Open Thread, September 1-15, 2012

A dramatic understatement -- I found this to be far superior to WAitW, as it's more concrete and offers reasonable advice to its readers. By being more systematic, it strikes me as a better illustration of WAitA than the actual WAitA article.

That you for linking to this article; I enjoy seeing other people making my point better than I could. Here are some additional thoughts:

My first thought after reading the linked article was "pick your battles", especially as expressed in Paul Graham's "What You Can't Say". It sounds like the exact opposite of "Atheism+", and yet they both seem to make a lot of sense... well, how is that possible?

More generally: You hold opinions X and Y, and they are both important to you. Another person agrees with X and disagrees with Y. When should you treat this person as an ally, and when should you treat them as an enemy? Let's suppose that both X and Y are your core values, so you can't decide by "which one is more important to you".

Seems to me that when X is endangered, then each proponent of X is a gift, and you don't look the gift horse in the mouth. On the other hand, when X is safe -- it may be still a minority belief, but it gains momentum irreversibly -- it is strategic to associate X with Y as much as possible, to transfer some momentum to Y; declaring "X but not Y" people as the "enemies of the true X (which includes Y)" is the obvious way to do it. You can afford to alienate the few "X but not Y" people if X will win without them too.

This was a strategic analysis in general, but now let's look at these specific X and Y; namely: What's could be possibly wrong about asking people to be compassionate and reasonable, and not be a bully???

Well, it depends on your specific definitions or "compassionate", "reasonable" and "bully". Yes, the devil is in the details. As long as the vocal people are allowed to redefine these words to mean exactly what they need them to mean in a given moment, and especially if "surely, you said A, but we all know that's just a code for B" arguments are accepted, it allows to relabel each dissent as bullying, and to ostracize given people not because they disagree, but simply because their behavior is interpreted as ethically unacceptable. (Even pointing out this mechanism will be problematic, because we all know that only a bully would expend their energy to defend bullies.)

Also this comment by Kaj_Sotala:

If you haven't read that article yet, you probably should, since the rest of this post will make very little sense without it.

Actually, although I can't perfectly emulate a person who hasn't read that post, I believe that this one can be understood just fine without it. The content of this post could be summed up with "the things you associate with this particular -ism aren't going to be the same things that everyone associate with this -ism", which can be easily understood even without knowing what the WAitW is.

I actually suspect that you shouldn't even mention the WAitW, because the WAitW implies that the other person is employing motivated cognition and throwing any poor argument they can come up with at you in order to shut you up. In contrast, here they might just genuinely have a different mapping between verbal and conceptual space than you do.

Has it occurred to anyone that worst-argument-in-the-world type thinking is probably a result of the affect heuristic?

Feeling Good also helped me a lot, I think I self-diagnosed on moderate depression using its test and then got much better after reading the first chapters of it.

The exercises are very interesting to this community I think and maybe I will write a dedicated discussion post.

Write a main post! Summarizing a widely acclaimed book about a rationality-related topic of interest to many LessWrongers surely constitutes worthy subject matter.

Very interesting, is it available online anywhere?

I'd be very interested in reading it!

The exercises are very interesting to this community I think and maybe I will write a dedicated discussion post.

I look forward to it.

Awesome! I look forward to reading any post you make about it.

All personalities are given a pair of esoteric stimuli. Through reinforcement/punishment, one personality is conditioned to have a positive physiological reaction to Stimulus A and a negative physiological reaction stimulus B. The other personality is given the converse.

The stimuli are all drawn from a common pool of images like "bear", "hat" or "bicycle", so one half of a stimuli pair may be "a bear in a hat on a bicycle". There's a canonical set of stimuli, like a huge deck of cards, with all possible combinations, all of which are numbered. The numbers for my stimuli pair are tattoed on my body in some obscure location, like the sole of my foot.

If I need to prove my identity, I show my tattoo to the authority figure. It will read something like "1184/0346". They pick out either image 1184 (bear in a hat on a bicycle) or image 0346 (a sword in a hill being struck by lightning), and show it to me. My immediate response will be either arousal or disgust, and they will know which personality I am.

Persons who share bodies still have distinct legal and social existences, so if one commits a crime, the other is entitled to walk free while awake as long as they come back before sleeping - but how do they prove it?

Is this a realistic cultural adaptation? In most human societies if you are stuck working or living with someone your social existence is somewhat shared. A person from your clan doing something bad is a also bad for your own reputation. If someone from your family committed a crime some legal traditions would hold you responsible. It seems much more plausible that society would consider the two people living in the same body to be legally treated at least like a married couple or brothers where in some past ones.

Given your constraints and assuming no cheap and easy test of distinguishing them, of all historical examples I can think of, only modern Western culture with its hyper-individual liberalism would bother with the impracticality of treating the two people like two fully distinct individuals. And even then they would have to give a family-like if not legal guardian-like relationship for the issue of making medical decisions. Not sharing your place of residence and ownership over it would be impractical, though perhaps there would be a strong norm of not going into the other guys part of the house.

Also as a minor note the culture would probably develop a norm of some sort of marker (perhaps clothes, jewellery) or face paint to show which of the two persons in currently in control. The distinction would be more or less universal not simply individualized so even strangers could tell this was two different persons. Think more "Ah I see your patron god is the first twin Jahu. Your cohabitor was here yesterday." instead of "Aha James always wears his leather jacket you must be Harry!". Using the wrong marker would probably at least as taboo as cross-dressing was in some past cultures.

Each personality owns a bracelet with a combination lock. To prove you're you, you unlock your bracelet. This is basically the password system, but localized, and now you just have to worry about making combination locks tamper-proof.

The first thing that occurs to me is to decentralise the database, which incidentally is rather a computer-ish concept. Each person designates two or more Keyphrase Holders, with a separate password for each. For low-security situations, they have to give their passphrase to one KH; for maximum security, they have to convince all of them. Ten or a dozen passwords should not be beyond anyone's memorisation capabilities in a world without shiny Internet distractions, and the KH can write them down - this gives you a lot of different DSP-DPs instead of one big one. Any given KH may be suborned or have his database broken into, but by the time you get up to a dozen or so that is unlikely.

Obviously this works best if you don't have to physically drag the KH to the prison cell, or whatever, before you let the innocent one out.

Give everybody training in a particular skill during their childhood: Juggling, acrobacy, calligraphy, drawing, playing a particular instrument - or even something more esoteric like doing figures with a Yoyo or a Diabolo, or doing pool tricks, or tricks with a socker ball; anyway something require a good amount of motor skills and training; and also make sure that no cohabitor pair has skills that are too similar (like calligraphy and drawing, or acrobacy and soccer tricks, or the violin and the bass).

Then have a taboo against learning those skills outside the "official" (or religious) context in childhood (for example: being seen training for them is a crime, the props can't be found outside special temples, etc.).

Physiological correlates to anxiety in response to known personality-specific trauma?

Can they use quill and parchent?

If so, the usual public key algorithms could be encoded into something like a tax form, i.e. something like "...51. Subtract the number on line 50 from the number on line 49 and write the result in here:__ ...500. The warden should also have calculated the number on line 499. Burn this parchent."

Of course there would have to be lots of error checks. ("If line 60 doesn't match line 50 you screwed up. If so, redo everything from line 50 on.")

To make it practical, each warden/non-prisoner-pair would do a Diffie-Hellman exchange only once. That part would take a day or two. After establishing a shared secret the daily authentication would be done by a hash, which probably could be done in half an hour or less.

Of course most people would have no clue why those forms work, they would just blindly follow the instructions, which for each line would be doable with primary school math.

The wardens would probably spend large parts of their shifts precalculating hashes for prisoners still asleep, so that several prisoners could do their get-out work at the same time. Or maybe they would do the crypto only once a month or so and normally just tell the non-prisoners their passwords for the next day every time they come in.

Everyone is born with a true name that they intuitively know but can't say, and they also have a unique soul-color. And there are special glow-stones that you can think your true-name at, which will then glow the same as the soul-color of the person with that name.

You need to think about one-way functions (hashes) and trapdoor one-way functions (public key algorithms). There are some additional issues that arise like nonces to thwart replay attacks and the level of protection individuals can be expected to give to secret keys.

Also, even without explicit mathematics the universe will presumably have a concept of entropy and conservation of something, even if it's just conservation of magical energy. If you can come up with a plausible problem that magic can solve given a lot of expended magical energy but can be solved much more easily with the knowledge of a secret, then you can build a challenge-response identify proof so long as it's not easy to steal the secret by watching the demonstration. If additionally it's very hard to derive the secret from the demonstration of its knowledge you probably have the power of a public key system.

Not all the following problems require magic to implement, and many of them actually benefit from not having a knowledge of mathematics and algorithms, since most of these are not cryptographically secure.

• Have each person construct an elaborate puzzle out of oddly shaped objects that can be packed into a small finite volume in only one way (the knapsack problem)
• Each person constructs a (large) set of sticks (or metal rods, or whatever) of varying lengths, of which a subset add up to a standard length like a meter (the subset sum problem)
• Society forms a hierarchical tree of secret handshakes so that each person only has to remember, say, 100 secret handshakes and the tree only has to be log_100 (N) tall so the courts can just subpoena a logarithmic number of individuals to verify handshakes between any two arbitrary people. Obviously any one of your 100 acquaintances can impersonate you, so two or more distinct trees would at least require collusion.
• Any magical item that only functions for its "owner".
• A magical "hash function", like a petronus or an aura, that is unique to every individual (not body) and can't be faked. Producing it would be an effective identifier.

Lastly, I should point out that very few "normal" people in the situation you describe would be able to achieve cryptographic security anyway. I can (barely) memorize a passphrase with 128-bit entropy (using diceware, so I'm certain it actually has 128 bits), and even that's not quite enough to choose a secure secret key for Elliptic Curve DSA. And it would have to only be memorized and never written down anywhere, and only computed on trusted hardware (who the sleep-twin could modify to their heart's content while I slept). So, yeah, Magic.

Maybe you could adapt this implicit memory-based authentication scheme into a board game format similar to Mastermind.

A few possibilities:

A clockwork Analytical engine / Enigma machine, that does something equivalent to public key verification (though I assume you don't want that kind of machine either).

In each city is a temple of the Sigils, in which are stored the Sigils of people, in public view. The Sigils are like intricate signatures drawn on clay tablets; but they are made on a special clay, Sigil Clay, that dries in about a minute, and changes color depending on the pressure you apply to it, the heat (depending of whether you're touching it with a stylus or with your fingers), and how dry it is. Sigil Priests know hundreds of drawing techniques, and when an alternate pair is created, each person will be taught a few techniques to apply to his drawing, with no overlap between the alternates (so it should be quite hard for someone to reproduce his alternate's Sigil). Being able to draw one's Sigil is generally considered a proof of identity, and since only the Sigil Priests know how to make Sigil Clay, one has little opportunity to practice drawing someone else's Sigil (not to mention that it's of course considered a grave crime).

For the prisonner's case, why not having the "day" persona return to prison to sleep and give a new passphrase short (randomly generated with a special set of dice) to the guard, and when he wakes up and wants to get out, he must give the same passphrase (if he gets it wrong, he is lightly punished and must wait at least 30 minutes before trying again.

This is a weird and interesting premise!

And all the adults share bodies (generally, one body has two people in it). One's asleep (insensate, not forming memories about what's going on, and not in any sort of control over the body) and one's awake (in control, forming memories, experiencing what's going on) at any given time.

So basically the Cherubs in Homestuck.

Why use cryptography? If I understand the problem statement correctly, there's a simpler solution. When a prisoner wants to go to sleep, they signal and a guard walks over and renders them unconscious, presumably using drugs. Since we know that nobody would go to sleep outside of jail, you can figure out who is who by counting the number of times they've been sedated.

(This is vulnerable to troubles telling who is who at the start, but so is any knowledge-based method. This is also vulnerable to people falling asleep outside, but so is any knowledge based method. It's also fairly dangerous, given that most drugs capable of rendering somebody unconscious are dangerous; however, giving guards some training and then handwaving away or saying the society isn't concerned by the (minimal) danger sounds reasonable. It assumes certain things about going to sleep and drugs that may not be true in this universe, but it at least sounds reasonable- and this is fiction.)

Is handwriting style per person or per body?

Well, there is visual cryptography in various forms, and if one databank is not secure enough, make it two or three- parole officier+National Databank or something, thats called secret-sharing-cryptography. It is possible to combine both, and even have them at a simple enough level to not require PCs. Of course, for visual cryptography you need a fast way to recreate the visual secrets- computing and graphing polynoms for thirty minutes every twelve-ish hours is a serious waste of time...

Does the protocol need to be robust against cohabitors in league with each other? That is, is "permanently private" built in, or could someone share their key with a cohabitor who agrees to take the fall?

This is remarkably similar to the informal descriptions of CEV and moral "renormalization" that exist. Someone should look into the literature on Bosanquet and Blanshard's rational will, and see if there's anything else of use.

Thanks for the reference. It's a shame that the informal description wasn't attached to a more distinctive label. If so it would be worth adopting it for the sake of conformity.

If I had a dollar for every time a philosopher talked informally about something potentially very cool...

That's a pretty good example of that, yeah. It's also interesting to note how values, or at least the potential for them, may be conserved across long-term shifts: American culture is notably fixated on geneaology compared to societies where the extended family is a socioeconomic norm; the motivation to have a wider familial context is there, even in families and individuals who are quite comfy with the nuclear pattern. I'm not suggesting it's a causal influence that trumps the economics driving the push for extended families, but I can't help seeing it as influential. The demographic transition and decline of extended families in the US wasn't that long ago...

I have a Great Filter related thought which doesn't address your question directly but, hey, it's the Open Thread.

My thesis here is that the presence of abundant fossil energy on earth is the primary thing that has enabled our technological civilization, and abundant fossil energy may be far less common than intelligent life.

On top of all the other qualities of Earth which allowed it to host its profusion of life, I'll point out a few more facts related specifically to fossil energy, which I haven't seen in any discussions of Fermi's Paradox or the Great Filter.

• Life on Earth happens to be carbon-based, and carbon-based life, when heated in an anoxic environment, turns into oil, gas and coal.

• Earth is roughly 2/3 covered in oceans (this figure has varied over geologic time), a fact with significant consequences to deposition of dead algae, erosion, and sedimentation.

• Earth possesses a mass, size, and age such that the temperature a few kilometers below the surface may be hundreds of degrees C, while the surface temperature remains "Goldilocks."

• Earth has a conveniently oxidizing atmosphere in which hydrocarbons burn easily, but not so oxidizing that it prevents stable carbon-based life. Quite a narrow window, really.

• Life has existed on Earth for billions of years, and thus algae and other life forms have been dying in oceans and swamps and accumulating subsurface hydrocarbon source material, for billions of years.

Put all this together and realize that the formation of oil, gas, and coal happens only in rare and specific circumstances even on Earth. We seem to have a lot of these resources today, but it took billions of years for them to accumulate in the quantities we now find.

If any one of the above facts were not true, we would not have fossil energy - coal, oil, gas, plastics, lubricants - we would not have an industrial revolution, and we would not have a technological civilization.

Many of the facts on the above list have to be true simply to enable fire, as in, wood fire, imagine what human history would look like if the oxygen content of Earth's atmosphere was too low to sustain wood fire?

Anyways, maybe people have discussed this before, but I wasn't able to Google anything up.

I think it's pretty clear that for broad definitions of life, you need carbon or something heavier. It's possible you could substitute boron, but I don't think you can get boron by any process that won't produce carbon as well. You almost certainly need both reducing and oxidizing agents, which means oxygen and hydrogen as the lightest options. There have been proposals of exotic life chemistries, but all the serious ones I've seen substitute heavier atoms like silicon.

The more interesting question is whether you can build more complex life without all the trace elements used on earth. For example, there are plenty of bacteria and fungi that have much lower dependence on heavier metals than multicellular life does, and some simpler multicellular organisms need less than humans do. My unfounded hunch is that you need something that can play the role of phosphorous as an energy carrier, and that it would be hard to find that in just CHON structures. On the other hand, it's possible that even a really poor substitute would offer enough for life to arise, even if it was inefficient, slow, and fragile compared to life on earth: there would be no stronger threat from other life using phosphorous.

The next question is whether metal-poor planets can produce a technological civilization. How important is metalworking in our history? Can you substitute something else for it? Can you get a spacefaring or radio-capable civilization without metals for magnets, wires, and electronics? There are alternatives like organic conductors and semiconductors, but are those accessible without the intervening metals stage? Just how metal-poor are these planets, anyway? Would it be like iron, copper, aluminum, and tin being only as available as, say, nickel is on Earth? Or is silver or gold a more appropriate comparison? Or even rarer than that? Or are they present, but not concentrated into usable deposits?

I feel like I don't know enough about the detailed makeup of these planets to give even a qualitative answer to your question. I'm not sure anyone knows enough about what is required for life to give a good answer. More data about the planets in question will clearly be helpful.

Another great filter related question I posted a while ago but didn't get much response to:

Could the great filter just be a case of anthropic bias?

• Assume any interplanetary species will colonise everything within reasonable distance in a time-scale significantly shorter than it takes a new intelligent species to emerge.
• If a species had colonised our planet their presence would have prevented our evolution as an intelligent species.
• Therefore we shouldn't expect to see any evidence of other species.

So the universe could be teeming with intelligent life, and theres no good reason there can't be any near us, but if there were we would not have existed. Hence we don't see any.

Several times more planets could increase the probability of a distant civilization several times, at the most. That is not a lot, if the initial probability is already tiny.

A rocky planet with no metals have a much weaker magnetic field. A civilization without iron and other metals is more difficult as well. Without heavy radioactive isotopes, volcanoes and tectonics is also different or non existent.

May be some other factors, not all against aliens.

Are there any metals necessary for life?

Yes, a planet around an old star should raise the odds of old, hence, metal-poor planets, but how much? Old stars have plenty of time to do other things to acquire planets, such as stealing them or creating them while passing through metal-rich nebulas. Can we directly measure the composition of this planet?

I find it hard to even take the idea of the Great Filter seriously, given that we don't have a good definition of what life, let alone intelligent life, is. Generalizing from one example is not very productive.

I suggest everyone to think for a moment about the fact that Eliezer somehow created this site, wrote a lot of content people consider useful, and made some decisions about the voting system, which together resulted in a website we like. So perhaps this is some Bayesian evidence that he knows what he is doing.

There's also plenty of Bayesian evidence he's not that great at moderation. SL4 was enough of an eventual failure to prompt the creation of OB; OB prompted the creation of LW; he failed to predict that opening up posting would lead to floods of posts like it did for LW; he signally failed to understand that his reaction to Roko's basilisk was pretty much the worst possible reaction he could engage in, such that even now it's still coming up in print publications about LWers; and this recent karma stuff isn't looking much better.

I am reminded strongly of Jimbo Wales. He too helped create a successful community but seemed to do so accidentally as he later supported initiatives that directly undermined what made that community function.

My thoughts on the recent excitement about "trolls", and moderation, and the new karma penalty for engaging with significantly downvoted comments:

First, the words troll and trolling are being used very indiscriminately, to refer to a wide variety of behaviors and intentions. If LW really needed to have a long-term discussion, about how to deal with the "troll problem", it would be advisable to develop a much more precise vocabulary, and also a more objective, verifiable assessment of how much "trolling" and "troll-feeding" was happening, e.g. a list of examples.

However, it seems that people are already moving on. For future reference, here are all the articles in Discussion which arose directly from the appearance of the new penalty and the ensuing debate: "Karma for last 30 days?", "Dealing with trolling", "Dealing with meta-disussion", "Karma vote checklist?", "Preventing endless September", "Protection against cultural collapse", and hopefully that's the end of it.

So it seems we won't need some specialized troll-ologists to work out all the issues. Rather than a "war on trolls" becoming a permanent element of LW political life, I'm hoping that in the long run this is just an episode in the history of LW governance. The site has transformed several times, it will undoubtedly transform again, and this is just a blip, one bump on the road.

I am somewhat interested in the larger issue of how the site might best produce intellectual progress. Viliam links to Grognor's article, "I Stand by the Sequences" (note that Grognor has since quit LW to join the aphoristic faction on Twitter, like "muflax" and "Kate Evans", who specialize in producing philosophical one-liners). A similar article from the same period is "Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough". These articles received some criticism as promoting dogmatism, groupthink, exclusivity, etc.; Alexander Kruel, aka XiXiDu, another LW defector, blogged about them as evidence of this.

However, I very much agree with the impulse behind those articles, even though I dissent from common LW opinion in some major ways. LW is not a site for anyone to talk about anything; it's not even a site for anyone who considers themselves "rational" to talk about anything. The Sequences do define a philosophy and they need to remain the reference point. Perhaps elements of them will one day, by consensus, be regarded as definitively obsolete, replaced by something better, but they're still the starting point from which any future progress begins, even if it's progress by opposition.

A year ago, I wondered what LW would amount to, if anything. LW is protean, it has many dimensions, but I especially meant its place in the history of ideas. I'm now prepared to say that it can amount to something, that it can be a tributary feeding into the common intellectual culture of humanity, but that will require a certain amount of discipline and due diligence on the part of people who do want it to matter that way. There are many things that are working already, for example the division between Discussion and Main (and perhaps the wiki represents an even higher-level distillation). It's good to have the rambunctious lower level where we are now, as well as the more rarefied and rigorous higher levels. It permits new possibilities to emerge.

Maybe my main message is to serious critics of LW (some of the "trolls" are just critics who aren't doing it constructively). They can actually contribute to the overall process by being more organized in their criticisms. This is one way that intellectual progress occurs: you have a position, you have an opposite position, and both positions are refined as a result of dialogue. LW, the site and the community, does have the mechanisms and the capacity to take on alternative views and give them a fair hearing, even if they are eventually rejected. Work with that, and we can all benefit.

One more thing I want to point out. It's often observed that hardly any sequences have been written since Eliezer. In fact, LWer palladias has written about a dozen series of posts on her blog in Sequence format. She recently achieved notoriety for converting from atheism to religion, so her sequences aren't LW canon, but they represent an interesting example of cross-pollination between very different schools of thought.

Recently we had also a few articles about how to make LW more popular; how to attract more readers and participants. Well, if that happens, we will need more strict moderation than we have now; otherwise we will drown in the noise. For instance, within this week we have a full screen of "Discussion" articles, some of them containing 86, 103, 191 comments. How many of those comments contain really useful information? What is your estimate, how many of that information will you remember after one week? Do you think that visiting LW once in a week is enough to deal with that amount of information? Or do you just ignore most of that? How big part of a week can you spend online reading LW, and still pretending you are being rational instead of procrastinating?

Up voted for this. I can't believe how many people don't get it.

He got my downvotes for making terrible arguments defending a change that won't do what it's supposed to do, while also doing other shitty things. He was also an overconfident dick about the whole situation. The problem isn't the rule, it's the wrong beliefs about how the forums work and how they might be fixed.

That thread is Bayesian evidence against the new poorly thought out rule. The objections that have been raised to it have not even come close to being met. That fact that your own post is a hair breadth away from inflicting negative karma on me should be enough to give you pause.

The reaction to the new rule should not be surprising. If it was surprising, then you should update your model.

Good point about the silliness of people downvoting Eliezer to show their disagreement.

Certainly, there are situations where replying to a negatively voted comment is the right thing to do. But are they the exception, or the rule? Because the new algorithm does not prevent you from doing this; it only provides a trivial disincentive to do so.

Using the phrase 'trivial disincentive' looks like a deliberate reference to this article which would be an unconvincing way to argue that the change won't cause any problems.

And in general, I don't think that the change will have really serious side-effects but I'm in favor of changing complex systems in as small increments as possible. The only sensible, currently relevant reason for implementing the new feature (flooding of the recent comments sidebar) that was given can be solved much less invasively by not having comments from crappy threads show up in the recent comments sidebar. For additional soft paternalist goodness, you could also have replies to comments made in such threads not appear in user's inboxes.

Do you think that visiting LW once in a week is enough to deal with that amount of information? Or do you just ignore most of that? How big part of a week can you spend online reading LW, and still pretending you are being rational instead of procrastinating?

Being able to keep up with all the conversation going on LessWrong seems incompatible with the goal of expanding the community. Reading comments and participating in conversation is a leisure activity. If I were very concerned with being "rational" about my LessWrong usage patterns I would stop reading them at all and stick to just articles (possibly only main section articles if I were really concerned).

I don't really follow. A multivitamin != vitamin D, so it's no surprise that they might do different things. If a multivitamin had no vitamin D in it, or if it had vitamin D in different doses, or if it had substances which interacted with vitamin D (such as calcium), or if it had substances which had negative effects which outweigh the positive (such as vitamin A?), we could well expect differing results.

In this case, all of those are true to varying extents. Some multivitamins I've had contained no vitamin D. The last multivitamin I was taking both contains vitamins used in the negative trials and also some calcium; the listed vitamin D dosage was ~400IU, while I take >10x as much now (5000IU).

Is that unsatisfactory?

Supplements have quality issues often. You'd be surprised what they get away with. Sometimes the coating doesn't digest, so the nutrients aren't absorbed. Sometimes they use the wrong form of the substance because it is cheaper. Sometimes they're even contaminated with lead. I only buy vitamins that have been tested by an independent lab. So far, the best brands I've found were Solgar and Jarrow.

(Links are created by writing [ text ] then ( url ), you seem to have used parentheses for both.)

Please confirm my name on the list of donors Brain Preservation General Fund

I see 'M J GEDDES' listed. Well done!

Out of curiosity, how much did you donate? (If it was >$500, I forgive you all the crap on OB and SL4; actions are more important than words.)

Well, so it was a good decision to play lottery after all!

(I'm joking)

But anyway, congratulations for the success and thanks for the contributions! I personally am going to donate huge amounts of money on similar causes if I get rich. It seems to be the most rational way (according to my goals) to spend them.

According to Wikipedia:

"Before Time Cube, Otis E. Ray advocated the sport of marbles. He authored a book titled Mr. Marbles – Marbles for Everyone,and got the city council of St. Petersburg, Florida to proclaim a "Marbles Week" in the 1970s. In 1987, this became a controversial attempt to establish a million dollar marble tournament inside a huge round structure and establish a philosophical "Order of the Sphere."

By rejecting many small spheres in favor of one large cube, Gene Ray has dedicated his life to demonstrating that reversed stupidity is not intelligence.

It seems Yvian has accepted the challenge and made a steel man attempt.

Consider the great circle passing through your current location and the Earth's poles, together with the great circle perpendicular to it at the poles. These form 4 lines of longitude, each one of which is experiencing a different day simultaneously (for instance, when it is midnight on your line of longitude, it is 6am, noon, and 6pm on the others). Of course, you might wonder why I would single out these 4 lines of longitude instead of just the one at your current location, giving the traditional 1 day per 24 hours, or all of them, giving infinity days per 24 hours. Of course, it would be ridiculous to say that there is a different day going on in one location and another some infinitesimal distance away from it, so the latter is a non-starter. And the standard 1-day answer ignores the fact that different longitudes do not experience the same day. Counting 4 days occurring at the same time makes sense because then the days are separated by 90-degree rotations of the Earth, and correspond to quadrants of a circle. 90 degrees is the most fundamental angle in geometry, and should be considered the primary unit of rotation, as explained in this video (relevant discussion starting at 4:28).

Challenge: Steel man TimeCube.

There is more than one time zone. When you search information about time, Bible is an unreliable source. Also, teachers should not use Bible in classrooms.

Is time cube pro gay and transgender rights? 4 Orientations (Man who likes ladies, man who likes men, Lady who likes ladies, Lady who likes men) and 4 semi-concrete genders (Cismen, Cisladies, FTM and MTF).

Its actually a stealth argument in favour of increased mental health provision, fallen prey to Poe's law.

This should probably be a page on the LW wiki.

I'm currently researching TDT, UDT, and ADT. So far as I am aware, there have been no comprehensive presentations of UDT and ADT. Eliezer's paper itself is a step in the right direction, but is unfinished and has some major flaws.

SI has contracted the philosopher Rachael Briggs to write a paper on TDT for a peer-reviewed, academic journal. Last time I spoke to Luke about it, he said that the pre-print will be done sometime this winter. I don't know whether the pre-print will available to the general public, or just to internal researchers.

Edit: According to Nisan, the information in the second paragraph is out-of-date.

I'm pretty sure greater gender equality in a society translates into women who are less likely to say they look for status in mates. To a certain extent it seems plausible that it influences behaviour, I'm very sceptical of the implied argument that "high status in men" ceases to be a key sexy trait if you just have the right culture though.

The participants were asked in their native language whether certain criteria (such as ‘financial prospect’ and ‘being a good cook’) were important in choosing a mate.

Did they put "is well liked by other women" or "someone who my friends consider cool" on that list?

The researchers had 3,177 respondents complete an online mate preference survey from 10 countries ranking from a low (Finland) to a high (Turkey) gender gap in terms of the Global Gender Gap Index (GGI) – a measure that was recently introduced by World Economic Forum to iron out shortcomings of earlier gender parity measures. The participants were asked in their native language whether certain criteria (such as ‘financial prospect’ and ‘being a good cook’) were important in choosing a mate.

Dr Zentner says what they found was that the gender difference in mate preferences predicted by evolutionary psychology models “is highest in gender-unequal societies, and smallest in the most gender-equal societies.”

So at the beginning of this story there was no AI, there was only nondestructive upload technology, and the researcher sneakily uploaded the 'testee' at the beginning of the test.

Probably worth noting that fish, even predatory ones, don't necessarily have binocular vision, and vice versa for herbivores. Sperm whales are the largest living predators and lack it; fruit bats, who don't hunt, do have it.

There ARE incentives to develop it, or retain it, based on those lifestyle differences, but it makes for a somewhat fuzzy heuristic.

The other thing is this is pretty much restricted to fish and their mutant descendants, the tetrapods. Get outside the chordates and you find different solutions to these problems. Arthropods have several distinct kinds of eye architecture and sometimes their strategies generalize well: house flies (which are prey and scavengers) and dragonflies (which hunt) both have similarly-structure eyes; if anything I think the dragonfly has wider coverage. Spiders often rely on widely-placed eyes of differing strengths and ranges; mantis shrimp only have the two eyes, on stalks, and are renowned predators.

So it might look like a generalizable rule because it applies to so many of the most obvious, easy-to-examine large animals you can find, but remember they're our close anatomical cousins, and they're solving the problem with very similar design constraints.

(Also, primates -- many primates who spend a lot of time in trees, but don't hunt, have binocular vision. In their case it's there because of its benefits for rangefinding and spacial awareness in an arboreal environment.)

I have read stuff that posited that hunters have front eyes (I think the reason given was for more accurate depth perception), and that prey-animals have eyes towards the side of their head to give a wider field of vision.

I'll see if I can refind any of that stuff.

I didn't find exactly what I was thinking of (I think it was probably a book), but a section of the Binocular vision wikipedia article has some information (uncited, unfortunately). Specifically:

Some animals, usually but not always prey animals, have their two eyes positioned on opposite sides of their heads to give the widest possible field of view. Examples include rabbits, buffaloes, and antelopes. In such animals, the eyes often move independently to increase the field of view. Even without moving their eyes, some birds have a 360-degree field of view.

Other animals, usually but not always predatory animals, have their two eyes positioned on the front of their heads, thereby allowing for binocular vision and reducing their field of view in favor of stereopsis. Examples include humans, eagles, wolves, and snakes.

Some predator animals, particularly large ones such as sperm whales and killer whales, have their two eyes positioned on opposite sides of their heads. Other animals that are not necessarily predators, such as fruit bats and a number of primates also have forward facing eyes. These are usually animals that need fine depth discrimination/perception; for instance, binocular vision improves the ability to pick a chosen fruit or to find and grasp a particular branch.

As a female, I wonder what it means that I don't react to behaviors like competing for status, class signaling and spending beyond ones means by being attracted - instead, I have the same feeling I get when people are being immature and stupid. Lol. I have thought about this a lot. I am just not attracted to the ordinary symbols of male power - though I seem to have a few triggers. Height doesn't matter, muscles don't do a thing and money has no effect. The demonstrations of power I do enjoy are when they're able to hold up their end of a debate with me (I keep wishing for someone to win against me), or when they're doing something really, really intellectually difficult. Those things, I do respond to. Fluff? No.

I have to wonder if other women who are as intellectual as I am are the same.

I don't think that you are missing anything.

I personally love nothing more than a Great Loyalty Oath Crusade.

Linked from Richard Carrier is this piece:

Avoid telling racist or sexist or homophobic jokes, unless perhaps if they are empowering because the target of the joke is the racist or sexist or homophobe. Don’t ever target specific real people with jokes or suggestions about rape or anal self-abuse.

I really hate it when someone tells me not to do something in a way that really makes me want to do it. I mean, I never thought of literally telling someone to self-abuse themselves anally before reading this post.

These comments seem terrible

I think this should be "I'll pick the opposite of what you'll predict me to pick", otherwise Omega will Loeb you...

An interesting analogy. If we were to apply it to uploads, one wonders whether the Googlers are more or less productive once inside the Google bubble...

I'm in Vienna through the 29th, and know of at least one other LWer here. PM me and we can meet up.

Did you mean that to be "Worst Argument in the World"?

You didn't miss the stupid questions thread, you can still post there. It doesn't really matter how old a thread is.

People with pet rats notice personality differences.

The world (including brains) is strictly deterministic. The only source of our mental contents are our genetics and what we are "taught" by our environments (and the interactions between them). The only significant difference between rat and human brains for the purpose of uploading should be the greater capacity and more complex interactions supported by human brains.

But there's also an opposing evolutionary pressure: educated women have fewer children.

I'd assign a low probability to this hypothesis. Most of the Flynn effect seems to occur on the lower end of the IQ spectrum moving upwards. Source. This is highly consistent with education, nutrition and diseases hypotheses, but it is difficult to see how to reconcile this with a sexual selection hypothesis.

Also, I'm not sure that your hypothesis fits with expected forms of infidelity. One commonly expected form of common infidelity would be generally with strong males while trying to get a resource rich males to think the children are there's If such infidelity is a common pattern, then one shouldn't expect much selection pressure for intelligence, if anything the opposite.

The fraction of the population which engages in infidelity even in urban environments is not that high. Infidelity rates in both genders are around 5-15%, but only about 3% of offspring have parentage that reflects infidelity. Source, so the selection impact can't be that large.

One thing worth noting though is that one of the pieces of evidence for disease mattering is that there's a correlation between high parasite load and lower average IQ, but your hypothesis would also cause one to expect such a correlation since reduced parasite load would be better correlated with better medicine and more functional urban environments in general. This is evidence in favor of your hypothesis.

I'm not aware of any obvious way to test your hypothesis. I'd be curious if you have any suggested things to look at or if anyone else has any ideas.

How would you test this model?

There are so many other factors, you're probably getting mostly noise there. For instance: I read somewhere that depending on whether babies drink breast milk or formula, they may lose 10 points (to formula) - the reason stated was lack of omega 3. What about lead paint chips? We have banned lead, that should increase IQ - after an initial decrease when lead paint began to be used. (There'd be a similar increase / decrease cycle with the invention of formula.) The point of these two is that as we learn more, we may be preventing a lot of things that previously caused children brain damage. And then there are other health factors which we've improved. In the great depression, I read 10% of the population starved to death. Starvation, for those who survive it, can cause brain damage. Were there other starvations before this, that had stopped happening? When did helmets become popular for people riding bicycles and skateboards and such?

There are just too many factors.

Heh, and I read somewhere that here in America, the Flynn effect has stopped. O.O

When people say that it's "too fast," they are making a quantitative claim. The Flynn effect is a standard deviation per generation. Under your scenario of no selection on women, this would require that the bottom half of the bell curve to have no biological children. 50% cuckoldry, perfectly correlated with IQ? Even men who think they've been cuckolded don't have that high a rate.

You're asking a question about language use here, yes?

Depends on the context.
If 90% of U.S.voters voted for a particular policy proposal I would comfortably describe that as a "vast majority", but if only 90% of sulfur atoms remained in an unstoppered container of sulfur at STP I would describe that as a "startlingly small percentage".

On a minute's thought, I'd say 2 standard deviations above mean portion-size for the context under discussion.

After I started writing this, I looked up on Wikipedia to confirm that there are no working forms of accupuncture, and this gave me the idea that it might have been placebo. Any other explanations I couldn't think of?

Do you need a different explanation? The super-surprising effectiveness of placebo feels a bit offensive to us truth-seekers; but the universe and our brain-architecture isn't required to play fair with us, alas. In certain occasions, the deluded and deceived may have an advantage.

I find some similar cases to be quite surrealistic, given the premise that the treatments used were proven to be ineffective.

? Am a bit confused because when I read the Wikipedia article, it says that accupuncture (both "real" and "sham") was seen to be effective in combatting pain. So where did you read that it was ineffective?

What exactly do you mean by "operate a turing machine."

If you have a simple enough machine and translation of symbols on the tape to stimuli for the animal, it seems easy (in principle) to use classical and operant conditioning on a rat to push the appropriate buttons to change the machine's states.

The title of that article is extremely misleading. The uncertainty principle, as understood in contemporary physics, is a consequence of the (extremely well-confirmed) laws of quantum mechanics. Momentum-space wavefunctions in quantum mechanics are Fourier transforms of position-space wavefunctions. As a consequence, the more you concentrate a wavefunction in position space, the more it spreads out in momentum space, and vice versa. More generally, there will be an "uncertainty principle" associated with any two non-commuting observables (two operators A and B are non-commuting if AB - BA is not 0). Any experiment challenging this version of the uncertainty principle would be contradicting the basic math of quantum mechanics, and the correct response would be to defy the data.

But this experiment does not challenge the uncertainty principle, it challenges Heisenberg's original interpretation of the uncertainty principle. Rather than seeing the principle as a simple consequence of the mathematical relationship between position and momentum, Heisenberg concocted a physical explanation for the principle that appealed to classical intuitions. According to his interpretation, the uncertainty principle is a consequence of the fact that any attempt to measure the position of a particle (by say, bouncing photons off it) disturbs the particle, which leads to a change in its momentum. The correct mathematical explanation of the uncertainty principle, given above, does not make any reference to measurement or disturbance, you'll notice.

Anyway, this experiment only challenges Heisenberg's version of the uncertainty principle, not the actual uncertainty principle. Far from contradicting the math of quantum mechanics, the falsity of Heisenberg's interpretation is actually predicted by that math, as shown by Ozawa. The abstract of the paper you link makes it clear that the authors are distinguishing between the actual uncertainty principle and Heisenberg's interpretation:

While there is a rigorously proven relationship about uncertainties intrinsic to any quantum system, often referred to as “Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle,” Heisenberg originally formulated his ideas in terms of a relationship between the precision of a measurement and the disturbance it must create. Although this latter relationship is not rigorously proven, it is commonly believed (and taught) as an aspect of the broader uncertainty principle.

I guess you could refer to Heisenberg's interpretation of the uncertainty principle as "Heisenberg's uncertainty principle", but it seems to me that that is just a recipe for confusion. Intelligent laypeople will get the impression that this is some profound and fundamental sea-change in the foundations of quantum mechanics. It isn't.