Open thread, Mar. 14 - Mar. 20, 2016

This post by Eric Raymond should be interesting to LW :-) Extended quoting:

There’s a link between autism and genius says a popular-press summary of recent research. If you follow this sort of thing (and I do) most of what follows doesn’t come as much of a surprise. We get the usual thumbnail case studies about autistic savants. There’s an interesting thread about how child prodigies who are not autists rely on autism-like facilities for pattern recognition and hyperconcentration. There’s a sketch of research suggesting that non-autistic child-prodigies, like autists, tend to have exceptionally large working memories. Often, they have autistic relatives. Money quote: “Recent study led by a University of Edinburgh researcher found that in non-autistic adults, having more autism-linked genetic variants was associated with better cognitive function.”

But then I got to this: “In a way, this link to autism only deepens the prodigy mystery.” And my instant reaction was: “Mystery? There’s a mystery here? What?” Rereading, it seems that the authors (and other researchers) are mystified by the question of exactly how autism-like traits promote genius-level capabilities.

At which point I blinked and thought: “Eh? It’s right in front of you! How obvious does it have to get before you’ll see it?”

... Yes, there is an enabling superpower that autists have through damage and accident, but non-autists like me have to cultivate: not giving a shit about monkey social rituals.

Neurotypicals spend most of their cognitive bandwidth on mutual grooming and status-maintainance activity. They have great difficulty sustaining interest in anything that won’t yield a near-immediate social reward. By an autist’s standards (or mine) they’re almost always running in a hamster wheel as fast as they can, not getting anywhere.

The neurotypical human mind is designed to compete at this monkey status grind and has zero or only a vanishingly small amount of bandwidth to spare for anything else. Autists escape this trap by lacking the circuitry required to fully solve the other-minds problem; thus, even if their total processing capacity is average or subnormal, they have a lot more of it to spend on what neurotypicals interpret as weird savant talents.

Non-autists have it tougher. To do the genius thing, they have to be either so bright that they can do the monkey status grind with a tiny fraction of their cognitive capability, or train themselves into indifference so they basically don’t care if they lose the neurotypical social game.

Once you realize this it’s easy to understand why the incidence of socially-inept nerdiness doesn’t peak at the extreme high end of the IQ bell curve, but rather in the gifted-to-low-end-genius region closer to the median. I had my nose memorably rubbed in this one time when I was a guest speaker at the Institute for Advanced Study. Afternoon tea was not a nerdfest; it was a roomful of people who are good at the social game because they are good at just about anything they choose to pay attention to and the monkey status grind just isn’t very difficult. Not compared to, say, solving tensor equations.

Simple hypothesis relating to Why Don't Rationalists Win:

Everyone has some collection of skills and abilities, including things like charisma, luck, rationality, determination, networking ability, etc. Each person's success is limited by constraints related to these abilities, in the same way that an application's performance is limited by the CPU speed, RAM, disk speed, networking speed, etc of the machine(s) it runs on. But just as for many applications the performance bottleneck isn't CPU speed, for most people the success bottleneck isn't rationality.

Probably everybody had seen it, but EY wrote long post on FB about AlphaGO which get 400 reposts. The post overestimates power of AlphaGO, and in general it seems to me that EY did too much conclusions based on very small available information (3:0 wins at the moment of the post - 10 pages of conclusions). The post's comment section includes contribution from Robin Hanson about usual foom's speed and type topic. EY later updated his predictions based on Segol win on game 4 and stated that even superhuman AI could make dumb mistakes, which may result in new type of AI failures.

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154018209759228?pnref=story

History of "That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be"

First said by Hodgell, Yudkowsky wrote a variant, Sagan didn't say it.

Ok, now Lenet run out his AI after 30 years of development https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600984/an-ai-with-30-years-worth-of-knowledge-finally-goes-to-work/

Russian Compreno system, which manually model language is also suggested first service Findo (after 20 years and 80 million USD) https://abbyy.technology/en:features:linguistic:semanitc-intro

Three days ago, I went through a traditional rite of passage for junior academics: I received my first rejection letter on a paper submitted for peer review. After I received the rejection letter, I forwarded the paper to two top professors in my field, who both confirmed that the basic arguments seem to be correct and important. Several top faculty members have told me they believe the paper will eventually be published in a top journal, so I am actually feeling more confident about the paper than before it got rejected.

I am also very frustrated with the peer review system. The reviewers found some minor errors, and some of their other comments were helpful in the sense that they reveal which parts of the paper are most likely to be misunderstood. However, on the whole, the comments do not change my belief in the soundness of the idea, and in my view they mostly show that the reviewers simply didn’t understand what I was saying.

One comment does stand out, and I’ve spent a lot of energy today thinking about its implications: Reviewer 3 points out that my language is “too casual”. I would have had no problem accepting criticism that my language is ambiguous, imprecise, overly complicated, grammatically wrong or idiomatically weird. But too casual? What does that even mean? I have trouble interpreting the sentence to mean anything other than an allegation that I fail at a signaling game where the objective is to demonstrate impressiveness by using an artificially dense and obfuscating academic language.

From my point of view, “understanding” something means that you are able to explain it in a casual language. When I write a paper, my only objective is to allow the reader to understand what my conclusions are and how I reached them. My choice of language is optimized only for those objectives, and I fail to understand how it is even possible for it to be “too casual”.

Today, I feel very pessimistic about the state of academia and the institution of peer review. I feel stronger allegiance to the rationality movement than ever, as my ideological allies in what seems like a struggle about what it means to do science. I believe it was Tyler Cowen or Alex Tabarrok who pointed out that the true inheritors of intellectuals like Adam Smith are not people publishing in academic journals, but bloggers who write in a causal language. I can’t find the quote but today it rings more true than ever.

I understand that I am interpreting the reviewers choice of words in a way that is strongly influenced both by my disappointment in being rejected, and by my pre-existing frustration with the state of academia and peer review. I would very much appreciate if anybody could steelman the sentence “the writing is too casual”, or otherwise help me reach a less biased understanding of what just happened.

The paper is available at https://rebootingepidemiology.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/effect-measure-paper-0317162.pdf . I am willing to send a link to the reviewers’ comments by private message to anybody who is interested in seeing it.

A while ago I was, for some reason, answering a few hundred questions with yes-or-no answers. I thought I would record my confidence in the answers in 5% intervals, to check my calibration. What I found was that for 60%+ confidence I am fairly well calibrated, but when I was 55% confidant I was only right 45% of the time (100)!

I think what happened is that sometimes I would think of a reason why the proposition X is true, and then think of some reasons why X is false, only I would now be anchored onto my original assessment that X is true. So instead of changing my mind to 'X is false' I would only decrease my confidence.

I.e. my thought processes looked like this

reason why X is true -> X is true, 60% confidence -> reasons why X is false -> X is true, 55% confidence

When it should be:

reason why X is true -> X is true, 60% confidence -> reasons why X is false -> CHANGE OPINION -> X is false, 55% confidence

In The genie knows, but it doesn't care, RobbBB argues that even if an AI is intelligent enough to understand its creator's wishes in perfect detail, that doesn't mean that its creator's wishes are the same as its own values. By analogy, even though humans were optimized by evolution to have as many descendants as possible, we can understand this without caring about it. Very smart humans may have lots of detailed knowledge of evolution & what it means to have many descendants, but then turn around and use condoms & birth control in order to stymie evolution's "wishes".

I thought of a potential way to get around this issue:

1. Create a tool AI.

2. Use the tool AI as a tool to improve itself, similar to the way I might use my new text editor to edit my new text editor's code.

3. Use the tool AI to build an incredibly rich world-model, which includes, among other things, an incredibly rich model of what it means to be Friendly.

4. Use the tool AI to build tools for browsing this incredibly rich world-model and getting explanations about what various items in the ontology correspond to.

5. Browse this incredibly rich world-model. Find the item in the ontology that corresponds to universal flourishing and tell the tool AI "convert yourself in to an agent and work on this".

There's a lot hanging on the "tool AI/agent AI" distinction in this narrative. So before actually working on this plan, one would want to think hard about the meaning of this distinction. What if the tool AI inadvertently self-modifies & becomes "enough of an agent" to deceive its operator?

The tool vs agent distinction probably has something to do with (a) the degree to which the thing acts autonomously and (b) the degree to which its human operator stays in the loop. A vacuum is a tool: I'm not going to vacuum over my prized rug and rip it up. A Roomba is more of an agent: if I let it run while I am out of the house, it's possible that it will rip up my prized rug as it autonomously moves about the house. But if I stay home and glance over at my Roomba every so often, it's possible that I'll notice that my rug is about to get shredded and turn off my Roomba first. I could also be kept in the loop if the thing gives me warnings about undesirable outcomes I might not want: for example, my Roomba could scan the house before it ran, giving me an inventory of all the items it might come in contact with.

An interesting proposition I'm tempted to argue for is the "autonomy orthogonality thesis". The original "orthogonality thesis" says that how intelligent an agent is and what values it has are, in principle, orthogonal. The autonomy orthogonality thesis says that how intelligent an agent is and the degree to which it has autonomy and can be described as an "agent" are also, in principle, orthogonal. My pocket calculator is vastly more intelligent than I am at doing arithmetic, but it's still vastly less autonomous than me. Google Search can instantly answer questions it would take me a lifetime to answer working independently, but Google Search is in no danger of "waking up" and displaying autonomy. So the question here is whether you could create something like Google Search that has the capacity for general intelligence while lacking autonomy.

I feel like the "autonomy orthogonality thesis" might be a good steelman of a lot of mainstream AI researchers who blow raspberries in the general direction of people concerned with AI safety. The thought is that if AI researchers have programmed something in detail to do one particular thing, it's not about to "wake up" and start acting autonomous.

Another thought: One might argue that if a Tool AI starts modifying itself in to a superintelligence, the result will be too complicated for humans to ever verify. But there's an interesting contradiction here. A key disagreement in the Hanson/Yudkowsky AI-foom debate was the existence of important, undiscovered chunky insights about intelligence. Either these insights exist or they don't. If they do, then the amount of code one needs to write in order to create a superintelligence is relatively little, and it should be possible for humans to independently verify the superintelligence's code. If they don't, then we are more likely going to have a soft takeoff anyway because intelligence is about building lots of heterogenous structures and getting lots of little things right, and that takes time.

Another thought: maybe it's valuable to try to advance natural language processing, differentially speaking, so AIs can better understand human concepts by reading about them?

The recently posted Intelligence Squared video titled Don't Trust the Promise of Artificial Intelligence may be of interest to LW readers, if only because of IQ2's decently sized cultural reach and audience.

Replication crisis: does anyone know of a list of solid, replicated findings in the social sciences? (all I know is that there were 36 in the report by Open Science Collaboration, and those are the ones I can easily find)

Telling truth to any face -

Not a lie, with mortar hoary -

Go apace to any place,

To attend to any story.

Happy belated Pi Day, everyone!

I want to make a desktop map application of my city, kinda like Paradox Interactive's games. My city is 280 km^2, and I would like it at a street level detail. I want to be able to just overlay multiple layers of different maps. What I have in mind is displaying predicted tram locations, purchasing power maps, and pretty much any information I can find on one map, and combining these at will, with a reasonable speed (and I would much prefer it to be seamless, like in a game, and not displaying white spots at the edges while it is loading)

Does anyone know of some toolset for such?

Do you have a background in formal debate?

[pollid:1129]

If you do, do you think it was worth the time?

[pollid:1130]

If you don't, do you regret not having it?

[pollid:1131]

I've always enjoyed Kurzweil's story about how the human genome project was "almost done" when they had decoded the first 1% of the genome, because the doubling rate of genomic science was so high at the time. (And he was right).

It makes me wonder if we're "almost done" with FAI.

I don't really know where we are with FAI. I don't know if our progress is even knowable, since we don't really know where we're going. There's certainly not a percentage associated with FAI Completion. However, there are a number of technologies that might suddenly become very helpful.

Douglas Lenat's Cyc, of which I was reminded by another comment in this very thread, seems to have become much more powerful than I would have expected the first time I heard of it. I'm actually blown away and a little alarmed by the things it can apparently do now. IBM's Watson is another machine that can interpret and answer complex queries and demonstrates real semantic awareness. These two systems alone indicate that the state of the art in what you might call "superhuman-knowledge-plus-superhuman-logical-deduction" is ripe (or almost ripe) for exploitation by human FAI researchers. (You could also call these systems "Weak Oracles" or something.)

Nobody expects Cyc or Watson to FOOM in the next few years, but other near-future Weak Oracles might still greatly accelerate our progress in exploring, developing and formalizing the technology needed to solve the Control Problem. It intuitively feels like Weak Oracle tech might actually enable the sort of rapid doubling in progress that we've observed in other domains.

The AlphaGo victory has made me realize that the quality of the future really hinges on which of several competing exponential trends happens to have the sharpest coefficient. Specifically, will we get really-strong-but-not-generally-intelligent Weak Oracles before we get GAI? Where is the crossover of those two curves?

Modest proposal for Friendly AI research:

Create a moral framework that incentivizes assholes to cooperate.

Specifically, create a set of laws for a "community", with the laws applying only to members, that would attract finance guys, successful "unicorn" startup owners, politicians, drug dealers at the "regional manager" level, and other assholes.

Win condition: a "trust app" that everyone uses, that tells users how trustworthy every single person they meet is.

Lose condition: startup fund assholes end up with majority ownership of the first smarter-than-human-level general AI, and no one's given smart people an incentive not to hurt dumb people.

If you can't incentivize smart selfish people to "cooperate" instead of "defect", then why do you think you can incentivize an AI to be friendly? What's to stop a troll from deleting the "Friendly" part the second the AI source code hits the Internet? Keep in mind that the 4chan community has a similar ethos to LW: namely "anything that can be destroyed by a basement dweller should be".

Looking for advice with something it seems LW can help with.

I'm currently part of a program the trains highly intelligent people to be more effective, particularly with regards to scientific research and effecting change within large systems of people. I'm sorry to be vague, but I can't actually say more than that.

As part of our program, we organize seminars for ourselves on various interesting topics. The upcoming one is on self-improvement, and aims to explore the following questions: Who am I? What are my goals? How do I get there?

Naturally, I'm of the opinion that rationalist thought has a lot to offer on all of those questions. (I also have ulterior motives here, because I think it would be really cool to get some of these people on board with rationalism in general.) I'm having a hard time narrowing down this idea to a lesson plan I can submit to the organizers, so I thought I'd ask for suggestions.

The possible formats I have open for an activity are a lecture, a workshop/discussion in small groups, and some sort of guided introspection/reading activity (for example just giving people a sheet with questions to ponder on it, or a text to reflect on).

I've also come up with several possible topics: How to Actually Change Your Mind (ideas on how to go about condensing it are welcome), practical mind-hacking techniques and/or techniques for self-transparency, or just information on heuristics and biases because I think that's useful in general.

You can also assume the intended audience already know each other pretty well, and are capable of rather more analysis and actual math than is average.

Ideas for topics or activities, particularly ones that include a strong affective experience because those are generally better at getting poeple to think about this sort of thing for the first time, are welcome.

Do you guys know how you can prevent sleep paralysis?

Does it make a difference if an organism reproduces in multiple smaller populations versus one larger, if the number of offspring at generation one is held constant? (score is determined by the number of offspring and their relatedness, so the standard game)

Smaller populations are more prone to genetic drift, but in both directions, right?

Does this change somehow if the populations are connected, with different rates of flow depending on the direction?

For example, in humans, migration to the capitals (and in general, urbanization) happens way more often than the converse. I also believe that people are unlikely to migrate between like-sized cities, cause what's the point, but that's just an assumption. In this case, for genes to spread from one small population to another, they have to go through the capital first. OTOH, the populations leaving source small population could be more related to the original.

So, uh, in general, how would one find the optimal strategy here? ...is there a difference?

I have a rationalist/rationalist-adjacent friend who would love a book recommendation on how to be good at dating and relationships. Their specific scenario is that they already have a stable relationship, but they're relatively new to having relationships in general, and are looking for lots of general advice.

Since the sanity waterline here is pretty high, I though I'd ask if anyone had any recommendations or not. If not, I'll just point them to this LW post, though having a bit more material to read through might suit them well.

Thanks!

Isn't some sort of deism at least plausible and reasonable at this juncture? Is there a materialistic theory of what happened before the big bang that is worth putting any stock in? Or are we in an agnostic wait-and-see mode regarding pre-big bang events?

• Private insurance approaches to universal healthcare seem like the only universal healthcare policy formulation that doesn't subsidise and therefore incentivise poor health decisions. Therefore, the primacy of my justice ethics would support that or non-universal health care policy formulations. However, I don't know if evidence supports or opposes the execution of that perverse incentive in actual human behaviour and whether complex other factors (e.g increased productivity of the subsidised risk takers?) sufficiently compensates individuals who are making legitimate, egoistic decisions or better (prosocial). Anyone know what the evidence says, preferably with an indication of the strength of evidence so others evidence can be synthesised appropriately?
• How do I work out whether an ethical duck farm is a profitable venture?
• Say this with me 'I will cognitively reframe and restructure the knowledge of antecedents and determinants of negative, inadvertable consequences because cognitive behavioural therapy actually works.'
• I'm interested in things people might expect or seek reactions after disclosing information or asking a question. What kind of reaction are you expecting in response to whatever you comment to this reply?
• Do you believe the affective fallacy is a legit fallacy? I don't, but I think attitudes to the fallacy would be a good correlate of attitudes to my writing.
• Strategically, do you think more like a naval admiral, or a pirate captain?
• By taxing tobacco above the Ramsey rate up to Pigovian rates it is sacrificing government tax revenue (by cannibalising the elasticity of demand) for public health gains that can be gained in other ways (eg by tobacco licenses), but that wouldn't that reduce demand too due to less consumption. That’s because even though tobacco tax revenue is high it doesn't match the costs externalised on the health care system.

Counterintuitive relevant fact: Adam Smith support Pigovian taxes

'Sugar, rum and tobacco are commodities which are no where necessaries of life, which are become objects of almost universal consumption, and which are therefore extremely proper subjects of taxation.'

• Adam Smith. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776i

• Got the travel bug? Want a cure? Check this out

• I recently almost asked someone if they had a strategy....for what amounted to the formulation fo their startup's strategy, meta addiction diagnosed!
• Maybe it's because I'm compulsive. Maybe it's because I'm clingy to motivational videos, maybe it's because I'm a gambling addict. So, I've got off the hedonic treadmill. How? A mindblowing attitude adjustment on desire. This culls my impulsivity and reactiveness. Thank you Julien Blanc. A supplement I'm too lazy to watch usually myself here. I wouldn't be suprised if people look back at PUAs with the admiration afforded to social movements with the benefits of historic hindsight, who are reviled or ignored in their living prime.
• Want to see the world's most competed, battle tested diplomat in action? Here's a video of him in an interview here: Interview: Dr Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran's Foreign Minister with ABC's Chief Foreign Correspondent Philip Williams. He's the consequence of being a career diplomat AND an academic THEN a politician.
• The standard of evidence for cocoa butter's efficacy on Wikipeida is citing Livestrong articles. They're natural, so are an attractive lip balm option, but do they work?
• Here's an idea that's before it's time: A nightclub that plays music at a level that won’t cause permanent hearing damage...could go hand in hand with sober nightclubs ...maybe even silent discos for talking friendly, individual tailoring and no noise pollution

One major difference between left and right is the stance on personal responsibility.

Leftist intellectuals (tends to) think society influence trumps individual capabilities, so people are not responsible for their misfortunes and deserve to be helped. Whereas Rightist have the opposite view (related).

This seems trivial, especially in hindsight. But I hardly ever see it mentioned and in most discussions the right side treat the left as foolish and irrational and the left thinks right people are self-interested and evil rather than simply having a different philosophical opinion.

I guess this is part of the bigger picture on political discourse, it is always easier to dehumanise an opponent than to admit is point is as valid as ours.