Open thread for December 17-23, 2013

I might as well point out my solution- I've set the date of the Austin meetup to be six years from now, and edit the date each week. It stays on the map, it stays on the sidebar (so I remember to edit the date- if this were automatic, then it could be correct), and it stays out of discussion.

This issue has been brought up many times, and I agree that it's a major problem. The solution I suggested was to have all the meetup locations be brought together into a single weekly meetup thread, with all the city names in the title. This could be done either automatically with a little bit of coding, or by just having someone do the coordination. I even volunteered to be the one doing the coordinating. But no one seemed to be interested in actually agreeing to do it. I still stand by my suggestion, if it is adopted.

... and of those five, for two of them the comments consist of me complaining that the meetup location hasn't been included in the title.

That being said, personally I don't mind the meetup posts that much, and I'm not sure that moving them to their own section would be an improvement. I find it pretty likely that nobody would ever look there.

Now that's creepy.

Eh... if an attacker has the level of physical access to the CPU that's required to plant a microphone, you have worse problems than acoustic attacks.

Seems related to the studies where people are told a fact, but it's in red, which they're told means it's not true. After seeing lots of different facts in colours blue or red (blue means true) they're asked about certain facts, and they're more likely to remember a false fact as true than a true fact as false - we're more likely to believe things, and don't tend to take on contrary evidence as easily.

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Cached_thought http://lesswrong.com/lw/k5/cached_thoughts/

This post is very interesting. It reminds me very much of some variations of the change scam. You seem to be describing something really similar, the rollback of information you speak of is applicable to the counting of change. I also feel like this sort of mistake happens often but I might not notice it. I feel like this deserves a name like rollback deduction failure or something.

Seems a bit Monty Hall-ish. You updated when B got out on 2 but didn't retract your update when B re-entered. After your update, C -- or maybe you were thinking "the remainder of strangers on this elevator" -- had near certain chance of getting out on 3 so when B came back in it looks like you mashed the two together as "the remainder of strangers on this elevator".

I have no clue if this phenomenon has a name or not.

Qiaochu's answer seems off. The argument that the parent AI can already prove what it wants the successor AI to prove and therefore isn't building a more powerful successor, isn't very compelling because being able to prove things is a different problem than searching for useful things to prove. It also doesn't encompass what I understand to be the Lobian obstacle, that being able to prove that if your own mathematical system proves something that thing is true implies that your system is inconsistent.

Is there more context on this?

They included vitamin D2 instead of D3. From what I read about vitamin D that seems to be a bad decision.

Given that dogfood and catfood work as far as mono-diets go, I'm pretty hopeful that personfood is going to work out as well. I don't know enough about nutrition in general to identify any deficiencies (and you kind of have to wait 10+ years for any long-term effects), but the odds are good that it or something like it will work out in the long run. I'd go with really rough priors and say 65% safe (85% if you're willing to have a minor nutritional deficiency), up to 95% three years from now. These numbers go up with FDA approval.

I'd like to see creatine included, just because most people would see mental and physical benefits from supplementation. The micronutrients otherwise look good. I've read things to the effect that real food is superior to supplementation (example), so I don't think that this is a suitable replacement to a healthy diet. I do think that this will be a significant improvement over the Standard American Diet, and a step up for the majority of people.

The macronutrients also look good -- especially the fish oil! 102g of protein is a solid amount for a non-athlete, and athletes can easily eat more protein if desired. Rice protein is pretty terrible to eat, I hope that they get that figured out. I'd probably prefer less carbs and more fat for myself, but I think that's just a quirk of my own biology.

Well, my estimates for long-term consequences would probably be:

Soylent is fine to consume occasionally -- 98%
Soylent is fine to be a major (but not sole) part of your diet -- 90%
Soylent is fine to be the sole food you consume -- 10%

I'd rank it below existing dietary replacements.

Never mind it's safety, I do not like it's hedonics at all. Basic: If you currently are eating blandly enough that shifting to a liquid mono-diet for any reason other than dire medical necessity is not a major quality of life sacrifice, you need to reprioritize either your time or your money expeditures.

Loosing one of the major pleasures of life is not a rational sacrifice. Life is supposed to be enjoyable!

I noticed that the micro quantities appear to be very different between Soylent and Jevity. Dropped a post on the Soylent forum here if anyone's interested.

I work at Google. When I was interviewing, I was in the exact same position of suspecting I shouldn't tell them my salary (which I knew was below market rate at the time). I read the same advice you did and had the same reservations about it. Here's what happened: I tried to withhold my salary information. The HR person said she had to have it for the process to move forward and asked me not to worry about it. I tried to insist. She said she totally understood where I was coming from, but the system didn't allow her flexibility on this point. I told her my salary, truthfully. I received an offer which was substantially greater than my salary and seemingly uncorrelated with it.

My optimistic reading of the situation is that Google's offer is mostly based on approximate market salary for the role, adjusted perhaps by how well you did at the interviews, your seniority, etc. (these are my guesses, I don't have any internal info on how offers are calculated by HR). Your current salary is needed due for future bookkeeping, statistics, or maybe in case it's higher than what Google is prepared to offer and they want to decide if it's worth it to up the offer a little bit. That's my theory, but keep in mind that that it's just a bunch of guesses, and also that it's a big company and policies may be different in different countries and offices.

Sidestepping the question:

Interview with other companies (Microsoft, Facebook, etc.) and get other offers. When the competition is other prospective employers, your old salary won't much matter.

The rationale behind salary negotiations are best expanded upon by patio11's "Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued" (that article's well worth the rent).

In real life, the sort of places where employers take offense by you not disclosing current salary (or generally, by salary negotiations -that is, they'd hire someone else if he's available more cheaply) are not the places you want to work with: if they're putting selection pressure for downscaling salaries, all your future coworkers are going to be, well, cheap.

This is anecdotally not true for Google; they can afford truckloads, if they really want to have you onboard. So this is much more likely to come from standardized processes. Also note in Google's case, that decisions are delegated to a board of stakeholders, so there isn't really one person who can be put off due to salary (and they probably handle the hire/no hire decisions entirely separate to the salary negotiations).

I'm a manager at a financial firm and I've hired people. I'd consider it pretty normal not to want to say. "Everyone" knows that trying to get the other person to name a number first is a common negotiating tactic, no real grownup is going to take it personally or get upset about this.

I don't know how "normal" a company Google is in this way, but I'd guess it's pretty normal.

If you are challenged on this, you can try stating it as a rule: "I'm not prepared to discuss my current salary, I'm here to talk about working for Google." Or, "As a policy I don't disclose my current salary. I'm sure you understand." Or make up some blah about how that's proprietary information for your current employer and you don't feel comfortable disclosing it.

If they absolutely refuse to process your application without this (which is a bad move on their part if they really want you, but some companies are stubborn that way), other options are to fudge your number upwards somehow, though personally I wouldn't try the ones that actually involve telling a literal lie:

• Give them a wide range of expectations instead of your current salary. Say that of course it depends on the other details of the offer, any other offers you might get, etc.

• Roll in as much stuff as you plausibly can (adding in bonuses or other moneylike benefits, and making an adjustment if the cost of living in Googleland is higher than where you live now). Example: I could add my salary of $80k, my last year's bonus of $5k (or next year's bonus, or my average bonus in percentage terms, whichever is highest), and my $2k transit benefits for a total of $87k.

• Round up to the nearest $10k and say it's an approximate figure. So if I make $87k I might say I'm in the ballpark of $90k.

• State a range (e.g. if I made $69k I might say I make something in the high 5 figures, or somewhere near the $70-80k range)

• Lie outright, but plausibly.

My guess is that a mild refusal would be acceptable to Google. They are unlikely to be put off by a change of subject.

A hard refusal might annoy them, if they persist in asking.

I suggest naming a very high figure first, to gain benefit from the anchoring effect. Then mentioning your salary will make it the anchor for the negotiation. Google has a reputation for paying high salaries.

If you are looking for advice on negotiation, I suggest searching for 'anchoring' as well as 'negotiation, to get more evidence-based advice.

Good luck.

If it's helpful to know what other Google employees make my compensation details are here.

This reminded me to ask about a similar question: I am currently interviewing. Assuming I get an in-person interview, that will involve a long flight. I feel like I shouldn't tell my current employer that I'm interviewing until I have an offer, but in order to hide it I presumably will have to take holiday on fairly short notice, have a plausible reason for why I'm taking it, and generally act like I'm not taking a long flight to an interview. There's a chance that I'll have to do this multiple times. (Though ideally I'd take multiple in-person interviews in the same trip.)

I don't particularly like the idea of doing this. It feels deceitful and stressful. How bad an idea would it be to just let my employer know what's going on?

Almost everyone finds an explicit refusal to answer offputting. Don't do it. But that doesn't mean that you should actually answer. Usually a good choice is to answer a different question, such as to make them an offer.

I would advise googling to find average salaries for similar positions, especially with google.

I don't feel qualified to answer your question, though if I were to make a guess, I wouldn't expect them to be put off by refusal. Assuming Google behaves at least somewhat rationally, they should at this point have an estimate of your value as an employee and it doesn't seem like your current salary would provide much additional information on that.

So, the question is, to what extent Google behaves rationally. This ties to something that I always wonder whenever I read salary negotiation advice. What is the specific mechanism by which disclosing current salary can hurt you? Yes, anchoring, obviously. But who does it? Is the danger that the potential employer isn't behaving rationally after all and will anchor to the current salary, lowering the upper bound on what they're willing to offer? Or is the danger primarily that anchoring will undermine your confidence and willingness to demand more (and if you felt sufficiently entitled, it wouldn't hurt you at all)?

We seem no less shocked now by social changes and technological developments and no less convinced that everything major under the sun has been done and only tweaks and refinements remain than people of past eras did.

I do expect the future to be different.

I could imagine a future where people see illegalizing LSD as strange as illegalizing homosexuality.

I can imagine that Google's rent an AI car service will completely remove personal ownership of cars in a few decades. This removes cars as status symbols with means that they will be built on other design criteria like energy efficiency.

I can imagine a constructed language possibly overtaking English.

There are a lot of other things that are more vague.

The problem is that human social mores seem to change on the order of 20-40 years which is consistent with the amount of time it takes a new generation of people to take the helm and for the old generation to die out. I have personally seen extreme societal change within my own country of origin, change that happened in only the span of 30 years. In comparison, Western culture over this same time has seemed almost stagnant (despite the fact that it, too, has undergone massive changes such as acceptance of homosexuality).

However, by some estimates, we are already just 20-40 years away from the singularity (2035-2055). This seems like too short a time for human culture to adapt to the massive level that is required. For instance, consider a simple thing like food. Right now, the idea of eating meat that has been grown in a lab seems unsettling and strange to many people. Now consider what future technology will enable, step-by-step:

• Food produced by nanotech with simple feedstock, with no slow and laborious cell growth required.
• Food produced by nanotech with household waste, including urine and feces (possibly the feces of other people as well), thus creating a self-contained system.
• Changing human biochemistry so that waste is simply recycled inside our bodies, requiring no food at all, and just an energy source plus some occasional supplements.
• Uploading brains. Food becomes an archaic concept.

There is likely to not be a very large span of time between each of these steps.

Vinge said something of the sort-- that the Singularity would be unimaginable from its past, but after the Singularity (he's assuming one which includes humans), the path to the Singularity will be known, and it will seem quite plausible.

I don't think the odds are good. Getting serious about cryonics will break a whole bunch of implicit assumptions about the order of life, and people who haven't signed out from the norms and conventions layer of mainstream society to the degree of your average outcast LessWronger are going to be keenly aware of the unspoken rules that are being broken.

Telling people that there's reason to think cryonics is a valid option and that you support it is good, but trying to get to the bottom of all disagreements beyond that seems like taking it on yourself to make a religious fundamentalist relative accept evolution. It's probably not going to happen, because the surface level argument is tied up to a head full of invisible machinery that won't respond to reasoning about technical feasibility.

I wonder how you framed it.

• Do you think that any resuscitation technology, including defibrillation is a sin (or use their favorite objection against cryonics)?

• How about one that enables resuscitation on a longer time frame? How long is still OK? Hours? Days? Years?

• Would you take a treatment that makes one feel younger and live longer?

• Would you approve of being cooled down for a day or two until a life-saving liver/heart/kidney transplant is available? What if it requires cooling deep enough that your heart stops beating?

Their replies, if any, might give you a hint of their true objections. If they are truly religious in nature, and your family attends church regularly, consider having a talk with your local pastor (or whatever religious authority figure they look up to). To paraphrase Ender's game and HPMoR, children's opinions have zero weight, so try to engage someone actually being listened to.

If someone really believes in going to heaving after they die, then being locked up in some state between being alive and dead is an issue.

Various religious people do believe that proper burials are important for letting the soul pass on.

(YouTube version for people who don't want to download QuickTime.)

Huh, a major Hollywood movie about superintelligence, uploading and the Singularity that seems like its creators might actually even have a mild clue of what they're talking about. Trailers can always be misleading, of course, but I'll have to say that this looks very promising - expect to enjoy this one a lot.

I'm not sure how to react to that. While the trailer does get some points correct (an intelligence explosion is dangerous, and much smarter than you things can likely do stuff that you can't even imagine) it looks like it is essentially from the technological-progress-is-bad-because-hubris end of science fiction, akin to the rebooted Outer Limits. And this seems to ignore the implicit issue that uploads are one of the safer results, not only because they would be near us in mindspace, but because the incredible kludge that is the human brain makes recursive self-improvement less likely.

How about the statements:

A: "The number of prime factors of 4678946132165798721321 is divisible by 3"

B: "The number of prime factors of 9876216987326578968732678968432126877 8498415465468 5432159878453213659873 1987654164163415874987 3674145748126589681321826878 79216876516857651 64549687962165468765632 132185913574684613213557 is divisible by 2"

P(F(A)) is about 1/3 and P(F(B)) is about 1/2.

But it's far more likely that someone will bother to prove A, just because the number is much smaller.

ETA: To clarify, I don't expect it to be particularly hard to prove or disprove, I just don't think anyone will bother.

If there's some new hypothesis it's likely to be proven or disproven quickly. If you look at an old one, like the Riemann hypothesis, that people have tried and failed to prove or disprove, it probabily won't be proven or disproven any time soon. Thus, it's not hard to find something more likely to be proven quickly than the Riemann hypothesis, but is still less likely to be true.

Let A = "pi is normal", and B = "pi includes in it as a contiguous block the first 2^128 digits of e". B is more likely to be provable in ZFC, simply because A requires B but not vice versa. A is vastly more likely to be proven by 2050. Is this a valid example, or do you see it as cheating in some way?

I'm not sure if this question is meaningful/interesting. It may be, but I'm not seeing it.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/4rx/agi_and_friendly_ai_in_the_dominant_ai_textbook/

This book's second author is Peter Norvig, director of research at google.

I've gotten the impression that Google doesn't really take this Friendliness business seriously. But beyond that, what is Google's stance towards it?

It difficult to know from the outside how Google spends it money on undisclosed projects.

Are there solid examples of people getting utility from Lesswrong?

The Less Wrong community is responsible for me learning how to relate openly to my own emotions, meeting dozens of amazing friends, building a career that's more fun and fulfilling than I had ever imagined, and learning how to overcome my chronic bouts of depression in a matter of days instead of years.

As opposed to utility they could get from other self-help resources?

Who knows? I'm an experiment with a sample size of one, and there's no control group. In the actual world, other things didn't actually work for me, and this did. But people who aren't me sometimes get similar things from other sources. It's possible that without Less Wrong, I might still have run across the right resources and the right community at the right moment, and something else could have been equally good. Or maybe not, and I'd still be purposeless and alone, not noticing my ennui and confusion because I'd forgotten what it was like to feel anything else.

I did self help before I joined lesswrong, and had almost no results. I'd partially attribute Lesswrong to changing me in ways such that I switched my major from graphic design to biology, in an effort to help people through research. I've also gotten involved in effective altruism in my community, starting the local THINK club for my college, which is donating money to various (effective) charities. I have a lovely group of friends from the Lesswrong study hall who have been tremendously supportive and fun to be around. There are a number of other small things, like learning about melatonin, which fixed my insomnia...etc. but those are more of a result of being around people who are knowledgeable of such things, not necessarily lesswrong-people.

In short, yes, it is helpful.

What would solid examples look like? Are there solid examples of people getting utility from other self-help sources? Can you think of any?

Less Wrong isn't just a self-help resource. I enjoy the conversational norms and topics here, and that's utility for me, but can you measure it?

Solid as in empirical, no. But I fee like I get a lot out of LW. It's a good source for finding other resources. What do you want help in, if any?

That's a pretty broad counterfactual.

I used TDT to get in the habit of flossing my teeth every night -- it worked beautifully.

I'm not sure if TDT is available elsewhere as I gave up on self-help books many years ago.

Also I'm not sure of the health benefits of flossing, but still.

There's some on IRC at least.

What did you want to discuss?

http://www.google.com/search?q=bitcoin+site:lesswrong.com

(SCNR.)

"Rationality" as used around here indicates "succeeding more often". Or if you prefer, "Rationality is winning".

That's the idea. From the looks of it, most of us either suck at it, or only needed it for minor things in the first place, or are improving slowly enough that it's indistinguishable from "I used more flashcards this month". (Or maybe I just suck at it and fail to notice actually impressive improvements people have made; that's possible, too.)

[Edit: CFAR seems to have a better reputation for teaching instrumental rationality than LessWrong, which seems to make sense. Too bad it's a geographically bound organization with a price tag.]

Try this. Do you care about achieving your values?

Rationality is the process of humans getting provably better at predicting the future. Evidence based medicine is rational. "traditional" and "spiritual" medicine are not rational when their practitioners and customers don't really care whether their impression that they work stands up to any kind of statistical analysis. Physics is rational, its hypotheses are all tested and open to retesting against experiment, against reality.

When it comes to "winning," it needs to be pointed out that rationality when consciously practiced allows humans to meet their consciously perceived and explicitly stated goals more reliably. You need to be rational to notice that this is true, but it isn't a lot more of a leap than "I think therefore i am."

One could analyze things and conclude that rationality does not enhance humanities prospects for surviving our own sun's supernova, or does not materially enhance your own chances of immortality, both of which I imagine strong cases could be made for. While being rational, I continue to pursue pleasure and happiness and satisfaction in ways that don't always make sense to other rationalists and to the extent that I find satisfaction and pleasure and happiness, i don't much care that other rationalists do not think what I am doing makes sense. But ultimately, I look at the pieces of my life, and my decisions, through rational lenses whenever I am interested in understanding what is going on, which is not all the time.

Rationality is a great tool. It is something we can get better at, by understanding things like physics, chemistry, engineering, applied math, economics and so on, and by by understanding human mind biases and ways to avoid them. It is something that sets humans apart from other life on the planet and something that sets many of us apart from many other humans on the planet, being a strength many of us have over those other humans we compete with for status and mates and so on. Rationality is generally great fun, like learning to drive fast or to fly a plane.

And if you use it right, you can get laid, and then have more data available for determining if that's what you REALLY want.

I care a lot about life and would find it a pity if it went extinct

So far, humans are the life's best bet for surviving the day our Sun goes supernova.

why having the human-style half-assed implementation of it around is considered a good idea

Because we don't have better one (yet?).

CAE_Jones answered the first part of your question. As for the second part, the human-style half-assed implementation of it is the best we can do in many circumstances, because bringing to bear the full machinery of mathematical logic would be prohibitively difficult for many things. However, just because it's hard to talk about things in fully logical terms, doesn't mean we should just throw up our hands and just pick random viewpoints. We can take steps to improve our reasoning, even with our mushy illogical biological brains.

Let's say that we have a box of weighted coins. Some are more likely to fall heads; others tails. We pull one out and flip it many times. The flips are identical, so we can switch the order. They are independent conditional on knowing which coin was chosen, but ahead of time they are dependent, the one telling us about the choice of coin and thus about the other. De Finetti's theorem says that all exchangeable sequences take this form.

Added: Actually, de Finetti's theorem only applies to infinite sequences. Here's an example of a finite exchangeable sequence that doesn't fit the theorem: draw balls from a box without replacement. This can only go on until the box is empty. And of course you can combine the two: randomly choose a box with at least n balls and then pull out n balls without replacement.

Added: A crazy model that is exchangeable is Pólya's urn. It is not obvious that it is exchangeable, let alone that the conclusion of de Finetti's theorem applies. Pólya's urn contains balls of two colors, the initial numbers of which are known. Every time you draw one out, you put k of the same color back. If k=1, this is drawing with replacement; if k=0, this is drawing without replacement, both of which are exchangeable. And if k is a larger integer, it is also exchangeable.
Here is an idea of how to the exchangeability. What if are somehow confused about the size of the balls, and think that they are r times bigger than they really are? Then each time we remove an actual ball, we're removing 1/r part of a confused ball. That's like removing 1 confused ball and putting back 1-1/r balls. Thus k=1-1/r is like drawing without replacement, but with this confusion. This is exchangeable. Thus the model is exchangeable for infinitely many values of k, which verifies some identities for infinitely many values of k, which is probably enough to verify it as an algebraic identity.

Examples?

So? For most people "traditional" means "what my grandparents used to do". Very very few people have a sense of history that extends far back.

Isn't the place for this the Rationality Quotes thread?

typo(s): sediment->sentiment