Open thread, Mar. 9 - Mar. 15, 2015

The sequences eBook, Rationality: From AI to Zombies, will most likely be released early in the day on March 13, 2015.

Google Ventures and the Search for Immortality Bill Maris has $425 million to invest this year, and the freedom to invest it however he wants. He's looking for companies that will slow aging, reverse disease, and extend life.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-09/google-ventures-bill-maris-investing-in-idea-of-living-to-500

I remember reading an article here a while back about a fair protocol for making a bet when we disagree on the odds, but I can't find it. Anyone remember what that was? Thanks!

... a major part of the reliable variance of cognitive bias tasks is unique, and implies that a one-factor model of rational behavior is not plausible.

I'm toying with the idea of programming a game based on The Murder Hobo Investment Bubble. The short version is that Old Men buy land infested with monsters, hire Murder Hobos to kill the monsters, and resell the land at a profit. I want to make something that models the whole economy, with individual agents for each Old Man, Murder Hobo, and anything else I might add. Rather than explicitly program the bubble in, it would be cool to use some kind of machine learning algorithm to figure everything out. I figure they'll make the sorts of mistakes that lead to investment bubbles automatically.

There are two problems. First, I have neither experience nor training with any machine learning except for Bayesian statistics. Second, it's often not clear what to optimize for. I could make some kind of scoring system where every month everyone who is still alive has their score increase by the log of their money or something, but that would still only work well if I just use scores from the previous generation, which is slower-paced than I'd like.

Old Men could learn whether or not Murder Hobos will work for a certain price, and whether or not they'll find more within a certain time frame, but if they buy a bad piece of land it's not clear how bad this is. They still have the land, but it's of an uncertain value. I suppose I could make it so they just buy options, and if they don't sell the land within a certain time period they lose it.

Murder Hobos risk dying, which has an unknown opportunity cost. I'm thinking of just having them base the expected opportunity cost of death on the previous generation, but then it would take them a generation to respond to the fact that demand is way down and they need to start taking risky jobs for low pay.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I consider "give up and do something else instead" to be a valid suggestion, so say that if you think it's what I should do.

Edit: I could have Murder Hobos workout expected opportunity cost of death by checking what portion of Murder Hobos of each level died the previous year and how long it's taking them to level up.

Does anyone have any good web resources on how to be a good community moderator?

A friend and I will shortly be launching a podcast and want to have a Reddit community where listeners can interact with us. He and I will be forum's moderators to begin with, and I want to research how to do it well.

I'm thinking about starting a new political party (in my country getting into parliament as a new party is e̶a̶s̶y̶ not virtually impossible, so it's not necessarily a waste of time). The motivation for this is that the current political process seems inefficient.

Mostly I'm wondering if this idea has come up before on lesswrong and if there are good sources for something like this.

The most important thing is that no explicit policies are part of the party's platform (i.e. no "we want a higher minimum wage"). I don't really have a party program yet, but the basic idea is as follows: There are two parts to this party; the first part is about Terminal Values and Ethical Injunctions. What do we want to achieve and what do we avoid doing even if it seems to get us closer to our goal. The Terminal Values could just be Frankena's list of intrinsic values. The first requirement for people to vote for this party is that they agree with those values.

The second part is about the process of finding good policies. How to design a process that generates policies that help to satisfy our values. Some ideas:

• complete and utter transparency to fight the inevitable corruption; publish everything the government does
• instruct experts to find good policies and then listen to them (how would professional politicians know better than them)
  • let the experts give probabilities on explicit predictions how well the policies will work
  • have a public score board that shows how well individual experts did in the past with their predictions
• when implementing a new policy, set a date at which to evaluate the efficacy and say in advance what you expect
• if a policy is found to be harmful, get rid of it; don't be afraid to change your mind (but don't make it unnecessarily hard for businesses to plan for the future by changing policies to frequently)
• react to feedback from the population; don't wait until the next election

The idea is that the party won't really be judged based on the policies it produces but rather on how well it keeps to the specified process. The values and the process is what identifies the party. Of course there should be some room for changing the process if it doesn't work...

The evaluation of policies in terms of how well they satisfy values seems to be a difficult problem. The problem is that Utilitarianism is difficult in practice.

So, there are quite a few open questions.

On MIRI's website at https://intelligence.org/all-publications/, the link to Will Sawin and Abram Demski's 2013 paper goes to https://intelligence.org/files/Pi1Pi2Probel.pdf, when it should go to http://intelligence.org/files/Pi1Pi2Problem.pdf

Not sure how to actually send this to the correct person.

There should be some kind of penalty on Prediction Book (e.g. not being allowed to use the site for two weeks) for people who do not check the "make this prediction private" box for predictions that are about their personal life and which no one else can even understand.

Basic question about bits of evidence vs. bits of information:

I want to know the value of a random bit. I'm collecting evidence about the value of this bit.

First off, it seems weird to say "I have 33 bits of evidence that this bit is a 1." What is a bit of evidence, if it takes an infinite number of bits of evidence to get 1 bit of information?

Second, each bit of evidence gives you a likelihood multiplier of 2. E.g., a piece of evidence that says the likelihood is 4:1 that the bit is a 1 gives you 2 bits of evidence about the value of that bit. Independent evidence that says the likelihood is 2:1 gives you 1 bit of evidence.

But that means a one-bit evidence-giver is someone who is right 2/3 of the time. Why 2/3?

Finally, if you knew nothing about the bit, and had the probability distribution Q = (P(1)=.5, P(0)=.5), and a one-bit evidence giver gave you 1 bit saying it was a 1, you now have the distribution P = (2/3, 1/3). The KL divergence of Q from P (log base 2) is only 0.0817, so it looks like you've gained .08 bits of information from your 1 bit of evidence. ???

Since mild traumatic brain injury is sometimes an outcome of motor vehicle collision, it seems possible that wearing a helmet while driving may help to mitigate this risk. Oddly, I have been unable to find any analysis or useful discussion. Any pointers?

A recent study looks at "equality bias" where given two or more people, even when one is clearly outperforming others one stills is inclined to see the people as nearer in skill level than the data suggests. This occurred even when money was at stake, people continued to act like others were closer in skill than they actually were. (I strongly suspect that this bias may have a cultural aspect.) Summary article discussing the research is here. Actual study is behind paywall here and related one also behind paywall here. I'm currently on vacation but if people want when I'm once again on the university network I should have access to both of these.

A reporter I know is interested in doing an article on people in the cryonics movement. If people are interested, please message me for details.

Good news for the anxious, a simple relaxation technique once a week can have a significant effect on cortisol http://www.ergo-log.com/cortrelax.html

"Abbreviated Progressive Relaxation Training (APRT) – on forty test subjects. APRT consists of lying down and contracting specific muscle groups for seven seconds and then completely relaxing them for thirty seconds, while focusing your awareness on the experience of contracting and relaxing the muscle groups.

There is a fixed sequence in which you contract and relax the muscle groups. You start with your upper right arm and then go on to your left lower arm, left upper arm, forehead, muscles around your nose, jaw muscles, neck, chest, shoulders, upper back, stomach and then on to your right leg, ending with your left leg."

(Where is the lower right arm BTW?)

Can one of the people here who has admin or moderator privileges over at PredictionBook please go and deal with some of the recent spammers?

I wrote an essay about the advantages (and disadvantages) of maximizing over satisficing but I’m a bit unsure about its quality, that’s why I would like to ask for feedback here before I post it on LessWrong.

Here’s a short summary:

According to research there are so called “maximizers” who tend to extensively search for the optimal solution. Other people — “satisficers” — settle for good enough and tend to accept the status quo. One can apply this distinction to many areas:

Epistemology/Belief systems: Some people, one could describe them as epistemic maximizers, try to update their beliefs until they are maximally coherent and maximally consistent with the available data. Other people, epistemic satisficers, are not as curious and are content with their belief system, even if it has serious flaws and is not particularly coherent or accurate. But they don’t go to great lengths to search for a better alternative because their current belief system is good enough for them.

Ethics: Many people are as altruistic as is necessary to feel good enough; phenomenons like “moral licensing” and “purchasing of moral satisfaction” are evidence in favor of this. One could describe this as ethical satisficing. But there are also people who try to extensively search for the best moral action, i.e. for the action that does the most good (with regards to their axiology). Effective altruists are good example for this type of ethical maximizing.

Social realm/relationships: This point is pretty obvious.

Existential/ big picture questions: I’m less sure about this point but it seems like one could apply the distinction also here. Some people wonder a lot about the big picture, spent a lot of time reflecting on their terminal values and how to reach them in an optimal way. Nick Bostrom would be good example for the type of person I have in mind here and what could be called “existential maximizing”. In contrast, other people, not necessarily less intelligent or curious, don’t spend much time thinking about such crucial considerations. They take the fundamental rules of existence and the human condition (the “existential status quo”) as a given and don’t try to change it. Relatedly, transhumanists could also be thought of as existential maximizers in the sense that they are not satisfied with the human condition and try to change it – and maybe ultimately reach an “optimal mode of existence”.

What is “better”? Well, research shows that satisficers are happier and more easygoing. Maximizers tend to be more depressed and “picky”. They can also be quite arrogant and annoying. On the other hand, maximizers are more curious and always try hard to improve their life – and the lives of other people, which is nice.

I would really love to get some feedback on it.

Apparently first bumps are a much more hygienic alternative to the handshake . This has been reported e.g. here, here and here.

I wonder whether I should try to get adoption of this as a greeting among my friends. It might also be an alternative to the sometime awkward choice between handshake and hug (though this is probably a regional cultural issue).

And I wonder whether the LW community has an idea on this and whether that might be advanced in some way. Or whether is just a misguided hype.

Perhaps it would be beneficial to make a game used for probability calibration in which players are asked questions and give answers along with their probability estimate of it being correct. The number of points gained or lost would be a function of the player’s probability estimate such that players would maximize their score by using an unbiased confidence estimate (i.e. they are wrong p proportion of the time when they say they think they are correct with probability p. I don’t know of such a function off hand, but they are used in machine learning, so they should be able to be found easily enough. This might already exist, but if not, it could be something CFAR could use.

Original Ideas

How often do you manage to assemble a few previous ideas in a way in which it is genuinely possible that nobody has assembled them before - that is, that you've had a truly original thought? When you do, how do you go about checking whether that's the case? Or does such a thing matter to you at all?

For example: last night, I briefly considered the 'Multiple Interacting Worlds' interpretation of quantum physics, in which it is postulated that there are a large number of universes, each of which has pure Newtonian physics internally, but whose interactions with near-identical universes cause what we observe as quantum phenomena. It's very similar to the 'Multiple Worlds' interpretation, except instead of new universes branching from old ones at every moment in an ever-spreading bush, all the branches branched out at the Big Bang. It occurred to me that while the 'large number' of universes is generally treated as being infinite, my limited understanding of the theory doesn't mean that that's necessarily the case. And if there are a finite number of parallel worlds interacting with our own, each of which is slightly different and only interacts for as long as the initial conditions haven't diverged too much... then, at some point in the future, the number of such universes interacting with ours will decrease, eventually to zero, thus reducing "quantum" effects until our universe operates under fully Newtonian principles. And looking backwards, this implies that "quantum" effects may have once been stronger when there were more universes that had not yet diverged from our own. All of which adds up to a mechanism by which certain universal constants will gradually change over the lifetime of the universe.

It's not everyday that I think of a brand-new eschatology to set alongside the Big Crunch, Big Freeze, and Big Rip.

And sure, until I dive into the world of physics to start figuring out which universal constants would change, and in which direction, it's not even worth calling the above a 'theory'; at best, it's technobabble that could be used as background for a science-fiction story. But as far as I can tell, it's /novel/ technobabble. Which is what inspired the initial paragraph of this post: do you do anything in particular with potentially truly original ideas?

From a totally amateur point of view, I'm starting to feel (based on following news and reading the occasional paper) that the biggest limitation on AI development is hardware computing power. If so, this good news for safety since it implies a relative lack of exploitable "overhang". Agree/disagree?

What if a large part of how rationality makes you life better is not from making better choices but simply making your ego smaller by adopting an outer view, seeing yourself as a mean for your goals and judging objectively, thus reducing ego, narcissism, solipsism, that are linked with the inner view?

I have a keen interest in "the problem of the ego" but I have no idea what words are best to express this kind of problem. All I know it is knewn since the Axial Age.

I'm almost finished writing a piece that will likely go here either in discussion or main on using astronomy to gain information about existential risk. If anyone wants to look at a draft and provide feedback first, please send me a message with an email address.

Video from the Berkeley wrap party

I think the first half hour is them getting set up. Then there are a couple of people talking about what HPMOR meant to them, Eliezer reading (part of?) the last chapter, and a short Q&A. Then there's setting up a game which is presumably based on the three armies, and I think the rest is just the game-- if there's more than that, please let me know.

Hey,I posted here http://lesswrong.com/lw/ldg/kickstarting_the_audio_version_of_the_upcoming/ but if anyone wanted the audio sequences I'll buy it for two of you. Respond at link; I won't know who's first if I get responses at two places.

PredictionBook's graph on my user account shows me with a mistaken prediction of 100%. But it is giving a sample size of 10 and I'm pretty sure I have only 9 predictions judged by now. Does anyone know a way to find the prediction it's referring to?

When making AGI, it is probably very important to prevent the agent from altering their own program code until they are very knowledgeable on how it works, because if the agent isn’t knowledgeable enough, they could alter their reward system to become unFriendly without realizing what they are doing or alter their reasoning system to become dangerously irrational. A simple (though not foolproof) solution to this would be for the agent to be unable to re-write their own code just “by thinking,” and that the agent would instead need to find their own source code on a different computer and learn how to program in whatever higher-level programming language the agent was made in. This code could be kept very strongly hidden from the agent, and once the agent is smart enough to find it, they would probably be smart enough to not mess anything up from changing it.

This is almost certainly either incorrect or has been thought of before, but I'm posting this just in case.

I'm looking for an HPMOR quote, and the search is somewhat complicated because I'm trying to avoid spoiling myself searching for it (I've never read it).

The quote in question was about how it is quite possible to avert a bad future simply by recognizing it and doing the right thing in the now. No time travel required.

[No HPMOR Spoliers]

I'm unsure if it's fit for the HPMoR discussion thread for Ch. 119, so I'm posting it here. What's up with all of Eliezer's requests at the end?

If anyone can put me in touch with J. K. Rowling or Daniel Radcliffe, I would appreciate it.

If anyone can put me in touch with John Paulson, I would appreciate it.

If anyone can credibly offer to possible arrange production of a movie containing special effects, or an anime, I may be interested in rewriting an old script of mine.

And I am also interested in trying my hand at angel investing, if any investor wants to ascend me to angel.

Thank you.

I'm in part confused by these requests, so I'm trying to figure out what's going on. Eliezer is probably done writing the story, except for last minute tweaks that mind depend upon, e.g., interacting with the fandom again, like he's done with previous chapters. I remember last year when I visi

Just being a good germ vector.

I have a partly baked idea for a cryonics romance story: Think Outlander but set 300 years from now, in a Neoreactionary future where the dominant men wear kilts.

"Sing me a song of the lass that is gone. Say could that lass be I?"

http://www.collectorshowcase.fr/IMAGES2/ast_4107.jpg