More "Stupid" Questions

Upvoted for blowing my mind.

Every time I think I've finally taken the measure of the Typical Mind Fallacy... Anyone want to announce that they dislike oxygen and rainbows? Let's get it over with!

Actual answer: for many people, including me, it's an incredibly useful mind-altering drug, that allows powerful immediate manipulation of my emotional state. In fact, I should really abuse it a lot more strategically than I do.

Just a couple of thoughts about this. First, as far as anyone can tell music enjoyment is a remarkably multifaceted phenomenon (and "music" itself is a term that describes a pretty giant range of human behaviors). There's no single reason, or even manageably short list of reasons, why people like it. It seems to be wrapped up in many different physical, neurological, cognitive, emotional, social, and cultural systems, any of which (in any combinations) could be responsible for a certain person's reaction to a certain kind of music. Some of the aspects of that seem to be relatively innate, like finding certain sonic timbres inherently pleasurable, while others are highly learned, like the kind of pleasurable "understanding" that comes from knowing how a classical sonata movement is ordinarily structured.

In your case, I'd guess that you have an atypically low physiological/neurological enjoyment of things like instrumental timbres, which makes the more cognitively demanding aspects of music-listening no more than a chore. For comparison, this is why we don't generally listen to spoken words (e.g., audiobooks) as background listening: there's nothing to be gained from it outside the semantic content, which is distracting unless you can tune it out, in which case why bother.

(Merely finding music distracting is not at all rare. In fact, the various professional musicians and music scholars I know listen to less music than most other people do, because our training makes it hard for us to listen as other than a "foreground" mental activity. I myself almost never listen to background music. Unlike you, though, I do like music a lot.)

We seem to have a tendency, when discussing music as when discussing other things, to assume that other people are more like us than we have any good reason to think they are. For example, I find the timbres and general sound world of noise music to be extremely unpleasant. So when I imagine someone who likes noise music a lot, my first impulse is to think they must in some sense "enjoy unpleasant things" (an obvious category error), or at least that they must find something in noise music that's rewarding enough to get past how clearly unpleasant the sounds are. And yet when I actually talk to a fan of noise music, they often tell me they find the timbres and sounds of noise music (exactly the aspects of it I can't even imagine liking) to be very pleasant or arousing in some way. The enjoyment of these basic aspects of a kind of music (what kinds of sounds it's made up of) seems to be sufficiently physiologically/neurologically determined for a lot of people that it is almost impossible to imagine liking a kind of music you don't "naturally" like.

In other words, and I do not mean this even slightly pejoratively, I would expect it to be very difficult for you to imagine why other people find, say, the sound of an orchestra playing a single major triad (NB, a purely sonic event with no syntactic or semantic content) pleasant. Much as it is for me to imagine finding noise music pleasant—it's just not what my brain is built to enjoy.

Relatedly, the history of the questions "why do people like music?" and "what kind of music is best?" feature some truly aggravating episodes that seem to stem from the idea that music is (or should be) a single kind of thing to all people, and that we just have to figure out what. (To be clear, I'm in no way suggesting that you're taking that point of view.) The idea that music is just a really, really complicated phenomenon with which everyone interacts a bit differently—and the corresponding aesthetic pluralism that follows from that fact—has been amazingly slow to spread, no less so in professional music circles than elsewhere.

There is evidence that people with amusia tend to report lower levels of musical appreciation. Perhaps you have amusia?

There are a few online tests that claim to test for amusia, such as this or this. If its not too unpleasant for you, you might consider taking one of them.

I doubt anyone has sufficient introspective powers over their own brains to answer this satisfactorily.

Or: I expect answers more complicated than "because it sounds good (to me)" to be mostly confabulation...

Here's a tautological answer: It's because music is designed to be exactly the kind of sound that people want to listen to!

This may be relevant; "Bad brains: some people are physically incapable of enjoying music; Research shows that people who say "I don't like music" aren't just trying to sound cool":

Not necessarily, says Josep Marco-Pallerés, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Barcelona and lead author of a new study ["Dissociation between Musical and Monetary Reward Responses in Specific Musical Anhedonia"] that explores why some people feel indifferent to music. "Music isn't rewarding for them, even though other kinds of rewards, like money, are," he says. "It just doesn't affect them." To find out why, researchers recruited 30 university students, each of whom had been identified as very sensitive to music, moderately sensitive, or not sensitive at all thanks to a questionnaire. Researchers also made sure that the study's participants weren't depressed, tone-deaf, hearing-impaired, or otherwise unable to understand music — all factors that would have dampened their pleasure response. Then, researchers monitored the student's heart rates and sweat levels during listening sessions involving familiar pieces of music (previous studies have shown that people react more strongly to music they know). "We asked them to bring music from home that they like," Marco-Pallerés recalls, "and most of them had problems doing that." Those who were indifferent to music either ended up bringing a smaller number of recordings — some didn't own music at all — or had to borrow music from a family member. The study's results, published today in Current Biology, are surprising. Although these participants were perfectly capable of perceiving when a tune was sad or happy, they didn't show physical or emotional reaction. They didn't shiver if a singer hit a high note, and their heart rate didn't increase with each crescendo. But when asked to play a game involving a monetary reward, those who were indifferent to music reacted just like everyone else: the thought of winning even a small amount of money was enough to make their hearts race. The results were unchanged a year later, when 26 of the students took the test again.

...Researchers even have a name for the condition: "specific musical anhedonia." The term anhedonia is used by psychologists to describe a person's inability to derive pleasure from activities that most find enjoyable. But as the monetary-reward experiment indicates, this specific anhedonia only affects music perception. "Now that we know that there are people with specific musical anhedonia," Marco-Pallerés says, "we want to know the neural bases that might explain [it]." The research team plans to conduct a new experiment using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study how the brain's reward system differs in these people.

A lot of people talk about having emotional reactions to music as their primary reason for liking it. I don't generally have this reaction to music, so I might as well talk about what I do get out of it for a different perspective.

1. It can drown out other noises. It is more regular than the sound of ventilation or traffic or chirping birds or upstairs footsteps, and I prefer it; I turn my (almost constantly on) music up when there are non-conversation noises about. (Conversation, though, competes too directly with music; I can't understand people talking over significant other sound.)

2. It can control sensory overload. When I am spun up to unmanageable levels of sensory sensitivity, putting on familiar music with a solid, thumpy beat forces my thoughts to match it somewhat. When I am not spun up like that, it's still nice to have a modestly engaging track for my attention to fall into when I'm not doing enough to occupy myself - I don't function well when I'm not multitasking, my brain decides it's not wanted and turns off if I try. This probably doesn't apply to anyone else, at least anyone else who isn't autistic in a way similar to me.

3. But that's all about the use of music, not the enjoyability of music. There is also enjoyability. Some music is a good source of word-pleasure, either in the poetic sense or just in the sense of some words sounding cool and feeling cool to say. People seem to vary widely in how much they appreciate this as a thing.

4. Notes and timbres and rhythms vary a lot, and some of them sound pretty together. I think this for me is less like visual art being pretty - sequence is too important; if it's like visual art it's more like animation than like a painting - and more like an especially complex version of enjoying running my hands over soft things. Music is texture for my ears.

It is possible that you perceive it differently. Do you have abnormal sound perception, e.g. inability to distinguish pitches or timbres, or to hear rhythms?

For example, if you hear a note, can you find it on a piano keyboard? Likewise a chord? Do you know what people mean when they talk about high pitches and low? If you hear a violin or a trumpet, can you tell which it is? Can you tap out a rhythm after hearing it? Can you appreciate poetry written with regular scansion and rhyme?

Wow, I thought I was the only one.

Not only do I like music but I wouldn't even know where to start explaining why I do; I didn't like music until in my teens and I don't even know what changed in me!

This is an excellent question. grouchymusicologist above has it right that "music enjoyment is a remarkably multifaceted phenomenon", and I would like to expand on this.

Michael J. Parsons, in How we understand art: a cognitive developmental account of aesthetic experience, identifies a sequence of developmental stages in the appreciation of visual art. This is of necessity a very rough and un-nuanced summary since I don't have the book to hand, but I think this sequence is: first, colour ("this painting is red"); second, subject matter ("this painting is of a dog"); third, emotional content ("this painting makes me feel wistful"); fourth, technique ("this painting is pointillist"); and fifth, historical relationships ("this painting is a witty riposte to a work of Velasquez").

I can't point you at a corresponding developmental study of music, but I'm sure that similar stages of appreciation are there. To give a flavour of the different kinds of thing going on in the appreciation of music, let's take an example: here's Ian Bostridge singing Schubert's setting of "Der Erlkönig" by Goethe.

When listening to this, I appreciate: (i) the timbre of the piano and voice; (ii) the driving and urgent rhythm; (iii) the words and the story; (iv) the way the harmony creates and releases the dramatic tension at appropriate points in the text; (v) the skill of the performers: stamina is needed by the pianist to keep the triplets going, and vocal control by the singer to maintain timbre of the high notes; (vi) the "tone-painting": that is, the ways in which the musical notes illustrate aspects of the story, for example the repeated notes representing the horse's hooves; the way that the "child's" entries are a semitone above the piano, this discord illustrating his distress; the way that each entry is higher and more distressed than the previous one; (vii) the vocal acting of Ian Bostridge: his use of different vocal timbres to differentiate the four parts, and details of expression like the snarl on "so brauch ich Gewalt"; (viii) the different choices Schubert made in this composition compared with Carl Loewe's setting of the same text.

(I recognize that this doesn't explain why I appreciate these aspects of the performance. But I think it's still useful to give an indication of how complex the phenomenon of music appreciation is.)

You don't enjoy any kind of music? Gregorian chant, polyphonic medieval, celtic, African percussions, Caribbean, classical, baroque, house, electronic, alt-rock, progressive, industrial, rap, metal in all its infinite variations, pop music, tuvan chant, trance, etc. None of them evokes pleasurable feelings?
Boy, you are an outlier :) That's perfectly fine, of course.
I can only answer that for me, I enjoy different kind of music for different reasons.
Listening to classical music evokes sensations akin to reading a novel: it evokes powerful emotions and tells an elaborate story.
Listening to pop music is much more like eating junk food: a fast, powerful kick of positive emotions, that anyway lasts very little and leaves nothing behind.
I also listen to salsa music, over which I try to dance: the rythm combined with the movements makes me feel sexy and passionate.
House music is pleasurable in a kind of guilty way: it's a complete immersion in group-think, a primordial forgetting of individuality.
In all those cases anyway the underlying theme is the evocation of powerful positive or negative emotion (which can be meta-positive).

I imagine you’ve read about synesthesia. Someone with synesthesia might find a particular color has texture or taste—some atypical crisscrossing between the senses. I find music (especially considering those who can’t understand music) can be well modeled as a near-universal form of synesthesia, a linking between the emotional parts of the brain and those that process auditory information. Now this analogy is not perfect, as synesthetes almost never achieve consensus; the taste and/or texture of any particular color varies wildly between synesthets. This isn’t true about music, as it doesn’t vary that much in structure; and there seems to be some consensuses on the “sadness” or “energy” of particular songs.

But still, this might be a good, non-confusing way for you to think about music. When someone describes the beauty of a song, treat their statement as you would a synesthete saying, “Wow, that sunset tastes like a cheese burger.”

I’m in the same boat. I don’t have anything against music, but never derived pleasure from it like other people seemed to. I’ve enjoyed particular songs, e.g. stuff from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, because I can enjoy cleverness and humor and a lot of songs have content that is clever or funny. But the music itself is background at best.

What I feel when listening to Bach isn't what someone else feels about a song they dislike; more like what you feel about an overheard conversation with nothing to do with you. Or a speech on an issue you don't care about. I have tried to change this, because of utilitarianism, but it turns out it's hard.

How often are you even exposed to music? Eg, do you consume TV/movies/games, etc?

I've thought about this before. Here's my go:

In regards to sound: If you take a tuning fork and smack it, it will vibrate. Vibration can be pleasurable. If the tuning fork is a brain, and the smack is music, then the result is a contented or slightly altered-from-the-norm feeling, that might be akin to the vibration of a tuning fork if tuning forks like vibrating.

In regards to lyrics: Singing along to things or singing by oneself can bring joy to one. This could have to do with the feeling of one's voice reverberating through their body, psychological factors I won't pretend to know, a combination of factors, or of course something I haven't considered.

Let me know if that helps, doesn't help, or causes confusion.

Music increases my motivation by making me feel like I am the main character in a story (since I have a "soundtrack") and prevents me from being distracted by people talking nearby (which makes it extremely difficult for me to study) because I can no longer hear them them with sound coming through the headphones.

Also, some music can make me feel more relaxed than I otherwise would (possibly due to sounds that mimic peaceful ancestral environments, such as gently moving water, etc...).

1) Music seems to have the closest link to my emotional state of anything short of romantic relationships. It's rather trivial to hack my emotional state into mellowness with a song like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paeNnR33i5Q, or into an aggressive upbeat state with something like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO6giM9UAv0, or appreciation of civilization with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAvQSkK8Z8U. No other form of art can do anything near as much for me - most of them I appreciate on an intellectual level, but music is heavily emotional as well.

2) I've always listened to a lot of it, which means that there's a whole mess of assorted nostalgia attached to it.

3) Similarly, silence sounds unusual to me. I don't mind a bit of it, but too much(at least, in a context where music is possible) creates a distinct sense that something is missing unless I'm engrossed in something else.

4) I find that a minor distraction actually improves my focus sometimes - giving my brain a B-plot, so to speak, short-circuits a lot of wandering thoughts. Music, especially music I'm familiar with, gives my brain something to latch onto when it's idling that can easily be pushed back into the background.

It can cause or intensify a large range of emotions or moods.

Do you not have an emotional reaction to any music?

I like to draw a (rather pretentious) delineation between music and songs, the archetypal examples being, say Beethoven's fifth symphony and "Call Me Maybe". (As a side note, I very much consider it possible for something to both be a "song" and "music") I enjoy music because I played a few instruments and sang when I was younger, so I know enough musical theory to appreciate the artistry it took to come up with the structure in the music, and (when appropriate) lyrics.

Contrarily, I enjoy songs (although happen to hate "Call Me Maybe") because they're fun and upbeat and keep me in a positive mood. You can find a song to fit most moods, and fitting them very closely is a very satisfying feeling. Once last week, I was in a very relaxed mood on my way home and set Sultans of Swing on repeat, because it fit how I was feeling very exactly. It was probably the happiest I have been in the last week. Additionally, sometimes songs have the ability to change my mood and/or motivate me to work harder, and I often exploit them for this purpose.

As well as what others have said about the aesthetic experience, I find it useful for taking up 'processing power' in my brain, making it easier to focus on something. For example if I'm doing fairly dull work having free 'processor cycles' in my brain will cause me to get distracted and divert myself away from what I need to be doing, but music in the background can take up some of that so I dont get s distracted.

I think that you must differ from the average person in some way that makes it not enjoyable for you. Perhaps you are more sensitive to certain sounds and find them unpleasant. Perhaps you weren't exposed to music at a very young age. Your brain might be "wired" differently than average.

My current unsubstantiated evpsych theory is that music is a collective mood-control language. A communication channel for getting everyones' attitudes in synch, songs to be used by the confident members with clear vision, to be shouted down if misplaced, or amplified and repeated if resonant. Does that sound plausible, considering your situation? Is it possible you've developed under conditions that would naturally cause you to be especially unreactive to a thing like that?

I could understand the pursuit of sanity would correlate with a disconnection from the mass's attitude control systems. Sometimes I find even as I laugh I wish the funny-man would shut up, as I dance I wish the music had not spoken to me, as I help I wish I had not been able to empathise in the first place. I wish I could just think my own thoughts.

Try Keeping Together in Time by McNeill. It doesn't directly address why someone would like music in isolation, but I think it is the right answer.

People are weird. I don't like music either. I mean, what's the point? For that matter, why do people like sex? Why do they LIKE to eat food, or get hungry for that matter, all things I have never experienced myself? More things that make absolutely no sense to me. I mean, obviously those serve a biological purpose, but I mean something deeper than a utilitarian reason. ALTHOUGH I do associate certain songs with things I like in a pavlovian sort of way, and so there actually is some music I like in a sense, but not for its own accord. For instance, certain video game music, just because I liked the video games that I was playing while I was hearing the music. But I would never, ever, ever derive any enjoyment from just listening to the music, I'd have to be playing the game. Though I may hum those songs while I'm running if it's a game with lots of running, like canabalt or doom. I don't know how many hundreds of miles I have run endlessly humming the canabalt song. Unfortunately humming it doesn't seem to give me the power to run 100+ mph :(.

why this idea is linked to the LW ideology

Question presupposes that it is linked to the LW ideology (wow, let's not use that phrase ever again), which isn't clear to me.

I don't think they are, except in a waffly 'compared to the general population' sense; look at the surveys.

Some fraction of the population is naturally poly, some naturally mono, some can go either way depending on circumstances. In the general population many naturally poly people are 'conformed' into being mono the same way they might be conformed into being religious. Thus 'people who want to be poly can be' would reasonably be expected to correlate with elements of the Correct Contrarian Cluster, and you would expect to find more polyamorous atheists or (he predicted more boldly) polyamorous endorsers of no-collapse quantum mechanics than in the general population, even outside LW. There are also specifically cognitive-rationality skills like 'resist Asch's conformity' and 'be Munchkin', and community effects like 'Be around people who will listen with interest to long chains of reasoning instead of immediately shunning you.'

I think it's the influence of San Francisco

More seriously: I think it follows perfectly well from rationality which is at it's core about doing non obvious things that result in better outcomes once you do the math. Obviously it comes down to preferences but many people seem to prefer multiple partners and only refrain because society condemns it. Polyamkry is more honest than cheating and more preference satisfying than monogamy for those with poly amorous inclinations.

Plus there's all the conveniences.

I think this is mostly a community thing: it just so happened that some key figures in the two largest rationalist communities (SF and NY) were polyamorous, so it became popular relative to the general population, and probably also popular relative to the coasts' populations.

Not being poly and only a bit rational (so far), I'll only propose

• Is polyamory actually higher amongst LW people than the general population? Do you just have more exposure to polyamorous LW people than a wider polyamorous population?
• Do polyamorous LW people talk about their polyamory more than polyamorous non-LW people?

i suspect that religious prohibitions significantly reduce the amount of westerners who are poly, so it kinda follows from the atheism part.

In addition to some of the things other people have suggested, it is my possibly incorrect observation that there is at least a weak inverse correlation between desire for personal immortality and desire to have children. If one has already ruled out having children, a lot of the complications that arise from polyamory disappear.

Perhaps rationalist in a modern society, values things like careers and quality of life more importantly than sharing resources and a stable relationship to raise a family and feel monogamy is not as optimal. Besides, isn't a large part of the culture of monogamy rooted in religion? Most religious people are monogamous because that is what their religion tells them to do.

Adding to the laundry list of explanations and trivializations, gender skew!

My guess: founder effects and the sheer dumb luck of what people got sucked into it and what attitudes they brought with them.

I think you're extrapolating from too little data. It would be nice to see some stats on this (not sure how you would go about collecting such stats...)

This may be of interest.

See here.

MIRI's journal publications:

Carl Shulman and Nick Bostrom (2012). How Hard Is Artificial Intelligence? Evolutionary Arguments and Selection Effects. Journal of Consciousness Studies 19 (7–8): 103–130.

Kaj Sotala (2012). Advantages of Artificial Intelligences, Uploads, and Digital Minds. International Journal of Machine Consciousness 4 (1): 275-291.

Kaj Sotala and Harri Valpola (2012). Coalescing Minds: Brain Uploading-Related Group Mind Scenarios. International Journal of Machine Consciousness 4 (1): 293–312.

(Bostrom and Shulman both work for FHI, and Bostrom doesn't work for MIRI. I'm not sure how mainstream the International Journal of Machine Consciousness is. ETA: It was one of the original journals Luke mentioned as targets, so I assume it qualifies.)

MIRI also has a larger number of CS conference papers, which this claims are higher status in CS than journal publications; Luke was presumably biased towards journals because he had less of a background in CS.

Also see this post, posted a month later and stating that he'd "recently updated hugely toward SIAI not publishing in mainstream journals."

This question bothers me so much that once I get to be a good enough programmer I actually want to build a website that will connect adult beginners with each other so that maximum learning can happen with minimal embarrassment and no interaction with children. A system where you can trade tutoring ("I'll teach you the violin if you'll teach me painting") or simply pay for classes, with some way to rate and view the quality of each person's teaching would be useful.

As long as there is no larger system like that, I'd suggest that your best bet is to find a friend or acquaintance who is good at whatever you want to learn and offer them something they want but wouldn't ask for, whether it's money or a favor. That way, you get to learn things at a personalized pace while building a friendship.

Aren't music instruments usually taught in 1-on-1 sessions with a teacher anyway? Then you don't need to interact with the teacher's other students.

Check out your local craft stores: often there will be flyers advertising classes, meetups, and so on. For non-messy crafts like knitting, it's common to have weekly meetups in a bookstore or such, in which people of different skill levels will work on their own projects and help each other out or answer questions.

Or, books!

For example, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

Craigslist should be able to connect you with people willing to offer instruction. Of course quality will be all over the map. Community colleges also offer open classes for some things, which might also have info on where to pursue further instruction once the class is over.

In the U.S., adult education programs often offer art and music classes.

If you are okay with paying, you can always find one-on-one tutors. It'll be the most efficient way to learn (assuming good teachers).

I found a website that might be useful: butterfly.com connects tutors to teachers with live online lessons in areas like music and cooking.

A combination of that and brief flashes of visual imagery.

I'm definitely an internal-monologue thinker. I've tried breaking myself from it and going into pure thought(which feels like it ought to be an option, because I know how the sentence I'm thinking will end when I'm halfway through, and I've successfully tested breaking monologue and still proceeding with the mental understanding of what I was going to think), but I spend more time thinking "No! Stop monologuing!" than I save by not monologuing.

The most common for me are verbal (if I think while taking a walk, I basically talk to myself), spatial/kinesthetic (which key on my ring goes to this door again?), and visual/symbolic (integrate Sin(Ln(x))/x dx). But there's plenty more stuff I'd call thinking.

Verbal and symbolic thinking are often just expressions of conceptual problem-solving, where my brain can actually fit concepts together rather than just talking. Like in the integral above - I pattern-match it to the general concept "change of variables," without using words or symbols, and then after a second or so of brewing I can examine the idea in terms of symbols and words.

Most idle thought comes across as a mental conversation.

Math (Calculus, Numeric Methods, structural design stuff, not actually numbers) is visualized as shapes, patterns, trends.

And decision making is more felt than anything else, where the attractiveness, consequences, and uncertainty of opposing ideas are weighted side my side.

I experience a thought all at once, usually without words or images. I sometimes reflexively start verbalizing thoughts internally at a spoken-conversation rate. I tend not to think of this inner monologue as the content of my thought but some incidental surface activity. It trails off after a couple words, since I already knew the entire verbalization before I even started inner-monologuing it.

Visualization and imagined conversations both feel very different from this and from each other.

Folks who are more verbal: do you talk to yourself in real time? How does reading feel in comparison? When you recall a conversation, do you re-verbalize the content? Can you speak without knowing what you're about to say beforehand? (I'm pretty sure I can't.)

Often times it doesn't feel like anything. I just tell my mind to think about something, pause and wait while it's thinking, and then ask for the best answer.

Mostly like that, with things mentioned in the other replies occasionally interspersed, their admixture varying depending on what kind of topic I'm thinking of, and my mental state (whether I'm fatigued, whether I've been reading a lot in the past couple days, whether I've been drinking, etc.)

I also think primarily verbally, but I have a friend who thinks (in their own words) "in raw abstract thoughts interspersed with occasional dialogue and imagery."

Mine is more like a congress, where I have multiple "me's" having a conversation on a topic offering ideas and alternative hypotheses.

I call it thought qualia, because it is something I clearly experience but it is a sensory qualia. (Interestingly, this is the first time I'm using the term in public). It can have sensory conotations, though, and I sometimes have thoughts which are clearly verbal or visual.

When I'm not in the mood to talk to people- not out of anger, I'm just not feeling a desire to share my thoughts- I think in pictures and feelings with a reticent, sarcastic monologue. When I'm alone but feeling social, my monologue is wordy and sometimes witty. When I'm in a conversation, I often have to stop talking for a moment to think through what I'm going to say before I can say it.

Bottom line, I almost always have some kind of monologue; sometimes it's talkative, sometimes nearly silent.

I construct (vague) imagery of dynamic simulation/tangible flavor (similar to remembered perception of simplified/idealized physical systems and of interaction with them, sometimes without relevant spatial component, as a collection of a few related objects). This gives more explicitly accessible mental models of ideas (such as examples of standard mathematical structures, situations arising in specific problems, designs of pieces of software, etc.) that can be inspected/developed/debugged in a directed fashion (constructing a novel model together with actions that allow manipulating it can take hours, mostly because enough details/skills have to be committed to long term memory for the whole thing to work, attention is too small; more familiar things can be reconstructed in the focus of attention in about a minute or so).

Sometimes repeating a word or two a few times in a loop helps to force focus on a topic/construction. I never use internal monologue (it doesn't seem to do anything helpful), but writing down half-formed thoughts can help with organizing them (I guess mostly by lifting short term memory limitations).

I feel a narrative that goes along with my thinking but does not seem to me to be the thinking itself. I do a lot of my work visually, when I am on a roll I will generate 100s of matlab plots a day as part of my sorting through stuff. Certainly as I look at the plots I narrate what I think I'm seeing, but it seems that what I think I'm seeing comes before my pushing that into narration comes. So I think I actually do some of my thinking visually, but it is hard to put how that feels in to words. Maybe as a movie script?

It makes sense that your thinking could be both wordy and picturey, and even audio (non-words). And even body feel. From my reading (suggest Jeff Hawkins book on the brain) thinking activity shows up as activity in verbal and visual areas of the brain.

Some mixture of verbal thinking, and what I can only really describe as 'thinking in rules'.

I think it would make sense to disable up/downvoting for top-level comments in 'stupid question' threads, actually. This would have the added benefit of attracting conversation from lurkers and 'outsiders', without the danger of having the whole forum go to hell. A little outside opinion would always be welcome.

Apparently we need a thread for questions too stupid to make it into the stupid questions thread :-/

This recurses well :-D

I haven't downvoted (or read yet) the questions here but do you not think that there are questions too stupid to ask?

Spend more time around them. Form hypotheses about what they're going to do and test them.

Take a sculpting class with live nude models.

If you mean explicitly/mathematically, you can't learn that, you have to discover that (and likely get a Nobel shortly thereafter).

If you mean intuitively/qualitatively, well, I bet B&N has a shelf of books about that, though they're probably called How To Understand (or Manage) People.

It might also be that you actually mean "How can I forecast how will that girl react to X?". That's a different question altogether :-D

Humans are generally pretty well-equipped to model other people, and you can practice using that equipment. Imagine as vividly as possible what it would be like to be the other person. Be aware of your own past feelings and other mental processes, in such a way that you can access those memories when you notice that the other person might be experiencing something which is (on some axis) familiar to you. Keeping a journal can help with that. It's also useful take some time to think of your own ways to practice this, where 'practice' includes getting and incorporating feedback. As Qiaochu points out you can be empirical. I would add that 'testing hypotheses' includes asking people about their internal state.

If you know anyone who seems to 'get people' especially well, ask them how they do their thing.

Look for existing resources on building empathy skills.

People appreciate words differently. Sometimes I'll hear a turn of phrase, just something someone says outside of any kind of artistic context, and it'll just feel really pleasant. Maybe it's the rhythm of the phrase, or the image it conjures up, or maybe it'll have some sort of immediate underlying theme. Some things just sound poetic, by various criteria my brain doesn't necessarily reveal to me, and if they sound poetic enough, they can be really, achingly beautiful.

Formal verse can often have a different appeal. It takes cleverness to express something in a constrained form, but from my experience in writing poetry, often that constraint helps promote good ideas to your attention when you're writing it. Seeing something difficult done well is satisfying.

A combination of the two can be extremely pleasurable to read or write.

You might try attending a poetry reading or two, Hearing them read and discussed might help.

I think it's sometimes related to liking wordplay. If you want to try to like it, I'd suggest reading a wide variety of poems to see if anything sticks. I'm not sure where one goes to find varied, good poetry, though.

Personally, I find it difficult to enjoy "typical" lyrical poetry, but I appreciate epic poetry a great deal more. Epic poetry not only aims to capture the drama of an event, but also to encapsulate an entire culture of a people. The Iliad and the Odyssey were the first two i have read, and they are not only about the Trojan War and the return home of one of its heroes, but it touches on every aspect of Greek society. War, love, food, honor, virtue, cowardice, honoring the gods, pissing off the gods, the gods pissing you off, hospitality, ethics, punishment, the afterlife, nobility and servitude, all touched upon.

For more conventional (and shorter) poetry, some of the enjoyment comes from the prosody and lyrical qualities of the poem. Reading them out loud increases my own enjoyment. Otherwise, there is oft a multitude of "senses" and meanings in poetry, which provides a pleasant meditation. Some quality poems to read (as a start) would be "the Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe, and "Ozymandias" by Percy Shelley

I don't think of myself as someone who likes poetry.

But I can recite (sing) all the verses of "American Pie," and I love it. I spent an hour and a half reading different verses that have been sung as part of Leonard Cohen's song "Hallelujah."

Maybe I think I don't like poetry because I am spoiled by having my poetry sung to me in recorded fashion, but when I think of "liking poetry" I think of some anachronistic action of sitting there with a book reading poems printed on a page. Maybe I love poetry to death, I just call it "music" due to modern technology.

What poetry have you tried? Perhaps it's only a question of finding the right author.

Are you one of those people who hear words in their mind while reading?

Why would you want to get yourself to like poetry if you don't? Are you short of things to do that you do like?

Anecdote time!

I had the high school resume to get into highly selective universities. For financial reasons, I instead went to my flagship state university. I expected the big fish in small pond effect to play to my advantage, and I did develop a reputation as "(one of) the smartest student(s) in the room" (which I'll at least admit was a boon to my romantic desirability), but the most salient result was extreme loneliness. I wasn't able to find many people I could have stimulating conversation with, and while I did make a few friends, none of them shared my degree of passion for intellectual subjects. This summer I've been at Hacker School, which I think is a correctly-sized pond for me, but the damage to my mood and social expectations from three years of being stuck in too small a pond has definitely impeded my ability to make friends and feel socially engaged. As of right now I'm attempting to find a job as a software developer so I can drop out of college in relative security, because college is that intolerable and I think I have a much better chance of finding more correctly-sized ponds on this path. (Transferring to a more selective university is still not a financial burden I'm willing to accept.)

I guess the takeaway here might be: while a small pond of the right size can have its advantages, larger ponds are much more likely to help you grow more, and ponds that are too small can be absolutely crushing. If finding a smaller pond consists of moving away from your current large pond, be extremely careful that it's not too small.

Binary search? Find a pond. If it's too big for you to conquer, try a pond half its size. If that's so small you're unsatisfied with being its biggest fish, try a pond 50% larger, etc.

Pond in what sense? Online community, company, soccer league, town, what? Or do you not care?

Define what you want out of it.

Alpha-maleness or status in general? Money? A sense of superiority? Something else?

Build your own pond. That is, start your own business, work for yourself.

Of course, you will need customers, but as long as you don't think of them as fish, you'll be fine.

Depends on what you intend to get out of it, but you can go to an amateur hack night ("we're going to implement C-style integers in Ruby", "we're going to implement simulated annealing)", where almost everyone but you will have trouble conceptualizing the problem.

Three to the to the to the three / is how you say it if you're M to the P

I've heard "three up up up three."

Threee-eee-eee.

"three up arrow up arrow up arrow three"

ETA: The notation is called Knuth's up-arrow notation, and is usually written with up-arrows instead of carets.

"Three to the pentation of three".

(There was a SMBC comic I wanted to jokingly link to which called ^^^ “penetration”, but I don't know how to search for it -- neither this thing nor googling for smbc penetration help.)

3-pentate-3. Actually pronouncing the up-arrows is generally too clunky for me.

How do you pronounce 3^(n)3, that is, 3 (n up-arrows) 3? "n-tate" works for simple numbers, but "3 (3 pentate 3)-ate 3" isn't exactly... comprehensible.

I like "Three-triple-Knuth-three"

My inclination is to say "three triple-arrow three".

People at SIAI in 2010 were saying "three triple-head three". I don't know why.

I pronounce it "three trip-up three". The pun is always appropriate.

I have a proposal: let's call x^^^y "x knuth y", just because it's used quite often in this community :)

"Three ar-ruh-ruh-row"

I usually say "three to the three to the three to the three" even though that's not technically correct unless I pronounce the parentheses in the proper places.

I look at the people I choose to interact with (friends), the people I have to interact with (relatives, public employees, etc.), compare and contrast, and extrapolate, but I'm not sure how reliable that is, given that I interact with the two in quite different sets of situations.

It gets worse: the tests I took asked me to compare myself to the typical person of my age and gender, and over most of the past decade nearly all of my friends have been members of the other gender, the kind of people that Graham here calls freaks, and/or graduate physics students, so my guesses about what the typical twentysomething male is like may be unusually unreliable and/or contaminated by stereotypes and/or the horns effect.

The people I interact with are obviously a non-random sample

Don't worry; the people whose responses the tests were built on didn't have access to a random sample either! Still seems to work, though.

Presumably, you are asking how to hack the status detectors of other people? If not, then you need to put a lot of work and energy into doing something that other people value, and not be shy about letting the kinds of people who value that thing know what you have done and can do. I think this is usually called "earning it."

But if you are seeking to acquire status as status, essentially, the reputation for something which you are not, then you are asking how to hack people's status detectors. The answer will very much depend on WHO you want to think you are high status, as different people will have different status. If it is biker chicks, for example, you should get the biggest hog (motorcycle, not mammal) you can, get a pot belly, go to some biker clothes stores and get the outfit, get some bitchin' tatoos. You should lie about having been in the marines, having been in jail, probably a crime of passion carries more status than a crime of violence, and either of those would be better than a white collar crime. Of course, you can lie about these but you will need to do some research to get the lie going.

If you want to hack the status of some other group, you'll have to do some research on what they think of as status-ful and then do enough research to come up with a good false story, and make yourself look like a high status individual in that crowd.

If my answer seems funny, it did seem like a funny question to me. Maybe I missed the point, if so I apologize in delay.

Are we in PUA-land?

The specifics of status acquisition very much depend on which social group do you want to grant you status.

Insofar as you exclude stuff like career choice from personal opinions I think the best way is to act like you share the opinions of whoever you're talking to (or the most powerful person in a group) while never committing to anything publicly. This is probably different in fields where your opinions ARE your career, like politics or art criticism, but I think schmoozing is probably more effective than trying to pick the most generally appealing to everyone opinions.

The same way you optimise the colour of a wheel for purposes of velocity-acquisition.

I think it also doesn't expand comments below threshold, no matter how short the thread is.

Click "Show all comments", wait for more comments to load, repeat. I suspect that there is a limit to the number of comments it loads in one go, probably to ease the load on the server.

Probably not the answer you're looking for (sorry), but if you're used to visually parsing XML, the RSS feed will let you do this.

Large amounts of male nerds

Meta-contrarianism.

There's apparently some connectivity in/through the rightward edge of transhumanism to them: http://habitableworlds.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/darkenlightenment2.png Note that from any two random points there you might not have moeven 50% agreement--but in each case you'll have emphatic disagreement with mainstream positions marking each as an outsider in some way.

(If I were to be sarcastic, I would answer your second question as "an interest in sexbots")

I have never heard of the manosphere.

Taboo the word "word", and what does your question become?

A word is already partly a thing-in-the mind, and partly a thing-outside-the-mind, the latter being a sound when spoken or a string of glyphs when written. Neither the sound nor the glyphs are, or contain, meanings. If you define "word" to mean the whole arrangement, including the meanings, then you have merely answered the question by definition: meanings are contained in words. The same is true if you define "word" to mean just the sound and string of glyphs: meanings are not contained in words. This method of answering a question is incapable of being a discovery about the world.

So the question becomes "what is the relationship between the sound and the meaning?" The answer is that people learn from the speech of those around them to associate a given sound with a given meaning, and that these agreements are what enable meanings to be communicated. However, there is no necessary connection between the two, and no correlation not explained by the shared history of related languages, borrowings, and a few onomatopoeic regularities. Contemplating the meaning will not tell you the sound that people use to express it, which will be different in different languages. Contemplating the sound will not tell you the meaning, else you could understand every language without learning it.

ETA: I should also have pointed out the third thing that is a part of what can be meant by the word "word": the thing-in-the-world that people are talking about when they use the word. This book may repay study.

BTW, why are you taking a philosophy course on metaphysics?

You mean, do words have an intrinsic meaning? If that were true, there would be only one language, no? I probably misunderstood the question, but I can't think of another interpretation.

If we put you inside a box and told you to think of a name for a cat, could we tell what the name was by looking at the cat? No, we'd have to open up the box and look at (or listen to ) you. Ditto for any similar game, like creating slang, interchanging meanings, creating private spellings, doing math and then giving names to important theorems, etc.

This only works for (at least partly-) intentional definition though - if your definition of red is to point at a stop sign, then a fire truck, then a tomato, and then to point at grass and say "not this," then we can't figure out your meaning for red just by looking at what's inside the box. First we have to get the definition from you, and then we have to go look at stop signs and fire trucks.

So depending on how you want to cash out "meaning," it can be in your mind, or in your mind+context. But it's not just in the outside world, because there's no way an alien knows what to call a capybara just from examining one.

Implement a tiger-recogniser in exactly five Unicode characters and get back to us.

Having a meaningful life is a very strong human value, and if FAI is done right, it will have something to keep your life meaningful post-singularity.

If people get smarter, they'll write smarter stories.

At least you probably won't feel too bad about present-day stories no longer feeling compelling at a point where they no longer feel compelling. Maybe think about the horror of a three-year-old you at the idea of no longer liking their favorite picture-book, and your current feelings about you no longer finding the same picture-book very interesting. That's not quite enough though, people also probably won't feel bad about being wireheaded once they have been wireheaded, and they don't feel bad about being in a coma while they're in a coma...

A more positive thought might be that if your abilities to perceive patterns are much improved, you might find many more interesting things going on in actual reality, instead of needing to have massively simplified stylized narratives laboriously distilled from the huge messy soup of actual stuff.

This is also a thing that happens with people right now, just from getting more used to the story patterns. Many older people probably find themselves feeling increasingly distant from the sort of storytelling culture we have now where many popular stories are made to be understandable and compelling to teenagers, like most all of science fiction and fantasy. You could try looking into what people significantly older than you who liked the sort of stories you like at your age think about stories now.

As bronies, we already enjoy things that are pretty danged obvious. I mean, how many episodes could you not call the end of, at the 14 minute mark? That doesn't mean that there aren't good things about them. Obvious does not immediately lead to banal. If you're paying attention, you can predict nearly note for note the last quarter or so of lots of sonatas (hint: repeats used to be really popular). That doesn't make them banal any more than listening to them a second time does, or listening to them after you've already familiarized yourself with them.

Another question - are you reading Friendship is Optimal and derived works? That's not Eutopia. CelestAI is a cosmic screwup.

Litmus test: do you find children's stories banal and obvious?

For me, they don't envoke the same awe and emotional connection that a novel for adults can, but I still find them pleasant, charming, and often immersive.

I've heard quite often (mainly in the writers community) that people's brain reasons primarily with stories. We need story to understand and make sense of things (they say). It's not a surprise than that you define yourself as a consumer/producers of stories.
To me, I think it's perfectly fine. I would love to contribute meaningfully to AGI understanding, but most probably I won't. I've long time ago made peace with that, and while this doesn't prevent me from trying, I'm also content to live my life consuming (and sometimes producing) stories, while trying to stay alive and have sex.
Anyway, if it's intelligence augmentation that worries you, think that with a more intelligent brain you can appreciate more complex stories...

This may ease your anxiety regarding intelligence enhancement and enjoyment. perhaps not. I still recommend reading it.

And I'm concerned that upgrading to transfuturist levels of intelligence will make the types of stories we have now incredibly banal and obvious, for many good reasons. Predictable, boring, and worthless.

This seems unlikely (albeit possible, I guess). I enjoy some children's stories, and while they're predictable, they're neither boring nor worthless.

I've also been having a few very similar worries. In relation to them, I've come up with plenty of half-formed ideas for solutions or potential ways around it, like the possible need to downgrade to current levels of intelligence temporarily to be able to enjoy current-era stories.

Here's the thing though: will there be much point in engaging in such activities? Perhaps we go through some kind of massive intelligence boost, and our current modes of fiction suddenly seem so outdated, simplistic and as you say, banal. Perhaps they will only seem that way compared to however sophisticated way we enjoy ourselves in the future? Perhaps we might have access to completely different media, with a difference in complexity comparable to that between cave-paintings and a motion picture or video game? Perhaps, like Mr Mind says, with a more intelligent brain we'll be able to appreciate more complex stories? Maybe it won't matter that the stories enjoy now won't seem so great, because our equivalent stories will be so great?

How much value do you place on still valuing current-era stories post-intelligence boost? I'm reminded of that Ghandi not wanting to swallow a pill that would make him into a person who doesn't mind committing murders.

I can only speculate. I feel like some of these kinds of concerns are touched upon at times in the fun theory sequence (possibly an understatement, you could consider the fun theory sequence to be a more generalised response to exactly these kinds of worries), among other bits and pieces.

Most characters in stories suffer from the same problems current humans do. Why not write far better endings (and interludes for that matter) for all the stories? I think you are correct that we will not find the tragic tale of Romeo and Juliet anything but appalling in 100 years ("They died??!?"). So we'll probably fix them in ways that are quite satisfying to transhumans, just like we plan to fix the rest of reality. And there will almost certainly be new, better, amazing stories.

Have you read the Fun Theory sequence? That deals directly with the question of what to do with potentially boundless time and space and intelligence.

Won't it all be fine as long as there are some intelligence-amplified authors hanging around after the singularity too?

You don't have enough karma to post a top level article.

Unfortunately that's kind of like asking what the difference in rank is between a Knight and a samurai. Poly is not monolithic and friends with benefits is itself a fairly new and evolving phrase, but from my point of view, a secondary poly partner is in a formal arrangement and fwb is informal. A poly partner is more likely to have constraints about what they do with others and has stronger emotional attachment. An fwb is a "we can both do whatever but when convenient we have sex"

Indeed. To put it another way, "absence of evidence" is just a different kind of evidence. If hearing a dog bark would tell you something then not hearing it bark also tells you something.

Yes.

This donation page lists their accomplishments in 2013 so far, which mostly seems to be research papers and analysis.

I realise that you did not say it was, but it is important to bear in mind that FAI is not MIRI's only goal. They also aim to prevent UFAI, and to prevent/adjust/encourage other possible future phenomena in AI to make things better.

I am almost always aware if the author is someone with a distinct name that posts a fair amount. Otherwise it doesn't really register.

(its almost impossible for me not to read the username before the comment unless I put real effort into it)

I use the anti-kibitzer. (This anonymises LessWrong, with the hope of reducing bias in judging posts. I think there's an option for it in Preferences.) It's great.

About 90% of the times for comments and about 60% of the times for posts, I think. (And I'm more likely to notice it when it's a regular than when it's a newbie.)

I only notice if the commenter happens to be someone I know in real life or whose posts I have taken particular note of. Every other LW username could be replaced by "Anonymous Internet Person Number 3," and I would barely notice.

I normally don't register the name at all, but if it's a high-status person on LW (gwern, eliezer, lukeprog), it might grab my attention.

When I'm reading a comment written by a name that I've seen enough to associate a personality with, I'm almost always aware of whose comment it is. But, when it's not a name I know well, I'm not consciously aware of having looked at the name and made that determination.

So I think I must always read the name, and if my brain doesn't recognize it, it automatically filters it out.

I check when a comment a surprises me, in either direction.

On LW, I hardly ever notice the username. (I tend to notice more often on sites where people have avatars, and sites where I know most of the people whose comments I see.) I think I might be skimming the names, because I remember noticing usernames of people who I already knew about, but can't remember actually reading and comprehending usernames I don't recognize, at least not very often.

I'd say the average Mathematics PhD student that has a publication has already solved such a problem!

There's usually a fair amount of low-hanging fruit in niche disciplines--for certain subdisciplines of mathematics, you really can count the number of people working on that discipline on one hand.

I would guess that there are many problems that nobody cares about. Producing new problems in math isn't really that hard. Just add a new axiom to an existing theory and you have a bunch of new problems.

The problem is that nobody necessarily cares and so they won't cite you.

It's probably not hard to find a question of the second type at the bright undergraduate level or earlier if you drill down into a subdiscipline that's both obscure and requires relatively few prerequisites (such subdisciplines do exist, e.g. probably some branches of combinatorics), but I don't really see the point of doing this.

My understanding is that it's not that involvement in politics that is somehow bad, but that discussing politics here is perilous, just like discussing feminism and PUA is, or sports, or any other subject matter where identity and opinions are intertwined. If anything, MIRI/CFAR should be doing more in terms of lobbying.

Politics is a zero sum game in which you spend 500 billion dollars to no avail except for forcing your opponent to spend 510 to win. Millions if people are already trying to win this zero sum game already. Might as well ask "why not just win the World Series of poker, then use that money to fund Miri?"

I don't have the impression that LWers are against involvement in politics.

Tribalism is bad? Without tribe affiliation you die and so probably do your memes. I think in your case your thinking about tribalism may be like a fish's thinking about water: it is ubiquitous, transparent, and you can't imagine life without it, and so you treat it as if it were nothing.

As to why lesswrongers seem less involved in politics... my thoughts. As wonky creative types we are way more interested in policy than the sausage-making of winning. We would be more interested in advising the president than in being the president, because we would be more interested in considering 22 different unrealistic policies and their implications than we would be in buttonholing 22 senators and trading pork with them for votes on the one policy which has percolated to the top which I do not have the time to truly understand myself because I need to get it passed.

Most politics is like driving a bus on the same route every day, and in local politics the route is not very big.

Piggyback question on this: why aren't LessWrongers finding and exploiting cognitive biases in markets in order to raise funds for their projects?

I realize that (a) it's really hard to do this or everyone would do it; and (b) there probably are individual LessWrongers working in finance. But to the extent that LW tends to think that entire fields of experts can be blind in their disciplines in ways disciplined rationalists are not (theologians, philosophers, doctors, politicians, educators, physicists), there would seem to be the prospect of some massively profitable arbitrage or prediction somewhere. And it's not like any of LessWrong's projects are allergic to funding.

CEV questions

...are just a proxy for "Should I think this is morally wrong on my own terms?" - I don't think invoking CEV helps on this.

I am better than some people at some things and I like that. If I practice or try harder and achieve more than others that also makes me feel good. I enjoy playing games in which winning means others must lose and vice versa.

And because you also will that these things should continue into the future of the galaxies, even to the children's children, therefore, you are of the Competitive Conspiracy and its secrets will be made yours.

where everyone can bypass what they were by chance given

Doesn't imply everyone is equal in all respects. If you can get better at anything by practicing, screw talent, it doesn't mean everyone has to spend the same amount of time practicing the same things.

If you demand that you be more formidable than some others in all respects so that they lose at the very game of life, then this I may dispute, but this the Competitive Conspiracy does not hold as an ideal. Though there may be some within the Erotic Conspiracy who would endorse that their masters be truly higher than them at any given point in time.

I think it's very likely, for the same reasons why boredom is an important human value, that humans value that kind of diversity enough to make it into CEV (or whatever the actual morality function is).

I enjoy playing games in which winning means others must lose and vice versa.

Gamblers fallacy helps us out here. If winning is more memorable than losing everyone can win sometimes/in some activities and everyone is happy. Also, I wouldn't play a sport in which I always won.

Would I change my values if I knew more? If yes, then I have the wrong values now? If no, but I want others to be happy as well, what then?

I find these particular questions quite hard to think about, so I'll just mention these few thoughts:

• There is a huge difference between wanting to win, and wanting others to lose. Not everyone will be on the same wavelength, but if they're mostly on the first wavelength, it creates an atmosphere of friendly competition / self-betterment, whereas wanting others to lose looks like academia (bitter competition / self-aggrandizement). In the former, you can lose thoroughly and still get satisfaction out of your participation, so I don't hesitate to say that updating in this direction promotes a better social environment for every individual. Perhaps this somewhat answers your third question.
• There's almost certainly value in limiting competition size. Losing with a thousand others placing ahead of you is much less motivating than losing with 50 others placing ahead of you. (it's not clear to me what exactly you meant by 'games' here -- the most general sense?). So if your
• Many games can also be played with a focus on beating yourself rather than your competitors. Having the mental resolve to do this consistently is relatively rare, but AFAICS this is a strict win (both in satisfaction/motivation levels and quality of results) over merely beating your competitors. Updating in this direction should make you more friendly in competition, more effective, and less vulnerable to temporary setbacks. And also more able to continue improving even if you are ranked at the top.

Will everyone be just as good as everyone else? Will everyone be smart as the latest patch, everyone strong as the latest hardware?

I think if you look at the wild variety of Linux distributions, that effectively answers these questions, assuming you believe that open-sourcing this stuff will be mandatory (I think it must be, in order to avoid social chaos and oppression, but I don't know if it will be). Perfection is highly subjective/contextual, and even transhumanists have limited resources to allocate.

There's also a pretty strong argument to be made that once we can 'reallocate' resources like intelligence, physical/visual attributes, health factors, that attractiveness / fitness will become ever more subjective, Basically arising from the same fact, that resources are still limited and 'perfection' is highly subject to context.

Is your projected self unhappy because this individuation of what is attractive/fit/winning effectively divides society up into hundreds of thousands of sub-sub-sub-subcultures, and we presumably become more blase about differences but simultaneously more clique-ish / narrowly focused / echo-chamber-ish?

Now I want to read some fiction discussing these topics :)

Will there be no diversity?

Only if for some reason we all end up with identical values. I find that to be extremely unlikely (and undesirable). People will have personal preferences, and will self-modify and self-optimize to suit those preferences. For example, some people might want gills to live underwater or something. Most won't.

Besides the obvious problems with forgetting to eat/sleep etc, what realistic downsides should overuse of this power have?

Extrapolate from stories about Adderall: infinite willpower for doing the wrong thing. The character winds up spending a year perfecting building toothpick castles eg.

I'll generalize from my own observations: I'm pretty sure there were many instances where, had I infinite willpower, I would have gotten some rather nice things done... but with some gaping flaws that I wouldn't notice until much later, flaws which would probably be pretty hard to mend without starting over. The sorta-kinda advantage to not being able to exert infinite will is the opportunity for plans to get gradually refined in the background, or for incidental side things to get involved, etc.

Metaphorical Tunnel vision, more or less.

So, for example, if this character is using their infinite willpower to construct an AGI, they'd be more likely to brute-force through it and end up with an UFAI.

Do you actually mean "infinite will" or "infinite ability to focus"?

Will -- that is, the ability of the rational mind / ego / neocortex to override anything coming from lower levels -- doesn't lead people to forget to eat or sleep. Focus does.

My quick ideas are something like going from vacillating between exploration and exploitation strategies into pursuing pure exploitation and missing out on exploration paths, and generally ending up in failure modes of Hofstadterian sphexishness, where you doggedly keep at the same behavior when it obviously isn't working right in the circumstances. Though you could also use the power to pursue deliberate exploration and thinking things through, so it's not quite that simple.

Still, now there's the meta-problem of whether the thing you're trying to think through is the best thing to be thinking about. For a historical analogue, would this end up with you staying up for weeks cranking out the best machine code with 1950s computers while people without the superpower decide that cranking out machine code for weeks at an end is horrible and go ahead to invent Lisp and Fortran? If you resolve to do something that's too difficult, like proving whether P != NP, will you ever stop? How will you figure out the correct level to figure out things, so that you neither end up arranging pebbles instead of inventing a compiler nor end up trying to solve all of philosophy and never get anywhere because it's too hard for you?

How do you end up deciding to turn the power off anyway once you've turned it on? I guess there could be a natural control there, like you eventually falling unconscious from lack of sleep and waking up with the power turned off. What if there isn't?

Spoiler warning! gothgirl420666's answer is here.

Before looking at that, can you say if you would attribute different meanings to what gothgirl420666 writes, depending on the gender you imagine gothgirl420666 being? The same for anyone else whose gender you do not know.

Preferably leaving aside the additional complications of people who, for whatever reason, present as the opposite gender to their physiological one.

ETA: More by gothgirl420666. Tvira gur anzr naq traqre, V'z vzntvavat na navzr pngobl glcr. Ohg V'z whfg znxvat gung hc.

Solomonoff induction is a formalization of Occam's razor.

You may find this article useful.

In order for the prior probabilities you assign to programs to be well-formed, they must limit to 0 as the length of the program goes to infinity. Otherwise the probabilities won't add up to 1.

No matter what prior you choose, you'll always end up with a variant of Occam's Razor where programs beyond a particular length are always assigned very low probabilities.

You don't necessarily have to decrease proportionally to 2^(-length), instead of say 3^(-length) or 1/Ackermann(length), like the Solomonoff prior does. However, since each additional bit lets you identify a value from a space that's twice as big (i.e. the precision grows like 2^length), it seems like a natural choice to penalize by that much.

(Personally, I prefer a prior that also lightly penalizes for running time. That removes computability issues and makes the induction approximable by dove-tailing.)

It depends on the test, that is to say that the information given is not enough to determine it. If different instances of the test are independent, then you update on the 7%. If they are partially or completely dependant on one another, it is a lot more complicated. (An analogy: If you roll a die, there is a 1/2 chance of getting an even number, and a 1/2 chance if getting an odd number. If you roll the die twice, there is a 1/2 * 1/2 =1/4 chance of the first roll being odd, and the second roll being even, because the rolls are independent. Between non-independent events, you cannot just multiply out the probabilities like that. The chance of getting both an odd number and an even number on one die roll is 0, despite the fact that on a surface level it seems the same as the previous example: Two tests, each with a 1/2 chance of passing.)

So again, it depends on the type of test. If, say, the test is that people with a certain gene have more of a chance for the cancer (the test can always find the gene, and tells you the gene with 100% accuracy, but while having the gene increases your risk, it isn't absolute, giving the numbers you gave), then it is obvious that the new test will give you no new information. You know the test will again say that you have the gene, and you stay at the 7% confidence level. On the other hand, if the test is, say, some sort of scan, that will look for precancerous tissue, and in each unit of time, it has a certain (fixed) chance of either finding precancerous tissue if it exists or of falsely finding precancerous tissue, then multiple instances of the test will be independent, and so you can "add the information together", first updating on one test, then on the other, so you will do the update from the new test from your 7% confidence level.

(Actually, in real life, it will be far more complicated than that, with different test being only partially independent. It is unrealistic to think the first test will correctly identify the gene 100% of the time, and in the second one, there is only a fixed number of places in the body to look, so the probability of finding a new precancerous growth will probably not stay fixed.)

It's not a stupid question. But I believe the answer depends on the details of the test. For some tests, the probabilities on successive tests will be correlated, and for others, they won't. My impression is that part of what people learn when they become medical specialists is when it makes sense to repeat the same test, and when it makes sense to look for a different test with uncorrelated errors.

You update on the 7%, but the conditional probabilities of getting a positive result if you have and not have cancer respectively have also changed so that another positive test gives you less information than what it took to bring you from 1% to 7 %. See what ygert said.

I hope you don't mind if I don't answer your actual question, but wouldn't it be a better option to sleep before taking your mom into bed, so you have sleep from 10 PM to 5 AM? What you're currently doing seems to equate to night-shifts, which are really bad for health, AFAIK. It would also help solving your problem of finding something social to do, I guess - that should be a lot easier in the evening.

Seems like those are your prime Internet hours, and you can be meatspace-social when 99% of the world isn't asleep.

Seems to depend pretty strongly on where you are.

You have two questions: why accurately approximate human value, and why not have it just ask us about ambiguities.

1. Because the hard part is getting it to do anything coherent at all, and once we are there, it is little extra work to make it do what we really want.

2. This would work. The hard part is to get it to do that.

I would also accept most people as BDFL, over the incumbent gods of indifferent chaos. Again the hard part is kicking out the incumbent. Past that point the debate is basically what color to paint the walls, by comparison.

Well, if we ask it to, say, maximize human happiness or "complexity" or virtue or GDP or any of a million other things ... BAM the world sucks and we probably can't fix it.

ask us questions on ambiguous points and whatnot

Everything is ambiguous and this would slow it down too much.

Some suggestions from a friend of mine-- fans, especially ceiling fans, make it hard for mosquitoes to fly. Also, make sure there isn't standing water in the house for two or three days at a time-- this can happen with saucers under potted plants or dishes left in a sink.

Many Worlds Interpretation http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

Friendly Artificial Intelligence http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/FAI

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Jargon

It's being discussed here. People with a computer science background often consider the physical reality mostly exchangeable with an extensive simulated environment for the purposes of intelligent agents and therefore tend to not readily agree with viewpoints that claim that a non-virtual environment is philosophically necessary.

Personally I'm just going with the policy of upvoting every negative Karma question.

I don't know if this is exactly what you're looking for, but the only way I've found to make philosophy of identity meaningful is to interpret it as about values. In this reading questions of personal identity are what you do/should value as "yourself".

Clearly you-in-this-moment is yourself. Do you value you-in-ten-minutes the same as yourself-now? ten years? simulations?, etc. Then Open Individualism (based on my cursory googling) would say we should value everyone (at all times?) identically as ourselves. Then it's clearly descriptively false, and, at least to me, seems highly unlikely to be any sort of "true values", so it's false.

I bet tabooing/rigorously defining "subject" and "everyone" in the context of the first line of the wikipedia summary would do it. At least to the extent that the position would become either incoherent or tautological.

Open individualism is the view in the philosophy of personal identity, according to which there exists only one numerically identical subject, which is everyone.

::does a Google Search, finds Wikipedia page::

This appears to be a position that is either incoherent, has no practical implications, or is obviously stupid and wrong. I therefore feel justified in ignoring it.

What convinced you that it's false? Use that. (Note that "what convinced you" might not have been a direct argument, but perhaps a particular way of looking at the problem.)