Open Thread, July 1-15, 2012

I was considering writing some more discussion posts, but am not sure if people would find them valuable. Possible ideas:

1) In light of the relatively recent discussion of the value of history in social engineering, a summary of Politics of the Prussian Army 1640-1945 in order to have a proper case study for whether learning history is a reasonable effort improvement for those trying to raise the sanity line.

2) A post on hyperlexis - the idea that modern society has too much law.

3) Law: Real World Hidden Complexity of Wishes. This post would be useful for showing skeptics why hidden complexity of wishes is an intractable problem. Also, it might help to bring a different discipline's perspective on the problem.

4) A followup to Please Don't Fight the Hypothetical called "When to Fight the Hypothetical"

Thoughts? Suggestions?

I've been reading stuff by philospher Wolfgang Spohn. His recent decision theory stuff (like Dependency equilibria and the causal structure of decision and game situations or Reversing 30 years of discussion: why causal decision theorists should one-box) is kind of cool. Like TDT, he talks about rational agents deciding on the basis of "reflexive entangled decision situations" and like UDT he proposes that agents should decide to follow the decisions they would have made in "earlier situations". It's not quite LW style reductionism, but it's close-ish, and it increases my estimation that LW decision theory would be well recieved in academia (after a little self promotion).

Perhaps of some interest to the Moldbug enthusiasts here is the Examining Idealism series recently written by James_G on his blog.

• Part 1. No real need to read this if you recall most of what you read on Unqualified Reservations, still a good and not too long overview.
• Part 2. Some neuroscience speculation and research --- into leftism and rightism (mind-killer warning, especially for people who self-identify as right wing).
• Part 3. Agency fiction, mind projection fallacy, TDT, morality, religion and how they relate to Idealism.
• Beyond moral anti-realism. Argues for Hedonic Utilitarianism and develops the concept of eminent self. Cute doodles on ways to think about morality (example). Good criticism of his ideas by "O" in the comment section.

Paul Krugman's hilarious predictions about the Internet / technology ca. 1998:

The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law"--which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants--becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.

Is anyone else watching the CERN announcement? I came in just when he said something about five standard deviations and everyone started clapping. Has Eliezer lost his bet? A boson has been found at 125.3 (+-) 0.6 GeV at 4.9 sigma.

Plenty of Room At The Top

Feynman once said there's Plenty of room at the bottom (nanotechnology). In the context of human genetics, it's clear there's plenty of room at the top -- possibly as much as +30 SDs based on existing variance in the human population!

...

Finally, regarding the +30 SD number, one could reason in a completely different way. Since only 10 billion or so humans have ever lived, and there are probably many many more distinct genotypes/phenotypes (e.g., 2^(many thousands) based just on gene variants), it is unlikely that the already realized phenotypes could be near the maximum potential of the species on any trait. I often argue with other physicists about the true exceptionality of, e.g., Einstein, based on this kind of logic (i.e., many more physicists, drawn from a much larger talent pool, have lived post-Einstein than pre-Einstein).

Wow.

Strongly suspect more of us should be taking this advice.

I'm looking to exchange Skype or equivalent with fellow rationalists. It's very hard to find rationalists in real life. My purpose is mainly to exchange information (apparently many of my questions aren't Google-able), but also to try out certain psychological tests/questions (many of them are invented by me) and see how well they score, to test my hypotheses.

A wasp smaller than an amoeba

Polilov found that M.mymaripenne has one of the smallest nervous systems of any insect, consisting of just 7,400 neurons. For comparison, the common housefly has 340,000 and the honeybee has 850,000. And yet, with a hundred times fewer neurons, the wasp can fly, search for food, and find the right places to lay its eggs.

On top of that Polilov found that over 95 per cent of the wasps’s neurons don’t have a nucleus. The nucleus is the command centre of a cell, the structure that sits in the middle and hoards a precious cache of DNA. Without it, the neurons shouldn’t be able to replenish their vital supply of proteins. They shouldn’t work. Until now, intact neurons without a nucleus have never been described in the wild.

I thought this might be of interest here because uploading would take detailed understanding of neurons, and finding out what the minimal neuron is could be useful.

Does anybody here know anything about hypnosis, especially academic research? In this post Armok_GoB posted an interesting link. Especially notable is the video of a hypnotist convincing strangers on the street to give him their wallets, supposedly with a 66% success rate.

It seems like a potentially very important area of research, and could be highly relevant to CFAR's goals.

PZ Myers on why he thinks preserving brains is not presently possible, similar to kalla724's notes on the subject. (He does brain preservation in the course of his own work, on zebrafish.)

And that’s another thing: what the heck is going to be recorded? You need to measure the epigenetic state of every nucleus, the distribution of highly specific, low copy number molecules in every dendritic spine, the state of molecules in flux along transport pathways, and the precise concentration of all ions in every single compartment. Does anyone have a fixation method that preserves the chemical state of the tissue? All the ones I know of involve chemically modifying the cells and proteins and fluid environment. Does anyone have a scanning technique that records a complete chemical breakdown of every complex component present?

I think they’re grossly underestimating the magnitude of the problem. We can’t even record the complete state of a single cell; we can’t model a nematode with a grand total of 959 cells. We can’t even start on this problem, and here are philosophers and computer scientists blithely turning an immense and physically intractable problem into an assumption.

Is it time for another welcome thread? The current one says 2012, but it has over 1200 comments on it, largely due to the infamous infanticide discussion.

Turns out the religious are less prone to emotionally inconsistent decision-making than atheists.

If you haven't seen what-if.xkcd.com, you really should check it out.

Anyone who knows what these two pictures are and where they come from? Nemesis is doing some I think not very accurate critique of LessWrong on the Swedish Skeptics internet forum. It is in Swedish, and sorry, I have not time to translate into English. But though I do not know, I suspect that Nemesis have not the pictures them by himself but found them somewhere. If anyone knows I would be glad to know. (If someone should know already and recogises them, I do not ask anyone to spend significant time on it.)

There seems to be a PHP Singularity. (Yeah.)

I was recently thinking about this: (1) PHP is a horrible, horrible, horrible language, but (2) many people use it anyway. It means it does some things right (at least for the given set of people), but it also does so many things wrong. Switching to Perl, Ruby or Python is apparently not seen as a good choice by the PHP users, because those languages miss... something. (Perhaps a simplicity for a total newbie, e.g. not having to think about libraries, etc.)

In my opinion, the good solution would be to make a new language "PHP done correctly". (Of course it would have different name, for copyright reasons.) It should have all the advantages of PHP, without the stupid design choices. If done correctly, it has a potential to gain millions of users (current PHP users). Some thoughts about the language:

• visually similar to PHP. We are trying to steal their user-base, right? So I would keep the "<? ... ?>" syntax for inserting code into HTML page, and a dollar prefix for "$variableNames". The goal is to make a PHP user look at the "Hello World" examples or the new language and think "Oh, it's just like PHP", because learning a new programming language is an inconvenience. (By the way, using dollars for variables is a good way to avoid naming conflicts with keywords.)

• there should be a web tool where you can copy-paste your code and it will highlight all errors. Syntax errors, wrong function names, etc.

• the first version should support the most important things PHP supports now. For me it would be displaying a text and connecting to a database.

• it should support namespaces and classes, done correctly. These may be different from PHP, because noobs (most of the PHP userbase) don't understand them anyway, so it is a good opportunity to improve the language design. At this point we don't have to be backwards compatible.

• it needs to be distributed with a lot of tutorials. Many beginners want to google their solutions. So the product website should include an example discussion forum, an example database editor, etc. All these examples as simple as possible.

• variable declaration optional (sorry, most people want it like this), but include a command that changes it (like "use strict" in Perl).

<p>
if condition:
....<b>
action1
</b>
action2
</p>

libertarian crackers

This post probably only makes sense if you have noticed the pattern that societies with high rates of consanguineous marriage tend to also be clannish societies and are familiar with recent evidence that shows rapid human evolution in the past few thousand years.

After reading this forum for some time, I finally realized that I'm not the only one who finds the standard linkage between romantic relationship and ownership weird. I recall that the statements like "s/he is mine" or "I'm yours" have been baffling me for as long as I can remember, yet most people consider them perfectly normal. A few posts by the regulars, both polys and "monos" show that I'm not alone.

I finished reading Left in the Dark by Gynn & Wright and have posted a review. Summary: it's seriously junk science. If you want a fun read, stick with Julian Jaynes.

It's been asked before, but has anyone found any useful online information regarding The Alexander Technique to improve posture and reduce overall stress and tension in the body?

In my recent reading, thought, and debates with Konkvistador I become more and more of the opinion that a highly refined and ethically grounded theocracy of some sort might indeed be the best solution ever to our political and social dilemmas. Expect the focus of my comments to turn from grappling with Neo-Reaction to exploring this possibility in the coming months.

Well, most people here actually do hope for a "direct theocracy" of FAI rule to turn out very well, so the "only" big leap of logic is to make the case for human institutions made up around an imaginary/potential Supreme Power being able to perform with anything approaching its benevolence and not turning completely inefficient. That sounds like an enormous stretch, I know. But consider the vast achievements of Western Christianity as a sociocultural institution from the 4th to the 19th centuries - not its (very apparent) flaws, but what good changes one would honestly have to attribute to this system.

Also, its regrettably narrow-minded progeny, born practically in its death throes - Leftist idealism - eventually turned out to look more or less "nice", despite having a hand in a few disasters while trying to step into the old system's shoes during early 20th century. (I'll muse some more about this.)

Survival Kit

It seems to me that people are far too casual about one of the greatest personal threats, that of suddenly being translated into another world, era, or alternate history. This happens all the time. You walk around the horses in a little town near Berlin, in 1809, and you disappear (with a popping sound). You get hit by lightning, and suddenly you find yourself in Ostrogothic Italy or medieval Iceland. Some bruiser hits you on the head with a crowbar, and you wake up in Arthur’s England. While investigating reports of strange gases in an abandoned coal mine in Pennsylvania, you fall into a kind of suspended animation for 492 years, waking to find America under the iron heel of the Air Lords of Han. While chasing down an armed perp (again in Pennsylvania), you’re accidentally swept up into someone’s sideways-in-time vehicle and land in a Keystone State full of pagan Aryans in desperate need of a new source of gunpowder.

It is a fun read. :)

I'm looking for advice on specific insurance policies for the aspiring gambler/test-subject/would-be-immortal.

First question: Term or permanent? Term is far cheaper, but runs the risk of having zero return if I should have the misfortune to enjoy a long and happy life. I'm leaning towards term if only because the costs of brain-preservation seem to be unpredictable over any sustained period of time (scale, plastination, other technological advancements) and the value of a fixed-return permanent policy decreases over time due to inflation.

Second question: How much? This is highly dependent on the first, and subject to unpredictable updates over time.

Third question: Through Rudi Hoffman or other parties? So far I've only talked to Rudi, but I wanted to know if anyone else has done some comparison shopping. If not, I'll do it and post the comparisons I find, checking in with Alcor to see what they find acceptable.

Sanctuary by Gregory Cochran is a short post on the science fiction thought experiment of a planet with low rates of mutation.

Review and discussion of Delany's Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders-- of interest to LW because there's a lot about the effects of reading material that breaks various taboos.

Another review which may give you a clearer idea of whether you want to read the book

Is there any way to do anthropic reasoning besides SIA and SSA? This includes anything you might call "not doing anthropic reasoning" as long as it isn't self-contradictory.

I'd like to see more of these.

A believer, a skeptic and a rationalist walk into a séance.

During the séance, the believer heard voices. After the séance, the believer proclaims, “See! See! I heard voices! The spirit world exists: séances work!”

During the séance, the skeptic heard nothing. After the séance, the skeptic proclaims, “I have looked everywhere for evidence of spirits and it is obvious that the mystic has tricked you with cold reading. Quit this nonsense, there is nothing to see.”

During the séance, the rationalist heard nothing, but notices that the believer heard something and that the skeptic heard nothing. After the séance, the rationalist proclaims, “Hmm… There’s obviously something very powerful going on here: how does it work and how can I use it?”

Looking for fashion advice

I've recently lost a lot of weight and need to buy new clothes. I'm particularly looking for fashionable, casual clothes. Something to portray the picture of a university student who has it together, is high status, but isn't uptight.

The stores I've shopped at so far don't seem to have what I'm looking for. For example, most the shirts have pop cultural or "funny" graphics on them or are a billboard for a company. I'm more so looking for colorful but masculine shirts, something with an interesting design. I think I may have more luck with an online vendor.

I remember Lukeprog recommended web retailers, but I can't find the post. Does anyone know which post it is, or have recommendations of their own?

Thanks!

Look at this. Does it set off anybody else's quantum woo detector? And yet it's a course offered by a real university, as far as I can see.

"I just flipped a fair coin. I decided, before I flipped the coin, that if it came up heads, I would ask you for $1000. And if it came up tails, I would give you $1,000,000 if and only if I predicted that you would give me $1000 if the coin had come up heads. The coin came up heads - can I have $1000?"

Obviously, the only reflectively consistent answer in this case is "Yes - here's the $1000", because if you're an agent who expects to encounter many problems like this in the future, you will self-modify to be the sort of agent who answers "Yes" to this sort of question - just like with Newcomb's Problem or Parfit's Hitchhiker.

- Timeless Decision Theory: Problems I Can't Solve - Eliezer_Yudkowsky

I don't understand why "Yes" is the right answer. It seems to me that an agent that self-modified to answer "Yes" to this sort of question in the future but said "No" this time would generate more utility than an agent that already implemented the policy of saying yes.

If I was going to insert an agent into the universe at the moment the question was posed after the coin flip had occurred, I would place one that answered "No" this time, but answered "Yes" in the future. (Assuming I have no information other than the information provided in the problem description.)

Thinking Like a Behavioural Economist (dentist edition)

On incentives, professionals and unconscious bias.

Advertising is regulatory capture of the peer-to-peer reputation system.

Did you know that each country has a different sign language? And they are not similar, even if the spoken languages of the respective countries sound similar. From Wikipedia:

On the whole, sign languages are independent of oral languages and follow their own paths of development. For example, British Sign Language and American Sign Language are quite different and mutually unintelligible, even though the hearing people of Britain and America share the same oral language. [...] Similarly, countries which use a single oral language throughout may have two or more sign languages; whereas an area that contains more than one oral language might use only one sign language.

To me this seems very irrational. I don't understand the details, but from short reading of Wikipedia it seems that many sign languages have a common origin, and that for each country there was historically an institution defining and teaching the language; if there were more such institutions in the country, sometimes there were more languages. Why? If the sign language is so different from the spoken language, what's the point of having a different sign language everywhere? I think it would be much better to keep the languages synchronized, so the deaf people would at least have an advantage of easy international communication.

(Once I thought about learning a sign language, just of curiosity, but this fact made a "trivial" inconvenience: which sign language should I learn? Slovakian? According to Wikipedia, it's not even similar to Czech sign language, despite similar languages and shared history. American? Possibly most users. International?)

I Want a New Drug, blog post by Gregory Cochran on why big pharma has been fail for the past two decades.

Why are users long, nonsensical names editing their own wiki pages? Here and here are two recent examples, but I've noticed it for a couple weeks now.

I want to be able to dance at weddings and parties, but I don't know how to break this down into a sequence of learnable subskills. To pick just one step that's not obvious to non-musical me: how do I tell what kind of dance fits the music that is playing? Do any of you have advice on how to quickly achieve a minimum viable level of competence?

Can anyone recommend me any nootropics for raising concentration (executive functions, working memory) that are effective, legal in the UK, not too expensive, and without too much side effects? My concentration is quite bad, if that's relevant.

I have some questions for people who think they believe in quantum worlds that split and join, and/or in "timeless physics".

Consider the sentence that you just read. The implication of such beliefs is that the person who started reading the sentence is not the same person who finished reading the sentence. According to the splitting quantum worlds idea, the person at the start would have split into many different people, who split into even more different people... by the time the sentence was finished. According to the timeless perspective, the person-moment who "began reading the sentence" and the person-moment who "finished reading the sentence" are fundamentally different entities, coexisting eternally in a universe where nothing actually changes.

Don't confuse this with the commonplace observation that every experience changes you a little bit. According to that "theory", first you exist, then you still exist but you're a little bit different, then you're still existing but you're even more different, and so on for the rest of your life. The metaphysics there is of one person changing over time.

The metaphysics in these avantgarde theories is of one person who becomes many, who become many^2, who become very many... or of disconnected person-moments, none of which actually changes, but all of which "feel like" they are changing. The important aspect, for my argument, is the denial of continuity: the person at the end of the sentence is literally not the person at the beginning of the sentence; not the same person changed, but a different being. That is a remarkable thing to believe - and "remarkable" is an understatement. (It resembles some well-known delusions.)

Or perhaps that is not what believers think? I don't know. Eliezer claims to believe in timelessness. He posts comments here, and presumably they take time to type out and submit; how does he reconcile this with his belief? As he goes through the motions, does he tell himself something like, "this 'change' is an illusion, this 'change' is an illusion, all that really exists is a set of unchanging Eliezers, frozen in different postures, which conceptually could be assembled into a causal sequence"?

As for many worlds that branch in time, it's a little harder to make the argument that the concept is radically at odds with experience; someone can say, yes, I agree that subjective time is like a line, but a branching world is like a tree, and my line is like one branch of the tree. In other words, it seems that someone who believes in splitting quantum worlds does not have to deny any of their experience, they just have to claim that stuff happened that they didn't feel and don't remember, namely the branching off of their other selves. Is this how many-worlds believers reconcile their beliefs with their experience? If so, then there are further stages to the critique, but before I go there, I want a better idea of what people are actually thinking.

Obviously I'm a skeptic about these positions, to put it mildly. So what I want to know is why people believe them, and how they reconcile their metaphysical position with the facts of their moment-to-moment experience. Is this even seen as a problem? Was there a time in your life when you struggled to make sense of the disparity? Did you take such a belief for granted, and then only later realize that it might be in contradiction with basic appearances? I am interested in hearing arguments and explanations, but also in anecdotes recounting episodes of philosophical worry and resolution - thoughts you had and how you reacted to them.

Not that I care about karma, but I've noticed that mine seems to hold steady at two thirds of the lowest top contributor.

Has anyone else noticed a stable karma ratio?

Does anyone have experience with Vector Marketing? Opinions online range from "fantastic" to "scam." I have an interview schedule with them tomorrow, and am trying to determine whether I should cancel. If it is a scam, it's certainly not worth my time.

// Long comment, no new material, ends with an ill defined decision theory question. Feel free to collapse it and move on.

Player M is playing rounds of PD against increasingly interesting agents. Players swap source code and then return their decisions. The game payoff matrix takes sets of actions (consisting of "C"ooperates and "D"efects, one from each player), and returns payoffs for each player.

PD := (<D,D>, <D,C>, <C,D>, <C,C>) → (<1,1>, <3,0>, <0,3>, <2,2>)

is a set of actions, are the corresponding payoffs. M is always the first player.

Round 1: M plays two games against Q-type agents. The first Q, defect rock, always returns D, the second Q, coop rock, always returns C.

If M sees the defect rock, the game is limited to strategy sets where player 2 defects

(<D,D>, <C,D>) → (<1,1>, <0,3>) := PD against defect rock

If M sees the cooperate rock, the game becomes

(<D,C>, <C,C>) → (<3,0>, <1,1>) := PD against cooperate rock

M defects in both cases to maximize her payoff. Across all possible rocks, M plays the strategy

Q(D,C) → M(D,D)

Round 1 can be summarized as

(<M=D, Q=D>, <M=D, Q=C>) → (<1,1>, <3,0>)

Round 2: M plays against R-type agents. The four types are R agents are

M(D,C) → R(D,D), "Tantrum"

M(D,C) → R(C,D), "Reverse"

M(D,C) → R(D,C), "Copy"

M(D,C) → R(C,C), "Saint"

Each predicts M's behavior from her source code and returns an action by its strategy. When M plays against Tantrum, she assumes Tantrum makes accurate predictions about her decision and reasons:

(M=D → R=D) → <1,1> 

(M=C → R=D) → <0,3>

and so returns D, which gives her a higher payoff. M's behavior in Round 2 can be summarized by the meta-strategy

R(Tantrum, Reverse, Copy, Saint) → M(D, D, C, D)

Round 2 can be summarized as

(<M=D, tantrum=D>, <M=D, reverse=C>, <M=C, copy=C>, <M=D, Saint=C>) → (<1,1>, <3,0>, <2, 2>, <3,0>)

In Round 1 M played "Tantrum"; Q(D,C) → M(D,D).

Round 3.

???

In round 1, the Qs each returned an action,

Q=(D,C)

and M decided by a strategy (Tantrum) that returned an M action for each possible Q action,

Q=(D,C)→M(D,D)

In round 2, the Rs had strategies, which returned an R action for each possible M action,

R=(Tantrum, Reverse, Copy, Saint), which was short-hand for
R=(M(D,C)→R(D,D), M(D,C)→R(C,D), M(D,C) → R(D,C), M(D,C) → R(C,C)), 

and M decided by a meta-strategy that returned an M action for each possible R strategy.

R(Tantrum, Reverse, Copy, Saint) → M(D, D, C, D)

Taking this up one more level of meta, it seems round 3 should have M facing S-players who decide by meta strategies. The sixteen meta-strategies map M(Tantrum, Reverse, Copy, Saint) → onto S(D, D, D, D) through S(C, C, C, C). I'll spare the enumeration.

But this is problematic: M tries to maximize its winnings from PD. PD takes the actions of M and S as input. S depends on M. So M is really maximizing PD(M,S(M)). But S-players select actions based on M's strategy (cooperate if M plays by Copy or Tantrum, et cetera), not based on her action. M doesn't decide by a strategy against S-players or R-players, she decides by a meta-meta-strategy and a meta-strategy, respectively. M decides by a normal strategy when faced with Q-agents.

So we could build a round 3 game where S simulates M in PDs with Qs, but this isn't a fair game because M doesn't know that the real payoff to maximize in the game with S, not the simulated game with Qs. Also, it's not clear to me how M selects any action for the PD with S. Is there a well defined game which is "a level of meta up" from round 2 and fair to M? Preferably something not quite as hard as "M against all rational agents".

I'm looking into getting some MCT oil. Prices seem to vary widely on Amazon, and a brief search hasn't turned up any recommendations on a particular type to get. Should I just go with the cheapest, or are there other important factors to consider?

Shouldn't HPMOR have updated just now?

What are people's views on the cow from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (as an ethical dilemma)? For those who haven’t read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the character is explained on wikipedia Ignoring the idea that vegetables don’t want to be eaten,

• Would it be a good thing to breed such a cow? (If so, good in what sense/why?)
• Would it be right/okay to eat such a cow if it existed?

My own opinion is that breeding such a cow is good because it replaces a non-sapient thing that will suffer being slaughtered with a sapient thing that is happy to be slaughtered. I think it’s perfectly okay to eat it because that’s what it wants to have happen (but at the same time, you aren’t obliged to).

It turns out my OH isn’t convinced by this reasoning, so I thought it worth asking.