Open thread, August 19-25, 2013

Also easier to translate. In fact, we often translate "up to" with "maximaal", the equivalent of "up to a maximum of" in Dutch. But of course that only translates the practical sense, and leaves out the implication of "up to a maximum of xx (and that is a LOT)". We could translate it with "wel" ("wel xx" ~ "even as much as xx"), but in most contexts, that sounds really... American, over the top, exaggerated. And also it doesn't sound exact enough, when it clearly is intended to be a hard limit.

I'm a keen swing dancer. Over the past year or so, a pair of internationally reputable swing dance teachers have been running something called "Swing 90X", (riffing off P90X). The idea is that you establish a local practice group, film your progress, submit your recordings to them, and they give you exercises and feedback over the course of 90 days. By the end of it, you're a significantly more badass dancer.

It would obviously be better if everything happened in person, (and a lot does happen in person; there's a massive international swing dance scene), but time, money and travel constraints make this prohibitively difficult for a lot of people, and the whole Swing 90X thing is a response to this, which is significantly better than the next best thing.

It's worth considering if a similar sort of model could work for CFAR training.

One of the core ideas of CFAR is to develop tools to teach rationality. For that purpose it's useful to avoid making the course material completely open at this point in time. CFAR wants to publish scientific papers that validate their ideas about teaching rationality.

Doing things in person helps with running experiments and those experiments might be less clear when some people already viewed the lectures online.

Is a CFAR workshop like a lecture? I thought it would be closer to a group discussion, and perhaps subgroups within. This would make a recording highly unfocused and difficult to follow.

(April 2013 Workshop Attendee)

(The argument is that) A lot of the CFAR workshop material is very context dependent, and would lose significant value if distilled into text or video. Personally speaking, a lot of what I got out of the workshop was only achievable in the intensive environment - the casual discussion about the material, the reasons behind why you might want to do something, etc - a lot of it can't be conveyed in a one hour video. Now, maybe CFAR could go ahead and try to get at least some of the content value into videos, etc, but that has two concerns. One is the reputational problem with 'publishing' lesser-quality material, and the other is sorta-almost akin to the 'valley of bad rationality'. If you teach someone, say, the mechanics of aversion therapy, but not when to use it, or they learn a superficial version of the principle, that can be worse than never having learned it at all, and it seems plausible that this is true of some of the CFAR material also.

This sounds interesting for cases where both parties are economically secure.

However I can't see it working in my case since my housemates each earn somewhere around ten times what I do. Under this system, my bids would always be lowest and I would do all the chores without exception. While I would feel unable to turn down this chance to earn money, my status would drop from that of an equal to that of a servant. I would find this unacceptable.

Wasn't it Ariely's Predictably Irrational that went over market norms vs. tribe norms? If you just had ordinary people start doing this, I would guess it would crash and burn for the obvious market-norm reasons (the urge to game the system, basically). And some ew-squick power disparity stuff if this is ever enforced by a third party or even social pressure.

Most couples agree that chores and common goods should be split equally.

I'm skeptical that most couples agree with this.

Anyway, all of these types of 'chore division' systems that I've seen so far totally disregard human psychology. Remember that the goal isn't to have a fair chore system. The goal is to have a system that preserves a happy and stable relationship. If the resulting system winds up not being 'fair', that's ok.

Wow someone else thought of doing this too!

My roommate and I started doing this a year ago. It went pretty well for the first few months. Then our neighbor heard about how much we were paying eachother for chores and started outbidding us.

I can see this working better than a dysfunctional household, but if you're both in the habit of just doing things, this is going to make everything worse.

And that's it. No arguing about who cleaned it last. No debating whether it really needs to cleaned. No room for misogynist cultural machines to pressure the wife into doing more than her fair share. Just a market transaction that is efficient and fair.

P.S.: those last two sentences ("No room for misogynist cultural machines to pressure the wife into doing more than her fair share. Just a market transaction that is efficient and fair.") also remind me of "If those women were really oppressed, someone would have tended to have freed them by then."

One datapoint: I know of one household (two adults, one child) which worked out chores by having people list which chores they liked, which they tolerated, and which they hated. It turned out that there was enough intrinsic motivation to make taking care of the house work.

Roger and I wrote a web app for exactly this purpose - dividing chores via auction. This has worked well for chore management for a house of 7 roommates, for about 6 months so far.

The feminism angle didn't even occur to us! It's just been really useful for dividing chores optimally.

I can see it working when all parties are trustworthy and committed to fairness, which is a high threshold to begin with. Also, everyone has to buy into the idea of other people being autonomous agents, with no shoulds attached. Still, this might run into trouble when one party badly wants something flatly unacceptable to the other and so unable to afford it and feeling resentful.

One (unrelated) interesting quote:

my womb is worth about the cost of one graduate-level course at Columbia, assuming I’m interested in bearing your kid to begin with.

I think it's much better than monthly open threads - back then, I would sometimes think "Hmm, I'd like to ask this in an open thread, but the last one is too old, nobody's looking at it any more".

I prefer it to the old format; once a month is too clumpy for an open thread. It was fine when this was a two-man blog, but not for a discussion forum.

Thanks for making these available.

Even if you can follow the math, these sorts of things can be useful for orienting someone new to the field, or laying a conceptually simple map of the subject that can be elaborated on later. Sometimes, it's easier to use a map to get a feel for where things are than it is to explore directly.

If you have the time, I heartily recommend Ben Polak's Introduction to Game Theory lectures. They are highly watchable and give a very solid introduction to the topic.

In terms of books, The Strategy of Conflict is the classic popular work, and it's good, but it's very much a product of its time. I imagine there are more accessible books out there. Yvain recommends The Art of Strategy, which I haven't read.

I actually found The Selfish Gene a pretty good book for developing game theory intuitions. I'd put it as #2 on my list after "the first 2/3 of The Strategy of Conflict".

If you're looking for something shorter than a full text, I can recommend this entry at the Standord Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

What's the name of the bias/fallacy/phenomenon where you learn something (new information, approach, calculation, way of thinking, ...) but after awhile revert to the old ideas/habits/views etc.?

Open subcomment subthread:

If it's not worth saying anywhere, it goes here.

Don't forget Australia. We have a few, large cities separated by long distances. In particular, Melbourne to Sydney is one of the highest traffic air routes in the world, roughly the same distance as the proposed Hyperloop, and there has been on and off talk of high speed rail links. Additionally, Sydney airport has a curfew, and is more or less operating at capacity. Offloading Melbourne-bound passengers to a cheaper, faster option would free up more flights for other destinations.

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

I continue to fail to see how this idea is anything more than a cool idea that would take huge amounts of testing and engineering hurdles to get going if it indeed would prove viable. Nothing is as simple as its untested dream ever is.

Not hating on it, but seriously, hold your horses...

I was only vaguely following the Hyperloop thread on Lesswrong, but this analysis convinced me to Google it to learn more. I was immediately bombarded with a page full of search results that were pecimmistic at best (mocking, pretending at fallasy of gray but still patronizing, and politically indignant (the LA Times) were among the results on the first page)[1]. I was actually kinda hopeful about the concept, since America desperately needs better transit infrastructure, and KND's analysis of it being best suited for America makes plenty of sense so far as I can tell.

[1] I didn't actually open any of the results, just read the titles and descriptions. The tone might have been exaggerated or even completely mutated by that filter, but that seems unlikely for the titles and excerpts I read.

I've been told that railways primarily get money from freight, and nobody cares that much about freight getting there immediately. As such, high speed railways are not a good idea.

I know you can't leave this to free enterprise per se. If someone doesn't want to sell their house, you can't exactly steer a railroad around it. However, if eminent domain is used, then if it's worth building, the market will build it. Let the government offer eminent domain use for railroads, and let them be built if they're truly needed.

I'd like to hear more about possibilities in China, if you've got more. Everything I've read lately suggests that they've extensively overbuilt their infrastructure, much of it with bad debt, in the rush to create urban jobs. And it seems like they're teetering on the edge of a land-development bubble, and that urbanization has already started slowing. But they do get rights-of-way trivially, as you say, and they're geographically a lot more like the US than Europe.

Do we still keep up with those secrecy shenanigans even when no MIRI employees were involved, or can you share some details?

Failing to convince your jailer to let you out is the highly likely outcome, so it is not very interesting. I would love to hear about any simulated AI winning against an informed opponent.

Political activism, especially in the third world, is inherently dangerous, whether or not it is rationality-related.

He was trying to pass a law to suppress religious freedoms of small sects. That doesn't raise the sanity waterline, it just increases tensions and hatred between groups.

The biggest problem I have with racists claiming racial realism is this.

So, I totally buy the "cognitive load decreases intellectual performance, both in life and on IQ tests" claim. This is very well replicated, and has immediate personal implications (don't try to remember everything, write it all down; try to minimize sources of stress in your life; try to think about as few projects at a time as possible).

I don't think it's valid to say "instead of A->B, it's B->A," or see this as a complete explanation, because the ~13 point drop is only present in times of financial stress. Take standardized school tests, and suppose that half of the minority students are under immediate financial stress (their parents just got a hefty car repair bill) and the other half aren't (the 'easy' condition in the test), whereas none of the majority students are under immediate financial stress. Then we should expect the minority students to be, on average, 6.5 points lower, but what we see is the gap of 15 points.

It's also plausible that the differentiatior between people is their reaction to stress--I know a lot of high-powered managers and engineers under significant stress at work, who lose much less than a standard deviation of their ability to make good decisions and focus on other things and so on. Some people even seem to perform better under stress, but it's hard to separate out the difference between motivation and fluid intelligence there.

It's like what the TV preacher told Bart Simpson: "Yes, a deathbed conversion is a pretty sweet angle, but if you join now, you're also covered in case of accidental death and dismemberment!"

(may not be an exact quote)

I don't think it's been asked before on Less Wrong, and it's an interesting question.

It depends on how much you value not dying. If you value it very strongly, the risk of sudden, terminal, but not immediately fatal injuries or illnesses, as mentioned by paper-machine, might be unacceptable to you, and would point toward joining Alcor sooner rather than later.

The marginal increase your support would add to the probability of Alcor surviving as an institution might also matter to you selfishly, since this would increase the probability that there will exist a stronger Alcor when you are older and will likely need it more than you do now.

Additionally, while it's true that it's unlikely that Alcor would reach you in time if you were to die suddenly, compare this risk to the chance of your survival if alternately you don't join Alcor soon enough, and, after your hypothetical fatal car crash, you end up rotting in the ground.

And hey, if you really want selfish reasons: signing up for cryonics is high-status in certain subcultures, including this one.

There are also altruistic reasons to join Alcor, but that's a separate issue.

There is some background base rate of sudden, terminal, but not immediately fatal, injury or illness.

For example, I currently do not value life insurance highly, and therefore I value cryonics insurance even less.

Otherwise, there's only some marginal increase in the probability of Alcor surviving as an institution. Seeing as there's precedent for healthy cryonics orgs to adopt the patients of unhealthy cryonics orgs, this marginal increase should be viewed as a yet more marginal increase in the survival of cryonics locations in your locality.

(Assuming transportation costs are prohibitive enough to be treated as a rounding error.)

Some advice for people who want to rent from landowners.

My current thinking is that Kolmogorov complexity / Solomonoff induction is probably only a small piece of the AGI puzzle. It seems obvious to me that the ideas are relevant to AGI, but hard to tell in what way exactly. I think Hutter correctly recognized the relevance of the ideas, but tends to exaggerate their importance, and as Olle Häggström recognized, can't really back up his claims as to how central these ideas are.

If Olle wanted to become an FAI researcher then I'd suggest getting an overview of the AIT field from Li and Vitanyi's textbook, but if he is more interested in what I called "Singularity Strategies" (which from Google translations of his other blog entries, it sounds like he is) and wants an understanding of just how Solomonoff Induction is relevant to AGI, in order to better understand AI risk and generally figure out how to best influence the Singularity in a positive direction, I'm afraid nobody has the answers at the moment.

(I wonder if we could convince Olle to join LW? I'd comment on some of Olle's posts but I'm really wary of personal blogs, which tend to disappear and take all of my comments with them.)

Random question - is AGI7 a typo, or a term?

"Also, insurance companies can reduce the cost of health care by negotiating lower prices for you. "

This is the case even with a high deductable plan. The insurance will have a different rate when you use an in-network doctor or hospital service. If you haven't met the deductible and you go in, they'll send you a bill--but that bill will still be much cheaper than if you had gone in and paid out of pocket (like paying less than half).

But make sure that the high deductable plan actually has a cheaper monthly payment by an amount that matters. With new regulations of what must be covered, the differences between plans may not end up being very big.

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So to first quote Hsu's description:

This graph displays the number of GWAS hits versus sample size for height, BMI, etc. Once the minimal sample size to discover the alleles of largest impact (large MAF, large effect size) is exceeded, one generally expects a steady accumulation of new hits at lower MAF / effect size. I expect the same sort of progress for g. (MAF = Minor Allele Frequency. Variants that are common in the population are easier to detect than rare variants.)

We can’t predict the sample size required to obtain most of the additive variance for g (this depends on the details of the distribution of alleles), but I would guess that about a million genotypes together with associated g scores will suffice. When, exactly, we will reach this sample size is unclear, but I think most of the difficulty is in obtaining the phenotype data. Within a few years, over a million people will have been genotyped, but probably we will only have g scores for a small fraction of the individuals.

I'll try to explain it in different terms. What you are looking at is a graph of 'results vs effort'. How much work do you have to do to get out some useful results? The importance of this is that it's showing you a visual version of statistical power analysis (introduction).

Ordinary power analysis is about examining the inherent zero-sum trade-offs of power vs sample size vs effect size vs statistical-significance, where you try to optimize each thing for one's particular purpose; so for example, you can choose to have a small (=cheap) sample size and a small Type I (false positives) error rate in detecting a small effect size - as long as you don't mind a huge Type II error rate (low power, false negative, failure to detect real effects).

If you look at my nootropics or sleep experiments, you'll see I do power analysis all the time as a way of understanding how big my experiments need to be before they are not worthlessly uninformative; if your sample size is too small, you simply won't observe anything, even if there really is an effect (eg. you might conclude, 'with such a small n as 23, at the predicted effect size and the usual alpha of 0.05, our power will be very low, like 10%, so the experiment would be a waste of time').

Even though we know intelligence is very influenced by genes, you can't find 'the genes for intelligence' by looking at just 10 people - but how many do you need to look at?

In the case of the graph, the statistical-significance is hardwired & the effect sizes are all known to be small, and we ignore power, so that leaves two variables: sample size and number of null-rejection/findings. The graph shows us simply that as we get a larger sample, we can successfully find more associations (because we have more power to get a subtle genetic effect to pass our significance cutoffs). Simple enough. It's not news to anyone that the more data you collect, the more results you get.

What's useful here is that the slope of the points is encoding the joint relationship of power & significance & effect size for genetic findings, so we can simply vary sample size and spit out estimated number of findings. The intercept remains uncertain, though. What Hsu finds so important about this graph is that it lets us predict for intelligence how many hits we will get at any sample size once we have a datapoint which then nails down a unique line. What's the datapoint? Well, he mentions the very interesting recent findings of ~3 associations - which happened at n=126k. So to plot this IQ datapoint and guessing at roughly where it would go (please pardon my Paint usage):

OK, but how does that let Hsu predict anything? Well, the slope ought to be the same for future IQ findings, since the procedures are basically the same. So all we have to do is guess at the line, and anchor it on this new finding:

So if you want to know what we'll find at 200000 samples, you extend the line and it looks like we'll have ~10 SNPs at that point. Or, if you wanted to know when we'll have found 100 SNPs for intelligence, you simply continue extending the line until it reaches 100 on the y-axis, which apparently Hsu thinks will happen somewhere around 1000000 on the x-axis (which extends off the screen because no one has collected that big a sample yet for anything else, much less intelligence).

I hope that helps; if you don't understand power, it might help to look at my own little analyses where the problem is usually much simpler.

R> power.t.test(n=40, delta=0.5, sig.level=0.05)

     Two-sample t test power calculation 

              n = 40
          delta = 0.5
             sd = 1
      sig.level = 0.05
          power = 0.5981
    alternative = two.sided

NOTE: n is number in *each* group

R> power.t.test(n=40, delta=0.5, sig.level=0.10)

     Two-sample t test power calculation 

              n = 40
          delta = 0.5
             sd = 1
      sig.level = 0.1
          power = 0.7163
    alternative = two.sided

NOTE: n is number in *each* group

"Don't be a dick" is now "Wheaton's law"? Pfeh!

What about dust specks in the eyes of 3^^^3 poodles? Or more to the point, what is the moral cost of killing one person vs one poodle? How many poodles lives would we trade for the life of one person?

I observe that the answer to the last question is not constrained to be positive.

Do the nervous systems of 3^^^3 nematodes beat the nervous systems of a mere 7x10^9 humans? If not, why not?

Have you tried searching the LW bugtracker or using a different browser?

I may be fighting the hypothetical here, but ...

If utility is unbounded, maximum disutility is undefined, and if it's bounded, then 3^^^3 is by definition smaller than the maximum so you should pay all to mugger B.

Pay both Muggers a split of the money: For example: If you pay half to each, and they're both telling the truth, you have a 25% chance of not getting either disutility and not having to resist/escape at all (unless one or both is faking, which may improve your odds.)

I think trading a 10% chance of utility A for a 10% chance of utility B, with B < A is irrational per the definition of utility (as far as I understand; you can have marginal diminishing utility on money, but not marginally diminishing utility on *utility. I'm less sure about risk aversion though.)

If you have some concept of "3^^^3 disutility" as a tractable measure of units of disutility, it seems unlikely you don't also have a reasonable idea of the upper and lower bounds of your utility function. If the values are known this becomes trivial to solve.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that VNM-utility is a poor tool for ad-hoc decision-theoretics, not because of dubious assumptions or inapplicability, but because finding corner-cases where it appears to break down is somehow ridiculously appealing.

If they're both telling the truth: since B gives maximum disutility, being mugged by both is no worse than being mugged by B. If you think your maximum disutility is X*3^^^3, I think if you run the numbers you should give a fraction X/2 to B, and the rest to A. (or all to B if X>2)

If they might be lying, you should probably ignore them. Or pay B, whose threat is more credible if you don't think your utility function goes as far as 3^^^3 (although, what scale? Maybe a dust speck is 3^^^^3)

Give it all to mugger B obviously. I almost certainly am experiencing -3^^^3 utilions according to almost any measure every millisecond anyway, given I live in a Big World.

On a wiki page. Allowing anyone to opt out.

The first step would be to gather data... probably in an article made for this purpose... or in a fresh open thread.

Probably use dban.

How can I apply rationality to business?

• Avoid sunk costs.
• If stuff doesn't work figure out why and (in most cases) do different stuff.
• When predicting how long a project will take consider how long similar tasks tend to take and use that as a (rather strong) guide.

Yes, it's been studied quite a bit by linguists. You can find some pointers in http://www.gwern.net/Notes#efficient-natural-language which may be helpful.

(Actually, that would be an interesting experiment - remove or replace fraction x of the letters in a paragraph and see at what average x participants can no longer make a "corrected" copy.)

Studies of this form have been done at least on the edge case where all the material removed is from the end (ie. tests of the ability of subjects to predict the next letter in an English text). I'd be interested to see your more general test but am not sure if it has been done. (Except, perhaps, as a game show).

You cant pay for things in Utils, you can only pay for them in Opportunities.

This is where pascals mugging goes wrong as well; the only reason to not give pascals mugger the money is the possibility of an even greater opportunity coming along later; a mugger that's more credible, and/or offers an even greater potential payof. (And once any mugger offers INFINITE utility there's only credibility left to increase.)

I have access - PM me if you're interested in it.

It's about eusocial animals. Human relevance?

Didn't Sci Hub work to find an upaid version, it often does......http://sci-hub.org/

V pna guvax bs guerr jnlf bs qbvat guvf gevpx.

1. Ur uvq sbhe fyvcf bs cncre, bar sbe rnpu frnfba. Cerfhznoyl ur jvyy erzbir gur bgure guerr ng gur svefg bccbeghavgl.

2. Ur unf qbar fbzr erfrnepu gb qvfpbire fbzr snpg nobhg ure gb hfr va uvf qrzbafgengvba.

3. Fur unf hfrq ure snibevgr frnfba nf gur nafjre gb n frphevgl dhrfgvba ba n jro fvgr gung ur unf nqzva-yriry npprff gb.

Gurer znl or bgure jnlf. Jvgu fb znal, V pnaabg or irel fher gung nal fvatyr bar gung V pubbfr vf evtug.

Guvf "chmmyr" frrzf rnfl gb na rkgerzr, gb zr ng yrnfg. Gur gevivny fbyhgvba jbhyq or gb uvqr nyy gur cbffvoyr nafjref va qvssrerag cynprf, naq bayl gryy ure gb ybbx va gur cynpr jurer ur uvq gur nafjre ur trgf gbyq vf pbeerpg. (Va guvf pnfr, haqre gur pybpx.)

Cerqvpgvba: Ur chg sbhe fyvcf bs cncre va gur ebbz (r.t. pybpx, grqql orne, fubr, cntr # bs grkgobbx), naq pubfr juvpu bowrpg gb qverpg ure gb onfrq ba ure erfcbafr. Ur'f unir gb erzbir gur bgure guerr fbbavfu, ohg ur boivbhfyl unq npprff bapr, naq vs gurl'er nyy va fhssvpvragyl bofpher cynprf, vg jbhyq or cerggl rnfl

My thought was the same as palladias'. I'm not seeing an obvious way involving cryptography though, but I am somewhat familiar with it (I understand RSA and its proof).

V'z abg fher V jbhyq unir pnyyrq guvf n sbez bs pelcgbtencul jrer V hacevzrq, ohg jvgu bayl sbhe cbffvoyr nafjref ur whfg unf gb cvpx sbhe uvqvat cynprf naq gryy ure gb ybbx va gur evtug bar, evtug?

Gurer jrer abgrf sbe rnpu bs gur sbhe frnfbaf uvqqra va qvssrerag cynprf nebhaq gur ebbz. Gur pnyyre fvzcyl ersreerq ure gb gur uvqvat-cynpr bs gur abgr gung zngpurq ure nafjre.

Zl svefg gubhtug ba ernqvat gur ceboyrz - juvpu fgvyy frrzf yvxr zl org thrff, ba ersyrpgvba, gubhtu.

Qvqa'g ibgr ba gur "ubj fher ner lbh", orpnhfr V'z ab ybatre fher ubj fher V nz - V'z hasnzvyvne jvgu gur fubj, naq gur ersrerapr gb pelcgbtencul fhttrfgf fbzr bgure fbyhgvba (V'z snzvyvne jvgu ehqvzragnel zntvp gevpxf, juvpu vf cebonoyl jurer ZL fbyhgvba pbzrf sebz.) Ohg V pregnvayl qba'g unir "ab vqrn" ubj vg jnf qbar.

Posted before I read other replies:

V fhfcrpg gurer ner sbhe fyvcf bs cncre va qvssrerag cnegf bs ure ebbz. Naq vs ur pbhyq farnx gurz va, gura gurer'f n ernfbanoyr punapr ur pna farnx gur guerr fyvcf ersreevat gb aba-jvagre frnfbaf bhg orsber fur svaqf gurz.

Yvxr frireny bs gur bgure pbzzragref V dhvpxyl fnj ubj guvf pbhyq or qbar jvgu onfvp fgntr zntvp, ohg qrfcvgr orvat snveyl snzvyvne jvgu pelcgb V qvqa'g vzzrqvngryl znxr gur pbaarpgvba gb pelcgb hagvy V fnj lbhe pbzzrag ba unfu cer-pbzzvgzragf. Univat n fvatyr pnabavpny yvfg bs lbhe cer-pbzzvgzragf. choyvfurq va nqinapr jbhyq frrz gb fbyir cngpu guvf fcrpvsvp irarenovyvgl.

V cnggrea zngpurq zl vqrn bs gur fbyhgvba gb gur onfvp fgntr zntvp gevpx bs univat znal uvqqra bcgvbaf naq znxvat gur znex guvax lbh bayl unq gur bar lbh fubjrq gurz, abg pelcgbtencul.

I'm rather alarmed at how many people appear to have said they're very sure they know how he did it, on (I assume, but I think it's pretty clear) the basis of having thought of one very credible way he could have done it.

I'm going to be optimistic and suppose that all those people thought something like "Although gwern asked how sure we are that we know how it was done, context suggests that the puzzle is really 'find a way to do it' rather than 'identify the specific way used in this case', so I'll say 'very' even though for all I know there could be other ways'.

(For what it's worth, I pedantically chose the "middle" option for that question, but I found the same obvious solution as everyone else.)

Mentally subtract my vote from "No idea" onto "Very" since apparently I can read poll answers better than poll questions.

Creuncf gur fyvc bs cncre ybbxrq fbzrguvat yvxr guvf. (Qrfvtavat na nzovtenz jbhyq or nanybtbhf gb svaqvat zhygvcyr zrffntrf jvgu gur fnzr unfu.)

Thanks for all the poll submissions. I decided since I just finished Umineko, this is a good time to analyze the 49 responses.

The gist is that the direction seems to be as predicted and the effect size reasonable (odds-ratio of 1.77), but not big enough to yield any impressive level of statistical-significance (p=0.24):

R> poll <- read.csv("http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/182368464/umineko-poll.csv")
R> library(ordinal)
R> summary(clm(as.ordered(Certainty) ~ Crypto, data=poll))
formula: as.ordered(Certainty) ~ Crypto
data:    poll

 link  threshold nobs logLik AIC   niter max.grad cond.H
 logit flexible  48   -30.58 67.16 5(0)  5.28e-09 2.9e+01

Coefficients:
       Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)
Crypto    0.571      0.491    1.16     0.24

Threshold coefficients:
    Estimate Std. Error z value
0|1    1.988      0.708    2.81
1|2    3.075      0.822    3.74
(1 observation deleted due to missingness)
R> exp(0.571)
[1] 1.77

Or if you prefer, a linear regression:

R> summary(lm(Certainty ~ Crypto, data=poll))

Call:
lm(formula = Certainty ~ Crypto, data = poll)

Residuals:
   Min     1Q Median     3Q    Max
-0.409 -0.287 -0.287 -0.164  1.836

Coefficients:
            Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept)    0.164      0.151    1.09     0.28
Crypto         0.122      0.117    1.05     0.30

Zhygvcyr ovgf bs cncre, boivbhfyl.

DUH

Downvoted because you made a poll in the open thread, thus making the RSS feed impossible to subscribe to, and producing a whole thread full of encrypted nonsense.

Does this mean that I should attribute zero negative utility to dust speck going into my eye?

You could consider the analogous problem of waking up during surgery & then forgetting it afterwards.

The dust speck is just a symbol for the smallest negative utility unit. Just imagine something else.

Not explicitly as an axiom AFAIK, but if you're valuing states-of-the-world, any choice you make will lead to some state, which means that unless your valuation is circular, the answer is yes.

Basically, as long as your valuation is VNM-rational, definitely yes. Utilitarians are a special case of this, and I think most consequentialists would adhere to that also.

That sounds like really exciting news to me

Well, keep in mind that Eliezer himself claims that "it's not as exciting as it sounds".

And of course you always need to have in mind that what Eliezer considers to be "the secret answer to the hard problem of conscious experience" may not be as satisfying an answer to you as it is to him.

After all, some people think that the non-secret answer to the hard problem of conscious experience is something like "consciousness is what an algorithm feels like from the inside" and this is quite non-satisfactory to me (and I think it was non-satisfactory to Eliezer too).

(And also, I think the bidding started at something like $4000.)

I got excited for the fraction of a second it took me to remember that everyone who could possibly want to bid could probably afford to spend more money than I have to my name on this without it cutting into their living expenses. Unless my plan was "Bid $900, hope no one outbids, ask Eliezer to get me a job as quickly as possible", which isn't really that exciting a category, however useful.

I might have bid on that, but the auction is already over.

The existence of an industry indicates a common problem that humans can make some progress toward solving. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Industrial_Classification

A manual or a textbooks for an field that is more applied than descriptive is full of procedural knowledge for solving the problems of that domain. You can find very good books explaining how to draw portraits, but for some reason people don't openly say portrait drawing is solved. Maybe in applied fields we just work to solve bigger and harder problems, like figuring out how to forecasting the weather ever more accurately, and once the problems are mostly, reliably solved the fields just quietly disappear. Like we don't have lamp lighters anymore, because light bulbs mostly and reliably solve the problem that lamp lighters were specialized to deal with. Or it's unusual for a university education to build up to theology these days, when theology used to be the main reason for universities existing.

Arbitrary, as in ones you pick yourself? Well, pick a problem, then Google it.

Do you mean random?