Open Thread: March 2009

I've often used voting to encourage posters that I like. Since I know that Eliezer has a long history of blogging, I don't see him as needing the same level of encouragement that new posters might need, so I'm not always so quick to upvote his posts even when I think it is deserved.

I often catch myself using "other Eliezer posts" as the reference class for an Eliezer post, versus "posts in general" as the reference class for everyone else's posts. That holds you to a much higher standard, especially since I best remember your early Overcoming Bias posts where you were picking off low-hanging fruit. It's unfair to you and I'm trying to stop it. Anti-kibbitzer doesn't work here because I go to new posts from the Recent Posts sidebar, plus your writing style's hard to miss.

I guess that counts as an upvote.

The latter.

Write shorter posts. Write in a simpler and less oracular prose style. And write more substantive posts -- at times, it seems as if you believe your every passing thought deserves 2,000 words. I'll often read your posts and, while recognizing some germ of a worthwhile idea there, regret the time and effort it took to locate it.

My impression is that your posts get voted up as much as anybody's. Just look at the Karma score list. Look at the "Recent Posts": 3, 4, 2, 22, 3, 5, 7, 18, 0, 25. You have the 22.

You might keep in mind the "Do I want my time back?" criterion that someone posted recently. Your posts are very long. Shorter posts will get more up-votes from people using that criterion.

Also, although I fear you will abuse this viewpoint, I think that everyone has their own "IQ window", and they will down-vote posts that are either below or above their window.

To anyone who agrees with an upvote not signalling much: Please reconsider to what extent the value of upvoting is to communicate to the author vs. to other readers. One would assume that, eventually, we'd like LW to have a healthy population of people who haven't necessarily read OB for years and may not be familiar with Eliezer's previous work, so won't realize the higher standard being applied.

Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that Eliezer is capable of reading the comments and comparing scores between articles, so holding him to a higher relative standard isn't actually providing substantial additional feedback to him. Based on this, it seems to me that rating Eliezer differently than you would other authors is strictly suboptimal.

I choose option C, I don't think your current posts are as important worth discussing as much as some other current posts.

The sequence on getting people to work together is only interesting if you are trying to form a specific type of fractious group. A group that cares about the world in 20-30 years will be very fractious because predicting the future is hard and has no particular methodology (and most people get it wrong) so most people will have different ideas of the future and hence different strategies for what should be done now.

Edit: You seem to be in a filler arc at the moment where as other people are starting their main sequences, to put it in anime terms.

I think you'd get higher ratings for more substantive posts, things in the vein of the posts on quantum physics, zombies, pebblesorters, etc.

Also, I consciously try to correct for bias in your favor, and I suspect others do the same (your posts are recognizable, even with Yvain imitating your style).

Reading the RSS feed, it's a significant extra step to vote. I'm more inclined to do that for new authors than those I already think highly of.

I also assumed that, as admin, your posts were automatically promoted. But maybe that's something you only sometimes elect.

Since you're using the data to judge reactions to your work, I hereby promise not to employ any (counter)-biasing strategy in praising you.

I think I hold you to a higher standard than others too.

A little of both I suspect. You had a bit of a quiet time there where you weren't posting many 'important' posts while (for example) Yvain was letting out years of repressed blogging brilliance.

I definitely do the former, because I presumed that everyone knew you were God ± 10%, so I ought to vote to give you information on the utility of different styles, topics, and the like. If your karma vis-a-vis other posters is also significant, I suppose I'll try to upvote you more than I do now, but still less than I do for others; otherwise I'd end up upvoting practically everything you write.

Very useful! Could it be added to one's User page, perhaps?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G18NfN76bAs

It might be worth a post, if you can relate it to rationality in general, and make an interesting point or two. You have the karma for it.

The underlying assertion of most of these goofy new-age claims is that consciousness is a quantum process. Of course, in a trivial sense it is quantum insofar that every process in the physical world seems to obey quantum mechanics. The exact claim is that something "essentially quantum" is behind the phenomenon of consciousness, that the computations of the brain actually exploit uninuitive quantum behaviours that cannot be explained by a classical physics picture -- the claim is that we're quantum computers.

You build a quantum computer by exploiting the fact that a simple, perfectly isolated physical entity does not act like a tiny billiard, but rather as a complex-valued wave that isn't in any particular place at a given time, it's spread out. We say that small systems can be in "superpositions" of multiple states. Now when the system interacts with the environment, by hitting a photon from our lasers, say, it will "collapse" into one state, we will see the photon bouncing off as though the particle had been at one particular place. (Parenthetically, It should be noted that "collapse" is not a real a-priori physical process, but only an apparent phenomenon. The modern understanding is that collapse happens when system of few degrees of freedom interacts with one of very many (the environment) causing the two to become "entangled" and forcing any given history of the environment to "see" only one well defined state of the small system through a process called "decoherence".)

Quantum computers exploit superpositions by encoding data into the states of small particles and allowing them to interact and evolve with each other isolated from the environment in such a way as to perform a simple calculation without collapsing until the very end when you measure (read out) the answer. The advantage comes from the fact that -every possible history- of the simple computation is performed in such a way that certain parallel algorithms can try all the combinatorial possibilities at once before being summoned to give an answer when they're collapsed. A quantum computer with N bits is like classical computer with 2^N bits.

The key requirement is that the quantum computer -not- interact with the environment (stray light, cosmic rays, etc.) during the duration of the calculation. The more complex the computer, the larger the number of particles needed to encode the data, the more exquisitely sensitive the computation becomes to outside noise:

It is -so difficult- to get more than a few particles isolated long enough to perform calculations that after about 10 years of effort, the biggest quantum computer has about 8 qubits. The quantum brain hypothesis says that there is some remarkable way that the proteins of our neurons could form an isolated network of qubits such that the brain could perform quantum calculations, and that the mysterious nature of consciousness could be chalked up to the weirdness of its quantum underpinnings.

There are two solid reasons this quantum brain hypothesis is trash:

1) Any time a stray particle hits a quantum computer it collapses back into a classical state, ruining the computation before its finished. The brain is a hot, disordered, massively chaotic place with countless particles bouncing into everything a billion times a second. The longest biological quantum superposition known happens in chlorophyll, and that lasts about a trillionth of a second.

A general, conservative calculation about the survival times of quantum states in the brain was done by a talented theorist: http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/brain.html ), suggesting a trillionth of a second as the limit. Now, biology certainly -does- exploit quantum effects -at the timescales at which they happen in cells-. i.e. quantum effects influence photosynthesis and the electron transport chain of respiration. Natural selection cannot select for life that uses extremely short-lived physical processes to perform long-lived tasks:

2) Mental phenomena seem to be explicable solely in terms of the electrical spikes neurons use to signal with each other. i.e. In animal experiments, we can see that the external information of sight and sound is encoded in the frequency and pattern of these spikes in populations of neurons. Controlling these electrical signals artificially seems to influence animal behaviour in a predictable fashion.

We are still very much in ignorance of the brain's operation, but not so much at the level of its biophysics. More so in the level of detail about how these signals work across the hundred billion or so neurons of the brain, and how individual neurons alter their connections and sensitivities over time to other neurons. The fastest of these processes happen at the -millisecond- timescale, meaning that any quantum process is much too fleeting to influence the phenomenon we know to be directly involved in neural computation, by a factor of at least 10^9!

I speak as a professional biophysicist: the consensus scientific opinion is that the brain acts as a massively parallel, stochastic, and -classical- computer. Whatever the "secret" to consciousness is, it's not quantum superposition.

Neuroscience is only beginning to rigorously grapple with emotions, "positivity" and its effects on the brain, so I won't comment on that here. Let me only remark that those seeking justifications for positive thinking in quantum mysticism might find less esoteric and superficial candidates in philosophy, history or literature instead.

Quick heuristic : if someone is trying to relate quantum physics to a topic outside of physics, it's probably (99% ?) bullshit.

(Eliezer's series on QM would fall in the remaining 1%)

So unless you have other independent reasons to believe he isn't full of it, it's probably not worth investigating.

Magic.

Your friend is suffering from a confusion of levels. Electron tunneling occurs on a vastly different level of organization than do positive thoughts. Anyone speaking of the two in the same sentence should at least set off warning bells.

ETA: I think I can state that a bit more clearly. Positive thoughts are invisible to a tunneling electron in the same way that New York is invisible to an ant in Central Park. The pattern of the whole is simply not accessible from that lower level.

ETA2: It is sensible to say "the sky is blue because dipole radiation is frequency dependent," despite the fact that "blue sky" occurs at a larger scale than "dipole radiation". However, this is because the contributions from the lower level add in a simple way: a blue sky is built from a mole of deflected blue photons. A happy thought is not composed of a mole of "happy" electrons.

I took a brief look at that book. The author seems to be saying "There just has to be quantum magic in the brain somewhere", and then he goes looking for places he could plausibly imagine some. He's trying to justify what he wants to believe.

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Another "occasionally but not systematically".

I occasionally meditate but not systematically. It would probably do me good, I just don't have that many quiet occasions to do so.

An excellent plan. Is there perhaps a way we can sticky this thread, or otherwise keep it linked from the front page as the month goes on?

You're subscribed to the RSS feed for "promoted" posts only. You need the RSS feed for "new" posts.

Seriously? Why? To encourage the Facebook masses to come here?

• shudders *

I don't think so, it's probably best to keep most of the community focused on the posts. With forums the attention would be divided.

An occasional open thread is a good way to fit in the lower-threshold stuff, and that's common to many blogs.