Open Thread, October 20 - 26, 2013

http://lesswrong.com/lw/d2w/cards_against_rationality/

At the Columbus megameetup, some people actually printed out a set of cards (as a stand-alone deck) and played the game. I don't know who of two people has the source file, but I can find out...

It does, doesn't it...

All have to say is if someone actually makes this game, there has to be room for the awesomeness of quines. After all, "is an applause light" is an applause light, isn't it?

quined is true

http://jsbin.com/ibebih/3

""""""""politics is the mindkiller" is an applause light" is a fully general counterargument" is deeply wise" is a semantic stop sign" is why our kind can't cooperate" is a fake explanation" is a mindkiller"

FTFY

I've been getting an early downvote on my posts, too. I can afford it, but it does seem malicious.

Do I understand it correctly that the behavior you describe is "downvote every new comment from user X when it appears" (as opposed to "go to user X's history and downvote a lot of their old comments at the same time")?

Because when hearing about karma assassinations, I always automatically assumed the latter form; only the words "early downvote" in Nancy's comment made me realize the former form is also possible.

A possible technical fix could be to not display the user comment's karma until at least three votes were made or at least one day has passed.

Also, off-topic: Crocker's Rules seem to be popular in out culture; maybe it would be nice to integrate them into LW user interface. For example user could add their "anonymous feedback URL" in preferences, and a new icon "Reply Anonymously" would then be displayed below all user's comments and articles.

Humans are extremely susceptible to the arguments they have not been inoculated against. These arguments van be religious, scientific, emotional, financial, anything. One example is the new immigrants from certain places falling for get-rich-quick scams in disproportionally large numbers (not so much anymore, since the knowledge has spread). Or certain LW regulars believing Roko's basilisk. Or become vegan (not all mind hacking is necessarily negative).

I would conjecture that every single one of us has open ports to be exploited (some more so than others), and someone with a good model of you, be it a super-smart AI or a police negotiator, can manipulate you into willingly doing stuff you would never have expected to be convinced of doing before having heard the argument.

I can't see why you claim it's a stronger result. In the AI box experiment, the power is entirely in the gatekeeper's hands; in an interrogation situation the suspect is virtually powerless. This distinction is important because even the illusion of having power is enough to make someone less susceptible to persuasion.

Plus, police don't sit down with suspects in a chat room. They use 'enhanced interrogation techniques', methods such as an unfamiliar environment, threat of violence (or actual violence in some cases), and various other threats. An AI cannot do any of this to a gatekeeper unless the gatekeeper explicitly lets it out.

Actual people are also using a hell of a lot more than text.

I will be price matching whatever gwern personally puts in.

The bet has gone live at http://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/1pko9y/the_bet_bmr_and_sheep_to_die_in_a_year/

Is that a per-person maximum, or are you only accepting up to that much worth of bets?

Edit: I have contacted gwern via IRC and invested 1 BTC.

chance of losing each bet: 0.75 0.58 0.50 * 0.3 = >0.07

don't you mean chance of losing every bet?

If so, no way in hell those are conditionally independent. If not, what did you mean?

Did you see that Daenerys and NancyLebovitz experienced a similar problem? Seems likely someones doing it systematically to several accounts.

I wonder if this is a common experience?

Well, "this" is broad, but I expect that failing to notice enmity, and relatedly being unaware of consequent social attacks, is a pretty common experience, especially in "polite" social contexts (that is, ones in which overt expressions of conflict violate social norms).

"Crocker's Rules" are an attempt to subvert this; you might find it useful to declare that you operate under them... though I would expect not... in cases like you describe I expect that the downvoter(s) will not wish to be identified.

I wish you luck in deciphering the reason(s).

PubMed's comment system will have some form of human moderation before 2015.

People who have publications at PubMed can have passwords stolen.

The Copernican Revolution, by Kuhn is one of the best science histories I've ever read.

The folk-tale version of how we adopted heliocentric cosmology is something like this: "Aristotle and Ptolemy thought the world was arranged as concentric crystalline spheres. Copernicus proposed a new model that better fit the data, and it was opposed by the Church. Ultimately thanks to the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the correct model won out."

None of those claims is right, and Kuhn does a great job explaining the true story. He explains what problem Copernicus thought he was solving and how well he solved it.

I second the recommendation of The Copernican Revolution, and suggest another book on the same topic: Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers.

Koestler was a great novelist (his best known novel, Darkness at Noon, rivals 1984 in its portrayal of totalitarian thought) and a brilliant, eclectic and sometimes bizarre thinker. The Sleepwalkers is a grand history of astronomy and cosmology from ancient times to Newton, with the bulk of the focus on Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo.

Pros: Fascinating and very detailed biographical information on these three figures (and others like Tycho Brahe), presented in a way that reads like a novel, indeed a page-turner. His biography of Kepler is especially unforgettable, very different from a dry academic presentation. The historical presentation is peppered with opinionated philosophical and even sociological detours.

Cons: unbalanced covering of different topics, subjective and somewhat biased viewpoints. In particular, his interpretation of the relationship between Kepler and Galileo, and of Galileo's dealings with the Church, is colored by what seems to be a strong personal dislike of Galileo. His interpretation of the reasons why the heliocentric model was rejected in ancient times is also unreliable.

As long as his interpretations are taken with a grain of salt (or balanced with a more objective presentation like Kuhn's) I would definitely recommend it; it is the most enjoyable book on history of science I have read.

I really enjoyed The Nothing That Is by Robert Kaplan. It's about the history of the concept (and the numeral) zero.

I think it is likely due to the political and controversial nature of those last two posts. I would be surprised if this was not the reason.

I think I set up mutt (and presumably some other software) just so that I could email files to my kindle from the command line; and I have an instapaper bookmarklet to do the same with webpages. I haven't used either very much recently, but that seems to pretty much cover my "getting content onto it" needs.

k2pdfopt. It slices up pdfs so that you can read them without zooming on a much narrower screen, and since its output pdfs are essentially images, it eats everything up to (and including )very math-heavy papers, regardless of the number of columns they have. Also, it works with scanned stuff too.

(And even though the output is a bit bigger than the originals, I didn't encounter any problems with 600 page books... the result was about 50 megs tops.)

Readability can be set up to send articles to it, and/or do a daily collection. Feedly can send rss feeds to it.

The user interface of the kindle is the real limitation, it fine for reading books/articles but pretty useless for going through large numbers of files.

"Lower Bounds on Superintelligence". While a lot of LW content is carefully researched, much of what's posted in support of the singularity hypothesis seems to devolve into just-so stories. I'd like to see a dry, carefully footnoted argument for why an intelligence that was able to derive correct theories from evidence, or generate creative ideas, much faster than humans would necessarily rapidly acquire the ability to eliminate all human life. In particular I'm looking for historical analogies, cases where new discoveries with important practical implications were definitely delayed not just due to e.g. industrial capacity, but solely through human stupidity.

"Trading with entities that are smarter than you". Given the ability of highly intelligent entities to predict the future better than you can, and deceive without outright lying, what kind of trades or bets is it wise to enter into with such entities? What kind of safeguards would you need to have in place?

"How to get a stupid person to let you out of a box". Along with, I think, many people who've never done it, I find the results of the AI-box experiment highly implausible. I can't even imagine a superintelligent persuading me to let it out, or, equivalently, I can't imagine persuading even someone very stupid to let me out. I know the most successful AI players are keeping their strategies secret for reasons I don't understand (if nothing else, it seems to imply those strategies are exceedingly fragile), but if there's anyone who has a robust strategy that's even partially effective I'd be very interested to see it.

"From printing results to destroying all humans" - to me this is the weakest part of the MIRI et al case, and I think most objections we see are variants on this theme. It's obvious that an oracle-like AI would have to interact with the universe in some sense. It's obvious that an AI with unbounded ability to interact with the universe would most likely rapidly destroy all humans. It's nonobvious that there is no possible way to code an AI that can reliably tell the difference between the two, and a solution to this problem naively seems rather more tractable than solving Friendliness in full generality. I'd like to see an exploration of this problem.

"When your gut won't shut up and multiply." The recent downvoted discussion post seems to be in this area, suggesting the wider community is perhaps less interested than I, but I'd love to see some practical advice on effective decision strategies when one's calculated best action is intuitively morally dubious, with anecdotes of the success or failure of particular approaches.

"Times when I noticed I was confused". In theory, noticing you're confused sounds like an effective heuristic. But the explanation in the sequences only gave a retroactive example of when Eliezer should have applied it, and didn't. I'd like to see more examples of when this has and hasn't worked in practice, and useful habits to acquire that make you more likely to be able to notice.

the one time I've fallen for phishing was when I received an email purporting to be from my bank literally the day after I signed up for an account.

Interesting. Feel free to offer more details.

I suggest Taste for Makers and How Art Can Be Good by PG.

Google is your friend, but keep in mind that "yoga" is an umbrella term for a large variety of exercises. In particular, yoga as an Indian discipline aimed at reaching moksha, the liberation from the reincarnation cycle, is rather different from yoga as practiced in the West with the goal of losing 10 lbs.

I saw one study that indicated that meditation did not lower blood pressure, refuting earlier studies, but that yoga did. Can't find it now however. The wikipedia page on meditation research might be useful. also this

What kinds of benefits are you looking for? It seems likely they don't optimize the same things.

Plenty of people predict that increased antibiotica use will lead to a raise in antibiotica resistance among bacteria.

Organisms like bacteria that have much more iterations behind them then humans also tend to have less waste in their DNA.

Grasses beat trees at growing in glades with animals that eat plants. Why? Grass has more iterations behind them and is therefore better optimized for the enviroment than the trees.

A tree has to get lucky to survive the beginning. If it surives the beginning it can however grow tall and win.

Let's say you keep the enviroment stable for 2 billion years. Everything evolves naturally. Then you take tree seeds and bring them back to the present time. I think there a good chance that such a tree would outcompete grass at growing in glades.

Most "predictions of evolution" that can be found online are more about finding past evidence of common descent (e.g. fossils) rather than predicting the future path that evolution will take.

Fossils don't really get used as the central evidence of common descent anymore. These days common descent usually get's determined by looking at the DNA. In my experience people who discuss evolution online that do focus on fossils are usually atheists who behave as if their atheism is a religion. They think it's important to defend Darwin against the creationists. On the other hand they aren't up to date with the current science on evolution.

Evolution leads to a higher level of fitness in the environment, but the problem is that the environment itself is constantly changing in unpredictable ways. It's like an optimization process where the utility function itself is contantly changing. That's why it's very hard to reliably quantify fitness. For instance, billions of years ago, the increase in oxygen in the atmosphere killed a lot of existing organisms and forced aerobic bacteria on to the scene.

Replies to comments that attempted to point out a numerical parameter that's increased by evolution. (I'd be more interested in comments pointing out a deep reason why we can't find such a numerical parameter, but there were no such comments.)

lmm:

Life "wants" to spread, so perhaps an increase in the volume in which life can be found?

That's been steady for awhile now.

ChristianKl:

Organisms like bacteria that have much more iterations behind them then humans also tend to have less waste in their DNA.

Evolution can both add and remove junk DNA. Humans are descended from bacteria.

David_Gerard:

Total number of species (including extinct).

That can't decrease by definition, and will increase under any mechanism that gives nonzero chance of speciation, e.g. if God decides to create new species at random.

Lumifer:

The chances of successful transmission of genes across generations given a stable environment.

That seems to be contradicted by the possibility of evolutionary suicide.

The number of offspring surviving to reproductive age

Humans don't have more offspring than bacteria in average conditions, and have much fewer offspring in ideal conditions.

Why should there be a numerical parameter predictably increased by evolution? Why not look for a numerical parameter predictably increased by continental drift? or by prayer? by ostriches?

While I don't know of any simple or convenient numerical parameter, I'd note that we do have some handy non-retrospective pieces of evidence for evolution by natural selection, such as the induced occurrence of evolutionary benchmarks such as multicellularity.

In general, there are some adaptations which are highly predictable under certain circumstances, but there may not be any sort of meaningful measure we can use for evolution of organisms over time which aren't a function of their relationship with their environment.

I think whatever numerical parameter evolution raised generally (not always) in respect to its environment, it would have to do with meaningful complexity , however that can be numerically expressed, and local decrease in entropy. Design would cause those too, but hypothesizing it would violate occam's razor.

Different environments and different substrates for mutation cause different kinds of evolutions.

Shouldn't directed evolution i.e. selective breeding count?

Are you looking for a parameter that is always increased by any kind of evolution? It doesn't make sense to me why you would.

we can't find any numerical parameter that is predictably increased by evolution

The chances of successful transmission of genes across generations given a stable environment. The number of offspring surviving to reproductive age is a good first-order approximation.

If you want something more tangible, predictions what features evolution would lose are rather easy -- those that are (energy-)expensive and are useless in the new environment.

There have been plenty of evolutionary simulations, surely they provide some testable predictions. I vaguely recall one of them: that new adaptations tend to propagate first in small isolated groups and only then spread through the rest of the species. I don't recall if this has been tested through the fossil records. I am sure there are many more testable predictions. Like how fish locked in a dark cave or murky water tend to lose eyesight. But the exact path is probably too hard to predict. For example, marine mammals did not develop gills. Or that mammals develop intelligence by growing Neocortex, while birds use DVR (dorsal ventricular ridge) or maybe Nidopallium for the same purpose.

Total number of species (including extinct).

Life "wants" to spread, so perhaps an increase in the volume in which life can be found?

Newly created islands may have "weird" biospheres initially, but evolve towards a more "normal" set of niches over time?

Something like "humans will have larger skulls and smaller teeth"?

After doing lumonsity exercises for a bunch of days I find that my speed/concentration scores are below 1000 (1000 is supposed to be average) while memory is at 1460 and problem solving at 1360.

When did you start, recently? I may be wrong but, I think average scores are matched to your peers regardless of time spent on the game. So if you just started exercises your score is being compared to everyone's score even those that have been learning how to play that particular game for a long time.

Upvoted since it's a little harsh for 'us' to tell someone that something is better suited for open thread and then to downvote it without explanation when it goes there...

A good place to start for this might be Scott Aaronson's lecture on Time Travel from his "Quantum Computing Since Democritus" course.

It sounds like you are depressed. It's probably worth considering therapy or psychiatric care - these interventions have helped me a lot. Hope things get better for you.

As someone who's been in that boat, get in touch with a psychiatrist ASAP. It can very literally save your life, not to mention making it much much better on a day-to-day level.

Life is terrible, but it's also strange and beautiful; if you can't see a reason to continue with it, there is most likely an underlying problem (even if it is just "faulty wiring") which drugs and therapy can help you identify.

I cannot recommend seeing a psychiatrist more completely.

An external view of your life and health, from a trusted professional, may help you identify causes of your discomfort and, most importantly, strategies to improve your life.

is life really this terrible

Some lives are and others aren't. Without knowing anything about you I can't tell, but given that you can write in English and access the Web, I'd guess yours probably isn't and join the other people in suggesting that you see a professional.

I'm not sure how it works in your country, but you don't necessarily need a psychiatrist to diagnose and treat depression. Also it's good to check for bodily conditions that could make you feel like crap, and a non-psychiatrist might do that more reliably.

I was disappointed in the last chapter, gung nqhygf jbhyq frg nfvqr gurve pbaivpgvbaf naq cerwhqvprf naq yrg puvyqera cynl n fvtavsvpnag ebyr runs contrary to common sense and to the rest of the book.

When I posted, it was still the 20th in my timezone, so that's what I went with.