Open Thread: May 2010, Part 2

I have an idea I'd like to discuss that might perhaps be good enough for my first top-level post once it's developed a bit further, but I'd first like to ask if someone maybe knows of any previous posts in which something similar was discussed. So I'll post a rough outline here as a request for comments.

It's about a potential source of severe and hard to detect biases about all sorts of topics where the following conditions apply:

1. It's a matter of practical interest to most people, where it's basically impossible not to have an opinion. So people have strong opinions, and you basically can't avoid forming one too.

2. The available hard scientific evidence doesn't say much about the subject, so one must instead make do with sparse, incomplete, disorganized, and non-obvious pieces of rational evidence. This of course means that even small and subtle biases can wreak havoc.

3. Factual and normative issues are heavily entangled in this topic. By this I mean that people care deeply about the normative issues involved, and view the related factual issues through the heavily biasing lens of whether they lead to consequentialist arguments for or against their favored normative beliefs. (Of course, lots of folks won't have their logic straight, so it's enough that a particular factual belief is perceived to correlate with a popular or unpopular normative belief to be a subject of widespread bias in one or the other direction.)

4. Finally, the prevailing opinions on the subject have changed heavily through history, both factually and normatively, and people view the normative beliefs prevailing today as enlightened progress over terrible evils of the past.

These conditions of course apply to lots of stuff related to politics, social issues, etc. Now, the exact bias mechanism I have in mind is as follows.

As per the assumptions (3) and (4), people are aware (more or less) that the opinions on the subject in question were very different in the past, both factually and normatively. Since they support the present norms, they'll of course believe that the past norms were evil and good riddance to them. They'll chalk that one up for "progress" -- in their minds, the same vaguely defined historical process that brought us science and prosperity in place of superstition and squalor, improvements that are impossible to deny, has also brought us good and enlightened normative beliefs on this issue instead of the former unfair, harmful, or just plain disturbing norms. However, since the area in question, as we've assumed under (2), is not amenable to a hard-scientific straightening out of facts from bullshit, it's not at all clear that the presently prevailing factual beliefs are not severely biased. In fact, regardless of what normative beliefs one has about it, there is no rational reason at all to believe that the factual beliefs about the topic did not in fact become more remote from reality compared to some point in the past.

And now we get to the troublesome part where the biases get their ironclad armor: arguing that we've actually been increasingly deluding ourselves factually about some such topic ever since some point in the past, no matter how good the argument and evidence presented, will as per (3) and (4) automatically be perceived as an attack on the cherished contemporary normative beliefs by a reactionary moral monster. This will be true in the sense that updating the modern false factual beliefs will undermine some widely accepted consequentialist arguments for the modern normative beliefs -- but regardless, even if one is still committed to these normative beliefs, they should be defended using logic and truth, not bias and falsity. Moreover, since both the normative and factual historical changes in prevailing beliefs have been chalked up to "progress," the argument will be seen as an attack on progress as such, including its parts that have brought indisputable enrichment and true insight, and is thus seen as sacrilege against all the associated high-status ideas, institutions, and people.

To put it as briefly as possible, the bias is against valid arguments presenting evidence that certain historical changes in factual beliefs have been away from reality and towards greater delusions and biases. It rests on:

• a biased moralistic reaction to what is perceived as an attack on the modern cherished normative beliefs, and

• a bias in favor of ideas (and the associated institutions and individuals, both contemporary and historical) that enjoy the high status awarded by being a contributor to "progress."

What should be emphasized is that this results in factual beliefs being wrong and biased, and the normative beliefs, whatever one's opinion about their ultimate validity, owing lots of their support to factually flawed consequentialist arguments.

Does this make any sense? It's just a quick dump of some three-quarters-baked ideas, but I'd like to see if it can be refined and expanded into an article.

I'm doing an MSc in Computer Forensics and have stumbled into doing a large project using Bayesian reasoning for guessing at what data is (machine code, ascii, C code, HTML etc). This has caused me to think again about what problems you encounter when trying to actually apply bayesian reasoning to large problems.

I'll probably cover this in my write up; are people interested in it? The math won't be anything special, but a concrete problem might show the problems better than abstract reasoning,

It also could serve as a precursor to some vaguely AI-ish topics I am interested in. More insect and simple creature stuff than full human level though.

Any given goal that I have tends to require an enormous amount of "administrative support" in the form of homeostasis, chores, transportation, and relationship maintenance. I estimate that the ratio may be as high as 7:1 in favor of what my conscious mind experiences as administrative bullshit, even for relatively simple tasks.

For example, suppose I want to go kayaking with friends. My desire to go kayaking is not strong enough to override my desire for food, water, or comfortable clothing, so I will usually make sure to acquire and pack enough of these things to keep me in good supply while I'm out and about. I might be out of snack bars, so I bike to the store to get more. Some of the clothing I want is probably dirty, so I have to clean it. I have to drive to the nearest river; this means I have to book a Zipcar and walk to the Zipcar first. If I didn't rent, I'd have to spend some time on car maintenance. When I get to the river, I have to rent a kayak; again, if I didn't rent, I'd have to spend some time loading and unloading and cleaning the kayak. After I wait in line and rent the kayak, I have to ride upstream in a bus to get to the drop-off point.

Of course, I don't want to go alone; I want to go with friends. So I have to call or e-mail people till I find someone who likes kayaking and has some free time that matches up with mine and isn't on crutches or sick at the moment. Knowing who likes kayaking and who has free time when -- or at least knowing it well enough to do an intelligent search that doesn't take all day -- requires checking in with lots of acquaintances on a regular basis to see how they're doing.

There are certainly moments of pleasure involved in all of these tasks; clean water tastes good; it feels nice to check in on a friend's health; there might be a pretty view from the bumpy bus ride upstream. But what I wanted to do, mostly, was go kayaking with friends. It might take me 4-7 hours to get ready to kayak for 1-2 hours. Some of the chores can be streamlined or routinized, but if it costs me effort to be sure to do the same chore at the same time every week, then it's not clear exactly how much I'm saving in terms of time and energy.

I have the same problem at work; although, by mainstream society's standards, I am a reasonably successful professional, I can't really sit down and write a great essay when I'm too hot, or, at least, it seems like I would be more productive if I stopped writing for 5 minutes and cranked up the A/C or changed into shorts. An hour later, it seems like I would be more productive if I stopped writing for 20 minutes and ate lunch. Later that afternoon, it seems like I would be more productive if I stopped for a few minutes and read an interesting article on general science. These things happen even in an ideal working environment, when I'm by myself in a place I'm familiar with. If I have coworkers, or if I'm in a new town, there are even more distractions. If I have to learn who to ask for help with learning to use the new software so that I can research the data that I need to write a report, then I might spend 6 hours preparing to spend 1 hour writing a report.

All this worries me for two reasons: (1) I might be failing to actually optimize for my goals if I only spend 10-20% of my time directly performing target actions like "write essay" or "kayak with friends," and (2) even if I am successfully optimizing, it sucks that the way to achieve the results that I want is to let my attention dwell on the most efficient ways to, say, brush my teeth. I don't just want to go kayaking, I want to think about kayaking. Thinking about driving to the river seems like a waste of cognitive "time" to me.

Does anyone else have similar concerns? Anyone have insights or comments? Am I framing the issue in a useful way? Is the central problem clearly articulated? Just about any feedback at all would be appreciated.

General question on UDT/TDT, now that they've come up again: I know Eliezer said that UDT fixes some of the problems with TDT; I know he's also said that TDT also handles logical uncertainty whereas UDT doesn't. I'm aware Eliezer has not published the details of TDT, but did he and Wei Dai ever synthesize these into something that extends both of them? Or try to, and fail? Or what?

Since I'm going to be a dad soon, I started a blog on parenting from a rationalist perspective, where I jot down notes on interesting info when I find it.

I'd like to focus on "practical advice backed by deep theories". I'm open to suggestions on resources, recommended articles, etc. Some of the topics could probably make good discussions on LessWrong!

ETA: This scheme is done. All three donations have been made and matched by me.

I want to give $180 to the Singularity Institute, but I'm looking for three people to match my donation by giving at least $60 each. If this scheme works, the Singularity Institute will get $360.

If you want to become one of the three matchers, I would be very grateful, and here's how I think we should do it:

1. You donate using this link. Reply to this thread saying how much you are donating. Feel free to give more than $60 if you can spare it, but that won't affect how much I give.

2. In your donation's "Public Comment" field, include both a link to your reply to this thread and a note asking for a Singularity Institute employee to kindly follow that link and post a response saying that you donated. ETA: Step 2 didn't work for me, so I don't expect it to work for you. For now, I'll just believe you if you say you've donated. If you would be convinced to donate by seeing evidence that I'm not lying, let me know and I'll get you some.

3. I will do the same. (Or if you're the first matching donor, then I already have -- see directly below.)

To show that I'm serious, I'm donating my first $60 right now. I will donate my second $60 after the second matching donor, and my third $60 after the third matching donor.

If you already donate regularly, please wait until it looks like my scheme is failing before taking up one of the matching-donor slots. But if you have never donated despite always wanting to, then here's a chance to double your help.

I'm also interested in information people might have about whether this scheme is a good idea (compared to, say, quietly making the donation alone).

So I'm trying to find myself some cryo insurance. I went to a State Farm guy today and he mentioned that they'd want a saliva sample. That's fine; I asked for a list of all the things they'll do with it. He didn't have one on hand and sent me home promising to e-mail me the list.

Apparently the underwriting company will not provide this information except for the explicitly incomplete list I got from the insurance guy in the first place (HIV, liver and kidney function, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and "no genetic or DNA testing").

Is it just me or is it outrageous that I can't get this information? Can anyone tell me an agency that will give me this kind of thing when I ask?

Is LessWrong undergoing a surge in popularity the last two months? What does everyone make of this:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/overcomingbias.com+lesswrong.com/

Possibly a variation on the attribution bias: Wildly underestimating how hard it is for other people to change.

While I believe that both attribution bias and my unnamed bias are extremely common, they contradict each other.

Attribution bias includes believing that people have stable character traits as shown by their actions. This "people should be what I want-- immediately!" bias assumes that those character traits will go away, leading to improved behavior, after a single rebuke or possibly as the result of inspiration.

The combination of attribution bias and "other people should change immediately" bias suggests a third bias: Outrage bias, a habit of seeing the world in such a way that it's reliably infuriating. This is especially visible in politics, but it's common enough in columnists generally.

Gawande on checklists and medicine

Checklists are literally life-savers in ICUs-- there's just too much crucial which needs to be done, and too many interruptions, to avoid serious mistakes without offloading some of the work of memory onto an system.

However, checklists are low status.

Something like this is going on in medicine. We have the means to make some of the most complex and dangerous work we do—in surgery, emergency care, and I.C.U. medicine—more effective than we ever thought possible. But the prospect pushes against the traditional culture of medicine, with its central belief that in situations of high risk and complexity what you want is a kind of expert audacity—the right stuff, again. Checklists and standard operating procedures feel like exactly the opposite, and that’s what rankles many people.

It’s ludicrous, though, to suppose that checklists are going to do away with the need for courage, wits, and improvisation. The body is too intricate and individual for that: good medicine will not be able to dispense with expert audacity. Yet it should also be ready to accept the virtues of regimentation.

I suggest that the problem starts earlier than rock-starism. Conventional schooling still tests on memory, and I think there's a leftover effect that one ought to be able to remember the basics, or be shown to be an inferior sort of person.

Sidetrack into science fiction: Varley's Eight Worlds stories have it that medicine has become so advanced and routinized that it's a low status occupation for people who want to work with their hands. When I read the stories, I wondered if he was getting a little indirect revenge on doctors. I do wonder what it could take for that to happen to medicine. Anyone have histories of de-professionalization in any field?

There's also a book: The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right:

From an article about the athletes' brains:

Unsurprisingly, most of the article is about elite athlete's brains being more efficient in using their skills and better at making predictions about playing, but then....

n February 2009 Krakauer and Pablo Celnik of Johns Hopkins offered a glimpse of what those interventions might look like. The scientists had volunteers move a cursor horizontally across a screen by pinching a device called a force transducer between thumb and index finger. The harder each subject squeezed, the faster the cursor moved. Each player was asked to move the cursor back and forth between a series of targets, trying to travel the course as quickly as possible without overshooting. The group trained 45 minutes a day for five days. By the end of training, the players were making far fewer errors.

The scientists also trained another group of people on the same game, but with a twist. They put a battery on top of the head of each subject, sending a small current through the surface of the brain toward a group of neurons in the primary motor cortex. The electric stimulation allowed people to learn the game better. By the end of five days of training, the battery-enhanced players could move the cursor faster and make fewer errors than the control group. And the advantage was not fleeting. For three months Krakauer and Celnik had their subjects come back into the lab from time to time to show off their game-playing skills. Everyone got rusty over time, but at the end of the period, the people who had gotten the electrode boost remained superior to the others.

I wonder whether there are similar brain differences between top mathematicians and everyone else, and if such a simple method could make people better at math.

Craig Venter et al. have succeeded in creating the first functional synthetic bacterial genome.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5981/958 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1190719 http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/05/first-functional-synthetic-bacterial-genome-announced.ars http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell/overview/

I wrote up a post yesterday, but I found I was unable to post it, except as a draft, since I lack the necessary karma. I thought it might be an interesting thing to discuss, however, since lots of folks here have deeper knowledge than I do about markets and game theory

I've been working recently for an auction house that deals in things like fine art, etc. I've noticed, by observing many auctions, that certain behaviors are pretty reliable, and I wonder if the system isn't "game-able" to produce more desirable outcomes for the different parties involved.

I think Less Wrong readers might have some interesting insights into the situation. Hopefully, at the least, it's an interesting thing to think about for a few minutes. Feel free to point out if this is well-worn territory; in fact, any feedback is welcome.

Structure of the game:

We have objects consigned with us. We have our experts evaluate the objects, and provide an estimate of their value, based on previous auction outcomes for similar objects and their own expertise. So, for instance, a piece of furniture may be estimated to bring a value of $400-$800, a particular painting might be estimated to bring $10,000-$20,000, and so forth. While not "arbitrary", they are to some degree simply good guesses.

We publish a catalog before the auction, listing the items up for sale along with their estimated values. A minimum bid is set, usually half of the low estimate.

The auction proceeds following bidding increments, which vary from one price bracket to another. So, for instance, between $100 and $200, the bidding increments are $10 -- so, $100, $110, $120, etc. Between, say, $10,000 and $20,000 however, the bidding increments are $1000 -- $10,000; $11,000; $12,000 and so forth.

Regardless of what bracket the prices fall into, there are several tendencies that happen frequently:

-- Bidders will readily bid on items they want which still have an asking price of below the low estimate. They feel like they're getting a bargain. -- Bidding will slow between the low estimate and the high estimate. Here, they're really relying on the estimate for their idea of whether or not the deal is so good. -- Bidders become much more reticent about continuing to bid once the price reaches or exceeds the high estimate.
-- "Bidding wars" are more likely to the degree to which bidders feel they still have room to get a "good deal"

It seems to me that it is advantageous (in terms of maximizing the final price paid for an item) to have MORE bidding increments between the low and high estimates than it is to have fewer. That is to say --

I would expect more bids on an item which has an estimate between $200-$400, where there are 20 bid increments between the low estimate and the high estimate, than I would expect on an item estimated to sell between $10,000 and $15,000, which only has five bidding increments between the low and the high.

Now, naturally, some of that has to do with the fact that the lower-priced item is affordable to more bidders. It's also worth noting that increasing the bid increments makes sure that the auction itself doesn't take forever to complete (the higher increments cause bidders to drop out faster, regardless of the number of increments.

So, all this in mind, it seems plausible to me that we could marginally improve the prices being paid for our larger value objects in one of two ways:

-- Increase the granularity of the bidding increments at higher values -- Provide low estimates that allow for a larger number of bidding increments (instead of saying, "the estimate is $15,000-$20,000" we could say, "the estimate is $10,000 - $20,000")

It seems tricky to figure out whether the strategy works, though. After all, each of these objects is unique; it's not like shares of stock or pork bellies or something, where you have a whole bunch of the same stuff and the market is setting a price.

My questions for you all then: -- Is my thinking on this subject sound? -- Do you think that the number of bidding increments available to bidders can affect their behavior in the way I've outlined (am I right?) -- Assume we implement one of the two strategies for maximizing the prices paid. Is there any reliable way to measure the outcome to see if it worked?

No.40 on Yahoo's homepage- "Is aging a disease?"

Ooh, speaking of Harry Potter and the Methods, someone totally needs to write an Atlas Shrugged fanfic in which some of the characters are actually good at achieving true beliefs instead of just paying lip service to "rationality." If I had more time, I'd call it ... Dagny Taggart and the Logic of Science.

Amazing videos, both in presentation and content.

Drive: on how money can be a bad motivator, and what leads to better productivity

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Smile or die: on 'positive thinking'

http://www.youtube.com/user/theRSAorg#p/a/u/1/u5um8QWWRvo

I have run into a problem in statistics which might interest people here, and also I'd quite like to know if there is a good solution.

In charm mixing we try to measure mixing parameters imaginatively named x and y. (They are normalised mass and width differences of mass eigenstates, but this is not important to the problem.) In the most experimentally-accessible decay channel, however, we are not sensitive to x and y directly, but to rotated quantities

where the strong phase delta is unknown. In fact, the situation is a bit worse than this; we get our result from a fit to a sum of terms, where one term is proportional to y' and the other to (x'^2+y'^2). Consequently the experimental result is in fact a value for y' and a value for x'^2. Because of uncertainty, the x'^2 value may be negative, which is unphysical - x' cannot be imaginary, but if it's close to zero you can make a mistake and measure x'^2 as negative.

Now, for comparison with other experiments we'd like to make a confidence-limit contour in (x,y) space. It seems that this contour ought to be an annulus, a doughnut shape, since we don't know anything about delta and we can therefore only tell how far we are from the origin. However, I cannot figure out how to make a contour which consistently (for all values of delta) has 68% coverage. Does anyone have an insight?

Nick Bostrom has posted a PDF of his Anthropic Bias book: http://www.anthropic-principle.com/book/anthropicbias.html

As someone who read it years ago when you had to ILL or buy it, I'm very pleased to see it up and heartily recommend it to everyone on LW who hasn't read it yet. (If you don't want to follow the link and see for yourself, the book focuses on the Doomsday problem and some related issues like Sleeping Beauty, which, incidentally, has come up here recently.)

I have been wondering whether the time was ripe to (say) tweet or blog about how wonderful the LessWrong wiki is. "If you're interested in improving your thinking, the LessWrong wiki is getting to be a great resource". The audience I'm likely to reach is mostly software professionals.

So I attempted to take as unbiased a look at the wiki as I could, putting myself into the shoes of someone motivated by the above lead.

Roadblock the first: the home page says "This wiki exists to support the community blog". This seems to undermine the implicit promise that people I send to the wiki will find the wiki itself a worthwhile investment of their time and attention.

The home page directs the wiki-only reader to the "topic tree". This purports to be "a list of all topics discussed on this wiki". It is in fact a list of all pages, a significant difference. Biases and fallacies together comprise one large LW topic, for instance, with Techniques another substantial chapter, and Positions, Problems, and Theorems forming a separate heading of "supporting material".

Roadblock the second: the "featured articles" include Complexity of Value (getting the point of which requires IMO the bridging of a substantial inferential distance), and Paperclip Maximizer (ditto, this is an FAI trope), only Ev Psych has some relevance to the topic "thinking better".

My options as I see them: a) abandon the idea of driving outside traffic to the wiki and direct people to the blog instead, b) formulate a different promise and lead, c) improve the wiki.

Discuss. ;)

A while ago, I was promoting trn.

One of the great virtues is having a lot of flexibility in what you're shown. In particular, you can choose to not see anything by a given poster.

I was mostly thinking of trn as a way of making it more feasible to follow what you want to read in high-volume discussions, but it's also a way of defusing quarrels, and I think it would be especially handy now.

Speculation about The Methods, which I put here because I want credit for brilliance if I'm right.

The one-pass creation of stable time loops can be accomplished by a Turing machine in the following manner: Have a machine simulate a countably finite set of universes by allocating clock ticks after the fashion of Cantor's diagonal argument. In each universe, wherever there exists an object with the properties that a Time-Turner exploits, spawn new Universes at every tick by inserting new matter "from [1 to N_max] ticks ahead", where N_max is the maximum range of that Time-Turner-like object. If this new matter includes a human brain, it will have memories of the future; even if not, its wave function may have couplings to future events. Now simulate as usual. If the timeline becomes inconsistent, that is, events occur such that the wave-function of the new matter could not be produced, cease simulating that timeline. No conscious being would ever observe an unstable time loop, although admittedly a few gazillion of them would cease to exist every few ticks, especially after irresponsible experiments such as Harry's effort to prove P=NP. Harry has not thought of this explanation because after all he's only eleven and CS is not his main interest; this is why he speculates that the universe may not be Turing-computable.

Observe also that quantum theory already includes acausal time loops, namely the virtual particle pairs making up the quantum foam. The amplitude for such a loop goes extremely rapidly to zero if the loop is unstable; one could exploit this property to create a Time-Turner. The ethical issues are the same as those involved in ordinary teleportation through space by the creation of a copy and destruction of the original, with the added risk that as long as they coexist one of them may do something to break the stability of the loop and destroy them both.

The HP:MR universe seems necessarily to exist in the same multiverse as FUMMC, especially since characters from other authors (Blake, Mornelithe Falconsbane, Harold Shea) show up as throwaways. But I would not expect this to have much of an impact on the plot.

WRT some recent posts on consciousness, mostly by Academician, eg "There must be something more":

There are 3 popular stances on consciousness:

1. Consciousness is spiritual, non-physical.

2. Consciousness can be explained by materialism.

3. Consciousness does not exist. (How I characterize the Dennett position.)

Suppose you provide a complete, materialistic account of how a human behaves, that explains every detail of how sensory stimuli are translated into beliefs and actions. A person holding position 2 will say, "Okay, but you still need to explain consciousness." A person holding position 3 denies that there's anything more to be explained.

I've found these posts perplexing, and I think this is why: What's happening is that someone who holds position 3 is arguing against position 2 by characterizing it as position 1.

So, I just had a strange sort of akrasia problem.

I was doing my evening routine, getting washed up and stuff in preparation for going to bed. Earlier in the evening, I had read P.J. Eby's The Hidden Meaning of "Just Do It", and so I decided I would "just do" this routine, i.e. simply avoid doing anything else, and watch the actions of the routine unfold in front of me. So, I used the toilet, and began washing my hands, when it occurred to me that if I do not interfere, I will never stop rinsing my hands. I did not interfere, however, and sure enough, I ended up just standing there, with my hands resting limply under the running water, doing nothing. My mind went over what I needed to do next, in various levels of detail; after a minute or two of this, I realized that I was leaning on my elbows, forming a triangle shape which prevented me from moving my hands out of the flow of the water. Once I realized this, I was able to stand up straight, freeing my hands to go on to the next task.

(Instead of doing that, however, I came downstairs to write about it on Less Wrong. But that's another story.)

Why did it take me so long to figure out what I needed to do next in order to continue the routine non-forcefully?

"Science Saturday: The Great Singularity Debate"

Eliezer Yudkowsky and Massimo Pigliucci

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/28165

I've just run into a second alumnus of my undergrad school from Less Wrong, and it has me curious, because... it's a tiny school. So this'd be quite a coincidence, and there might be a correlation to dig up.

Present yourselves, former (or current) students of Simon's Rock. I was there from the fall of '04 until graduating with my BA in spring '08 (I was abroad the spring of my junior year though).

If you lurk and don't want to delurk, feel free to contact me privately. If you don't have an account, e-mail me at alicorn@intelligence.org :)

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/true-lies

Ryk Spoor's latest universe, of which the only published book so far is Grand Central Arena, has as major characters people who were raised in simulated worlds, and later covers their escape therefrom. Just occurred to me that some LWers might be interested.

Eliezer seems to have gone dark lately. Anybody know what he's up to?

The Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) convened a "Presidential Panel on Long-Term AI Futures". Read their August 2009 Interim Report from the Panel Chairs:

There was overall skepticism about the prospect of an intelligence explosion as well as of a “coming singularity,” and also about the large-scale loss of control of intelligent systems. [...] The group suggested outreach and communication to people and organizations about the low likelihood of the radical outcomes, sharing the rationale for the overall comfort of scientists in this realm

Don't know how we missed this when it happened; I learned about this from the Hacker News thread. I've yet to find anything they've put out to justify this position.

Would anyone be interested if we were to have more regular LW meetups around the East Bay or San Francisco areas? We probably wouldn't have the benefit of the SIAIfolks' company in that case, but having the meetups at a location easily accessible by BART may help increase the number of people from the surrounding area who can attend. (Also, I hear that preparing for and hosting meetups at Benton can be somewhat taxing on the people who work there, so having them at restaurants will allow us to do it more frequently, if there is demand for such.)

I have a request for those bayesianly inclined among the LW crowd.

I had mentioned in an article that I had become addicted to watching theist/atheist debates. Unfortunately I have not weaned myself off this addiction as of yet. In one I watched recently, it is William Lane Craig (the theist that Eliezer wanted to debate) arguing for the provability of the resurrection of Jesus, and New Testament scholar Dr. Bart Ehrman arguing for its historical improvability.

At some point in this debate, Dr. Ehrman argues that miracles are fundamentally unprovable by historical analysis as they are by definition 'the least probable event'. So history cannot find them as 'the most probable event'. Craig then responds by bringing up Bayes' theorem, to prove show that (if I understand correctly) Dr. Ehrman is ignoring the evidence.

To hear the arguments for yourselves, the video of the debate is here, Dr. Ehrman's argument is stated from 34:59 to 36:02, and Dr. Craig's counter is from 42:03 to 46:24. (do not go past 46:24, as Dr. Craig derails and starts talking supernatural again)

Against my prior bias, I strongly suspect that Dr. Craig is in fact correct. The irony is that while Dr. Craig usually wins his debates by sophistry and pure rhetorical ability, this time he gets bogged down by the details of actually trying to debunk a bad argument. In a turn of poetic justice, the argument goes over the head of the audience, and this debate is one of the few that Dr. Craig can be said to have lost.

The problem I see in this argument is that if you define a miracle as the least expected event (low prior), you can still prove a miracle if it leaves behind strong enough evidence (multiple, unbiased, independent, consistent sources), which would give you a high posterior.

So, to those of you who care to look into this, do I have it right? Have I lost the plot somewhere?

Martin Gardner died today.

Wired has an article 'Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up,' about how scientists and the brain handle unexpected data and anomalies, and our preference to ignore them or explain them away.

I sometimes get various ideas for inventions, but I'm not sure what to do with it, as they are often unrelated to my work, and I don't really possess the craftsmanship capabilities to make prototypes and market them or investigate them on my own. Does anyone have experience and/or recommendations for going about selling or profiting from these ideas?

I vaguely recall a thread where folks discussed what makes jokes funny, and advanced some theories. This may well have been in an Open Thread or buried deep within the comments of an unrelated post - at any rate I can't find it.

Anyone who remembers seeing it or participating, I'd appreciate help locating it...

Egan's Law is "It all adds up to normality." What adds up to what, exactly?

We have always lived in the universe of quantum mechanics, or the Tegmark Level IV Multiverse, but I don't understand why it is supposed to add up to normality. I understand that this word "normality" is supposed to help me dissolve some of the weirder aspects of this universe, but it doesn't seem to work as I am not at all convinced that the universe actually does add up to normality.

Is it really proper to assume from the start that the universe (multiverse) adds up to normality? Is it useful?

Will this all make sense to me if I read Quarantine?

Continuing my thinking about Pascal's mugging, I think I've an argument for why one specifically wants the prior probability of a reward to be proportional/linear to the reward and not one of the other possible relationships. A longish excerpt:

One way to try to escape a mugging is to unilaterally declare that all probabilities below a certain small probability will be treated as zero. With the right pair of lower limit and mugger's credibility, the mugging will not take place.

But such a ad hoc method violates common axioms of probability theory, and thus we can expect there to be repercussions. It turns out to be easy to turn such a person into a money pump, if not by the mugging itself.

Suppose your friend adopts this position, and he says specifically that any probabilities less than or equal to 1/20 are 0. You then suggest a game; the two of you will roll a d20 die, and if the die turns up 1-19, you will pay him one penny and if the die turns up 20, he pays you one dollar - no, one bazillion dollars.

Your friend then calculates: there is a 19/20 chance that he will win a little money, and there is a 1/20 chance he will lose a lot of money - but wait, 1/20 is too small to matter! It is zero chance, by his rule. So, there is no way he can lose money on this game and he can only make money.

He is of course wrong, and on the 5th roll you walk away with everything he owns. (And you can do this as many times as you like.)

Nor can it be rescued simply by shrinking the probability; the same game that defeated a limit of 1/20 can easily be generalized to 1/n, and in fact, we can make the game even worse: instead of 1 to n-1 winning, we define 0 and 1 as winning, and each increment as losing. As n increases, the large percentage of instant losses increases.

So clearly this modification doesn't work.

If we think about the scaling of the prior probability of a reward, there's clearly 3 general sorts of behavior:

1) sublinear relationship where the probability shrinks slower than the reward increases 2) a linear relationship where the probability shrinks as fast as the reward increases 3) and a superlinear relationship where the probability shrinks faster than the reward increases.

The first doesn't resolve the mugging. If the mugging is ever rejected, then the mugger merely increases the reward and can always devise an accepted mugging.

The second and third both resolve the mugging - the agent will reject a large mugging if it rejected a smaller one. But is there any reason to prefer the linear relationship to the superlinear?

Yes, by the same reasoning as leads us to reject the lower limit solution. We can come up with a game or a set of deals which presents the same payoff but which an agent will accept when they should reject and vice versa.

Let's suppose a mugger tries a different mugging. Instead of asking for 20$ he asks for a penny, and he mentions that he will ask this another 1999 times; because the reward is so small, the probability is much higher than if he had asked for a flat $20 and offered a consequently larger reward.

If the agent's prior was not so low that they always rejected the mugger, then we would see an odd flip - for small sums, the agent would accept the mugging and then as the sums increased, it would suddenly start rejecting muggings, even when the same total sums would have been transacted. That is, just by changing some labels while leaving the aggregate utility alone, we change the agent's decisions.

If the agent had been using a linear relationship, there would be no such flip. If the agent rejected the penny offer it would reject the 20$ offer and vice versa. It would be consistently right (or wrong). The sublinear and superlinear relationships are inconsistently wrong.

Has anybody else thought that the Inverse Ninja Law is just the Bystander Effect in disguise?

(Yes, I've been reading this.)

Buddha: The quintessential rational mind

http://www.hindu.com/mag/2010/05/23/stories/2010052350210600.htm

Let's suppose Church-Turing thesis is true.

Are all mathematical problems solvable?

Are they all solvable to humans?

If there is a proof* for every true theorem, then we need only to enumerate all possible texts and look for one that proves - or disproves - say, Goldbach's conjecture. The procedure will stop every time.

(* Proof not in the sense of "formal proof in a specific system", but "a text understandable by a human as a proof".)

But this can't possibly be right - if the human mind that looks at the proofs is Turing-computable, then we've just solved the Halting Problem - after all, we can pose the halting of any Turing machine as a mathematical problem.

So what does that mean?

• Not all true theorems have a proof? (what does that even mean)
• Not all proofs are possible to follow by a human? (very pessimistic, in my opinion)
• Some other answer I'm missing?

You can also extend the question to any human-made AIs/posthuman minds, but this doesn't help much - if the one looking at proofs can reliably self-improve, then the Halting Problem would still be solved.

EDIT: A longer explanation of the problem, by a friend.

Does inverse of fundamental attribution error have a good name?

A little over the top:

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-05/new-software-can-assemble-army-overnight-making-human-bosses-obsolete

I believe the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences" can be explained based on the following idea. Physical systems prohibit logical contradiction, and hence, physical systems form just another kind of axiomatic, logical, and therefore mathematical system. To take a crude example, two different rocks cannot occupy the same point in space, due to logical contradiction. This allows the ability to mathematically talk about the rocks. Note that this example is definitively crude, since there are other things like bosons which actually can occupy the same position, but anyways, hopefully you get the idea.

What is the status of this argument in the philosophy of mathematics? Or general comments/references?

http://moronail.net/img/902_NATURAL_SELECTION_It_can_be_tampered_animals