Open thread, September 8-14, 2014

Someone -- maybe on LW? -- said that their strategy was to choose their friends carefully enough that they didn't have to resist peer pressure.

I've always been a huge non-conformist, caring relatively little what others think. I now believe that I went too far and my advice to my younger self would be to try and fit in more.

Such as?

My go-to catchphrase when I notice this sort of situation is (spoken sarcastically):

"Why be happy when you can be normal?"

Though that certainly has happened to me as well, it strikes me that the opposite has happened more often: I've done things which turned out to be beneficial, and avoided to do things that would have been bad, because of the opinions of my social circles.

Lots of the time, things that are seen as weird and stupid by the majority actually are weird and stupid.

That sounds like a good way to end up with more paywalls.

I don't think "refusing" news sources is helpful. Even a bad newspaper gives some perspective on some topics that you won't find elsewhere.

The whole idea of "news sources" is problematic. It assumes a certain 20th century model of learning about the world. If you want to get really informed about a topic it often necessary to read primary sources. I don't get scientific news from mainstream media. I either read the papers, discussion on LW or blogs by scientists.

When I see a claim that I find interesting and where I don't know it's true I head over to skeptic.stackexchange and open a question. The website is no newspaper but it also serves the purpose of staying in contact with world events.

Advertising is just one biases among many. If I watch a news video at German public television that's payed for by taxpayer money, the a German public television network pays a production company for that video. Some of those production companies also produce PR for paying customers.

A lot of articles in newspapers get these days written by freelance journalists who aren't payed very well and can be hired for other tasks. So even if the newspaper wouldn't make it's money by serving corporate interest the individual journalist might still serve corporate interests.

Wikipedia illustrates that we are actually quite good at coordination. Much better than anyone would have expected 20 years ago. It just doesn't like like we would have expected. Cultural development isn't just more of the same.

If people were a great deal better at coordination I suspect advertising wouldn't exist at all.

I think I'd be more inclined to frame this sort of thing as typical mind fallacy. Modeling it in terms of an I Win button seems to violate Hanlon's Razor: we don't need an adversarial model when plain old ignorance will suffice, and I don't think preferred interaction style is a matter of conscious choice for most people.

I think people want that because they don't how to communicate effectively in any other way. You also have to decide why people choose to communicate in the way that they do. People that prefer written communication (as I do) may be passive aggressive or be afraid of verbal communication. Those who want their partner to "just know" I think will have the least amount of success because of their inability to use a method of agreeable communication to express their needs and desires. I am somewhat aware of this because I do expect people to have certain ideas and execute them and I have learned that I have to speak up about what I think should be done because they aren't "just going to figure it out" because most people don't think like I do.

As for the "I win" button, I don't think thats what people want. People want their needs met in a pleasurable and dynamic way. Is that "winning?"

This model assumes that relationships are adversarial, which need not be the case, and isn't the case in a good relationship.

I'd have thought any extraterrestrial civilization capable of doing something useful with the information wouldn't need the explicit warning.

Does mankind have a duty to warn extraterrestrial civilizations that we might someday unintentionally build an unfriendly super-intelligent AI that expands at the speed of light gobbling up everything in its path?

One response to such a warning would be to build a super-intelligent AI that expands at the speed of light gobbling up everything in its path first.

And when the two (or more) collide, it would make a nice SF story :-)

I love this idea! A few thoughts:

1. What could the alien civilizations do? Suppose SETI decoded "Hi from the Andromeda Galaxy! BTW, nanobots might consume your planet in 23 years, so consider fleeing for your lives." Is there anything humans could do?

2. The costs might be high. Suppose our message saves an alien civilization one thousand light-years away, but delays a positive singularity by three days. By the time our colonizers reach the alien planet, the opportunity cost would be a three-light-day deep shell of a thousand light-year sphere. Most of the volume of a sphere is close to the surface, so this cost is enormous. Giving the aliens an escape ark when we colonize their planet would be quintillions of times less expensive. Of course, a paperclipper would do no such thing.

3. It may be presumptuous to warn about AI. Perhaps the correct message to say is something like "If you think of a clever experiment to measure dark energy density, don't do it."

You can see some discussion on "How does MIRI know it has a medium probability of success?"

I bet some folks would love you forever if you gave them reply notification

I think a predictionbook app or an app version of the credence game, would be more useful than a app for LessWrong.

What do you see it doing that the web site doesn't?

I would expect most LWers to prefer Android. Certainly I do.

Not really what you're looking for, but I feel obligated:

Move or get a different job. Reduce your commute by 1 or 1.5 hours. This is the best way to increase the productivity of your commute.

I read (can't remember source) that commuting was the worst part of the people's day (they were unhappy, or experienced the lowest levels of their self-assess subjective well being).

Does anyone have any good ideas about how to be productive while commuting?

Driving or public transportation?

If driving, don't forget that you have a limited amount of attention available and being "productive" as a driver involves some trade-offs X-)

Given the limitations (that you describe in other replies) I think you've got a good list.

Regarding podcasts, this could be a great time to experiment with new ones & decide which you want to listen to longer term.

Perhaps there are some short activities of value to you, such as Anki (assuming you have a smartphone), mentally reviewing your memory palace, or mindfulness exercises. Mindfulness exercises on public transport may seem a little odd, but the distractions may make it more effective as exercise - just be patient with yourself.

Just out of curiosity: How (if at all) is this related to your LW post about a year ago?

I think surely the following has to be wrong:

if you never experience a timeline in which you've permanently died, then the only timelines you experience are the ones in which you have sufficient resources to survive; thus implying that whatever resources you have are going to be sufficient to survive.

because you can't get that kind of information about the future ("are going to be sufficient") just from the fact that you haven't died in the past.

As for the more central issue:

If you buy a lottery ticket, and /win/, then via Bayesian inference from the previous paragraphs, you have just collected evidence which suggests an increased likelihood that you are about to face a disaster which requires a great deal of resources to survive.

this also seems terribly wrong to me, at least if the situation I'm supposed to imagine is that I bought a lottery ticket just for fun, or out of habit, or something like that. Because surely the possible worlds that get more likely according to your quantum-immortality argument are ones in which I bought a lottery ticket in the expectation of a disaster. Further, I don't see how winning makes this situation any more likely, at least until the disaster has actually occurred and been surmounted with the help of your winnings.

Imagine 10^12 equal-probability versions of you. 10^6 of them anticipate situations that desperately require wealth and buy lottery tickets. Another 10^9 versions of you buy lottery tickets just for fun. Then one of the 10^6, and 10^3 of the 10^9, win the lottery. OK, so now your odds (conditional on having just bought a lottery ticket) of being about to face wealth-requiring danger are only 10^3:1 instead of 10^6:1 as they were before -- but you need to conditionalize on all the relevant evidence. Let's suppose that you can predict those terrible dangers half the time when they occur; so there are another 10^6 of you facing that situation without knowing it; 10^3 of them bought lottery tickets, and 10^-3 of them won. So conditional on having just bought a lottery ticket for fun, your odds of being in danger are still 10^6:1 (10^9 out of danger, 10^3 in); conditional on having just bought a lottery ticket for fun and won, they're still 10^6:1 (10^3 out of danger, 10^-3 in).

Perhaps I'm missing something important; I've never found the idea of "quantum immortality" compelling, and I think the modes of thought that make it compelling involve wrongheadedness about probability and QM, but maybe I'm the one who's wrongheaded...

I think you're leaving out that disasters which require a lot of money to survive are fairly rare and hard to predict.

The expansion of the universe blows up the Boltzmann Brain problem. The universe is not of uniform density over time, and far into the future things get thinner and thinner on average with more and more concentrated local knots of matter of changing atomic/etc composition.

It pushes the question to why we see the universe as it is rather than something smaller in space rather than in time, which becomes a question about the properties of the event we call the big bang, which nobody really understands - was it a singular event or one of many such events and what was its/their scale?

Looks like they agree that specialization is for insects :-)

The idea of the well rounded human being strikes again! That is why we moved away from the structure of classical education and towards the free-form well rounded-ness of the liberal arts education. It allows for curiosity and testing out your own ability.

"Whether you have herpes" is not as clearly-defined a category as it sounds. The blood test will tell you which types of HSV antibodies you have. If you're asymptomatic, it won't tell you the site of the infection, if you're communicable, or if you will ever experience an outbreak.

I had an HSV test a while ago (all clear, thankfully), and my impression from speaking to the medical staff was that given the prevalence and relative harmlessness of the disease, (compared to, say, HIV or hepatitis or something), the doubt surrounding a positive test result was enough of a psychological hazard for them to actively dissuade some people from taking it, and many sexual health clinics don't even offer it for this reason.

From Poor Economics by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Bannerjee

There is potentially another reason the poor may hold on to beliefs that might seem indefensible: When there is little else they can do, hope becomes essential. One of the Bengali doctors we spoke to explained the role he plays in the lives of the poor as follows: “The poor cannot really afford to get treated for anything major, because that involves expensive things like tests and hospitalization, which is why they come to me with their minor ailments, and I give them some little medicines which make them feel better.” In other words, it is important to keep doing something about your health, even if you know that you are not doing anything about the big problem. In fact, the poor are much less likely to go to the doctor for potentially life-threatening conditions like chest pains and blood in their urine than with fevers and diarrhea. The poor in Delhi spend as much on short-duration ailments as the rich, but the rich spend much more on chronic diseases.34 So it may well be that the reason chest pains are a natural candidate for being a bhopa disease (an older woman once explained to us the dual concepts of bhopa diseases and doctor diseases—bhopa diseases are caused by ghosts, she insisted, and need to be treated by traditional healers), as are strokes, is precisely that most people cannot afford to get them treated by doctors.

Thanks to its multiple infection sites, herpes has the unusual property that two people, neither of whom have an STI, can have sex that leads to one of them having an STI. It's a spontaneous creation of stigma! And if you have an asymptomatic infection (very common), there's no way to know whether it's oral (non-stigmatized, not an STI) or genital (stigmatized, STI) since the major strains are only moderately selective.

... and that's why you should prefer to sleep with rationalists. :)

His answer to "Peter, what's the worst investment you've ever made? What lessons did you learn from it?" is intersting. He focuses on not investing more on facebook. The shift of focus says a lot about his mindset.

One of the better AMAs I've read.

Peter is an interesting guy. Is his book worth reading?

Unfortunately the program has been discontinued by Capital One :(

We have it in our queue to look into alternatives.

One thing you might want to look into is that many cards will allow you to donate your reward points etc. to charity. For many credit cards, this generates more value for the charity you choose to donate to.

I think they stopped distributing them. The last I saw, they had that entry struck out on their support page.

Never worked for them in particular, but my experience with such online tutoring businesses hasn't been great: generally don't get many hours, are expected to commit fully to being available at certain times every week (which when in uni, with tests etc. at unexpected times, isn't too possible - might be possible for you in your situation) and they take a fair chunk of your earnings. On one occasion I put a lot of time into signing up, getting documents etc. to verify myself, and then never got a single student. On the other hand, signing up for services such as www.firsttutors.com has been great (not sure if this is international, I've been using the NZ site, but think it is). Basically it's a repository of tutors, people come and leave messages for you to see if you'd be a good fit and if you have times you could both make it, and then you each pay a small one-off fee (usually <$20 for the tutor) for the website providing the interface and get eachother's contact details. I've set up both online and in-person tutoring through this, online being about a fifth of all requests. The first year I used it I got about 3 or 4 students through it (each of whom I met for one or two hours a week and lasted on average ~6 months). Nowadays, with a few good reviews on there, I've put up my fees to double what they used to be and still get about 15 requests a year, each of which is good for about 2 hours tutoring a week - I don't take them all, but I could. And the fee the website charges is nothing in comparison to the hours I get out of it, usually it's less than an hour's work to make it back.

Tutoring seems like a great way for lots of LW people to earn extra money. Apparently at least one high end tutor earns $1000 an hour.

I haven't worked with that specific company before, but there are a lot of mixed incentives in the tutor market.

If we can believe Glassdoor, they offer around $20/hour. (I suspect the 2 reported at $30/hour are either grad students or some other specialization). Here are some employee reviews, but I expect two of the five-stars are faked.

Judging by the reviews and my own experience in the past, I think you can expect to get around five hours a week of tutoring this way. That doesn't include time spent preparing for topics and other overhead. I imagine the only way the company maintains quality control is by reducing hours on tutors after one or two bad reviews, or after a single refund request. Office politics wrt the director-tutor relationship are probably going to be brutal, and there's not going to be any reward or incentive for doing an above-average job. It seems reasonable to assume turnover is high.

Since you're looking for online tutoring, I assume it's not possible to tutor in person in your local area?

Didn't read the PDF, but I suspect the main problem is that not all "communities with downvotes" are the same. Some websites have downvotes where the downvoted comments are just as visible as the upvoted ones; so there is no punishment.

Not sure if the causality can't go the other way round: crazy people having more time to post comments. Or even that members are more tolerant to new crazy people and annoyed by them later (which causes the decrease of comment karma), while the crazy people gradually write more and more comments because they become more comfortable or have more open battles to fight.

The list makes for interesting ideas. Most of them seem good, but a few make we wonder about Paul Graham. Some of the ideas (e.g., Government) make me wonder if he's starting to drink his own cool-aid and it has caused him to forget everything he has learned along the way. With others (e.g., Diversity) one almost gets the impression that the SJ crowd is putting the screws on silicon valley and he has to at least through them some bone (the since deleted "Female Founders" essay reads similarly).

These are all crazy vague.

How does he know that he actually is in REM? How does he know it boosts his learning potential?

How does LSD help you get develop an ability to get to sleep faster? LSD makes one less sleepy, so this seems like an improbably ability to ascribe to it. But if it actually works, its a really useful ability.

You might want to try asking this question to a polyphasic sleeping community BTW.

He developed this

What is "this"? this ability?

Does he also get a full night's sleep? Eliminating other stages of sleep is almost certainly bad, but supplementing with REM seems to me unlikely to be bad.

People with narcolepsy basically only have REM sleep. Narcolepsy is very bad, but many people who eventually develop it seemed to have only had REM sleep when they were functional with no ill effects. In particular, they greatly benefit from naps (both before and after developing full-blown narcolepsy).

Consider other possible tradeoffs such as engaging in less leisure activities so you can take a part time job that will pay for cryonics, or saving money by reducing consumption.

Have you considered Term life insurance vs Whole-of-Life insurance? Salemen will try to push you towards the latter but the former can have much lower premiums (especially if your time horizon is < 40 years)

David Wallace's The Emergent Multiverse is an excellent introduction to the many-worlds interpretation, written by its best defender. Most of it should be accessible to a layperson, although there are technical sections. You can't use it to fully learn quantum mechanics from scratch, though. But if you learn the basic formalism from another textbook (I recommend this one; the first eight chapters should suffice) you'll be able to follow almost all of Wallace.

As for criticism, this is the best non-technical article I know of. It does presume some knowledge of quantum mechanics and many-worlds, but not deep technical knowledge.

We don't know what we want from AI, beyond obvious goals like survival. Mostly I think in terms of a perfect tutor that would bring us to its own level of intelligence before turning itself off. But quite possibly we don't want that at all. I recall some commenter here seemed to want a long-term ruler AI.

The promise of AI is irresistibly seductive because an FAI would make everything easier, including wireheading and survival.

I think it depends? People around here use utilitarianism to mean a few different things. I imagine that's the version talked about the most because the people involved in EA tend to be those types (since it's easier to get extra value via hacking if your most important values are something very specific and somewhat measurable). I think that might also be the usual philosopher's definition. But then Eliezer (in the metaethics sequence) used "utilitarianism" to mean a general approach to ethics where you add up all the values involved and pick the best outcome, regardless of what your values are and how you weight them. So it's sometimes a little confusing to know what utilitarianism means around here.

(Edited for spelling.)

If both FAIs use TDT or a comparable decision theory, then (under plausible assumptions), they will both maximize an aggregate of both civilizations' welfare.

It's not clear that territory that already has a FAI watching over it can be overtaken by another FAI. A FAI might expand to inhibit territory by sending small probes. I think those probes are unlikely to have any effect in territory already occupied by another FAI.

I'm also not sure to what extend you can call nodes of an FAI of the same origin that have millions of light years between them the same FAI.

If their ideas of friendliness are incompatible with each other, perhaps a conflict? Superintelligent war? It may be the case that one will be 'stronger' than the other, and that there will be a winner-take-all(-of-the-universe?) resolution?

If there is some compatibility, perhaps a merge, a la Three Worlds Collide?

Or maybe they co-operate, try not to interfere with each other? This would be more unlikely if they are in competition for something or other (matter?), but more likely if they have difficulties assessing risks to not co-operating, or if there is mutually assured destruction?

It's a fun question, but I mean, Vinge had that event horizon idea, about how fundamentally unpredictable things are for us mere humans when we're talking about hypothetical intelligences of this caliber, and I think he had a pretty good point on that. This question is taking a few extra steps beyond that, even.

Neither defects?

... Since I am, of course a FAI (Sarcasm!) I can tell you the answer to this. They obviously split the future time-streams of the universe by each committing instant civilization-wide suicide or not based on a quantum lottery. Anthropic engineering in this way ensures they do not have to fight each other at all, which would entail actual risk of people getting hurt,

No, seriously, you want us to take guesses at how weakly godlike entities are going to interact ? Pftrttfffff,mwhahahahahaahaaa.

This is how I read too, usually. I think it's one of those things that works better for some people but not others. I've tried reading things the standard way, and it works for some books, but for other books I just get too bored trudging through the boring parts.

BTW, I've also been reading HoTT, so if you want to talk about it or something feel free to message me!

On one hand, it's a good sign that you have a keen sense of what you need to know, how and where to look for it, and at what pace. On the other hand, authors who know more about a subject than you do must have had their reasons to choose the order in which they present their material. I'd say keep listening to your gut on what is important to read, but at least try to get acquainted with the other topics you're choosing not to go deeply into.

What would a separate section accomplish that couldn't be done by putting tags in posts/comments?

This seems to be LW's collected wisdom on the matter.

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Futility_of_chaos

Having a work ethic might help you accomplish more things than you would without one.

It's a good reputation boost. "A highly-skilled, hard-working x" might be more flattering than "a highly skilled x."

Work ethic might be a signal/facet of conscientiousness, a desirable trait in many domains.

It'll build habits that also make it easier to do things you want when not at work?

That's the big one. I have things I want to do, in far mode, and I find that diligence at work translates to diligence off work. Admittedly I also love my job, but...

I got about +30 as well, ad only a small amount is due to recent upvotes. And despite the jump, I'm out of the top 30-day contributors list, which I've been in and out of the bottom of for some weeks. The other names in that list are regulars there, so they must have got some upvotes also.

Perhaps some systematic downvoter had all his votes reversed?

My guess is that someone with a similar political ideology to you upvoted forty of your comments on the recent political post.

ETA: Well I've been struck by the mysterious mass-upvoter as well! I'm pretty sure the political motivation hypothesis is wrong now.

I've seen several unexpected increases on the order of 10 points over the last couple of weeks. (I don't remember the exact dates.) My guess was gradual undoing of prior mass-downvoting, but a Mystery Mass Upvoter is certainly another possibility.

[EDITED to add ...] A possible variant of the Mystery Mass Upvoter hypothesis: we have a Mystery Small-Mass Upvoter, who is upvoting old posts in Main (maybe because s/he is new here and reading through old material). But that only works if everyone affected has old posts in Main, which I don't think is the case.

My karma's been running higher than I expected, too.

I wish there was some way to track karma dif. So far as I know, there's no way to do it for older comments and posts.

So it's not just me? I also seemed to see something like that, but I assumed I just misremembered my previous 30-day karma score or something.

Indeed, it sounds like a bug. It might need direct fixing. Here, have a downvote. :-D

I am not sure about this, but seems to me that in both cases it is the same person. Only in scenario 2 we have two copies that start to diverge at that point; so they are both continuations of the old one, but are not the same as each other.

This does not have a good equivalent in our intuition, because we usually don't "branch" this way. But you can imagine a magic spell that creates two identical humans from you. Both are you, but from the moment of copying, they start evolving differently, so after some time it is just like two twins, having a shared memory from before that moment.

In both cases I'd say they're different persons.

I can see why a theory of consciousness that argues that you're not the atoms, but the pattern, wouldn't care whether that pattern is realized in meat or in silicon, but my subjective experience of continuity of memories is what confirms that I'm still me. Once you copy my mind with zero loss onto a digital, durable substrate, my original brain would still have strong objections to being switched off.

The first five chapters of Marker's Model Theory will satisfy

syntax and semantics for propositional and first-order classical logic

and some information about type theory in the context of model theory. I know it doesn't satisfy all of your requirements, but it is a seriously good book with an excellent learning curve. I took a semester course covering the first three chapters in undergrad. It almost convinced me to work in mathematical logic, but sadly economic incentives trumped aesthetic ones.

This is the textbook we used in graduate school, and it is very good. Not sure if this is what you were referring to as "Computation and Logic". It covers second order logic, but not intuitionistic logic as far as I can remember.

we still have no idea...

No, this is an unmitigated triumph. It's amazing how people take such a negative view of this.

So let me get this straight: over the past few decades we have slowly moved from a viewpoint where Gould is a saint, intelligence doesn't exist and has no predictive value since it's a racist made-up concept promoted by incompetent hacks and it has no genetic component and definitely nothing which could possibly differ between any groups at all, to a viewpoint where the validity of intelligence tests in multiple senses have been shown, the amount of genetic contribution has been accurately estimated, the architecture nailed down as highly polygenic & additive, the likely number of variants, and we've started accumulating the sample size to start detecting variants, and not just have we detected 60+ variants with >90% probability* (see the remarks on the Bayesian posterior probability in the supplementary material), we even have 3 which pass the usual (moronic, arbitrary, unjustified) statistical-significance thresholds - and wait, there's more, they also predict IQ out of sample and many of the implicated variants are known to relate to the central nervous system! - and this is a disappointment where 'we still have no idea' and the findings are 'maddeningly small' with 'inconclusive findings'?

* which imply you can predict much better than the article's calculation of 1.8 points

You've got to be kidding me. Or is this how zeitgeists change? They get walked back step by step and people pretend nothing has changed? When the tests are shown to be unbiased and predictive, we stop talking about them; when the twin studies show in every variant genetic influences on intelligence, we talk about how very difficult causal inference is and how twin studies can go wrong; when genetics comes up, suddenly everyone is discussing how nonadditive and gene-environment effects will make identification impossible (never mind that there's no reason to expect them to be large parts of the genetics); when good genetic candidates are found which don't pass arbitrary thresholds, that's taken as evidence they don't exist and genetic influence is irrelevant; and when enough samples are taken to satisfy that, then each of the hits is now deprecated as small and irrelevant? And the changes and refutations quietly go down the memory hole. 'Of course some of intelligence is genetic, everyone knows that - but all the variants are small, so really, this changes nothing at all.'

No, the Rietveld papers this year and last were historic triumphs. The theory has been as proven as it needs to be. The fundamental points no longer need to be debated - the debate is over. In some respects, it's now a pretty boring topic.

All that's left is engineering and application: getting enough samples to infer the rest to sufficiently high posterior probabilities to make good-enough predictions, and exploiting new possibilities like embryo-selection.

Some forms of Markdown do, but not LW's AFAIK. If you're patient, you can use the Latex formatting to do subscripts.

Why do you think that Sailer post is worthy of attention? It doesn't add much useful information or analysis, it's almost relentlessly unpleasant (consistently referring to Rothblatt with a pronoun she has disavowed and mocking her gender identification), and many of the comments are simply heinous ("Martine’s “wife” is black, which means that he was too socially awkward to find an attractive woman."). Also, the comparison of transhumanism and Scientology is pretty silly.