Open Thread, August 2010

The whole thread is about relationship hacks-- it's fascinating.

But apparently it still wasn't enough to keep them together...

If you want non-PC approaches there are two communities you could look into: sales-people and conning people. The second one actually has most of the how-to-hack-peoples minds. If you want a kinder version look at it titled "social engineering".

Toastmasters?

General social skills are needed in business, a lot of places teach them and they seem to be quite successful.

Would such "practice" require a physical venue? -- or would an online setting -- maybe even Skype -- be sufficient?

Extremely, yes, not to my knowledge.

A lot of companies conduct anonymous "360 review" processes which veer into this territory to some degree.

Also, several business schools conduct leadership labs. In fact, a large chunk of the business school experience is really about social grooming / learning how to network / and so forth.

So do we have any traction for this idea? How about a meetup?

I think you're probably correct in your presumptions. I find it an interesting idea and would certainly follow any further discussion.

That's incredibly sad.

Every so often, people derisively say to me "Oh, and you assume you'd never convert to religion then?" I always reply "I absolutely do not assume that, it might happen to me; no-one is immune to mental illness."

Tricycle has the data. Also if an event of JCW magnitude happened to me I'm pretty sure I could beat it. I know at least one rationalist with intense religious experiences who successfully managed to ask questions like "So how come the divine spirit can't tell me the twentieth digit of pi?" and discount them.

However, if EY converted to religion, he would (in that condition) assert that he had had good reasons for doing it, i.e. that it was rational. So he would have no reason to take down this website anyway.

You can use the wget program like this: 'wget -m lesswrong.com'. A database download would be easier on the servers though.

I support this idea.

But what about copyright issues? What if posts and comments are owned by their writer?

WebOffline can grab the whole thing to an iphone or ipad, formatting preserved. There are similar programs for PC/MAC

On a completely serious, if not totally related, note: it would be a lot easier to convince people to sign up for cryonics if the Cryonics Institute's and/or KrioRus's websites looked more professional.

I doubt it. Signing up for a lottery for cryonics is still suspicious. There is only one payoff, and that is of the suspicious thing. No one objects to the end of lotteries because we all like money, what is objected to is the lottery as efficient means of obtaining money (or entertainment).

Suppose that the object were something you and I regard with equal revulsion as many regard cryonics. Child molestation, perhaps. Would you really regard someone buying a ticket as not being quite evil and condoning and supporting the eventual rape?

End of life regulation is one reason cryonics is suffering, as well: without the ability to ensure preservation when the brain is still relatively healthy, the chances diminish significantly. I think it'd be interesting to see cryonics organizations put field offices in countries or states with legal suicide laws. Here's a Frontline special on suicide tourists.

The framing of the end of life issue as a gain or a loss as in the monkey token exchange probably makes a gigantic difference in the choices made.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2d9/open_thread_june_2010_part_4/2cnn?c=1

When you feel you are in a desperate situation, you will do desperate things and clutch at straws, even when you know those choices are irrational. I think this is the mindset behind the clutching at straws that quacks exploit with CAM, as in the Gonzalez Protocol for pancreatic cancer.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=1545

It is actually worse than doing nothing, worse than doing what main stream medicine recommends, but because there is the promise of complete recovery (even if it is a false promise), that is what people choose based on their irrational aversion to risk.

I've had some dozens of viewquakes, most minors, although it's hard to evaluate it in hindsight now that I take them for granted.

Some are somewhat commonplace here: Bayesianism, map–territory relations, evolution etc.

One that I always feel people should be shouting Eureka — and when they are not impressed I assume that this is old news to them (and is often not, as I don't see it reflected in their actions) — is the Curse of Knowledge: it's hard to be a tapper. I feel that being aware of it dramatically improved my perceptions in conversation. I also feel that if more people were aware of it, misunderstandings would be far less common.

Maybe worth a post someday.

Kant famously argued that lying is wrong, period. Even if the fate of the world depends on it.

I remember Eliezer saying something similar, though I can't find it right now (the closest I could find was this ). It was something about the benefits of being the kind of person that doesn't lie, even if the fate of the world is at stake. Because if you aren't, the minute the fate of the world is at stake is the minute your word becomes worthless.

Drescher has some important things to say about this distinction in Good and Real. What I got out of it, is that the CI is justifiable on consequentialist or self-serving grounds, so long as you relax the constraint that you can only consider the causal consequences (or "means-end links") of your decisions, i.e., things that happen "futureward" of your decision.

Drescher argues that specifically ethical behavior is distinguished by its recognition of these "acausal means-end links", in which you act for the sake of what would be the case if-counterfactually you would make that decision, even though you may already know the result. (Though I may be butchering it -- it's tough to get my head around the arguments.)

And I saw a parallel between Drescher's reasoning and UDT, as the former argues that your decisions set the output of all similar processes to the extent that they are similar.

I thought Kant sounded a lot more like TDT than UDT. Or was that what you meant?

It sure seems like a lot of people could feed their will to live by reading just the first half of an exciting fiction book.

One thought is that it's tempting to think of yourself as being the only one (presumably with help from natives) trying to deal with the changed world.

Actually I think it's more likely that there will be many people from your era, and there will be immigrants' clubs, with people who've been in the future for a while helping the greenhorns. I find this makes the future seem more comfortable.

The two major reasons I can think of for wanting to be in the future is that I rather like being me, and the future should be interesting.

The single largest motivation for me is just that a future which is powerful enough, and rich enough, and benevolent enough to revive cryonicists is likely to be a very pleasant place to be in. If nothing else, lots of their everyday devices are likely to look like marvelous toys from my point of view. The combination of that with the likelihood that if they can repair me at all, I'd guess that they would use a youthful body (physical or simulated) as a model is quite enough to be an attractive prospect.

I wrote up some notes on this, because there's no transcript and it's good information. Let's see if I can get the comment syntax to cooperate here.

How to win in conversations, in general.

Never get angry. Stay calm, and use communication tactically to achieve your goals. Don't communicate naturally; communicate tactically. If you get upset, you are weakened.

How to deflect.

To get past an unproductive and possibly angry conversation, you need to deflect the unproductive bluster and get down to the heart of things: goals, and how to achieve them. Use a sentence of the form:

"[Acknowledge what the other guy said], but/however/and [insert polite, goal-centered language here]."

You spring past what the other person said, and then recast the conversation in your own terms. Did he say something angry, meant to upset you? Let it run off you like water, and move on to what you want the conversation to be about. This disempowers him and puts you in charge.

How to motivate people.

There's a secret to motivating people, whether they're students, co-workers, whatever. To motivate someone, raise his expectations of himself. Don't put people down; raise them up. When you want to reprimand someone for not living up to your expectations, mention the positive first. Raise his expectations of himself.

Empathy

To calm somebody down, or get him to do what you want, empathy is the key. Empathy, the ability to see through the eyes of another, is one of the greatest powers that humans have. It gives you power over people, of a kind that they won't get mad about. Understand the other guy, and then think for him as he ought to think. The speaker worked as a police officer, so most of the people he dealt with were under the influence of something. Maybe they were drugged, or drunk; maybe they were frightened, or outraged. Whatever it is, it clouds their judgement; be the levelheaded one and help them think clearly. Empathy is what you need for this.

How to interrupt someone.

Use the most powerful sentence in the English language: "Let me see if I understand what you just said." It shuts anybody up, without pissing them off, and they'll listen. Even if they're hopping mad and were screaming their lungs out at you a minute ago, they'll listen. Use this sentence, and then paraphrase what you understand them as saying. When you paraphrase, that lets you control the conversation. You get to put their point of view in your own words, and in doing so, you calm them down and sieze control of the conversation.

How to be a good boss.

This was a talk at Colombia University business school; people came to learn how to be good bosses. And the secret is that if you're a boss, don't focus directly on your own career; focus on lifting up the people under you. Do this, and they will lift you up with them. To be powerful in a group setting, you must disappear. Put your own ego aside, don't worry about who gets the credit, and focus on your goals.

How to discipline effectively.

This is his biggest point. The secret of good discipline is to use language disinterestedly. You can show anger, condescension, irritation, etc., OR you can discipline somebody. You can't do both at the same time. If you show anger when disciplining someone, you give them an excuse to be angry, and you destroy your own effectiveness. Conversely, if you want to express anger, then don't let punishment even enter the conversation. Keep these separate.

How to deal with someone who says no.

There are five stages to this. Try the first one; if it fails, go to the next one, and so on. Usually you won't have to go past the first one or two.

1. Ask. Be polite. Interrogative tone. "Sir, will you please step out of the car?" This usually works, and the conversation ends here.

2. Tell him why. Declarative tone. This gives you authority, it's a sign of respect, and it gives the other guy a way of saving face. It builds a context for what you're asking. If asking failed, explaining usually works. "I see an open liquor bottle in your cup-holder, and I'm required by law to search your vehicle. For our safety, I need you to step out of the car."

3. Create and present options. There are four secrets for this:

   • Voice: friendly and respectful.

   • Always list good options first ("You can go home tonight, have dinner with your family, sleep in your own bed."). Then the bad options ("If you don't get out of this car, the law says you're going to jail overnight, and you'll get your car towed, and they'll charge you like 300 bucks."). Then remind him of the good options, to get the conversation back to what you want him to do. ("I just need you to get out of your car, let me have a look around, and we'll be done in a few minutes.")

   • Be specific. Paint a mental picture for people. Vivid imagery. WIIFM: What's In It For Me? Appeal to the other guy's self-interest. It's not about you; it's about him.

4. Confirm noncompliance. "Is there anything I can say to get you to cooperate, and step out of the car for me, so you don't go to jail?" Give them a way to save face.

5. Act -- Disengage or escalate. This is the part where you either give up or get serious. In the "get out of the car" example, this is the part where you arrest him. Very seldom does it get to this stage, if you did the previous stages right.

If you want more on verbal judo, watch the video; he's a good speaker.

Thanks. That was a compact and helpful 90 minutes. The first 30 minutes were OK, but the 2nd 30 were better, and the 3rd was the best. Towards the end I got the impression that he was explaining lessons that were the kind of thing people spend 5 years learning the hard way and that lots of people never learn for various reasons.

I have a (I suspect unusual) tendency to look at basic concepts and try to see them in as many ways as possible. For example, here are seven equations, all of which could be referred to as Bayes' Theorem:

=\frac{P(E%7CH).P(H)}{P(E)}\\[10]P(H%7CE)=\frac{P(E%7CH)}{P(E)}.P(H)\\[10]P(H%7CE)=\frac{P(E%7CH).P(H)}{P(E%7CH).P(H)+P(E%7C\neg%20\!\,H).P(\neg%20\!\,H)}\\[10]P(H%7CE)=\frac{1}{1+\frac{P(E%7C\neg%20\!\,H).P(\neg%20\!\,H)}{P(E%7CH).P(H)}}\\[10]P(H%7CE)=\frac{P(E%7CH).P(H)}{\sum%20P(E%7CH_i).P(H_i)}\\[10]%0Aodds(H%7CE)=\frac{P(E%7CH)}{P(E%7C\neg%20\!\,H)}.odds(H)\\[10]%0Alogodds(H%7CE)=log(\frac{P(E%7CH)}{P(E%7C\neg%20\!\,H)})+logodds(H))

However, each one is different, and forces a different intuitive understanding of Bayes' Theorem. The fourth one down is my favourite, as it makes obvious that the update depends only on the ratio of likelihoods. It also gives us our motivation for taking odds, since this clears up the 1/(1+x)ness of the equation.

Because of this way of understanding things, I find explanations easy, because if one method isn't working, another one will.

ETA: I'd love to see more versions of Bayes' Theorem, if anyone has any more to post.

using only your present knowledge

This strikes me as an un-lifelike assumption. If I had to explain things in this way, I would expect to encounter some things that I don't explicitly know (and other that I knew and have forgotten), and to have to (re)derive them. But I expect that I would be able to rederive almost all of them.

Refining my own understanding is a natural part of building a complex explanation-story to tell to others, and will happen unless I've already built this precise story before and remember it.

I think I know a fair amount about doing calligraphy, but I'm dubious that someone could get a comparable level of knowledge without doing a good bit of calligraphy themselves.

If I were doing a serious job of teaching, I would be learning more about how to teach as I was doing it.

I consider myself to be a good but not expert explainer.

Possibly of interest: The 10-Minute Rejuvenation Plan: T5T: The Revolutionary Exercise Program That Restores Your Body and Mind : a book about an exercise system which involves 5 yoga moves. It's by a woman who'd taught 700 people how to do the system, and shows an extensive knowledge of the possible mistakes students can make and adaptations needed to make the moves feasible for a wide variety of people.

My point is that explanation isn't an abstract perfectible process existing simply in the mind of a teacher.

I will reply to this in the sense of

"do you believe you are aware of the inferential connections between your expertise and layperson-level knowledge?",

since I am not so familiar with the formalism of a "Level 2" understanding.

My uninteresting, simple answer is: yes.

My philosophical answer is that I find the entire question to be very interesting and strange. That is, the relationship between teaching and understanding is quite strange IMO. There are many people who are poor teachers but who excel in their discipline. It seems to be a contradiction because high-level teaching skill seems to be a sufficient, and possibly necessary condition for masterful understanding.

Personally I resolve this contradiction in the following way. I feel like my own limitations make it to where I am forced to learn a subject by progressing at it in very simplistic strokes. By the time I have reached a mastery, I feel very capable of teaching it to others, since I have been forced to understand it myself in the most simplistic way possible.

Other people, who are possibly quite brilliant, are able to master some subjects without having to transmute the information into a simpler level. Consequentially, they are unable to make the sort of connections that you describe as being necessary for teaching.

Personally I feel that the latter category of people must be missing something, but I am unable to make a convincing argument for this point.

I think that the "teaching" benchmark you claim here is actually a bit weaker than a Level 2 understanding. To successfully teach a topic, you don't need to know lots of connections between your topic and everything else; you only need to know enough such connections to convey the idea. I really think this lies somewhere between Level 1 and Level 2.

I'll claim to have Level 2 understanding on the core topics of my graduate research, some mathematics, and some core algorithmic reasoning. I'm sure I don't have all of the connections between these things and the rest of my world model, but I do have many, and they pervade my understanding.

I think I have level 2 understanding of many areas of Biology but of course not all of it. It is too large a field. But there are gray areas around my high points of understanding where I am not sure how deep my understanding would go unless it was put to the test. And around the gray areas surrounding the level 2 areas there is a sea of superficial understanding. I have some small areas of computer science at level 2 but they are fewer and smaller, ditto chemistry and geology. I think your question overlooks the nature of teaching skills. I am pretty good at teaching (verbally and one/few to one) and did it often for years. There is a real knack in finding the right place to start and the right analogies to use with a particular person. Someone could have more understanding than me and not be able to transfer that understanding to someone else. And others could have less understanding and transfer it better. Finally I like your use of the word 'understanding' rather than 'knowledge'. It implies the connectedness with other areas required to relate to lay people.

I have some trouble answering your question, chiefly because my definition of "expert" is approximately synonymous with your definition of "Level 2".

Or, to put it another way, do you think that, given enough time, but using only your present knowledge, you could teach a reasonably-intelligent layperson, one-on-one, to understand complex topics in your expertise, teaching them every intermediate topic necessary for grounding the hardest level?

"Enough time" would be quite a long period of time. One problem is that there are a lot of textbook results that I would have to use in intermediate steps that would take me a long time to derive. Another is that there are a lot of experimental parameters that I haven't memorized and would have to look up. But I think I could teach arithmetic, algebra, geometry, calculus, differential equations, and Newtonian physics enough that I could teach them proper engineering analysis.

Criminal Law: Yes to Level 2. Yes to teaching a layperson. It would take a while, for sure, but it's doable. Some of the work requires an understanding of a different lifestyle; if you can't see the potential issues with prosecuting a robbery by a prostitute and her armed male friend, or you can't predict that a domestic violence victim will have a non-credible recantation, you'll need some other education.

I've done a lot of instruction in this field. It is common for instruction not to take until there's other experience in the field which helps things join up.

Bridge: Yes to Level 2. Possibly to teaching a layperson. The ability to play bridge well is correlated heavily to intelligence, but it also correlates to a certain zeal for winning. I have taught one person to play very well indeed, but that may not be replicable, and took years. (On an aside, I am very likely the world's foremost expert on online bridge cheating; teaching cheating prevention would require teaching bridge first.)

Teaching requires more than reasonable intelligence on the part of the teachee. Some people who are very intelligent are ineducable. (Many of these are violators of my 40% rule: You are allowed to think you are 40% smarter/faster/stronger/better than you are. After that, it's obnoxious.) Some people are not interested in learning a given subject. Some people will not overcome preset biases. Some people have high aptitudes in some areas and little aptitude in others (though intelligence strongly tends to spill over.)

Anyway, I'm interested in the article. My penultimate effort to explain something to many people - Bayes' Theorem to lawyers - was a moderate failure; my last effort to explain something less mathy to a crowd was a substantial success. (My last experience in explaining something, with assistance, to 12 people was a complete failure.)

--JRM

"That is, do you believe you are aware of the inferential connections between your expertise and layperson-level knowledge?"

This is related to an idea that has been brewing at the back of my mind for a while now: Experts aren't always good teachers because their problem solving algorithms may operate at a level of abstraction that is inaccessible to a beginner.

Hmm... I'm not sure if I think of myself as an expert at anything, other than when people ask. But I'm pretty sure I have about the best understanding of logic I can hope to have, and could explain virtually all of it to an attentive small child given sufficient time.

And I might be an expert at some sort of computer programming, though I can think of people much better at any bit of it that I can think of; at any rate, I am also confident I could teach that to anyone, or at least anyone who passes a basic test

Computer programming: I'm not sure if I am at Level 2 or not on this.

In favor of being at Level 2: I regularly think about non-computer-related topics with a CS-like approach (i.e. using information theory ideas when playing the inference game Zendo).

Also, I strongly associate my knowledge of "folk psychology" and "folk science" to computer science ideas, and these insights work in both directions. For example, the "learned helplessness" phenomenon, where inexperienced users become so uncomfortable with a system that they prefer to cling to their inexperienced status than to risk failure in an attempt to understand the system better, appears in many areas of life having nothing directly to do with computers.

Evidence against being at Level 2: I do not have the necessary computer engineering knowledge to connect my understanding of computer programming to my understanding of physics. And, although I have not tried this very often, my experiments in attempting to teach computer programming to laypeople have been middling at best.

My assessment at this point is that I am probably near to Level 2 in computer programming, but not quite there yet.

Can you teach a talented, untrained person a skill so that they exceed your own ability? Can you then identify why they are superior? If you have deep level knowledge of your area of expertise that you can impart to others, you ought to be able to evaluate and train a replacement based on "raw talent."

Considering that intellectual or artistic endeavors may have a variety of details hidden even from the expert, perhaps a clearer example may be found in sports coaches.

I would like a better source than a blog comment for the claim that Kurzweil has been selling bogus nutritional supplements. The obvious alternative possibility is that someone else, with less of a reputation to worry about, attached Kurzweil's name to their product without his knowledge.

Thank you.

The idea reminded me of Moravec's thoughts on death:

When we die, the rules surely change. As our brains and bodies cease to function in the normal way, it takes greater and greater contrivances and coincidences to explain continuing consciousness by their operation. We lose our ties to physical reality, but, in the space of all possible worlds, that cannot be the end. Our consciousness continues to exist in some of those, and we will always find ourselves in worlds where we exist and never in ones where we don't. The nature of the next simplest world that can host us, after we abandon physical law, I cannot guess. Does physical reality simply loosen just enough to allow our consciousness to continue? Do we find ourselves in a new body, or no body? It probably depends more on the details of our own consciousness than did the original physical life. Perhaps we are most likely to find ourselves reconstituted in the minds of superintelligent successors, or perhaps in dreamlike worlds (or AI programs) where psychological rather than physical rules dominate. Our mind children will probably be able to navigate the alternatives with increasing facility. For us, now, barely conscious, it remains a leap in the dark.

Ought to be available at: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/Arkes%20et%20al--Eliminating%20the%20Hindsight%20Bias.pdf

(If this link doesn't work, let me know.)

Link?

Related - verbal overshadowing, where describing something verbally blocks retrieving perceptual memories of it. Critically, verbal overshadowing doesn't always occur - sometimes verbal descriptions improve reasoning.

Doesn't refute Lehrer's main point exactly, but does complicate it somewhat.

So my presumption is that 4 points means this article isn't hopeless - it hasn't attracted criticism, some people have upvoted it - but isn't of a LW standard - it hasn't been voted highly enough, there is only 1 comment engaging with the topic.

Is anyone able to give me a sense at to why it isn't good enough? Should the topic necessarily be backed up by peer reviewed literature? Is it just not a big enough insight? Is it the writing? Is it the lack of specific examples noted by Gwern? Is it too similar to other ideas? And so on.

I hope I'm not bugging people by trying to figure it out but I'm trying to get better at writing posts without filling the main bit of less wrong with uninteresting stuff and this seemed like a less intrusive way to do this. I also feel like the best way to improve isn't simply reading the posts but involves actually trying to write posts and (hopefully) getting feedback.

Thanks

I like this, but in Good and Real, Drescher's paradigm works because he then supplies a few examples where he invalidates a paradox-causing argument, and then goes on to apply this general approach. Asides from your dwarf hypothetical example, where do you actually check that your graph is complete?

And in one comment we've already got to "I’m not ready to waste my time on a crusade against another piece of ignorant superstition".

Thanks to the two people who pointed this out to me in DM. I've commented, though Cyan has already linked to the essays on my blog I'd link to first.

Has there been any work on measuring, studying attraction basins around autocatalytic entities?

I don't know of any work on the question, but it's a good topic. Nations seem to be autocatylitic.

It was interesting that most of the commenters were opposed to the idea of a stress vaccine, though their reasons didn't seem very good.

I'm wondering whether the vaccine would mean that people would be more inclined to accept low status (it's less painful) or less inclined to accept low status (more energy, less pessimism.)

I also wonder how much of the stress from low status is from objectively worse conditions (less benign stimulus, worse schedules, more noise, etc.) as distinct from less control, and whether there's a physical basis for the inclination to crank up stress on subordinates.

OK, I can't seem to get the escaping to work right with crontab no matter how I fiddle, so I've replaced the one-liner with a regular script and meaningful variables names and all:

 1,14,32,26 * * * * ~/bin/bin/memento-mori

The script itself being (with the 32-bit hack mentioned below):

#!/bin/sh
set -e

if grep open /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID?/state > /dev/null
then
    CURRENT=`date +%s`;
    if [ $(( $CURRENT % 8 )) = 1 ]
    then
        # DEATH_DATE=`date --date='9 August 2074' +%s`
        DEATH_DATE="3300998400"
        REMAINING=$(( $DEATH_DATE  - $CURRENT ))
        REMAINING_MINUTES=$(( $REMAINING / 60 ))
        REMAINING_MINUTES_FMT=`env printf "%'d" $REMAINING_MINUTES`
        (sleep 10m && killall xmessage &)
        xmessage "$REMAINING_MINUTES_FMT minutes left to live. Is what you are doing important?"
    fi
fi

Dates that far into the future don't seem to work with the date on 32-bit Linux.

Fun idea otherwise. You should report back in a month or so if you're still using it.

 -        DEATH_DATE=`date --date='9 August 2074' +%s`
 +        # DEATH_DATE=`date --date='9 August 2074' +%s`
 +        DEATH_DATE="3300998400"

In all honesty, I suspect another reason people are uncomfortable with cryonics is that they don't like being cold.

what's a soul?

It would be nice if we had profile pages with machine-readable information and an interface for simple queries so posts such as that one would be redundant.

I suspect that people are overestimating in their replies how much could be done with Wikipedia. People in general underestimate a) how much technology requires bootstrapping (metallurgy is a great example of this) b) how much many technologies, even primitive ones, require large populations so that specialization, locational advantages and comparative advantage can kick in (People even in not very technologically advanced cultures have had tech levels regress when they settle large islands or when their locations get cut off from the mainland. Tasmania is the classical example of this. The inability to trade with the mainland caused large drops in tech level). So while Wikipedia makes sense, it would also be helpful to have a lot of details on do-it-yourself projects that could use pre-existing remnants of existing technology. There are a lot of websites and books devoted to that topic, so that shouldn't be too hard.

If we are reducing to a small population, we may need also to focus on getting through the first one or two generations with an intact population. That means that a handful of practical books on field surgery, midwifing, and similar basic medical issues may become very necessary.

Also, when you specify "ordinary men and women" do you mean who all speak the same language? And do you mean by "ordinary" roughly developed world countries? That's what many people seem to mean when questions like this are proposed. They could alter things considerably. For example, if it really is a random sample, then inter-language dictionaries will be very important. But, if the sample involves some people from the developing world, they are more likely to have some of the knowledge base for working in a less technologically advanced situation that people in the developed world will lack (even this may only be true to a very limited extent because the tech level of the developing world is in many respects very high compared to the tech level of humans for most of human history. Many countries described as developing world are in better shape than for example much of Europe in the Middle Ages.)

Maps.

Locations of pre-disaster settlements to be used as supply caches. Locations of structures to be used for defense. Locations of physical resources for ongoing exploitation: water, fisheries, quarries. Locations of no travel zones to avoid pathogens.

Presupposing that only a limited amount of knowledge could be saved seems wrong. You could bury petabytes of data in digital form, then print out a few books' worth of hints for getting back to the technology level necessary to read it.

In rough order of addition to the corpus of knowledge:

1. The scientific method.

2. Basic survival skills (e.g. navigation).

3. Edit: Basic agriculture (e.g. animal husbandry, crop cultivation).

4. Calculus.

5. Classical mechanics.

6. Basic chemistry.

7. Basic medicine.

8. Basic political science.

Let's examine the problem in more detail: Different disaster scenarios would require different pieces of information, so it would help if you knew exactly what kind of catastrophe. However, if you can preserve a very large compendium of knowledge, then you can create a catalogue of necessary information for almost every type of doomsday scenario (nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, etc.) so that you will be prepared for almost anything. If the amount of information you can save is more limited, then you should save the pieces of information that are the most likely to be useful in any given scenario in "catastrophe-space." Now we have to go about determining what these pieces of information are. We can start by looking at the most likely doomsday scenarios--Yoreth, since you started the thread, what do you think the most likely ones are?

A dead tree copy of Wikipedia. A history book about ancient handmade tools and techniques from prehistory to now. A bunch of K-12 school books about math and science. Also as many various undergraduate and postgraduate level textbooks as possible.

How to start a fire only using sticks.

How to make a cutting blade from rocks.

How to create a bow, and make arrows.

Basic sanitation.

I'm tempted to say "a university library" as the short answer. More specifically, whatever I could get from the science and engineering departments. Pick the classic works in each field if you have someone to filter them. Look for stuff that's more universal than specific to the way we've done things - in computing terms, you want The Art of Computer Programming and not The C Programming Language.

In the short term, anything you can find on farming and primitive medicine - all the stuff the better class of survivalist would have on their bookshelf.

I only need one item:

The Holy Bible

(kidding)

Depends what level you want to achieve post-catastrophe; some, if not most of your resources and knowledge will be needed to deal with specific effects. In short, your suitcase will be full of survivalist and medical material.

In an thought experiment where you freeze yourself until the ecosystem is restored, you can probably use an algorithm of taking the best library materials from each century, corrected for errors, to achieve the level of that century.

Both Robinson Crusoe and Jules Verne's "Mysterious Island" and explore similar bootstrapping scenarios, interestingly both use some "outside injections".

You make good points. I do think that multiple independent identical copies have the same moral status as one. Anything else is going to lead to absurdities like those you mentioned, like the idea of cutting a mechanical computer in half and doubling its moral worth.

I have for a while had a feeling that the moral value of a being's existence has something to do with the amount of unique information generated by its mind, resulting from its inner emotional and intellectual experience. (Where "has something to do with" = it's somewhere in the formula, but not the whole formula.) If you have 100 identical copies of a mind, and you delete 99 of them, you have not lost any information. If you have two slightly divergent copies of a mind, and you delete one of them, then that's bad, but only as bad as destroying whatever information exists in it and not the other copy. Abortion doesn't seem to be a bad thing (apart from any pain caused; that should still be minimized) because a fetus's brain contains almost no information not compressible to its DNA and environmental noise, neither of which seems to be morally valuable. Similar with animals; it appears many animals have some inner emotional and intellectual experience (to varying degrees), so I consider deleting animal minds and causing them pain to have terminal negative value, but not nearly as great as doing the same to humans. (I also suspect that a being's value has something to do with the degree to which its mind's unique information is entangled with and modeled (in lower resolution) by other minds, à la I Am A Strange Loop.)

Here is my proposal for an ansatz for P(Y(n+1)|Y(n)). That is, given that at least n people already believe X, how likely it is that at least one more person also believes X. Let N be the total population of the world. If n/N is close to zero, then I expect P(Y(n+1)|Y(n)) is also close to zero, and if n/N is close to 1, then P(Y(n+1)|Y(n)) is also close to 1. That is, if I know that a tiny proportion of people believe something, that's very weak evidence that a slightly larger proportion believe it also, and if I know that almost everyone believes it, that's very strong evidence that even more people believe it.

One family of functions that have this property are the functions f(n) = (n/N)^C, where C is some fixed positive number. Actually it's convenient to set C = c/N where c is some other fixed positive number. I don't have a story to tell about why P(Y(n+1)|Y(n)) should behave this way, I bring it up only because f(n) does the right thing near 1 and N, and is pretty simple.

To evaluate P(Y(n)), we take the integral of

(c/N)log(t/N)dt

from 1 to n, and exponentiate it. The result is, up to a multiplicative constant

exp(c times (x log x - x)) = (x/e)^(cx)

where x = n/N. I think it's a good idea to leave this as a function of x. Write K for the multiplicative constant. We have P(Proportion x of the population believes X) = K(x/e)^(cx). A graph of this function for K = 1, c = 1 can be found here and a graph of its reciprocal (whose relevance is explained in the parent) can be found here

After Life

I have also artificially induced an Ugh Field in myself. A few months ago, I was having a horrible problem with websurfing procrastination. I started using Firefox for browsing and LeechBlock to limit (but not eliminate) my opportunities for websurfing instead of doing work. I'm on a Windows box, and for the first three days I disabled IE, but doing so caused knock-on effects, so I had to re-enable it. However, I knew that resorting to IE to surf would simply recreate my procrastination problem, so... I just didn't. Now, when the thought occurs to me to do so, it auto-squelches.

I think some of the statistical fallacies that most people fall for are quite high up the list.

One such is the "What a coincidence!" fallacy. People notice that some unlikely event has occurred, and wonder how many millions to one against this event must have been - and yet it actually happenned ! Surely this means that my life is influenced by some supernatural influence!

The typical mistake is to simply calculate the likelihood of the occurrence of the particular event that occurred. Nothing wrong with that, but one should also compare that number against the whole basket of other possible unlikely events that you would have noticed if they'd happenned (of which there are surely millions), and all the possible occasions where all these unlikely events could have also occurred. When you do that, you discover that the likelihood of some unlikely thing happenning is quite high - which is in accordance with our experience that unlikely events do actually happen.

Another way of looking at it is that non-notable unlikely events happen all the time. Look, that particular car just passed me at exactly 2pm ! Most are not noticable. But sometimes we notice that a particular unlikely event just occurred, and of course it causes us to sit up and take notice. The question is how many other unlikely events you would also have noticed.

The key rational skill here is noticing the actual size of the set of unlikely things that might have happenned, and would have caught our attention if they had.

I'm going to be running a series of Rationality & AI seminars with Alex Flint in the Autumn, where we'll introduce aspiring rationalists to new concepts in both fields; standard cognitive biases, a bit of Bayesianism, some of the basic problems with both AI and Friendliness. As such, this could be a very helpful thread.

We were thinking of introducing Overconfidence Bias; ask people to give 90% confidence intervals, and then reveal (surprise surprise!) that they're wrong half the time.

The concept of inferential distance is good. You wouldn't want to introduce it in the context of explaining something complicated - you'd just sound self-serving - but it'd be a good thing to crack out when people complain about how they just can't understand how anyone could believe $CLAIM.

Edit: It's also a useful concept when you are thinking about teaching.

#3 is a favorite of mine, but I like #1 too.

How about "Your intuitions are not magic"? Granting intuitions the force of authority seems to be a common failure mode of philosophy.

google archive.org

BEHOLD!

Far more interesting than the software is the chapter in the CIA book Psychology of Intelligence Analysis where they describe the method:

Analysis of competing hypotheses, sometimes abbreviated ACH, is a tool to aid judgment on important issues requiring careful weighing of alternative explanations or conclusions. It helps an analyst overcome, or at least minimize, some of the cognitive limitations that make prescient intelligence analysis so difficult to achieve.

ACH is an eight-step procedure grounded in basic insights from cognitive psychology, decision analysis, and the scientific method. It is a surprisingly effective, proven process that helps analysts avoid common analytic pitfalls. Because of its thoroughness, it is particularly appropriate for controversial issues when analysts want to leave an audit trail to show what they considered and how they arrived at their judgment.

Summary and conclusions:

Three key elements distinguish analysis of competing hypotheses from conventional intuitive analysis.

• Analysis starts with a full set of alternative possibilities, rather than with a most likely alternative for which the analyst seeks confirmation. This ensures that alternative hypotheses receive equal treatment and a fair shake.
• Analysis identifies and emphasizes the few items of evidence or assumptions that have the greatest diagnostic value in judging the relative likelihood of the alternative hypotheses. In conventional intuitive analysis, the fact that key evidence may also be consistent with alternative hypotheses is rarely considered explicitly and often ignored.
• Analysis of competing hypotheses involves seeking evidence to refute hypotheses. The most probable hypothesis is usually the one with the least evidence against it, not the one with the most evidence for it. Conventional analysis generally entails looking for evidence to confirm a favored hypothesis.

I can't imagine any reason why it would be a problem to make a User page. Go ahead.

I haven't seen any sort of policy articulated. I just sort of went for it, and haven't gotten any complaints yet. Personally, I'd love to see more people with wiki user pages, since the LW site itself doesn't have much in the way of profile features.

My default assumption has that been unless otherwise stated, all the norms and conventions of Wikipedia apply to the LW wiki. En, at least, lets you have one for any reason you want.

Your Price for Joining?

As I see it, there are two possibilities; either we come to a point where the moral value drops to zero, or else we decide that entities approach zero to some arbitrary limit: e.g. a c. elegans roundworm with its 300 neurons might have a 'hedonic coefficient' of 3x10^-9. I personally favor the former, the latter just seems absurd to me, but I am open to arguments or any comments/criticisms.

Less absurd than that some organism is infinitely more valuable than its sibling that differs in lacking a single mutation (in the case of the first organism of a particular species to have evolved "high" enough to have minimal moral value)?

Suppose sentient beings have intrinsic value in proportion to how intensely they can experience happiness and suffering. Then the value of invertebrates and many non-mammal vertebrates is hard to tell, while any mammal is likely to have almost as much intrinsic value as a human being, some possibly even more. But that's just the intrinsic value. Humans have a tremendously greater instrumental value than any non-human animal, since humans can create superintelligence that can, with time, save tremendous amounts of civilisations in other parts of the universe from suffering (yes, they are sparse, but with time our superintelligence will find more and more or them, in theory ultimately infinitely many).

The instrumental value of most humans is enormously higher than the intrinsic value of the same persons - given that they do sufficiently good things.

My answer: if it shows signs of not wanting something to happen, such as avoiding a situation, it's best not to have it happen. Of course, simple stimulus response doesn't count, but if an animal can learn, it shouldn't be tortured for fun.

This only applies to animals, though. I'm not sure about machines.

With no time limit, how can you ever win that one?

Considering most of my favorite books are the result of mentions in comment threads here, I'd say a book recommendation thread is in order.

Tangental, but I remember "Logic of Failure" to be mostly being mental phenomena I was already familiar with, and generalizations from computer experiments that I didn't find particularly compelling. I'll have to give it another look.

I'd say new top-level thread. The wiki can get a curated version of that.

I know. Does any human mathematician really doubt that?

It's possible - the next sentence after your quotation reads:

As economist Casey Mulligan has argued, some inflation right now could have some salutary effects: "Specifically, inflation would raise prices of homes, among other things. Higher housing prices would pull a number of mortgages out from under water … and thereby reduce the number of foreclosures."

...which is at least a causal mechanism that would go the correct direction. That said, the part you quoted sounds pretty bad.

I've always pictured Omega like this: suddenly I'm pulled from our world and appear in a sterile white room that contains two boxes. At the same moment I somehow know the problem formulation. I open one box, take the million, and return to the world.

I've always thought of Omega as looking something like a hydralisk--biological and alien, almost a scaled-down Lovecraftian horror.

At the risk of spoiling a very good webcomic; Omega looks like this.

DAMN YOU WILLIS.

A white human-shaped figure in a business suit, possibly faceless, stepping into a transparent blue cube for the flight part. Possibly unconsciously influenced by Einstein.

One of the facts about 'hard' AI, as is required for profitable NLP, is that the coders who developed it don't even understand completely how it works. If they did, it would just be a regular program.

TLDR: this definitely is emergent behavior - it is information passing between black-box algorithms with motivations that even the original programmers cannot make definitive statements about.

Yuck.

Books are not enough. Smart kids are lonely. Get him into a good school (or other community) where he won't be the smartest one. That happened to me at 11 when I was accepted into Russia's best math school and for the first time in my life I met other people worth talking to, people who actually thought before saying words. Suddenly, to regain my usual position of the smart kid, I had to actually work hard. It was very very important. I still go to school reunions every year, even though I finished it 12 years ago.

Forum favorite Good and Real looks reasonably accessible to me, and covers a lot of ground. Also seconding Gödel, Escher Bach.

The Mathematical Experience has essays about doing mathematics, written by actual mathematicians. It seems like very good reading for someone who might be considering studying math.

The Road to Reality has Roger Penrose trying to explain all of modern physics and the required mathematics without pulling any punches and starting from grade school math in a single book. Will probably cause a brain meltdown at some point on anyone who doesn't already know the stuff, but just having a popular science style book that nevertheless goes on to explain the general theory of relativity without handwaving is pretty impressive. Doesn't include any of Penrose's less fortunate forays into cognitive science and AI.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett explains how evolution isn't just something that happens in biology, but how it turns up in all sorts of systems.

Armchair Universe and old book about "computer recreations", probably most famous is the introduction of the Core War game. The other topics are similar, setting up an environment with a simple program that has elaborate emergent behavior coming out of it. Assumes the reader might actually program the recreations themselves, and provides appropriate detail.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman is pretty much entertainment, but still very good. Feynman is still the requisite trickster-god patron saint of math and science.

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software explains how computers are put together, starting from really concrete first principles (flashing Morse code with flashlights, mechanical relay circuits) and getting up to microprocessors, RAM and executable program code.

Godel Escher Bach!

knb, does your nephew know about lesswrong, rationality and the Singularity? I guess I would have enjoyed reading such a website when I was a teenager.

When it comes to a physical book, Engines of Creation by Drexler can be a good way to introduce him to nanotechnology and what science can make happen. (I know that nanotech is far less important that FAI, but I think it is more "visual" : you can imagine those nanobots manufacturing stuff or curing diseases, while you cannot imagine a hard takeoff).
Teenagers need dream.

My dad's been trying to get me to read the Feynman Lectures for ages - the man's a good writer if your nephew would be interested by physics.

The Heinlein Juveniles. 'have space suit will travel' and others have the whole self-reliance, work hard and achieve things strongly ingrained. I cannot judge how well the integrate with your current culture, but in the 50s they sold well, and still do. But those are not specific for über-bright kids, more for the normal bright types. If he hasn't done so yet, just introducing him to the next big library might help a lot.

Get him a book of math contests. The Mandelbrot Problem Book is an excellent one.

You might also consider Raymond Smullyan's books of logic puzzles - I particularly recommend The Lady or the Tiger? as excellent.

If you're talking about math, Bayes' theorem is true and that's the end of that. If you're talking about degrees of belief that real people hold - especially if you want to convince your opponent to update in a specific direction because Bayes' theorem says so - I'd advise to use another strategy. Going meta like "you must be persuaded by these arguments because blah blah blah" gives you less bang per buck than upgrading the arguments.

Jaynes' book PT:LoS has a good chapter on this, where he derives Bayes' theorem from simple assumptions (use of numbers to represent plausibility, consistency between paths that compute the same value, continuity, and agreement with common sense qualitative reasoning). The assumptions are sound.

Note that the validity of Bayes' theorem is a separate question from the validity of any particular set of prior probabilities, which is on much shakier ground.

Bayes's theorem follows almost immediately from the ordinary definition of conditional probability, which I think is itself so reassuringly intuitive that no one who accepts the use of probabilities would worry about it (except perhaps in the corner case where the denominator's zero).

No, I haven't written in any detail about any other approach. I think when I wrote that post I was mainly worried that Eliezer/SIAI wasn't thinking enough about what other approaches might be more likely to succeed than FAI. After my visit to SIAI a few months ago, I became much less worried because I saw evidence that plenty of SIAI people were thinking seriously about this question.

I wouldn't have problems copying myself as long as I could merge the copies afterwards. However, it might not be possible to have a merge operation for human level systems that both preserves information and preserves sanity. E.g. if one copy started studying philosophy and radically changed its world views from the original, how do you merge this copy back into the original without losing information?

That sounds (to me) better than having children, but not as good as living longer.

Sounds wonderful. Divide and conquer.

As this sounds like a computer assisted scenario, I would like the ability to append memories while sleeping. Wake up and have access to the memories of the copy. This would not necessarily include full proficiency as I suspect that muscle memory may not get copied.

Copying has at best zero utility (as regards interests): each copy only indulges in one interest, and I anticipate being only one copy, even if I don't know in advance which one.

How is having children at all similar? 1) children would have different interests; 2) I cannot control (precommit) future children; 3) raising children would be for me a huge negative utility - both emotionally and resource-wise.

Waste of processing power. Having dozens of focuses of attention and corresponding body/brain construction is more efficient.

Surely, this is dealt with by considering the amount of information in the hypothesis? If we consider each hypothesis that can be represented with 1,000 bits of information, there will only be a maximum of 2^1,000 such hypotheses, and if we consider each hypothesis that can be represented with n bits of information, there will only be a maximum of 2^n - and that is before we even start eliminating hypotheses that are inconsistent with what we already know. If we favor hypotheses with less information content, then we end up with a small number of hypotheses that can be taken reasonably seriously, and the remainder being unlikely - and progressively more unlikely as n increases, so that when n is sufficiently large, we can, practically, dismiss any hypotheses.

(1)Everything is "real" in some universe, and we have no way of ever finding such universes. This cannot ever be proved or falsified, and also leads to problems with the definition of "everything" and "real".

That's pretty much Tegmark's Multiverse, which seems pretty popular around here (I think it makes a lot of sense).

Indeed. I have a post making similar arguments, though I still haven't been able to resolve the ethical and anthropic problems it raises in any satisfactory way. At this point I've backtracked from the confidence I held when I wrote that post; what I'm still willing to say is that we're probably on the right track thinking of "Why does anything exist?" as a wrong question and thinking of reality as indexical (i.e. the true referent of the category "real" is the set of things instantiated by this universe; it is a category error to talk about other universes being real or not real), but the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis still leaves much to be confused about.

I don't think it works like that. Math is a conceptual construct, not something that has its own reality separate from either the thing it approximates or the mind that approximates with it.

I'm reminded of the person who thought that using the equations for relativistic rather than classical mechanics to model cannonballs would give the wrong answer.

Only things that happen are real. There's no Math Heaven inhabited by angelic equations in a separate magisterium from the world of the merely real.

Executing the same program twice (with the same inputs each time) is equivalent to executing it once

In some sense, maybe. But if that were generally true, then I wouldn't have any reason to run the same program twice, but I do. (for example, I have repeatedly asked my calculator what is 1080*4/3, since I have a weird TV and untrustworthy memory)

I don't know what's wrong, but a peek at the raw HTML editor (there's a button for it in the toolbar) might give a hint.

He makes the surprising claim that after 20 years of selling life insurance, none of his clients have died.

Wow. He admitted that to you? That seems to be strong evidence that most people refuse to buy life insurance from him. In a whole 20 years he hasn't sold enough insurance that even one client has died from unavoidable misfortune!

"No."

Life insurance salesmen are used to hearing that. If they act offended, it's a sales act. If you're reluctant to say it, you're easily pressured and you're taking advantage. You say "No". If they press you, you say, "Please don't press me further." That's all.

Since his sales rate probably increased with time, that means the average time after selling a policy is ~8 years. So the typical client of his didn't die after 8 years. Making a rough estimate of the age of the client he sells to, which would probably be 30-40, it just means that the typical client has lived to at least 48 or less, which is normal, not special.

Furthermore, people who buy life insurance self-select for being more prudent in general.

So, even ignoring the causal separations you could find, what he's told you is not very special. Though it separates him from other salesmen, the highest likelihood ratio you should put on this piece of evidence would be something like 1.05 (i.e. ~19 out of 20 salesmen could say the same thing), or not very informative, so you are only justified in making a very slight move toward his hypothesis, even under the most generous assumptions.

You could get a better estimate of his atypicality by asking more about his clients, at which point you would have identified factors that can screen off the factor of him selling a policy.

(Though in my experience, life insurance salesmen aren't very bright, and a few sentences into that explanation, you'll get the, "Oh, it's one of these people" look ...)

How'd I do?

Edit: Okay, I think I have to turn in my Bayes card for this one: I just came up with a reason why the hypothesis puts a high probability on the evidence, when in reality the evidence should have a low probability of existing. So it's more likely he doesn't have his facts right.

Maybe this is a good case to check the "But but somebody would have noticed" heuristic. If one of his clients died, would he even find out? Would the insurance company tell him? Does he regularly check up on his clients?

Buying life insurance can't extend a human's life.

Tell him you found his pitch very interesting and persuasive, and that you'd like to buy life insurance for a 20 year period. Then, ponder for a little while; "Actually, it can't be having the contact that keeps them alive, can it? That's just a piece of paper. It must be that the sort of person who buy it are good at staying alive! And it looks like I'm one of them; this is excellent!

Then , you point out that as you're not going to die, you don't need life insurance, and say goodbye.

If you wanted to try to enlighten him, you might start by explicitly asking if he believed there was a causal link. But as the situation isn't really set up for honest truth-hunting, I wouldn't bother.

With a degree of discombobulation, I imagine. I can't see any causal mechanism by which buying insurance would cause you to live longer, so unless the salesman knows something I wouldn't expect him to, he would seem to have acquired an unreliable belief. Given this, I would postpone buying any insurance from him in case this unreliable belief could have unfortunate further consequences* and I would reduce my expectation that the salesman might prove to be an exceptional rationalist.

* For example: given his superstition, he may have allotted inadequate cash reserves to cover future life insurance payments.

Maybe the salesman mostly sells temporary life insurance, and just means that no clients had died while covered?

I think we cannot expect the computed numbers P(A) to have the consistency property (B implies A means P(A) not smaller than P(B)).

Clarify for me what you are saying here. Why would a bounded-rational superintelligence maintain a logically inconsistent belief system? Are you making the following observation?

• Even a superintelligence is not logically omniscient
• There are inevitably going to be complicated mathematical properties of the superintelligence's map that are not worth spending processing time on. This is ensured by the limits of physics itself.
• Outside the 'bounds' of the superintelligence's logical searching there will be logical properties for which the superintelligence's beliefs are not consistent.
• A bayesian superintelligence is not logically omniscient so some of it's beliefs will be logically inconsistent.

My impression is that the above holds true unless the superintelligence in question cripples itself, sacrificing most of it's instrumentally rational capability for epistemic purity.

Here's the post

I remember vaguely one discussion of Bayesianism vs. frequentism, where the frequentists held that a study in which the experimenters resolved to keep making observations until they observed Foo X times (for a total of X times and Y total observations) must be treated statistically different from a study where the experimenters resolved to make Y total observations but wound up X times observing Foo; while from the Bayesian perspective, these studies, with their identical objective facts, ought to be treated the same.

Does this sound like it?

How valuable was each experiment? If you make a theory after ten experiments, then you could design the next ten experiments to be very specific to the theory: if the theory is right, they come out one way, and they should come out a very different way if the theory is wrong.

It's like writing test-cases for software: once you know what exactly you're testing, you can write test cases that aim at any potential weak spots, in a deliberate and targeted attempt to break it. So if we're assuming that these scientists are actual people (rather than really hypothetical abstractions), I would give more credence to the guy who did ten experiments, formulated a theory, and did ten more experiments, iff those later ten experiments look like they were designed to give new information and really stress-test the theory.

If we're talking about the exact same 20 experiments, then I would generally favor doing maybe 13 experiments, making a theory, and then doing the other 7, to avoid overfitting. Or split the experiments up into two sets of ten, and have two scientists each look at ten of the experiments, make a theory, then test it with the other ten. This kind of thinking would have killed Ptolemy's theory of epicycles, which is a classic case of overcomplicating the theory to match your observations.

I know that's hardly a formal answer, but I think the original question was oversimplifying.

[In the context of SIAI folks thinking an unpleasant AI was likely]

The SIAI derives its funding from convincing people that the end is probably nigh - and that they are working on a potential solution. This is not the type of organisation you should trust to be objective on such an issue - they have obvious vested interests.

They used to have a "commitment" that:

"Technology developed by SIAI will not be used to harm human life."

...on their web site. I probably missed the memo about that being taken down.

[In the context of SIAI folks thinking an unpleasant AI was likely]

Re: "The justification is that uFAI is a lot easier to make."

That seems like naive reasoning. It is a lot easier to make a random mess of ASCII that crashes or loops - and yet software companies still manage to ship working products.

So many of the problems with typical education systems can be solved by moving to a really good computer-based education system. Lectures given by marginally qualified teachers could be replaced by videos of really good lectures from excellent teachers. We could avoid crappy textbooks. The system could adapt to the pace of each student, so that if they don't understand something, they can take extra time to learn it properly, and if they do understand something, they can go on to the next thing instead of waiting for the rest of the class to catch up. Human teachers could help students out, and do more interactive teaching because they would no longer have their time filled with lecturing and grading and miscellaneous crap work. Ideally. I wouldn't trust any existing education system to actually implement this in a sane way, of course.

(By the way, Curriki doesn't give links, but some of the course materials on there really are open source. For example, you can make a fork of Free High School Science Textbooks by going to their web site and snagging the LaTeX source code.)

I don't want this kind of items to be discussed on LW. It's either off-topic or crackpottery, irrelevant whatever the case.

My essay on the topic:

http://alife.co.uk/essays/the_singularity_is_nonsense/

See also:

"The Singularity" by Lyle Burkhead - see the section "Exponential functions don't have singularities!"

• http://www.geniebusters.org/29_singularity.html

It's not exponential, it's sigmoidal

• http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/11/its-not-exponential-its-sigmoi.html

The Singularity Myth

• http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/Kurzweil.htm

Singularity Skepticism: Exposing Exponential Errors

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_svQQ5g2hk

IMO, those interested in computational limits should discuss per-kg figures.

The metric Moore's law uses is not much use really - since it would be relatively easy to make large asynchronous ICs with lots of faults - which would make a complete mess of the "law".