Open Thread, May 11 - May 17, 2015

On the subject of Arimaa, I've noted a general feeling of "This game is hard for computers to play -- and that makes it a much better game!"

Progress of AI research aside, why should I care if I choose a game in which the top computer beats the top human, or one in which the top human beats the top computer? (Presumably both the top human and the top computer can beat me, in either case.)

Is it that in go, you can aspire (unrealistically, perhaps) to be the top player in the world, while in chess, the highest you can ever go is a top human that will still be defeated by computers?

Or is it that chess, which computers are good at, feels like a solved problem, while go still feels mysterious and exciting? Not that we've solved either game in the sense of having solved tic-tac-toe or checkers. And I don't think we should care too much about having solved checkers either, for the purposes of actually playing the game.

I hadn't heard of Armaa before, but based on about 5 minutes worth of reading about the game, I don't understand how it is significantly more suited to natural reasoning that chess. It inherits many of chess's general features that make serial planning more effective than value function knowledge - thus favoring fast thinkers over slow deep thinkers. Go is much more of a natural reasoning game.

From the sound of it, the AI works more or less like chess AI - search with a hand-tuned evaluation function.

That's no more transhumanism than this.

What does 6th year AU mean?

If it helps you, the 2014 census gave for moral beliefs:

Moral Views Accept/lean towards consequentialism: 901, 60.0% Accept/lean towards deontology: 50, 3.3% Accept/lean towards natural law: 48, 3.2% Accept/lean towards virtue ethics: 150, 10.0% Accept/lean towards contractualism: 79, 5.3% Other/no answer: 239, 15.9%

Meta-ethics Constructivism: 474, 31.5% Error theory: 60, 4.0% Non-cognitivism: 129, 8.6% Subjectivism: 324, 21.6% Substantive realism: 209, 13.9%

In general I don't think there are foundational ideas on LW that shouldn't be questioned. Any idea is up for investigation provided the case is well argued.

I endorse discussion of virtue ethics on LW mostly because I haven't seen many arguments for why I should use it or discussions of how using it works. I've seen a lot of pro-utilitarianism and "how to do things with utilitarianism" pieces and a lot of discussion of deontology in the form of credible precommitments and also as heuristics and rule utilitarianism, but I haven't really seen a virtue ethics piece that remotely approaches Yvain's Consequentialism FAQ in terms of readability and usability.

When you say virtue ethics, it sounds like you are describing consequentialism implemented on human software.

If we're talking about the philosopher's virtue ethics, this question should clarify: Are virtues virtuous because they lead to moral behavior? Or is behavior moral because it cultivates virtue?

The first is just applied consequentialism. The second is the philosopher's virtue ethics.

Consequentialism, where morality is viewed through a lens of what happens due to human actions, is a major part of LessWrong. Utilitarianism specifically, where you judge an act by the results, is a subset of consequentialism and not nearly as widely accepted. Virtue Ethics are generally well liked and it's often said around here that "Consequentialism is what's right, Virtue Ethics are what works." I think that practical guide to virtue ethics would be well received.

Is utilitarianism foundational to LessWrong?

No. Individual utility calculations are, as a component of decision theory, but decision-theoretic utility and interpersonal-comparison utility are different things with different assumptions.

encourage people to "build character" so as to become more moral beings or improve their behaviour.

This is a solid view, and one of the main ones I take--but I observe that listing out goals and developing training regimens have different purposes and uses.

I think virtue ethics is sufficiently edgy, new, different these days to be interesting. Go on.

Again I recommend a poll:

Is utilitarianism foundational to LessWrong? (use the middle option to see results only) [pollid:964]

Also, have you read this post? The virtue tag only points at it and one other, but searching will likely find more.

Given that I know somebody is a virtue ethicist, I place a prior probability of 20% that they are bisexual, and a prior probability of 40% that they are some variant of highly functional sociopath.

That's adjusted for overconfidence. I -want- to assign 60% to bisexuality and 80% to sociopath.

Gravity is a conserved vector field. Any closed path through a gravitational potential leaves you with the same energy you started with. And if it doesn't you've stolen energy that was creating the gravity in the first place leaving less for the next circle to take and are thus just transforming energy from one to another.

Wormholes don't quite behave like portals in the game.

When something drops into a wormhole with zero velocity, the apparent mass of the entry end increases by the mass of the object and the apparent mass of the exit end decreases by the mass of the object. At some point one of the ends should acquire negative mass. I'm not sure what that means: either it literally behaves as a negative mass object or this is an indication of the wormhole becoming unstable and collapsing.

Similarly, when something with momentum drops into a wormhole, the momentum is added to the apparent momentum of the entry end and subtracted from the apparent momentum of the exit end. The apparent masses change in a way that ensures energy conservation. This means that the gain in energy of the "cycling" object comes from wormhole mass loss and transfer of mass from the high end to the low end. Again, if it's true that the wormhole becomes unstable when its mass is supposed to go negative, that would be the end of the process.

I have a PhD in Physics and my thesis was, in part, related to wormholes, so here it goes. (Squark covered most of your question already, though.)

If something falls into a black hole, it increases the black hole mass. If something escapes a black hole (such as Hawking radiation), it decreases the black hole mass. Same with white holes. A wormhole is basically two black/white holes connected by a throat. One pass through the portal would increase the mass of the entrance and decrease the mass of the exit by the mass of the passing object.

A portal with two ends having opposite masses would behave rather strangely: they sort of repel (the equivalent of Newton's law of gravity), but the gravitational force acting on the negative-mass end propels it toward the positive-mass end. As a result, the portal as a whole will tend to accelerate toward the positive end (entrance) and fly away, albeit rather slowly.

In addition, due to momentum and angular momentum conservation, the portal will start spinning to counteract the motion of the passing object.

At a glance, it seems like you're asking for extrapolation from a "suppose X - therefore X" - type statement, where X is the invalidation of conservation laws.

I am just taking wormholes to mean "altered connectivity of space" and leave out the "massive concentrations of mass" aspect.

The curious thing about portals portals is that they somehow magically know to flip gravity when a object travels thourht. If the portal is just ordinary space there shouldn't be a sudden gradient to the gravity field but it should go smoothly from one direction to the other. And in additon gravity ought to work throught portals. that would mean that if you have a portal in a ceiling it ought to pull stuff throught it towards the ceiling (towards the center of mass beyond the portal). That is a standard "infinite fall" portal setup should feel equal gravity up and down midway between the portals. That kind of setup could be used to store kinetic energy but it doesn't generate it per se.

However if portals aftected the gravity fields it could be that the non-standard gravity environment could be a major problem and would work even when you didn't want it to. That is since the net 0 gravity point of a infinite fall setup needs to transition smoothly to the "standard gravity environment" that likely means that quite a ways "outside" the portal pair there would be a reduced gravity environment.

You can probably think about it as the lines of a gravity field also going through the wormhole, and I believe the gravitational force would be 0 around the wormhole.

The actual answer involves thinking about gravity and spacetime as a geometry, which I don't think you want to answer your question.

I doubt it will help scientists reverse engineer the function of the brain any faster. However it could potentially be very useful for helping AI researchers develop artificial neural networks.

ANNs aren't really tied to neuroscience research, and they probably won't help with emulations. But they are the current leading approach to AI, and increased computing power would significantly help AI research, as it has in the past.

Neural networks chips aren't neurons. Neurons are much more complex than nodes in artificial neural networks.

This ought to be verified by someone to whom the ideas are genuinely unfamiliar.

Even with my own business, I found it incredibly hard to find lots of tasks which I could hand off to an assistant from whom I didn't know what their strengths were, and couldn't train.

A few thoughts based on eliminating/ruling out possible causes:

• Can you avoid making cell -> cell calls? If you're both on a smartphone with wifi could you use e.g. Skype or Messenger?
• Can you both use a hands free kit? This should eliminate poor positioning of the microphone/earpiece.
• Are you or your girlfriend in a poor signal area? Does going outside to make the call reduce the problem? There are options such as GSM signal boosters and femtocells that might be worth exploring.
• Some carriers have deployed HD Voice service. See if your phone and carrier(s) support this.

Sounds like the only disutility of the stuff is that it annoys some people, but it can't annoy you if you dont notice it...so why bring it up?

I think what would be useful is to distinguish a story (a typically linear narrative) and a model (a known-to-be-simplified map of some piece of reality). They are sufficiently different and often serve different goals. In particular, stories are rarely quantitative and models usually are.

You are talking about prediction vs causality. I agree, we understand via causality, and causality lets us take data beyond what is actually observed into the realm of the hypothetical. Good post.

Yup. Nick Bostrom is basically the man. Above and beyond being the man, he's a respectable focal point for a sea change that has been happening for broader reasons.

You can detect newbies by their low karma and moderate positive ratio. The registration age doesn't mean much really.

This is a good place to ask about how the site works.

Here -- it's in Main rather than Discussion.

Offtopic, but I like your theory of depression have you ever written about it elsewhere longer? Or any recommended online readings?

Well, for a start there's the Rationalist Masterlist currently hosted by Yxoque (MathiasZaman here on LW). You could announce your presence there and ask to be added to the list, or just lurk around some of the blogs for a while and send anonymous asks to people to get a feel for the community before you set up an account.

It does seem familiar.

An idea: auto-generated anki-style flashcards for mathematical notation.

Auto-generated exercises might be better. Compared with e.g. learning a language, there aren't many elementary components to mathematical notation to be memorised.

The exercises might be auto-rated for complexity, and a generalised Anki for this sort of material would generate random examples of various degrees of complexity, and make the distribution of complexity depend in some way on the distribution of your errors with respect to complexity.

Language learning materials might be similarly generalised from the simple vocabulary lists that flashcards are usually used for.

I like the idea of making it easier to understand mathematical notation, and get more practice at it. However, using flash cards to implement it could be problematic.

As I learned more and more mathematical notation while studying engineering, it became clear that a lot of the interpretation of the notation depends upon context. For example, if you see vertical lines to either side of an expression, does that mean absolute value or the determinant of a matrix? Is i representing the imaginary number, or current, or the vectors in the same direction as the x-axis? (As an example, electrical engineers use j for the imaginary number, since I represents current.)

For a sufficiently narrow topic, the flashcards might be useful, but it might set up false expectations that the meaning of the symbols will apply outside that narrow topic. There is not a one-to-one correspondence between symbols and meaning.

It's important to understand the notation before you put it into Anki. Automatically generated cards with mathematical notation that the person doesn't yet understand is asking for trouble.

Don't need to posit crazy things, just think about selection bias -- are the sorts of people that tend to become rationalist randomly sampled from the population? If not, why wouldn't there be blind spots in such people just based on that?

Depends on how you decide what truth is, and what qualifies it to be "unearthed."

But for one universe in which some truth, for some value of truth, can be unearthed, for some value of unearthed, while other truth can't be:

Imagine a universe in which 12.879% (exactly) of all matter is a unique kind of matter that shares no qualities in common with any other matter, and is almost entirely nonreactive with all other kinds of matter, and was created by a process not shared in common with any other matter, which had no effect whatsoever on any other matter. Any truths about this matter, including its existence and the percentage of the universe composed of it, would be completely non-observational. The only reaction this matter has with any other matter is when it is in a specific configuration which requires extremely high levels of the local equivalent of negative entropy, at which point it emits a single electromagnetic pulse. This was used once by an intelligence species composed of this unique matter who then went on to die in massive wars, to encode in a series of flashes of light every detail they knew about physics, and was observed by one human-equivalent monk ascetic, who used a language similar to morse code to write down the sequence of pulses, which he described as a holy vision. Centuries later, these pulses were translated into mathematical equations which described the unique physics of this concurrent universe of exotic matter, but no mechanism of proving the existence or nonexistence of this exotic matter, save that the equations are far beyond the mathematics of anyone alive at the time the signal was encoded, and it has become a controversial matter whether or not it was an elaborate hoax by a genius.

What do you mean with "Rationalism"?

The LW standard definition is that it's about systematized winning. If the Matrix overlords punish everybody who tries to do systematized winning than it's bad to engage in it. Especially when the Matrix overlords do it via mind reading. The Christian God might see it as a sin.

If you don't use the LW definition of rationalism, then rationalism and empiricism are not the same thing. Rationalism generally refers to gathering knowledge by reasoning as opposed to gathering it by other ways such as experiments or divine revelation.

they will tell you Rationalism can only find some but not all truths

Gödel did prove that it's impossible to find all truths. This website is called Lesswrong because it's not about learning all truths but just about becoming less wrong.

There's no guarantee we should be able to find any truths using any method. It's a miracle that the universe is at all comprehensible. The question isn't "when can't we learn everything?", it's "why can we learn anything at all?".

A universe where humans are running on brains with certain glitches that prevent them from coming to correct conclusions through reasoning about specific topics.

Hm. I have been camping quite a few times, but would not really be comfortable camping alone. Might be true for you as well due to perceived lowering of risk.

ETA: This is more of a preference thing for me than an actual concern thing.

It is because you forgot to pack TP. Bring TP and things will be ok.

After some further mental gymnastics, the plan I've come up with which seems to most greatly reduce the disquiet is to buy a backup cellphone, small enough to turn off, stick in a pocket and forget about until I drop my smartphone in a stream. Something along the lines of taking one of the watchphones from http://www.dx.com/s/850%2b1900?category=529&PriceSort=up and snipping off the wristband, or one of the smaller entries in http://www.dx.com/s/850%2b1900?PriceSort=up&category=531 ; along with the $25/year plan from http://www.speakout7eleven.ca/ . Something on the order of $65 to $85 seems a moderate price for peace of mind.

I am, however, going to take at least a day before placing any such order, to find out if such a plan still seems like it /will/ offer increased peace of mind. Not to mention, whether I can come up with (or get suggestions for) any plans which reveal that my actual disquiet arises from some other cause.

Despite medical and police personnel aware of his Alcor bracelet, he was taken to the medical examiner’s office in Santa Barbara, as they did not understand Alcor’s process and assumed that the circumstances surrounding his death would pre-empt any possible donation directives. Since this all transpired late on a Friday evening, Alcor was not notified of the incident until the following Monday morning.

How the hell are they treating this as a successful preservation? The body spent two days "warm and dead".

Looking at their past case reports, this seems to be fairly normal. Unless you're dying of a known terminal condition and go die in their hospice in Arizona, odds are the only thing getting froze is a mindless, decaying corpse.

In Praise of Life (Let’s Ditch the Cult of Longevity)

That article would be better titled "In Praise of Death", and is a string of the usual platitudes and circularities.

Overcoming Bias: Why Not?

Why not? Because (the article says) rationalists are cold, emotionless Vulcans, and valuing reason is a mere prejudice.

Prepping for cataclysms, neglecting ordinary emergencies

Maybe there are people who do that, but the article is pure story-telling, without a single claim of fact. File this one under "fiction".

A cryonics novel:

The New World: A Novel Hardcover – May 5, 2015 by Chris Adrian (Author), Eli Horowitz (Author)

The previous links scored 0 out of 3 for rational content, so coming to this one, I thought, what am I likely to find? Clearly, the way to bet is that it's against cryonics. There's only about a blogpost's worth of story in the idea of corpsicles just being unrevivable, so the novel will have to have revival working, but either it works horribly badly, or the revived people find themselves in a bad situation.

Click through...and I am, I think, pleasantly surprised to find that it might, in the end, be favourable to the idea. Or maybe not, there are no reviews and it's difficult to tell from the blurb:

Furious and grieving, Jane fights to reclaim Jim from Polaris [the "shadowy" cryonics company]. Revived in the future, Jim learns that he must sacrifice every memory of Jane if he wants to stay alive in the new world.

Spoiler request! How does it play out in the end?

Tomorrowland: Our Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact Paperback – May 12, 2015 by Steven Kotler (Author)

Yep, futurological journalism. Pass.

Another of cryonics' founding generation goes into cryo, though under really bad circumstances.

Dr. Laurence Pilgeram becomes Alcor’s 135th patient on April 15, 2015

Shit happens.

Just FYI, it looks like you goofed that last link.

1. Am I on a remotely right track here?

That sounds like a subset of neurotypical behavior. I'm neurotypical and from the very first sentence ("Neurotypicals like social mingling primarily because they play a constant game of social status points, both in the eyes of others (that is real status) and just feeling like getting status (this is more like self-esteem).") I found it contrary to my experience. Which is not to say it is wrong, and it certainly looks like behavior I have seen, but it kind of suggests that there is One Neurotypical Experience as opposed to a spectrum.

That is reading the initial "neurotypicals" as "all/most neurotypicals" as opposed to "some neurotypicals" or "some subset of neurotypicals." I think you are trying to describe typical neurotypical behavior, so I would read that "neurotypicals" as trying to describe how most neurotypicals behave.

But I am not the most central example of a neurotypical, so others may find it a more accurate description of their social experiences. I don't like social mingling, and I avoid most games of social status points. My extroversion score is 7 out of 100, which is likely a factor in not seeing myself in your description of neurotypicals.

2. Does the statement "nerds / neckbeards often have poor social skills" unpack into "people on the spectrum not even noticing that neurotypicals don't just mindlessly follow social customs, but they are involved in a status micropayment exchange" ?

There seem to be several assumptions built into that unpacking. For example, it suggests that all/most nerds are on the spectrum. My characterization of neurotypical socialization would include mindlessly following social customs as well as enjoying the social game. I don't think highly social neurotypicals would describe their behavior as a "status micropayment exchange"; that seems like the wrong metaphor and suggests the dominant model as a fixed-sum status game, whereas many (most?) social interactions have no need for an exchange of status points.

Even when a social status point game is in play, I would expect more interactions to involve the recognition of point totals rather than an exchange. "Mutual reassurance or reinforcement of each others status" seems on point.

If the above is the start of a hypothesis, it seems to me that it links greetings and status point exchange too strongly. Greetings are rarely an occasion to gain or lose points, although they may be occasions to discover the current score.

"Pinging" is a metaphor I have seen used productively in these attempts to explain neurotypical social behavior. The greeting is a ping, a mutual recognition that someone is there and potentially responsive to interaction, potentially also exchanging some basic status information.

If you say Bob likes X because of Y, what do you mean with it? Do you mean that if Y wouldn't be there Bob wouldn't like X?

I don't think that there a good reason to believe that if you take status away no neurotically would engage in social mingling or like engaging in it.

Apart from that "status" is a word that's quite abstract. It's much more something "map" than "territory". That produces danger to get into too vague to be wrong territory.