Open Thread, November 1 - 7, 2013

Trying for minimal technicalities: There are at least 3 different technologies with not much surface-level usage similarities referred to as "nanotech".

Assemblers: basically 3d printers, but way more flexible and able to make things like food, robots, or more assemblers.

Materials: diamondoids, buckytubes, circuitry. We already have some of these really, it's just that we'd get more kinds of them, and they'd be really cheap to make with a nanotech assembler. Stronger, faster, more powerful versions of what modern tech already can do.

Nanobots, particularly medical: Basically can do all the things living cells can do, but better, and also being able to do most of the things machines can do, and commandable in exact detail. There are also a number of different ways they'd grant immortality enough that they are almost sure to do so even if most of them end up not working out.

Now you can ask questions about each one of these in order, with more specifics.

Try Nanosystems perhaps.

An analogy might help give a sense of scale here. This isn't an argument, but it hints at the scope of the unknown unknowns in nanotech space. Here on our macroscopic scale, some wonders wrought by evolution include the smasher mantis shrimp's kinetic attack, a bee hive's eusocial organization, the peregrine falcon's flight speed, and the eagle's visual system. But evolution is literally mindless -- by actually knowing how to do things, human engineering created electromagnetic railguns, networks of international trade, the SR-71 Blackbird, and the Hubble telescope. Now apply that kind of thinking to "because biology" on the nano scale...

Consider a machine as smart as a cellphone but the size of a blood cell.

In a sense, a protein or a drug is a smart molecule. It keys in to a very limited number of things and ignores the rest. There are many different smart proteins or smart molecules to be used as drugs with many different purposes. Even so, chemotherapy, for example, is primarily about ALMOST killing everything while differentially being a bit more toxic to the cancer cells.

Now increase the intelligence of ths smartest molecule by 10 fold, 100 fold, 1000 fold. Perhaps you give it the ability for a simple 2-way communication to the outside world. If its intelligence is increased, there should be MANY ways to allow it to distinguish a tumor, a micro-tumor, a cancerous cell, from all the good things in your body. All the sudden, the differential toxicity of "chemo" therapy (now nanotherapy) will be 10, 100X as high as it is for smart molecules.

Now consider these smart little machines doing surgery. Inoperable tumor? Not inoperable for a host of machines the size of bloodcells that will literally be able to operate on the most remote of tumors from inside of them.

Tendency towards obesity? How hard will it be to have a system of nanites that screw with your metabolism in such a way to eliminate all the stored fat in cells until told that, or until they measure that, we are down to a good level.

These are just a few stories from medicine. I expect anybody who does not wish to get sick and die would be enthusiastic about these, but YMMV.

and I don't get where that comes from, even after picking up Engines of Creation.

Probably comes from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer :-)

Perhaps the reason is that the ideas we're used to nowadays - like reconfiguring matter to make dirt and water into food or repair microcellular damage (for example, to selectively destroy cancer tumors) - were absolutely radical and totally unheard of when they were first proposed. As far as I know, Feynman was the first to seriously suggest that such a thing was possible, and most reactions to him at the time were basically either confusion, disbelief, or dismissal. Consider the average technologist in 1950. Hand-wound computer memories were state of the art, no one knew what DNA looked like, famines seemed a natural part of the order of things, and as far as everyone knew, the only major technological difference between the present and the future was maybe going to be space travel. Now someone comes along and tells you that there could be this new technology that allows you to store the library of congress in the head of a pin and carry out any chemical reaction just by writing down the formula - including the chemical reactions of life. The consequences would be, for instance, the ability to feed everyone on the planet at basically free. To you, such a technology would seem "Indistinguishable from magic." Would it be a dramatic inferential step to then say that it could do stuff that literally is magic?

Nanotechnology never promised magic, of course. All it promises is the ability to rearrange atoms into a subset of those structures allowed by physics (a subset that is far larger than our current technology can do, but a subset nonetheless). It promised nothing more, nothing less. This is in itself dramatic enough, and it would allow all sorts of things that we probably couldn't imagine today.

Does someone have the medical knowledge to explain how this is possible? My layperson guess is that once cut up a knee, you can more or less see all the macroscopic structures. Did they just think it was unimportant?

The media giveth sensationalism, and the media taketh away.

reddit - "So that "new" ligament? Here's a study from 2011 that shows the same thing. It's not even close to a new development and has been seen many times over the past 100 years." Summary quote: "The significance of the Belgian paper was to link [the ligament's] functionality to what they called "pivot shift", and knee reinjuries after ACL surgery. The significance of this paper, I believe, is that in the near future surgeons performing these operations will have an additional ligament to inspect and possibly repair during ACL surgery, which will hopefully reduce recurrence rates, and likely the rates of developing osteoarthritis in the injured knee down the line."

Another example of low-hanging gristle on the knee of trollage.

Discussing with my girlfriend about which stories should be x-rationalizated next, she suggests HPMOR. Someone should make a HPMOR fanfic where the protagonist is even more rational than the rational Harry.

An idea came to my mind. Would it be possible to make a story in which Harry is less intelligent, in a way that he would score less in an IQ test for example, but at the same time more rational? HJPEV seems to be a highly intelligent prodigy even without the rationality addition. I would like to see how a more normal boy would do.

Is "a story where the protagonist behaves rationally" really a new genre of literature?

I think what you are referring to here is "a story where the protagonist describes their actions and motivations using rationality terminology" or maybe "a story where the rational thinking of the protagonist motivates the plot or moves it along". At least some of the genre of detective fiction — early examples being Poe's Auguste Dupin stories — would be along these lines.

Stories where protagonists behave rationally (without using rationality terrminology) wouldn't look like stories about rationality. They look like stories where protagonists do things that make sense.

Wait, what?! Is "a story where the protagonist behaves rationally" really a new genre of literature? There is something horribly wrong with this world if this is true.

Yup. At least sort-of. If you haven't read Eliezer's old post Lawrence Watt-Evans's Fiction I recommend it. However, conspicuous failures of rationality in fiction may be mostly an issue with science fiction and fantasy. If you want to keep the characters in your cop story from looking like idiots, you can do research on real police methods, etc. and if you do it right, you have a decent shot at writing a story that real police officers will read without thinking your characters are idiots.

On the other hand, when an author is trying to invent an entire fictional universe, with futuristic technology and/or magic, it can be really hard to figure out what would constitute "smart behavior" in that universe. This may be partly because most authors aren't themselves geniuses, but even more importantly, the fictional universe, if it were real, would have millions of people trying to figure out how to make optimal use of the resources that exist in that universe. It's hard for one person, however smart, to compete with that.

For that matter, it's hard for one author to compete with an army of fans dissecting their work, looking for ways the characters could have been smarter.

which stories should be x-rationalizated next

This leads to another comment on rationalist fiction: Most of it seems to be restricted to fan-fiction. The mold appears to be: "Let's take a story in which the characters underutilized their opportunities and bestow them with intelligence, curiosity, common sense, creativity and genre-awareness". The contrast between the fanfic and the canon is a major element of the story, and the canon an existing scaffold which saves the writer from having to create a context.

This isn't a bad thing necessarily, just an observation.

Wait, what?! Is "a story where the protagonist behaves rationally" really a new genre of literature?

So, the question becomes, how do you recognize "rationalist" stories in non-fan-fic form? Is it simply the presence of show-your-work-smart characters? Is simply behaving rationally sufficient?

Every genre has a theme...romance, adventure, etc.

So where are the stories which are, fundamentally, about stuff like epistemology and moral philosophy?

Wait, what?! Is "a story where the protagonist behaves rationally" really a new genre of literature?

I think there's a difference between what I've been describing as rationalist!fic (or rationalist!fiction) and fiction in which the -agonists (PCs is the right terminology, I guess) are rational/clever. Rationalist!fic doesn't just feature rationalist characters, they're expressively written to teach the audience about rationality.

Examples:

• Doctor Who features a sufficiently advanced alien who is, within the rules of the universe, pretty rational (in that he is good at reaching his goals). The message of the show however, is not: "be clever and rational," it's: "humanity is awesome and you should feel some wonder about the universe." Not rationalist!fic.
• The Conqueror's Shadow, by Ari Marmell features rationalist agonists and the message the audience goes away with is: "be clever and creative when it comes to reaching worthwhile goals." Rationalist!fic.

Erfworld is a piece of rationalist fiction not related to HP:MoR. It was discussed on here a while back. There must be others.

Also, I suggest calling it Rational!Rational!Harry.

Wait, what?! Is "a story where the protagonist behaves rationally" really a new genre of literature? There is something horribly wrong with this world if this is true.

I get your sentiment, but I don't think this is true. Anyways, wouldn't this just mean that rational minds usually pursue other goals than writing fiction? Not saying that there shouldn't be rationalist fiction, but this doesn't sound like such a bad state of affairs to me.

I haven't read HPMOR. Do I have to know anything about the HP universe to enjoy this thing? Will I learn anything new if I've read the sequences?

Only one problem: MoreRational!Voldemort would have killed MoreRational!Harry as a baby. Using a knife.

Given that the spell never failed in the past, I'm not sure that it would have been rational to use a knife.

In addition to the other's already listed, DataPacRat's Myou've Got To Be Kidding Me follows a perspective of a character thrown into a setting and trying to analyze the basic rules in order to optimize them. There are some interesting concepts, but I don't know that I can recommend it : It has not been updated in over a year, and was part of some big conglomeration of fanfic writers which had some pretty widely varying quality (although thankfully nothing necessary to Myou've plotline).

MoreRational!Voldemort would have killed MoreRational!Harry as a baby. Using a knife.

Fbzr sna gurbevrf ubyq gung Dhveeryzbeg vf hfvat Ibyqrzbeg nf n chccrg vqragvgl va beqre gb tnva cbjre. Fb Ibyqrzbeg'f erny tbny vfa'g gb xvyy Uneel; vg'f gb unir n qenzngvp fubjqbja gung trgf ybgf bs nggragvba naq fpnerf crbcyr.

Guhf gur snpg gung Ibyqrzbeg qvqa'g xvyy Uneel jvgu n xavsr vf abg orpnhfr ur'f abg engvbany rabhtu, ohg orpnhfr ur unf aba-boivbhf tbnyf.

There's no brief answer. I've been slowly gravitating towards, but am not yet convinced, by the suspicion that making a computer out of twice as much material causes there to be twice as much person inside. Reason: No exact point where splitting a flat computer in half becomes a separate causal process, similarity to behavior of Born probabilities. But that's not an update to the anthropic trilemma per se.

I wonder if it would be fair to characterize the dispute summarized in/following from this comment on that post (and elsewhere) as over whether the resolutions to (wrong) questions about anticipation/anthropics/consciousness/etc. will have the character of science/meaningful non-moral philosophy (crisp, simple, derivable, reaching consensus across human reasoners to the extent that settled science does), or that of morality (comparatively fuzzy, necessarily complex, not always resolvable in principled ways, not obviously on track to reach consensus).

Ugh. The prize was first and foremost in recognition of Fama, Shiller, and Hansen's empiricism in finance. In the sixties, Fama proposed a model of efficient markets, and it held up to testing. Later, both Fama, Shiller, and Hansen showed further tests didn't hold up. Their mutual conclusion: the efficient market hypothesis is mostly right, and while there is no short-term predictability based on publicly available information, there is some long-term predictability. Since the result is fairly messy, Fama and Shiller have differences about what they emphasize (and are both over-rhetorical in their emphasis). Does "mostly right" mean false or basically true?

What's causing the remaining lack of agreement, especially over bubbles? Lack of data. Shiller thinks bubbles exist, but are rare enough he can't solidly establish them, while Fama is unconvinced. Fama and Shiller have done path-breaking scientific work, even if the story about asset price fluctuation isn't 100% settled.

... researchers isolated about 100 neurons from three people posthumously. The scientists took a high-level view of the entire genome -- looking for large deletions and duplications of DNA called copy number variations or CNVs -- and found that as many as 41 percent of neurons had at least one unique, massive CNV that arose spontaneously, meaning it wasn't passed down from a parent. The CNVs are spread throughout the genome, the team found.

Edit: see the paper for more precise statements.

I've already seen work to the effect that somatic cells often have ~10x the point mutations per human generation as the germline, which is protected by a small number of divisions per generation and low levels of metabolism and transcription. It was in mitochondrial rather than nuclear DNA, but the idea is similar.

(Comment cosmetically edited in response to Kaj_Sotala, and again to replace a chunk of text that fell in a hole somewhere)

OK, I'll have a go (will be incomplete).

People in general will find the Optimalverse unpleasant for a lot of reasons I'll ignore; major changes to status quo, perceived incompatibility with non-reductionist worldviews, believing that a utopia is necessarily unpleasant or Omelas-like (a variant of this fallacy?), and lots of even messier things.

People on LessWrong may be thinking about portions of the Fun Theory Sequence that the Optimalverse conflicts with, and in some cases they may think that these conflicts destroy all of the value of the future, hence horror.

(rot13 some bits that might consitute spoilers)

• Humans want things to go well, but they also want things to have been able to go badly, such that they made the difference. Relevant: Living By Your Own Strength, Free to Optimize.

• The existence of a superintelligence makes human involvement superfluous, and humans do not want this to happen. Relevant: Amputation of Destiny.

• Gur snpg gung gur NV vf pbafgenvarq gb fngvfsl uhzna inyhrf gur cbal jnl zrnaf gung n uhtr nzbhag bs cbffvoyr uhzna rkcrevrapr vf abj vzcbffvoyr gb rire ernyvfr. Eryrinag: Hzz... znlor Value is Fragile? Abg dhvgr. Uryc zr bhg urer, thlf! (nyfb, vafreg lbhe bja cersreerq snaqbz wbxr nobhg cbbe Ylen arire trggvat gb unir unaqf rgp.)

• Nf lbh zragvbarq, gur jnl va juvpu gur NV'f cnegvphyne qrsvavgvba bs "uhzna" jnf abg evtug naq pna arire or zbqvsvrq, urapr nyvra ncbpnylcfrf. Eryrinag: The Hidden Complexity of Wishes

Themes that are more explicit after the extra worldbuilding in Caelum est Conterrens:

• Zbqvslvat uhzna zvaqf va gur jnl gur hcybnqf ner qrfpevorq nf orvat zbqvsvrq vf ernyyl, ernyyl, ernyyl, ernyyl uneq, naq zvtug or vzcbffvoyr jvgubhg oernxvat crefbany pbagvahvgl Growing Up is Hard. (Guvf vf zber bs n ubeebe fbhepr guna na nethzrag, orpnhfr gur fgbel pna or ernq nf fgvchyngvat gung gur NV vf trggvat vg evtug).

Gjb cbffvoyr svany nggenpgbef sbe uhzna tebjgu ner cerfragrq (Ybbc naq Enl Vzzbegnyf):

1. ybbcvat raqyrffyl jvgu zrzbel biresybj (gung vf, va gur raq nyy yvirf snvy gur pbaqvgvbaf va Emotional Involvement ol orpbzvat n qvfpbaarpgrq frevrf bs rcvfbqrf)
2. qrcnegvat sebz gur uhznar inyhr senzrjbex, ("bhgtebjvat ybir")
   Fbzr urer ner abg fngvfsvrq jvgu rvgure naq ernyyl, ernyyl ubcr gurer vf n guveq jnl sbe uhznaf gb npuvrir haobhaqrq tebjgu gung erznvaf zrnavatshy (ol gurve yvtugf).

Notes:

• I'm sympathetic to your position; this is the substance of my comment here that I think I understand what's supposed to horrify me.

• That comment of mine is no doubt wrong; there will be things that don't horrify me that I didn't even realise were supposed to.

• There are quick and obvious comebacks to nearly all the above points. In a lot of cases, those quick comebacks are dealt with in the linked articles. Read the Fun Theory Sequence; it's my favorite sequence, despite the fact that I disagree with more of it than any of the others.

At least to me, it's increasingly difficult to distinguish between a paradise machine and wireheading, and I dislike wireheading. Each shard of the Equestria Online simulation is built to be as fulfilling (of values through ponies and friendship) as possible, for the individual placed within that shard.

That sounds great! .... what happens when you're wrong?

I mean, look at our everyman character, David. He's set up in a shard of his own, with one hundred and thirty two artificial beings perfectly formatted to fit his every desire and want, and with just enough variation and challenge to keep from being bored. It's not real variation, or real challenge, but he'd not experience that in the real world, either, so it's a moot point. But look at the world he values. His challenges are the stuff of sophmore programming problems. His interpersonal relationships include a score counter for how many orgasms he gives or receives.

Oh, his lover is sentient and real, if that helps, but look at that relationship in specific. Butterscotch is created as just that little bit less intelligent than David is -- whether this is because David enjoys teaching, or because he's wrapped around the idea of women being less powerful than he is, or both, is up to the reader. Sculpted in her memories to exactly fit David's desires, and even a few memories that David has of her she never experiences, so that the real Butterscotch wouldn't have to have experienced unpleasant things that CelestAI used to manipulate David into liking/protecting her.

There are, to a weak approximation, somewhere between five hundred billion and one trillion artificial beings in the simulation, by the time most of humanity uploads. That number will only scale up over time. Let's ignore, for now, the creepiness in creating artificial sentients who value being people that make your life better. We're making artificial optimized for enjoying slaking your desires, which I would be surprised if it happened to also be optimized for what we as society would really like.

Lars is even worse: he is actively made to not not want his life of debauchery -- see the obvious overlap with the guy modifying himself to not get bored with a million years of catgirl sex.

At a deeper level, what if your own values are wrong?

The basic example, brought up in the Rules of The Universe document, is a violent psychopath. Upon being uploaded, CelestAI would quite happily set our psychopath up in a private shard with one hundred and fifty artificial ponies, all of which are perfectly molded to value being shot, stabbed, lit on fire, and violated in a way that is as satisfying as possible to a Dexter villain.

Or I can provide a personal example. I can go both ways, preferring guys, and was an unusually late bloomer. I can look back through time to see an earlier version of myself's values, and remember how they changed. Even in a fairly tolerant society and even with a very collaborative environment, this was not something that came according to my values or without external stimulus. ((There is a political position version of this, but for the sake of brevity I'll just mention that it's possible. More worryingly, I'm not sure there's a way to formalize this concern, as much as it hits me at a gut level. For the most part, value drift is something we don't want.))

Or, for an in-story example :

Ybbx ng jung unccraf gb Unaan / 'Cevaprff Yhan'. Gur guvat fur inyhrf zbfg, ng gur raq bs gur fgbel, vf oryvrivat gung fur qvq abg znxr n zvfgnxr hayrnfuvat PryrfgNV. Naq PryrfgNV vf dhvgr pncnoyr bs fubjvat ure whfg gur orfg rknzcyrf bs ubj guvatf ner orggre. Vg qbrfa'g znggre jung gur ernyvgl vf, naq vaqrrq gur nhgube gryyf hf gung Unaan pbhyq unir qbar orggre. Zrnajuvyr, Unaan vf xrcg whfg ba gur obeqre bs zvfrenoyr nf gur fgbel raqf.

It's a very good dysutopia -- I'd rather live there than here, and heck it even beats a good majority of conventional fluffy cloud heaven afterlives -- but it's still got a number of really creepy issues..

Having just finished reading "Friendship is Optimal" literally less than 10 minutes ago, I didn't find it dark or creepy at all. There are certain aspects of it that are suboptimal (being ponies, not wireheading), but other than that, it sounds like a great world.

Poll: how many readers who have not found FiM to be substantially "Dark" and "Creepy" have also supported the Normal Option in Ch. 5 of Three Worlds Collide? I naturally suspect a strong crossover. [pollid:575]

The lifetime risk of developing cancer is 44 % in males and 38 % in females. The lifetime risk of dying from cancer is 23 % in males and 19 % in females. It's worth mentioning that the methods for gathering medical mortality statistics are pretty biased, if not completely bonkers.

Am I the only one who is bothered that these threads don't start on monday anymore?

I like it for purely selfish reasons. I can't easily post between Sunday bedtime and Tuesday evening. If I want to post and the thread starts on Monday, my post will be less visible.

I seem to be able to do this with almost any power to various degrees. Including ones I actually have, and ones that are common among humans. Any specifics you had in mind?

Really, ANY ability will reroll some chaotic stuff and be a valuable asset simply because it's rare. Even a deliberating curse, if rare and interesting enough, can do things like be useful for research or provide unique perspectives to be studied. So really, the only limit to where a power stops being useful is where it's only useful to someone else controlling you.

Hence, why anything properly rationalist that's not going to be largely about breaking the setting must do something like give MANY the ability so the low hanging fruit is already gone, or make it inherently mysterious and unreplicable, or have some deliberate intelligence preventing it from getting well known, or something like that.

Bit over a decade ago, when I was still a naive wild-eyed idealist blissfully unaware of anything realistic about people at all, I set up the foundations for most of my sci fi/fantasy/etc fictions. The piece of supertech I immediately had to nerf was technology based around a form of space compression--somewhere between the MCron Crystal (Marvel) and Dynocaps (Dragonball). And today, I'm still coming up with more reasons to nerf it heavily, to the extent that the civilization based around this technology must certainly have had a shady counsil of vagueness who developed a limited-scope AI to control production and block any of the scarier uses. This after I tied it to FTL capabilities (I'm trying very hard to prevent this from turning into timetravel, not that I'm too afraid to abuse that option for a crisis crossover or something).

It took me much longer to realize how much nerfing of powers unrelated to the above tech I needed to do, partially because I was trying to avoid breaking the laws of physics too horribly (this universe runs on a sort of mangling of GR and M-Theory that assumes fundamental forces each get something resembling a dimension, and that attempts to break the light-speed barrier have lots of wide-reaching consequences).

A few things I've had to seriously remodel (mostly for the sake of in-universe physics not breaking, though I'm sure there are obvious uses/flaws here I've missed):

• Light manipulation. The version I started out with was written as superweight (tvtropes) type IV, when the applications I had in mind were more indicative of a potential V or VI. Since tried to tone down so that this character hovers between II and III (the distinction is a little vague), but I'm sure I'm still underutilizing this character even with all the restrictions I've added. (Invisibility, holograms, filtering specific wavelengths to minimize radiation risks, screwing with radio communication, sometimes can weaponize directly with lasers and x-rays and such).
• Gravity manipulation. This one perplexes me most, even though it seems like it's become relatively clear what limitations it should have--denser matter is more easily affected, sources of gravity can be boosted or reduced on specific objects, all within a finite range. Not precise enough to simulate telekinesis, yet I feel like I'm missing some crucial issues with this power.
• Variations on "interversal connections"; that is, we have a multiverse that would take too long to explain, but spaces or objects in universes can remain connected, after a fashion. These are generally unstable, so those that we see are generally related to intelligence, just because intelligences can find ways to maintain them. The broadest versions tend to catch any high-energy particles entering the affected area and replace them with particles from the connected universe (so if you shot a stream of gamma rays at one of these, you'd get a small amount of hydrogen out of it). These can become more specialized until we have people that can summon and manipulate stellar matter (these tend to be the scariest mofos around, and get appropriate attention from any governments who learn of them), or in some unique cases, people that can "turn into water" (or rather, swap with a mass of water in the connected universe), generate ice/magma/metal, etc. It hasn't really come up yet, but I expect that special relativity tries to be conserved after a fashion, with matter elsewhere being fed into the power-supplying universe, and if anyone measured the delay, it would turn out as one would expect given distances involved.
• I had nebulous "ki power", which I've since remodeled as being related to a unique sort of substance that I'm pretty sure would turn the first quantum physicist with appropriate equipment to study it into a god. However, I only realized that god part very recently. I don't think I can explain it without a long trek through my mythos, but things we've seen related to this substance (and its even scarier source) include: walking talking skeletons (can produce the stuff as a byproduct of feeding on organic matter), people with the most intense exposure becoming effectively immune to aging but with continually degrading cognitive function (and as a bonus, they can pretty much ignore gravity and wind resistance exactly as much as they want), lesser exposure has been associated with abilities such as fireballs, limited flight/hovering, some degree of pyro/electrokinesis. And the ability of the substance to replicate, of course.
• In a completely different direction, there is a more fantasy-esque universe with souls, gods, and magic as facts of nature, except this is part of the same multiverse as the above, so I realized that the laws of physics couldn't be all that different. So I had the creator-god (effectively a backup of a pre-scientific human mind with way more resources to devote to naive conceptions of wisdom), reallocate the weak nuclear force to manage souls, and the sun god (or rather, the superintelligence the creator built to handle the finer details of physics) having a more reductionist/lifist stance. Shenanigans ensue, which resulted in me realizing that, if one of this world's souls wound up in our world, it would turn into a transmutation bomb. Commence panic when I realized that I had a character that I really like getting stuck in one of the more Earth-like worlds in desperate need of a soul-shield, less all the neutrinos give him soul-cancer before all the surrounding gases get zapped with a pound of W and Z bosons and start the biggest Fluorine explosion ever. On the "bright" side, I can now have a supervillain summon the dead from that world and use them as transmutation bombs whenever I need something sufficiently horrifying.
• Oh, and I keep glossing over wind manipulation. It's treated as simple and boring in-universe, when it probably shouldn't be. I'm sure if I did some number-crunching, there'd be a lot of scary possibilities here that I've overlooked. The character who specializes in this can use it to fly and may or may not be able to summon hurricane-force winds or stronger. Most other examples are much more mundane; the most impressive demonstrations are some directed gusts being used to push people a little. Combine this with the first two (light and gravity), and the space program might get considerably cheaper.

In all of this, I expect I'm missing something world-breaking that half of LW would notice within five minutes of having the powers explained (or maybe just introduced--do you need to know that someone generates his fireballs by burning in a weird chemical unwanted bodyhair (and subdermal fat when that runs out) to think of issues that arise from someone with the power to toss fireballs around?).

Have you read the earlier discussions on this topic?

There's tons of easily discovered information on the web about it.

I'm not sure the Tulpa-crowed would agree with this, but I think a non-esoteric example of Tulpas in everyday life is how some religious people say that God really speaks and appears to them. The "learning process" and stuff seem pretty similar - the only difference I can see is that in the case of Tulpas it is commonly acknowledged that the phenomenon is imaginary.

Come to think of it, that's probably a really good method for creating Tulpas quickly - building off a real or fictional character for whom you already have a relatively sophisticated mental model. It's probably also important that you are predisposed to take seriously the notion that this thing might actually be an agent which interacts with you...which might be why God works so well, and why the Tulpa-crowed keeps insisting that Tulpas are "real" in the sense that they carry moral weight. It's an imagination-belief driven phenomenon.

It might also illustrate some of the "dangers" - for example, some people who grew up with notions of the angry sort of God might always feel guilty about certain "sinful" things which they might not intellectually feel are bad.

I've also heard claims of people who gain extra abilities / parallel processing / "reminders" with Tulpas....basically, stuff that they couldn't do on their own. I don't really believe that this is possible, and if this were demonstrated to me I would need to update my model of the phenomenon. To the tupla-community's credit, they seem willing to test the belief.

I don't know any obvious reason not to

What is stopping is me is the possibility that I will be potentially permanently relinquishing cognitive resources for the sake of the Tulpa.

I've been doing some research (mainly hanging on their subreddit) and I think I have a fairly good idea of how tulpas work and the answers to your questions.

There are a myriad very different things tulpas are described as and thus "tulpas exist in the way people describe them" is not well defined.

There undisputably exist SOME specific interesting phenomena that's the referent of the word Tulpa.

I estimates a well developed tulpas moral status to be similar to that of a newborn infant, late-stage alzheimer's victim, dolphin, or beloved family pet dog.

I estimates it's ontological status to be similar to a video game NPC, recurring dream character, or schizophrenic hallucination.

I estimate it's power over reality to be similar to a human (with lower intelligence than their host) locked in a box and only able to communicate with one specific other human.

It does not seem deciding to make a tulpa is a sign of being crazy. Tulpas themselves seem to not be automatically unhealthy and can often help their host overcome depression or anxiety. However, there are many signs that the act of making a tulpa is dangerous and can trigger latent tendencies or be easily done in a catastrophically wrong way. I estimate the risk is similar to doing extensive meditation or taking a single largeish dose of LSD. For this reason I have not and will not attempt making one.

I am to lazy to find citations or examples right now but I probably could. I've tried to be a good rationalist and am fairly certain of most of these claims.

Tulpa creation is effectively the creation of a form of sentinent AI that runs on the hardware of your brain instead of silicon.

That brings up a moral question. To what extend is it immoral to create a Tulpa and have it be in pain?

Tulpa are supposed to suffer from not getting enough attention so if you can't commit to giving it a lot of attention for the rest of your life you might commit an immoral act by creating it.

Well, if you think that the human illusion of unified agency is a good ideal to strive for, it then seems that messing around w/ tulpas is a bad thing. If you have really seriously abandoned that ideal (very few people I know have), then knock yourself out!

Welp, look at that, I just found this thread after finishing up a long comment on the subject in an older thread. Go figure. (By the way, I do recommend reading that entire discussion, which included some actual tulpas chiming in).

I don't know any obvious reason not to

A fairly obvious reason is that to generate a tulpa you need to screw up you mind in a sufficiently radical fashion. And once you do that, you may not be able to unfuck it back to normal.

I vaguely recall (sorry, no link) reading a post by a psychiatrist who said that creating tulpas is basically self-induced schizophrenia. I don't think schizophrenia is fun.

While you make your tulpa, you may also want to investigate whether you are a reincarnated Nazi or a good reptilian.

Only if I heard particularly good things about it.

Most creative endeavors you could undertake have a very small chance of leading to external reward, even the validation of people reading/watching/playing them - there's simply too much content available these days for people to read yours. So I'd advise against making such a thing, unless you find making it to be rewarding enough in itself.

What do you hope to achieve? Making money through selling the game? Artistic expression? Pushing memes?

I've played several RPG maker games made by amateurs. Some of them seemed to have significant followings, though I wasn't interested enough to make a serious effort to estimate the numbers, since I wasn't the creator. What kind of game were you thinking of making?

test

It looks like you have an unspoken treaty of non-hostility. People don't just forget those kind of things; you didn't. My advice is to make good with the person and acknowledge your prior differences, it will be less awkward going forward and you would gain his/her respect. And who knows, they might even gain your respect. Friends for the most part are always better than enemies.

You got into an argument with a coworker (or someone else you see regularly). You had a bitter falling out.

"It takes two to tangle" and such. Is the reason for the falling out still there? Or is the residual hate just one of those lost purposes?

I've experienced variation on the theme.
My usual approach is to decide whether I value treating them as an enemy for some reason. If I do, then I continue to do so (which can include pretending to treat them like a friend, depending on the situation). If I don't, then I move on. Whether they've actually moved on or not is their problem.

I generally don't think it makes much sense to label other people as enemies.

I have the same problem for pages like recent posts, which look OK at first, but then become blank. Article pages are more likely to load correctly. Solution: turn off javascript. (Android 2.2)

If Yvain is (understandably) too busy to run it this year, I am willing to do it. But I will be making changes if I do it, including reducing the number of free responses and including a basilisk question.

Read about hyperbolic discounting, if you haven't already.

Assuming a conflict between short- and long-term decisions, the general advice is to mentally bundle a given short-term decision with all similar decisions that will occur in the future. For example, you might think of an unhealthy snack tonight as "representing" the decision to eat an unhealthy snack every night.

Optimize your environment for decreased time-preference when you have the most control:

Fill your refrigerator when you're not hungry. Apply effortful-to-dismantle restrictions on your computer when you're not bored and tired. Walk to the university library to study so it takes effort to come back home to your hobbies.

I'd like to read and collect other similar strategies for my toolbox.

ETA: I just realized I do this for exercise too. There's a lake near my house with a circumference of about 6 kilometers, and I go jogging around it frequently. I have a strong desire to quit once I've gotten to the other side, but I have no choice but to run the whole route at that point. Sometimes I decide to walk the other half, but I guess it's better than nothing. Another option would be to just run in one direction and then back, but I find the idea too boring, even if I change my route a bit.

-- Time less ;)

-- this question feels like it's missing a word or two. What does time-preference mean?

EDIT: Thanks, Arundelo. So basically, time preference ~= level of short-sighted optimization.

In that case, do some projects that strictly require long-sighted optimization. A deadline is one good tool; Telling others what you're doing (in an unequivocal way, so that the greatest disappointment/irritation/harassment is achieved). Of course these tools are nothing new, the point is to increase the pressure as high as you can stand and reduce the amount of 'slack' time you have to allocate to a minimum.

On a more meta level, you can try things like doing some mindfulness meditation every day, which I personally find makes it easier to ignore irrelevant stimuli, worry less, and stick to my priorities.

An even more general observation: Introverts typically have lower time preference relative to extraverts, so ask them about how they dispel distraction. (I say this in the sense described by Dorothy Rowe: 'extraverts are basically worried about belonging and feel understimulated, introverts are basically worried about keeping control of themselves and feel overstimulated' , and not the vague 'Extraverts are social, introverts are not, derp' that seems to be the misapprehension of the average person)

In case there's any question, I'm an extravert, so yeah, I tend to struggle with this issue too.

I wonder if there's research that rationalists should do that could be funded this way. I'd pay for high quality novel review articles about topics relevant to lw.

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Looking forward to this one ...

Well, it's been a year. When can we expect this to be revealed?

It seems to me that a relevant detail is time frame is ~7 months (as you say elsewhere). Ideally, hashes would be commitments to reveal the plaintext in a specified time. Don't you discuss this somewhere?

How could such an AI convince someone to hand over the encryption key? Note that it can't promise things like e.g. ending human suffering, because it already has the means to do that (it is 'free') as well as the incentive (obtaining reward).

Torture is probably the easiest way. Another way could be to examine the key-keeper's mind and extract the key directly from that, but this is needlessly complicated.

The first step would start by starting to control information flow to the people who hold the key. Only tell the person about all the good thing the AI does, and hide evidence of any wrongdoing that might reduce the rewards that the AI gets.

The second step is to break the security which gets used to protect the key. Install a keylogger.

I don't understand how this encryption would work. What do people physically do to reward the AI, and how do you ensure that only people can do that? Would humans compute RSA signatures in their head? Would humans typing reusable passwords onto a "secure" reward computer that is "outside the AI's control"? Do humans precompute and memorize a finite number of one-time reward phrases before the AI is turned on, and reward the AI by uttering a phrase aloud?

In the precomputed, one-time cookie case, I'd just make the human think about the reward phrase. I'm sure humans leak thoughts like a sieve through subvocalization, nerve impulses, etc.

Yes and yes.

If you're already beeminding without the pledge and it's not working perfectly, I'd suggest trying a small pledge for the value of information.

Doesn't this already exist? Or is this not what you meant?

I'm reading that pdf version on my phone and it looks fine.

In the interests of shaping behavior by praising approximations of the desired behavior, can you identify three threads that are most like what you'd like to see more of?

because it's based on the works of someone who wrote volumes about untestables and unprovables?

Generally, there are many things which are unproven or not tested, a smaller (but still large) number of things which difficult to test or difficult to prove, a smaller number of things which are testable or provable relatively easily, and finally a small number of things which are tested or proven.

One can expect some people to consider only truths which cluster at these ends. Academia I think tends in that direction. At one level this makes sense, one can expect a lot of useful work to be done on things which are relatively easy to prove, while things that are very difficult to prove one can expect a much lower density of utility in the work and discussion on them.

However, one cannot expect interesting and useful truths to cluster at the "provable" or "proven" end of these distributions. Indeed, given the high amount of work done at the provable end, one might expect the most useful provable truths to be pretty well described already, and the supply of provable truths yet to be proven to be more and more abstract and less and less useful. We pick the fruit that is low-hanging, and well we should.

So one would expect the more interesting truths still open to question to be concentrated along the spectrum of harder or very hard to prove.