January 1-14, 2012 Open Thread

Experiment: The open threads are always used a lot when they are first posted, but they are quickly forgotten, because they get hidden as the month progresses.

This month I will post two open threads. One for January 1-14, and another for January 15-31. I predict, at P=.8 that there will be significantly more open thread posts in the second half of the month using this 2-post method.

To test my hypothesis, I will average the number of open thread comment in the second half of the month in the past few open thread posts, and compare them to the amount of open thread comments on the January 15-31st post.

This test WILL be biased, as it is neither blind on my side, nor on the commenters' side (aka people who post will read this and see the test I am doing.). This will be somewhat ameliorated by me NOT posting this experiment note in the second thread, and in two weeks' time it will not be foremost in people's minds.

I'm not even sure if this is even worth a comment.

But the "ETA" acronym. Can we stop using this? To normal people, "ETA" means "estimated time of arrival", not "edited to add". Just using "Edit:" instead of "ETA:" will work fine.

Why doesn't Microsoft put an ad-blocker in Internet Explorer to reduce Google's revenue?

EDIT: And that of Facebook.

When buying items I often do quite a bit of research, I suspect many people on LW are also the type to do this. I think this is a potential goldmine of information as I would trust the research/reviews of people from LW at least an order of magnitude more than random reviews on the internet.

Something as simple as "what do LWers buy on amazon" would be highly interesting to me. Is there a feasible way of collating this kind of info?

I note that the 2012 Welcome thread accumulated ~100 comments in very short order - it looks like there was pent-up demand. It may be worth doing these more often than every year or two as well.

In particular, the about page needs to link to the current welcome thread, not the 2010 one!

Is it ethical to eat a cow with human level intelligence that wanted to be eaten? To avoid convenient worlds, assume the cow not only wants to be eaten, but also likes and approves of being eaten. [Edited to clarify that this is an intelligent cow we're talking about.]

In the spirit of dissolving questions (like Yvain did very well for disease), I wanted to give an off-fthe-cuff breakdown of a similar contentions issue: use of the term "design", as in "cats are designed to be good hunters [of small animals]" or "knives are designed to cut".

Generally, people find both of those intuitive, which leads to a lot of unnecessary dispute between reductionists and anti-reductionists, with the latter claiming that the former implicitly bring teleology into biology.

So, here's what I think is going on when people make a "design" evaluation, or otherwise find the term intuitively applicable: there are a few criteria that make something seem "designed", and if enough of them are satisfied, it "feels" designed. Further, I think there are three criteria, and people call something designed if it meets two of them. Here's how it works.

"X is designed to Y" if at least two of these are met:

1) Goodness: X is good at Y.
2) Narrowness: The things that make X better at Y make it worse at other things normally similar to Y.
3) Human intent: A human crafted X with the intent that it be used for Y. (Alternately: replace human with "an intelligent being".)

(You can think of it as a "hub-and-spoke" neural net model where each of the criteria's being activated make the "design" judgment stronger.)

"A knife is designed to cut" meets all three, and we have no problem calling it designed for that. Likewise for "A computer is designed to do computations quickly".

Now for some harder cases that create fake disagreements:

"A cat is designed to hunt small animals." Cats are good at hunting mice, etc, so it meets 1. They weren't human-designed to catch small animals so they fail 3. Finally, a lot of the things that make them good at catching mice make them unsuited for other purposes. For example, their (less-)social mentality and desire to keep themselves clean makes them harder for mice to detect when hunting, but it prevents them from using hunting tactics that dogs use on larger animals (e.g. "split the pack up and have one of them chase the prey downwind to the rest of the pack").

Thus, the cat example meets 2, and this "narrow optimality" gives us the "feel" of it being designed, and has historically led humans to equate this with 3.

How about this one: "a stone is designed to hurt people". Stones are good at hurting people, so they pass 1. However, they are not narrowly good, nor were they specifically crafted with the intent of hurting people. Thus, we generally don't get the feeling of stones being designed to hurt people.

Try this test out for yourself on things that "feel" designed or non designed.

I'm interested in seeing statistics about what LWers do in their daily lives. In that vein, I'm thinking of a survey about what lifehacks the average LWer uses. This could help people decide which lifehacks to try out.

For instance, most readers of this comment probably know what SRS, nootropics, n-back, self-tracking, polyphasic sleep and so on are, but I'd guess less than 10% of you currently practice each. To reduce the barriers to entry to people actually trying to improve their lives with these tools, we need to get some quick clues about what's worthwhile.

The survey could also measure the reasons why people don't employ certain lifehacks. Is it because they're lazy or because they doubt the lifehack's efficacy or because they've never heard of the hack?

I plan to make a post for the second half of this month because daenerys hasn't made one yet. Can I have a couple of karma points so I can make it happen?

Is this video (Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Society ) and the ideas, concepts and arguments in it worth discussing on LW in a separate discussion thread? By which I mean am I underestimating the mind-killing triggered by some of the political criticisms made by Thomas Sowell in it? Obviously he's politically biased in his own direction, but the fundamental idea that public intellectuals are basically rent seekers seems alarmingly plausible.

Also Thomas Sowell is obviously an intellectual, his criticism should reduce our trust in his criticism. ;)

Timelapse video of the Milky Way Stunningly beautiful. I knew I live on a planet spinning through space, but I'd never felt it viscerally.

One more item for the FAI Critical Failure Table (humor/theory of lawful magic):

37. Any possibility automatically becomes real, whenever someone justifiably expects that possibility to obtain.

Discussion: Just expecting something isn't enough, so crazy people don't make crazy things happen. The anticipation has to be a reflection of real reasons for forming the anticipation (a justified belief). Bad things can be expected to happen as well as good things. What actually happens doesn't need to be understood in detail by anyone, the expectation only has to be close enough to the real effect, so the details of expectation-caused phenomena can lawfully exist independently of the content of people's expectations about them. Since a (justified) expectation is sufficient for something to happen, all sorts of miracles can happen. Since to happen, a miracle has to be expected to happen, it's necessary for someone to know about the miracle and to expect it to happen. Learning about a miracle from an untrustworthy (or mistakenly trusted) source doesn't make it happen, it's necessary for the knowledge of possibility (and sufficiently clear description) of a miracle to be communicated reliably (within the tolerance of what counts for an effect to have been correctly anticipated). The path of a powerful wizard is to study the world and its history, in order to make correct inferences about what's possible, thereby making it possible.

Cracked delivers: 6 Small Math Errors That Caused Huge Disasters.

The first paragraph hook is perfect:

If there are any children reading this, there's really only one thing we want to tell you about adulthood: If you make one tiny mistake, people will die.

This correction from the NYT seems almost designed as LW-linkbait for miscellaneous humor.

My grandmother died tonight. If you are on the fence, or procrastinating, please sign up for cryonics. Costs less then signing up for high speed internet for a year, opens up the possibility of not ceasing to exist. In a side note, I learned again tonight that atheism is no sure sign of rationality: http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/o4x5u/think_you_are_rational_my_grandmother_died/

Then again, I was not at my most elegant.

Rejoice, all you who read these words, for tonight we live, and so have the continued hope of escaping death.

Life would've been hell of a lot more fun if it worked on hentai logic. Of course, grass being greener on the other side, people would've probably consumed anti-porn in such a universe. Like, about celibate nuns that actually stay celibate and nothing sexual ever happens to them. This'd be as over-the-top ridiculous as tentacle sex is to us.

You'll be delighted, I'm sure, to know that the unimpeachably robust scientific researchers of the Discovery Institute have been writing about transhumanism.

In accordance to this comment and the high number of upvotes received, here is the place to list further threads worthy of preservation, advertising, rejuvenation; also to list short-term/long-term solutions to this problem.

List of threads:

• the mentoring-network thread
• The thread where people offered listening-time to depressed people.
• The thread with the ongoing survey for zip-codes of LWlers
• gate-keeper/AI-box-experiment-volunteering-thread

Possible super-easy solutions to better ensure visibility of these threads:

• make a wiki-page
• reposting in every other "monthly open thread"
• include a link in "welcome to lesswrong"-thread

Any and all suggestions are welcome, especially longterm-solutions ; and I hereby precommit to make a wiki-page with the suggestions a week from now and post it in at least the next two open threads.

Real Names Don't Make for Better Commenters, but Pseudonyms Do

I think it would be cool to have some sort of asterisk next to the usernames of people who have declared "Crocker's Rules". Would that be hard to implement?

Funny comic = a straw vulcan of a rationalist relationship.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2474#comic

What are the warmest gloves known to humanity? I have poor circulation in my hands and none of the store gloves ever keep my hands warm outside.

I was wondering, why aren't don't articles that are part of a sequence tagged as such?

For example: fun theory sequence

I often get linked to one of the older articles and then have to do a search first to figure out which sequence it is a part of and then to find the other parts of the sequence.

I wasn't sure this was worth its own discussion thread, so I rather dumped it here.

Manna

A neat science fiction story set in the period of transition to a automated society and later in a post-scarcity world. There are several problems with it however, the greatest is that so far the author seems to have assumed that "want" and "envy" are tied to primarily tied in material needs. This is simply not true.

I would love to live in a society with material equality on a sufficiently hight standard, I'd however hate to live in society with a enforced social equality, simply because that would override my preferences and freedom to interact or not interact with whomever I wish.

Also since things like the willpower to work out (to stay in top athletic condition even!) or not having the resources to fulfil even basic plans are made irrelevant, things like genetic inequality or how comfortable you are messing with your own hardware to upgrade your capabilities or how much time you dedicate to self-improvement would be more important than ever.

I predict social inequality would be pretty high in this society and mostly involuntary. Even a decision about something like the distribution of how much time you use for self-improvement, which you could presumably change later, there wouldn't be a good way to catch up with anyone (think opportunity cost and compound interest), unless technological progress would hit diminishing returns and slow down. Social inequality would however be more limited than pure financial inequality I would guess because of things like Dunbar's number. There would still be tragedy (that may be a feature rather than a bug of utopia). I guess people would be comfortable with gods above and beasts below them, that don't really figure in their "my social status compared to others" part of the brain, but even in the narrow band where you do care about inequality would grow rapidly. Eventually you might find yourself alone in your specific spot.

To get back to my previous point about probable (to me) unacceptable limitations on freedom, It may seem silly that a society with material equality would legislate intrusive and micromanaging rules that would force social equality to prevent this, but the hunter gatherer instincts in us are strong. We demand equality. We enjoy bringing about "equality". We look good demanding equality. Once material needs are met, this powerful urge will still be there and bring about signalling races. And new and new ways to avoid the edicts produced by such races (because also strong in us is our desire to be personally unequal or superior to someone, to distinguish and discriminate in our personal lives). This would play out in interesting and potentially dystopia ways.

I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people in the Australia project would probably end up wireheading. Why bother to go to the Moon when you can have a perfect virtual reality replica of it, why bother with the status of building a real fusion reactor when you can just play a gameified simplified version and simulate the same social reward, why bother with a real relationship ect... dedicating resoruces for something like a real life space elevator simply wouldn't cross their minds. People I think systematically overestimate how much something being "real" matters to them. Better and better also means better and better virtual super-stimuli. Among the tiny remaining faction of remaining "peas" (those choosing to spend most of their time in physical existence), there would be very few that would choose to have children, but they would dominate the future. Also I see no reason why the US couldn't buy technology from the Australia Project to use for its own welfare dependant citizens. Instead of the cheap mega-shelters, just hook them up on virtual reality, with no choice in the matter. Which would make a tiny fraction of them deeply unhappy.

I maintain that the human brains default response to unlimited control of its own sensor input and reasonable security of continued existence is solipsism. And the default of a society of human brains with such technology is first social fragmentation, then value fragmentation and eventually a return to living under the yoke of an essentially Darwinian processes. Speaking of which the society of the US as described in the story would probably outpace Australia since it would have machines do its research and development.

It would take some time for the value this creates to run out though, much like Robin Hanson finds a future with a dream time of utopia followed by trillions of slaves glorious , I still find a few subjective millennia of a golden age followed by non-human and inhuman minds to be worth it.

It is not like we have to choose between infinity and something finite, the universe seems to have an expiration date as it is. A few thousand or million years dosen't seem like something fleas on a insignificant speck should sneer at.

Who do I talk to to change my Less Wrong username?

What is everybody's Twitter handle? I want to follow you.

Mine is @michaelcurzi.

Our brains are paranoid. The feeling illustrated by this comic is, I must unfortunately admit, pretty familiar.

It seems uncontroversial that a substantial amount of behavior that society labels as altruistic (i.e. self-sacrificing) can be justified by decision theoretic concepts like reputation and such. For example, the "altruistic" behavior of bonobos is strong evidence to me that more altruism can be justified by decision theory than I know decision theory. (Obviously, this assumes that bonobo behavior is as de Waal describes).

Still, I have an intuition that human morality cannot be completely justified on the basis of decision theory. Yes, superrationality and such, but that's not mathematically rigorous AFAIK and thus is susceptible to being used as a just-so story.

Does anyone else have this intuition? Can the sense that morality is more than game theory be justified by evidence or formal logic?

Pleased to finally meet you, agent.

I'm A BOMB.