Open Thread, Apr. 20 - Apr. 26, 2015

I retract my Great Filter hypothesis: I realized this predicts an ever smaller population of ever smarter hominids, who still have a good quality of life, making up in smarts what they miss in numbers. But the simple fact is, hominid populations were not dwindling. They were pretty steadily taking over the planet, migrating out of Africa and all that.

Well, unless it happened before and caused the mitochondrial Eve bottleneck and then things turned different after that, but that is adding too much detail and courting a conjunction bias, so I don't propose that until more evidence is unearthed.

[-]NancyLebovitz10y110

Upvoted for updating.

[-]dxu10y230

Has anyone here ever had the "location" of their sense of self change? I ask because I've recently read that while some people feel like "they" are located in their heads, others feel like "they" are in their chests, or even feet. Furthermore, apparently some people actually "shift around", in that sometimes they feel like their sense of self is in one body part, and then it's somewhere else.

I find this really interesting because I have never had such an experience myself; I'm always "in my head", so to speak--more precisely, I feel as though "I" am located specifically at a point slightly behind my eyes. The obvious hypothesis is that my visual sense is the sense that conveys the most information (aside from touch, which isn't pinned down to a specific location), which is why I identify with it most, but the sensation of being "in my head" persists even when I have my eyes closed, which somewhat contradicts that hypothesis. Also, the fact that some people apparently don't perceive themselves in that place is more weak evidence against that hypothesis.

So, any thoughts/stories/anecdotes?

[-]Lumifer10y160

The large field of the so-called out-of-body experiences is precisely about the "location of self" moving outside of the body. I understand that specific types of meditation and mental exercises can produce this effect fairly reliably. So can some psychoactives.

the sensation of being "in my head" persists even when I have my eyes closed

Don't forget that your ears which provide you with hearing and the sense of balance and orientation are on your head, too.

5Ishaan10y

I've have had out of body experiences which match the description of other out of body experiences fairly well (for example, while I am half dreaming with eyes open during sleep paralysis) and I think that's completely different. In an out-of-body experience of the type that I have, you feel like your head and other body parts are somewhere different than where it really is.Your sense of self in relation to your body is preserved. You might still be in your head, but you imagine your head is somewhere else. (And hallucinate visual and tactile phenomenon consistent with your body being somewhere else). It's not much different drom a regular dream - instead of dreaming you're in a fantasy place, you dream you are in your room but in another location of your room. (Then you feel a sort of snap back to your true body when the dream ends) That's different from feeling a sense of self as localized somewhere other than behind the eyes.

[-]NancyLebovitz10y120

I've occasionally been able to move my sense of self downwards from my head. From what I've read, people didn't put their sense of self in their heads (it was typically in the heart or abdomen) until the importance of the brain was discovered.

9pianoforte61110y

I find this very hard to believe, given that humans are highly visual creatures and our eyes are located in our head. What time period/people had their sense of self in their heart or abdomen?

7[anonymous]10y

Whenever my nerdy/schizoid/introverted side is stronger, I feel exactly this, I am behind the eyes and staring forward, as in this state my spatial location ability, the ability to be aware in 360 degrees, is bad. But whenever this side of me retreats a bit (for example any sense of success or victory beats down the inner nerd for a while) and I come out from my inner shell to bask in the world, I feel at home in space, I get 360 degrees awareness, I know where my legs and hands are and so on, then I am less aware of where I am and more in the center of the body, perhaps chest level.

5buybuydandavis10y

Not everyone is that visually focused. I'd say I'm more focused on auditory and kinesthetic senses. I'm focused in my head, but more between the ears than behind the eyes.

2[anonymous]10y

Even moreso than visual, we are mental creatures. Ideas and culture can make all the difference. To the OP: there are times and circumstances by which I can lose much connection to the location of my body at all. Usually associated with stargazing.

0Gunnar_Zarncke10y

I also recall that the perceived location of self (soul, mind) has changed historically. Without doubt Aristotele placed it in the heart but otherwise refs are hard to find. I vaguely recall reading about it in Precht.

2Gunnar_Zarncke10y

Just tried it. I'm able to move the focus of my attention downward. Mostly the same way as I can consciously widen the angle of my attention. But I can't be sure that this implies that it is my self. I'd like to add that there are multiple self: A perceiving self (which I'm tempted to locate in the brain), a whole self which contains everything of my body that I take to be my body and then probably another self which is the space that I contain and where I do not wan't anybody to intrude on. And some more. ADDED: The widening of the angle of perception seems to be this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconcentration_of_attention

3NancyLebovitz10y

I just tried imagining being in my heart looking up at my head. I can't guarantee that I actually moved my sense of self-- maybe "I" was still in my head creating an imagined self in my heart-- but it was at least an interesting and rather cheering experience. I feel more alert.

2Gunnar_Zarncke10y

Can confirm that. I noticed that my mood subly changed in response to the moved location - presumably due to the associations these bring. This would match up with the Dalai Lama receommendations in some other comment.

2NancyLebovitz10y

For me, there was a large postural change. Oddly, moving my sense of self down meant that my head came up.

3Gunnar_Zarncke10y

Another thing I noticed: The effect feels like when directing attention toward something outside of the focus area (direction of gaze).

2[anonymous]10y

Worth noting, the Dalai Lama recommends before falling asleep focusing the sense of self in the middle of the chest at the level of the heart for deeper sleeping or in the throat for more vivid dreams. I have never tried it, but may be an experiment for people with sleep problems or trying to lucid dream.

[-][anonymous]10y100

I think this is learned - Aristotle considered it is in the heart and the brain is just about cooling blood. I think it is because we are taught from childhood to "use your head" etc.

1[anonymous]10y

Be critical of these sorts of factoids. Aristotle was a 'wise man' which in that pre-scientific time meant more seemingly-wise than actually-wise regarding most topics (although Aristotle was better than other contemporaries to be fair). You can take it as weak evidence that Aristotle claiming the self to be in the heart and not in the brain means that most people of the time thought it was in the brain not the heart, as with today. His view got recorded for history because it was contrarian.

9Houshalter10y

Is this true that most people believed the brain was where thought came from? I know the Egyptians used to rip it out because they didn't think it was important. I was literally just thinking about this the other day, about how ancient people didn't notice that people that got head injuries would change their behave or die instantly.

7[anonymous]10y

That is good evidence, on the other hand.

6Kaj_Sotala10y

I don't have a single friend whose behavior I'd have noticed changing after a head injury: the only reason I know it happens is because I've read case reports of it happening to someone. Maybe some doctor might have noticed, but then, I'd expect ancient peoples to also have fewer head injuries that were serious enough to change behavior but also mild enough to be survivable.

4Lumifer10y

People that got heart injuries tend to die instantly, too :-/ A better clue would be that you can knock someone out by hitting him on the head, but not on any other part of the body.

5[anonymous]10y

If you hit someone hard in the region of the heart, they die.

0Lumifer10y

You're missing the point. There is only one part of the body that you can apply physical shock to in order to make someone lose consciousness for a time.

7[anonymous]10y

But you could also say that death is a more permanent form of losing consciousness. To someone who doesn't know better, I could certainly see someone thinking "If something happens to the brain, you get seriously messed up. But if something happens to the heart you die, period. So perhaps the heart is more important than the brain since even the slightest injury or malfunction means instant death. Therefore, our life force must reside in the heart, not the brain." This could even lead you to thinking that the brain's purpose is in someway indirectly related to the heart, e.g. blood cooling, such that damage to the brain can cause damage to the heart, which is why some but not all damage to the brain is deadly. I get what you are saying, but I think that connection is only obvious in hindsight.

2Lumifer10y

For the purposes of this subthread we should distinguish "life force", "soul", and "mind". They were commonly thought to be separate concepts and not necessarily residing in the same body part.

4[anonymous]10y

Depends on the culture.

0VoiceOfRa10y

You can pass out from serious injuries, even if they're not in the head.

5Toggle10y

In ancient Greece, it was common knowledge that the liver was the thinking organ. This is obvious, because it is purple (the color of royalty) and triangular (mathematically and philosophically significant).

5mwengler10y

I always thought my sense of self was in my head because of where my eyes and ears were. I look out at myself and see my hands typing and my legs when I am walking and I am looking from my head. I.e., I am in my head, that is the center.

3NancyLebovitz10y

http://www.yale.edu/minddevlab/papers/starmans%26bloom.pdf?hc_location=ufi I'm not sure this is definitive, but it's at least interesting.

3Username10y

When I'm reaching into a space I can't see with my hands to say, untangle something, I definitely have more of a sense of space around my hands than my head. Closing your eyes and untying/retying your shoes right now might simulate this.

2passive_fist10y

I have had out-of-body experiences. Nothing too major; just the sensation of floating above my 'actual' body, sometimes only a few centimeters, other times a full human body length (as if I was standing on my own head). I had a burst of these out-of-body experiences around 2005-2006 (perhaps four or five in a two-year period) and have not had them since. Each episode lasted only a minute or two. Once, a friend was present, and they told me I had 'zoned out' for several minutes. It's worth mentioning don't know what caused or triggered the episodes. During the episodes my eyes were fully open and I could see what was happening in front of me. However, I wasn't focused on sensory input but was more inward-focused on my own thoughts. If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask.

2[anonymous]10y

I'm very doubtful of the significance of this because it seems unlikely that evolution would have selected for this kind of perception (there are many points of failure, not just a single one). It seems more likely that this notion only arises when you ask this very question, and that naturally, the mind is simply concerned with the position of all body parts (for safety and coordination, a.k.a. proprioception). With drugs or some dedication we appear to be able to override parts of our self-representation which are concerned with proprioception with arbitrary stories that incorporate sensations that we focus on, but it should better be something romantic ("the brain with which I think, the feet with which I feel the ground"), as people would laugh at your if you said your self is located at your anus because you defacate from it.

1jam_brand10y

I haven't had this experience myself, but apparently it's not difficult to induce: http://www.npr.org/2011/02/25/134059271/creating-the-illusion-of-a-different-body

0Elo10y

A hypothesis; if you think your sense of self is connected to the location of your eyes; try spend some time blindfolded; say 1 hour in a normal/safe environment without vision and see if it moves. It might just be in your hands as you feel your way around; or your feet as you travel around. it would seem reasonable that the focus of your interaction with the environment feels like its at one of your strongest senses but might be elsewhere for other people with different sensory wiring.

0bageldaughter10y

Cool question. I have experienced a change in 'location' of my sense of self- it 'spreads out'. It is a feeling that "I" do not reside in the particular head/body of Bageldaughter, but instead in both my head/body and the other things I happen to be keenly aware of. If I am deeply engrossed in a conversation or social activity, "I" will begin to be identified with the group of individuals as a whole. The particular intentions, thoughts or feelings that I typically associate with myself lose some of their distinguishing quality from the ones I perceive from others. There is often an accompanying "spreading-out" of "my" location in time- the round-trip time of ideas through a group is often slower than just through my own head. I will get the sense that my "current moment" spans back to a thought that originated in my friend's head one minute ago! I can invoke this sensation pretty reliably. It can be fun. I get worried when people talk about experiencing this type of thing as some kind of higher truth than normal, because it seems like a sign of mental illness that may not end well.

0[anonymous]10y

As a single data point, this is totally bizarre to me... I've never in my life felt a "sense of self" anywhere myself, but I find the idea intriguing. How do you locate yourself? Do you have to meditate or something, or are "you" just always there?

0[anonymous]10y

I commented in that thread myself and what you've said seems a worthy addition even without a disclaimer; it adds at least as much to the discussion as this post which nobody has downvoted. (of course, it might seem easy for me to say your comment should be posted if I'm not the once risking the karma punishment for doing so, so note that I'd be willing to copy/paste what you've said and take any punishment/reward for myself if you'd like)

0Ishaan10y

Try closing your eyes and navigating your home with a cane at the same time and see if it persists? Try checking if it persists when you're playing video-games? Does your sense of self go into the character? What about if you watch another person really closely? I have a shifting spatial attention that changes according to the task at hand. The only sense in which "self" is located in my "head" is that to me the world "self" partially means things like "face" and "brain" to me and so recalling the word "self" directs my spatial attention there, in the same way that "door' directs spatial attention to the door. But as I go through the day I don't think there is anything mentally privileged about the space right behind my eyes unless I specifically start thinking about "self" and what it means. I suspect spatial attention and the nature of how verbal concepts direct it is most of what is going on here.

0[anonymous]10y

As a single data point, this exactly corresponds to me. I identify with the locus of my vision. I wonder how blind, or blind-deaf people identify.

0emr10y

Maybe the head is the most vulnerable region to injury, and the locating of the self in the head reflects the need to protect the brain and other inputs (mouth, eyes, ears).

0[anonymous]10y

Besides just look at a dog or any animal really, it does everything with the head, eat, fight, hunt etc.

-2negamuhia10y

If you practice mindfulness meditation, you'll realize that your sense of self is an illusion. It's probably true that most people believe that their "self" is located in their head, but if you investigate it yourself, you'll find that there's actually no "self" at all.

[-]sixes_and_sevens10y170

I've noticed a lot of disciplines, particularly ones that sometimes have to justify their value, often make a similar claim:

"[subject] isn't just about [subject matter]: it teaches you how to think"

This raises some interesting questions:

I can believe, for example, that Art History instils in its students some useful habits of thought, but I suspect they're less general than those from a discipline with an explicit problem-solving focus. What kind of scheme could one construct to score the meta-cognitive skills learned from a particular subject?
Are there any subjects which are particularly unlikely to make this claim? Are any subjects just composed of procedural knowledge without any overarching theory, cross-domain applicability, or necessary transferable skills?
Are there particularly potent combinations of skills, or particularly useless ones? It seems that a Physics degree and a Maths degree would have similar "coverage" in terms of thinking habits they instil, but a Physics degree and a Law degree would have much broader coverage. "I have technical skills, but I also have people-skills" is a fairly standard contemporary idea. Do Physics and Law have strikingly different coverages because Physics Lawyers don't really need to exist?

[-]Viliam10y170

I would interpret that claim as: "we may be practically useless, but we are still fucking high-status!" :D

6sixes_and_sevens10y

The claim isn't just made with arguably useless disciplines, though. Many people argue (quite rightly, IMO) that programming doesn't just teach you to command machines to do your bidding, but also instils powerful thinking tools. So even if kids don't grow up to be software developers, it's still valuable for them to learn programming. Similar arguments could be made for law or finance.

7JQuinton10y

Slightly off topic, but I both program and play guitar and for the longest time I was wondering why I was getting an overwhelming feeling of the two bleeding into each other. While playing guitar, it would "feel" like I was also coding. Eventually I figured out that the common thread is probably the general task of algorithm optimization. There's no way for me to tell if programming made me a better guitar player or vice versa.

0ChristianKl10y

Could you make that argument for finance? I see that learning finance is very useful for personal financial decisions but how does it provide use beyond that?

5sixes_and_sevens10y

Obviously "finance" is a very wide area that covers a lot of different ideas, but my observation of "finance people" is that they have a powerful mental vocabulary for thinking about what kind of a value something is and what can be done with it over time. For example: the difference between stock values and flow values, expected return of a portfolio of assets, the leveraging of credit, the mitigation of risk. More generally, they seem to be able to look at some number assigned to a thing, and observe that it's morphologically similar to some other number assigned to some different thing, and understand what sort of things can happen to both those numbers, and what sort of process is required to turn one sort of number into another sort of number.

0mwengler10y

Finance is about marshalling resources and using them to efficiently create a lot more wealth. Since wealth is at minimum the thing that keeps us from working 24/7 on getting enough food to eat, and generally gives us the kind of free time we need to invent AIs, post on message boards, have hobbies, and try to get the hot chicks, it can be quite useful even for a non-wall-street worker. Think of finance as the thing that keeps you from carrying a balance on your credit card or buying lottery tickets as investments.

0ChristianKl10y

That's not an argument for the claim that finance skills instill thinking tools that are useful in other domains. It's just an argument that finance skills are useful.

[-]James_Ernest10y140

Physics lawyers definitely need to exist. I would strongly like to get an injunction against the laws of thermodynamics.

5Lumifer10y

Seems to me that "teaches you how to think" does not necessarily imply instilling habits of thought. I would interpret that (say, in the context of Art History) as: * Supplying you with some maps of unknown to you territory * Giving you some tools to explore and map the territory further * Pointing you towards some well-worn tracks as "default" ways of thinking about the issues involved The habits of thought are not involved in all of this -- it's more of a broadening-your-horizons exercise.

1Good_Burning_Plastic10y

Most (~70%) of the times it is a euphemism for "it's useless, but we like it so we still want to use taxpayers' money to teach it". (If people really cared about teaching people how to think, they'd teach cognitive psychology, probability and statistics, game theory, and the like, not stuff like Latin.)

7Kaj_Sotala10y

I expect you're typical-minding here. I know enough linguistics enthusiasts who feel that learning new languages makes you think in new ways that I believe that to be their genuine experience. Also because I personally find a slight difference in the way I think in different languages, though not as pronounced as those people. Presumably they, being familiar with the thought-changing effects of Latin but not having felt the language-changing effects of cognitive psychology etc. (either because of not having studied those topics enough, or because of not having a mind whose thought patterns would be strongly affected by the study of them), would likewise say "if people really cared about teaching people how to think, they'd teach Latin and not stuff like cognitive psychology". Just like you say what you say, either because of not having studied Latin enough, or because of not having a mind whose thought patterns would be strongly affected by the study of languages.

5Good_Burning_Plastic10y

Sure, but the same happens with living languages as well. I studied Latin for five years. Sure, it is possible that if I had studied it longer it would have changed my thought patterns more, but surely there are cheaper ways of doing that. (Even the first couple months of studying linear algebra affected me more, but I don't expect that to apply to everybody so I didn't list it upthread.)

1ChristianKl10y

A while ago I read that a betting firm rather hires physics or math people than people with degrees in statistics because the statistics folks to often think that real world data is supposed to follow a normal distribution like the textbook example they faced in university. Outside of specific statistics programs a lot of times statistics classes lead to students simply memorizing recipes and not really developing a good statistical intuition. Teaching statistics sounds often much better in the abstract than in practice.

5Good_Burning_Plastic10y

That's a good point, but on the other hand, even thinking that everything is a Gaussian would be a vast improvement over thinking that everything is a Dirac delta and it is therefore not ludicrous to speculate about why some politician's approval rating went down from 42.8% last week to 42.3% today when both figures come from surveys with a sample size of 1600.

0ChristianKl10y

A well trained mathematician or physicist who never took a formal course on statistics likely isn't going to make that error, just as a well trained statistician isn't going to make that error. I would think that the mathematician is more likely to get this right than the medical doctor who got statistics lessons at med school.

3Lumifer10y

That is, ahem, bullshit. Stupid undergrads might think so for a short while, "statistics folks" do not.

3mwengler10y

Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) was a hedge fund that lost billions of dollars because its founders, including nobel prize winners, assumed 1) things that have been uncorrelated for a while will remain uncorrelated, and 2) ridiculously low probabilities of failure calculated from assumptions that events are distributed normally actually apply to analyzing the likelihood of various disastrous investment strategies failing. That is, LTCM reported results as if something which is seen from data to be normal between +/- 2*sigma will be reliably normal out to 3, 4, 5, and 6 sigma. Yes, there WERE people who knew LTCM were morons. But there were plenty who didn't, including nobel prize winners with PhDs. It really happened and it still really happens.

7Lumifer10y

I am familiar with LTCM and how it crashed and burned. I don't think that people who ran it were morons or that they assumed returns will be normally distributed. LTCM's blowup is a prime example of "Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" (which should be an interesting lesson for LW people who are convinced markets are efficient). LTCM failed when its convergence trades (which did NOT assume things will be uncorrelated or that returns will be Gaussian) diverged instead and LTCM could not meet margin calls. Hindsight vision makes everything easy. Perhaps you'd like to point out today some obvious to you morons who didn't blow up yet but certainly will?

2mwengler10y

An LTCM investor letter, quoted here, says And of course, it proceeded to lose essentially all of its portfolio after operating for just a handful of years. Now if in fact you are correct and the LTCM'ers did understand things might be correlated and that tail probabilities would not be gaussian, how do you imagine they even made a calculation like that?

1Lumifer10y

Can we get a bit more specific than waving around marketing materials? Precisely which things turned out to be correlated that LTCM people assumed to be uncorrelated and precisely the returns on which positions the LTCM people assumed to be Gaussian when in fact they were not? Or are you critiquing the VAR approach to risk management in general? There is a lot to critique, certainly, but would you care to suggest some adequate replacements?

1sixes_and_sevens10y

"Statisticians think everything is normally distributed" seems to be one of those weirdly enduring myths. I'd love to know how it gets propagated.

9gjm10y

I strongly suspect that a large part of its recent popularity is because in the recent CDO-driven crash it suited the interests of the (influential) people whose decisions were actually responsible to spread the idea that the problem was that those silly geeky quants didn't understand that everything isn't uncorrelated Gaussians, ha ha ha.

1Lumifer10y

Someone was overly impressed by the Central Limit Theorem... X-)

0Emile10y

I can't say I ran into it before (whereas "economists think humans are all rational self-interested agents", jeez...)

0Kindly10y

Given that I remember spending a year of AP statistics only doing calculations with things we assumed to be normally distributed, it's not an unreasonable objection to at least some forms of teaching statistics. Hopefully people with statistics degrees move beyond that stage, though.

-4IlyaShpitser10y

I read that Germans are often anti-semites, is it true?

0Elo10y

I suspect that with "mastery of a skill" comes an ability to understand "mastery", in that - on a variation of man-with-a-hammer syndrome; holding the mastery of one area will help you better understand the direction to head in when mastering other areas, and learning in other areas. to me the line now reads; "mastery of [subject] isn't just about [subject matter]: mastery teaches you how to think" where can vary; the significance of what people are trying to convey is maybe not in the but in the experience of learning.

[-]SanguineEmpiricist10y140

If any one has sleep apnea with or without snoring or even a hint of being too tired during the day please fix it. My life is profoundly better and I have access to a life i did not know was possible, no more sadness or depression whatsoever.

My life is 20-40x better I feel like I have woken up in another world that was shut off from me for the first 20ish years of my lifespan.

8passive_fist10y

On that note, I've heard a lot about how addressing sleep apnea is great but how do you check if you have it in the first place (or, at least, to the extent that would warrant seeing a doctor about it)? 'Being tired during the day' doesn't seem like a strong self-diagnostic criterion.

2SanguineEmpiricist10y

sleeping on my side worked for me, if i am not disciplined i mess it up, the expectation is so large that perhaps a mouthguard or machine is worth it. If you wake up at night but cannot remember or remember falling then I now that is a good sign. google sleep apnea/shallow breathing while sleeping. I'm afraid I cannot do too much more to help with my current knowledge.

0Elo10y

I tried a lot of sleep tracking with apps and wearables. (fitbit, basis, sleep as android) I currently use both fitbit and basis, fitbit visualises long term sleep better, basis visualises a single night better. These devices showed me what my sleep looks like, and further what my "normal sleep pattern" looks like. while I have good sleep now; if I stop having good sleep; I will have the graphs to prove it.

[-]advancedatheist10y140

The big cryonics story of the week, about the Thai toddler Matheryn Naovaratpong:

The Girl Who Would Live Forever

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-girl-who-would-live-forever

Two-year-old cryogenically frozen by parents

http://www.cnet.com/news/two-year-old-cryogenically-frozen-by-parents/

The girl who could come back from the dead: Toddler who died from a brain tumour is FROZEN by parents who hope she can one day be revived by medical advances

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3043272/The-girl-come-dead-Toddler-died-brain-tumour-FROZEN-parents-hope-one-day-revived-medical-advances.html#ixzz3XoNKDW00

PZ Myers weighs in. I guess he got bored with inflicting damage on communion wafers and accusing Michael Shermer of sexually assaulting women, and now he wants to pick on cryonicists:

How to live forever

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/04/16/how-to-live-forever/

[-]Viliam10y170

PZ Myers weighs in. I guess he got bored with inflicting damage on communion wafers and accusing Michael Shermer of sexually assaulting women, and now he wants to pick on cryonicists:

I am oscillating between "calm down, politics is the mindkiller" and "if the iron is hot, I want to believe it is hot".

Is there any hope that if we bite our collective tongues and not feed the trolls, they will get bored and find a new victim? I am afraid that when the troll has sufficient power and allies in online media, the old advice of not feeding it is just not available anymore; whatever you do, someone else on the planet will feed the troll anyway.

It almost makes me think these guys are maximizing evil, but then I realize they are simply maximizing money, and the laws of the universe say that you generate most screaming when you poke in the place it hurts. It is nothing personal; it's just that your tears are an important component in paperclip production. The Clippy does not hate you, it just calmly explores the places where your density of sensory receptors is highest. It could just as well try to make you laugh, but that is a less productive thing to do with humans.

[-][anonymous]10y150

Money? I think PZ types are mainly looking for narcissistic supply. Also, there was an article either here on on SSC about how people sometimes don't want to be high status just feel high status, cannot find it anymore, but seems relevant.

EDIT found it I think this is what is going on here, not really money.

5Viliam10y

Yes, the link explains why some people may be obsessed by some ideas -- because they generate feeling of status in their heads. Now other question is why this idea instead of some other idea. For example, you are looking for a "bad guy" whose reputation you can smash online, thus generating heroic feelings in yourself... so, from all the available options, why choose cryonics? Well, I guess it is somehow similar to the previous "bad guys", so whatever enemy-detection algorithm chose them, it also chose cryonics. atheists... video game fans... cryonicists... -- complete the pattern What do these have in common? * They are groups of people considered weird by most of the society. * They are predominantly male groups (which may be merely a consequence of the previous fact, but it takes 0.1 second to spin it as sexism). * Those people care about their group strongly, but outsiders do not empathise with them. For a clickbait website, this is a perfect target. All they have to do is write: "Your way of life makes you hate women, therefore your way of life should be regulated by well-meaning outsiders. What is our proof for this? We have found this one women who feels uncomfortable with you. And since you have a minority of women, it must be a general rule. Now stop resisting and start obeying your new overlords!" Well, for me the interesting question here is who are the next likely targets. Who else fits this pattern? Can we recognize them before they are attacked? And assuming we care about them, can we use this knowledge to somehow protect them? My suspicion is that "rationalist" and "effective altruists" do fit this pattern; they were just not given sufficiently high priority yet. It may depend on how large wave of hate the attack on cryonicists can generate. (There is always a risk of choosing too weird group, so the outsiders will be too indifferent to join the wave.) Of course there is always the chance that I am pattern-matching here too much. My only de

[-]JoshuaZ10y180

I don't think this is what is going here at all. The pattern match that is going on is cryonics and fringe science or pseudoscientific ideas that sound like they are promising things they cannot deliver. This much more about PZ thinking of himself as a skeptic and having just enough biology background to think he can comment on any biology related issue.

2satt10y

Yeah. The parent & sibling comments here got me curious about exactly what PZ wrote, and whether it'd be a transparently politically motivated fulmination against cryonicists. But the post, as far as I can see, is just an unfavourable comparison of cryonics to ancient mummification, and Myers calling cryonicists frauds who practice "ritual" & "psuedo-scientific alteration of [a] corpse", frauds sometimes defended with "the transhumanist technofetishist version of Pascal’s Wager". Strong stuff, but I don't see anything in the post about partisan politics, race, nerd culture (unless one counts "transhumanist technofetishist" as a dog-whistle meant to slam nerds in general...?), or sexism or feminism or gender (well, except the reference to the frozen girl as a "girl"). Ctrl-F-ing for "Myers" doesn't reveal anything along those lines either. I see several comments in the political categories I mentioned but they weren't posted by PZ or cheered by PZ, so I'm a bit surprised by the comments here focusing on PZ to impute political motives to him and psychoanalyze him. PZ's post all but says he's slamming cryonicists because (to his mind) they're crooks & quacks. (Based on the reference to "tortur[ing] cadavers", maybe there's a purity-violation ick-reaction too. That's still pretty distant from the motivations people are speculating about here.) I don't understand why I'd need a special explanation for that, over & above the more common reasons why people tend to scoff at cryonics (absurdity heuristic, plus scepticism about future technological trends w.r.t. brain preservation & re-instantiation, plus over-generalization from everyday experience of how freezing affects food and the like).

3[anonymous]10y

The funny part is PZ being a nerdy white male atheist scientist so basically the perfect target for this. Could this partially be a preventive action i.e. if I shoot at my group, perhaps people don't notice I am one of them?

1Viliam10y

In debates I read about similar people, "projection" is a word mentioned repeatedly. I would also suspect "reaction formation" (known as "the lady doth protest too much" outside of psychoanalysis) to play an important role. That means, I think there is more than merely strategically shooting at one's own phenotype to draw attention away from one's own person. If drawing attention away would be the only goal, it would make more sense to try draw attention away towards some other group, also an easy target, but not including me. For example, white male nerds could shoot at white male jocks, since it is only being white and male that is considered a bad thing in certain circles. Similarly, white male atheists could shoot at white male Christians. So there must be some additional explanation. (Not everyone is like this. There are also people who do not shoot at their own group, but at a different group, or at least at a much larger supergroup so that their own group gets a smaller fraction of attention. For example white male non-nerds shooting at white male nerds, or rich white people putting huge emphasis on whiteness and maleness and maybe also cissexuality but never ever mentioning class privilege. (Which is rather ironic, considering that the whole privileged/oppressed framwork was stolen from Marx. Here, Marx would be an example of a rich white male shooting at rich white males.)) So I guess in a way these people are trying to shoot at themselves -- on some metaphorical level. It's like they perceive something undesirable in themselves... then use typical mind fallacy to generalize it to their whole group (because being a member of a sinful group is less painful than being a sinful individual in otherwise mostly healthy group) ... and then try to atone for their sins by attacking all the other members of their group (because it is less painful than trying to improve oneself). That is, on some level they are sincerely fighting against something they consider evi

[-]dxu10y110

"calm down, politics is the mindkiller"

Agreed. Of course, calming down is hard enough by itself without people seemingly actively trying to prevent you from calming down--people like, say, the commenters in that particular blog post. (Major kudos to DataPacRat for managing to stay calm while he/she was being accused of believing in "godbots"; I would not have been able to do the same.) I'm inclined to apply the principle of charity here along with Hanlon's Razor to conclude that they're not actually deliberately trying to piss you off... but God, it sure feels like it sometimes.

[-]RowanE10y100

Well, hats off to /u/DataPacRat for fighting the good fight in that comment section. I suspect most of the thread is people who just came in to post their little dig at the weird meat-popsicle cultists and then move on, so I'm not sure if he's achieving much, but if nothing else he's stopped me from feeling I need to go in there and join the fray to say what he ended up saying, except less well.

7dxu10y

Lots of people employing the weirdness heuristic, as expected. Oh, and of course David Gerard's over there too. sigh

7skeptical_lurker10y

PZ Myers: Here's a fun topic of conversation - if I happen across PZ Myers, and he's having a heart attack, should I feel any obligation to perform CPR?

[-]advancedatheist10y110

Does anyone really believe that they’d feel any obligation to resurrect them, even if they could?

Yes, if they have cryonics or its successor technologies for themselves and they can reason about consequences carefully. If you have an injury or pathology in the 24th Century that the health care providers don't know how to treat, you could go into brain preservation to see if the health care providers in, say, the 26th Century would know how to help you. Some of those health care professionals active in the 26th Century might have been born in the 20th or 21st Centuries and have gone through a round or two of brain preservation themselves, and they entered the practice of medicine in the 26th Century as one of their new careers. "Hey, I know this guy. He helped to resuscitate me in 2327. I owe him so I'll return the favor."

9dxu10y

I get that Myers' article pisses a lot of people here off (myself included), but let's try to refrain from mean-spirited-ness, neh? Mind-killing happens readily enough by itself without people helping the process along.

9skeptical_lurker10y

Normally, yes I think it wise to refrain from mean-spirited-ness. But when someone writes a hit piece against the parents of a recently deceased toddler because they dared to try to save her life in a weird way, well, in this case I'm going to make an exception.

1ChristianKl10y

The fact that his behavior emotionally triggers you is no reason to engage in bad and unproductive behavior yourself. Even if it's "justified".

7[anonymous]10y

I think you are greatly missing the point. If you want to be effective in the world, sometimes that involves being politically smart. And sometimes the politically smart thing to do is a show of force. You should not jump from emotion straight to action. But sometimes after examining the evidence and weighing the possibilities, the best response is an angry toned rejection.

6ChristianKl10y

I have nothing against calculated actions that shows force. Against a blogger who in the business of getting page views by stirring up controversy being mean-spirited isn't showing force.

1JoshuaZ10y

He's not saying in that quote that they shouldn't feel an obligation, he's making a point focusing on doubting whether they'd want to resurrect them. I think they very likely would, and PZ is ignoring the entire first-in/last-out which cryonics plans on using to further encourage people to resurrect, but it helps to actually focus on what his criticism is.

0Jiro10y

If you can perform CPR with little cost to you, you should. If performing CPR has a large cost to you, or if there are so many people that need CPR that performing CPR on all of them is, in total, a large cost to you, you are not obliged to do anything. How easy would it be for the future civilization to resurrect the brains?

9skeptical_lurker10y

I'm pretty sure cost of resurrection isn't his true rejection, his true rejection is more like 'point and laugh at weirdos'. I'm guessing that any civilisation capable of resurrecting cryonics patients would be post-scarcity, and cost would therefore be irrelivent. But even if I am wrong on this point, well, to continue his mummified Egyptians analogy, can you imagine how much money you would make selling the TV rights to the first ever resurrection of a Pharaoh? Additionally, don't Alcor, and many individuals, have funds set up to cover the cost of resurrection? I understand that there are plausible arguments against cryonics, such as technological feasibility. But the "why bother saving people?" argument is both stupid and repugnant.

[-]The_Duck10y110

I'm pretty sure cost of resurrection isn't his true rejection, his true rejection is more like 'point and laugh at weirdos'.

Also for a number of commenters in the linked thread, the true rejection seems to be, "By freezing yourself you are claiming that you deserve something no one else gets, in this case immortality."

8skeptical_lurker10y

This is almost identical to the argument against free-market medical care "Why should you get better treatment just because you can afford it?". I wonder how many commentators would agree with both arguments.

-2Lumifer10y

Heh. Any true-believer Christian would laugh at cryonics and point out that the way to everlasting life is much simpler -- just accept Jesus... X-D Oh, and any true-believer Buddhist would be confused as to why would you want to linger on your way to enlightenment.

5Jiro10y

I find the idea of "true rejection" over-used. Many people, for many things, have more than one reason to reject them, and none of those reasons is the reason. That would only make money because it hasn't been done before. Each successive Pharaoh resurrection would make less money. A question asking what a future civilization would do about a frozen head implies asking what they would do for a typical frozen head. Being one of the first frozen heads they run across is very atypical, and carries a higher profit only because it is atypical.

8skeptical_lurker10y

It might also cost less money, because most of the cost might be R&D to work out how to resurrect someone, after which resurrecting each person is easy. Continuing the Egypt analogy, each additional Egyptian artefact is less interesting than the previous one, yet people continued digging them up rather than just digging up the first few.

3dxu10y

This does not seem psychologically realistic. Humans aren't built to arrive at conclusions through rational evaluation of multiple independent lines of evidence; rather, they choose their answer in advance for some reason or other (usually "this is weird" or "my tribe rejects this"), and only then begin cherry-picking arguments to support their conclusion. This is true, but ignores skeptical_lurker's point that any civilization capable of resurrection is likely to be post-scarcity.

2Jiro10y

That seems to have an implied "... so every time I argue with a human, I should never assume that the human has more than one reason for something". I hope you can see how that will go seriously wrong when the human actually does have more than one reason, and particularly on LW-style topics. If the civilization is post-scarcity, then making money from TV rights to the first Pharaoh is not useful as an analogy; the future civilization never does one thing because it gets them more of something than another thing does.

4dxu10y

Absolute claims are almost never correct. Replace the "never" in your statement with "usually not, especially when discussing politically charged, or better yet, weird-sounding topics" and you've got yourself a deal.

2Jiro10y

You're refusing to address someone's stated argument, and in fact, are saying something that is nonresponsive if he means what he is actually saying. Yes, sometimes you have to do that. But making it your default behavior when addressing all people in the real world who don't agree with you is a bad idea.

3dxu10y

Who said anything about making it your default behavior? There's a difference between "many" and "most", and an even bigger difference between "many" and "all".

0Jiro10y

Okay, change that statement to include the word "most". Making it the default behavior for when addressing most people who don't agree with you is still a bad idea.

3[anonymous]10y

Yes, that's why Alcor is so expensive.

1RowanE10y

Presumably, the ease will change with time, tending easier until ceilings of possible economic and technological progress are reached. If it takes centuries for the procedure of resurrecting the cryopreserved to go from "experimental and expensive" to "cheap and routine", the old 21st-century cryo-patients can wait, they aren't getting any deader.

1[anonymous]10y

Is it wrong that I'm most saddened that they tore apart her brain for a year chasing that tumor, before they did the sensible thing and let her be cryopreserved? Not that this is an open and shut case at all, but we need laws on the books regarding elective cryopreservation in the case of brain degenerative disease.

-2witness10y

You know what he does for a living don't you?

[-]advancedatheist10y140

"Evolutionary developmental biology," which means Myers tries to understand biology that happens on its own. The cryonics idea, by contrast, involves trying to get human biology, and specifically the human brain, to do something it didn't evolve to do, namely, enter a state of preservation through vitrification. Basically Myers doesn't think about cryonics as an engineering challenge because he doesn't have experience or talent with that sort of practical problem solving.

Myers invokes his credentials as a neuroscientist to criticize cryonics; but then another neuroscientist, Kenneth Hayworth, started the Brain Preservation Foundation because he thinks that cryonics deserves a second look due to advances in organ vitrification. I would like to see these two go head to head (yeah, I see the pun potential there) in a debate.

-6Salemicus10y

[-]NancyLebovitz10y130

I'm inclined to think that policy towards illegal immigration is a result of incoherent moral standards-- some combination of "discourage strangers from showing up in large numbers" and "rescue harmless people who are close to death".

[-]Viliam10y330

It reminds me of a thought experiment I have read somewhere. Imagine that there are many people in the world who are dying from starvation. They would happily agree to be your slaves, if you feed them. There is too many of them and they are not qualified for modern economy; if you would give them more than a minimum, there wouldn't be enough for you to have a decent life. Imagine you only have the following three options:

A) Share everything with them. Everyone will live, but everyone will be rather poor.
B) Accept them as your slaves, in exchange for food and shelter. Everyone will live, you will keep your quality of life, but there will be a huge inequality.
C) Refuse to interact with them. You will keep your quality of life, but they will die from starvation.

If we order these options by altruism, which is how those poor people would see them, we get A > B > C. It would be best to make those poor people our equals, but even helping them survive as slaves is better than letting them die.

If we order these options by pure egoism, we get B > C > A. Having slaves would be a cool improvement, keeping status quo is acceptable.

But in the typical decision process, we refuse B to signal that we are not complete egoists, and refuse A because we are not really that much altruistic. Thus what remains is the option C... which paradoxically both altruists and egoists consider to be worse than B (and the altruists also worse than A).

[-]NancyLebovitz10y200

The thing is, I don't think a lot of illegal immigrants are unqualified for a modern economy. If they were unqualified, there wouldn't be so many laws trying to keep them from working.

6Viliam10y

Great point! Although hypotetically here could be two independent interests that just happen to be strategically aligned. Some people want to stop unqualified immigrants, other people want to stop qualified immigrants who would compete with them on the job market. Also there are of course concerns other than economical, such as people bringing with them some nasty habits from their cultures. These were not included in the thought experiment, which perhaps makes it irrelevant for real-world situations. Also having slaves has the risk of those slaves rebelling later.

5NancyLebovitz10y

I wasn't kidding when I said one of the motivations was a desire to not live with large numbers of strangers. One issue might be cognitive load-- the strangers have unfamiliar customs (is a sincere apology accompanied by a smile or a serious expression?) and possibly an unfamiliar language. As far as I can tell, the economic side of not wanting immigrants is a sort of merchantilism-- a belief that all that matters is where the money is, so that new people showing up and getting paid for work just seems like money getting drained away. Weirdly, rich people who show up and spend money without working locally may be disliked, but they don't seem to be as hated as poor people who do useful work. I don't think it's just about competition for jobs.

4NancyLebovitz10y

https://hbr.org/2015/04/emotional-intelligence-doesnt-translate-across-borders A few examples of people from different cultures misreading each other.

1DanielLC10y

Even without that, there's a lot of issues about giving them welfare. We could allow them entry as second-class citizens who have no minimum wage or access to welfare but still need to pay taxes. We'll avoid having to give them welfare, but we'll need to admit that we have second-class citizens, which is something we pretend to be against.

2ChristianKl10y

It also means that the people who are currently working at minimum wage jobs are likely to lose their jobs to the cheaper competition.

0[anonymous]10y

That depends on the degree to which the two groups compete for jobs. There are also positive secondary effects which reduce the impact (immigration reduces inflation and increases the overall market size). The employment impact of immigration on low-skilled workers is somewhere between slightly negative and slightly positive.

[-][anonymous]10y130

Slavery is a non sequitur here. Under the circumstances you might suggest "I will pay you below minimum wage" or "I will pay you nothing, but provide housing on my plantation where you work." But so long as they have the right to walk away at any time its not slavery, and there's nothing in the setup that justifies that loss of liberty. Your hypothetical situation is an argument against the minimum wage, not pro-slavery.

6mwengler10y

I don't think policy is a result of incoherent moral standards. I think it is a result of different people having different moral ideas that they consider important. So some subset of people are concerned enough to be active in discouraging strangers from showing up, and some other subset of people are concerned with rescuing people who are close to death, and the political/legislative system cobbles these things together into something which can pass a vote. I suspect CEV is unlikely. That is, if one were to extrapolate volition from bunches of different people, the result would not be coherent, it would be incoherent. Because people have different and inconsistent volitions.

3JoshuaZ10y

I'd say inconsistent rather than incoherent moral standards, or different moral standards at tension. Honestly, this seems like a "well, duh" sort of thing. One just needs to read the rhetoric from say both sides of the US immigration debate, or both sides of the discussions in Europe about refugees from North Africa to see this pretty clearly.

2passive_fist10y

Probably but I'm not sure why that should be surprising; most moral standards we hold are inconsistent. So what would distinguish policy towards illegal immigration from other policies? In a previous open thread, I brought up the theory of right-wing authoritarianism, which purports that conservative attitudes may be partially a defensive response to perception of threat. That offers one way of looking at policy towards illegal immigration: Maybe some people really do view immigrants as a threat to their way of living. So from that perspective they would not view them as harmless. It may be simpler than that, though. Maybe 'rescue harmless people who are close to death' is not a strong value (or a value at all) for some. Certainly we know that psychopaths do not hold this as a value, and may even consider it an anti-value -- they would enjoy increasing the number of harmless people who are close to death. I'm sure this is not true for the majority of human beings, however.

[-]DanielLC10y100

I've come up with an interesting thought experiment I call oracle mugging.

An oracle comes up to you and tells you that either you will give them a thousand dollars or you will die in the next week. They refuse to tell you which. They have done this many times, and everyone has either given them money or died. The oracle isn't threatening you. They just go around and find people who will either give them money or die in the near future, and tell them that.

Should you pay the oracle? Why or why not?

[-]cousin_it10y140

I wouldn't pay. Let's convert it to a mundane psychological experiment, by replacing precognition with precommitment (which is the right approach according to UDT):

1) Ten participants sign up for the experiment.

2) One participant is randomly chosen to be the "loser". We know who the "loser" is, but don't tell the participants.

3) Also, each participant tells us in private whether they are a "payer" or "non-payer".

4) Each "payer" who is not a "loser" pays $10 (this corresponds to paying the oracle and staying alive). The "loser" pays $100 (this corresponds to dying). Everyone else pays nothing.

It seems obvious that you should choose to be a "non-payer", right?

In terms of the original problem, if you're the kind of person who would pay the oracle if you were approached, you're causing the oracle to approach you, so you're paying for nothing.

0ChristianKl10y

I don't think that it's specified in the OP that the oracle considers it likely that you will pay or indeed approaches people based on their likelihood to pay.

0Elo10y

but it is! it really depends on how many levels of "If I know that the oracle knows that I know" you want to go into. Because if the oracle is able to factor in your decision to pay or not in whether they tell you that you should pay then thats a super-duper-oracle. Also paying and dying is permissable and not great either.

4TheOtherDave10y

So, as in most such problems, there's an important difference between the epistemological question ("should I pay, given what I know?") and the more fundamental question ("should I pay, supposing this description is accurate?"). Between expected value and actual value, in other words. It's easy to get those confused, and my intuitions about one muddy my thinking about the other, so I like to think about them separately. WRT the epistemological question, that's hard to answer without a lot of information about how likely I consider accurate oracular ability, how confident I am that the examples of accurate prediction I'm aware of are a representative sample, etc. etc. etc., all of which I think is both uncontroversial and uninteresting. Vaguely approximating all of that stuff I conclude that I shouldn't pay the oracle, because I'm not justified in being more confident that the situation really is as the oracle describes it, than that the oracle is misrepresenting the situation in some important way. My expected value of this deal in the real world is negative. WRT the fundamental question... of course, you leave a lot of details unspecified, but I don't want to fight the hypothetical here, so I'm assuming that the "overall jist" of your description applies: I'm paying $1K for QALYs I would not have had access to without the oracle's offer. That's a good deal for me; I'm inclined to take it. (Though I might try to negotiate the price down.) The knock-on effect is that I encourage the oracle to keep making this offer... but that's good too; I want the oracle to keep making the offer. QALYs for everyone! So, yes, I should pay the oracle, though I should also implement decision procedures that will lead me to not pay the oracle.

2Vaniver10y

I think a key part of the question, as I see it, is to formalize the difference between treatment effects and selection effects (in the context where your actions might reflect a selection effect, and we can't make the normally reasonable assumption that our actions result in treatment effects). An oracle could look into the future, find a list of people who will die in the next week, and a list of people who would pay them $1000 if presented with this prompt, and present the prompt to the exclusive or of those two lists. This doesn't give anyone QALYs they wouldn't have had otherwise. And so I find my intuitions are guided mostly by the identification of the prompter as an "oracle" instead of a "wizard" or "witch." Oracle implies selection effect; wizard or witch implies treatment effect.

2TheOtherDave10y

Leaving aside lexical questions about the connotations of the word "oracle", I certainly agree that if the entity's accuracy represents a selection effect, then my reasoning doesn't hold. Indeed, I at least intended to say as much explicitly ("I don't want to fight the hypothetical here, so I'm assuming that the "overall jist" of your description applies: I'm paying $1K for QALYs I would not have had access to without the oracle's offer." ) in my comment. That said, it's entirely possible that I misread what the point of DanielLC's hypothetical was.

0cousin_it10y

DanielLC said: I interpreted that as a selection effect, so my answer recommended not paying. Now I realize that it may not be entirely a selection effect. Maybe the oracle is also finding people whose life would be saved by making them $1000 poorer, for various exotic reasons. But if the probability of that is small enough, my answer stays the same.

0TheOtherDave10y

Right. Your reading is entirely sensible, and more likely in "the real world" (by which I mean something not-well-thought-through about how it's easier to implement the original description as a selection effect), I merely chose to bypass that reading and go with what I suspected (perhaps incorrectly) the OP actually had in mind.

2Shmi10y

Clearly you give them money, since otherwise you are almost certain to die. It's just one-boxing in disguise.

2Lumifer10y

It's just a version of the Newcomb's problem with negative outcomes instead of positive. Presumably the oracle makes its offer only to people from two classes: (1) Those who will die next week AND will not pay $1000; and (2) Those who will pay $1000 AND not die next week. Since it's the oracle it can identify these people and make its offer only to them. If you got this offer, you are in one of the above classes but you "don't know" in which.

0[anonymous]10y

I agree. Paying $1000 is akin to one-boxing and not paying is like two-boxing.

0nshepperd9y

This is essentially just another version of the smoking lesion problem, in that there is no connection, causal or otherwise, beween the thing you care about and the action you take. Your decision theory has no specific effect on your likelyhood of dying, that being determined entirely by environmental factors that do not even attempt to predict you. All you are paying for is to determine whether or not you get a visit from the oracle. ETA: Here's a UDT game tree (see here for an explanation of the format) of this problem, under the assumption that oracle visits everyone meeting his criteria, and uses exclusive-or: ETA2: More explanation: the colours are states of knowledge. Blue = oracle asks for money, Orange = they leave you alone. Let's say the odds of being healthy are α. If you Pay the expected reward is α(-1000) + (1-α) DEATH; if you Don't Pay the expected reward is α 0 + (1-α) DEATH. Clearly (under UDT) paying is worse by a term of -1000α.

0Jiro10y

Variation on this: An oracle comes up to you and tells you that you will give it a thousand dollars. This oracle has done this many times and every time it has told people this the people have given the oracle a thousand dollars. This oracle, like the other one, isn''t threatening you. It just goes around finding people who will give it money. Should you give the oracle money?

1Elo10y

I believe in testing rules and breaking things. So no. Don't give and see what happens.

0nshepperd9y

Under UDT: pay iff you need human contact so much that you'd spend $1000 to be visited by a weird oracle who goes around posing strange decision theory dilemmas.

0Unknowns10y

No, but you will.

-1DanielLC10y

Every decision theory I throw at it says either don't pay or Error: Divide By Zero. Is this a trick question?

0Jiro10y

I don't know what "error: divide by zero" means in this context. Could you please clarify? (If you're suggesting that the problem is ill-posed under some decision theories because the question assumes that it is possible to make a choice but the oracle's ability to predict you means you cannot really choose, how doesn't that apply to the original problem?)

0gjm10y

You want to figure out whether to do as the oracle asks or not. To do this, you would like to predict what will happen in each case. But you have no evidence concerning the case where you don't do as it asks, because so far everyone has obliged. So, e.g., Pr(something good happens | decline oracle's request) has Pr(decline oracle's request) in the denominator, and that's zero.

0Jiro10y

I think you can say something similar about the original problem. P(decline oracle's request) can (for the new problem) also be phrased as P(oracle is wrong). And P(oracle is wrong) is zero in both problems; there's no evidence in either the original problem or the new problem concerning the case where the oracle is wrong. Of course, the usual Newcomb arguments apply about why you shouldn't consider the case where the oracle is wrong, but they don't distinguish the problems.

0Lumifer10y

That's a forward-looking probability and is certainly not zero. In the absence of evidence you just fall back on your prior.

0DanielLC10y

In order to get Error: Divide By Zero, you have to be using a particular kind of decision theory and assume P(decline oracle's request) = 0.

0Jiro10y

Your prior for what?

0Lumifer10y

For the baseline, "underlying" probability of the oracle's request being declined. Roughly speaking, if you have never seen X happen, it does not mean that X will never happen (=has a probability of zero). This assumes you're a passive observer, by the way -- if you are actively making a decision whether to accept or decline the request you can't apply Bayesian probabilities to your own actions.

0Houshalter10y

I really want to say that you should pay. Obviously you should precommit to not paying if you can, and then the oracle will never visit you to begin with unless you are about to die anyway. But if you can't do that, and the oracle shows up at your door, you have a choice to pay and live or not pay and die. Again, obviously it's better to not pay and then you never end up in this situation in the first place. But when it actually happens and you have to sit down and choose between paying it to go away or dying, I would choose to pay it. It's all well and good to say that some decision theory results in optimal outcomes. It's another to actually implement it in yourself. To make sure every counter factual version of yourself makes the globally optimal choice, even if there is a huge cost to some of them.

0tut10y

The traditional LW solution to this is that you precommit once and for all to this: Whenever I find myself in a situation where I wish that I had committed to acting in accordance with a rule R I will act in accordance with R.

2Houshalter10y

That's great to say, but much harder to actually do. For example, if Omega pays $1,000 to people or asks them to commit suicide. But it only asks people it knows100% will not do it, otherwise it gives them the money. The best strategy is to precommit to suicide if Omega asks. But if Omega does ask, I doubt most lesswrongers would actually go through with it.

1Kindly10y

So the standard formulation of a Newcomb-like paradox continues to work if you assume that Omega has a merely 99% accuracy. Your formulation, however, doesn't work that way. If you precommit to suicide when Omega asks, but Omega is sometimes wrong, then you commit suicide with 1% probability (in exchange for having $990 expected winnings). If you don't precommit, then with a 1% chance you might get $1000 for free. In most cases, the second option is better. Thus, the suicide strategy requires very strong faith in Omega, which is hard to imagine in practice. Even if Omega actually is infallible, it's hard to imagine evidence extraordinary enough to convince us that Omega is sufficiently infallible. (I think I am willing to bite the suicide bullet as long as we're clear that I would require truly extraordinary evidence.)

-2Houshalter10y

Please Don't Fight the Hypothetical. I agree with you if you are only 99% sure, but the premise is that you know Omega is right with certainty. Obviously that is implausible, but so is the entire situation with an omniscient being asking people to commit suicide, or oracles that can predict if you will die. But if you like you can have a lesser cost, like Omega asking you to pay $10,000. Or some amount of money significant enough to seriously consider just giving away.

3Kindly10y

I did say what I would do, given the premise that I know Omega is right with certainty. Perhaps I was insufficiently clear about this? I am not trying to fight the hypothetical, I am trying to explain why one's intuition cannot resist fighting it. This makes the answer I give seem unintuitive.

0tut10y

Pay iff you would pay $1000 to avoid learning of your death the last week of your life. If you don't pay the oracle only shows up when you are about to die anyway.

-2ChristianKl10y

Give them the thousand dollars under eyes of police who then imprison the oracle for blackmail so that you get your 1000 dollars back.

1LawrenceC10y

And then 7 days later, you die.

0ChristianKl10y

The prediction was only about giving the money. Not about it permanently staying with the oracle.

0DanielLC10y

Doesn't blackmail require that the oracle threaten you somehow? They're just predicting the future. They will not take any action against you regardless of whether or not you pay. On the other hand, if oracles did this a lot and people payed them frequently, it probably would become illegal.

0ChristianKl10y

I think the average court of law would interpret: "Give me thousand dollars or you will die in the next week" as a threat.

-2VoiceOfRa10y

So, do the cops regularly lock up cancer doctors?

0Kindly10y

You're saying that it's common knowledge that the oracle is, in fact, predicting the future; is this part of the thought experiment? If so, there's another issue. Presumably I wouldn't be giving the oracle $1000 if the oracle hadn't approached me first; it's only a true prediction of the future because it was made. In a world where actual predictions of the future are common, there should be laws against this, similar to laws against blackmail (even though it's not blackmail). (I obviously hand over the $1000 first, before trying to appeal to the law.)

2DanielLC10y

Why? People who use the strategy of always paying don't live any longer than people who use the strategy of never paying. They also save money and get to find out a week in advance if they'd die so they can get their affairs in order.

0Kindly10y

That wasn't obvious to me. It's certainly false that "people who use the strategy of always paying have the same odds of losing $1000 as people who use the strategy of never paying". This means that the oracle's prediction takes its own effect into account. When asking about my future, the oracle doesn't ask "Will Kindly give me $1000 or die in the next week?" but "If hearing a prophecy about it, will Kindly give me $1000 or die in the next week?" Hearing the prediction certainly changes the odds that the first clause will come true; it's not obvious to me (and may not be obvious to the oracle, either) that it doesn't change the odds of the second clause. It's true that if I precommit to the strategy of not giving money in this specific case, then as long as many other people do not so precommit, I'm probably safe. But if nobody gives the oracle money, the oracle probably just switches to a different strategy that some people are vulnerable to. There is certainly some prophecy-driven exploit that the oracle can use that will succeed against me; it's just a question of whether that strategy is sufficiently general that an oracle will use it on people. Unless an oracle is out to get me in particular.

0Epictetus10y

Defenses along those lines have been tried a long time ago: "Well, your honor, I never actually said I'd burn down his house. I only said it would be a shame if his house happened to burn down." An oracle that did it often enough would (in the US) probably be brought up on racketeering charges and sent to prison for a long time.

0DanielLC10y

If you say it's a shame if someone's house burned down, you're implying that you'd burn it down. A reasonable person could conclude that you'd burn it down. The oracle makes it quite clear that they are not going to kill you. You may or may not give them money, and then they will leave. You'll only die if that would have happened anyway.

2Epictetus10y

The point is that a statement does not have to be a literal threat for a reasonable person to interpret it thus. The oracle's statement is logically equivalent to "If you don't pay me in the next week, then you will die". The oracle isn't actually saying that they'll kill you, but phrased that way any reasonable person would interpret it as a threat.

2Lumifer10y

How about doctor's "If you don't go to a hospital and have a surgery, then you will die" -- is this a threat?

2ChristianKl10y

If the doctor would say: "I'm the only doctor who can help you with your problem and if you go to another doctor and ask him to operate you, you will die" he's likely outside of medical ethics. But let's see we don't have a doctor but have a person who claims to be a witch. She goes around and diagnoses that people have a "dark curse" and unless the person pays them money to remove the curse the person will die. If that's someone's business model I don't think our courts would like kindly on that person.

0polymathwannabe10y

The OP's description doesn't seem to imply that refusal to pay causes the death. The oracle is simply saying that there are two possible futures: in one, the victim pays the money and survives; in the other one, the victim doesn't pay and doesn't survive. I guess the difference in our interpretations is what we take the "and" to mean; you seem to see it as denoting causation, whereas I'd say it's merely denoting temporal consecution.

0TheOtherDave10y

I think you mean "that there are only two possible futures." Which leaves me puzzled as to your point. If I am confident that there are only two possible futures, one where I pay and live, and one where I don't pay and die, how is that different from being confident that paying causes me to live, or from being confident that not-paying causes me to die? Those just seem like three different ways of describing the same situation to me.

0ChristianKl10y

I'm rephrasing Lumifers example to a person who doesn't work within the traditionally accepted medical field. It makes no statement about how the causation works. That means a person who doesn't know how the causation works can not sure that the oracle doesn't cause it in some way.

-2VoiceOfRa10y

Or the only doctor with access to the right experimental procedure.

0Epictetus10y

Here's where jurisprudence gets fun. The doctor is asking for money (payment for surgery) and saying the patient will die otherwise. So, what's the difference? Visiting a doctor means you're consulting a medical expert and asking for an expert opinion. Properly speaking, the doctor is giving a prognosis that you're likely to die, and is suggesting a course of treatment. Statements like that are part of the medical profession and can be reasonably expected in the course of ordinary medical consultation. Now, if the doctor is abusing his position and trying to frighten the patient into paying for unnecessary treatment, then he could be charged with fraud. If he's threatening to kill the patient unless money is paid, then that's extortion. The main point is that the doctor is an expert, is being asked for an expert opinion, has grounds for predicting the death of the patient, and is recommending a course of action that would prevent that death. In the oracle's case, asking for money and predicting the death have no clear relationship, The oracle isn't receiving payment for services rendered. The sole purpose of the oracle's statement is to frighten someone else into giving the oracle money while getting nothing in return. If the oracle decided to, say, charge money upfront to tell people when they would die, that's a different story. I'm sure someone can discover a loophole in the above. I'm a layman, not a jurist. However, even in real life there are people who get paid good money to find and exploit loopholes.

0Lumifer10y

You added a lot of assumptions. Let me rephrase the example to sharpen the point: You're walking down the street when an unknown woman approaches you. She looks at you carefully and says "I'm a doctor and you are ill. The illness is fatal unless you immediately go a hospital and have operation/treatment X. If you don't do this, you will die." Then she turns around and walks away. Did she just threaten you?

0DanielLC10y

I'd say that the main point is that the doctor pays a cost to help you, where a blackmailer would pay a cost to hurt you. If you never pay, the blackmailer has no incentive to hurt you and you'd be fine, but the doctor would have no incentive to help you and you'd die.

0DanielLC10y

If a reasonable person interpreted as a threat, then for all intents and purposes, the question would be if you would pay someone $1000 if they threaten to kill you. I don't care how the oracle phrases his statement, or how he proves that he's an oracle. Whatever he does, it makes it clear to a reasonable person that it's not a threat.

0drethelin10y

It doesn't matter if they're in fact just predicting, since you can easily convince the cops that they're threatening.

0DanielLC10y

They convinced you they were predicting. Presumably they can convince the cops as well. Perhaps it's well-established that they're an oracle after they made all that money on the stock market. Then they went into oracle mugging after it was declared insider trading.

0ChristianKl10y

The fact that the oracle made money on the stock market in no way implies that there wasn't a causal relationship between the actions of the oracle and future price movements.

[-][anonymous]10y80

Thought experiment. You are doing a really boring job you dislike like data entry, but so well paid you don't want to leave it. You cannot automate it. You cannot work from home. You sit in the office 8 hours Thankfully it does not take 8 hours, you can do it in 5 and then browse the web or something.

What do you do? Trying to spend the other 3 meaningfully like studying with Anki, and trying to find challenging games in the actual job part are two obvious ones, what else? E.g. would you listen to ebooks while doing it? What else?

[-]wadavis10y140

Plan A: Change your environment; spend three hours a day preparing a proposal for management/ownership to work as a contractor paid by entry opposed to an employee paid by the hour. Find the relevant tax and overhead savings to make this a mutually beneficial arrangement. Find out who in management/ownership can approve your proposal and who it just creates headaches for, buy beer for both.

I understand that goes against the spirit of your question, that your work environment may be to rigid, management that could approve the proposal are out of reach of the data entry staff, or one of many other arguments, but 60 hours a month is a large amount of time, it is shocking what could be done.

Plan B: Now on to things I've actually done in that situation; spend 60 hours preparing a bulletproof argument/presentation for a raise, spend 60 hours learning how to create better resumes, spend 60 hours learning how to job hunt without a resume (handshakes and recommendations), spend 60 hours job hunting, and last on the list spend the time on entertainment so that you are mentally recharged to make the most of your personal time.

5polymathwannabe10y

I can't concentrate if the words I'm hearing are not the ones I'm typing. Ebooks would be a terrible distraction for me during data entry. Music without lyrics would be better. During blank minutes at a call center I used to work at, I made slow progress at writing a novel. It was made more enjoyable by the quirk that my writing flows better with pen and paper.

4mwengler10y

Post to lesswrong.com.

4Shmi10y

Tried something like that. Was unable to do anything productive after 5 hours without a real deadline.

4Viliam10y

Could you hire a cheap online personal assistant that would give you the deadlines? Like, you would make a plans for the whole week in advance, give those plans to the assistant, and then during the week the assistant would role-play being your manager. (Using another person as proxy for your planning self.)

4Shmi10y

If it doesn't feel real, it's easy to ignore.

1Viliam10y

I would start programming mobile games, and would hope to make money from them. If I don't succeed, at least I had a hobby, and maybe can use the experience to get a more interesting job later. If I do succeed, then I do not have to solve the problem of boring job anymore. That would require sufficient freedom to spend those 3 hours not just programming, but also painting pictures, editing 3D models, editing levels, and testing the game on the phone. Okay, hypothetically that is not necessary; there can be some parts that I have to do at home. But it would be much more convenient if I could do whatever is necessary for the game immediately when I need it. Or, if I wouldn't have a specific plan, I would just learn random stuff from online universities. I enjoy learning, so I wouldn't necessarily care about how useful are those lessons. I would imagine that some part of that would be useful somehow later, if nothing else, then for impressing people. Someone who is a buddhist could use those three hours to meditate daily, and achieve nirvana in a few years, while keeping a well-paying job. Also, being a buddhist could help with the feelings of boredom from the job. ;)

6ChristianKl10y

That's not how it works.

8Viliam10y

You are right, Buddha himself had to quit his job before he could achieve enlightenment.

0Elo10y

upvoted for the determined, "thats not how nirvana works".