Open Thread, September 23-29, 2013

Welcome to Urbit

One of Urbit’s problems is that we don’t exactly have a word for what Urbit is. If there is such a word, it somehow means both “operating system” and “network protocol,” while somehow also implying “functional” and “deterministic.”

Not only is there no such word, it’s not even clear there should be one. And if there was, could we even hear it? As Wittgenstein said: if a lion could talk, we would not understand him. But heck, let’s try anyway.

I love the smell of Moldbug in the morning.

I love those dream posts in the open threads.

I used to get a lot of people telling me I was an atheist because I either didn't want there to be a god or because I wanted the universe to be logical (granted, I do want that, but they meant it in the pejorative Vulcan-y sense). I eventually shut them up with "who doesn't want to believe they're going to heaven?" but it took me a while to come up with that one.

I don't understand it either, but this is a thing people say a lot.

This seems pretty close to a Bulverism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism

>implying Bulverism

I've heard it called "psychologizing".

If someone else accuses you of engaging in motivated reasoning that's ad hominem.

Against Intellectual Monopoly converted me from being strongly in favor of modern copyright to strongly against it.

The Feynman Lectures on Computation did this for me by grounding computability theory in physics.

I'm not sure if it is possible or has a high chance of success to give someone a book in the hope of provoking a viewquake. Most people would detect being influenced. Compare with trying to give people the bible to convert them doesn't work either even though it also could provoke a viewquake - after all the bible is also much different from other common literature. To actually provoke a viewquake it must be a missing piece either connecting pieces or buildig on them and thus causing an aha moment. And the trouble is: This depends critically on your prior knowledge thus not every book will work on everyone.

Compare with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development

If someone will actually get through the density of the text, moldbug has been known to provoke a few viewquakes.

I know of a few former-theists whose atheist tipping point was reading Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine. I recall being fairly heavily influenced by this myself when I first read it (about twelve years ago, when it was one of only a small handful of popular books on memetics), but suspect I might find it a bit tiresome and erroneous if I were to re-read it.

A microecon textbook given to a reflective person.

The Sequences.

Are there any particular books that have caused you personally to experience a viewquake?

"1493" and "The Better Angels of Our Nature"

Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky.

Reading Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations prompted the biggest viewquake I've ever experienced, substantially changing my conception of what a properly naturalistic worldview looks like, especially the role of normativity therein. I'm not sure I'd assign it a high probability of provoking a viewquake in others, though, given his aphoristic and often frustratingly opaque style. I think it worked for me because I already had vague misgivings about my prior worldview that I was having trouble nailing down, and the book helped bring these apprehensions into focus.

A more concrete scientific viewquake: reading Jaynes, especially his work on statistical mechanics, completely altered my approach to my Ph.D. dissertation (and also, incidentally, led me to LW).

The Anti-Christ would be my #1 pick, for both versions of the question. Stumbling on Happiness is a good second choice though.

The biggest world-shattering book for me was the classic, Engines of Creation by K. Eric Drexler. I was just 21 and the book had a large impact on me. Nowadays though, the ideas in the book are pretty mainstream, so I don't think it would have the same effect for a millenial.

An iteration of this class was one of the high points of the May 2013 CFAR retreat for me. It was extraordinarily helpful in helping me get over various aversions, be less reactive and more agenty about my actions, and generally enjoy life more. For instance, I gained the ability to enjoy, or substantially increased my enjoyment of, several activities I didn't particularly like, including:

• improv games
• additional types of social dance
• conversations with strangers
• public speaking

It also helped substantially with CFAR's comfort zone expansion exercises. Highly recommended.

Would you be able to post a summary for people unable to attend? I find the topic very interesting, but habitually reside in a different continent,.

I just started rereading Science and Sanity and maybe the project will develop into a lesswrong post.

When it comes to Korzybski being difficult to read I think it's because the idea he advocates are complex.

As he writes himself:

For those other readers who insist on translating the new terms with new structural implications into their old habitual language, and choose to retain the old terms with old structural implications and old semanatic relations this work will not appear simple.

It's a bit like learning a foreign language in a foreign language. In some sense that seems necessary. A lot of dumb down elements of General Semantics made it into popular culture but the core seems to be intrinsicly hard.

Non-violent communication is the intellectual heir of E-prime which was the heir of semantic concerns in General Semantics. Recent books on the subject are well reviewed. It is a useful tool in communicating across large value rifts.

Probably these people use a definition of theism that says that a god has to be an ontologically basic entity in an absolute sense, not just relative to our universe. If our simulators are complex entities that have evolved naturally in their physical universe (or are simulated in turn by a higher level) then they don't count as gods by this definition.

Calling myself an agnostic would put me in an empirical cluster with people who think gods worthy of worship might exist, and possibly have some vague hope for an afterlife (though I know not all agnostics believe these things). I do not think of potential matrix overlords the way people think of the things they connect to the words "God" and "gods". I think of them as "those bastards that (might) have us all trapped in a zoo." And if they existed, I wouldn't expect them to have (real) magic powers, nor to be the creators of a real universe, just a zoo that looks like one. I do not think that animals trapped in a zoo with enclosure walls painted with trees and such to look like a real forest should think of zookeepers as gods, even if they have effectively created the animals' world, and may have created the animals themselves (through artificial breeding, or even cloning), and I think that is basically analogous to what our position would be if the simulation hypothesis was correct.

Theism usually involves God as the explanation of why the world exists, and why we are conscious. In usual simulation scenarios, a world happens through physics and natural selection etc. And then a copy of part of that world is made. Yes, the copying process "made" the copy, but most explanations of how the copied world is the way it is (from the point of view of those in it) still has to do with physics, natural selection, etc. and not the copying process.

In other words, "who designed our world?" is more relevant than "who created our world?".

I'm reminded of the perennial objections to Torture vs Dust Specks to the effect that torture is a sacred anti-value which simply cannot be evaluated on the same axis as non-torture punishments (such as jail time, presumably), regardless of the severities involved..

There's a post on Overcoming Bias about this here.

I would much rather...

Don't look at it from the perp point of view, look at it from an average-middle-class-dude or a suburban-soccer-mom point of view.

If there's a guy who, say, committed a robbery in your neighborhood, physical punishment may or may not deter him from future robberies. You don't know and in the meantime he's still around. But if that guy gets sent to prison, the state guarantees that he will not be around for a fairly long time.

That is the major advantage of prisons over fines and/or physical punishments.

Dunno about that -- peak-end rule.

It's not about harshness but about the concept of the important for physical integrity for human dignity.

This is a game I like to play with myself actually. I sit and observe my surroundings, consciously removing labels from the objects in my visual field until it's clear that everything is one big continuity of atoms. It's fun and brings back for me that childlike feeling of seeing thing for the first time again. I have to be in the right frame of mind to do it and it's much harder when in a man-made environment (where everything is an object) than in nature.

But I've never had a word for it before, so thanks.

If you haven't yet read Neal Stephenson's Zodiac, I recommend it.

As an aside, I find it convenient to think of a significant part of environmentalism as purely religious movement.

how future movements might tackle other potential existential risks, specifically UFAI

Is there anything you've learnt that's particular about groups trying to tackle x-risk in particular? If not, you could just make a post describing what you've learnt about groups that challenge big problems. Generality at no extra cost.

Yes. As I see, a lot of Greens are Misanthropes. Do you cover this aspect?

Wikipedia seems close enough to what you're describing ... and improving Wikipedia (plenty of science pages are flagged as "this is hard to understand for non-specialists) seems like the easiest way to move it closer.

It could be worth doing but it's a hard task.

Take a subject like evolution.The fact that evolution happens is setteled science for a long time. On the other hand if you take a school book on evolution that was written 30 years ago there a good chance that it has examples of how one species is related to another species that got overturned when we got genome data.

People used to respect Science, as an abstract mysterious force which Scientists could augur and even use to invoke the odd miracle. In a way, people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw Scientists in a similar way to how pre-Christian Europe saw priests; you need one on hand when you make a decision, and contradict them at your peril, but ultimately they're advisers rather than leaders.

That attitude is mostly gone now, but it could be useful to bring it back. Ordinary people are not going to provide useful scientific insights or otherwise helpfully (1) participate in the process, so keeping them out of the way and deferential is going to be more valuable then trying to involve them. There seems to be a J curve between 100% scientific literacy and old-school Science-ism, and it seems to me at least that climbing back up to an elitist position is the option most likely to actually work in our lifetimes.

1. If anything, the more easily lay people can lay their hands on scientific materials the worse the situation is; the Dunning-Kruger effect and a lack of actual scientific training / mental ability means that laypeople are almost certain to misinterpret what they read in ways which disagree with the actual scientific consensus. Just look at the huge backlash against biology and psychometry these days; most of the people I've argued with in person or online have no actual qualifications but feel entitled to opinions on the issues because they stumbled through an article on pub-med and know the word methodology.

Imagine, you have something like this back in 1900.

Do you remember how settled was that the Universe is slowing down at its expansion? The only thing wasn't settled was the slowing rate - is it big enough to stop one day and reverse. 20 years ago.

Just now, they discuss Big Bang. Settled long ago.

I am not saying your idea isn't good. It is, but the controversy is imminent.

What would this do that Wikipedia and encyclopaedias don't do?

My friend did an extremely simple Unity game (with nice graphics and music), added AdMob advertising, put an Android version as a free game on Google Play, and gets about 20 dollars a month (during the recent half of the year, and the number seems stable). That's the only data point I have.

I suppose your game would be better (but I don't really know what the players value), so... let's make a wild guess that it could make 50 dollars a month during the following 5 years. That's like 5×12×50 = 3000 dollars total. Maybe! If you need 9 months to finish it (beware the planning fallacy!), it is 300 dollars per month of work. I don't know how much time during the month you would spend coding. Discounting for the planning fallacy and the uncertainty of outcome, let's make it, say, 100 dollars per month of work.

Of course, besides money you get some additional benefits such as feeling good and having a nice item in your portfolio (probably irrelevant for most jobs you consider).

Jon's what I call normal-smart. He spends most of his time watching TV, mainly US news programs, and they're quite destructive to rational thinking, even if the purpose is for comedic fodder and to discover hypocrisy. He's very tech averse, letting the guests he has on the show come in with information he might use, trusting (quite good) intuition to fit things into reality. As such, I like to use him as an example of what more normal people feel about tech / geek issues.

Every time he has one of these debates, I really want to sit down as moderator so I can translate each side, since they often talk past each other. Alas, it's a very time restricted format, and I've only seen him fact check on the fly once (Google, Wikipedia).

The number thing was at least partly a joke, along the lines of "bigger than 10 doesn't make much sense to me" - scope insensitivity humor. I've done similar before.

I'm beginning to think that we shouldn't be surprised by reasonably intelligent atheists having reasonable thoughts about x-risk. Both of the two reasonably intelligent, non-LWer atheists I talked to in the past few weeks about LW issues agreed with everything I said on them and said that it all seemed sensible and non-surprising. Most LW users started out as reasonably intelligent atheists. Where did the "zomg everyone is so dumb and only LW can think" meme originate from, exactly? Is there any hard data on this topic?

Contra dance. Closely correlated with LessWrong; also correlated with nerdy people in general. I would recommend it to most LessWrongers; it's good even for people who are not generally good at dancing, or who have problems interacting socially. (Perhaps even especially for those people; I think of it as a 'gateway dance.')

Other types of dance, like swing dance. Also some correlation with LessWrong, somewhat recommended but this depends more on your tastes. Generally has a higher barrier to entry than contra dancing.

My local hackerspace, and broadly the US and European hacker communities. This is mainly because information security is my primary focus, but I find myself happier interacting with hackers because in general they tend not only to be highly outcome-oriented (i.e., inherently consequentialist), but also pragmatic about it: as the saying goes, there's no arguing with a root shell. (Modulo bikeshedding, but this seems to be more of a failure mode of subgroups that don't strive to avoid that problem.) The hacker community is also where I learned to think of communities in terms of design patterns; it's one of the few groups I've encountered so far that puts effort into that sort of community self-evaluation. Mostly it helps me because it's a place where I feel welcome, where other people see value in the goals I want to achieve and are working toward compatible goals. I'd encourage any instrumental rationalist with an interest in software engineering, and especially security, to visit a hackerspace or attend a hacker conference.

Until recently I was also involved in the "liberation technology" activism community, but ultimately found it toxic and left. I'm still too close to that situation to evaluate it fairly, but a lot of the toxicity had to do with identity politics and status games getting in the way of accomplishing anything of lasting value. (I'm also dissatisfied with the degree to which activism in general fixates on removing existing structures rather than replacing them with better ones, but again, too close to evaluate fairly.)

The only two communities I am currently active in right now (other than career/family communities) are Less Wrong and Unitarian Universalism.

In the past had a D&D group that I participated very actively in. I think that the people I played D&D with in high school had a very big and positive effect on my development.

I think that I would like to and am likely to develop a local community of people to play strategy board games in the future.

Do you mean online communities or IRL?

I'm active in UK competitive debating (mainly real life, but I also run some discussion forums).

[Good question. Its interesting to see the variety of people's responses.]

I'm pretty active in lots of social activist/environmentalist/anarchist groups. I sometimes join protests for recreational reasons.

I'm active in Toastmasters and martial arts (mostly the community of my specify school). Overall Toastmasters seems pretty effective at its stated goals of improving public speaking and leadership skills. Its also fun (at least for me). Additionally, both force me to actually interact with other people, which is nice and not something that the rest of my live provides.

I'm active in (though not really a member of) the "left-libertarian" community, associated with places like Center for a Stateless Society (though I myself am not an anarchist) and Bleeding Heart Libertarians. I'm also a frequent reader and occasional commenter on EconLog.

Less related, I'm an active poster on GameFAQs and on a message board centered around the Heroes of Might and Magic game series.

Orthogonal to LW, I'm very active in my university's Greek community, serving as VP of a fraternity. It's been excellent social training and I've had a very positive experience.

The UU "Seven Principles and Purposes" seem like a piece of virtue ethics. If you don't mind this particular brand of it, then why not.

From Wikipedia:

"We come from One origin, we are headed to One destiny, but we cannot know completely what these are, so we are to focus on making this life better for all of us, and we use reason when we can, to find our way. "

If you discard the ornamental fluff in this "philosophy" and "focus on making this life better for all of us", then it's as good a guideline as any.

I'm not really invested enough in the question to debate it, but I know plenty of atheists (both with and without children) who are active members of UU churches because they get more of the things they value from a social community there than they do anywhere else, and this seems entirely sensible to me. What effects on your future children are you concerned about?

However, I am trying to decide if my morality has a problem with allying myself this community.

What's your moral system? If you get value from the community it's probably more moral to focus your efforts on donating more for bed nets than on the effect that you have on the world through being a member of that community.

A city of ~200,000 people if you include the outlying rural areas, in which you can go from the several block wide downtown to farmland in 4-5 miles in the proper directions. Fifteen minutes from another city of 60,000 which is very much a state college town. Forty minutes away from a city of nearly 500,000 people.

Granted the city of ~200,000 has a major university and a number of biotech companies.

Its somewhat inaccurate in my case (I live in the suburbs of a semi-major city).

A lot of the CFAR/MIRI core lives in Berkeley.

I think living in a big city is the standard that most people here consider normal. It's like living in the first world. We know that there are people from India who visit but we still see being from the first world as normal.

When you have the choice between living in a place with memetic diversity or not living in such a place the choice seems obvious.

Preliminaries: Make sure you can touch type, being able to hit 50+ wpm without sweat makes it a lot easier to whip up a quick single-screen test program to check up something. Learn a text editor with good macro capabilities, like Vim or Emacs, so you can do repetitive structural editing of text files without having to do every step by hand. Get into the general habit of thinking that whenever you find yourself doing several repetitive steps by hand, something is wrong and you should look into ways to automate the loop.

Working with large, established code bases, like Vladimir_Nesov suggested, is what you'll probably end up doing a lot as a working programmer. Better get used to it. There are many big open-source projects you can try to contribute to.

Unit tests, test-driven development. You want the computer to test as much of the program as possible. Also look into the major unit testing frameworks for whatever language you're working on.

Build systems, rigging up a complex project to build with a single command line command. Also look into build servers, nightly builds and the works. A real-world software project will want a server that automatically builds the latest version of the software every night and makes noise to the people responsible if it won't build, or if an unit test fails.

Oh, and you'll want to know a proper command line for that. So when learning Linux, try to do your stuff in the command line instead of sticking to the GUI. Figure out where the plaintext configuration files driving whatever programs you use live and how to edit them. Become suspicious about software that doesn't provide plaintext config files. Learn about shell scripting and onliners, and what the big deal in Unix about piping output from one program to the next is.

Git is awesome. After you've figured out how to use it on your own projects, look into how teams use it. Know what people are talking about when they talk about a Git workflow. Maybe check out Gerrit for a collaborative environment for developing with Git. Also check out how bug tracking systems and how those can tie into the version control.

For the social side of software development, Peopleware is the classic book. Producing Open Source Software is also good.

Know some full stack of web development. If you want a web domain running a neat webapp, how would you go about getting the domain, arranging for the hosting, installing the necessary software on the computer, setting up the web framework and generating the pages that do the neat thing? Can you do this by rolling your own minimal web server instead of Apache and your own minimal web framework instead of whatever out of the box solution you'd use? Then learn a bit about the out of the box web server and web framework solutions.

Have a basic idea about the JavaScript ecosystem for frontend web development.

Look into cloud computing. It's new enough not to have made it into many curricula yet. It's probably not going to go away anytime soon. How would you use it, why would you want to use it, when would you not want to use it? Find out why map-reduce is cool.

Learn how the Internet works. Learn why people say that the Internet was made by pros and the web was made by amateurs. Learn how to answer the interview question "What happens between typing an URL in the address field and the web page showing up in the browser" in as much detail as you can.

Look into the low-level stuff. Learn some assembly. Figure out why Forth is cool by working through the JonesForth tutorial. Get an idea how computers work below the OS level. The Elements of Computing Systems describes this for a toy computer. Read up on how people programmed a Commodore 64, it's a lot easier to understand than a modern PC.

Learn about the difference between userland and kernel space in Linux, and how programs written (in assembly) right on top of the kernel work. See how the kernel is put together. See if you can find something interesting to develop in the kernel-side code.

Learn out how to answer the interview question "What happens between pressing a key on the keyboard and a letter showing up on the monitor" in as much detail as you can.

Write a simple ray-tracer and a simple graphics program that does something neat with modern OpenGL and shaders. If you want to get really crazy with this, try writing a demoscene demo with lots of graphical effects and a synthesized techno soundtrack. If you want even crazier, try to make it a 4k intro.

Come up with a toy programming language and write a compiler for it.

Write a toy operating system. Figure out how to make a thing that makes a PC boot off the bare iron, prints "Hello world" on the screen and doesn't do anything beyond that. Then see how far you can get in making the thing do other things.

Also this list looks pretty good.

It's a good start, but I notice a lack of actual programming languages on that list. This is a very common mistake. A typical CS degree will try to make sure that you have at least basic familiarity with one language, usually Java, and will maybe touch a bit on a few others. You will gain some superpowers if you become familiar with all or most of the following:

• A decent scripting language, like Python or Ruby. The usual recommendation is Python, since it has good learning materials and an easy learning curve, and it's becoming increasingly useful for scientific computing.

• A lisp. Reading Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs will teach you this, and a dizzying variety of other things. It may also help you achieve enlightenment, which is nice. Seriously, read this book.

• Something low-level, usually C.

• Something super-low-level: an assembly language. You don't have to be good at writing in it, but you should have basic familiarity with the concepts. Fun fact: if you know C, you can get the compiler to show you the corresponding assembly.

You should take the time to go above-and-beyond in studying data structures, since it's a really vital subject and most CS graduates' intuitive understanding of it is inadequate. Reading through an algorithms textbook in earnest is a good way to do this, and the wikipedia pages are almost all surprisingly good.

When you're learning git, get a GitHub account, and use it for hosting miscellaneous projects. Class projects, side projects, whatever; this will make acquiring git experience easier and more natural.

I'm sure there's more good advice to give, but none of it is coming to mind right now. Good luck!

Where can I find more detailed data for cause of death?

I've been using this.

CDC has every death certificate, although they only let you look at aggregated information.

Let me know if you find anything useful. I'm working on a project (though I haven't done anything on it since making that post).

fubarobfusco's reply to that post might be useful to you too.

When it comes to typical online forums signatures are a good way to promote things. Take a quote of HPMOR and attach a link to it.

Convince me of this claim that you think is well decided.

I am not convinced that from the viewpoint of a non-rationalist that HPMoR doesn't have many of the same problems as Spock. I can see many people reading the book, feeling that HP is too "evil," and deciding that "rationality" is not for them.

Also, EY said "Authors of unfinished stories cannot defend themselves in the possible worlds where your accusation is unfair." This should swing both ways. If it turns out that HP goes crazy because he was being meta and talking to himself too much, then spreading HPMoR is probably not as good an idea.

I prefer 'to oblivion' over all your suggested alternatives. Why do you think it should change?

Slang vocabulary tends to become more consistent and repetitive over time in my experience. New phrases will appear and then go to fixation until everyone uses them. The only answer is to try to be as creative as possible in your own word choices.

I think they're different, though with some overlap.

Rationality applies to a much wider range of subjects, and involves dealing with much more uncertainty.

I think it means "Don't treat me as a stranger about whom all you knew was x"

I think it means "Don't update your opinion of me on the basis of evidence X".

I remember reading somewhere (sorry, no link) that waking up at the midnight, and then going to sleep again after an hour or so, was considered normal a few hundred years ago. Now this habit is gone, probably because we make the night shorter using artificial lights.

Do I have a bias or useful heuristic?

That's like asking whether someone is a freedom fighter or a terrorist.

Every heuristic involves a bias when you use it in some contexts.

I agree with your last sentence. The important thing should be how much good does the charity really do to those children. Are they really making their lives better, or is it merely some nonsense to "show that we care"?

Because there are many charities (at least in my country) focusing on providing children things they don't really need; such as donating boring used books to children in orphanages. Obviously, "giving to children in orphanages" is a touching signal of caring, and most people don't realize that those children already have more books than they can read (and they usually don't wish to read the kind of books other people are throwing away, because honestly no one does). In this case, the real help to children in orphanages would be trying to change the legislation to make their adoption easier (again, this is an issue in my country, in your part of the world the situation may be different), helping them avoid abuse, or providing them human contact and meaningful activities. But most people don't care about the details, not even enough to learn those details.

This depends on what you mean by "care", i.e., they care about children in the sense that they derive warm fuzzies from doing things that superficially seem to help them. They don't care in the sense that they aren't interested in how much said actions actually help children (or whether they help them at all).

The game you are talking about should not be called PD.

The solution will be for everyone to pick randomly, (weighted based on the difference in C/C and D/D payoff) until they get a C/D outcome, and then just picking the same thing over and over. (This isn't a unique solution, but it seems like a Schelling point to me.)

what if C/D provides a greater net payoff than C/C

The Prisoner's Dilemma is technically defined as requiring that this not be the case, precisely so that one doesn't ahve to consider the case (in iterated games) where the players agree to take turns cooperating and defecting. You are considering a related but not identical game. Which is of course totally fine, just saying.

If you allow C/D to have a higher total than CC, then it seems there is a meta-game in coordinating the taking-turns - "cooperating" in the meta-game takes the form of defecting only when it's your turn. Then, the players maximise both their individual scores and the group score by meta-cooperating.

Is there a summary available?

Large amphibians survived, so it couldn't have been that hot.

Hm, the trouble is that this doesn't account for the insulating effect of air, or a thin cool surface layer. A layer of air can reflect a lot of radiated heat right back into its source. Dare I say you might need something like a climate model to decide this?