Alexander's Shortform

The theory of ‘morality as cooperation’ (MAC) argues that morality is best understood as a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life. MAC draws on evolutionary game theory to argue that, because there are many types of cooperation, there will be many types of morality. These include: family values, group loyalty, reciprocity, heroism, deference, fairness and property rights. Previous research suggests that these seven types of morality are evolutionarily-ancient, psychologically-distinct, and cross-culturally universal. The goal of this project is to further develop and test MAC, and explore its implications for traditional moral philosophy. Current research is examining the genetic and psychological architecture of these seven types of morality, as well as using phylogenetic methods to investigate how morals are culturally transmitted. Future work will seek to extend MAC to incorporate sexual morality and environmental ethics. In this way, the project aims to place the study of morality on a firm scientific foundation.

Source: https://www.lse.ac.uk/cpnss/research/morality-as-cooperation.

Do you notice your beliefs changing overtime to match whatever is most self-serving? I know that some of you enlightened LessWrong folks have already overcome your biases and biological propensities, but I notice that I haven't.

Four years ago, I was a poor university student struggling to make ends meet. I didn't have a high paying job lined up at the time, and I was very uncertain about the future. My beliefs were somewhat anti-big-business and anti-economic-growth.

However, now that I have a decent job, which I'm performing well at, my views have shifted towards pro-economic-growth. I notice myself finding Tyler Cowen's argument that economic growth is a moral imperative quite compelling because it justifies my current context.

[Minor spoiler alert] I've been obsessed with Dune lately. I watched the movie and read the book and loved both. Dune contains many subtle elements of rationality and x-risks despite the overall mythological/religious theme. Here are my interpretations: the goal of the Bene Gesserit is to selectively breed a perfect Bayesian who can help humanity find the Golden Path. The Golden Path is the narrow set of futures that don't result in an extinction event. The Dune world is mysteriously and powerfully seductive.

I just came across Lenia, which is a modernisation of Conway's Game of Life. There is a video by Neat AI explaining and showcasing Lenia. Pretty cool!

On the mating habits of the orb-weaving spider:

These spiders are a bit unusual: females have two receptacles for storing sperm, and males have two sperm-delivery devices, called palps. Ordinarily the female will only allow the male to insert one palp at a time, but sometimes a male manages to force a copulation with a juvenile female, during which he inserts both of his palps into the female’s separate sperm-storage organs. If the male succeeds, something strange happens to him: his heart spontaneously stops beating and he dies in flagrante. This may be the ultimate mate-guarding tactic: because the male’s copulatory organs are inflated, it is harder for the female (or any other male) to dislodge the dead male, meaning that his lifeless body acts as a very effective mating plug. In species where males aren’t prepared to go to such great lengths to ensure that they sire the offspring, then the uncertainty over whether the offspring are definitely his acts as a powerful evolutionary disincentive to provide costly parental care for them.

Source:  “The Social Instinct” by Nichola Raihani.

The lack of willpower is a heuristic which doesn’t require the brain to explicitly track & prioritize & schedule all possible tasks, by forcing it to regularly halt tasks—“like a timer that says, ‘Okay you’re done now.’”

If one could override fatigue at will, the consequences can be bad. Users of dopaminergic drugs like amphetamines often note issues with channeling the reduced fatigue into useful tasks rather than alphabetizing one’s bookcase.

In more extreme cases, if one could ignore fatigue entirely, then analogous to lack of pain, the consequences could be severe or fatal: ultra-endurance cyclist Jure Robič would cycle for thousands of kilometers, ignoring such problems ⁠as elaborate hallucinations⁠, and was eventually killed while cycling.

The ‘timer’ is implemented, among other things, as a gradual buildup of adenosine⁠, which creates sleep homeostatic drive pressure and possibly physical fatigue during exercise (Noakes 2012⁠, ⁠Martin et al 2018), leading to a gradually increasing subjectively perceived ‘cost’ of continuing with a task/​staying awake/​continuing athletic activities, which resets when one stops/​sleeps/​rests. (Glucose might work by gradually dropping over perceived time without rewards⁠.)

Since the human mind is too limited in its planning and monitoring ability, it cannot be allowed to ‘turn off’ opportunity cost warnings and engage in hyperfocus on potentially useless things at the neglect of all other things; procrastination here represents a psychic version of pain.

Source: https://gwern.net/Backstop

While reading the book "Software Engineering at Google" I came across this and thought it was funny:

Some languages specifically randomize hash ordering between library versions or even between execution of the same program in an attempt to prevent dependencies. But even this still allows for some Hyrum’s Law surprises: there is code that uses hash iteration ordering as an inefficient random-number generator. Removing such randomness now would break those users. Just as entropy increases in every thermodynamic system, Hyrum’s Law applies to every observable behavior.

It is beyond me why anyone would use hashset ordering as a random number generator! But that is why Hyrum's Law is a law and not some other thing that's not a law. For context, Hyrum's Law states:

With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.

A common criticism of rationality I come across rests upon the absence of a single, ultimate theory of rationality.

Their claim: the various theories of rationality offer differing assertions about reality and, thus, differing predictions of experiences.

Their conclusion: Convergence on objective truth is impossible, and rationality is subjective. (Which I think is a false conclusion to draw).

I think that this problem is congruent to Moral Uncertainty [? · GW]. What is the solution to this problem? Does a parliamentary model similar to that proposed by Bostrom and Ord make sense here? I am sure this problem has been talked about on LessWrong or elsewhere. Please direct me to where I can learn more about this!

I would like to improve my argument against the aforementioned conclusion. I would like to understand this problem

Almost any technology has the potential to cause harm in the wrong hands, but with [superintelligence], we have the new problem that the wrong hands might belong to the technology itself.

Excerpt from "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" by Norvig and Russell.

I wish moneymaking was by default aligned with optimising for the "good". That way, I can focus on making money without worrying too much about the messiness of morality. I wholly believe that existential risks are unequivocally the most critical issues of our time because the cost of neglecting them is so enormous, and my rational self would like to work directly on reducing them. However, I'm also profoundly programmed through millions of years of evolution to want a lovely house in the suburbs, a beautiful wife, some adorable children, lots of friends, etc. I do not claim that the two are impossible to reconcile. Instead, I argue that it's easier to achieve status maximising goals without caring too much about the morality of my career. I'd like to not feel guilty for my natural propensity toward earning more status. (When I say status, I don't mean rationality community status, I mean broader society status.)

I recently read Will Storr's book "The Status Game" based on a LessWrong recommendation by user Wei_Dai. It's an excellent book, and I highly recommend it.

Storr asserts that we are all playing status games, including meditation gurus and cynics. Then he classifies the different kinds of status games we can play, arguing that "virtue dominance" games are the worst kinds of games, as they are the root of cancel culture.

Storr has a few recommendations for playing the Status Game to result in a positive-sum. First, view other people as being the heroes of their own life stories. If everyone else is the hero of their own story, which character do you want to be in their lives? Of course, you'd like to be a helpful character.

Storr distils what he believes to be "good" status games into three categories. They are:

• Warmth: When you are warm, you communicate, "I'm not going to play a dominance game with you." You imply that the other person will not get threats from you and that they are in a safe place around you.
• Sincerity: Sincerity is about levelling with other people and being honest with them. It signals to someone else that you will tell them when things are going badly and when things are going well. You will not be morally unfair to them or allow resentment to build up and then surprise them with a sudden burst of malice.
• Competence: Competence is just success and it signals that you can achieve goals and be helpful to the group.

I thought this book offered an interesting perspective on an integral aspect of being a human, status.

Recently I came across this brilliant example of avoiding reducing selection bias when extracting quasi-experimental data from the world towards the beginning of the book "Good Economics for Hard Times" by Banerjee and Duflo.

The authors were interested in understanding the impact of migration on income. However, most data on migration contains plenty of selection bias. For example, people who choose to migrate are usually audacious risk-takers or have the physical strength, know-how, funds and connections to facilitate their undertaking,

To reduce these selection biases, the authors looked at people forced to relocate due to rare natural disasters, such as volcano eruptions.

I sometimes wondered why mathematicians are so pedantic about proofs. Why can't we just check the first $n$ cases with a supercomputer and do without rigorous proofs? Here's an excellent example of why proofs matter.

Consider this proposition: $313(x^3+y^3)=z^3\text{has no solution when}x,y,z\in Z^{+}$.

If you check with a computer, then this proposition will appear true.

The smallest counterexample has more than 1000 digits, and your computer program might not have checked that far. If you relied on the assumption that this equation has no solution in a cryptographic application without a proof, the consequences could be catastrophic.

Will the Sequences Highlights become available in print on Amazon?

When some people hear the words "economic growth" they imagine factories spewing smoke into the atmosphere:

This is a false image of what economists mean by "economic growth". Economic growth according to economists is about achieving more with less. It's about efficiency. It is about using our scarce resources more wisely.

The stoves of the 17th century had an efficiency of only 15%. Meanwhile, the induction cooktops of today achieve an efficiency of 90%. Pre-16th century kings didn't have toilets, but 54% of humans today have toilets all thanks to economic progress.

Efficiency, if harnessed safely, benefits us all. It means we can get more value for less scarce resources, thus increasing the overall pie.

Will economic growth create more inequality due to rent seeking and wealth concentration? The evidence suggests that as GDP (not a perfect measure, but a decent one) grows, per capita incomes also grow. I’d rather be a peasant in South Korea than an average government employee in North Korea.

This is a list of the top 100 most cited scientific papers. Reading all of them would be a fun exercise.

According to Wikipedia, the most significant known prime number at this moment in time is $2^{82589933}-1$. This is a nice illustration of two phenomena:

1. The profound unpredictability of the growth of knowledge. If we can predict the next prime, then we should know what it is, but we don't.
2. It tells us something profound about the reality of (Platonic) abstractions. We know that a more significant prime number must exist (there are infinitely many primes), but we just haven't found it yet. But we know it's out there in reality.

Is bias within academia ever actually avoidable?

Let us take the example of Daniel Dennett vs David Chalmers. Dennett calls philosophical zombies an "embarrassment," while Chalmers continues to double-down on his conclusion that consciousness cannot be explained in purely physical terms. If Chalmers conceded and switched teams, then he is going to be "just another philosopher," while Dennett achieves an academic victory.

As an aspiring world-class philosopher, you have little incentive to adopt the dominant view because if you do you will become just another ordinary philosopher. By adopting a radically different stance, you establish an entirely new "school" and become at its helm. Meanwhile, it would be considerably more effortful to become at the helm of the more well-established schools, e.g. physicalism and compatibilism.

Thus, motivated skepticism and motivated reasoning seem to me to be completely unavoidable in academia.

I keep coming across the opinion that physics containing imaginary numbers is somehow a crazy and weird phenomenon, such as this article.

Complex numbers are an excellent tool for modelling rotations. When we multiply a vector by $i$, we effectively rotate it anticlockwise by 90 degrees around the origin. Rotations are everywhere in reality, and it's thus unsurprising that a tool that's good at modelling rotations shows up in things like the Schrödinger Equation.

I find it helpful to think about probabilities as I think about inequalities. If we say that $x>7$, then we are making an uncertain claim about the possible values of $x$, but we have no idea what value $x$ actually has. However, from this uncertain claim about the value of $x$, we can make the true claim that $x\ne 5$.

Similarly, when we prove that a probability is nonzero, it means that whatever it is we are talking about must be true somewhere within possibility space.

What causes us to sometimes try harder? I play chess once in a while, and I've noticed that sometimes I play half heartedly and end up losing. However, sometimes, I simply tell myself that I will try harder and end up doing really well. What's stopping me from trying hard all the time?

Fascinating question, Carmex. I am interested in the following space configurations:

1. Conservation: when a lifeform dies, its constituents should not disappear from the system but should dissipate back into the background space.
2. Chaos: the background space should not be empty. It should have some level of background chaos (e.g. dispersive forces) mimicking our physical environment.

I'd imagine that you'd have to encode a kind of variational free energy minimisation to enable robustness against chaos.

I might play around with the simulation on my local machine when I get the chance.

A map displaying the prerequisites of the areas of mathematics relevant to CS/ML:

A dashed line means this prerequisite is helpful but not a hard requirement.