Open thread, February 15-28, 2013

One part of my brain keeps being annoyed by the huge banner saying “Less Wrong will be undergoing maintenance in 1 day, 9 hours” and wishes there were a button to hide it away; another part knows perfectly well that if I did that, I would definitely forget that.

Does anyone else believe in deliberate alienation? Forums and organizations like Lesswrong often strive to be and claim to want to be more (and by extension indefinitely) inclusive but I think excluding people can be very useful in terms of social utilons and conversation, if not so good for $$$. There's a lot of value in having a pretty good picture of who you're talking to in a given social group, in terms of making effective use of jargon and references as well as appeals to emotion that actually appeal. I think thought should be carefully given as to who exactly you let in or block out with any given form of inclusiveness or insensitivity.

On a more personal note, I think looking deliberately weird is a great way to make your day to day happenstance interactions more varied and interesting.

Did anyone try using the LessWrong web software for their own website? I would like to try it, but I looked at the source code and instructions, and it seemed rather difficult. Probably because I have no experience with Python, Ruby, or with configuring servers (a non-trivial dose of all three seems necessary).

If someone would help me install it, that would be awesome. A list of steps what exactly needs to be done, and what (and which version) needs to be installed on server would be also helpful.

The idea is: I would like to start a rationalist community in Slovakia, and a website would be helpful to attract new people. Although I will recommend all readers to visit LW, reading in a foreign language is a significant incovenience; I expect the localized version to have at least 10 times more readers. Also I would like to discuss local events and coordinate local meetups or other activities.

Seemed to me it would be best to reuse the LW software and just localize the texts; but now it seems the installation is more complicated than the discussion softwares I have used before (e.g. PHPBB). But I really like the LW features (Markdown syntax, karma). I just have no experience with the used technologies, and don't want to spend my next five weekends learning them. So I hope someone already having the skills would help me.

Are there any mechanisms on this site for dealing with mental health issues triggered by posts/topics (specifically, the forbidden Roko post)? I would really appreciate any interested posters getting in touch by PM for a talk. I don't really know who to turn to.

Sorry if this is an inappropriate place to post this, I'm not sure where else to air these concerns.

So, there are hundreds of diseases, genetic and otherwise, with an incidence of less than 1%. That means that the odds of you having any one of them are pretty low, but the odds of you having at least one of them are pretty good. The consequence of this is that you're less likely to be correctly diagnosed if you have one of these rare conditions, which again, you very well might. If you have a rare disorder whose symptoms include frequent headaches and eczema, doctors are likely to treat the headaches and the eczema separately, because, hey, it's pretty unlikely that you have that one really rare condition!

For example, I was diagnosed by several doctors with "allergies to everything" when I actually have a relatively rare condition, histamine intolerance; my brother was diagnosed by different doctors as having Celiac disease, severe anxiety, or ulcers, when he actually just had lactose intolerance, which is pretty common, and I still cannot understand how they systematically got that one wrong. In both cases, these repeated misdiagnoses led to years of unnecessary, significant suffering. In my brother's case, at one point they actually prescribed him drugs with significant negative side effects which did nothing to alter his lactose intolerance.

I don't intend to come off as bitter, although I suppose I am. My intent is rather to discuss strategies for avoiding this type of systematic misdiagnosis of rare conditions. This line of thought seems like a strong argument in favor of the eventual role of Watson-like AIs as medical diagnostic assistants. A quick Googling indicates that the medical establishment is at least aware of the need to confront the under-diagnosis of rare diseases, but I'm not seeing a lot of concrete policies. For the present time, I don't know what strategy a non-medically-trained individual should pursue, especially if the "experts" are all telling you that your watery eyes mean you have have hay fever when you really have some treatable congenital eye disease.

P(not sick) = 0.99  (most people have nothing to worry about)
U(not sick, do nothing) = 0
U(not sick, find cure) = -1  (unnecessary tests, drugs, worry)
U(sick, do nothing) = -10  (possibly more headaches, or something worse)
U(sick, find cure) = -1  (still need tests, drugs, etc.)

E[U(do nothing)] = P(not sick) * U(not sick, do nothing) + P(sick) * U(sick, do nothing) = -0.1
E[U(find cure)] = P(not sick) * U(not sick, find cure) + P(sick) * U(sick, find cure) = -1

At this point, there should be little doubt that the best response to this "basilisk" would have been "That's stupid. Here are ten reasons why.", rather than (paraphrasing for humor) "That's getting erased from the internet. No, I haven't heard the phrase 'Streisand Effect' before; why do you ask?"

White coat hypertension is a phenomenon in which patients exhibit elevated blood pressure in a clinical setting (doctor's office, hospital, etc.) but not in other settings, apparently due to anxiety caused by being in the clinical setting.

Stereotype threat is the experience of anxiety or concern in a situation where a person has the potential to confirm a negative stereotype about their social group. Since most people have at least one social identity which is negatively stereotyped, most people are vulnerable to stereotype threat if they encounter a situation in which the stereotype is relevant. Although stereotype threat is usually discussed in the context of the academic performance of stereotyped racial minorities and women, stereotype threat can negatively affect the performance of European Americans in athletic situations as well as men who are being tested on their social sensitivity.

Math anxiety is anxiety about one's ability to do mathematics, independent of skill. Highly anxious math students will avoid situations in which they have to perform mathematical calculations. Math avoidance results in less competency, exposure and math practice, leaving students more anxious and mathematically unprepared to achieve. In college and university, anxious math students take fewer math courses and tend to feel negative towards math.

Set and setting describes the context for psychoactive and particularly psychedelic drug experiences: one's mindset and the setting in which the user has the experience. 'Set' is the mental state a person brings to the experience, like thoughts, mood and expectations. 'Setting' is the physical and social environment. Social support networks have shown to be particularly important in the outcome of the psychedelic experience. Stress, fear, or a disagreeable environment, may result in an unpleasant experience (bad trip). Conversely, a relaxed, curious person in a warm, comfortable and safe place is more likely to have a pleasant experience.

The Wason selection task, one of the most famous tasks in the psychology of reasoning, is a logic puzzle which most people get wrong when presented as a test of abstract reasoning; but produce the "correct" response when presented in a context of social relations. A Wason task proves to be easier if the rule to be tested is one of social exchange and the subject is asked to police the rule, but is more difficult otherwise.

(The above paragraphs summarize the Wikipedia articles linked; see those articles for sources. Below is speculation on my part.)

IQ tests, and other standardized tests, are usually given in settings associated with schooling or psychological evaluation. People who perform very well on them (gifted students) often report that they think of tests as being like puzzles or games. Many gifted students enjoy puzzles and solve them recreationally; and so may approach standardized tests with a more relaxed and less anxious mindset. Struggling students, who are accustomed to schooling being a source of anxiety, may face tests with a mindset that further diminishes their performance — and in a setting that they already associate with failure.

In other words, the setting of test-taking, and the mindset with which gifted and struggling students approach it, may amplify their underlying differences of reasoning ability. In effect, the test does not measure reasoning ability; it measures some combination of reasoning ability and comfort in the academic setting. These variables are correlated, but failing to notice the latter may lead us to believe there are wider differences in the former than there actually are.

Some people I've discussed the Wason task with, who have been from gifted-student and mathematical backgrounds, have reported that they solve the social-reasoning form of it by translating it to an abstract-reasoning form. This leaves me wondering if the task is easier if presented in a form that the individual is more comfortable with; and that these folks expect more success in abstract reasoning than others do: in other words, that the discrepancy has very much to do with mindset, and serves as an amplifier for people's comfort or discomfort with abstract reasoning more than their ability to reason.

Over the last month Bitcoin's nearly doubled in value. It's now nearly at hit historical high. http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#tgMzm1g10zm2g25zv

Does anybody know what drives the latest Bitcoin price development?

Any bored nutritionists out there? I've put together a list of nutrients, with their USDA recommended quantities/amounts, and scoured amazon for the best deals, in trying to create my own version of Soylent. My search was complicated by the following goals:

• I want my Soylent to have all USDA recommendations for a person of my age/sex/mass.
• I want my Soylent to be easy to make (which means a preference for liquid and powder versions of nutrients).
• My Soylent should be as cheap, per day, as possible (I'd rather have 10 lbs of Vitamin C at $0.00/day than 1lb at $0.01/day).
• Because I'd like it to be trivially easy to possess a year's supply of Soylent, should I find this to be a good experiment.
• I want to make it easy for other people to follow my steps, and criticize my mistakes, because I'm totally NOT a nutritionist, but I'm awfully tired of being told that I need X amount of Y in my diet, without citations or actionable suggestions (and it is way easier to count calories with whey protein than at a restaurant).
• I want the items to be available to anybody in the USA, because I live at the end of a pretty long supply chain, and can't find all this stuff locally.
• I'm trying not to order things from merchants who practice woo-woo, but if they have the best version of what I need, I won't be too picky.

There's probably other things, but I can't think of them at the moment.

The spreadsheet isn't done yet. I hope to make it possible to try dynamic combinations of multiple nutrients, since most merchants seem to prefer the multivitamin approach. Plus, I'd like for there to be more options for liquid and powder substances, because they are easier to combine. Right now, I'm just an explorer, but eventually I'd like to just have a recipe.

If this all sounds too risky, I've also made contact with Rob, and he says that he's planning on releasing his data in a few weeks, once he's comfortable with his results (I think he's waiting on friends to confirm his findings). I'm planning on showing him my list, so we can compare notes. It has already been noted that his current Soylent formula is a bit lacking in fiber. My Soylent is currently slated to use psyllium husks to make up the difference, but I'm looking into other options.

A brief overview of the options indicates that this isn't much cheaper than other food choices (~$7.20 / day), but it meets all of your needs, and once the routine is down, would be fast and easy to make, and could be stored for a long time. So I'm optimistic.

I'm quite excited that MIRI's new website has launched. My thanks to Louie Helm (project lead), Katie Hartman (designer), and the others who helped with the project: Malo Bourgon, Alex Vermeer, Stephen Barnes, Steven Kaas, and probably some others I don't know about.

How much do actors know about body language? Are they generally taught to use body language in a way consistent with what they're saying and expressing with their faces? (If so, does this mean that watching TV shows or movies muted could be a good way to practice reading body language?)

Dude. Seriously. Spoilers.

This comment is a little less sharp than it would have been had I not gone to the gym first; but unless you (and the apparent majority in this thread) actively want to signal contempt for those who disagree with you, please remember that there are some people here who do not want to read about the fucking basilisk.

It's been suggested to me that since I don't blog, I start an email newsletter. I ignored the initial suggestions, but following the old maxim* began to seriously consider it on the third or fourth suggestion (who also mentioned they'd even pay for it, which would be helpful for my money woes).

My basic idea is to once a month compile: everything I've shared on Google+, articles excerpted in Evernote or on IRC, interesting LW comments**, and a consolidated version of the changes I've made to gwern.net that month. Possibly also include media I've consumed with reviews for books, anime, music etc akin to the media thread.

I am interested in whether LWers would subscribe:

[pollid:415]

If I made it a monthly subscription, what does your willingness-to-pay look like? (Please be serious and think about what you would actually do.)

[pollid:416]

Thanks to everyone voting.

* "Once is chance; twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action." Or in Star Wars terms: "If someone calls you a Hutt, ignore them; if two people call you a Hutt, begin to wonder; and if three do, buy a slobber-pail and start stockpiling glitterstim."

** For example, my recent comments on the SAT (Harvard logistic regression & shrinking to the mean) would count as 'interesting comments', but not the Evangelion joke.

Conditional Spam (Something we could use a better word for but this will do for now)

In short: Conditional Spam is information that is valuable to 99 percent of people.

Huge proportions of the content generated and shared on the internet is in this category, and this becomes more and more the case as a greater percentage of the population outputs to the internet as well as reading it. In this category are things like people's photos of their cats, stories about day to day anecdotes, baby pictures, but ALSO, and importantly, things like most scientific studies, news articles, and political arguments. People criticize twitter for encouraging seemingly narcissistic pointless microblogging, but in reality it's the perfect engine for distributing conditional spam: Anyone who cares about your dog can follow you, and anyone who doesn't can NOT.

When your twitter or facebook or RSS is full of things you're not informed (or entertained, since this applies to fun as well as usefulness) by, this isn't a failing of the internet. It's a failing of your filter. The internet is a tool optimized to distribute conditional spam as widely as possible, and you can tune your use of it to try and make the less than 1 percent of it you'll inevitably see something you WANT to see, and your less than 1 percent of it you'll MAKE go to the people who actually care about it.

I don't like the phrase conditional spam both because it's not CREATED with sinister motives and it also presents it as a bad thing. 99 percent of all things are not for YOU but that doesn't mean it's not good that they're created. I think coming up with good terminology for this can also help us start to create actual mechanisms by which to optimize it. You can sort of shortcut the information filter process by paying attention to only people who pay attention to similar things as you, but is there an efficient way to set up eg, a news source that only gives you news you are likely to be interested in reading? It might be tuneable by tracking how likely you are to finish reading the articles.

In the short story/paper "Sylvan's Box" by Graham Priest the author tries to argue that it's possible to talk meaningfully about a story with internally inconsistent elements. However, I realized afterward that if one truly was in possession of a box that was simultaneously empty and not empty there would be no way to keep the inconsistency from leaking out. Even if the box was tightly closed it would both bend spacetime according to its empty weight and also bend spacetime according to its un-empty weight. Opening the box would cause photons and air molecules (at the least) to being interacting and not interacting with the contents. Eventually a hurricane would form and not form over the Atlantic due to the air currents caused (and not caused) by removing the lid. In my opinion If there is any meaning to be found in a physical interpretation of the story it's that inconsistency everywhere would explode from any interaction with an initial inconsistency, probably fairly rapidly (at least as fast as the speed of sound).

I'd be interested to know what other people think of the physical ramifications.

Persson (Uehiro Fellow, Gothenburg) has jokingly said that we are neglecting an important form or altruistic behavior.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKmxR1L_4Ag&feature=player_detailpage#t=1481s

We have a duty not to kill

We have a duty not to rape

but we do not have a duty, at least not a strong duty, to save lives

or to have sex with someone who is sexually-starved

Its a good joke.

What worries me is that it makes Effective Altruism of the GWWC and 80000h kind analogous to "fazer um feio feliz" an expression we use in portuguese meaning "making happy an ugly one". The joke is only funny because the analogy works to an extent.

And given it works, should Eff Alt be finding the most effective ways of getting the sexually deprived what they'd like to have?

Evolutionarily, sex is pretty high in the importance scale. Our psychology is engineered towards it (Buss2004).

Could finding the best matchmaking algorithm be an important utilitarian cause?

Where on LW is it okay to request advice? (The answers I would expect -- are these right? -- are: maybe, just maybe, in open threads, probably not in Discussion if you don't want to get downvoted into oblivion, and definitely not in Main; possibly (20-ish percent sure) nowhere on the site.)

I'm asking because, even if the discussions themselves probably aren't on-topic for LW, maybe some would rather hear opinions formulated by people with the intelligence, the background knowledge and the debate style common around here.

Two papers from last week: "The universal path integral" and "Quantum correlations which imply causation".

The first defines a quantum sum-over-histories "over all computable structures... The universal path integral supports a quantum theory of the universe in which the world that we see around us arises out of the interference between all computable structures."

The second, despite its bland title, is actually experimenting with a new timeless formalism, a "pseudo-density matrix which treats space and time indiscriminately".

I don't believe in timeless physics, computation as fundamental, or quantum mechanics as fundamental, but many people here do, and it amused me to see two such papers coming out on the same day.

I've been reading the sequences but i've realized that less of it has sunk in then i would have hoped. What is the best way to make the lessons sink in?

With all the mental health issues coming up recently, I thought I'd link Depression Quest, a text simulation of what it's like to live with depression.

Trigger warning: Please read the introduction page thoroughly before clicking Start. If you are or have been depressed, continue at your own risk.

I'm looking for information about chicken eye perfusion, as a possible low-cost cryonics research target. Anyone here doing small animal research?

Following up on my comment in the February What are You Working On thread, I've posted an update to my progress on the n-back game. The post might be of interest to those who want to get into mobile game/app development.

I have recently tried playing the Monday-Tuesday game with people three times. The first time it worked okay, but the other two times the person I was trying to play it with assumed I was (condescendingly!) making a rhetorical point, refused to play the game, and instead responded to what they thought the rhetorical point I was making was. Any suggestions on how to get people to actually play the game?

I decided I want to not see my karma or the karma of my comments and posts. I find that if anyone ever downvotes me it bothers me way more than it should, and while "well, stop letting it bother you" is a reasonable recommendation, it seems harder to implement for me than a software solution.

So, to that end, I figured out how the last posted version of the anti-kibitzer script works, and remodeled it to instead hide only my own karma (which took embarrassingly long to figure out, since my javascript skills can be best described with terms like "vague" and "barely existing"). If anyone wants it, here it is - you just need to open it with some editor (notepad works) and change all (7) instances of "Elithrion" in the Votepaths to your username. I tested and it works with both Greasemonkey for Firefox and Tampermonkey for Chrome.

The one thing that doesn't work well is that the page loads and then maybe 0.1s later everything gets hidden, which does leave you with enough time to see your own karma sometimes if you're looking at that spot, so if anyone knows how to fix that (or can confirm that it's too hard to fix to bother with), that would be welcome. Also, let me know if you think there are enough people who might want it that I should make a discussion post for more visibility or something.

(I'm not particularly concerned that I will lose feedback on the quality of my comments and posts, since I will still see the karma others receive and be able to compare, and I would still be interested in having a positive reputation. As of this writing my positive karma rate is a little under 90%, and my plan is to check once in a while and change something if I see it fall too much.)

The quantum coin toss

A couple guys argue that quantum fluctuations are relevant to most macroscopic randomness, including ordinary coin tosses and the weather. (I haven't read the original paper yet.)

Could someone write a post (or I suppose we could create a thread here) about the Chelyabinsk meteorite?

It's very relevant for a variety of reasons:

• connection to existential risk

• the unlikely media report that the meteorite is 'independent' of the asteroid that passed by this day

• any observations people have (I haven't any) on global communication and global rational decision making at this time, before it was determined that the damage and integrated risk was limited

The last Dungeons and Discourse campaign was very well-received here on Less Wrong, so I am formally announcing that another one is starting in a little while. Comment on this thread if you want to sign up.

I've seen several references to a theory that the english merchant class out breeded both the peasants and nobles with major societal implications (causing the industrial revolution), but now I can't find them. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

A bit of a meta question / possibly suggestion:

Has the idea of showing or counting karma-per-reader ratios been discussed before? The idea just occurred to me, but I'd rather not spend time thinking at length about it (I've not noticed any obvious disadvantages, so if you see some please tell me) if multiple other LWers have already discussed or thought about it.

Deleted. Don't link to possible information hazards on Less Wrong without clear warning signs.

E.g. this comment for a justified user complaint. I don't care if you hold us all in contempt, please don't link to what some people think is a possible info hazard without clear warning signs that will be seen before the link is clicked. Treat it the same way you would goatse (warning: googling that will lead to an exceptionally disgusting image).

My anecdata say that comments skew negative even for highly upvoted posts of mine. So, I wasn't surprised to see this.

Working on my n-back meta-analysis again, I experienced a cute example of how prior information is always worth keeping in mind.

I was trying to incorporate the Chinese thesis Zhong 2011; not speaking Chinese, I've been relying on MrEmile to translate bits (thanks!) and I discovered tonight that I had used the wrong table. I couldn't access the live thesis version because the site was erroring so I flipped to my screenshotted version... and I discovered that one line (the control group for the kids who trained 15 days) was cut off:

screenshot of the table of IQ scores

I needed the 2 numbers in the upper right hand corner (mean then standard deviation). What were they? I waited for the website to start working, but hours later I became desperate and began trying to guess the control group's values. After minute consideration of the few pixels left on the screen, I ventured that the true values were: 20.78 1.43.

I distracted myself unsplitting all the studies so I could look at single n-back versus dual n-back, and the site came back up! The true values had been: 23.78 1.48.

So I was wrong in just 2 digits. Guessing 43 vs 48 is not a big deal (the hundredth digit of the standard deviation isn't important), but I was chagrined to compare my 20 with the true 23. Why?

If you look at the image, you notice that the 3 immediately following means were 25, 24, 22; they were all means from people training 15-days as well. Knowing that, I should have inferred that the control group's mean was ~24 ((25+24+22)/3); you can tell that the bottom of the digit after 2 is rounded, so the digit must be 0, 3, 6, or 8 - but 0 and 8 are both very far from 24, and it's implausible that the control had the highest score (26), which leaves just '3' as the most likely guess.

(I probably would've omitted the 15-day groups if the website had gone down permanently, but if I had gone with my guess, 20 vs 23 would've resulted in a very large effect size estimate and resulted in a definite distortion to the overall meta-analysis.)

「META」：Up-votes represent desirable contributions, and down-votes negative contributions. Once one amasses a large corpus of comments, noticing which of one's comments have been upvoted or down-voted becomes nontrivially difficult. It seems it would be incredibly difficult to code in a feature that helped one find those comments; on the off chance it isn't, consider it a useful feature.

Link: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

It's still more-or-less rumors with little in the way of concrete plans. It would, at the least, be exciting to see funding of a US science project on the scale of the human genome project again.

The date in the title is incorrect s/2003/2013/

I don't see why the "pattern matching" is invalid.

It is the things that tend to go with it that are the problem. Such as the failure to understand which facets are different and similar and the missing of the most important part of the particular case due to distraction by thoughts relevant to a different scenario.

What's wrong with embracing foreign cultures, uploadings, upliftings, and so on?

Maybe I am biased by my personal history, having embraced what, as far as I can tell, is the very cutting edge of Western Culture (i.e. the less-wrong brand of secular humanism), and feeling rather impatient for my origin cultures to follow a similar path, which they are violently reticent to. Maybe I've got a huge blind spot of some other sort.

But when the Superhappies demand that we let them eradicate suffering forever, or when CelestAI offers us all our own personal paradise on the only condition that it be pony-flavoured, I don't just feel like I want to enthusiastically jump in, abandoning all caution. I feel like it's a moral imperative to take them up on their offer, and that getting in their way is a crime that is potentially on the same level as genocide or mass torture.

Yet in both stories these examples come from, and in the commentary by the authors, this is qualified as a Bad Thing... but I don't recall coming across an explanation that would satisfy me as to why.

Again, please warn me if I'm mixing things up here, as my purpose here is to correct any flaws that my stance may have, by consulting with minds that I expect will understand the problem better than I, and might see the flaws in how I frame it.

An overview of political campaigns

Once a new president is in power, he forgets that voters who preferred him to the alternative did not necessarily comprehend or support all of his intentions. He believes his victory was due to his vision and goals; he underestimates how much the loss of credibility for the previous president helped him and overestimates how much his own party supports him.

Is there a better way to look at someone's comment history, other than clicking next through pages of pages of recent comments? I would like to jump to someone's earliest posts.

I've been trying to correct my posture lately. Anyone have thoughts or advice on this?

Some things:

• Advice from reddit; if you spend lots of time hunched over books or computers, this looks useful and here are pictures of stretches.

• You can buy posture braces for like $15-$50. I couldn't find anything useful about their efficacy in my 5 minutes of searching, other than someone credible-sounding saying that they'd weaken your posture muscles (sounds reasonable) and one should thus do stretches instead.

• Searching a certain blog, I found this which says that sitting at a 135-degree angle is better than sitting straight, and both are better than slouching. Elsewhere on the internet, some qualified person said that standing is better than all three.

• At the moment I'm not sure that good-looking posture is healthier, but I'd guess it's worth it anyway because of signalling benefits. My current best guess for how to improve things is to use a standing desk and to give some form of reinforcement when I notice and correct my posture. And to sit as little as possible, and not in chairs. I may incorporate stretching, but only a little and in parallel with another activity because 15 minutes a day for like 3 months is a lot of time.

I could spend more time trying to figure this out, but I suspect others here might have already done that. If so, I'd be super happy if you'd post your conclusions, even if you don't take the time to say how you came to them.

Look, if this gets into metafictional causality violation, there's gonna be hell to pay.

A rationalist, mathematical love song

I got a totally average woman stands about 5’3”
I got a totally average woman she weighs about 153
Yeah she’s a mean, mean woman by that I mean statistically mean
Y’know average

I just watched Neil Tyson, revered by many, on The Daily Show answer the question "What do you think is the biggest threat to mankind's existence?" with "The threat of asteroids."

Now, there is a much better case to be made for the danger from future AI than it is from asteroids as an x-risk, by the transitive property Neil Tyson's beliefs would pattern match to xenu even better than MIRI's beliefs - a fiery death from the sky.

Yet we give NdGT the benefit of the doubt of why he came to his conclusion, why don't you do the same with MIRI?

The pattern matching's conclusions are wrong because the information it is matching on is misleading. The article implied that there was widespread belief that the future AI should be assisted, and this was wrong. Last I looked it still implied widespread support for other beliefs incorrectly.

This isn't an indictment of pattern matching so much as a need for the information to be corrected.

I didn't even say anything remotely close to that, and you know it.

This article got me rather curious

Extracts:

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Now that's the kind of rationalist spirit that I like to see.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

I was under the impression that there was ample evidence that concentration of power is a risk factor in and of itself, at least when it comes to humans. Lord Acton's "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it." tirade seems so uncontroversial as to practically be an Applause Light. Why would bankers be an exception?

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy.

Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth.

Well, people have been warning about the natural and spontaneous concentration of capital for quite a while now, and I am thrilled to see a mathematical model free of political baggage taking a stab at stating the problem in non-controversial terms. A step towards rationalizing the Dismal Science of Economics?

Just for sharing an unpretentious but (IMO) interesting post from a blog I regularly read.

In commenting on an article about the results of an experiment aimed at "simulating" a specific case of traumatic brain injury and measuring its supposed effects on solving a particularly difficult problem, economist/game theorist Jeffrey Ely asked whether a successful intervention could ever be designed to give people certain unusual, circumstantially useful skills.

It could be that we have a system that takes in tons of sensory information all of which is potentially available to us at a >conscious level but in practice is finely filtered for just the most relevant details. While the optimal level of detail might >vary with the circumstances the fineness of the filter could have been selected for the average case. That’s the second >best optimum if it is too complex a problem to vary the level of detail according to circumstances. If so, then artificial >intervention could improve on the second-best by suppressing the filter at chosen times.

Any thoughts?

So I was planning on doing the AI gatekeeper game as discussed in a previous thread.

My one stipulation as Gatekeeper was that I could release the logs after the game, however my opponent basically backed out after we had barely started.

Is it worth releasing the logs still, even though the game did not finish?

Ideally I could get some other AI to play against me, that way I have more logs to release. I will give you up to two hours on Skype, IRC, or some other easy method of communication. I am estimating my resounding victory with a 99%+ probability. We can put karma, small money, or nothing on the line.

Is anyone up for this?

I enjoy your posts, and I have been a consumer of your G+ posts and your blog for sometime now, even though I don't much comment and just lurk about. While I would want some sort of syndication of your stuff, I am wondering if an external expectation of having to meet the monthly compilation target or the fact that you know for sure that there is a definite large audience for your posts now, will affect the quality of your posts? I realize that there is likely not any answer possible for this beforehand, but I'd like to know if you've considered this.

Are there any good recommendations for documentaries?

I was reading Buss' Evolutionary Psychology, and came across a passage on ethical reasoning, status, and the cognitive bias associated with the Wason Selection Task. The quote:

Cummins (1998) marshals several forms of evidence to support the dominance theory. The first pertains to the early emergence in a child's life of reasoning about rights and obligations, called deontic reasoning. Deontic reasoning is reasoning about what a person is permitted, obligated, or forbidden to do (e.g., Am I old enough to be allowed to drink alcoholic beverages?). This form of reasoning contrasts with indicative reasoning, which is reasoning about what is true or false (e.g., Is there really a tiger hiding behind that tree?). A number of studies find that when humans reason about deontic rules, they spontaneously adopt a strategy of seeking rule violators. For example, when evaluating the deontic rule "all those who drink alcohol must be twenty-one years old or older," people spontaneously look for others with alcoholic drinks in their hands who might be underage. In marked contrast, when people evaluate indicative rules, they spontaneously look for confirming instances of the rule. For example, when evaluating the indicative rule "all polar bears have white fur," people spontaneously look for instances of white-furred polar bears rather than instances of bears that might not have white fur. In short, people adopt two different reasoning strategies, depending on whether they are evaluating a deontic or an indicative rule. For deontic rules, people seek out rule violations; for indicative rules, people seek out instances that conform to the rule. These distinct forms of reasoning have been documented in children as young as three years old, suggesting that they emerge reliably early in life (Cummins, 1998). Perhaps no coincidentally, at age three, children organize themselves into transitive dominance hierarchies (that is, hierarchies in which if A is dominant to B and B is dominant to C, then A is dominant to C). Moreover young children also can reason about transitive dominance hierarchies earlier in life than they can reason transitively about other stimuli (Cummins, 1998).

That is from Chapter 12 Status, Prestige, and Social Dominance, page 366 of the Third Edition. The paper that Buss is quoting is Cummins' Social Norms and other minds: The evolutionary roots of higher cognition. The PDF of the paper is here, and the discussion of deontic reasoning starts at the bottom of page 39.

edit: I am posting it here, because I had seen discussion of the Wason task from a confirmation bias viewpoint, but had not seen the behavioral ethics viewpoint fully explained before.

Of course, you're awesome and extremely rational and everything

Awww thanks!

Assuming by "it" you refer to the decision theory work, that UFAI is a threat, Many Worlds Interpretation, things they actually have endorsed in some fashion, it would be fair enough to talk about how the administrators have posted those things and described them as conclusions of the content, but it should accurately convey that that was the extent of "pushing" them. Written from a neutral point of view with the beliefs accurately represented, informing people that the community's "leaders" have posted arguments for some unusual beliefs (which readers are entitled to judge as they wish) as part of the content would be perfectly reasonable.

It would also be reasonable to talk about the extent to which atheism is implicitly pushed in stronger fashion; theism is treated as assumed wrong in examples around the place, not constantly but to a much greater degree. I vaguely recall that the community has non-theists as a strong majority.

The problem is that this is simply not what the articles say. The articles imply strongly that the more unusual beliefs posted above are widely accepted- not that they are posted in the content but that they are believed by Less Wrong members, part of the identity of someone who is a Less Wrong user. This is simply wrong. And the difference is significant; it is incorrectly accusing all people interested in the works of a writer of being proponents of that writer's most unusual beliefs, discussed only in a small portion of their total writings. And this should be fixed so they convey an accurate impression.

The Scientology comparison is misleading in that Scientology attempts to use cult practices to achieve homogeneity of beliefs, whereas Less Wrong does not- the poll solidly demonstrates that homogeneity of beliefs is not a thing which is happening. A better analogy would be a community of fans of the works of a philosopher who wrote a lot of stuff and came to some outlandish conclusions in parts, but the fans don't largely believe that outlandish stuff. Yeah, their outlandish stuff is worth discussing- but presenting it as the belief of the community is wrong even if the philosopher alleges it all fits together. Having an accurate belief here matters, because it has greatly different consequences. There are major practical differences in how useful you'd expect the rest of the content to be, and how you'd perceive members of the community.

At present, much of the articles are written as "smear pieces" against Less Wrong's community. As a clear and egregious example, it alleges they are "libertarian", for example, clearly a shot at LW given RW's readerbase, when surveys tell us that the most common political affiliation is "liberalism", and while "libertarianism" is second, "socialism" is third. It does this while citing one of the surveys in the article itself. Many of the problems here are not subtle.

If by "it" you meant the evil AI from the future thing, it most certainly is not "the belief pushed by the organization running this place"; any reasonable definition of "pushing" something would have to meancommunicating it to people and attempting to convince them of it, and if anything they're credibly trying to stop people from learning about it. There are no secret "higher levels" of Less Wrong content only shown to the "prepared", no private venues conveying it to members as they become ready, so we can be fairly certain given publicly visible evidence that they aren't communicating it or endorsing it as a belief to even 'selected' members.

It doesn't obviously follow from anything posted on Less Wrong, it requires putting a whole bunch of parts together and assuming it is true.

I was wondering about the LW consensus regarding molecular nanotechnology. Here's a little poll:

How many years do you think it will take until molecular nanotechnology comes into existence? [pollid:417]

What is the probability that molecular nanotechnology will be developed before superhuman Artificial General Intelligence? [pollid:418]

Omega appears and makes you the arbiter over life and death. Refuse, and everybody dies.

The task is this: You are presented with n (say, 1000) individuals and have to select a certain number who are to survive.

You can query Omega for their IQ, their life story and most anything that comes to mind, you cannot meet them in person. You know none of them personally.

You cannot base your decision on their expected life span. (Omega matches them in life expectancy brackets.)

You also cannot base your decision on their expected charitable donations, or a proxy thereof.

What do?

(Exasperated sigh) Come on.