Open Thread: May 2009

I'm particularly grateful for the reply notifications! No more tedious checking every visit, lest I appear rude.

It appears that Karma cannot be negative. There also does not appear to be a way to ignore comments from users below a certain Karma threshold. The ability to set a Karma threshold together with the ability for Karma to be negative would seem useful for this kind of situation. Setting a Karma threshold of 0 would not be ideal as it would block comments from new users as well as trolls.

I'd just like to say as an occasional Lojbanist that the LW user “Lojban” does not speak for us.

LW doesn't register negative karma right now. It should.

Sufficiently negative karma should enforce a maximum posting rate.

Of course, that just leads to getting lots of accounts. Not sure how to deal with that.

Not my only objection, but:

so the probability that it will win is more like 10^-3

If the hololords smiled upon you, why would they even need you to buy a lottery ticket? How improbable is it that they not only want to help you, but they want to help you in this very specific way and in no other obvious way?

I don't think this argument holds up. Suppose the holodeck hypothesis is true and someone outside the simulation decides to punish irrational choices by killing you if you buy a lottery ticket. The probability of you being killed is around 10^-3 so you should never risk buying a lottery ticket.

The problem is that you've no reasonable basis for assigning your 10^-3 probability for a good outcome rather than a bad outcome or a batshit insane outcome. You also have no basis for your 10^-4 probability of being in a holodeck. The only rational way to behave is to act as if you're not in a holodeck (or a world with an occasional interventionist god who does his damndest not to ever leave clear proof of his interventions, or a simulation run by aliens, or The Matrix) because you have no basis on which to assign probabilities otherwise. This changes of course if you are confronted with evidence that implies a greater likelihood of one your holodeck hypothesis.

This is exactly like the old joke about the guy who prays fervently for years that God let him win the lottery; finally, a booming voice comes down "At least meet me halfway: buy a ticket!"

When exactly will the probability estimate go way up? Someone living in the holodeck obviously isn't aware they are living "in the future" or not. The probability has to be calculated from the inside, so I don't see how it would ever change.

However, if the holodeck hypothesis is true, then someone outside the simulation might decide to be nice to me, so the probability that it will win is more like 10^-3.

Um, what?

Yeah, that's getting to be a problem around here. We could at least make it more time-consuming for the griefers by removing the ability to upvote or downvote on the user pages, so that you'd have to click on the permalink for each comment first. I don't think that would be too much of a hassle for those of us who are using the karma system properly...

While I disagree with rhollerith below, I also sometimes downvote (or upvote) from the user page (though less frequently than from 'recent comments'). Sometimes I read a comment so obscure (or so brilliant) that I feel the need to look back and see if this person has made a lot of comparable comments that have been neglected.

Of course, I haven't been able to downvote at all for some time.

conchis, I have been reading your comments for at least 12 months on Overcoming Bias and have accumulated no negative feeling or opinion about you, so please do not think that what I am going to say is directed at you.

I have been thinking of adopting this strategy of occasionally giving a participant 20 or 30 or so downvotes all at once rather than frequently giving a comment a single downvote because I judge moderation of coment-writers (used, e.g., on SL4 back before 2005 and again in recent months, when a List Sniper has been active, during which times SL4 has been IMHO very high quality) to work better than moderation of comments (used, e.g., on Slashdot, Reddit and Hacker News, which are IMHO of lower quality).

So, I would like people to consider the possibility that downvoting of 20 or 30 of the comments of one comment-maker in one go should not be regarded as an abuse or an improper use of this web site unless of course it is done for a bad reason.

I hereby withdraw this comment because the responses to this comment have made me realize that it is destructive to downvote a comment without regard to the worthwhileness or quality of that particular comment.

Earn a lot of money. Fund what you consider important.

I have no brilliant ideas on solving the cooperation problem but suspect if you start then others may follow your example.

Indeed this would be difficult to implement, and furthermore I'm not convinced it's the best choice from a UI perspective.

It would be a bit of work even to find out when a comment linked to another comment, and notify it.

This sort of thing is why Tim Berners-Lee wanted hyperlinks to be two-directional in the first place, but there are a lot of good reasons why they're not.

The major problem with this approach is that you'd need to ask the good thinker about each particular decision of this kind, taking into account the context in which you are making it. Only when you have good understanding of the world yourself, you can make good custom decisions for every situation.

Textbook decisions only work where textbook writers know in advance what questions they need to address.

And then, of course, there is a task of making sure this system doesn't turn into an echo chamber.

In my opinion the eleventh man should choose himself.

Do you really mean "should" in the sense that it's morally better to choose oneself? If so, could you provide some justification for that? My view would be that saving the 10 isn't morally required but would be virtuous in a supererogatory sense.

I agree that the 11th man has no moral obligation in this scenario and I wouldn't consider him to have acted immorally to choose his own life. I think this is the kind of scenario where people will signal altruism by costlessly saying they would sacrifice themselves in the thought experiment but that far fewer people would sacrifice themselves when faced with the actual choice.

I suspect that people will tend to look negatively on those who fail to signal altruism by saying they would sacrifice themselves but would be more forgiving of someone who was faced with the choice in reality. I think they would consider an individual who had actually made such a choice to have made a morally weak but understandable choice and would not consider him deserving of punishment.

See also Eliezer's Rationalist Fiction and Great Books of Failure posts, and his old but good Bookshelf. A few here too.

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett.

I'm reading The Moral Animal (Robert Wright) currently and have been recommending it to everyone I talk to.

[Hm, the unordered list doesn't seem to be working for me. Any hints?]

Beginning of unordered list test

• Item one
• Item two

End of unordered list test

Source code:

Beginning of unordered list test

* Item one
* Item two

End of unordered list test

My guess: you're missing a blank line before your list.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

Empire by Niall Ferguson.

Freedom Evolves by Daniel Dennett.

Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman.

Might be easier to manage comments and direct people to it if its a whole post rather than a comment in the may 09 open thread.

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer

It seems you are conflating net neutrality (ISPs should not discriminate based on packet characteristics, including origin) with the concept that users should pay for the resources they use.

For one thing, spammers usually use botnets so no change there, average users would bear the cost one way or another. Unless you are advocating depriorization of all email traffic, ISPs have no way other than spam filters to differentiate what counts as spam. I see no connection to the net neutrality debate, or the pay-per-usage model.

As for porn-downloaders, I take it you mean people with high bandwidth needs, which includes all sorts of downloaders. (I really don't see why you would emphasise porn here, even if you're trying to evoke feelings of moral resentment, LW would seem the unlikeliest of places that this would have any efect.) I never had a problem with bandwidth usage caps, as long as they are explicit. Then carriers can compete on what they set these limits to and I can choose based on my needs. Nothing to do with net neutrality as far as I can see.

As for my libertarian view on net neutrality: When the governments allow for true competition between ISPs, they can drop all net neutrality provisions as far as I care. But then again, in a truly competitive market, I doubt we would be having a net neutrality issue to begin with.

Net neutrality is a bunch of different issues that get incorrectly lumped together.

The first issue is prioritizing traffic based on endpoints. An example of that is where ISP A contacts example.com and offers to speed up its customers' connections to example.com, in exchange for money. The problem is that example.com isn't a customer of ISP A, but of a competing ISP. The full graph of business relationships is

End user --- ISP A --- ISP B --- example.com

The end user pays ISP A to use its portion of the network, example.com pays ISP B to use its portion of the network, and they split the cost of the link that connects the two ISP's networks. If ISP A goes after example.com, then it's trying to bill its competitor's customers. This is probably in violation of its peering agreement with ISP B, and it would cause a total nightmare for anyone trying to run a web site, as they would have to negotiate with every ISP instead of just the one they get their connectivity from. So with respect to traffic endpoints, net neutrality is extremely important.

The second issue is prioritizing traffic based on type. This is reasonable and sometimes necessary, because some protocols such as telephony only use a small amount of bandwidth but are badly disrupted if they don't get any for a fraction of a second, while other protocols like ftp use tons of bandwidth but can be paused for several seconds without disrupting anything. The problem there is that protocol prioritization is more often used as a cover story for anti-competitive behavior; eg, ISP A wants to drive ISP B out of business, so they configure their network so that ISP A's expensive VoIP service gets high priority, ISP B's VoIP service gets low priority, and everything else gets medium priority. You end up with telephone companies setting the priority on VoIP services that directly compete with their own voice services, cable television setting the priority on streaming video services that directly compete with their own television services, and so on.

Phil, things like cables and phone lines going to houses are "natural monopolies" in that it costs so much to install them that competitors probably can never get started. In fact, if the technology to deliver video over phone lines were available or anticipated when cable TV was building out in the 70s, the owner of the phone lines (pre-breakup AT&T) could probably have stopped the new cable TV companies from ever getting off the ground (by using the fact that AT&T has already paid for its pipe to the home to lowball the new companies). In other words, the probable reason we have two data pipes going into most homes in the U.S. rather than just one is that the first data pipe (the phone line) was not at that time of the introduction of the second pipe technically able to carry the new kind of data (video).

It is desirable that these duopolists (the owners of the phone lines and the cable-TV cables going to the home) are not able to use their natural duopoly as a wedge to enter markets for data services like search engines, online travel agencies, online stores, etc, in the way that Microsoft used their ownership of DOS to lever their way into dominance of markets like word processors and web browsers.

One way to do that is to draw a line at the level of "IP connectivity" and impose a regulation that say that the duopolists are in the business of selling this IP connectivity (and if they like, levels below IP connectivity like raw copper) but cannot enter the market (or prefer partners who are in the market) of selling services that ride on top of IP connectivity and depend on IP connectivity to deliver value to the residential consumer.

This proposal has the advantage that up to now on the internet companies that provide IP connectivity have mostly stayed out of most of the markets that depend on IP connectivity to deliver value to the residential consumer.

It is possible to enshrine such a separation into law and regulations without letting one cable-internet user on a local network (or whatever they call them) shared by a whole block of houses hog up most of the bandwidth of the local network. I.e., there is nothing incompatible here with contracts that impose a monthly cap on bytes received.

And even if spam filtering is made an exception to the separation, so that both connectivity providers (cable-internet and DSL providers) and Google can offer spam filtering, that does not mean that spammer get a free license to spam. What we want is to prevent Verizon or Comcast from making it impossible or more difficult for the Joe Consumer to go to Expedia than to go to Travelocity (or the Comcast Travel Store) -- or more difficult for him to go to Windows Live Search than to Google Search -- and we can do that while still allowing Verizon and Comcast to cut off recalictrant spammers (or requiring Joe Consumer to get his email from a email provider that does not happen to be a duopolist who will cut off recalitrant spammers).

Bob Frankston has been eloquent on this issue for at least 10 years now.

I'm not a libertarian. I am in favor of net neutrality for the following reasons:

• Setting up different speeds for different sources of data means that somewhere along the line, either a person or a program is going to see what sites or downloads the customer is trying to access. Anything that gives someone an excuse to spy on browsing is to be discouraged.
• Net neutrality keeps the barrier to entry on the Internet low. If it's necessary to pay extra fees to ISPs to make your site tolerably fast to access, then financially disadvantaged people who have something to offer on their websites will lose out on the part of their audience that is not patient enough to wait for the slower load times.
• Saying that no sites will get slower than they already are without net neutrality is not a convincing argument, because speed in computers is judged relatively. The computer my family had when I was five was a fast computer then. It is not just slower than the computers that are new now, it's no longer a fast computer, period, even if we assume that it hasn't deteriorated by an absolute measure in the last fifteen years. As such, I would rather everything be the same (absolutely slower) speed than have some things get (absolutely) faster.
• Saying that consumers will be able to choose net-neutral ISPs is not a convincing argument, because in many places, there are not multiple ISPs competing for business. I cannot get my Internet from anyone other than Comcast; if Comcast becomes non-neutral, I cannot take my business elsewhere unless I want to do without the Internet at home altogether.

The telecommunications market in the United States is so ridiculously far from an idealized free market in so many ways that I don't see why you'd expect a libertarian perspective to be insightful.

The only sensible free market perspective on anything related to telecommunications has to pretty much start with "tear down the entire current system and start over".

Look up Tim Lee from the Cato Institute. I think he has written on this topic. I think the standard libertarian position on net neutrality is that it's no good. Personally, I don't have the technical knowledge to really comment, though once at what might be called a libertarian boot camp, I came up with the slogan "surf at your own speed" in an exercise to come up with promotions for net nonneutrality.

Also, see this podcast: http://www.econtalk.org//archives/2009/01/eric_raymond_on.html

Toward the end (i think) they get into the issue. I can't remember what Raymond says, but IIRC, he takes a nonneutrality position while not sound like the standard libertarian position. It's an interesting podcast throughout, however, and you should listen to the whole thing. All of you.

edit: It was Tim Lee, not Tim Butler: http://www.cato.org/people/timothy-lee

For a libertarian perspective on these issues see:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/11/hazlett_on_tele.html

"Thomas Hazlett of George Mason University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about a number of key issues in telecommunications and telecommunication policy including net neutrality, FCC policy, and the state of antitrust. Hazlett argues for an emergent, Hayekian approach to policy toward the internet rather than trying to design it from the top down and for an increased use of exchangeable property rights in allocating spectrum."

Internet should be as free as streets. Internet cables, switches, retransmitters, etc. should be considered public space.

Would you hurt me if I pointed out that G_1 is actually 3^^^^3, not 3^^^3?

Are 3^^^3 dust specks enough dust specks to cause the universe to collapse rather than expand or has the expansion moved beyond even the theoretic influence of gravity?

Well, someone's eye.

What's 3^^^3? I take it more than 27.

Believing things that are true, and then using this true knowledge to do the best thing.

I am going to be thinking about all of these things anyway; what harm is there in typing it up and submitting it? There is potential gain in some feedback and the only potential harm seems to be annoying you. But if the post is annoying, the community can downvote and be done with it.

I agree; do post.

Each post under http://lesswrong.com/user/yourname/hidden/ should have an Unhide link.

I found Strangers to Ourselves an interesting read on this topic. One of his claims is that the best way to come to know yourself is to study how others react to you and to study your own actions rather than relying on introspection which is an interesting perspective.

Someone mentioned Eric Schwitzgebel here recently, and if you didn't catch it, his papers might be of help. I'm currently reading "The Unreliability of Naïve Introspection", and it's very good so far.

Do you read OB as well? Robin Hanson's posts often cover topics related to self-knowledge (typically how our actions are better explained by such cynical factors as social signaling, and our beliefs are revised in feel-good ways). I'd say just about any of the studies he links could use up a number of pages.

In many eastern philosophies, there are meditational practices which seek to see without ego. In less wrong and other places, i got ideas that autistic people don't construct stories, they see things as they are.

A topic you could try is - When an autistic person sees within himself, there is something present there, not just nothing ness.

Such research could be useful in constructing artificial conciousness and uploading applications. Kudos!

On the basis of a brief perusal of that post and the Wikipedia article it links to, I'd say it looks ad hoc and overcomplicated. It's entirely possible that people working with it have had useful insights, but if the approach turns out to be anything like the best way of doing decision theory under conditions of extreme uncertainty then I'll be extremely surprised.

(I also looked at the website made by the theory's chief proponent. It seems to have scarcely any actual mathematical content, and to exist only for publicity; that doesn't seem like a good sign.)

I can't help suspecting that Eliezer's suggestion that no one should talk about AI, technological singularities, etc., until May was motivated not only by wanting to keep LW undistracted until then, but also by wanting to encourage discussion of those topics afterwards. (He has been quite open about his hope that all his writings on rationality, etc., will have the effect of increasing support for SIAI.)

Whether that's a reason for talking about those topics (yay, Eliezer will be pleased, and Eliezer is a good chap) or a reason for not talking about them (eeew, he's trying to manipulate us) will doubtless vary from person to person.