Stupid Questions May 2015

how can it be that the ultimate fate of humanity to either thrive beyond imagination or perish utterly may rest on our actions in this century, and yet people who recognize this possibility don't do everything they can to make it go the way we need it to?

Well, ChaosMote already gave part of the answer, but another reason is the idea of comparative advantage. Normally I'd bring up someone like Scott Alexander/Yvain as an example (since he's repeatedly claimed he's not good at math and blogs more about politics/general rationality than about AI), but this time, you can just look at yourself. If, as you claim,

I'm a village idiot by LW standards, and especially bad at math, so I don't think I'd be very useful on the "front lines" so to speak, but perhaps I could try to make a lot of money and do FAI-focused EA? I might be more socially oriented/socially capable than many here, perhaps I could try to raise awareness or lobby for legislation?

then your comparative advantage lies less in theory and more in popularization. Technically, theory might be more important, but if you can net bigger gains elsewhere, then by all means you should do so. To use a (somewhat strained) analogy, think about expected value. Which would you prefer: a guaranteed US $50, or a 10% chance at getting US $300? The raw value of the $300 prize might be greater, but you have to multiply by the probabilities before you can do a comparison. It's the same here. For some LWers, working on AI is the way to go, but for others who aren't as good at math, maybe raising money is the best way to do things. And then there's the even bigger picture: AI might be the most important risk in the end, but what if (say) nuclear war occurs first? A politically-oriented person might do better to go into government or something of the sort, even if that person thinks AI is more important in the long run.

So while it might look somewhat strange that not every LWer is working frantically on AI at first, if you look a little deeper, there's actually a good reason. (And then there's also scope insensitivity, hyperbolic discounting, and all that good stuff ChaosMote brought up.) In a sense, you answered your own question when you asked your second.

To address your first question: this has to do with scope insensitivity, hyperbolic discounting, and other related biases. To put it bluntly, most humans are actually pretty bad at maximizing expected utility. For example, when I first head about x-risk, my thought process was definitely not "humanity might be wiped out - that's IMPORTANT. I need to devote energy to this." It was more along the lines of "huh; That's interesting. Tragic, even. Oh well; moving on..."

Basically, we don't care much about what happens in the distant future, especially if it isn't guaranteed to happen. We also don't care much more about humanity than we do about ourselves plus our close ones. Plus we don't really care about things that don't feel immediate. And so on. Then end result is that most people's immediate problems are more important to them then x-risk, even if the latter might be by far the more essential according to utilitarian ethics.

people who recognize this possibility don't do everything they can to make it go the way we need it to

Despite all talking about rationality, we are still humans with all typical human flaws. Also, it is not obvious which way it needs to go. Even if we had unlimited and infinitely fast processing power, and could solve mathematically all kinds of problems related to Löb's theorem, I still would have no idea how we could start transferring human values to the AI, considering that even humans don't understand themselves, and ideas like "AI should find a way to make humans smile" can lead to horrible outcomes. So maybe the first step would be to upload some humans and give them more processing power, but humans can also be horrible (and the horrible ones are actually more likely to seize such power), and the changes caused by uploading could make even nice people go insane.

So, what is the obvious next step, other than donating some money to the research, which will most likely conclude that further research is needed? I don't want to discourage anyone who donates or does the research, just saying that the situation with the research is frustrating by its lack of feedback. On the scale where 0 is the first electronic computer and 100 is the Friendly AI, are we at least at point 1? If we happen to be there, how would we know that?

I don't agree with this particular argument, but I'll mention it anyway for the sake of having a devil's advocate:

The number of lives lost to an extinction event is arguably capped at ~10 billion, or whatever Earth's carrying capacity is. If you think the AI risk is enough generations out, then it may well be possible to do more good by, say, eliminating poverty faster. A simple mathematical model would suggest that if the singularity is 10 generations away, and Earth will have a constant population of ~10 billion, then 100 billion lives will pass between now and the singularity. A 10% increase in humanity's average quality of life over that period would be morally equivalent to stopping the singularity.

Now, there are a host of problems with the above argument:

• First, it is trying to minimize death rather than maximize life. If you set out to maximize the number of Quality Adjusted Life Years that intelligent life accumulates before it's extinction, then you should also take into account all of the potential future lives which would be extinguished by an extinction event, rather than just the lives taken by the event itself.

• Second, the Future of Humanity Institute has conducted an informal survey of existential risk researchers, asking for estimates of the probability of human extinction in the next 100 years. The median result (not mean so as to minimize the impact of outliers) was ~19%. If that's a ~20% chance each century, then we can expect humanity to last perhaps 2 or 3 centuries (aka, that's the half life of a technological civilization). Even 300 years is only maybe 4 or 5 generations, so perhaps 50 billion lives could be effected by eliminating poverty now. Using the same simplistic model as before, that would require a 20% increase in humanity's average quality of life to be morally equivalent to ~10 billion deaths. That's a harder target to hit, but it may be even harder still if you consider that poverty is likely to be nearly eliminated in ~100 years. Poverty really has been going down steadily for the last century or so, and in another century we can expect it to be much improved.

Note that both of these points are based on somewhat subjective judgements. Personally, I think Friendly AI research is around the point of diminishing returns. More money would be useful, of course, but I think it would be putting some focus on preemptively addressing other forms of existential risk which may emerge over the next century. Additionally, I think it's important to play with other factors that go into QALY. Quality of life is already being addressed, and duration of our civilization is starting to be addressed via x-risk reduction. The other factor is the number of lives, which is currently capped at Earth's carrying capacity of ~10 billion. I'd like to see trillions of lives. Brain uploads are one method as technology improves, but another is space colonization. The cheapest option I see is Directed Panspermia, which is the intentional seeding of new solar systems with dormant single cell life. All other forms of X-risk reduction address the possibility that the Great Filter is ahead of us, but this would hedge that bet. I haven't done any calculations yet, but donating to organizations like the Mars Society may even turn out to be competitive in terms of QALY/$, if they can tip the political scale between humanity staying in and around Earth, and humanity starting to spread outward, colonizing other planets and eventually other stars over the next couple millennia. It's hard to put a figure on the expected QALY return, but if quadrillions of lives hang in the balance, that may well tip the scales and make the tens of billions of dollars needed to initiate Mars colonization an extremely good investment.

To elaborate on existing comments, a fourth alternative to FAI theory, Earning To Give, and popularization is strategy research. (That could include research on other risks besides AI.) I find that the fruit in this area is not merely low-hanging but rotting on the ground. I've read in old comment threads that Eliezer and Carl Shulman in particular have done a lot of thinking about strategy but very little of it has been written down, and they are very busy people. Circumstances may well dictate retracing a lot of their steps.

You've said elsewhere that you have a low estimate of your innate mathematical ability, which would preclude FAI research, but presumably strategy research would require lower aptitude. Things like statistics would be invaluable, but strategy research would also involve a lot of comparatively less technical work, like historical and philosophical analysis, experiments and surveys, literature reviews, lots and lots of reading, etc. Also, you've already done a bit of strategizing; if you are fulfilled by thinking about those things and you think your abilities meet the task, then it might be a good alternative.

Some strategy research resources:

• Luke Muehlhauser's How to study superintelligence strategy.

• Luke's AI Risk and Opportunity: A Strategic Analysis sequence.

• Analysis Archives of the MIRI blog.

• The AI Impacts blog, particularly the Possible Empirical Investigations post and links therein.

• The Future of Life Institute's A survey of research questions for robust and beneficial AI.

• Naturally, Bostrom's Superintelligence.

which is what is the most any person, more specifically, I can do for FAI?

First thing you should do is talk to the people that are already involved in this. CFAR seems to be the gateway for man people (at least, it was for me).

Actually, this scheme is currently employed by utilities, albeit usually not with seawater. The technique is called pumped storage hydro. Pumped storage hydro accounts for the vast majority of grid energy storage world-wide. Pumped storage hydro is used to by power companies to achieve various goals, e.g.:

• flatten out load variations (as you suggested elsewhere in this thread)

• provide "instant-on" reserve generation for voltage and frequency support

• level out the fluctuating output of intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar (as you suggested above)

Wikipedia states that round-trip efficiency of pumped storage hydro can range between 70% and 87%, making it an economical solution in many cases.

A couple of obstacles to using pumped storage hydro are:

• Certain topological/geographic features are needed to make PSH viable

• Social and ecological concerns

The operating cost for hydro power plants is very low, so the relevant cost is the initial building. If you dam a river, it just takes one wall, while if you want to create a swimming pool, it takes four. Actually, five, and the floor may be the biggest problem. If you dam a river, you already know that it isn't easy for the water to flow through the ground, because it isn't taking that route. Whereas pumping it onto dry ground probably won't work.

What is the fundamental problem with this?

Cost. Wind/wave/solar energy is more expensive than fossil-fuel or nuclear energy to start with, and adding not-too-efficient storage mechanisms to even out the supply does not help it at all.

Really, the answer to most questions of this kind is "cost". It is the default and usually correct answer.

Storing energy in batteries is a net loss. Even at retail prices, the total electricity stored in the battery over its entire lifespan will not pay for the upfront cost of the battery. Even if the electricity were free.

Batteries are a generic technology. If they were useful for grid energy storage, they would be used for it already, not just useful for exotic future energy generation methods. In particular, wind power is terrible because it is erratic (and badly timed where it has trends) and would be the existing technology to most benefit from improved storage.

Saltwater causes huge amounts of wear and tear, and weather fluctuations can completely destroy your ship. What you're basically doing is paying a ton more money per square foot of solar panel space than you would be on land, because every bit of that space needs to be attached to a ship.

I imagine in most places it'd be cheaper to buy an acre of land on the outskirts of town, or to rent an acre of otherwise unused rooftop from your local big-box store, than to build a barge with equivalent deck area; Wikipedia informs me for example that a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier has a deck area of only about six acres.

Land-based solutions also let you plug directly into the grid rather than futzing with also-expensive battery storage.

Batteries? Batteries?

There's the problem.

Solar panels don't take that much space. Elon Musk has a nice graphic in yesterday's presentation of his new battery: https://youtu.be/yKORsrlN-2k?t=3m32s The amount of space required for enough solar panels to produce enough energy for the whole world is tiny.

Why isn't sea-based solar power more of a thing?

For the usual reason -- it's not cost-efficient, and in this case ridiculously so.

Best guess, it's simply because Typical Mind is overwhelmingly more common (though this could be an example of TMF at work right here!). Humans are social animals, who value the agreement of others with their own views. It's easy and comfortable to assume that other people will think similarly to you. There's an even deeper level than that, though: you are the only person whose mind you are truly familiar with, and so there's a huge availability bias in favor of your own thought processes on any subject. It requires more thought to consider what other people - either in particular, or generally - would think of a situation than it does to form your own thoughts; you do the latter automatically just be considering the situation at all. Many people will never put forth the extra effort without being prodded to do so.

Even those who claim to be their own special snowflake actually commonly do value commonality with other people. Hipsters (not saying you are one, it's just a convenient category of identifiable people who, ironically, share a useful set of criteria) may proudly claim to think differently from the rest of society, but even then they are agreeing with each other about what to think differently about, and are frequently thinking different in the same way. If you drink PBR but claim to do so "ironically", you're a hipster; you belong to a society that may have some differences from the dominant one, but is internally relatively consistent. If you only drink micro-brewed craft beers of at least 7% ABV and made with organically-grown hops then you're a couple different kinds of beer snob, but in a way that people can relate to; maybe they also prefer stronger beers, or stick to organic produce, or whatever, and they know other people who have those other preferences too so they can visualize you as the intersection of those groups, and you can be a member (a "special" member, but one nonetheless) of groups such as "craft beer snobs". If you drink Bud Light and Coors Light but only when mixed with pear juice and Tabasco sauce, you're actually a special snowflake... otherwise known as being just weird. People won't really be able to relate to your tastes, and (except when trying to signal your different-ness) you probably won't talk about your atypical taste when you're at a bar and somebody strikes up a conversation.

I'll admit I've had AMF moments myself, though. Topics I avoid talking about because I don't expect anybody else to be interested, or situations where I think literally everybody must think some way except me because I don't see any other counterexamples. It's rare, though; at 28 I probably experience as much TMF in a week as I can recall AMF experiences in my life.

Typical mind fallacy is "that person behaved that way for the same reasons I would behave that way, and they would like what I would like, and dislike what I dislike".

Even if you think you are special and different, you might still implicitly assume that everyone knows that crinkling that noisy bag of chips is annoying simply because it's annoying to you and therefore flare up in irritation at the one guy in the library doing so. You say "how inconsiderate", but they don't even notice when other people crinkle chips, so they think you just appeared out of nowhere and started being unreasonable and mean on purpose.

"Special snowflake" attitudes don't run counter this, it's an entirely separate thing, operating on a "higher" level. Your ego might think you're a special snowflake, but your id doesn't take that into account when you instantly react.

I would say that it has to do with the consequences of each mistake. When you subconsciously assume that others think the way you do, you might see someone's action and immediately assume they have done it for the reason you would have done it (or, if you can't conceive of a reason you would do it, you might assume they are stupid or insane).

On the other hand, assuming people's minds differ from you may not lead to particular assumptions in the same way. When you see someone do something, it doesn't push you into thinking that there's no way the person did that for any reason you would do it. I don't think it will have that same kind of effect on your subconscious assumptions. I might be missing something, though. How do you see the atypical mind fallacy affecting your behaviour/thoughts in general?

It's a bad idea. Don't do it. You'll be turned off by all the low-level grudgery and it'll distract you from the real content.

Most of the time, you'll know if you found a solid proof or not. Those times you're not sure, just post a question on math.stackexchange, they're super-helpful.

Mathematicians have come up with formal languages that can, in principle, be used to write proofs in a way that they can be checked by a simple algorithm. However, they're utterly impractical. Most proofs leave some amount of detail to the reader. A proof might skip straightforward algebraic manipulations. It might state an implication and leave the reader to figure out just what happened. Actually writing out all the details (in English) would at least double the length of most proofs. Put in a formal language, and you're looking at an order-of-magnitude increase in length.

That's a lot of painstaking labor for even a simple proof. If the problem is the least bit interesting, you'll spend a lot more time writing out the details for a computer than you did solving it.

I have tried exactly this with basic topology, and it took me bloody ages to get anywhere despite considerable experience with coq. It was a fun and interesting exercise in both the foundations of the topic I was studying and coq, but it was by no means the most efficient way to learn the subject matter.

The Metamath project was started by a person who also wanted to understand math by coding it: http://metamath.org/

Generally speaking, machine-checked proofs are ridiculously detailed. But it being able to create such detailed proofs did boost my mathematical understanding a lot. I found it worthwhile.

"There is no royal road to geometry."

The way we teach proofs and mathematical sophistication is ad hoc and subject specific. I wish I knew a better general way, but barring that, perhaps start with a mathematical subject close to programming. For instance logic or complexity theory. I wouldn't bother with proof assistants until you are pretty comfortable with proofs.

There is a demonstration of exactly this in Eliezer's post from 2008 about the Allais paradox.

(Eliezer modified the numbers a bit, compared with other statements of the Allais paradox that I've seen. I don't think this makes a substantial difference to what's going on.)

The point of the Allais paradox is less about how humans violate the axiom of independence and more about how our utility functions are nonlinear, especially with respect to infinitesimal risk.

There is an existing Dutch Book for eliminating infinitesimal risk, and it's called insurance.

You get them to pay you for one, in terms of the other. People will pay you for a small chance of a big payoff in units of a medium chance of medium payoff. People will pay you for the certainty of a moderate reward by giving up a higher reward with a small chance of failure. All of the good examples of this I can think of are already well-populated business models, but I didn't try very hard so you can probably find some unexploited ones.

As I told someone else, this pdf has preliminary discussion about how to resolve differences that persist under extrapolation.

The specific example of religious disagreements seems like a trivial problem to anyone who gets far enough to consider the question. Since there aren't any gods, the AI can ask what religious people would want if they accepted this fact. (This is roughly why I would oppose extrapolating only LW-ers rather than humanity as a whole.) But hey, maybe the question is more difficult than I think - we wouldn't specifically tell the AI to be an atheist if general rules of thinking did not suffice - or maybe this focus on surface claims hides some deeper disagreement that can't be so easily settled by probability.

The "if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together" CEV idea hopes that the disagreements are really just misunderstandings and mistakes in some sense. Otherwise, take some form of average or median, I guess?

This is an SQ because probably this was the first problem solved -it just so obivious - yet I cannot find it.

AFAIK it has not been solved and if it has, I would love to hear about it too. I also believe that, like you said, while it's possible for humans to negotiate and agree, any agreement would clearly be a compromise, and not the simultaneous fulfillment of everyone's different values.

CEV has, IIRC, a lot of handwaving and unfounded assumptions about the existence and qualities of the One True Utility Function it's trying to build. Is there something better?

I suppose people aren't robbed "in broad daylight", when there are many people on the streets, because standers-by can help the victim, call the police, or take videos that show the robber's face.

As for rioting, the rioters would rather attack and rob a store when the store-owner isn't there to defend it or, again, call for help or take photos.

But even if that wasn't so, there might be game theoretic reasons to rob and riot at night. Suppose police (or other authorities) need to invest some amount of effort to make each hour of the day or night crime-free. They don't have enough budget to make all hours crime-free; besides, the last few hours require the most effort, because it's easier to make robbers to delay their robbery by a few hours, than to make them never rob at all.

So which hours should the police invest their effort in? Since robbing affects pedestrians, and rioting affects stores and shoppers, then clearly police should prioritize daylight or working hours, when there are many more people at risk, when people can't just decide to stay home because they're afraid of being robbed, and when the police themselves want to have their shifts. And once police are more active during certain hours, criminals will become less active during those hours.

https://keysso.net/community_news/May_2003/improved_lighting_study.pdf crime goes down when areas are better lit. I think there is a psychological reluctance to commit crimes if you think you're going to be clearly visible, regardless of your actual chances of getting away with it. Sort of like the experiment with the eyes posted above the honor system bagels in an office.

But is there any technical reason that you can't rob people or riot in daylight?

The odds of finding a sufficiently isolated spot to safely carry out a robbery are a lot lower in the day. If I leave my office and walk to my car at 2 pm, I pass at least a dozen people on the way. If I do it at 2 am, I'm usually the only one around. Daylight hours are a lot riskier for a robber because there are a lot more people walking around. That means more witnesses and more people who could interfere.

Salt water is VERY UNKIND to precision metal machinery like rocket engines. Also the tank has such thin walls that chaotic wave action will destroy it.

It's a step toward landing it back at the launch site for rapid reuse.

The project's long-term objectives include returning a launch vehicle first stage to the launch site in minutes and to return a second stage to the launch pad following orbital realignment with the launch site and atmospheric reentry in up to 24 hours. Both stages will be designed to allow reuse a few hours after return.

— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_reusable_launch_system_development_program

The Space Shuttle did something like this, the rocket boosters were landed in the ocean with parachutes and reused. I found a PDF from NASA which describes the procedure. They disassembled the entire thing into parts, inspected each part for damage, and then restored and reused the parts as appropriate. By contrast, I think what SpaceX is aiming for is more like an airplane, you just fill the tank with new fuel and launch it again.

(The PDF claims that the refurbishment program is cost effective, but word of mouth has it that if you factor in the cost of retrieving the boosters, the whole thing cost more than just manufacturing new ones from scratch. See also this thread in the KSP forum.)

What fubarobfusco said, and also because the ocean deals a huge amount of damage to complicated machinery, which is very expensive and slow to fix.

Yes, there is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Terrestrial gives reserves of 13 million tonnes, ie 13 billion kg. I think these are "proven" reserves, ie economical to mine at current prices.

The amount of lithium in a Li-ion battery is not that much, roughly 500g/kwhr. So a 10 kW Tesla Power Wall would contain about 5 kg of lithium. We can make 2.6 billion Power Walls... and E. Musk said at the launch that 2 billion would be enough to convert the entire planet's energy usage - including industry and transport - to renewable electricity.

Is there enough lithium in the world that we can mine to build enough batteries?

I have mostly seen claims to the contrary. However, there are other technologies that work very well at storing energy at industrial scales; phase change materials come to mind as promising.

My impression is that this sort of thing is not done already because nonrenewables are so cheap. Musk pays more attention to the energy markets than I do, so he might be correct that solar is going to happen in a big way in the near term, but I think this is more likely to be a conspicuous consumption thing than an economically wise thing for the next decade or so.

Lithium doesn't seem particularly cosmically abundant:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/SolarSystemAbundances.png

here

I feel like I might have missed the LW post where this kind of thing was discussed, or maybe I read it and was left unsatisfied with the reasoning.

I do not think anyone who's thought about it deeply thinks that they have the best possible solution to this problem, and most proposed solutions are preliminary at best.

There's a pdf discussing the matter linked here - though as you can see, a lot of people failed to read it (or "seer" has a lot of sockpuppets).

How would you as an individual deal with having inconsistent values? Let's assume that you become super intelligent, so you can rather reliably see the possible consequences of any changes you would try to do.

The person who takes their religion very seriously probably believes that the religion is factually true. Or possibly they believe that the religion is false, but that it is a "Noble Lie", i.e. that the belief in the religion is a net benefit. Either way, there is an empirical claim they have related to the religion. They would probably be interested in knowing whether this claim is true.

These are not full answers, just hints towards possible answers.

If you try to do that, you get a paradox where, if A is not creating anyone, B is creating a new person and letting them lead a sad life, and C is creating a new person and letting them lead a happy life, then U(A) = U(B) < U(C) = U(A). You can't say that it's better for someone to be happy than sad, but both are equivalent to nonexistence.

It has been studied and it's actually usually not recommended. This is the principle of interleaving. See Make It Stick, especially chapter 3. See also the recently linked document by richard_reitz.

A few comments from my experience, these may not be applicable to all circumstances.

I found material to have a digestion time, to much material too fast and I would stop learning. If understanding A depends on understanding B, which depends on C, It was easier to learn C, and sleep on it, then learn and sleep on B, then A. As opposed to taking ABC all in one bite. In addition to the short term, I experienced this in the long term; I would frequently look back at courses from the previous years and wonder how I ever found them challenging. When I had Calculus 1 and 2 back to back I struggled hard, When I had a year break, then Calculus 3, another year break, then Calculus 4, I felt I had a better grasp of the material.

Also, as you approach higher levels of education and specialize, your classes overlap material more and more. In high school I took grade twelve physics then grade 12 calculus. I was very upset to discover after the fact the derivative relations between locations, velocity, and acceleration, and that the equations were simple to derive once the missing calculus piece of the puzzle was provided. Once I got to the end of my undergrad, every class I was taking was looking at the same problem from different perspectives, so any one taken by themselves would be without supporting knowledge to lean on.

And lastly, Topic burn out would kill me. This has to do with mental digestion time, but some times it was nice to skip a class or two, not think about the topic for a week, and then jump back in with renewed energy.

But of course also am full of bias, because learning is complex and I'm just latching on to the few patterns I've recognized.

I predict higher test scores but lower long term information retention.

it depends on which goal you are trying to achieve.

What is the LessWrong-like answer to whether someone born a male but who identifies as female is indeed female?

The Lesswrong-like answer to whether a blue egg containing Palladium is indeed a blegg is "It depends on what your disguised query is".

If the disguised query is which pronoun you should use, I don't see any compelling reason not use the word that the person in question prefers. If you insist on using the pronoun associated with whatever disguised query you associate with sex/gender, this is at best an example of "defecting by accident".

Like others said, the answer is more like "depends what do you want to know". In this case, you need to figure out what is the point of an all-female college at all. Fixing systemic disadvantages? Rape safety? More cooperative athmosphere? What you need to figure out is not whether trans women are "really, truly, indeed" women, which is a meaningless kind of sentence, but more like whether they can be categorized as women for the purposes of the goals of an all-women college.

But another relevant aspect is, and this I guess is not discussed so much on LW so I am not really sure what is the best way of wording it... basically that means to an end tend to ossify into values in themselves, via becoming part of identity, tradition etc. There is the old story of a Zen monastery, where the cat made a lot of noise during meditation so they ended up tying it up and 200 years they write treatises about the spiritial significance of having a tied up cat around symbolizing the tied up mind.

Even if the idea of an all-women college was originally utilitarian, a means to an end, now it is easily identity based. And identity isn't a rational thing. There is no truly objective answer whether biological women should or should not accept trans women into their idea of women-as-an-identity-group, because identity is something that tends to break free from the original reasons of creating it. People tend to ask precisely these "are X truly, really, indeed Y" when discussing identity, and there is no good answer, because on the rational level we can only ask the question "is it useful to categorize X as Y for the purposes of Z" and identity is precisely something that breaks free of such purposes and becomes a tribe on its own. There is no right or wrong answer about who should be allowed to be a member of a tribe. It is largely based on the feelings of the other tribe members. You cannot really give an objective, rational answer to who should be considered a hardcore Manchaster United fan or what is true, real punk music as opposed to pop punk. This just based on how the people in question feel.

What does it mean to be female? It has to be something such that babies, animals and people in tribal cultures can be classified as female or not. Lets call this property, that baby girls, hens and women in hunter-gatherer tribes share, and baby boys etc. do not, property P. People who identify as female are presumably claiming they have property P, and presumably think this is a substantive claim.

Now, could P be something such that merely believing you had property P, made you have property P? Certainly there are some properties like this:

• X has P if and only if ( X has two x chromosomes OR X believes ( X has property P ) )

but I think this is clearly unsatisfactory. For example, it would mean that an ordinary young boy who, upon being taught about gender for the first time, was momentarily mistaken and thought he was female, would instantly become female. And it would mean that transwomen were asserting a disjunction of a falsehood and a weird recursive clause.

There are social-role based alternatives, along the lines of

• X has P if and only if ( X wishes to be treated in the typical manner of people with property P )

but this doesn't work for Tomboys, who wish to be treated broadly like boys but are nonetheless definitely girls. Nor does it work for extreme feminists, who do not wish women (including themselves) to be treated in the typical way women are treated.

Now, whether believing something is sufficient to make it true is of course a separate issue from what is politically prudent of you to say. My guess is that your students would ask you this question have a few motivations:

• If you say that the map is not the territory, they can safely reject you as an outdated and uncaring reactionary, and will reject what you say on other subjects.
• If you say that believing things makes them true, they can say "even our ultra-conservative republican lecturer agrees".

My advice to you is to say 'mu'. Ask your students what they mean by female, or why they are asking. Then you can respond in the correct manner according to their definition, pointing out that if they don't like the answer, maybe they didn't really mean that definition.

'Whatever you might say something "is", it is not.' Whatever we might say belongs to the verbal level and not to the un-speakable, objective levels.

'what we see, hear, feel, speak about or infer, is never it, but only our human abstraction about 'it'

'A map is not the territory.'

'Identity is invariably false to facts.'

'Every identification is bound to be in some degree a misevaluation'

-- Korzybski

I don't know the LessWrong-like answer, so I can only offer you the human, empathic answer.

Based on the phrasing of your question:

whether someone born a male but who identifies as female is indeed female

and the fact that you have posted it to LessWrong, I understand it to be a question about constructing a useful and consistent model of the human condition, rather than about respecting an actual or hypothetical human being. If so, I think you are asking the wrong question.

Your students want to learn from you, but on a more basic level, they want to feel safe with you. If you have a trans student, or a student with a trans friend/relative, she is likely to take your answer to this question very personally. Your choice boils down to whether you offer a personal welcome (by recognizing your student's identity) or a personal affront (by implying that you have more authority than she does to determine who she "really is").

I should add that it is a common failure mode for humans, when confronted with a counterexample to their existing model of the human condition, to insist that their model is correct and that the fellow human they are dealing with is a bad data point. As well as rude and demeaning, this approach is irrational and intellectually dishonest.

For the purposes of a all women college you have to ask yourself about the purpose of limiting the college to women.

Maybe there a perception out there that math isn't a women's subject. In mixed-gender classes woman are more likely to spent effort into signalling their strong femininity. The are spending more effort into engaging in actions that signal high mating market value when suitable mates are around.

Do transwomen trigger the same behavior? I don't think that the gender that's assigned at birth matters. On the other hand "identifies" is a complex word. Just checking a checkbox isn't enough to stop being seen as a potential mating partner. The transwomen who spends enough effort on looking female that strangers easily identify them as being female on the other hand is unlikely to trigger mating market behavior.

Another reason to limit the college to women is about women being a minority that's discriminated against. Transwomen do get discriminated against them and don't get included in old boys networks. From that perspective it also seems fine to accept transwomen.

Maybe you can also think of other reasons for the policy of being all-women. Check whether those reasons matter for transwomen.

There seem to be strong laws against gender discrimination in the US, how does your college avoid getting sued for discrimination?

Historically, the transgendered were swept under the rug in Western society and we're left with hopelessly inadequate naming conventions. Some cultures have come up with extra genders in order to accommodate the transgendered and this sort of question is moot.

Working within the present naming conventions, we can develop a simplified model. Suppose there are two sexes (M and F) and two genders (M and F). To every person we can associate an ordered pair where e.g. (M,F) would denote someone who is biologically male but identifies as female. Mathematically, we have a map F from the set of humans (H) to the cartesian product {M,F} X {M,F}.

The question at hand can be stated thus: suppose we wish to define a projection operator p: {M,F} X {M,F} to {M,F}. Is it better to project onto the first coordinate or the second? In other words, should we associate (M,F) with M or with F?

Projecting onto a coordinate loses information. This is unavoidable. The answer will depend on which bit of information we consider more important. That, in turn, depends entirely on our values. My own view is that if we accept the legitimacy of being transgender (as opposed to considering it a mental defect), then one's present self-identified gender is far more pertinent to daily life and so deserves priority. Changing our conventions would be ideal, but in the meantime we have to deal with accidents of history.

What is the LessWrong-like answer to whether someone born a male but who identifies as female is indeed female?

What do you mean by "indeed"? That is, neural categories seems like the right place to start. (And, especially as a professor, that seems like the right thing to talk about when students ask about a political issue--not your position, but the mental algorithms you're executing to determine your position.)

(Very similar to PeerGynt's response, and drawing on the same sequence.)

Our society is currently set up to assume that there are only two genders, male and female, and that those categories imply many other things. You can encounter this everywhere, from pronouns in language to the M/F boxes on government forms. If a person cannot be adequately described by those categories, with their implicit assumptions, (and there are people who even on a biological basis cannot be described as purely male or female, based on what genitals or chromosomes they have), then they likely have a difficult life, and it is important to be kind to them, (not that it is not important to be kind to people with easy lives.)

I would keep in mind, when addressing questions regarding this issue, just how hard it would be to live a life in a society completely not set up for something so basic and personal, that by daily interactions does not acknowledge one's true experience and tries to force badly constructed and mismatched categories onto the person to make the cognitive dissonance go away, instead of addressing the problems with the categories.

my general answer to similar questions of hard to tease out results is:-

either way this does not help me do the things that I do and be good at life. (other than to specifically related to those people, at which point - ask them what they want and create the categories around their preference)

gender is only a map made by humans - one humans have found useful for a long time. A map should be used any way possible to make the territory easier to predict.

Causal inference research.

Yes depending on how you define "meaningful". If you can speed up a cure for cancer by 1 day, or increase the chance of us getting a cure next year by 1 in a million then the expected value of this increase in terms of human welfare is huge compared to what most people manage to accomplish in their life.

Become a famous billionaire?

It seems like the barriers to innovation are insurmountable to everyone with the will to try

Why?

When it comes to running studies, you could run a study for the effect of taking Vitamin D in the morning vs. in the evening. Various QS people have found an effect for themselves. The effect should be there. As far as I know there no study establishing the effect. Doesn't seem to be difficult for someone without resources but with a decent amount of time on their hand.

As far as diagnostic tools go, we today have a lot of smart scales and blood pressure measurement devices. As far as I know nobody produced a similarly smart peak flow meter (/ FEV1). Such a device would allow the gathering of more data for a lot of people. More and better data means more opportunities for scientific insight.

On a more theoretical level I think there could be advances in organizing the large pile of biological and medical knowledge we have. I don't think that textbooks and journal articles are good mediums for transferring knowledge between scientists. Protein databases like uniprot contain a lot of information in a way that's easy to query. I think that finding ways to organize less structured biological insights and the evidence for them is an area with a high potential impact.

I think a sport drink is basically a branded version of this.

Given that sweating while dancing means loss of salt, having a drink with a bit of salt to replace the lost salt seem reasonable. Replacing all your water consumption with a isotonic drink on the other hand doesn't seem like a good idea.

As far as sugar goes I would use a more complex one than glucose.

Overhydration, but I'm not sure whether a sedentary person drinking it orally is at risk for that. (We know runners drinking hydration fluid and sedentary people taking hydration intravenously are at risk).

Empty calories, but you can offset that.

Excess salt (but it is now uncertain as to whether excess salt is harmful in the absence of high blood pressure).

It's also weird, as in it's both an evolutionary novel and culturally novel thing for you to do, and that means it's risky until proven innocent.

there may be room in the market for a new, smaller firm that creates value in a way that established players can't

Maybe this is what startups are about. When a few people start a company and invent a product... well, hypothetically you could have a big company like Microsoft select a few employees, give them salary and complete freedom, and let them invent a new product for the company... but for various reasons that rarely happens. So it is better to wait until someone outside of the company develops the stuff and then try to buy it.

An alternative explanation is that by buying external startups that succeed, you save money by not having to finance all those other startups that failed, so for a big company buying a startup is cheaper than trying to create one at home. But I feel this explanation is probably wrong. -- You could do some preselection about whom you allow to try making an "internal startup". And if one in a hundred succeeds, the price of a successful startup is probably higher than salaries for a few hundred employees; and a sufficiently big company has enough resources to play this game. To sufficiently motivate people, you could promise half or maybe even 10% of the "internal startup" profits to the employees who created it, and the company would still be profitable.

Sounds partially correct, although, I am a self-taught "economist" mostly.

However, in my experience, this kind of "basic incentive structure analysis" type of economics does not really predict the real world so well. I had to actually un-learn a lot of it in real life. (Or maybe I should have learned more advanced kinds of economics.)

Basic Econ can be understood as more normative than descriptive. That is, if you had these kinds of markets, then things would be really great and efficient. But in real life everything from old-boys networks to political corruption to cognitive biases screwing this up. The more you live in a place that works like Basic Econ the closer you are to an optimum. If you see lots of poverty around you, someone, something is throwing big monkey wrenches into this mechanism.

So in the real life you can see well-paid employees who are just nephews of the CEO or have an excellent sales pitch (interview skills). It does not always work out the textbook way. It should, just doesn't.

Your job is probably a commodity. Engineer, baker, tailor, data scientist, statistician...it's a commodity unless you can make buyers believe that other sellers are not selling the same thing that you are - basically, that they can't approach other sellers and get a price from them for the same good.

But most people are specialists today. When was the last time you saw a General IT Guy in a big city? 1990? Today it is being some kind of an Enterprise Network Bullshit Bingo Database Architect. Or more realistically, simply based on what kinds of products or technologies they know. For example being an Oracle Financials expert is a world on its own. Or SAP, Navision...

But if you become a specialist, there is one trade-off. You must live in a city. Rural areas need generalists. This is simply based on density. In the country, there may not be more than 5 doctors or IT folks within 100km so they better know it all.

I think that large companies likely have quite a bit of inertia, meaning that they may not be making "efficient" decisions either. The people working at those companies have TVs that are probably risk-averse with respect to money. Firm capital (if publicly traded) depends on shareholders transient judgment...which may be to SELL due to their own risk aversion if the firm makes a radical move. So I would expect firms to be not efficient in the strict sense, and also risk averse. So it looks like there is a tradeoff as firms get bigger (as revenue increases and costs increase). They likely get some smoother processes, less hiccups, economies of scale etc, but they also possibly give away expected utility through risk aversion.

The big issue is not even risk aversion. After all a truly large firm can risk a tiny fraction of its revenue on an experiment and that tiny fraction can still be large. The issue is plain simply the incentive chains. There is a long hierarchy with everybody on higher than you trying to use rewards and punishments to get you work the way they want you to. After several steps down in this chain, this naturally gets corrupted. Like a game of telephone. People who are 4-5 level removed from shareholders they don't want the same things shareholders want to. If they are rewarded for number of calls taken, they will find any excuse to drop calls and take another one.

This is a well-known problem dating back to Laplace (pp 18-19 of the book).

I notice the effects of the recession – I always offer to buy food, and in the past beggars often concocted elaborate excuses why I should give them money instead of buying a hotdog or something. But in the last few years, more and more they agree to get the food (and actually eat it).

Anyway, depending on where you live, there might be organized teams of professional beggars who are exploited by their "owner" and they have to give him his daily share "or else". By not giving money, you really hurt the beggars - but this amounts to emotional blackmailing, so perhaps you should not - for the price of hurting a few beggars now we could close the exploitation later, since if there is no profit there is no incentive to exploit the beggars.

What's your goal? Effective altruism literature suggest that if you want spent money to do good, bet nets for Africa are an effective way to do so.

Do you care if they buy booze and cigarettes? I for one do not. If it makes you happy to give them a few bucks, do it. I do not charge this against my charity budget, however, but my discretionary budget. But that impulse causing you to take money OUT of your charity budget may be a poor choice, as there may be charities about which you care more than beggar booze. Bottom line, giving to beggars is consumption not charity and if you get more happiness that way, do it. Or go buy a bunch of mini liquors and hand them out; I did this once and I felt great afterwards.

The money you would have spent on giving money to a beggar might be better spent on something that will decrease existential risk or contribute to transhumanist goals, such as donating to MIRI or the Methuselah Foundation.

I can see nothing wrong with buying such a person food.

And sometimes they bring babies, not always their own, drugged perhaps unto death so that they will receive more charity but not be bothered by the unrest of the children... I think it is better to donate to hostels because it doesn't give the 'parenting homeless' an advantage.

Science fiction is about imaging how the future would look like and not essentially about space travel.

Bruce Sterling even managed to write science fiction that happens at the same year it's written with Zeitgeist. It's a quite good book. It manages to name Osama Bin Ladin as a significant player even through it's written in 1999 (and published a year later). It also features the NSA and how they manage to wiretap everything in the world.

Technological progress also hasn't ended. 20 years ago flying drones bringing your packages to your door step was science fiction and today Amazon rolls out field trials where they do that.

Given how technology prices change the costs of bugging equipment sinks fast. Cheap bugging that can be deployed by individuals features a role in Bruce Sterling's Distraction. The book also looks at a gene-manipulated guy who lives in a country where gene manipulation is outlawed and as a result he can't run for office.

There plenty of technology and change to be written about. Apart from that the future is "Old people in cities who are afraid of the sky".

Has any science fiction writer ever announced that he or she has given up writing in that genre because technological progress has pretty much ended?

Charlie Stross has expressed disappointment that technological change hasn't been as rapid as he hoped for in the mid 1990s, but that's a very different claim. I don't think anyone has claimed that progress has stopped completely, and it would be very strange to do so. Yes, the specific technologies involved in space travel have not progressed much but even in those areas progress is still occurring: the rise of cubesats and private rockets, the spread of highly accurate civilian GPS, the ability to send long-lived rovers to other planets - these are all advances in the last 20 years.

Outside space issues, there's been big jumps in technology- the most obvious changes have been (and continue to be) in the computer related fields (e.g. cheap smart phones, rise of big data, general increase in computer power level, drastic reductions in bandwith cost) but there have also been major improvements in other fields.

Let's look at medicine. HIV used to be a death sentence and now the life expectancy of people in much of the developed world with HIV is close to that of the general population. Death rates from various cancers continue to decline. Many tests are faster and more reliable. You seem implicitly to be using a 45 year time window, but in either a 45 or a 20 year time window, these advances are pretty clearcut.

I could continue with other fields but the general trend is clear: progress may be occurring slowly but technological progress is still definitely going on.

Haven't heard about such an accident. Why do you ask?

Can't figure how the second paragraph demonstrates that technological progress has ended (by the way, do you mean it stopped or it really reached its logical conclusion?). Rather, it illustrates its ever more rapid pace. And that might be a problem for science fiction: where formerly readers were excited to read fiction about strange new things that science could bring in the future, nowadays they are rather overwhelmed with the strange new things they already have, and afraid and unwilling to look into the future; it's not that the science fiction cannot show it. Charles Stross has written about it (don't have the exact link; sorry)

Why should they?

You many note a general shift away from space opera towards biology and computer technology inspired storylines. But even that being said, why should the direction reality is going affect the direction of speculative fiction?

What's stopping people from doing this?

You can't do this for a large amount without a decent amount of credit history and seven (I think) years of no credit is a very high price to pay for a 50% chance at some sum.

And if you try to do this for a large amount, the bank will want assurances of you being able to pay them back. If you do this with "false documents", you will go to jail for fraud.

If people obtain 70% information through vision

What does that even mean?

why do lecturers never bind their eyes?

Eye contact is part of good public speaking. It useful to perceive one's audience and see when it get's confused.

If someone is afraid, binding their eyes is not likely to reduce anxiety.

In some applications, you can get a base rate through random sampling and go from there.

Otherwise, you're stuck making something up. The simplest principle is to assume that if there's no evidence with which to distinguish possibilities, then one should take a uniform distribution (this has obvious drawbacks if the number of possibilities is infinite). Another approach is to impose some kind of complexity penalty, i.e. to have some way of measuring the complexity of a statement and to prefer statements with less complexity.

If you have no data, you can't have a good way to calculate the probability of something. If you defend a method by saying it works in practice, then you're using data.

Intuition. Trusting our brain to come up with something useful.

mutter mutter something something to do with parsimony/complexity/occam?

No, practical Bayesian probability starts with an attempt to represent your existing beliefs and make them self-consistent. For a brief post on the more abstract problem, see here.

If you want to minimize the mean travel time, the answer is either to always take the bus or always walk (unless you see the bus at the stop immediately, in which case you should take it--this violates the assumption that the bus's arrival time is unknown.) With the numbers you've given, walking is better.

If you want to minimize the chance that you'll have regret, where regret is defined as "if I had chosen the other method, I would have gotten there first", the solution is the same as in the average case.

(Both of these cases are complicated by the fact that since you see the bus at the stop some percentage of the time, the bus arrival times are not actually evenly distributed from 0 to 30 minutes, but that just makes choosing the bus worse and it's already worse.)

To the question "should I wait X length of time for the bus and start walking if the bus hasn't arrived in that time", generally, you should never do that; if walking after X minutes is better than continuing to wait after X minutes, then walking after X' minutes (where X' < X) is better than continuing to wait after X' minutes (since the bus will arrive sooner if there has been no bus for X minutes, than if there has been no bus for X' minutes), so you should walk immediately.

It is of course possible to come up with more detailed requirements that could demand you wait X length of time and then start walking. For instance, "I never want to take more than 20 minutes, but as long as it is less than 20 minutes, I want it to be as short as possible", it takes 15 minutes to walk, and the bus takes 0-20 minutes to arrive--you should wait for the bus for 5 minutes, and then start walking.

Just for the sake of completion, there are some bus services that offer real-time GPS tracking, so you'd know where the bus is and roughly how long until it arrives. Presumably no such service is available.

We go on to the age-old question: do you try to get the best average performance or the best worst-case performance? If it's the best average performance, go to the bus stop and wait. If you prefer to get the best worst-case performance, just walk every time.

"if you don't assume it, then you can't prove that all natural numbers can be reached by repeatedly applying S(x) from 0." But why can't you just assume that as an axiom, instead of induction?

How would you say "repeatedly" in formal language? Would it be something like, 'every number can be reached by applying the successor operation some number of times'? To the extent we can say that, it already seems included in the definition of addition. But it doesn't rule out non-standard numbers, because you can reach one of them from zero by applying S(x) a non-standard number of times.

I can't figure out why induction is considered an axiom. It seems like it should follow from other axioms.

You can prove that any individual natural number is part of a set by applying S(x) finitely many times, but getting all of them either requires an infinitely long proof (bad) or an axiom.

I think you could express that in first order logic, but the axiom of induction can't be expressed in first order logic (according to wikipedia.) And that seems like a huge issue and bothers me.

You run into Lowenheim-Skolem. If you could express the axiom of induction in first-order logic, then you'd have a model of arithmetic with k numbers for every infinite cardinal k. That's the advantage of second-order logic: the original Peano axioms give only one set of natural numbers (up to isomorphism). I believe there are certain formulations that only use first-order logic, but they give weaker results.

why can't you just assume that as an axiom, instead of induction?

It is induction. And no, you can't express it in first-order logic, for the exact same reason as you can't with other formulations of induction.

Catholic priestly celibacy was codified at the second Lateran Council in 1139. Before this time there was great diversity in practice in different locations. You had theological justifications for the practice which included Christ's and various apostles' appeals for celibacy as a way of focusing on religious rather than worldly matters. There were also scandals by which large amounts of church property were inherited away from it by priests who had many children which lead directly to a previous decree in the early 11th century by Pope Benedict VIII that the children of priests could not inherit property.

No, there were various theological and practical (inheritance) grounds, I don't think anyone can find evidence for this being an acknowledged purpose. However it could still be an unspoken purpose and it could still work that way. I actually find it very reasonable, given how geeky Catholic priests and monks tend to be, they are prone to typical nerd traits like hair-splitting arguments, they are pretty much like the nerds who can't get some and thus better to rebrand it as a virtue. Just it was not an explicit, outspoken purpose.

I should also say, there were no sexual rejects in the modern sense. Just have a wealthy father, someone will arranged-marry their daughter to you.

The Catholic priesthood is more likely an offshoot of other existing priesthoods from Hellenic traditions and Judaism, some of which were celibate and others of which decidedly not, eg Rabbis are expected to be fruitful and multiply just as much as all Jews.

I doubt it was "invented to do X" -- that implies too much strategy. Instead, I think it happened because of some historical coincidences, and coincidentally it also happened to do X.

The historical reason for not reproducing was the early Christian belief that the end of the world is near, so it does not make sense to marry and have children. (These days there are some Jehovah Wittnesses who don't have children for these reasons.) Of course most people violated this rule and had sex anyway, but following the rule became a voluntary signal of having strong faith.

A few centuries later Catholic Church realized that if they could make non-reproduction of priests mandatory, all resources that those priests would otherwise gather for their families, would now return to the church ownership. And they already had the excuse that not reproducing was a signal of strong faith, so it made sense to demand the signal from the priests. So the Popes began a campaign against marriage of priests; at the beginning the priests ignored them, but gradually the pressure increased, and at some moment one Pope ordered to take all existing wives and children of priests and sell them to slavery. From that moment, Catholic priests were celibate... at least officially, because unofficially I would guess most of them either have a secret wife and secret children, or secret homosexual relations.

Of course the people who are religious and unattractive can rationalize this and join some institution that requires celibate, thus converting their lower status on sexual marketplace to religious status. On the other hand, there are also many attractive people who choose this role because of their strong religious feelings. -- The fact that many priests actually secretly have sex and children is an evidence of their attractivity. Of course there is this confounding factor whether having high religious status could have made the difference in their attractivity. But I anecdotally know about a few people who were considered attractive before they became celibate for religious reasons.