Open Thread, March. 6 - March 12, 2017

I'm rooting for you!

"Individuals should" is not an architecture.

A great many things become possible conditional on "everyone should so as I say".

How is this different from the karma system?

What do you think is the best example of this kind of principle at work? My first guess would be academia, but I can also think of a dozen reasons why the prestige system in academia is flawed.

My intuition is that there is really no shining example of the prestige economy in the real world - but whether this has to do with the difficulty of implementation, or a flaw with the idea itself, I'm not sure.

I'm not sure that "social status" on an online forum like this is an important currency.

Awesome link, and a fantastic way of thinking about how human institutions/movements/subcultures work in the abstract.

I'm not sure the quote conveys the full force of the argument out of that context though, so I recommend reading the full thing if the quote doesn't ring true with you (or even if it does).

I think a concrete example is good for explaining this concept. Imagine you flip a coin and then put your hand over it before looking. The state of the coin is already fixed on one value. There is no probability or randomness involved in the real world now. The uncertainty of it's value is entirely in your head.

Sure; including probability in the map means admitting that it is a map (or a meta-map as you called it).

I rather like this way of thinking. Clever intuition pump.

What are we actually optimizing the level-two map for, though?

Hmmm, I guess we're optimizing out meta-map to produce accurate maps. It's mental cartography, I guess. I like that name for it.

So, Occam's Razor and formal logic are great tools of philosophical cartographers. Scientists sometimes need a sharper instrument, so they crafted Solomonoff induction and Bayes' theorem.

Formal logic being a special case of Bayesian updating, where only p=0 and p=1 values are allowed. There are third alternatives, though. Instead of binary Boolean logic, where everything most be true or false, it might be useful to use a 3rd value for "undefined". This is three-value logic, or more informally, Logical Positivism. You can add more and more values, and assign them to whatever you like. At the extreme is Fuzzy Logic, where statements can have any truth value between 0 and 1. Apparently there's also something which Bayes is just a special case of, but I can't recall the name.

Of all these possible mental cartography tools though, Bayes seems to be the most versatile. I'm only dimly aware of the ones I mentioned, and probably explained them a little wrong. Anyone care to share thoughts on these, or share others they may know? Has anyone tried to build a complete ontology out of them the way Eliezer did with Bayes? Are there other strong metaphysical theories from philosophy which don't have a formal mathematical corollary (yet)?

I don't think there's anything wrong with having an additional thread like this. But there no need to commit to a weekly schedule from the beginning. Simply open one and then see how it goes.

MVP's.

How about a [stub] tag in the title?

...maybe bi-weekly?

Sorry to hear that, I know a lot of LW-adjacent people were involved.

Is there a postmortem discussion or blog post anywhere?

Below the edit area is a drop down menu where you can select "discussion", you may need 10 karma to post it.

IF acquiring a new belief, THEN try to destroy it immediately.
An example from yesterday: "wow, these TRX suspension trainer look really cool, they would allow me to do better pull-ups", following immediately by "I should read negative reviews of TRX right now."

If organising some event, put it in my diary now. (if people say, "we should catch up")

When I get home I put my laptop on my desk and plug it in.

Phase I clinical trials exist for this purpose. The objective of Phase I trials is to establish safety, dosage, and side-effects of drugs in human subjects, and to observe their proposed mechanism of action if relevant.

It's rare for Phase II and III trials (which have clinically-relevant endpoints ) to be carried out on healthy subjects. Part of this is ethical considerations, but also clinical trials are extremely expensive to carry out, and there's not much payoff in learning whether your drug has some specific effect on healthy subjects.

Are the personalities of the sub-copies allowed to evolve on their own? If this is true, given enough time there would be very little difference between a society of people following from the same source and a society of individual that were born from different parents, so you would require no special treatment of the subject.

In lieu of coming up with a creative solution to your problem, I will relate how Hannu Rajaniemi solves this problem in the Quantum Thief books, particular for the group called the Sobornost. (Spoilers, obviously.) There are billions (trillions?) of copies of certain individuals, and each copy retains self-copying rights. Each copy knows which agent forked it (who its "copyfather" is), and is programmed to feel "religious awe" and devotion to its specific line of descent. So if you found yourself spawned in this world, you would feel strong awe and obedience for your copyfather, even stronger awe and obedience for your copygrandfather, and ultimate devotion to the "original" digital version of yourself (the "prime"). This policy keeps everyone in line and assists in conflict resolution, because there's always a hierarchy of authority among the copies. This also allows small groups of copies to go off and pursue a tangential agenda with trust that the agenda will be in line with what the prime individual wanted.

I suspect your proposed charter is practically impossible for you to write. If is was possible for one charter document to scale up and down the way you suggest, then we should expect it to already exist and be in use. After all, people have been writing charter documents for a long time.

In the real world, charter don't survive in their original form all that long. To pick an example I am familiar with, the US Constitution was ratified in 1789. Fourteen years later, in 1803, the Supreme Court interpreted the document to allow judicial review of whether statutes complied with the Constitution. You'll have to take my word for it, but whether judicial review was intended by the drafters of the US Constitution is controversial to this day.

It is pretty clear that the drafters would have been surprised by the degree of judicial intrusiveness in implementing policy, just as they would be surprised by how much the US has grown in economic size and political power since the Constitution was drafted.

You mean /r/hpmor?

You mean they weren't sufficiently cultish, so they fixed that?

The other stuff, including the clicking stuff, was thereby deemed history, it wasn't that effective.

What kind of evidence did convince them that the clicking stuff isn't effective? How did the decision process look like?

To be honest this seems exciting and the impact you were speculating of

Nope. My speculation was:

The other stuff, including the clicking stuff, was thereby deemed history, it wasn't that effective.

It was an easy prediction.

if feminists have fewer children, then all the genes that predispose one to being feminist (and to anything else that corrlates) will be selected against

That applies to homosexuality in spades, and yet gay people haven't been washed out of populations.

By the way, keep in mind that "feminist" is not a very precise label. In particular, there is a rather large difference between the first-wave feminists (e.g. Camille Paglia) and third-wave feminists (e.g. Lena Dunham, I guess?). They don't like each other at all.

 threshold_select <- function(fraction_0, heritability, selection_intensity) {
     library(VGAM) ## for 'probit'
     fraction_probit_0 = probit(fraction_0)
     ## threshold for not manifesting trait:
     s_0 = dnorm(fraction_probit_0) / fraction_0
     ## new rate after one selection:
     fraction_1 = pnorm(fraction_probit_0 + heritability * s_0 * selection_intensity)
    return(fraction_1)
 }
 threshold_select(0.95, 0.31, 0.5)
 # [1] 0.9517116257

 fractions <- 0.95
 for (i in 2:100) { fractions[i] <- threshold_select(fractions[(i-1)], 0.31, 0.5); }
 round(fractions, digits=3)
 #  [1] 0.950 0.952 0.953 0.955 0.956 0.958 0.959 0.960 0.961 0.963
 # [11] 0.964 0.965 0.966 0.966 0.967 0.968 0.969 0.970 0.971 0.971
 # [21] 0.972 0.973 0.973 0.974 0.974 0.975 0.975 0.976 0.977 0.977
 # [31] 0.977 0.978 0.978 0.979 0.979 0.980 0.980 0.980 0.981 0.981
 # [41] 0.981 0.982 0.982 0.982 0.983 0.983 0.983 0.983 0.984 0.984
 # [51] 0.984 0.984 0.985 0.985 0.985 0.985 0.986 0.986 0.986 0.986
 # [61] 0.986 0.987 0.987 0.987 0.987 0.987 0.987 0.988 0.988 0.988
 # [71] 0.988 0.988 0.988 0.989 0.989 0.989 0.989 0.989 0.989 0.989
 # [81] 0.989 0.990 0.990 0.990 0.990 0.990 0.990 0.990 0.990 0.990
 # [91] 0.991 0.991 0.991 0.991 0.991 0.991 0.991 0.991 0.991 0.99

I haven't seen any feminists addressing that particular argument (most are concerned with cultural issues rather than genetic ones) but my initial sense is something like this: a successful feminist society would have 1) education and birth control easily available to all women, and 2) a roughly equal division of the burden of child-rearing between men and women. These changes will remove most of the current incentives that seem likely to cause a lower birth rate among feminists than non-feminists. Of course, it could remain true that feminists tend to be more educated, more independent, less traditional, etc--traits that might correlate with reduced desire for children. However, I suspect we already have that issue (for both men and women) entirely separately from feminism. Some highly-educated countries try to increase fertility with tax incentives and ad campaigns (Denmark, for instance) but I'm not sure how successful it is. In the end the only good solution to such Malthusian problems may be genetic engineering.

Speaking of which, can anyone recommend any short, intelligent, rational writings on feminism for instance? My average exposure to anti-feminist thought is fairly intelligent, while my average exposure to pro-feminist thought is "How can anyone disagree with me?[...]"

There are some intelligent and interesting heterodox feminists who spend a lot of their time criticizing mainstream or radical feminist positions. I could recommend them to you, and you would probably like some of what they have to say, but then you wouldn't really be challenging your current notions and wouldn't be getting the strongest defenses of current feminist thought.

I'm not a feminist (or a marxist) but I do remember being impressed by the thoughtfulness and clarity of Friedrich Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State when I read it back in college.

Some hint:

https://protokol2020.wordpress.com/2017/03/07/landaus-problem-continuation/

It kinda is, isn't it?

What if terrorists are just a twist on the run-of-the-mill cult or suicide cult?

Some are. But not all.

Terrorism is basically a method, a tool. People who use that method are quite diverse.

Some societies tried and failed (Sparta or soviet Russia, say), or developed parallel monetary economy. Money being universal is exactly why it exists and is so efficient in coordinating human behavior.

Uhm, do you even know what "fallacy" means?

This is why we need downvotes.

I undertook type training at the beginning of my programming carreer, many many years ago (I used a program I think was called "Type genius"). It took me not much more than three-four weeks (although it's fair to say that I was obsessed with typing back then), and I've reaped the benefits ever since.

I changed schools during the period of time when typing classes are generally taught, this led to me taking two years of typing classes. I could type pretty goddamn fast at the end of this period. That was about twenty years ago. I just tested myself at this site and average about 92 words per minute, which is still pretty fast. I actually feel like ~90 WPM is close to the physical limit at which point you are making most of your errors because your fingers are hitting keys out of order due to the signals being sent milliseconds apart.

I doubt that I really needed two years of training to get good at typing, but on the other hand, there's something to be said for over-learning.

I have not yet; but I believe the trick (via deliberate practice) is to try to do hard things; look ahead to what needs typing next, then do that while reducing errors. also track and get feedback regularly.

there's source out there somewhere

LW.

Example: preoccupation with the Newcomb's problem. You think it's of any use in reality?

Being high-class means that you can afford to spend your time on issues that are impractical. As a result you had throughout history high class people signal the fact that they are high class by spending their time on impractical matters.

I'll mention this site or rationality as a practice in General. Typically, I get what I believe is a cached response most people saw somewhere that follows along something like this, "Rationalists are too high in the clouds to have useful ideas. Logic is impractical."

Applied rationality doesn't have that much to do with using logic. It doesn't violate logic but a lot of what we talk about, is about different heuristics. It might be worthwhile to present the idea of applied rationality differently.

I'm reminded of a tale retold by Plato, about the famous philosopher Thales who was so intent at looking at the star that he fell into a well. This 'meme' is actually as ancient as civilization itself (Thales is indeed pre-Socratic, that is, this anecdote predates the very idea of rationality).