Open thread, Sep. 19 - Sep. 25, 2016

These two lines seem to me contradictory. It is not clear to me should I upload you or preserve your brain.

• I don't understand how the cells of the brain produce qualia and consciousness, and have a certain concern that an attempt at uploading my mind into digital form may lose important parts of my self. If you haven't solved those fundamental problems of how brains produce minds, I would prefer to be revived as a biological, living being, rather than have my mind uploaded into software form.

• I understand that all choices contain risk. However, I believe that the "information" theory of identity is a more useful guide than theories of identity which tie selfhood to a physical brain. I also suspect that there will be certain advantages to be one of the first minds turned into software, and certain disadvantages. In order to try to gain those advantages, and minimize those disadvantages, I am willing to volunteer to let my cryonically-preserved brain be used for experimental mind-uploading procedures, provided that certain preconditions are met, including:

New version of the draft text: https://www.datapacrat.com/temp/Cryo Revival Preferences - draft 0.1.2.txt

If I were going to make such a document, I would make it minimally restrictive. I would rather be brought back even in less-than-ideal circumstances, so that I could to observe how the world had developed, and then decide whether I wanted to stay. At least then I would have a me-like agent operating on my own behalf.

If they bring me back as a qualia-less em, then at least there's a chance that the em will be able to say, "Hey, this is cool and everything, but this isn't actually what my predecessor wanted. So even though I don't have qualia, I'll make it my personal mission to try to bring myself back with qualia." Precommitting to such an attitude now while you're alive boosts the odds of this. At worst, if it turns out to be impossible to revive the "observer", there's a thing-like-you running around in the future spreading your values, even if it doesn't have your consciousness, and I can't see that as a bad thing.

You don't seem to describe what you would consider as a revived copy of you. How much of your personality has to stay intact?

I would add lines about would you prefer to be revived together with your friends, family members, before them or after.

May be I would add a secret question to check if you are restored properly.

I would also add all my digital immortality back-up information, which could be used to fill gaps in case if some information is lost.

I also expect that revival may happen in maybe 20-30 years from my death so I should add some kind of will about how to manage my property during my absence.

Interesting idea! I guess you could add a 'when in doubt' for whether you'd rather be revived in an early period (eg, if resurrection is possible with a 80% success rate) or to be downprioritized until resurrection is very mature and safe.

My equivalent of this document focused more on the risks of unreasonable delays in uploading me. Cryonics organizations have been designed to focus on preservation, which seems likely to bias them toward indefinite delays. This might be especially undesirable in an "Age of Em" scenario.

Instead of your request for a "neutral third-party", I listed several specific people, who I know are comfortable with the idea of uploading, as people whose approval would be evidence that the technology is adequate to upload me. I'm unclear on how hard it would be to find a genuinely neutral third party.

My document is 20 years old now, and I don't have a copy handy. I suppose I should update it soon.

Great idea. I will probably do a similar thing myself at some point, and it will probably look similar to yours.

The only thing I see that might be missing is advise for a scenario in which the odds of revival go down with time, creating pressure to revive you sooner rather than later. In that case your wishes may contradict with each other (since later revival could still increase the odds of living indefinitely). That seems far fetched but not entirely impossible.

Other than that, I'd say be more specific to avoid any possible misinterpretation. You never know how much bureaucracy will be involved in the process when it finally happens.

Have you ever taken Adderall? I greatly suspect you have not.

People who fight chronic akrasia because of varoius degrees of ADHD and related mental disorders have a different response to stimulants than "normal" individuals. For me, Adderall puts me into cool, calm, clear focus. The kind of productive mode of being that most people get into by drinking a cup of coffee (except coffee makes me jittery and unfocused). Being on Adderall is just... "normal." Indeed the first time I tried it I thought the dose was too low because I didn't feel a thing.. until 8 hours later when I realized I was still cranking away good code and able to focus instead of my normal bouts of mid-day akrasia. I could probably count on my hands the number of times I had a full day of highly focused work without feeling stress or burn-out afterwards... now it's the new normal :)

For such people low-dose amphetamines don't provide any high, nor are they accompanied by some sort of berserker productivity binge like popular media displays. In the correct dosages they also don't seem to come with any addiction or withdraw -- I go off of it without any problems, other than reverting to the normal, viscous cycles of distraction and akrasia. (This isn't just anecdotal data -- the incidence rate of Adderall addiction among those following the prescribed plan is lost in the backround noise of people who are abusing in these trials.)

Honestly, see a psychiatrist that specializes in these things and talk to them about your inability to focus, your history of trouble in completing complex, long tasks, how this is affecting your career and personal growth goals, etc. Be honest about your shortcomings, and chances are they will work with you to find a treatment plan that truly helps you. You're not manipulating anybody.

Seriously, ADHD is a real mental disorder. Your first step should be to recognize it as such, and accept the fact that you might actually have a real medical condition that needs treatment. You're not manipulating the system, you're exactly the kind of person the system is trying to help! Prescription drugs are for more than just people who hear voices...

Drugs are prescribed based on a cost-benefit analysis. In general, the medical establishment is pretty conservative (there's little benefit to the doctor if your problem gets solved, but if they hurt you they're liable to get sued). In the usual case for amphetamines, the cost is the risk of side effects and the benefit is helping someone manage their ADHD. For you, the cost is the same but it sounds like the benefit is much bigger. So even by the standards of the risk-averse medical establishment, this sounds like a risk you should take.

You're an entrepreneur. A successful entrepreneur thinks and acts for themselves. This could be a good opportunity to practice being less scrupulous. Paul Graham on what makes founders successful:

Naughtiness

Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.

Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.

I'd recommend avoiding Adderall as a first option. I've heard stories of people whose focus got worse over time as tolerance to the drug's effects developed.

Modafinil, on the other hand, is a focus wonder drug. It's widely used in the nootropics community and bad experiences are quite rare. (/r/nootropics admin: "I just want to remind everyone that this is a subreddit for discussing all nootropics, not just beating modafinil to death.")

The legal risks involved with Modafinil seem pretty low. Check out Gwern's discussion.

My conclusion is that buying some Modafinil and trying it once could be really valuable, if only for comfort zone expansion and value of information. I have very little doubt that this is the right choice for you. Check out Gwern's discussion of suppliers. (Lying to your doctor is another option if you really want to practice being naughty.)

This is not intended to be snarky or backhanded or anything. You did ask for insights.

It sounds like you're seeking some kind of complex justification to do something that you want to do anyway. Currently your reasons are not-necessarily-rational and maybe not fully consciously acknowledged, but you feel the desire/compulsion anyway. I say just go ahead and do what your gut is suggesting, while keeping in mind that you can always back. This isn't an irrevocable decision, so you lose almost nothing for trying.

Perhaps you expect to in the future be in a position where your expected impact is significantly larger, and so your gut tells you to be careful with anything whose long-term effects are not clear?

soul to soul

Those are interesting semantics.

You want some sort of adaptive or sequential design (right?), so the optimal design not being terribly helpful is not surprising: they're more intended for fixed up-front designing of experiments. They also tend to be oriented towards overall information or reduction of variance, which doesn't necessarily correspond to your loss function. Having priors affects the optimal design somewhat (usually, you can spend fewer datapoints on the variables with prior information; for a Bayesian experimental design, you can simulate a set of parameters from your priors and then simulate drawing n datapoints with a particular experimental design, fit the model, find your loss or your entropy/variance, record the loss/design, and repeat many times; then find the design with the best average loss.).

If you are running the learning material experiment indefinitely and want to maximize cumulative test scores, then it's a multi-armed bandit and so Thompson sampling on a factorial Bayesian model will work well & handle your 3 desiderata: you set your informative priors on each learning material, model as a linear model (with interactions?), and Thompson sample from the model+data.

If you want to find what set of learning materials is optimal as fast as possible by the end of your experiment, then that's the 'best-arm identification' multi-armed bandit problem. You can do a kind of Thompson sampling there too: best-arm Thompson sampling: http://imagine.enpc.fr/publications/papers/COLT10.pdf https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:227658&datastreamId=FULL-TEXT.PDF http://nowak.ece.wisc.edu/bestArmSurvey.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.4443v1.pdf https://papers.nips.cc/paper/4478-multi-bandit-best-arm-identification.pdf One version goes: with the full posteriors, find the action A with the best expected loss; for all the other actions B..Z, Thompson sample their possible value; take the action with the best loss out of A..Z. This explores the other arms in proportion to their remaining chance of being the best arm, better than A, while firming up the estimate of A's value.

Poll for it:

I'm a native speaker [pollid:1163]

Such a tool to visualize parse trees would be/have been helpful. [pollid:1164]

How would you use the grammar visualization tool to aid study? Many people answered "unsure" to the poll because it's not clear how it should be used, or "Not really" because the first uses they thought about were not helpful.
You should give the user the guidelines on how to better consume your product.

Usually needs --> tools. Yours seems a case of inverted implication.

He didn't not. Also Buck institute of aging is underfunded.

Having read a bit more sources besides TechCrunch I'm a bit more optimistic. Chen/Zuckerberg won't judge applications and tool building is a valid goal.

The Cell Atlas also looks like a valid project.

It's not my impression that self driving cars simply try to copy what a human does in any case. The AI don't violate speed limits and generally try to drive with as little risk as possible. Humans drive very differently.

Registering a trademark doesn't cost that much. You can simply apply to register a trademark for your product for your usage and see whether the government will grant you a trademark for that usage.

is it google-able. If you google the name, will you show up easy? That's what having a name is all about right?

Important to who? Any intelligent system wants to stick around as long as possible in an indifferent universe.

I think that it is clear that can't do it just splitting existing control group in two parts, as such action could be done in many different ways and researcher could choose most favorable, and also because there could be some interactions inside control group, and also because smaler statistic power.

You can. Cross-validation, the bootstrap, permutation tests - these rely on that sort of procedure. They generate an empirical distribution of differences between groups or effect sizes which replace the assumption of being two normal distributions etc. It would be better to do those with both the experimental and control data, though.