Open thread, June. 12 - June. 18, 2017

Sequences also contain criticism, towards smart people who are smart in the wrong way ("clever arguers"), and even towards smart people in general ("why our kind can't cooperate").

Making smartness sound like the most important thing gives you Mensa or RationalWiki; you also need harsh lessons on how to do it right to create Less Wrong. Maybe so harsh that most people who identify with being X will actually turn against you, because you assigned low status to their way of doing X.

And by the way, effective altruism is already using this strategy in the field of... well, altruism.

Can you give specific examples of him doing that?

Well, as far as I can tell, the latest progress in the field has come mostly through throwing deep learning techniques like bidirectional LSTMs at the problem and letting the algorithms figure everything out. This obviously is not particularly conducive to advancing the theory of NLP much.

I'm not following NLP per se, but lately I've seen papers on grammar's analysis based on the categorical semantics of quantum mechanics (that is, dagger-compact categories). Search the latest papers by Coecke on the arXiv.

Critics are also a sign that the site is becoming more recognized and has started spreading around... You cannot control what other people choose to criticize, mainly because it's known that people get a status kick by taking down others.
When downvotes will be resurrected, we'll have some means of judging nasty or undue criticisms.

Seems to me, when you find a vitriolic comment, there are essentially three options (other than ignoring it):

• upvote it;
• downvote it;
• write a polite steelmanned version as a separate top-level comment, and downvote the original one.

The problem is, the third option is too much work. And the second options feels like: "omg, we can't take any criticism; we have become a cult just like some people have always accused us!". So people choose the first option.

Maybe a good approach would be if the moderators would write a message like: "I am going to delete this nasty comment in 3 hours; if anyone believes it contains valuable information, please report it as a separate top-level comment."

There seems to be a subset of people tangentially related to LW that really likes criticizing LW

Some of them also like to play the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" game (e.g. the Basilisk). Delete or not delete, you are a bad guy either way; you only have a choice of what kind of a bad guy you are -- the horrible one who keeps nasty comments on his website, or the horrible one who censors information exposing the dark secrets of the website.

My current exposure to several blogs / messaging boards seems to be it's fashionable/wise/something in some sense to be that LW types childish/autistic/stupid (?) I'm curious why this is the case.

Trolling or status games, I guess. For people who don't have rationality as a value, it is fun (and more pageviews for their website) to poke the nerds and watch how they react. For people who have rationality as a value, it is a status move to declare that they are more rational than the stupid folks at LW.

At some moment, trying to interpret everything charitably and trying to answer politely and reasonably will make you a laughingstock. The most important lacking social skill is probably recognizing when you are simply being bullied. It is good to start with assumption of good intent, but it is stupid to refuse to update in face of overwhelming evidence.

For example, it is obvious that people on RationalWiki are absolutely not interested in evaluating the degree of rationality on LW objectively; they enjoy too much their "snarky point of view", which simply means bullying the outgroup; and they have already decided that we are an outgroup. Now that we stopped giving a fuck about them, and more or less called them stupid in return, they moved to editing the Wikipedia article about LW as their next step. Whatever. As they say, never wrestle with a pig, because you get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it. Any energy spent on debating them would be better spent e.g. writing new valuable content for LW.

I think I'm unlikely to attend regularly, but what do you plan to do with the meetup? Lay discussion, technical discussion, attempts to make progress?

I'll link to this from the London rationalish group.

It's one of the proposed plans. The main difficulty is that low impact is hard to formalize. For example, if you ask the AI to cure cancer with low impact, it might give people another disease that kills them instead, to keep the global death rate constant. Fully unpacking "low impact" might be almost as hard as the friendliness problem. See this page for more. The LW user who's doing most work on this now is Stuart Armstrong.

Finally read the review, and I am happy I did. Made me think about a few things...

Legibility has its costs. For example, I had to use Jira for tracking my time in many software companies, and one task is always noticeably missing, despite requiring significant time and attention of all team members, namely using the Jira itself. How much time and attention does it require, in addition to doing the work, to make notes about what exactly you did when, whether it should be tracked as a separate issue, what meta-data to assign to that issue, who needs to approve it, communicating why they should approve it, explaining technical details of why the map drawn by the management doesn't quite match the territory, explaining that you are doing a "low-priority" task X because it is a prerequisite to a "high-priority" task Y, then explaining the same thing to yet another manager who noticed that you are logging time on low-priority tasks despite having high-priority tasks in the queue and decided to take initiative, negotiating whether you should log the time in your company's Jira or your company's customer's Jira or both, in extreme cases whether it is okay to use English when writing in your customer's Jira or you need to learn their language, etc. And as the review mentions, these costs are usually imposed by the people higher in hierarchy, and paid by those lower in hierarchy, so people having the power to improve this don't have an incentive.

Legibility is often used as a reason to remove options. Previously you had options X, Y, Z, but 90% of people used X, and X is most known to people in power and they already have it better documented, so let's make things more legible by banning Y and Z, and perhaps by also banning the choice to use none of these services; now everyone uses X which we can easily track.

Depending on country, educational system may be a victim of this: homeschooling either illegal or just strongly disliked by people in power, same for alternative schools, it is much simpler to use the same system for everyone. So although my daughter knew all characters in alphabet when she was 1, the government will try hard to teach her all those letters again slowly when she is 6, and of course it will pay for this complete waste of everyone's time and energy using my tax money. (Luckily homeschooling is kinda-legal here, if you interpret some laws creatively and deal with all the resulting inconvenience.) Because a country where everyone learns alphabet exactly at the age of 6 is aesthetically more appealing for the people in positions to make the bureaucratic decisions about education. If I try to debate them, they will probably be tempted to just make a strawman who wants to keep their children illiterate, and debate that strawman instead of me.

Or there could be a problem with people who make small irregular side income - such as a student or an employee who also has a web page with adsense or a game or two on android market - because the state would like you to clearly choose whether you are an employee (with all the related legal and tax consequences) or an entrepreneur (with another set of consequences), and not "mostly this, but also a bit of that". You may be unable to find an expert who really understand how to tax your adsense / android / kickstarter income, because you are not supposed to be doing this, unless you have a company for doing it.

Similarly, the state may be rolling their eyes if you are trying to find an employment with 2 hours a day, or working only every other weak, because it has the nice predefined category of an "employee" that works 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

And the problem is that most people designing this system, and probably many left-leaning people hearing about your problems they don't share, will most likely react on emotional level like: "Just choose one of the existing options, asshole, just like all normal people do! Why are you trying to complicate our work? Do you believe there should be special laws for you; do you consider yourself some kind of royalty?" When the truth is that no one needed a special law for them, until the state attempted to standardized things using a map that doesn't quite fit the territory.

Also, some of these problems could be solved by creating a less specific abstraction; for example, the state could check that your children have certain knowledge and skills, regardless of how specifically they gained them; or it could tax your total income, regardless of how specifically you gained it. Programmers call this design pattern "programming for interface, not for implementation" (in this analogy "education" would be an interface, and "classical school", "alternative school", "homeschooling", "unschooling" would be implementations; or "income" would be an interface, and "employment", "business", "kickstarter", "patreon" would be implementations). But it would probably still be difficult to convince the people in power of the need of this abstraction in first place. Again, because of legibility -- with interface, you have certain things you know, and the rest is black box; but implementation tempts you with unlimited possibilities of further inspection.

As usual, the impact is worse on poor people; when a middle-class employee cannot find a way to properly tax his monthly $10 from the android game, they can either just give the game away for free, or take a risk, hoping that in case they are doing wrong, the punishment is not going to be draconic. For a poor person, the monthly $10 makes a greater difference, but also involves a risk that e.g. if they are taking unemployment benefits, having an extra untaxed income will be treated as an attempt to cheat the system, and may have more severe consequences. Similarly, a rich person has more options to make their homeschooling legal, e.g. by declaring their child a foreign citizen (of a country that allows homeschooling) and perhaps even "prove" it by buying a house in that country; or whatever it is that according to the given country's laws will make the bureaucrat satisfied.

Then there is the aspect "if people in power don't understand it, it doesn't exist, and everyone who cares about it is acting irrationally". Whether a programmer acts like an asshole, or helps people around him, as long as it is not reflected in Jira, it didn't happen. Of course the official answer is to put it in Jira, which includes all the trivial and not-so-trivial inconvenience. You may enjoy cooperating with one colleague and suffer when you are forced to cooperate with another one, but on the official level this does not exist, and you will be treated as irrational (I think the proper word in this context is "unprofessional") for simply expressing preference for sitting next to person X instead of person Y, even if doing so would mean zero costs for the company, and could actually increase your productivity. There are some allowed ways to express your job-unrelated human side, and they are generally called "teambuilding", i.e. doing what the people in power believe is fun.

On the state level, using your local knowledge that is not recognized by state may be considered illegal discrimination. Better not go into specific details.

We should adopt an acronym: YASLASR, yet another seeing like a state review. And we are crossing into the meta-reviews territory already.
To be frank, I've never understood the wide appeal that the book enjoys. Sure, it's an important lesson that implicit knowledge sometimes is less wrong than scientific knowledge, but we (should) already know: it's in Jaynes (about the peasants believing that meteors were rocks falling from the sky) and it's in the metaphor of evolution as the mad god Azatoth (referenced here many times). Perhaps is less surprising to aspiring rationalists because we already know the limitation of scientific knowledge.

I'm going to take a wild guess, and suggest that your attitude towards FAI research, and your experience of CFS, are actually related. I have no idea if this is a standard theory, but in some ways CFS sounds like depression minus the emotion - and that is a characteristic symptom in people who have a purpose they regard as supremely important, who find absolutely no support for their attempt to pursue it, but who continue to regard it as supremely important.

The point being that when something is that important, it's easy to devalue certain aspects of your own difficulties. Yes, running into a blank wall of collective incomprehension and indifference may have been personally shattering; you may be in agony over the way that what you have to do in order to stay alive, interferes with your ability to preserve even the most basic insights that motivate your position ... but it's an indulgence to think about these feelings, because there is an invisible crisis happening that's much more important.

So you just keep grinding away, or you keep crawling through the desert of your life, or you give up completely and are left only with a philosophical perspective that you can talk about but can't act on... I don't know all the permutations. And then at some point it affects your health. I don't want to say that this is solely about emotion, we are chemical beings affected by genetics, nutrition, and pathogens too. But the planes intersect, e.g. through autoimmune disorders or weakened disease resistance.

The core psychological and practical problem is, there's a difficult task - the great purpose, whatever it is - being made more difficult in ways that have no intrinsic connection to the problem, but are solely about lack of support, or even outright interference. And then on top of that, you may also have doubts and meta doubts to deal with - coming from others and from yourself (and some of those doubts may be justified!). Finally, health problems round out the picture.

The one positive in this situation, is that while all those negatives can reinforce each other, positive developments in one area can also carry across to another.

OK, so that's my attempt to reflect back to you, how you sound to me. As for practical matters, I have only one suggestion. You say

he travels to the USA for a few days every couple of months

so I suggest that you at least wait until his next visit, and use that extra time to understand better how all these aspects of your life intersect.

One of the core questions of rationality is: "Why do you believe what you believe?" Specifically, why do you believe that this doctor will be able to help you in a way that others can't?

You can also write down the likelihood of different outcomes.

Given that you had success at improving your condition with one mind-body paradigm, why not try others?

Given that you speak about travelling to the US it would also be worthwhile to know where you are living at the moment to know about what's available to you.

I think that 1/2 is an acceptable answer, and in fact the only correct answer. Basically 1/2 corresponds to SSA, and 1/3 to SIA; and in my opinion SSA is right, and SIA is wrong.

We can convert the situation to an equivalent Incubator situation to see how SSA applies. We have two cells. We generate a person and put them in the first cell. Then we flip a coin. If the coin lands heads, we generate no one else. If the coin lands tails, we generate a new person and put them in the second cell.

Then we question all of the persons: "Do you think you are in the first cell, or the second?" "Do you think the coin landed heads, or tails?" To make things equivalent to your description we could question the person in the first cell before the coin is flipped, and the person in the second only if they exist, after it is flipped.

Estimates based on SSA:

P(H) = .5

P(T) = .5

P(1st cell) = .75 [there is a 50% chance I am in the first cell because of getting heads; otherwise there is a 50% chance I am the first person instead of the second]

P(2nd cell) = .25 [likewise]

P(H | 1st cell) = 2/3 [from above]

P(T | 1st cell) = 1/3 [likewise]

P(H | 2nd cell) = 0

P(T | 2nd cell) = 1

Your mistake is in the assumption that "P(Heads | Monday) = P(Tails | Monday) = 1/2, since if it's Monday then a fair coin is about to be flipped." The Doomsday style conclusion that I fully embrace is that if it is Monday, then it is more likely that the coin will land heads.

Adding P(Heads | Monday) and P(Tails | Monday) doesn't give you P(Monday), it gives you P(1 | Monday).

P(X) = P(X | A) * P(A) + P(X | B) * P(B)

ideas about intelligence that might be different compared to current AI

What kind of things are you thinking about? Any examples?

Flippant answer. Nanotech has come first! And we are made of it.

I'm not quite sure what you are getting at here. Are you asking whether it will be possible to recreate a human with nanotech more easily than to emulate one?

I ask this because not all atoms are not equal. It is somewhat hard to pry two nitrogen atoms apart but easier to pry two oxygen atoms apart. So the energy costs to make the thing depend a lot what your feedstock is.

Then there is the question of whether running the recreated human is cheaper than running an emulation. Which is separate from the cost to recreate a human vs emulation. It depends on the amount of fidelity you require. If there are strange interactions between neurons mediated by the electrics fields that you want to emulate, or the exact way that the emulation interacts with certain drugs then I think recreation is probably going to be a lot cheaper

Not exactly right now, but I've called in sick for work when I would have gone in with sufficient precommitment.

edit: for clarity - this is a decision that I would prefer to have escaped the night before, and the day after. A number of things I lump into the "akrasia" topic fit this pattern.

A person who's on a diet might agree if X is "I give you a piece of cake" in many instances.

I'm personally quite good at inhibiting myself from actions I don't want to take but less good at getting myself to do uncomfortable things, so there's no example that comes to mind immediately.

In general, I think that cases where system I wants to accept to offer but system II wants to reject the offer provide material for X. I would be surprised if you can't find examples that hold for most people.

Do they have to be examples of willingly yielding?

E.g. if there was a malign Super intelligence in the box that I had to interact with, then I would probably yield to letting it out but if I could I would precommit to not letting it out I would.

Could you rewrite it more clearly? I'm not sure exactly what you're asking... Besides, offer me to precommit against x why? With which incentive?

I'm not sure I'm parsing the question correctly. Attempting to set X = five dollars, I get "If you offered me five dollars right now, I'd accept the offer, but if you first offered me to precommit against taking five dollars, I'd accept that offer and escape the other one." Precommitting against taking five dollars seems strange.

My best interpretation is "If you offered me X right now, I'd accept the offer, but if you first offered me Y to precommit against taking X, I'd accept that offer and later wouldn't take X." If that interpretation is close enough, then yes. If you offered me the opportunity to play Skyrim all day right now, I'd accept the offer, but if you first offered me a hundred dollars to precommit against playing Skyrim all day, I'd accept that offer and later wouldn't take the opportunity to play Skyrim all day. That seems too straightforward though, so I don't think I'm interpreting the question right.

I think this article shows that you probably won't get a crisp answer.