Open thread, Dec. 12 - Dec. 18, 2016

This thought made me more sympathetic to other political factions:

A good way to understand the difference between the three main American political tribes is to look at their attitude towards the problem of social irresponsibility, which let's define for the sake of argument to be when someone makes a big Life Mistake and thereby causes a lot of damage, most of which borne by the individual in question but part of which is borne by society. Consider as example 1) a single mother of three kids by three different deadbeat dads, who relies on government handouts to get by 2) The kid who went to college and racked up a bunch of debt, but played too many video games and smoked too much weed, so he dropped out, and now wants debt forgiveness 3) The typical couch potato who ate too much junk food and was too lazy to exercise, so is now diabetic and morbidly obese and so needs lots of expensive health care 4) the unwisely promiscuous person who had lots of unprotected sex, contracted HIV, and now also needs expensive drug cocktails.

The three political orientations can be understood by their instinctual response to this problem. The social conservatives want to prevent social irresponsibility by force, law, or regulation. That, in their view, not only protects society from having to pick up a huge tab, but also protects the individuals themselves. The liberals reason that the individual has suffered enough already, and society should step in and help to ease the suffering. After all, Western societies are fairly wealthy and can afford to help out those in need. The libertarians want to build fences. The problem in their view is just the issue of "splash damage"; if a person wants to screw up his own life he should be allowed to do so, as long as he doesn't screw up anyone else's. Thus libertarians don't want government intervention in individual liberty, but also don't want to have to pay high taxes to clean up the problems somebody else created.

Framed in this way, I personally can see the appeal and wisdom of each of the three tendencies, so I wanted to offer this idea to LW. It might help people win ideological Turing Tests. Let's not debate which tendency is actually "correct".

There's been a lot of discussion about Trump. But I think the actual most important aspect is one that I havn't seen discussed in any depth anywhere - there seems to be speculation that Peter Theil will be advise Trump on tech issues.

The president's (unofficial?) technology advisor will be someone who has donated to miri/open ai/life extension. This is great news, and I would argue far more important than any other factor except nuclear war. This comes at a time when AI risk seems to be starting go mainstream, when Obama has had discussions on AI risk (that he did not seem to understand).

So, I'd like to see discussion on what this could lead to, whether there is a possibility that the US government might start funding life extension/AI risk research. One factor that does seem a little worrying is that, with any other president, I might be wondering whether MIRI might be able to apply for government funding or receive official recognition or be incorporated into a government body in some way. (does the US government do that sort of thing?) But given the horrific things that EY has said about Trump and the Borderer-descended people who voted for him, I doubt that's possible anymore.

Oh well. I suppose there are other people who can be pointed to as experts on AI risk - Bostrom for instance - although he isn't a US citizen.

I am searching for readings I can assign for my Smith College game theory class that I will teach this spring. The course has a one semester calculus requirement. An ideal article would be available for free on the internet, and would use game theory to explain something interesting. Suggestions?

Here is a problem I have with LW user interface, please tell me if there is a simple solution I have not noticed:

Suppose someone posted a link post, a few weeks ago, and I have posted a comment below that article. Today I come to LW and a red icon tells me I got a reply in the discussion.

I want to display all the comments in the discussion below that link post, so that all yet unseen comments are marked as new. But the post is a bit old, and I don't want to browse through the Discussion pages to find it. I would like to somehow get there from my inbox. But without destroying the information about which comments were already seen in the process.

How to achieve this?

Below the reply in the inbox is the "Context" link. Clicking it will only display the reply to my comment, but will mark all comments below the article as seen. This is not what I want.

With non-link posts I usually do the following trick: I click on the name of the user who wrote the reply. Hopefully their reply is on the first page of their recent comment, with a header saying "In response to comment by Viliam on ." Clicking on the article name displays the whole debate, with all unseen comments markes as unseen.

Unfortunately, with link posts, clicking on the article name leads to the linked article, not to the LW debate. So this solution is not available.

Here is a little idea I had at today's FHI workshop on how encryption & zero-knowledge proof-style approaches might help reduce risks from AI arms races, by using homomorphic encryption to allow safe comparison of countries' respective AI prowess.

In an AI arms race between two large countries (say, China & the USA), lack of information about each other's capabilities is highly destabilizing. Overestimates and underestimates can both lead to precipitate actions. One way to defuse tensions would be something equivalent to a nuclear arms inspection regime. But while plutonium & uranium cores and rockets can, with care, be inspected & verified to exist & verifiably destroyed without revealing too many secrets, it's harder to see how any such arrangement could exist for AI. After all, AI software leaves no radionuclides in the environment to be detected, nor does it emit radiation, nor are the raw materials produced only in very bulky, expensive, and noticeable facilities like nuclear power plants. AI software, on the other hand, only emits waste heat. In general, one is able to prove possession of a cutting-edge AI (simply provide a copy of the software and let the other person run it on their computers) but one is not able to prove the absence. And proving possession is itself problematic since if your AI is better, you certainly don't want to just hand it to the enemy.

One thought that came to mind about this: we could use cryptography to arrange head-to-head comparisons between countries' best AIs without leaking source code or the size of the delta.

In the millionaires' protocol, two millionaires wish to compare their wealth numbers w1 and w2 without revealing any data other than if w1>w2 or vice-versa. In our problem, we could consider the numbers w1 and w2 as being the two AI's losses on a particular suite of tasks. This avoids leaking the exact losses and performance of each. But what about being forced to reveal the AIs themselves?

NN AIs are based on simple primitives which can be handled efficiently, and turn out to be feasible to run under homomorphic encryption: "CryptoNets: Applying Neural Networks to Encrypted Data with High Throughput and Accuracy". The data in the test suite (itself encrypted) probably shouldn't be specified ahead of time due to overfitting concerns, but can be verifiably randomly generated on the fly using hash precommitment & XORing together a random seed from each country and using it in a PRNG. Since it's all homomorphically encrypted, both countries can run their own copy of the testing and not need trust the other to report the results truthfully.

So the full protocol could be: each country provides a homomorphic encrypted version of their best AI to the other, which they will run on a test suite of problems and loss functions computed (again, homomorphically/encrypted), and the comparison of the losses is the only result - revealing which country has a better or worse AI without revealing exactly how much, or anything about the AI implementation.

What about incentives?

A country which doesn't participate learns nothing about the other, and vice-versa.

A country could submit a lousy AI, but then it will probably learn the result 'worse' - but what does this mean? If the second country submits its best AI, then this result is uninformative because the first country was already almost certain that a lousy AI is worse than the second country's best; and if the second country submitted its best, then it is likewise uninformative. If it submits its best AI, however, and it learns the result 'worse', then it has learned something very important: that the second country has at least one AI, and possibly many AIs, which are better than its best, and the first country should avoid war. If it learns 'better', then it could be ahead (if the second country submitted its best) but also might not be (if the second country submitted its worst). Thus, the first country learns something useful only if it submits its best AI. And the same reasoning symmetrically holds for the second country as well. So one might expect both to participate honestly, submit their best AIs, learn who is ahead, more accurately gauge their relative strengths, and reduce the uncertainty & risk of war rather than a peaceful accommodation.

Of course, a country reasoning like this could try to submit a deliberately bad AI while expecting the other to submit their best AI, to trick the other country into overconfidence, but it does so at the risk of that overconfidence starting a war and also denying itself the chance to check how well the other country has done - it assumes that it already knows how well the other country is doing and doesn't need the information, but if it has so accurately gauged the other country, the other country probably knows that the first country knows that the second country is doing much worse, and so the first country has no need to participate in the AI arms measure and any 'victory' is just trickery (and maybe it shouldn't bother participating at all).

So overall, it looks like countries are better off participating honestly than not participating, and not participating than participating dishonestly, and the effects are pro-peace.

It would be cool if somebody wrote a post on what, exactly, should be the high standards of LW posts. 'Intelligent discussion' reads to me like a stopper. I mean, it's easy to imagine at least a bunch of things we shouldn't do, but not the other way round.

I've noticed that I've become quite handicapped by the fact that I get weakly triggered by having to interact with things that aren't, but could plausibly be, dirty. This fear goes away once I wash my hands, but I've found that I'm wasting lots of time washing my hands, and that I've stopped e.g. gratitude journaling because I have to pick up a pen to journal, and the pen might be dirty and I'd have to wash my hands after, which hurts me because I seem to get lots out of gratitude journaling. I've also stopped drinking tea (which I enjoy) because, even though I clean my microwave and sink handles often enough, it's possible that a roommate touched them with dirty hands, which means that I'd have to wash my hands after, which sounds effortful, and that knowing that having to wash my hands would require effort makes getting up to have tea much harder.

I won't go on, but I assure you that my system 1 is making a bigger deal of this cluster of cleanliness-related things than it should.

Mostly, I'm looking for suggestions, and also mushy emotional verificatioin that, while I'm not being bad, it's not necessary to be so paranoid.

It's not so much the case that I have unanswered factual questions about cleanliness, with the exception that I am unsure if (say) touching a doorknob, then touching my phone, then washing my hands and touching phone again makes them dirty. I will say that my System 1 thinks that my hands are always either in a binary "dirty" or "not dirty", which is perhaps a bit silly.

Anyhow, thank you all very much. It seems like having to interact with dirty things on a daily basis might have acted as some sort of exposure therapy, but it seems like I've just gotten more System 1-paranoid over time. Suggestions are quite welcome. <3

Here are some things that I, as an infrequent reader, find annoying about the LW interface.

• The split between main and discussion doesn't make any sense to me. I always browse /r/all. I think there shouldn't be such a distinction.
• My feed is filled with notices about meetups in faraway places that are pretty much guaranteed to be irrelevant to me.
• I find the most recent open thread to be pretty difficult to find on the side bar. For a minute I thought it just wasn't there. I'd like it if the recent open thread and rationality quotes were sticked at the top of r/discussion.

What's going to happen to Taiwan?

On the one hand Trump signaled less willingness to defend the interests of other countries with the US military. On the other hand he provokes the Chinese by speaking directly with Taiwanese leaders.

What are the probabilities that China will attempt to take over Taiwan during Trump's term?

I have deviced a math problem, can you solve it?

https://protokol2020.wordpress.com/2016/12/13/quine-number-problem/

I'll cross-post this from here because no-one responded and I'm still interested in an answer.

There is a question in this rationality test which goes like this:

Question 11 of 21: Imagine that a fast food company called BurgerCorp has launched a new sandwich called the BacoNation: a bacon patty slathered in bacon jack cheese, pork drippings, and bacon-fat-fried onions, served on a bacon-bran bun.

The BacoNation was introduced in March of this year. So far, its per-month sales revenues have been inconsistent:

March: $55.0 million

April: $43.8 million

May: $59.4 million

June: $49.6 million

July: $46.1 million

August: $54.9 million

September: $44.5 million

As BurgerCorp heads into the holidays, its executives hope to boost sales of the BacoNation by having their advertising team create an ad campaign featuring a wacky animated mascot called the BacoNutcase—a wild-eyed bacon fanatic who is willing to commit unspeakably immoral and degrading acts in the pursuit of BacoNation sandwiches.

BurgerCorp launches the BacoNutcase ad campaign at the beginning of October. When the sales figures come in at the end of the month, the executives are ecstatic: it turns out that the BacoNation sandwich earned $60.5 million in sales during the month of October. This figure represents an increase of $16 million over the September sales figure, and a new record high for the sandwich.

How likely is it that the introduction of the BacoNutcase largely caused the increase in the BacoNation's sales?

They claim that the correct answer is "somewhat likely," arguing that the prize has fluctuated as much in past months as it did from September to October, therefore there is no strong evidence for the ads to have contributed. I think this is plain wrong, because

• the a priori chance of ads increasing sales is high
• October beat the past 7 months, therefore Bayesian updating increases the odds further

The way I see it, their explanation would possibly be correct if we only knew that there was a 50% probability that the ad campaign had taken place, and were to decide whether or not it did based on the results. But since we already know that it did take place, the correct answer seems to be "very likely."

Who is correct? The test or me? (I'm asking because if I'm wrong I really want to know why).

How do you prevent or stop the creation of an "ugh field"?

Context

There's a game I play which uses real money - Entropia Universe. In this game, I am a trader - though most of my activity is reselling resources (stackable items). I buy large stacks of various resources, and then split these up into smaller stacks which are more affordable for the regular buyer. I then list these smaller stacks on the in-game auction.

There is an app for this game. Using this app, I can see which stacks have sold and how much I have left of each item. The app also also me to place bids on auction items (such as large stacks with which I resupply my stock), and the app allows me to list stacks on auction.

The only thing I can't do in the app is split a larger stack into smaller stacks. Thus, I have to login to the game on my PC, go to my inventory, and perform the menial task of looking at what items I have and which items I need to split up. I have to do this about once every 20 days, give or take 5. I could put some effort into increasing my stockpile, increasing the time that goes between moments at which I have to login, but this is hard, since if there is a shortage, I can't stockpile all resources equally high and I have to make a tradeoff between restocking as soon I'm out of 1 resource or restocking once I'm out of multiple resources (decreasing my earnings in between due to selling less). So 20 days plusminus 5 is about the best I can do there.

I find that logging into the app is a bit of a bother, since it is boring work, but it pays reasonably well (5 minutes a day of time which I can plop down in any segment - such as during lunch break or when waiting for something). And if I don't do it, well, I can do it the next day.

But logging into the game on my PC is turning into a hassle for me. I keep postponing it, since there is no actual need to login and split stacks until I am running out of stacks to sell of a certain resource. When I do login, there is naturally lots of work to do - it can take up to 45 minutes to do all the things I have to do (take stock of inventory, make a list of stuff I need to buy, announce buy offer in trade chat, split stacks off the stuff I already have, make trades with the people who are willing to sell me the stuff I need, buy stacks off auction if nobody is willing to sell to me, make stacks out of the stuff people sold me, check if I did everything properly - then, log out of the game on the PC, login on the mobile app, and clear the notification list there so I don't double list something).

And I'm starting to notice that I find the IDEA of having to do this work more annoying than the actual work itself. The actual work itself is quite simple, there's no heavy lifting involved, just some clicking. I put on some music during that work, and it's quite pleasant. But the idea of "ugh, I have to remember to login tonight because I'm almost running out of X" frustrates me. It also doesn't help that I sometimes forget and have to make the choice to do it now (where now means stop watching the series you're watching right now, log in, do the work, log out, go to bed because it's bedtime) or postpone it until tomorrow.

TL;DR

I spend 5 minutes a day making money via a phone app. After about 2 to 4 weeks, I have to do a task which takes 45 minutes on my PC at home to enable the ability to make money via the phone app. The phone app task feels easy, but the idea of having to do the 45-minute task at home is a burden. The actual work in the 45 minute task is pretty light.

Question

How do I prevent a task which I have to do on a irregular basis in my leisure time from becoming an ugh field?

I'd like to keep doing the actual tasks - I earn about 2 to 3 euro in those 5 minutes a day. The 45 minute task itself doesn't earn me anything directly, but good performance (such as paying attention to the trade chat and spotting a deal) does improve how much I can get with the 5 minute daily work on my phone. Suggesting I drop the whole thing together IS an idea, but I feel I'm making an adequate trade of time for money with these tasks.

I also can't automate the task, mostly because modding the game is not allowed and because there's quite a bit of thinking involved which makes the whole thing non-trivial. Plus the game has to communicate with the servers before it will let you make another change (such as creating a new stack of x units and reducing another stack by x units), so even if the clicking was automated I'd still have to sit there.

Of people who are more than two years out of school: What was your average bed time last week?

[pollid:1177]

I've heard more grown adults stay up extremely late than I'd assumed. First time trying to do a poll; there may well be errors.

So the last survey has me a little surprised and confused regarding the amount of people who strongly disagree with entering great stagnation and strongly agree with basic income, all across the board.

Can someone shed some light on why this might be? I'm surprised because I would expect strong supporters of basic income to have some belief in the coming technological automation unemployment. You see this all the time in r/futurology, where they are always posting up articles talking about how jobs are going away and not coming back.

I'm not saying they are right, but the point goes to show that these two beliefs sorta go hand in hand, or at least from what I've seen. So what about LW made the survey so different? Is it that I have the wrong idea about what the great stagnation is?

IRC and Study Hall lurker here, thought I'd post a Reddit-tier ramble not up to par with the rest of this site. Without further ado, my first post:

I've been all over the spectrum. I'm highly skeptical of big corporate capitalism these days, but I do believe in free markets. The rules of classical economics are logically sound, but they're not very humane.

The sad truth is that employees are expendable, and only paid as much as there are people able and willing to do the job. Today's job shortage and labor surplus means low wages and benefits for those lucky enough to land a position. If there were no minimum wage, as there isn't in much of the so-called "third world", McDonald's employees would be paid less than dirt - that is the true market value of unskilled labor in the 21st Century.

At UMass Amherst, I had the pleasure of attending a live seminar featuring economist Thomas Piketty, who popularized an important truth about wealth today: r > g. That is, returns on capital exceed economic growth.

At the time of its $1B acquisition by Facebook, Instagram had just 13 employees. Can you really blame firms and startups for trending toward minimalism? They're reaping megacorporate profits on their capital without any of the dehumanizing bureaucracy of a staff exceeding Dunbar's Number. HR lied to you, you're nowhere close to your company's "greatest asset". This is r > g in the real world: when employees go from being an asset, to a liability.

Today's wealth trends toward massive consolidation into the hands of monopolies or duopolies like Apple, Google, Walmart and Amazon. These companies are so lucrative, so productive that we should be living in an age of abundance, but we're not. Expendable employees work more hours than ever for less reward.

I believe we might actually be on the verge of realizing the dream of Marxist utopia, but not in the way you might expect. When Americans think of socialism or communism, they think of authoritarian interpretations like Bolshevism, Maoism, Nazism, or Juche. They don't think of more libertarian interpretations like prehistoric tribes, Nordic countries, The Venus Project, or Bernie Sanders.

I'm a proponent of "Fully Automated Luxury Communism" with relatively free markets. I wish for a society where people work not because they have to, but because they want to, whether for profit, or for self-actualization and fulfillment. Personally, I want more of the latter out of my work, because profit is often funneled directly into consumption.

I find society's overconsumption quite disgusting - obesity, environmental damage, conspicuous consumption, resource depletion, you name it. We slaughter 9.08 billion chickens every year in America alone to satisfy the population's craving for McNuggets, and that's not even getting into how wasteful beef is. I don't know if we'll ever see an end to such detritus, but I'm somewhat hopeful for virtual reality and lab-grown meat to be able to fulfill people's desires more sustainably.

We don't have the tech or resources to automate every unfulfilling, expendable "job" right now, but we probably will by midcentury. The question is, will society opt to adopt something like Basic Income, or will we continue to romanticize manufacturing and revert to the way "we've always done it"? Trump makes me unoptimistic.

POSSIBLY POLITICAL (MINDKILLING) WARNING: WEED, also I can't get the asterisks at the bottom to work correctly, what the hell happened to WYSIWYG?

So recently I've been acquainted with a few smokers. It's not really about the smoking itself but rather it's my overall disposition toward it.

Maybe it's some sort of blind spot on my hand, I'd appreciate if maybe the nootropics guys can help me with this. But I can't seem to wrap my head around what are the:

1. Benefits*
2. Drawbacks**
3. Placebo

Obligatory warning that I'm not really knowledgeable nor experienced with any mind-altering substance.

** Most of the benefits I found are usually related to diseases, like cancer and Parkinson's but anxiety is also commonly mentioned. The diseases part seems interesting, but it's interesting in the same way that learning that there's gold under your house. It becomes a question of "How much?". As for anxiety, it's part of life and learning to deal with it on your own is better than turning it down. Maybe "What are the benefits random dude #0 could gain from smoking weed?" is a better question.

** Addiction? General brain harm? Money spent? Opportunity cost? I really want to rule addiction out but sometimes it feels like they NEED it in their system, which fits the criteria. Obvious anecdote, but a honest one. Not really sure about brain damage, and damage is a much more powerful description than "long term effects". As for money, it feels like it already correlates with opportunity cost here, not like they aren't correlated anyway. My imperfect reasoning system says that after X amount of days I would rather have M amount of money with me than without me but I imagine it also discards the effects in those moments. (Being hungry and buying a small snack, versus staying hungry and keeping the money, the hunger could be annoying at the time but long-term insight suggests that I'm quite likely to find myself a satisfying meal, so should I bear with the hunger?)

\* Version *A*.

* Version *B*.