Open Thread: December 2011

I'm not sure if it is "worth saying" but a google search for "Secret Bayesian Man" turned up nothing so I wrote this:

ET Jaynes was a 1000 year old vampire

Inspired Cog Sci, AI and Eliezer.

The Probabilities,

Is something that we'll see.

Given that we have the same priors.

Secret Bayesian Man,

Secret Bayesian Man,

You update your beliefs,

Based on the evidence. (2x)

A grandmaster of Bayesian Statistics

He'll straighten out your bias and Heuristics

You'll be Less Wrong than most

You'll take a "Rational Approach..."

Given that we have the same priors

Secret Bayesian Man

Secret Bayesian Man

You update your beliefs,

Based on the evidence. (2x)

Aumann states we must come to agreement

If we have common knowledge with no secrets

Our posteriors must be the same

Or one of us is to blame

Given that we have the same priors.

I deeply apologize.

I love the idea of the open thread. So many things I would like to discuss, but that I don't feel confident to actually make discussion posts on. Here's one:

On Accepting Compliments

Something I learned, and taught to all my students is that when you are performing certain things (fire, hoops, bellydancing whatever), people are going to be impressed, and are going to compliment you. Even though YOU know that you are nowhere near as good as Person X, or YOU know that you didn't have a good show, you ALWAYS accept their compliment. Doing otherwise is actually an insult to the person who just made an effort to express their appreciation to you. Anyways, you see new performers NOT following this advice, all the time. And I know why. It's HARD to accept compliments, especially when you don't feel deserving of them. But you have to learn to do it anyway, because it's the right thing to do.

Same idea, said better by somebody else

This is one of those things that's probably a pet peeve of mine because I use to do it myself, but I figured I would share what I was told during my performance days. I've seen this phenomenon a bunch, a performer or presenter gets done, an audience member comes up and says something along the lines of "Great job," the complimented responds with something like:

"Oh I totally screwed up"

"No, I didn't really do anything"

"No, I thought it went awfully"

Invariably there are two things that drive this:

1. The presenter/performer is so caught up in their own self examination, that they are being hyper critical and sharing it with the complementer.

2. The presenter/performer is concerned about the appearance of humility.

Both ignore a greater truth in the interaction: Someone has said something nice to you, and you are immediately telling them they are wrong! Even if they don't directly perceive this, it can leave them with a bad taste in their mouth. So what do you do? Say "Thank you," that's it. Leave the self examination stuff where it belongs, in your head. If you are concerned with your ego, accept and expand the compliment: "Thank you; I have to say the audience was really great, you guys asked really great questions."

It's a silly little thing, but it can have a big impact on how you are perceived.

I think this is applicable to all areas of life not just performing. In fact, doing some googling, I found a Life Hack on the subject. Some excerpts:

A compliment is, after all, a kind of gift, and turning down a gift insults the person giving it, suggesting that you don’t value them as highly as they value (soon to be “valued”) you. Alas, diminishing the impact of compliments is a pretty strong reflex for many of us. How can we undo what years of habitual practice has made almost unconscious?

Stop [...] making them work for it: Cut the long stream of “no, it was nothings” and “I just did what I had to dos” and let people give you the compliment. Putting it off until they’ve given it three or four times, each time more insistently, is selfish.

This link actually has sample dialogue, if that helps, but it is bellydance-centric.

A common claimed Great Filter issue is that Earth-like planets need a large moon to stabilize their orbit. However, recent research seems to indicate that this view is mistaken. In general, this seems to be part of a general pattern where locations that are conducive to life seem more and more common(for another recent example see here) (although I may have some confirmation bias here?). Do these results force us to conclude that a substantial part of the Great Filter is in front of us?

Is it worth posting a series of videos that makes up a gentle introduction to the basics of game theory from the AI class on LW for people who aren't in the class and aren't very good at math?

This is the one of the videos from the series. There are also a few easy practical exercises and their solutions.

John Cheese from Cracked.com pulls out another few loops of bloodsoaked intestine and slaps them on the page as a ridiculously popular Internet humour piece: 9 YouTube Videos That Prove Anyone Can Get Sober. I hate watching video, and I sat down and watched the lot. Horrifying and compelling. I've been spending this afternoon reading the original thread. It's really bludgeoning home to me just how much we're robots made of meat and what a hard time the mind has trying to steer the elephant. Fighting akrasia is one thing - how do you fight an addiction with the power of your mind?

I was musing on the old joke about anti-Occamian priors or anti-induction: 'why are they sure it's a good idea? Well, it's never worked before.' Obviously this is a bad idea for our kind of universe, but what kind of universe does it work in?

Well, in what sort of universe would every failure of X to appear that time interval make X that much more likely? It sounds a bit vaguely like the hope function but actually sounds more like an urn of balls where you sample without replace: every ball you pull (and discard) without finding X makes you a little more confident that next time will be X. Well, what kind of universe sees its possibilities shrinking every time?

For some reason, entropy came to mind. Our universe moves from low to high entropy, and we use induction. If a universe moved the opposite direction from high to low entropy, would its minds use anti-induction? (Minds seem like they'd be possible, if odd; our minds require local lowering of entropy to operate in an environment of increasing entropy, so why not anti-minds which require local raising of entropy to operate in an environment of decreasing entropy - somewhat analogous to reversible computers expending energy to erase bits.)

I have no idea if this makes any sense. (To go back to the urn model, I was thinking of it as sort of a cellular automaton mental model where every turn the plane shrinks: if you are predicting a glider as opposed to a huge turing machine, as every turn passes and the plane shrinks, the less you would expect to see the turing machine survive and the more you would expect to see a glider show up. Or if we were messing with geometry, it'd be as if we were given a heap of polygons with thousands of sides where every second a side was removed, and predicted a triangle - as the seconds pass, we don't see any triangles, but Real Soon Now... Or to put it another way, as entropy decreases, necessarily fewer and fewer arrangements show up; particular patterns get jettisoned out as entropy shrinks, and so having observed a particular pattern, it's unlikely to sneak back in: if the whole universe freezes into one giant simple pattern, the anti-inductionist mind would be quite right to have expected all but one observations to not repeat. Unlike our universe, where there seem to be ever more arrangements as things settle into thermal noise: if a arrangement shows up we'll be seeing a lot of it around. Hence, we start with simple low entropy predictions and decreases confidence.)

Boxo suggested that anti-induction might be formalizable as the opposite of Solomonoff induction, but I couldn't see how that'd work: if it simply picks the opposite of a maximizing AIXI and minimizes its score, then it's the same thing but with an inverse utility function.

The other thing was putting a different probability distribution over programs, one that increases with length. But while you are forbidden uniform distributions over all the infinite integers, and you can have non-uniform decreasing distributions (like the speed prior or random exponentials), it's not at all obvious what a non-uniform increasing distribution looks like - apparently it doesn't work to say 'infinite-length programs have p=0.5, then infinity-1 have p=0.25, then infinity-2 have p=0.125... then programs of length 1/0 have p=0'.

Less Wrong is a sect

Funny comic from bouletcorp: Physics of a Pixelated World

Cf. Eric Flint, I've always found the idea of bringing technology back in time very interesting. Specifically, I've always wondered what technology I could independently invent and how early I could invent it. Of course, the thought experiment requires me to handwave away lots of concerns (like speaking the local language, not being killed as a heretic/outsider, and finding a patron).

Now, I'm not a scientist, but I think I could invent a steam engine if there was decent metallurgy already. Steam engine: Fill large enclosed container with water, heat water to boiling, steam goes through a tube to turn a crank, voila - useful work. So, 1000s in Europe, maybe?

I'd like to think that I could inspire someone like Descartes to invent calculus. But there's no way I could invent in on my own.

Anyone else ever had similar thoughts?

I'm usually a lurker here. I generally spend a little too much time on this site. I'm making a personal resolution to leave the site alone for the rest of the day, whenever i read an article here and find that i have nothing to say about it. Under this policy, i expect that i will be spending less time here, and also that i will be contributing more.

For those interested in the Big Five: "The Big-Five Trait Taxonomy: History, Measurement, and Theoretical Perspectives".

Is there any easy way to report spam comments?

I'm curious what happened to SarahC. I enjoyed her presence, but I haden't seen her recently and I notice she's deleted her account (http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gu/the_best_textbooks_on_every_subject/3f00). Anyone know what happened?

I've been wondering for several weeks now how to pronounce 3^^^3.

It might confuse newbies that regular meetups don't appear on the meetup map (only irregular ones), and this can be easily fixed. Is there any reason to leave it as is?

I'm having a wall-banging philosophical disputation with someone over the word "scientism", but mostly over qualia and p-zombies, here. I ask your help on trying to work out if any commonality is resolvable in between the spittle-flecked screaming at each other. (I would suggest diving in only if you have familiarity with the participants - assume we're all smart, particularly the guy who's wrong.)

There is an unfortunate equivocation in the word theory (compare "Theory of Evolution" to "Just War Theory"). Popper says that theory can only be called scientific if it is falsifiable. Using that conceptual terminology, Freudian theory is pseudoscience, not a scientific theory. But many things that the vernacular calls theories are not falsifiable. (What would it mean to falsify utilitarian theory?)

Does that mean that we can't talk about moral theories? What word should we use instead? Because it seems like talking about moral theories is doing something productive.

For some context, I'm starting this post to separate off this conversation from a distinct conversation I'm having here

New experiment supports evopsych idea that some out-group prejudice is related to disease risk (though I wish it had been controlled with a state of generalized non-disease stress to see whether it's just stress that increases prejudice).

I'm interested in conducting a simple, informal study requiring a moderate number of responses to be meaningful. Specifically, I want to look at some aspects of the "wisdom of the crowd". I'm new here, so I want to ask first: is LessWrong Discussion a good place to put things like this that ask people to take a quick survey in the name of satisfying my curiosity? Are there other websites where this is appropriate?

If we believe that our conscious experience is a computation, and we hold a universal prior which basically says that the multiverse consists of all Turing machines, being run in such a fashion that the more complex ones are less likely, it seems to be very suggestive for anthropics.

I visualize an array of all Turing machines, either with the simpler ones duplicated (which requires an infinite number of every finite-length machine, since there are twice as many of each machine of length n as of each machine of length n+1), or the more complex ones getting "thinner," with their outputs stretching out into the future. Next, suppose we know we've observed a particular sequence of 1's and 0's. This is where I break with Solomonoff Induction—I don't assume we've observed a prefix. Instead, assign each occurrence of the sequence anywhere in the output of any machine a probability inversely proportional to the complexity of the machine it's on (or assign them all equal probabilities, if you're imagining duplicated machines), normalized so that you get total probability one, of course. Then assign a sequence a probability of coming next equal to the sum of the probabilities of all machines where that sequence comes next.

Of course, any sequence is going to occur an infinite number of times, so each occurrence has zero probability. So what you actually have to do is truncate all the computations at some time step T, do the procedure from the previous paragraph, and hope the limit as T goes to infinity exists. It would be wonderful if you could prove it did for all sequences.

To convert this into an anthropic principle, I assume that a given conscious experience corresponds to some output sequence, or at least that things behave as if this were the case. Then you can treat the fact that you exist as an observation of a certain sequence (or of one of a certain class of sequences).

So what sort of anthropic principle does this lead to? Well, if we're talking about different possible physical universes, then after you weight them for simplicity, you weight them for how dense their output is in conscious observer-moments (that is, sequences corresponding to conscious experiences). (This is assuming you don't have more specific information. If you have red hair, and you know how many conscious experiences of having red hair a universe produces, you can weight by the density of that). So in the Presumptuous Philosopher case, where we have two physical theories differing in the size of the universe by an enormous factor, and agreeing on everything else, including the population density of conscious observers, anthropics tells us nothing. (I'm assuming that all stuff requires an equal amount of computation, or at least that computational intensity and consciousness are not too correlated. There may be room for refinement here). On the other hand, if we're deciding between two universes of equal simplicity and equal size, but different numbers of conscious observer-moments, we should weight them according to the number of conscious observer-moments as we would in SIA. In cases where someone is flipping coins, creating people, and putting them in rooms, if we regard there as being two equally simple universes, one where the coin lands heads and one where the coin lands tails, then this principle looks like SIA.

The main downside I can see to this framework is that it seems to predict that, if there are any repeating universes we could be in, we should be almost certain we're in one, and not in one that will experience heat death. This is a downside because, last I heard, our universe looks like it's headed for heat death. Maybe earlier computation steps should be weighted more heavily? This could also guarantee the existence of the limit I discussed above, if it's not already guaranteed.

Transhumanism is important-- it's the only way we can live up to the possibilities offered by our toys.

When _ozymandias posted zir introduction post a few days ago, I went off and binged on blogs from the trans/men's rights/feminist spectrum. I found them absolutely fascinating. I've always had lots of sympathy for transgendered people in particular, and care a lot about all those issues. I don't know what I think of making up new pronouns, and I get a bit offput by trying to remember the non-offensive terms for everything. For example, I'm sure that LGBT as a term offends people, and I agree that lumping the T with the LGB is a bit dubious, but I don't know any other equivalent term that everyone will understand. I'm going to keep using it.

However, I don't currently know any LGBT people who I can talk to about these things. In particular, the whole LGBT and feminist and so on community seems to be prone to taking unnecessary offense, and believing in subjectivism and silly things like that.

So I'd really like to talk with some LWers who have experience with these things. I've got questions that I think would be better answered by an IM conversation than by just reading blogs.

If anyone wants to have an IM conversation about this, please message me. I'd be very grateful.

I'm writing a discussion post titled "Another Way of Thinking About Mind-States". I'm not sure at all whether my draft explains what I'm talking about clearly enough for anyone reading it to actually understand it, so I'd appreciate a beta volunteer to take a look at it and give me some feedback. If you'd like to beta, just reply here or send me a PM. Thanks!

For reasons I won't spoil ahead of time, I'm reasonably certain most LWers will really enjoy this song.

(I also expect people will enjoy this one, this one, this one, and probably most others by this songwriter, but that's less a LW-specific thing and more a general awesomeness thing.)

Do these open treads serve as places to make comments or ask small questions? Personally, I was reading Luke's new Q and A and I was thinking that I would like to have a thread full of people's questions. If the purpose of this thread is for comments and not questions, should we make a new recurring-monthly post?

Random Thought Driving Home:

I hate when all my programmed radio stations are on commercial. Why does this always happen?

Say a radio station spends 25% of it's air time playing commercials. This sounds pretty conservative. It would mean that for every 45 minutes of music, it plays 15 minutes of commercials.

I have 6 pre-programmed stations. That means if the commercials were evenly spaced out, they would only ALL have commercials on .25 ^ 6 = 0.00024 = .02% of the time.

Say I spend an hour a day driving. Then only .014 hours, or 0.86 seconds, of that time should be of all pre-programmed stations on commercials.

I am pretty sure that more than a second per hour has all-commercials, leaving me with two possible interpretations:

1) I notice the all-commercials times a lot, and so over-estimate their prominence, OR

2) Radio stations are evil, and they all play commercials at the same time (say every o'clock and -thirty) on purpose, so that the listener HAS to listen to commercials.

....Evil radio stations.

I am writing a discussion post called "On "Friendly" Immortality" and am having some difficulties getting my thoughts fully verbalized. I would appreciate a volunteer that's willing to read it before I post and provide feedback. If you are willing to be my "beta" either reply to this comment, or send me a pm. Thank you!