Open thread, June 26 - July 2, 2017

I do not know, but I will advise you that your query is likely to find more answers if you asked it at Overcoming Bias, as Hanson tends to respond to comments over there, or perhaps SSC, given the comments there have a decent number of economists who will be more familiar with those kinds of paper

Too bad (or actually good) we can't actually see those superintelligent arguments. I wonder which direction they would take.

The author should perhaps describe them indirectly, i.e. not quote them (because the author is not a superintelligence, and cannot write superintelligent arguments), but describe reactions of other people after reading them. Those other people should generally become convinced about the validity of the arguments (because in-universe the arguments are superintelligent), but that can happen gradually, so in the initial phases they can be just generally impressed "hey, it actually makes more sense than I expected originally", and only after reading the whole document they would will become fully brainwashed (but perhaps not able to reproduce the argument in its full power, so they would urge the protagonist to read the original document). Random fragments of ideas can be thrown here and there, e.g. reported by people who read the superintelligent argument halfway. Perhaps the AI could quote Plato about how pure knowledge is the best knowledge (used as an excuse for why AI does not research something practical instead).

Seems to me that most people understand the difference between good and evil, and most people prefer good to evil, but we have a fashion where good is considered low-status, so many people are ashamed to admit their preferences publicly.

It's probably some mix of signalling and counter-signalling. On the signalling side, powerful people are often evil, or at least indifferent towards good and evil. By pretending that I don't care about good, I am making myself appear more powerful. On the counter-signalling side, any (morally sane) idiot can say that good is better that evil; I display my sophistication by expressing a different opinion.

It's a central notion in the computational metaethics that, not under that name, was tentatively sketched by Yudkowski in the metaethics sequence.
Humans share, because of evolution, a kernel of values that works as a foundation of what we call "morality". Morality is thus both objective and subjective: objective because these values are shared and encoded in the DNA (some are even mathematical equilibria, such as cooperation in IPD); subjective because since they are computation they exists only insofar our minds compute them, and outside of the common nucleus they can vary depending on the culture / life experiences / contingencies / etc.

I think this is totally consistent with relativism (Where I mean relativism in the sense of moral and aesthetic judgments being based on subjective personal taste and contingent learned behavior. Moral and aesthetic judgments still exist and have meaning.).

The fact that people make the same moral judgments most of the time is (I claim) because humans are in general really, really similar to each other. 200 years ago this would be mysterious and might be taken as evidence of moral truths external to any human mind, but now we can explain this similarity in terms of the origin of human values by evolution.

I live in a tiny rural town, and get the majority of my meat from farmer's markets. Having been raised on a similar farm to the ones I buy from, I'm willing to bet those cows are happy a greater percentage of their lives than I will be. I recognize this is mostly working because of where I live and the confidence I have in how those farms are run. In the same way that encouraging fewer animals to exist in terrible conditions (by being vegan) is good I feel that encouraging more animals to exist in excellent conditions (by eating meat) is good. I don't stop eating meat (though I do eat less) when I go on trips elsewhere even though I'm aware I'm probably eating something that had a decidedly suboptimal life because switching on and off veganism would be slow.

That's my primary argument. My secondary, less confident position is that since I prefer existing in pain and misery to not existing, my default assumption should be that animals prefer existing in pain and misery to not existing. I'm much less confident here, since I'm both clearly committing the typical mind fallacy and have always had some good things in my life no matter how awful most things were. Still, when I imagine being in their position, I find myself preferring to exist and live rather than not have existed. (Though I prefer existing and not being in pain the superior outcome by a wide margin!)

Meat tastes nice, and I don't view animals as moral agents.

I'm not addressing those that say morality is subjective

You think that people who believe in objective morality all agree on what this morality is?

One possible explanation is that most people here fail at following most of their plans; and veganism is not an exception, but a part of the pattern. For example, see this relatively ancient complaint:

what is Less Wrong? It is a blog, a succession of short fun posts with comments, most likely read when people wish to distract or entertain themselves, and tuned for producing shiny ideas which successfully distract and entertain people. As Merlin Mann says: "Joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging". Well, reading a blog to overcome akrasia IS joining a Facebook group about creative productivity.

My feeling is that since this was written, things didn't improve; it was possibly the other way round.

If this hypothesis is true, then if you would classify the readers by how much of their plans they actually accomplished in real life, the veganism would correlate with that positively, because like everything is has two steps: (1) a decision to become a vegan, and (2) actually becoming a vegan; and people who are generally better at getting from step 1 to step 2 should also be better in this specific instance.

And then of course there are the rationalizations like:

"Do you care about reducing suffering, even the suffering of animals?"
"Sure I do."
"Are you a vegan?"
"No; but that's because I am a consequentialist -- I believe that creating a superintelligent Friendly AI will help everyone, including the animals, orders of magnitude more than me joining the ranks of those who don't eat meat."
"Then... I guess you are contributing somehow to the development of the Friendly AI?"
"Actually, I am not."

And then of course there are people like:

"Actually, I don't give a fuck about suffering or about Friendly AI; I am simply here to have fun."

Veganism seems well-intentioned, but misguided. So then, your main reason for veganism is some sense of empathy for animal suffering? My best guess for vegans' motives is to merely signal that empathy, for social status without any real concern for their real-world impact on animal welfare.

Empathy is a natural human tendency, at least for other members of the tribe. Extending that past the tribe, to humans in general, seems to be a relatively recent invention, historically. But it does at least seem like a useful trait in larger cities. Extending that to other animals seems unnatural. That doesn't mean you're wrong, per se, but it's not a great start. A lot of humans believe weird things. Animistic cultures feel may feel empathy for sacred objects, like boulders or trees, or dead ancestors, or even imaginary deities with no physical form. They may feel this so strongly that it outweighs concern for their fellow humans at times. Are you making the same mistake? Do mere rocks deserve moral consideration?

So there are things that are morally important and things that are not. Where do we draw that line? Is it only a matter of degree, not kind? How much uncertainty do we tolerate before changing the category? If you take the precautionary principle, so that something is morally important if there's even a small chance it could be, aren't you the same as the rock worshipers neglecting their fellow humans?

Why do you believe animals can suffer? No, we can't take this as a settled axiom. Many people do not believe this. But I'll try to steelman. My thoughts are that generally humans can suffer. Humans are a type of animal, thus there exists a type of animal that can suffer. We are related to other species in almost exactly the same sense that we are related to our grandparents (and thereby our cousins), just more generations back. Perhaps whatever makes us morally relevant evolved before we were human, or even appeared more than once through convergent evolution. Not every organism need have this. You are related to vegetables in the evolutionary sense. That's why they're biochemically similar enough to ourselves that we can eat them. You're willing to eat vegetables, so mere relation isn't enough for moral weight.

By what test can we distinguish these categories? Is it perhaps the mere fact of an aversive behavior to stimulus? Consider the Mimosa pudica, a plant that recoils to touch. Is it morally acceptable to farm and kill such a plant? That's just an obvious case. Many plants show aversive behaviors that are less obvious, like producing poisons after injury, even releasing pheromones that stimulate others nearby to do the same. But again, you're fine with eating plants. Consider that when you burn your finger, your own spinal cord produces a reflexive aversive behavior before the nerve impulse has time to reach your brain. Is your spine conscious? Does it have moral weight by itself? Without going into bizarre thought experiments about the moral treatment of disembodied spinal cords, I think we can agree a conscious mind is required to put something in the "morally relevant" category. I hope you're enough of a rationalist to be over the "soul" thing. (Why can't vegetables have souls? Why not rocks?) I think it is a near certainty that the simplest of animals (jellyfish, say) are no more conscious than vegetables. So merely being a member of the animal kingdom isn't enough either.

So which animals then? I think there's a small chance that animals as simple as honeybees might have some level of conscious awareness. I also think there's a significant chance that animals as advanced as gorillas are not conscious in any morally relevant way. Gorillas, notably, cannot pass the mirror test. Heck, I'm not even sure if Dan Dennet is conscious! So why are we so worried about cows and chickens? I am morally opposed to farming and eating animals that can pass the mirror test.

Gorillas to honeybees are pretty wide error bars. Can we push the line any farther down? Trying to steelman again. What about humans too young to pass the mirror test? Is it morally acceptable to kill them? Are vegans as a subculture generally pro life, or pro choice? On priors, I'd guess vegans tend Democratic Party, so pro choice, but correct me if I'm wrong. It seems so silly to me that I can predict answers to moral questions with such confidence based on cultural groups. But it goes back to my accusation of vegans merely signaling virtue without thinking. You're willing to kill humans that are not conscious enough. So that fails too.

Even if there's some degree of consciousness in lesser beings, is it morally relevant? Do they suffer? Humans have enlarged frontal lobes. This evolved very recently. It's what gives us our willpower. This brain system fights against the more primitive instincts for control of human behavior. For example, human sex drive is often strong enough to overcome that willpower. (STIs case in point.) But why did evolution choose that particular strength? Do you think humans would still be willing to reproduce if our sex drive was much weaker than it is? This goes for all of the other human instincts. It has to be strong enough to compete against human will. Most notably for our argument, this includes the strength of our pain response, but it also applies to other adverse experiences, like fear, hunger, loneliness, etc. What might take an overwhelming urgency in human consciousness to get a human to act, might only require a mild preference in lower animals, which have nothing better to do anyway. Lower animals may have some analogue to our pain response, but that doesn't mean it hurts.

I think giving any moral weight to the inner experience of cows and chickens is already on very shaky ground. But I'm not 100% certain of this. I'm not even 90% certain of this. It's within my error bars. So in the interest of steelmanning, lets grant you that for the sake of argument.

Is it wrong to hurt something that can suffer? Or is it just sometimes the lesser of evils? What if that thing is evil? What if it's merely indifferent? If agents of an alien mind indifferent to human values (like a paperclip maximizer) could suffer as much as humans, but have no more morality than a spider, would it be wrong to kill them? Would it be wrong to torture them for information? They would cause harm to humans by their very nature. I'd kill them with extreme prejudice. Most humans would even be willing to kill other humans in self-defense. Pacifistic cavemen didn't reproduce. Pacifistic cultures tend to get wiped out. Game theory is relevant to morality. If a wild animal attacks your human friend, you shoot it dead. If a dog attacks you while you're unarmed you pin it to the ground and gouge out its brains through its eye socket before it rips your guts out. It's the right thing to do.

If you had a pet cat, would you feed it a vegan diet? Even though it's an obligate carnivore, and would probably suffer terribly from malnutrition? Do carnivores get a pass? Do carnivores have a right to exist? Is it okay to eat them instead? Is it wrong to keep pets? Only if they're carnivores? Why such prejudice against omnivores, like humans? Meat is also a natural part of our diet. Despite your biased vegan friends telling you that meat is unhealthy, it's not. Most humans struggle getting adequate nutrition as it is. A strict prohibition on animal products makes that worse.

But maybe you think farm animals are more innocent than indifferent. They're more domesticated. Not to mention herbivores. Cows have certainly been know to kill humans though. Pigs even kill human children. Maybe cows are not very nice people. But if I'm steelmanning, I must admit that self-defense and factory farming are very different things. But why aren't you okay with hunting for food? What about happy livestock slaughtered humanely? If you are okay with that, then support that kind of farm with your meat purchases, have better health for the more natural human diet, and make a difference instead of this pointless virtue signalling. If you're not okay with that, then it's not just about suffering, is it? That was not your true objection.

Then what is?

I'm extremely surprised that the percentage of vegans here is only slightly higher than the general public.

Actually, I'd suggest that that's evidence that your premise is false. In other words, if veganism is not as correct as you think, that explains away your troubling observation. There are things which rationalists believe at higher frequency than the general public, such as atheism. The fact that veganism is not one should tell you something.

I can literally play bingo with the responses I get from the average person, that's how reoccurring the rationalizations are.

The average person is not good at arguing anything, whether correct or not.

Furthermore, seeing "rationalizations" demonstrates exactly nothing. If you believe in X, and X is true, you'll see rationalizations from people who don't believe X. If you believe in X and X is false, you'll see good reasons from people who don't believe X, but those good reasons will look like rationalizations to you. No matter what the true state of affairs is, whether you are right or wrong, you'll "see rationalizations".

The simple answer is that I care about humans more than about other animals by an extremely large degree. So other things being equal, I would prefer that the other animals suffer less. But I do not prefer this when it means slightly less utility for a human being.

So my general response about "veganism" is "that's ridiculous," since it is very strongly opposed to my utility function.

Now, I'm not addressing those that say morality is subjective and those that live solely for themselves.

I'd wager those not addressed are more numerous than you think, especially among lurkers.

I'm not confident that this better accounts for the disparity between your expectations and the survey numbers than confused altruists, but the thought occurs.

You're not addressing me, as I say morality is subjective. However, even within your stated moral framework, you haven't specified the value range of a marginal animal life. I'm extremely suspicious of arguments that someone else's (including factory-farmed animals) are negative value. If you think that they're lower value than other possible lives, but still positive, then the equilibrium of creating many additional lives, even with suffering, is preferable to simply having fewer animals on earth.

So yes, suffering is worse than contentment. Is it worse than never having existed at all? I don't know, and suspect not.

A while ago, we did Double Crux on the topic at an LW meetup. We all agree that why would prefer that animals suffer less. A key question is how becoming vegan compares to other possible interventions for reducing animal suffering. The discussion was a while ago and at the time the numbers weren't high enough to argue that it's important to switch to being a vegan.

I think I understand your basic mistake. You seem to think that morality is objective in a way which is unrelated to the particular kinds of beings that have that morality. So for example you might think that killing innocent persons is wrong regardless of the particular history of those persons and their species.

This is a mistake. For example, if people had evolved in such a way that reproduction required the killing of one of the persons, but it consistently resulted in the birth of twins, then killing a person in this context would not be wrong. This is not because morality is or would be subjective, but because it would be objectively right for that species existing in that context.

In the same way, people have evolved as meat eaters. They consequently evolved to assign extremely low value to the lives of other edible creatures, and this is objectively correct for the human species, even if it might not be correct for some other kind of being.

Animals are not zero important, but people are more important. I am a pescetarian because that is the threshold at which I can still enjoy an excellent quality of life, but I don't need to eat chicken fingers and salami to reach that point. Vegans are (hopefully) at a different point on this tradeoff curve than I am and meat-eaters (also hopefully) are at a different point in the other direction.

I do think that unnecessary suffering is wrong, but I also lean toward the consequentialist side and determining what is "unnecessary" is very difficult. I do not consider myself particularly altruistic, although I tend to have a high degree of empathy towards other human beings. I'm also a Duster and not a Torturer, which means I don't believe in the additivity of suffering.
On one side, I literally cannot say how much my arguments are the products of backward rationalization from not wanting to abandon meat.

On the other side, I have many problems with standard veganism.
First, they usually make a set of assumptions that might seem obvious (and in there lies the danger), but are sometimes falsified. One such assumption is the connection between not consuming meat and reducing animal suffering. A simple, direct boycott for example is either too naive to work (it can even suffer from the Cobra effect) or morally wrong from a consequentialist point of view.
Second, the very notion that animals suffer more in intensive environment than in free ranging farms is doubtful: for chickens this is hardly true, for example, and the notion is blurry for force-feeded geese.

Assuming one or two a month counts as "avid" then I count.

Some combination of what's on sale, what my friends/family/favourite bloggers are reading, and what's in a field I feel like I could use more background in for the fiction I write. (Anything that's all three at once gets read first, then anything with two of the three, and then whatever fits at least one of those.)

I sometimes buy outdated books on subjects that I remember being weird (metal alloys, ancient history) or charming/grounding (history of languages, the biological aspect of forensics etc.) from the time when I attended high school. Of course, I am not an avid reader, and sometimes I put the book aside. OTOH, my parents' library has more books than I care to read, some of them nonfiction, so I can just pull out anything and trust it will be either interesting to read or at the very list a conversation starter.

Yes. I follow authors, I ask avid readers similar to me for recommendations, I observe best-of-category polls, I scan through collections of categorized stories for topics that interest me, I click through "Also Liked" and "Similar" links for stories I like. My backlog of things to read is effectively infinite.

Clearly pre-committed methodology and explicitly stated priors. Double blinds whenever possible. Bayesian model analysis. Posterior distributions, not conclusions.

What did you mean by "fanon dwarves"? Is that just a fan interpretation or do you think Tolkien intended it? In Tolkien's idealized world, all economic motivations are marginal and deprecated. The dwarves are motivated partially by a desire for gold, but mostly by loyalty to their king and a desire to see their ancestral homeland restored to them. To the extent the treasure itself motivates Thorin & co., it causes disaster (for example his unwillingness to share the loot almost causes a battle against local men & elves.)

If there was a briefcase full of hundred dollar bills over there that someone told me was mine by right, I'd be pretty attached to it. If they then added the caveat that there was a massive dragon squatting on the thing who also believed the briefcase was theirs, I do not think I would try and steal the briefcase. Would you?

put an enormous heap of money in front of a few poor travellers

Put an enormous heap of money with a big nasty dragon on top of it in front a few poor travelers...

It seems to me like the most important piece of data is your prior on the default conditions. If, for example, there was a 99% chance of the universe winding up getting tiled in paperclips in the next year then I would accept very unlikely odds on X and likely odds on Y. Depending on how likely you think an "I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream" situation is, you might 'win' even if Y happens.

Hrm. A somewhat pedantic but important question; are these chances independent of each other? For example, lets say X and Y are both 50%. Does that mean I'm guaranteed to get either X or Y, or is there a ~25% chance that both come up 'tails' so to speak and nothing happens? If the later, what happens if both come up 'heads' and I get my utopia but everyone dies? (Assuming that my utopia involves being at least me being alive =P)

The second most important piece of data to me is that X is the odds of "my best imaginable utopia" which is very interesting wording. It seems to mean I won't get a utopia better than I can imagine, but also that I don't have to compromise if I don't want to. I can imagine having an Iron Man suit so I assume the required technology would come to pass if I won, but HPMoR was way better than I imagined it to be before reading it. Lets say my utopia involves E.Y. writing a spiritual successor to HPMoR in cooperation with, I dunno, either Brandon Sanderson or Neil Stephenson. I think that would be awesome, but if I could imagine that book in sufficient fidelity I'd just write it myself.

My probability space looks something like 10% we arrive at a utopia close enough to my own that I'm still pretty happy, 20% we screw something up existential and die, 40% things incrementally improve even if no utopia shows up, 20% things gradually decline and get somewhat worse but not awful, 9% no real change, 1% horrible outcomes worse than "everybody dies instantly." (Numbers pulled almost entirely out of my gut, as informed by some kind of gestalt impression of reading the news and looking at papers that come to my attention and the trend line of my own life.) If I was actually presented that choice, I'd want my numbers to be much firmer, but lets imagine I'm pretty confident in them.

I more or less automatically accept any Y value under 21%, since that's what I think the odds are of a bad outcome anyway. I'd actually be open to a Y that was slightly higher than 21%, since it limits how bad things can get. (I prefer existence in pain to non-existence, but I don't think that holds up against a situation that's maximizing suffering.) By the same logic, I'm very likely to refuse any X below 10%, since that's the odds I think I can get a utopia without the deal. (Though since that utopia is less likely to be my personal best imagined case, I could theoretically be persuaded by an X that was only a little under 10%.) X=11%, Y=20% seems acceptable if barely so?

On the one hand, I feel like leaving a chance of the normal outcome is risking a 1% really bad outcome, so I should prefer to occupy as much of the possible outcomes with X or Y; say, X=36% and Y=64%. On the other, 41% of the outcomes if I refuse are worse than right now, and 50% are better than right now, so if I refuse the deal I should expect things to turn out in my favour. I'm trading a 64% chance of bad things for a 41% chance of bad things. This looks dumb, but it's because I think things going a little well is pretty likely- my odds about good an bad outcomes change a lot depending on whether I'm looking at the tails or the hill. Since I'm actually alright (though not enthusiastic) with things getting a little worse, I'm going to push my X and Y halfway towards the values that include things changing a little bit. Lets say X=45% and Y=55%? That seems to square with my (admittedly loose) math, and it feels at first glance acceptable to my intuition. This seems opposed by my usual stance that I'd rather risk moderately bad outcomes if it means I have a bigger chance of living though, so either my math is wrong or I need to think about this some more.

TLDR, I'd answer X=45% and Y=55%, but my gut is pushing for a higher chance of surviving or taking the default outcome depending on how the probabilities work.

I feel like I would accept approximately at 90/10, and would be reluctant to accept it with worse terms. But this might be simply because a 90% chance for a human being is basically where things start to feel like "definitely so."

I think there are close to zero humans who make this tradeoff. Scope insensitivity hits too hard.

The first question, though, is "compared to what?" If I reject the deal, what's the chance intelligence will attain utopia at some point, and what's the chance of extinction? The second question is "why should I believe this offer?"

None, if I knew exactly this and nothing more.

Did you see this thread on making an on-line course. It is probably a place to co-ordinate this sort of thing.

Honestly, the best contribution that the vast majority of people (even very smart like you or extremely smart like in the 140+) is to live the best life you can find and support more research through encouragement (now) and contributions (years from now when you're established at something other than AGI-building).

If you limit yourself to direct work in the field, you greatly delay your success and seriously increase the risk that you won't succeeed.

For almost all people, their comparative advantage won't be in AI research, and they'd do more good doing whatever they're best placed to do, and donating a portion of their income.

You don't give enough detail for us to give specific suggestions, but unless you have extraordinarily compelling reasons to think that you were born to be an AI researcher, I wouldn't recommend making major life changes for the sole purpose of maybe becoming a fairly average AI researcher in ~10 years.

I dropped out of high school, and was able to take a short, 3hr test to get a high school equivalent certificate from my state (the California High School Proficiency Test). I then went to community college and transferred to a 4-year university.

Some frank advice: if you "have no math or programming skills" then you don't even know enough to know whether AI x-risk is even something worth working on. There is a ridiculous amount of biased literature available on the Internet, LW in particular, targeted towards those without strong backgrounds in computer science or AI. You may not be getting the whole story here. If this is what you feel you want to do, then I suggest taking the community college route and getting a comp sci degree from an inexpensive local university. You'll be in a better position then to judge what you want to do.

Also, all forms of IQ measurement are worthless and without any value in this context. I would suggest doing your best to forget that number.

What's your age?

It sounds like you think that having a high school degree, a bachelor's degree and a master's degree is a requirement for working on AI safety. That isn't true Eliezer Yudkowsky for example has neither of those.

Ethereum is working on proof of stake, which boils down to "I believe that this future is what really happened, and to guarantee so, here's $1000 that you may destroy if it's not true."

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ

Key quote for me:

"in PoW, we are working directly with the laws of physics. In PoS, we are able to design the protocol in such a way that it has the precise properties that we want - in short, we can optimize the laws of physics in our favor. The "hidden trapdoor" that gives us (3) is the change in the security model, specifically the introduction of weak subjectivity."

1. The amount of wastage from bitcoin mining pales compared to the GDP spent on traditional forms of trust. Think banking isn't contributing to global warming? Well all those office buildings have lights and electricity and back-room servers, not to mention the opportunity costs.

2. If you want to reduce the need for bitcoin, then reduce the need for trustless solutions. This is an open-ended political and social problem, but not one that is likely to remain unsolved forever.

Also possibly problematic is the dichotomy described by the summary:

classical logic is the logic of making a map accurate by comparing it to a territory, which is why the concept of falsehood becomes an integral part of the formal system. In contrast, intuitionistic logic is the logic of describing a territory without seeking to compare it to something else. Intuitionistic type theory turns up type errors, for example, when such a description turns out to be inconsistent in itself.

seems more appropriate to contrast scientific/Bayesian reasoning, which strives to confirm or refute a model based on how well it conforms to observed reality vs deductive (a priori) reasoning, which looks only at what follows from a set of axioms. However, one can reason deductively using classical or intuitionistic logic, so it is not clear that intuitionistic logic is better suited than classical logic for "describing a territory without seeking to compare it to something else".

I can't shake the idea that maps should be represented classically and territories should be represented intuitionistically.

But, it seems to me that a map is a representation of a territory. So, your statement “maps should be represented classically and territories should be represented intuitionistically” reduces to “representations of the territory should be intuitionistic, and representations of those intuitionistic representations should be classical”. Is this what you intended, or am I missing something?

Also, I’m not an expert in intuitionistic logic, but this statement from the summary sounds problematic:

classical logic is the logic of making a map accurate by comparing it to a territory, which is why the concept of falsehood becomes an integral part of the formal system

But, the concept of falsehood is integral to both classical and intuitionistic logic. Intuitionistic logic got rid of the principle of the excluded middle but did not get rid of the concept of falsity.

I can't tell you where you took a wrong turn, because I don't know whether you did. But I can tell you where you lost me -- i.e., where I stopped seeing how each statement was an inference drawn from its predecessors plus uncontroversial things.

The first place was when you said "This corresponds to the notion that intuitionism captures the concept of truth." How does is correspond to that? "This" is the idea that tthe territory has no errors in it, whereas the map has errors, and I don't see how you get from that to anything involving intuitionism.

... Oh, wait, maybe I do? Are you thinking of intuitionism as somehow lacking negation, so that you can only ever say things are true and never say they're false? Your "summary" paragraph seems to suggest this. That doesn't seem like it agrees with my understanding of intuitionism, but I may be missing something.

The second time you lost me was when you said "If The Map is included in The Territory [...] that neatly dovetails with the idea [...] that classical mathematics is a proper subset of intuitionistic mathematics". Isn't that exactly backwards? Intuitionistic mathematics is the subset of classical mathematics you can reach without appealing to the law of the excluded middle.

Finally, your "summary" paragraph asserts once again the correspondence you're describing, but I don't really see where you've argued for it. (This may be best viewed as just a restatement of my earlier puzzlements.)

Project management training materials.

This is the question isn't it? Rationality can help you create and implement strategies but the choice of your goal is another matter. Of course as humans we have some build in goals that are common to everyone:

• Basic Survival (food, water, warmth, selter etc.). In our era that means a job.
• Social Interaction
• Intimate Relationship and Family

If you have these sorted then you can decide what is important for you as a next level goal. Attempts have been made in psychology to organise goals (an example). I personally have found that there are much deeper value systems that can be experientially confirmed. A large part of the LW community seems (to my current personal assessment) to be behind in their understanding due to a kind of undetected prejudice. You see, the most advanced value systems are actually stemming from stories as can be found in stories. Myth, religion, mysticism, drama, literature etc. And there is a growing amount of evidence that they have evolved to accord with reality and not to be socially constructed (and definitely not rationally arrived at).

If your new age alert was activated due to my last statement consider the possibility of this undetected prejudice I was talking about. Check out the work of Jordan Peterson.

The problem seems to be that you think that you need to choose a goal. Your goal is what you are tending towards. It is a question of fact, not a choice.

Your preferences can include other people's well being. I have a strong preference that my brother be happy, for example.

Why, my, preferences?

What are your other options?

Possibly relevant (crazy idea about extracting angular momentum from the Earth)

Well, tidal power plants exist. If you want a smaller device that will work in principle, hang a ball on a spring from the ceiling. When the moon passes overhead, the ball will go up. Then it's up to you to translate that to rotary motion. The effect will be tiny though, so you'll need a really lossless spring, a really stable building, and maybe a vacuum filled room :-)

As for Foucault's pendulum, which works based on rotation of the Earth (not tides), I don't think you can extract energy from such things even in principle.

To detect tides with a symmetrical wheel, start it spinning. It will experience a gyroscopic torque due to tidal forces. This is actually the same mechanism that causes the earth's axis to precess.