Open thread, 30 June 2014- 6 July 2014

When I started tooth-grinding in my sleep in grad school, I assumed it was a stress reaction. But apparently my body was merely rationally trading enamel for a critical IQ boost?!

PSA: if your jaws become chronically sore, don't hesitate before getting it checked out. I'm kidding about the IQ boost, but not about the lost enamel.

Interesting, and it's good to have alternatives.

However, I am not sure how exactly to put together this information from FAQ page:

if you eat 5 MealSquares (2000 calories) you will get 100% of your daily recommended value of all essential vitamins and minerals

and from the Nutrition page, where "% Daily Values Per Serving" differ from 20% -- they range from 15% to 160%.

The most relevant part is probably another study mqrius mentions, "The effect of the loss of molar teeth on spatial memory and acetylcholine release from the parietal cortex in aged rats", Kato et al 1997 (available through Libgen):

After the molar teeth of rats were extracted, the rats were fed with powdered food for 135 weeks. Although the performance in the radial arm maze was progressively acquired by daily training, an increase in the number of errors and a decrease in the initial correct responses were observed in the teethless aged rats compared to the control aged rats, indicating impaired acquisition of spatial memory in the teethless aged rats...the extracellular ACh level of the teethless aged rats under high-concentration of K+ and atropine sulfate stimulation was significantly low compared to that of the control aged rats. These results suggest that the impairment of spatial memory in the teethless aged rats may be due to the functional deterioration of the cholinergic neuronal system induced by tooth loss

It's not a long paper. Skimming, the major problems I see:

1. the usual problems with animal studies: tiny sample size (9 in the control and 10 in the experimental, apparently), unclear randomization, no mentioned blinding of experimenters or raters

2. they didn't show removing teeth caused lower performance, they showed removing teeth and feeding on a liquid diet caused lower performance. (On the plus side, they say they anesthesized both groups, so that removes a serious confound.)

   The experimental group had its teeth removed & also was fed liquid, while the control group kept its teeth & also ate normal pellets. Hence, the decreased performance could've been caused (ignoring the issues of bias and sampling error) by either the removal of teeth, the liquid food, or some interaction thereof (perhaps liquid food aggravating tooth infection caused by the surgery?). They do say

   Kawamura [6: "The effect of food consistency on conditioned avoidance response in mice and rats"] has reported the relationship between mastication and learning and memory in young rats. He has also reported that rats fed with a powdered diet had poor results of learning and memory compared to those fed with a solid diet.

   but I haven't looked at it and in any case, given how much varies from lab to lab, this is a basic issue which needs to be verified in your own sample, and not just hope that it's a universal. Also, if Kawamura finds that liquid food on its own damages learning & memory compared to a solid diet, how are you showing anything new by looking at liquid+surgery & finding damage...?

3. Their data is purely a post-comparison. They say they did the surgery, and then apparently left the rats alone for 135 weeks before doing the radial arm maze test.

   So there's no way to know what the decline looked like or when it happened. It's perfectly possible that the toothless rats suffered a single sudden shock to their system from the surgery and that permanently degraded their memory, or that they had ongoing chronic inflammation or infection.

   Worse, the difference may have been there from the start, they never checked. Randomization with such small n can easily fail to balance groups, that's one reason for pre-tests: to verify that a difference in the groups on the post-test wasn't there from the start but can be attributed to the experimental condition.

4. I'm not sure this can be described as a true 'randomized experiment'. They never actually say that the selection of rats was random or how the animals were picked for their group, and there's a weird pattern in the writing where they only ever write about the toothless rats being subjected to procedures even though logically you'd say stuff like 'all the rats were tested on X'; eg:

   After the molar teeth of rats were extracted, the rats were fed with powdered food for 135 weeks...Animals (11 weeks old) were anesthetized with sodium pentobarbital (40 mg/kg i.p.) and all maxillary and mandibular molars were extracted. Animals given anesthesia alone, without undergoing extraction of the molar teeth, were used as control aged rats...One hundred and thirty-five weeks after the surgery, the ability of learning and memory in the aged rats without molar teeth (hereafter referred to as 'teethless') was examined by using the radial arm maze [9], and compared to the control aged rats...Nine weeks after the learning and memory study, the ability of releasing ACh in the parietal cortex of teethless aged rats was examined by using in vivo microdialysis methods [5]...In order to examine the functional changes in cholinergic neuronal system of the teethless aged rats, animals were stimulated by high-concentration of K ÷ at 100mM or atropine sulfate at 3 ktM for 15 rain when the level of extracellular ACh stabilized.

   Plus, Figure 1 reports 9/10 rats, but by Figure 2, we're down to 5/5 rats. Huh? This makes me wonder if they're reusing control rats from a previous experiment, or reusing their data, and only actually had experimental rats. (The use of "historical controls" is apparently not uncommon in animal research.)

   This would massively compromise their results because rats change over time, litters of rats will correlate in traits like memory, and these effects are all large enough to produce many bogus results if you were to, say, take 10 rats from 1 litter as your control group and 9 rats from another litter as your experimental group. Just like with humans, one family of rats may have a very different average from another family. (See the very cool paper “Design, power, and interpretation of studies in the standard murine model of ALS”, Scott et al 2008, which helpfully notes on pg5 that when you have a mouse study with 10/10 mice similar to this study and the null is true, "an apparent effect [of >5% difference in survival] would be seen in 58% of studies". Which really makes you think about a small difference in # of errors in maze performance.)

5. Their reward may have been a bit screwy in the memory task:

   The apparatus was placed 40 cm above the floor. At the end of each arm there was a food cup that held a single 50-mg food pellet. Prior to the maze task, animals were kept on a restricted diet and the body weight was reduced to 80-85% of their normal weight over a 1-week period; water was freely available. Before the actual training began, the animals were allowed to explore the apparatus, for 10 min a day, for 2 days. For the following 16 trials, each animal was placed individually in the center of the maze and allowed to consume the bait in the food cup.

   If this description is literally accurate, there's a problem. They don't mention the setup differing between groups! So this "food pellet" is the reward which gives the rats motivation to solve the maze... but you've removed the teeth from half the rats and can only feed them liquid. And you're surprised the toothless rats perform worse? I'm reminded of the reward confounds in much animal intelligence research.

6. the authors mention excluding the other maze performance variable:

   The teethless aged rats showed impairment performance during the acquisition of the radial arm maze task, as revealed by the increased number of errors (Fig. 1) and the decreased number of initial correct responses (data not shown).

   One wonders if the # of initially correct responses would have reached p<0.05. Good old researcher degrees of freedom...

So overall, I would have to say this result seems to be extremely weak.

What makes you think a court would believe your story about a memory palace, precommitment or no, and not throw you in jail indefinitely for contempt of court until you retrieve the files for them?

Another way to deal with the issue would be to claim that you memorized the password via a mnemonic like a memory place that's easily destructible. If you fill up a memory place with a bunch of new items, the old memory that stores the password becomes inaccessible because of memory interference.

That sounds like an overly convoluted way of saying "I forgot", with the added disadvantage of making the judge think you're up to no good.

I don't think you actually love her unless you're using that part of your brain.

You're not conscious while you're frozen.

That depends on whether you think that: a) the past ceases to exist as time passes, or b) the universe is all of the past and all of the future, and we just happen to experience it in a certain chronological order

The past may still be "there," but inaccessible to us. So the answer to this question is probably to dissolve it. In one sense, I won't still love you. In another, my love will always exist and always continue to have an effect on you.

If I lie directly, the child will figure that out some time after I'm dead. I'm trying to avoid that, and to still give her comfort.

I actually started out with using uniform colors, shapes, etc.

I can only give my own experience, but I find that those earlier images are universally harder to remember, even when I don't have the image in front of me and I'm just trying to recall the set on it's own. This is true even for cards where I have only four items in the set for the uniform images, and upwards of 15 for the non-uniform ones.

I think that what happens is that these extra cues help in the initial learning and memorization. As I get better, I can simply visualize the location of the node in the image, visualize the attached image, which brings to mind the text. I have trouble getting to this point when I don't have the other context cues to help me out initially.

I don't quite understand what test you're suggesting in your last paragraph. I think what you're saying is try to memorize a random set using simply text, then a random set using simply the images, and then test myself outside of anki by trying to recall the sets. If so, I have done this, and the images (with the crazy shapes), outperform by a large margin. I can't remember a set of more than about 5 using simply text in Anki.

I wouldnt trust such a poll much due to selection effects, but at any rate there probably isn't much of a problem given that no one else has reported an attendance drop.

Yes, that's a good example, thanks.

You're right. I'd recommend submitting the issue here

If an AI-player wants to give that sort of information, they should probably do it in the same way they'd give a cure for cancer. Something like "I now give you [the ending for HPMOR]."

Doing it in another way would break the rule of not offering real-world things.

Would it be within the rules to offer to tell the GK the ending to HPMoR? That is something the AI would know

Why would the AI know that?

My call is that it is against the rules. This is certainly something an oracle AI would know, but this is something that the GK-player cares about more than the game itself (probably), and I'd put it in the same class as bribing the GK-player with lots of DOGEs.

What's the latter one? Trying to convince the gatekeeper that actually they're the AI and they think they've been drugged to think they're the gatekeeper except they actually don't exist at all because they're their own hallucination?

Think harder. Start with why something is impossible and split it up.

1) I can't possibly be persuaded.

Why 1?

You do have hints from the previous experiments. They mostly involved breaking someone emotionally.

Real world gatekeepers would have to contend with boredom, so they read their books, watch their anime, or whatever suits their fancy. In the experiment he abused the style of the experiment and prevented me from doing those things. I would be completely safe from this attack in a real world scenario because I'd really just sit there reading a book, while in the experiment I was closer to giving up just because I had 1 math problem, not 2.

Thanks, the second link is good. Tl;dr:

• http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738587/figure/F3/
• http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738587/figure/F4/

My overall conclusion is that acute caffeine gives a short-term boost, BUT chronic caffeine is probably slightly worse than chronic abstinence. So my recommendation would be to never consume caffeine, with occasional short exceptions when it would be valuable (e.g. when taking your SATs).

And the answer to the grandparent's question seems to be that yes, after a few weeks without caffeine your mental performance will go back to baseline, and probably slightly above.

Thanks!

Playing video games results in a waste of a life, however.

I think it was this

wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Adult_Intelligence_Scale

I had similar results from the WISC as a child, low processing speed relative to everything else. It's been something I've been meaning to ask about for a while as well, particularly since one educational professional predicted my test scores (roughly, of course) from certain problematic behavioural patterns, which was enough evidence that there's something meaningful there to get my attention.

My memory of the tests isn't entirely clear, but one task was something like transcribing unfamiliar symbols according to a substitution key in a particular time span. If that's similar to Daniel's experience, then any advice that cognitive science types can come up with here could be useful to both of us.

ETA:

I think this study details the task I remember.

Similar results in a similar test. High akrasia, potentially confounded by depression and anxiety.

IDK really. I do procrastinate more than I should.

This one seems interesting:

You could say, “The formalism of QR says that macroscopic systems behave as if there were many worlds.” Or you could say, “The formalism of QR says that macroscopic systems behave as if there were many worlds — and there really are” How is the second an improvement over the first? What does the claim that a hypothesis is “true” add to the claim that it is predictively successful, aesthetically satisfying and productive of new insights?

Seems smart. But then again, why not apply it to all our knowledge? For example, you should say "2 + 2 behaves as if it were 4", because saying that "2 + 2 is 4" does not bring any new insights.

In some technical sense of word, it's true. You could probably build an AI that processes "2 + 2 behaves as if it were 4" in the same way and with the same speed as "2 + 2 is 4".

I think the difference is mostly psychological, for humans. If you would teach people "2 + 2 behaves as if it were 4 (but don't ever say that it is 4, because that's just wrong)", those people could do the simple math, but they would be probably much slower, because of all the time they would have to remind themselves that 2 + 2 behaves as 4, but isn't really 4. They would pay a cognitive tax, which could impact their ability to solve more complex problems.

Or they would gradually develop a belief in belief. They would believe and correctly profess that the dragon, ahem, the collapse is in the garage, but it is invisible, inaudible, and cannot be detected experimentally. -- This is actually kinda scary, if I am correct, because it would mean that people more resistant to forming a belief in belief would have more difficulty in doing quantum physics. Unless they accept the many worlds.

Originally I thought that accepting the many worlds could have the advantage of people being able to think faster and more simply about quantum problems. Not paying the cognitive tax of the dragon in the garage. But that probably is overestimating of how much energy other people really invest in reminding themselves about the collapse.

So the question is: those successful quantum scientists who believe in collapse... how often do they really think about the collaps while doing physics? How high is the real cost of having this belief that doesn' pay any rent. Maybe it's trivial. Maybe even smaller than the emotional tax of the frustration of those who believe in many worlds. (Metaphorically said, you could have a tenant who lives in such ridiculously cheap place that evicting them would actually be more costly than just letting them be.) This is not a Dark Arts argument for believing in collapse, just a question about how much does believing in collapse really influence a quantum scientist's everyday work.

If it was deleted, curi should be able to still see it, but that doesn't explain why I can still see it. It's only the owner - and site moderators too? - who should be able to see it. So maybe there's some odd glitch involved when something is "removed from main and discussion" where you can no longer view it directly?

(Also wow what a terrible post.)

Why would it be deleted? Is there any accountability or appeal? Is there any way someone could get me a copy of the discussion? BTW Eliezer specifically wrote in the thread that the page would remain accessible:

Eliezer_Yudkowsky 11 April 2011 07:08:01AM 0 points

Post removed from main and discussion on grounds that I've never seen anything voted down that far before. Page will still be accessible to those who know the address.

I'm very much aware of that, to the point that melancholic moods tend to attack me by stripping away my ability to ignore far-away events I have no control over.

Yes, I already agree, and am already at least partially trying to integrate this stuff in my daily life. Unfortunately, consciously telling myself "availability bias" does not actually reduce the emotional hit.

My belief is that a great deal of violence is caused by political, economic, and social deprivation and inequality

I dispute that this is a belief rather than a fact ;-).

But no mathematical argument will tell you the right way to measure and combine utilities . . .

Much the same could be said about potential probability functions.

I think what I'm looking for is some equivalent to Jaynes's "Desiderata" for probability, but in the realm of either basic utility functions or how to combine them.

. . . any more than it will tell you that you should be a utilitarian in the first place.

Being new to this, I'm also interested in a pointer to some kind of standard argument for (any kind of) utilitarianism. I mean something more than Yvain's wonderful little Consequentialism FAQ.

But even with that scheme, it seems that you could just as easily want to maximize the minimal utility as maximize the sum.

I have nothing against happiness per se, it just doesn't feel like a proper terminal value.

That feels too much like lost purposes. "Power" refers to something that can be used to fulfill values in general.

It's the sort of thing you'd acquire if you haven't figured out what you really want.

Preferences revealed through e.g. Wikipedia's history suggest that people put a surprisingly high value on Pokemon trivia relative to more useful but less entertaining information, at least when it comes to investing time in compiling and reading it.

It feels impure and is too mainstream.

Some further thoughts about eudaimonia. What is happiness? I suggest that happiness is, literally, what it feels like to live well.

An analogy with pain: why does pain hurt? If it's a warning, why can't it just be a warning, without the hurting that seems so unnecessary? Because the painfulness of pain is the warning. You might wish that, like a fire alarm, it wouldn't go off when there's no fire, or you could turn it off when there's nothing more to do about the fire. There are drugs that will turn off pain, but for everyday purposes you can't take the painfulness out of the pain because then you'll be in the situation of children born without the ability to feel pain at all. They usually get dreadful injuries, wear out their joints, and end up crippled. You won't heed the warnings because they won't be warnings any more. How good are people at heeding milder warnings like "yet another game of 2048 would be a really stupid waste of time", or "I notice that I am confused"? If pain was that mild a warning, people would ignore it, because that is what a minor warning feels like from inside. Pain is what an urgent warning of physical damage feels like from inside.

In the same way, happiness is what living well feels like from inside. It's like a meter reading on a control panel. The meter reading is telling you how well you're doing, and happiness is what a high reading on that meter feels like.

You want that reading to be high, but there's no point in grabbing hold of the meter needle and turning it all the way over to the right. It would be as futile as living on morphine to take the painfulness out of ordinarily functioning pain. Or like satisfying a desire for an Olympic medal by making one -- the medal itself isn't what you really wanted, but the achievement of winning one. Or like keeping a nuclear reactor running smoothly by disconnecting all the sensors and replacing them by fake signals saying everything's fine.

Happiness tells you how well you're living. It only looks like a goal in the context of a well-functioning system that doesn't deliver the sensation without achieving the real goals that the sensation is measuring your approach to. If you obtain the signal without the reality, as I've heard that crack cocaine does, your life will fall apart.

Unrelatedly, if I had read this blog post (and others like it by the same author) before going to college, I might have joined a fraternity... unfortunately it's too late now.

No. Do you think that I would go flaunting that here for no reason if I was? Mostly I just read a lot and don't write so much. And of course writing is what you get karma for.

What's weird is that I always am either 0 points short (able to downvote) or exactly three points short. Never one or two points. And my total karma has not decreased.

First chapter of Pearl's book Causality.

Fair point.

I don't think it's arguing for group selection, more as empathy as an adaption for understanding the mental states of other people so that you could better navigate reciprocal social obligations. So long as effective mechanisms existed to punish free riders, it would be a beneficial adaption.

I think.

(much more recently, there has been some controversy about the publication of a way of obtaining a particularily infectious strain of a certain virus, but I can't find any references for that right now)

This is a perennial issue, occurring in various forms relating to the preservation of viruses like smallpox, the sequencing of their genomes, and increasing their virulence. Looking in Google News for 'virus research increase virulence', it seems the most recent such research would be http://www.nature.com/news/biosafety-in-the-balance-1.15447 / http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/american-scientists-controversially-recreate-deadly-spanish-flu-virus-9529707.html :

Groups led by Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin–Madison created a storm in late 2011 when they artificially engineered potentially pandemic forms of the H5N1 avian flu virus. In January last year, researchers ended a voluntary 12-month moratorium on such gain-of-function flu research, which can increase the host range, transmissibility or virulence of viruses (see Nature 493, 460; 2013), and work resumed.

This month, Kawaoka’s group reported that it had engineered a de novo flu virus from wild-avian-flu-strain genes that coded for proteins similar to those in the 1918 pandemic virus (T. Watanabe Cell Host Microbe 15, 692–705; 2014). The researchers were able to make a virulent version that could transmit between ferrets, and they concluded that a 1918-like virus could therefore emerge from wild avian flu viruses.

EDIT: Sandberg provides an amazing quote on the topic: http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2014/07/if_nature_doesnt_do_containment_why_should_i.html

Although fellow flu researcher professor Wendy Barclay at Imperial College said there was nothing wrong with doing the research in a BSL-2 lab: “In nature there is no containment. He’s only doing what happens in nature every day.” Which is true for ebola too.

I think that I remember reading an even better example about publishing scientific results that might have furthered the Nazis ability to produce a nuclear weapon in HPMOR, though I can't recall where it was exactly. I found that example persuasive, but I considered it a distasteful necessity, not a desirable state of affairs. Hence my confusion at Brennan's world, which I thought being set in the future of our world was perhaps post-Singularity, and therefore the epitome of human flourishing. Another commenter asked me if I wouldn't enjoy the thought of being a super-villain, and I thought , um no, that would be terrible, so maybe there are some Mind Projection issues going on in both directions. I don't know the distribution of people who would gain positive utility from a world of conspiracies, but I'm sure there would be a great deal of disutility with some proportion of current people with current minds. I can see where that world might provide challenge and interest for its inhabitants, but I remain highly skeptical that it's a utilitarian optima. Using my current brain and assuming stable values, it actually seems pretty dystopian to me, but I'll admit that's a limited way to look at things.

If something is valuable and powerful, and (big if) it's not harmful, plus it's extremely cheap to reproduce I see no reason not to distribute it freely. My confusion was that Brennan's world seems set in the future, and I got the sense that EY may have been in favor of it in some ways (perhaps that's mistaken). Since it seemed to be set in the future of our world, I got the sense that the Singularity had already happened. Maybe I just need to get to the fun sequence, but that particular future really made me uneasy,

"Conspiracy" doesn't mean "people working where you can't tell what they are doing".

Not everything that takes place in an author's fiction is indicative of something they support.

This, however, is a recurring theme in Eliezer's work. I don't think I fully grok the motivations (though I could hazard a guess or two), but it's definitely not just HJPEV's supervillain fetish talking.

I'm relatively new to the site and I wasn't aware of any censorship.I suppose I can imagine that it might be useful and even necessary to censor things, but I have an intuitive aversion to the whole business. Plus I'm not sure how practical it is, since after you posted that I googled lesswrong censorship and found out what was being censored. I have to say, if they're willing to censor stuff that causes nightmares then they ought to censor talk of conspiracies, as I can personally attest that that has caused supreme discomfort. They are a very harmful meme and positing a conspiracy can warp your sense of reality. I have bipolar, and I was taking a medicine that increases the level of dopamine in my brain to help with some of the symptoms of depression. Dopamine (I recently rediscovered) increased your brain's tendency to see patterns, and I had to stop talking a very helpful medication after reading this site. Maybe it would have happened anyway, but the world of conspiracy theories is very dark and my journey there was triggered by his writings. I guess most of the content on this site is disorienting though, but perhaps some clarification about what he thinks the benefits of conspiracies are and their extent should be would help.

Also, the content on this site is pretty hard hitting in a lot of ways, I find it inconsistent to censor things to protect sensitive people who think about AI but not people who are sensitive to all the other things that are discussed here. I think it's emblematic of a broader problem with the community, which is that there's a strong ingroup outgroup barrier, which is a problem when you're trying to subsist on philanthropy and the ingroup is fairly tiny.