Open Thread, Jun. 22 - Jun. 28, 2015

The same animation studio also made this fairly accurate and entertaining introduction to (parts of) Bostrom's argument. Although I don't know what to think of their (subjective) probability for possible outcomes.

Although not improving my life at all; I quite like the short story as an analogy for UFAI risks.

Once I was facing akrasia and I kind of had the same thing happen. I knew what I needed to do, and I ruminated on why I wasn't doing that.

I thought at first that I was just being lazy, but then I realized that I subconsciously knew that the strategy I was procrastinating from was actually pretty terrible. Once I realized that, I started thinking about how I might do it better, and then when I thought of something (which wasn't immediate, to be sure) I was actually able to get up and do it.

sounds like a growth mindset discovery! Congratulations!

For my benefit can you try to rephrase this sentence with alternative words or in a more verbose form:

I know what I actually need to do, I just need to sit down and start working and once I've started it's much easier to keep going. I was thinking about this today and I had an imaginary conversation where I said: "I know what I need to do, I just don't know what I need to do, so I can do what I need to do."

mainly a taboo on the multiple meanings of the word need that you tried to express. without knowing the tone; it just sounds confusing.

Meta: I suspect people have rewarded you for achieving an epiphany.

Purely on Outside View grounds, or based on something more?

The outside view is not very good for predicting technology. Every technology has an eternity of not existing, until suddenly one day it exists out of the blue.

Now no one is saying that deep learning is going to be AGI in 10 years. In fact the deep learning experts have been extremely skeptical of AGI in all forms, and are certainly not promoting that view. But I think it's a very reasonable opinion that it will lead to AGI within the next few decades. And I believe sooner rather than later.

The reasons that 'this time it is different':

• NNs are extraordinarily general. I don't think you can say this about other AI approaches. I mean search and planning algorithms are pretty general. But they fall back on needing heuristics to shrink the search space. And how do you learn heuristics? It goes back to being a machine learning problem. And they are starting to solve it. E.g. a deep neural net predicted Go moves made by experts 54% of the time.

• The progress you see is a great deal due to computing power advances. Early AI researchers were working with barely any computing power, and a lot of their work reflects that. That's not to say we have AGI and are just waiting for computers to get fast enough. But computing power allows researchers to experiment and actually do research.

• Empirically they have made significant progress on a number of different AI domains. E.g. vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, and Go. A lot of previous AI approaches might have sounded cool in theory, or worked on a single domain, but they could never point to actual success on loads of different AI problems.

• It's more brain like. I know someone will say that they really aren't anything like the brain. And that's true, but at a high level there are very similar principles. Learning networks of features and their connections, as opposed to symbolic approaches.

And if you look at the models that are inspired by the brain like HTM, they are sort of converging on similar algorithms. E.g. they say the important part of the cortex is that it's very sparse and has lateral inhibition. And you see leading researchers propose very similar ideas.

Whereas the stuff they do differently is mostly because they want to follow biological constraints. Like only local interactions, little memory, only single bits of information at a time. And these aren't restrictions that real computers have too much, so we don't necessarily need to copy biology in those respects and can do things differently, and even better.

It would be condescending to talk in short bursts of wisdom.

It would be condescending for the master too, to talk in short bursts of wisdom to his disciples, as long as he was alive. The issue is rather that once he dies, and the top level disciples gradually elevate the memory of the master into a quasi-deity, pass on the thoughts verbally for generations, and by the time they get around to writing it down the memory of the master is seen as such a big guy / deity and more or less gets worshipped so it becomes almost inconceivable to write it in anything but a condescending tone. But it does not really follow the masters were just as condescending IRL.

You can see this today. The Dalai Lama is really an easy guy, he does not really care how people should behave to him, he is just friendly and direct with everybody, but there is an "establishment" around him that really pushes visitors into high-respect mode. I had this experience with a lower lama, of a different school, I was anxious about getting etiquette right, hands together, bowing etc. then he just walked up to me, shook my hand in a western style, did not let it go but just dragged me halfway accross the room while patting me on the back and shaking with laughter at my surprise, it was simply his joke, his way of breaking the all too ceremonious mood. He was a totally non-condescending, direct, easy-going guy, who would engage everybody on an equal level, but a lot of retainers and helpers around him really put him and his boss (he was something of a top level helper of an even bigger guy too) on a pedestal.

According to a distinction that originates with Aristotle himself, his writings are divisible into two groups: the "exoteric" and the "esoteric". Most scholars have understood this as a distinction between works Aristotle intended for the public (exoteric), and the more technical works intended for use within the Lyceum course / school (esoteric). Modern scholars commonly assume these latter to be Aristotle's own (unpolished) lecture notes (or in some cases possible notes by his students). ... Another common assumption is that none of the exoteric works is extant – that all of Aristotle's extant writings are of the esoteric kind.

Wikipedia on Aristotle

It seems to have a synergistic effect but I regularly drink coffee and take modafinil irregularly so it's hard to say. It doesn't seem bad by any means.

1) surgery is dangerous. Even innocuous surgeries can have complications such as infection that can kill. There's also complications that aren't factored into the obvious math, for example ever since I got 2 of my wisdom teeth out, my jaw regularly tightens up and cracks if I open my mouth wide, something that never happened beforehand. I wasn't warned about this and didn't consider it when I was deciding to get the surgery.

2) If it's something dangerous, you're very likely to find out anyway before it becomes serious. eg, if it's a tumor, it's going to keep growing and you can come back a month later and get it out then with little problem.

3) even if it's not nothing, it might be something else that's unlikely to kill you. Thus the 5/1000 chance of death you're imagining is actually a 5/1000 chance of being not nothing.

You're probably misreading your doctor.

When he said "99.5 or 99.95%" I rather doubt he meant to give the precise odds. I think that what he meant was "There is a non-zero probability that the cyst will turn out to be an issue, but it is so small I consider it insignificant and so should you". Trying to base some calculations on the 0.5% (or 0.05%) chance is not useful because it's not a "real" probability, just a figurative expression.

I think you should use the cream for a week, to start with.

Also, thought experiment: Suppose a person is going to live another 70 years. If undergoing some oversimplified miracle-cure treatment will cost, one way or another, 1 week of their life, what chance of "it's just a cyst" will they accept? 99.97%. So from the doctor's perspective (neglecting other risks or resources used, taking their '99.95%' probability estimate at face value, and assuming that a biopsy is some irreplaceable road to health), your condition is so likely to be benign that the procedure to surgically check spends your life at about the same rate as it saves it.

The biggest thing is that the doctor's priorities are not your priorities. To him, a life is valuable... but not infinitely valuable -estimates usually puts the value of a life at (ballpark) 2 million dollars. When you consider the relative probability of you dying, and then the cost to the healthcare system of treatment, he's probably making the right decision (you of course, would probably value your own life MUCH MUCH higher). Btw, this kind of follows a blindspot I've seen in several calculations of yours - let me know if you're interested in getting feedback on it.

Finally, there are two other wrinkles - the possibility of complications and the possibility of false positives from a biopsy. The second increases the potential cost, and the first decreases the potential years added to your life. Both of these tilt the equation AGAINST getting it removed.

(Two people mentioned this so I figure I'll just reply here.)

Re: doctors perspective. I see how it might be rational from his perspective. My first thought is, "why not just give me the info and let me decide how much money I'm willing to invest in my health?". I could see how that might not be such a good idea though. From a macro perspective, perhaps those sorts of transaction costs might not be worth the benefits of added information -> increased efficiency? Plus it'd be getting closer to admitting to how much they value a life, which seems like it'd be bad from an image perspective

I guess what I'm left with is saying that I find it extremely frustrating, I'm disappointed in myself for not thinking harder about this, and I'm really really glad you guys emphasized this so I could do a better job of thinking about what the interests are of parties I interact with (specifically doctors, and also people more generally). I feel like it makes sense for me to be clear that I would like information to be shared with me and that I'm willing to spend a lot of money on my health. And perhaps that it's worth exercising some influence on my doctors so they care more about me. Thoughts?

A perspective on the nature of medical advice: There exist people who are so concerned about not dying that they would do anything in their power to survive medically, and organise for themselves regular irrelevant medical tests. They are probably over-medicated and wasting a lot of time. i.e. a brain scan for tumours (where no reason to think they exist is present). There exist people who get yearly mammograms. there exist people who probably get around to their (reccomended yearly) mammogram every few years. There exist people who have heart attacks from long term lifestyle choices. There exist people who are so not concerned about dying that they smoke.

This is the range of patients that exist. You sound like you are closer to the top in terms of medical concern. The dermatologist has to consider where on the spectrum you are when devising a treatment as well as where the condition is on the spectrum of risk.

For a rough estimate (not a doctor) I would say the chance of a cyst on your ear killing you in the next 50 years would be less than the chance of getting an entirely different kind of cancer and having it threaten your life. (do you eat burnt food? bowel cancer risk. Do you go in the sun? skin cancer risk)

If it can be removed by cream; it will still be gone. The specialist should suggest a biopsy to cover their ass, but really; it could be 99 different types of skin growths or few type of cancerous growth. With no other symptoms there is no reason to suspect any danger exists.

the numbers you suggested sound like they were fabricated when given to you. Which is a reason to not mathematically attack them; but take them on the feeling value of 99.99% thumbs up. (and its really hard and almost impossible to find 0.01% so medically we don't usually bother)

My advice would be:

1) See another doctor to get a second opinion. (And possibly a third opinion, if you don't like the second doctor.) Keep looking for a doctor until you find one that explains things to you in enough detail so that you understand thoroughly. Write down the questions you want answered ahead of time, and take notes during your appointment. "I am confident" is a bullshit answer unless you understand what possibilities the doctor considered, why the doctor thinks this one is the most likely, what the possible approaches to dealing with it if it turns out to be "not fine" are, and their advantages and disadvantages, what warning signs to look for that might indicate it is not fine, and the mechanism by which the cream option would work.

Unfortunately, the state of medical knowledge is such that there may not be good answers to all of the questions. The best the doctor may be able to do is "I don't know" for some of them. But you can get a better understanding of the situation than you have now, and a better understanding of where there are gaps in the medical knowledge.

2) Read a bunch of scientific papers about cysts and biopsies and tests so that you understand the possibilities and the risks better.

3) Also read about medical errors and risks of surgeries. People following doctor's instructions is one of the leading causes of death in the USA. I read an article about it in JAMA a few years ago. There might be more up-to-date papers about it by now. Having a medical procedure done is not a neutral option when it comes to affecting your chances to continue living.

For example, here's a paper that indicates that prostate biopsies could increase the mortality rate in men. This is just one study, not enough information to make an informed decision.

Boniol M, Boyle P, Autier P, Perrin P. Mortality at 120 days following prostatic biopsy: analysis of data in the PLCO study. Program and abstracts of the 2013 American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting and Exposition; May 31-June 4, 2013; Chicago, Illinois. Abstract 5022. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.23559/full

(deleted--everything I said was said by others already)

Saying 99.9999% seems a mouthful. Would you have preferred an answer like this instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sWpSvQ_hwo :)

As far as I understand CFAR teaches this heuristic under the name "Gears-Thinking".

One thing you might want to consider is the reason people or posting on Facebook... usually, it's NOT to create a good argument, and in fact, sometimes a good, logical argument is counterproductive to the goal people have (to show their allegiance to a tribe).

you might like www.yourlogicalfallacy.com

The core difference between B and F is what they mean by "probability." If you go to the casino, the Bs and the Fs will interpret everything the same way, but when you go to the stock market, the Bs and the Fs will want to use their language differently. It seems likely to me that most of the uncertainties that show up in everyday life are things that Bs would be comfortable assigning probabilities to, but Fs would be hesitant about.

When it comes to an action you must structure your knowledge in Bayesian terms to use to compute an expected utility. It is only when discussion detached knowledge that other options become available.

A paper "Philosophers’ Biased Judgments Persist Despite Training, Expertise and Reflection" (Eric Schwitzgebel and Fiery Cushman) is available here: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/Stability-150423.pdf

You've messed up the link, this is it

http://www.twitch.tv/317070

Some more links: the blog post and a ten minute sample that you put on youtube. I imagine that there are many people who prefer youtube to twitch. In particular, I like the 2x setting on youtube.

Science and Sanity contains a lot of good insights that aren't in the sequences. The problem is that it's not an accessible book. It hard to read and a substantial time investment.

I correctly guessed what X was. Because there's only one thing it could ever be, unless the paper was talking about very unusual subgroups like Jehovah's Witnesses in Mormon territory.

ROT13: V thrffrq pbafreingvirf pbeerpgyl, nygubhtu V'z cerggl fher V unq urneq fbzrguvat nobhg gur fghql ryfrjurer.

Cbyvgvpnyyl pbafreingvir.

I haven't looked. Pbafreingvirf.

fbpvny pbafreingvirf

I don't know of Sam Altman, so maybe this criticism is wrong, but the quote: "If you join a company, my general advice is to join a company on a breakout trajectory. There are a usually a handful of these at a time, and they are usually identifiable to a smart young person." Absent any guides on how to identify breakout trajectory companies, this advice seems unhelpful. It feels like: "Didn't work for you? You must not have been a smart young person or you would have picked the right company."

Paired with the paragraph below on not letting salary be a factor, I am left with the suspicion that Sam runs what he believes to be a company with a 'breakout trajectory' and pays noncompetitive salaries.

Now to find a way to test that suspicion.

These types of advices are really not honest enough, I think. Let me try a honest one:

1) Move to America if you don't already live there. Bluff your way through immigration officers and whatnot.

2) Move to the Silicon Valley if you don't already live there. Deal with the costs of living there / outside your parents house anyhow.

3) Acquire enough money, lump sum or regular income that you can can focus on chasing shiny things for years without pay. Consider getting reincarnated in a well-to-do family, that helps.

4) Above is still true if you intend to join a company. Unless you want to join the kind of company where you are okay with HR drones keyword-buggering and credential-combing your resume and requiring 3 years of experience in technologies 2 years old, which is not really what the truly ambitious like to, those years will be spent on getting to know excellent founders, and making the kind of stuff on your own that convinces them to let you join them. I.e. chasing shiny things without pay before you can join the right kind of company.

5) Be a programmer, because there are very few professions where you can just casually build things as you see fit. As a programmer you get away with not having access to anything but your brain, the net, and a laptop. If you are e.g. a sculptor and your dream is to build a 50m tall Darth Vader statue out of bronze, well that is going to require some harder to acquire stuff as well. If you took all these building a bit too literally and you graduated in civil engineering, your chances of starting out on your own after graduating are nil, these kinds of startups don't exist, and you will probably work 10 years at the construction equivalent of Microsoft before you can try to start out on your own and finally do something interesting. So be a programmer. Don't like programming and computer technology so much? Still be a programmer or at the very least figure out real hard how to graduate in something that 1) can be made without really expensive inputs 2) scales up readily to serving many customers simply by gradually renting more stuff and hiring more people, staying ahead of cash-flow. (John, this MealSquares is an excellent example of a non-programming activity that satisfies these criteria. But imagine if your knack was for designing dams. People must invest a ton of money into building them so they will not hire a young nobody, and you can only design one dam at a time, it does not scale up to serving many customers simultaneously.) Have no idea what could be like this, beside programming? Be a programmer. Or a musician.

6) After all these preconditions are done, then you are ready to read Sam Altman and similar folks (Graham etc.)

Would it maybe help, if you left some of the details vague at first, to get back into writing, and go back later to rewrite those parts?

From the way things seem given your recent posts about struggling with getting words onto the page, I would suggest doing anything that actually gets you moving in that direction. If you are stuck on one particular bit, by all means skip it for now. Whether that means incorporating this into the narrative, or coming back later for clean-up, depends on the product itself (I haven't read the work you are talking about).

A more general aside: I've found myself in a very similar position, finding it incredibly hard to put words on the page yet needing to do so more and more urgently. I've seen a few comments you made before about preparing optimal writing situations and planning for them - I did exactly the same and in retrospect it seems this was a bad strategy for me. Mainly because such preparations got me thinking more and more about providing an optimal situation for written productivity: in essence setting up small "writing retreats" now and again. This became a self-perpetuating loop of non-writing, because doing so provided perfect excuses for NOT writing at any other time.

A friend who is a (now retired) writer suggested that instead, I work on writing despite distractions, rather than constraining my writing effort to those situations where all distractions are minimised. In alternating weeks I tried the different techniques (A,B,B,A, where A=my old approach of writing in optimal situations and B=explicit attempt to write in distracting environments I wouldn't consider suitable for "A"). It turned out that B>A both in minutes spent writing (+125%) and in wordcount (+160%). Quality of work under "B" might have been lower but I don't seem to have a block in editing and revising, only in first drafting.

IDSIA / University of Lugano in Switzerland is where e.g. Schmidhuber is. His research is quite neural network-focused, but also AGI-focused. Also Shane Legg (now at DeepMind, one of the hottest AGI-ish companies around) graduated from Lugano with a PhD thesis on machine superintelligence.

"AGI but not machine learning or neuroscience or anything with neural nets" sounds a little odd to me, since the things you listed under the "not" seem like the components you'll need to understand if you want to ever build an AGI. (Though maybe you meant that you don't want to do research focusing only on neuroscience or ML without an AGI component?)

Zoubin Gharhamani / Carl Rassmussen (Cambridge)

Michael Osborne / Yee Whye Teh (Oxford)

Microsoft Research Cambridge

Just wondering why you don't want to do machine learning? Many ML labs have at least some people who care about AI, and you'll get to learn a lot of useful technical material.

There's a number of "game" related courses that take this approach. Most of these programs involve going out, and continually approaching and interacting with people, with specific goals in mind.

There's the connection course (This one is probably the closest you're looking for, as he's reworked it to remove all "gamey" stuff, and just focused on social interactions): http://markmanson.net/connection-course

There's the Collection of Confidence: http://www.amazon.com/The-Collection-Of-Confidence-HYPNOTICA/product-reviews/B000NPXWT8

Stylelife academy: http://web.stylelife.com/

Ars Amorata: http://www.zanperrion.com/arsamorata.php

and a whole bunch more.

Edt: in my area at least, there's also practice groups for Non-violent communication on meetup.com

The Rejection Game using Beeminder can be a good start for social skills development in general

If you're interested in a specific area of social interactions then finding a partner or two in that area could help out. Toastmasters, pua groups, book clubs, and improv groups fall into this category.

Alternatively, obtaining a job in sales can take you far

Advice about picking in person training is location dependent. Without knowing what's available where you live it's impossible to give good recommendations.

A subset of Speech Therapy (especially for Autism Spectrum) covers exactly this sort of thing. I rather doubt it's what you're looking for, even if it's an option, but it fits what you described almost perfectly. The major issues would be the tendency toward a more clinical setting, only being an hour or so a week, the limited pool of people to practice with, and establishing your existing skills.

Sometimes career centres at universities or community colleges have workshops to practice job interviewing and networking. You could see if there's something like that near you.

I recall reading somewhere (slatestarcodex, I think) that the neoreactionists have three main strains: ethnocentric, techno-futurist/capitalist, and religious-authoritarian. In light of that, I wonder if Israel isn't a better example than Hungary. Israel is technologically advanced but also a strict ethnostate with some theocratic elements. Like Hungary, Israel is probably too democratic to really qualify.

Why do think Orbán's Hungary is a good example of NRx ideas implemented?

It's still a democracy which has elections that the OCED can inspect Hungary. It's also still a member of the EU. That means it's subject to all sorts of legislation from Brussels and action by the EU Court of Human Rights.

It seems like Hungary has to pay billions to the churches due to a verdict of the EU Court of Human Rights.

If you just want a basic "display information" website, go with wordpress.

If you're looking to do a full web-app, I'd recommend either Drupal, or Wordpess with the Toolset plugins.

Wordpress is open source. That's a good thing, and important.

There isn't really a "LW approach to AI," but there are some factors at work here. If there's one universal LW buzzword, it's "Bayesian methods," though that's not an AI design, one might call it a conceptual stance. There's also LW's focus on decision theory, which, while still not an AI design, is usually expressed as short, "model-dependent" algorithms. It would also be nice for a self-improving AI to have a human-understandable method of value learning, which leads to more focus diverted away from black-box methods.

As to whether there's some tribal conflict to be worried about here, nah, probably not.

I think this sums up the problem. If you want to build a safe AI you can't use neural nets because you have no clue what the system is actually doing.

If you want to establish intelligent life on Mars, the best way to do that is by establishing a human colony. Obviously this is unlikely to succeed but trying to evolve microbes into intelligent life is less likely by far.

You note: "I did not really put forth any particularly new ideas here, this is just some of my thoughts and repetitions of what I have read and heard others say, so I'm not sure if this post adds any value."

Many readers (myself included) are already familiar with these sources, and so the post comes across as unoriginal. It is basically you rephrasing and summarizing things that a lot of people have already read. In other words, it's probably not that people are downvoting to disagree, but because they don't see a response-journal reiterating well-known views as a good Main post. It's not "Go away, you are not smart enough to post here!" but "Yes, yes, we know these things; this particular post here is not news."

The post has far too much "I think", "I realized", "it seems to me" language in it. It's your post; of course it is about what you think. In conversation those kind of phrases are used to soften the impact of a weird view strongly stated, but in writing they make it sound like the writer is excessively wrapped up in themselves.

(On the other hand, if the important part is the sequence of your realizations, then present the evidence that convinced you, not just assertions that you had those realizations.)

While different language communities have different standards for paragraph length, by the standards of current Web writing, your paragraphs are often way too long. To me, long block paragraphs come across as "kook sign" — that is, they lead me to think that the writer's thinking is disorganized.

NancyLebovitz is the newest moderator at present.... and I believe the only really active one at least in day-to-day operations. Viliam_Bur was previously in that role but he backed off in January due to other time commitments.

There is a moderator list here

am I morally obliged to contact the police/site admin?

I hope not (though your morality is your morality, of course). Bringing in the cops into an online discussion is very VERY rarely a proper thing to do, IMHO.

I didn't see the post I believe you're referring to before the author redacted it, but for me the line would be real danger to other people, which you say you don't think is the case. It any case, it would be best to go through the mods first. A pseudonymous post recounting deeds in (perhaps) unspecified places and times isn't something the police can work with. Also, summoning the police is not to be done lightly, for once summoned, no power can banish them whence they came.

You may or may not be legally obligated (although this obligation is not realistically enforceable by law); as for morally obligated, it depends upon the nature of the act. There is imperfect overlap between things defended by law and by morality. If we're talking piracy or jaywalking or buying modafinil on the black market, you may be overexerting your civic powers here, and your conscience can relax. If the matter at hand involves violence, and you can expect to save some people through your report, then maybe it's better to get involved. For all matters in-between, both approaches may be valid in certain proportions, so apply common sense.

A site mod theoretically has IP addresses that allow him to pick the right country when reporting to the police. As a result it makes sense to report to a mod.

If you would contact the police and then they contact the side mod, things can get more messy when the mod doesn't reply fast enough.

I thought this comment was pretty good.

yep. someone else downvoted this. I agree in downvoting because of the lack of description or information given with the random link.

EDIT: I dont know why this comment received downvotes

You voiced a political opinion on LW and you provided no proper reasoning for why other people should agree with you. You didn't steelman the opposing site and showed why you think they are wrong.

in previous eras, a woman who entered into marriage became something close to a slave of her husband

If it was Reddit, I would reach for the downvote button. Since it is not, I will try to make a shot why this type of argument is problematic. The Past is a big place, ranging from the beginnings of written history to the recent minute and over the planet. While on the conservative side there is an equally erroneous tendency to glorify the whole of this range, often on the progressive side there is an equally erroneous tendency to vilify the whole of it. These tendencies come from various philosophies of history, "kali yuga" in the first case and "whig theory" in the second case, your one. This - both - simply puts the politics of today into an unrealistic perspective. Both errors set up the mood of discussing political changes into a distorted "one more step away from our glorious past" vs. "one more step away from the horrors of our past".

Your example illustrates this meta problem excellently. The last time I remember men were actually allowed to sell their wives to slave traders was Pagan Rome. What matters of the past for current politics is largely the last 250 years of largely western nations, so the Enlightenment era, where none of the actual characteristics of slavery were present in marriage. What there was instead is broadly the status of women in marriage as minors, not slaves, i.e. comparable to children but even that was changing was early as 1809-1848 in the US and in similar developed nations. So plain simply in that kind of past that matters, that is relevant, because it affects the present through the weight of being an established tradition it is not so. None of your grandmothers even remembers what it was like to not own property in a marriage and similar things. Non-equality does not imply being a slave unless you felt like a slave at 17.

The problem of your view is that you really see marriage as being about the people who marry. In reality it is largely about their children. Even gay marriage is seen as a way to pave the way to allowing adoption / surrogate parenthood and thus enabling gays to have full families, including children, although not necessarily biologically theirs - at least that is part of the story, although using it as a vehicle for social validation, and some weird US-specific rules like hospital visits play a role too. While childfree and old people marry too, this is broadly the same as eating ice-cream vs. actually eating a meal. The meat is missing. Which does not mean that it should not be allowed, because just why not, but it does not mean either that it is valid to see marriage as an institutionalization of a relationship of adults and see how could we make better institutions for this? But marriage is not for adults primarily. For adults the whole thing is simple - ideally everybody should be able to marry but people who are dedicatedly childfree should probably realize there is no good reason to. There is hardly any good reason for two modern, income-earning people to pool resources unless one of them is becoming a housewife / houseman and really the only good reason to do that ever is children otherwise you are just being a maid. The primary thing marriage is optimized for is children. I predict most gay couples who bother about the whole marriage thing intend to adopt or have a surrogate child. Otherwise there would be little point to.

Gay marriage does not hurt children but abolishing marriage would. It would be one step towards making it less and less sure that children will always have their mother and father, and their property, around.

The answer to poly marriage is that first figure out how to sort out parenthood and then you will have your answer. If you would see it as an "it takes a village to raise a child" kind of setup, sure, just consider it a group thing, everybody pooling their property for the sake of raising children, no matter who is the father or the mother. I think Robert Heinlein proposed this in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress in 1966. However if you think even in a poly thing primarily the two biological parents would be responsible for the children, things could really get a bit complicated.

In short, I think you really need to update the view that marriage is about two or more adults for some weird reason wanting to make their love institutional. No, it is primarily about children, own or adopted, although due to the social customs associated to it it is often used for other purposes, but that is not the main purpose.

I should add that in the wedding ceremony where my wife and me are from this is halfway explicit. After the promise we gave our parents flower / wine thanking them to raising us - this can be seen as the childhood being over (at 34 it was about time) and now we are going to take up the mantle of becoming parents and continuing the family lines. During the dinner and party, people kept asking when do we plan the first kid. So the generic mood was "nice you guys chose to reproduce" and not something like "nice you guys made your love public". I don't need to make my love public and I could do that without wearing a ridiculous penguin costume...

Well, it seems to me that in some sense the burden of proof is on the other side.

No. If you call for the abolition of an significant public institution you have to provide proof.

In general, the less complexity we have in the legal system the better.

You haven't shown how handle every single aspect in which marriage is involved by a new rule will reduce complexity.

To put in other words, if we had to reinvent the state without relying on history, I see no reason we would have invented legal marriage at all.

That's argument from ignorance. "I'm to stupid or uninformed about the subject to think of arguments for the opposing site" is not something that should encourage people to adopt your position. Or to reference the sequences: Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided

When all is well and people are living peacefully and amicably, you don't really need the law. When problems come up, you want clear laws detailing each party's rights, duties, and obligations. For example, when a couple lives together for a decade while sharing assets and jointly building wealth, what happens when one party unilaterally wants to end the relationship? This situation is common enough that it's worth having legal guidelines for its resolution.

The various spousal privileges are also at issue. Sure, you can file all kinds of paperwork to grant the individual legal rights to a romantic partner. At this point the average person needs to consult an attorney to make sure nothing is missed. What happens when someone doesn't? You can expedite the process by drafting a special document that allows all these rights to be conferred as part of a package deal, but now you're on the verge of reinventing marriage.

The legal issues surrounding the circumstances of married life will still remain whether marriage is a legal concept or no.

Do you think that a state shouldn't give spouses special immigration rights? What about spousal rights when it comes to making medical decisions for an incapacitated partner?