[Open Thread] Stupid Questions (2014-02-17)

There's also zoning laws. For instance, I live in DC, where there's a height cap on buildings, which makes it impossible to build towering, cheap, apartment buildings. (much to my sorrow).

That zoning law exists to keep buildings from blocking views of the Capitol, but a lot of other zoning laws exist exactly to prevent cheap apartments, because the people active in the zoning process don't want to live near the kind of people who would live in cheap apartments.

Robert Moses, from my home state of NY, is particularly famous for this kind of things. In addition to zoning, he also made sure that buses weren't allowed on some Long Island roads, or that bridge overpasses would be too low to fit buses under, to prevent people who rely on public transportation from traveling to certain neighborhoods and beaches.

The cost of complying with health and safety regulations makes it too expensive to price rent below a certain amount even at the worst the rental situation is legally allowed to be.

There's also zoning and other issues, and subtler ones like licensing of construction trades, etc. But this seems to be a big part of the story. From last year http://www.psmag.com/navigation/politics-and-law/how-the-trailer-park-could-save-us-all-55137/

By any name, they are the largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing in the country. There are seven million manufactured homes housing 18 million people. In some counties they make up 60 percent of dwellings. Approximately one out of every 12 Floridians lives in a manufactured home. Units built since 1976, when the Department of Housing and Urban Development started regulating their construction, can last as long as site-built homes when they’re well built and maintained. Yet they cost far less: $41 per square foot versus $85 per square foot and up. At least one study, from the University of Illinois-Chicago, on trailer parks in Omaha, Nebraska, found that crime rates in mobile-home parks are the same as the rest of the community; the parks do not cause crime nearby; and that the parks appear to depress crime levels because residents own their homes. In one survey, nine out of 10 owners of manufactured homes said they were satisfied with their dwellings. They’ve found a housing option that suited their budget and needs.

Commentary: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/04/why_trailers_in.html

Not paying rent is the least of the problems with bad tenants. There is a long tail of risk, such as destroying the building.

The middle class would prefer that people be homeless than that they have permanent dwellings that do not reach their standards. None of your explanations is correct but the second comes closest. See Flophouse. I believe Matthew Yglesias has written on this and there's a commenter on slatestarcodex, St. Rev, who may or may not have a blog, who's homeless.

• The opportunity cost of the land may be higher than you think. How far from a major population area are you looking?
• Transaction costs (an expansion of your third point) are higher than you think.

Do an estimate of what it would take for you to set up a group home in the areas you are willing to live. If you're lucky, you will be able to find partners and get it going for a bit under going rental rates. If not, you'll learn a lot and be able to report back here.

What do you mean by "bad" housing?

One possible reason is that many of the relevant aspects of good or bad housing are governed by building codes (plumbing, HVAC, bathrooms, room size, etc.) which put a (often high) lower bound on how cheap a building can be built. In addition, the organization of the construction industry (many specialized subcontractors) means there's a fairly high fixed cost for any new construction. While this mostly applies to new construction, it can apply to existing buildings as well.

You may be looking in the wrong places. SRO arrangements are still a thing, albeit a declining one, but as far as I can tell they don't get advertised anywhere a middle-class tenant would find them.

What parts are you familiar with? This makes a drastic difference.

You also have to take into account public housing projects and rent assistance programs.

Pick a date, time, and location that seems sensible. Post a meetup. Say "I'm flexible about details, if this point in spacetime doesn't work for people". At the specified time, show up with something identifiable, and a book or some work that you can do to keep you occupied for, say, two hours in case nobody shows up. Hope somebody shows up.

Or feel free to say "I will only be there if I get at least N replies", where my own preferences would place N at one or two but YMMV. That reduces the probability of being bored and alone, but also reduces the probability of successfully meeting someone.

If you wanted low-level technical details, this is how I do it:

I have a phone number to a cafe, where I already did some meetups, so I call them to reserve a table for me on Monday from 18:00. They have no problem with it, even if I say "I am not sure how many people will come, at most 10 but maybe much less", because on Mondays they are half-empty anyway.

When I did this the first time, I used google and recommendations from my friends about nice places in the city. Then I visited personally (to see the place, and to be able to negotiate in person) and asked whether it would be okay to have a table reserved there. -- I specifically emphasised that most participants will be students who don't have much money and just want to talk, so they shouldn't expect a big revenue from this; and I asked whether that would be acceptable. (It's better to have a feedback in advance than a misunderstanding later.) -- Then I picked a Monday cca 2 weeks in future.

I post an announcement on LW, and also to the local LW mailing list. Sometimes I send personal e-mails to people I think could be interested. (Mostly they don't come, but sending the e-mail is so cheap and sometimes they come, that it's worth doing. Some people don't come the first few times, and then when I already lost hope, they appear.) -- At the beginning I also used to post an invitation on my Facebook page.

A day or two before the meetup, I send e-mail reminders. The e-mails contain my phone number, in case someone would have last-minute problem finding us.

I go to the meetup. -- At the beginning, I was careful to be the first one there, and to somehow attract other people's attention (e.g. have a paper saying "LessWrong" on the table). These days we already know each other, and we meet in a cafe that has only three tables, so this is not necessary.

There are two problems here: (1) Increasing the visibility of LW among minds which could be positively influenced by it. (2) Coordinating the already interested minds to meet at one point in the timespace.

You asked specifically about the latter, but I want to make it explicit that the former is a meta-strategy for the latter. The more people know about LW, the easier it is to get some of them to the meetup. (These is a chance -- although I wouldn't rely on it -- that with popularity big enough, someone else would organize the meetup.)

As a data point, the first meetups in Slovakia had between 4 and 6 people. And even that was because there were already 2 organizers (me and my girlfriend, and she did it partially to make me happy), and at that time there were no regular meetups in neighbor countries, so we regularly had one or two visitors from other country. It took more than a year to create a relatively stable community of about 10 local people. And I had to make some trade-offs; for example a few of them are not fluent in English, so we speak in Slovak, which excludes the potential foreign visitors.

I am saying this to prepare you not to be disappointed by smaller participation. On the other hand, there are a few possible strategic moves I have ignored so far (such as doing a LW presentation at a local university), so a better strategy could possibly bring higher participation.

I've wondered about this too. I once tried to organize a round-robin tournament, and discovered that all the other players preferred single elimination despite its vulnerability to noise and lack of a meaningful second place. In the ensuing argument, I discovered that they do know about problems like this, but they don't care, for two reasons:

1. They don't care much about accuracy. Tournaments ostensibly rank teams by quality, but they're used mostly as ritual contests: the audience wants to know who won, not who would most likely win.
2. They don't like complexity or novelty. They're suspicious of any design they don't understand, because they're afraid it might be gamed, or might have perverse incentives (e.g. where losing a match helps you win the tournament), and because they want everyone, even the dumb jocks, to understand the rules.

from Wikipedia

In a random knockout tournament (single-elimination without any seeding), awarding the second place to the loser of the final is unjustified: any of the competitors knocked out by the tournament winner might have been the second strongest one, but they never got the chance to play against the losing finalist. In general, it is only fair to use a single-elimination tournament to determine first place. To fairly determine lower places requires some form of round-robin in which each player/team gets the opportunity to face every other player/team.

Well, on the surface level, Team B lost their first match and won their second, while team C won their first match but lost their second, so clearly order matters.

On the more meta level, a format optimised for selecting one winner has been poorly adapted to the task of selecting three winners and ranking them. Adjusting the format to fairly select silver and bronze would add complexity and cost and time, and apparently not enough people care enough about fairly selecting silver and bronze for this to have happened.

[Delted: Didn't think about the question properly]

What do you plan on doing with an answer to this question?

This seems easily testable. Though I cannot recommend any, I'm sure there are online memory tests that let you know how you performed relative to all the other subjects. Maybe not good enough, as there is a selection bias in the sample of people who take those tests, but it will give you some info.

However, I think that you have an above average memory and are only noticing this because you usually hang around people who have above average memory as well[1]. Perhaps a more useful test would be getting your friends to take the test as well and compare the results. Maybe ask on LW for subjects? I'd participate.

[1] Assumptions:

• You have an above average IQ. I a priori assume this of all LWers.

• There is a positive correlation between IQ and memory. A quick search gives results in favor of the assumption, but I didn't dig deeper.

• You hang around people of similar IQ.

Memory is a complex process and there are different kinds of specialized memory modules in the brain. Have you noticed that you have a problem with specific kinds of memories? Do you have problems with attention? You might not encode the memories in the first place.

There are a lot of different kinds of memory. You might have a good memory for some facts that you care about and a bad memory for facts that you don't care about.

There are tests of working memory that you can seek out, if this really bothers you.

Do you have many more memories of other people remembering things when you don't remember them than you have memories of things you remember that others don't remember?

The anti-death argument you are implicitly referencing only states that "Death is bad", not "we have to feel negative emotions in response to death".

There's nothing wrong with coming to terms with it, as in "this bad thing will probably happen to me, and I accept that it must be so". It's like if you lose a limb - its possible to come to terms with that even if it's clearly bad.

If we end biological aging we still have accidents. If we end accidents we still have suicide. If we end suicide we still have the heat death of the universe.

Making peace with death isn't a terrible use of time regardless of circumstance.

Along these lines, if we pretend there is actually a zero percent chance of curing death in our lifetime, how should we rationally act differently? Often people use the cliche 'if you were going to die tomorrow what would you do differently today?' as a thought experiment, seemingly implying (to me at least) that we're already living rationally for an ~80 year lifetime and that only changes in behavior should come from learning you have a very short time to live left.

I often wonder if I too easily approximate ~80 years as infinity in my reasoning about life, and that I'm not appropriately taking into account an 80 year life span (or much shorter if you subtract sleep, how old you are now, and years of life you think you'll be healthy enough to have control over).

TLDR: I think it's hard to reason about spans of time that are longer than we've experienced but shorter than infinity, and I don't know what to do about it.

I don't think that probability is low.

But even if it would be low, not tormenting yourself with the idea that you will die is not the same thing as completely accepting death.

Not if you think slightly increasing the probability of death being cured is more important than being happy. (I'm not saying I think this.)

Who would be willing to fund this research? The cryonics organizations usually run at losses (membership and preservation fees do not pay 100% of expenses) and don't have the money for much research. And the public doesn't care - have you donated to the nearest available equivalents like the Brain Preservation Prize? If you haven't and are unwilling, then you have your answer.

Why isn't there more research in progress on how to wake up people from cryonics? Or, rather, why aren't more people sticking hamsters and dogs under liquid nitrogen*, then trying to revive them and bring them back to "full life", and seeing if dear ole Spot remembers all the tricks we taught him?

Because anything bigger than a cubic centimeter or two that you try to vitrify always comes out of vitrification full of massive cuts and chemical toxicity and ice crystals and leaky membranes to the point that calling it temporarily 'alive' is a stretch. This is not a problem with the revival process, but with the preservation process. Even freezing samples of cultured cells has a mortality rate.

Why isn't there more research in progress on how to wake up people from cryonics? Or, rather, why aren't more people sticking hamsters and dogs under liquid nitrogen*, then trying to revive them and bring them back to "full life",

Because cryonics is not simply about putting people under liquid oxygen.

It also involve given people a highly toxic substance that prevent ice crystals from forming inside their brains. The substance does no harm if you are frozen is ice but if you would just try to revive people the substance would kill them. You need nanotech to remove it.

Cryonics needs nanotech to revive patients. Currently there no good nanotech for doing so. It makes more sense to wait till we have good nanobots and then attempt to revive organisms.

Because it's a very small industry, and nobody has the money for it?

I'm told that there have been brains with no activity that have been revived, showing that that at least isn't where all the information is stored. It doesn't prove that cryonics is possible, but it disproves the most obvious reason why it wouldn't be.

I tried upgrading from Mnemosyne 1 to Mnemosyne 2, but a large fraction of the cards were damaged in the translation (for example, I'd often made double-sided cards, then deleted one side, in Mnemosyne 1, but Mnemosyne 2 was not happy about this).

I occasionally deleted one half a of a double-sided card and I do not recall any odd behavior when I upgraded to 2.x... Have you tried exporting your cards with learning history and importing them to a 2.x installation? Or brought this up with Peter?

We can call it Hipster Fallacy, maybe?

Seems like a specific case of reverting stupidity (but that's not a formal name).

Perhaps specific examples could help. Can you name something that is clearly overrated and clearly doesn't suck?

I wouldn't bother. If you're old enough to be taking the LSAT, a high IQ score won't be opening any worthwhile doors for you; at a younger age you might have been able to leverage it into admission to some useful programs, but now it's only good for bragging rights. And it's not something that it's socially acceptable to brag about in most contexts. (I don't remember ever mentioning mine past high school, except on the mostly-anonymous LW surveys.)

This equation blew my mind.

Off the top of my head:

Physics:

• Einstein-Hilbert action:

• Expectation values using Feynman's path integral:

• Yang-Mills Lagrangian:

• Deformation quantization (not sure what's the proper name for this, maybe Dirac's rule):

• Fundumental thermodynamic relation:

Mathematics:

• Stokes' theorem:

• Riemann's functional equation:

• L'Hopital's rule:

• Taylor's series:

• Lefschetz-Hopf theorem (unfortunatelly couldn't find one image of both sides of the equation):

For a right-angled triangle, x^2 + y^2 = z^2.

Are you interested in elegance given physical relevance? For instance, Maxwell's equations aren't anything all that special in themselves, but when you discover that they explain approximately all of electricity, magnetism and light it's a different matter.

The tau version for Euler's Identity is slightly more elegant.

e^(iτ) = 1

S = k ln W

No, since there may be far more happy living than suffering. Not on its own, at least.

You might want to look at the writings of David Benatar. He's a professional philosopher who argues something similar in spirit. His position it that it would be better for there to not be (and never have been) any sentient life. He is not as crazy as this may sound; the problem is just that he has one premise that is totally intuitive to some people while others completely fail to see its appeal, and there's no real reason for or against accepting it other than intuition. The shortest thing to read would be his paper "Why It Is Better Never to Come into Existence". He also has a book titled "Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence".

No. Not purely from that knowledge about your utility function, anyway.

Unless suffering has infinite disutility, then enough happiness would outweigh all the suffering in the world.

If we reach a Good Future, then it would be worth it even if the average modern human has negative utility - which seems far from obvious itself, even given the premise; most human lives could still experience sufficiently more happiness than suffering.

Only if you also do not expect there to be enough happy living to outweigh the amount of suffering.

In that case (which I believe is not true for almost any modern human, so this is a purely theoretical answer), it's logical to conclude that it'd be good for you to cease to exist. In order to prefer that others so cease (assuming you're a utilitiarian), you'd need to believe that every individual has a similar weighting.

All that implies is that we ought to tolerate suicide. Those with negative net value attached to living can reset it to zero pretty easily.

I haven't used it, but I think If This Then That might be helpful. It's a way to link triggers (like an RSS feed) with other actions (like a text).

The keywords to search under are "rss" and "feed." This is a format intended for computers to read and learn about updates to a website. There are feeds for main and discussion. I don't know any particular tools, but there are certainly ways of turning an rss update into an email or a text message. There are probably apps for your phone that make an alert when they notice something new in the feed, too. The inbox has a feed, too, but that link only works if you are logged in, which may be difficult to do in the feed reader.

Does there exist a moral system based on reciprocity?

The Golden Rule is one: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".

Dr. Lewin's technically correct (which is the best kind of correct), but I doubt it much matters. Did you look at the lecture supplement? He gives a lot more detail there.

I no longer find it totally implausible that imagined people might, if modeled in enough detail, be in some sense conscious -- it seems unlikely to me that human self-modeling and other-modeling logic would end up being that different -- but even if we take that as given, there's a couple of problems with threatening to imagine someone in some unpleasant situation.

The basic issue is asymmetry of information. You might be able to imagine someone that thinks or even reliably acts like your enemy; but, no matter how good you are at personality modeling, they aren't going to have access to all, or even much, of your enemy's memories and experiences. Lacking that, I wouldn't say your imagined enemy is cognitively equivalent to your real enemy in a way that'd make the threat hold up.

(Skynet, by contrast, might be able to reproduce all that information by some means -- brain scanning, say, or some superhuman form of induction.)

You can't simulate anything in the relevant sense. Personally I don't care about the threat you refer to even when it comes from skynet, but the thing that makes some people care is that the simulation contains all information that's in their conscious mind, and thus plausibly is conscious and suffers for real.

My own thinking about this whole class of questions starts with: is the agent threatening this capable of torturing systems that I prefer (on reflection) not be tortured? If I'm confident they can do so, then they can credibly threaten me.

Among other things, this formulation lets me completely ignore whether Skynet's simulation of me is actually me. That's irrelevant to the question at hand. In fact, whether it's even a simulation of me, and indeed whether it's a person at all, is irrelevant. What's important is whether I prefer it not be tortured.

A lot of ill-defined terms ("person", "simulation","me") thus drop out of my evaluation.

In principle I expect that a sufficiently capable intelligence can create systems that I prefer not be tortured, but I'd need quite a lot of evidence before I was actually confident that any given intelligence was capable of doing so.

That said, the problem of evidence is itself tricky here. I expect that it is much easier to build a system I don't endorse caring about in the abstract, and then manipulate the setting so that I come to care about it anyway, than to build a system that I endorse caring about. That said, we can finesse the epistemic issue by asking a different question: is the intelligence capable of creating (and torturing) a system S such that, if I somehow became confident that S has the attributes S in fact has, I would prefer that S not be tortured?

My confidence that humans have this ability is low, though (as above) in principle I expect that a sufficiently capable intelligence can do so. Certainly I don't have it, and I've never seen significant evidence that anyone else does.

Have you?

So first of all, a purely syntactic remark: this involves a rather unnatural construction, taking "X's quotation" to mean what you get by putting X in quotation marks. So far as I know, no one ever uses the word "quotation" in this way except when talking about Quine's construction (i.e., the thing we're talking about now). OK, let's proceed.

The version of this I've seen is slightly different (and avoids Creutzer's complaint):

"yields a falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields a falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

So, let Q be the sentence-fragment "yields a falsehood when preceded by its quotation". Then for any sentence-fragment R we can construct a sentence ["R" Q], and what it says that ["R" R] is false.

E.g., if you say ["foo" yields a falsehood when preceded by its quotation"] you're saying that ["foo" foo] is a falsehood. Now, of course in this particular case that's wrong because ["foo" foo] is just nonsense, not a falsehood. So ["foo" yields a falsehood when preceded by its quotation] is wrong.

Or consider ["is a sentence fragment" is a sentence fragment]. That's true, so ["is a sentence fragment" yields a falsehood when preceded by its quotation] is wrong.

So, in general, ["R" Q] is a sentence -- call it S -- saying what you get when you construct the possibly-a-sentence ["R" R] -- call that T -- and in particular claiming that it's a falsehood. That is: S says that T is false.

Now, what happens when you let R=Q? Well, in that case S and T are both ["Q" Q] or, writing it out in full, ["yields a falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields a falsehood when preceded by its quotation]. S says that T is false, but in this case S=T, so S says that S is false.

In other words, it's an Epimenides-style paradox but without explicit self-reference. Instead we have a sort of self-reference by construction: we've got a sentence that says "Build a sentence according to such-and-such a recipe; the result is false", and it just so happens that when you do what it says the sentence you get is that sentence.

This is quite closely analogous to how some metamathematical proofs work -- e.g., Goedel's theorem is proved by constructing a mathematical proposition S that in some sense says "S is not provable", and Tarski's theorem by constructing (assuming you have a way of expressing "is true", which is what we're trying to prove is impossible) an S that says "S is not true". (Note: Everything in this paragraph is at best an approximation to the truth, with the possible exception of this parenthetical remark.)

The grammar of the sentence is a bit hard to follow. When I am presenting this paradox to friends (I have interesting friends), I hand them a piece of paper with the following words on it:

Take another piece of paper and copy these words:

"Take another piece of paper and copy these words: "QQQ" Then replace the three consecutive capital letters with another copy of those words. The resulting paragraph will make a false claim."

Then replace the three consecutive capital letters with another copy of those words. The resulting paragraph will make a false claim.

I urge you to carry out the task. You should wind up with a paper that has the exact same words on it as the paper I gave you.

If you believe that the statement on my paper is true, then you should believe that the statement on your paper is false, and vice versa. Yet they are the same statement! Assuming that you think truth or falsehood is a property of grammatical sentences, independent of where they are written, this should bother you. Moreover, unlike the standard liar paradox, the paper I gave never talks about itself, it only talks about a message you will write on some other piece of paper (which does not, in turn, talk about the original message) when you perform some simple typographical operations.

Quine constructed this example to demonstrate the sort of subtleties that come up in order to invent a mathematical formalism that can talk about truth, and can talk about manipulating symbols, without bringing in the liar paradox. (To learn how this problem is solved, take a course on mathematical logic and Goedel's theorem.)

Have you read the Wikipedia article?

I suppse the intention is for this to be another version of This sentence is false, but it fails.

The sentence

(1) "Is false when preceded by its quotation" is false when preceded by its quotation.

says that the string "Is false when preceded by its quotation" has the property of being false when preceded by its quotation. The sentence is, in fact, that string preceded by its own quotation. However, there is no paradox. The whole sentence (1) can be true, and then the italicised occurrence of the string "Is false when preceded by its quotation" is false. No problem there. Incidentally, it's dubious to ascribe "is false when preceded by its quotation" a truth-value anyway, since it's not a sentence, but merely a verb-phrase.

One could change it to "yields falsehood when predicated of its own quotation". Then you get the sentence "Yields falsehood when predicated of its quotation" yields falsehood when predicated of its quotation, which looks more paradoxical. However, I'm not entirely clear that it really is a paradox, either. There might be some confusion there between predicates and strings that refer to predicates. It depends on how quotation in natural language really works...

While we're on the subject, what words would you use to differentiate "proof" from "evidence" in Polish?

"Poszlaki"?

http://translate.google.com/#en/pl/odds

I really hope I am missing something and this isn't a sufficent answer to your question.

Yes, the two will diverge. But then, so they would even without rounding error, on account of quantum mechanics.

Neither of them is "the original person" (you are not, now, quite the same person as you were a year ago). Both are, so to speak, descendants of the original person. There are many (apparently) possible descendants -- you never know what might happen to you, after all. A good enough simulation would be as much like one of those as they are like one another. (I suppose that's a definition of "good enough".)

Since humans have a finite lifespan, if the point of divergence takes long enough, then it doesn't matter. And even if one wishes to simulate an immortal being, if one has unlimited resources, one can perform a sequence of simulations, each one twice as long as the previous.

Even an actually person diverges from who they are at 20 years of age to who they are at 40 years of age. Calling the person over that timeframe the same person means that you do allow some changes.

As far as I understand proponent of uploading think that the brain will be simulated enough that the changes in the person will be as trivial as a few years of learning.

News is entertainment (and not even particularly good entertainment; I think it's generally a good idea to avoid it). Even news that's supposed to inspire outrage is entertainment; people like being outraged.

Some rich people get together occasionally to eat overpriced food, make tasteless jokes, and impose humiliating initiation rituals on their slightly less wealthy aspirational juniors? That's pretty tame, as bacchanals go. If I'm to treat Wall Street like Thulsa Doom, I expect human bones in the soup and at least one giant snake.

In general most people don't think of themselves as actors. The think of themselves as the audience of whatever happens on TV or in the media.

In some sense, I even doubt whether focusing on how people misbehave on a fraternity party is very useful.

Most energy shouldn't be focused on attacking the status quo but on building viable alternatives.

Bloody hell, why is this and all their responses so heavily downvoted?