Open Thread: May 2010

I'm a bit upset.

In my world, that's dinner-table conversation. If it's wrong, you argue with it. If it upsets you, you are more praiseworthy the more you control your anger. If your anti-racism is so fragile that it'll crumble if you don't shut students up -- if you think that is the best use of your efforts to help people, or to help the cause of equality -- then something has gone a little screwy in your mind.

The idea that students -- students! -- are at risk if they write about ideas in emails is damn frightening to me. I spent my childhood in a university town. This means that political correctness -- that is, not being rude on the basis of race or ethnicity -- is as deep in my bones as "please" and "thank you." I generally think it's a good thing to treat everyone with respect. But the other thing I got from my "university values" is that freedom to look for the truth is sacrosanct. And if it's tempting to shut someone up, take a few deep cleansing breaths and remember your Voltaire.

My own beef with those studies is that you cannot (to my knowledge) isolate the genetics of race from the experience of race. Every single black subject whose IQ is tested has also lived his whole life as black. And we have a history and culture that makes race matter. You can control for income and education level, because there are a variety of incomes and education levels among all races. You can control for home environment with adoption and twin studies, I guess. But you can't control for what it's like to live as a black person in a society where race matters, because all black people do. So I can't see how such a study can really ever isolate genetics alone. (But correct me if I'm missing something.)

Here is the leaked email by Stephanie Grace if anyone is interested.

… I just hate leaving things where I feel I misstated my position.

I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:)

Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in mathematics performance within genders. This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria. I don’t think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn’t mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.

I also don’t think that there are no cultural differences or that cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of disparate test scores (statistically, the measurable ones like income do account for some raw differences). I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects. One example (courtesy of Randall Kennedy) is that some people, based on crime statistics, might think African Americans are genetically more likely to be violent, since income and other statistics cannot close the racial gap. In the slavery era, however, the stereotype was of a docile, childlike, African American, and they were, in fact, responsible for very little violence (which was why the handful of rebellions seriously shook white people up). Obviously group wide rates of violence could not fluctuate so dramatically in ten generations if the cause was genetic, and so although there are no quantifiable data currently available to “explain” away the racial discrepancy in violent crimes, it must be some nongenetic cultural shift. Of course, there are pro-genetic counterarguments, but if we assume we can control for all variables in the given time periods, the form of the argument is compelling.

In conclusion, I think it is bad science to disagree with a conclusion in your heart, and then try (unsuccessfully, so far at least) to find data that will confirm what you want to be true. Everyone wants someone to take 100 white infants and 100 African American ones and raise them in Disney utopia and prove once and for all that we are all equal on every dimension, or at least the really important ones like intelligence. I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.

Please don’t pull a Larry Summers on me,

A few minor fallacies but overall quite respectable and even stimulating conversation nothing any reasonable person would consider should warrant ostracism. Note the reference to "disscused over Dinner". She was betrayed by someone she socialised with.

And yes I am violating my own advice by boldening that one sentence. ;) I just wanted to drive home how close she may be to a well meaning if perhaps a bit untactfull poster on Less Wrong. Again, we need to be carefull. What society considers taboo changes over time as well, so one must get a feel for where on the scale of forbidden a subject is at any time and where the winds of change are blowing before deciding whether to discuss it online. Something inoccus could cost you your job a decade or so in the future.

Edit: For anyone wondering what a "Larry Summers" is.

PS Also why does the Dean equate inteligence with genetic superiority and imlicitly even worth as a person?

See Michael Vassar's discussion of this phenomenon. Also, I think that people discussing statements they see as dangerous often implicitly (and unconsciously) adopt the frames that make those statements dangerous, which they (correctly) believe many people unreflectively hold and can't easily be talked out of, and treat those frames as simple reality, in order to more simply and credibly call the statement and the person who made it dangerous and Bad.

The Harvard incident is business as usual: http://timtyler.org/political_correctness/

I think there's something to be said for not posting opinions such that 1) LW is likely to agree with the opinion, and 2) sites perceived as agreeing with the opinion are likely to be the target of hate campaigns.

Undiscriminating skepticism strikes again: here's the thread on the very topic of genetic IQ differences.

I agree with what you've written, with particular emphasis on the problem of privacy on the Internet (and off, for that matter).

Given that I don't even know who Stephanie Grace is, though, I think I don't care.

I'm more directly disturbed by the bias present in your exposition: "perfectly reasonable", "merely expresses agnosticism", "well documented", "harsh and inaccurate".

Starting off a discussion with assorted applause lights and boo lights strikes me as unlikely to lead to much insight.

What would be likely to lead to useful insight? Making use of the tools LessWrong's mission is to introduce us to, such as the applications of Bayesian reasoning.

"Intelligence has a genetic component" strikes me as a causal statement. If it is, we ought to be able to represent it formally as such, tabooing the terms that give rise to cognitive muddles, until we can tell precisely what kind of data would advance our knowledge on that topic.

I've only just cracked open Pearl's Causality, and started playing with the math, so am still very much an apprentice at such things. (I have my own reasons to be fooling with that math, which are not related to the race-IQ discussion.) But it has already convinced me that probability and causality are deep topics which it's very easy to draw mistaken conclusions about if you rely solely on a layman's intuition.

For instance, "the well documented IQ differences between groups" are purely probabilistic data, which tell us very little about causal pathways generating the data, until and unless we have either controlled experiments, or further data sets which do discriminate between the competing causal models (only very grossly distinguished into "nature" and "nurture").

I don't know if the email you quoted (thanks for that, BTW, it's a treat to have access to a primary source without needing to chase it down) is racist, but it does sound very ignorant to me. It makes unwarranted inferential leaps, e.g. from "skin and hair color are definitely genetic" to "some part of intelligence is genetic", omitting the very different length of developmental chains leading from genes to pigmentation on the one hand, and intelligence on the other. It comes across as arrogant and elitist as well as ignorant when saying "I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria".

It is not bad science to be on the lookout specifically for data that claims to be "scientific proof" of some old and demonstrably harmful prejudices, and to hold such claims to a higher standard. Just as we do hold claims of "scientific proof of ESP" to a higher standard - at least of scrutiny and replicability - than, say, claims of a correlation between apparel color and competitive performance. We have more reason to suspect ulterior motives in the former case than in the latter.

We have a very long thread about a not very interesting subject, but it has finally made me annoyed. I hope it does not show too much because I accept that being polite is important.

1)Nature or nurture, genetics or environment, is a discredited dichotomy. Both are probably active at the same time for each and every aspect of intelligence (as they would be for any complex trait). Not only is it unlikely to be one or the other, it is unlikely to be x% for one and 1-x% for the other. They are too interwoven and the patterns of interactive too individual and unique to each person's life to be thought of as two separate influences. Is it nuture or nature? - wrong question.

2)Intelligence as a measure of the worth of a person is not reasonable. We define the worth of a person legally. We say that all people have equal worth. Their intelligence does not change that definition.

3)Measurement of intelligence in the form of IQ scores is not without problems and always needs to be examined to see if it is likely that factors other than 'g' have biased the results. It is only theoretically valid within a group and not between groups. Each human group should have an average IQ of 100 by definition.

4)Comparisons between groups never apply to individuals and are therefore useless in judging the potential of a particular person. One has to wonder of what use such group comparisons really are.

5)If it is considered a good idea to try to increase the intelligence of individuals in the society than it is going to be easier and more socially acceptable to use environmental rather than genetic methods. Good nutrition, lack of lead and other poisons, lack of continuous stress, enriched environment, good education and so on will help all, the smart and the not so smart.

6)Dividing a population into two (or a handful of) racial types is simplistic in societies as genetically and ethically diverse as North America or Western Europe.

7)Differences in mean IQ that have been reported (for what they are worth given the points above) are so small compared to the natural range of IQ within groups, that they are of no value other than in arguments about various stereotypes, pro and con. Investigating how genes affect the structure and functioning of the brain and investigating how environmental aspects affect the brain are both reasonable science. They are both likely to give results that are valuable. Comparing the IQ of racial groups is plainly no longer science but racial politics. It is hard to credit, in this day and age, that educated people are so ignorant that they would actually believe that the brain is built and operated without genes or that an organ that functions to perceive and move in the environment is immune to its effects. Give me a break! Anyone who insists that genetics is not important to intelligence has a big ax to grind. Anyone who insists that environment is not important to intelligence also has a big ax to grind. Trust the motives of neither. The PC gang and the racialist/sexist gang are both acting like bullies.

This is golden. I demand continuation.

It's a real question where to, the Karma system leads. In a long run, we might see quite unexpected and unwanted results. But there is probably no other way to see that, than to wait where to it will actually go. I guess, a kind of conformism will prevail, if it hasn't already.

The karma=wireheading angle is wonderful, and I think new.

Alcor whole body suspension

Why not save some money and lose what's below the neck?

For what it's worth, I've been finding Alcor to be bureaucratic and very slow to respond. I've been trying to sign up (from Australia) for several months and am not over the line yet.

I second this query. I've been meaning to post something similar.

Yes, under two conditions:

1. It is announced in advance and properly implemented.

2. It does not delete other affiliate codes if links are posted with affiliate codes.

Breaking both these rules is one of the many things which Livejournal has done wrong in the last few years, which is why I mention them.

Interesting essay.

I'd like to see this pursued further. In particular, I'd like to hear your thoughts on modafinil.

JustinShovelain's post on caffeine was similar, and upvoted.

I'd like to see it pursued further. where does alcohol fit in your schema?

One could argue that definition 2 is Just Wrong, because it implies that purple isn't a color (purple doesn't have a wavelength, it is non-spectral).

By her definition, the yellow color you see on a computer screen is not a color at all, since it's made up of two wavelengths of light which happen to stimulate the red and green cone cells in your retina in approximately the same way that yellow light would.

This will replace Eliezer's tree falling in a forest sound as my go-to example of how an algorithm feels on the inside about wrong questions.

Huzzah! That's all too common a problem... sometimes the main problem...

the most extreme example is depressed people having an increased risk of suicide if an antidepressant lifts their akrasia before it improves their mood.

Good observations.

Sometimes I procrastinate for weeks about doing something, generally non-urgent, only to have something happen that would have made the doing of it unnecessary. (For instance, I procrastinate about getting train tickets for a short trip to visit a client, and the day before the visit is due the client rings me to call it off.)

The useful notion here is that it generally pays to defer action or decision until "the last responsible moment"; it is the consequence of applying the theory of options valuation, specifically real options, to everyday decisions.

A top-level post about this would probably be relevant to the LW readership, as real options are a non-trivial instance of a procedure for decision under uncertainty. I'm not entirely sure I'm qualified to write it, but if no one else steps up I'll volunteer to do the research and write it up.

Continuing on the "last responsible moment" comment from one of the other responders - would it not be helpful to consider the putting off of a task until the last moment as an attempt to gather the largest amount of information persuant to the task without incurring any penalty?

Having poor focus and attention span I use an online todo-list for work and home life where I list every task as soon as I think of it, whether it is to be done within the next hour or year. The list soon mounts up, occassionally causing me anxiety, and I regularly have cause to carry a task over to the next day for weeks at a time - but what I have found is that a large number of tasks get removed because a change makes the task no longer necessary and a small proportion get notes added to them while they stay on the list so that the by the time the task gets actioned it has been enhanced by the extra information.

By having everything captured I can be sure no task will be lost, but by procrastinating I can ensure the highest level of efficiency in the tasks that I do eventually perform.

Thoughts?

I suspect it’s just a figure of speech, but can you elaborate on what you meant by “evil” above?

Theism. Couldn't keep it. In the end, it wasn't so much that the evidence was good -- it had always been good -- as that I lost the conviction that "holding out" or "staying strong" against atheism was a virtue.

Standard liberal politics, of the sort that involved designing a utopia and giving it to people who didn't want it. I had to learn, by hearing stories, some of them terrible, that you have no choice but to respect and listen to other people, if you want to avoid hurting them in ways you really don't want to hurt them.

I'm no longer a propertarian/Lockean/natural rights libertarian. Learning about rationality essentially made me feel comfortable letting go of a position that I honestly didn't have a good argument for (and I knew it). The ev-psych stuff scared the living hell out of me (and the libertarianism* apparently).

*At least that sort of libertarianism

I stopped being a theist a few years ago. That was due more to what Less Wrong people would call "traditional rationalism" than the sort often advocated here (I actually identify as closer to a traditionalist rationalist than a strict Bayesianism but I suspect that the level of disagreement is smaller than Eliezer makes it out to be). And part of this was certainly also emotional reactions to having the theodicy problem thrown in my face rather than direct logic.

One major update that occurred when I first took intro psych was realizing how profoundly irrational the default human thinking processes were. Before then, my general attitude was very close to humans as the rational animal. I'm not sure how relevant that is, since that's saying something like "learning about biases taught me that we are biased." I don't know if that's very helpful.

My political views have updated a lot on a variety of different issues. But I suspect that some of those are due to spending time with people who have those views rather than actually getting relevant evidence.

I've updated on how dangerous extreme theism is. It may sound strange, but this didn't arise as much out of things like terrorism, but rather becoming more aware of how many strongly held beliefs about the nature of the world there were out there that were motivated by religion and utterly at odds with reality. This was not about evolution which even in my religious phases I understood and was annoyed at by the failure of religious compatriots to understand. Rather this has included geocentrism among the Abrahamic religions, flat-Earthism among some Islamic extremists, spontaneous generation among ultra-Orthodox Jews (no really. Not a joke. And not even microscopic spontaneous generation but spontaneous generation of mice), belief among some ultra-Orthodox Jews that the kidneys are the source of moral guidance (which they use as an argument against kidney transplants).

My three most recent major updates (last six months or so) are 1) Thinking that cryonics has a substantial success probability (although I still think it is very low). This came not from actually learning more about rationality, but rather after reading some of the stuff here going back and trying to find out more about cryonics. Learning that the ice formation problem is close to completely solved substantially changed my attitude. 2) Deciding that there's a high chance that we'll have space elevators before we have practical fusion power. (This is a less trivial observation than one might think since once one has a decent space elevator it becomes pretty cheap to put up solar power satelites). This is to some extent a reevaluation based primarily on time-frames given by relevant experts. 3) Deciding that there's a substantial chance that P=NP may undecidable in ZFC. This update occurred because I was reading about how complexity results can be connected to provability of certain classes of statements in weakened forms of the Peano axioms. That makes this sound more potentially like it might be in a class of problems that have decent reasons for being undecidable.

I started to believe in the Big Bang here. I was convinced by the evidence, but as this comment indicates, not by the strongest evidence I was given; rather, it was necessary to contradict the specific reasoning I used to disbelieve the Big Bang in the first place.

Is this typical? I think it would be very helpful if, in addition to stating which opinion you have changed, you stated whether the evidence convinced you because it was strong or because it broke the chain of thought which led to your pre-change opinion.

To answer my own question:

• changed political and economic views (similar to Matt).

• changed views on the effects of Nutrition and activity on health (including the actions that follow from that)

• changed view on the dangers of GMO (yet again)

• I became aware of areas where I am very ignorant of opposing arguments, and try to counterbalance

• I finally understand the criticisms about the skeptics movement

• I repeatedly underestimated the amount of ignorance in the world, and got shocked when discovering that

And on the funnier side. Last week I found out that i learned a minor physics fact wrong. That was not a strongly held opinion, just a fact i never looked up again till now. For some reason i always was convinced that the volume increase in freshly frozen water is 10x, while its actually more like 9%

Does anyone know the relative merits of folding@home and rosetta@home, which I currently run? I don't understand enough of the science involved to compare them, yet I would like to contribute to the project which is likely to be more important. I found this page, which explains the differences between the projects (and has some information about other distributed computing projects), but I'm still not sure what to think about which project I should prefer to run.

So I think I have it working but... theres nothing to tell me if my CPU is actually doing any work. It says it's running but... is there supposed to be something else? I used to do SETI@home back in the day and they had some nice feedback that made you feel like you were actually doing something (of course, you weren't because your computer was looking for non-existent signals, but still).

What is this?

I don't know that we've ever successfully assimilated a feral human either.

Sounds plausible to me. I suspect people aren't able to develop enculturation for animals-- the sensory systems and communication methods are too different.

I also believe people have been unintentionally selecting wild animals for intelligence.

Next step: "Okay, what should I do to test this?"

I will vote it down unless you say something that I have not seen before. I think that it was a good idea to not make LW a site for rehearsing political arguments, but if you have thought of something that hasn't been said before and if you can explain how you came up with it then it might be a good reasoning lesson.

I'd love to read it, though I may well disagree with a lot of it. I'd prefer it if it were kept more abstract and philosophical, as opposed to discussing current political parties and laws and so forth: I think that would increase the light-to-heat ratio.

Upvoted your comment for asking in the first place.

If your post was a novel explanation of some aspect of rationality, and wasn't just about landing punches on libertarianism, I'd want to see it. If it was pretty much just about criticizing libertarianism, I wouldn't.

I say this as someone very unsympathetic to libertarianism (or at least what contemporary Americans usually mean by 'libertarianism') - I'm motivated by a feeling that LW ought to be about rationality and things that touch on it directly, and I set the bar high for mind-killy topics, though I know others disagree with me about that, and that's OK. So, though I personally would want to downvote a top-level post only about libertarianism, I likely wouldn't, unless it were obnoxiously bare-faced libertarian baiting.

I'm interested.

Not enough information to answer. I will upvote your post if I find it novel and convincing by rationalist lights. Try sending draft versions to other contributors that you trust and incorporate their advice before going public. I can offer my help, if being outside of American politics doesn't disqualify me from that.

ergh.... after the recent flamewar I was involved in, I had resolved to not allow myself to get wrapped up in another one, but if there's going to be a top level post on this, I don't realistically see myself staying out of it.

I'm not saying don't write it though. If you do, I'd recommend you let a few people you trust read it over first before you put it up, to check for anything unnecessarily inflammatory. Also, what Blueberry said.

TLDR: “War” is the inter-group version of “duel” (ie, lawful conflict). “Assassination” is the inter-group version of “murder” (ie, unlawful conflict).

My first “intuition about the intuition” is that it’s a historical consequence: During most history, things like freedom, and power and responsibility for enforcement of rules when conflicts (freedom vs. freedom) occur, were stratified. Conflicts between individuals in a family are resolved by the family (e.g. by the head thereof), conflicts between families (or individuals in different families) by tribal leaders or the kind. During feudalism the “scale” was formalized, but even before we had a large series of family → group → tribe → city → barony → kingdom → empire.

The key about this system is that attempts to “cross the borders” in this system, for instance punishing someone from a different group directly rather than invoking punishment from that group’s leadership is seen as an intrusion in that group’s affairs.

So assassination becomes seen as the between-group version of murder: going around the established rules of society. That’s something that is selected against in social environments (and has been discussed elsewhere).

By contrast, war is the “normal” result when there is no higher authority to recurse to, in a conflict of groups. Note that, analogously, for much of history duels were considered correct methods of conflict resolution between some individuals, as long as they respected some rules. So as long as, at least in theory, there are laws of war, war is considered a direct extension of that instinct. Assassination is seen as breaking rules, so it’s seen differently.

A few other points:

• war is very visible, so you can expend a lot of signaling to dehumanize the adversary.
• but assassination is supposed to be done in secret, so you can’t use propaganda as well (assassinating opposing leadership during a war is not seen as that much of a big problem; they’re all infidels/drug lords/terrorists anyway!)
• assassination was a bit harder (even now, drones are expensive), and failed assassination attempts would lead to escalation to war often, anyway
• assassination is oriented towards leaders, who have an interest to discourage, as much as they can, the concept. You can do that, e.g., via the meme that conflict is only honorable when it’s between armored knights on horses and the like. (For best results, add another meme which implies that observing that peasants are not allowed to own armor and horses is “dissent”.)

Who thinks assassination is worse than war?

I could make an argument for it, though: If countries engaged regularly in assassination, it would never come to a conclusion, and would not reduce (and might increase) the incidence of war. Phrasing it as "which is worse" makes it sound like we can choose one or the other. This assumes that an assassination can prevent a war (and doesn't count the cases where it starts a war).

I've always assumed that the norm against assassination, causally speaking, exists mostly due to historical promotion by leaders who wanted to maintain a low-assassination equilibrium, now maintained largely by inertia. (Of course, it could be normatively supported by other considerations.)

It makes sense to me that people would oversimplify the effect of assassination in basically the way you describe, overestimating the indispensability of leaders. I know I've seen a study on the effects of assassination on terrorist groups, but can't find a link or remember the conclusions.

Whoooohooo! Awsomest thing in the last ten years of genetic news for me! YAAY! WHO HOO!!! /does a little dance / I want to munch on that delicious data!

Ahem.

Sorry about that.

But people 1 to 4% admixture! This is big! This gets an emotional response from me!That survived more than a thousand generations of selection, the bulk of it is probably neutral but think about how many perfectly usefull and working allels we may have today (since the Neanderthalls where close to us to start with). 600 000 or something years of speration these guys evolved sperate from us for nearly as long as the fictional Vampires in Blindsight.

It seems some of us are have a bit our ancestors picked of another species in our genes! Could this have anything to do with behavioural modernity that started off at about the same time the populations crossbred in the middle east ~100 000 years ago? Which adaptations did we pick up? Think of the possiblities!

Ok I'll stop the torrent of downvote magnet words and get back to reading about this. And then everything else my grubby little paws can get on Neanderthals, I need to brush up!

Edit: I just realized part of the reason why I got so excited is because it shows I may have a bit of exotic ancestry. Considering how much people, all else being equal, like to play up their "foreign" or "unusual" semimythical ancestors or even roots in conversation, national myths or on the census instead of the ethnicity of the majority of their ancestors this may be a more general bias, that I could of course quickly justify with a evo psych "just so" story but I'll refrain from that to search for what studies have to say about this.

And the paper:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5979/710

Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt is a good slim introduction to the economic mindset. For a different approach focused on the application of economic thinking to everyday life The Logic of Life by Tim Harford is worth a look. Neither book covers much of the math of economics but I think that is a good thing since most of the math heavy parts of economics are the least useful and relevant.

ETA: Economics In One Lesson is a heavily free market / free trade 'classical' economic slant.

The book I used in my college Econ 101 class was this one.

MIT OpenCourseWare has a lot of material. I also like Bryan Caplan's lecture notes (these sometimes have a libertarian slant).

Pick up a copy of Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. It is, by far, the best introduction to economics I've ever read. Don't be put off by the size of the thing — it's a very easy read and requires no background in math. There's a follow-up book by the same author, too: Applied Economics.

I believe a textbook is always a better first step.

I know you said you don't have a ton of time to read but Gary Drescher's Good and Real has been called Less Wrong in book form on occasion. If nothing else, I found it an enjoyable read that gives a good start to getting into the mindset people have in this community.

Given that this now opens the door for artificially designed and deployed harmful viruses, perhaps unfriendly AI falls a few notches on existentialist risk ladder.

I agree that AI deterrence will necessarily fail if:

1. All AI's modify themselves to ignore threats from all agents (including ones it considers irrational), and

2. any deterrence simulation counts as a threat.

Why do you believe that both or either of these statements are true? Do you have some concrete definition of 'threat' in mind?

The notion of "first mover" is meaningless, where the other player's program is visible from the start.

I think that question is a conversation stopper because those who do not have children who not feel qualify and those that do have children know what a complex and tricky question it is. Personally I don't think there is a method that fits all children and all relationships with them. But... You might try activities rather than presents. 'Oh cool, uncle is gone to make a video with us and we're going to do it at the zoo.' If you get the right activity (depends on child), they will remember it and what you did and said for years. I had a uncle that I only saw a few times but he showed me how to make and throw a bomerang. He explained why it returned. I have thanked him for that day for 60 years.

Possibly relevant, from the archives:

• "On the Care and Feeding of Young Rationalists"
• "On Juvenile Fiction"

Sin could be the greatest tool for bad managers everywhere since Total Quality Management.

That sounds like the kind of remark that goes out of its way to offend several categories of people at once. :)

But in that category the gold standard remains Evelyn Waugh's “now that they no longer defrock priests for sexual perversities, one can no longer get any decent proofreading.”

Awwwww :D

PS: If this endorsement of house food quality encourages anyone to apply for an SIAI fellowship, note your inspiration in the e-mail! We receive referral rewards!

Does Alicorn's presence prohibit me from applying for an SIAI fellowship?

This seems like the sort of activity Google Wave is (was?) meant for.

Eliezer Yudkowsky and Massimo Pigliucci just recently had a dialogue on Bloggingheads.tv. The title is The Great Singularity Debate.

After Yudkowsky at the beginning gives three different definitions of "the singularity" they discuss strong artificial intelligence and consciousness. Pigliucci is the one who quite quickly takes the discussion from intelligence to consciousness. Just before that they discuss whether simulated intelligence is actually intelligence. Yudkowsky made an argument (something like) if the AI can solve problems over a sufficiently broad range of areas and give answers then that is what we mean by intelligence, so if it manages to do that then it has intelligence. I.e., it is then not "just simulating to have intelligence" but is actually intelligent. Pigliucci however seems to want to distinguish between those and say that "well it may then just simulate intelligence, but maybe it is not actually having it". (Too difficult for me to summarize it very well, you have too look for yourself if you want it more accurately.)

There it seemed to me (but I am certainly not an expert in the field) that Yudkowsky's definition looked reasonable. It would have been interesting to have that point elaborated in more detail though.

Pigliucci's point seemed to be something like that for the only intelligence that we know so far (humans (and to lesser extent other higher animals)) intelligence comes together with consciousness. And for consciousness we know less, maybe only that the human biological brain somehow manages to have it, and therefore we of course do not know whether or not e.g. a computer simulating the brain on a different substrate will also be conscious. Yudkowsky seemed to think this very likely while Pigliucci seemed to think that very unlikely. But what I lacked in that discussion is what do we know (or reasonable conjecture) about the connection between intelligence and consciousness? Of course Pigliucci is right in that for the only intelligence we know of so so far (the human brain) intelligence and consciousness comes together. But for me (who do not know much about this subject matter) that seems not a strong argument for discussing them so closely together when it comes to artificial intelligence. Maybe someone here on Less Wrong who knows more about connection or not between intelligence and consciousness? For a naive non-expert like me intelligence seems (rather) easy to test if anything has: just test how good it is to solve general problems? While to test if anything has consciousness I would guess that a working theory of consciousness would have to be developed before a test could be designed?

This was the second recent BHTV dialogue where Pigliucci discussed singularity/transhumanism related questions. The previous I mentioned here. As mentioned there it seems to have started with a blogg-post of Pigliucci's where he criticized transhumanism. I think it interesting that Pigliucci continues his interest in the topic. I personally see it as a very positive establishing of contact between "traditional rationalist/skeptic/(cis-)humanist"-community and "LessWrong-style rationalist/trans-humanist".community. Massimo Pigliucci very much gave the impression of enjoying the discussion with Elizer Yudkowsky! I am also pleased to have noticed that recently Pigliucci's blog has now and then linked to LessWrong/ElizerYudkowsky (mostly Julias Galef if I remember correctly (too lazy to locate the exact links right now)). I would very much like to see this continue (e.g. Yudkowsky discussing with people like e.g. Paul Kurtz, Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, Sean Carroll, Steven Weinberg, Victor Stenger (realizing of course that they are probably too busy for it to happen)).

Previous BHTV dialogues with Elizer Yudkowsky I have seen noticed here on LessWrong but not this one (hope it is not that I have just missed that post). Therefore I posted this here, I did not find a perfect place for it, this was the least-bad I noticed. Although my post here is only partly about "Is Elizer alive and well" (he surely looked so on BHTV), I hope it is not considered too much off-topic.

You can tell he's alive and well because he's posted several chapters in his Harry Potter fanfiction in that time; his author's notes lead me to believe that, as he stated long ago, he's letting LW drift so he has time to write his book.

He's writing his book.

Question: Who is moderating if Eliezer isn't?

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality updated on Sunday; it could be that writing that story is filling much of his off time.

In a thread called Acturial vs. Software Engineering - what pays best?, somebody wrote:

Do any of you know how much of an option it is to start a software engineering career with a math/science but not CS background?

My response...

I encourage most people to pursue a math or science degree, rather than comp.sci., even if their long term goals are in the field of software engineering. My opinion is based on personal hindsight (having majored in computer science, I often wish my ability to absorb and apply fundamental math or hard physics was stronger) and on eleven years industry experience (where I've noticed an inverse correlation between the amount of formal comp.sci. training a person's had and his or her strength as a software engineer).

In regards to my personal hindsight; it could well be that had I studied math or physics, that I'd feel my comp.sci. expertise would need brushing up. That's probably true to some extent, but there's another factor; namely that many comp.sci. programs are a less-than-ideal blend of theoretical math (better obtained through a dedicated programs[1]) and practical engineering (most definitely useful[2], but because of its nature easily accessible in your spare time). That last point is critical; anybody who can afford university education, has access to a computer and a compiler. So why not tinker at home - you're passionate, right? Compare with programs like mechanical engineering, chemistry, and most hard physics programs - you probably don't have access to a particle accelerator or DNA extraction lab at home.

Not yet anyway... :-)

That brings me to my observation from industry experience, namely that the best programmers I've worked with often hadn't majored in comp.sci. The point of course not that a comp.sci. education makes for worse programmers. Rather, that people with the audacity and discipline to pursue hard physics or math who also have a passion for programming have a leg-up on those who are only passionate about programming.

I'm sure there's the occasional failed particle physicist applying for a hundred programming gigs without success, but that person would've been just as unskilled as a programmer had he or she majored in comp.sci.

I'm not sure I even know how to parse "wikipedia blog on rationality". But at least in some sense, we apparently are Wikipedia. Congrats.

What about snake oil?

The link is giving me trouble. Can you paste the whole abstract?

On the Wiki, perhaps? A bit of a pain to update it, admittedly...

Its too late for me. Its the Second of May over here. :' (

Yes, I have an intention to do so, because I'm convinced that it is very important to the future of humanity. I don't quite know how I'll be able to contribute yet, but I think I'm smart and creative enough that I'll be able to acquire the necessary knowledge and thinking habits (that's the part I'm working on these days) and eventually contribute something novel, if I can do all that soon enough for it to matter.

I'm working on one as part of a game, where I'm knocking off just about every concept I've run into - goal systems, eurisko-type self-modifying code, AIXI, etc. I'll claim it's nontrivial because the game is, and I very much intend to make it unusually smart by game standards.

But that's not really true AI. It's for fun, as much as anything else. I'm not going to claim it works very well, if at all; it's just interesting to see what kind of code is involved.

(I have, nevertheless, considered FAI. There's no room to implement it, which was an interesting thing to discover in itself. Clearly my design is insufficiently advanced.)

I am writing a book about a new approach to AI. The book is a roadmap, after I'm finished, I will follow the roadmap. That will take many years.

I have near-zero belief that AI can succeed without a major scientific revolution.

I used to be interested in working on AI, but my current general understanding of the field indicates that for me to do anything worthwhile in the field would require acquiring a lot of additional knowledge and skills — or possibly having a different sort of mind. I am spending my time on other projects where I more readily see how I can do something worthwhile.

Count me as "having an intention to do that in the future". Although I'm currently just an undergraduate studying math and computer science, I hope to (within 5-10 years) start doing everything I can to help with the task of FAI design.

Marcello posted an anti-kibitzer Greasemonkey script which does that. It'd be nice to have it as core functionality of the site though, yeah.

If you just want to not see the scores, but still see the author names, then Marcello's script isn't appropriate, because I think that hides the author as well.

I just added a LessWrong Comment Score Tweaks script that can be used to hide/display scores or toggle between visible and hidden.

After you install greasemonkey and that script, the "user script commands" menu of greasemonkey on lesswrong pages will contain:

• Toggle Comment Scores
• Hide Comment Scores
• Show Comment Scores

There are also some key bindings defined for these. They don't work for me, but they might work for others.

For that matter, it might be good to have the option of not automatically seeing one's karma score-- I think I give mine more attention than it's worth, and I can't not see it if it's at the top of the page.

There's currently a Greasemonkey script - "no kibitz", I think (I'm browsing by mobile, hard to look things up) - that does this; someone said they were working on adding it to the codebase a while ago.

I remind myself of Conservation of Expected Evidence most days I'm at work.

I'm an engineer, and it helps remind me that a data point can either support a hypothesis or that hypothesis's opposite, but not both at once. This is especially useful for explaining things to non-technical people.

I think learning more about rationalization, akrasia, and so forth, has made it easier for me to keep regularly going to the gym, by noticing when I'm just making excuses for being lazy, etc.

I really should start working on applying akrasia techniques, but I just haven't the willpower :P

That aside, I regularly remind myself to not be like Bruce in games like Risk and Magic, and probably in some other actives where he might show. And, as I posted before on this thread, making use of tabooing words and learning how an algorithm feels from the inside have helped clear up discussions when they'd otherwise be going back and forth with no understanding.

I always enjoy these kinds of questions, because when I ask myself, I have a harder time finding areas where I use what I learned here, than I do when someone else asks.

The interesting question isn't so much "how do I convert a degree of belief into a number", but "how do I reconcile my degrees of beliefs in various propositions so that they are more consistent and make me less vulnerable to Dutch books".

One way to do that is to formalize what you take that statement to mean, so that its relationships to "other beliefs" becomes clearer. It's what, in the example you suggest, the Doomsday clock scientists have done. So you can look at whatever data has been used by the Doomsday Clock people, and if you have reason to believe they got the data wrong (say, about international agreements), then your estimate would have to be different from theirs. Or you could figure out they forgot to include some evidence that is relevant (say, about peak uranium), or that they included evidence you disagree is relevant. In each of these cases Bayes' theorem would probably tell you at the very least in what direction you should update your degree of belief, if not the exact amount.

Or, finally, you could disagree with them about the structural relationships between bits of evidence. That case pretty much amounts to making up your own causal model of the situation. As other commenters have noted it's fantastically hard to apply Bayes rigorously to even a moderately sophisticated causal model, especially one that involves such an intricately interconnected system as human society. But you can always simplify, and end up with something you know is strictly wrong, but has enough correspondence with reality to be less wrong than a more naive model.

In practice, it's worth noting that only very seldom does science tackle a statement like this one head-on; as a reductionist approach science generally tries to explicate causal relationships in much smaller portions of the whole situation, treating each such portion as a "black box" module, and hoping that once this module's workings are formalized it can be plugged back into a more general model without threatening the overall model's validity too much.

The word "complex" is appropriate to refer precisely to situations where this approach fails, IMHO.

Well to begin with we need a prior. You can choose one of two wagers. In the first, 1,000,000 blue marble and one red marble are put in a bag. You get to remove one marble, if it is the red one you win a million dollars. Blue you get nothing. In the second wager, you win a million dollars if a a nuclear weapon is detonated under non-testing and non-accidental conditions before 2020. Otherwise, nothing. In both cases you don't get the money until January 1st 2021. Which wager do you prefer?

If you prefer the nuke bet, repeat with 100,000 blue marbles, if you prefer the marbles try 100,000,000. Repeat until you get wagers that are approximately equal in their estimated value to you.

Edit: Commenters other than vinayak should do this too so that he has someone to exchange information with. I think I stop at maybe 200:1 against nuking.

Normally I would try and find systematic risk analyses by people who know more about this subject than me. However, Martin Hellman has written a preliminary risk analysis of nuclear deterrence as part of his Defusing the Nuclear Threat project, and he claims that there have been no formal studies of the failure rate of nuclear deterrence. Hellman himself estimates that failure rate as on the order of 1% a year, but I don't know how seriously to take that estimate.

Can someone please show me exactly how to do that?

The problem with your question is that the event you described has never happened. Normally you would take a dataset and count the number of times an event occurs vs. the number of times it does not occur, and that gives you the probability.

So to get estimates here you need to be creative with the definition of events. You could count the number of times a global war started in a decade. Going back to say 1800 and counting the two world wars and the Napoleonic wars, that would give about 3/21. If you wanted to make yourself feel safe, you could count the number of nukes used compared to the number that have been built. You could count the number of people killed due to particular historical events, and fit a power law to the distribution.

But nothing is going to give you the exact answer. Probability is exact, but statistics (the inverse problem of probability) decidedly isn't.

Speaking as an engineer, I'd think he wasn't talking about subjective aspects: "The guy who came first" is the one which was copied (perfectly) to make the clone, and therefore existed before the clone existed.

More importantly, the question is terribly phrased - or just terrible. The philosopher could have started with "If you met the 'twins' afterwards, could someone tell them apart without asking anyone?", which has an obvious response of "no", and then gets followed by a actually interesting questions about, for example, what "memory" exactly is.

That version is a lot funnier, though!

Is there a consensus on whether or not it's OK to discuss not-specifically-rationality-related politics on LW?

This looks like very expensive way to kill terrorists, like 100k$ per militant not counting sunken costs such as the 4.5 mil price tag per drone. And not trying to estimate the cost of civilian deaths.

Related, Obama authorizes assassination of US citizen. I'm amazed how little anybody seems to care.

No idea about the time lag-- my posts show up quickly-- but my intuition says that a fair coin has a 1/2 probability of being heads, and nothing about the experiment changes that.

Nope, new posts should show up immediately (or maybe with a half hour delay or so; I seem to recall that the sidebars are cached, but for far less than two days). Did it appear to post successfully, just not showing up? The only thing I can think of is that you might not have switched the "Post to" menu from "Drafts for neq1" to "LessWrong".

As noted in the comments, artificial natural speech recognition is in the 85-95% range, and human natural speech recognition is also around 95%. I was skeptical of that article when I first read it because it did not even mention how good humans are at it to compare to the machines.

This has happened twice in the past two days - generally there is some specific comment which is broken and causes pages which would display it to crash. My analysis of the previous and current pattern here.

Can you control the colors? Dark red on black is hard to read.

Having Recent Comments problems again: after 1yyu and before 1yyu work. The sidebar "Recent Comments" circa 1yyw does not include 1yyu - skips straight from 1yyv to 1yyt.

No crashes are observed in the comment threads of "Antagonizing Opioid Receptors for (Prevention of) Fun and Profit" through "Possibilities for converting useless fun into utility in Online Gaming".

Edit: byrnema has discovered the guilty comment - it appears to have been on this post.

Yep, the URL http://lesswrong.com/comments?count=40&after=t1_1ypw is reliably breaking for me.

I recall "Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People":

Whether I do it on paper, or in speech, I now try to never mention calibration and overconfidence unless I have first talked about disconfirmation bias, motivated skepticism, sophisticated arguers, and dysrationalia in the mentally agile. First, do no harm!

Can you give us a basic outline of what you have? Then it's a lot easier to see if you're missing anything.

A dystopian society is unlikely to thaw out and revive people in cryostasis. Cryostasis revival makes sense for societies that are benevolent and have a lot of free resources. Also, be careful not to try to generalize from fictional examples. They are not evidence. That's all the more the case here because science fiction is in general a highly reactionary genre that even as it uses advance technology either warns about the perils or uses it as an excuse to hearken back to a more romantic era. For example look how many science fiction stories and universes have feudal systems of government.

Science fiction has a bias towards things going wrong.

In the particular case of cryonics, if there's a dystopian future where the majority of people have few or no rights, it's a disaster all around, but as ata says, you can presumably commit suicide. There's a chance that even that will be unfeasible-- for example if brains are used, while conscious, for their processing power. This doesn't seem likely, but I don't know how to evaluate it in detail.

The other case-- people in general have rights, but thawed people, or thawed people from before a certain point in time, do not-- requires that thawed people do not have a constituency. This doesn't seem terribly likely, though as I recall, Niven has it that it takes a very long time for thawing to be developed.

Normally, I would expect for there to be commercial and legal pressures for thawed people to be treated decently. (I've never seen an sf story in which thawed people are a political football, but it's an interesting premise.)

I think the trend is towards better futures (including richer, with less reason to enslave people), but there's no guarantee. I think it's much more likely that frozen people won't be revived than that they'll be revived into a bad situation.

Or do they figure that if they are revived, FAI has most likely come to pass?

Can't speak for any other cryonics advocates, but I find that to be likely. I see AI either destroying or saving the world once it's invented, if we haven't destroyed ourselves some other way first, and one of those could easily happen before the world has a chance to turn dystopian. But in any case, if you wake up and find yourself in a world that you couldn't possibly bear to live in, you can just kill yourself and be no worse off than if you hadn't tried cryonics in the first place.

We are wired for individual rather than general insights. Stories are much more effective at communicating certain things than treatises are. I would never have believed, in theory, that a man who enjoyed killing could be worthy of respect; only a story could convince me. To use Robin Hanson's terminology, narrative can bring near mode and far mode together.

Why not true stories? I think there you get into Aristotle and why versimilitude can be more effective than mere reality. True stories are good too, but life is disorderly and not necessarily narrative. It's a truism of writing workshops and creative writing classes that whenever you see a particularly unrealistic event in a story, the author will protest "But that really happened!" It doesn't matter; it's still unrealistic. Narrative is, I think, a particular kind of brain function that humans are good at, and it's a painting, not a photograph. To tap into our ability to understand each other through narrative, we usually need to fictionalize the world, apply some masks and filters.

It was not until I read Three Worlds Collide that I began to embrace moral consequentialism. I would not have found an essay or real-life case study nearly as convincing.

ETA: I didn't change my mind just because I liked the story. The story made me realize that in a particular situation, I would be a moral consequentialist.

A possible benefit of fiction is that it leads you to experience emotions vicariously that it would be much more expensive to experience for real, yet the vicarious experience is realistic enough that it serves as useful practice, a way of "taming" the emotions. Textbooks don't convey emotions.

I seem to recall this argument from a review of Cloverfield, or possibly the director's commentary. Broadcast images such as from the 9/11 aftermath generated lots of anxiety, and seeing similar images - the amateurish, jerky camcorder type - reframed in a fictional setting which is "obviously" over the top helps you, the audience, come to terms with the reality.

Fiction is good for teasing out possibilities and counterfactuals, experimenting with different attitudes toward the world (as opposed to learning facts about the world), and learning to be cool.

Whatever you're learning about the real world from fiction, wouldn't it be more effective to read a textbook instead or something?

Let's assume for the sake of argument that your time would be better spent reading a textbook. Getting yourself to read textbooks is harder than getting yourself to read entertaining fiction, so you may not get as much benefit from textbooks even if you get more benefit per hour.

Also, it sounds like you're putting too little importance on fun. Fun is important.

I have similar sensory issues on occasion and believe them to be a component of my autism, but if you don't have other features of an ASD then this could just be a sensory integration disorder. When it's an auditory processing issue, I find that listening to loud techno or other music with a strong beat helps more than other types of music, and ear-covering headphones help filter out other noise. I'm more often assaulted by textures, which I have to deal with by avoiding contact with the item(s).

As for the long day, that sounds like a matter of running out of (metaphorical) spoons. Paying attention to what activities drain or replenish said spoons, and choosing spoon-neutral or spoon-positive activities whenever they're viable options, is the way to manage this.

Ok. Reading the paper now. Some aspects are bit technical and so I don't follow all of the arguments or genetic claims other than at a broad level. However, the money quote is "Therefore, UCA is at least 10^2,860 times more probable than the closest competing hypothesis." (I've replaced the superscript with a ^ becaause I don't know how to format superscripts). 10^2860 is a very big number.

I take it "a universal common ancestor" doesn't mean a universal common ancestor, but means a universal common ancestral group?

To save everyone the googling: VXX is an exchange traded fund (basically a stock) whose value tracks the level of the VIX index. The VIX index is a measure of the volatility of the markets, with higher values indicating higher volatility (volatility here generally implying lost market value). VIX stands at about 33 now, and was around 80 during the '08 crisis.

Time is just a dimension in which there is determinism, so that the slice of the universe at position t is a function of the slice at position t-1.

For this entire discussion, I'm missing the part where the theories/models being discussed lead us to anticipate certain experiences.

That reminds me of this discussion.

Of course if you define "luminiferous aether" as generally as "whatever mechanism results in the propagation of electromagnetic waves", then it exists, because electromagnetic waves do propagate. But when it was under serious scientific consideration, the luminiferous aether theory made testable predictions, and they failed. Just saying "they're different concepts" is easier than saying "it's the same basic concept except it has a different name and the structure of the theory is totally different".

I could sympathize with trying to revive the name "luminiferous aether" (or even better, "luminiferous æther"), though. It's a pretty awesome name. (I go by "Luminiferous Æther Bunny" on a few other forums.)

The problem with this is that it assumes we only care about the end state.

It's fairly well established that actively managed funds on average underperform their benchmarks. I'm not aware of specific research on investing based solely on analyst forecasts but I imagine performance would be even worse using such a strategy. Basically, you are right to be skeptical. All the evidence indicates that the best long term strategy for the average individual investor is to invest in a low cost index fund and avoid trying to pick stocks.

ETA: This recent paper appears relevant. They do indeed find that analysts' target prices are inaccurate and appear to suffer from consistent biases.

A clever idea, but won't work: "The New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq OMX Group say they will cancel trades involving stocks that saw sharp volatility at the height of the market’s steep intraday decline Thursday afternoon."

In the same vein, a note from the machines:

"Many traders said computer program trades accelerated the slide as market indexes fell through crucial levels." —A barely literate human assessment of yesterday's two-minute market panic.

We are Wall Street. It's our job to make money. We didn't hear you humans complaining when the Dow went up 3000 points in the last nine months.

Just like gambling, it's not a problem for you until we make some of the machines lose so that some of the other machines can win. Your market positions are merely a small casualty in yesterday's triumph of Fidessa's EMS Workstation over Automated Trading Desk in the larger Algorithm Battles during this Long War on Execution Services. Well, yesterday some machines were crapped out and even though the market has come back somewhat, the reporters, the regulators and the hyperactive business blogs are looking for a scapegoat. But what did you think was going to happen when you invented the Turing Test anyway?

Anyone with $1000, lighting reflexes, and insider knowledge could've made $4.1M yesterday. For every $1000 they had.

Many of those trades will be cancelled.

At 4:06 we see a slide that provides less than overwhelming support for the Red Bias hypothesis.

And http://www.rokomijic.com/ doesn't work as well...