Open thread, Sept. 1-7, 2014

You should recurse one level deeper and put a sign outside the store saying "Products marked purchased in stores marked with can be heated at your request!"> can be heated at your request!"

Nerdier:

Products marked with this sentence can be heated at your request.

Nerdiest:

Products marked with "Products marked with X, with the first X replaced by the previous quoted sentence, can be heated at your request", with the first X replaced by the previous quoted sentence, can be heated at your request.

Even after all these years, writing quines still feels like I'm cheating the universe.

Saying it's a direct A/B comparison is seriously overstating it. Transitioning is itself a huge confounder, and if it were true that time before/after were exactly comparable, that would debunk one of the main justifications for allowing sex-changes in the first place!

Of course, the sample size is small here. And there’s no perfect agreement on cause-and-effect. Chris Edwards, a trans advertising executive, says that post-transition, he was given greater levels of responsibility—but he thinks it’s because the testosterone he took changed his behavior. He became less timid and more outspoken—and was seen, at work, as more of a leader. Indeed, some suggest that transmen might experience these workplace benefits partly because, post-transition, they are happier and more comfortable, and that this confidence leads to greater workplace success. But if that’s the case, one would expect that transwomen, armed with this same newfound confidence, would see benefits. The opposite seems to be true.

Note the willful incomprehension of the author about the possible effects of things like testosterone. 'Opposite seems to be true' my ass. But I suppose materialism and individual differences should never be allowed to get in the way of a good story about endemic sexism and racism...

(Sadly, this is only the second most infuriating statistical argument I've seen today. The first is a linear regression in the Washington Post about whippings vs productivity for slaves, in which they claim it shows whipping works. Aside from the usual correlation!=causality problem, their scatterplot clearly shows that there is not such a small positive correlation: their model does not fit the data because most slaves were never whipped so it's not Gaussian but more like a zero-inflated model, and in the population that was whipped a non-zero number of times, more whippings correlate dramatically with decreased cotton production. At a guess, male slaves were much more likely to act out or run away or get into fights or refuse to produce, and would be whipped for it. It borders on malpractice to present this graph baldly without including sex as a covariate or better yet doing a mixture model - certainly any model diagnostics would flag this regression as bogus. The author's bio says he's a professor at Columbia who "studies the roots of poverty and violence in developing countries, especially Africa"; all I can think is that if that's what passes for analysis for him, then no wonder Africa remains poor and violent.)

I agree this is a very real issue. For example:

http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/violence-women-hurts-men-20-things-men-can-hesaid/

1. I know of at least one male-to-female transgendered person who has made the exact opposite claim, viz. that women are treated better by society. (Not going to dig up a link.)
2. I would prefer not to see gender politics on LW, especially when the connection to rationality is tenuous.

Typing just criticism because typing on tablet: the text seems to site to appear very slowly, and I become instantly frustrated because I can't read it at normal speed

My first impression is that the text looks very cramped - it would probably be very difficult to read from far away.

Speaking of lucid dreaming, the other day I ran into some very interesting research about tACS (the dual of tDCS) being used during REM sleep to induce lucid dreaming in naive subjects with something like a 50% success rate: "Induction of self awareness in dreams through frontal low current stimulation of gamma activity", Voss et al 2014.

Unfortunately, a bunch of reading up on the topic of tACS indicates that there aren't any really tACS devices available which are both safe & cheap. (Which is too bad, because with an effect size like that it should both be easy to verify the effect and very useful if it pans out.)

Out of curiosity, do you suspect (let's say with p >= .05) that lucid dreaming is unsafe? Or do you know of someone on this site who does? I'd like to know why, because I lucid dream somewhat frequently. But I don't personally see any reason to think it would be less safe than regular dreaming, especially as I see awareness while dreaming as something on a sliding scale, not a binary "yes" or "no" question.

Not exactly about that claim but addressing stronger and less plausible versions of it: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years by Peter Norvig.

First, Paul Graham's idea of "anyone reasonably smart" probably involves not more that the top 5% of the population and likely even less X-)

Second, while it's not hard to get to the "edge", it's less trivial to do something useful while being there -- such as advancing that edge.

I think it depends a lot on what you mean with "being at the leading edge" of mobile app development.

Programming an Android app that works isn't that hard. On the other hand that doesn't mean that you understand everything there to know about Android app development.

I remember from my informatic A lectures at university which were in Haskell that at the end of a semester some of the students still didn't understand the concept of recursion.

Someone without a math background or computer science background is probably not going to use recursion for problems that are neatly solved with it when designing his app after learning Android programming with the standard tutorials. For a programmer that simply considers principles like recursion common sense it can be very hard to estimate how much time someone without a background needs to learn the concept.

You can program in Android without knowing exactly when a given object will be garbage collected. Multithreading can be complicated. Someone with years of experience in developing Android apps will likely outperform a nonprogrammer who spends a year learning Android but that doesn't mean that the second person can't find work as an Android developer.

I would estimate that to be good at programming in general, you need 10+ years of practice. After that, to become good at something new, e.g. building mobile apps, 1 year should be enough.

But it depends on how much time can you spend learning. Can you spend all your days learning? Or does your daily job take most of your energy and time, and then you have to split the remaining time between learning the new thing and having a social life? The 1 year estimate is for the best case.

For example, when I started learning programming as a teenager, I had a lot of free time, and I spent a lot of it programming. Later, when I worked as a programmer, I kept practicing my skills almost every day. However, when I am learning something new now, I must do it in evenings and weekends (but I would also like to spend that time with my girlfriend), so it goes rather slowly.

If you want to make great/lucrative aps, how hard is the programming compared to other sorts of programming?

Starting from zero programming knowledge, I think you can probably get a programming job in a hot subfield in a year if you're reasonably smart and dedicated, if you grok abstraction (probable if you did well in high school calculus, or if you read Less Wrong), and if you can successfully work around the guild rituals involved. You won't be an expert in anything, but you'll be able to do decent work and make decent money.

Being at the leading edge isn't hard; all that takes is buzzword compliance. Pushing it forward is hard, and unless you're exceptionally talented and hard-working I think that'd take significantly more than a year.

Of all the smart and dedicated programmers I know, I'm confident not one would claim to have been any good in under five years of practice.

If you pick a tiny area of expertise, say coding modifications of existing apps using one particular API using two or three particular libraries, you could probably be producing publishable results in a year. But you won't be as efficient, and won't have the same job security (because the market changes so quickly) as the guys who put in the years to learn to think like a programmer.

A good portion of LessWrong is unreadable for me as it is based on some kind of altruistic axiom. Personally, I care about myself, my immediate family and a few friends. I will feel a pang of suffering when I see people suffering but I do not feel that pang when I hear about people I don't know suffering, so I conclude that I don't care about other people beyond some abstract measure of proximity and their economic utility for me.

You don't know that he does. You only know that he says he does. Also, MIRI needs your donations!

In all seriousness, it appears that he simply has a much larger circle of empathy than you do. Yours only includes yourself, children, family and friends, which sounds like (what Peter Singer has convincingly argued to be) the default setting that evolution presumably gave you a sense of empathy for because that'd promote the survival of your genes. But that circle can expand, and in fact it has tended to expand over the last couple of millenia. In Eliezer's case, it appears to include at least all humans. And why? Well, my suspicion is that people have a distaste for contradictions, and any arbitrary limit to empathy is inherently fraught with contradictions. ("Is it okay for a policeman to not care about you because you're not his friend?" "How many non-friends would you kill to save the life of a friend?" etc.) And maybe maybe Eliezer simply has a greater sensitivity to, and distaste for, contradictions than you do.

Living among billions of happy people who have realistic chances to meet their goals is a world I find much more desirable than a world where my friends and I are the only successful people in existence.

On one hand, there's the cold utilitarian who only values other lives inasmuch as they further hir goals, and assigns no intrinsic worth to whichever goals they may have for themselves. This position does not coincide, but overlaps, with solipsism. On the other hand, there's what we could call the naïve Catholic who holds that more life is always better life, no matter in what horrid conditions. This position does not coincide, but overlaps, with panpsychism.

The strong altruistic component of EY's philosophy is what sets it on a higher moral ground than Ayn Rand's. For all her support of reason, Rand's fatal flaw was that she failed to grasp the need for altruism; it was anathema to her, even if her brand of selfishness was strange in that she recognized other people's right to be selfish too (the popular understanding of selfishness is more predatory than even she allowed).

EY agrees with Rand's position that every mind should be free to improve itself, but he doesn't dismiss cooperation. It makes perfect sense: The ferociously competitive realm of natural selection does often select for cooperation, which strongly suggests it's a useful strategy. I can't claim to divine his reasons, but the bottom line is that EY gets altruism.

(As chaosmage suggested, it is not impossible that EY merely pretends to be an altruist so people will feel more comfortable letting him talk his way into world domination (ahem, optimization), but the writing style of his texts about the future of humanity and about how much it matters to him is likelier if he really believes what he says.)

Still, the question stands: Why care about random people? I notice it's difficult for me to verbalize this point because it's intuitively obvious to me, so much so that my gut activates a red alarm at the sight of a fellow human who doesn't share that feeling.

Whence empathy? Although empathy has a long tradition of support in many philosophies, antiquity alone is not a valid argument. Warfaring chimpanzees share as much DNA with us as hippie bonobos; mirror neurons are not conclusively proven to exist; and disguised sociopathy sounds like an optimal strategy.

Buddhism has a concept that I find highly appealing. It's called metta and it basically states that sentient beings' preference for not suffering is one you can readily agree with because you're a sentient being too. There are several ways to express the same idea in contemporary terms: We're all in this together, we're not so different, and other feel-good platitudes.

We can go one step further and assert this: A world where only some personal sets of preferences get to be realized runs the risk of your preferences being ignored, because there's no guarantee that you will be the one who decides which preferences are favored; whereas a world where all personal sets of preferences are equally respected is the one where yours have the best chance of being realized. To paraphrase the Toyota ads, what's good for the entire world is good for you.

(I know most LWers will demand a selfish justification for altruism because any rational decision theory will require it, but I feel hypocritical having to provide a selfish argument for altruism. Ideally, caring for others shouldn't need to be justified by resorting to an expected personal benefit, but I acknowledge that trying to advance this point is like trying to show a Christian ascetic that hoping to get to heaven by renouncing worldly pleasures is the epitome of calculated hedonism. I still haven't resolved this contradiction, but fortunately this is the one place in all the Internet where I can feel safe expecting to be proved wrong.)

So, you say you have a "preference not to suffer" for everyone, but "preference not to die" only for a few people, if I read it correctly.

When you are asking how someone can have a "preference not to die" for everyone, I think you should also ask how you have a "preference not to suffer" for everyone, because to me it seems rather similar. I mean, the part of "preference not to ... for everyone" is the same, so we can ask whether this is realistic, or is just some kind of illusion, to create a better self-image. The difference between wanting someone not to suffer and not to die does not seem so big to me, knowing that many people prefer not to die, and that the idea that they will die causes them suffering.

Another thing is the technical limitation of the human brain. If a death or a suffering of one person causes you some amount of sadness (whether we measure it by neurons firing, or by hormones in blood), of course a death or suffering of million people cannot cause you million times more neuron signals or hormones, because such thing would kill you instantly. The human brain does not have the capacity to multiply this.

But for a transhumanist this is simply a bug in the human brain. What our brains do is not what we want them to do. It is not "what my brain does, is by definition what I think is correct". We are here to learn about biases and try to fix them. The human brain's inability to properly multiply emotions is simply yet another such bias. The fact that my brain is unable to care about some things (on the emotional level) does not mean that I don't. It merely means that currently I don't have the capacity to feel it on the gut level.

AFAIK, the highest-concentration populations of both, at least in the US, are geographically semi-overlapping (the Bay is a magnet for both), so I'd be surprised if there isn't. Certainly I know many people who have similar interests to LW and who are also serious circus-arts people, though most of them prefer fire props to straight balls. I personally am at least a single-person overlap, though I don't consider myself to be at a high level in either.

As a sidenote, watching this video gave me a weird sense of how much my standards are distorted, because everything before about 2:30 in it looked totally pedestrian to me; I personally know a half-dozen people who could pull off everything up to that point.

I partake in a great deal of circus things. It has been my hobby for a few years. Message me if you have questions.

I can juggle three balls kinda clumsy, but that's probably not what you're looking for. My brother used to be (still kinda is) a semi-professional juggler, so I do have some experience with that community. From my experience there doesn't seem to be a greater degree of rationality in the circus community, compared to other communities where people learn various skills.

What I did like from that community is the different learning style they have. Learning those skills is very hand-on and from being a total newcomer to being able to do something well enough to show off to friends and family doesn't take that long. (You can learn to juggle three objects or ride a unicycle in under a day.)

It looks like this is your first post. Welcome to Less Wrong!

I suspect there are quite a few jugglers / circus-skills folk in the rationality community, though I'm not sure I'd draw any kind of associative conclusion. After all, an interest in pot, didgeridoos and the narcissistic approval of one's peers can also draw someone to juggling.

Fiddlemath (Matt Elder) is a good juggler.

I'm totally down, cameron@cameroncowan.net

I'm always happy to proofread. PM me with the details.

It argues against the conjecture that utility function is separate from optimization power? Do you mean that it argues against Omohundro's instrumental AI drives?

There are a number of 3rd party tools that allow you to upload your 23 and me raw data for analysis. Here is a list

Yes it's a great show.

R is a piece of software) for running statistical analyses on data and getting nice graphs. It's free, has a lot of stuff built in and is quite pleasant to use.

Out there in the world a lot of people use software like Excel for doing their data processing. They want to have tables where they see their data.

That has the advantage that you have a nice GUI that normal people can easily learn. However some tasks take a lot of time with tables, and Excel automatically reformats your data when it think it knows better than you. Excel also doesn't handle it well to have 500000 rows in your data. Excel doesn't make pretty customizable plots.

Often the choice is between doing a task for 15 minutes in manual labor in Excel or writing 5 lines in R that take you 15 minutes of reading the documentation to find the right parameters.

As a result in a lot of professional context where statistics are needed people use specialised statistics software. That might be SPSS, Stata, SAS or R. SPSS, Stata and SAS both need a license and R is free software. State of the art statistics if often done in R and if someone invents a new statistical method they often publish a R package along with their paper to allow other people to use their shiny new technique.

It's worth noting that statisticians aren't primarily programmers and R is build for statisticians. It has a lot of powerful magic functions with 20 optional parameters.

These days there are also liberaries for like Pandas for Python that allow you to do most of the things that R can do while at the same time having a beautiful language.

What is R?

It's a programming language and environment which is widely used in the statistical community, in part because it has a LOT of statistics-related libraries available for it.

Historically, it's an open-source re-implementation of the programming language S developed at Bell Labs in mid-70s.

The interface that imparted information into a human subject was just a standard transcranial magnetic stimulation coil that they futzed around with until for each subject they found an orientation and intensity and frequency that made them see a spot in their visual field when it was activated. They then would report when they saw a spot and slowly decode a binary string of seeing and not-seeing. That's nothing terribly new, what was new was that the on/off state was decided upon by a computer using electrodes to get a rough look at a sitting person's imagery/intent of moving their arms, and they would visualize moving their arms or not in order to binary-encode the message.

I would NOT want it on a t-shirt. Kills your expected utility right off.

There's this for example. Or if you want to get more technical...

"0 votes, 993rd most popular", ouch X-D

I think you need to start with defining what do you mean by "just" -- that's a... controversial issue.

When I try to think of examples of 'just world' culture in the world, the only one I can produce is Prosperity Theology, which is easily used by the rich and powerful as justification that they must be good and deserving people. You'd have to make clear why this wouldn't do that, because divorced from religion this still seems to be harmful.

Aligns incentives correctly.

There are incentives for defecting in prisoner dilemmas. A world where people get ahead by defecting instead of cooperating is unjust to those people who choose to cooperate.

"Delete all AIs such that deleting them would result in you rewarding me with one utility."

When you request a mass delete, and 1 FAI is deleted along with 999 UFAI, in which order will Omega calculate the points? First remove all points and then award 999, or first award 999 points and then remove all?