Open Thread: October 2009

One reason against a forum that I can think of is that we'd rather we not say low quality things at all. Maybe we want to force us to put our karma on the line at all times. Maybe we want to deny all opportunity for chatting. Enforce high standards. Discipline ourselves.

Downvote one or more random comments of mine to balance things out.

There is a "Next" button. Also, this counts as my comment.

You should probably make an explicit karma balance post for this.

This post tests how much exposure comments to open threads posted "late" get. If you are reading this then please either comment or upvote.

I saw the above quoted request (today, two weeks after it was made) because I saw RobinZ's reply to it (which was made today) at lesswrong.com/comments, got curious about the context of RobinZ's comment, then clicked on its "Parent" link.

Parenthetically, I do not like the idea of running part of this community on "web forum" software (e.g., phpBB) and will not participate unless I have to participate to continue to be part of the community.

We could see this as the upper bound on comments posted to an old open thread; it's possible that a comment be posted that is really good and invites comment, so logically you'd need to take into account the feedback loop it might cause (if you want to make any generalization about open threads).

A lot of stick and stones civilizations that can read, are there?

Not yet.

In the book it's chemicals (gunpowder) and radios. The application of radios by Vinge's version of non-anthropomorphic intelligences is especially interesting.

What about a "Mote In God's Eye" -style technology bunker? Would having a set of raw materials, instructions, and tomes of information be the ideal setup? Perhaps something along the lines of the Svalbard Seed Vault. What are the most useful artifacts that can survive A) the catastrophe and B) the length of time it takes for the artifacts to be recovered? Such a timeframe could be short or many, many generations long (even geologic time?). Do we want this to potentially survive until the next intelligent being evolves, in the case of total destruction of mankind? What sealing mechanism would still be noticeable and breach-able by a low-tech civilization?

Or do we want to assume there is NO remaining technology and we're attempting to bootstrap from pure knowledge? Either way, I think it would be an interesting problem to solve.

Basic electrics are possible as soon as you have decent metalworking. Dynamos are just a bunch of spools of copper wires and magnets. Add some graphite, and you have telephones. ̶G̶r̶e̶e̶k̶s̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶d̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶m̶.

I tried this with one of my first cars back in the early 90s. It turns out that there are a very large number of things that can go wrong with essentially every step of repairing a car, and I didn't have the money or time to continue replacing parts I'd destroyed or troubleshooting problems I'd caused while trying to fix another problem.

I like programming because it has the same features of tracking down problems, but almost entirely without the autocommit feature of physical reality, as long as you choose to back up and test.

Also, even in the 90s, a computer was far cheaper than a good set of tools.

Could you explain Philosophical Materialism and the Scientific Method without first having the read do science? I agree that these might be the most important things but it isn't clear to me how they can be explained to a civilization that lacks a general scientific vocabulary or the context to interpret things like falsifiability, hypotheses, ontological fundamental mental entities, etc. Does the most important lesson have to be toward the end of the book?

incidentally, this is a hobby that I strongly recommend to other LW members - you get to put the scientific method into practice in a hands-on manner, and at the end of it you get a car which is slightly less crappy.

Does the same principle apply to motorcycle maintenance? :-)

There's a huge different between having the raw knowledge available and simple step by step instructions.

A book created for this express purpose would be an order of magnitude more useful than any number of encyclopedias or even entire libraries. A big challenge would be even knowing what to research--if you don't have the next technology, you may not even know what it will be.

The biggest obstacle is really distribution. What you'd need its a government, church, or NGO to put a copy in every branch or something.

Maybe you could donate a copy to every prison library. Prisons would actually be a really defensible location to stay post-societal collapse . . .

We can imagine a handbook that is written to be useful for a broad spectrum of possible disastrous situations.

The handbook could be written for post-disaster survivors finding themselves in many possible situations. For example, your first bullet "No technological human societies survive" could be expanded to "(No|Few|Distant|Hostile) technological human societies survive". Indeed, uncertainty about which of the aforementioned possibilities actually hold might be quite probable, given both a civilization-destroying disaster and some survivors.

To some extent, the Long Now's Rosetta project (to build sturdy discs inscribed with examples of many languages) is an example of this sort of handbook.

http://rosettaproject.org/

Adults who know the relevant things don't survive

Actually, all you would need for serious problems is that none of the relatively few people who know the essential details of a critical piece of support technology don't survive. Or at least don't survive in your group or that you otherwise have access to. And since if that happens, and you can't know ahead of time what bits of information you might lose, having references to everything possible only makes good sense. Especially given how relatively inexpensive references are now. Cheap insurance against an very unlikely result (of course, they can also be helpful day-to-day too).

Do you assign significant probability to the need for such a book in humanity's future?

Black Swan.

I see scenarios like the following not impossible.

90% of the human population dies from a plague/meteor along with the knowledge/sufficient numbers to maintain things like power plants, steel mills and the trappings of modern life. Those people that are left with the knowledge have to spend all their time subsistence farming just to survive.

A few generations later when the population has increased a bit and subsistence farming improved in yield due to experience. People want to recreate technology, with just the knowledge passed down by word of mouth.

TAKE THE CREDIT

You have to handle two issues first:

1. What if your audience can't read? What if they don't understand English, because they're rural Chinese, or because it's 3000 AD?
2. Supposing that they read the first chapter out of curiosity, you need to convince them it'll be worth their while to read the rest of the book and do what it tells them to, at cost of time, effort, materials, money and reputation.

You also need to choose a catchy title. I recommend From Sticks and Stones to Atom Bombs: How to Build Your Own World-Destroying Civilization In Only 30 Days!!!

Any ideas for a better solution? The devs are busy, but they're listening (and if the devs don't have time, the code is open).

and I recall the LW community had consciously decided to avoid descending down into the 'cool tips/tools' territory?

This is an Open Thread. No restrictions here. Though, I wish we'd replace these with a proper forum that's active throughout the month.

We discussed quite a bit how to motivate ourselves and increase the percentage of time spent being 'productive'; shouldn't it be equally fascinating to us that things like modafinil* can eliminate the need for sleep, gaining hours?

More fascinating for me is how modafinil improves my motivation.

knb: I found it a little hard to separate your experience from your speculations there - could you clarify the meaning of "we experience" vs "I couldn't achieve a true CR diet if I tried". I suspect that you're speculating.

CR isn't a line you need to get over - more CRON (CR with Optimal Nutrition) is better: http://www.crsociety.org/files/images/cr-youth.gif

I don't CR as much as I'd like to, but I lost about 18% of my body weight from my set point (at which point my family instructed me not to look any freakishly thinner)… and it was only hard at first. Some of what makes it easier is habit, some is clearing the high GI cycle from your system (once I stopped eating high GI foods I fairly quickly stopped craving high GI foods), but I think most of it is simple life hacking:

• shop on a full stomach
• buy good snacks that are not very tasty (nuts, seeds, etc)
• don't leave any food in plain view in your house or workplace
• if someone gives/leaves bad food in your house, throw it in the bin as soon as you can
• plan your meals in advance and shop only for what you've planned to eat
• and etc. - every time you see a temptation you have to spend mental energy to overcome it, so remove them

knb: but what about IF? You get all the calories you want there. From my college days with the buffet, I remember on more than a few occasions I would simply not eat for a day and then the next day I would gorge. (I wasn't losing weight during this time, just to be clear, and I was also more athletic than my norm.)

Did you try polyphasic sleep before or during CR? I think MV found it only possible during CR.

1) I can't work and starve at the same time.

That assumes you're starving during intermittent fasting. Many practitioners actually find that they are much more clear-headed when they have not eaten recently.

My guess is that you're equating hypoglycemia with hunger. I eat a paleo diet, which has low levels of dietary carbohydrates. This forces the body to use gluconeogenesis to meet its glucose needs. Because you're producing it endogenously, your blood sugar remains completely steady. You only suffer from hypoglycemia when you're dependent upon exogenous sources of glucose, forcing you to eat every few hours. I much prefer the freedom to eat whenever I want.

Update: Gregory Benford (who recently founded a life extension company) says that CR slows down life processes in both flies and humans. You live longer but you're less active. Sounds plausible.

I remember that there is a considerable benefit for mice (not a week), but no good evidence for people. On the other hand, there is lots of evidence about correlation of weight with all sorts of diseases, which themselves kill.

Maybe - but protection against heart attack, stroke and cancer is worth quite a bit.

A Bayesian gives the win to CR.

True, if you mean body building as "bulking up". But I work with weights partially to keep from losing muscle mass when dieting. If you diet without strength training you lose muscle mass right along with the fat.

Not necessarily true, actually. Fasting can release a good deal of growth hormone. It can also keep your insulin response in good condition. Intermittent fasting, in particular, doesn't even decrease the total number of calories a person eats, so could be ideal for body building.

This may be tangential to your point, but it's worth remembering that human intelligence has a very special property, which is that it is strongly domain-independent.

Not so fast. Human intelligence is relatively domain independent. But human minds are constantly exploiting known regularities of the environment (by making assumptions) to make better inferences. These reguarities make up a tiny sliver of the Platonic space of generating functions. By (correctly) assuming we're in that sliver, we vastly improve our capabilities compared to if we were AIXIs lacking that knowledge.

Human intelligence appears strongly domain-indepdent because it generalizes to all the domains that we see. It does not generalize to the full set of computable environments -- no intelligence can do that while still performing as well in each as we do in this environment.

Non-human animals are likewise "domain-independently intelligent" for the domains that they exist in. Most humans would die, for example, if dropped in the middle of the desert, ocean, or arctic.

Another example of how domain-dependent human intelligence actually is, is optical illusions.

Optical illusions are when an image violates an assumption your brain is making to interpret visual data, causing it to misinterpret the image. And remember, this is only going slightly outside of the boundary of the assumptions your brain makes.

If there is no computable regularity, then no prior can do well. In fact, the Solomonoff prior does just as well asymptotically as any computable prior.

This seems to be a common belief. But see this discussion I had with Eliezer where I offered some good arguments and counterexamples against it.

The link goes to the middle, most relevant part of the discussion. But if you look at the top of it, I'm not arguing against the Solomonoff approach, but instead trying to find a generalization of it that makes more sense.

I've linked to that discussion several times in my comments here, but I guess many people still haven't seen it. Maybe I should make a top-level post about it?

This is a subtle point. The NFL theorem does prohibit any algorithm from doing well over all possible worlds. But Solomonoff induction does well on any world that has any kind of computable regularity.

Okay, fair point. But by smearing its optimality over the entire Platonic space of computable functions, it is significantly worse than those algorithms tuned for this world's function. And not surprisingly, AIXI has very little practical application.

If there is no computable regularity, then no prior can do well. In fact, the Solomonoff prior does just as well asymptotically as any computable prior.

And that's unhelpful when, as is likely, you don't hit that asymptote until the heat death of the universe.

The reason AIXI doesn't work in practice is that the "efficient approximations" aren't really efficient, or aren't good approximations.

My point is that the most efficient approximations can't be efficient in any absolute sense. In order to make AIXI useful, you have to feed it information about which functions it can safely skip over -- in other words, feed it intelligence of type 2), the information about its environment that you already gained through other methods Which just shows that those kinds of intelligence are not the same.

So, you're disagreeing that an algorithm that is optimal, on average, over a set of randomly-selected computable environments, will perform worse in any specific environment than an algorithm optimized specifically for that environment?

Because if not, that's all I need to make my point, no matter what subtlety of NFL I'm missing. (Actually, I can probably make it with an even weaker premise, and could have gone without NFL altogether, but it grants some insight on the issue I'm trying to illuminate.)

I should probably give you some proper feedback, as well as caustic comments. The intelligence subdivision looks useful and interesting - though innate intelligence is usually referred to as being 'instinctual'.

However, I was less impressed with the idea that the concept of intelligence lies somewhere between a category error and a fallacy of compression.

NFL theorems are about max-entropy worlds. Solomonoff induction works on highly lawful, simplicity-biased, low-entropy worlds.

The same (or a similar) point applies. If you limit yourself to the set of lawful worlds and use an Occamian prior, you will start off much worse than an algorithm that implictly assumes a prior that's close to the true distribution. As Solomonoff induction works its way up through longer algorithms, it will hit some that run into an infinite loop. Even if you program a constraint that gets it past or out of these, the optimality is only present "after a long time", which, in practice, means later than we need or want the results.

If you could actually do Solomonoff induction, you would become at least as smart as a human baby in roughly 0 seconds (some rounding error may have occurred).

What else can you tell us about the implications of being able to compute uncomputable functions?

Along with what orthonormal said, I definitely think that up until ~1960, the Nobel Prize committee was very careful, in all categories, not to give the award to a person of "ill repute", which includes, among other things, being gay. So Nobel Prize winnings wouldn't be informative.

However, you could control for this by checking out how many men won the prize before 1960, and would be suspected of being gay (i.e. old and never-married).

What suggests that homosexuals are getting less sex than heterosexuals in the first place?

Genius being easier to claim in retrospect, I think the real claim is that until recent decades, there were plenty of nearly celibate homosexuals (for lack of public opportunities to seek out others, or from internalized stigmas).

Obvious thing to check is the contribution to science and art from other known celibates; plenty more examples (including Erdös) leap to mind.

Some objective benchmark yes, Nobel Prize winners no. There are too few Nobel Prize winners in the first place, the categories aren't obviously the right ones, and the selection process is far too political.

Hm, yes, I was a bit familiar with Freud, but I was hoping for ties to biochemistry; it's one thing to intuit that the mind has n bits of energy & forces sloshing around and if they can't come out in sex they have to come out elsewhere, and entirely another to have a specific, materialist model of what's going on. I haven't found anything for the latter.

I already mentioned Values Dissonance as a reason to prefer new fiction to old.

I personally ran into this effect with a work written in 1981 - the song "Same Old Lang Syne" has a casual reference to people driving away after splitting a six-pack of beer...

Fiction, like society, is capable of social progress.

Progress is quite a loaded word, and if you assume fiction will progress, then you are almost assuming your conclusion.

This isn't a completed project. Stopping the production of fiction in its tracks now would leave us with a corpus of stories that under- and misrepresents many groups, and this would become even more of a problem than it already is

Let's make 'progress' concrete. Perhaps progress means that 'the fiction produced every year will feature characters that will statistically ever more closely match current demographics in the United States'.

Why is fiction mirroring demographics important?

Think of science-fiction; should Accelerando feature a carefully balanced cast with a few African-American men & women, 3 or 4 Hispanics of various ethnicities & nationalities, and a number of South-East Asians and old sansei? How would it be improved by such mimicking?

Or think of regular fiction - When William Shakespeare was writing Othello, the number of blacks in England must've been a rounding error; would he have done better to reflect the 100% white composition of England and make Othello an Arab or just a regular white northern European? When David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest, would it be somehow more just or better, and not just more "progressive", if he had randomly noted that Michael Pemulis was of Chinese descent?

Fiction has never mirrored society even crudely, not in racial composition of characters, socio-economic status, career, religious or philosophical beliefs, or any distinction that you would like to honor with the title 'group'. That's the whole point: it's fiction. Not real. To make it ever more accurate this way would be to turn it into journalism, or render it as pointless as Borges's 1:1 map from "Of Exactitude in Science".

Translation: we shouldn't discourage new fiction, because we need more fiction that supports my worldview (which by the way happens to be good and true).

Alicorn, no offense intended, but your rationality just seems to switch off when you start talking about your politics. This isn't the first time I notice that.

Sensory stimuli (why old horror movies aren't scary, older movies have longer shots, and Michael Bay has a career).

But what extra sensory stimulation does Dan Brown's novels have over Don Quixote? If anything, the medieval printings (to say nothing of the illuminated manuscripts) could be much more elaborate and visually complex, and for every adjective Dan Brown employes, Cervantes uses 10 and throws in an allegorical speech. (I kid, but you know what I mean.)

Further, if we imagined that we had only a few books in existence of high quality (ie. not a lifetime's worth), and nothing else but this hot new medium of video games, then the technical development must come to an end at some point and then regular production will push us ever closer to the point where the argument resurrects itself. Notice that Nintendo has for 2 consoles generations now chosen to not compete on sound or graphics. I don't doubt that there are further innovations in store, but at some point video games will become like novels are now, and movies are fast becoming: a medium whose full limitations are known and anything desired produced.

Capturing the spirit of the times (we like it when works express what is unique in us, works that capture our sense of place and time, how we're different from our parents, etc. this is why punk music wouldn't have worked in the 18th century, why we have shows like the Wire, and why Rambo's motivations are really confusing for people born after 1980 who never took a modern history course.).

With enough superior works of #1, we don't need that. But I think you're a little pessimistic. Why couldn'tve punk have worked in the 19th century?

Religious folks read the Bible and Islam in every time period for every conceivable purpose and regularly produce new interpretations for their time. Consider the hippie Jesus compared to the medieval Catholic Jesus; or look at higher biblical criticism. One might think that after 1800 and more years of intensive analysis & exegesis, nothing new could really be said about the text, much less a powerful new interpretation of just about everything that will send shockwaves through Christian & Jewish communities around the world and fundamentally altered many sects - in a way that was more appropriate for a post-Enlightenment/Industrial Age world.

And of course, Shakespeare keeps being tweaked and and reinterpreted to speak to society's current interests.

Re the culture piece: you make some important points, but the "Let's ban new books" thing seems rather self-undermining. If you're going to ban new books, why not ban new blog comments, too?

Yeah, it is undermining. But it's funny! You're reading along and then you see "Let's ban new books", which although a fairly logical extrapolation, is still something that no one would expect to be seriously suggested.

More seriously, as I think I've already argued here, blog comments (and most websites in general) don't affect the weakened argument about removing subsidies. Less Wrong receives no government support (if anyone mirrored us, would we actually sue them or even bother with DMCA takedowns? I note that we don't work under any CC licenses, but that seems more like an omission than anything).

The observation that we have more culture than anyone can know what to do with is hardly original,

Alas, there is nothing new under the sun. (Oops.) But it seems to've been novel enough to most of the people who read it, and it's not like non-philosophers read Schopenhauer any more.

and your phrasing can't have been the best, so why did you spend all that time writing this piece, when you could have been making money?

As a student, my time is worthless! Essays like this may be useful as advertising, or spinning off into assignments; and they're much better than playing Geometry Wars. (Also, is my phrasing that bad? I thought I wrote it pretty well. :()

My answer to this entire dilemma is just to say that culture isn't about economic consumption: I guess that was entirely your point

I was also trying to show that it's 'not about Esthetics' too: if it were, we would expect there to be a lifetime-length canon optimizing your esthetics-per-work count, with occasional tweaks (deletions & additions) by specialists when some work is realized to not be very good or just exceeded by some unincluded work. But that is manifestly not the case.

I think that society ought not discourage the production of new novels, not because we need more novels around (you're right; we don't), but because I want to live in a world where everyone writes a good novel.

So this would fall under the 'externalities' category - people writing novels become better people for it?

It would be tremendously difficult, as we can generally agree whether a book is fiction or nonfiction, but 'net-unproductive websites' is unclear, and what subsidies are websites in general receiving that we could scrap? (An actual ban or tax obviously would be even more difficult to implement in a usefully Pigovian way.)

Books have copyrights, universities, direct government grants, etc.; but the Internet is famously disdainful of the former, and the mechanisms like the latter 2 are very rare indeed. (Quick: name an American poet or novelist who took a foundation or university-sponsored sabbatical to work on their website!)

Random thoughts:

Values Dissonance is a real problem, even when applied over the scale of 50 years. Also, ScienceMarchesOn and even History Marches On. The more things we learn, the more things we can tell stories about.

I've found that, by reading an awful lot of books, I feel like I understand literature and storytelling. On the other hand, I really don't understand music very well. I can't tell what qualities make one piece of music good and another not as good. I can play the piano pretty well, but I can't really improvise or compose. My taste in music (or complete lack thereof) seems to have a great deal to do with the mere exposure effect; I like the kinds of music that I hear a lot and don't like the kinds of music that I hear less of.

Also, one other big difference between much contemporary popular music and much classical music is that a lot of contemporary popular music has lyrics that listeners can understand, and a lot of classical music is entirely instrumental or in foreign languages.

Obviously, if we were actually going to work through this data we would want to know the rate of best-movie-ranking rather than the absolute numbers. Just as importantly, we'd want to know the frequency of best-movie-ranking relative to the number of movies watched from each decade, such that best-movie-rankings aren't simply dependent on availability.

In my experience, of the older movies I have watched, a greater fraction were strongly memorable than of the newer movies I have watched. In part, I suspect this is because I watch older movies intentionally, knowing that they are reputed to be good, where I watch newer movies with a somewhat lower bar for putting in the effort (because they are available in theaters, are easier to talk about, etc.).

Or highly enjoyable music earlier than the last quarter of 20th century.

Really? Really? I would put Mozart, Bach or Verdi against absolutely anyone from 1975 to the present.

As Technologos points out, # of movies made per year seems to have increased considerably, so the fraction of good movies made could have dropped but your numbers be accurate. (eg. the 1930s saw 15, so 15 * 3 = 45, not too far from the 2000s's 56)

A message board I used to frequent had an extremely long-running discussion of Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" series that died shortly after the final book was published.

Well, being a (former) Dark Tower fan myself, I think that's not necessarily related to the bald fact that the series ended so much as how it ended...

Waiting for the next installment, making guesses at what's going to happen next, discussing your theories with your friends who are all at the same place in the story as you are, and so on, are all things that rarely, if ever, happen with old stories as intensely as they do with new stories.

How much of this, do you think, is due simply to the fact that everyone is coordinated & equally ignorant due to sheer temporal necessity, and how much to the actual 'new' nature of releases?

I remember as a child I loved The Wizard of Oz, but I hadn't the slightest idea that there were sequels. One day, browsing through the very disorganized school library, I found one. I was shocked, and from then on, every few weeks or months as I rummaged, I would find another one. I recall being as thrilled to find one (though out of order) as I think I would have if they were freshly released & bought by the librarian, though they were, gosh, at least 80 years old by this point?

Thanks, it's been a while since I wasted a whole morning on TvTropes. Please link responsibly, people!

There is a button in the editor that allows to enter raw HTML (and it should be easy to construct a regex script to get whatever).

Sorry, hiatus. No haven't been tested recently, and slacked off on the DNB, it starts to feel monotonous, and frustrating, I couldn't break through D3B. I'll try and pick it up again when I figure out how to get it to work on Ubuntu.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/gx/just_lose_hope_already/ ?

This is random and for all sorts of reasons possibly a bad idea- but have you ever thought about anti-anxiety medication? It might have side effects that turn you off of it but it could help you deal with high risk situations.

(I should disclaim: I'm not a doctor, my knowledge doesn't extend past personal experience and a cog sci minor. Obviously, not medical advice, etc.)

I personally didn't suggest it because it seemed like it's obvious to you, so the only interesting response would be to deny it for some good reason.

I would note that you shouldn't give up permanently. Maybe wait a year or a few, then see if you've grown in other ways that would make a new attempt more fruitful.

It's been hinted at a few times, usually in terms of "how to pick goals" rather than "when to give up on goals". AFAIK, never a top-level post of "maybe you should give up and do something easier and/or more productive toward other goals". I think it'd be valuable.

Peer's comment is too vague and general for any meaningful response, and your comment doesn't add clarity ("Risky situations Peer mentioned are SIAI-related"?).

"Risk aversion"? In one interpretation it's a perfectly valid aspect of preference, not something that needs overcoming. For example, one can value sure-thing $1000 more than 11% probability at $10000.

Relatedly, has anyone thought about the relationship between rationality and psychotherapy? It just occurred to me that there might be a lot there.

It puts the 'R' in REBT.

Relatedly, has anyone thought about the relationship between rationality and psychotherapy? It just occurred to me that there might be a lot there.

Huh? You mean, like, psychotherapists are unusually irrational people? Or maybe that no rationalist would give any significant credence to any of the clinical psychology theory? Or maybe that a good rationalist will rarely need psychotherapy because their deduction skills are much better than most therapists? Please explain.

To be less snide, I find it quite unlikely that therapy would help PI significantly. (Of course, I know little of his/her specific circumstances.) I think a more fruitful course of action, if PI does want to overcome the problem*, would be to keep trying to overcome it directly, and meanwhile continue to form new free relationships with a variety of trusted people and see if they can help at all by providing insight or emotional support. Social networks are better than yellow book pages at finding people with relevant insights. And good friends are better than good therapists at emotional support.

* Which isn't to say that PI should keep trying.

Upon reading of that link (which I imagine is now fairly outdated?) his theory falls apart under the weight of its coercive nature - as the questioner points out.

It is understood that the impact of an AI will be on all in humanity regardless of it's implementation if it is used for decision making. As a result consequentialist utilitarianism still holds a majority rule position, as the link talks about, which implies that the decisions that the AI would make would favor a "utility" calculation (Spare me the argument about utilons; as an economist I have previously been neck deep in Bentham).

The discussion at the same time dismisses and reinforces the importance of the debate itself, which seems contrary. I personally think this is a much more important topic than is thought and I have yet to see a compelling argument otherwise.

From the people (researchers) I have talked to about this specifically, the responses I have gotten are: "I'm not interested in that, I want to know how intelligence works" or "I just want to make it work, I'm interested in the science behind it." And I think this attitude is pervasive. It is ignoring the subject.

"Utilons" are a stand-in for "whatever it is you actually value"

Of course - which makes them useless as a metric.

we tend to support decision making based on consequentialist utilitarianism

Since you seem to speak for everyone in this category - how did you come to the conclusion that this is the optimal philosophy?

Thanks for the link.

Maybe I'm just dense but I have been around a while and searched, yet I haven't stumbled upon a top level post or anything of the like here on the FHI, SIAI (other than ramblings about what AI could theoretically give us) OB or otherwise which either breaks it down or gives a general consensus.

Can you point me to where you are talking about?

On reflection, I'm actually going to start spelling my first name again

Why? (If I may ask.)

unless we have some name-change feature that I just couldn't find.

I've been wishing we had one for a while -- I replicated my Reddit login without really thinking.

I guess you could implement one!

The author addresses this. He's not particularly opposed to paying people to do things; he's opposed to people having to do paid work or starve. The existence of a GMI should make people less willing to do unpleasant jobs for relatively low wages, effectively reducing the supply of unskilled labor. If you can't automate away a job that most people don't like doing, then just pay people the new, higher market rate.

Thousand Cultures: The technology develops through the series. In "The Merchants of Souls" the uploading is the main McGuffin, and in "The Armies of Memory" the AIs are, with the uploads as a good second.

Meme Wars: You are missing "Orbital Resonance" and "The Sky so Big and Black", although I the memes as such are background, not the main story element, in both.

I would describe my view on the free will question as basically being Dennett's in Elbow Room and Freedom Evolves. But that seems to be confounded by what I expect to be the utter randomness that would emerge from the MWI. I don't worry about having free will; I am concerned about having some sort of causal chain in my actions. I don't disavow that I'm confused, I just don't think I'm confused over free will.

Hi Jack,

[i]Anyway it is true that MWI does entail that there is some non-zero possibility that your next words will be in Klingon. But the possibility is so small that the universe is likely to end many, many times over before it ever happens.[/i]

This all could just be an issue of me being massively off on the probabilities, but aren't there a greater number of possibilities that my next words will be not be in English than in English, and therefore a greater probability that what I would say would not be in English? And in this particular example, there are a number of universes that have branched off that I would have spoken Klingon. I'm not understanding the limitation that would demonstrate that there are more universes where I spoke English instead (i.e. why would there be a bell curve distribution with English sentences being the most frequently demonstrated average?)

And I do want to more clearly re-iterate that I'm not talking about Everett's formal proof, but the purely philosophical ramifications you mention (and also, I haven't got some earth shattering thesis waiting in the wings, I'm just describing my confusion). QM is fact, and MWI is a way of interpreting it. For whatever reason, I'm interested in that interpretation. So chalk it up to me thinking through a dumb question. I don't believe I've falsified a mainstream QM theory. I do feel I've demonstrated to my satisfaction that I don't fully understand the metaphysical implications of MWI. It sounds easier to just chalk it up to "it's the equations", but I do find the potential implications interesting.

The other interpretations allow for the possibility, but MWI seems to argue for it to definitely occur, in some universe branch.

I think it's the "wacky but not TOO wacky" world that I find pretty fascinating in QM. I just haven't seen a description that just seemed to nail it for me. Obviously, YMMV.

Well, there's no physical limitation against me speaking something other than my birth language. Using the coin analogy, my tongue position, lips position, and airflow out of my throat are the variables. Those variables, across all distributions, can produce any human word. Across infinity, there will be worlds where I'm speaking my birth language, and other ones that I'm not, for my next statement. MWI seems to me to eliminate the prior state from having an influence on the next state of my language machine. If all probabilities do occur in the MWI, I see the probability of me continuing to speak English to be the 995 heads case (which is still possible, I just see it as unlikely). I don't think MWI "makes" me do anything, I just think the implication is that all possible worlds become reality. It really comes down to the prior state's apparent lack influence; that's what confuses me. Once that's gone, I just see causality in human actions going out the window.