Open Thread: April 2010, Part 2

Very interesting. This makes me want to do the program even more. I look forward to times when I can just pursue whatever interests me (intellectually) at the moment instead of focusing on coursework.

Thanks! Please keep on posting, this is interesting.

When genetic engineering becomes practical

What a cool Black Eyed Peas video! Edit: Oh, and what a weird essay.

When the population of transhumanists become a prominent demographic.

That would be nice - better than raw #+/#-, actually, because it immediately gives you the score. Are there any programmers listening?

That is excellent news!

It is a difficult question to answer. I can point to various studies but I must keep in mind that those that made me aware of such studies are not necessarily unbiased.

Any useful tips and heuristics?

That depends. You need to know just what you want your kids to be like. And that has to be what you really want your kids to be like, not what it sounds good to say you want your kids to be like. For example, spanking kids will make them more likely to be physically aggressive. But this may well benefit them in the long run, teaching them tactics for maintaining higher status and so improving their health and happiness.

There is a clear negative correlation between childhood spanking and IQ. But given that your child's genetic heritage is already determined, your own choice of behaviour quite possibly has no causal influence on the IQ outcome. Low IQ parents are more likely to be physically (rather than verbally or socially) aggressive and also more likely to pass on genes for low IQ so causal influence from the spanking is doubtful.

I'm also interested in hearing other peoples tricks, but I'll share mine.

The first thing I'd do is to check LW to see if I got lucky (google "spanking kids site:lesswrong.com" for example)

I don't really have any good tricks for finding good sources, but you might want to try adding some related technical words in your search to filter your results towards smarter people.

Once I find a source, the main thing I look for is "does this person understand the opposing arguments?". If they say something that suggests that they don't understand the idea that different forms of dis-utility might be interchangeable, or if they ever take the "it's bad because it's wrong!" stance, then I'll move on.

Let me see if I can formalize. This might not be quite what you had in mind, but I think it will be similar:

For clarity we can reduce the possible worlds to two, either there are many many more Boltzman brains than human brains (H1) or there are few if any Boltzman brains (H2).

In H2 aprox. everyone who learns of the Boltzman brain hypothesis (and the evidence in favor) is not a Boltzman brain.

In H1 very very few Boltzman brains will learn of the Boltzman brain hypothesis (and the evidence in favor). A significantly larger percentage of the non-Boltzman brains capable of conceiving the hypothesis will learn of it (and the evidence in favor).

So independent evidence of H1 means (1) H1 is more likely to whatever degree that evidence dictates, (2) if H1 you are more likely than most brains to be non-Boltzman, (3) by the self-indication assumption H2 is more likely because in that world most or all brains are non-Boltzman.

The inference from (2) to (3) seems problematic to me. I'm not sure.

Questions:

1. How the hell do we evaluate the evidence since any evidence of H1 is also evidence of H2 (if we like the SIA).
2. What the hell is the proper reference class?
3. If new evidence came in against H1 would we have to say were more likely to be Boltzman brains?

An anecdote:

When I've had people shoulder surf while I was visiting the site, everyone asked, "LessWrong? What's that supposed to mean?" (5+ people). When I explained that it was a rational community where people tried to improve their thinking, they immediately began status attacks against me. One used the phrase "uber-intellectual blog" in a derogatory context and another even asked, "Are you going to come into work with a machine gun?" They often laughed at the concept.

Nobody commented on the graphic.

It didn't deter me, but I didn't get it until someone explained it just recently. For a while, I was just thinking "What's that a map of? Is that where FHI is based? Is it the area in Santa Clara surrounding the SIAI House? Whatever it's a map of, is is relevant enough to put it at the top of every page?" (Actual answer from a minute googling street names: it's in San Francisco, but I don't know if there's any reason this particular location was chosen.)

O'course, even for those who get it, it may not be the best illustration of the map/territory distinction, because the lower half isn't the territory either. It's just a more detailed map than the top half. Ceci n'est pas le territoire!

Anyway, I doubt it will actively deter many people, but there are probably better possibilities.

There's also a significant percentage of traffic that comes from Stumble Upon. Not sure how we can better optimize for people arriving for Stumble Upon, but certainly the current state is not ideal.

There is a possibility of presenting different pages to people depending on their referrers...

The map-territory metaphor is pretty central to what goes on here, so I kind of like it. I don't really know if it is a deterrent. Any alternatives in mind?

I do think the logo could be a map of somewhere more interesting than Candlestick Park! And maybe a cooler place would keep googler's around. Or make it look a dojo.

I have to admit I'd never really consciously noticed the image until someone recently pointed out that it symbolizes the map/territory distinction. I guess that is evidence that is not very eye catching or distinctive but neither is it particularly off-putting in my opinion.

Nice!

Fascinating. If I thought that genetic propagation was still an efficient way to maximise my influence on the future universe I would look into just what these other reasons are so that I could effectively game the system.

I agree with khafra. If "selfish" means "pursuing things if and only if they accord with one's own values", then most people here would say that every value-pursuing agent is selfish by definition.

But, for that very reason (among other things), that definition is not a useful one. A useful definition of "selfish" is closer to "valuing oneself above all other things." And this is not universally agreed to be good around here.

I might value myself a great deal, but it's highly unlikely that I would, upon reflection, value myself over all other things. If I had to choose between destroying either myself or the entire rest of the universe (beyond the bare minimum that I need to stay alive), I would obliterate myself in an instant. I expect that most people here would make the same choice in the same situation.

I think the general view is more nuanced. If there is a LW theory of selflessness/selfishness, Robin Hanson would be able to articulate it far better than I; but here's my shot:

"Selflessness" is an incoherent concept. When you think of being selfless, you think of actions to make other people better off by your own value system. Your own value system may dictate that fulfilling other people's value systems makes them better off, or yours may say that changing others' value systems to "believing in Jesus is good" makes them better off.

The latter concept is actually more coherent than the first, because if one of those other systems includes a very high utility for "everyone else dies," you cannot make everyone better off.

Many LW members place a high value on altruism, but they don't call themselves selfless; they understand that they're fulfilling a value system which places a high utility on, for lack of a better word, universal eudaimonia.

we tend to think that we're selfless beings

That's news to me.

the sole reason we act selfless at all is to make other people think we really are selfless

That doesn't describe me. I sometimes act in ways that are detrimental to me and beneficial to others, out of a broader conception of my own self-interest: I figure that those actions are beneficial to my own projects, properly conceived.

I most specifically don't want people to think I am exploitable (which is one interpretation of "selfless"). I do want people to think of me as someone with whom it is desirable to cooperate.

I don't think that's the tacit theory of ethics around here.

Genes may be selfish, but primates survived better who had other related primates looking out for them, or who showed that they were caring. It could well be that some simple mutations led to primates that showed they were caring because they actually were caring. (Edit: It seems to me that this must be the case for at least part of our value system. )

This is relevant:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/uu/why_does_power_corrupt/

but the benefits to the genes can just as easily come from more subtle situational differences, and assistance by related others, rather than a major status change and change in attitudes.

One would be hard-pressed to find a more perfect example of doublethink than the popular notion of selflessness.

Selflessness is supposed to be praiseworthy, but if we try to clarify the meaning of "selfless person" we either get

1. A person who's greatest (or only) satisfaction comes from helping others, or

2. A person who derives no pleasure at all from helping others (not even anticipated indirect future pleasure), but does it anyway

Neither of these are generally considered praiseworthy: (1) is clearly someone acting for purely selfish reasons, and (2) is just a robotic servant. Yet somehow a sort of "quantum superposition" of these two is held to be both possible and praiseworthy*.

*The common usage of "selfish" is an analogous kind of doublethink/newspeak

ETA: I, and probably many others, consider (1) praiseworthy, but if that's the definition of selfless then the standard LW argument you mentioned applies to it.

1. I don't think that people think they are selfless. They usually think they're more selfless than they actually are, though.

The theory is that though we tend to think that we're selfless beings, we're actually not, and the sole reason we act selfless at all is to make other people think we really are selfless, and the reason we think we're selfless is because thinking we're selfless makes it easier to convince others that we're selfless.

1. I suspect most people at Less Wrong have more a complex view than this description. People also behave selflessly for reasons of inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism. People also engage in "selfless" behavior for the same reason a "forgiving" tit-for-tat strategy wins in iterated prisoner's dilemmas.

Where is that justification?

ISTM that any other theory would be the one that requires justification. How do your genes selfishly reproduce if you're genuinely selfish?

This seems obviously true, except that there are certain regimes where genuine cooperation isn't ruled out by selfish genes (typically requiring a sort of altruistic willingness to undertake costly detection and punishment of cheaters). So I would not at all rule out instances of genuine altruism if a case can be made that it's positive-sum enough and widespread enough.

I'd be interested, and you could PM these folks to find others who may not be reading this open thread.

I maybe would come. (I live near Detroit.)

What, in particular, is the tool your are looking for?

A First Course in Bayesian Methods is ~$50 used, and covers what I take to be the basics. I'm currently using it in a grad class in Baysian statistics (with a companion text for computing in R) and have no complaints - well, other than that it's not an all encompassing text.

The first edition of Gelman's text is going for ~$35 used (~$50 for the second edtion) and has the added advantage of actually being in UM's library (both editions). I've not read either edition, but I hear it's the general Bayesian text to get.

An important aspect of a decision theory is how it defines counterfactuals. Anna Salamon wrote a good sequence on this topic.

Torturing animals is bad. But I wouldn't have a problem with, say, a CGI version.

This was a reply to another copy of this comment

Are crush videos, as mentioned in http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/04/truetoleranc.html , actually bad, and if so, why?

I theorize that they are, based on what I've read about sex addiction and serial killers, but I'm not really prepared to rigorously defend that position.

Torturing animals is bad. But I wouldn't have a problem with, say, a CGI version.

Heh, that is a topic that is very relevant to an article I was intending to post to Less Wrong today.

I've written it, but then noticed I have 17/20 of the required karma points.

Any three people wanna upvote this comment of mine so I can post my article?

Accepting God as a probable hypothesis has a lot of epistemic implications. This is not just one thing, everything is connected, one thing being true implies other things being true, other things being false. You won't be seeing the world as you currently believe it to be, after accepting such change, you will be seeing a strange magical version of it, a version you are certain doesn't correspond to reality. Mutilating your mind like this has enormous destructive consequences on your ability to understand the real world, and hence on ability to make the right choices, even if you forget about the hideousness of doing this to yourself. This is the part that is usually overlooked in Pascal's wager.

Belief in belief is a situation where you claim to have a belief, and you believe in having the belief, but you act in a way that can only be explained by working from the understanding of reality that involves the belief in question being wrong. Belief in belief keeps the human believers out of most of the trouble, but that's not what Pascal's wager advocates! Not understanding this distinction may lead to underestimating the horror of the suggestion. You are being offered an option to actually believe, but this is not what people have experience with observing in others. You only see other people believing in belief, which is not as bad as actually believing.

Hence, while you believe in belief that Pascal's wager offers you an option to believe in God, actually you believe that you are offered an option to believe in belief in God. (Phew!)

(Edit - it's probably a good idea to avoid reading this comment until you try RobinZ's suggestion.)

I looked at the parent of the comment of yours, and I think I can see why you disagreed with MatthewB and JGWeissman about Pascal's Wager: the three of you may be thinking of PW differently to each other.

It sounds to me that MatthewB was evaluating PW in terms of how well it gets you to the truth, whereas you were evaluating PW in terms of whether it helps you win the +∞ reward for belief. PW is misguided for the first purpose, but could work for the second, depending on the situation.

And JGWeissman, I think, was considering PW-as-applied-to-theism whereas you were thinking of PW-in-general - but you identified that difference yourself.

response from Cracked

Shouldn't you focus your efforts on people who are still eligible for life insurance?

Same answer, new formulation.

However, "winning" is in the map not the territory.

Nah. Winning isn't determined by the map, it's like a highlighted endpoint (like drawing on a map with a marker). You win when you get there. Note that a little red x or circle on a map isn't really part of the map. There is nothing there that we expect to correspond to the territory (imagine arriving at your destination and everything turns the color of the marker you used!).

The theistic move is like not finding any destination on the map that you're happy with so so you draw in a really cool mountain and make it your endpoint.

Winning isn't in the map because winning conditions are defined by desires, not beliefs.

Our sense of "winning" isn't entirely up for grabs: we prefer sensory stimulation to its absence, we prefer novel stimulations to boring old ones, we prefer to avoid protracted pain, we generally prefer living in human company rather than on desert islands, and so on.

In one manner of thinking, our sense of "winning" - considered as a set of statistically reliable facts about human beings - is definitely part of the territory. It's a set of facts about human brains.

"Winning" more reliably entails accumulating knowledge about what constitutes the experience of winning, and it seems that it has to be actual knowledge - it's not enough to say "I will convince myself that my sense of winning is X", where X is some not necessarily coherent predicate which seems to match the world as we see it.

That may work temporarily and for some people, but be shown up as inadequate as circumstances change.

Beware trying to time the market. Make sure you're taking this action, not because you feel that the time is right to switch, but because you've carefully analyzed your risk/reward preferences.

That said, yes, there are 'index fund' bond investment vehicles, outside of the ETFs mentioned by mattnewport. They generally track the time frame (short, medium, long term) and type of bond (corporate, state, federal). Here are some examples from Vanguard: VBISX (Short Term Index), VBIIX (Intermediate Term Index), VBLTX (Long Term Index), and VBMFX (Total Bond Market Index).

What you're talking about is Asset Allocation, and it's the number one predictor of your long term investment results. This generally involves determining your own risk profile and picking bonds vs. stocks appropriately. A rule of thumb is to pick 100 - (your age) as a percentage of stocks, since the younger you are, the more growth you'll need. If you have less tolerance for risk, then you could go lower.

I'm currently invested 20% bonds and 80% stocks, but the bonds I have access to are the safest in the world (Federal employee G Fund, the same thing that Social Security invests in). Further breaking down AA, general categories include foreign vs. domestic, index vs. actively managed, taxable vs. non-taxed.

Example Asset Allocation:

20% bonds:

• 100% Medium-Term Securities (G Fund)

80% equities:

• 25-35% International Index Funds (EAFE, VEIEX)
• 55-75% Wilshire 5000 Index Funds (C/S Fund 3:1, VTSMX)

Tax efficient fund placement:

1. Put your most tax-inefficient funds in TSP, 401ks, 403bs, Traditional IRAs and similar retirement accounts.
2. Put your next most tax-inefficient funds in your Roth(s).
3. Put what's left into your taxable account. Try to use only tax-efficient funds in taxable accounts.

List of securities from least to most tax efficient:

1. Hi-Yield Bonds
2. Taxable Bonds
3. TIPS
4. REIT Stocks
5. Stock trading accounts
6. Small-Value stocks
7. Small-Cap stocks
8. Large Value stocks
9. International stocks
10. Large Growth Stocks
11. Most stock index funds
12. Tax-Managed Funds
13. EE and I-Bonds
14. Tax-Exempt Bonds

Disclaimers: This advice is US-centric. I invest in Vanguard because they have very low Expense Ratios (ER), low or no purchase costs (loads), and have a large number of high quality index funds. Other investment firms such as Fidelity are also very good, and often have comparable funds.

ETFs offer small investors access to a number of alternative investments to stocks. There are lots of bond/fixed income index ETFs available. You can also use ETFs to diversify out of US stocks (assuming you're a US investor) through international indexes. It is also possible to invest in other asset classes such as commodities and foreign currencies through ETFs but there are a number of caveats and potential hidden costs to many of these so you should do some research before going that route.

How about you ask this again when the present PUA type discussion (which has already devolved to some flame waring, in places) calms down?

You probably don't mean trivial information eg the position of every oxygen atom in my room at this exact moment. But if you eliminate trivial information and concentrate only on useful information, you've turned it into a circular argument - all useful information is inherently useful.

Further, saying that we "must" gather and preserve information ignores opportunity costs. Sure, anything might eventually turn out to be useful, but at some point we have to say the resources invested in disk space would be better used somewhere else.

It sounds more like you're trying to argue that information can never be evil, but you can't even state that meaningfully without making a similar error. Certainly giving information to certain people can be evil (for example, giving Hitler the information on how to make a nuclear bomb).

See this discussion for why I think calling something like "information" good is a bad idea.

One thing you may want to address is what you mean by "gather and preserve information." The maximum amount of information possible to know about the universe is presently stored and encoded as the universe. The information that's useful to us is reductions and simplifications of this information, which can only be stored by destroying some of the original set of information.

Do you mean that information already is a terminal value for (most) humans? Arguing that something should be a terminal value makes only a limited amount of sense, terminal values usually don't need reasons, though they have (evolutionary, cultural etc.) causes.

I don't make arguments for terminal values. I assert them.

Arguments that make any (epistemic) sense in this instance would be references to evidence to something that represents the value system (eg. neurological, behavioural or introspective observations about the relevant brain).

Information takes work to produce, to filter, and to receive, and more work to evaluate it and (if genuinely new) to understand it. There's a strong case that information isn't a terminal value because it's not the only thing people need to do with their time.

You wouldn't want your inbox filled with all the things anyone believes might be information for you.

Another case of limiting information: rules about what juries are allowed to know before they come to a verdict.

There might be an important difference between forbidding censorchip vs. having information as a terminal value.

I very much doubt that we have enough understanding of human values / preferences / utility functions to say that anything makes the list, in any capacity, without exception.

In this case, I think that information is useful as an instrumental value, but not as a terminal value in and of itself. It may lie on the path to terminal values in enough instances (the vast majority), and be such a major part of realizing those values, that a resource-constrained reasoning agent might treat it like a terminal value, just to save effort.

I look at it like a genie bottle: nearly anything you want could be satisfied with it, or would be made much easier with its use, but the genie isn't what you really want.

• Storing information has an inherent cost in resources, and some information might be so meaningless that no matter how abundant those resources are, there will always be a better or more interesting use for them. I'm not sure if that's true.
• "Information" might be an unnatural category in the way you're using it. Why are the bits encoded in an animal's DNA worth more than the bits encoded in the structure of a particular rock? Doesn't taking any action erase some information about the state the world was in before that action?
• EY might call information bad that prevents pleasant surprise.

A straightforward counter-argument is that forgetting, i.e. erasing information, is a valuable habit to acquire; some "information" is of little value and we would burden our minds uselessly, perhaps to the point of paralysis, by hanging on to every trivial detail.

If that holds for an individual mind, it could perhaps hold for a society's collective records; perhaps not all of YouTube as it exists now needs to be preserved for an indefinite future, and a portion of it may be safely forgotten.

Reading what you have said in this thread, I was confident that you were committing the fallacy of rationalization. Your statement is simple, and it seems like reality can be made to fit it, so you do so. But your name looked familiar, and so I clicked on it, and found that your karma is higher than mine, which seems to be strong evidence that you would not commit such a fallacy, using phrases so revealing as "I want to build a case for . . .".

Your words say you are rationalizing; your karma says you are not. I am confused.

May I suggest adding to your list of test cases the blueprints for a non-Friendly AI?

By that I mean any program which is expected to be a General Intelligence but which isn't formally or rigorously proven to be Friendly. (I still haven't come to definite conclusions about the plausibility of an AI intelligence explosion, therefore about the urgency of FAI research and that of banning or discouraging the dissemination of info leading to non-F, but given this blog's history it feels as if this test case should definitely be on the list.)

Some counter-arguments

child pornography

What exactly is the pro-information position here? Cause I'm against this being produced and agree with bans on it's distribution and possession as a way of hurting its purveyors. The way such laws are enforced, at least in America, is sometimes disgraceful. But I don't think it is an inherrently bad policy.

viruses (all three kinds),

Biological, computer and memetic? The last one looks like an open and shut case to me. If learning information (being infected by a meme) can damage me then I should think that information should be destroyed. Maybe we want some record around so that we can identify them to protect people in the future? Maybe this stuff is too speculative to flesh out.

research on race

For the IQ issue: Here is my read of the status quo: most people believe the science says there is no innate racial difference in IQ. This is probably what it says but if we really want to know for sure we'd need to gather more data. If we gathered more data there are three possible outcomes: (1) we find out conclusively there is no innate IQ difference. Most people's beliefs do not change. An impassioned minority continues to assert that there is an IQ difference and questions the science, perpetuating the controversy. This is socially the status quo but some people paying attention have actually learned something. (2) We don't learn anything conclusive one way or the other. The status quo continues. (3) We learn there are innate racial differences in IQ. All hell breaks lose.

I'll attempt a counter-example. It's not definitive, but at least makes me question your notion:

Does a spy want to know the purpose of his mission? What if (s)he gets caught? Is it easier for them to get though an interrogation not knowing the answers to the questions?

Please post arguments and counterarguments in their own comments and separately from general discussion comments.

At first I thought you were saying that you wanted the comments to be flat rather than threaded; I figured that that was because you wanted inbox notification of each new reply. Then I saw you replying to replies yourself, so I was less sure. I take it you actually mean that (for example) I shouldn't include remarks on the main topic in this comment, or vice versa?

Information is a terminal value without exception

What would an unfriendly superintelligence that wanted to hack your brain say to you? Does knowing the answer to that have positive value in your utility function?

That said, I do think information is a terminal value, at least in my utility function; but I think an exception must be made for mind-damaging truths, if such truths exist.

First of all, I recommend clearing away the moral language (value, good, and must) unless you want certain perennial moral controversies to muddy the waters.

Example phrasings of the case you may be trying to make:

Bayesian predictions made from (100% certain) information set {N}U{M} are usually more accurate than those made from {N} alone

I suppose this is true.

Bayesian predictions made from (100% certain) information set {N}U{M} are always more accurate than those made from {N} alone

If you've ever done a jigsaw puzzle, you can probably think of a counterexample to this.

We cannot know what information we might need in the future, therefore we must gather as much as we can and preserve all of it. Especially since much (most?) of it cannot be recreated on demand.