Open Thread March 21 - March 27, 2016

Sarginlove, that is, Sargin Rukevwe, works as a "virtual assistant". Basically you hire him to do whatever and in this case he seems to have been hired to promote InIn.

It's interesting that his page says he graduated from the Polytechnic in 2013, but his introductory post here says he is a student at that school.

Let me repeat the observation I've made before -- Gleb_Tsipursky is a very clear case of cargo-cult behaviour. He has no clue about marketing, but he's been told which motions to make so that the planes will come and he's making them very earnestly. One of these motions is "native" (or covert) promotion which is designed to look like spontaneous endorsement -- and so he hires a lad from Lagos to post cringeworthy stuff here and everywhere...

P.S. Hey, look, Sarginlove has a Google+ account and his entire post history consists of -- drumroll, please! -- InIn reposts.

I guess he was hired on Dec 3, 2015, amiright?

For his motivations, he's already stated them; Gleb is attempting to prove he belongs here. His angle is social acceptance, but he's... critically undersocialized.

Dealing with him is going to be a matter of setting boundaries and making sure he understands them. I think he's probably too useful to get rid of, and also seems likely to go crazy-stalkery if it was attempted besides.

Maybe I'm cynic, but it's pretty commonplace for business to hire fake social supporters. Considering that we do not have certainty that those are of that kind, and that it is plausible that LW gets attended from all over the world, what is your suggested course of action?
What would you suggest that people do?

Upvoted, I appreciate the concern, and thanks for expressing it! Some other folks might have noticed this and been concerned without expressing it openly, so it's good to get this out into the open.

Intentional Insights has an international reach and aim. While we are based in the US, less than a third of our traffic comes from there, and the next three highest venues are India, Philippines, and Pakistan. We write regularly for internationally-oriented venues. We have plenty of volunteers who are from those places as well, and I encourage them regularly to join Less Wrong after they have engaged sufficiently with InIn content.

Most are currently lurkers, but as I have seen positive changes coming with the LW 2.0 transformation, I encouraged a number to be active contributors to the site. So some have responded, and naturally talked about how they found LW. I'm sad, but unsurprised, to see this met with some suspicion.

Sargin in particular volunteers at Intentional Insights for about 25 hours, and gets paid as a virtual assistant to help manage our social media for about 15 hours. He decided to volunteer so much of his time because of his desire to improve his thinking and grow more rational. He's been improving through InIn content, and so I am encouraging him to engage with LW. Don't discourage him please, he's a newbie here.

However, he made a mistake by not explicitly acknowledging that he works at InIn as well as volunteers at it. It's important to be explicit about stuff like this - his praise for InIn content should be taken with a grain of salt, just like praise from CFAR staff for CFAR content should be taken with a grain of salt. Otherwise, there is an appearance of impropriety. I added a comment to his welcome thread to make that clear.

Thanks for raising this issue, gjm, appreciate it!

EDIT: Edited with a comment I made on Sargin's welcome thread.

What's going on in his thought process? Is he still downvoting people? What is he doing that's this bad? I mean i'm sure there's a good reason, but it's sort of strange he keeps coming back and not changing his behavior or not moving on to one of our tangent communities.

I've not dealt with him, so can someone explain to me what he is doing?

His new account is (p=0.9) Crownless_Prince.

What a surprise, somebody has been downvoting every comment in this subthread at least once.

Hide everything that reminds you of your dog. Keep it all, in a drawer somewhere, so that you can take it out and have a good cry sometimes, when you want to. But don't put pictures or other triggers where they'll keep making you sad.

You're good at grieving. Nature did not design us to be crippled by the loss of friends. If you hide all the triggers you'll forget to be sad quickly.

Your dog is unlikely to want you to be miserable after he is gone. Don't do that for him if you don't have to and he wouldn't want you to. Imagine if the position was reversed. What would you want?

My roommate died from cancer 3 years ago. It never stops being a sad memory, except that the hard pang of the initial shock is gone after some time. I don't feel guilty for no longer feeling that pang, because I know I still wish it hadn't happened and it still marked my life in several ways, so I haven't stopped doing what I privately call "honoring my pain." The usual feel-good advice of forgetting it all and moving on sounds to me as dangerously close to no longer honoring my pain, by which I mean acknowledging that the sad event occurred, and giving it its deserved place in my emotional landscape, but without letting it define my life.

Several of my pets died when I was a kid, and at some point I just sort of integrated the implicit assumption that every new pet would eventually die as well. If I began with that assumption, the actual event would no longer be such a strong shock. I no longer have pets, though.

For some years I had problems with the concept of acceptance. It felt like agreeing to everything that happened, and I just didn't want to give my consent to a series of adverse occurrences that it's not relevant to mention here. Some time afterwards I found somewhere a different definition of acceptance: it's not about agreeing with what happened, but simply no longer pretending that the world is otherwise, which to me sounded like a much healthier attitude. With that in mind, I'm more capable of enjoying the time with my friends while knowing that all living things die.

I don't know whether any of my strategies will work in your situation, but this might: doctors specialized in the treatment of pain distinguish between the physical perception of pain and the emotional experience of suffering. Your dog has no awareness of its impending death; he only knows the physical pain. As strong as the pain may be on a purely physical level, he is spared the existential anguish that worries you. Perhaps making a conscious effort to not project your own emotional experience onto him may make the burden lighter for you.

I hope I haven't said anything insensitive, and preemptively apologize if it sounded that way.

I'm very sorry to hear about your dog. It's a very difficult thing to go through even without any predisposition towards depression.

This is probably an idiosyncratic thing that only helps me, but I find remembering that time is a dimension just like space helps a little bit. In the little slice of time I inhabit, a pet or person who has passed on is gone. From a higher-dimensional perspective, they haven't gone anywhere. If someone were to be capable of observing from a higher dimension, they could see the deceased just as I remember them in life. So in the same way that someone whose children are living far from home can remind themselves that their children are in another place, likewise your dog is living happily in another time. English doesn't quite have a tense that conveys the sentiment I want to convey, but I think you get the idea. Don't know if that line of thought does anything for you - I find it a small but useful comfort.

Re actually doing exercise/positive self-talk when you're down, setting up little conditionals that I make into automatic habits by following them robotically has sometimes worked for me. "IF notice self getting anxious - THEN take five minute walk outside". Obviously setting up those in the first place and following through on them the first n times only works when in an OK mood, but once they become habits they're easier to follow through on in more difficult states of mind. I've also found the Negative Self-Talk/Positive Thinking table at the bottom of the page here to be useful.

But hard things are hard no matter what. Sounds like you're doing the right thing now by making the most of the time you have together. Best of luck to you.

It's unlikely that someone is going to say something that will take away your pain. Death sucks. Losing someone you love sucks, and sadness is a normal reaction to that. There are emotionally healthy ways to deal with grief. Give yourself more self-care than you think you need throughout this process to counter the planning fallacy and better to err on the side of too much than too little.

If you do find yourself depressed, seeking professional help is not a sign of weakness and I would encourage you to seek it out. Summoning motivation can be an impossible effort when you are depressed and sometimes someone outside your un-motivated brain is the best thing to stop you from falling down an emotional spiral. If money or something else prevents you from doing that, there are other things you can try here and some more here.

I tend to view depression as an evolved adaptation and a certain state which it is natural for humans to move into in certain situations. I think that it can be helpful to recognize that dysphoria, sadness and grief are all natural reactions. It is ok to be sad. Although, like with all conditions if it becomes chronic or persists for an overly long time then you should probably get some help to deal with it. See here for more information.

For general advice for dealing with grief, see this article and apply whatever you think is applicable or would be helpful. Excerpt:

• Establish a simple routine
  • Regular meal and bed times
• Increase pleasant events
• Promote self-care activities
  • Regular medical check-ups
  • Daily exercise
  • Limited alcohol intake
• Provide information about grief and what to expect
  • Grief is unique and follows a wave-like pattern
  • Grief is not an illness with a prescribed cure
  • Children benefit from being included and learning that grief is a normal response to loss
• Compartmentalise worries
  • List the things that are worrying
  • Create a ‘to-do’ list, prioritise and tick off items as they are completed
  • Use different coloured folders for the paperwork that needs to be finalised
• Prepare to face new or difficult situations
  • Graded exposure to situations that are difficult or avoided
  • Plan for the ‘firsts’ such as the first anniversary of the death – How do you want it to be acknowledged? Who do you want to share it with?
  • Adopt a ‘trial and error’ approach; be prepared to try things more than once
• Challenge unhelpful thinking
  • Encourage identification of thoughts leading to feelings of guilt and anger
  • Gently ask the following questions – What would your loved one tell you to do if they were here now? What are the alternatives to what you thought? Where is the evidence for what you thought?

• Provide a structured decision-making framework to deal with difficult decisions e.g., When to sort through belongings? Whether to take off the wedding ring? Whether to move or not?

  • Base decisions on evidence, not emotions
  • Avoid making major, irreversible decisions for 12 months to prevent decisions being based on emotion
  • Identify the problem and possible solutions
  • List the positives and negatives for each potential solution
  • Determine the consequences for each solution – can they be lived with?

  I guess, and it sucks. I've been regretting not valuing him more during his peak health, as well, although maybe I'd always feel guilty for anything short of having been perfect.

I would try to stop doing this. It will gnaw at you and we can always find something that we could have done better in the past. The better thing to do is learn from the past, appreciate it and experience, to the utmost, what is happening now.

You may want to spend some time thinking about how you can give your dog the best end of life experience that you can.

Losing a dog is painful. However, and I'm only speaking from personal experience here, you will probably have the opportunity to control to a great extent how your dog dies, its relative level of pain / discomfort, and in what situation and setting the death takes place.

Knowing that my dog - who my parents found abandoned a few weeks before I was born, who I grew up with, and who died in my early adulthood - died at home, surrounded by her family, having spent her last days lovingly attended and not in great physical pain, makes remembering her whole and relatively joyful life more pleasant for me now. It may help you too.

So I wanted to ask how people here deal with this sort of thing.

Well, I actually try to emotionally distance myself every day a little bit.

Is there a way to make the dynamically-generated sidebar stuff on LW pages invisible to Google's crawler? It looks like there is. Should I file an issue on GitHub?

Yes, you should do this.

I've run into this problem several times before. It would be very helpful if the search feature ignored the text in the sidebar.

LW's dog in this catfight is probably on the Kahneman's side

Well, probability is about reasoning with logic under imperfect information, and when you factor in the cost of elaboration you see that "ecological" model could be better, but evolution and thermodynamics. I think that simply distinguishing "correct" and "useful" dissolves the debate.

Not necessarily. "You can't do inference without making assumptions".

Is it even a fight? What is it that they disagree about? Neither side is saying "Decision heuristics that once worked well still work well in our changed world".

Eh. This is sounding more and more like a dispute over definitions, and hence tedious; and I would be unsurprised to find that it arose from either self-promotion or ideology; q.v. the Gould and Eldredge v. Maynard Smith et al. kerfuffle.

I admit that I don't get the explanation. Wouldn't both approaches lead to the same thing?

Something tells me Gigerenzer is misquoting Kahneman, he is just saying any deviation from that counts as irrational and measuring that as his baseline, i'm more than sure he would be happy to use ecological rationality as a baseline as well.

I write down one line (about 80 characters) about what things I did each day. Originally I intended to write down "accomplishments" in order to incentivise myself into being more accomplished, but it has since morphed into also being a record of notable things that happened, and a lot of free-form whining over how bad certain days are. It's kindof nice to be able to go back and figure out when exactly something in the past happens, or generally reminisce about what was going on some years ago.

I keep a daily journal. Beginning of day: Two things that I'm grateful for. End of day: Two things that went well that day, two things that could have gone better. Each "thing" is usually only a sentence or few long. I find that going back through the end-of-day sentences every so often is useful for doing 80-20 analyses to find out what seems to be bringing me the most happiness / dissatisfaction (at least as judged by my end-of-day assessments).

I wrote this on the topic - might help with the habit of keeping a book -

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mpz/making_notes_an_instrumental_rationality_process/

Poll for it!

[pollid:1132]

Please take journal to mean anything that contains personal information, insights or the like. A slip box of articles you read and commented on might already count.

Not according to Razib Khan who writes in part:

"A new paper on which has some results on life satisfaction, intelligence and the number of social interactions one has has generated some mainstream buzz....The figure above shows the interaction effect between intelligence, life satisfaction, and number of times you meet up with friends over the week. What you see is that among the less intelligent more interactions means more life satisfaction and among the more intelligent you see the reverse...But take a look at the y-axis...The effect here is very small....These are not actionable results for anyone."

I wonder if the reason could be that for smart people it is difficult to find many good friends. So the actual choice for most of them is between having only a few great friends (which is better), or having many friends that suck (which is worse). But maybe given a chance, having many great friends could be even better.

By difficulty to find many good friends I mean that for people with very high intelligence the set of their peers is already small enough, and then within this set they need to find people with similar values, hobbies, personality, etc. Even admitting this problem is a huge taboo (essentially you are telling 99% of your social environment "I don't consider you a good friend material"), so many people probably don't have good strategies for solving it.

I'd like to see an example of how you resolve these.

I think a lot of those debates do have differences in opinion that go beyond definitions.

That only moves the disagreement into the decision about what description would be appropriate. I wouldn't call that a resolution.

How about "black people are less intelligent"/"asians are more intelligent"?

My guess is that he is worried about existential risks, but of the Black Swan type: risks that can't be predicted or theorized about far in advance.

He liked Bostrom's new institute dedicated to existential risks. He doesn't think AI is a ruin-style risk, saying it requires "risk vigilance" but isn't a ruin type risk yet, and that he would be willing to reconsider later.

He has his own risk initiative called the "Extreme risk initiative".

Separate itself into multiple personalities

I wish I had read the ending first; Hall is relying heavily on Deutsch to make his case. Deutsch has come up on LW before, most relevantly here. An earlier comment of mine still seems true: I think Deutsch is pointing in the right direction and diagnosing the correct problems, but I think Deutsch underestimates the degree to which other people have diagnosed the same problems and are working on solutions to address those problems.

Hall's critique is multiple parts, so I'm writing my response part by part. Horizontal lines distinguish breaks, like so:

It starts off with reasoning by analogy, which is generally somewhat suspect. In this particular analogy, you have two camps:

1. Builders, who build ever-higher towers, hoping that they will one day achieve flight (though they don't know how that will work theoretically).

2. Theorists, who think that they're missing something, maybe to do with air, and that the worries the builders have about spontaneous liftoff don't make sense, because height doesn't have anything to do with flight.

But note that when it comes to AI, the dividing lines are different. Bostrom gets flak for not knowing the details of modern optimization and machine learning techniques (and I think that flak is well-targeted), but Bostrom is fundamentally concerned about theoretical issues. It's the builders--the Ngs of the world who focus on adding another layer to their tower--who think that things will just work out okay instead of putting effort into ensuring that things will work out okay.

That is, the x-risk argument is the combination of a few pieces of theory: the Orthogonality Thesis, that intelligence can be implemented in silicon (the universality of intelligence), and that there aren't hard constraints to intelligence anywhere near the level of human intelligence.

One paragraphs, two paragraphs, three paragraphs... when are we going to get to the substance?

Okay, 5 paragraphs in, we get the idea that "Bayesian reasoning" is an error. Why? Supposedly he'll tell us later.

The last paragraph is good, as a statement of the universality of computation.

And the first paragraph is one of the core disagreements. Hall correctly diagnoses that we don't understand human thought at the level that we can program it. (Once we do, then we have AGI, and we don't have AGI yet.) But Hall then seems to claim that, basically, unless we're already there we won't know when we'll get there. Which is true but immaterial; right now we can estimate when we'll get there, and what our estimate is determines how we should approach.

And then the latter half of this section is just bad. There's some breakdown in communication between Bostrom and Hall; Bostrom's argument, as I understand it, is not that you get enough hardware and then the intelligence problem solves itself. (This is the "the network has become self-aware!" sci-fi model of AGI creation.) The argument is that there's some algorithmic breakthrough necessary to get to AGI, but that the more hardware you have, the smaller that breakthrough is.

(That is, suppose the root of intelligence was calculating matrix determinants. There are slow ways and fast ways to do that--if you have huge amounts of hardware, coming across Laplace Expansion is enough, but if you have small amounts of hardware, you can squeak by only if you have fast matrix multiplication.)

One major point of contention between AI experts is, basically, how many software breakthroughs we have left until AGI. It could be the case that it's two; it could be the case that it's twenty. If it's two, then we expect it to happen fairly quickly; if it's twenty, then we expect it to happen fairly slowly. This uncertainty means we cannot rule out it happening quickly.

The claim that programs do not engage in creativity and criticism is simply wrong. This is the heart and soul of numerical optimization, metaheuristic programs in particular. Programs are creative and critical beyond the abilities of humans in the narrow domains that we've been able to communicate to those programs, but the fundamental math of creativity and criticism exist (in the terms of sampling from a solution space, especially in ways that make use of solutions that we've already considered, and objective functions that evaluate those solutions). The question is how easily we will be able to scale from well-defined problems (like routing trucks or playing Go) to poorly-defined problems (like planning marketing campaigns or international diplomacy).

Part 4 is little beyond "I disagree with the Orthogonality Thesis." That is, it sees value disagreements as irrationality. Bonus points for declaring Bayesian reasoning false for little reason that I can see besides "Deutsch disagrees with it" (which, I think, is due to Deutsch's low familiarity with the math of causal models, which I think are the solution he correctly thinks is missing with EDT-ish Bayesian reasoning).

Not seeing anything worth commenting on in part 5.

Part 6 includes a misunderstanding of Arrow's Theorem. (Arrow's Theorem is a no-go theorem, but it doesn't rule out the thing Hall thinks it rules out. If the AI is allowed to, say, flip a coin when it's indifferent, Arrow's Theorem no longer applies.)

Your problem is called a clustering problem. First of all, you need to answer how you measure your error (information loss, as you call it). Typical error norms used are l1 (sum of individual errors), l2 (sum of squares of errors, penalizes larger errors more) and l-infinity (maximum error).

Once you select a norm, there always exists a partition that minimizes your error, and to find it there are a bunch of heuristic algorithms, e.g. k-means clustering. Luckily, since your data is one-dimensional and you have very few categories, you can just brute force it (for 4 categories you need to correctly place 3 boundaries, and naively trying all possible positions takes only n^3 runtime)

Hope this helps.

If I'm understanding this correctly, it sounds like you're performing k-means clustering.

You'd minimize information loss by giving the actual scores.

The argument is 'grading on the curve' vs 'ABCDEF'. The first way is fair, but it promotes extreme competition to be in the top 1% (or 'The Senior Wrangler', as we used to call it), which may not be desirable. The second way hands out random bonuses and penalties to individuals near the arbitrary boundaries.

I was in the top 25% of my year in terms of marks, I believe. I was a 'Senior Optime', or 'got a second'. A class that stretched from around 25%-75%.

Not bitter, or anything.

I don't understand what's going on here.

What does it mean that this is a "containment thread"

What is going on with this dialog?

negotiating self-defense

B is likely in a poor negotiating position to start with, and better off just giving A the wallet or running. A's strong position comes from the precommittment strategy of poor impulse control: "I don't care if you can get me in trouble, I'm too involved in this attack to think beyond the next few minutes".

1. you might be motivating a simple, "punch him and steal his wallet " to "kill him and get away with it". Might not want to do that.

Apparently no Open Thread was created this week yet. I guess it makes sense to make this one span two weeks. Or does that break some automation here or there?

I think it is useful to distinguish between "friendly AI" and "patronizing AI".

There is a continuum that moves from complete dream-obliviousness (not being aware one has dreamed upon waking) all the way up to comprehensively lucid dreaming, where a dreamer is able to create and control their dream environment at will and then retain an accurate memory upon waking.

There are obvious problems with the self-reporting of dreams and dream recall, so the exact definitions of the continuum are fuzzy, but I'm not aware of anyone seriously disputing the continuum exists.

Also making matters more interesting is the mechanics of dreaming in terms of what frames of reference the brain uses to create the imagery of the dream. It's not surprising that people dream about places similar to their environments if we think about terms of raw data in the brain as it dreams.

At age 17 I had the common experience of dreaming of my recently deceased mother, but my brain didn't take long to realize that seeing her was not possible, and I realized it was a dream. For some years I kept that ability to quickly see the inconsistencies in the dream world, but as of now my asleep brain is back to normal gullibility. Because I have a strong preference for living in the real world, I very strongly (verbally, actually) forbade my mind from showing me my dead mother again, and it obeyed.