Stupid Questions December 2014

I'm succumbing to confirmation bias and this isn't a real pattern

No, this is definitely a real pattern. YouTube switched from a 5-star rating system to a like/dislike system when they noticed, and videogames are notorious for rank inflation.

Partial explanation: we interpret these scales as going from worst possible to best possible, and

• games that get as far as being on sale and getting reviews are usually at least pretty good because otherwise there'd be no point selling them and no point reviewing them
• people entering competitions are usually at least pretty good because otherwise they wouldn't be there
• a typical day is actually quite a bit closer to best possible than worst possible, because there are so many at-least-kinda-plausible ways for it to go badly

One reason why this is only a partial explanation is that "possible" obviously really means something like "at least semi-plausible" and what's at least semi-plausible depends on context and whim. But, e.g., suppose we take it to mean something like: take past history, discard outliers at both ends, and expand the range slightly. Then I bet what you find is that

• most games that go on sale and attract enough attention to get reviewed are broadly of comparable quality
  • but a non-negligible fraction are quite a lot worse because of some serious failing in design or management or something
• most performances in competitions at a given level are broadly of comparable quality
  • but a non-negligible fraction are quite a lot worse because the competitor made a mistake of some kind
• most of a given person's days are roughly equally satisfactory
  • but a non-negligible fraction are quite a lot worse because of illness, work stress, argument with a family member, etc.

so that in order for a scale to be able to cover (say) 99% of cases it needs to extend quite a bit further downward than upward relative to the median case.

RottenTomatoes has much broader ratings. The current box office hits range from 7% to 94%. This is because they aggregate binary "positive" and "negative" reviews. As jaime2000 notes, Youtube has switched to a similar rating system and it seems to keep things very sensitive.

People are thinking in terms of grades, where 75% is a C. People think most things are not worse than a C grade (or maybe this is just another example of the pattern I'm seeing)

I don't think it's this. Belgium doesn't use letter-grading and still succumbs to the problem you mentioned in areas outside the classroom.

You may find the work of the authors of http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2369332 interesting.

People are thinking in terms of grades

That's not an explanation, just a symptom of the problem. People of mediocre talent and high talent both get A - that's part of the reason why we have to use standardized tests with a higher ceiling.

My intuition is that the top few notches are satisficing, whereas all lower ratings are varying degrees of non-satisficing. The degree to which everything tends to cluster at the top represents the degree to which everything is satisfactory for practical purposes. In situations where the majority of the rated things are not satisfactory (like the Putnam - nothing less than a correct proof is truly satisfactory), the ratings will cluster near the bottom.

For example, compare motels to hotels. Motels always have fewer stars, because motels in general are worse. Whereas, say, video games will tend to cluster at the top because video games in general are satisfactorily fun.

Or, think Humanities vs. Engineering grades. Humanities students in general satisfy the requirements to be historians and writers or liberal-arts-educated-white-collar workers more than Engineering students satisfy the requirements to be engineers.

I've noticed the same thing. Part of it might be that reviewers are reluctant to alienate fans of [thing being reviewed]. Another explanation is that they are intuitively norming against a wider degree of things than they actually review. For example, I was buying a smartphone recently, and a lot of lower-end devices I was considering had few reviews, but famous high-end brands (like iPhone Galaxy S, etc.) are reviewed by pretty much everyone.

Playing devil's advocate, it might be that there are more perceivable degrees of badness/more ways to fail than there are of goodness, so we need a wider range of numbers to describe and fairly rank the failures.

Well here is an article by Megan McArdle that talking about how insider-outsider dynamics can lead to this kind of rank inflation.

Math competitions often have the opposite problem. The Putnam competition, for example, often has a median score of 0 or 1 out of 120.

I'm not sure this is a good thing. Participating in a math competition and getting 0 points is pretty discouraging, in a field where self-esteem is already an issue.

In medicine we try to make people rate their symptoms, like pain, from one to ten. It's pretty much never under 5. Of course there's a selection effect and people don't like to look like whiners but I'm not convinced these fully explain the situation.

In Finland the lowest grade you can get from primary education to high school is 4 so that probably affects the situation too.

This is exactly why in my family we use +2/-2. 0 really does feel like average in a way 5-6/10 or 3/5 doesn't.

I tried to change out the 10 rating for a z-score rating in my own conversations. It failed due to my social circles not being familiar with the normal bell curve.

I think it's the C thing. I have no evidence for this.

According to http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0503520 we would need to be able to boost our current orbital radius to about 7 AU.

This would correspond to a change in specific orbital energy of 132712440018/(2(1 AU)) to 132712440018 / (2(7 AU)). (where the 12-digit constant is the standard gravitational parameter of the sun. This is like 5.6 10^10 in Joules / Kilogram, or about 3.4 10^34 Joules when we restore the reduced mass of the earth/sun (which I'm approximating as just the mass of the earth).

Wolframalpha helpfully supplies that this is 28 times the total energy released by the sun in 1 year.

Or, if you like, it's equivalent to the total mass energy of ~3.7 * 10^18 Kilograms of matter (about 1.5% the mass of the asteroid Vespa).

So until we're able to harness and control energy on the order of magnitude of the total energetic output of the sun for multiple years, we won't be able to do this any time soon.

There might be an exceedingly clever way to do this by playing with orbits of nearby asteroids to perturb the orbit of the earth over long timescales, but the change in energy we're talking about here is pretty huge.

Ignoring the concept of "can we apply that much delta-V to a planet?", I'd be interested to know whether it's believed that there exists a "Goldilocks zone" suitable for life at all stages of a star's life. Intuitively it seems like there should be, I'm not sure.

Of course, it should be pointed out that the common understanding of "when the sun becomes a red giant" may be a bit flawed; the sun will cool and expand, then collapse. On a human time scale, it will spend a lot of that time as a red giant, but if you simply took the Earth when its orbit started to be crowded by the inner edge of the Goldilocks zone and put it in a new orbit, that new orbit wouldn't be anywhere close to an eternally safe one. Indeed, I suspect that the outermost of the orbits required for the giant-stage sun would be too far from the sun at the time we'd first need to move the Earth.

The sun's luminosity will rise by around 300X as it turns into a giant. If we wish to keep the same energy flux onto the earth at that point, we must increase the earth's orbit a factor of sqrt(300) = 17X. The total energy of the earth's current orbit is 2.65E33 J. We must reduce this to 1/17 of its current value. or reduce it by (16/17)*2.65E33 J = 2.5E33 J. The current total annual energy production in the world is about 5E17 J. The sun will be a red giant in about 7.6E9 years. So we would need about a million times current global energy production running full time into rocket motors to push the earth out to a safe orbit by the time the sun has expanded.

But it is worse than that. The Sun actually expands over a scant 5 million years near the end of that 7.6E9 years. So to avoid freezing for billions of years because we have started moving away from the sun too soon, we essentially will need a billion times current energy production running into rocket engines for those 5 million years of solar expansion. But the good news is we have 7.6E9 billion years to figure out how to do that.

If we use plasma rockets which push reaction mass out at 1% the speed of light, then we will need a total of about 6E16 kg reaction mass, or about 0.000001% of the earth's total mass. The total mass of water on the earth is about 1E21 kg so we could do all of this using water as reaction mass and still have 99.99% of the water left when we are done.

I'm curious about the thought process that led to this being asked in the "stupid questions" thread rather than the "very advanced theoretical speculation of future technology" thread. =P

As a more serious answer: Anything that would effectively give us a means to alter mass and/or the effects of gravity in some way (if there turns out to be a difference) would help a lot.

Not "when the sun becomes a red giant", because red giants are variable on a much too short time scale, but, as others mentioned, we can probably keep the earth in a habitable zone for another 5 billion years or so. We have more than enough hydrogen on earth to provide the necessary potential energy increase with fusion-based propulsion, though building something like a 100 petaWatt engine is problematic at this point, (for comparison, it is a significant fraction of the total solar radiation hitting the earth).

EDIT: I suspect that terraforming Mars (and/or cooling down the Earth more efficiently when the Sun gets brighter) would require less energy than moving the Earth to the Mars orbit. My calculations could be off, though, hopefully someone can do them independently.

Yes, I saw an article a few years ago a back of the envelope estimate that suggested this would be doable if one could turn mass on the moon more or less directly to energy and use the moon as a gravitational tug to slowly move Earth out of the way. You can change mass almost directly into energy by feeding the mass into a few smallish blackholes.

I don't really know if it's plausible, but Larry Niven's far-future fiction A World Out of Time (the novel, not the original short story of the same name) deals with exactly this problem.

His solution is a "fusion candle": build a huge double-ended fusion tube, put it in the atmosphere of a gas giant, and light it up. The thrust downwards keeps the tube floating in the atmosphere. The thrust upwards provides an engine to push the gas giant around. In the book, they pushed Uranus to Earth, and then moved it outwards again, gravitationally pulling the Earth along.

This is a fascinating question. Very speculatively, I could imagine somehow using energy gained by pushing other objects closer to the Sun, to move the Earth away from the Sun. Like some sort of immense elastic band stretching between Mars and Earth, pulling Earth "up" and Mars "down".

We could really use a new Aral sea, but intuitively I'd expected that this would be a tiny dent in the depth of the oceans. So, to the maths:

Wikipedia claims that from 1960 to 1998 the volume of the Aral sea dropped from its 1960 amount of 1,100 km^3 by 80%.

I'm going to give that another 5% for more loss since then, as the South Aral Sea has now lost its eastern half enitrely.

This gives ~1100 * .85 = 935km^3 of water that we're looking to replace.

The Earth is ~500m km^2 in surface area, approx. 70% of which is water = 350m km^2 in water.

935 km^3 over an area of 350m km^2 comes to a depth of 2.6 mm.

This is massively larger that I would have predicted, and it gets better. The current salinity of the Aral Sea is 100g/l which is way higher than that of seawater at 35g/l, so we could pretty much pump the water straight in still with net environmental gain. Infact this is a solution to the crisis that has been previously proposed, although it looks like most people would rather dilute the seawater first.

To acheive the desired result of 1 inch drop in sea level, we only need to find 9 equivalent projects around the world. Sadly, the only other one I know of is Lake Chad, which is significantly smaller than the Aral Sea. However, since the loss of the Aral Sea is due to over-intensive use of the water for farming, the gives us an idea of how much water can be contained onland in plants: I would expect that we might be able to get this amount again if we undertook a desalination/irrigation program in the Sahara.

I recommend googling "geoengineering global warming" and reading some of the top hits. There are numerous proposals for reducing or reversing global warming which are astoundingly less expensive than reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and also much more likely to be effective.

To your direct question about storing more water on land, this would be a geoengineering project. Some straightforward approaches to doing it:

Use rainfall as your "pump" in order to save having to build massive energy using water pumps. Without any effort on our part, nature natually lifts water a km or more above sea level and then drops it, much of it dropped onto land. That water generally is funneled back to the ocean in rivers. With just the constructino of walls, some rivers might be prevented from draining into the ocean. Large areas would be flooded by the river, storing water other than in the ocean.

Use gravity as your pump. THere are many large locations on earth than are below sea level. Aquifers that took no net energy to do pumping could be built that would essentially gravity-feed ocean water into these areas. These areas can be hundreds of meters below sea level, so if even 1% of the earth's surface is 100 m below sea level, then the ocean's could be lowered by a bit more than 1 m by filling these depressions with ocean water.

Of course either one of these approaches will cause massive other changes, although probably in a positive direction as far as climate is concerned. More water surface on the planet should mean more evaporation of water which reates more clouds which reflects more energy from the sun, lowering the heating of the earth. But of course a non-trivial analysis might yield a rich detail of effects worth pondering.

In the past features like the Salton sea and the Dead sea have been filled by fresh-water rivers, essentially meaning that rain was used as the pump to fill them. The demand for fresh water has stopped these features from being filled. It seems to me that an aquifer to refill these features with salt water from the ocean would be relatively benign in impact, since in nature these features have been fuller of salt water in the past, and so the impact of that water might be blessed by humanity as "natural" instead of cursed by humanity as "man made."

Where does the water go? Assuming you want to reduce sea level by a 1/2 inch using this mechanism, you have to do the equivalent of covering the entire ETA: land area of earth in a full inch of water (what's worse, seawater; you'd want to desalinate it). Even assuming you can find room on land for all this water and the pump capacity to displace it all, what's to stop it from washing right back out to sea? Some of it can be used to refill aquifers, but the capacity of those is trivial next to that of the oceans. Some of it can be stored as ice and snow, but global warming will reduce (actually, has already quite visibly reduced) land glaciation; even if you can somehow induce the water to freeze, that heat you extract from it will have to go somewhere and unless you can dump it out of the atmosphere entirely it will just contribute to the warming. The rest of the water will just flood the existing rivers in its mad rush to do what nearly all continental water is always doing anyhow: flowing to sea.

One possibility would be to replace the ice caps by hand. Run a heated pipeline from the ocean to the icecaps, pump water there, and let it freeze on its own. I don't know how well that would work, and I suspect you're better off just letting sea levels rise. If you need the land that bad, just make floating platforms.

Edit: Replace "ice caps" with "Antartica". Adding ice to the northern icecap, or even the southern one out where it's floating, won't alter the sea level since floating objects displace their mass in water.

Well, this is not pumping, but it might be much more efficient: As I understand, the polar ice caps are in an equilibrium between snowfall and runoff. If you could somehow wall in a large portion of polar ice, such that it cannot flow away, it might rise to a much higher level and sequester enough water to make a difference in sea levels. A super-large version of a hydroelectric dam, in effect, for ice.

It might also help to have a very high wall around the patch to keep air from circulating, keeping the cold polar air where it is and reduce evaporation/sublimation.

This should be a what if question. I'd like to see what Randall would do with it.

tl;dr: It is definitely more difficult than most people think, because most people's thoughts(even scientifically educated ones) are heavily influenced by sci-fi, which is almost invariably premised on having easy interstellar transport. Even the authors like Clarke with difficult interstellar transport assume that the obvious problems(e.g., lightspeed) remain, but the non-obvious problems(e.g., what happens when something breaks when you're two light-years from the nearest macroscopic object) disappear.

Some comments on this from Charles Stross. Not optimistic about the prospects. Somewhat quantitative, at the back-of-envelope level of detail.

Project Icarus seems like a decent place to start.

You might want to check out Centauri Dreams, best blog ever and dedicated to this issue.

A fair bit of this is either cited or calculated within "Eternity in six hours." See also my interview with one of its authors, and this review by Nick Beckstead.

Seems to me that very high intelligence can cause problems with socialization: you are different from your peers, so it is more difficult for you to model them, and for them to model you. You see each other as "weird". (Similar problem for very low intelligence.) Intelligence causes loneliness, not the other way round.

But this depends on the environment. If you are highly intelligent person surrounded by enough highly intelligent people, then you do have a company of intellectual peers, and you will not feel alone.

I am not sure about the relation between reading many books and being "less shallow". Do intelligent kids surrounded by intelligent kids also read a lot?

My friend isn't obviously-to-me wrong, but their argument is unconvincing to me.

It's normal for a smart kid to be kind of lonely - if true, that's sad, and by default we should try to fix it.

It builds substance - citation neded. It seems like it could just as easily build insecurity, resentment, etc.

Lousy social life - this is a failure mode. It might not be the worst one, but it seems like the most likely one, so deserving of attention.

Ditzy adolescent - how likely is this?

FWIW, I'm an adult who was kind of lonely as a kid, and on the margin I think that having a more active social life then would have had positive effects on me now.

Here is Paul Graham's essay on the subject.

I think I remember reading that famous inventors were likely to be isolated due to illness as children. I think it's unlikely that intelligence is decreased by being well-socialized, but it seems possible to me that people who are very well-socialized might find themselves thinking of fewer original ideas.

Tangentially, is it possible for a good reputation metric to survive attacks in real life?

Imagine that you become e.g. a famous computer programmer. But although you are a celebrity among free software people, you fail to convert this fame to money. So must keep a day job at a computer company which produces shitty software.

One day your boss will realize that you have high prestige in the given metric, and the company has low prestige. So the boss will ask you to "recommend" the company on your social network page (which would increase the company prestige and hopefully increase the profit; might decrease your prestige as a side effect). Maybe this would be illegal, but let's suppose it isn't, or that you are not in a position to refuse. Or you could imagine a more dramatic situation: you are a widely respected political or economical expert, it is 12 hours before election, and a political party has kidnapped your family and threatens to kill them unless you "recommend" this party, which according to their model would help them win the election.

In other words, even a digital system that works well could be vulnerable to attacks from outside of the system, where otherwise trustworthy people are forced to act against their will. A possible defense would be if people could somehow hide their votes; e.g. your boss might know that you have high prestige and the company has low prestige, but has no methods to verify whether you have "recommended" the company or not (so you could just lie that you did). But if we make everything secret, is there a way to verify whether the system is really working as described? (The owner of the system could just add 9000 trust points to his favorite political party and no one would ever find out.)

I suspect this is all confused and I am asking a wrong question. So feel free to answer to question I should have asked.

Are there any good trust, value, or reputation metrics

The first problem is defining what do you want to measure. "Trust" and "reputation" are two-argument functions and "value" is notoriously vague.

I don't know of one. I doubt that everyone wants the same sort of thing out of such a metric. Just off the top of my head, some possible conflicts:

• Is a post good because it attracts a lot of responses? Then a flamebait post that riles people into an unproductive squabble is a good post.
• Is a post good because it leads to increased readership? Then spamming other forums to promote a post makes it a better post, and posting porn (or something else irrelevant that attracts attention) is really very good.
• Is a post good because a lot of users upvote it? Then people who create sock-puppet accounts to upvote themselves are better posters; as are people who recruit their friends to mass-upvote their posts.
• Is a post good because the moderator approves of it? Then as the forum becomes more popular, if the moderator has no additional time to review posts, a diminishing fraction of posts are good.

The old wiki-oid site Everything2 explicitly assigns "levels" to users, based on how popular their posts are. Users who have proven themselves have the ability to signal-boost posts they like with a super-upvote.

It seems to me that something analogous to PageRank would be an interesting approach: the estimated quality of a post is specifically an estimate of how likely a high-quality forum member is to appreciate that post. Long-term high-quality posters' upvotes should probably count for a lot more than newcomers' votes. And moderators or other central, core-team users should probably be able to manually adjust a poster's quality score to compensate for things like a formerly-good poster going off the deep end, the revelation that someone is a troll or saboteur, or (in the positive direction) someone of known-good offline reputation joining the forum.

You may be interested in the new system called Dissent

Metaphysics: what's out there? Epistemology: how do I learn about it? Ethics: what should I do with it?

Basically, think of any questions that are of the form "what's there in the world", "what is the world made of", and now take away actual science. What's left is metaphysics. "Is the world real or a figment of my imagination?", "is there such a thing as a soul?", "is there such a thing as the color blue, as opposed to objects that are blue or not blue?", "is there life after death?", "are there higher beings?", "can infinity exist?", etc. etc.

Note that "metaphysical" also tends to be used as a feel-good word, meaning something like "nobly philosophical, concerned with questions of a higher nature than the everyday and the mundane".

This is in no way an answer to your actual question (Anatoly's is good) but it might amuse you.

"Meta" in Greek means something like "after" (but also "beside", "among", and various other things). So there is a

Common misapprehension: metaphysics is so called because it goes beyond physics -- it's mode abstract, more subtle, more elevated, more fundamental, etc.

This turns out not to be quite where the word comes from, so there is a

Common response": actually, it's all because Aristotle wrote a book called "Physics" and another, for which he left no title, that was commonly shelved after the "Physics" -- meta ta Phusika* -- and was commonly called the "Metaphysics". And the topics treated in that book came to be called by that name. So the "meta" in the name really has nothing at all to do with the relationship between the subjects.

But actually it's a bit more complicated than that; here's the

Truth (so far as I understand it): indeed Aristotle wrote those books, and indeed the "Metaphysics" is concerned with, well, metaphysics, and indeed the "Metaphysics" is called that because it comes "after the Physics". But the earliest sources we have suggest that the reason why the Metaphysics came after the Physics is that Aristotle thought it was important for physics to be taught first. So actually it's not far off to say that metaphysics is so called because it goes beyond physics, at least in the sense of being a more advanced topic (in Aristotle's time).

In my experience people use "metaphysics" to refer to philosophical exploration of what kinds of things exist and what the nature, behavior, etc. of those things is.

This is usually treated as distinct from scientific/experimental exploration of what kinds of things exist and what the nature, behavior, etc. of those things is, although those lines are blurry. So, for example, when Yudkowsky cites Barbour discussing the configuration spaces underlying experienced reality, there will be some disagreement/confusion about whether this is a conversation about physics or metaphysics, and it's not clear that there's a fact of the matter.

This is also usually treated as distinct from exploration of objects and experiences that present themselves to our senses and our intuitive reasoning... e.g. shoes and ducks and chocolate cake. As a consequence, describing a thought or worldview or other cognitive act as "metaphysical" can become a status maneuver... a way of distinguishing it from object-level cognition in an implied context where more object-level (aka "superficial") cognition is seen as less sophisticated or deep or otherwise less valuable.

Some people also use "metaphysical" to refer to a class of events also sometimes referred to as "mystical," "occult," "supernatural," etc. Sometimes this usage is consistent with the above -- that is, sometimes people are articulating a model of the world in which those events can best be understood by understanding the reality which underlies our experience of the world.

Other times it's at best metaphorical, or just outright bullshit.

As far as correct behavior goes... asking people to taboo "metaphysical" is often helpful.

The Wikipedia article on Planck time says:

Theoretically, this is the smallest time measurement that will ever be possible, roughly 10^−43 seconds. Within the framework of the laws of physics as we understand them today, for times less than one Planck time apart, we can neither measure nor detect any change.

However, the article on Chronon says:

The Planck time is a theoretical lower-bound on the length of time that could exist between two connected events, but it is not a quantization of time itself since there is no requirement that the time between two events be separated by a discrete number of Planck times.

Many things in our best models of physics are discrete, but as far as I know, our coordinates (time, space, or four-dimensional space-time coordinates) are never discrete. Even something like quantum field theory, which treats things in a non-intuitively discrete way does not do this. For example, we might view the process of an electron scattering off another electron as an exchange of many discrete photons between the two electrons, but it is all written in terms of integrals or derivatives, rather than differences or sums.

My intuition is every good allocation system will use prices somewhere, whether the users see them or not. The main perk of the story's economy is getting things you need without having to explicitly decide to buy them (ie the down-on-his-luck guy unexpectedly gifted his favorite coffee), and that could be implemented through individual AI agents rather than a central AI.

Fleshing out how this might play out, if I'm feeling sick, my AI agent notices and broadcasts a bid for hot soup. The agents of people nearby respond with offers. The lowest offer might come from someone already in a soup shop who lives next door to me since they'll hardly have to go out of their way. Their agent would notify them to buy something extra and deliver it to me. Once the task is fulfilled, my agent would send the agreed-upon payment. As long as the agents are well-calibrated to our needs and costs, it'd feel like a great gift even if there are auctions and payments behind the scenes.

For pointers, general equilibrium theory studies how to allocate all the goods in an economy. Depending on how you squint at the model, it could be studying centralized or decentralized markets based on money or pure exchange. A Toolbox for Economic Design is fairly accessible texbook on mechanism design that covers lots of allocation topics.

I'm looking for the intellectual tools that would be used to ask these questions in a more rigorous way

The field of study that deals with this is called economics. Any reason an intro textbook won't suit you?

Could a variant of Watson be used to automate the distribution of capital in the same way that it makes a medical dignosis?

The stock market has a lot of capable AIs that manage capital allocation.

I don't think anybody has hard evidence of answers to any of those questions yet (though I'd be fascinated to learn otherwise) but I can offer some conjectures:

Possible in principle? Yes. I see no evidence that sentience and identity are anything other than information stored in the nervous system, and in theory the cognitive portion of a nervous system an organ and could be transplanted like any other.

Preserving anatomical integrity? Not with anything like current science. We can take non-intrusive brain scans, but they're pretty low-resolution and (so far as I know) strictly read-only. Even simply stimulating parts of the brain isn't enough to basically re-write it in such a way that it becomes another person's brain.

Need to kill donors? To the best of my knowledge, it's theoretically possible to basically mature a human body including a potentially-functional brain, while keeping that brain in a vegetative state the entire time. Of course, that's still a potential human - the vegetativeness needs to be reversible for this to be useful - so the ethics are still highly questionable. It's probably possible to do it without a full brain at all, which seems less evil if you can somehow do it my some mechanism other than what amounts to a pre-natal full lobotomy, but would require the physical brain transplant option for transference.

Nerves connecting and healing? Nerves can repair themselves, though it's usually extremely slow. Stem cell therapies have potential here, though. Connecting the brain to the rest of the body is a lot of nerves, but they're pretty much all sensory and motor nerves so far as I know; the brain itself is fairly self-contained

Personality change? That depends on how different the new body is from the old, I would guess. The obviously-preferable body is a clone, for many reasons including avoiding the need to avoid immune system rejection of the new brain. Personality is always going to be somewhat externally-driven, so I wouldn't expect somebody transferred from a 90-year-old body to a 20-year-old one to have the same personality regardless of any other information because the body will just be younger. On the other hand, if you use a clone body that's the same age as the transferee, it wouldn't shock me if the personality didn't actually change significantly; it should basically feel like going under for surgery and then coming out again with nothing changed.

Now, mind you, I'm no brain surgeon (or medical professional of any sort), nor have I studied any significant amount of psychology. Nor am I a philosopher (see my question above). However, I don't really see how the mind could be anything except a characteristic of the body. Altering (intentionally or otherwise) the part of the body responsible for thought alters the mind. Our current attempted maps of the mind don't come close to fully representing the territory, but I firmly believe it is mappable. Whether an existing one is re-mappable I can't say, but the idea of transplanting a brain has been explored in science fiction for decades, and in theory I see ne logical reason why it couldn't work.

In order to provide a definite answer to this question, we'd need to know how the brain produces consciousness and personality, as well as the exact mechanism of the upload(e.g., can it rewire synapses?).

Can you transfer "software" from one brain to another in a purely informational way, while preserving the anatomical integrity of the second organism?

This can already be done via the senses. This also transfers consciousness of the content that is being transferred. What would consciousness without content look like?

There no such thing as "purely informational" when it comes to brains.

I'm asking this because ever since I found out about ems and mind uploading, having minds moved to bodies rather than computers seemed to me a more appealing hypothetical solution to the problem of death/mortality.

If you want to focus on that problem it's likely easier to simply fix up whatever is wrong in the body you are starting with than doing complex uploading.

Suppose all the memories in one person were wiped and replaced with your memories. I believe the new body would claim to be you. It would introspect as you might now, and find your memories as its own, and say "I am Dahlen in a new body."

But would it be you? If the copying had been non-destructive, then Dahlen in the old body still exists and would "know" on meeting Dahlen in the new body that Dahlen in the new body was really someone else who just got all Dahlen's memories up to that point.

Meanwhile, Dahlen in the new body would have capabilities, moods, reactions, which would depend on the substrate more than the memories. The functional parts of the brain, the wiring-other-than-memories as it were, would be different in the new body. Dahlen in the new body would probably behave in ways that were similar to how the old body with its old memories behaved. It would still think it was Dahlen, but as Dahlen in the old body might think, that would just be its opinion and obviously it is mistaken.

As to uploading, it is more than the brain that needs to be emulated. We have hormonal systems that mediate fear and joy and probably a broad range of other feelings. I have a sense of my body that I am in some sense constantly aware of which would have to be simulated and would probably be different in an em of me than it is in me, just as it would be different if my memories were put in another body.

Would anybody other than Dahlen in the old body have a reason to doubt that Dahlen in the new body wasn't really Dahlen? I don't think so, and especially Dahlen in the new body would probably be pretty sure it was Dahlen, even if it claimed to rationally understand how it might not be. It would know it was somebody, and wouldn't be able to come up with any other compelling idea for who it was other than Dahlen.

The task you describe, at least the part where no whole brain transplant is involved, can be divided into two parts: 1) extracting the essential information about your mind from your brain, and 2) implanting that same information back into another brain.

Either of these could be achieved in two radically different ways: a) psychologically, i.e. by interview or memoir writing on the extraction side and "brain-washing" on the implanting side, or b) technologically, i.e. by functional MRI, electro-encephalography, etc on the extraction side. It is hard for me to envision a technological implantation method.

Either way, it seems to me that once we understand the mind enough to do any of this, it will turn out the easiest to just do the extraction part and then simulate the mind on a computer, instead of implanting it into a new body. Eliminate the wetware, and gain the benefit of regular backups, copious copies, and Moore's law for increasing effectiveness. Also, this would be ethically much more tractable.

It seems to me this could also be the solution to the unfriendly AI problem. What if the AI are us? Then yielding the world to them would not be so much of a problem, suddenly.

Definitions will vary depending on the purity obsession of the speaker :-) but as a rough guide, most things in cans, jars, boxes, bottles, and cartons will be processed. Things that are, more or less, just raw plants and animals (or parts of them) will be unprocessed.

There are boundary cases about which people argue -- e.g. is pasteurized milk a processed food? -- but for most things in a food store it's pretty clear what's what.

Anything that you could have picked from the plant yourself (a pear, a carrot, a berry) AND has not been sprinkled with conservants/pesticides/shiny gloss is unprocessed. If it comes in a package and looks nothing like what nature gives (noodles, cookies, jell-o), it's been processed.

Raw milk also counts as unprocessed, but in the 21st century there's no excuse to be drinking raw milk.

Reminds me of something Scott said once:

And when I tried to analyzed my certainty that – even despite the whole multiple intelligences thing – I couldn’t possibly be as good as them, it boiled down to something like this: they were talented at hard things, but I was only talented at easy things.

It took me about ten years to figure out the flaw in this argument, by the way.

Impostor syndrome:

Despite external evidence of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be.

Psychological research done in the early 1980s estimated that two out of five successful people consider themselves frauds and other studies have found that 70 percent of all people feel like impostors at one time or another. It is not considered a psychological disorder, and is not among the conditions described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

I think people are quick to challenge this type of impression because it pattern matches to known cognitive distortions involved in things like depression, or known insecurities in certain competitive situations.

For example, consider that most everyone will structure their lives such that their weaknesses are downplayed and their positive features are more prominent. This can happen either by choice of activity (e.g. the stereotypical geek avoids social games) or by more overt communication filtering (e.g. most people don't talk about their anger problems). Accordingly, it's never hard to find information that confirms your own relative incompetence, if there's some emotional tendency to look for it.

Aside from that, a great question is "to what ends am I making this comparison?" I find it unlikely that you have a purely academic interest in the question of your relative competence.

First, it can often be useful to know your relative competence in a specific competitive domain. But even here, this information is only one part of your decision process: You may be okay with e.g. choosing a lower expected rank in one career over a higher rank in another because you enjoy the work more, or find it more compatible with your values, or because it pays betters, or leaves more time for you family, or you're risk averse, or it's more altruistic, etc. But knowing your likely rank along some dimension will tell you a bit about the likely pay-offs of competing along that dimension.

But what is the use of making an across-the-board self-comparison?

Suppose you constructed some general measure of competence across all domains. Suppose you found out you were below average (or even above average). Then what? It seems you're in still in the same situation as before: You still must choose how to spend your time. The general self-comparison measure is nothing more than the aggregate of your expected relative ranks on specific sub-domains, which are more relevant to any specific choice. And as I said above, your expected rank in some area is far from the only bit of information you care about.

As an aside, a positive use for a self-comparison is to provide a role-model. If you find yourself unfavorably compared to almost everyone, consider yourself lucky that you have so many role-models to choose from! Since you are probably like other people in most respects, you can expect to find low-hanging fruit in many areas where you have poor relative performance.

But if you find (as many people will) that you've hit the point of diminishing returns regarding the time you spend comparing yourself to others, perhaps you can simply recognize this and realize that it's neither cowardly nor avoidant to spend your mental energy elsewhere.

Possibly parallel-- I've had a feeling for a long time that something bad was about to happen. Relatively recently, I've come to believe that this isn't necessarily an accurate intuition about the world, it's muscle tightness in my abdomen. It's probably part of a larger pattern, since just letting go in the area where I feel it doesn't make much difference.

I believe that patterns of muscle tension and emotions are related and tend to maintain each other.

It's extremely unlikely that everyone is more competent than you at everything. If nothing else, your writing is better than that of a high proportion of people on the internet. Also, a lot of people have painful mental habits and have no idea that they have a problem.

More generally, you could explore the idea of everyone being more competent than you at everything. Is there evidence for this? Evidence against it? Is it likely that you're at the bottom of ability at everything?

This sounds to me like something worth taking to a therapist, bearing in mind that you may have to try more than one therapist to find one that's a good fit.

I believe there's strong psychological effect which can create that impression-- growing up around people who expect you to be incompetent. Now that I think about it, there may be genetic vulnerability involved, too.

Possibly worth exploring: free monthly Feldenkrais exercise-- this are patterns of gentle movement which produce deep relaxation and easier movement. The reason I think you can get some evidence about your situation by trying Feldenkrais is that, if you find your belief about other people being more competent at everything goes away, even briefly, than you have some evidence that the belief is habitual.

There are two separate issues: morale management and being calibrated about your own abilities.

I think the best way to be well-calibrated is to approximate pagerank -- to get a sense of your competence, don't ask yourself, average the extracted opinion of others that are considered competent and have no incentives to mislead you (this last bit is tricky, also the extracting process may have to be slightly indirect).

Morale is hard, and person specific. My experience is that in long term projects/goals, morale becomes a serious problem long before the situation actually becomes bad. I think having "wolverine morale" ("You know what Mr. Grizzly? You look like a wuss, I can totally take you!") is a huge chunk of success, bigger than raw ability.

Look up the imposter syndrome. And try not to automatically say; "I don't have it because I never did anything of noteworthyness"

---Oh dang; someone else got to it first.

How did you go with your opinions of imposter syndrome now?

Possible, but unlikely. We're all just winging it and as others have pointed out, impostor syndrome is a thing.

I sometimes have a similar experience, and when I do, it is almost always simply an effect of my own standards of competence being higher than those around me.

Imagine, some sort of problem arises in the presence of a small group. The members of that group look at each other, and whoever signals the most confidence gets first crack at the problem. But this more-confident person then does not reveal any knowledge or skill that the others do not possess, because said confidence was entirely do to higher willingness to potentially make the problem worse through trial and error.

So, in this scenario, feeling less competent does not mean you are less competent; it means you are more risk-adverse. Do you have a generalized paralyzing fear of making the problem worse? If so, welcome to the club. If not, nevermind.

I personally am a fan of talking therapy. If you are thinking something is worth asking a therapist about, it is worth asking a therapist about. But beyond the generalities, thinking you are not good enough is absolutely right in the targets of the kinds of things it can be helpful to discuss with a therapist.

Consider the propositions: 1) everyone is more competent than you at everything and 2) you can carry on a coherent conversation on lesswrong I am pretty sure that these are mutually exclusive propositions. I'm pretty sure just from reading some of your comments that you are more competent than plenty of other people at a reasonable range of intellectual pursuits.

Anything you can talk to a therapist about you can talk to your friends about. Do they think you are less competent than everybody else? They might point out to you in a discussion some fairly obvious evidence for or against this proposition that you are overlooking.

I suppose that the problem emerged only because you communicate only with people of your sort and level of awareness, try to go on a trip to some rural village or start conversations with taxists, dishwashers, janitors, cooks, security guards etc.

Is that basically a self-confidence problem?

I frequently feel similar and I haven't found a good way to deal with those feelings, but it's implausible that everyone around you is more competent at everything. Some things to take into account:

• Who are you comparing yourself to? Peers? Everyone you meet? Successful people?
• What traits are you comparing? It's unlikely that someone who is, for example, better at math than you are is also superior in every other area.
• Maybe you haven't found your advantage or a way to exploit this.
• Maybe you haven't spend enough time on one thing to get really good at it.

Long shot: Do you think you might have ADHD?.pdf) (pdf warning) Alternatively, go over the diagnostic criteria

The post's score transfers, but I think that the votes that were applied when it was in Discussion don't get the x10 karma multiplier that posts in Main otherwise do.

It's trial and error mostly, paying attention to other people doing well or making mistakes, getting honest feedback from a skilled and trusted friend. Learning social skills is like learning to ride a bike, reading about it doesn't give you much of an advantage.

The younger you are the less it costs to make mistakes. I think a social job is a good way to learn because customers are way less forgiving than other people you randomly meet. You could volunteer for some social tasks too.

If your native hardware is somehow socially limited then you might benefit from reading a little bit more and you might have to develop workarounds to use what you've got to read people. It's difficult to learn from mistakes if you don't know you're making them.

One thing I've learned about the average human looking like a telepath is that most people are way too certain about their particular assumption when there are actually multiple possible ways to understand a situation. People generally aren't as great at reading each other as they think that are.

I think "how do you get better", mostly yes, but "how do you get to be very very good", mostly no.

LW user Stuart Armstrong did a number of posts assessing Kurzweil's predictions: Here, here, here, and here.

I'm not sure how you're getting from not provable(X) to provable(provable(X) -> X), and I think you might be mixing meta levels. If you could prove not provable(X), then I think you could prove (provable(X) ->X), which then gives you provable(X). Perhaps the solution is that you can never prove not provable(X)? I'm not sure about this though.

By what principle would such an extrapolation be reasonable?

If you are doing reference class forecasting, you need at least a few members in your reference class and a few outside of it, together with the reasons why some are in and others out. If you are generalizing from one example, then, well...

I'm a firstyear AI student, and we are currently in the middle of exploring AI 'history'. Ofcourse I don't know a lot about about AI yet, but the interesting part about learning of the history of AI is that in some sense the climax of AI-research is already behind us. People got very interested in AI after the Dartmouth conference ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Conferences ) and were so optimistic that they thought they could make an artificial intelligent system in 20 years. And here we are, still struggling with the seemingly simplest things such as computer vision etc.

The problem is they came across some hard problems which they can't really ignore. One of them is the frame problem. http://www-formal.stanford.edu/leora/fp.pdf One of them is the common sense problem.

Solutions to many of them (I believe) are either 1) huge brute-force power or 2) machine learning. And machine learning is a thing which we can't seem to get very far with. Programming a computer to program itself, I can understand why that must be quite difficult to accomplish. So since the 80s AI researchers have mainly focused on building expert systems: systems which can do a certain task much better than humans. But they lack in many things that are very easy for humans (which is apparently called the Moravec's paradox ).

Anyway, the point Im trying to get across, and Im interested in hearing whether you agree or not, is that AI was/is very overrated. I doubt we can ever make a real artificial intelligent agent, unless we can solve the machine learning problem for real. And I doubt whether that is ever truly possible.

Should beings/societies/systems clever enough to figure this out (and with something like preferences or values) just seek to self-destruct if they find themselves in a sufficiently suboptimal branch, suffering or otherwise worse off than they plausibly could be?

Not really. If you're in a suboptimal branch, but still doing better than if you didn't exist at all, then you aren't making the world better off by self-destructing regardless of whether other branches exist.

Committing to give up in case things go awry would lessen the impact of setbacks and increase the proportion of branches where everything is stellar, just due to good luck. Keep the best worlds, discard the rest, avoid a lot of hassle.

It would not increase the proportion (technically, you want to be talking about measure here, but the distinction isn't important for this particular discussion) of branches where everything is stellar - just the proportion of branches where everything is stellar out of the total proportion of branches where you are alive, which isn't so important. To see this, imagine you have two branches, one where things are going poorly and one where things are going great. The proportion of branches where things are going stellar is 1/2. Now suppose that the being/society/system that is going poorly self-destructs. The proportion of branches where things are going stellar is still 1/2, but now you have a branch where instead of having a being/society/system that is going poorly, you have no being/society/system at all.

I did some googling, but all I found was that they would be great at cooling computer systems in space.

When you're sufficiently advanced, cooling your systems, technically disposing of entropy, is one of the main limiting constraint on your system. Also if you throw matter into a black hole just right you can get its equivalent (or half its equivalent I forgot which) out in energy.

Edit: thinking about it, it is half the mass.

They make awesome garbage disposal units :-)

What would I do differently if I believed it was true, or wasn't?
What expectations about future events would I have in one case, that I wouldn't have in the other?
What beliefs about past events would I have in one case, that I wouldn't have in the other?

The Bay Area has a high concentration of rationalists compared to most places, but I don't think it's very high compared to the local population. How many rationalists are we talking about?

Are rationalists more or less likely than non-rationalists to participate in local government?

It is mostly rational for generating advantage to people with political pull and power.

Should start with toothpaste first.

Seems to me that Rand's model is similar to LessWrong's "rationality as non-self-destruction".

Objectivism in the novels doesn't give the heroes any positive powers. It merely helps them avoid some harmful beliefs and behaviors, which are extremely common. Not burdened by these negative beliefs and behaviors, these "normal men" can fully focus on what they are good at, and if they have high intelligence and make the right choices, they can achieve impressive results.

(The harmful beliefs and behaviors include: feeling guilty for being good at something, focusing on exploiting other people instead of developing one's own skills.)

Hank Rearden's design of a new railroad bridge was completely unrelated to his political beliefs. It was a consequence of his natural talent and hard work, perhaps some luck. The political beliefs only influenced his decision of what to do with the invented technology. I don't remember what exactly were his options, but I think one of them was "archive the technology, to prevent changes in the industry, to preserve existing social order", and as a consequence of his beliefs he refused to consider this option. And even this was before he became a full Objectivist. (The only perfect Objectivist in the novel is Galt; and perhaps the people who later accept Galt's views.)

Francisco d'Anconia's fortune, as you wrote, was inherited. That's a random factor, unrelated to Objectivism.

John Galt's "magical" motor was also a result of his natural talent and hard work, plus some luck. The political beliefs only influenced his decision to hide the motor from public, using a private investor and a secret place.

Violating the law of thermodynamics, and surviving the torture without damage... that's fairy-tale stuff. But I think none of them is an in-universe consequence of Objectivism.

So, what exactly does Objectivism (or Hank Rearden's beliefs, which are partial Objectivism plus some compartmentalization) cause, in-universe?

It makes the heroes focus on their technical skills, and the more enlightened heroes on keeping their technical inventions for themselves. As opposed to attempting a political carreer or serving the existing political powers. Instead of networking, Rearden focuses on studying metal. Instead of donating the magical machine to the government, Galt keeps it secret. Instead of having his fortune taken by government, d'Anconia destroys it... probably because of a lack of smarter alternative (or maybe he somehow secretly preserves a part of his fortune, and ostentatiously destroys the rest to draw away attention; I don't remember the details here).

Without Objectivism, the heroes would most likely become clueless nerds serving the elite, because they couldn't win at the political fight (requires a completely different set of skills that people like Mouch are experts in), but they also wouldn't understand that the system is intentionally designed against them, so they would spend their energy in a futile fight, winning a few battles but losing the war.

Understanding the system allows one to focus on finding an "out of the box" solution. John Galt's victory is his ability to use his natural talent and work to devise a solution where he can live without political masters. He is economically independent, thanks to his magical motor, but also mentally independent. (If we removed the magic, his victory would be understanding the system, and the ability to resist its emotional blackmail and optimize for himself.)

The lack of this understanding made Rearden vulnerable to blackmail from his wife, and in a way cost Eddie Willers his life. (And James Taggart his sanity, if I remember correctly.)

tl;dr: (According to Rand) Objectivism makes you able to understand how the system works, so you can more realistically optimize for your values. Objectivism doesn't give you talent, skills, or luck; but it gives you a chance to use them more efficiently, instead of wasting them in a fight you cannot win.

EDIT: In real life, I expect that an Objectivist training could make people be more aware of their goals and negotiate harder. Maybe increase work ethics.

Did organized Objectivist activism, at least in some of its nuttier phases, offer to turn its adherents who get it right into a kind of superhuman entity? I guess you could call such enhanced people "Operating Objectivists," analogous to the enhanced state promised by another cult.

Not that I'm aware of, but you might also be interested in A. E. Van Vogt's "Null-A" novels, which attempted to do this for a fictionalized version of Korzybski's General Semantics.

(Van Vogt later did become involved in Scientology, as did his (and Hubbard's) editor John W. Campbell.)

On top of that, he can survive torture without suffering from post-traumatic stress symptoms.

PTSS almost seems like a culture-bound syndrome of the modern West. In particular there don't seem to be any references to it before WWI and even there (and in subsequent wars) all the references seem to be from the western allies. Furthermore, the reaction to "shell shock", as it was then called, during WWI suggests that this was something new that the established structures didn't know how to deal with.

For what it's worth, Rand was an unusually capable person in her specialty (she wrote two popular, and somewhat politically influential novels in her second language), but still not in the same class as her heroes.

I'm not sure you've got the bit about Rearden right. I don't think there's any evidence that he came up with the final design for the bridge. There's a mention that he worked with a team to discover Rearden metal, and presumably he also had an engineering team. The point was that he (presumably) knew enough engineering to come up with something plausible, and that he was fascinated by producing great things enough to be distracted from something major going wrong that I don't remember.

I have no idea whether Rand knew Galt's engine was physically impossible, though I think she should have, considering that other parts of the book were well-researched. Dagny's situation at Taggart Transcontinental was probably typical for an Operations vice-president in a family owned business. The description of her doing cementless masonry matched with a book on the subject. Atlas Shrugged was the only place I saw the possibility of shale oil mentioned until, decades later, it turned out to be a possible technology.

The three people Akston was talking about didn't include Rearden. They were D'Anconia, Galt, and Danneskjold (the mostly off-stage pirate). I feel as though I've lost, not just geek points, but objectivist points both for forgetting something from the book, but also because I went along with everyone else who got it wrong.

The remarkable thing about Galt and torture isn't that he didn't get PTSD, it's that he completely kept his head, and over-awed his torturers. He broke James Taggart's mind, not that Taggart's mind was in such great shape to begin with.

A number of these matters seem more narrative or genre conveniences : Francisco acts a playboy in the same way Bruce Wayne does, Rearden's bridge development passes a lot of work to his specialist engineers (similarly to Rearden metal having a team of scientists skeptically helping him) and pretends that the man is still a one-man designer (among other handwaves). At the same time, Batman is not described as a superhuman engineer or playboy, nor would he act as those types of heroes. I'm also not sure we can know the long-term negative repercussions John Galt experiences given the length of the book, and not all people who experience torture display clinically relevant post-traumatic stress symptoms and many who do show them only sporadically. His engine is based on now-debunked theories of physics that weren't so obviously thermodynamics-violating at the time, similarly to Project Xylophone.

These men are intended to be top-of-field capability from the perspective of a post-Soviet writer who knew little about their fields and could easily research less. Many of the people who show up under Galt's tutelage are similarly exceptionally skilled, but even more are not so hugely capable.

On the other hand, the ability of her protagonists to persuade others and evaluate the risk of getting shot starts at superhuman and quickly becomes ridiculous.

On the gripping hand, I'm a little cautious about emphasizing fictional characters and acknowledgedly Heroic abilities as evidence, especially when the author wrote a number of non-fiction philosophy texts related to this topic.

Not to my knowledge, but they should have! PM me..

Not quite in the spirit of admitting ignorance, but since it's in this thread, I'll answer it.

Did organized Objectivist activism, at least in some of its nuttier phases, offer to turn its adherents who get it right into a kind of superhuman entity? ...
another cult

No.

So despite Rand's disclaimer, if you view....

So despite what Rand or any Objectivist ever said or did, if you choose to view Objectivism as a nutty cult, you can.

If you were actually interested in why Rand's characters are the way they are, you could read her book on art, "The Romantic Manifesto". Probably a quick google search on the book would give you your answer.