Open thread, Nov. 10 - Nov. 16, 2014

I think the phrase in the education literature is mastery learning: my exposure to it was discussion of how Khan Academy does math tests. Because they're on a computer-based system, they can generate an arbitrary number of problems of a particular form (like, for example, 'multiply two three digit numbers together') and give each student as many problems as it takes for them to get 10 right in a row. Sometimes the student gets the lesson and only does 10 questions; sometimes the student takes 200 tries to get 10 right in a row, but they always master the skill before they move on (or they spend a lot of time getting very lucky).

I think your account will be received fairly well in Discussion if you present it like the above.

There were a few ways this was different; as an example, we used 'high expectations, low stakes'- we allowed students to retake any assignment as many times as they liked, but their grade for the entire class was basically the lowest grade they got on any assignment.

Isn't that a high stake situation?

I don't know, but I'm guessing the Extropians mailing list.

OB was sponsored by the Future of Humanity Institute, (IIRC) so perhaps they encouraged RH and EY to post there? You could always ask at Robin Hanson's monthly open thread.

Why do you think that a part time job is the way to go? Maybe it's better to switch your main job to a higher paying job that's more demanding?

I thought it'd be worth bringing to attention here, because if there's one adjective that would not apply to the online LW community, it's "laid back".

Hmm. I have pretty strong Daoist / Stoic tendencies, and a large part of that deals with rejection of "should-ness;" that is, things are as they are, and carrying around a view of how the world "should" be that disagrees with the actual world is, on net, harmful.

I've gotten some pushback from LWers on that view, as they use the delta between their should-world and their is-world to motivate themselves to act. As far as I can tell, that isn't necessary; one can be motivated by the is-world directly, and if one reasons in the is-world one is more likely to make successful plans than if one reasons in the should-world (which is where one will reason, since diffs between the should-world and is-world are defects!).

But I think that LW is useful at dissolving that pushback; the practice of cashing out beliefs as predictions about the world rather than tribal identifications or moral claims is basically the practice of living in the is-world instead of the should-world.

How much could we benefit from being more laid-back, from openly and deliberately saying "fuck it"? From doing what we actually want to do without regard for what's expected of us?

I would say substantially. LW largely seems to advocate for preference utilitarianism, whereas EA and animal rights subsets of the group often come suspiciously close to deontological "whatever you do care about, here is what you should care about". As a matter of fact, the whole advocacy for consistency in ethics (e.g. "shut up and multiply") can backfire since System 1's values are not necessarily consistent. I'm not suggesting giving up on these attempts, but I guess that many people would benefit from being able to listen to System 1's voice saying "I want to invent a lightsaber" without having System 2 immediately scream "but people in Africa are suffering, and you're just being scope insensitive".

I think the steelman of "The Dude" is that you shouldn't run your mind like a police state, it's cutting against the grain.

But "The Dude" is kinda "trampy," for lack of a better word, I don't think he's a diamond in the rough or anything like that.

Raymond Smullyan's The Tao is Silent is possibly relevant.

There is, well, y'know, early Christianity... :-)

Matthew 6:25-27:

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?
Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?
Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

and Matthew 6:34:

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

I thought it'd be worth bringing to attention here, because if there's one adjective that would not apply to the online LW community, it's "laid back". Note that many of us are lazy, but we struggle with laziness, we keep looking for self-help and trying to figure out our motivation systems and trying so hard to achieve. Other urges and "sufferings" we struggle with are the need to fit in, the need to make sense of the world, the need to be perfectly clear in thought and expression (and the need to demand that of others), and so on and so forth.

QFT

I could speculate why this is the way it is but that would be too much work to type up.

7) Studies show that on spatial reasoning tests, male mean scores are higher than females', whereas the converse is true of emotional intelligence tests. (True/false)

I see no reason to bundle those claims.

8) “Taxes are too high”

9) “Foreign aid spending is too high"

10) “Top executives are paid too much”

I would rather rephrase "X is too high" as "X should be reduced" if that's what you want to ask. Otherwise it seems to shift the perspective from policy-making to emotional evaluation.

At present I seem to have more questions where the liberal answer is the true one, so “pro-conservative” questions are particularly welcome.

How about a questions about the average IQ in some subsaharan country?

3) Which of the following statements best describes expert scientists’ views of the claim that humans are causing mass extinction of species at a rate that is at least 100 times the natural rate? (Same possible answers)

Without knowing anything about the extinction of species, I could guess that the answer is "most scientists agree".

If the correct number is not 100 but is large, the question would incorrectly conclude that some people who are not biased are biased (since someone who falsely thinks the number is 100 when it's really 75 or 125 is not biased, but would incorrectly answer "scientists agree").

If the correct number is not 100 but is small, the question would incorrectly conclude that some people who are biased are not biased (since someone who falsely thinks the number is 75 or 125 when it's really 1 is biased, but this bias would be undetectable since he would correctly answer the question with "scientists disagree")

Therefore the correct number is 100.

This question should be phrased using words like "many", not using the exact number 100.

For pro-conservative questions, one could be: In a recent poll of 15000 police officers polled, a large majority thought assault weapon bans are effective, a small majority thought assault weapon bans are effective, they were about equal, a small majority thought assault weapon bans are ineffective, a large majority thought assault weapon bans are ineffective. http://www.policeone.com/Gun-Legislation-Law-Enforcement/articles/6183787-PoliceOnes-Gun-Control-Survey-11-key-lessons-from-officers-perspectives/

Generally, however, people should be suspicious of such questions because in real political discourse, these questions are used to set the terms of the debate.

-- Does it matter whether the death penalty increases homicide rates?

-- Does it matter that humans cause climate change regardless of the size of the change?

-- I would think that any truly expert economist would say "we have no way to know the answers to these questions to the same degree as we know physics or chemistry answers. I could give you my educated opinion, but there's still a lot of disagreement within economics".

On your question 1, I would rephrase it to say that human activities tend to cause global temperatures to rise. Or that human activities have caused global temperatures to rise. Otherwise, you get stuck in the whole issue about the "pause," which might show that temperatures are not currently rising for reasons that are not fully understood and are subject to much debate. The paper you cite was from early 2010, and was based on research before that, so the pause had not become much-discussed by then.

One thing that I think will be interesting if you run the quiz is to identify a group who resist polarization and are between the extremes. For example, I think there are plenty of people that agree that carbon dioxide causes temperatures to rise (all else being equal) but believe that the feedback loop is not significantly positive. People from each extreme tend to lump them middle-grounders in with the people at the other extreme: "You're an alarmist!" "You're a denier!" etc.

What do economists think of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009?

For the true/false(/divided) questions, it'd be wise to aim for an even split in true/false(/divided) answers to minimize acquiescence bias. At the moment disproportionately few answers for questions 1-7 are "false", so someone who just likes agreeing with things has an unfair advantage there!

You could have a question about the scientific consensus on whether abortion can cause breast cancer (to catch biased pro-lifers). For bias on the other side, perhaps there is some human characteristic the fetus develops earlier than the average uninformed pro-choicer would guess? There seems to be no consensus on fetus pain, but maybe some uncontroversial-yet-surprising fact about nervous system development? I couldn't find anything too surprising on a quick Wiki read, but maybe there is something.

If you want to catch the other side on the global warming debate as well, there are a bunch of claims where I suspect the average liberals is overconfident. Maybe something like "Hurricane X wouldn't have happened without global warming". The IPCC report shows their confidence for various claims and it's likely something there to catch liberals.

Some domestic questions would be nice. Opinions about school choice for example.

Reminds me of "The Cactus and the Weasel".

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin originally proposed a (tongue-in-cheek) classification of people into "hedgehogs", who have a single big theory that explains everything and view the world in that light, and "foxes", who have a large number of smaller theories that they use to explain parts of the world. Later on, the psychologist Philip Tetlock found that people who were closer to the "fox" end of the spectrum tended to be better at predicting future events than the "hedgehogs".

In "The Cactus and the Weasel", Venkat constructs an elaborate hypothesis of the kinds of belief structures that "foxes" and "hedgehogs" have and how they work, talking about how a belief can be grounded in a small number of fundamental elements (typical for hedgehogs) or in an intricate web of other beliefs (typical for foxes). The whole essay is worth reading, but a few excerpts that are related to what you just wrote:

Where does [the fox prediction advantage], let’s call it the Tetlock edge, come from? I have a speculative answer.

It comes from eschewing abstraction and preferring the unreliable world of System 1 tools: metaphor, analogy and narrative; tools that all depend on pattern recognition of one sort or the other, rather than classification into clean schema. Fox brains are in effect constantly doing meta-analyses with unstructured ensembles, rather than projecting from abstract models.

That’s where the advantage comes from: eschewing abstraction.

Abstraction creates meta-knowledge via inductive generalization, and can grow into doctrinaire world views. The way this happens is that you try to formalize the interdependencies among all your generalized beliefs. Your one big idea as a hedgehog is an idea that covers everything, the whole T-box, so to speak. Abstraction provides you with ways to compute beliefs and actions in domains you haven’t even encountered yet, thereby coloring your judgment of the novel before the fact.

Pattern recognition creates meta-knowledge through linkages among weak views in multiple domains. The many things you know start getting densely connected in a messy web of ad hoc associations. Your collection of little ideas, densely connected, does not cover everything, since there are fewer abstractions. So you can only form beliefs about new domains once you encounter some data about them (which means you have an inclusion bias). And you cannot act decisively in those domains, since you lack strong metanorms. This means pattern recognition leaves you with a fundamentally more open mind (or less strongly colored preconceptions about what you do not yet know).

The way you slowly gain a Tetlock advantage, if you live long enough to collect a lot of examples and a very densely connected mind full of little ideas, is as follows: The more you see instances of a belief in various guises, the better you get at recognizing new instances. This is because the chances that a new instance will be recognizable close to an existing instance in your collection increases, and also because patterns color the unknown less strongly than abstractions.

As you age, your mind becomes a vessel for accumulating a growing global context to aid in the appreciation of novelty.

Abstraction offers you a satisfyingly consistent and clean world view, but since you generally stop collecting new instances (and might even discard ones you have) once you have enough to form an abstract belief through inductive generalization, it is harder to make any real use of new information as it comes in. There is already a strongly colored opinion in place and guides to action that don’t rely on knowing things. Your abstractions also accumulate metanorms, and give you an increasing array of reasons to not include new information in your world view. [...]

Foxes are fundamentally Big Data native people. They operate on the assumption that it is cheaper to store new information than to decide what to do with it. Hedgehogs are fundamentally not Big Data native. If they can’t structure it, they can’t store it, and have to throw it away. If they can structure it with an abstraction, they don’t need to store most of it. Only a few critical details to fit the Procrustean bed of their abstraction.

Because foxes resist the temptation of abstraction (and therefore the temptation to throw away examples of patterns once an inductive generalization and/or metanorm has been arrived at, or stop collecting), they slowly gains an advantage over time, as the data accumulates: the Tetlock edge.

We can restate the Archilocus definition in a geeky way: The fox has one big, unstructured dataset, the hedgehog has many small structured datasets.

But this takes a long time and a lot of stamp collecting, and foxes have to learn to survive in the meantime. Young foxes can be particularly intimidated by old hedgehogs, since the latter are likely to have accumulated more data in absolute terms.

On th other hand, you can imagine data-driven epistemology, where you don't really formulate any hypotheses. You just have a lot of pattern-matching power, completely agnostic of the knowledge domain

When you say "pattern-matching," what do you mean? Because when I imagine pattern-matching, I imagine that one has a library of patterns, which are matched against sensory data- and those library of patterns are the 'hypotheses.'

But where does this library come from? It seems to be something along the lines of "if you see it once, store it as a pattern, and increase the relevance as you see it more times / decrease or delete if you don't see it enough" which looks like an approximation to "consider all hypotheses, updating their probability upward when you see them and try to keep total probability roughly balanced."

That is, I think we agree; but I think when we use phrases like "pattern-matching" it helps to be explicit about what we're talking about. Distinguishing between patterns and hypotheses is dangerous!

Carnegie's How to Make Friends and Influence People has a slightly parallel approach: reread the book on a regular schedule, as you'll notice things the fourth time you didn't notice the third because your skill growth puts you in a different place relative to the material. (Maybe he also recommends not to read the whole book at once, also, and I just forgot that part; I think he does encourage people to read just the parts they want to.)

It seems to me that rereading is likely to be more effective than staggering the reading, and that rereading enables staggering. One of my childhood English teachers was more forgiving of reading in class than other teachers, and had a small rack of books available- one of them was Watership Down, which I read cover to cover probably ~7 times, and afterwards would just open to a random page and then would be able to immediately place myself in the story at that point and read from there.

This also calls to mind the practice among more serious Christians of reading the Bible once a year- it takes about four pages a day, and does not take many years for much of it to be very familiar. Muslims have the term "Hafiz" for someone who has memorized the Quran, which typically takes several years of focused effort, and I don't think Christians have a comparable term, but I've definitely noticed phrases along the lines of "quote chapter and verse" for when people had sizeable blocks of the Bible memorized.

Now when I think about rationality seminars -- aren't they analogical to reading the whole book at the same time? So the proper approach would be instead an hour or two, once in a week or two weeks (as long as it takes to master the lesson). But that would make travelling really expensive, so instead the lessons would have to be remote. Perhaps explaining the topic in a YouTube video, then having a Skype debate, a homework, and a mailinglist only for debating the current homework.

Seconded. There are a lot of clever ideas that I haven't seen anywhere in other probability books: A_p distributions, group invariance, the derivation of an ignorance prior as a multi-agents problem, etc.

The only lacking (due to obsolescence) chapter is the one about quantum mechanics. Jaynes advocates (although implicitly) a hidden variables theory, but so far Bell's and Kochen-Specher's theorems imposed heavy constraints on those.

Started yesterday

So I guess you haven't read very far yet? The first chapter is great, but the demand for mathematical fluency goes up fast from there.

Seconding this. A good way to find good old threads is to go through the highest ranked comments and click through to the thread, or look at the back comments of good but non-prolific commenters like vassar.

IANANRx, but I think the maximally charitable answer is "Nature; especially, the biological, physiological, and game-theoretical constraints within which any society and culture must operate." By extension, a culture neglecting these constraints is necessarily in a state of collapse- a faux perpetual motion machine may move for a few moments because of initial momentum in the system, but it must necessarily halt.

As an additional corollary, homeostatic societies (which were, presumably, not in a state of collapse) must have been acting within these constraints. Therefore, long-running traditional cultures most clearly illustrate the terms of compliance with Gnon.

Gnon is reality, with an emphasis towards the aspects of reality which have important social consequences. When you build an airplane and fuck up the wing design, Gnon is the guy who swats it down. When you adopt a pacifist philosophy and abolish your military, Gnon is the guy who invades your country. When you are a crustacean struggling to survive in the ocean floor, Gnon is the guy who turns you into a crab.

Basically, reality has mathematical, physical, biological, economical, sociological, and game-theoretical laws. We anthropomorphize those laws as Gnon.

Seems like they take Feynman's "reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled" and add a but of mysticism, resulting in "Nature is out to get you, constant vigilance, citizen!". Certainly makes the message easier to internalize for those who already think they live in a hostile environment.

As I understand it, the apatheist statement of "the laws of nature as they justify traditional societal hierarchy".

Alexander Technique is one somatic technique of many. All of them lead to skillful movement and without background knowledge there no reason to assume that a specific technique inspired Dune.

I don't think that discussing it is inherently impossible. It just hard. It's even more hard when the people you are talking with don't have the background to understand the basic claims and then want peer reviewed research for every claim.

If you want to discuss issues around shifting around your center of gravity than the people you talk to have to know what you mean with shifting around one's center of gravity and it's not something that can be easily done via a blog post.

Boring means different things to different people. I personally like a deep intellectual discussion.

Other people value other characteristics. Many people are not boring when they are unstifled and just follow their impulses.

"I drink to make other people more interesting" -- Ernest Hemingway

But don't forget that this didn't work out well for him.

Otherwise, the solution is to find interesting people. Internet helps a LOT.

If you can afford pasture-raised chicken or grass-fed beef, the animal suffering consideration becomes less important than if you're eating factory-farmed animals.

Also consider which choice is more likely to stick, or make future ethical choices seem reasonable.

Why choose one? If you aren't sure which is worse, maybe you should assume that they are about equal. Then you should reduce total consumption. Is eliminating one option going to help you do that? Or will the other grow to fill the void?

Chicken. Far more chickens die per amount of meat, and I suspect that they have worse lives, since it is probably easier to keep a whole bunch of chickens in a small space and cut off bits of them without anaesthesia. Brian Tomasik writes about this question here, although be warned that there are some pretty nasty pictures that you will have to scroll past to get to his estimate of the numbers.

I eat chicken but I don't eat mammals. This is partly for environmental reasons, but it is also because my ethics are not cosmopolitan. I think beings that are more cognitively similar to me are owed more moral concern (by me, not everyone else), not merely because they are more likely to be sentient or sapient or whatever, but because they are more likely to share my interests and outlook on the world, have emotions that I can identify with, etc. So I believe that I have greater moral obligations to my family and friends than to strangers, greater moral obligations to humans than to great apes, and so on. In the absence of contrary evidence, I use distance on the evolutionary tree as a proxy for cognitive distance. On those grounds, I am pretty uncomfortable with the suffering that cattle (and other mammals) undergo in the factory farming industry. I am significantly less uncomfortable about the suffering that chickens undergo.

So I guess my point is that you shouldn't be weighing chicken suffering against cattle suffering on a one-to-one scale, because completely cosmopolitan ethical systems are wrong. Our sphere of moral concern shouldn't work like an absolute threshold, where we have equal concern for all entities within the sphere and no concern for any entity outside it. Instead, it should gradually attenuate with distance. I probably can't convince you of all this in a single comment, but perhaps you should at least consider it as a morally relevant possibility.

I would add that (vague recollection upcoming:) chicken might be healthier than beef, if you're just going to eat one of them.

Beef. Chickens are even less likely to be sentient by a considerable margin.

I don't know much about organic chemistry, but amino acids are fairly simple molecules, and if memory serves they've been found free-floating in molecular clouds. I'd tentatively bet at 100:1 odds that that the right isomers of at least the simpler ones will be found conditional on the experiment being run, since a comet's basically a giant slushball of compounds left over from those molecular clouds.

On the other hand, I'd put the odds at well under 1% that we'll see terrestrial-like isomer ratios. That would be tantamount to finding a biosphere -- an active one, not just the remains of one, since amino acids are photosensitive and tend toward an equilibrium isomer ratio unless biological processes are leaning on it.

Do you mean AI research or FAI research? (The FHI does not do AI research.)

For (a), it would probably look like the late 90's dot com bubble runup, except that it wouldn't end with a bubble burst and most of the companies going under, instead it would just keep going, while world dramatically changed.

For (b), I don't think we would really know until it had started, at which point things would go bad very, very quickly. I doubt that you could use price movements far in advance to predict it coming.

In general, markets can go down in price much faster than they went up. Scenario (a) would look like a continual parabolic rise, while (b) would just be a massive crash.

I think you may be missing a time factor. I'd agree with your statement if it was "A system can only simulate a less complex system in real-time." As an example, designing the next generation of microprocessors can be done on current microprocessors, but simulation time often takes minutes or even hours to run a simulation of microseconds.

Institutions are bigger than humans.

Also the time thing.

The whole point of a theory is that it's less complex than the system you want to model. You are always making some simplifications.

It's my understanding that nobody understands every part of major modern-day engineering projects (e.g. the space shuttle, large operating systems) completely, and the brain seems more complex than those, so this is probably right. That said, we still have high-level theories describing those, so we'll likely have high-level theories of the brain as well, allowing one to understand it in broad strokes if not in every detail.

A system can only simulate a less complex system, not one at least as complex as itself

It probably depends on what you mean by complexity. Surely a universal Turing machine can emulate any other universal Turing machine, given enough resources.

On the other side, neurological models of the brain need not to be as complex as the brain itself, since much of the complexity is probably accidental.

Seems unlikely, given the existence of things like quines), and the fact that self-reference comes pretty easily. I recommend reading Godel Escher Bach, it discusses your original question in the context of this sort of self-referential mathematics, and is also very entertaining.

Unless from the beginning you create the system to accomplish a certain number of tasks and then work to create the system to complete them. That can mean creating systems and subroutines in order to accomplish a larger goal. Take stocking a store for example:

There are a few tasks to consider:

1. Price Changes
2. Presentation
3. Stocking product
4. Taking away old product (or excess)

A large store like Target has 8 different, loosely connected teams that accomplish these tasks. That is a store system within a building of 8 different subroutines to create a system that, if it works at its best, makes sure that the store is perfect stocked with the right presentation, amount of produce and the correct price. That system of 8 subroutines is back up by the 3 backroom subroutines that create the backroom system that take in product and make it available for stocking and that system is backed up by the distribution center system which is backed up by the transportation system (each truck and contractor working as a subroutine).

These systems and subroutines are created to accomplish one goal and that is to make sure that customers can find what they are looking for a buy it. I think using this idea we can start to create systems and subroutines that make it possible to replicate very complicated systems without losing anything.

What of it?

Either the 1 in a million is wrong

This.

Since P(S) = P(S|A)P(A) + P(S|-A)P(-A), and P(S|A)P(A) is already .99, then P(S) cannot be .000001.
Those two assertions are contradicting each other: you cannot coherently believe a composite event (suriving an illness) less than you believe each factor (surviving the illness with the aid of magic).

If you believe that God will cure everyone who gets the disease (P(S|A) = 1) and God is already a certainty (P(A) = .99), then why so few people survive the illness?

One possibility is that it's P(S|-A) that is one in a million (surviving without God is extremely rare). In this case:

P(A|S) = P(S|A) P(A) / P(S) -->
P(A|S) = P(S|A) P(A) / (P(S|A) P(A) + P(S|-A) P(-A)) -->
P(A|S) =1 .99 / (1 .99 + .000001 * .01) -->
P(A|S) = .99 / (.99 + .00000001) -->
P(A|S) = .99 / .99000001 -->
P(A|S) = .9999999...

If you already believe that curing aliens are a certainty, then for sure surviving an illness that has only a millionth possibility otherwise, will bring up your belief up to almost a certainty.

Another possible interpretation, that keeps P(S) = .000001, is that P(S|A) is not the certainty. Possibly God will not cure everyone who gets the disease, but only those who deserves it, and this explains why so few survive.

In this case:

P(S) = x .99 + y .01 = .000001 -->
P(A|S) = x * .99 / .000001

a number that depends on how many people God considers worthy of surviving.

I think your denominator in your original equation is missing a second term. That is why you get a non-probability for your answer. See here: http://foxholeatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Bayes.jpg

The argument was him basically saying something equivalent to "If I had a disease that had a 1 in a million chance of survival and I survived it, it's not because I was the 1 in a million, it's because it was due to god's intervention". So I tried to point out that either his (subjective) base rate is wrong or his (subjective) conditional probability is wrong.

There no reason why God in principle should be unable to choose which of the people of the mass of one million survives. If you don't have a model of how the one in a million gets cured you don't know that it wasn't the God of the gaps.

In medicine you do find some people having theories according to which nobody should recover from cancer. The fact that there are cases in which the human immune system manages to kick out cancer does suggest that the orthodox view according to which cancer develops when a single cell mutates and the immune system has no way to kill mutated cells is wrong.

Today we have sessions with a psychologists as the standard of care for cancer patients and we pushed back breast cancer detection screening because a lot of the "cancers" that the screening found just disappear on their own and it doesn't make sense to operate them away.

Have you tried Goodreads?