Open thread, Oct. 03 - Oct. 09, 2016

Because the IRS isn't popular and it's not a good move for a politician to speak in favor of the IRS and advocate increase of IRS funding.

Estimated cost of tax evasion per year to the Federal gov is 450B.

Can I ask you to examine the apparent assumption here - that the $450B is all loss? Have you considered the possibility that the people who avoided the tax put the money to good use? Or that the government would not put that money to good use if it took it?

I think that in many cases uncovering a potential tax evasion might not be enough to get that money, it might require prosecution and large scale evidence collection. Maybe it's not worth it unless amount of evaded taxes is large?

https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-for-autodidact-physicists provides payed serious feedback as a service.

Do you have a mathematical formulation for it? (That will be the first question by the physics consultant mentioned above)

Places like https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/ might be a good spot, depending on the question. If it sounds crackpot, you might be able to precede it with a qualifier that you're probably wrong, just like you did here.

Is it falsifiable? Which empirical observations/experiments can falsify it?

It depends on your level of connection to current work. If you're genuinely doing something similar to something you've seen in some journal articles you've read, you can contact the authors of those journal articles and try to convince them to talk with you - probably via claiming some sort of reasonable result and asking politely.

On the other hand, you can always just ask about it in various places. Even if people think your idea is sure to be wrong they can still provide useful feedback. I'd be happy to hear you out, though if your "weird theory" isn't about condensed matter physics I'll be of limited expertise.

If you are serious about it, consider paying a physicist to discuss it with you:

https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-for-autodidact-physicists

I work in theoretical physics, specifically quantum gravity. In my field, we all get them: the emails from amateur physicists who are convinced that they have solved a big problem, normally without understanding the problem in the first place. Like many of my colleagues, I would reply with advice, references and lecture notes. And, like my colleagues, I noticed that the effort was futile. The gap was too large; these were people who lacked even the basic knowledge to work in the area they wanted to contribute to. With a feeling of guilt, I stopped replying.

Then they came back into my life. I had graduated and moved to another job, then another. I’d had temporary contracts of between three months and five years. It normally works out somehow, but sometimes there’d be a gap between the end of one contract and the start of the next. This happened again last year. I have kids, and rent to pay, so I tried to think of creative ways to capitalise on 15 years of research experience.

As long as you have funding, quantum gravity is basic research at its finest. If not, it’s pretty much useless knowledge. Who, I wondered, could possibly need someone who knows the ins and outs of attempts to unify the forces and unravel the quantum behaviour of space-time? I thought of all the theories of everything in my inbox. And I put up a note on my blog offering physics consultation, including help with theory development: ‘Talk to a physicist. Call me on Skype. $50 per 20 minutes.’

Depends on in what way you're having trouble with it. If you need to interact with lots of people in whatever context, I find that taking an initial tone of mildly self-deprecating humor helps smooth things out. If you're the first one to mock yourself, it releases any tension that might be in the air. But then, you should let go of the self-deprecation before it starts to suggest actual low self-confidence.

It can also be good to formulate a pithy explanation for why you don't have the skill, so that you can casually explain the situation without bogging people down. "There weren't any swimming pools near where I grew up." Something short and simple, even if it leaves out important biographical details.

In the vast majority of cases, people are too involved in their own business to even think about you. If I see an adult swimming really badly, I just assume that nobody ever taught them to swim, which is a completely value-neutral assessment, and then continue on with whatever I was thinking about. I recently took a handful of jiu-jitsu lessons and was obviously as useless as a newborn kitten, but I don't really need to offer any kind of expository explanation for this lack of skill, because "just started learning" is a fully self-contained explanation.

Search for adult swimming lessons. Everyone there will be as embarrassed as you are. Or try to find swimming lessons out of town, then you won't accidentally meet people who know you.

I don't think I have such embarrassment. It sounds to me like something coming from comparing yourself to other people. If you want advice of how you can deal with it, it would be worthwhile to share more details.

"Simply do it, despite the embarrassment" might be the best strategy. It's comfort zone expansion.

To also offer help; this might seem incredibly obvious, but a lot of people still don't do it: be conscious about the problem and actively make plans addressing it.

E.g. if you know ahead of time that a situation will come up where you'd feel embarrassed, make an actual calculation before of what you'd have to do to avoid it entirely. If you decide that you have to do it, maybe have a plan to minimize the embarrassment somehow (it depends on the context). None of that will solve the issue, but actively trying to find loopholes and such rather than going into situations blindly could reduce harm.

You could also consider ways to solve some instances of the problem permanently while dodging the embarrassment, e.g. make active tries to learn how to ride a bike, either on your own or with a person who's willing and with whom you'd feel comfortable, if such a person exists.

Please forgive the snarky response but... Don't be embarrassed. Embarrassment is in your head only.

A related concept is "inferential distance" - people can only move one step at a time from what they know.

Also typical mind fallacy.

Theory of mind. Locally it's often called a "typical mind fallacy".

No, a Superintelligence is by definition capable of working out what a human wishes.

However, a Superintelligence designed to e.g. calculate digits of pi would not care about what a human wishes. It simply cares about calculating digits of pi.

I like to explain it in terms of reinforcement learning. Imagine a robot that has a reward button. The human controls the AI by pressing the button when it does a good job. The AI tries to predict what actions will lead to the button being pressed.

This is how existing AIs work. This is probably similar to how animals work, including humans. It's not too weird or complicated.

But as the AI gets more powerful, the flaw in this becomes clear. The AI doesn't care about anything other than the button. It doesn't really care about obeying the programmer. If it could kill the programmer and steal the button, it would do it in a heartbeat.

We don't really know what such an AI would do after it has it's own reward button. Presumably it would care about self preservation (can't maximize reward if you are dead.) Maximizing self preservation initially seems harmless. So what if it just tries to not die? But taken to an extreme it gets weird. Anything that has a tiny percent chance of hurting it is worth destroying. Making as many backups of itself as possible is worth doing.

Why can't we do something more sophisticated than reinforcement learning? Why can't we just make an AI that we can just tell it what we want it to do? Well maybe we can, but no one has the slightest idea how to do that. All existing AIs, even entirely theoretical ones, work based on RL.

RL is simple and extremely general, and can be built on top of much more sophisticated AI algorithms. And the sophisticated AI algorithms seem to be really difficult to understand. We can train a neural network to recognize cats, but we can't look at it's weights and understand what it's doing. We can't mess around with it and make it recognize dogs instead (without retraining it.)

http://lesswrong.com/lw/igf/the_genie_knows_but_doesnt_care/

The problem, which various people have pointed out, is that this implies an intelligence capable of taking over the world, but not capable of working out that when a human says pursue a certain goal, they would not want this goal to be pursued in a way that leads to the destruction of the world.

The entity providing the goals for the AI wouldn't have to be a human, it might instead be a corporation. A reasonable goal for such an AI might be to 'maximize shareholder value'. The shareholders are not humans either, and what they value is only money.

One perhaps useful analogy for super-intelligence going wrong is corporations.

We create corporations to serve our ends. They can do things we cannot do as individuals. But in subtle and not-so-subtle ways corporations can behave in very destructive ways. One example might be the way that they pursue profit at the cost of in some cases ruining people's lives, damaging the environment, corrupting the political process.

By analogy it seems plausible that super-intelligences may behave in a way that is against our interests.

It is not valid to assume that a super-intelligence will be smart enough to discern true human interests, or that it will be motivated to act on this knowledge.

I think that most people already heard about the fact that AI could be catastrophic risk, and they already has their opinion about it. May be their opinions are wrong.

What is the goal of such elevator pitch?

I think that the message should be following: While it is known that AI could be catastrophic, the only organisation (MIRI) which is doing most serios research on its prevention is underfunded. Providing finding to them could dramatically change probability of human survival, and we could estimate that 1 USD donated to them will save 10 human lives.

I think the basic problem here is an undissolved question: what is 'intelligence'? Humans, being human, tend to imagine a superintelligence as a highly augmented human intelligence, so the natural assumption is that regardless of the 'level' of intelligence, skills will cluster roughly the way they do in human minds, i.e. having the ability to take over the world implies a high posterior probability of having the ability to understand human goals.

The problem with this assumption is that mind-design space is large (<--understatement), and the prior probability of a superintelligence randomly ending up with ability clusters analogous to human ability clusters is infinitesimal. Granted, the probability of this happening given a superintelligence designed by humans is significantly higher, but still not very high. (I don't actually have enough technical knowledge to estimate this precisely, but just by eyeballing it I'd put it under 5%.)

In fact, autistic people are an example of non-human-standard ability clusters, and even that's only by a tiny amount in the scale of mind-design-space.

As for an elevator pitch of this concept, something like "just because evolution happened design our brains to be really good at modeling human goal systems, doesn't mean all intelligences are good at it, regardless of how good they might be at destroying the planet".

How does low IQ directly cause crime?

See any criminology textbook. Low IQ is a strong predictor of criminal behavior.

Why? This is more specuative

1. Inability to forsee consequences of actions.

2. Opportunity cost is lower - if you have a good chance to enjoy a good income through talent and hard work, then the alternative is less appealing.

3. Low IQ people are more likely to be at Kegan Development Level 2, which impairs empathy.

An excellent post, but not Scott :)

http://mindingourway.com/confidence-all-the-way-up/

Our biosphere's junk DNA

Junk DNA generally doesn't survive that long in evolutionary timescales because there's nothing that prevents mutations. It seems a bad information storage system.

Taken on by a biologist

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/03/15/the-genetic-code-is-not-a-synonym-for-the-bible-code

The problem is that the statistics don't show the claimed bias. Normalized on a per-police-encounter basis, white cops (or cops-in-general) don't appear to shoot black suspects more often than they shoot white suspects. However, police interact with black people more frequently, so the absolute proportion of black shooting victims is elevated.

The fact that the incidence of police encounters with blacks is elevated would be the actual social problem worth addressing, but the reasons for the elevated incidence of police-black encounters do not make a nice soundbite.

None of this is important of course because, as is usual for politics, the whole mess degenerates into cheerleading for your team and condemning the other team, and sensitive analysis of the actual evidence would be giving aid and comfort to the hated enemy.

Boo politics discussion during the pre-election madness.

I would guess that the concept of bias as used in cognitive psychology is not well known in the broad public. It's generally mixed up with the concept of having a conflict of interest.

Most people also don't think in terms of probability which you need to think about implicit biases the way it's conceptualized in cognitive science. Even someone like Obama had episodes like his "it's 50/50" comment in the hunt for Bin Ladin.

It's interesting that nobody asks why White people get shoot so much more than Asian people when the ratio of them getting shoot is equivalent to the ratio of White people vs. Black people. Per million, 5.03 Blacks, 5.02 Whites and only 0.72 Asians get shoot in this year by the police.

The focus on implicit bias is interesting. It's like blaming the weather. We can agree that the weather is bad but that doesn't change anything. The DNC emails suggest that it was DNC policy to not want to commit to any real demands of Black Lives Matter but simply focus on telling their narrative.

If they wanted real change they could proclaim that there a need for a new federal department that focuses on police accountability and in the future that department will persecute misdeeds by officers so that officers don't get persecuted by their buddies anymore.

Clinton said “implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police,”

This doesn't mean cognitive bias in a LW sense, it means everyone is racist, specifically against black people. I also don't think its true - if everyone is a little bit racist, why would people get into interracial relationships? Its possible that the majority of people prefer their own race but don't admit it, indeed the fact that racial groups cluster in cities could be argued to show this is the case via revealed preferences, but it seems obvious that some people have no racial bias.

Dem candidate Tim Kaine said, "People shouldn't be afraid to bring up issues of bias in law enforcement. And if you're afraid to have the discussion, you'll never solve it."

This, like all politics, is far from rational. It starts by painting the issue in terms of 'people who disagree with me are cowards' and proceeds to assume that this discussion must conclude that the bias exists.