Open Thread: August 2009

Worth a top level post.

I think this is a great idea.

I'm aware of one simple technology which uses spaced repetition (items you remember or "get correct" taking longer to reappear, for optimal learning), is pre-existing and would be easy to use, which is that of flash card programs. There are a number of free ones out there, two of the best that I found are: Mnemosyne and Anki. I have been using Anki for about half a year now for learning vocabulary (largely for the GRE) and am very happy with it, wish I had discovered such programs earlier.

While they're pre-existing and easy to use (and to share and add "cards"), two imperfections stand out. First, I'm not aware of any functionality that lets you actually select an answer. You could look at the question and possible answers and then pick one mentally, but the "answer side" couldn't be customized to the selection you made. Secondly, you of course wouldn't be able to calibrate the questions to your level as the program won't know what you answered. You're able to select to repeat an item very soon, or after short, medium or long intervals (relative to how many times you've answered correctly, by your own scoring), but it's not quite the same.

I might be wrong and some existing flash card program might allow for the selection of answers. Or perhaps more promising Anki is open-source, so perhaps with only a bit of work we could build a quiz-version.

It was Thanksgiving dinner that sealed it. My husband bowed his head humbly and said, “I’m thankful for my family.”

He was back.

And I saw what had been missing: pride. He’d lost pride in himself.

If I were that husband, I'd have tried to save my pride even if it meant abandoning the family, because once your pride is taken from you, it's only a matter of time before all the other good things in your life get taken as well.

http://code.reddit.com/ticket/449

I don't feel the need, because I can re-edit immediately and easily.

The first example I thought of is a level where people are drowning, and you need to choose who to save first, or possibly which method to use to try to save them, in order to maximize the total number of people saved.

I do competitive lifeguarding (possibly the world's weirdest recreational activity) and there is actually an event like this, called Priority Assessment or PA. Your team walks in and finds an area of the pool with a bunch of people drowning (for a team of 4 rescuers, usually it's about 12 victims.) The scoresheets are set up so that you get more points for rescuing the victims who are more likely to survive–i.e. non-swimmers and injured swimmers have a much higher point multiplier than unconscious, submerged victims. PA involves a lot of strategy–it's not always the teams of fast swimmers that win, although that helps. There is an optimal strategy, which has to be worked out in advance because it's a two-minute event.

I've been thinking about educational games as well. The main problem, it seems to me, is that trying to make learning fun for someone who isn't already interested and motivated is a waste of time because you're just trying to hide the teaching under a sugarcoating of computer game, and that never works. On the other hand trying to make learning fun for someone who is already interested and motivated is pointless, because they already want to learn and the game just adds needless hassle like completing levels in order to reach the next piece of knowledge, or whatever game mechanic you're using. It's a pity, because I think of the way games like Portal build up complex puzzles from simpler ones and use the level itself to ask the player leading questions, like a kind of visual/spatial socratic method, and I think there must be a way to use that to teach, espiecally mathematics where visual/spatial metaphors could easily translate into mathematical metaphors... but I just can't come up with a concrete version of the idea that wouldn't be boring or stupid.

Lately I've been thinking that the fastest way to get to grips with a new subject is probably just to memorise big chunks of information without trying to understand it, using techniques like a memory palace and spaced learning programs like Mnemosyne and Anki, then think about what you've learned later, and insight might strike you. This would be espiecally effective if you combined it with a social precommitment to teach your knowledge to someone else, or to take part in a competitive quiz.

I'd suggest making it so you get scored by the number of people you save, but the game is long enough that luck doesn't make a difference.

I wonder if it would be a good idea to give it multiple scores. For example, lives saved, life-years saved, quality-adjusted life-years saved, etc.. This way, you won't have as many problems with people disagreeing with the scoring system.

Alternately, you could just have it so you could change the scoring mode in the options part. It would also act somewhat as a difficulty setting. It would get harder when you have to weigh a destitute child, who will live longer, vs. a middle-class adult, who will be happier.

Reading that, it occurred to me that in all the computer games I've played, it is possible to totally succeed. Kill every monster, pick up every piece of treasure, solve every puzzle, gain the perfect score. (I have not actually played all that many, but I also read some of the games press and it seems to be the usual case.) Even the old arcade games fit the pattern: you can't win them, only endure as long as possible, but until then your goal is to impeccably handle every challenge that comes at you.

Are there any games in which this is deliberately made impossible? For example, PeerInfinity's suggestion of trying to save drowning people, in a scenario that makes it impossible to save all of them (and which is varied every time you play the game, so you can't simply search out the optimal walk-through). Military operations in a city, fighting door-to-door, with innocent civilians everywhere whose lives matter in game terms.

Indeed, as Psy-Kosh suggests, that's a LW original.

Perhaps it would have helped if Eliezer had used waapuro-style romanization, or modified Hepburn, as is right and proper (when kana are not acceptable).

IIRC, that one isn't imported but is an LW original and was never on OB. I don't think I've seen such artifacts on any of the imported posts that I've looked at anyways.

I think Flow is one of the most important ideas to have come out of psychology. My hypothesis for why it's not more widely known is that the creator's name is so difficult to spell and pronounce.

My belief is that the learning part of your brain sends a signal to the decision-making part, when the former is experiencing a type of stimulus that is highly learnable. That signal is treated by the decision making part in the same way as a more typically pleasant signal (food, sex, etc) would be. Flow is thus an evolutionary adaptation that makes us seek experiences that help us learn more rapidly (the underlying assumption being that not all stimuli are equally learnable).

I think Flow is pretty good as a theory of fun, or as a theory of fun-from-learning. Flow is the best way to learn. The problem is that not all ideas can be learned in a way that meets the Flow criteria (rapid feedback, ability to experiment, clear goals, challenge keyed to ability level). So the interesting questions in my view are how to rephrase learning problems in such a way that one can enter Flow states when approaching those problems.

A few years ago I had developed a theory of game playing and low pressure social group interaction which starts at a similar place as Koster's. I was able to take that starting point about play and patterns and produce empirically testable hypotheses with formal mathematical models of what is happening during play.

And then I stopped working on it because I couldn't seem to get across the concept that learning and fun might be related well enough. Now that I've had a chance to read his book, I might have to reconsider.

meh. The "say something maximally offensive" game is nothing new, and I'm not sure there's a lot to be gained here.

Could this be made into an actually playable game? How many sessions could you play and still have a social circle?

Once it starts getting personal, it's all over. A game I used to play with my friends was just debating random propositions (I once defended with considerable success the proposition that puppies are tender and delicious.) I think this was as useful simply to see what pleased the onlookers the most, and there was little chance that someone might say something like 'John's acne is truly grotesque'. How many non-personal, awful truths does anyone know, or could people agree on?

Mathematics

Its the foundation for everything else I want to learn. I don't know why I didn't major in it- other than concerns for a paycheck.

"subject area" defined as anything offered as a degree by a respectable university

Hard to choose between Science and Math, but I'll take Math.

Hey, B.Sc is a degree, right?

Marketing

Biology, specifically brain-related neurosci.

I never could get far studying it because of the immense squick factor, but if I could just KNOW all of it via genie, the squick ought to go away because then it'd be just so much brain bits. Kind of like how intimidating complex and austere symbols become just regular greek letters after learning to read math.

I want to know foreign languages, especially Japanese, but I find them much harder to learn than other things, due to the sheer amount of brute force memorization required to learn vocabulary.

The other thing I would consider is this.

This example is in no way intended to imply that women are less worthy of the right to be attacked by genies. Neither is it intended to imply that there could never be a female genie. That would be stupid. Where else could baby genies come from?

You're solving the wrong problem by including this asterisk. It's easy to just call the genie "it" - which you already did above - and pick a different action - "rip off your arms" would work as well.

For personal interest, neuroscience (and the genie would wave his wand, and I would be V. Ramachandran). For benefit to society, probably genetics (or do colleges offer degrees in AI?)

I'd also like to see if I could use the genie to answer one of the great questions of the ages. I guess it all depends on how the "expert" thing is implemented. For example, if the genie created a great expert in quantum mechanics, would the expert simply know and understand facts about quantum mechanics, or would they also be such an expert as to have the correct opinion on the Copenhagen vs. many worlds question? After all, Tom did say "an expert equivalent to the greatest mind today", and there are minds that are pretty sure they know the answer to that question, so the mind that has the correct opinion on it must be greater than an equivalent mind that doesn't. That means if I wake up and find myself believing Many Worlds, I have very strong evidence that Many Worlds is correct.

If I thought that plan would work, I'd probably choose Philosophy. I might get kicked in the 'nads, but for the chance to have genie-approved answers all the great philosophical questions at once, it'd be worth it.

I'd pick neurology, assuming that doesn't cause my brain to implode.

I would go for whatever could make me the most money with the pure skill that they teach in school. In most professions, it seems like you need either some talent at sales or self-promotion or just luck to be successful, in addition to whatever skill you supposedly have. I think that maybe being the world's greatest computer engineer or something like that would probably get you paid millions without having do much other than be amazing at what you do.

My initial thinking was cardiac surgeon or something like that, but on further reflection I think that is about the worst choice possible. You have this amazing skill, but what do you do with it? Do you have to go to medical school and get easy As before you can get licensed to use it? That would really suck.

I'd have to agree with "math", given that the ability granted includes not just comprehensive knowledge, but extreme ability to make novel important and fundamental discoveries in the field.

(How is babby genie formed? (Sorry, couldn't resist))

Does this apply only to theoretical expertise, or could I choose (say) vocal music and then totally win on American Idol?

Thanks, if this is what you're saying it is, it's something I've been looking for. :-)

I think we can fairly easily come up with examples of things that are regarded as attractive in some cultures and not others.

For example, tanned skin. Back in the "olden days" in Europe, pale skin was considered the ideal. The much-desired "fair maiden" in old tales is literally one with light-colored skin that is kept out of the sun so it doesn't tan. Today, in the U.S. at least, skin with a slightly bronze tan is often considered the ideal.

This may or may not have to do with social class. Prior to industrialization, lower class people would be tanned from working outside on farms, while higher class people (nobility, etc.) could stay inside and keep their skin nice and pale. Once poor people switched from working on farms to working in indoor factories, they, too, had pale skin, while the wealthier could afford to waste time sitting in the sun getting a tan. "Find signals of high status attractive" might be a genetically influenced trait (I'd be surprised if it weren't) but genes don't seem to determine exactly how people signal high status.

Plenty of behavior has genetic influences, but people learn an awful lot from their environment, too. When a dog is trained to roll over on command, is that a genetic behavior? If it is, then so is everything and it becomes a meaningless category.

If preference for large breasts was genetic, surely there might be a family somewhere with some mutation which would prefer small breasts. Do we have any evidence of that?

Brain-coding phenomena like sexual preferences seem to be built from large collections of genes that are interconnencted with other systems, such that there aren't many possible mutations that would undo the feature without wreaking havoc elsewhere in the phenotype as well.

In fact, the universality of such preferences across neurologically intact humans is evidence that they come from Paleogenes rather than memes or fresh genes, either of which can more easily be altered without deleterious effects elsewhere.

http://the10000yearexplosion.com/

The 10000 year Explosion shows very good evidence that this isn't quite true; many significant genetic adaptations are indeed far more recent and have been developping faster since the end of the Paleolithic.

It's also an enjoyable read.

A very common belief here is that most human behaviour is based on Paleolithic genes, and only trivial variations are cultural (memetic), coming from fresh genes, or from some other sources.

...

If preference for large breasts was genetic, surely there might be a family somewhere with some mutation which would prefer small breasts. Do we have any evidence of that?

Maybe there is also disagreement about what is and isn't a trivial variation.

If preference for large breasts was genetic, surely there might be a family somewhere with some mutation which would prefer small breasts. Do we have any evidence of that?

On the other hand, do we have disconfirming evidence? (Would we expect to have noticed?)

Sure:

"All conventional theories of cultural evolution, of the origin of humans, and what makes us so different from other species. All other theories explaining the big brain, and language and tool use and all these things that make us unique, are based upon genes. Language must have been useful for the genes. Tool use must have enhanced our survival, mating and so on. It always comes back, as Richard Dawkins complained all that long time ago, it always comes back to genes.

The point of memetics is to say, "Oh no it doesn't." There are two replicators now on this planet. From the moment that our ancestors, perhaps two and a half million years ago or so, began imitating, there was a new copying process. Copying with variation and selection. A new replicator was let loose" [...] - Sue Blackmore.

So I suspect memes might be much more important relative to Paleogenes than we tend to assume.

I agree with this.

I've only just heard of PCT, so I don't know if this is familiar to everyone already, or whether it's what the PCT people had in mind all along and I'm just the last to find out, but it seems to me that PCT explains, if not the how, then at least the why of consciousness. If all actions arise from errors against a model, then the upper layers of human decision-making would consist of a simulated person living in a simulated world, which is indeed what we seem to be.

PCT?

Ask the person questions you know they will lie about and watch their body language very closely. Compare it with their body language when you know they are telling the truth or relaxed. Then when you see signs of the lying body language in future, probe further and see if you can uncover the lie.

My favourite way of doing this isn't even with deception. I use a bit of PUA-style material as follows:

"Hey, I've known you a while now, I reckon I can guess a few facts about you. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to come up with four facts about yourself, but one of them has to be a LIE. Tell me them in any order and I'll see if I can spot the lie. It will be fun, and you'll learn something about yourself!" etc. etc.

People love this kind of thing (because it's about themselves), and they love thinking that you have special powers or an intimate psychic connection with them. Of course, most people on LW would see it as a challenge to mislead me into choosing the wrong lie, but that's not usually what happens in my experience.

It doesn't matter if you don't spot the lie, because if you're paying attention to their body language throughout the whole conversation, you should pick up plenty of their ticks and be able to associate them with particular emotions. You can invert the idea with anchoring too, if you know what you're doing. If you anchor a particular gesture or touch to when they are open and honest with you then you can use it later when you want them to answer truthfully.

It's never a case of people having a single fixed truth-telling body language and a single fixed lying body language, but that when they're lying they subconsciously change something in how they appear. It's "spot the odd one out" which makes the lie easy to spot.

Then there's stuff like looking into the a top corner when trying to remember something. If you ask someone three difficult memory questions and they look into the top left corner for two of them but then look off to the middle-lower right for the other, you can be pretty confident that the odd one out in this case is because they aren't even bothering to try to remember, but are immediately fabricating their answer.

I'm not sure if that was the kind of response you were after. I'm fairly new to these techniques, but I've already found them remarkably effective for cold reading. It's fun, you feed the person an input (question, statement, whatever), and watch very closely at the body language. Rinse and repeat, getting a better feel for their subconscious responses each time. Then you use these to your/their advantage. Ha!

I model motivations and personality too, but I use the body language tricks to speed it up.

I originally wasn't going to reply because I'm not entirely sure if it's a good idea for other people to adopt my strategy, but my name has been uttered, so I'll give it a shot.

What strategies do you people who aren't me have to detect lies?

I have no strategy directly aimed at detecting lies. I notice when someone's statement seems to contradict something I already believe, and I notice when someone's statement seems just plain wacky. I tend not to believe those statements, unless the preexisting belief they contradict is equally unsupported (which means I don't care much about the subject and might as well be agreeable with whoever I'm talking to), or I have an extended friendship with and favorable insight into the ethics and intellect of the speaker (so I think they'd be especially unlikely to lie to me or be mistaken), or I seek additional information and find the statement confirmed by legitimate-looking other sources (which I do when I care about the subject a great deal, regardless of my opinion of the likelihood of lying/mistake). But other than that, I'm a very trusting person.

The lies and errors that slip through this admittedly unsophisticated web of detection are usually caught when I permit myself to become loudly curious, which happens whenever I care about a subject. (It matters very little to me if I have false beliefs on subjects that are of no importance to me). Your average liar cannot tolerate extensive, earnest questioning about the details of the situation about which they have lied, even if there are legitimate-looking sources which back them up. When this inquisition turns up a falsehood, I typically operate under the assumption that it was a mistake rather than a deliberate attempt at deception; this seems to make most people less likely to resent me, and is probably true much of the time anyway.

I can't really parse what you said above, nor do I know what you mean by "a verbal person". What do you mean by "mental hijacking", and in what context are you asking about detecting lies?

I don't think I'm usually in a situation where I should expect someone might be lying to me.

Good question. I hope you get a few more answers, and I particularly hope Alicorn comments on this, since she's also autistic but seems to have a different strategy for dealing with people than I do. Here's my first approximation, which may not be completely accurate:

For intentional lies, simply keeping track of what they've said in the past, and the implications of what they've said, works well. Many people don't have the kind of memory to be able to be completely consistent with their lies even without taking the implications into account, and keeping the implications of any kind of significant lie consistent with both reality and itself over time is practically impossible. Not every instance of that is a lie, of course - people also tend to change their minds or find new information and not explicitly state that - but it's a good warning sign.

Figuring out that there's a flaw in what someone truly believes is harder, and a more common issue. My strategy is to find the base assumptions that their view rests on, and evaluate those for truth. (This also sometimes works on intentional lies, though with those it's often true that there are no underlying assumptions - which is another clue that something's wrong.) Generally, at least one assumption will be questionable, which is okay - I just have to evaluate that assumption in each situation before I consider taking advice based on it. If one of the underlying assumptions is obviously false, or questionable, I consider the advice suspect.

Both of those strategies feel similar to what you described, so you might be able to figure out how to do them. I can do what you described, but not often; it seems to conflict with being verbal.

homomorphic encryption

homomorphism

holomorphic function

Nope.

Total utility has obvious problem - it's only meaningful to talk about relative utilities so where do we put zero? (as it's completely arbitrary)

• If zero is very low, then total utility maximization = make as many people as possible
• If zero is very high, then total utility maximization = it's kill everyone
• If zero is average utility, then total utility maximization = doesn't matter what you do

None of the three make any sense whatsoever.

Not really, but moral philosophers already have, at length.

What you "should" do depends on what your goal is.

Most biological organisms don't maximise either of your proposed functions - their utility function is down to how many great grandchildren they have - not how many people they help.

What prevents a consequentialist from accepting various hypothetical conditions arguendo and working out their consequences?

I'd consider it a possibly bad idea to actually do so, what with the known cognitive biases that might skew future decision making; but accepting arguendo that a particular consequentialist has overcome these biases, I can't see a reason for her to refuse to consider least-convenient-world scenarios.

I doubt there actually are any strict consequentialists (or strict deontologists for that matter). E.g., would anyone be in favour of not punishing failed murder attempts?

To me, consequentialism/deontology always seem like post-hoc explanations of our not all too rational moral intuitions -- useful to describe the 'moral rules playing field', but not saying very much about who people really decide how to act.

The consequentialist can't Know the consequences of the actions, but he can list the likely possibilities and assign probabilities and error bars to the consequences. If there's no difference in probability between the more and less desirable consequence, or if the difference is well within the error bars, then there's no way to determine whether the action is right or wrong using consequentialist morality.

For instance, if there's a 50/50 chance torture will give you the answer, there's no way to make the right choice. If it's 60/40 with +-30 error bars, you still can't make a right choice (though the maximum error bar overlap is a matter of personal moral configuration). But if it's 70/30 with +-5 error bars, a consequentialist can make a choice.

This is, of course, complicated by the fact that we're loaded with cognitive biases that will lead most people to make probability mistakes in a "ticking bomb" situation, and guessing error bars is equally a difficult skill to master. That, and most real situations aren't simple dilemmas, but intractable quagmires of cascading consequences.

Even apart from apparent mind-killing properties of this proposal, I don't think it's reasonable. First, it's unnecessary: if you expect the probability of a positive intelligence explosion to go up even a little bit as a result of your donation, the crazy positive utility of the outcome compensates for the donation. If you don't think the donation affects the outcome, don't donate. Second, implementation of some compensation mechanism is an ad-hoc rule that isn't necessarily possible to attach to the AI's goals in a harmless way, so you can't promise that it will be done. Also, if something of the kind is really a good idea, FAI should be able to implement it regardless of what you promise now, without tweaking of its goals.

Um, he's still emphatically not a moral relativist as usually understood; don't you remember the metaethics sequence? The conclusion that

(A) morality is essentially anthropomorphic rather than universal,

doesn't imply that

(B) we should become indifferent to the content of that morality.

ISTM that strict philosophical definitions of moral relativism tend to center on A, but that most of the conversation around moral relativism assumes it means B.

Eliezer has declared CFAI obsolete. Try CEV, it's much clearer, though not entirely clear yet.

(Treating this as a survey; I am not speaking for LW.)

What do you consider to be the "self"? Your physical body, your subconscious and conscious processes combined, consciousness, or something else?

I am currently implemented on many layered systems whose existence in those particular forms is not logically necessary, but we don't know the details of those systems enough to know how much of "me" is in each of them.

Also, do you consider your "past selves" and "future selves" to be part of a whole with your "present self," and to what extent?

Do I consider the tree falling with no one to hear it to make a sound?

For an example of why the distinction might be important, let's say that one night, you sleepwalk and steal a thousand dollars. This is the first time something like this has happened. Of course, society will hold you accountable for your actions, but how will you assign the blame in your head? E.g. "I'm such a horrible person" vs. "That pesky subconscious! Always up to no good!"

"My implementation is buggy."

Both of your examples are incorrect assignment, and the reality is somewhere in the middle. You-which-are-thinking-about-it did not choose the action, but that "you" is in the best position to affect the future behavior and are therefore responsible — insofar as there is any knowledge of how — for reducing the chance it will happen again.

You are offered a deal in which you will live in earthly paradise for 10 years, but at the end of that ten years, you will be tortured in way so that your future self will regret accepting. Do you accept the deal?

There is always a delay between cause and effect. I choose nothing except to have its effects later. Given the particular condition, "your future self will regret accepting", I must reject it now.

I would help them deconstruct their notion of the "right" size of a heap in terms of prime numbers, and then I would do all that other nice stuff for them, while leaving them to build the heaps of pebbles themselves, since they seem to enjoy it so much.

I think it's obvious which would be more right. But the real question is, which would be more prime?

Is there some reason I can't do all of the above?

I'd like a description of reshuffling more detailed than "stuff gets reshuffled".

This page and this page offer some information, although neither is as good as the relevant chapter of B:CP. (Also, the second of those two pages is missing spaces at times, apparently due to a botched conversion from some non-HTML format.)

Where can I read more about perceptual control theory?

At the links I posted here. I also recommend Bill Powers' books 1, 2, 3. (Note: I wrote the appendix to the last of those and so get a small proportion of the royalties. Buy a copy and buy me my next designer coffee!)

It looks to me like garden-variety armchair speculation and argument from personal anecdote.

Instead of vaguely asking people to go read some, why couldn't we do something more concrete? What we know gets traffic, and what everyone knows that everyone knows gets traffic (so you aren't pouring the water of your comments onto the sands of an abandoned page), is being on the front page. Instant traffic, entree into RSS feeds, etc.

Why not every 2 days without a fresh front page post, for example, automatically post the next old EY article? (I suggested this back when EY's old articles were being imported, but my suggestion was unjustly neglected, I felt; perhaps the need has become more apparent since.)

That's not really needed, I think. Since a simple way to do that is to just notice which ones you tend to reference/search for most, and simply upvote as you happen to have need of them, right?

What's going to happen, regardless of how people rate, is that people will read the articles that get lots of links. People who come directly from google will read what has lots of links, whether internal or external. People who become regulars here will read what gets linked to from contemporary LW articles. Some small number of new regulars will use the ratings to decide what to read, but most of them won't do that until after they read a bunch that were linked recently.

I'm not sure there's a point to modding up old posts. While threaded comments on old posts might benefit from moderation to help drive-by viewers, I don't see how ratings on old posts are beneficial to anyone (aside from trying to overflow EY's karma).

In a word, no. Rationality can't tell you what to like, it can only tell you how to get it once you know it.

If you had clearly defined criteria for what good music is, you could use reason along with these criteria to select music efficiently. Reason can't tell you what the criteria are.