Open Thread: March 2010, part 3

May I suggest "I'm tapping out", perhaps with a link to this very comment? It's a good line (and perhaps one way the dojo metaphor is valuable).

I think in this comment you did fine. Don't sweat it if the comment that signals "I'm stopping here" is downvoted, don't try to avoid it.

In this comment I think you are crossing the "mind reading" line, where you ascribe intent to someone else. Stop before posting those.

I've twice intentionally taken ~48 hours away from this site after I said something stupid. Give it a try.

Just leave the conversations hanging; come back days or weeks later if you want. Also, admitting you were wrong goes a long way if you realize you said something that was indeed incorrect, but the rationality police won't come after you if you leave a bad conversation unresolved.

gg

There's the stopgap measure of asking for a rain check (e.g. "I'm sorry, but this conversation is just getting me frustrated - I'll come back tomorrow and see if I can come up with a better reply"), but I'm not sure what are the best methods to conclude a conversation. Most of the socially-accepted ones are logically rude.

I don't understand the question. What are we doing that you describe this way, and why do you expect us to be tired of it?

I'm tired of it, I'd like to get a real subreddit enabled here as soon as possible.

We could just start a forum and stop complaining about it.

I don't think you should charge a fixed rate per person. An auction or market would be a better way to set pricing, something like Amazon's Mechanical Turk or the Google adwords auctions.

I give it a solid "that could work" but the business operations are non-trivial. You probably would need someone with serious B2B sales experience, ideally already connected with the NYC-area focus group/marketing community.

As cool as this was there is reason to doubt it's authenticity. There doesn't seem to be any internet record of Pandit Surender Sharma "India's most powerful Tantrik" except for this TV event. Moreover, about a minute in it looks like the tantrik is starting to laugh. Maybe someone who knows the country can tell us if this Pandit Sharma fellow is really a major figure there.

I mean, what possible incentive would the guy have for going on TV to be humiliated?

Note: Most of the article is not about the TV confrontation so it's well worth reading even if you already heard about that in 2008.

If they disagree with me and I (eventually?) agree with them, three times in a row. Applies more to questions of logic than questions of knowledge.

Mathematical ability seems to be a high sensitivity test for this. I cannot recall ever meeting someone who I concluded was smarter than me who was not also able to solve and understand math problems I cannot. But it seems to have a surprisingly low specificity-- people who are significantly better at math than me (and this includes probably everyone with a degree in a math heavy discipline) are still strangely very stupid.

Hypotheses:

1. The people who are better at math than me are actually smarter than me, I'm too dumb to realize it.
2. Intelligence has pretty significant domain variability and I happen to be especially low in mathematical intelligence relative to everything else.
3. My ADHD makes learning math especially hard, perhaps I'm quite good at grasping mathematical concepts but lack the discipline to pick up the procedural knowledge others have.
4. Lots of people of smart people compartmentalize their intelligence, they can't or won't apply it to areas other than math. (Don't know if this differs from #2 except that it makes the math people sound bad instead of me)

Ideas?

It's not really all that simple, and it's domain specific, but having someone take the keyboard while pair programming helped to show me that one person in particular was far smarter than me. I was in a situation where I was just trying to keep up enough to catch the (very) occasional error.

Teach me something I didn't know.

I was wondering: Would something like this be expected to have any kind of visible effect?

(Their object is at the limit of bare-eye visibility in favorable lighting,* but suppose that they can expand their results by a couple orders of magnitude.)

From “first principles” I’d expect that the light needed to actually look at the thing would collapse the superposition (in the sense of first entangling the viewer with the object, so as to perceive a single version of it in every branch, and then with the rest of the universe, so each world-branch would contain just a “classical” observation).

But then again one can see interference patterns with diffracted laser light, and I’m confused about the distinction.

[eta:] For example, would coherent light excite the object enough to break the superposition, or can it be used to exhibit, say, different diffraction patterns when diffracted on different superpositions of the object?

[eta2:] Another example: it the object’s wave-function has zero amplitude over a large enough volume, you should be able to shine light through that volume just as through empty space (or even send another barely-macroscopic object through). I can’t think of any configuration where this distinguishes between the superposition and simply the object being (classically) somewhere else, though; does anyone?

(IIRC, their resonator’s size was cited as “about a billion atoms”, which turns out as a cube with .02µm sides for silicon; when bright light is shined at a happy angle, depending on the background, and especially if the thing is not cubical, you might just barely see it as a tiny speck. With an optical microscope (not bare-eyes, but still more intuitive than a computer screen) you might even make out its approximate shape. I used to play with an atomic-force microscope in college: the cantilever was about 50µm, and I could see it with ease; I don’t remember ever having seen the tip itself, which was about the scale we’re talking about, but it might have been just barely possible with better viewing conditions.)

Paperclips.

I have no interest in tiling the universe with anything - that would be dull. Therefore I would strive to subvert the spirit of such a restriction as effectively as I could. Off the top of my head, pre-supernova stars seem like adequate tools for the purpose.

Can the tiles have states that change and interact?

If you had to tile the universe with something - something simple - what would you tile it with?

Copies of my genome. If I can't do anything to affect the utility function I really care about, then I might as well optimize the one evolution tried to make me care about instead.

(Note that I interpret 'simple' as excluding copies of my mind, simulations of interesting universes, and messages intended for other universes that simulate this one to read, any of which would be preferable to anything simple.)

I have no preferences within the class of states of the universe that do not, and cannot evolve to, contain consciousness.

But if, for example, I was put in this situation by a cheesecake maximizer, I would choose something other than cheese cake.

me

(i'm assuming I'll be broken down as part of the tiling process, so this preserves me)

Witty comics. (eg)

The words "LET US OUT" in as many languages as possible.

Isn't the universe already tiled with something simple in the form of fundamental particles?

A sculpture of stars, nebulae and black holes whose beauty will never be admired by anyone.

ETA: If this has too little entropy to count as simple--- well whatever artwork I can get away with I'll take.

Computronium

If someone asks you how to spell a certain word, does the word appear in your head as you're spelling it out for them, or does it seem to come out of your mouth automatically?

I never see words. I feel them.

If it comes out automatically, would you describe yourself as being adept at language (always finding the right word to describe something, articulating your thoughts easily, etc.) or is it something you struggle with?

Great with syntax. Access to specific words tends to degrade as I get fatigued or stressed. That is, I can 'feel' the word there and know the naunces of the meaning it represents but can not bring the actual sounds or letters to mind.

I have often troubles with finding proper words, both in English and my native language, but I have no problems with spelling - I can say it automatically. This may be because I have learned English by reading and therefore the words are stored in my memory in their written form, but generally I suspect, from personal experience, that ability to recall spelling and ability to find the proper word are unrelated.

I can visualize sentences, paragraphs, or formatted code, but can't zoom in as far as individual words; when I try I get a verbal representation instead. I usually can't read over misspelled words (or wrong words, like its vs. it's) without stopping. When this happens, it feels like hearing someone misparonounce a word.

When spelling a word aloud, it comes out pretty much automatically (verbal memory) with no perceptible intermediate steps. I would describe myself as adept with language.

In retrospect, spelling words out loud, something I do tend to do with a moderate frequency, is something I've gotten much better at over the past ten years. I suspect that I've hijacked my typing skill to the task, as I tend to error correct my verbal spelling in exactly the same way. I devote little or no conscious thought or sense mode to the spelling process, except in terms of feedback.

As for my language skills, they are at least adequate. However, I have devoted special attention to improving them so I can't say that I don't share some bias away from being especially capable.

I'm adept at language and I never visualize letters or words in my head. I think in pronounced/internally spoken words, so when I spell something aloud I think the letters to myself as I am saying them.

This is turning interesting:

Sensory type of access to spelling information by poster:
hegemonicon: verbal (?) ( visual only with great difficulty)
Hook: mechanical
FAWS: mechanical, visual
prase: verbal (???)
NancyLebovitz: visual
Morendil: visual
mattnewport: visual, mechanical (?)
Rain: mechanical (???)
Kevin: verbal (???) (never visual)

Is there anyone who doesn't fall into at least one of those three categories?

When I spell out a word, I don't visualize anything. Using words in conversation, typing, or writing is also innate - they flow through without touching my consciousness. This is another aspect of my maxim, "my subconscious is way smarter than I am." It responds quickly and accurately, at any rate.

I consider myself to be adept at the English language, and more objective evidence bears that out. I scored 36/36 on the English portion of the ACT, managed to accumulate enough extra credit through correcting my professor in my college level writing class that I didn't need to take the final, and many people have told me that I write very well in many different contexts (collaborative fiction, business reports, online forums, etc.).

I would go so far as to say that if I make an effort to improve on my communication by the use of conscious thought, I do worse than when I "feel it out."

I have pretty good language skills and I think I am above average at both spelling in my own writing and spotting spelling mistakes when reading but I do not find it particularly easy to spell a difficult word out loud, it is a relatively effortful process unlike the process when reading or writing which is largely automatic and effortless. With longer words I feel like short term memory limitations make it difficult to spell the word out, for a difficult word I try to visualize the text and 'read off' the spelling but that can be taxing for longer words. I may end up having to write it down in order to be sure the spelling is correct and to be able to read it out.

Growing up in England I was largely unaware of the concept of a spelling bee so this is not a skill I ever practiced to any great extent.

My experience of spelling words is quite visual (in contrast to my normal thinking style, which suggests that if "thinking styles" exist they are not monolithic), I literally have the visual representation of the word floating in my head. (I can tell it really is visual because I can give details, such as what kind of font - serif - or what color - black - they are the words as they'd appear in a book.)

I'd also describe my spelling skill as "automatic", i.e. I can usually instantly spot whether a word is "right" or "not right", I absolutely cannot stand misspellings (including mine, I have the hardest time when writing fast because I must instantly go back and correct any typos, rather than let them be), and they tend to leap out of the page; most people appear to have an ability to ignore typos that I lack. (For instance, I often get a kick out of spotting typos on the freakin' front page of national magazines, and when I point them out I mostly get blank stares or "Oh, you're right" - people just don't notice!)

I'd self-describe as adept at language.

(ETA: upvoted for a luminous question.)

If I'm trying to spell a word out loud and it's difficult for me, it appears in my head, but not necessarily as a whole, and I'll be doing checking as I go.

This is interesting, I'd swear the words are appearing more clearly in my mind now that you've brought this up.

I'm pretty adept at straightforward language. I can usually find the words I want, and if I'm struggling to find a word, sometimes it's a memory glitch, but it's more likely to be pinning down a meaning.

Sometimes I can't find a word, and I blame the language. There doesn't seem to be an English word which includes planning as part of an action.

I do creative work with words on a small scale-- coming up with button slogans, and sometimes I'm very fast. (Recent examples: "Life is an adventure-- bring a webcam", "God is watching. It's a good thing He's easily amused.")

"Effortlessly" might be a better word than "automatically", but it took me a couple of minutes to think of it.

Writers typically need to revise. You might be able to become more facile, but it's also possible that you're imagining that other writers have it easier than you do.

Also, you may be slowing yourself down more than necessary by trying to get it right at the beginning. Many people find they're better off letting the very first draft just flow, and then do the editing.

I use a mixed strategy-- I edit somewhat on the first pass, aiming for satisfactory, and then I go over it a time or two for improvements.

I suspect that really fast writers (at least of the kind I see online) are doing most of their writing by presenting things they've already thought out.

If someone asks you how to spell a certain word, does the word appear in your head as you're spelling it out for them, or does it seem to come out of your mouth automatically?

Neither, really. For simple frequent words I remember each letter individually, but otherwise I either have to write it down using the mechanical memory to retrieve the spelling or I have to look at the complete word to test whether it looks right. I can test a spelling by imagining how it looks, but that's not as reliable as seeing it with my eyes, and of course writing it down and then looking at it is always best (short of looking it up of course).

Spelling a word out loud is an infrequent task for me. I have to simulate writing or typing it and then dictate the result of that simulation. I would characterize myself as adept at language. Choosing the appropriate words comes easily to me, and I don't think this skill is related to spelling bee performance.

I tried, it didn't work. Other people can still try! I didn't want to give the hardest possible sell because survival rates for Stage IV breast cancer are actually really good.

Teaching something to others is often a way of consolidating the knowledge, and I would argue that the pursuit of personal excellence usually requires sharing the knowledge at some point, and possibly on an ongoing basis.

See e.g. Lave and Wenger's books on communities of practice and "learning as legitimate peripheral participation".

I'm sure it's a factor, but I suspect "it contradicts my religion" is the larger.

Assuming that's not it: how often do mutations happen, how much time has passed, and how many mutations apart are different species? The first times the second should dwarf the third, at which point it's like that change-one-letter game. Yes, every step must be a valid word, but the 'limit' on how many tries is so wide that it's easy.

Sounds likely to me. I don't know exactly what wording I'd use, but some food for thought: when Alfred Wallace independently rediscovered evolution, his paper on the topic was titled On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type. You can find the full text at http://www.human-nature.com/darwin/archive/arwallace.html - it's short and clear, and from my perspective offers a good approach to understanding why existing species are not ontologically fundamental.

That's a good idea; it's tempting to believe that a category is less fuzzy in reality than it really is. I would point out recent examples of speciation including the subtle development of the apple maggot, and fruit fly speciation in laboratory experiments. If you want to further mess with their concept of species, tell them about ring species (which are one catastrophe away from splitting into two species).

From the site:

I define a "Bizarre Domain" as a problem domain that has all of these four properties: It is Chaotic, it requires a Holistic Stance, it contains Ambiguity, and it exhibits Emergent Properties. I examine sixteen kinds of problems that fall into these four categories.

Man, you just know it's going to be a fun read...

Looks like a step in the right direction -- kind of obvious, but you do need both probabilistic reasoning and rules to get reality-interpretation.

Looks like the usual empty promises to me.

If you have no emotional or other investment, the best thing to do is not engage.

When rational argument fails, fall back to dark arts. If that fails, fall back to damage control (discredit him in front of others). All that assuming it's worth the trouble.

Where the utility function is simple or the AI is stupid, we have useful things like game opponents.

Rather, where the utility function is simple AND the program is stupid. Paperclippers are not useful things.

If it is the case that there is a big gap between AI's that are smart enough for their non-human utility functions to be annoyingly evident and AI's that are smart enough to improve themselves, then non-friendly AGI research will hit an apparent wall where all avenues are unproductive.

Reinforcement-based utility definition plus difficult games with well-defined winning conditions seems to constitute a counterexample to this principle (a way of doing AI that won't hit the wall you described). This could function even on top of supplemental ad-hoc utility function building, as in chess, where a partially hand-crafted utility function over specific board positions is an important component of chess-playing programs -- you'd just need to push the effort to a "meta-AI" that is only interested in the real winning conditions.

Coincidentally, I was reading the quantum non-realism article when writing my recent understanding your understanding article, and that's where it's from -- though he mentions it actually happened in a previous discussion and linked to it.

The context in the LW version is:

My attitude toward questions of existence and meaning was nicely illustrated in a discussion of the current state of evidence for whether the universe is spatially finite or spatially infinite, in which James D. Miller chided Robin Hanson:

"Robin, you are suffering from overconfidence bias in assuming that the universe exists. Surely there is some chance that the universe is of size zero."

To which I replied:

"James, if the universe doesn't exist, it would still be nice to know whether it's an infinite or a finite universe that doesn't exist."

Ha! You think pulling that old "universe doesn't exist" trick will stop me? It won't even slow me down!

It's not that I'm ruling out the possibility that the universe doesn't exist. It's just that, even if nothing exists, I still want to understand the nothing as best I can.

(I was actually inspired by that to say something similar in response to an anti-reductionist's sophistry on another site, but that discussion's gone now.)

The simulation argument muddles the issue from my perspective. There's more to weigh than just the anthropic principle.

I'm reading the paper now, and I see in the "Methods" section:

We selected these schedules to allow comparison of intermittent and continuous access, as our previous publications show limited (12 h) access to sucrose precipitates binge-eating behavior (Avena et al., 2006).

which the author of the blog post apparently does not acknowledge. I'll grant that the study may be overblown, but it is not as obviously flawed as I believe the blogger suggested.

You can believe that it leads to a 100%-always-true-in-every-possible-universe conclusion, but the strength of your belief should not be 100% itself. The difference is crucial. Good posts on this subject are How To Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3 and Infinite Certainty. (The followup, 0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities, is a worthwhile explanation of the mathematical reasons that this is the case.)

I still fail to see how Bayesian methods eliminate fluke results or publication bias.

Outlawing AI research was successful in Dune, but unsuccessful in Mass Effect. But I've never seen AI research fictionally outlawed until it's done actual harm, and I seen no reason to expect a different outcome in reality. It seems a very unlikely candidate for the type of moral panic that tends to get unusual things outlawed.

I'm pretty sure Eliezer commented publicly on this and I think his answer was that it doesn't make sense to outlaw AI research.

10 free karma to whoever can find the right link.

Is there a particular reason you linked to a blog instead of the actual story? How much money did you net from that decision?

This would be an interesting classroom tool.

That's actually a very interesting question. You'd want a problem which:

1. is either embarrassingly parallel or large enough to get a decent speedup,
2. involves a fair amount of complex branching and logic, such that GPGPU would be unsuitable,
3. cannot be efficiently solved by "shared nothing", message-passing systems, such as Beowulf clusters and grid computing.

The link also states that the aim should be "to help society, to help others" and to "make the world a better, more interesting place". Here's a start; in fact, many of these problems are fairly relevant to AI.

Finally get to play Crysis.

Write a real time ray tracer.

Meh. I think Arrington and this company are overestimating the market. JuicyCampus went out of business for a reason and they had the advantage of actually targeting existing social scenes instead of isolated individuals. Here is how my campus's juicy campus page looked over time (apologies for crudeness):

omg! we have a juicycampus page! Who is the hottest girl? (Some names) Who is the hottest guy? (Some names) Alex Soandso is a slut! Shut up Alex is awesome and you have no friends! Who are the biggest players? (Some names) Who had sex with a professor? (No names) Who is the hottest professor? (A few names) Who has the biggest penis?

... This lasted for about a week. The remaining six months until JuicyCampus shut down consisted of parodies about how awesome Steve Holt is and awkward threads obviously contrived by employees of Juicy Campus trying to get students to keep talking.

Because these things are uncensored the signal to noise ratio is just impossible to deal with. Plus for this to be effective you would have to be routinely looking up everyone you know. I guess you could have accounts that tracked everyone you knew... but are you really going to show up on a regular basis just to check? It does look like some of these gossip sites have been successful with high schools but those are far more insular and far more gossip-centered places than the rest of the world.

My intuition tells me that if we manage to entirely formalize correct reasoning, the result will have a sort of adversarial quality: you can "prove" statements, but these proofs can be overturned by stronger disproofs.

That... doesn't sound right at all. It does sound like how people intuitively think about proof/reasoning (even people smart enough to be thinking about things like, say, set theory, trying to overturn Cantor's diagonal argument with a counterexample without actually discovering a flaw in the theorem), and how we think about debates (the guy on the left half of the screen says something, the guy on the right says the opposite, and they go back and forth taking turns making Valid Points until the CNN anchor says "We'll have to leave it there" and the viewers are left agreeing with (1) whoever agreed with their existing beliefs, or, if neither, (2) whoever spoke last). But even if our current formal understanding of reasoning is incomplete, we know it's not going to resemble that. Yes, Bayesian updating will cause your probability estimates to fluctuate up and down a bit as you acquire more evidence, but the pieces of evidence aren't fighting each other, they're collaborating on determining what your map should look like and how confident you should be.

Of course, for this to work . . . no AGI could be so much smarter than the others that it could find tons of evidence in favor of its pet truths and have the database favor them despite that they're false.

Why would we build AGI to have "pet truths", to engage in rationalization rather than rationality, in the first place?

My intuition tells me that if we manage to entirely formalize correct reasoning, the result will have a sort of adversarial quality: you can "prove" statements, but these proofs can be overturned by stronger disproofs.

Game semantics works somewhat like this; a proof is formalized as an "argument" between a Proponent and an Opponent. If an extension of game semantics to probabilistic reasoning exists, it will work much like the 'theory of uncertain arguments' you mention here.

I seem to have man-with-a-hammer syndrome, and my hammer is economics. Luckily, I'm using economics as a tool for designing stuff, not for understanding stuff; there is no One True Design the way there's a One True Truth.

How many know about this, and are games such as the lottery, and sports betting still viable?

Lottery numbers / stock changes seem like the first impression answer to me.

Can't answer until I know the laws of time travel.

No, seriously. Is the resulting universe randomly selected from all possible self-consistent ones? By what weighting? Does the resulting universe look like the result of iteration until a stable point is reached? And what about quantum branching?

Considering that all I know of causality and reality calls for non-circular causal graphs, I do feel a bit of justification in refusing to just hand out an answer.

Why am I firmly committed to realizing the future the machine shows? Do I believe that to be contrary would cause a paradox and explode the universe? Do I believe that I am destined to achieve whatever is foretold, and that it'll be more pleasant if I do it on purpose instead of forcing fate to jury-rig something at the last minute? Do I think that it is only good and right that I do those things which are depicted, because it shows the locally best of all possible worlds?

In other words, what do I hypothetically think would happen if I weren't fully committed to realizing the future shown?

My question is this: What is your prior probability for any observation you can make with this machine? For example, what are the odds of the windows being open?

Depends on the details of the counter-factual science. Does not depend on my firm commitment.

I think you're being overly dramatic.

Nate Silver has some good numerical analysis here: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/12/why-progressives-are-batshit-crazy-to.html

I don't think that US government debt has much connection to reality any more. The international macroeconomy wizards seem to make things work. Given their track record, I am confident that the financial wizards can continue to make a fundamentally unsustainable balance sheet sustainable, at least until the Singularity.

So I think that the marginal increase in debt from the bill is a smaller risk to the stability of the USA than maintaining the very flawed status quo of healthcare in the USA.

Useful question: When does the bill go into effect? My parent's insurance is kicking me off at the end of the month and it will be nice to be able to stay on it for a few more years.

The voting system is of utmost importance and I'd rather be inconvenienced by the current system than have a karma-free zone on this site.

General risk-aversion; LW is a city on a hill, and the only one, so we should be very warey of fiddling unnecessarily.

I don't know enough about cold fusion, so I haven't read that part. As for relativity theory, it seems that the only valid argument against it presented in the linked article is, translated into more "lesswrongian" language, that doubting special relativity strongly endangers your status. Which is true, at least in general. Then they mention a "Modified Lorentz Aether Theory" without giving a single link to a place where this theory is explained, and support it by saying that the Michelson-Morley experiment conducted in 1887 in fact gave slightly different results than it is now believed it gave - as if these results were not anyway screened off by more recent experiments of the same kind.

The overall feeling I got from reading the passages is that the physical community is ready to censor any theory which doesn't precisely agree with special relativity. Which is a nonsense. First of all, general relativity itself extends special relativity and thus disagrees with it, and the differences between GR and SR are arguably bigger than between SR and Newton. Moreover, practically all physicists expect GR to break somewhere, at Planck scale at the latest.

Well, nobody really believes that the progress will take us back to æther. There is nothing strange with that. The authors of Suppressed Science have, as usual in similar debates, written about how the Newtonian physics was supposed to be absolutely correct until it turned out to be false, but they somehow forgot to notice that it wasn't replaced by "Modified Galilean Epicycle Theory" or something of that sort.

Or more generally, their style of writing ignores that most of the alleged crackpots really are crackpots.

It's too bad that this will be downvoted into invisibility just because you didn't have the discipline to leave off the last sentence.

The 'suppressed science' link is worth reading IMO, even though I think it's highly probable that the experimental results therein are bunk; it's quite conceivable that the scientific establishment draws its "crank research" line too early in some modern cases, given its history.

Btw, I couldn't fail to notice that I see the very same tendency to suppress evidence that goes against certain established theories here on LW. 9/11 would be one case for certain.

Not to be rude but I couldn't fail to notice that you systematically overestimate claims against established theories and routinely fail to notice indicators of crank science, unprofessional-ism and mental instability in your sources.

Start here.