Open Thread, January 1-15, 2013

And I'm a bit worried that this kind of post falls under the new censorship laws.

My analysis:

Do your posts look like solicitation to possess illegal drugs with intend to distribute? (Hint: for anything short of "Please tell me where to buy drugs," the answer is probably no).

Could a malicious prosecutor convince a grand jury to indict Eliezer (or others) as co-conspirators based on what you have written? (Hint: probably not).

In short, you are probably fine. But I am not a "power" on LW.

Just to be clear, I doubt this is Eliezer's thought process. But I suspect it is a fairly accurate heuristic for what is and isn't acceptable.

The "Lesswrong censorship laws" speak of illegal violence. Possession of drugs might be illegal but isn't violence.

There are a lot of things that that didn't cover. Go for it!

Have you read gwern's writings (under “Practical”) about melatonin, modafinil, nicotine, and other nootropics?

I take non-programmers seriously about programming all of the time. That's pretty much in the job description.

Just because I'm not stupid doesn't mean I'm not wrong. Indeed, it takes some serious intelligence to be wrong in the worst kind of ways.

A relevant distinction that you are not making is between the questions that are well-understood in the expert's area and the questions that are merely associated with the expert's area (or are expert's own inventions), where we have no particular reason to expect that the expert's position on the topic is determined by its truth and not by some accident of epistemic misfortune. The expert will probably know the content of their position very well, but won't necessarily correctly understand the motivation for that position. (On the other hand, someone sufficiently unfamiliar with the area might be unable to say anything meaningful about the question.)

Good post. It's EY's fault, imo. He set the norms.

I think philosophy does belong to the list if you are arguing some matters of philosophy but not others. There is a common field to all mathematics-heavy disciplines, that is mathematics, with huge overlaps, and there's no reason why for example a physicist couldn't correctly critique bad mathematics of a philosopher, even though most non philosophers or amateur philosophers really should learn and not argue as a philosopher is a bit of an expert in mathematics.

OK, I cannot bring myself to add philosophy to the list of "don't argue with the experts, learn from them" topics, but maybe it's because I don't know anything about philosophy.

I find that an odd statement. Why can't you assume by default that arguing with an expert in X is bad for all X?

For some reason, theoritis is much worse with regard to philosophy than just about anything else. Amateurs hardly ever argue with brain surgeons or particle physicists. I think part of the reason for that is that brain surgeons and particle physicists have manifest practical skills that others don't have. The "skill" of philosophy consists of stating opinions and defending them, which everyone can do to some extent. The amateurs are like people who think you can write (well, at a a professional level) because you can type.

Want to give some examples? I don't seem to recall seeing a lot of this myself.

OK, I cannot bring myself to add philosophy to the list of "don't argue with the experts, learn from them" topics, but maybe it's because I don't know anything about philosophy.

Could this be because we have fewer philosophy experts (although there are a few notable ones) than science experts?

This is a tall order. Nearly everyone I talk to seems to while getting the same basic models emphasise wildly different things about them. Their updates on the matter also vary considerably everything from utterly changing their politics to just mentally noting that you can make smart arguments for positions very divergent from the modern political consensus. Lots of people dislike his verbose style.

That is certainly the reason I haven't read all of his material so far.

I think the best way to get a summary is to discuss him with people here who have been read him. They will likely learn things too. When its too political continue the discussion either in the politics thread or in private correspondence.

I'm interested and willing to engage in such discussion. If you are too I'd ask you to perhaps make a list of the posts you have read so far? For now I'm assuming you began with one of the recommended essays like Idealism Is Not Great, Divine-right monarchy for the modern secular intellectual, Formalist Manifsto. Perhaps the introductory Open Letter to Open Minded Progressives or the Gentle Introduction sequences.

To this I would add the comment history of fellow LWer Vladimir_M which is littered with high quality Moldbug-like arguments on various issues. Who knows a few new responses might coax him out of inactivity!

I recall some old sort of interesting discussion of Moldbuggian positions in which I participated as well:

• Belief in religion considered harmful? (My summary of the post. )
• Five ways to classify belief systems
• A list of several articles I read and would be interesting in talking about

I summarized very briefly my understanding of his political philosophy in this comment a few weeks ago.

If you've got a few hours, I found the Gentle Introduction to be sufficiently gentle, but it does have nine parts and is written in his regular style. I think the first part is strongly worth slogging through, in part because his definition of "church" is a great one. I may write a short summary of it at some point, but that's a nontrivial writing project.

He also refers to a lot of background knowledge I just don't have, e.g. I don't know what I'm supposed to take away from him calling something Calvinist.

Could you please clarify if you are unsure what he means when he calls a position Calvinist (presumably Crypt-Calivinist or something like that) or are you just unsure what Calvinism is?

The short and sufficient answer to the second is that this is a designation for a bunch of Protestant Christians who historically took themselves very seriously and have a reputation for being dour. Take special note of the Five Points of Calvinism.

The short and insufficient answer to the first is people who have ethical, political and philosophical ideas that can't be justified by their declared systems of ethics but can be perfectly well explained if you note the memeplexes in their heads are descendent of highbrow American Protestantism of the previous centuries. He goes into several things he considers indications of this and points out they dislike this explanation very much and want to believe their positions are the result of pure reason or Whiggish notions of history inching towards a universal "true human morality".

Moldbug has a variety of opinions that he expresses in his articles. Summarizing all of them is therefore hard. I will try to list a few.

Moldbug reject the progressive project. That means that he's opposed to most politicial ideas of Woodrow Wilson and presidents after Wilson.

Moldbug rejects modern democracy. He thinks that the US military should orchestrate a coup d'état. After the coup d'état the US should split and every state should have his own laws.

In the ideal case Moldbug wants that the states to be run like a stock company. If that isn't possible Moldbug prefers the way Singapur and Qatar are governed to the way the US is governed. According to him competition between a lot of states that are governed like Singapur is better than a huge federal government.

Luke lists "Why extrapolate the values of humans alone? What counts as a human? Do values converge if extrapolated?" as an open question in So You Want to Save the World.

Would the choice to extrapolate the values of humans alone be an unjustified act of speciesism, or is it justified because humans are special in some way — perhaps because humans are the only beings who can reason about their own preferences? And what counts as a human? The problem is more complicated than one might imagine (Bostrom 2006; Bostrom & Sandberg 2011). Moreover, do we need to scan the values of all humans, or only some? These problems are less important if values converge upon extrapolation for a wide variety of agents, but it is far from clear that this is the case (Sobel 1999, Doring & Steinhoff 2009).

I see no reason to restrict our preference extrapolation to presently-existing humans. CEV should extrapolate from all preferences, which includes the preferences of all sentient beings, present and future. Any attempt to place boundaries on this require justification.

Edit: You might say, "Why not also include rocks in our consideration?" Simple: rocks don't have preferences. Sentient beings (including many non-human animals) have preferences.

I'm not sure that there is community consensus that "human beings currently living" is the right reference class. Eliezer suggests that he thinks the right reference class is all of humanity ever in this post.

If one assumes some kind of moral progress constraint and unpredictable future values, CEV(living humans) seems like our future descendents would hate it. Certainly, modern Westerners probably would hate CEV(Europeans-alive-in-1300). But I'm a moral anti-realist, so I don't believe there are constraints that cause moral progress - and don't expect CEV(all-humans-ever) to output a morality.

No one else seems to be giving what is IMO the correct answer; I want the values of a created FAI to match my own, extrapolated. ie moral selfishness.

I would actually prefer that the extrapolation seed be drawn only from SI supporters (or ideally just me, but that's unlikely to fly), because I'm uneasy about what happens if some of my values turn out to be memetic, and they get swamped/outvoted by a coherent extrapolated deathist or hedonist memplex. Or if you include, for example, uplifted sharks in the process.

Slight sidetrack: By the time AI seems plausible, I think it's likely that the human race will have done enough self-modification (computer augmentation, biological engineering) that the question of what's human is going to be more difficult than it is now.

I would also like to see this discussion. It isn't terribly clear to me why the extinction of the human race and its replacement with some non-human AI is an inherently bad outcome. Why keep around and devote resources to human beings, who at best can be seen as sort of a prototype of true intelligence, since that's not really what they're designed for?

While imagining our extinction at the hands of our robot overlords seems unpleasant, if you imagine a gradual cyborg evolution to a post-human world, that seems scary, but not morally objectionable. Besides the Ship of Theseus, what's the difference?

It sounds like extra work, and I'm not sure there would be a payoff. Presumably a past person whose volition was coherently extrapolated would lose their racism and other backwards attitudes, and thus be on par with a contemporary person's coherently extrapolated volition. With future persons, the argument could be made that their CEV can't be much different from a current person's for similar reasons.

No preferences "matter" except in relation to each other. The subset of humanity that I value isn't decided by logic, but by my values and how they interact with humans.

It may well be the case that there are multiple eventual equilibria that depend on the order in which one considers arguments

Another way to get several equilibria would be moral judgements whose "correctness" depends on whether other people share them. I find it likely that there would be some like that, since you get those in social norms and laws (like, on which side of the road you drive, or whether you should address strangers by their first or last name), and there's a bit of a fuzzy continuum between laws, social norms, and morality.

The basic point is reasonable, but there are so many things that bother me about that article.

Drum's credulity varies a lot in this article. His lowest level is about where I stand. I have to wonder if that actually reflects his beliefs and the rest of it is forcing enthusiasm on himself because to reflect value rather than truth; that is, he is doing an expected value calculation. Certainly, he should be applauded for scope sensitivity.

Perhaps the biggest thing that bothers me is that Drum tries to have it both ways: small amounts of lead matter and big amounts of lead matter. It seems rather unlikely that this is true. Maybe 10μg/dL has a huge effect, but if so, I doubt that 20 has double that effect, and this ruins all the analysis of the first half of the article. This is important because there is a logical trade-off between saying that past lead reduction was useful and saying future lead reduction will be useful. In particular, Drum says that Kleiman says that if the US were to eliminate lead, it would reduce crime by 10%. Did he just make up this number, or does it come out of a model? I'd like to see the model because even if he pulled the model out of thin air, it forces him to deal with the logical trade-off.

In Kleiman's book, he says that eliminating lead paint would reduce crime by 5% and attributes it to Nevin 2000. On the same page, he misquotes Nevin in a way that makes me not trust Kleiman with models. But that's OK because he has a citation, not model. I cannot find the claim in Nevin's paper. There is a model on p19 that says that 6 points of IQ, applied to the lowest 30% of the population could explain the past decline. And that's at a rate of 2 points of IQ for 10μg/dL, a small enough rate I'm willing to extrapolate linearly. If you assume crime in linear in lead, the 5% number is reasonable, except for the assumption that lead explains all of the past decline. (I'm not sure Nevin actually makes this assumption because I don't think he makes a prediction about eliminating lead; in this section, I think he's just doing a reality check that the known IQ effect of lead plus the known correlation of IQ and crime is big enough to explain the whole drop in crime.)

So I am bothered by Drum's language about the effects of low levels of lead, even though the suggestion of a 10% drop in crime maybe survives the trade-off between past and future. (And how does Kleiman's 5% turn into "Kleinman's" 10%? windows vs windows+soil?)

From the first half of the article:

the field of econometrics gives researchers an enormous toolbox of sophisticated statistical techniques

Econometrics gives people enough rope to publish themselves. Plus they implement these algorithms in spreadsheets, to hide the bugs from themselves.

murder rates have always been higher in big cities than in towns and small cities

If lead explains everything, this should not always have been true. In fact, I think it was not true in 1960. The graph Drum cites starts in 1975, after most of the increase in national murder rates has already happened, but there is very little dependence on city size until later. The graph seems to me evidence against the claim that lead explains this detail. Anyhow, such bucketed graphs are a bad way to test this hypothesis. In particular, there are only 9 "big cities" and NYC has 1/3 of this population. The convergence today is probably driven just by NYC now having a lower murder rate than small cities.

Drum says that Newarks's crime rate dropped 75%. That is true and but it is also true that Newark's murder rate has rebounded to its peak. I don't know how to resolve this. I usually prefer murder rates because they are harder to fake, but there are only about 80 murders in the worst years, making the data quite noisy.

That the graphs of leaded gasoline and crime match perfectly, up until year that Nevin's first paper was published screams publication bias.

Crack:

Trying to explain the crack epidemic in terms of childhood seems like a serious error to me. It seems very clear to me that it was contagious. How it spread and why it burnt itself out, I do not know. Regardless, one can disprove Nevin's model's claim to explain the crack epidemic, like Levitt's spreadsheet fraud before it, because it assumes that the age of criminals is constant in time. In fact, the crack epidemic involved young murderers, born after lead levels had started to decline. I think Nevin worries about this in later papers, but I don't know what he does.

Here is a suggestion for a better model for testing Nevin's hypothesis than he used in 2000: instead of lagging on some constant, create a new time series of murder by age of birth. This also corrects for the demographic problems such as the baby boom. The disadvantage is that this loses exogenous effects, such as the crack epidemic, which hit multiple ages simultaneously. Yet another time series, to avoid the problem of missing data, uses the age of the victim rather than of the perp.

So Nevin fails to explain the crack epidemic, but if he just explains the big rise and the big fall, that's a big deal. Unfortunately, the presence of the crack epidemic masks the big fall. In the absence of crack, when would crime have started falling? Perhaps it would have started falling earlier, but was elevated by crack. Or perhaps all those dead or jailed young teens would have become 25 year old criminals and so the effect of crack was to speed things up, including the falling crime rate.

There's a lot you can do to remediate lead and the bioavailable forms of it, fortunately (been working on a garden in an urban area, and bioremediation is a chief concern) -- it doesn't just have to involve removing it. Unfortunately, it's still likely to be rather expensive and unglamorous, so it'll be a tough sell as a point of policy.

International data about a connection between lead and crime

pdf

less technical pdf

"Intelligence" seems to consist of multiple different systems, but there are many tasks which recruit several of those systems simultaneously. That said, this doesn't exclude the possibility of a hierarchy - in some people all of those systems could be working well, in some people all of them could be working badly, and most folks would be somewhere in between. (Which would seem to match the genetic load theory of intelligence.) But of course, this is a partially ordered set rather than a pure hierarchy - different people can have the same overall score, but have different capabilities in various subtasks.

IQ in childhood is predictive of IQ scores in adulthood, but not completely reliably; adult scores are more stable. There have been many interventions which aimed to increase IQ, but so far none of them has worked out.

IQ is one of the strongest general predictors of life outcomes and work performance... but that "general" means that you can still predict performance on some specific task better via some other variable. Also, IQ is one of the best such predictors together with conscientiousness, which implies that hard work also matters a lot in life. We also know that e.g. personality type and skills matter when it comes to rationality.

I would suppose that the kinds of people referred to "the level above mine" would be some of those rare types who've had the luck of getting a high score on all important variables - a high IQ, a high conscientiousness, a naturally curious personality type, high reserves of mental energy, and so on. To what extent these various things are trainable is an open question.

Why is it ridiculous to believe in mutants born with high anger levels?

I will start with: +1 for caring about the community etiquette

Less Wrong is a diverse community, but I was by and large under the impression that it was biased towards a growth mindset. Indeed, it seems in many ways the raison d'etre of LW relies on the assumption that it is possible to improve your intelligence.

Intelligence (IQ) is more or less static. If you have a scientifically proven method of increasing IQ, please post it here, and I am sure many people will try it. But at this moment, LW is not about increasing human intelligence. It is about increasing human rationality -- learning a better way to use the intelligence (brain) we already have -- and about machine intelligence. A hypothetical intelligent machine could increase its intelligence by changing its code or adding new hardware. For humans, similar change would require surgery or implants beyond our current knowledge.

if it's ridiculous to believe in "mutants born with unnaturally high anger levels" then why the rush to believe in mutants with unnaturally high levels of intelligence?

How high is unnaturally high? The intelligence is on the Bell curve. One in two persons has IQ above 100. One in ten has IQ above 115. One in fifty has IQ above 130; one in hundred above 135; one in thousand above 146; one in ten thousands above 156... this is all within the Bell curve. It is possible to search for people with this level of intelligence. (Speaking about someone with IQ 300, that would be unnatural.)

The question is, how much real-world effect do these levels of intelligence have. Clearly, intelligence is not enough to make people smart -- a person with a high IQ can still believe and do stupid things. (This is why we usually don't obsess about IQ, and discuss rationality instead.) On the other hand, some IQ may be necessary for some outcome, or at least could make the same person get the same outcome significantly faster. (This is easier to understand by imagining people with very low IQs. Even the best rationality training is not going to make them new Einsteins.) Being faster does not seem like a critical difference, but for sufficiently complex tasks the difference between years and decades, or maybe decades and centuries, can determine whether a human is able or unable to ever complete the task.

Is it possible that what we perceive as greater intelligence, as "the level above mine" is just someone who has spent more time working on something, or working on something similar to it?

In the article, Eliezer considers the alternative explanations. (Maybe Conway had more opportunities to show his mastery. Maybe he specializes in doing something different. Maybe Conway used the time of his youth better.) But maybe... it is the difference in general intelligence. All these explanations deserve to be considered.

What is the prior probability that someone picks up a new idea quickly because they've been exposed to a similar idea before, versus the prior probability that they are of mutant intelligence?

Depends on circumstances. Did it happen once, or does it happen all the time? Does it happen consistently in a field where both persons spent a lot of time learning? Does it happen in different fields? The prior probability of someone having higher intelligence is not so small that evidence like this couldn't change the result.

\2. Does our love of static hiearchies, esp. one that priveleges intelligence affect our answer to 1? I'm not sure about question 1, but I'm pretty sure the answer to question 2 is yes.

Just because we have a bias for X, it does not automatically mean non-X must be true. People do love hierarchies. People are bad at estimating their skills, or skills of others. That does not mean different people can't really have different traits.

doesn't the idea of a persistent ranking system, and the concern with it imply a belief in intelligence as a static factor? Less Wrong is a diverse community, but I was by and large under the impression that it was biased towards a growth mindset.

I'd just like to point out that a growth mindset is fully compatible with fixed intelligence. Fixed intelligence doesn't mean that growth is impossible, only that some people can grow faster than others.

There actually are mutants with high anger levels (read about Brunner's syndrome). Less Wrong is not about improving human intelligence but rather human rationality. The two are obviously distinct.

If you are asking these basic questions about intelligence, (i.e. proposing that it can easily be changed) you simply need to read more about this topic.

They are repositories for quotes that resonate with and/or amuse us. It might be a little too easy to get karma that way, admittedly, but I think they are nice to have around.

What exactly is the function of the Rationality Quotes threads? They seem like nothing more that a litmus test for local orthodoxy.

One of their functions is to act as a kind of litmus test for local orthodoxy.

I don't think it's a test for orthodoxy. Take the quote: "To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.” ― Paul Valéry with 13 upvotes while I write it.

The position that gets articulated in that quote isn't orthodox on LessWrong. There are a bunch of quotes that are interesting instead of just making an orthodox point.

They trigger the ingroup fuzzies really well for me. I think quotes inspire me as well sometimes and it's otherwise hard to find quotes that inspire in the right direction.

The purpose is clearly articulated in the first one.

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Yeah, I've been experiencing this as well. It mostly happens when I'm trying to use karma or when I first open up LW.

See here.

TVTropes has an -amazing- political and philosophical library. They have the single-best description of Objectivism I've ever seen, in particular.

Rubber doesn't sound that important to me. The Wikipedia article includes all sorts of useful bits: it only went into European use in the late 1700s, at earliest, well after most datings of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions; most rubber is now synthesized from petroleum; many uses of insulation like transoceanic telegraphs used gutta-percha which is similar but not the same as rubber (and was superior to rubber for a long time); and much use is for motor-vehicle tires, which while a key part of modern civilization, does not seem necessary for cheap long-distance transportation of either goods or humans (consider railroads).

So rubber doesn't look like a defeater. If it didn't exist, we'd have more expensive goods, we'd have considerably different transportation systems, but we'd still have modern science, we'd still have modern industry, we'd still have cheap consumer goods and international trade, and so on and so forth.

I'll second drethelin; CBT is both evidence-based as a treatment method- there's evidence it works- and evidence-based in practice, meaning you don't have to believe in it or anything, you just follow the prescribed behaviors and observe the results. Really, it's highly rationalism-friendly, being mainly about noticing and combatting "cognitive distortions" (e.g. generalizing from one example, inability to disconfirm, emotional reasoning, etc.). A therapist who specializes in CBT can be pretty well assumed to not be in the habit of dragging "spirituality" into their work.

CBT style therapy is pretty founded on science

You might want to look at Rational-emotive behavior therapy (REBT), and the affiliated organizations' websites. There are usually a few REBT therapists in any major city.

I don't have anything specific to offer, but (in theory) hard choices matter less. And if you literally can't decide between them, you can try flipping a coin to make the decision and as it is in the air, see which way you hope it will end up, and that should be your choice.

I concur with dbaupp's suggestion.

Additionally, you can try the reframing technique. Anna describes it here:

When facing a difficult decision, I try to reframe it in a way that will reduce, or at least switch around, the biases that might be influencing it. (Recent example from Anna's brother: Trying to decide whether to move to Silicon Valley and look for a higher-paying programming job, he tried a reframe to avoid the status quo bias: If he was living in Silicon Valley already, would he accept a $70K pay cut to move to Santa Barbara with his college friends? (Answer: No.))

The example she gives isn't quite isomorphic to the choice you're making, but I think the technique still may be worth trying. Imagine you're currently living out one option but given the chance to take the other - how would you feel about it? And vice versa.

dbaupp, ParagonProtege, thank you both for the links and suggestions. I'm going with the laptop. Anything else I could do (naturally, there's a lot i want to do) will be kickstarted by the modest, but easy(ish) money I'll get by doing ~$100 websites, as I upgrade my code-fu for Other Stuff. ;)

I also haven't cycled actively for years & I'm afraid my unfit body might conk out on me, making me unable to Do The Job once I commit. Cliff scaling is much harder than hill climbing.

From Alicorn's post , I can easily tell that after I get the laptop, the correct thing to have would be a bike, since I can ease myself back into cycling regularly. It's also weird how I saw the Other Option (buy bike, work, afford laptop, buy laptop, cut down on bike work as I increase study & laptop work hours) as just as good, even though I know I will feel like a flake if I stop riding after it gets tougher and more tiring, which is more likely than giving up on wordpress. Wordpress isn't even the only option for devastatingly easy Internet work.

Link to the LW Discussion post.

So an idea I had is that maybe wearing blue glasses might increase alertness. I've been weirdly fatigued during the day lately, even though I've been using melatonin and redshift. But does the /absolute/ magnitude of the blue light matter, or the amount of blue relative to other colours? Blue glasses would mostly have no effect on the absolute amount, but would increase the relative amount.

Unless the mechanism which causes our pupils to constrict is itself sensitive exclusively to blue light those blue glasses will increase the absolute amount of blue light that make it into your eyes.

There is light therapy for people who get depressed in the winter. If I don't misunderstand they are nowadays using "full spectrum" (=white) light, not blue light. That might have something to do with what you are talking about, and in that case it is evidence that it is not just the proportion of blue light that matters.

It is far more important what you are doing than how efficiently you do it. Discussions of specific low-level habits have low value of information.

Further, LW is mostly about the meta questions: how to think, how to strategise, etc.

Imagine all the attention such article would get on the RationalWiki! They would rewrite the LW page from scratch... :D

Unwelcome.

My very first post on this site was about the mistreatment of Stephanie Grace related to the new chilling and shrinking of acceptable discourse in the late 2000s after the 90s thaw mentioned in the article.

I was impressed by the reasonableness of the discussion. And I continued to be impressed at how well LessWrong handled matters like these where for almost two years. However making the same post today on this site as a new member wouldn't be as well accepted as it was back then. If this had been the case then I would have taken the claim that this community is one "dedicated to refining the art of human rationality" with a larger grain of salt, I'm unsure if I would have lingered since I had read most of the sequences at that point but was unsure about whether to participate.

So since I'm unsure if it would be appreciated in the community had I arrived today why do I remain? Well in the mean time I've grown to greatly respect the sanity of many excellent commenter's and several people generating good articles post do post here, some have arrived after I started participating. And it is the most civil and intellectually honest internet forum I've ever seen. But despite this I'm unsure if it is rational of me to do so.

Speaking to some other people from here, who make comments like "more people follow your writing than mine can you please comment on my post?" or people using me as a go to example for some matters, apparently I've become a sort of Schilling point for a subculture within the rationalist subculture. I feel kind of sad about this. I preferred it back when Vladimir_M filled this role, he was far worthier than me.

I think we are at the start of a long winter in the West, only technological progress can keep us afloat if it won't falter. And even if it doesn't uFAI is the overwhelmingly likely outcome. I think I need a strong drink.

2009 survey results

When asked to determine a year in which the Singularity might take place, the mean guess was 9,899 AD, but this is only because one person insisted on putting 100,000 AD. The median might be a better measure in this case; it was mid-2067.

2011 survey results

The mean for the Singularity question is useless because of the very high numbers some people put in, but the median was 2080 (quartiles 2050, 2080, 2150). The Singularity has gotten later since 2009: the median guess then was 2067. There was some discussion about whether people might have been anchored by the previous mention of 2100 in the x-risk question. I changed the order after 104 responses to prevent this; a t-test found no significant difference between the responses before and after the change (in fact, the trend was in the wrong direction).

The 2012 survey also had a "date of the Singularity" question, but Yvain didn't report on the results of that question, so you'll have to look at the raw data for that.

R> lw <- read.csv("2012.csv")
R> lw <- as.integer(as.character(lw$Singularity))
R> summary(lw[lw > 2011 & lw < 5000])
   Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.    NA's
   2010    2060    2080    2140    2150    4000     236

I find the matter unclarified. Given the large variability of the Pleistocene climate and habitat (that Kurzban mentions), what does the quoted definition of the EEA mean? "A statistical composite...weighted by frequency and fitness-consequences" looks pretty much like a time and a place -- just an average one instead of one asserted to be the actual environment, habitat, and social structure over the whole Pleistocene. Both concepts ignore the variation.

Harder Choices Matter Less. Unless you expect that there is a way of improving your understanding of the problem at a reasonable cost (such as discussing the actual object level problem), the choice is now less important, specifically because of the difficulty in choosing.

Not really.

If you can understand that "This sentence is a lie" is complicated to decide if true - in any depth at all - then you will get interesting insights from GEB.

Not in the slightest. DH does a good job of providing you with the things that he later asks you to use.

There is a mindset prerequisite. Some people get forever lost/bored the first time the book talks about valid mathematical statements as well-formed finite strings of symbols.

Nope. I mean, I'd suggest knowing WHO Godel, Escher, and Bach are... possibly listen to some of the music/look at some artwork, but its not necessary.

Would most game theorists say that they would defect against copies of themselves in a one-shot PD?

It depends on what "against copies of themselves" means. If it means "I know the other person behaves like a game theorist, and the payoff matrix is denominated in utility," then yes. If it means "I know the other person behaves like a game theorist, but the payoff matrix is not denominated in utility because of my altruism towards a copy of myself," then no. If it means "I expect my choices to be mirrored, and the payoff matrix is denominated in utility," then no.

Did they take it down?

Sorry, can't defend it. It's not a horrible argument, but it's also not totally well grounded in facts.

For starters, it takes far more land and resources to produce 1 lb of beef than 1 lb of grain, since you have to grow all the grain to feed the cow, and cows don't turn all of that energy into meat, so if you believe that undeveloped land or other forms of resource conservation have some intrinsic worth, then vegetarianism is preferable.

Secondly, I think the metaphor comparing a factory farm to a cubicle farm is disingenuous. It's emotionally loaded, since I work in a cubicle and I don't wish I were dead, and it's not terribly accurate. I think you could make a different comparison, that is arguably more accurate and compare a factory farm to a concentration camp. In both instances the inhabitants are crowded together with minimal resources as they await their slaughter. (Obviously my example is also emotionally loaded). I think if one were to ask the question should we do things that will encourage the birth of children who will grow up in concentration camps, it's a little more difficult to come down with the same definitive yes.

Additionally, the article wanders into conjecture in several place. It's hard to see the statement "most farm animals prefer living to dying" as anything more than a specious claim. No one has any way of knowing a cow's preference vis-a-vis life or death, probably including the cow. Suicide is a particularly egregious red herring. By what means does a cow in a pen commit suicide? Starving to death? Surely that not comparable to wishing it had never been born...

As for your Soylent Green example, it has even worse problems with trophic losses, because if your farm-raised humans were not strictly vegetarian, you're losing an even higher percentage of your original energy. If the food babies are raised on an all meat diet you may be getting less than 1% of the energy you would have gotten out of just eating the plants you started the process with. Humans also have a ridiculously long gestation time etc. to function as an efficient food item, although the modest proposal you mention has certainly been suggested before.

Finally, the argument makes me nervous because I think that in general the morality of causing things to be born isn't well settled. We regard saving the life of an child as definitely a moral good. It isn't clear that giving birth to a child is also a moral good, or also a comparable moral good. If I had to pick between saving one child and having two babies, I would think that saving the kid's life was the higher moral calling, even though it will result in less children over all.

I think that would be true, assuming you have no additional reasons for opposing cannibalism.

Personally, I have no moral opposition to the idea of eating babies, but I suspect that baby farming would cause much more distress to the general population than the food it would produce would justify.

I don't agree with Hanson's position in that essay though. To take an excerpt:

We might well agree that wild pigs have lives more worth living, per day at least, just as humans may be happier in the wild instead of fighting traffic to work in a cubical all day. But even these human lives are worth living, and it is my judgment that most farm animal's lives are worth living too. Most farm animals prefer living to dying; they do not want to commit suicide.

How does he claim to know that? It's not as if he can extrapolate from the fact that they don't kill themselves. Factory farmed animals are in no position to commit suicide, regardless of whether they want to or not. And even if a farm animal's life is pure misery, it probably doesn't have the abstract reasoning abilities to realize that ending its own life, thereby ending the suffering, is a possible thing.

He compares the life of a farmed animal to a worker who has to fight traffic to spend their time working in a cubicle, but an office worker has leisure time, probably a family to spend time with, and enough money to make them willing to work at the job in the first place. I think the abused child in Omelas is a better basis for comparison.

I had to stop (though I may resume later) at "People who buy less meat don't really spend less money on food overall, they mainly just spend more money on other non-meat food" -- it made me go "are you fucking kidding me" and wonder whether he has ever been to a supermarket. See also this -- differences in retail prices aren't quite that extreme, but that's because governments subsidize meat production, so even though not all of the money comes out of meat eaters' pockets, it still comes out of somewhere.

EDIT: I finished reading it, and... if I didn't know who Hanson was and he had posted somewhere that allowed readers to comment, I would definitely conclude he was trolling. Along with things that others have already pointed out, “per land area, farms are more efficient at producing "higher" animals like pigs and cows” -- where the hell did he take that from? Pretty much everyone I've ever read about this topic agrees that growing food for N people on a mostly vegetarian diet requires way less land, energy, and water than growing food for N people on a largely meat-based diet, and there's a thermodynamic argument that makes that pretty much obvious.

(I do agree that “meat eaters kill animals” isn't a terribly good argument because if it wasn't for meat eaters those animals wouldn't have lived in the first place (but that doesn't apply to hunting and fishing); but that's nowhere near one of the main reasons why I limit my consumption of meat.)

Isn't this just a re-statement of the Repugnant Conclusion?

Essentially all domesticated animals are alive because of demand for products made from them (eggs, milk, meat, etc). If everyone kept kosher, there would be far fewer pig-experience-moments than the current world, including much less pig-experience-suffering. Is that good or bad for someone who values pig utility?

Anyway, I've always taken this kind of reasoning as a reason not to adopt that perspective on these types of questions. But I think that means I'm not a consequentialist - which puts me slightly out of consensus in this community.

How much physics do you want and how much math do you want? I mean most of the first year of a physics class you can experimentally verify yourself if you have a watch and a ruler. If you're looking to verify special relatively, you'll probably need more equipment, but in general there aren't nearly as many experiments as in other sciences, however, there's a lot more math. If you know the math and the underlying rules, you need a lot less experiments to understand a phenomenon.

Physics is a very broad discipline, which makes this a very difficult question. Do you just want some interesting and surprising physics cocktail facts and the experiments that go along with them?

It's not limited to physics, but I enjoyed The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments. It goes through ten experiments in narrative detail, explaining some biographical details of the scientist, what the beliefs at the time were, and what the experiment showed.

I'm currently reading The Feynman's Lectures on Physics, and it pretty much fits your description. It's not light reading, but it's well written and goes into interesting details.

When I'm trying to understand something, I imagine myself explaining it to my younger sister. I started doing this when I was a kid, but it is so useful to me, that I never stopped.

Kind of weird now that she's an adult though.

I don't think I have any people in my head other than 'me.'

It takes me substantial conscious effort to emulate other minds. Is this unusual? (I can however easily argue from premises/to conclusions I don't believe).

I imagine defending my arguments with people that I know, debate with, and find are good at challenging my beliefs/making me explain them - my girlfriend and my family most usually. They're always not very good copies - I often make bad predictions at what people will think about certain concepts - but they are useful in getting me to examine arguments. That might be a good place to start.

Ten years or so ago, I used to have more distinct personas in my head than I do now.
Back when I did, they roughly speaking exemplified distinct emotional stances.
One was more compassionate, one more ruthless, one more frightened, one more loving, and so forth.
This wasn't quite the way Eliezer writes Harry, but shares some key elements.

My model of what's going on, based on no reliable data, is that there's a transition period between when a particular stance is altogether unacceptable to the ruling coalition in my head (aka "me"), and when that stance has more-or-less seamlessly joined that coalition (aka "I've changed"), during which it is acceptable but not fully internalized and I therefore tag it as "someone else".

As I say, I don't do this nearly so much anymore. That's not to say I'm consistent; I'm not, especially. In particular, I often observe that the way I think and feel is modified by priming effects. I think about problems differently after spending a while reading LW, for example.

What's changed is that there's no sense of a separate identity along with that. To put it in MoR terms: my experience is not of having a Slytherin in my head distinct from me that sometimes thinks things, but rather of sometimes thinking things in a more Slytheriny sort of way.

That suggests to me that maybe the difference is in how rigidly I define the boundaries of "the sorts of things I think".

I sometime find it helpful to label a particular perspective: cynical-Tim, optimistic-Tim, etc. They are helpful for clarifying my thoughts by formalizing a certain type of self-reflection. But they don't know more than I, so are generally useless at brain-storming - which is how MoR!Harry seems to use them - I've taken those discussions as literary conceit and exposition for the readers, not models of how to be more effective.

I often try to understand concepts by pretending to explain them to a historical figure who's smart enough to understand what I'm saying but from too long ago to know about the thing I'm trying to explain. For example I might try to explain Newton's Laws to Aristotle.

Use something like http://www.ibiblio.org/weidai/lesswrong_user.php?u=gwern and then save the generated page?

You could click the permalink and bookmark it, or copypaste interesting comments to a text file you can grep

Isn't the whole point of patents for people NOT to use them? If it's not economical for the patent-holders to profit from them isn't it even less economical for someone who would need to pay license fees to use them?

I seem to remember that, or something similar, popping up on the internet months ago.

Oh? That recently?

It lacks the crown on the top!

No. I think that is fighting the hypothetical.

More generally, the discipline of decision theory is not about figuring out the right solution to a particular problem - it's about describing the properties of decision methods that reach the right solutions to problems generally.

Newcomb's is an example of a situation where some decision methods (eg CDT) don't make what appears to be the right choice. Either CDT is failing to make the right choice, or we are not correctly understanding what the right choice is. That dilemma motivates decision-theorists, not particular solutions to particular problems.

I don't know if this is relevant for you, but when I'm that stuck, it's a good idea to check on what I've been eating lately-- too much simple carbs means my ability to take action is squelched.

My current thoughts on this issue run as follows: it seems like smart people can come up with various reasons not to have children (e.g. because it frees up their finances and free time to do interesting things, or because life is suffering). This seems dangerous. If smart people stop having children, then the population gets dumber, and I don't want that. On the other hand, insanely smart people really should have money and free time to do interesting things such as save the world.

So my current ideal child-bearing policy is something like the following: dumb people should be discouraged from having children, smart but not insanely smart people should be encouraged to have children, and insanely smart people should do whatever they want. (Maybe periodically donate their genetic material.)

Error, insufficient data

I'd say something bad, because the money could be better spent. But if they weren't going to do effective altruism stuff with it, it's probably just neutral so far as I can tell.

A quick google search was surprisingly useless at answering this question. In particular, there is no good answer on Quora.

So, poll time:

[pollid:378]

It seems to me that it would be easy enough to do experiments (maybe a month long) to find out how you're affected. I doubt that the answer is the same for everyone, and it might not be the same for most people at all times.

If there's a quickly changing situation at work or at home, this might mean that you want all your email in one queue.

If work or home is resulting in highly fraught email, you might want the non-fraught one as a refuge.

And you might have privacy concerns which mean that you absolutely don't want the both of them in one queue.

A data point from me: I was much more stressed when I had my emails joint. I'd say that in the long run you want to have them separated even if you really enjoy your job.