Open thread, 9-15 June 2014

I have no idea how likely it is, but an alternative explanation is that the vote counts were first converted to percentages to one decimal place, then someone else converted them back to absolute numbers for this announcement.

Nice work. I tend to take high-profile election results over 66% or so in favor of one option as prima facie evidence of election fraud (maybe 75 if there's some exceptionally strong reason to vote one way or another, like if one of the candidates is dead), but this is certainly damning.

You'd think that the perpetrators of electoral fraud would realize this sort of thing -- but I suppose the most likely explanation is that (dons Robin Hanson glasses) elections in these cases aren't about legitimacy, but rather about proving that one party has enough power to enforce a clearly illegitimate result.

Very nice! I love this kind of mathematical detective-story - I'm reminded of Nate Silver's consideration of the polling firm Strategic Vision here and here - but this is far, far more blatant.

Another reason: ransomware!

I remember reading in Lee Kuan Yew's autobiography that China asked him to set up a Singapore in China, but Lee said this wouldn't be possible.

More practically, let's get a copy of Lee's DNA and when the technology becomes available make a few thousand clones of him that in 20 years can be made mayors of major cities.

Does Paul Romer count?

The Gulf is impoverished?

Besides, isn't Dubai just a better version of Singapore?

Sure, thank you for your invitation. I tend to copy and paste from Wikipedia cause I'm aweful at writing unambiguously. Ummmm I have OCD and basically spend a large amount of the last few years reading wikipedia pages compulsively. I'm starting to recover and the in the process I've started to actually understand some of the things I've been reading - but not in any systematic way. So I'm here to better understand things and clarify my own misconceptions and also challenge a few of the things here. You guys want more contrarian participants so what's more contrarian than mental illness!

The odd thing about that graph, to me, is the large number of estimates in the middle of the scale for P(simulation). I'd have expected more people to accept the simulation argument (and rate it very high) or reject it outright (and rate it very low).

I guess we might be seeing uncertainty over whether or not to accept the argument, or some kind of computationally bounded simulation argument where the root universe can only handle a relatively small number of simulations. I don't quite think I buy the latter, though.

Both Nick B's have their surnames listed.

Before the Industrial Revolution, people ate when they were hungry. Our insistence on meals at fixed times is a modern effect of accurate watchmaking and the introduction of work shifts.

Daydreaming is nice.

I tend to daydream while in this situation but here are some other ideas: meditate, try to train yourself to count seconds accurately (requires a watch or other timepiece to score yourself with), ask yourself the miracle question.

Mostly I think about questions and ideas.

If I don't think I meditate or do something more physical like practicing dance steps.

Think about my coding and/or writing plans for that evening.

Worldbuilding for when I start writing fiction again (one of these days, I swear).

Planning my next week(s) in fractal detail.

Trying to solve a pet decision theory problem. If I don't have one, I can try to find one.

Doing posture exercises / stretching - or if there's more space and not too many people, regular exercises.

Daydreaming.

these days I'm often trying to consider the ramifications of x or y in stories I've been recently reading.

Introspection is easier without distractions, though less useful without some way of writing notes to my future self.

Debugging/exercising understanding of recently learned/revisited concepts/proofs in math.

Trying to solve problems that interest me in math, decision theory, programming, etc.

Imagining words, pictures, music, scenes.

Quietly listening to my own emotions.

I try to always have a pen and paper and a smartphone with Anki, so it doesn't happen often. Otherwise, I sometimes recite poetry I've memorised years ago (mostly Tolkien, Kipling and Blake).

I buy a new phone, because the only way I get into that situation is if my phone was stolen or broken.

When my mind is on idle I tend to go into anxiety cycles, which is bad. As such I've got into the habit of carrying my smartphone and headphones with me at all times, and playing podcasts and audiobooks continuously, often at double speed.

I also have a mental calming exercise where I go through the integers in order and work out their prime factors (or if they are prime) in my head.

For me, having nothing to do is a luxury. When I find myself in this mode, I take long walks, let my mind drift and think about whatever it feels like (usually it chooses to think about one of my ongoing projects, big unsolvable world-scale problems, future, lack of moral progress, or sex), read long-form stuff (mostly Kindle books on my phone) and generally relax and recharge, assuming that I can find a relatively quiet environment.

Not that surprising - I recall people were worrying about this when they were at 45%.

Mostly I'm seeing Bitcoin enthusiasts upset that Bitcoin now has a central bank - that it's no longer decentralised and therefore the point is gone.

How's this on the issues?

The most reliable way to create a lasting community is basing it on shared religion AND costly personal sacrifices. Secularity doesn't cut it, even if demanding sacrifices.

What kind of secular communities was used in the research? The "secular community" without further specification feels a bit like a non-apple.

Maybe this is because religious communities try to solve all aspects of their member's lives, while secular communities usually have a single purpose. Single-purpose communities can fall apart when their members focus on some other aspect of their lives. For example, yesterday they wanted to save the whales or start the proletarian revolution, today they want to start a family. A religious community can satisfy a wider range of needs. Also, your relatives are often part of the same religious community.

Being religious signals trustworthiness

I imagine this is because religion has a clearly defined set of rules, and members are punished by other members if they break them. I can imagine that a christian who would steal from many people, would be unpopular within their own community. On the other hand, when a social justice warrior would steal from many people, their victims would be probably told to check their privilege, and called sexist / racist / ...phobic for trying to avoid them. Okay, I exaggerate a bit here to illustrate the point.

Being a member of a group is an evidence of a trait if the group tries to change or avoid people who lack the trait.

Being religious signals trustworthiness

Not quite -- for a counterexample consider whether being a highly religious Muslim signals trustworthiness in the contemporary US.

I think in local terminology this can be generalized as an observation that high-cost precommitment to avoid certain behavior provides a convincing signal :-)

Looking at the whole thing from 10,000 feet I am impressed by how much the high-trust societies are more productive than low-trust societies.

The most reliable way to create a lasting community is basing it on shared religion AND costly personal sacrifices. Secularity doesn't cut it, even if demanding sacrifices.

Cialdini's Influence presents a pretty strong case for Sacrifice being a very powerful method for ensuring group cohesion all by itself. For example, Fraternities and Hazing or indigenous peoples and coming-of-age rituals.

The first reason I would think of that religion does a good job of holding groups together is that it's an interest that you're "not supposed to" grow out of, unlike things like drinking/partying and playing sports.

I should try taking one of these ideological Turing tests some time.

I listen to a lot of conservative talk radio, and I find myself able to predict their arguments with some regularity; on the other hand, I'm probably just falling prey to confirmation bias. Also I'm not certain I'm a liberal. :-/

Strong communities tend to have a shared religion but this doesn't tell us which way the casual arrow points. Given that trustingness is heritable, I think its likely that trustingness increases both religiosity and the ability to form a community. The sacrifice result seems a bit more robust since it was done with both religious and secular groups.

About liberals, they are the least accurate in modeling how other political groups describe themselves. However, this could mean that other groups are less genuine in their self description: for example conservatives that think that gays are gross will probably appeal to "family values" rather than being honest. And really all this tells us is that other groups are harder to understand. This doesn't tell us if they are right or not.

BTW, the term for that concept is “pecuniary externality”.

Try to find actual examples. See if you can find two examples where your intuition as to which way is correct are different.

Did the mere presence and values of Charlie hurt Alice? In this scenario I'm inclined to say yes. Does this mean Alice has a claim to be compensated by Charlie (and Bob)? I'm inclined to say no.

Why is this a problem? The mere presence of a bunch of people who are trying to use the road at the same time as I do hurts me. That doesn't mean I have a claim against them. Or just look at any markets.

The general rule is that for Alice to assert a claim against Charlie, Charlie must have some sort of legally recognized duty towards Alice. Just showing loss is not sufficient.

I guess that you would also find it equally vexing if Daisy comes with a newspaper and newspaper valuation of $3 and "damages" Bob by trading with Alice.

Also note that if Bob has two newspapers he just sells to both Alice and Charlie. Is it now Charlie that complains about 3$ of damages or Alice that doesn't get the newspaper because Charlie sets a price over 7$ while there would have been enough newspapers to go around? (I guess Bob could also complain if he only gets 2*$7 while the average valuation would have been higher).

Suspecting that there is a "trade is good" or "trade is fair" assumption for certain sense of "good" and "fair" that just doesn't hold. Most likely you are treating market value as property. The value is not in the object to be traded but also in the needs of the peoples using it.

This is a big issue, the root of protectionism vs. free trade.

My first example is the National Energy Program from the 1970s to 1980s in Canada. Left Canada (Alice) legislated the prices Right Canada (Bob) could sell their oil to Alice while the World (Charlie) was offering higher prices.

The second example is a little more convoluted but have a look at the Canada–United States softwood lumber dispute. In this case Bob and Alice are producing newspapers for $5 and $7 respectively. Charlie is a newspaper distributer wants to protect Alice who is his sister, so he charges the buyers an extra $2 for Bob's papers to keep things fair.

Edited for spelling.

Yep, absolutely Alice is injured. In many market scenarios this is true. Usually, of course, Alice is both a producer and a consumer so broad protectionist laws will hurt her. But sometimes, the "pure buyer" idea is true. So, for instance, incumbent renters have a strong incentive to advocate rent control; otherwise, a frothy real estate market will force them to find new housing.

(edited post)

Second, edited draft.

David Lewis is generally regarded as one of the most formidable philosophers of the last century in terms of sheer intellectual firepower. I'm not aware of anyone who thinks he's outright crap. His papers are incredibly well-written - dense, but very well argued and lucid. On topics of interest to LW: he made significant contributions to causal decision theory, the interpretation of probability, the compatibilist account of free will, physicalism about the mind, and the counterfactual analysis of causation.

However, he has been criticized for too often directing his impressive abilities towards an ill-conceived task - the revival of armchair speculative metaphysics. I think this is a fair criticism. Lewis was very adept with logic and mathematics, but he was, as far as I can tell, insufficiently familiar with the sciences, and this shows in his metaphysics.

That said, the idea for which he is most often criticized -- his modal realism -- is now making somewhat of a comeback in the form of Tegmark's Level IV multiverse hypothesis. It's still a fairly fringe and very controversial idea, of course, but its now being taken seriously in at least some non-philosophical circles. It also appears to have some currency among some of the people working on new decision theories here at LW.

I've not heard that Lewis (note for other readers: that's David Kellogg Lewis, the mid-to-late 20th-century philosopher best known for modal realism, even though his dates don't overlap with Ramsey's) is regarded as "outright crap" by anyone of substance. But I'm not particularly well up on the internal disputes of philosophy. Who doesn't like him?

Supposing that indeed some people do hold his work in low esteem, I'd guess it's because of his modal realism, which is for sure a major bullet-biting exercise and might strike some as silly. (I suppose he might also be contemned in some quarters for "political" reasons -- e.g., he was a fairly outspoken atheist, and I wonder what Alvin Plantinga thinks of him.)

Sounds like metacognition: the act of the mind watching itself think.

There are several research communities working on this and related problems, generally under the headings: Computational/Algorithmic Mechanism Design and Social/Public Choice Theory

Multilevel voting rounds have the problem that they end up representing elite interests to a very unhealthy degree - round one is likely to select representatives with impressive accomplishments and credentials. Which means the pool of voters for subsequent votes is now more or less entirely from the very top social strata, and as such is not likely to elect leadership responsive to needs of the people. This is not just theory- it has been tried, and the results were bad.

The one I would actually like to see tried is rotating sortition. Representatives are selected for five years terms at random, one year where they are non-voting observers, then 4 years of service. (to counter the inherent problem of throwing people straight into the job)

I read a very interesting book on election systems by William Poundstone called Gaming the Vote. His conclusion was that Score (aka Range) Voting was the best system on offer. A brief explanation can be found at rangvoting.org; it's a rather simple and intuitive system. As to idea number 2, I had a similar idea a while back, I called it fractal hierarchy, and a few thoughts occurred to me. First, it need not be democratic at all levels. I was thinking that if you wanted to select for rationality then the entry levels might not be very good at this. This led me to realize that this was rather similar to how the US military is structured, and they are generally positively regarded and considered quite meritocratic, so it might be a good way to do things.

Another idea for legislative systems that I came across that is a merger between direct and representative democracy is called delegable proxy. The idea is that every member can vote on every issue, but they can choose to delegate their vote to a proxy voter, who can then choose to delegate all their votes to another voter, and so on, until you get a number of people with large chunks of votes. But for any issue, an individual can retract their vote(s) and vote how they wish. I think this system would allow for a lot of legislation to get passed, and would most strongly represent the popular will, but that is also it's greatest weakness, in that you get the issue of tyranny of the majority and ignorance of the masses playing a greater role.

I am working on a project right now to put these and other ideas into practice, and will make a discussion post about it at some point in the future. If anyone is interested in helping me to better articulate my ideas before I post them, please let me know.

Multiple rounds of liquid democracy based voting. You first select the top 10 candidates. Then the top 5, followed by the top 2 and then you decide for the last candidate.

In theory, if a small group of people can be trusted to pick a person among them who is at least slightly above average rationality of the group, you could add lots and lots of levels of voting for people who vote for people who vote for people who vote on the issues.

I think your initial post was not the best / least-condescending way of talking about the singularity. But I think the main problem you encountered was that many of the commenters were religious and openly anti-materialist. If you think God created man in his image and that man's consciousness and cognition are special and linked to a divine, immaterial element called a soul, it's going to be hard to convince you of superhuman AI. Trying to start off with an argument for materialism conflated with an argument for extrapolating current scientific trends is just going to make them dig in further.

So you really were in a lose-lose situation. But your response was solid; certainly better than the original case.

A better point many of those commenters make is the distinction between extrapolation and creation; even if I disagree that singularity predictions are optimistic navel-gazing, it's still fair to say that the path to the singularity is not laid out in a concise and reasonable way (and pointing to Kurzweil's charts is a poor response).

Your case was kinda simple and condescending. On the other hand I can answer Wright by saying "Phineas Gage"

I fail to see how Wright's answer is even remotely relevant. Let's say that for some mysterious reason brains have a door that connects them to some metaphysical realm that silicon-based devices could never have.
Does this changes the fact that a properly programmed computer can beat any human at chess or checkers? Does this changes the fact that cars can self-drive successfully for thousands of miles? Does this changes the fact that right now a living organism is being simulated at cellular level?
The only thing that distinguishes the Singualirty scenario from a simple observation of the state of the world is the assumption that there is a point after which an AI can exponentially self-improve, and that will have an exponentially large effect on our society.

And you're surprised? I haven't read more than a five thousand words by or about Wright and I am not at all surprised.

What was your goal? Did you tune your pitch to this audience?

In what follows, all logs are to base 3.

Definition: [a,b,c,d] := a^(b^(c^d))), etc.

Lemma: log [a,b,...,z] = log a^[b,...,z] = (log a) [b,...,z].

Definition: {n} := [3,...,3] with n 3's.

Lemma: log {n} = {n-1}.

Definition: G := [10,10,100].

OK. So we want to know when {n} > [G,G]. Taking logs, this is the same as {n-1} > G log G = [10,10,100] log [10,10,100]. Taking logs again, it's the same as {n-2} > log log [10,10,100] + log [10,10,100] which (unless it comes out amazingly close) is the same as {n-2} > log [10,10,100] = (log 10) [10,100]. Taking logs again, this is the same as {n-3} > log log 10 + log [10,100] = log log 10 + 100 log 10, which again is basically the same as {n-3} > 100 log 10, and now we're in the realm of small numbers and we find that [3,3] is too small but [3,3,3] is way more than enough.

So I'm pretty sure the answer is that you need six 3s in your tower.

Since it's easy to get this kind of thing wrong -- which is why I introduced notation and lemmas intended to make the manipulations as simple as possible -- I just did it again a different way (a couple of steps of algebra on paper, plus some ordinary floating-point arithmetic on a computer) and without the informal throwing away of much smaller bits. I can confirm that five 3s aren't nearly enough and six 3s are way more than you need.

[EDITED to remove a definition and a lemma that I never actually used, and to add a little clarification.]

Most prospective employers will want to interview candidates before making offers. If you are living in Asia, you will not want to be constantly flying back and forth to interviews. So you may have to have fewer (reducing your options) or schedule them all in a small number of blocks (also reducing your options since some prospective employers won't have flexible enough schedules for that to be easy).

How much this matters depends on how tasty a prospect you are for employers, how much you care how good your first job is, what field you're looking to work in, etc.

I should do the job search here and only return to the US after getting an offer.

Most people will expect you to physically show up at an interview (or several). Videoconferencing isn't going to suffice.

What kind of a job will you be looking for?

How is the spin going to look to the employer? Are you going to come across as uninformed and chasing a pipe dream, or as an ambitious self starter that any employer will want on their team?

I have a hard time thinking of a likely scenario where you could only save 6K even though 1) you did it in a place with a low cost of living, and 2) you're a LWer and want to move to California (which implies the tech industry, which is a high-paying field--and otherwise, moving to California is stupid).

(If you can only save 3K a year in a place with a low cost of living, how much are you going to be able to save when living in California?)

Did you mean to post that somewhere in this thread?

since knowing whether [MWI] is correct or not wouldn't affect your decision-making unless you are willing to kill yourself

Almost no one who believes in MWI believes that it makes a difference even then.

This fail-safe is only an actual net gain if you would rather die than see the aftermath of nuclear war, but don't want to go through all the trouble of committing suicide manually.

The reasoning is fairly solid, though - looking back at the past, the lack of nuclear war is weaker evidence for human peacefulness if you grew up in Washington DC.

If you have a choice between living in Sitka and living in New York, isn't that a choice that splits the worlds too? So in one world you'd be living in Sitka and in another world you'd be living in New York. In general, it would seem like "choose X so that I am in this set of worlds and not in that set of worlds" doesn't work--you're always still in the set of worlds where you made the opposite choice.

Even "choose X so as to increase my measure in this set of worlds and decrease my measure in that set of worlds" won't really work. By definition, the whole set of worlds encompasses all choices. You can't choose X so as to affect something about your situation with respect to the worlds. What would that mean anyway? Would there be a meta-set of sets of worlds, and there's a branch of the meta-set where you chose X and increased the measure of part of the set, and another branch of the meta-set where you didn't choose X and didn't increase the measure of the same part?

'Died from nuke in London' is a vague thing, but even if you choose a boundary by which to delineate it, that partition does not carve reality at the joints. There would probably be intermediate states of some measure where you suffer but live for some time after the initial blast, and probably be states of lesser measure where you are unharmed or even gain from the blast.

It might still turn out that the measure/probability/whatever of the suffering states is low enough that it's still worth leaving yourself open to being nuked, though. Like, maybe P(Alive|Nuked)=10^-5 and that's an acceptable proportion of worlds where you live through the nuking since you do successfully die in the vast majority of worlds. But if you're not sure, all else being equal, you'd want to pick the place within London that would be most likely to kill you if a bomb hit, rather than some obscure, heavily-sheltered place on the outskirts where you'll just about live and suffer after the blast.

In general, it's pretty suspicious if death seems to be the fundamental deciding factor in such matters (e.g. whether to live in London, whether MWI vs. Copenhagen matters); the reason people suspect so is anthropic--we can't observe (parts of) worlds where we are dead. But since 'I' and 'dead' are going to be fuzzy notions that do not carve reality at the joints, we should not expect them to be fundamental to decision-making in multiverses, even if they are efficient shorthands. It's important to bear this in mind with MWI and anthropics.

(yeah, I know - finally a reason for rationalists to move to the Bay Area)

lolol

How would your decision be different if you evaluate possible worlds as opposed to Everett branches?

What do you mean by censorship here? Can you give examples?

When it has a higher expected utility, taking into account that you will optimize less well when you're thinking less clearly.

I've found Google Docs to be perfect for collaborative writing.

Here is an MWI perspective from an actual physicist: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/02/12/the-many-worlds-of-quantum-mechanics/

A very thorough explanation of QM by Sean, much better quality than the QM sequence: http://preposterousuniverse.com/eternitytohere/quantum/

Relevant video debate: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/05/29/quantum-mechanics-smackdown/

Read/watch those first.

I guess they are somehow an animation of complex points in 3 real dimensions?

A set of n entangle particles is a function from R^(3n) to C. It's assigning a complex number to each configuration of particles. Since there are n particles, and each particle has three real dimensions, it comes out to 3n real dimensions.

If you can't compute the next state of a "world" from how it looks now but have to look at the neighbours in configuration space doesn't this mean that world evolution is inherently not a "private" fact?

It's a local fact. Knowing just that point won't work; it only gives you the positions of the particles, but having an arbitrarily small neighborhood will give you the derivative, which gives you the momentums of the particles.

And in stationary wavefunctions while each individual wave moves outward the shape of the wave function is the same after one cycle. That is such wavefunctions don't "shatter" and they have the quality of reforming the same shape. I don't have a good detail to point to but it seems it must converge just as fast as it splits.

In stationary waves, you're dealing with something that only has a small set of states. It has to converge as fast as it splits, since there's nowhere else to go. If you stick a particle in an infinite universe, there's no stationary wavefunction.

Woudn't the "converging worlds" be us much of a big deal as "splitting worlds"?

It doesn't happen as much thanks to increasing entropy. Everything starts from the big bang, but it can end anywhere.

That's not to say it doesn't happen. The double slit experiment works because the universe where the photon passes through the left slit and the one where it passes through the right slit intersect again. It doesn't work when you record which slit the photon passes through, since one universe now has a detector saying "left" and the other one has one saying "right", so they're not the same universe.

And wouldn't it be quite possible that instead of looking like a tree or balloon on the macro level your world line would look more like a line.

As long as it's stable it will. Once something chaotic happens, it will start splitting.

Doesn't the preservation of measure mean that worlds don't "dissipate into ambivalence". A common take on many worlds where each decision splits your world would in my mind imply such a dissipation.

Imagine you're putting a drop of dye into a pool. It doesn't break down or otherwise stop being dye, but it does dissipate. It's the same deal with quantum physics. The measure is preserved, but later on it's just spread out more.

The bomb tester experiment reads to me as if you blow up the bomb in another world to gain info on the version in your world.

Also a good example of converging worlds. If the bomb doesn't explode, the universes can converge again, causing destructive interference in places. If it does explode in one universe, they can't converge, so those places that would have had destructive interference can still happen, and if they do, that proves the bomb exploded in another universe.

Downvoted for linking a memetic vaccine. (Yes, memetic immune reaction to memetic immune reactions.)