Open thread, Aug. 17 - Aug. 23, 2015

Are there major points that MIRI considered to be true 5 years ago but doesn't consider to be true today?

Is this a new bias? I haven't seen it mentioned before. Abstract (emphasis mine):

Consumers routinely rely on forecasters to make predictions about uncertain events (e.g., sporting contests, stock fluctuations). The authors demonstrate that when forecasts are higher versus lower (e.g., a 70% vs. 30% chance of team A winning a game) consumers infer that the forecaster is more confident in her prediction, has conducted more in-depth analyses, and is more trustworthy. The prediction is also judged as more accurate. This occurs because forecasts are evaluated based on how well they predict the target event occurring (team A winning). Higher forecasts indicate greater likelihood of the target event occurring, and signal a confident analyst, while lower forecasts indicate lower likelihood and lower confidence in the target event occurring. But because, with lower forecasts, consumers still focus on the target event (and not its complement), lower confidence in the target event occurring is erroneously interpreted as the forecaster being less confident in her overall prediction (instead of more confident in the complementary event occurring—team A losing). The authors identify boundary conditions, generalize to other prediction formats, and demonstrate consequences.

A quick update: My astrobiology posts are still coming, but after conferring with Toggle and being surprised with a massive response to my first blog posts (who linked me onto ycombinator? thousands of views in two days) I am going through a bit more research about the geochemical history of Earth and other solar system objects in an attempt to be as rigorous as possible. I only play an astrobiologist on TV so to speak, day to day my focus is a little smaller.

I like this part from a MIRI blog article:

The problem isn’t Terminator. It’s “King Midas.” King Midas got exactly what he wished for — every object he touched turned to gold. His food turned to gold, his children turned to gold, and he died hungry and alone.

When people insist on using fictional evidence, at least give them one that matches your concerns.

(It will probably also help that Kind Midas is higher status than Terminator.)

Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases by Scott O. Lilienfeld1, Katheryn C. Sauvigné, Steven Jay Lynn, Robin L. Cautin, Robert D. Latzman and Irwin D. Waldman

The goal of this article is to promote clear thinking and clear writing among students and teachers of psychological science by curbing terminological misinformation and confusion. To this end, we present a provisional list of 50 commonly used terms in psychology, psychiatry, and allied fields that should be avoided, or at most used sparingly and with explicit caveats. We provide corrective information for students, instructors, and researchers regarding these terms, which we organize for expository purposes into five categories: inaccurate or misleading terms, frequently misused terms, ambiguous terms, oxymorons, and pleonasms. For each term, we (a) explain why it is problematic, (b) delineate one or more examples of its misuse, and (c) when pertinent, offer recommendations for preferable terms. By being more judicious in their use of terminology, psychologists and psychiatrists can foster clearer thinking in their students and the field at large regarding mental phenomena.

TL;DR: what actual useful outcomes are there of political discourse for people who don't have political advocacy as an area of comparative advantage?

I think the ability to discuss politics clearly is one of the biggest successes of rationality, perhaps because politics breaks minds so thoroughly. It is ironic then, that it's not obvious whether this is of any use whatsoever to the majority of us. I don't believe that political advocacy is my area of comparative advantage, and with the general aspie nature of LWers I would assume this probably applies to most of us. Indeed, the main effect of thinking rationally about politics that I can't stand non-rationalist politics anymore. Having the correct political views is of some small benefit, although since no general election has ever been won or lost by one vote, its very unlikely to change anything.

Are there other benefits to having accurate political views? Some people, largely on both the far left and the far right think that total social collapse is likely within a few decades. I think they might be partially right - for instance, in Europe previously fringe parties are becoming mainstream, both communists protesting against austerity and nationalists protesting against immigration. In Greece, actual neo-Nazis have won seats. If there is another financial crash happens (which again, I think is likely, quite probably before the end of the year) then as countries go totally bankrupt because they are still in debt from the last crash, we will see extremist parties getting into power, which probably make the situation worse (not that communism and nationalism will always cause disasters, but I don't trust panicking electorates to vote in people who can do it properly, and if half the population goes right and half goes left this causes more problems like riots).

Anyway, I seem to have digressed, but my point is, if one can predict that society is going to collapse, would that be useful? Not really, as far as I can tell. Its more difficult to make money from a collapse than from a boom, and the timescales are too long anyway. If you hold the converse opinion, that the future will be ok, then the advice that leads to is simply "buy indexes" which is standard advice anyway.

If I decided that society is likely to collapse, is that useful because it gives me warning to get out while there is still time? Not really - only the really paranoid people think that things are going to get really bad in the immediate future. Even if I thought there was likely to be total collapse, and outcome so bad that I need to leave, as opposed to the far more likely outcome of general stagnation, the predictions are still decades in advance, and one does not need that much time to prepare to leave.

Is there some way politics could be useful applying to the way I interact with other people? Some people might say that its important to put aside subconscious prejudices everyone has. But, generally I would say that subconscious prejudices are just wrong on a probabilistic level - even if some characteristic does vary between group A and group B of people, one is far better off just measuring the characteristic directly, in most cases.

I think some of what I've written pattern-matches to being slightly crazy, but what I am trying to ask is whether there is any benefit to having accurate views about politics. Personally, I think I spend too much time thinking about politics because I find it interesting, and it feels like I'm doing something useful. But maybe this feeling of being useful is an illusion, and thinking about politics is no more useful than watching TV.

Where are all the vids of the speeches and stuff from the EA global events? Surely they were recorded?

I took part in the Good Judgment Project, a giant prediction market study from Philip Tetlock (of "Foxes and Hedgehogs" theory). I also blogged about my results, and the heuristics I used to make bets:

http://aarongertler.net/good-judgment-project/

I thought it might be of interest to a few people -- I originally learned that I could join the GJP from someone I met at CFAR.

What are you thought rituals when you want to optimise your cognitive processes when you don't have much else to do. For instance, you are walking between office buildings.

For me, I'm going to phase in the following ritual and see if it's helpful. Asking myself:

What was done effectively or what outcomes were useful today?

How might things have been improved or what different ideas do you have?

What questions arising from today might be relevant to tomorrow?

How do you feel about the process and content of your life today?

Have you been radically honest or dishonest today?

The good, the bad, and the ineffective: social programs in America

Do people know which social interventions work just from hearing about them?

To do a test, we made the following game. We've described ten major US social interventions, and you'll have to guess whether they had a positive effect, no effect or negative effect.

The interventions were taken from those reviewed by the Campbell Collaboration, which brings together all the highest-quality research that's available on major social interventions to decide whether they're effective or not. We chose the top ten interventions that were easiest to explain and had the clearest conclusions, so it's clear what the answers are. There's no trick!

Hi! This is my first post. I have a physics/MWI question, and I don't know if LessWrong / Discussion is the right place to post it, so is it OK if I ask it here? Here it goes:

As any other amateur who reads Eliezer’s quantum physics sequence, I got caught up in the “why do we have the Born rule?” mystery. I actually found something that I thought was a bit suspicious (even though lots of people must have thought of it, or experimentally rejected this already.) Note that I'm deep in amateur swamp, and I'll gleefully accept any "wow, you are confused" rejections.

Here is my suggestion:

What if the universes, that we live in, are not located specifically in configuration space, but in the volume stretched out between configuration space and the complex amplitude? So instead of talking about “the probability of winding up here in configuration space is high, because the corresponding amplitude is high”, we would say “the probability of winding up here is high, because there are a lot of universes here”. And here, would mean somewhere on the line between a point in configuration space and the complex amplitude for that point. (All these universes would be exactly equal.) And then we completely remove the Born rule. Of course someone thought of this, but responds: “But if we double the amplitude in theory, the line becomes twice as long, and there would be twice as many universes. But this is not what we observe in our experiments, when we double the amplitude, the probability of finding ourselves there multiplies by four!” This is true, if you study a line between the complex amplitude peak and a point in configuration space. But you are never supposed to study a point in configuration space, you are supposed to integrate over a volume in configuration space.

Calculating the volume between the complex amplitude “surface” and the configuration space, is not like taking all the squared amplitudes of all points of the configuration space and summing them up. The reason is that, when we traverse the space in one direction and the complex amplitude changes, the resulting volume “curves”, causing there to be more volume out near the edges (close to the amplitude peak) and less near the configuration space axis.

Take a look at the following image (meant to illustrate an "amplitude volume" for a single physical property): [http://www.wolframalpha.com] , type in: ParametricPlot3D {u Sin[t], u Cos[t], t / 5}, {t, 0, 15}, {u, 0, 1}

Imagine that we’d peer down from above, looking along the property axis. If we completely ignore what happens in the view direction, the volume (the blue areas) would have the shape of circles. If we’d double the amplitude, the volume from this perspective would be quadrupled.

But as it is, what happens along the property axis matters. The stretching out causes the volume to be less than the amplitude squared. It seems that, the higher the frequency is, the closer the volume is to have a square relationship with the amplitude, while as the frequency lowers, the volume approaches a linear relationship with the frequency. Studying the two extreme cases; with frequency 0 the geometric object would be just a straight plane, with an obvious linear relationship between amplitude and volume, while with an “infinite” frequency, the geometric object would become a cylinder, with a squared relationship between volume and amplitude. This means that the overall current amplitude-configuration-space ratio is important, but as far as I know, it is unknown to us.

In a laboratory environment, where all frequencies involved are relatively low, we would see systems evolving linearly. But when we observe the outcome of the systems, and entangle them with everything else, what suddenly matters is the volume of our combined wave which has a very very high frequency.

Or does it? At this point I'm beginning to lose track and the questions starts piling up.

What happens when multiple dimensions are mixed in? I’m guessing that high-frequency/high-amplitude still approaches a squared relationship from amplitude to volume, but I’m not at all certain.

What happens over time as the universe branches, does the amplitude constantly decrease while the length and frequencies remain the same? (Causing the relationship to dilute from squared to linear?)

Note that this suggestion also implies that there really exists one single configuration space / wave function that forms our reality.

So, what do you think?

What should you be doing right now if you believe that advances in AI are about to cause large-scale unemployment within the next 20 years (ignoring the issue of FAI for the sake of discussion)?

Oh, dear... From Marginal Revolution's comment section:

What if “Satoshi Nakamoto” is an evil AI, and the whole concept of the blockchain was invented to see if it could devise a way to harvest the processing power of billions of computers. Currently they are just doing meaningless (or seemingly meaningless) math problems. But what if the math problems they were doing weren’t meaningless? What if they were trying to solve some sort of physics problem necessary to create wormholes or something?

What if Satoshi Nakamoto is Roko’s Basilisk?

How do you decide whether to post in Open Thread, Discussion, or Main?

Bentham’s Fallacies, Then and Now by Peter Singer

Bentham collected examples of fallacies, often from parliamentary debates. By 1811, he had sorted them into nearly 50 different types, with titles like “Attack us, you attack Government,” the “No precedent argument,” and the “Good in theory, bad in practice” fallacy. (One thing on which both Immanuel Kant and Bentham agree is that this last example is a fallacy: If something is bad in practice, there must be a flaw in the theory.)

Bentham was thus a pioneer of an area of science that has made considerable progress in recent years. He would have relished the work of psychologists showing that we have a confirmation bias (we favor and remember information that supports, rather than contradicts, our beliefs); that we systematically overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs (the overconfidence effect); and that we have a propensity to respond to the plight of a single identifiable individual rather than a large number of people about whom we have only statistical information.

1824 edition of the book

For the next two weeks I won't be able to create the Open Threads precisely on monday morning, and with some probability I won't be able to connect at all.
There needs to be someone willing to embark on this admittedly very easy task. Please comment below if you wish to wear the cape for the time being.

What is something that would profoundly surprise you?

An interesting take on ethics.

What are your thoughts on the following Great Filter hypothesis: (1) Reward-based learning is the only efficient way to create AI. (2) AGI is easy, but FAI is hard to invent because the universe is so unpredictable (intelligent systems themselves being the most unpredictable structures) and nearly all reward functions will diverge once the AI starts to self-improve and create copies of itself. (3) The reward functions needed for a friendly reinforcement learner reflect reality in complex ways. In the case of humans they are learned by trial and error during evolution. (4) Because of this, the invention of FAI requires a simulation in which it can safely learn complex reward functions via evolution or narrow AI, which is time-consuming. (5) However, once AGI is widely regarded as feasible, people will realize that whoever invents it first will have nearly unlimited power. An AI arms race will ensue in which unfriendly AGIs are much more likely to arise.

Try this game!

How good you actually are at solving a NP problem by hand?

Re: rationality books for children. Winnie the Pooh is great for confirmation bias!

Remote Exploitation of anUnaltered Passenger Vehicle by Dr. Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek

Target – 2014 Jeep Cherokee

The 2014 Jeep Cherokee was chosen because we felt like it would provide us the best opportunity tosuccessfully demonstrate that a remote compromise of a vehicle could result in sending messages thatcould invade a driver’s privacy and perform physical actions on the attacker’s behalf. As pointed out inour previous research [6], this vehicle seemed to present fewer potential obstacles for an attacker. Thisis not to say that other manufacturer’s vehicles are not hackable, or even that they are more secure,only to show that with some research we felt this was our best target. Even more importantly, the Jeepfell within our budgetary constraints when adding all the technological features desired by the authorsof this paper.

Network Architecture

The architecture of the 2014 Jeep Cherokee was very intriguing to us due to the fact that the head unit(Radio) is connected to both CAN buses that are implemented in the vehicle.

We speculated that if the Radio could be compromised, then we would have access to ECUs on both theCAN-IHS and CAN-C networks, meaning that messages could be sent to all ECUs that control physicalattributes of the vehicle. You’ll see later in this paper that our remote compromise of the head unit doesnot directly lead to access to the CAN buses and further exploitation stages were necessary. With thatbeing said, there are no CAN bus architectural restrictions, such as the steering being on a physicallyseparate bus. If we can send messages from the head unit, we should be able to send them to everyECU on the CAN bus

....

Conclusion

This paper was a culmination of three years of research into automotive security. In it, wedemonstrated a remote attack that can be performed against many Fiat-Chrysler vehicles. The numberof vehicles that were vulnerable were in the hundreds of thousands and it forced a 1.4 million vehiclerecall by FCA as well as changes to the Sprint carrier network. This remote attack could be performedagainst vehicles located anywhere in the United States and requires no modifications to the vehicle orphysical interaction by the attacker or driver. As a result of the remote attack, certain physical systems such as steering and braking are affected. We provide this research in the hopes that we can learn tobuild more secure vehicles in the future so that drivers can trust they are safe from a cyber attack whiledriving. This information can be used by manufacturers, suppliers, and security researchers to continuelooking into the Jeep Cherokee and other vehicles in a community effort to secure modern automobiles

A few nutrition-related questions:

• Why does Soylent 2.0 have so much fat? They appear to be going for 45% of calories from fat, whereas they typical recommendation is 10%-35%.

• Why does the Bulletproof stuff include so much saturated fat? It appears that the consensus is that saturated fat significantly increases blood cholesterol and arterial plaque formation - curious why such a deviation here.

I want to model incentives, behaviour and agents. Are there any handy, intuitive, web-based tools for mechanism design?

Here is a theory (fox lens viewpoint) of why many people are under economic duress. The problem is not consumerism but producerism:

In the US there are many ambitious, hardworking people who are very excited about their work and career. Such people view work, achievement, and production as its own reward. They primarily value the intellectual satisfaction and social validation that comes from career success; money is less important.

However, even though they don't necessarily value the money that highly, they still get a lot of it, because they are typically quite successful (other things being equal, people who value achievement highly tend to achieve a lot). Because they have obtained quite a bit of money without directly aiming for it, they don't spend a lot of time thinking about how to conserve it. Such a person's inner monologue might run something like this: "I've got to get a job a Google/Facebook/Amazon/Goldman, they're the best in the business, and I want to work with the best people and change the world!... (person works hard to get a relevant degree from a top school, does a lot of networking and side projects, etc etc and finally lands the dream job) ... Okay sweet, now I'm here! This is awesome, now I've got to hit a homerun on this project... oh right and I've got to buy some clothes and a car... how much will that be? $30K....? Seems pricey, but I'm making $150K, so it's no big deal ..."

The point is, because these people have lots of cash that they don't care too much about conserving, they drive prices up for everyone else. Consumer companies orient themselves towards the people who have a lot of cash and don't care too much about getting the best prices; such people probably are the most valuable customers. Other people, who don't love their work and view it as a necessary evil, find that they need to work much harder than they should because of the crazy overachievers who are running up the prices on everything.

This article is interesting to me because I have this belief that weight loss is basically about eating less (and exercising more). And some extremely high percentage of everything said about dieting, etc. beyond that is just irrational noise. And that the diets that work don't work because of the reasons their proponents say they work, but only because they end up restricting calories as a byproduct.

this study is NOT a blow to low-carb dieting, which can be quite effective due to factors such as typically higher protein and more limited junk food options.

This line is the funniest to me. This is why I think low carb diets work: Because if you eliminate the primary source of calories in a person's diet (carbs, which can be 50%+ of many people's diets), they will eat significant fewer calories overall restricting themselves to only protein and fat. But people have, instead, made up all sorts of fancy, science-y sounding reasons why carbs were evil.