Open Thread May 9 - May 15 2016

The swarm intel community picked the Superfecta at the Kentucky Derby, turned 20 bucks into 11k

http://unu.ai/blog/

Comment spammer.

Some notes from my LW meetup lecture on book of Julian Jaynes: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Not sure if legible for someone who wasn't there. May serve as a motivation to read the book.

Human brain has two hemispheres, relatively loosely connected, each of them is relatively independent (look up experiments when one hemisphere was disabled by e.g. injecting amytal into neck artery). Both can listen and see, but only the dominant hemisphere can talk. The corresponding part of the non-dominant hemisphere, when stimulated by electric current, creates super-realistic auditory -- and sometimes even visual -- hallucinations, similar to schizophrenia.

What is the evolutionary purpose of having a schizophrenia center in the brain? (This is just a speculation, skip this paragraph if it annoys you.) Julian Jaynes supposes that something similar to today's schizophrenia was actually an evolutionary precedessor of consciousness. Hallucinating voices of their fellow apes allowed our ancestors to create tribes of larger sizes than other primates. Belief in afterlife emerged as a side effect of hallucinating voices of dead tribe members. Obeying dead tribe leaders became a basis of religion. The hallucinations of specific people later evolved into hallucinations of culturally shared gods.

When the society becomes so complex that mere knowledge of rules and pattern-matching is not sufficient to solve existing problems, people have to develop theory of mind instead (first the theory of other minds; later, applying it to themselves, the consciousness), which made them lose the ability to see gods. Jaynes believes the switch from interacting with gods to consciousness happened during the "fall of Atlantis", which was a series of vulcanic eruptions in the Mediterranean sea, dramatically changing life in all local civilizations except for Egypt. In the absence of gods, "religions/superstition as we know it today" emerged. People started praying to absent gods, and making rituals to appease them; they also invented various forms of divination. Even then, a high level of stress can invoke the hallucinations again. The threshold of stress required seems to be genetic. People who retained the ability to speak with gods were called prophets. They were often uneducated people.

Some evidence: In ancient Egypt seeing hallucinations of other people was perfectly normal; the hallucinations were called "ka". In Iliad, people interacted with gods all the time; pretty much all thinking was outsourced to gods. (The later Odyssey already depicts humans with modern psychology: they make decisions, invent tricks, lie.) The Oracle of Delphi used illiterate teenage girls from peasant families to channel the god Apollon.

The Old Testament (a collections of books written and edited in different eras) also reflects the process. At the beginning, humans regularly interacted with gods; the latest of them was Moses. Then the interaction with gods was limited to prophets; often uneducated people, sometimes prophesizing against their wills. Sometimes they were killed either because their prophecies failed, or for political reasons when they prophesized for the wrong god. Gradually they were eradicated.

Relevant Biblical quotes:

"The words of Amos, one of the shepherds of Tekoa — the vision he saw concerning Israel … He said: The Lord roars from Zion and thunders from Jerusalem … This is what the Lord says: … This is what the Lord says: … This is what the Lord says: …" (Amos) He speaks while hearing the hallucinations.

"Amos answered Amaziah, “I was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I was a shepherd, and I also took care of sycamore-fig trees. But the Lord took me from tending the flock and said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’" (Amos 7:14-15) Prophet explains to a professional priest why such a nobody as him is speaking for the mighty God.

"But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”" (Exodus 3:11) Moses tries to avoid the role of prophet, because he doesn't feel high-status.

"Alas, Sovereign Lord,” I said, “I do not know how to speak; I am too young." (Jeremiah 1:6) "You persuaded me, Lord, and I was persuaded; you overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction. So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long. But if I say, “I will not mention his word or speak anymore in his name,” his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot." (Jeremiah 20:7-9) Jeremiah also tries to avoid this role, but to no end. Hallucinations come involuntarily, and they require to be acted upon; resistance is futile.

Related interesting phenomenon is hypnosis. That's something that Vulcan rationalists try to avoid, because it works differently in different cultural settings and for different people, so it seems to avoid scientific approach. Jaynes's explanation is that the non-dominant hemisphere hears the hypnotist's voice and decides to obey (usually because the person believes that this is how hypnosis really works, hence the cultural dependence), overruling the dominant hemisphere. How is hypnosis different from voluntary compliance? People who try faking it by conscious compliance provide worse results. For example, if you convince someone in hypnosis that they are a chicken, they can spend fifteen minutes happily clucking, while a person who fakes being hypnotized will become visibly bored.

Here is something that wasn't mentioned in the book, but I think it fits the pattern: In Zen Buddhism, priests used paradoxical puzzles called "koans" to make students "enlightened", and to verify that they really are "enlightened". If Jaynes's theory is true, it could have been a historical tool to turn off the bicameral (hallucinatory, pattern-matching) thinking, and turn on the consciousness. In other words, if you are a modern human interested in Buddhism, studying koans is probably just a waste of time: the abilities they promise you already have; and no, they aren't supernatural. (Also many koans are based on puns in languages you don't know, so you actually can't solve them.)

This is just my speculation: This theory could explain why it is useful to debate your thoughts with other people (e.g. in therapy; most obviously Rogerian therapy), or to accompany your decisions with rituals, as opposed to just thinking rationally about them. It is how the dominant hemisphere explains its intentions to the non-dominant hemisphere, which in turn can later provide the necessary willpower. This could also provide a hint to why highly intelligent people suffer so often from akrasia.

This week in big name rationalists on facebook: Wiblin's commenters allege a Trump conspiracy, and EY argues against Wiblin on the social value of voting

Obscure Australian Tax Office document explains how to dodge tax in Australia. Protip: The Netherlands is your friend, the Cayman Islands are for chumps

1. So, for example, investors who are resident of the United States, or indeed a group of investors who are residents of various jurisdictions, may want to join together in creating an investment entity in the Cayman Islands. If the funds of that entity were used to acquire Australian business assets, that Cayman Islands entity would be the relevant taxpayer for the purposes of the Australian taxation system. For entities resident of a non-treaty country deriving a business profit sourced in Australia, it has always been readily understood that Australia would seek to tax that profit.

2. This understanding may be responsible for arrangements involving the purchase of shares in Australian businesses where the arrangements go beyond what might be thought necessary to achieve the commercial goal of bringing various buyers together to make the purchase.

3. Whilst no particular adverse taxation conclusions ought to follow from the use of a Cayman Islands entity to invest into Australia, the use of more complicated structures to make the same investment may require a broader consideration.

4. For example, rather than make a direct purchase from the Cayman Islands of the Australian assets, we have see>n Cayman Islands entities make an equity investment of their funds in a shelf company resident in another low-tax jurisdiction, which may then make an equity investment into a shelf company resident in a country with which Australia has a tax treaty. (European resident interposed entities are often used.) The treaty country resident then capitalises an Australian company intended to be the holder of the target assets. (It is this new Australian holding entity that is ultimately the entity sold by its tax treaty country resident parent.)

5. Where no sound commercial reasons for creating this pattern of holding interests in a number of jurisdictions is apparent, it naturally requires consideration of why these interposed entities between the Cayman Islands entity and Australia are there. For example, if a Dutch company buys and sells Australian assets and makes a business profit, the Australia-Netherlands tax treaty provides that the profit would be assessed in the Netherlands. If a Cayman Islands entity or a Luxembourg entity made a business profit on a similar transaction, the profit is assessable in Australia.

6. Under Australia's tax treaty with the Netherlands a business profit derived from Australian sources is taxable in the Netherlands, not Australia. We understand, however, that the Netherlands domestic tax law provides a participation exemption for mere holding companies that make a gain upon the sale of shares in a subsidiary company. There is also a European Union tax directive regarding the non-imposition of withholding tax in respect of dividends paid from subsidiaries to their European Union resident parent. In these circumstances if the Dutch holding company is owned, for example, by a Luxembourg holding entity, then one can see that a business profit that otherwise is taxable in Australia might be argued to have become a non-taxable gain in the Netherlands, a tax free dividend in Luxembourg, and then a tax free dividend to the Cayman Islands owner of the Luxembourg shelf company.

7. The characterisation of certain profits derived that are, for Australian taxation purposes, considered to be business profits, which in the Netherlands may well be characterised as mere capital gains in terms of Dutch tax jurisprudence, explains the desire, in tax terms, to have the profits derived by a Dutch resident entity rather than its Luxembourg parent or its indirect Cayman Islands holding entity.

Notes from my evening with my friend from the US

• Turns out my effective altruism economics politics and science motivation are all extrinsic therefore incompatible with my egoism and wellbeing
• It not a 100% maxim it's about nudging in the right direction
• Stop time travelling into the future about what happens. Contingencies, just enjoy the here and now
• Relationships from PERMA are extrinsic motivation, shift that! Unconditional self worth don't need validation
• Alternative explanation: I’m just not opinionated therefore non fb posts
• Reduce decision fatigue don't casually revisits tough decisions
• Sunk cost blog
• Read aloud ms voice my blog
• Overthinking the utility of my journal
• my externalising of my breakup with my housemate could be fed by a lack of humility about what’s wrong with me and my room for improvement.

Notes on reflection of that time, afterwards

• damn she even suggested having sex in my car at one point. Damn, so close, dw, keep trying with others
• I’ll be sure to change my preferences from intelligence operator with the army to intelligence specialist with the airforce since the fitness requirements are getting too dangerous!
• Excessive self reflection?
• Enjoy that Idgaf mentality

Here's a simple explanation why quantum entanglement is weird. Imagine that Alice tells you: "I have three numbered fair coins. I can flip one of them, but then the other two will disappear." Bob, who is far away from Alice and can't communicate with her, says: "I have another set of three coins that is mysteriously connected to Alice's and always gives the same outcomes."

1) If you ask Alice and Bob to flip the same numbered coin, their answers always agree.

2) If you ask Alice to flip coin 1 and Bob to flip coin 2, they are different about 5% of the time.

3) If you ask Alice to flip coin 2 and Bob to flip coin 3, they are different about 5% of the time.

4) If you ask Alice to flip coin 1 and Bob to flip coin 3, they are different about 20% of the time!

Why is that strange? Well, if coin 1 is different from coin 3, then at least one of them must be different from coin 2, which you didn't ask about, but could have. So the probability of the last situation can't be greater than the sum of the previous two. Even if Alice and Bob are lying to you and have agreed on some strategy beforehand, the above scenario is still impossible. But with quantum mechanics it's possible (see Wikipedia or Eliezer's post for details).

It's also easy to understand why such tricks don't allow you to send signals faster than light. For example, if you want to influence one of Bob's coins toward heads, asking Alice to flip one of her coins won't help you, because it's equally likely to come up either way. As a tool for playing games like this one, quantum entanglement is stronger than hidden variables, but weaker than communication.

Which psychological findings have great practical implications, if they are indeed true?

Overjustification comes to mind, as an example.

On a related note: if it is true, does that suggest that, as far as we take the diminishing utility of money for granted, by using extrinsic rewards, we are reducing the number of extreme performers? (in so far as we can't keep giving exponential rewards, and money/tokens/what have you motivates in proportion to their utility) I have seen it argued, that if you are not doing well enough to be expecting a non-interrupted stream of extrinsic rewards, you probably shouldn't be doing that thing. Does that lose any validity in this context?

Still, it seems like whether it's true should have some implications.

A more certain finding seems to be the poor transfer of learning. It SEEMS like this SHOULD have implications for the education system.

What else would? (like, even if stereotype threat existed as a significant force, it seems far less clear to me how that finding could realistically impact any policies or our behaviors)

deleted

I was reading through a link on an Overcoming Bias post about the AK Model and came across the idea that, " the Social return on many types of investments far exceed their private return". To rephrase this: there are investments you can make such as getting a college education which benefit others more than they benefit you. These seem like they could be some good skills to focus on which might be often ignored. Obvious examples I can think of would be the Heimlich maneuver, CPR, and various social skills.

Do you know of any good low hanging fruit in terms of skills or time investments a person can make which can provide a lot of benefit to the people around them (company, family, friends, etc.) but don't actually benefit themselves?

http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm
some fun but old reading - Fenyman's review of why the challenger disaster happened. Bonus points if you share what you think the take-away messages are (in ROT13) and how we (and NASA) has learnt from this mistake.

I saw a link in an open thread several months back about an organization in the past that was quite similar to the Rationality movement but eventually fell apart. It was science based self-improvement and people trying to make rational choices back in the 1920s or earlier. I've tried searching for the link again but can't find it. Does anyone know which one I'm referring to?

Is there a public database for math proofs in a form where they can be read by computers?

Some months ago someone mentioned a chat website that tracked arguments in syllogism form to help people organize their debates. Does anyone remember what it was called?

In the context of religious arguments, some say that the constants of the universe are improbably finely tuned for the existence of life and order. The constants refer to things like the gravitational constant, the strength of the atomic weak force, etcetera.

It is my understanding that the order part is key; most other possible constants wouldn't allow for an alternate form of life, for example, because everything would be so far apart as to never interact, or so close together as to never vary in its state.

Some will respond that there may be a multiverse of universes, with random universal constants, so that some improbable universes are bound to crop up.

To this, it is responded that inventing a multiverse to explain away apparently purposeful tuning of universal constants doesn't really work. It's an excuse.

Now, I know that MWI was NOT invented to explain away anything, that it was presented as a possible explanation for certain observations well in advance of this kind of argument.

But, here is my question. Does MWI limit itself to alternate universes with the same universal constants, or does it predict also the existence of universes with different universal constants?

a brief history of game AI in three parts...

http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/a-brief-history-of-game-ai/

There's a typo in the title ("Open Threat").

In our world, classical mechanics (Newton + Maxwell and their logical implications) holds for most everyday experiences at slow speeds (relative to the speed of light) and at scales larger than the atomic realm.*

Question: Is this necessarily true for every possible world that matches our macroscopic physical observations? Is it possible to construct an alternative set of physical laws such that the world would function exactly as our world does on a macroscopic, everyday level, but that would violate Newton's laws or Maxwell's laws or thermodynamics or the like? Again, I'm not talking about violating those laws in extreme cases (close to the speed of light, tiny scales) where these laws don't really apply even in our world. I'm talking about a world where even the everyday approximate equations of physics, as expressed in classical mechanics, do not apply.

Said another way: If you messed with Newton's equations or Maxwell's equations or thermodynamics even a little bit, would the world necessarily function differently in such a way that we could tell that you'd messed with the laws? Would it function so differently as to be unrecognizable?

Or said yet another way: Do our macroscopic experiences entail that the equations of classical mechanics are at least a very good approximation of the underlying physics?

I'd especially appreciate sources / references / links to further reading.

[*Leaving aside the types of modern technology which bring quantum mechanical effects into the everyday observable world.]

Is there any recorded evidence of grown daughters of hirsute mothers exhibiting signs of masculinization? Like, in the 2D4D ratio, or body type, or 'character'?

(Brief googling was insufficient. Question arose from looking at the portrait of Magdalena Ventura.)

So I got a bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering , but I worked in a non engineering related field since then. I'm preparing to go back and do a Master'\s degree in engineering. Does anyone have any tips for what I can do to regain lost knowledge over the summer? I'm cracking open some old textbooks.

a brief history of game AI in three parts...

http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/a-brief-history-of-game-ai/

Why does http://lesswrong.com/lw/z0/the_pascals_wager_fallacy_fallacy/, written by EY, have "deleted" as the author?

Experiments guided by Bayesian math reveal that the guessing process differs in people with some disorders

Someone might want to start a conversation about this line of psych.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/bayesian-reasoning-implicated-some-mental-disorders

El-cheapo VR headsets from China shipping now.... content still slack, but this could def drive demand.

http://www.destructoid.com/-130-oculus-clones-from-china-are-here-360673.phtml

"Humans are nothing but robots that nature, via Darwinian evolution, happened to produce from self-assembling nano machinery."

"‘natural’ selection involves systems eating each other while ‘artificial’ selection is less violent."

http://www.science20.com/alpha_meme/adapting_as_nano_approaches_biological_complexity_witnessing_humanai_integration_critically-172631

For the media thread, Aeon magazine philosophical article

https://aeon.co/essays/true-ai-is-both-logically-possible-and-utterly-implausible