Open Thread: March 2010, part 2

Anybody else think the modern university system is grossly inefficient?

Only if I consider the modern university system (or education institutions in general) to have a primary purpose of conveying knowledge.

Anybody else think the modern university system is grossly inefficient?

Yep. They mainly persist as a way to sort workers: those that can get through, and with a degree in X at university Y, are good enough to be trusted to job Z (even though, as is usually the case, nothing in X actually pertains to Z -- you're just signaling your general qualifications for being taken on to do job Z).

Having the degree is a good proxy for certain skills like intelligence, diligence, etc. Why not test for intelligence directly? Because in the US and most industrialized countries, it's illegal, so they have to test you by proxy -- let the university give you an IQ test as a standard for admission, but not call it that.

Shifting to a system that actually makes sense is going to require overcoming a lot of inertia.

Clearly universities are grossly inefficient at teaching, but as Robin Hanson would say, School isn't about Learning.

The education system in general in most Western countries is grossly inefficient but that is largely because it is not structured in a way that rewards educating efficiently, and that is exactly how most of the participants want it.

Oh, and to add to my earlier comment, another major problem with the system is the difficulty with which you can dismiss employees, which extends through most industrialized countries. This makes it much harder to take a chance on anyone, significantly restricting the set of who has a chance at any job, and thus requiring much more proof in advance.

And what frustrates me the most is that most such regulations/legal environments are called "pro-worker" and the debate on them framed from the assumption that if you want to help workers you must want these laws. No, no, no! These laws make it labor markets much more rigid.

Remember, whatever requirement you force on employers as a surprise, they will soon take into account when looking to hire their next albatross. There's no free lunch! These benefits can only be transient and favor only people lucky enough working at a particular time. As time goes by, you just see more and more roundabout, wasteful ways to get around the restrictions. (Note the analogy to "push the fat guy off the trolley" problems...)

Are you talking about the US? The statistic suggests that you're talking about somewhere specific. I'll assume the US.

You have several claims that are not obviously related. That's not to say that I disagree with any of them, though I probably would disagree with the implicit claims that relate them, if I had to guess what they were. One red flag is the conflation of public and private schools, which have different goals and methods. The 6 year graduation rate is really about public schools, right? But then you invoke selective schools in the last paragraph.

I certainly agree that CBL is useful, and the system as a whole is riddled with inefficiencies and perverse incentives.

However, I think a lot of the problem there is actually a matter of cultural context. Prior to entering college, those undegrads learned that drinking is something fun grownups are allowed to do, whereas listening to the teacher and doing homework are trials to be either grimly endured, or minimized by good behavior in other areas.

College is often a way for 18 year olds to delay social adulthood for 4-6 years. This American Life did a very good episode on the drinking culture at the USA's #1 party school, Penn State, that proves this point beyond a reasonable doubt. Time and time again binge drinking students say that the reason they are doing it and the reason they love Penn State is because this is the only chance in their lives they are going to have to live this lifestyle.

TAL sells the MP3 of the show or it's widely available on torrent sites with a simple Google search.

Do you have a statistic to back up the 6-years figure? The graduation rate appears higher than that to me.

On an unrelated note, sorry I've been and will continue to be too busy/akratic to do anything more than reply to a couple of my PMs recently.

Good to hear from you!

If I am around I'll come. CipherGoth will probably be interested too.

The results of that study seem to be a bit more complicated in that they suggest that part of the cause of the distinction is that there's a common belief in the population that is very close to witchcraft (where intending harm or desiring can cause harm) and thus intent matters as much as action and there's isn't a clear dividing line between the two.

A rather ironic take on Hauser's Trolley Problem.

These "act" trolley problems have the same difficulty as the original.

It's so implausible that the only way to stop a runaway truck/trolley would be to make it run over a person, that one doesn't know if one's intuition is reacting against the sheer implausibility or the moral dimension.

IMO, telling the subject that "pushing the fat man is the only way" is not helpful. We can't imagine ourselves in that epistemic position.

The best "fat man" scenario is the Unwilling Transplant Donor, but sadly it does not have a good omission counterpart.

You want to do user-facing stuff? Then don't bother with desktop programming, write webapps. HTML and JavaScript are much easier than C++. You don't even have to learn the server side at first, a lot of useful stuff can be written as a standalone html file with no server support. For example you could make your own draggable interface to the free map tiles from http://openstreetmap.org - basically it's all just cleverly positioned image elements named like this, within a rectangular element that responds to mouse events. Or, if a little server-side coding doesn't scare you, you could make a realtime chat webpage. Stuff like that.

If you need any help at all, my email is vladimir.slepnev at gmail and I'm often online in gtalk.

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
    UP VAR!!1
    IZ VAR LEFTOVER 15 LIEK 0?
    YARLY VISIBLE "FizzBuzz"
    NOWAI IZ VAR LEFTOVER 3 LIEK 0?
    YARLY VISIBLE "Fizz"
    NOWAI IZ VAR LEFTOVER 5 LIEK 0?
    YARLY VISIBLE "Buzz"
    NOWAI VISIBLE VAR
    KTHX
    IZ VAR NOT SMALR THAN 100? KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE

output "FizzBuz"

output "Fizz"

output "Buzz"

output var

return

main = putStr . unlines $ fizzbuzz 100
fizzbuzz m = map f [1..m] where
        f n | n `mod` 15 == 0 = "FizzBuzz"
        f n | n `mod` 3 == 0 = "Fizz"
        f n | n `mod` 5 == 0 = "Buzz"
        f n = show n

until(m/j{100}/){s/(j*)$/\1\n\1j/};
s/^(j{15})*$/fizzbuzz/gm;
s/^(j{3})*$/fizz/gm;
s/^(j{5})*$/buzz/gm;
s/^(j+)$/length($1)/gme;
print;

for i in range(1, 101):
    if i % 15 == 0:  print 'fizzbuzz'
    elif i % 3 == 0: print 'fizz'
    elif i % 5 == 0: print 'buzz'
    else:            print i

% FizzBuzz - print all numbers from 1 to 100, replacing multiples of 3 with
% "fizz", multiples of 5 with "buzz", and multiples of 3 and 5 with
% "fizzbuzz".

clear
clc

for i = 1:100
    fb = '';
    if length(find(factor(i)==3)) > 0
        fb = [fb 'fizz'];
    end
    if length(find(factor(i)==5)) > 0
        fb = [fb 'buzz'];
    end
    if length(fb) > 0
        fprintf([fb '\n'])
    else
        fprintf('%5.0f\n', i)
    end
end

But strangely, whenever I compile them myself and get them to run, it just runs on the command screen blindingly fast and then closes, as if I'm missing some important step.

If you're doing them in Windows, open the command prompt using "cmd" and run them from the command line. They'll run in the CMD window, which will stay open after the program finishes doing whatever it does, leaving the output visible.

So, an specific suggestions on where I should go from here?

Find a specific programming problem you need (want) to solve. That, for me at least, makes the task of learning almost automatic.

I (also) recommend Ruby+Rails for practical purposes. If you want to learn how to program, for example, 3D games then I have no particular recommendations. I only got as far as 2D bitbliting on that path! ;)

Try Python+Django, Ruby+Rails, or PHP+CakePHP depending on your preference, but the pragmatic difference is much smaller than language zealots pretend. If you plan on making something with millions of users, PHP is faster than Python or Ruby.

Graphic programming is harder than using generated HTML for your GUI, and there seem to be a lot more real world applications with a web GUI than anything that uses local OS graphics.

but it turned out to require very circuitous routes to do simple things.

Unfortunately this about sums up the current state of 'real world' programming.

It is helpful to have a concrete goal to work towards rather than merely coding for the sake of learning. Learning 'on the job' is helpful in this regard as there is usually a somewhat defined set of requirements and there is added motivation and supervision that comes with being paid to write code.

If you are trying to learn on your own I'd suggest trying to set yourself the task of writing a simple program to do something fairly clearly defined and then work towards that. Simply reading through open source code (or any third party code) is not something I've found terribly helpful as a learning exercise. More useful is to set yourself the task of fixing a specific bug or adding a specific feature as this will help direct your investigation.

Learning how to use the debugging tools available to you is also important. Understanding how software is put together can be greatly aided by stepping through code in a good debugger.

C# is pretty good for 'real world'/GUI development. Personally I think it is the best option overall at the moment for that kind of programming but you will find language choice is a bit of a religious war issue.

If you want to write UIs, Lisp and friends would probably not be the first choice, but since you mentioned it...

For Lisp, you can of course install Emacs, which (apart from being an editor) is a pretty convenient way to play around with Lisp. Emacs-Lisp may not be a start of the art Lisp implementation, but it is certainly good enough to get started. And because of the full integration with the editor, there is instant-gratification when you can use some Lisp to glue to existing things together into something useful. Emacs is available for just about any self-respecting computer system.

You can also try Scheme (a Lisp dialect); there is the excellent freely available Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which uses Scheme as the vehicle to explain many programming concepts. Guile is nice, free-software implementation.

When you're really into a more mathematical approach, Haskell is pretty nice. For UI stuff, I find it rather painful though (same is true for Lisp and to some extent, Scheme).

To better explain where I am, here is what I have tried so far: I've downloaded a lot of simple open source programs that have a lot of source files. But strangely, whenever I compile them myself and get them to run, it just runs on the command screen blindingly fast and then closes, as if I'm missing some important step. (How are you normally expected to compile open-source programs?)

Most open-source programs are made to be easy to compile on Unix platforms. If you're using OS X or Linux, great; if you're on Windows, download Cygwin and you'll have a Unix environment. Given all that, read the INSTALL file; it should give you step-by-step instructions for compiling and installing. Most commonly, you run ./configure, then make, then (as root) make install.

That said, platforms with package managers are really nice because you can download, build, and install many programs in a single step; Debian has APT, OS X has MacPorts and Fink, and Haskell (a programming language, not an operating system) has the Cabal.

In general, if running something causes a terminal to open and immediately close, try running it on a command line instead of double-clicking it. For Windows, open Command Prompt, drag the executable onto the terminal window, and hit enter.

Got Skype, microphone, etc?

What category of app are you looking to write, narrowing down the class "app with a GUI" a little?

How are you normally expected to compile open-source programs?

Can you name a specific example of one you've tried to compile and run, and you've been confused at the result?

One general hint is that a good way to learn how to code up significant programs from scratch is to, first, get a significant program that works and modify or extend it in some way.

Also, be aware that there are several competing design philosophies when it comes to writing GUI programs, with very different outcomes in terms of maintainability and adherence to sound design principles. The "Visual" approach exemplified by the Microsoft line of tools leaves much to be desired in my experience, leading to spaghetti code too easily.

I prefer approaches in which graphical components are created programmatically, and where design principles such as MVC then serve to further structure the resulting code and drive the design toward high levels of abstraction. The various Smalltalk environments are a good illustration of that philosophy.

Well, if you want to play with a lisp, maybe consider PLT-Scheme?. That one has a really nice environment, etc etc... (it's a Scheme rather than a Common Lisp, though.)

I've found wxPython a relatively pleasant way to write GUI programs.

When I expressed problems that I have with my life, I experienced that this community is not very well versed in the emotional aspect of the situation. At least, that is how I felt (heh) when they swarmed and attacked in an effort to other-optimize. I'm sure they wanted to help, but it was a very direct, blunt experience, with little regard for the difficulties inherent in the situation, or the knowledge I already possessed.

"Get therapy" is a solution, but one that I've known about for a very long time. Alicorn's post on problems vs. tasks comes to mind. It felt almost tautological: "You're depressed? You should take an action which cures depression." At least, until it ended with me telling people to please stop, and getting called sad, pitiful, and a jerk.

To take a stab at what I know of that topic:

• offer help, but don't inflict help that isn't requested
• verify that the helpee is "serious" about using your help: help can't be for free
• an intervention is also a a test of a hypothesis: update on the results
• as a corollary, effective help requires forming a theory or model of the situation
• the best way to get entangled with the situation is to listen to the "helpee"
• listening requires an open mind (i.e. often changing your mind)
• the helpee's situation is a system, with many entangled components, which can include other people
• your help and intentions in helping can become part of that system, for good or ill
• your help, intentions, approach and results should always be a legitimate topic of discussion with the helpee
• you should always be clear about why you're helping
• because of that, it's often a good idea to have someone in turn helping you help others

That's from my general approach to consulting, i.e. helping people, or more precisely "influencing people at their request". It's not specific to grief or depression counseling, and thus should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt.

Both idea sound good. Any analysis and commentary or recommendations would be useful for people, I'm sure.

This list is a therapy already for the majority of its readers, commentators and posters.

You should be at least as pleased as you would be to discover that someone else was happy during that period.

If you are a utilitarian, I think you should be pleased.

Imagine you happened to find out that a person on the other side of the world, whose life has never and will never affect yours in any way, is happy right now. You'd be pleased about that, right? Now imagine you knew instead that that person was happy last week. Since this affects you not at all, there's no real difference between these: you're just pleased about the fact of someone's happiness at some point in time.

If you buy my argument up to this point, then you may as well be pleased if that mystery person from the past was actually your own past self. And that's not even to mention Kevin's argument which does take into account the ways in which your past self influences your future self.

Here is one possible reason for being pleased to discover that one was unhappy in the past:

Times of apparent unhappiness can lead to great personal growth. For instance, the hardest, most stressful time of my life was studying for my physics honors exams. However, now that the exams are over, I am glad to have both the knowledge I gained in studying, and the self knowledge that I am capable of pushing myself as hard as I did. (Would skills learned during the missing time be retained? Even if they weren't, the latter reason above would still apply).

It would be devastating to lose the memory of any part of ones life, but I think there would be some satisfaction in learning that one had spent the missing time doing something difficult but worthwhile, even if one was not happy during that time.

It sounds as though you now have some information about those past events. Hopefully, it is a sign that your goals were being met during that period. Also, if you managed to learn that, maybe you will also learn something more useful about the period. So: I would say it is normally a good sign.

I vote "pleased", for the rather weak reason that this makes my preferences time-symmetric*.

* Edit: This is poorly-worded - what I was referring to was time shift symmetry.

Or is it that past experiences are valuable only through the pleasure their memories give us in the present?

This seems very unlikely. If the experience of remembering pleasurable events is valuable in itself, why can't other experiences be valuable in themselves?

Yeah why not. It is better to be pleased than not, all else being equal.

That past experience is valuable in the sense that it did not damage your psyche in the way that a traumatic experience could have.

Vote this up if you are the oldest child with siblings.

Vote this up if you have older siblings.

Vote this up if you are an only child.

I'm pretty sure that in the general population, there are at least as many people with older siblings as there are people with only younger siblings. But in this poll, it's 6 vs 19. That looks like a humongous effect (which we also found in SIAI-associated people, and which this poll was intended to further check). I could see some sort of self-selection bias and the like, and supposedly oldest children have slightly higher IQs on average, but on the whole I'm stumped for an explanation. Anyone?

ETA: Here's a claim that "it is consistently found that being first-born is particularly favourable to high levels of scientific creativity". See also this.

Vote this down for karma balance.

I'm still with Jack that pointing new readers to the entirety of the sequences is non-optimal. I'm waiting for the day when we can at least say "Start here (link) and keep clicking Next, and skim as much as you like", but you probably don't want to wait that long to send the post, so I don't know.

It doesn't look bad to me - if you believe it would be well-received, I see no problem with sending it.

Looks fine to me.

I was about to post this here. If they actually verified that the resonator was in superposition, if they actually got interference effects out of it, well, that's it then, collapse isn't just dead, it's, well... I need a word for "dead" that's more emphatic than "dead".

It's... ahem... collapsed. :P

(at least such is my thought.)

I think it's an aesthetically appealing way of looking at what's going on, but that it doesn't help with understanding what's going on (or what to do with it) in any way.

Has anyone seen a better explanation?

Yes, that the original papers advocating the placebo effect were misleading in their reports and the popularisations thereof grossly exageratted.

Placeobo's can be shown to reliably have an effect on:

• Experience of symptoms.
• Even more so on reports of symptoms (that is, the presence of an expectant experimentor messes with people's heads big time.)
• Psychological state.
• Things that are significantly influenced by psychological state. The main two actual physical conditions that I can recall being genuinely altered by placebo (as opposed from being perceived to be altered) are ulcers and herpes virus (cold sores). Basically, two conditions that you more or less get from being stressed.

(I am not criticising the use of placebo controls here. But I am asserting that the primary benefit from such controls is in 'balancing out' other biases rather than because of direct effect of placebos on healing.)

A self-administered placebo might still be effective for evolutionary reasons. It would signal that a reduced activity level is related to tending your injuries, rather than, say, waiting in ambush or 'freezing' to avoid notice by motion-sensitive predators, so it's safe to divert resources toward repair or antibody production at the expense of sensory and muscular readiness.

Same reason people have a hard time getting to sleep in unfamiliar circumstances, but focusing on a token reminder of home dispels the feeling.

People are very much affected by what they imagine is going on. For the unbendable arm you don't tell people to extend their arm effiiciently, you have them imagine the arm extending out to infinity, or imagine the arm as a firehose.

I'm not sure why any of this works-- it may have something to do with activating one's own mirror neurons, but I do think the placebo effect should be viewed as a special case rather than a thing in itself.

More -- much more! -- discussion of the article by statisticians here.

This is the best introduction to the subject I've seen yet. I highly recommend it to the mathphobic.

Yes to 1, 2, 3, 5, 6. Undecided on 4.

I've been wondering about 7 for some time now. I'm against the death penalty, but given that some countries have it, it seems so obvious that people who are now being executed should be preserved instead. The probablity of a wrongful conviction being non-trivial, $30K seems like a paltry sum to invest in the possibility, however slight, of later reviving someone who was wrongfully executed. I have looked at the figures for the cost to society of the legal process leading to execution, and it is shockingly high. People on death row should at least have the option, given how much is otherwise spent on them.

My answers:

1. Yes and yes.
   I know what this is like because my grandmother spent the last years of her life with Alzheimer's, in a nursing home. When she finally died, my mom didn't cry; she explained to me that she had already done her mourning years ago. It made sense, insofar as it can ever make sense to "get over" the annihilation of a loved one: my grandmother, the person, had already effectively died long before her body did. None of us knew about cryonics at the time, and we likely wouldn't have done it even if we had known about it, but I know that people are in this situation all the time, and as awareness and acceptance of cryonics grows, people should definitely have this option.

2. I'm inclined to say that it should be discouraged but legal as an individual choice. A person could already achieve a similar (though riskier) effect by calling an ambulance, making sure their bracelet and necklace are prominently visible, and killing themselves in a relatively non-destructive way.

3. Yes. I don't know much about the pros and cons of neuro/whole-body other than the cost, but I think I'd go with the latter, to err on the side of caution.

4. Yes. I'd say it should be opt-out, or opt-in if that is absolutely necessary for getting the law passed.

5. Yes. The laws should treat it like an instance of killing someone in a coma, which are presumably the same as the laws for killing someone in general. Of course it should vary depending on whether it is accidental, negligent, or intentional.

6. I'm not quite sure. I'd think that if you cause someone's bodily death, and they are able to be preserved perfectly, then it should be treated as a non-fatal assault or accident or whatever, but something doesn't seem right about that. I think, rather than having the laws against causing someone's bodily-but-not-information-theoretic death less severe, I'd prefer to have laws against causing someone's information-theoretic death more severe.

7. I'd prefer to abolish the death penalty altogether. If the compromise I gave as an example were politically feasible, I would support it, but I doubt it would garner much more support than abolishing the death penalty; it seems like too many people in the US view the criminal justice system as a tool of punishment/revenge rather than of rehabilitation.

8. When it seems like a relatively mainstream thing to do (not necessarily common, but common enough that your friends don't think you're crazy for opting in to it) — when society has outgrown its rationalizations of death and its resistance to immortality (religious objections; the idea that there is some spiritual essence that will be destroyed; the luddite/"science has gone too far!" response; the idea that having people die against their will is a morally permissible means of avoiding overpopulation; et cetera) — then can we start questioning the mental health of people who still object to it.

I love how some xkcds aren't even comics or particularly funny, just hand drawn Less Wrong posts.

If it had been me in that situation, I might have reacted pretty much as you did, because I have a heuristic to leave other people's kids alone when the parents are around. Nothing riles me quite like seeing someone else interact with my child in a bossy way, and I have noticed that others often react the same.

Near a school I would expect adults (including in cars) to be more on the lookout for kids running around and so my awareness of danger would be lowered relative to my awareness of etiquette and the rule to look after my own kids.

There have been several times in the past year where I just want to kick myself for not doing the right thing at the right time. Is this a form of akrasia?

No, the term akrasia should be reserved for when you have already computed what you want to do, and fail to carry through with the want.

What you describe seems more like a matter of doing the best with limited computing resources. Making what in retrospect appears to be the wrong decision should, if it has not had dire consequences, be good news: you get to adjust the internal "weights" you assign to the relevant rules, and so prepare yourself for right decisions in future.

Don't beat yourself up for not "thinking faster", simply reflect on your repertoire of relevant actions in similar contexts, perhaps try to expand it. For instance you may want to practice with shouting "stop" so that it works. ;)

It appears to me that you simply ran into a situation for which you were not prepared. If there are general rules you can implement that will work, that is good, but the only cure I can think of is anticipating and considering in advance many possible scenarios.

Let Every Breath, Systema, and Rmax International are related systems based on the idea of learning to maintain mental focus under stress.

I haven't worked with them myself, but the approach seems safe and plausible, and probably at least worth investigating.

Formal abstract, consisting of one or a few paragraphs, indented.

Karma balance.

Précis, consisting of one or two sentences, italics.

Karma balance.

"tl;dr" summary, indicated by "tl;dr" abbreviation.

Karma balance.

No summary.

Karma balance.

If I think style choices are best left up to the poster I should vote for all the options?

I read an argument to that effect on the Internet, but I don't have any strong feelings - maybe if I were writing a philosophical conlang I would make the change, but not normally. You may as well argue for base four arithmetic.

e^(pi*i) = -1

Anything else: lame.

No. This is nowhere near like the metric vs. english units debate. (If you want to talk about changing units, you should put your weight on that boat instead, as it's much more of a serious issue.) Pi is already well defined, anyways. It's defined according to its historical contextual meaning, regarding diameter, for which the factor of 2 does not appear.

http://www.math.utah.edu/~palais/pi.pdf

One can dream. :) Pi relates to diameter; it'd be much nicer if it related to radius directly instead.

Personally, I want to replace the kg in the mks system with a new symbol and name: I want to go back to calling it the "grave" (as it was called at one time in France), having the symbol capital gamma. Then we wouldn't have the annoying fact of a prefixed unit as a basic unit of the system.

Definitely. 2pi appears so much more often than pi.

Meh. 2 Pi shows up a lot, but so does Pi, and so does Pi/2. I think I'd rather cut it in half, actually, as fractions are more painful than integer multiples.

But from that he tacitly draw the conclusion (it seemed to me at last after a single view of the dialogue) that also [general] intelligence is depending on that assumption.

No, Pigliucci agrees that it might be possible to get an intelligence (e.g., that passes the Turing test) through the computer system. He just does not think that you can call it a human intelligence.

He thinks the concept of "mind uploading" is silly because the human mind (and intelligence) is therefore fundamentally different from this computer mind. He also argues that the human mind is inseparable from the biological construction. I have to admit I am not surprised that this argument is coming from a biologist. To a physicist or an engineer, almost all problems and constructs are computational, and it's just a matter of figuring out the proper model. As a biologist, it is more difficult to see how living entities follow similar sorts of fundamental rules. In objecting to the computational theory of mind, Pigliucci objects to the computational theory of reality, and in essence, he contradicts himself. He reveals himself to be a dualist. I think he is confusing the mathematical or logical abstraction of a system (not dualistic) with the physical or material abstraction (dualistic).

Good link. Question: In one part of the discussion, Pigliucci mentions that we know how chess players seem to think (and it's not at all like chess playing computer programs.) Does anyone have any good references about how chess players think?

Re: "Already we have computer programs which can re-write existing to programs to run faster. These programs can also re-write themselves to run faster. However, they cannot rewrite themselves to become better at re-writing themselves faster."

You mean that they can't do that alone? Refactoring programs help speed up their own development, and make it easier and faster to make improvements in a set of programs that often includes their own source code.

It's not total automation - but partial automation is still very significant progress.

It looks correct to me, but I'm not an experienced judge of such things.

If you work on AGI and you make actual progress, then you have a moral obligation to keep it away from people who can't be trusted with it. You cannot satisfy this obligation while working for a military or a military contractor.

I'm not an expert, but I don't think there is much more overlap with FAI than other domain AI projects have. The problems for military robots probably are more of the machine vision kind than of the meta-ethics kind.

Am I the only one to think that no, creating military robots isn't a "good career path" towards friendly AI, because creating military robots is inherently unfriendly to humanity? Especially if you live in the US and know that your robots will be used in aggressive wars against poorer countries. It's some kind of crazy ethical blindness that most Americans seem to have for some reason, where "our guys" are human beings, but arbitrarily chosen foreigners deserve whatever they get... Just like this incident I saw on HN when one guy asked about career prospects working for the occupation force in Iraq, and another answered that it'll be an "amazing and unique experience". You'll note my reply there was much more concise.

The difference between specialized FAI and general FAI is like the difference between adaptation executors and fitness maximizers. It's a big difference.

Sounds like a good idea, but here are my reservations/warnings:

1) For the kind of work you describe, you would probably need a high-level security clearance and continued scrutiny on your life (to make sure you don't share it with the wrong people), and you probably wouldn't be able to publicly discuss your work. (i.e., where SIAI can hear it.)

2) What are your chances you'll actually get to work on the aspect of the problem that relates to Friendliness?

No. FAI is about figuring out how to implement precise preference, not an approximation of it appropriate for non-magical environments. Requires completely different tools.

It seems that to work on FAI, one has to become mathematician and theoretical computer scientist (whatever the actual career).

I have very little in the way of morality, but I personally draw the line at supporting the military industrial complex. I don't think helping the military make robots that make kill decisions themselves has much to do with provable mathematical Friendliness.

I'd say yes, go for it. The value would be in gaining experience in designing AI systems that have to work in the real world -- a very different proposition from systems that only have to work in the laboratory or in the imagination.

Cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology are far more relevant. A Friendly AI is a moral agent; it's more like a judge than a cruise missile. A killer robot must inflict harm appropriately but it does not need to know what "harm" is; that's for politicians, generals, and other strategists.

We have to extract the part of the human cognitive algorithm which, on reflection, encodes the essence of rational and moral judgment and action. That's the sort of achievement which FAI will require.

The problems involved in creating ethical military robots are vastly different from those involved in general AI. Ron Arkin's Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots does a good job of describing how one should think when building such a thing. Basically, there are rules for war, and the trick is to just implement those in the robot, and there's very little judgement left over. To hear him explain it, it doesn't even sound like a very hard problem.

This is a good question, I would appreciate more discussion of it on LW. I am wondering about similar issues: my research involves computer vision, the most obvious applications of which are for surveillance and security. One does not need to be a science fiction author or devotee to imagine powerful computer vision tools or military robots being used for evil.

Actually this may be a better link.

Part of the problem is that 3rd person representations have extensional semantics. If Mary Doe represents her knowledge about herself internally as a set of propositions about Mary Doe, and then meets someone else named Mary Doe, or marries John Deer and changes her name, confusion results.

A more severe problem becomes apparent when you represent beliefs about beliefs. If you ask, "What would agent X do in this situation?", and you represent agent X's beliefs using a 3rd-person representation, you have a lot of trouble keeping straight what you know about who is who, and what agent X knows about who is who. If you just put a tag on something at call it Herbert, you don't know if that means that you think the entity represented is the same entity named Herbert somewhere else, or that agent X thinks that (or thought that).

An even more severe problem becomes apparent when you try to build robots. Agre & Chapman's paper on Pengi is a key paper in the behavior-based robotics movement of the 1990s. If you want to use 3rd-person representations, you need to give your robot a whole lot of knowledge and do a whole lot of calculation just to get it to, say, dodge a rock aimed at its head. Using deictic representations makes it much simpler.

We could perhaps summarize the problem by saying that, when you use a 3rd-person representation, every time you use that representation you need to invoke or at least trust a vast and complicated system for establishing a link between the functional thing being represented, and an identity in some giant lookup table of names. Whereas often you don't care about all that, and it's nothing but an opportunity to introduce error into the system.

To make sure I'm interpreting this correctly: the calibration data is a list of pairs of genes, along with their %id, and %len, and tagged by either "same function" or "different function"? And currently, these are binned, and the probabilities estimated from the statistics known in that bin?

You want to change this, in particular, reduce the number of bins. Before we get to "how", may I ask why you want to do this? It doesn't seem as if it would reduce the computational cost. It would up the number of samples and possibly get a better discrimination, but at the same time it spreads the gene pairs being compared against over larger regions of parameter space, meaning your inference is now based more on genes that should have less relevance to your case...