Open Thread: April 2010

My fellow Earthicans, as I discuss in my book Earth In The Balance and the much more popular Harry Potter And The Balance Of Earth, we need to defend our planet against pollution. As well as dark wizards.

-- Al Gore on Futurama

I'm 98% confident it's Eliezer. He's been taunting us about a piece of fanfiction under a different name on fanfiction.net for some time. I guess this means I don't have to bribe him with mashed potatoes to get the URL after all.

Edit: Apparently, instead, I will have to bribe him with mashed potatoes for spoilers. Goddamn WIPs.

Magnificent. (I've sent it to some of my friends, most of whom are thoroughly enjoying it too; many of them are into Harry Potter but not advanced rationalism, so maybe it will turn some of them on to the MAGIC OF RATIONALITY!)

Edit: Sequel idea which probably only works as a title: "Harry Potter and the Prisoner's Dilemma of Azkaban". Ohoho!

Edit 2: Also on my wishlist: Potter-Evans-Verres Puppet Pals.

Harry Potter as a boy genius smart-aleck aspiring rationalist works surprisingly well. And the idea of extending the pull of rationalism a bit beyond its standard sci-fi hunting grounds using Harry Potter fanfiction is brilliant.

For the record, it's currently the first Google autocomplete result for "harry potter and the me", with apparently multiple pages of forum posts and such about it.

Fb, sebz gur cbvag bs ivrj bs na Nygreangr-Uvfgbel, V nffhzr gur CBQ vf Yvyyl tvivat va naq svkvat Crghavn'f jrvtug ceboyrz. Gung jbhyq graq gb vzcebir Crghavn'f ivrj bs ure zntvpny eryngvirf, naq V nffhzr gur ohggresyvrf nera'g rabhtu gb fnir Wnzrf naq Yvyyl sebz Ibyqrzbeg. Tvira gur infgyl vapernfrq vagryyvtrapr bs Uneel, V nffhzr ur vf abg trargvpnyyl gur fnzr puvyq jr fnj va gur obbxf, nygubhtu vzcebirq puvyqubbq ahgevgvba pbhyq nyfb or n snpgbe.

The probability of magic should make any effort on testing the hypothesis unjustified. Testing theories no matter how improbable is generally incorrect dogma. (One should distinguish improbable from silly though.)

Wow, I wish I saw this sooner. And there are already 99 pages of reviews!

ETA: Wow, now there's 100...

AAAAAIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEE

BOOM

It would have been even more frustrating had the protagonist not also been guessing the teacher's password. It seemed that the protagonist just had a better memory of what more authoritative teachers had said.

The protagonist was closer to being able to derive π himself, but that played no part in his argument.

Quite depressing. Makes me even less likely to have my kids educated in the states. I wonder how bad Europe is on that count? Is it really better here? It can be hard to tell from inside; correcting for the fact that most info I get is biased one way or the other leaves me with pretty wide confidence intervals.

22/7 gives "something like" something like 3.1427 ?!? Surely it is more like some other things that that!

I took it for at least 8 weeks, primarily on weekdays. I found after a while that I was waking up at 4am, sometimes unable to get back to sleep. I had some night sweats too. May not be a normal response, but I found that if I take it in moderation it does not have these effects.

The easily available product for me is a blend of 3mg melatonin/25mg theanine. 25mg is a heavy tea-drinker's dose, and I see no reason to consume theanine at all (even dividing the pills in half), so I haven't bought any.

Does anyone have some evidence recommending for/against taking theanine? In my view, the health benefits of tea drinking are negligible, and theanine is just one of many compounds in tea.

I've been trying it as well for ~2 months (with some gaps).

Normally I have trouble falling asleep, but have no problem staying asleep, so the main reason I take melatonin is to help fall asleep.

Currently, I take 2 5mg pills. Taking 1 doesn't have a very noticeable effect on my ability to fall asleep, but 2 seems to do the trick. However, I have to be sure that I give myself 7-8 hours for sleep, otherwise getting up is more difficult and I may be very groggy the next day. This can be problematic because sometimes I just have to stay up slightly later doing homework and because I can't take the melatonin I end up barely getting any sleep at all.

I haven't noticed any habit forming effects, though some slight effects might be welcome if it helped me to remember to take the supplement every night ;)

edit: its actually two 3mg pills, not 5mg. I googled the brand walmart carries since that's where I bought mine from, and it said 5mg on the bottle. Now that I'm home, I see that my bottle is actually 3mg.

I also tried it out after reading that LW post. At first it was fantastic at getting me to fall asleep within 30 minutes (I'm a good sleeper, it would only take me 30 minutes because I would be going to sleep not tired in order to wake up earlier) and I would wake up feeling alert.

Now unfortunately I wake up feeling the same and basically have stopped noticing its effects. The only time I take it is when I want to go to sleep and I'm not tired.

Also: During the initial 1-2 week period of effectiveness, I had intense and vivid and stressful dreams (or maybe I simply remembered my normal dreams better).

Thanks. It would be really helpful if people talking about their experiences would describe the entirety of their psychostimulant usage since how they interact and whether or not other drugs can be replaced are important things to know about Melatonin.

To get the doomsday conclusion, you have to instead ask, "What is the probability that I was human number N, where N is some number from 1 to X?" What justifies doing that?

Because we don't care about the probability of being a particular individual, we care about the probability of being in a certain class (namely the class of people born late enough in history, which is characterized exactly by one minus "the probability that I was human number N, where N is some number from 1 to X").

The real problem with anthropic reasoning is that it's just a default starting point. We are tricked because it seems very powerful in contrived thought experiments in which no other evidence is available.

In the real world, in which there is a wealth of evidence available, it's just a reality check saying "most things don't last forever."

In real world situations, it's also very easy to get into a game of reference class tennis.

Voted up for having jokes with cautionary power, and not just amusement value.

Cool. Since a handful of studies suggest a narrow majority believe moral responsibility and determinism to be incompatible this shouldn't actually be that surprising. I want to know how people act after being exposed to statements in favor of compatibilism.

Why does the universe that we live in look like a giant computer? What about uncomputable physics?

Consider "syntactic preference" as an order on agent's strategies (externally observable possible behaviors, but in mathematical sense, independently on what we can actually arrange to observe), where the agent is software running on an ordinary computer. This is "ontological boxing", a way of abstracting away any unknown physics. Then, this syntactic order can be given interpretation, as in logic/model theory, for example by placing the "agent program" in environment of all possible "world programs", and restating the order on possible agent's strategies in terms of possible outcomes for the world programs (as an order on sets of outcomes for all world programs), depending on the agent.

This way, we first factor out the real world from the problem, leaving only the syntactic backbone of preference, and then reintroduce a controllable version of the world, in a form of any convenient mathematical structure, an interpretation of syntactic preference. The question of whether the model world is "actually the real world", and whether it reflects all possible features of the real world, is sidestepped.

You can do better than frequentist approach without using the "magic" universal prior. You can just use a prior that represents initial ignorance of the frequency at which the machine produces head-biased and tail-biased coins. (dP(f) = 1df). If you want to look for repeating patterns, you can assign probability (1/2)(1/2^n) to the theory that the machine produces each type of coin on a frequency depending on the last n coins it produced. This requires treating a probability as a strength of belief, and not the frequency of anything, which is what (as I understand it) frequentists are not willing to do.

Note the universal prior, if you can pull it off, is still better than what I described. The repeating pattern seeking prior will not notice, for example, if the machine makes head biased coins on prime-numbered trials, but tailbiased coins on composite-numbered trials. This is because it implicitly assigns probability 0 to that type of machine, which takes infinite evidence to update.

BTW, I wish there is a "public drafts" feature on LessWrong, where I can make a draft accessible to others by URL, but not show up in recent posts, so I don't have to post a draft elsewhere to get feedback before I officially publish it.

I second this feature request.

ETA: I did not notice earlier Steve Rayhawk made the same comment.

I wish there is a "public drafts" feature on LessWrong

Seconded. See also JenniferRM on editorial-level versus object-level comments.

Agreed. I'll be investigating what it would take to implement that.

(Edit: interesting; draft folders are apparently private sub-reddits created when a user registers and admin'ed by that user.)

Found this entirely by chance - do a top level post?

Hmm, that's also Easter Sunday, so I have commitments with family. I would love to meet you in person, Yvain, but it looks like I won't make this.

I'll try to come.

I hope to get to this, as I'll be not too far away this weekend.

I think I can't afford to come...

An annoying thing about the RQ test (rot13'd):

Jura V gbbx gur ED grfg gurer jnf n flfgrzngvp ovnf gbjneqf jung jbhyq pbzzbayl or pnyyrq vagrerfgvat snpgf orvat zber cebonoyr naq zhaqnar/obevat snpgf orvat yrff cebonoyr. fgrira0461 nyfb abgvprq guvf. Guvf jnf nobhg 1 zbagu ntb. ebg13'q fb nf abg gb shegure ovnf crbcyrf' erfhygf.

I did not check the test in detail, but I somehow question the validity of the test: As presented in their summary, would not just total risk aversion give you a perfect score? 50% on everything, except for the 0 and 100 entries (where 0 is something like "hey, I do play an instrument, and I know this is total crap, except if I would now be hallucinating, in which case..."). It seems like a test which is too easy to play.

The only way I know to track karma changes is having an old tab with my Recent Comments visible and comparing it to the new one. That captures a lot of the change - >90% - but not the old threads.

I would love to know how hard it would be to have a "Recent Karma Changes" feed.

Well, his TED talk does make a number of specific testable predictions. They were registered in wrongtomorrow.com, but that's down.

That review is a very worthwhile read - thanks for linking to it!

I've heard claims that his "general model of international conflict" has been independently tested by the CIA and some other organization to 90% accuracy, but haven't seen any details of any of these tests.

Available without the paywall from the author's home page.

It's also an argument in favor of using checklists.

The causes of "too big to fail" are:

1. Corporate personhood laws makes it harder to punish the actual people in charge.

2. Problems in tort law (in the US) make it difficult to sue corporations for certain kinds of damages.

3. A large government (territorial monopoly of jurisdiction) makes it more profitable for any sufficiently large company to use the state as a bludgeon against its competitors (lobbying, bribes, friends in high places) instead of competing directly on the market.

4. Letting companies that waste resources go bankrupt causes short-term damage to the economy, but it is healthy in the long term because it allows more efficient companies to take over the tied-up talent and resources. Politicians care more about the short term than the long term.

5. For pharmaceutical companies there is an additional embiggening factor. Testing for FDA drug approval costs millions of dollars, which constitutes a huge barrier to entry for smaller companies. Hence the large companies can grow larger with little competition. This is amplified by 1 and 2, and 3 suggests that most of the competition among Big Pharma is over legislators and regulators, not market competition.

Disclosure: I am a "common law" libertarian (I find all monopolies counterproductive, including state governments).

I've been trying to do this since November for a close family member. So far the reaction has been fairly positive, but she has still not decided to go for it.

I hope this isn't a vegatarianism argument, but remember that you have to rehabilitate both killing and cruelty to justify eating most meat, even if killing alone has held you back so far.

Do you want to eat meat?

Or do you just want to have a good reason for not wanting to eat meat?

It's... y'know... food. I don't have an ethical objection to peppermint but I don't eat it because I don't want to.

.

I don't know exactly what the prior on "killing animals is wrong" is, but I think it has a reasonable size (certainly larger than that for god), and I feel more justified in being vegetarian because of this.

Is it meaningful to put a probability on 'killing animals is wrong' and absolute moral statements like that? Feels like trying to put a probability on 'abortion is wrong' or 'gun control is wrong' or '(insert your pet issue here) is wrong/right' or...

I find this paper to be a good resource to think about this subject: https://motherjones.com/files/emotional_dog_and_rational_tail.pdf

See this discussion of my own meat-eating. My conclusion was that there is not much of a rational basis for deciding one way or the other -- my attempts to use rationality broke down.

I think you should go out and get yourself something deliciously meaty, while still being mostly vegetarian. "Fair weather vegetarianism". Unless you don't actually like the taste of meat. That's ok. There's also an issue of convenience. You could begin the slippery slope of drinking chicken broth soup and Thai food with lots of fish sauce.

We exist in an immoral system and there isn't much to do about it. Being a vegetarian for reasons of animal suffering is symbolic. If we truly cared about the holocaust of animal suffering, we would be waging a guerrilla war against factory farms.

My take on capital punishment is that it's not actually that important an issue. With pretty much anything that you can say about the death penalty, you can say something similar about life imprisonment without parole (especially with the way that the death penalty is actually practiced in the United States). Would you lock an innocent man in a cell for the rest of his life to keep 19 bad ones locked up?

Virtually zero chance of recidivism? True for both. Very expensive? Check. Wrongly convicted innocent people get screwed? Check - though in both cases they have a decent chance of being exonerated after conviction before getting totally screwed (and thus only being partially screwed). Could be considered immoral to do something so severe to a person? Check. Deprives people of an "inalienable" right? Check (life/liberty). Strongly demonstrates society's disapproval of a crime? Check (slight edge to capital punishment, though life sentences would be better at this if the death penalty wasn't an option). Applied disproportionately to certain groups? I think so, though I don't know the research. Strong deterrent? It seems like the death penalty should be a bit stronger, but the evidence is unclear on that. Provides closure to the victim's family? Execution seems like more definitive closure, but they have to wait until years after sentencing to get it.

The criminal justice system is a big important topic, and I think it's too bad that this little piece of it (capital punishment) soaks up so much of our attention to it. Overall, my stance on capital punishment is ambivalent, leaning against it because it's not worth the trouble, though in some cases (like McVeigh) it's nice to have around and I could be swayed by a big deterrent effect. I'd prefer for more of the focus to be on this sort of thing (pdf).

Standard response: politics is the mind-killer.

Personal response: I'm opposed to the death penalty because it costs more than putting them in prison for life due to the huge number of appeals they're allowed (vaguely recall hearing in newspapers / reports). I feel the US has become so risk-averse and egalitarian that it cannot properly implement a death penalty. This is reflected in the back-and-forth questions you ask.

I also oppose it on the grounds that it is often used as a tool of vengeance rather than justice. Nitrogen poisoning (I think that was the gas they were talking about) is a safe, highly reliable, and euphoric means of death, but the US still prefers electrocution (can take minutes), injection (can feel like the veins are burning from the inside out while the body is paralyzed), etc.

That said, I don't care enough about the topic to try and alter its use, whether through voting, polling, letters, etc, nor do I desire to put much thought into it. Best to let hot topics alone.

And after asking about Bayes, you should ask for math rather than opinions.

There is strong Bayesian evidence that the USA has executed one innocent man. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Todd_Willingham By that I mean that an Amanda Knox test type analysis would clearly show that Willingham is innocent, probably with greater certainty than when the Amanda Knox case was analyzed. Does knowing that the USA has indeed provably executed an innocent person change your opinion?

What are the practical advantages of death over life in prison? US law allows for true life without parole. Life in an isolated cell in a Supermax prison is continual torture -- it is not a light punishment by any means. Without a single advantage given for the death penalty over life in prison without parole, I think that ~100% certainty is needed for execution.

I am against the death penalty for regular murder and mass murder and aggravated rape. I am indifferent with regards to the death penalty for crimes against humanity as I recognize that symbolic execution could be appropriate for grave enough crimes.

The more judicious question, I am coming to realize, isn't so much "Which of these two Standard Positions should I stand firmly on".

The more useful question is, why do the positions matter? Why is the discussion currently crystallized around these standard positions important to me, and how should I fluidly allow whatever evidence I can find to move me toward some position, which is rather unlikely (given that the debate has been so long crystallized in this particular way) to be among the standard ones. And I shouldn't necessarily expect to stay at that position forever, once I have admitted in principle that new evidence, or changes in other beliefs of mine, must commit me to a change in position on that particular issue.

In the death-penalty debate I identify more strongly with the "abolitionist" standard position because I was brought up in an abolitionist country by left-wing parents. That is, I find myself on the opposite end of the spectrum from you. And yet, perhaps we are closer than is apparent at first glance, if we are both of us committed primarily to investigating the questions of values, the questions of fact, and the questions of process that might leave either or both of us, at the end of the inquiry, in a different position than we started from.

• Would I revise my "in principle" opposition to the death penalty if, for instance, the means of "execution" were modified to cryonic preservation? Would I then support cryonic preservation as a "punishment" for lesser crimes such as would currently result in lifetime imprisonment?

• Would I still oppose the death penalty if we had a Truth Machine? Or if we could press Omega into service to give us a negligible probability of wrongful conviction? Or otherwise rely on a (putatively) impartial means of judgment which didn't involve fallible humans? Is that even desirable, if it was at all possible?

• Would I support the death penalty if I found out it was an effective deterrent, or would I oppose it only if I found that it didn't deter? Does deterrence matter? Why, or why not?

• How does economics enter into such a decision? How much, whatever position I arrive at, should I consider myself obligated to actively try to ensure that the society I live in espouses that position? For what scope of "the society I live in" - how local or global?

Those are topics and questions I encounter in the process of thinking about things other than the death penalty; practically every important topic has repercussions on this one.

There's an old systems science saying that I think applies to rational discussions about Big Questions such as this one: "you can't change just one thing". You can't decide on just one belief, and as I have argued before, it serves no useful purpose to call an isolated belief "irrational". It seems more appropriate to examine the processes whereby we adjust networks of beliefs, how thoroughly we propagate evidence and argument among those networks.

There is currently something of a meta-debate on LW regarding how best to reflect this networked structure of adjusting our beliefs based on evidence and reasoning, with approaches such as TakeOnIt competing against more individual debate modeling tools, with LessWrong itself, not so much the blog but perhaps the community and its norms, having some potential to serve as such a process for arbitrating claims.

But all these prior discussions seem to take as a starting point that "you can't change just one belief". That's among the consequences of embracing uncertainty, I think.

Political questions like this are far removed from the kind of analysis you seem to want to apply. If it's you taking out a killer yourself that's one thing, but the question of whether to support it as a law is something entirely different. This rabbit hole goes very far indeed. Anyway, why would you care about the Constitution - you're not one of the signers, are you? ;-)

You try frantically to tell people about this, and it always seems to go badly for you.

Telling people frantically about problems that are not on a very short list of "approved emergencies" like fire, angry mobs, and snakes is a good way to get people to ignore you, or, failing that, to dislike you.

It is only very recently (in evolutionary time) that ordinary people are likely to find important solutions to important social problems in a context where those solutions have a realistic chance of being implemented. In the past, (a) people were relatively uneducated, (b) society was relatively simpler, and (c) arbitrary power was held and wielded relatively more openly.

Thus, in the past, anyone who was talking frantically about social reform was either hopelessly naive, hopelessly insane, or hopelessly self-promoting. There's a reason we're hardwired to instinctively discount that kind of talk.

You should present the easily implemented, obviously better solution at the same time as the problem.

If the solution isn't easy to implement by the person you're talking to, then cost/benefit analysis may be in favor of the status quo or you might be talking to the wrong person. If the solution isn't obviously better, then it won't be very convincing as a solution or you might not have considered all opinions on the problem. And if there is no solution, then why complain?

Is that true? 'Cause if it's true, I'd like to join.

Brain training, for those not following the link, refers to playing games involving particular mental skills (e.g. memory). The study ran six weeks.

I don't think the experiment looks definite - the control group did not appear as thoroughly distinguished from the test groups as I would have liked - but the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (who were partners in the experiment) is well-regarded enough that I would call the null result major evidence.

The fact that they studied adults rather than children may make a difference.

I had the rats learn that a light, a little flashing light in a Pavlovian box, is followed sometimes by a tone and sometimes by food.

The information here is a little scant. If, in the cases where there was a tone instead of food, the tone always followed very soon after the light, it'd be most logical for rats to wait for the tone after seeing the light, and only go look for food after confirming that no tone was forthcoming. (This would save them effort assuming the food section was significantly far away. No tone = food. Tone = no food. Or did the scientists sometimes have the light be followed by both tone and food? I assume no, because that would introduce a first-order Pavlovian association between tone and food, which would mess up the next part of the experiment.)

Then, at test, some of the rats got tone and they tended to go look in the food section.

If, as I suggested above, the rats had previously been trained to wait for the lack of a tone before checking in the food section, this result would more strongly rule out a second-order Pavlovian response.

The critical test was with another group of rats that got the same training. We gave them a lever that they had never had before. They were in this box, and they have a lever that is rigged so that if they press the lever the tone will immediately come up. ... In that case, the intervening rats, after hearing the tone of their own intervention, should not expect food. Indeed, they didn't go to food nearly as much.

On the one hand, this is really surprising. On the other hand, I don't see how rats could survive without some cause-and-effect and logical reasoning. I'm really eager to see more studies on logical reasoning in animals. Any anecdotal evidence with house pets anyone?

Rather sad to see Chalmers embracing the dopey "singularity" terminology.

He seems to have toned down his ideas about development under conditions of isolation:

"Confining a superintelligence to a virtual world is almost certainly impossible: if it wants to escape, it almost certainly will."

Still, the ideas he expresses here are not very realistic, IMO. People want machine intelligence to help them to attain their goals. Machines can't do that if they are isolated off in virtual worlds. Sure there will be test harnesses - but of course we won't keep these things permanently restrained on grounds of sheer paranoia - that would stop us from using them.

53 pages with only 2 mentions of zombies - yay.

I prefer links to the abstract, when possible.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803

This might be interesting in combination with the a "balanced drive". They were invented by science fiction author Charles Sheffield who attributed them his character Arthur Morton McAndrew so they are sometimes also called a "McAndrew Drive" or a "Sheffield Drive".

The basic trick is to put an incredibly dense mass at the end of a giant pole such that the inverse square law of gravity is significant along the length of the pole. The ship flies "mass forward" through space. Then the crew cabin (and anything else incapable of surviving enormous acceleration) is set up on the pole so that the faster the acceleration the closer it is to the mass. The cabin, flying "floor forward", changes its position while the floor flexes as needed so that the net effect of the ship's acceleration plus the force of gravity balance out to something tolerable. When not under acceleration you still get gravity in the cabin by pushing it out to very tip of the pole.

The literary value of the system is that you can do reasonably hard science fiction and still have characters jaunt from star to star so long as they are willing to put up with the social isolation because of time dilation, but the hard part is explaining what the mass at the end of the pole is, and where you'd get the energy to move it.

If you could feed a black hole enough to serve as the mass while retaining the ability to generate Hawking radiation, that might do it. Or perhaps simply postulating technological control of quantum black holes and then use two in your ship: a big one to counteract acceleration and a small one to get energy from a "Crane-Westmoreland Generator".

Be careful about making assumptions about the intelligence of cows. I used to think sheep were stupid, then I read that sheep can tell humans apart by sight (which is more than I can do for them!), and I realized on reflection I never had any actual reason to believe sheep were stupid, it was just an idea I'd picked up and not had any reason to examine.

Also, be careful about extrapolating from the intelligence of domestic cows (which have lived for the last few thousand years with little evolutionary pressure to get the most out of their brain tissue) to the intelligence of their wild relatives.

At the risk of repeating the same mistake as my previous comment, I'll do armchair genetics this time:

Perhaps genes controlling the size of various mammalian organs and body regions tend to grow or shrink uniformly, and only become disproportionate when there is a stronger evolutionary pressure. When there is a mutation leading to more growth, all the organs tend to grow more.

(I now see this answered in the first few comments on the link eliezer posted.)

Purely armchair neurology: To answer the question of why cow brains would need to be bigger than rat brains, I asked what would go wrong if we put a rat brain into a cow. (Ignoring organ rejection and cheese crazed, wall-eating cows)

We would need to connect the rat brain to the cow body, but there would not be a 1 to 1 correspondence of connections. I suspect that a cow has many more nerve endings throughout it's body. At least some of the brain/body correlation must be related to servicing the body nerves. (both sensory and motor)

I wouldn't proselytize too directly - you want to stay on their (and their mother's) good side, and I doubt it would be very effective anyways. You're better off trying to instill good values - open-mindedness, curiosity, ability to think for oneself, and other elements of rationality & morality - rather than focusing on religion directly. Just knowing an atheist (you) and being on good terms with him could help lead them to consider atheism down the road at some point, which is another reason why it's important to maintain a good relationship. Think about the parallel case of religious relatives who interfere with parents who are raising their kids non-religiously - there are a lot of similarities between their situation and yours (even though you really are right and they just think they are) and you could run into a lot of the same problems that they do.

I haven't had the chance to try it out personally, but Dale McGowan's blog seems useful for this sort of thing, and his books might be even more useful.

One thing to do is make sure the kids understand that the Bible is just a bunch of stories. My mom teaches Reform Jewish Sunday school and makes this clear to her students. I make fun of her for cranking out little atheists.

Teaching that the bible is a bunch of stories written by multiple humans over time is not nearly as offensive as preaching atheism. Start there. This bit of knowledge should be enough to get your young relatives thinking about religion, if they want to start thinking about it.

I'm not speaking from experience here, but that doesn't stop me from having opinions.

I don't believe this is an emergency. Are the kid's lives being affected negatively by the religion? What do they think of what they're being taught?

Actually, this could be an emergency if they're being taught about Hell. Are they? Is it haunting them?

Their minds aren't a battlefield between you and religious school-- what they believe is, well not exactly their choice because people aren't very good at choosing, but more their choice than yours.

I recommend teaching them a little thoughtful cynicism, with advertisements as the subject matter.

Dangerous situation!

How do the parents feel about science and science fiction? I believe that stuff has good effects.

Possibly introducing them to some of the content in A Human's Guide to Words, such as dissolving the question, would lead them to theological noncognitivism. The nice thing about that as opposed to direct atheism is it's more "insidious" because instead of saying, "I don't believe" the kids would end up making more subtle points, like, "What do you even mean by omnipotent?" This somehow seems a lot less alarming to people, so it might bother the parents much less, or even seem like "innocent" questioning.

Introduce them to really cool, socially near, atheists. In particular, provide contact with attractive opposite-gender children who are a couple of years older and are atheists.

Teach them the basis of bayesian reasoning without any connection to religion. This will help them in more ways and will lay the foundation for later when they naturally start questioning religion. Also their parents wont have anything against it you merely introduce it as a method for physics or chemistry or with the standard medical examples.

Speaking as someone who is seeing that sort of thing happening on the inside, I'm really not sure how you should deal with it. Even teaching traditional rationality doesn't help if religion is wrapped up in their social identity. I myself was lucky, in that I never did believe in god. I almost believe that the reason I came through sane was my IQ, although I'm sure that cannot be entirely correct. Getting them to socialize with other children who don't believe in god, or if that's not possible, children who believe in very different gods might help. I would also suggest you introduce them to fiction with strong rationality memes - Eliezer's Harry Potter fanfic [edited, see below] is the kind of thing that might appeal to children, although it has too much adult material.

I value empathy. Unfortunately, it's a highly packed word in the way I use it.

Attempting a definition, I'd say it involves creating the most accurate mental models of what people want, including oneself, and trying to satisfy those wants. This makes it a recursive and recursively self-improving model (I think), since one thing I want is to know what else I, and others, want. To satisfy that want, I have to constantly get better at want-knowing.

The best way to determine and to satisfy these preferences appears to be through the use of rationality and future prediction, creating maps of minds and chains of causality, so I place high value on those skills. Without the ability to predict the future or map out minds, "what people want" becomes far too close to wireheading or pure selfishness.

Empathy, to me, involves trying to figure out what the person would truly want, given as much understanding and knowledge of the consequences as possible, contrasting with what they say they want.

Take a wild, wild guess.

No rush -- I'll wait.

How do you evaluate your actions as proper or improper, good or bad, right or wrong?

I don't fully understand how I tell good from bad. A query goes in, an answer pops out in the form of a feeling. Many of the criteria probably come from my parents, from reading books, and from pleasant/unpleasant interactions with other people. I can't boil it down to any small set of rules that would answer every moral question without applying actual moral sense, and I don't believe anyone else can.

It's easier to give a diff, to specify how my moral sense differs from that of other people I know. The main difference I see is that some years ago I deeply internalized the content of Games People Play) and as a result I never demonstrate to anyone that I feel bad about something - I now consider this a grossly immoral act. On the other hand, I cheat on women a lot and don't care too much about that. In other respects I see myself as morally average.

I value my physical human needs, similarly to Maslow.

I endeavor to value larger, long-term contributions to my needs more than short term ones.

I often act as though I value others' needs approximately in relation to how well I know them, though I endeavor to value others' needs equally to my own. Specifically I do this when making a conscious value calculation rather than doing what "feels right."

I almost always fulfill my own basic needs before fulfilling the higher needs of others; I justify this by saying that I would be miserable and ineffective otherwise but it's very difficult to make my meat-brain go along with experiments to that end.

My conscious higher order values emerge from these.

What do you value?

Getting pleasure and avoiding pain, just like everyone else. The question isn't, "What do I value?" but "When do I value it?" (And also, "What brings you pleasure and pain?" But do you really want to know that?)

I value time spent in flow times the amount of I/O between me and the external world.

"Time spent in flow" is a technical term for having a good time.

By I/O (input/output) I mean both information and actions. Talking to people, reading books, playing multiplayer computer games, building pyramids, writing software to be used by other people are examples of high impact of me on the world and/or high impact of the world on me. On the other hand, getting stoned (or, wireheaded) and daydreaming has low interaction with the external world. Some of it is okay though because it's an experience I can talk to other people about.

I value individual responsibility for one's own life. As a corollary I value private property and rationality as means to attain the former.

From this I evaluate as good anything that respects property and allows for individual choices. Anything that violates property or impedes choice as bad.

Let's not forget that the clever student will be indeed very surprised by a test on any day, since he thinks he's proven that he won't be surprised by tests on those days. It seems he made an error in formalizing 'surprise'.

(imagine how surprised he'll be if the test is on Friday!)

Why not give a test on Monday, and then give another test later that day? I bet they would be surprised by a second test on the same day.

not as an exercise for solving

...and yet...

Can the teacher fulfill his announcement?

Probably.

p(teacher provides a surprise test) = 1 - x^3
Where:
x = 'improbability required for an event to be surprising'

If a 50% chance of having a test that day would leave a student surprised he can be 87.5% confident in being able to fullfil his assertion.

However, if the teacher was a causal decision agent then he would not be able to provide a surprise test without making the randomization process public (or a similar precommitment).

p(teacher provides a surprise test) = 1 - x^2

p(teacher provides a surprise lack of test) = x^2 * (1 - x)

Melatonin. Also, getting my housemates to harass me if I don't go to bed.

I've been struggling with this for years, and the only thing I've found that works when nothing else does is hard exercise. The other two things that I've found help the most:

• Let the sun hit your eyelids first thing in the morning (to halt melatonin production)
• F.lux, a program that auto-adjusts your monitor's light levels (and keep your room lights low at night; otherwise melatonin production will be delayed)

EDIT: Apparently keeping your room lights at a low color temperature (incandescent/halogen instead of fluorescent) is better than keeping them at low intensity:

"...we surmise that the effect of color temperature is greater than that of illuminance in an ordinary residential bedroom or similar environment where a lowering of physiological activity is desirable, and we therefore find the use of low color temperature illumination more important than the reduction of illuminance. Subjective drowsiness results also indicate that reduction of illuminance without reduction of color temperature should be avoided." —Noguchi and Sakaguchi, 1999 (note that these are commercial researchers at Matsushita, which makes low-color-temperature fluorescents)

What do you do instead of going to bed? I notice myself spending time on the Internet.

There are lots of studies on the issue, and as usual most of them are bad and disagree with each other.

I tend to trust the one by the UK Food Standards Association because it's big and government-funded. Mayo Clinic agrees. I think there are a few studies that show organic foods do have lower pesticide levels than normal, but nothing showing that it actually leads to health benefits. Pesticides can cause some health problems in farmers, but they're receiving a bajillion times the dose of someone who just eats the occasional carrot. And some "organic pesticides" are just as bad as any synthetic ones. There's also a higher risk of getting bacterial infections from organic food.

Tastewise, a lot of organics people cite some studies showing that organic apples and other fruit taste better than conventional - I can't find the originals of these and there are equally questionable studies that say the opposite. Organic vegetables taste somewhere between the same and worse, even by organic peoples' admission. There's a pretty believable study showing conventional chicken tastes better than organic, and a more pop-sci study claiming the same thing about almost everything. I've seen some evidence that locally grown produce tastes better than imported, but that's a different issue than organic vs. non-organic and you have to make sure people aren't conflating them.

They do produce less environmental damage per unit land, but they produce much less food per unit land and so require more land to be devoted to agriculture. How exactly that works out in the end is complex economics that I can't navigate.

My current belief is that organics have a few more nutrients here and there but not enough to matter, are probably less healthy overall when you consider infection risk, and taste is anywhere from no difference to worse except maybe on a few limited fruits.

The famous metaanalyses which has shown that vitamin supplementation is essentially useless, or possibly even harmful totally destroys the basic argument ("oh look, more vitamins!" - not that it's usually even true) that organic is good for your health.

It might still be tastier. Or not.

Is the methodology of the Amanda Knox test useful in this case? (I didn't attempt the test or even read the posts, but it sounds like a similarly politicized problem.)

People have been worrying about that one since Malthus. Turns out, production capacity can increase exponentially too, and when any given child has a high enough chance of survival, the strategy shifts from spamming lots of low-investment kids (for farm labor) to having one or two children and lavishing resources on them, which is why birthrates in the developed world are dropping below replacement.

Sorry for ranting instead of answering your question, but "power laws emerge everywhere" is mostly bullshit. Power laws are less ubiquitous than some experts want you to believe. And when you do see them, the underlying mechanisms are much more diverse than what these experts will suggest. They have an agenda: they want you to believe that they can solve your (biology, sociology, epidemiology, computer networks etc.) problem with their statistical mechanics toolbox. Usually they can't.

For some counterbalance, see Cosma Shalizi's work. He has many amusing rants, and a very good paper:

Gauss Is Not Mocked

So You Think You Have a Power Law — Well Isn't That Special?

Speaking Truth to Power About Weblogs, or, How Not to Draw a Straight Line

Power-law distributions in empirical data

Note that this is not a one-man crusade by Shalizi. Many experts of the fields invaded by power-law-wielding statistical physicists wrote debunking papers such as this:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.21.8169

Another very relevant and readable paper:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.11.6305

You could try "Ubiquity" by Mark Buchanan for the power law stuff, but it's been a while since I read it, so I can't vouch for it completely. (Confusingly, Amazon lists three books with that title and different subtitles, all by that author, all published around 2001-2002.)

Is there any chance that we (a) CAN'T restrict AI to be friendly per se, but (b) (conditional on this impossibility) CAN restrict it to keep it from blowing up in our faces?

First, define "friendly" in enough detail that I know that it's different from "will not blow up in our faces".

Such an eventuality would seem to require that (a) human beings are not computable or (b) human beings are not Friendly.

In the latter case, if nothing else, there is [individual]-Friendliness to consider.

Trust your intuition.

It all looks pretty flaky to me at this point, but I figure some of you must have run into her stuff before, and I was hoping you could share.

It looks like a biology-inspired, predictive approach somewhat along the lines of Hawkins' HTMs, except that I've not seen her implementation details spelled out as thoroughly as Hawkins'.

Her analysis seems sound to me (in the sense that her proposed model quite closely matches how humans actually get through the day), except that she seems to elevate certain practical conclusions to a philosophical level that's not really warranted (IMO).

(Of course, I think there would likely be practical problems with AN-based systems being used in general applications -- humans tend to not like it when machines guess, especially if they guess wrong. We routinely prefer our tools to be stupid-but-predictable over smart-but-surprising.)

Is quantum physics actually an improvement in the theory of how reality works?

It explains everything microscopic. For example, the stability of atoms. Why doesn't an electron just spiral into the nucleus and stay there? The uncertainty principle means it can't be both localized at a point and have a fixed momentum of zero. If the position wavefunction is a big spike concentrated at a point, then the momentum wavefunction, which is the Fourier transform of the position wavefunction, will have a nonzero probability over a considerable range of momenta, so the position wavefunction will start leaking out of the nucleus in the next moment. The lowest energy stable state for the electron is one which is centered on the nucleus, but has a small spread in position space and a small spread in momentum "space".

However, every quantum theory ever used has a classical conceptual beginning. You posit the existence of fields or particles interacting in some classical way, and then you "quantize" this. For example, the interaction between electron and nucleus is just electromagnetism, as in Faraday, Maxwell, and Einstein. But you describe the electron (and the nucleus too, if necessary) by a probabilistic wavefunction rather than a single point in space, and you also do the same for the electromagnetic field. Curiously, when you do this for the field, you get particles as emergent phenomena. A "photon" is actually something like a bookkeeping device for the probabilistic movement of energy within the quantized electromagnetic field. You can also get electrons and nucleons (and their antiparticles) from fields in this way, so everywhere in elementary particle physics, you have this "field/particle duality". For every type of elementary particle, there is a fundamental field, and vice versa. The basic equations that get quantized are field equations, but the result of quantization gives you particle behavior.

Everyone wants to know how to think about the uncertainty in quantum physics. Is it secretly deterministic and we just need a better theory, or do things really happen without a cause; does the electron always have a definite position even when we can't see it, or is it somehow not anywhere in particular; and so on. These conceptual problems exist because we have no derivation of quantum wavefunctions from anything more fundamental. This is unlike, say, the distributions in ordinary probability theory. You can describe the output of a quincunx using the binomial distribution, but you also have a "microscopic model" of where that distribution comes from (balls bouncing left and right as they fall down). We don't have any such model for quantum probabilities, and it would be difficult to produce (see: "Bell's theorem"). Sum over histories looks like such a model, but the problem is that histories can cancel ("interfere destructively"). It is as if, in the quincunx device, there were slots at the bottom where balls never fell, and you explained this by saying that the two ways to get there cancelled each other out - which is how sum-over-histories explains the double-slit experiment: no photons arrive in the dark regions because the "probability amplitude" for getting there via one slit cancels the amplitude for getting there from the other slit.

As a practical matter, most particle physicists think of reality in quasi-classical terms - in terms of fields or particles, whichever seems appropriate, but then blurred out by the uncertainty principle. Sum over histories is an extension of the uncertainty principle to movement and interaction, so it's a whole process in time which is uncertain, rather than just a position.

The actual nature of the uncertainty is a philosophical or even ideological matter. The traditional view effectively treats reality as classical but blurry. There is a deterministic alternative theory (Bohmian mechanics) but it is obscure and rather contrived. The popular view on this site is "the many-worlds interpretation" - all the positions, all the histories are equally real, but they live in parallel universes. I believe this view is, like Bohmian mechanics, a misguided philosophical whimsy rather than the future of physics. Like Bohmian mechanics, it can be given a mathematical and not just a verbal form, but it's an artificial addition to the real physics. It's not contributing to progress in physics. Its biggest claim to practical significance is that it helped to inspire quantum computation; but one is not obliged to think that a quantum computer is actually in all states at once, rather than just possibly in one of them.

So, I hold to the traditional view of the meaning of quantum theory - that it's an introduction of a little uncertainty into a basically classical world. It doesn't make sense as an ultimate description of things; but I certainly don't believe the ideas, like Bohm (nonlocal determinism) or Everett (many worlds), which try to make a finished objective theory by just adding an extra mathematical and metaphysical facade. The extra details they posit have a brittle artificiality about them. They do link up with genuine aspects of the quantum mathematical formalism, and so they may indirectly contribute to progress just a little, but I think the future lies more with the traditional view.

Is quantum physics actually an improvement in the theory of how reality works? Or is it just building uncertainty into our model of reality?

The Quantum Physics Sequence

On the first point: I try never to categorize questions as intelligent or dumb, but is quantum mechanics an improvement? Unquestionably. To give only the most obvious example, lasers work by quantum excitation.

I, too, would be interested in learning quantum mechanics from a good textbook.

"Forcibly rewritten" implies your being a different person afterwards. Naively, time consistency would suggest treating them as such.

it isn't all that likely to lead to a conclusion there's a God as commonly conceived

The Bayesian translation of this is "I'm an atheist".

While I'm on the subject, is there any reason to think Omega is possible? Or is Omega simply a handy tool for thinking about philosophical problems?

Interesting. I'm not sure I know enough about Omega to say. But for one thing: I think it is probably impossible for Omega to predict it's own future mental states (there would be an infinite recursion). This will introduce uncertainty into its model of the universe.

The justification for atheism over agnosticism is essentially Occam's Razor. As far as we know, there are no exceptions to physics as we understand it. So God/Gods explains nothing that isn't already explained by physics. So P(physics is true) >= P(Physics is true AND God/Gods exist(s))

I've always taken Omega to be just a handy tool for thinking about philosophical problems. "Omega appears and tells you X" is short for "For the purposes of this conundrum, imagine that X is true, that you have undeniably conclusive evidence for X, and that the nature of this evidence and why it convinces you is irrelevant to the problem."

In a case where X is impossible ("Omega appears and tells you that 2+2=3") then the conundrum is broken.

It's not feasible to attempt to create a government which both perfect and self-correcting. I'm not sure if the same is true of FAI.

I pretty much don't read paper books - this format and medium might as well die as far as I'm concerned. I listen to ridiculous number of audiobooks on Sansa Clip (in fast mode). The Bay has plenty, or Audible if you can stand their DRM. My favourite have been TTC lectures, which have zero value to me other than entertainment.

The idea for audiobooks was mostly to do something useful at times when I cannot do anything else - but it does use cognitive resources and makes me more tired than if I was listening to music or so for the same amount of time. It's very reliable relation.

I read about a book a week, almost exclusively non-fiction, generally falling somewhere between the popular science and textbook level. Occasionally I'll throw a sci-fi novel into the mix.

I'd love to speed this up, since my reading list grows much faster than books get completed, but I'm not sure how (other than simply spending more time reading). Has anyone had luck with speed-reading techniques , such as Tim Ferriss's?

After a fallow period I'm back to two-three a month as a fairly regular rhythm. Fiction has been pretty much eliminated from my reading diet (ten years ago it used to make up the bulk of it).

Who else has a LibraryThing account or similar?

Read: 2 books a year :(

Listen on iPhone through audible.com subscription: 2-3 books a month

Plan to read on iPad once I buy it: Maybe one a month, and denser stuff than what they put on audio.

I have read over 5 books a day. I generally read less than one book a week though, as there are so many other things to consume, e.g. on the Internet.

Tyler Cowen also reads voraciously.

I read up to 3 books a week, averaging around 0.3 due to long periods of avoiding them. The internet and Netflix are much more immediate and require less work.

I read primarily science fiction and fantasy, but I have lots of classical fiction and non-fiction as well, Great Books style.

However, accelerations have one observable impact: they break things.

No. Moving non-rigidly breaks things. Differences in acceleration on different parts of things break things.

Why does a planet coming toward me cause my bones to break, even before I touch it, and there exists a frame in which I'm not undergoing acceleration?

In a gravitational field steep enough to have nonnegligible tides (that is the phenomenon you were referring to, right?), there is no reference frame in which all parts of you remain at rest without tearing you apart. You can define some point in your head to be at rest, but then your feet are accelerating; and vice versa.

It was so filled with wrong I couldn't even bother to finish it, and I usually enjoy crackpots from TED.

Harris has also written a blog post nominally responding to 'many of my [Harris'] critics' of his talk, but it seems to be more of a reply to Sean Carroll's criticism of Harris' talk (going by this tweet and the many references to Carroll in Harris' post). Carroll has also briefly responded to Harris' response.

My reaction was: bad talk, wrong answers, not properly thought through.

He discusses that science can answer factual questions, thus resolving uncertainty in moral dogma defined conditionally on those answers. This is different from figuring out moral questions themselves.

I'm always impressed by Harris's eloquence and clarity of thought.

This is a blog devoted to rationality - it's no wonder it hasn't been linked here.