Open Thread, May 19 - 25, 2014

I was talking to the loved one about this last night. She is going for ministry in the Church of England. (Yes, I remain a skeptical atheist.)

She is very charismatic (despite her introversion) and has the superpower of convincing people. I can just picture her standing up in front of a crowd and explaining to them how black is white, and the crowd each nodding their heads and saying "you know, when you think about it, black really is white ..." She often leads her Bible study group (the sort with several translations to hand and at least one person who can quote the original Greek) and all sorts of people - of all sorts of intelligence levels and all sorts of actual depths of thinking - get really convinced of her viewpoint on whatever the matter is.

The thing is, you can form a cult by accident. Something that looks very like one from the outside, anyway. If you have a string of odd ideas, and you're charismatic and convincing, you can explain your odd ideas to people and they'll take on your chain of logic, approximately cut'n'pasting them into their minds and then thinking of them as their own thoughts. This can result in a pile of people who have a shared set of odd beliefs, which looks pretty damn cultish from the outside. Note this requires no intention.

As I said to her, "The only thing stopping you from being L. Ron Hubbard is that you don't want to. You better hope that's enough."

(Phygs look like regular pigs, but with yellow wings.)

I think you're overcomplicating it. People like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Paul Graham are certainly not cult leaders, but they have many strong opinions that are well outside the mainstream; they don't believe in, and in fact actively scorn, hedging/softening their expression of these opinions; and they have many readers, a visible subset of whom uncritically pattern all their opinions, mainstream or not, after them.

And pushback against excitement over Hofstadter can stem from legitimate disagreement about the importance/interestingness of his work. The pushback is proportional to the excitement that incites it.

There is nothing bad per se about suggesting that e.g. Douglas R. Hofstadter should be the king of the nonconformist tribe.

Disagreed. IMO, there should only be kings if there's a good reason... among other things, I suspect that status differences are epistemologically harmful. See Stanley Milgram's research and the Asch conformity experiment.

I also disagree with the rest of your analysis. I anticipate a different sense of internal revulsion when someone starts talking to me about why Sun Myung Moon is super great vs why Mike Huckabee is so great or why LeBron James is so great. In the case of LW, I think people whose intuitions say "cult" are correct to a small degree... LW does seem a tad insular, groupthink-ish, and cultish to me, though it's still one of my favorite websites. And FWIW, I would prefer that people who think LW seems cultish help us improve (by contributing intelligent dissent and exposing us to novel outside thinking) instead of writing us off.

(The most charitable interpretation of the flaws I see in LW is that they are characteristics that trade off against some other things we value. E.g. if we downvoted sloppy criticism of LW canon less, that would mean we'd get more criticism of LW canon, both sloppy and high-quality... not clear whether this would be good or not, though I'm leaning towards it being good. A less charitable interpretation is that the length of the sequences produces some kind of hazing effect. Personally, I haven't finished the sequences, don't intend to, think they're needlessly verbose, and would like to see them compressed.)

p_quality_criticism * social_reward_for_quality_criticism -
p_sloppy_criticism * social_punishment_for_sloppy_criticism

(Are you suggesting that Hofstadter deserves a similar status to e.g. Dostoyevsky? Are you insane or what? Look at the size of your faction, our faction, and think again.)

I'm not sure about this - the "Yay Hofstadter" team looks about as big as the "Yay Dostoyevsky" team, at least especially in the anglophone internet.

Not an expert, but Euclid made some mistakes, like using superposition to prove some theorems. I'm curious how they handle those. (e.g. I think Euclid attempted to prove side-angle-side congruence, but Hilbert had to include it as an axiom.)

what blind spots did 12-14-year-old you have

Heh, if I was 12-14 these days, the main message I would send to me would be: Start making and publishing mobile games while you have a lot of free time, so when you finish university, you have enough passive income that you don't have to take a job, because having a job destroys your most precious resources: time and energy.

(And a hyperlink or two to some PUA blogs. Yeah, I know some people object against this, but this is what I would definitely send to myself. Sending it to other kids would be more problematic.)

I would recommend Anki only for learning languages. For other things I would recommend writing notes (text documents); although this advice may be too me-optimized. One computer directory called "knowledge", subdirectories per subject, files per topic -- that's a good starting structure; you can change it later, if you need. But making notes becomes really important at the university level.

I would stress the importance of other things than math. Gifted kids sometimes focus on their strong skills, and ignore their weak skills -- they put all their attention to where they receive praise. This is a big mistake. However, saying this without providing actionable advice does not help. For example, my weak spots were exercise and social skills. For social skills a list of recommended books could help; with emphasis that I should not only read the books, but also practice what I learned. For exercise, a simple routine plus HabitRPG could do the job. Maybe to emphasise that I should not focus on how I compare with others, but how I compare with yesterday's me.

Something about an importance of keeping contact with smart people, and insanity of the world in general. As a smart person, talking with other smart people increases your powers: both because you develop with them the ideas you understand, and because you can ask them about things you don't understand. (A stupid person will not understand what you are saying, and will give you harmful advice about things you asked.) In school you are supposed to work alone, but in real life a lot of success is achieved by teams; but the best teams are composed of good people, not of random people.

Another advice that is risky to give to other kids: Religion is bullshit and a waste of time. People will try to manipulate you, using lies and emotional pressure. Whatever other positive traits they have, try to find other people that have the same positive traits, but without the mental poison; even if it takes more time, it's worth it.

what blind spots did 12-14-year-old you have

• Social capital is important. Build it.
• Peer pressure is far more common and far more powerful than you think. Find an ingroup that puts it to constructive ends.
• Don't major in a non-STEM field. College is job training and a networking opportunity. Act accordingly.
• Something about time management, pattern-setting, and motivation management -- none of which I've managed to learn yet.

I never learned how to put forth effort, because I didn't need to do so until after I graduated high school.

I got into recurring suboptimal ruts, sometimes due to outside forces, sometimes due to me not being agenty enough, that eroded my conscientiousness to the point that I'm quite terrified about my power (or lack there of) to get back to the level of ability I had at 12-14.

I suppose, if I had to give my younger self advice in the form of a sound-byte, it'd be something like: "If you aren't--maybe at least monthly--frustrated, or making less progress than you'd like, you aren't really trying; you're winning at easy mode, and Hard Mode is likely to capture you unprepared. Of course, zero progress is bad, too, so pick your battles accordingly."

Also, even if you're on a reasonable difficulty setting, it pays to look ahead and make sure you aren't missing anything important. My high school calculus teacher missed some notational standards in spite of grasping the math, and her first college-level course started off painful for it; I completely missed the cross and dot products in spite of an impressive math and physics High school transcript, and it turns out those matter a good deal (and at the time, the internet was very unsympathetic when I tried researching them).

Speaking as a somewhat gifted seventeen year old, I'd really like to have known about AoPS, HPMOR and the Sequences.

Also, I'd like to have had in my mind the notion that my formal education is not optimised for me, and that I really need to optimise it myself. Speaking more concretely, I think that most teenagers in Britain pick their A Levels (if they do them at all) based on what classes the other people around them are doing, which isn't very useful. Speaking to a friend though, I realised that when he was picking his third A Level to study, there was no other A Level he needed to study to get into his main area of specialisation (jazz musician), and his time would be better spent not doing the A level at all; he needed to think more meta. He was just doing an A level because that's what everyone seems to think you should do. I'm about to give up a class because it's not going to help me get anywhere, I can use the time better and learn what I want to better alone anyway. So, really optimise.

Don't know if that helps. And AoPS is ridiculously useful.

Instill the importance of a mastery orientation (basically, optimizing for developing skills rather than proving one's innate ability). My 12-14 year old self had such a strong performance orientation as to consider things like mnemonics and study skills to be only for the lazy and stupid. Anyone stuck in the performance orientation won't even be receptive to things like Anki.

I had these blind spots as a 20some year old, so I assume I had them when I was 12-14 too:

• I assumed that if I was good at something, I would be good at it forever. Turns out skills atrophy over time. Surprise! (This seems similar to your Anki revelation.)

• I am agenty. I had no concept of the possibility that I might be able to cause* some meaningful effect outside my immediate circle of interaction.

* I did, of course, daydream about becoming rich and famous through no fault of my own; I wouldn't say I actually expected this to happen, but I thought it was more likely than becoming rich and famous under my own steam.

I have been in such a program when I was 12-14 (run by the William Stern foudnation in Hamburg, Germany) and the curriculum consisted mostly of very diverse 'math' problems prepared in a way to make them accessible to us in a func way without introducing too much up-front terminology or notation. Examples I remember of the spot:

• turing machines (dresses as short-sighted busy beavers)

• generalized Nim really with lots of matches

• tilings of the plane

• conveys game of life (easy on paper)

More I just looked up in an older folder:

• distance metrics on a graph

• multi-way balances

• continuous fractions (cool for approximations; I still use this)

• logical derivations about beliefs of people whose dream are indistinuishable from reality

• generalized magical squares

• Fibinacci sequences and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_square_puzzle

• Drawing fractals (the iterated function ones; with printouts of some)

In general only an exposition was given and no task to solve. Or some introductory initial questions, The patterns to be detected were the primary reward.

We were not introduced to really practical applications but I'm unsure whether that had been helpful or rather whether it had been interesting. My interest at that time stemmed from the material being systematic patterns that I could approach abstractly and symbolically and 'solve'. I'm not clear whether the Sequences would have been interesting in that way. Their patterns are clear only in hindsight.

What should work is Bayes rule - at least in the form that can be visualized (tiling of the 1/1 grid) or symbolcally derived easily.

Also guessing and calibration games should work. You can also take standard games and add some layer of complexity on them (but please not arbitrary but helpful ones; a minimum example is: Play Uno but cards don't have to match color+number but some number theoretic identity e.g. +(2,5) modulo (4,10)).

I think most of my blindspots before roughly the age of 18 involved not understanding that I'm personally responsible for my success and the extent of my knowledge and that "good enough" doesn't cut it. If I were to send a message back to 14-year-old!Me, I'd tell him that he has a lot of potential, but that he can't rely on others to fulfill that potential.

what blind spots did 12-14-year-old you have

I don't know how much of this falls under your remit, but I had quite a few educational blind-spots I inherited from my parents, who didn't come from a higher-educated background. If any of your students are in a similar position, it's worth checking they don't have any ludicrous expectations out of the next several years of education which no-one close to them is in a position to correct.

Just curious -- are you teaching at a math camp? Which one? (I have a lot of friends from Canada/USA Mathcamp, although I didn't go myself.)

Alternative: Liven up Less Wrong. I'm not sure how to do that, but it's possible solution to your problem.

Slate Star Codex comments have smart people and a significant overlap with LW, but the interface isn't great (comment threading stops after it gets to a certain level of depth, etc). Alternatively, it may help to be more selective on reddit - no default subreddits, for example.

Check out metafilter.

Also looking for LW replacement, with no current success.

So LW but bigger? I think you are out of luck there.

How in the world did that work?

It didn't. This is the argument in image form, and you can find similar ones for employment (basically, when you conscript people, unemployment goes down. Shocking!). There are lots of libertarian articles on the subject--this might be an alright introduction--but the basic argument is that standards of living dropped (that's what happens when food is rationed and metal is used for tanks instead of cars or household appliances) but the government spending on bombs and soldiers made the GDP numbers go up, and then the post-war boost in standards of living was mostly due to deferred spending.

One simple model which seems to fit the "WWII ending the depression" piece of data (and which might have some overlap with the truth) is that it's relatively difficult to put idle resources into use, and significantly easier to repurpose resources that have been in use for other uses.

During the depression, a bunch of people were unemployed, factories were not running, storefronts were empty, etc. According to this model, under those economic conditions there were significant barriers to taking those idle resources and putting them to productive use.

Then WWII came and forced the country to mobilize and put those resources to use (even if that use was just to make stuff which would be shipped off to Europe and the Pacific to be destroyed). Once the war was over, those resources which had been devoted to war could be repurposed (with relatively little friction) to uses with a much more positive effect on people's standard of living. So things became good according to meaningful metrics like living standards, not merely according to metrics like unemployment rate or total output which ignore the fact that building a tank to send to war isn't valuable in the same way as building a car for local consumers.

The glaring open question here is why there might be this asymmetry between putting idle resources to use and repurposing in-use resources. Which is closely related to the question of why recessions/depressions exist at all (as more than momentary blips): once a recession hits and bunch of people become unemployed (and other resources go idle), why doesn't the market immediately jump in to snap up those idle resources? This article gets into some of the attempts to answer those questions.

(Bonus answer: World War One did not happen during a depression, so mobilizing for war mostly involved repurposing resources which had served other uses in peacetime rather than bringing idle resources into use.)

I'm not sure how much it influenced the overall picture, but there was quite a brain drain to the US before and during WWII (mostly Jewish refugees) as well as after (Wernher von Braun and the like). Migrating away from the Nazi and Stalinist spheres of influence demonstrates intelligence, and the ability to enter the US despite the complex “national origins quota system” that went into effect in 1929 demonstrates persistence, affluence and/or marketable skills, so I estimate these immigrants gave a significant boost to the US economy.

However this goes, this seems to be a huge argument in favor of big-government spending (if we get this much utility from the government building things that literally explode themselves without providing non-military utility, then in a time of peace, we should be able to get even more by having the government build things like high-tech infrastructure, places of beauty, peaceful scientific research, large-scale engineering projects, etc.). So should we be spending 20-40% of our GDP on peace-time government mega-projects? It's either that or this piece of common knowledge is wrong (and we all know how reliable common knowledge is!).

I'm surprised no one has explained this yet, but this is wrong according to standard economic theory as I understand it.

1. The United States suffered from terrible monetary policy during the Great Depression.
2. Due to "animal spirits" and "sticky wages" this caused large scale unemployment and output well below our production possibilities frontier.
3. World War II caused the government to kickstart production for the war effort.
4. Living standards actually didn't rise, although GDP did (GDP per capita is NOT the same as living standards). Consumption was dramatically deferred during the war. People had fewer babies, bought fewer consumer products (and fewer were produced) and shifted toward home production for some necessities.
5. There was a short recession as the end of the war lowered demand, but pent-up consumer demand quickly re-stabilized the economy.

The point is WWII helped the economy because we were well under our production possibilities frontier during the depression. Peace-time mega projects would only be helpful under recessed/depressed conditions, and fortunately, we now can use monetary policy to produce similar effects.

Anyway, the argument you were making seems pretty common among people who don't follow economics debates, and in fact is one of the major policy recommendations of the oddball Lyndon LaRouche cult.

The labor force of the 1930s was sapped by over-allocation in unproductive industries. Specifically, much of the labor share was occupied in the sitting around feeling depressed and wishing you had a job industry. Economic conditions improved as workers shifted out of that industry and into more productive ones, such as all of them.

Part of it is that deflation in the early 1930s meant that workers were overpaid relative to the value of goods they produced (wages being harder to cut than prices). That caused wasteful amounts of unemployment. WWII triggered inflation, and combined with wage controls caused wages to become low relative to goods, shifting the labor supply and demand to the opposite extreme.

The people who were employed pre-war presumably had their standard of living lowered in the war (after having it increased a good deal during the deflation).

I won't try to explain here why deflation and inflation happened when they did, or why wages are hard to cut (look for "sticky wages" for info about the latter).

I assumed it was because it motivated people into becoming much more productive.

I think you probably find some relevant hits if you search for depression. In particular you will find recommendations of Burn's Feel Good Handbook.

A combination of controlled breathing, visualization, and mantra is pretty effective for me at battling acute anxiety and panic attacks. Personally, I use the Litany Against Fear from Dune. I'm happy to elaborate if there's any interest.

That makes sense. Even cooperating across short time frames might be problematic - "I'll stay in bed for 10 more minutes, even if it means that me-in-10-minutes will be stressed out and might be late for work"

I prefer to see long-term thinking as increased integration among different time-selves rather than a sacrifice, though - it's not a sacrifice to take actions with a delayed payoff if your utility function puts a high weight on your future-selves' wellbeing.

See https://www.google.com/search?q=picoeconomics

The biggest problem I can see with this is inefficient resource allocation. Others have mentioned ways of giving money to yourself, but we could probably minimize that with conflict-of-interest controls or by scoping budgetary buckets correctly. But there's no reason, even in principle, to think that the public's willingness to donate to a government office corresponds usefully to its actual needs.

As a toy example, let's say the public really likes puppies and decides to put, say, 1% of GDP into puppy shelters and puppy-related veterinary programs. Diminishing returns kick in at 0.1% of GDP; puppies are still being saved, but at that point marginal dollars would be doing more good directed at kitten shelters (which were too busy herding cats to spend time on outreach in the run-up to tax season). The last puppy is saved at 0.5% of GDP, and the remaining 0.5% -- after a modest indirect subsidy to casinos and makers of exotic sports cars -- goes into the newly minted Bureau for Puppy Salvation's public education fund.

Next tax cycle, that investment pays off and puppies get 2% of GDP.

There would be a lot of advertising.

In Italy there's something similar: you can choose whether 0.8% of your income taxes goes to the government or to an organized religion of your choice (if you don't choose, it's shared in proportion to the number of people who choose each church), and 0.5% goes to a non-profit or research organization of your choice.

What would happen if citizens had direct control over where their tax dollars went?

That's what the free market looks like -- and the dollars involved are no longer tax.

I suppose the government could still tax and then ask you if you'd rather use it to buy a flatscreen TV for your living room or else better air conditioning for Army tents in Afghanistan, or they could even restrict options to typical government spending,

Take a look at Hanson's proposals for allocating government resource with prediction market.

A sharp divide between basic, subsidized, no-frills good and services and other ones didn't work in the socialist German Democratic Republic (long story, reply if you need it). What does seem to be for various countries is different rates of value-added tax depending on the good or service - the greater the difference in taxation, the closer you get to the system you've described, but it is more gradual and can be fine-tuned. Maybe that could work for sales tax, too?

"Those who want to distinguish themselves from the masses - who want to consume conspiciously - will also be affected, since they will have to spend less to stand out from the crowd" - maybe I've misunderstood this, but surely it would have the opposite result? Let's say rents are ~$20/sqm (adjust for your own city; the principle stays the same). If I want my apartment to be 50 sqm rather than 40 sqm, that's an extra $200. But if 40 sqm apartments were free, the price difference would be the full $1000/month price of the bigger apartment. You've still got a cliff, just like in the means-tested welfare case; it's just that now it's on the consumption side.

In practice this would probably destroy the market for mid-priced goods - who wants to pay $1000/month just for an extra 10 square meters? Non-subsidized goods will only start being attractive when they get much better than the stuff the government provides, not just slightly better.

Also, if you give out goods rather than money, you're going to have to provide a huge range of different goods/services, because otherwise there will be whole categories of products that people who legitimately can't work (elderly, disabled etc) won't have access to. And if you do that, the efficiency of your economy is going to go way down - not just because the government is generally less efficient than the free market, but also because people can't use money to allocate resources according to their own preferences.

If the government would give each person say 30 % of GDP per capita to each person (not a very high standard of living), then that would force them to raise 30 % of GDP in taxes to cover for that.

In 2002, total U.S. social welfare expenditure constitutes over 35% of GDP

I think that would be too high anyway. Since anyone who bothers to work can make more than that, and the reduction in labor supply would increase pay, and any money you save will last you longer, there's little reason to make it enough for people to be well off, as opposed to getting just enough to scrape by.

It's also worth noting that most people will get a significant portion of that money back. If you make below the mean income (which most people do, since it's positively skewed) you will end up getting all of it back.

It seems unfair to charge people the entire price to get slightly better goods. Thus, if you want to get slightly better goods, the government should still reimburse you for the price of the cheap goods. At this point, it's just unconditional basic income with the government selling cheap goods.

As a minor point, Soylent as it is now can't be considered no-frills food. If you buy it ready-made, it costs around $10 a day.

If a government produces goods, the results tend to be low quality (education may be an exception in some places).

The cost of a guaranteed minimum income may not be quite as high as you think-- it would replace a lot of more complicated government support. Also, it might be possible to build in some social rewards for not taking it if you don't need it.

The advantage over the basic income system is that it would be considerably cheaper, since these goods and services would only be used by a part of the population. The advantage over the means-tested system is that people will still be allowed to use these goods and services if their income goes up, so it doesn't create perverse incentives.

The universal basic income schemes that seem the most reasonable to me adjust the taxation so that, while the UBI itself is never taxed, if you make a lot of money then your non-UBI earnings get an extra tax so that the whole reform ends up having very little direct effect on you. In effect, that ends up covering the "only used by a part of the population" criteria. The perverse incentives can't be avoided entirely, but they can be mitigated somewhat if the tax system is set up so that you're always better off working than not working.

For a concrete example, there's e.g. this 2007 proposal by the Finnish Green party. Your working wage (in euros per month) is on the X-axis, your total income after is on the Y-axis. Light green is the basic income, dark green is your after-tax wage, red is paid in tax. According to their calculations, this scheme would have been approximately cost neutral (compared to what the Finnish state normally gets in tax income and pays out in welfare).

Lots of people are arguing governments should provide all citizens with an unconditional basic income. One problem with this is that it would be very expensive.

You are missing the point. It's cheaper to give the poor unconditional basic income than to have a huge bureaucratic administration that makes sure that they pass certain conditions to be eligible for welfare payments.

That might mean a low basic income but it would still be an unconditional basic income. Don't confuse the debate for a unconditional income with the debate about how high it or welfare payments to the poorest should be.

I guess this system to some extent exist - e.g. in many countries, the government does provide you with education and health care

Actually you are looking at the wrong countries. Countries like Iran would be an example where essential goods like food get's heavily subventioned.

There are many reasons why subventions are a bad idea. The produce incentives for companies to lobby heavily to be included. The encourage people to waste products that get subventioned. They need bureaucracy to be organised. The prevent innovation because new products usually don't fit into the template along with old products are subventioned.

One middle route I've been toying with is that the government could provide people with cheap goods and services.

This is a popular practice in the third world.

See e.g. this or this.

how is this better than Walmart and Mcdonalds?

Not quite what you're looking for I think, but if someone is having that problem they might have anomic aphasia.

"Not having a word for it"? Or in the technical vocabulary of linguistics, the concept is not "lexicalised".

Sounds kind of like the Tip of the Tongue Effect

I've heard "anomia" and "being able to talk all around the idea of an [X] but not the word [X] itself".

First observation: Surely any entity intelligent enough to hack the essay according to the rules you have set is also intelligent enough to get the maximum grade (much more easily) by the usual means of writing the assigned essay…

Second observation: Since the concept of "being on topic" is vague (essentially, anything that humans interpret as being on a certain topic is on that topic) maybe the easiest way to hack it following your rules would be to write an essay that is not on topic by the criteria the designers of the exam had in mind, but that is close enough that it can confuse the graders into believing it is on topic. An analogy could be how some postmodernists confused people into believing they were doing philosophy...

This reminds me of something I've read about Isaac Asimov doing. He said that people tended not to believe him when he told them he didn't know anything about the subject he was asked to give a speech on. As a result, he started changing the subject.

He gave an example in which he was asked to give a speech on information retrieval or something. He didn't know anything about it beyond that it was apparently called "information retrieval". He basically said that Mendelian inheritance was discovered long before it was needed to solve certain problems in the theory of evolution, but nobody knew about it so it took a while to figure out the answer, so a better way to retrieve information would be helpful. Mostly he was just talking about Mendelian inheritance.

Heh, part of the strategy I used when I took the SAT was slightly darkening my "two-bit" words with my pencil and making sure to fill the exact amount of space provided-minus-one line. I had read (don't have the citation at hand) that length of essay tracks score pretty well. And, to clinch it, I wanted their (very brief) attention to be drawn to good words, used correctly.

Result: 12.

(Though, I think the main thing was just committing to writing a tight, formulaic essay. I outscored some friends who I thought were better writers than I was, because they were trying to write a good essay rather than a good SAT essay.)

You have to reliably convince a grader in the 1-2 min they spend on it that your essay is in the top 1% or so (that's the fraction of perfect 12s), and the grader intuitively knows the score she'll give you within one point after 30 seconds or less. I doubt there is a sure way to do it without hitting their mental model of a perfect essay on all counts.

Write a subtly but powerfully persuasive narrative about how you've long been planning to become a teacher, and rate essays like this one, because obviously that is the job that ultimately decides what kind of minds will be in charge in the next generation. Include a mention of the off topic problem, and claim that the "official" topic of your essay is merely an element in a more important and more real topic: this situation, happening right now, of a real and complex relationship between the writer and rater that will, in a sense, continue for the rest of both people's lives, even if they never meet again.

I'd rate that a 6 anyway.

There's always using a modified version of Pascal's mugging.

The pair "tend to always" or "always tend to". Sometimes they come off to me as a way to exploit the rhetorical force of "always" while committing only to a hedged "tend to", in which case they can condense a two-step of terrific triviality into three words. There are likely other phrases that can provide plausibly deniable pseudo-certainty but I can't think of any.

More generally, the Unix utility diction tries to pick out "frequently misused, bad or wordy diction", which is a kinda related precedent.

"[...]may be the case[...]"

Sometimes this phrase is harmless, but sometimes it is part of an important enumeration of possible outcomes/counterarguments/whatever. If "the case" does not come with either a solid plan/argument or an explanation why it is unlikely or not important, then it is often there to make the author and/or the audience feel like all the bases have been covered. E.g.,

We should implement plan X. It may be the case that [important weak point of X], but [unrelated benefit of X].

I had the notion a while ago to try to write a linter to aid in tasks beyond code correctness by automatically detecting the desired features in a plethora of objects. Kudos on actually doing it and in a not hare-brained fashion.

As a former Natural Language Processing researcher, the technology definitely exists. Using general vocabulary combined with many (semi-manually generated) regexes to figure out argumentative or weaselly sentences with decent accuracy should be doable. It could improve over time if you input exemplar sentences you came across.

I think this is a good idea, and I'm curious to see how it goes. I'll be watching, and as I complete some of my other writing duties I think this has a good chance of becoming one.

Something else that might be interesting: this comment and the idea it's a response to in the OP.

I'd love to see a discussion between people like LeCun, Norvig, Yudkowsky and e.g. Russell. A discussion where they talk about what exactly they mean when they think about "AI risks", and why they disagree, if they disagree.

Right now I often have the feeling that many people mean completely different things when they talk about AI risks. One person might mean that a lot of jobs will be gone, or that AI will destroy privacy, while the other person means something along the lines of "5 people in a basement launch a seed AI, which then turns the world into computronium". These are vastly different perceptions, and I personally find myself somewhere between those positions.

LeCun and Norvig seem to disagree that there will be an uncontrollable intelligence explosion. And I am still not sure what exactly Russell believes.

Anyway, it is possible to figure this out. You just have to ask the right questions. And this never seems to happen when MIRI or FHI talk to experts. They never specifically ask about their controversial beliefs. If you e.g. ask someone if they agree that general AI could be a risk, a yes/no answer provides very little information about how much they agree with MIRI. You'll have to ask specific questions.

Sure, lay it on us. If nothing else, writing it up clearly should help you.

Try posting some problems in the open threads here. MathOverflow has also worked really well for me.

In order to capture your intuition that a random sequence is "unsurprising", you want the predictor to output a distribution over {0,1} — or equivalently, a subjective probability p of the next bit being 1. The predictor tries to maximize the expectation of a proper scoring rule. In that case, the maximally unexpected sequence will be random, and the probability of the sequence will approach 2^{-n}.

Allowing the predictor to output {0, 1, ?} is kind of like restricting its outputs to {0%, 50%, 100%}.

Just in case anyone wants pointers to existing mathematical work on "unpredictable" sequences: Algorithmically random sequences (wikipedia)

My guess is that to a human observer they would seem like a random noise. -- Which contradicts my initial words that the sequence would not be what you'd expect... but I guess the answer is that the generation process is trying to surprise the prediction machine, not me as a human.

"What is the specific pattern of bits?" and "Give a vague description that applies to both this pattern and asymptotically 100% of possible patterns of bits" are very different questions. You're asking the machine the first question and the human the second question, so I'm not surprised the answers are different.

Does "most unexpected" differ from "least predictable" in any way? Seems like a random number generator would match any algorithm around 50% of the time so making an algorithm less predictable than that is impossible no?

My prediction machine can maximize it's expected minimum score by outputting random guesses. Then your bitstring is precisely the complement of my random string, and therefore drawn from the random distribution.

or whether anyone has explored this before

I have briefly thought about this idea in the context of password selection and password crackers: the "most unexpected" string (of some maximum length) is a good password. No deep reasoning here though.

I think adding a little meta-probability will help.

Since there's some probability of the sequence being "the most surprising", this would basically mean that several of the most surprising end up with basically the same probability. For example, if it takes n bits of data to define "the most surprising m-bit sequence", then there must be a 2^-n chance of that happening. Since there are 2^m sequences, and the most surprising sequence must have a probability of at most 2^-m, there must be at least 2^(m-n) most surprising sequences.

What sort of AIs have emotions? How can I tell whether an AI has emotions?

I think you are plain wrong.

There a lot of thought in AI development of mimicking human neural decision making processes and it's very well possible that the first human level AGI will be similar in structure to human decision making. Emotions are a core part of how humans make decisions.

Define "emotion".

I find it highly unlikely robots would have anything corresponding to any given human emotion, but if you just look at the general area in thingspace that emotions are in, and you're perfectly okay with the idea of finding a new one, then it would be perfectly reasonable for robots to have emotions. For one thing, general negative and positive emotions would be pretty important for learning.

I have never thought about this, so this is a serious question. Why do you think evolution resulted in beings with emotions and what makes you confident enough that emotions are unnecessary for practical agents that you would end up being frustrated about the depiction of emotional AIs created by emotional beings in SF stories?

From Wikipedia:

Emotion is often the driving force behind motivation, positive or negative. An alternative definition of emotion is a "positive or negative experience that is associated with a particular pattern of physiological activity."

...cognition is an important aspect of emotion, particularly the interpretation of events.

Let's say the AI in your story becomes aware of an imminent and unexpected threat and allocates most resources to dealing with it. This sounds like fear. The rest is semantics. Or how exactly would you tell that the AI is not in fear? I think we'll quickly come up against the hard problem of consciousness here and whether consciousness is an important feature for agents to possess. And I don't think one can be confident enough about this issue in order to become frustrated about a science fiction author using emotional terminology to describe the AIs in their story (a world in which AIs have "emotions" is not too absurd).

It wasn't working for me either all day. A few hours ago it mysteriously reappeared. I called tech support. They said they had no explanation.

It should be up again now. I will investigate better hosting solutions.

It's not loading for me, either; I'm getting my ISP's "website suggestions" page, which tells me it's probably a DNS issue (this page theoretically only shows up when a domain name is not registered).

I wound up googling the URL in the "Recent on Rationality Blogs" sidebar, and was able to read Google's cache of the latest post. Said cache includes no comments. I did not try to comment from the cached page (I didn't expect it to work).

[edit: This is with Firefox.]

working for my cheap mobile phone, not for my new laptop with IE. Which is a shame, because it's a very good post, but I'm going to be way behind to contribute to any comment threads.

edit: Shame for me, I mean, not for the observer concerne with signal to noise ratio.

It's down for me, too. Ping is failing to resolve the address, so I think we're looking at a DNS issue.

On my Firefox it works fine. If it's loading for everyone else and not you, some things you might look at: See if you can ping the site, and see if it works under a clean browser profile. I'm not sure how to get one on Chrome but I'm sure there's a way.

You might also post whatever error message you're getting, if any. "Not loading" covers a fairly broad range of behavior.

[Edit: It worked when I was at work, but does not work at home. And yes, it looks like a DNS issue.]

Using Chrome as well, not having a problem. Have you e-mailed Yvain at the reverse of gro.htorerihs@ttocs?

It's not loading for me either, nor for downforeveryoneorjustme.com. I use firefox.

Update: They made it.

Bayesian Truth Serum

I wonder if you aren't thinking of this bagel vendor.

The square brackets are greedy. What you want to do is this:

\[Link\]: [Why do people persist in believing things that just aren't true?](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/mariakonnikova/2014/05/why-do-people-persist-in-believing-things-that-just-arent-true.html?utm_source=www&utm_medium=tw&utm_campaign=20140519&mobify=0)

which looks like:

[Link]: Why do people persist in believing things that just aren't true?

This bit of the article jumped out at me:

But, when the researchers took a closer look, they found that the only people who had changed their views were those who were ideologically predisposed to disbelieve the fact in question. If someone held a contrary attitude, the correction not only didn’t work—it made the subject more distrustful of the source. [...] If information doesn’t square with someone’s prior beliefs, he discards the beliefs if they’re weak and discards the information if the beliefs are strong.

As unfortunate as this may be, even perfect Bayesians would reason similarly; Bayes's rule essentially quantifies the trade-off between discarding new information and discarding your prior when the two conflict. (Which is one way in which Bayesianism is a theory of consistency rather than simple correctness.)

This might be counter-intuitive and impractical for self-teaching, but for me it was an assembly language course that made it 'click' for how things work behind the scenes. It doesn't have to be much and you'll probably never use it again, but the concepts will help your broader understanding.

If you can be more specific about which parts baffle you, I might be able to recommend something more useful.

Could you give a couple examples of specific things that you'd like to understand?

Without that, a classic that might match what you're interested in is Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. It starts as an introduction to general programming concepts and ends as an introduction to writing interpreters.

Without citation: minimal "organic" labeling standards often aren't a very high or impressive barrier to clear.

Another suggestion (also without citation): It may also be worth evaluating risks associated with certain pesticides common to a crop or region and related externalities (the effect on local food chains). Also, when exposure involves more than one chemical, the overall risk assessment becomes more involved.

The latter. The former is already decreasing at an incredible speed but I see no trend for the latter.

I'm much more likely to die of aging than of violence; so I'd rather stop aging.

This seems to generalize well to the rest of humanity. I am surprised that most others who replied disagrees. ISTM that most existential risks are not due to deliberate violence, but rather unintended consequences.

The formed is a major existential risk, while the latter is probably going to be solved soon(er), so the former.

If you could magically stop all human-on-human violence, or stop senescence (aging) for all humans, which would it be?

All governments rely on an implicit or explicit threat of force, of "human-on-human violence".

If no one can apply violence to me why should I pay any taxes, or, more crudely, pay for that apple I just grabbed off a street stall?

Ending aging would almost certainly greatly diminish human-on-human violence, since increasing expected lifespans would lower time preference. Right?

My problem with these questions is that it sorta gets difficult quickly. If you stopped aging today, I imagine there would very quickly be overpopulation issues and many old patients in hospitals wouldn't die etc. and yet I am finding it difficult to think of major issues with the ending of violence (boxing champions would be out of a job). And even now, I'm sure someone's thought of a counter example, and then the discussion would be harder. And so even though I think that aging is more important than violence as a focus, the question asks a hypothetical that is never going to occur (being able to just make that decision, I mean) and takes us away from reality into the nitty/gritty of a literal non-problem.

Why did you ask?

Edit: I didn't mean to make a case for either side, I was trying to suggest that the question itself seems unhelpful. We'll end up with a complicated technical discussion which is unlikely to have any practical value.

The former. Stopping ageing without giving us time to prepare for it would cause all sorts of problems in terms of increasing population. Whereas stopping violence would accelerate progress no end (if only for the resources it freed up).

Modern "infographics" like those by informationisbeautiful are extremely often terrible in exactly the ways that Tufte warns against. They are often beautiful, but rarely excel at their original purpose of displaying data.

Enough to make learning Braille, meaningfully improving existing screenreader software if I don't care for it, and figuring out how to echolocate relatively short-term projects so that I could move on to other things instead of spending forever trying to reconstruct the anatomy of my life.

I almost said "enough to be able to route around this drawback somehow", but no, I don't think it's quite that dire.

Spend some time deciding if decisiveness is a virtue. Dwell on it until you've convinced yourself that decisiveness is good, and have come to terms that you are not decisive. Around here it may be tempting to label decisiveness as rash and to rationalize your behavior, or not worth the work of changing, if so return to step one and reaffirm that you think it is good to be decisive. Now step outside your comfort zone and practice being decisive, practice at the restaurant, at work, doing chores. Have reminders to practice, set your desktop or phone background to "Be Decisive" in plain text (or whatever suits your esthetic tastes). Pick a role model who takes decisive action. Now after following these steps, you have practiced making decisions and following through on them, you have decided that to make a choice and not dwelling on it is a virtue, Now you can update your image of yourself as a decisive person. From there it should be self sustaining.

If you're not familiar with the ideas read "The Paradox of Choice" by Barry Schwartz or watch a talk about it.

Other ideas:

give yourself a very short deadline for most decisions (most decisions are trivial); i.e. I will make this decision in the next two minutes and then I will stick with it. For long-term life decisions, maybe not so much.

Flip a coin. This is a good way to expose your gut feelings. A pros and cons type of weighting the options allows you to weigh lots of factors. Flipping a coin produces fewer reactions (in my experience): "Shoot, I really wish i had the other option (good information), or "I don't feel to strongly about the outcome (good information), or "I'm content with this flip" (good information).

A greatly simplified example: two countries are having a dispute and the tension keeps rising. They both believe that they can win against the other in a war, meaning neither side is willing to back down in the face of military threats. Improved forecasting would indicate who would be the likely winner in such a conflict, and thus the weaker side will preemptively back down.

improved political forecasting is good. .... Why is improved forecasting not zero sum?

For the simple reason that politics is not zero-sum, foreign policy included.

Improved forecasting might mean that both sides do fewer stupid (negative sum) things.

International politics is zero-sum once you've already reached the Pareto frontier and can only move along it, but if forecasting is sufficiently bad you might not even be close to the Pareto frontier.

I don't think Tetlock talks about that much.

Imagine a better forecast about whether invading Iraq reduces terrorism, or about whether Saddam would survive the invasion. Wouldn't both sides make wiser decisions?

Had a look at your link, but couldn't make sense of it. Consider writing a proper summary upfront.

I want to build a better formalization of naturalized induction than Solomonoff's

This seems an ambitious task. Can you start with something simpler?

Your essay was interesting. What did you think of a similar post I recently wrote?

Feedback (entirely on the writing): The first goal when editing this should be to eliminate words from sentences. Use short and familiar words whenever possible. Change around a paragraph's structure to get it shorter. Since this is for English class, cut out every bit of jargon you can. If there's a length requirement, you can always fill it with story.

The best lesson of my dreadful college writing class was that nonfiction can have a story too - and the primary way you engage with a nontechnical audience is with this story. Solomonoff induction practically gets a character arc - the hope for a universal solution, the impotence at having to check every possible hypothesis, then being built back up by hard work and ancient wisdom to operate in the real world.

When you shift gears, e.g. to talk about science, you can make it easier on the reader by cutting technical explanations for historical or personal anecdotes. This only works once or twice per essay, though.

You can make your paragraphs more exciting. Rather than starting with "An issue similar in cause to separability is the idea of the frontier," and then have the reader go in with the mindset that they have to hear about a definition (English professors hate reading about definitions), try to give the reader a very concise big-picture view of the idea and immediately move on to the exciting applications, which is where they'll learn the concept.

Please write a clear layperson's intro to UDT. You can also mention TDT etc. A good way to do this is a Wiki article.

A citation of related literature would be good too. Alex Altair's paper was good, but I'd like to read about UDT in more depth yet still in an accessible form.

Well meaning, rationalized theft is still an assault on the seller.

I see no reason to send my money anywhere other than to the most needy person. I'd divert 100%.

but the seller gets less/none, and the rest goes to charity. Seller has no right to complain.

Why would there be any sellers under this system?