Open thread, May 15 - May 21, 2017

\Will it be possible to import all existing LW content?

the Calories In / Calories Out model of weight loss is correct

My opinion is that it is a "motte-and-bailey" type of a model. Technically correct, but skips some of the important parts.

Things you can control directly:

• amount and type of food you put in your mouth
• type and amount of exercise you choose to do
• whether you really start doing the exercise each day, and keep doing it as long as possible

Things you cannot control directly:

• what your metabolism actually does with the food you put in your mouth

Things this model doesn't even mention:

• there are other important things about the food, not just calories

As a consequense, these things happen in real life that the model does not predict:

If you are lucky, you can actually put a lot of calories in your mouth without getting fat as a result, even if you are not exercising hard. Not sure what exactly happens, my uneducated guess is that the metabolism only takes as much calories as needed, as the rest goes to shit. (So yes, technically it is "calories out", but it is not what people proposing this model typically mean, and you have no direct control over this, i.e. you can't simply decide to lose weight by going to the bathroom more often.)

If you are unlucky, the "calories in" get converted into something that is somehow not easily accessible as an energy source. (Either because your metabolism is fucked up generally, or because your body is low on some important component, such as iron.) You know you should burn some calories, but at the same time you are weak as a fly, so you really can't. (Not because "math doesn't work", but because the linear model ignores some parts of the reality.) But you mentioned this in the "random thoughts" part.

...however, assuming that the metabolism is working more or less correctly, the model is useful.

My recommendation would be:
Step 1 -- get checked by a doctor, whether you are low on something; start taking supplements;
Step 2 -- start exercising regularly, without worrying about the "calories in" yet, just to build the momentum;
Step 3 -- get more strategic about the food you eat.

The reason I put "step 2" before "step 3" is because studing calories can take unlimited amounts of time, and can be used as a convenient excuse to procrastinate on exercising. I would also say that "add a lot of unprocessed vegetables in your food" is a good first approximation for healthy diet.

Other random thoughts:

• don't focus too much on "weight" -- it correlates with the right thing, but is not exactly the right thing; converting 5 kg of fat into 5 kg of muscles increases your health and attractivity even if the resulting weight is the same, on the other hand dehydrating yourself decreases your weight but hurts your health;
• shaming people for their metabolism (or just not having time to exercise because they e.g. have to work 2 jobs to survive) is bad; but enforcing a norm of tabooing information about healthy lifestyle is in my eyes even worse... essentially, because people doing the former are at least usually recognized as assholes, while people doing the latter can pretend noble intentions while in fact they contribute to avoidable premature deaths;
• I believe that "eating a lot of unprocessed vegetables" is the essence of healthy diet, and the rest is mostly role-playing (i.e. you can eat "Mediterranean diet" and imagine being an exotic Italian, or eat a "paleo diet" and imagine being a prehistorical warrior, but the outcome is the same for the same reasons, regardless of your aesthetical preferences)

Good luck with your weight loss!

You can steelman no-CICO by saying that CICO is a good physics model, but a bad control model. CICO has a simple direct link, while in the body there exists all kind of feedback loops: from fat cell to food intake, from food intake to NEAT, from exercise to NEAT, etc., all mediated by poorly-to-moderatedly understood hormones and neurological triggers.

The first 2-5 weeks of big diet changes are fucking hard, but it gets easier like any habit change.

As far as I understand the literature suggest that many people succeed with the first 2-5 weeks of big diet changes only to have the yoyo-effect later in the process.

Good luck on your weight loss! :-)

You can fall asleep, so it seems like continuity does get broken sometimes.

I think it does imply subjective immortality. I'll bite that bullet. Therefore, you should sign up for cryonics.

Consciousness isn't continuous. There can be interruptions, like falling asleep or undergoing anesthesia. A successor mind/pattern is a conscious pattern that remembers being you. In the multiverse, any given mind has many many successors. It doesn't have to follow immediately, or even have to follow at all, temporally. At the separations implied even for a Tegmark Level I multiverse, past and future are meaningless distinctions, since there can be no interactions.

You are your mind/pattern, not your body. A mind/pattern is independent of substrate. Your unconscious, sleeping self is not your successor mind/pattern. It's an unconscious object that has a high probability of creating your successor (i.e. it can wake up). Same with your cryonicically-preserved corpsicle, though the probability is lower.

Any near-death event will cause grievous suffering to any barely-surviving successors, and grief and loss to friends and relatives in branches where you (objectively) don't survive. I don't want to suffer grievous injury, because that would hurt. I also don't want my friends and relatives to suffer my loss. Thus, I'm reluctant to risk anything that may cause objective death.

But, the universe being a dangerous place, I can't make that risk zero. By signing up for cryonics, I can increase the measure of successors that have a good life, even after barely surviving.

In the Multiverse, death isn't all-or-none, black or white. A successor is a mind that remembers being you. It does not have to remember everything. If you take a drug that causes you to not form long-term memory of any event today, have you died by the next day? Objectively, no. Your friends and relatives can still talk to "you" the next day. Subjectively, partially. Your successors lack certain memories. But people forget things all the time.

Being mortal in the multiverse, you can expect that your measure of successors will continue to diminish as your branches die, but the measure never reaches absolute zero. Eventually all that remains are Bolzman Brains and the like. The most probable Boltzman brain successors only live long enough to have a "single" conscious qualia of remembering being you. The briefest of conscious thoughts. Their successors remember that thought and may have another random thought. You can eventually expect an eternity of totally random qualia and no control at all over your experience.

This isn't Hell, but Limbo. Suffering is probably only a small corner of possible qualia-space, but so is eudaimonia. After an eternity you might stumble onto a small Botzlman World where you have some measure of control over your utility for some brief time, but that world will die, and your successors will again be only Boltzman brains.

I can't help that some of my successors from any given moment are Boltzman brains. But I don't want my only successors to be Boltzman Brains, because they don't increase my utility. Therefore, cryonics.

See the Measure Problem of cosmology. I'm not certain of my answer, and I'd prefer not to bet my life on it, but it seems more likely than not. I do not believe that Boltzman Brains can be eliminated from cosmology, only that they have lesser measure than evolved beings like us. This is because of the Trivial Theorem of Arithmetic: almost all natural numbers are really damn huge. The universe doesn't have to be infinite to get a Tegmark Level I multiverse. It just has to be sufficiently large.

I'm not willing to decipher your second question because this theme bothers me enough as it is, but I'll just say that I'm amazed figuring this stuff out is not considered a higher priority by rationalists. If at some point someone can definitely tell me what to think about this, I'd be glad about it.

you ought never to be worried about what you're doing leading to your death (maybe painful existence, but never death), because there would be a version of you that would miraculously escape it.

I am worried about the version that feels the pain but doesn't die.

It implies Big world immortality, but it may be not nice, until we use it correctly. I wrote about it here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/n7u/the_map_of_quantum_big_world_immortality/

You should strive to maximize utility of your pattern, averaged over both subjective probability (uncertainty) and squared amplitude of wave-function.

If you include the latter, then it all adds up to normalcy.

If you select a state of the MWI-world according to born rule (i.e. using squared amplitude of the wave-function), then this world-state will, with overwhelming probability, be compatible with causality, entropy increase over time, and a mostly classic history, involving natural selection yielding patterns that are good at maximizing their squared-amplitude-weighted spread, i.e. DNA and brains that care about squared-amplitude (even if they don't know it).

Of course this is a non-answer to your question. Also, we have not yet finished the necessary math to prove that this non-answer is internally consistent (we=mankind), but I think this is (a) plausible, (b) the gist of what EY wrote on the topic, and (c) definitely not an original insight by EY / the sequences.

I have a problem with the definition: patternism doesn't fall automatically out of reductionism / naturalism, so it's not automatically accepted by those who accept cryonics.

I agree that patternism contingently implies subjective immortality, but I agree with Oscar Cunningham that subjective immortality does not imply not-caring about death. I think patternism is stronger than beliefs that cause people to sign up for cryonics or step into the teleporter or read (even agree with) the QM sequence.

(I'm not convinced that the universe is large enough for patternism to actually imply subjective immortality.)

jul jrer lbh noyr gb haqretb narfgurfvn? (hayrff lbh pbagraq lbh jrer fgvyy pbafpvbhf rira gura)

(Fgvchyngvat ynetr-havirefr cnggreavfz.) Gurer'f na vafgnagvngvba bs zl cnggrea gung unf gur fhowrpgvir rkcrevrapr bs orvat tvira narfgurfvn naq erznvavat pbafpvbhf. Gurer'f znal bs gubfr. Ohg vg'f abg gur vafgnagvngvba gung rkvfgf ba rnegu, juvpu unf gur fhowrpgvir rkcrevrapr bs orvat tvira narfgurfvn naq gura jnxvat hc. Nyfb, nyzbfg nyy bs gubfr bgure cnggreaf qrpburer vagb fbzrguvat ragveryl hayvxr gur cnggrea ba rnegu.

If some one offered me a bet giving $0 or $100 based on a quantum coin flip I'd be willing to pay $50 for it. So it's clear that I'm acting for the sake of my average future self, not just the best or worst outcome. Therefore I also act to avoid outcomes where I die, even if there are still some possibilities where I live. The fact that I won't experience the "dead" outcomes is irrelevant - I can still act for the sake of things which I won't experience.

What about the question of whether I anticipate immortality? Well if I was planning what to do after an event where I might die, I would think to myself "I only need to think about the possibility where I live, since I won't be able to carry out any actions in the other case" which is perhaps not the same as "anticipating immortality" but it has the same effect.

As I've pointed out before, we don't need to say whether patternism is true, or whether the universe is big or not, to notice that we are subjectively non-mortal -- no matter what is the case, we will never experience dying (in the sense of going out of existence.)

This is a good question and I'd be interested to hear answers to it as well.

Briefly, I'll say that there seem to be plenty of reductio-ad-absurdum arguments for a "self" existing at all, such as the implication of philosophical zombies and the like. Rob Bensinger's post here goes into this matter a bit.

If these arguments have validity, then it seems to me that neither "annihilation" nor "immortality" can actually be true. In short, it might be that "patternism" probably implies that there is no "you" at all, besides the conceptual construct your brain has created for itself. But these questions are really important to me to get right, because it calls into question whether it is rational, or moral, to try and preserve myself through the use of technologies such as cryonics, if that effort and money can be used somewhere else for a different moral good.

It seems like you have just reinvented the criticism "if you can extract almost all the value from each transaction (aka 'exploitation'), you will shortly be rich". Well, yes, but the point is that a market with competition generally prevents you from doing that. As someone pointed out, if you make 100 loaves then you have created 100 dollars of value; the question is how those 100 dollars are distributed. You construct an example where the baker is able to capture 99% of the value he created; good for him, but it relies on your construction of the price. Seeing the baker get rich, won't a bunch of other people decide that bread-making can't be that hard, make some loaves, and sell them for 98 cents? And so on until the price of bread is equal to the cost of production plus the smallest profit anyone is willing to live with, which in your example seems to be a penny.

Instead it rewards those who provide value to those who provide value! It's recursive, like PageRank!

Contra Lumifer, this looks right to me. Notice the second-order effects, where a value-provider not only gets tokens to spend, but also them having more tokens means that everyone else is more sensitive to their desires.

That's the main reason why we have so much inequality. Recursive systems will have attractors that concentrate stuff.

This isn't as clear to me. If transactions happen entirely at random, but debts aren't allowed, then you'll end up with a Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution for income, which will be highly unequal. If you allow debts, then probably the resulting distribution is normal or something, which is still highly unequal. That is, this likely explains the particular shape of inequality, but not the existence of inequality at all. (Note, for example, a world where everyone has the same utility function but has variable capacity to produce goods and services will have significant inequality, driven by the variable capacity rather than the spiralling effects.)

That's also why you can't blame people for having no jobs. They are willing to provide value, but they can't survive by providing to non-providers, and only the best can provide to providers.

Trying to reach a conclusion about blame seems like trying to cross the is-ought chasm, and note that not being able to satisfy producers doesn't imply being able to satisfy non-producers.

Nope.

Imagine a loaf of bread is worth 1 dollar to consumers. If you make 100 loaves

...then you have created value, $100 worth of it.

And don't forget that "you" is also part of the society. In both cases society got richer by $100, it's just the distribution is different: in the first case you : others is 99 : 1 and in the second case you : others is 0 : 100.

the market doesn't reward those who provide value

Reality check: fail.

If you make 100 loaves and sell them for 99 cents each, you've provided 1 dollar of value to society, but made 100 dollars for yourself.

Not 99 dollars?

"If you make 100 loaves and sell them for 99 cents each, you've provided 1 dollar of value to society, but made 100 dollars for yourself. "

The argument here is that since the loaves are worth $1 to each consumer, and they pay $0.99, they gain only one cent by buying them. (That's improbable, since they would likely not buy them at all if it was only as useful as picking up a penny.) The problem is that something is going to happen to that $100 that the seller takes. If the seller does not spend it, then the average value of money in society will go up, meaning that society will have profited by $100, not by $1. If the seller does spend it, others will receive that $100 in return for other things that they valued less. And so once again, society will profit by more than $1.

The trick is in the word "value".

If you play some motte-and-bailey around it, you could redefine "value" to mean "that, which is maximized by the free market", and then prove that free market indeed maximizes value. I expect that most pro-market answers you will get at most places will be a variant of this.

The question is, how closely related is such definition to our intuitions about value, i.e. what we actually mean by "value". That is tricky, because human intuitions are in general unreliable (e.g. likely to change if you describe the same situation using different words), inconsistent, implemented on a broken hardware, etc. But of course that doesn't give us a license to redefine words arbitrarily, so... as the saying goes, it's complicated.

You are correct about the similarity between free market and PageRank. Free market is recursive -- you can only gain money by selling to people who have money, who in turn gained that money by selling to people who had money, etc. If you are a starving person with no money and nothing to sell, well, sucks to be you; there may be tons of food on the market, but no way to sell it to you, unless someone gives you some money first.

Money is not the same as value, though, and that is one of the places where the whole process is grounded in something other than recursion. Value can be created by work, or by selling or renting resources you have.

Also, economical value can be brought from outside of the free-market system. For example, an African warlord can extract resources locally using murder or slave work, but then can exchange those resources at the international free market for something else. What I am hinting at here is that even if you would in abstractly prove that "free market benefits all participants", that doesn't necessarily mean it benefits all humans, because some "participants" at the market are e.g. slave owners, and the "benefits" for them include the ability to exploit their slaves more safely and easily. That doesn't necessarily imply that it benefits the slaves, too; it may sometimes be the other way round. (Lenin would say: "Those naive libertarians in Silicon Valley keep inventing and selling on free market a cheaper and stronger rope with which we can now hang more people, mwa-ha-ha-ha!")

Speaking about human values, we have terminal and instrumental values, and the instrumental values are also recursive by nature.

So...

Seems to me that the recursive nature could be a red herring. Markets are recursive. Instrumental values are recursive. Maybe these things actually match each other well. Perhaps we should focus on (1) whether the non-recursive parts also match each other; and if there is a difference, (2) whether the recursive parts amplify the difference.

(I do have some opinions on that, but this comment is already too long, and contains important parts I wouldn't want to get ignored just because I write something controversial afterwards.)

I think you have to back up a step in your idea of "value". What makes the loaf worth $1 if you sell it for $0.99? Why isn't it worth $1M (to a theoretical starving rich person) and you're giving away HUGE amounts? Why isn't it worth $0.10 and the buyers gave you $890 in charity?

A thing's value is relative - different to every participant. And the relative values are only known (actually, not - they're bounded above by the seller and below by the buyer) by the transaction.

If you make 100 loaves and sell them for 99 cents each, you've provided 1 dollar of value to society, but made 100 dollars for yourself.

Total, $101. (Society also includes you.)

If you make 100 loaves and give them away to those who can't afford it, you've provided 100 dollars of value to society, but made zero for yourself.

Total, $100.

You should be very surprised if you think you have found a new counterexample to a centuries-old discipline that comes from a millennia-old example. Odds are there is an existing literature addressing exactly that question.

An easy way to think of it is to just look at the physical stuff. What do you mean by 'provide value'. Like, not terminology games or whatever, but what do you think of when you say that? Do those people get paid? That's an easier question than whether 'the market rewards' them.

Reading too much into voting decisions is a mistake. Different readers vote for different reasons, and without downvotes (and even with) it's difficult to get a clear signal from the system.

For me, it's perfectly upvote-worthy to write things that are amusing, provocative, or even useless but well-intentioned. Don't be boring, and even then I can skip it pretty easily.

Everyone likes insight porn :-)

But I don't know why you think that insights are less useful than more instrumental advice.

If you are trying to help the most people then the odds that the right thing to do is 'post on a website that nobody reads' is pretty slim. Like, once you are in the 'posting on LW' space, then you are pretty clearly not trying to maximize how much other people get out of your time. Just do what you like.

Va beqre gb abg znxr vg gbb boivbhf gb crbcyr jub pna frr gur yratgu bs gur rapelcgrq grkg, V nggnpu guvf cersvk gb gur fbyhgvba bs guvegl guerr ovfubcf.

Edit: Oh, it's in that page's comments. :/

Can you give an operational definition (or concrete example) of the free rider 'problem'? There are a couple of different things that you might not like about the phenomenon, and I'm not sure exactly which is the problem you're concerned about.

Exclusion is the most common "solution" (auctions and "fair" divisions being specific allocation mechanisms within that). Don't let "free riders" actually ride, and there's no problem.

I suspect the answer is "not in general, unless you're willing to pump extra money into the payment-extracting mechanism". Depending on how generally you define "free rider problem", at least some examples of the problem are likely to be captured by Holmström's theorem: a system which pays each member of a team to to provide inputs to produce output can't balance its budget (exactly split the output's value among the team members), be self-enforcing, and Pareto efficient.

I think your fresh paint example is susceptible to Holmströmean logic. Suppose you've found a painter who's willing to do an amount of painting proportional to the money they're given; you're willing to pay for $40 worth of painting but your two housemates would only pay for $20 worth of painting. If you propose to either housemate that you pay $20 to the painter while the housemates pay $10 each, the housemate will (assuming they act as homo economicus spherical cows) notice that if they don't pay anything, $30 of painting will still get done, more than the $20 they wanted in the first place. So they won't pay anything, as you expected.

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize winner Elinor Ostrom won the price for research on the tragedy on the commons. She came up with a few principles: http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons

It's empiric data based research as opposed to a nice theoretic solution but depending on your use-case that might be even better ;)

This?

Except in a very few matches, usually with world-class performers, there is a point in every match (and in some cases it's right at the beginning) when the loser decides he's going to lose. And after that, everything he does will be aimed at providing an explanation of why he will have lost. He may throw himself at the ball (so he will be able to say he's done his best against a superior opponent). He may dispute calls (so he will be able to say he's been robbed). He may swear at himself and throw his racket (so he can say it was apparent all along he wasn't in top form). His energies go not into winning but into producing an explanation, an excuse, a justification for losing.

C. TERRY WARNER, Bonds That Make Us Free

The ferrett had a quote like that.

Regret is an emotion, so standard emotion release techniques work. I have a few different one's but on LW I generally recommend Eugine Gendlin's Focusing.