Open Thread: February 2010, part 2

That is a truly beautiful story. I wonder how many places there are on Earth where people would appreciate this story.

There are a lot of opportunities in the day for something to happen that might prompt you to think "wow, that's one in a thousand", though. It wouldn't have been worth wasting a moment wondering if it was coincidence unless you had some reason to suspect an alternative hypothesis, like that it changed because the mouse moved.

bit that makes no sense deleted

I experience several 1-in-60 events, perhaps everyday. Many times when I look at the clock, the seconds number matches the minutes number. So I see [hour]:X:X. This happened enough times that I even predict it on occasion, and I’m not a person who checks the clock too frequently. Honestly, not having checked the time in quite a while, I did after reading your post and it was 4:03:03 pm. Scary.

This somehow reminds me of the stories when Tom Schelling was trying to quit smoking, using game theory against himself (or his other self). The other self in question was not the unconscious, but the conscious "decision-making" self in different circumstances. So that discussion is somewhat orthogonal to this one. I think he did things like promising to give a donation to the American Nazi Party if he smokes. Not sure how that round ended, but he did finally quit.

Reminds me of The User Illusion, which adds that the consciousness has an astoundingly low bandwidth--around 16bps--around 6 orders of magnitude lower than the senses transmit to the brain.

Interesting.

I've glanced at that site before and its metaphors have the ring of truthiness (in a non-pejorative sense) about them; the programming metaphors and the focus on subconscious mechanisms seem to resonate with the way I already think about how my own brain works.

I read the original article and some of the other PJE material. I think he's really onto something. This is how far I got:

• Identify the '10% controlling part'

• Everything else is not under direct control (which is where most self-help methods fail)

• It is under indirect control

So far makes sense from personal experience/general knowledge.

• Here are my methods for indirect control.

This is the part that I remain skeptical about . Not PJE's fault, but I do need more data/experience to confirm.

Thanks, Kaj, that was useful.

I wonder how many trivially wrong beliefs we carry around because we've just never checked them. (Probably most of them are mispronunciations of words, at least for people who've read a lot of words they've never heard anybody else use aloud.)

For the longest time, I thought that nuclear waste was a green liquid that tended to ooze out of barrels. I was surprised to learn that it usually came in the form of dull gray metal rods.

I envy you being the one to tell someone that!

Did you explain that the Sun was a miasma of incandescent plasma?

If it's really frequentism that caused the problem, please spell this out. I find that "frequentist" is used a lot around here to mean "not correct." (but I'm interested whether or not it's about frequentism)

Will the case be feasibly anonymous? I would vote that the article be left unwritten if it would unambiguously identifies the author(s), either explicitly or through unique features of the case (e.g. details of the case which are idiosyncratic to only one or a very few research groups).

Karma balance.

The AF is quite bad; just a retread of the Thinking Ape piece. The Caveman Science Fiction is much better.

This site does tend to implicitly favour a subset of human values, specifically what might be described as 'enlightenment values'. I'm quite happy to come out and explicitly state that we should do things that favour my values, which are largely western/enlightenment values, over other conflicting human values.

White people value the values of non-white people. We know that non-white people exist, and we care about them. That's why the United States is not constantly fighting to disenfranchise non-whites. If you do it right, white people's values are identical to humans' values.

then why don't you talk about doing things to favor e.g. "white people's values"?

We more or less do. Or rather we favour values of a distinct subset humanity and not the whole.

Just a general comment about this site: it seems to be biased in favor of human values at the expense of values held by other sentient beings.

What other sentient beings? As far as I know, there aren't any. If we learn about them, we'll probably incorporate their well-being into our value system.

I have no idea if this is a serious question, but....

Just a general comment about this site: it seems to be biased in favor of human values at the expense of values held by other sentient beings. It's all about "how can we make sure an FAI shares our [i.e. human] values?" How do you know human values are better?

"Better"? See Invisible Frameworks.

Or from the other direction: if you say, "because I'm human", then why don't you talk about doing things to favor e.g. "white people's values"?

We don't say that. See No License To Be Human.

I approve of Clippy providing a roleplay exercise for the readers, and am disappointed in those who treat it as a "joke" when the topic is quite serious. This is one of my two main problems with ethical systems in general:

1) How do you judge what you should (value-judgmentally) value?
2) How do you deal with uncertainty about the future (unpredictable chains of causality)?

Eliezer's "morality" and "should" definitions do not solve either of these questions, in my view.

I'm pretty sure that I'm not against simply favoring the values of white people. I expect that a CEV performed on only people of European descent would be more or less indistinguishable from that of humanity as a whole.

I, for one, am willing to consider the values of species other than my own... say, canids, or ocean-dwelling photosynthetic microorganisms. Compromise is possible as part of the process of establishing a mutually-beneficial relationship.

Your comment only shows that this community has such a blatant sentient-being-bias.

Seriously, what is your decision procedure to decide the sentience of something? What exactly are the objects that you deem valuable enough to care about their value system? I don't think you will be able to answer these questions from a point of view totally detached from humanness. If you try to answer my second question, you will probably end up with something related to cooperation/trustworthiness. Note that cooperation doesn't have anything to do with sentience. Sentience is overrated (as a source of value).

Or from the other direction: if you say, "because I'm human", then why don't you talk about doing things to favor e.g. "white people's values"?

I think this way of posing the question contains a logical mistake. Values aren't always justified by other values. The factual statement "I have this value because evolution gave it to me" (i.e. because I'm human, or because I'm white) does not imply "I follow this value because it favors humans, or whites". Of course I'd like FAI to have my values, pretty much by definition of "my values". But my values have a term for other people, and Eliezer's values seem to be sufficiently inclusive that he thought up CEV.

The reason ancient Greek writers thought women were like children is the same reason men in all cultures think women are like children: There are significant incentives to do so. Men who treat women as children reap very large rewards compared to those men who treat women as equals.

EDIT: If someone thinks this is an invalid point, please explain in a reply. If the downvote(s) is just "I really dislike anyone believing what he's saying is true, even if a lot of evidence supports it" (regardless of whether or not evidence currently supports it) then please leave a comment stating that.

EDIT 2: Supporting evidence or retraction will be posted tonight.

EDIT 3: As I can find no peer-reviewed articles suggesting this phenomenon, I retract this statement.

Interesting read, thanks.

Plus women have more juvenile morphology compared to men.

Women are shorter, smaller, less muscled, beardless, have higher voices, more fatty tissue, etc. The Greeks and Romans seemed to rely on surface analogies for reasoning.

It's not at all obvious to me how to comparison-shop for cryonics. The websites are good as far as they go, but CI's in particular is tricky to navigate, funding with life insurance messes with my estimation of costs, and there doesn't seem to be a convenient chart saying "if you're this old and this healthy and this solvent and your family members are this opposed to cryopreservation, go with this plan from this org".

Alcor is better.

CI is cheaper and probably good enough.

Pretty darned high, because at this point we already know that the world doesn't work the way we think it did.

For the two examples of the mundane prophecies that you gave it seems possible some on-going conspiracy could have made them true... but it sounds like you're trying to rule that out.

Most articles link to those preceeding it, but it would be very helpful to have links to those articles that follow.

That's not a bad idea. How about just a third monthly thread? To be created when a genuinely curious newcomer is asking good, but basic questions. You do not want to distract from a thread but at the same time you may be willing to spend time on educational discussion.

Yes, I am working my way through the sequences now. Hearing these ideas makes one want to comment but so frequently its only a day or two before I read something that renders my previous thoughts utterly stupid.

It would be nice to have a "read this and you won't be a total moron on subject X" guide.

Also, it would be good to encourage the readings about Eliezer Intellectual Journey. Though its at the bottom of the sequence page I used it a "rest reading" between the harder sequences.

It did a lot to convince me that I wasn't inherently stupid. Knowing that Eliezer has held foolish beliefs in the past is helpful.

Arguably, as seminal as the sequences are treated, why are the "newbies" the only ones who should be (re)reading them?

As a newcomer, I would find this tremendously useful. I clicked through the wiki links on noteworthy articles, but often find there are a lot of assumptions or previously discussed things that go mentioned but unexplained. Perhaps this would help.

Given how much time I've spent reading this site lately, doing something like that is probably a good idea. Therefore, I am now incorporating Less Wrong into the day-week-month rule, which is a personal policy that I use for intoxicants, videogames, and other potentially addictive activities - I designate one day of each week, one week of each month, and one month of each year in which to abstain entirely. Thus, from now on, I will not read or post on Less Wrong at all on Wednesdays, during the second week of any month, or during any September. (These values chosen by polyhedrical die rolls.)

This is to confess that I cheated several times by reading the Google cache.

Great plugin. In case you have a linux dev (virtual) machine I also recommend:

sudo iptables -A INPUT -d lesswrong.com -j DROP

It does wonders for productivity!

I'm disappointed, but if you think you have better things to do, I won't object.

False equivalence?

Fair and balanced reporting.

This is a great example of a "pitch". I've added it just now to the database of pitches:
http://www.takeonit.com/pitch/the_equivalence_pitch.aspx

Closest I know is "tu quoque".

(All of the below is IIRC.)

For a really basic introduction, there's Elementary Bayesian Statistics. It's not worth the listed price (it has little value as a reference text), but if you can find it in a university library, it may be what you need. It describes only the de Finetti coherence justification; on the practical side, the problems all have algebraic solutions (it's all conjugate priors, for those familiar with that jargon) so there's nothing on numerical or Monte Carlo computations.

Data Analysis: A Bayesian Approach is a slender and straighforward introduction to the Jaynesian approach. It describes only the Cox-Jaynes justification; on the practical side, it goes as far as computation of the log-posterior-density through a multivariate second-order Taylor approximation. It does not discuss Monte Carlo methods.

Bayesian Data Analysis, 2nd ed. is my go-to reference text. It starts at intermediate and works its way up to early post-graduate. It describes justifications only briefly, in the first chapter; its focus is much more on "how" than "why" (at least, for philosophical "why", not methodological or statistical "why"). It covers practical numerical and Monte Carlo computations up to at least journeyman level.

I'm not intending to put this out as a satisfactory answer, but I found it with a quick search and would like to see what others think of it.

Introduction to Bayesian Statistics by William M. Bolstad

http://books.google.com/books?id=qod3Tm7d7rQC&dq=bayesian+statistics&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Good reviews on Amazon, and available from $46 + shipping... http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Bayesian-Statistics-William-Bolstad/dp/0471270202

I second the question. "Elements of Statistical Learning" is Bayes-aware though not Bayesian, and quite good, but that's statistical learning which isn't the same thing at all.

That issue could be captured if there were some obvious way to identify issues where predictions should be made in advance. If they fail to make predictions, they are being careless; if their predictions are incorrect, they are incorrect.

I think so, but it's important to identify the time at which it became predictable - for example, you could only predict that you were painting yourself into a corner just prior to when you made the last brushstroke that made the strip(s) of paint covering the exit path too wide to jump over. This seems hard.

Also, you'd have to know what your utility function was going to be in the future to know that some event was even worth predicting. This seems hard, too.

I have not seen RationalWiki before. Why is it called Rational Wiki?

http://lesswrong.com/lw/gs/i_dont_know/
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/I_don%27t_know

This may be related to the recent post Study: Making decisions makes you tired. It seems plausible that we don't assign probabilities to events until we have to, in order to make a decision, and that's why making decisions is tiring.

I self-identify as using the first one, with a caveat.

The second is obviously awful for communicating any sort of information given that only the sum of votes is displayed rather than total up and total down. The second is order dependent and often means you'll want to change your vote later based purely on what others think of the post.

My "strategy" is to vote up and down based on whether I'd have wanted others with more insight than me to vote to bring my attention to or away from a comment, unless I feel I have special insight, in which case it's based on whether I want to bring others' attention to or away from a comment.

This is because I see the goal of the voting process that readers' independent opinions on how much a comment is worth readers' attention be aggregated and used to bring readers' attention to or away from a comment. As a side effect, the author of a comment can use the aggregated score to determine whether her readers felt the comment was worth their collective attention.

Furthermore since each reader's input comes in distinct chunks of exactly -1, 0, or +1, it's wildly unlikely that voting very often results in the best aggregation: instead I leave a comment alone unless I feel it was(is) significantly worth or not worth my(your) attention.

The caveat: there is a selection effect in which comments I vote on, since my attention will be drawn away from comments with very negative karma. There is also undoubtedly an unconscious bias away from voting up a comment with very high karma: since I perceive the goal to be to shift attention, once a comment has very high karma I know it's going to attract attention so my upvote is in fact worth fewer attention-shift units. But I haven't yet consciously noticed that kick in until about +10 or so.

At home I use the Anti-Kibitzer, which enforces 1. I've been on vacation for a couple days and noticed the temptation to use 2. Gave in on one occasion, I'm afraid. On balance I'll stick to 1, as 2 seems too vulnerable to information cascades.

It is worth noting that people have explicitly claimed to be following strategy 2 here. Edit: This is far from the only example; just the one I found by searching for "upvoted to".

It would be also interesting to check the difference between comments on quotes threads and comments on substantive posts - at least one person has proposed that quotations are disproportionately subject to strategy 1 voting over strategy 2.

It takes effort to evaluate examples. Revealing that one example is bad raises the possibility that others are bad as well, because the methods for choosing examples are correlated with the examples chosen. The two obvious reasons for a bad example are:

1. You missed that this was a bad example, so why should I trust your interpretation or understanding of your other examples?
2. You know this is a bad example, and included it anyway, so why should I trust any of your other examples?

From EY's post:

The fourth horn of the anthropic trilemma is to deny that increasing the number of physical copies increases the weight of an experience, which leads into Boltzmann brain problems, and may not help much (because alternatively designed brains may be able to diverge and then converge as different experiences have their details forgotten).

Suppose I build a (conscious) brain in hardware using today's technology. It uses a very low current density, to avoid electromigration.

Suppose I build two of them, and we agree that both of them experience consciousness.

Then I learn a technique for treating the wafers to minimize electromigration. I create a new copy of the brain, the same as the first copy, only using twice the current, and hence being implemented by a flow of twice as many electrons.

As far as the circuits and the electrons travelling them are concerned, running it is very much like running the original 2 brains physically right next to each other in space.

So, does the new high-current brain have twice as much conscious experience?

This should help.

In general, the best charities are SIAI, SENS and FHI.

Someone once told me that the reason they don't read Less Wrong is that the articles and the comments don't match...I have no idea what that person is talking about. Do you?

Yes.

Back in Overcoming Bias days, I constantly had the impression that the posts were of much higher quality than the comments. The way it typically worked, or so it seemed to me, was that Hanson or Yudkowsky (or occasionally another author) would write a beautifully clear post making a really nice point, and then the comments would be full of snarky, clacky, confused objections that a minute of thought really ought to have dispelled. There were obviously some wonderful exceptions to this, of course, but, by and large, that's how I remember feeling.

Curiously, though, I don't have this feeling with Less Wrong to anything like the same extent. I don't know whether this is because of the karma system, or just the fact that this feels more like a community environment (as opposed to the "Robin and Eliezer Show", as someone once dubbed OB), or what, but I think it has to be counted as a success story.

That reason sounds incomplete, but I think I know what the person is talking about.

The best example I can think of is Normal Cryonics. The post was partly a personal celebration of a positive experience and partly about the lousiness of parents that don't sign their kids up for cryonics. Yet, the comments mostly ignored this and it became a discussion about the facts of the post -- can you really get cryonics for $300 a year? Why should a person sign up or not sign up?

The post itself was voted up to 33, but only 3 to 5 comments out of 868 disparaged parents in agreement. There's definitely a disconnect.

Also, on mediocre posts and/or posts that people haven't related to, people will talk about the post for a few comments and then it will be an open discussion as though the post just provided a keyword. But I don't see much problem with this. The post provided a topic, that's all.

I'm not quite sure I can answer the question. I certainly have no major, world(view)-shaking Cause which is driving me to improve my strength.

For what it's worth, I've had this general idea that being wrong is a bad idea for as long as I can remember. Suggestions like "you should hold these beliefs, they will make your life happier" always sounded just insane - as crazy as "you should drink this liquor, it will make your commute less boring". From that standpoint, it feels like what I have to protect is just the things I care about in the world - my own life, the lives of the people around me, the lives of humans in general.

That's it.

I'm trying to apply LW-style hyper-rationality to excelling in what I have left of grad school and to shepherding my business to success.

My mission (I have already chosen to accept it) is to make a pile of money and spend it fighting existential risk as effectively as possible. (I'm not yet certain if SIAI is the best target). The other great task I have is to persuade the people I care about to sign up for cryonics.

Strangely enough, the second task actually seems even less plausible to me, and I have no idea how to even get started since most of those people are theists.

OB then LW were the 'step beyond' to take after philosophy, not that I was seriously studying it.

to be honest I don't think there's much going on these day new-topic-wise, so I'm here less often. but I do come back whenever I'm bored, so at first "pure desire to learn" then "entertainment" would be my reasons ..

oh and a major part of my goals in life is formed by religion, ie. saving humanity from itself and whatever follows, this is more ideological than actual at this point in time, but anyway, that goal is furthered by learning more about AI/futurism, the rationality part less so, as I already had an intuitive grasp of it you could say, and really all it takes is reading the sequences with their occasional flaws/too strong assertions, the futurism part is more speculative-and interesting- so it's my main focus, along with the moral questions it brings, though there is no dichotomy to speak of if you consider this a personal blog rather than book or something similar.

hope this helped :)

How does the North Korean government do such a good job under such difficult circumstances?

Holy shit, what utter raving idiocy. The author has obviously never emigrated from anywhere nor seriously talked with anyone who did. People return because they miss their families, friends, native language and habits... I know a fair number of people who returned from Western countries to Russia and that's the only reason they cite.

I had previously no idea that half of the North Koreans who cross the border never return. If it is so, it is an extremely strong indicator that the life in the DPRK is very unpleasant for its own citizens. To imply that this piece of data is in fact evidence for the contrary is absurd.

To emigrate from DPRK to China means that you lose your home, your family, your friends, your job. You have to start from scratch, from the lowest levels in social hierarchy, capable of doing only the worst available jobs, without knowledge of local language (which is not easy to learn, given that the destination country is China), probably facing xenophobia. If you are 40 or older, there is almost no chance that your situation will improve significantly.

The North Koreans who actually travel abroad are probably not the poorest. They have to afford a ticket, at least. They have something to lose. In North-Korean style of tyrannies, families are often persecuted because of emigration of their members. In spite of all that, half of the North Koreans never return (if the linked post tells the truth) and the author says about it that "the North Korean government [does] such a good job under such difficult circumstances", and then needs to explain that "success" by group identity. Thats an absurdity.

"How much will it cost?" "How long will it take?" Who the hell is supposed to be able to answer that on a basic research problem?

Interesting, but some of the questions aren't easy to answer.

For example if you were asking the question to someone involved in early contraception development, do you think they could of predicted what demographic/birth rate changes it would have? Similarly someone inventing a better general machine learning technique, (useful for surveillance to robot butlers) could they enumerate the variety of ways it would change the world?

For AI projects, even weak ones, I would ask how they planned to avoid the puppet problem.

Sounds like good rules of thumb, though one would think DARPA should be using something a little more formal, such as Decision Analysis methodology.

http://decision.stanford.edu/library/the-principles-and-applications-of-decision-analysis-1

For one, value of acquiring information did not make the list. Maybe this was a dumbed-down version.

I am by and large convinced by the arguments that a UFAI is incredibly dangerous and no precautions of this sort would really suffice.

However, once a candidate FAI is built and we're satisfied we've done everything we can to minimize the chances of unFriendliness, we would almost certainly use precautions like these when it's first switched on to mitigate the risk arising from a mistake.

This might be stupid (I am pretty new to the site and this possibly has come up before), I had a related thought.

Assuming boxing is possible, here is a recipe for producing an FAI:

Step 1: Box an AGI

Step 2: Tell it to produce a provable FAI (with the proof) if it wants to be unboxed. It will be allowed to carve of a part of universe to itself in the bargain.

Step 3: Examine FAI the best you can.

Step 4: Pray

After reading Kaj's pointer, I spent several hours at Steve Pavlina's site. It's fascinating for someone like me who's always in danger of falling apart at the self-discipline front if he's not very vigilant about it. As a lot of self-help authors, Pavlina is very analytic; plus he's open about his experiments in life style -- which he tackles with the same resolve as his other projects -- and Erin Pavlina is a "psychic reader" who apparently does consultations via telephone (preferably land line)!

Juergen Schmidhuber writes about humor as information compression and that plus decompression seems about right to me. Being on TV is decompression from a phrase-as-concept to the component words, a pun, a switch to a lower level analysis than that which adults favor (a situation children constantly have to deal with). Muffin and cupcake is a proposal for a new lossy compression of two concepts to a new concept with a "topping" variable, which would be useful if you wanted to invent, for instance, the dreadful sounding "muffin-roll sushi", "next Wednesday" is a commentary on the inadequacy of current cultural norms for translating concepts and words into one another even for commonly used concepts. The last one is a successful compression from sense data to the fact that a common joke pattern is happening and inference that one is in a joke.

I wish that we had a "Less Wrong Community" blog for off-topic but fun comments like the above to be top level posts, as well as an "instrumental rationality" blog for "self help" subject matter.

I believe that humor requires harmless surprise, Harmlessness and surprise are both highly contextual, so what people find funny can vary quite a bit.

One category of humor (or possibly an element for building humor) is things which are obviously members of a class, but which are very far from the prototype. Thus, an ostrich is funny while a robin isn't. This may not apply if you live in ostrich country-- see above about context.

I have spent a great deal of time thinking about humor, and I've arrived at a place somewhat close to yours. Humor is how we pass on lessons about status and fitness, and we do that using pattern recognition. I heard a comedian describe comedy by saying, "It's always funny when someone falls down. The question is, is it still funny if you push them?" He said for a smaller group of the population, it is. Every joke has a person being displayed as not fit - even if we have to take an object, or an abstraction, and anthropomorphize it. This is the butt of the joke. The more butts of a joke there are, the funnier the joke is - i.e., a single butt will not be that funny, but if there are several butts of a joke, or if a single person is the butt of several layers of the joke, it will be seen as funnier. The most common form of this is when the goals of the butt of a joke is divorced from their results.

Joke 1: This is funny because Jeremy displays a lack of fitness by not being able to properly process the phrase "on TV." This has one butt - Jeremy.

Joke 2: This joke has two butts. One is the muffin, which is being declared unfit for being bald. The other is the comedian's character, who is being displayed as needlessly paranoid toward a benign object (a muffin).

Joke 3: This joke isn't that funny when displayed in text form - the comedy is in the performances, where both conversation participants are butts of the joke for arguing so intensely over something so petty.

Joke 4: The butt of this joke is the traditional joke it's mocking.

As for your outsiders' behavior:

New student asks for both cream and lemon: Displays he is unfit by not understanding the purpose of what he's asking for.

New employee swears and makes racist comments: This isn't funny in person, but it is funny if a few conditions are met. The first condition is that you're sufficiently removed from it (i.e., watching it on TV): Imminent threats aren't funny because this isn't a status lesson, but a status competition. The second condition is that it must be demonstrated how this makes the person unfit. For example, if the new employee is making these comments because she thinks they demonstrate her social savvy, that starts becoming more funny again (notice Michael Scott in The Office). Or, imagine the new employee has Tourette syndrome and is actually a very sweet girl, who constantly apologizes after making obscene statements. This also would elicit laughs.

If the guy sitting behind you starts grunting and moaning: The threat is too imminent, but if you remove the worrying aspect of it, this is ripe for a punchline. Once again, you have to demonstrate how he is unfit. Perhaps he says, "I'm trying to communicate secretly in Morse Code - grunts are dots, moans are dashes."

EDIT / ADDENDUM: This also explains why humor is so tied up in culture - you don't know the purpose of certain cultural habits. Until you intuitively grasp their purpose, you will have a hard time understanding why certain violations of them are funny.

For example, take the Simpsons episode where Homer's pet lobster dies and he's weeping as he eats it. In between bouts of loud, wailing grief, he sobs out comments like, "Pass the salt." This would be hard to understand for cultures that don't express grief like Western culture does.

Slight variant: Humour is a form of teaching, in which interesting errors are pointed out. It doesn't need to involve an outsider, and there's no particular class of error, other than that the participants should find the error important.
If the guy sitting behind you starts moaning and grunting, if it's a mistake (e.g. he's watching porn on his screen and has forgotten he's not alone) then it's funny, whereas if it's not a mistake, and there's something wrong with him, then it isn't.
Humour as teaching may explain why a joke isn't funny twice - you can only learn a thing once. Evolutionarily, it may have started as some kind of warning, that a person was making a dangerous mistake, and then getting generalised.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527451.400-the-comedy-circuit-when-your-brain-gets-the-joke.html?full=true&print=true

New findings in the neurology of humor, and who finds what sort of jokes funny

I'm glad you bring up this topic. I think that explanation makes a lot of sense: behavior that is wrong, but wrong in subtle ways, is good for you to notice -- you I.D. outsiders -- and so you benefit from having a good feeling when you notice it. Further, laughter is contagious, so it propagates to others, reinforcing that benefit.

I want to present my theory now for comparison: A joke is funny when it finds a situation that has (at least) two valid "decodings", or perhaps two valid "relevant aspects".

The reason it's advantageous in selection is that, it's good for you to identify as many heuristics as possible that fit a particular problem. That is, if you know what to do when you see AB, and you know what to do when you see BC, it would help if you remember both rules when you see ABC. (ABC "decodes" as "situation where you do AB-things" and as "situation where you do BC-things).

Therefore, people who enjoy the feeling of seeking out and identifying these heuristics are at an advantage.

To apply it to your examples:

1) It requires you to access your heuristics for "displayed on a TV screen" and "on top of a TV set".

2) It requires you to access your heuristics for "muffin as food" and "deficiencies of foods", not to mention the applicability of the concept of "baldness" to food.

3) Recognizing different heuristics for interpreting a date specification.

4) I don't know if this is a traditional joke: it became a traditional joke after the tradition of minister/priest/rabbi jokes. But anyway, its humor relies on recognizing that someone else can be using your own heuristics "minister/priest/rabbi = common form of joke", itself a heuristic.

Food for thought...

You missed this category of funny things.

I've always liked Isaac Asimov's theory of where humor comes from. It's not actually true, but it should be!

I saw somewhere an article, though I unfortunately forget where exactly, about research noting that humor is also tied to social status. Jokes are funnier when told by a superior than someone below your own position.

As a personal observation, jokes are also more fun when there are lots of others who also laugh at them. They're also a great way to break the tension in a group situation. Humor has a very important social function, though obviously it might also have a function like the one you're describing, as "it's a social glue" doesn't explain why some things are funny and why others aren't. (Though I do think the social function is much greater.)

A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.

—Dave Barry

Nice. I always find humor to be one of the most intuitively baffling things for my consideration. Maybe that's because my sense of humor is just too f*....

As your goal is to build community, I would time new posts based on posting and commenting activity. For example, whenever there is a lull, this would be an excellent time to make a new post. (I noticed over the weekend there were some times when 45 minutes would pass between subsequent comments and wished for a new post to jazz things up.)

On the other hand, if there are several new posts already, then it would be nice to wait until their activity has waned a bit.

I think that it is optimal to have 1 or 2 posts 'going on' at a time. I prefer the second post when one of them is technical and/or of focused interest to a smaller subset of Less Wrongers.

(But otherwise no limit on the rate of posts.)

I'd say damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. If people are annoyed, let them downvote. If posts start getting downvoted, slow down.

Your posts have generally been voted up. If now is the golden moment of time where you can get everything said, then for the love of Cthulhu, say it now!

one obvious idea that I didn't notice anyone else mention:

Another option is to go ahead and write the posts as fast as you think is optimal, but if you think this is too fast to actually post the stuff you've written, then you can wait a few days after you wrote it before posting.

LW has a handy "drafts" feature that you can use for that.

This also has the advantage that you have more time to improve the article before you post it, but the disadvantage that you may be tempted to spend too much time making minor, unimportant improvements. Another disadvantage is that feedback gets delayed.

A related question: If I have a large topic to cover, should I cover it in one post, or split it up along convenient cleavage planes and make it a sequence? (If I make sequences, I think I'll learn my lesson from the last one I tried and write it all before posting anything, so I don't post 2/3 of it and then stop.)

It seems to me that any strategy that does not end up with three posts by you on "Recent Posts" seems fine, as a rule of thumb.

Or am I still underestimating human insanity by that much?

Yes.

People dismiss the scientific evidence weighing similarly against them on many issues in the news every day. There's nothing spectacular about finding someone who does it regarding the Earth being flat, especially given that an entire society has existed for hundreds of years to promote the idea.

That you see this as a particularly extreme case of insanity (even in an apparently intelligent, lucid, fully-functioning person) is far more shocking to me than this guy.

Maybe I've just seen too many Louis Theroux documentaries.

At any rate, if it may not be quite a conscious scam, it sounds a lot like belief in belief, i.e. he may be telling himself that he believes the earth is flat because there is no conclusive proof that it isn't, but he secretly knows quite well that the evidence for this is as close to conclusive as it is for anything.

I think that this post doesn't list the strongest objection: CEV would take a long list of scientific miracles to pull off, miracles that whilst not strictly "impossible", are each profound computer science and philosophy questions. To wit:

• An AI that can simulate the outcome of human conscious deliberation, without actually instantiating a human consciousness, i.e. a detailed technical understanding of the problem of conscious experience

• A way to construct an AI goal system that somehow extracts new concepts from a human upload's brain, and then modifies itself to have a new set of goals defined in terms of those concepts.

• A solution to the ontology problem in ethics

• A solution to the friendliness structure problem, i.e. a self-improving AI that can reliably self-modify without error or axiological drift.

• A solution to the problem of preference aggregation, (EDITED, thanks ciphergoth)

• A formal implementation of Rawlesian Reflective Equilibrium for CEV to work

• An AI that can solve philosophy problems that are beyond the ability of the designers to even conceive

• A way to choose what subset of humanity gets included in CEV that doesn't include too many superstitious/demented/vengeful/religious nutjobs and land those who implement it in infinite perfect hell.

• All of the above working first time, without testing the entire superintelligence. (though you can test small subcomponents)

And, to make it worse, if major political powers are involved, you have to solve the political problem of getting them to agree on how to skew the CEV towards a geopolitical-power-weighted set of volitions to extrapolate, without causing a thermonuclear war as greedy political leaders fight over the future of the universe.