Open thread, Nov. 24 - Nov. 30, 2014

Finally some common sense. I was seriously disappointed in statements made by people I usually admire (Pinker, Schremer). It just shows how much we still have to go in communicating AI risk to the general public when even the smartest intellectuals dismiss this idea before any rational analysis.

I'm really looking forward to Elon Musk's comment.

Any sufficiently capable intelligent system will prefer to ensure its own continued existence and to acquire physical and computational resources – not for their own sake, but to succeed in its assigned task.

ELI5...

• Why can't we program hard stops into AI, where it is required to pause and ask for further instruction?

• Why is "spontaneous emergence of consciousness and evil intent" not a risk?

There a good strategy against publishing something stupid: Peer review before publication.

Something that's missing from a lot of social justice talk is quoting cognitive science papers. Talking about actual experiments and what the audience can learn from them could make people care more about empiricism.

The radius of the sun is only about ten times the radius of jupiter. I feel like a spherical elephant has considerably more than ten times the radius of a watermelon.

...is what I was about to say until I did research, and apparently it's pretty accurate. A watermelon can exceed 60cm diameter, and wolfram alpha gives an elephant's length between 5.4 and 7.5 metres.

That's either one huge grapefruit...or one tiny watermelon.

An upper bound on the loss incured by waiting another year before you donate your savings to an organization is the interest they would have to pay on a loan of your saving's size in that time. If you estimate the chance that you will regret your choice of donation target in a year highly enough, that means waiting may be prudent. Just a thought.

(The cost might be increased by their reduced capacity for planning with the budget provided by you in mind; but with enough people acting like you, the impact of this factor should disappear in the law of large numbers)

If you think general EA movement building is what makes the most sense currently, then funding the Centre for Effective Altruism (the people who run GWWC and 80k) is probably best.

If you think X-risk specific movement building is better, then CSER and FLI seem like they make the most sense to me: they're both very new, and spreading the ideas into new communities is very valuable.

(And congratulations on getting to where you're ready to start donating!)

One of the charities mentioned in the article, Deworm the World, is actually a Givewell top charity, due to "the strong evidence for deworming having lasting impact on childhood development". The article, on the other hand, claims that the evidence is weak, citing three studies in the British Medical Journal, which Givewell doesn't appear to mention in their review of the effectiveness of deworming.

Givewell's review of deworming

Might be worth looking into more.

He mostly tells me to kill annoying people.

Do you have more than one such useful sub-personality?

No, but I'm working on them. I've found my inner Hufflepuff to be particularly helpful in actually getting things done.

Incidentally, is there a name for the "sub-personality technique?"

I unfortunately haven't developed a quirrellmort yet (the concept is on my to-do list though, along with a number of other personifications). I do have two loose internal models though, for very specific tasks.

The first is called "The Alien" or just "Alien". I created it in my mid-teens after reading the last samurai (not the movie), although my use of The Alien is not the same as the book's. The Alien is the voice in my head that says the pointlessly stupid or cruel things (generally about people) for no reason other than being able to. They aren't things I actually believe or feel, so I just tell The Alien to shut up. By doing this, I can create a divide between myself and these thoughts, not feel guilty about them occuring, and more quickly put them out of my mind.

The second I created very recently based off this thread. It is for the prevention of ego depletion when it comes to either starting big tasks or taking care of long lists of little tasks. Rather than think "Ok time to (make myself) do this" I defer the choice to an internal, slightly more rational model of myself that doesn't suffer from decision fatigue. The outcome is very predictable ("Do the goddarn task already"), but does seem to work very well for me. It's still quite new, and I probably don't use it as much as I should.

I have plans to make a number of other internal models to create an internal 'parliment' that can discuss and debate major decisions, or act on their own for specific required benefits. Other models that might be included include a cynic/pessimist (to help me be more pessimistic in my planning), an altruist (to consider if my actions are actually beneficial), a highly motivated being (to help renew my resolve), and some kind of quirrellmort. These are probably very liable to change as I try to implement them.

I've often considered producing such a personality, after observing a previous LW discussion about tulpas, but never even got past the stage of which character to use - I don't know who the "most competent person I can imagine" would be.

You know that spreading rationality is a strong net positive, right? How many lives could we save if people just stopped for a while and though about stuff in a relatively unbiased way? Even then the population of purely selfish but rational agents could do better than we do - and people usually aren't purely selfish. If we could only spread rationality better. But you know as good as I do: it's exactly the biases that make demagogy almost always sounds more convincing than the truth. It is so hard, so frustrating to explain the bitter truth, while competing against comforting lies, pushing all the buttons that - you've learned it - almost guaranteed to make one agree.

But what if you could do a little bit of... you know... marketing? Oh, spreading rationality through irrationality sounds so hypocritical!.. deontologically. But you're utilitarian, you know how to make trade-offs. And you know better than to make trade-offs against some general principles that may be reasonable rules of thumb, but don't even start to encompass the actual people and their happiness. How did you put that - shut up and multiply? Well, go on, multiply: billions of lives saved against millions slightly offended. And here is the thing - before learning about biases they won't be able to recognize your little tricks, and the job would be already done. Many will probably agree that it would have been net positive. Oh, your reputation could be damaged? Well, I though you were an altruist.

Can it even get any worse than it is now? I'm not even talking about the marketing of commodities - adding a little bit of your marketing isn't gonna change anything at all, even if you still believe in those deontological ideas. I'm talking about the market of ideas. You compete against people who learned some of the tricks, but use them with malicious intents, not for the benefit of the consumer. But you know better. They vaguely learned some buttons from classical novels and books by liberal arts majors. You learned how the whole machine works, with mathematical modeling. You know what buttons to push to make your point sweeter ans stickier. You can crush all that irrationality all at once.

After all, there are no arguments without any flavor with them. It's just that you either select to give the randomness and subconsciousness to choose the flavor, and call it "fair", or purposefully select the flavor, and call it "trickery" and "marketing". But since when do rationalists consider obliviousness better than knowledge?

Why do you choose to not use your force for good? What stops you? What's your choice?

Seconding too.
I've played in very small groups (~3), and the game usually stabilizes into predictable strategies (1 discards, 2 gives information, 3 puts down, and after a while switch between 2 and 3). Larger groups are probably messier and funnier, but nonetheless, very instructive.

Seconding this recommendation.

As someone who has taken the NIMS/ICS 100 course (online through FEMA), and gone to my local fire station and taken their equivalent of NIMS/ICS 100/200/70 -- I was not very impressed.

I can clearly see that there are valuable things in NIMS/ICS, and I can even believe that the movement which gave rise to the whole thing had valuable, interesting, and novel insights. But you're not going to get much of that by taking the course. It's got about one important concept -- which basically boils down to "it's good for different agencies to cooperate effectively, and here's one structure under which that empirically seems to happen well, therefore let's all use it" -- and the rest is a lot of details and terminology which are critically important to people actually working in said agencies, and mostly irrelevant otherwise.

EDIT: Boromir's big thing seems to be that HRO is about risk analysis, updating based on evidence, and dealing with low probabilities as mentioned in the excerpt. I can tell you that the basic ICS course covers exactly none of that. So I wonder what 'training course at the local volunteer fire department' he thinks we should all take. (I admit I have not taken the FEMA-official ICS 200 and 70 classes, which are online. But given the style of the 100 class, I cannot imagine them being dense with the kind of knowledge he thinks we should be gaining from them.)

Interesting, though apparently this person made his suggestions to Salamon and Yudkowsky in person, not to the LW community itself - thus, his reference to "outright derision" is somewhat misleading. CFAR has indeed adopted some ideas that originally came from LW itself - the whole "goal factoring" theme of recent CFAR workshops seems to be a significant example.

I'm not particularly close to the CFAR wing of that crowd, but: on the one hand, that sounds at least potentially valuable, and I'd look into it if I had anything more specific to go on than "a simple training course". (Poking around my local fire department's webpage turned up only something called "Community Emergency Response Training", which seems to consist of first aid, disaster prep, and basic firefighting -- too narrow and skill-based to be what Boromir's comment is talking about.)

On the other hand, though, I don't think we're getting the full story here. The fact that Boromir devotes most of his comment to flogging the organization he's (judging from his username's link) either a member or a fanboy of, in particular, is a very bad sign.

I'd be wary of making a thing like that. Even ignoring the EU's bizarre "Right to be forgotten" law, people should be allowed to change their opinion, and such a website would incentivise consistency only. Not truth; consistency.

Are you sure that's what you want?

The answers to questions like this aren't necessarily "yes" or "no". But it could still be valuable to say things like "the source for this seems to be this article from 2004, in which he is quoted as saying ...." Or, "he was quoted as saying this in this article. He encouraged people to read the article, but years later, he said that that line was a misquote."

I assume you're talking about internet figures in the greater LW-memeplex. If so, I think this is a bad idea.

Tidy reasons this may have low-to-moderate value:

• It's already easy to find the public positions of an internet figure.
• Reasons are more important than conclusions. Unless you think you can present the arguments better than the original source, you'll just end up simply linking to the original source, which is, again, easy to find.

Messy reasons this might have negative value:

• As a rule, no online community has ever suffered from a lack of introspection. I'm so very sick of hearing groups talk about themselves. In particular, talking about prominent group figures is extremely off-putting to newcomers.
• It will become a source of emotional stress for those quoted. "Popular-online-writer" is a world apart from being a real public figure. Empirically, the latter handle third-party discussion of themselves poorly.
• Realistically, this will not guard against drama involving the unfair attributions of positions. If somebody wants to pattern match so-and-so to a particular archetype, there's nothing you can do to stop them.
• I love my favorite blogs, but gaining an audience is a quality-quantity game, with an emphasis on quantity. Why give particular attention to the conclusions of a figure who have been selected in this way?

There are a lot of true claims of the form "person X said thing Y". It would be a mistake to only include false claims, because then a claim which isn't listed may be considered true by default. But including every claim would make it impossible to find the one someone is interested in. I'm not sure what notability guidelines would look like.

As far as famous/notable people go, skeptics.stackexchange works perfectly well for those questions.

In general however focusing on "he said, she said" is bad. I might argue I wide arrange of positions depending on the context. Sometimes I play devils advocate to make points.

Focusing on actual content instead of focusing on what someone said in a single instance if often better.

I'm envisioning this as a mediawiki, where a given person will have a page, and that page lists claims about things they have said. Edit wars can hopefully be fixed by having a number of editors who know how to be impartial, and being trigger-happy on locking pages so that only they can edit. The talk page can be used for discussion, and for the person themselves to weigh in.

I like this idea a lot. I honestly think it would be a useful resource, should it be well researched and accurate.

What is your intention? If you hope to espouse truth then I doubt it helps. People have lots of opinions - many of them uninformed or guesswork. And such a site has the risk of additionally weighing the prominent voices too much.

But assuming there is a sensible purpose then I think care must be taken to balance against prominence. User pages are prone to become hubs and mouthpieces of prominent people. Same for popular topics.

I think wikipedias approach of mentioning popular backers for claims is a good balance. Maybe this could be realized as an add-on to existing sites like Wikipedia. "What did X say about Wikipediapage Y?"

This has been proposed before, and on LW is usually referred to as "Oracle AI". There's an entry for it on the LessWrong wiki, including some interesting links to various discussions of the idea. Eliezer has addressed it as well.

See also Tool AI, from the discussions between Holden Karnofsky and LW.

First, there's the political problem: if you can build agent AI and just choose not to, this doesn't help very much when someone else builds their UFAI (which they want to do, because agent AI is very powerful and therefore very useful). So you have to get everyone on board with the plan first. Also, having your superintelligent oracle makes it much easier for someone else to build an agent: just ask the oracle how. If you don't solve Friendliness, you have to solve the incentives instead, and "solve politics" doesn't look much easier than "solve metaethics."

Second, the distinction between agents and oracles gets fuzzy when the AI is much smarter than you. Suppose you ask the AI how to reduce gun violence: it spits out a bunch of complex policy changes, which are hard for you to predict the effects of. But you implement them, and it turns out that they result in drastically reduced willingness to have children. The population plummets, and gun violence deaths do too. "Okay, how do I reduce per capita gun violence?", you ask. More complex policy changes; this time they result in increased pollution which disproportionately depopulates the demographics most likely to commit gun violence. "How do I reduce per capita gun violence without altering the size or demographic ratios of the population?" Its recommendations cause a worldwide collapse of the firearms manufacturing industry, and gun violence plummets, along with most metrics of human welfare.

If you have to blindly implement policies you can't understand, you're not really much better off than letting the AI implement them directly. There are some things you can do to mitigate this, but ultimately the AI is smarter than you. If you could fully understand all its ideas, you wouldn't have needed to ask it.

Does this sound familiar? It's the untrustworthy genie problem again. We need a trustworthy genie, one that will answer the questions we mean to ask, not just the questions we actually ask. So we need an oracle that understands and implements human values, which puts us right back at the original problem of Friendliness!

Non-agent AI might be a useful component of realistic safe AI development, just as "boxing" might be. Seatbelts are a good idea too, but it only matters if something has already gone wrong. Similarly, oracle AI might help, but it's not a replacement for solving the actual problem.

This is actually one of the standard counterarguments against the need for friendly AI, at least against the notion that is should be an agent / be capable of acting as an agent.

I'll try to quickly summarize the counter-counter arguments Nick Bostrom gives in Superintelligence. (In the book, AI that is not agent at all is called tool AI. AI that is an agent but cannot act as one (has no executive power in the real world) is called oracle AI.)

Some arguments have already been mentioned:

• Tool AI or friendly AI without executive power cannot stop the world from building UFAI. Its abilities to prevent this and other existential risks are greatly diminished. It especially cannot guard us against the "unknown unknowns" (an oracle is not going to give answers to questions we are not asking.)
• The decisions of an oracle or tool AI might look good, but actually be bad for us in ways we cannot recognize.

There is also a possibility of what Bostrom calls mind crime. If a tool or oracle AI is not inherently friendly, it might simulate sentient minds in order to give the answers to the questions that we ask; kill or possibly even torture these minds. The possibility that these simulations have moral rights is low, but there can be trillions of them, so even a low probability cannot be ignored.

Finally, it might be that the best strategy for a tool AI to give answer is to internally develop an agent-type AI that is capable of self-improvement. If the default outcome of creating a self-improving AI is doom, then the tool AI scenario might in fact be less safe.

If you use a spell checking engine while you are typing that likely has an utility function buried in it's code.

what could a faltering, medium-trust country like argentina need more than millions of poor, low-trust immigrants

It's interesting, but I wouldn't be much concerned with models that "reproduce some generic quantum phoenomena".
Thanks to categorical quantum mechanics, we already know that many finite toy models do that: heck, you can have quantum phoenomena in databases.

I had a similar prompt for knowledge seeking in wanting to figure out how the math supports or doesn't support "converging worlds" or "mangled worlds". The notion of a converging world is also porbably of note worthy intuitive reference point in thought-space. You could have a system that is in a quantum indeterministic state each state have a different interaction so that the futures of the states are identical. At that point you can drop the distinguising of the worlds and just say that two worlds have become one. Now there is a possibility that a state left alone first splits and then converges or that it does both at the same time. There would be middle part that would not be being able to be "classified" which in these theories would be represented by two worlds in different configurations (and waves in more traditional models).

Some times I have stumbled upon an argument that if many worlds creates extra worlds whether that forms as a kind of growing block ontology (such as the flat splitters in the sequence post). Well if the worlds also converge that could keep the amount of "ontology stuff" constant or able to vary in both directions.

I stumbled upon that |psi(x)^2| was how you calculated the evolution of a quantum state which was like taking a second power and then essentailly taking a square root by only careing about the magnitude and not the phase of the complex value. For a double slit wtih L being left and R being R it resulted in P(L+R)^2= ^2+C+^2 (where C was either 1, 2 or sqr(2) don't remember and didn't understand which) . The squarings in the sum I found was claimed to be the classical equivalent of the two options. The interference fridges would be great and appear where the middle term was strong. I also that you could read as something like "obtain X if situation was/is y". Getting L when the particle went L is thus very ordinary and all. You can also note that the squaring have the same form as the evolution of a pure state. However I didn't find anything in whether the middle term was interpretable or not. If you try to put it into words it looks a lot like "probability of getting L when the situation was R" which seems very surprising that it could be anything else than zero. But then again I dont' know what imaginary protoprobabilties are. Because it's a multipication of two "chains of events" it's clear you can't single out the "responcible party", it can be a contribution from both. I somehow suspect that this correlates that if your "base" is |L> then the |R>|L> base doesn't apply, ie you can't know the path taken and still get interference. I get that many worlds posits the R world and the L word but it seems there is like a bizarre combination world also involved. One way I in my brute naivity think migth be goign on is taht the particle started in the L world but then "crossed over" to the R world. If worlds in contact can exchange particles it might seem as particles "mysteriously jumped" while the jumping would be loosely related where the particle was. They would have continous trajectories when tracked within the multiverse but they get confused for each other in the single worlds.

However I was unable to grasp the intuition how bras and kets work or what they mean. I pushed the strangeness to wavefunctions but was unable to reach my goal.

It still seems mysterious to me how the single photon state turns into two distinct L and R. I could imagine the starting state to "do a full loop" be a kind of spiral where the direction that photon is travelling is a superpositon of it travelloing in each particular direction with each direction differing from it's neighbour by the phase of the protoprobability phase with their magnitudes summing to 1. That way if the photon has probability one at L it can't have probability 1 as the real part of the protoprobability at R can't be 1 as it is known to differ in phase. I know these intuitions are not well founded, I know the construction of them is known to be unsafe. However intuitive pictures are more easy for me to work with even if it means needing to reimagine them rather than just have them in the right configuration (if somebody know s a more representative way to think about it please tip me about it).

I am also using a kind of guess that you can take a protoprobaility strip it of imaginary parts an dyou get a "single world view" and I am using a view of having 2 time dimensions: a second additional clock makes the phases of the complex values sweep forward (or sweep equal surface areas) even if the "ordinary clock time" would stay still. The undeterminancy under this time would be that a being that is not able to measure the meta-time would be ignorant on what part of the cycle the world is in. Thus you would be ignorant of the phases, but the phases would "resonate". I am assuming one could turn this into a equivalent view where the imaginary component would just select a spatial world in a 1-time multiverse (in otherwise totally real-part only worlds).

I don't have known better understanding but I have a bunch of different understadnings of unknown fittness.

This doesn't seem to give a straightforward explanation for whether it could reproduce the expected Bell-type experiments, especially a CHSH experiment, and from a glance I don't see how they'll get that correct without forcing some sort of completely ad-hoc rule for how the universes interact.

Sure, it's doable. It may even be trivial - one can recast partial time derivatives of a wave function as total time derivatives of a distribution of particles with velocities.

Unfortunately this seems doable an infinite number of ways, and in general probably isn't useful.

On the same topic, Gunnar_Zarncke recently started a LessWrong Financial Effectiveness Repository

That is a neat hack - who said there's no such thing as a free lunch?

The book On Combat by Dave Grossman discusses some of these things. I haven't read it yet, but have read reviews and listened to a podcast by two people I consider highly evidence-based and reputable (here). In particular, the book discusses a method of physiologically lowering your heart rate he calls "Combat Breathing". This entails 4 phases, each for the durations of a count of 4 (no unit specified, I do approx 4 seconds):

1. Breathe in

2. Hold in

3. Breathe out

4. Hold out

It sounds very simple, but I have heard multiple recommendations of it from both the armed-forces and medical worlds. I can also add a data point confirming it works well for me (mostly only for reducing heart rate to below 100, not all the way down to resting rate).

Years ago I saw an interview with Michael Phelps' (Olympic swimmer) coach in which he claims that most Olympic-finalist caliber swimmers have nearly indistinguishable physical capabilities, Phelps' ability to focus and visualize success is what set him apart.

I'm skeptical of this.

No doubt it is relatively true that professional/elite athletes have similar physical capabilities, but even very small differences in athletic ability can be very consequential over the course of XXX meters in a swimming race or, say an entire season of football. We are talking about very small margins of victory in many (or most) cases.

The first step of how to of biofeedback means getting a biofeedback device.

Direct heart rate is no good goal. Doing biofeedback on heart rate variance is better.

I also read that elite military units visualize to remain calm and carry out complex tasks despite incredible stress (for instance, bomb squad members with heart rates lower in the presence of a bomb than on an average afternoon at the base).

I'm not sure whether you want a bomb squad to have a heart rate that's lower than normal.

Has anyone read any specific how-to books on the topic, i.e., here are step-by-step instructions for visualizations, lowering heart rate, mental clarity, etc?

Step-by-step instructions are not how you achieve the kind of results of Phelps or the bomb squat. Both are done through the guidance of coaches.

To the extend that the main way I meditate has steps it has three:

1. Listen to the silence
2. Be still
3. Close your eyes.

Among those (3) is obvious in meaning. (1) takes getting used to and is probably not accessible by mere reading. Understanding the meaning of (2) takes months.

Seems very good, but this is coming from a person familiar with the topic. I wonder how good it would seem to someone who hasn't heard about the topic yet.

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8bl/link_back_to_the_trees/

Are you a time-traveler or a native?

I give Napoleon a hand, on the basis that he was one of the more scientifically-minded world leaders, and the theory that a strong France makes our future more multipolar. For the same reason I try to spread the notion of the limited-liability corporation in the islamic world (no idea how to do that though). I might try to convince nations of the (AIUI genuine) non-profitability of colonialism.

Start an insurance company with a focus on risk mitigation.

(Amass resources, collect information, you get the idea.)

Vaccination for everyone! Aqueduct (AND toilets) for everyone!

Make good publicity for Mr. Volta's new chemical battery, and convince everyone of how ugly the world is when tainted by coal smoke. This has a dual purpose: ease the way for early development of electric cars, thus fighting global warming, and delay Western meddling in the Middle East for oil extraction purposes, which contributed largely to the mess the region is now.

Find Mr. Heinrich Marx at his law practice in Trier and quietly castrate him.

Popularize DIY production of blue cheese and thus increase the chances that someone playing with Penicillium fungi will get creative.

Recruit would-be Temperance Leagues and redirect their strength to strangle the tobacco industry in its crib.

Edited to add: only massive distribution of aqueducts and toilets would be obvious to a true native of 1800.

There is no reason, other than happy cultural accident, for any given Wikipedia article on a technical topic to be good. Technical subjects I know something about are generally treated very poorly. Wikipedia has no incentives in place for experts to correct things, and for non-experts to shut up.

it has been recognized by a respected authority on thermodynamics, Max Planck, that the phrase 'entropy of the universe' has no meaning because it admits of no accurate definition.[1][2] Kelvin's speculation falls with this recognition.

The fact that Max Planck is a respected authority can't be easily disproved and he's cited.

On the other hand he did write that more than 100 years ago.

The introductory section doesn't contain any modern physics but 19th century views. If you would gather more modern sources, you might use them to update the article.

We shouldn't select our fitness gurus for whether they're of our tribe, we should select our fitness gurus for the effectiveness and truth of what they teach.

On that basis, do you have any reasons beyond "it's nerdy!" for recommending this website over any number of other ones, many of which are very good? If it's the gimmicky motivational approaches, I think LessWrong has that down pat - loads of us play HabitRPG and I'm pretty sure Beeminder's founders were some of our own.

Edit: For some reason my links ate themselves and the text between them so I took them out.

This is not exactly a reply to your question, but I think your question is fits this dynamic:

Miller's Iron Law of Iniquity

In principle, there is an evolutionary trade-off between any two positive traits. But in practice, every good trait correlates positively with every other good trait.

http://edge.org/response-detail/11314

Don't start with the resources you lack. Start with the resources you have and then look how can you utilize them to achieve your aims.

All of those things can be mitigated by other traits. Connections can be useful even without very much charisma. Cleverness can lead to pretty good earning potential even with relatively little conscientiousness, and may help one think of ways to improve charisma and conscientiousness. At any given level of earning potential, being cheap ("frugal" would be a better word but begins with the wrong letter) eases the transition from gradually sliding into debt to gradually accumulating savings. Other aspects of character besides conscientiousness make a difference -- e.g., a reputation for honesty may be helpful.

Given a bad enough deficit in everything that matters, it's certainly possible to be so screwed that recovery is unlikely. It's also possible to overestimate those deficits and the resulting screwage, e.g. on account of depression. There's probably a nasty positive feedback loop where doing so makes getting unscrewed harder.

Is there an easier way of doing that than by hand?

I account hop a lot, and also would like to know if anyone knows.

Will you be making a new account that will be even less tied to you, or will you stop posting on LW?

I have been convinced that deleting my comments would be overkill, so I'm going to just delete my account, which will anonymize my comments, and hope that the permalink page title bug will be fixed.

I might come back here with a different username later.

Thanks to Baughn for their offered help.

Have a nice day.

You could try changing your username. I am not sure whether it would change the username that appears on all your past comments, but I suspect it would. You could email and ask.

Do you really think that who you are in meatspace is possible to identify from reading a few LW posts?

I think if you are worried I would simply remove references to your location.

I would also think that it's likely that you overrate the cost of people knowing you participate on LW.

the probability that any given person I know in meatspace will read my comments on Less Wrong just jumped up by orders of magnitude.

Why not use your real name and own what you write?

Keep in mind that you can delete posts from LW, but you can't delete things from internet archives.

The easiest solution is to just delete your current account and start a new one. None of your meatspace friends could then know which posts from [deleted] was from you or even that any of them came from you in the first place (unless they are an LW admin, but then I don't think you should be worried about them knowing you post here).

This solution also has the benefit of not removing valuable comments in old threads (which looking at your karma I assume there are many of).

the probability that any given person I know in meatspace will read my comments on Less Wrong just jumped up by orders of magnitude.

Why are you concerned about this?

?! But your name seems even less tractable to yourself than mine is, and I don't worry about that!

(also, if you take into account the probability that they will link those comments to you, and that they will think badly of you because of it, no?)

1: No. Well, in theory, an presence on the moons of neptune that could survive indefinately without contact would do it, but that's not going to happen any time soon.

2: Arguably, we already live in this world. There are very destructive things in the canon of human knowledge, only people don't conceptualize them as weapons at all, but merely as dangers to be avoided. So.. good news, this does not work as a filter, and the actually odd thing is that we do* think of runaway super criticality as a weapon. Conditioning by lots of wars to think of explosions as ways to kill people?

*I'm not going to name examples in this context, because that might theoretically "help" someone to think of said example as a weapon. Which would be bad.

The whole scenario depends on a reification fallacy. You don't negotiate with, or engage in prediction theory games with, impersonal forces (and calling capitalism a force of nature seems a stretch to me).

Evolution is powerful, but that doesn't make it an intelligence, certainly not a superintelligence. We're not defecting against evolution, evolution just doesn't/can't play PD in the first place. But I'm also not sure how important the PD game is to this scenario, as opposed to the aliens just crushing us directly.

And as long as we're personifying evolution, an argument could be made that the triumph of human civilization would still be a win for evolution's "values", like survival and unlimited reproduction.

We follow a version of your meta-golden rule. Treat your inferiors as you would like to be treated by your superiors.

I don't understand how this rule leads to the described behavior. As written, it suggests that the aliens would like to be crushed by their superiors...?

That's not how TDT works.

Is the idea of extending our "empathy" to the impersonal forces that govern our life too much?

Deification of natural forces is a standard human culture trait. A large proportion of early gods just personified natural phenomena.

Shinto is a contemporary religion that still does that a lot.

Similar "problem"(?): Acausal trade with Azathoth

any executive-level decision-maker would be paralyzed without strong prior

I don't think that's necessarily true, just having a high risk tolerance works as well. I also think you underestimate the amount of evidence present -- e.g. in most organizations the next-year budget is a variation on the previous year's budget.

the kind of certainty we hold out for (often vainly) in science is almost unknown in many aspects of business

Yes, of course. That's why, for example, risk management is an important part of doing business but is not normally a big part of doing science...

It's very "Black Swan".

I don't think you understand what the term means. It's unknown unknowns and not known unknowns. Whether or not an unproven product will succeed is a question about a known unknown.

This is especially true in fast-changing or competitive markets, where the only way to collect more evidence without direct risk is to let your competitors jump in the water first.

I don't think that's true. There are various forms of doing market research that simply involve money but not additional risk.

I'd like to know how seeing a prostitute will help a young man develop the skills he needs to get into sexual relationships through dating

Seeing sex as less "magical" could help reduce tension with trying to get sex.

(By the way, the whole article seems to me like: "Look, some people have less social skills -- let's make fun of them! Oh, they are trying to overcome their weakness -- wow, that's even funnier!" The elephant in the room is that in our culture it is taboo to express empathy towards men and boys.)

I'd like to know how seeing a prostitute will help a young man develop the skills he needs to get into sexual relationships through dating - because I just don't see the connection.

Dating and sex are related skills. I assume we agree a prostitute could give a good intro to sex. So why shouldn't she be a good dating coach too? The young man won't need to fear rejection from her, nor fear being talked about later, so they can role-play in emotional safety. She can still tell him what's going to cause rejection when he's not a customer, and what's going to work better. Best of all, she can lead all the way, past exchanging numbers and kissing all the way to sex etiquette.

Of course there's the drawback of possible shame over having visited a prostitute - but virginity can be a source of shame too. So I figure that for the median male adult virgin, seeing a prostitute would be net plus, especially if he manages to specifically ask for dating and first time sex roleplay.

I wouldn't be too much concerned. The article is a lot less dismissive of PUA than what is usually put forward, even on this site. Plus, it's not that La Ruina isn't another little Mystery clone.

If a 17 year old boy picked at random can probably figure out how to close the deal with a girl for the first time

Based on what I know of my culture (US or other European countries might differ), not even 17 yo boys who do get girls know better. They usually get them because of a combination of some better looks, wider social circle, inferior opinions on women.
Those who apply for a PUA seminar are the ones who are trying to optimize their understanding of females, letting aside the fact that you cannot will yourself into being non-anxious. My opinion is that if they could be at ease around the opposite sex, they would wind up with a better sexual life than their "natural" peers.

Another post I made to this AlterNet piece:

I can see why progressives want to discredit PUA coaches and belittle the men who seek their help, setting aside the question of these coaches' competence at doing what they advertise about themselves.

One, the PUA subculture promotes a politically incorrect view of women which sounds like the world view of traditional, conservative patriarchy, only read in reverse, so to speak: PUA coaches endorse the patriarchal view of women's weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and they teach men how to exploit these for sex by adopting the strategies of old-school cads. And I feel some sympathy for this view of women because to me women seem to have defective agency relative to men. If PUA coaches and writers can make a living with this message, perhaps their advice to men based on this traditional understanding of women has some validity after all.

And two, these men seek to improve themselves in an era of "You didn't build that" and the denigration of the self-made man. They've sought help in civil society and in the market instead of turning to the collectivist institutions created, maintained and thought-policed by progressives. They've rejected the progressive ethic of helplessness, dependency and victimization, in other words, in favor of the conservative ethic of self-reliance.

Yeah, that article has a weirdly dismissive tone. It reads like pickup is all about helping these 'painfully shy', inexperienced guys boost their self-confidence, and there's nothing more to it than that. But ISTM that folks who sign up for a random intro bootcamp are quite likely to be a lot shier and more intraverted than average. There's quite a bit of innovative stuff in pickup, but people probably come across it on internet forums, or perhaps through proprietary guides/videos or in the most 'elite', costly workshops/bootcamps.

More along these lines by Dr. Helen Smith, the wife of blogger Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit:

Geeks on Strike?

http://pjmedia.com/drhelen/2014/11/20/geeks-on-strike/

She references Vox Day's observations about how many young men these days find themselves alienated from young women, hence their willingness not to pull their punches when female social justice warriors start to mess with their gaming activities. What can these young women really do to these guys to punish them - withhold sex? They've already done that. Rejections have consequences.

For what it's worth.

Yeah, I was thinking about similar themes some days ago. My reference was Galois, a very young genius of the field. After single-handedly inventing group theory, he died. At 20. In a duel. Over a girl (allegedly).

Or Ramanujan. Died because he refused to eat healthily.

There are many examples of geniuses that died early, and had not the time to contribute much more to humanity, usually over silly things.

I think you posts was interesting., so why the downvote? I'm new here, and I'm just trying to understand Karma system. Any particular reason?

I failed to do basic googling. They are sorry for the fate but don't revert any official decision.

Statistics don't work like you think they do. The number is controlled.

If you come to that conclusion, the thing you should do as a rationalist is "notice confusion". Then you would check the source and would see:

While black residents accounted for 67 percent of Ferguson’s population, black drivers accounted for more than 86 percent of the traffic stops made last year by the Ferguson Police Department, according to a report produced by the office of Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster.

If you want to learn the relevant statistical literacy skills to understand what the sentence "Ferguson police were twice as likely to arrest African Americans during traffic stops as they were whites" usually means, the relevant subject is regressian analysis.

Bitterness at things you can't change isn't a useful mental state. There no reason to have it.