this list for well expressed sources.
It seems like there might be some argument about who "really" understood a given point of view best, but we could resolve debates by having eg pastafarianism-mstevens for the article on pastafarianism I like best, and pastafarianism-openthreadguy for the one openthreadguy prefers.
TVTropes has an -amazing- political and philosophical library. They have the
single-best description of Objectivism I've ever seen, in particular.
8mstevens10y
You're right, the tvtropes article on Objectivism
[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/Objectivism] is actually
really good. I knew they had a lot of good non-trope content.
5drethelin10y
Wow that's amazingly good. It reminds me of how baffled i was about the degree
that everyone hated Ayn Rand after reading atlas shrugged as a teenager, and I
now realize the reason is that everyone thought she was arguing against things
she wasn't arguing against.
0shminux10y
It's a great description, I agree. Unfortunately, Atlas Shrugged is meta-ethics
top-heavy on fighting the "the motive of service to others is intrinsically
virtuous" windmill/strawman. So much so, that I was unable to continue reading
after the first 100 pages or so, given the quoted statement seems obviously
fallacious to me to begin with, yet she kept pounding on and on.
0NancyLebovitz10y
Would that it were a windmill/strawman.... but sometimes dysfunctional families
teach their less-favored children to believe it, and I'd say that some nations
certainly go in for it now and then.
Admittedly, this isn't service to others in general, it's to some specific
person or organization which wants the service, and that changes the concept
somewhat.
0drethelin10y
oh, don't get me wrong. I'm not an objectivist and I think Atlas Shrugged is
badly written. I just get really tired of people attacking Ayn Rand for stupid
reasons
3NancyLebovitz10y
I wonder whether not being a formally respectable source is actually good for
tvtropes.
5TimS10y
By not being formally respectable, TVtropes gets an otherwise skeptical audience
(western nerds) to seriously consider certain philosophical positions that they
are otherwise quite hostile to.
If LW concepts (eg mindkiller, raising the sanity line, paying rent in
anticipated experience) were as popular as similarly philosophical TVtropes
concepts, I think SI and CFAR leadership would be thrilled.
6NancyLebovitz10y
I was thinking about it from a different angle-- that sometimes lack of
respectability leaves more room for conscientiousness.
It doesn't always work that way-- but so far tvtropes is a home for people who
genuinely want to get the details of popular culture right. It seems odd, but it
doesn't seem to have the problems with fraud and sloppiness that science does.
Is this because people care more about popular culture than science? Or is it
just that if tvtropes becomes respectable, the rewards for cheating will go up?
2TimS10y
I hadn't thought of it that way - it's very plausible.
But some of the fraud in science [http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/] is just
lost purpose [http://lesswrong.com/lw/le/lost_purposes/]. If you need a certain
number of publications to advance in your job, submitting fraudulent studies
seems much more rewarding. And TVtropes doesn't have a similar issue - in part
because of the lack of respectability you noted.
Is rubber part of the Great Filter? This thought occurred to me while reading Charles Mann's "1493" about the biological exchange post Columbus.
Rubber was a major part of the industrial revolution (allowing insulation of electric lines, and is important in many industrial applications in preventing leaks) . Rubber only arose on a single continent for a small set of species. While synthetic rubber exists, for many purposes it isn't as of high quality as natural rubber. Moreover, having the industrial infrastructure to make synthetic rubber would be extremely difficult without modern rubber. Thus, a civilization just like ours but without rubber might not have been able to go through the industrial revolution. This situation may also be relevant to Great Filter issues in our future: if civilization collapses and rubber becomes wiped out in the collapse, is this another potential barrier to returning to a functional civilization, especially if there's less available coal and oil to make synthetic rubber easily?
Rubber doesn't sound that important to me. The Wikipedia article includes all sorts of useful bits: it only went into European use in the late 1700s, at earliest, well after most datings of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions; most rubber is now synthesized from petroleum; many uses of insulation like transoceanic telegraphs used gutta-percha which is similar but not the same as rubber (and was superior to rubber for a long time); and much use is for motor-vehicle tires, which while a key part of modern civilization, does not seem necessary for cheap long-distance transportation of either goods or humans (consider railroads).
So rubber doesn't look like a defeater. If it didn't exist, we'd have more expensive goods, we'd have considerably different transportation systems, but we'd still have modern science, we'd still have modern industry, we'd still have cheap consumer goods and international trade, and so on and so forth.
Can anyone recommend a good therapist in San Francisco (or nearby) who's rationalism-friendly? I have some real problems with depression and anxiety, but the last time I tried to get help the guy told me I was paying too much attention to evidence and should think more spiritually and less rationally. Uh...huh.
If you don't want to post publicly here, PM or email is fine.
I'll second drethelin; CBT is both evidence-based as a treatment method- there's
evidence it works- and evidence-based in practice, meaning you don't have to
believe in it or anything, you just follow the prescribed behaviors and observe
the results. Really, it's highly rationalism-friendly, being mainly about
noticing and combatting "cognitive distortions" (e.g. generalizing from one
example, inability to disconfirm, emotional reasoning, etc.). A therapist who
specializes in CBT can be pretty well assumed to not be in the habit of dragging
"spirituality" into their work.
3ahh10y
I agree that CBT is well-supported by the evidence, and in general should be
rationalism-friendly but that isn't always so. The therapist I mentioned in my
OP was, in fact, calling himself a CBT practitioner. So I was hoping someone
knew a CBT guy (or other equally well-supported method, honestly) he personally
liked.
2Vaniver10y
There are a handful of CBT books that are about as effective in general as
having a therapist. You might be interested in feeling good
[http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&field-keywords=feeling%20good&index=blended&link_code=qs&sourceid=Mozilla-search&tag=mozilla-20],
the depression workbook
[http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Behavioral-Workbook-Depression-Step-/dp/1608823806/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1357871051&sr=8-3&keywords=cognitive+behavioral+therapy+workbook+depression],
or the anxiety workbook
[http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Behavioral-Workbook-Anxiety-Step-/dp/1572245727/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1357871040&sr=8-1&keywords=cognitive+behavioral+therapy+workbook+anxiety].
I recommend that you keep looking for social support as well.
0pedanterrific10y
Oh. Well, that's surprising.
Sorry, I'm not in the area.
0drethelin10y
CBT style therapy is pretty founded on science
0knb10y
You might want to look at Rational-emotive behavior therapy (REBT), and the
affiliated organizations' websites. There are usually a few REBT therapists in
any major city.
Happy New Year, LWers,
I'm on a 5 month vacation from uni, and don't have a job. Also, my computer was stolen in October, cutting short my progress in self-education.
Given all this free time I have now, which of these 2 options is better?
Buy a road bicycle & start a possibly physically risky job as a freelance bike-messenger within my city ( I'm that one guy from Nairobi )in order to get out of the house more, then buy a laptop and continue my self-education in programming, computer science, philosophy, etc.
or
buy a laptop, do quick and easy wordpress websites for local businesses, then buy the bike and use it for leisurely riding under no pressure?
I only have money for either one or the other for now, and for some reason I'm hesitating. Maybe it's because I want to do both. This is important to me, and I'll appreciate any discussion on this. Thanks.
I don't have anything specific to offer, but (in theory) hard choices matter less. And if you literally can't decide between them, you can try flipping a coin to make the decision and as it is in the air, see which way you hope it will end up, and that should be your choice.
Sorry for the delayed reply
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/g66/open_thread_january_115_2013/874n].
0[anonymous]10y
.
7[anonymous]10y
I concur with dbaupp's suggestion
[http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/g66/open_thread_january_115_2013/86ji].
Additionally, you can try the reframing technique. Anna describes it here
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/fc3/checklist_of_rationality_habits/]:
The example she gives isn't quite isomorphic to the choice you're making, but I
think the technique still may be worth trying. Imagine you're currently living
out one option but given the chance to take the other - how would you feel about
it? And vice versa.
0negamuhia10y
Likewise [http://lesswrong.com/lw/g66/open_thread_january_115_2013/874n], thank
you for your suggestion.
2negamuhia10y
dbaupp, ParagonProtege, thank you both for the links and suggestions. I'm going
with the laptop. Anything else I could do (naturally, there's a lot i want to
do) will be kickstarted by the modest, but easy(ish) money I'll get by doing
~$100 websites, as I upgrade my code-fu for Other Stuff. ;)
I also haven't cycled actively for years & I'm afraid my unfit body might conk
out on me, making me unable to Do The Job once I commit. Cliff scaling is much
harder than hill climbing.
From Alicorn's post [http://lesswrong.com/lw/eyt/how_to_have_things_correctly/]
, I can easily tell that after I get the laptop, the correct thing to have would
be a bike, since I can ease myself back into cycling regularly. It's also weird
how I saw the Other Option (buy bike, work, afford laptop, buy laptop, cut down
on bike work as I increase study & laptop work hours) as just as good, even
though I know I will feel like a flake if I stop riding after it gets tougher
and more tiring, which is more likely than giving up on wordpress. Wordpress
isn't even the only option for devastatingly easy Internet work.
Watson, the IBM AI, was fed urban dictionary to increase its vocabulary / help it understand slang. It started swearing at researchers, and they were unable to teach it good manners, so they deleted the offending vocabulary from its memory and added a swear filter. IBTimes.
It seems to be common knowledge that exposure to blue light lowers melatonin and reduces sleepiness, and that we can thus sleep better if we wear orange glasses or use programs like Redshift that reduce the amount of blue light emanating from the strange glowing rectangles that follow us around everywhere.
So an idea I had is that maybe wearing blue glasses might increase alertness. I've been weirdly fatigued during the day lately, even though I've been using melatonin and redshift. But does the /absolute/ magnitude of the blue light matter, or the amount o... (read more)
Unless the mechanism which causes our pupils to constrict is itself sensitive
exclusively to blue light those blue glasses will increase the absolute amount
of blue light that make it into your eyes.
2tut10y
There is light therapy for people who get depressed in the winter. If I don't
misunderstand they are nowadays using "full spectrum" (=white) light, not blue
light. That might have something to do with what you are talking about, and in
that case it is evidence that it is not just the proportion of blue light that
matters.
Do the current moderation policies allow editors to add "next in sequence" and "previous in sequence" links to posts that don't already have such links, and are there any editors willing to do this? If not, can we change the policy to allow this? And I'd like to volunteer to add such links at least to the posts that I come across (I'm already a moderator but not an editor).
The hard problem of consciousness is starting to seem slightly less impossible to me than it used to.
Specifically, I remember reading someone's dismissal of the possibility of a reductionist explanation of consciousness, something along the lines of, "What? You think someone's going to come up with an explanation of consciousness, and everyone else will slap their forehead and say, 'Of course, that's it'"?
But that kind of argument from incredulity fails because it conflates explanation (writing down or speaking an argument that other humans will ... (read more)
The header backgrounds of Main and Discussion are similar but different. This irks me slightly.
My selfish strategy is to point it out so it irks more people and the minimal effort of changing it becomes worthwhile. Given the autism scores from the survey, I am confident that among the people reading this comment, a good part will be irked. However, I am not familiar with how changes to the design have been made in the past. I am taking this opportunity to make my first prediction on predictionbook.com
I have a query - exactly how interested are people here in improving the efficiency of their daily lives? To whit, would a discussion about efficient toilet habits be welcome or unwelcome? (No, I'm not joking, nor am I working up to a toilet joke, I'm entirely serious.)
It is far more important what you are doing than how efficiently you do it.
Discussions of specific low-level habits have low value of information.
Further, LW is mostly about the meta questions: how to think, how to strategise,
etc.
2Viliam_Bur10y
Imagine all the attention such article would get on the RationalWiki! They would
rewrite the LW page from scratch... :D
2Oscar_Cunningham10y
Unwelcome.
2gwern10y
Unless it involves meta-analyses, regressions, value of information
calculations, or preferably all 3!
How do you stop suicide, for individuals and or populations? I looked up antidepressants. They don't look so promising. Brief summary follows. Feel free to skip it.
All pharmacological antidepressants have scary side effects. All of them, sometimes individually or sometimes in combination, put you at risk for serotonin toxicity. Most all increase risk of sucide relative to no treatment. Tricyclic antidepressant are old, scary drugs; rarely prescribed. MAOIs kind of scary. Moclobemide is one of the newer, safer MAOIs. Weird dietary reactions. Still not as s... (read more)
The flourish of HBD books and talk in the years around 2000 was, to switch metaphors, early growth from seeds too soon planted.Had the shoots been nourished by a healthy stream of scientific results, they might have grown strong enough to crack and split the asphalt of intellectual orthodoxy.But as things turned out, the maintenance crew has had no difficulty smothering the growth.
Even the few small triumphs of HBD—triumphs, I mean, of general acceptance by cognitive elites—have had an ambiguous quality about them.
My very first post on this site was about the mistreatment of Stephanie Grace related to the new chilling and shrinking of acceptable discourse in the late 2000s after the 90s thaw mentioned in the article.
I was impressed by the reasonableness of the discussion. And I continued to be impressed at how well LessWrong handled matters like these where for almost two years. However making the same post today on this site as a new member wouldn't be as well accepted as it was back then. If this had been the case then I would have taken the claim that this community is one "dedicated to refining the art of human rationality" with a larger grain of salt, I'm unsure if I would have lingered since I had read most of the sequences at that point but was unsure about whether to participate.
So since I'm unsure if it would be appreciated in the community had I arrived today why do I remain? Well in the mean time I've grown to greatly respect the sanity of many excellent commenter's and several people generating good articles post do post here, some have arrived after I started participating. And it is the most civil and intellectually honest internet forum I've ever seen. But despite ... (read more)
From watching you for a while, I think you're driven to off-handedly forecast doom and gloom because it suits your identity as someone strongly dissatisfied with their current world, signaling contrarianism and wallowing in dignified pessimism. And of course elitism and despair look cooler to you, and form a coherent narrative.
And I'm not going to judge this as something negative, or implore you to fix some "problem" with your personal feelings, I just suggest that you keep a skeptical perspective on your self-narrative somewhere in the back of your mind. As you surely already do.
I've looked at this argument so many times from so many different angles that I
would be very surprised if I hadn't in previous correspondence with you talked
about it in very similar terms. I think I've given it its proper weight, but I
guess readers may not be aware of it so you pointing it out isn't problematic.
I thought I'd seen a survey result of when LWers thought the Singularity was plausible-- maybe a 50% over/under date, but I haven't been able to find it again. Does anyone remember such a thing?
2009 survey results [http://lesswrong.com/lw/fk/survey_results/]
2011 survey results [http://lesswrong.com/lw/8p4/2011_survey_results/]
The 2012 survey also had a "date of the Singularity" question, but Yvain didn't
report on the results of that question, so you'll have to look at the raw data
for that.
The 2012 survey also had a "date of the Singularity" question, but Yvain didn't report on the results of that question, so you'll have to look at the raw data for that.
Note that the last survey made it explicitly clear that the question was “what
is the year such that P(Singularity before year|Singularity ever) =
P(Singularity after year|Singularity ever) = 0.5”, whereas in the previous
surveys it was ambiguous between that and “P(Singularity before year) =
P(Singularity after year) + P(no Singularity ever) = 0.5”.
Robert Kurzban clarifies the concept of the EEA (mostly by quoting various excerpts from Tooby & Cosmides). I think this is an important post for people to check out, given how often the concept of EEA is referenced on this site.
In 1990, Tooby and Cosmides wrote (p. 387):
The concept of the EEA has been criticized under the misapprehension that it refers to a place, or to a typologically characterized habitat, and hence fails to reflect the variability of conditions organisms may have encountered.
From this it can be seen that even in 1990, they we
I find the matter unclarified. Given the large variability of the Pleistocene
climate and habitat (that Kurzban mentions), what does the quoted definition of
the EEA mean? "A statistical composite...weighted by frequency and
fitness-consequences" looks pretty much like a time and a place -- just an
average one instead of one asserted to be the actual environment, habitat, and
social structure over the whole Pleistocene. Both concepts ignore the variation.
0Kaj_Sotala10y
Did you read the whole post? I thought it was relatively clear - if I had to
summarize it in my own words, I guess I'd say something like "the EEA is not a
specific physical or temporal location, but rather those properties in the
environment of the organism which have stayed invariant over very long periods".
It doesn't "ignore" the variation, it's specifically defined via the complement
of the variation.
0Richard_Kennaway10y
I really don't see what distiction you are drawing there.
0Kaj_Sotala10y
Not sure we're talking about the same thing, so probably better to ask, what do
you mean when you say that it ignores the variation?
2Richard_Kennaway10y
It leaves it out. Explicitly saying "I am going to include only what did not
change" is still ignoring whatever did change.
0tut10y
Variation is a feature of the environment, which itself makes certain demands of
creatures that live in it. This is not taken into account by just taking the
average of everything. If you have one foot in a pot of boiling water and the
other in a pot of ice water is not the equivalent of having both feet in a
pleasantly hot bath. Even though the average temperature will be about the same.
0Kaj_Sotala10y
True, which is why the EEA is more complicated than just an average. Like it
said in the post:
I have an important choice to make in a few months (about what type of education to pursue). I have changed my mind once already, and after hearing a presentation where the presenter clearly favored my old choice, I'm about to revert my decision - in fact, introspection tells me that my decision was already changed at some point during the presentation. In regards to my original change of mind, I may also have been affected by the friend who gave me the idea.
All of this worries me, and I've started making a list of everything I know as far as pros/cons go ... (read more)
Harder Choices Matter Less
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/th/harder_choices_matter_less/]. Unless you expect that
there is a way of improving your understanding of the problem at a reasonable
cost (such as discussing the actual object level problem), the choice is now
less important, specifically because of the difficulty in choosing.
0Fadeway10y
From rereading the article, which I swear I stumbled upon recently, I took away
that I shouldn't take too long to decide after I've written my list, lest I
spend the extra time conjuring extra points and rationalizations to match my
bias.
As for the meat of the post, I don't think it applies as much due to the
importance of the decision. I could go out and gather more information, but I
believe I have enough, and now it's just a matter of weighing all the factors;
for which purpose, I think, some agonizing and bias removal is worth the pain.
Hopefully I can get somewhere with the bias removal step, as opposed to getting
stuck on it. (And, considering that I just learned something, I guess this can
be labeled "progress"! Thanks :))
If you can understand that "This sentence is a lie" is complicated to decide if
true - in any depth at all - then you will get interesting insights from GEB.
3quiet10y
Not in the slightest. DH does a good job of providing you with the things that
he later asks you to use.
1shminux10y
There is a mindset prerequisite. Some people get forever lost/bored the first
time the book talks about valid mathematical statements as well-formed finite
strings of symbols.
1Michelle_Z10y
Nope. I mean, I'd suggest knowing WHO Godel, Escher, and Bach are... possibly
listen to some of the music/look at some artwork, but its not necessary.
http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/rational_suckers-99998
Slightly intrigued by this article about Braess' paradox. I understand the paradox well enough, but am confused by how he uses it to critisize super-rationality. But mostly I was amused that in the same comment where he says, 'Hofstader's "super-rationality" concept is inconsistent and illogical, and no single respectable game theorist takes it seriously.' he links to EY's The True Prisoners' Dilemma post.
Also, do people know if that claim about game theorists is true? Would most game theorists say that they would defect against copies of themselves in a one-shot PD?
It depends on what "against copies of themselves" means. If it means "I know the
other person behaves like a game theorist, and the payoff matrix is denominated
in utility," then yes. If it means "I know the other person behaves like a game
theorist, but the payoff matrix is not denominated in utility because of my
altruism towards a copy of myself," then no. If it means "I expect my choices to
be mirrored, and the payoff matrix is denominated in utility," then no.
The link works for me, if that's what you're asking about.
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-01/scientists-hilariously-vent-methodology-overlyhonestmethod
[http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-01/scientists-hilariously-vent-methodology-overlyhonestmethod]
0MileyCyrus10y
Hmm, still doesn't work for me. That's odd.
0NancyLebovitz10y
Before I start posting some of the choicest tweets about realworld science,
here's the twitter feed
[https://twitter.com/search?q=%23OverlyhonestMethods&src=hash].
Huffington Post
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/08/overly-honest-methods-twitter_n_2435364.html]
Neatorama
[http://www.neatorama.com/2013/01/09/Overly-Honest-Methods/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Neatorama+(Neatorama])
io9
[http://io9.com/5974256/overlyhonestmethods-is-the-postsecret-of-the-science-world-and-it-is-amazing]
In other words, I probably didn't need to post about this..... everyone would
have seen it anyway.
Whiteboard animation of a talk by Dan Ariely about dishonesty, rationalization, the "what the hell" effect, and bankers. The visual component made it really easy for me to watch.
I am looking for defenders of Hanson's Meat is Moral. On the surface, this seems like a very compelling argument to me. (I am a vegetarian, primarily for ethical reasons, and have been for two years. At this point the thought of eating meat is quite repulsive to me, and I'm not sure I could be convinced to go back even if I were convinced it were moral.)
It struck me, however, nothing in this argument is specific to animals, and that anyone who truly believes this should also support growing people for cannibalism, as long as those lives are just barely wor... (read more)
Sorry, can't defend it. It's not a horrible argument, but it's also not totally
well grounded in facts.
For starters, it takes far more land and resources to produce 1 lb of beef than
1 lb of grain, since you have to grow all the grain to feed the cow, and cows
don't turn all of that energy into meat
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level#Biomass_transfer_efficiency], so if
you believe that undeveloped land or other forms of resource conservation have
some intrinsic worth, then vegetarianism is preferable.
Secondly, I think the metaphor comparing a factory farm to a cubicle farm is
disingenuous. It's emotionally loaded, since I work in a cubicle and I don't
wish I were dead, and it's not terribly accurate. I think you could make a
different comparison, that is arguably more accurate and compare a factory farm
to a concentration camp. In both instances the inhabitants are crowded together
with minimal resources as they await their slaughter. (Obviously my example is
also emotionally loaded). I think if one were to ask the question should we do
things that will encourage the birth of children who will grow up in
concentration camps, it's a little more difficult to come down with the same
definitive yes.
Additionally, the article wanders into conjecture in several place. It's hard to
see the statement "most farm animals prefer living to dying" as anything more
than a specious claim. No one has any way of knowing a cow's preference
vis-a-vis life or death, probably including the cow. Suicide is a particularly
egregious red herring. By what means does a cow in a pen commit suicide?
Starving to death? Surely that not comparable to wishing it had never been
born...
As for your Soylent Green example, it has even worse problems with trophic
losses, because if your farm-raised humans were not strictly vegetarian, you're
losing an even higher percentage of your original energy. If the food babies are
raised on an all meat diet you may be getting less than 1% of the en
5Desrtopa10y
I think you got these flipped around.
0leplen10y
Fixed. Thank you.
2Desrtopa10y
I think that would be true, assuming you have no additional reasons for opposing
cannibalism.
Personally, I have no moral opposition to the idea of eating babies, but I
suspect that baby farming would cause much more distress to the general
population than the food it would produce would justify.
I don't agree with Hanson's position in that essay though. To take an excerpt:
How does he claim to know that? It's not as if he can extrapolate from the fact
that they don't kill themselves. Factory farmed animals are in no position to
commit suicide, regardless of whether they want to or not. And even if a farm
animal's life is pure misery, it probably doesn't have the abstract reasoning
abilities to realize that ending its own life, thereby ending the suffering, is
a possible thing.
He compares the life of a farmed animal to a worker who has to fight traffic to
spend their time working in a cubicle, but an office worker has leisure time,
probably a family to spend time with, and enough money to make them willing to
work at the job in the first place. I think the abused child in Omelas
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas] is a better
basis for comparison.
7[anonymous]10y
Also: very few office workers get mutilated to prevent them from mutilating
their coworkers out of stress, or locked into their cubicles full-time and
forced to wallow in their own faeces (periodically being hosed down from
outside), or are so over-bred for meat production purposes that even in their
cramped conditions the strain of their under-used, oversized muscles strains
their skeletons and joints to the breaking point.
Oh, and instead of a salary designed to seem big but actually undervalue your
performance, you get paid in being killed (not infrequently a painful and
lingering experience) and having any children you bore taken away for no obvious
reason.
2A1987dM10y
Yes. “If you have doubts on this point, I suggest you visit a farm” is a massive
Appeal to Generalization from One Example. I'm pretty sure some farms are a
helluva much worse than others, and I strongly suspect that the farms a random
person is most likely to visit will be closer to the good end of the scale.
0OrphanWilde10y
I vote we breed animals to be happy under these conditions. Or is that
baby-eating?
Hmmm.
7Desrtopa10y
If you're going to do that, why not skip the animals entirely and raise vat meat
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_meat]? Neither happy or sad, but much
more cost effective.
1drethelin10y
not really, the rpoblem with baby eating was the babies were NOT happy
-3OrphanWilde10y
No, I think there's a parallel there. The solution in the story was to reduce
the babies to chemical reactions, so they weren't aware, and couldn't suffer;
that doesn't really lessen the horror implicit in the solution.
Apparently sleep deprivation is making me -more- insightful than normal. I'm
going to have to give vegetarianism/veganism more thought. Right on the heels of
a huge insight into privilege arguments, which I'm considering writing up.
1A1987dM10y
I had to stop (though I may resume later) at "People who buy less meat don't
really spend less money on food overall, they mainly just spend more money on
other non-meat food" -- it made me go "are you fucking kidding me" and wonder
whether he has ever been to a supermarket. See also this
[http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/flex-fuel-humans/] -- differences
in retail prices aren't quite that extreme, but that's because governments
subsidize meat production, so even though not all of the money comes out of meat
eaters' pockets, it still comes out of somewhere.
EDIT: I finished reading it, and... if I didn't know who Hanson was and he had
posted somewhere that allowed readers to comment, I would definitely conclude he
was trolling. Along with things that others have already pointed out, “per land
area, farms are more efficient at producing "higher" animals like pigs and cows”
-- where the hell did he take that from? Pretty much everyone I've ever read
about this topic agrees that growing food for N people on a mostly vegetarian
diet requires way less land, energy, and water than growing food for N people on
a largely meat-based diet, and there's a thermodynamic argument that makes that
pretty much obvious.
(I do agree that “meat eaters kill animals” isn't a terribly good argument
because if it wasn't for meat eaters those animals wouldn't have lived in the
first place (but that doesn't apply to hunting and fishing); but that's nowhere
near one of the main reasons why I limit my consumption of meat.)
Along with things that others have already pointed out, “per land area, farms are more efficient at producing "higher" animals like pigs and cows” -- where the hell did he take that from? Pretty much everyone I've ever read about this topic agrees that growing food for N people on a mostly vegetarian diet requires way less land, energy, and water than growing food for N people on a largely meat-based diet, and there's a thermodynamic argument that makes that pretty much obvious.
The full sentence is
And if you do manage to induce less farmland and more wild land, you'll have to realize that, per land area, farms are more efficient at producing "higher" animals like pigs and cows. So there is a tradeoff between producing more farm animals with worse lives, or fewer wild animals with better lives, if in fact wild animals live better lives.
or
per land area, farms are more efficient [than wilderness is] at producing "higher" animals like pigs and cows.
Thanks. I did think “more efficient than what?”, but none of the possibilities I
came up with other than “than they are at producing other foodstuffs” seemed
relevant in context. (I don't even remember what they were.)
7[anonymous]10y
Not only that, it makes me wonder if he realizes that most people in the world
don't live on six figures. I remember once living on nothing but cereal, milk,
eggs and kimchi for about eight months because, when rent and bills were
totalled, there simply wasn't any money for more food than that.
4gwern10y
Richard Carrier comes to mind as making counterintuitive claims about the
efficiency of meat vs plant food:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/87/
[http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/87/]
0A1987dM10y
Interesting...
Just one quibble: “other than pure aesthetics (“I just like it”) ... which are
idiosyncratic (i.e. not true for most people)” sounds like a overwhelming
exception to me. Given that I've never met anyone trying to convince other
people to become vegetarians (though I've read a couple such people), I guess
that's by far the most common reason. (I've eaten meat in front of at least a
dozen different vegetarians from at least four different countries, and none of
them seemed to be bothered by that.)
0RobertLumley10y
Depending on how ostentatiously (Which I know isn't the right word, but I think
conveys what I'm trying to evoke?) you were eating the meat, it would bother me.
The type of meat would also make a difference to me. I know vegetarians who are
bothered if you eat any meat near them. They are obviously polite about it, (I
certainly never say anything) but it might bother people more than you realize.
0A1987dM10y
Not at all -- not that I tried to hide the fact that I was eating meat, but I
tried to be as nonchalant as I would be if I didn't know they were vegetarians.
OTOH I'm not terribly good at hiding emotions, so probably some of them could
tell I was feeling a little embarrassed.
What kind of difference? Pork vs beef vs chicken? Steaks vs minced meat?
Free-range vs factory farmed vs hunted (but how would you tell)?
0RobertLumley10y
My opposition to meat varies linearly with the intelligence of the animal. I'm
much more OK with fish than I am pigs.
0NancyLebovitz10y
This reminds me of something I've wondered about. It seems plausible that it's
cheaper to be a vegetarian, but the last I checked, meat substitutes seem to
cost about as much as meat.
Is it just that no one's been exploring how many people would like good cheap
meat substitutes, or is there some reason meat substitutes are so expensive? Or
are there cheap ones I haven't noticed?
Price of quorn
[http://www.foodservicedirect.com/product.cfm/p/171286/Quorn-Foods-Meat-Free-Naked-Chicken-Cutlet-9.7-Ounce.htm?gclid=CM6E3djr3rQCFUQw4AodJwwAvw]
Fancy meat substitutes like quorn are expensive. TVP and tofu are dirt cheap. Going with vegetable sources of protein that make no attempt to directly replace meat, like rice and beans or peanut butter, is also cheap.
Basically what Alicorn said. People aren't necessarily satisfied with the cheap
ones that are available - mimicking the exact mouthfeel and flavor of meat is
difficult, and because many of the original meat substitutes are from Asia, they
weren't common here until fairly recently Mock duck, aka Seitan (made from wheat
gluten) is cheap, and very popular in Asia, but it seems to be a perennial
also-ran in the US. Back during my veggie days I tried using it, only to find
out I have a minor glutease deficiency (not full-on coeliac, but enough that
seitan causes problems). It was by far the closest I've found to mimicking
texture and mouthfeel for non-specific cuts of meat (as opposed to mimicking
burgers or hot dogs or chicken nuggets or something); when prepared right it can
be close to indistinguishable from meat.
Making good, cheap meat substitutes is a lot of work; Western would-be consumers
often have high standards for them and aren't satisfied with the
more-established forms, such as tofu, while new forms have substantial outlays
for R&D (Quorn) and sometimes face regulatory hurdles or other barriers to
acceptance (Quorn's initial attempt at a US release went very poorly). In the
US, where meat production is directly subsidized, it's hard to compete anyway
because there's lots of cheaper meat.
0drethelin10y
One of the confounding factors is that a lot of meat is raised on land that's
not suitable for human food farming. EG, free range cattle grazing in australia.
0A1987dM10y
See also [http://lesswrong.com/lw/g66/open_thread_january_115_2013/88yw].
0RobertLumley10y
My evaluation is very much the same as yours, in that Hanson is way off on the
efficiency of meat vs other foods. My conclusion is just that he is ignorant of
the facts though, not trolling.
1TimS10y
Isn't this just a re-statement of the Repugnant Conclusion
[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/]?
Essentially all domesticated animals are alive because of demand for products
made from them (eggs, milk, meat, etc). If everyone kept kosher, there would be
far fewer pig-experience-moments than the current world, including much less
pig-experience-suffering. Is that good or bad for someone who values pig
utility?
Anyway, I've always taken this kind of reasoning as a reason not to adopt that
perspective on these types of questions. But I think that means I'm not a
consequentialist - which puts me slightly out of consensus in this community.
2[anonymous]10y
I value pig-utility. I'd much rather see a smaller number of comparitively
well-kept, well-treated farm pigs and a healthy population of wild boars than
the status quo. I'd also rather not see that arrived it by a mass slaughter of
all other pigs, though, and pragmatically I'm not going to get that either way,
so "a largeish-but-not-contemporary number of reasonably well-treated pigs
farmed for food production" would be a much more feasible goal. Temple Grandin
does a lot of work in this area, actually.
0Oscar_Cunningham10y
Isn't this what's happening all the time anyway?
0[anonymous]10y
Not in the sense I was using it above, namely, "We kill them all at once to
remove their population." What's happening at present is more like "we kill them
in batches to meet production demands, and bring in more." Aggregated over the
very long term a whole lot more pigs can suffer and die in the second case; I'm
simply saying I don't find "One sudden, nearly-complete mass slaughter" to be a
preferable alternative.
0Oscar_Cunningham10y
My point is that the lifetime of a pig (EDIT: being farmed for meat) isn't very
long (about 6 months from what I can find on the internet). Thus all we would
have to do is stop breeding them for a while and we very quickly wouldn't have
many pigs.
0[anonymous]10y
That's totally true, but it feels a bit tangential to what I was saying.
0RobertLumley10y
I think it is in a similar vein, certainly, but I think it's different in some
ways too. For example, I don't think most people would accept cannibalism even
if the people (victims? food?) led very happy lives, perhaps like a system where
people were pampered in spas all day before being killed for food. But the
logical extension of Hanson's argument is that this would be a great system.
Assuming that there was a remote economic demand for human meat, which,
thankfully, there isn't.
Also, I think cannibalism engages people's sense of moral intuition much moreso
than simply having a lot of marginally happy people does.
BEST, a Bayesian replacement for frequentist t-tests I've been using in my self-experiments, now has an online JavaScript implementation: http://www.sumsar.net/best_online/
Bit of an unusual request: Does anybody know of any good science books for physics? Specifically, books with not only the facts about physics, but the specific reasons and experiments for which those facts are believed?
I have an associate who is interested in the subject, and completely uninterested in reading something that presents current beliefs as facts. When explaining particle spin, it then took me something like four hours to find the relevant experiments performed for proving the existence of particle spin (and I have to confess the information I was able to find on such a fundamental element of modern physics left me a bit underwhelmed).
How much physics do you want and how much math do you want? I mean most of the
first year of a physics class you can experimentally verify yourself if you have
a watch and a ruler. If you're looking to verify special relatively, you'll
probably need more equipment, but in general there aren't nearly as many
experiments as in other sciences, however, there's a lot more math. If you know
the math and the underlying rules, you need a lot less experiments to understand
a phenomenon.
Physics is a very broad discipline, which makes this a very difficult question.
Do you just want some interesting and surprising physics cocktail facts and the
experiments that go along with them?
0OrphanWilde10y
Modern physics (I find "quantum physics" to be a misnomer, as the majority of
what we call quantum physics could survive energy being continuous rather than
discrete); in particular, the experiments I was able to dig up for things like
particle spin weren't particularly impressive. He doesn't find mathematics
particularly convincing, on account of the fact that mathematics are models. (To
use local parlance, he finds the mathematical proofs to be confusing the map for
the territory.)
1leplen10y
Sure the math is a map, but it's a lot easier sometimes to understand how a city
is laid out by looking at a good map than by walking around it.
Your statement about quantum physics is as far as I can tell very wrong. If
energy is continuous rather than discrete then you have the Rutherford model of
the atom rather than the Bohr model, and there's nothing to prevent atoms from
all collapsing. More generally, energy confinement is generally taken to be the
defining characteristic of quantum systems. If you have a convincing argument
for why this is not true I would be very interested to hear it.
Any good modern physics textbook will go over the experiments. It sounds like
essentially you want a physics textbook without the math? You could just read
the book and skip the math? If you're just interested in the experiments, you
could also just get a good "modern physics" lab manual. That would give you a
nice write-up of the experiments with minimal math, and they aren't particularly
hard to find.
I'm still not sure why you want this book or what it's supposed to be about. I'm
made a little nervous by someone who "doesn't want something that presents the
current beliefs as facts" and "doesn't find mathematics particularly
convincing." If you're looking for a book that is going to lay out the evidence
for you for why modern physics is true in an effort to convince skeptics you may
be looking for a while.
As for particle spin the relevant experiment is probably The Stern-Gerlach
experiment [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern%E2%80%93Gerlach_experiment].
which is mentioned several times in Wikipedia's article on spin.
0OrphanWilde10y
The Bohr model is wrong. It's just wrong in a useful way. And Rhydberg was
working on an alternative model to explain exactly this when quantum mechanics
came out; he abandoned it. I'm personally inclined to believe he was correct,
but that's not what I want to talk about.
The Stern-Gerlach Experiment was merely in agreement with particle spin; at best
its existence, given that it predated particle spin theory, proves that particle
spin adds up to normality.
He's proficient in classical mechanics, and wants to grok quantum mechanics. In
order to do so, he needs to follow it; not just learn the current state, but see
why the current state is what it is, what experiments were performed, what ideas
were discarded. I'm not terribly helpful in this regard on account of probably
being a crank; my explanations tend to come with a large number of "buts" and
alternative explanations that are more confusing than helpful.
0leplen10y
In that case maybe chapters 1,2,4 and 6 of Volume 1 of Albert Messiah's Quantum
Mechanics? That gives you a pretty nice introduction and connects well with
classical mechanics, without relying too much on the math.
I'm sure selections from other textbooks would work as well. For future
reference, quantum mechanics is a subset of modern physics, so if you only want
quantum mechanics, you should indicate that somehow.
0Vaniver10y
It's not limited to physics, but I enjoyed The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments
[http://www.amazon.com/The-Ten-Most-Beautiful-Experiments/dp/140003423X/ref=nosim?tag=vglnk-c319-20].
It goes through ten experiments in narrative detail, explaining some
biographical details of the scientist, what the beliefs at the time were, and
what the experiment showed.
0Emile10y
I'm currently reading The Feynman's Lectures on Physics
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feynman_Lectures_on_Physics], and it pretty
much fits your description. It's not light reading, but it's well written and
goes into interesting details.
0OrphanWilde10y
It's been years since I've listened (father was a big fan of book on tapes, as
he had 2 hours drive time commute every day) to that. I'll give it a look,
thanks!
What kind of people do you all have in your heads? Do you find that having lots of people in your head (e.g. the way MoR!Harry has lots of people in his head) is helpful for making sense of the world around you and solving problems and so forth? How might I go about populating my head with more people, and what kind of people would it be useful to populate my head with?
When I'm trying to understand something, I imagine myself explaining it to my
younger sister. I started doing this when I was a kid, but it is so useful to
me, that I never stopped.
Kind of weird now that she's an adult though.
2FiftyTwo10y
I don't think I have any people in my head other than 'me.'
It takes me substantial conscious effort to emulate other minds. Is this
unusual? (I can however easily argue from premises/to conclusions I don't
believe).
2Bill_McGrath10y
I imagine defending my arguments with people that I know, debate with, and find
are good at challenging my beliefs/making me explain them - my girlfriend and my
family most usually. They're always not very good copies - I often make bad
predictions at what people will think about certain concepts - but they are
useful in getting me to examine arguments. That might be a good place to start.
1TheOtherDave10y
Ten years or so ago, I used to have more distinct personas in my head than I do
now.
Back when I did, they roughly speaking exemplified distinct emotional stances.
One was more compassionate, one more ruthless, one more frightened, one more
loving, and so forth.
This wasn't quite the way Eliezer writes Harry, but shares some key elements.
My model of what's going on, based on no reliable data, is that there's a
transition period between when a particular stance is altogether unacceptable to
the ruling coalition in my head (aka "me"), and when that stance has
more-or-less seamlessly joined that coalition (aka "I've changed"), during which
it is acceptable but not fully internalized and I therefore tag it as "someone
else".
As I say, I don't do this nearly so much anymore. That's not to say I'm
consistent; I'm not, especially. In particular, I often observe that the way I
think and feel is modified by priming effects. I think about problems
differently after spending a while reading LW, for example.
What's changed is that there's no sense of a separate identity along with that.
To put it in MoR terms: my experience is not of having a Slytherin in my head
distinct from me that sometimes thinks things, but rather of sometimes thinking
things in a more Slytheriny sort of way.
That suggests to me that maybe the difference is in how rigidly I define the
boundaries of "the sorts of things I think".
0TimS10y
I sometime find it helpful to label a particular perspective: cynical-Tim,
optimistic-Tim, etc. They are helpful for clarifying my thoughts by formalizing
a certain type of self-reflection. But they don't know more than I, so are
generally useless at brain-storming - which is how MoR!Harry seems to use them -
I've taken those discussions as literary conceit and exposition for the readers,
not models of how to be more effective.
2Qiaochu_Yuan10y
Brainstorming has at least two components: knowing things, and recognizing that
a thing you know is relevant to a situation. People inside your head might not
be helpful at the former but they might be helpful at the latter, thanks to the
brain's useful ability to mimic other brains.
I think Eliezer might have been inspired by internal family systems
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Family_Systems_Model], which means this
might be more useful at being effective than it sounds.
0Oscar_Cunningham10y
I often try to understand concepts by pretending to explain them to a historical
figure who's smart enough to understand what I'm saying but from too long ago to
know about the thing I'm trying to explain. For example I might try to explain
Newton's Laws to Aristotle.
I've recently become interested in holding some competent opinions on FAI. Trying these on for size:
FAI is like a thermostat. The thermostat does not set individual particles in motion, but measures and responds to particles moving in a particular average range. Similarly, FAI measures whether the world is a Nice Place to Live and makes corrections as needed to keep it that way.
Before we can have mature FAI, there is the initial dynamic or immature FAI. This is a program with a very well thought out, tested, reliable architecture that not only contains
I often need to retrieve something I've read on Lesswrong but search isn't always helpful. Saving everything I read would limit the scope significantly.
Use something like http://www.ibiblio.org/weidai/lesswrong_user.php?u=gwern
[http://www.ibiblio.org/weidai/lesswrong_user.php?u=gwern] and then save the
generated page?
3drethelin10y
You could click the permalink and bookmark it, or copypaste interesting comments
to a text file you can grep
I've played through Spec. Ops: the Line. Interesting though that game is, there's one aspect that I found very lacking; the intelligence and rationality of the protagonists, both instrumental and cognitive. It's not just in their poor decision-making, or their delusions, but also their complete lack of defenses in front of the horrors of war, both from them and from others. They act from the gut, they mismanage the feelings of guilt, obligation, and fear.
The game has a theme of helplessness in the face of chaos; it... (read more)
The idea is to crowdsource uses for the huge number of patents and new technologies generated by universities but never used, and awarding prizes. Seems like a really clever idea to capture low hanging fruit, and the sort of thing LW people should be quite good at,
Isn't the whole point of patents for people NOT to use them? If it's not
economical for the patent-holders to profit from them isn't it even less
economical for someone who would need to pay license fees to use them?
2pedanterrific10y
I think the idea is that it is economical, but the patent-holder simply never
thought of it.
If in Newcomb's problem you replace Omega with James Randi, suddenly everyone is a one-boxer, as we assume there is some slight of hand involved to make the money appear in the box after we have made the choice. I am starting to wonder if Newcomb's problem is just simple map and territory- do we have sufficient evidence to believe that under any circumstance where someone two-boxes, they will receive less money than a one box? If we table the how it is going on, and focus only on the testable probability of whether Randi/Omega is consistently accurate, we... (read more)
No. I think that is fighting the hypothetical.
More generally, the discipline of decision theory is not about figuring out the
right solution to a particular problem - it's about describing the properties of
decision methods that reach the right solutions to problems generally.
Newcomb's is an example of a situation where some decision methods (eg CDT)
don't make what appears to be the right choice. Either CDT is failing to make
the right choice, or we are not correctly understanding what the right choice
is. That dilemma motivates decision-theorists, not particular solutions to
particular problems.
0thescoundrel10y
That's possible, but I am not sure how I am fighting it in this case. Leave
Omega in place- why do we assume equal probability of omega guessing incorrectly
or correctly, when the hypothetical states he has guessed correctly each
previous time? If we are not assuming that, why does cdc treat each option as
equal, and then proceed to open two boxes?
I realize that decision theory is about a general approach to solving problems-
my question is, why are we not including the probability based on past
performance in our general approach to solving problems, or if we are, why are
we not doing so in this case?
Here's an anthropic question/exercise inspired by this fanfic (end of 2nd chapter specifically), I don't have the time to properly think about it but it seems like an interesting tests for current anthropic reasoning theories under esoteric/unusual conditions. The premise is as follows:
There exist a temporal beacon, acting as an anchor in time. An agent/agents may send their memories back to the anchored time, but as time goes on they may also die/be otherwise prevented from sending memories back. Every new iteration, the agent-copy at the time immediately... (read more)
I spent four hours today not working. Not doing things other than working, mind; I had the necessary files open, took notes designed to lead toward writing code, then spent most of the time simply... not working.
When it became apparent that akrasia was not going to give up, I went to sleep for four hours.
I was trying to work on a map format conversion function, with which my latest project would be able to move forward more quickly, toward my target demo date of March 2013, at which point I would attempt to secure funding and such.
I don't know if this is relevant for you, but when I'm that stuck, it's a good
idea to check on what I've been eating lately-- too much simple carbs means my
ability to take action is squelched.
0CAE_Jones10y
I've noticed the same thing, and tried to control for that here as well.
I finally managed to write it, after twelve hours of non-accomplishment. I don't
really know what changed; the first time I tried, was shortly after waking and
eating. The third four-hour period consisted of the same, though I think there
was a bigger gap between the waking and eating, and in the third four hours I
wound up spending time on the internet. The coding itself only took a few
minutes, correcting compilation errors included.
My current thoughts on this issue run as follows: it seems like smart people can
come up with various reasons not to have children (e.g. because it frees up
their finances and free time to do interesting things, or because life is
suffering). This seems dangerous. If smart people stop having children, then the
population gets dumber, and I don't want that. On the other hand, insanely smart
people really should have money and free time to do interesting things such as
save the world.
So my current ideal child-bearing policy is something like the following: dumb
people should be discouraged from having children, smart but not insanely smart
people should be encouraged to have children, and insanely smart people should
do whatever they want. (Maybe periodically donate their genetic material.)
0Viliam_Bur10y
We could encourage smart people to have more children by paying some of their
expenses, if specified conditions are met. This would be completely legal, and
within power of a few people with sufficient money.
If done by LW fans, the conditions should be written to increase the probability
that the children will become smart rationalists and contribute to the society
positively.
2FiftyTwo10y
Error, insufficient data
0Jabberslythe10y
I'd say something bad, because the money could be better spent. But if they
weren't going to do effective altruism stuff with it, it's probably just neutral
so far as I can tell.
A quick google search was surprisingly useless at answering this question. In
particular, there is no good answer on Quora
[https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-the-population-uses-Dvorak].
So, poll time:
[pollid:378]
3OrphanWilde10y
Qwerty user.
I've hit, back when ephedra was legal, more than 250 WPM; but ephedra increased
the speed at which I thought. The limiting factor for me is not the speed at
which my fingers move, but the speed at which I can articulate and finish my
thoughts. My primary issue when typing isn't the typing speed in itself, but an
extensive editing process, and the fact that I'll alter my thoughts mid-stream
and have to go back to correct my verbs to match the fact that I've altered
which subject/noun to use in the sentence.
I've tried Dvorak. It's not any harder to use than Qwerty, but I didn't find it
any easier, either. It's just different.
09eB110y
This poll is subject to self-selection problems. People who use QWERTY are less
likely to bother responding. I use Colemak, and so answered "Other."
I'm not sure that I necessarily type much faster using Colemak than I do using
QWERTY, but it is far more comfortable in the same way that lounging in a chair
feels more comfortable than sitting on a stool. Typing is effortless as compared
with typing in QWERTY because of the economy of motion it has with Colemak (and
I presume Dvorak as well). I just measured my typing speed at 78 WPM so people
can definitely achieve better typing speeds than me with QWERTY if they are
dedicated, but I still wouldn't go back to QWERTY.
0[anonymous]10y
This pretty much describes my experience with Dvorak. I'll just add that my
learning hump was a few weeks long; I'd recommend learning an alternate layout
during an extended period when your typing efficiency can afford to plummet.
0drethelin10y
I type around 100 wpm with Qwerty, which is plenty for conversations on IRC and
forum typing. I don't program or anything like that
When sitting down to design one's life happiness is a worthy goal. In today's world our online life requires a large amount of attention and as such has a large influence on us, namely our happiness.
The question I'd like to ask is whether it is more likely to make you happy if you have one queue of e-mail messages that incorporates your work and personal life.
A pro argument could be made that by incorporating them you are creating a holistic smooth lifestyle. Such an argument is similar to advocating living near your workplace and having friendships with c... (read more)
It seems to me that it would be easy enough to do experiments (maybe a month
long) to find out how you're affected. I doubt that the answer is the same for
everyone, and it might not be the same for most people at all times.
If there's a quickly changing situation at work or at home, this might mean that
you want all your email in one queue.
If work or home is resulting in highly fraught email, you might want the
non-fraught one as a refuge.
And you might have privacy concerns which mean that you absolutely don't want
the both of them in one queue.
2mapnoterritory10y
A data point from me: I was much more stressed when I had my emails joint. I'd
say that in the long run you want to have them separated even if you really
enjoy your job.
I'm thinking about writing a more comprehensive guide than Skatche's Rationalist's Guide to Psychoactive Drugs.
My analysis:
Do your posts look like solicitation to possess illegal drugs with intend to distribute? (Hint: for anything short of "Please tell me where to buy drugs," the answer is probably no).
Could a malicious prosecutor convince a grand jury to indict Eliezer (or others) as co-conspirators based on what you have written? (Hint: probably not).
In short, you are probably fine. But I am not a "power" on LW.
Just to be clear, I doubt this is Eliezer's thought process. But I suspect it is a fairly accurate heuristic for what is and isn't acceptable.
Just wanted to point out that many contributors to the site are afflicted by what I call "theoritis", a propensity to advance a theory despite being green amateurs in the subject matter, and then have the temerity to argue about it with the (clearly-non-stupid) experts in the field. The field in question can be psychology, neuroscience, physics, math, computer science, you name it.
It is rare that people consider a reverse situation first: what would I think of an amateur who argues with me in the area of my competence? For example, if you are an auto mechanic, would you take seriously someone who tells you how to diagnose and fix car issues without ever having done any repairs first? If not, why would you argue about quantum mechanics with a physicist, with a decision theorist about utility functions,or with a mathematician about first-order logic, unless that's your area of expertise? Of course, looking back it what I post about, I am no exception.
OK, I cannot bring myself to add philosophy to the list of "don't argue with the experts, learn from them" topics, but maybe it's because I don't know anything about philosophy.
Can someone who's familiar with Mencius Moldbug's writing briefly summarize his opinions? I've tried reading Unqualified Reservations but I find his writing long-winded. He also refers to a lot of background knowledge I just don't have, e.g. I don't know what I'm supposed to take away from him calling something Calvinist.
This is a tall order. Nearly everyone I talk to seems to while getting the same basic models emphasise wildly different things about them. Their updates on the matter also vary considerably everything from utterly changing their politics to just mentally noting that you can make smart arguments for positions very divergent from the modern political consensus. Lots of people dislike his verbose style.
That is certainly the reason I haven't read all of his material so far.
I think the best way to get a summary is to discuss him with people here who have been read him. They will likely learn things too. When its too political continue the discussion either in the politics thread or in private correspondence.
I'm interested and willing to engage in such discussion. If you are too I'd ask you to perhaps make a list of the posts you have read so far? For now I'm assuming you began with one of the recommended essays like Idealism Is Not Great, Divine-right monarchy for the modern secular intellectual, Formalist Manifsto. Perhaps the introductory Open Letter to Open Minded Progressives or the Gentle Introduction sequences.
To this I would add the comment history of fellow LWer Vladimir_M wh... (read more)
The few times I raised this question in the past, my comments were met with either indifference or hostility. I will try to raise it one more time in this open thread. If you think the question deserves a downvote, could you please, in addition to downvoting me, leave a brief comment explaining your rationale for doing so? I promise to upvote all comments providing such explanations.
So, here's the question: What is the reason for defining the class of beings whose volitions are to be coherently extrapolated as the class of present human beings? Why present and not also future (or past!)? Why human and not, say, mammals, males, or friends of Eliezer Yudkowsky?
Note that the question is not: Why should we value only present people? This way of framing the problem already assumes that "we" (i.e., present human beings) are the subjects whose preferences are to be accorded relevance in the process of coherent extrapolation, and that the interests of any other being (present or future, human or nonhuman) should matter only to the extent that "we" value them. What I am asking for, rather, is a justification of the assumption that only "our" preferences matter.
Luke lists "Why extrapolate the values of humans alone? What counts as a human? Do values converge if extrapolated?" as an open question in So You Want to Save the World.
Thanks!
Of course, the premise that "humans are the only beings who can reason about their own preferences" could only justify the conclusion that some human beings are special, since there are members of the human species who lack that ability. Similar objections could be raised against any other proposed candidate property. This has long been recognized by moral philosophers.
The ability to go easily from standing to sitting and from sitting to standing has a good correlation with all-causes mortality
As might be predicted, I'm putting in a little work on improving my ability at the test-- I have no idea whether this an example of Goodhart's Law.
A couple of quick points about "reflective equilibrium":
... (read more)I just recently noticed that when philosophers (and at least some LWers including Yvain) talk about "reflective equilibrium", they're (usually?) talking about a temporary state of coherence among one's considered judgement or intuitions ("There need be no assurance the reflective equilibrium is stable—we may modify it as new elements arise in our thinking"), whereas many other LWers (such as Eliezer) use it to refer to an eventual and stable state of coherence, for example after one has considered all possible moral arguments. I've personally always been assuming the latter meaning, and as a result have misinterpreted a number of posts and comments that meant to refer to the former. This seems worth pointing out in case anyone else has been similarly confused without realizing it.
I often wonder and ask others what non-trivial properties we can state about moral reasoning (i.e., besides that theoretically it must be some sort of an algorithm). One thing that I don't think we know yet is that for any given human, their moral judgments/intuitions are guaranteed to converge to some stable and cohe
Lead and crime Arguments that lead has a lot to do with crime levels, and discussion of why this has gotten so little attention.
Just to indulge in a little evolutionary psychology..... Punishing people and helping people are both strong drives, but spending a lot of money on lead abatement (the lead from gasoline is still in the soil, and it keeps coming back-- lead paint is still a problem, too) is pretty boring.
ETA: And worse, progress with lead abatement is literally invisible (you don't have a dam or a highway so it looks like you're doing something) and the good effects take some 15 or 20 years to be obvious.
The basic point is reasonable, but there are so many things that bother me about that article.
Drum's credulity varies a lot in this article. His lowest level is about where I stand. I have to wonder if that actually reflects his beliefs and the rest of it is forcing enthusiasm on himself because to reflect value rather than truth; that is, he is doing an expected value calculation. Certainly, he should be applauded for scope sensitivity.
Perhaps the biggest thing that bothers me is that Drum tries to have it both ways: small amounts of lead matter and big amounts of lead matter. It seems rather unlikely that this is true. Maybe 10μg/dL has a huge effect, but if so, I doubt that 20 has double that effect, and this ruins all the analysis of the first half of the article. This is important because there is a logical trade-off between saying that past lead reduction was useful and saying future lead reduction will be useful. In particular, Drum says that Kleiman says that if the US were to eliminate lead, it would reduce crime by 10%. Did he just make up this number, or does it come out of a model? I'd like to see the model because even if he pulled the model out of thin air, it forc... (read more)
So I'm fairly new to LessWrong, and have being going through some of the older posts, and I had some questions. Since commenting on 4 year old posts was probably unlikely to answer those questions or to generate any new discussion, I thought posting here might be more appropriate. If this is not proper community etiquette, I'm happy to be corrected.
Specifically, I'm trying to evaluate how I understand and feel about this post: The Level Above Mine
I have some very mixed feelings on this post, and the subject in general. (You might say I've noticed that I'm confused.) Sure. It's hard to evaluate reliably just how intelligent someone who is more intelligent than you is, just like a test that every student in a class aces doesn't allow you to identify which student knows the information the best, but doesn't the idea of a persistent ranking system, and the concern with it imply a belief in intelligence as a static factor? Less Wrong is a diverse community, but I was by and large under the impression that it was biased towards a growth mindset. Indeed, it seems in many ways the raison d'etre of LW relies on the assumption that it is possible to improve your intelligence. I would further... (read more)
"Intelligence" seems to consist of multiple different systems, but there are many tasks which recruit several of those systems simultaneously. That said, this doesn't exclude the possibility of a hierarchy - in some people all of those systems could be working well, in some people all of them could be working badly, and most folks would be somewhere in between. (Which would seem to match the genetic load theory of intelligence.) But of course, this is a partially ordered set rather than a pure hierarchy - different people can have the same overall score, but have different capabilities in various subtasks.
IQ in childhood is predictive of IQ scores in adulthood, but not completely reliably; adult scores are more stable. There have been many interventions which aimed to increase IQ, but so far none of them has worked out.
IQ is one of the strongest general predictors of life outcomes and work performance... but that "general" means that you can still predict performance on some specific task better via some other variable. Also, IQ is one of the best such predictors together with conscientiousness, which implies that hard work also matters a lot in life. We also kn... (read more)
What exactly is the function of the Rationality Quotes threads? They seem like nothing more that a litmus test for local orthodoxy.
LW has been loading slowly lately-- sometimes it times out. Has anyone else been having this problem?
Random idea inspired by the politics thread: Could we make a list of high quality expressions of various positions?
People who wished to better understand other views could then refer to this list for well expressed sources.
It seems like there might be some argument about who "really" understood a given point of view best, but we could resolve debates by having eg pastafarianism-mstevens for the article on pastafarianism I like best, and pastafarianism-openthreadguy for the one openthreadguy prefers.
Is rubber part of the Great Filter? This thought occurred to me while reading Charles Mann's "1493" about the biological exchange post Columbus.
Rubber was a major part of the industrial revolution (allowing insulation of electric lines, and is important in many industrial applications in preventing leaks) . Rubber only arose on a single continent for a small set of species. While synthetic rubber exists, for many purposes it isn't as of high quality as natural rubber. Moreover, having the industrial infrastructure to make synthetic rubber would be extremely difficult without modern rubber. Thus, a civilization just like ours but without rubber might not have been able to go through the industrial revolution. This situation may also be relevant to Great Filter issues in our future: if civilization collapses and rubber becomes wiped out in the collapse, is this another potential barrier to returning to a functional civilization, especially if there's less available coal and oil to make synthetic rubber easily?
Rubber doesn't sound that important to me. The Wikipedia article includes all sorts of useful bits: it only went into European use in the late 1700s, at earliest, well after most datings of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions; most rubber is now synthesized from petroleum; many uses of insulation like transoceanic telegraphs used gutta-percha which is similar but not the same as rubber (and was superior to rubber for a long time); and much use is for motor-vehicle tires, which while a key part of modern civilization, does not seem necessary for cheap long-distance transportation of either goods or humans (consider railroads).
So rubber doesn't look like a defeater. If it didn't exist, we'd have more expensive goods, we'd have considerably different transportation systems, but we'd still have modern science, we'd still have modern industry, we'd still have cheap consumer goods and international trade, and so on and so forth.
May your plans come to fruition!
Can anyone recommend a good therapist in San Francisco (or nearby) who's rationalism-friendly? I have some real problems with depression and anxiety, but the last time I tried to get help the guy told me I was paying too much attention to evidence and should think more spiritually and less rationally. Uh...huh. If you don't want to post publicly here, PM or email is fine.
Happy New Year, LWers, I'm on a 5 month vacation from uni, and don't have a job. Also, my computer was stolen in October, cutting short my progress in self-education.
Given all this free time I have now, which of these 2 options is better?
or
I don't have anything specific to offer, but (in theory) hard choices matter less. And if you literally can't decide between them, you can try flipping a coin to make the decision and as it is in the air, see which way you hope it will end up, and that should be your choice.
Aaron Swartz (aaronsw on LW) has killed himself. tech.mit.edu; news.ycombinator.com.
Watson, the IBM AI, was fed urban dictionary to increase its vocabulary / help it understand slang. It started swearing at researchers, and they were unable to teach it good manners, so they deleted the offending vocabulary from its memory and added a swear filter. IBTimes.
It seems to be common knowledge that exposure to blue light lowers melatonin and reduces sleepiness, and that we can thus sleep better if we wear orange glasses or use programs like Redshift that reduce the amount of blue light emanating from the strange glowing rectangles that follow us around everywhere.
So an idea I had is that maybe wearing blue glasses might increase alertness. I've been weirdly fatigued during the day lately, even though I've been using melatonin and redshift. But does the /absolute/ magnitude of the blue light matter, or the amount o... (read more)
Do the current moderation policies allow editors to add "next in sequence" and "previous in sequence" links to posts that don't already have such links, and are there any editors willing to do this? If not, can we change the policy to allow this? And I'd like to volunteer to add such links at least to the posts that I come across (I'm already a moderator but not an editor).
The hard problem of consciousness is starting to seem slightly less impossible to me than it used to.
Specifically, I remember reading someone's dismissal of the possibility of a reductionist explanation of consciousness, something along the lines of, "What? You think someone's going to come up with an explanation of consciousness, and everyone else will slap their forehead and say, 'Of course, that's it'"?
But that kind of argument from incredulity fails because it conflates explanation (writing down or speaking an argument that other humans will ... (read more)
The header backgrounds of Main and Discussion are similar but different. This irks me slightly.
My selfish strategy is to point it out so it irks more people and the minimal effort of changing it becomes worthwhile. Given the autism scores from the survey, I am confident that among the people reading this comment, a good part will be irked. However, I am not familiar with how changes to the design have been made in the past. I am taking this opportunity to make my first prediction on predictionbook.com
I have a query - exactly how interested are people here in improving the efficiency of their daily lives? To whit, would a discussion about efficient toilet habits be welcome or unwelcome? (No, I'm not joking, nor am I working up to a toilet joke, I'm entirely serious.)
How do you stop suicide, for individuals and or populations? I looked up antidepressants. They don't look so promising. Brief summary follows. Feel free to skip it.
All pharmacological antidepressants have scary side effects. All of them, sometimes individually or sometimes in combination, put you at risk for serotonin toxicity. Most all increase risk of sucide relative to no treatment. Tricyclic antidepressant are old, scary drugs; rarely prescribed. MAOIs kind of scary. Moclobemide is one of the newer, safer MAOIs. Weird dietary reactions. Still not as s... (read more)
John Derbyshire Wonders: Is HBD Over?
... (read more)My very first post on this site was about the mistreatment of Stephanie Grace related to the new chilling and shrinking of acceptable discourse in the late 2000s after the 90s thaw mentioned in the article.
I was impressed by the reasonableness of the discussion. And I continued to be impressed at how well LessWrong handled matters like these where for almost two years. However making the same post today on this site as a new member wouldn't be as well accepted as it was back then. If this had been the case then I would have taken the claim that this community is one "dedicated to refining the art of human rationality" with a larger grain of salt, I'm unsure if I would have lingered since I had read most of the sequences at that point but was unsure about whether to participate.
So since I'm unsure if it would be appreciated in the community had I arrived today why do I remain? Well in the mean time I've grown to greatly respect the sanity of many excellent commenter's and several people generating good articles post do post here, some have arrived after I started participating. And it is the most civil and intellectually honest internet forum I've ever seen. But despite ... (read more)
From watching you for a while, I think you're driven to off-handedly forecast doom and gloom because it suits your identity as someone strongly dissatisfied with their current world, signaling contrarianism and wallowing in dignified pessimism. And of course elitism and despair look cooler to you, and form a coherent narrative.
And I'm not going to judge this as something negative, or implore you to fix some "problem" with your personal feelings, I just suggest that you keep a skeptical perspective on your self-narrative somewhere in the back of your mind. As you surely already do.
Infographic of logical and rhetorical fallacies List organized into categories with an icon for each fallacy.
Kolmogorov complexity via xkcd
I thought I'd seen a survey result of when LWers thought the Singularity was plausible-- maybe a 50% over/under date, but I haven't been able to find it again. Does anyone remember such a thing?
Had to filter because of idiots putting in values like 2147483647 or 30 or 1800.
Robert Kurzban clarifies the concept of the EEA (mostly by quoting various excerpts from Tooby & Cosmides). I think this is an important post for people to check out, given how often the concept of EEA is referenced on this site.
... (read more)I have an important choice to make in a few months (about what type of education to pursue). I have changed my mind once already, and after hearing a presentation where the presenter clearly favored my old choice, I'm about to revert my decision - in fact, introspection tells me that my decision was already changed at some point during the presentation. In regards to my original change of mind, I may also have been affected by the friend who gave me the idea.
All of this worries me, and I've started making a list of everything I know as far as pros/cons go ... (read more)
Quick question: I want to read Godel Escher Bach, but are there any math or knowledge prerequisites to understanding it?
http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/rational_suckers-99998 Slightly intrigued by this article about Braess' paradox. I understand the paradox well enough, but am confused by how he uses it to critisize super-rationality. But mostly I was amused that in the same comment where he says, 'Hofstader's "super-rationality" concept is inconsistent and illogical, and no single respectable game theorist takes it seriously.' he links to EY's The True Prisoners' Dilemma post.
Also, do people know if that claim about game theorists is true? Would most game theorists say that they would defect against copies of themselves in a one-shot PD?
I've stumbled upon this:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/09/25/a-lunar-mountains-eternally-sunny-disposition/#.UOKtr-RX0Yg
A place on the Moon where the Sun is always visible, never sets. Well, except for an eclipse, of course.
OK, I give up. We're living in a simulation. Science can't possibly work under these conditions.
Possibly of interest
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBmJay_qdNc
Whiteboard animation of a talk by Dan Ariely about dishonesty, rationalization, the "what the hell" effect, and bankers. The visual component made it really easy for me to watch.
I am looking for defenders of Hanson's Meat is Moral. On the surface, this seems like a very compelling argument to me. (I am a vegetarian, primarily for ethical reasons, and have been for two years. At this point the thought of eating meat is quite repulsive to me, and I'm not sure I could be convinced to go back even if I were convinced it were moral.)
It struck me, however, nothing in this argument is specific to animals, and that anyone who truly believes this should also support growing people for cannibalism, as long as those lives are just barely wor... (read more)
The full sentence is
or
Fancy meat substitutes like quorn are expensive. TVP and tofu are dirt cheap. Going with vegetable sources of protein that make no attempt to directly replace meat, like rice and beans or peanut butter, is also cheap.
BEST, a Bayesian replacement for frequentist t-tests I've been using in my self-experiments, now has an online JavaScript implementation: http://www.sumsar.net/best_online/
Hey -
Bit of an unusual request: Does anybody know of any good science books for physics? Specifically, books with not only the facts about physics, but the specific reasons and experiments for which those facts are believed?
I have an associate who is interested in the subject, and completely uninterested in reading something that presents current beliefs as facts. When explaining particle spin, it then took me something like four hours to find the relevant experiments performed for proving the existence of particle spin (and I have to confess the information I was able to find on such a fundamental element of modern physics left me a bit underwhelmed).
What kind of people do you all have in your heads? Do you find that having lots of people in your head (e.g. the way MoR!Harry has lots of people in his head) is helpful for making sense of the world around you and solving problems and so forth? How might I go about populating my head with more people, and what kind of people would it be useful to populate my head with?
There seems to be a reasonable attempt to get to Mars within a decade. See the Mars One website for details.
They intend to have people on Mars by 2023 (four of them), and it seems that a self-sustaining colony will be the eventual goal.
I've recently become interested in holding some competent opinions on FAI. Trying these on for size:
... (read more)FAI is like a thermostat. The thermostat does not set individual particles in motion, but measures and responds to particles moving in a particular average range. Similarly, FAI measures whether the world is a Nice Place to Live and makes corrections as needed to keep it that way.
Before we can have mature FAI, there is the initial dynamic or immature FAI. This is a program with a very well thought out, tested, reliable architecture that not only contains
Can we have a way to save comments?
I often need to retrieve something I've read on Lesswrong but search isn't always helpful. Saving everything I read would limit the scope significantly.
Spec. Ops: The Line; a Rationalist twist?
I've played through Spec. Ops: the Line. Interesting though that game is, there's one aspect that I found very lacking; the intelligence and rationality of the protagonists, both instrumental and cognitive. It's not just in their poor decision-making, or their delusions, but also their complete lack of defenses in front of the horrors of war, both from them and from others. They act from the gut, they mismanage the feelings of guilt, obligation, and fear.
The game has a theme of helplessness in the face of chaos; it... (read more)
Little or no artificial light after dark for better sleep and mood
Anyone heard of Marblar?.
The idea is to crowdsource uses for the huge number of patents and new technologies generated by universities but never used, and awarding prizes. Seems like a really clever idea to capture low hanging fruit, and the sort of thing LW people should be quite good at,
noooooooooooooooooooo! The Singularity Institute, and FHI, jump a shark! :(
Partially examied life's critique of LessWrong
If in Newcomb's problem you replace Omega with James Randi, suddenly everyone is a one-boxer, as we assume there is some slight of hand involved to make the money appear in the box after we have made the choice. I am starting to wonder if Newcomb's problem is just simple map and territory- do we have sufficient evidence to believe that under any circumstance where someone two-boxes, they will receive less money than a one box? If we table the how it is going on, and focus only on the testable probability of whether Randi/Omega is consistently accurate, we... (read more)
Here's an anthropic question/exercise inspired by this fanfic (end of 2nd chapter specifically), I don't have the time to properly think about it but it seems like an interesting tests for current anthropic reasoning theories under esoteric/unusual conditions. The premise is as follows:
There exist a temporal beacon, acting as an anchor in time. An agent/agents may send their memories back to the anchored time, but as time goes on they may also die/be otherwise prevented from sending memories back. Every new iteration, the agent-copy at the time immediately... (read more)
Does the
quote have any origin before Final words? I searched for it but only found it in a post on heuristics that linked back there.
The quote appeals to me quite a lot, but I'd like more discussion around it and arguments for or against. (If you have any feel free to post here.)
I spent four hours today not working. Not doing things other than working, mind; I had the necessary files open, took notes designed to lead toward writing code, then spent most of the time simply... not working.
When it became apparent that akrasia was not going to give up, I went to sleep for four hours.
I was trying to work on a map format conversion function, with which my latest project would be able to move forward more quickly, toward my target demo date of March 2013, at which point I would attempt to secure funding and such.
Honestly, it's just a for... (read more)
If a middle-class couple in a first world country decide to create and raise a child, they have done
[pollid:379]
A long overdue response about "superrational" justification:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/e5d/link_reddit_help_me_find_some_peace_im_dying_young/872a
OP: http://lesswrong.com/lw/e5d/link_reddit_help_me_find_some_peace_im_dying_young/786i
What percentage of the computer-using populace, or of LWers, do you think uses the Dvorak keyboard?
When sitting down to design one's life happiness is a worthy goal. In today's world our online life requires a large amount of attention and as such has a large influence on us, namely our happiness.
The question I'd like to ask is whether it is more likely to make you happy if you have one queue of e-mail messages that incorporates your work and personal life.
A pro argument could be made that by incorporating them you are creating a holistic smooth lifestyle. Such an argument is similar to advocating living near your workplace and having friendships with c... (read more)