Aussiekas

Karma: 11

Aussiekas 7 May 2014 23:55 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: Aussiekas’s comment on: Sortition—Hacking Government To Avoid Cognitive Biases And Corruption
Wow, note to self, never reply to comments not directly relating to the idea or adding to the conversation or seek to argue definitions. Will this get me negative karma too? I stand by my reply. If you refuse a jury then you also refuse to participate in your democracy out of individually selfish motives. Is that a wrong analysis to think the person who comes up with some excuse is doing so to benefit themselves and that the knock on effects of that are a negative indicator for democracy?

Tapping out.

Aussiekas 7 May 2014 23:46 UTC
−1 points
on: Sortition—Hacking Government To Avoid Cognitive Biases And Corruption
Ok, so aside from presentation and procedure, I haven’t seen any objections to the idea of splitting up the three stages of government based decision making to better align itself with wide accepted proposals on LW to reduce cognitive bias in the modern practice of Science.

Takeaway message, use more dark arts or better frame arguments.

I don’t care at all about the details here. That would have to be hashed out by the people in question to come up with they think is a fair system. The central idea I was considering would be the effect of removing elections, removing donor dependency removing re-election concerns, and in general accounting for cognitive biases in a democracy while taking into account more people’s opinions.

I also wanted to challenge people’s thinking by getting them to consider if they actually believe in democracy. I think far fewer people really believe in it. They think the average person is too dumb or they think smart people should be in charge. They think the seeming inevitability of corruption negates any system improvement in a defeatist attitude. Belief in democracy is low amongst most everyone I’ve met in life. They want leaders, they want inspiration, they want propaganda, and they want someone else to take care of running and thinking about government. This separate and only tenuously connected system of government and its people is not what I would think of as democracy. I think we have redefined the term so that what we are doing right now IS democracy, no matter what it is that we are doing. We refuse to collectively consider what it would mean if we are NOT living in a democracy.

I think we can improve things I think we can eliminate sources of bias by design. I think sortition can accomplish a lot of those goals by eliminating the majority of incentives and avenues for corruption which exist today. I think more people can be more involved in democracy, I think the government can be two fingers on the wrist of the people measuring their pulse, and I think that is a good thing. I don’t think we can tinker around the edges and remove money based or influence based corruption from a system of democracy reliant on electoral systems. More regular general referendums will invovle people and get them thinking about government. It need not be someone else’s job for us to rule ourselves, that is internally inconsistent outside of a world of perfect trust in elected career politicians. I don’t have that trust that they will be beholden to the people. I’d guess most people agree that that is not currently the case as judged by public opinion polls of trust in government (citation, meh)

if the problem is corruption and poor demographics with too many rich white men and not enough of anyone else and we are not attached forever and ever to the idea of elections = democracy. Then perhaps we can abandon or at least consider alternatives to the electoral system. I think sortition takes into account biases. I think that by having large enough central committee to pass legislation, it acts as a small version of the general referendum to capture the will of the people. What is the point of calling a system democracy if it is incapable of capturing or going along with the will of the people? If we need smarter, better, faster, more informed, super leaders to decide things for us and hold back the excesses of the people, to have our betters constrain, control, and limit the will of the people...then that is not democracy except through redefining the therm. And it is what we have today and most western countries with elections, massive private influence through wealth, power, and political parties. And I thought we were not supposed to win arguments by redefining terms :)

Cheers!

Aussiekas 7 May 2014 23:20 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Sortition—Hacking Government To Avoid Cognitive Biases And Corruption
People who skip out on jury duty—people who don’t believe or want to engage in their democratic government and want to live in a fascist world run by dumb people. Not rational on a large scale, only rational in putting Ayn Rand style capitalistic individuality first. Ignores and derides collectivist cultures and people who place value over democracy above personal profit for not being just like them.

If we’re being snarky! ;)

Aussiekas 7 May 2014 23:17 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Sortition—Hacking Government To Avoid Cognitive Biases And Corruption
Alas a copy and paste job. And while fonts do matter, I am not in the camp of people who care. In the future I’ll try to remember to use the site specific font. I hardly ever notice fonts at all unless they are horribly unintelligible like cursive writing or custom fonts for advertisements.

Aussiekas 7 May 2014 23:16 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Sortition—Hacking Government To Avoid Cognitive Biases And Corruption
I am fully aware of how things happen in the real world. I know of the corruption and loopholes and work arounds which have been established to degrade democracy and to address issues some 300 year old document could never have predicted.

I would negate their power to do more than continue to propose legislation. There would be no standing law making committee to write laws. They would have a very short turn around time and measures could be taken to prevent special access from being created. The SC’s have no reason to listen to the Chamber of Commerce. They need no election funds or advertisements and they will not serve more than one term. I’m attempting to engineer a real world solution to design out the causes and motivations for legislators to engage with special interest groups.

Also the executive will have less influence in this system. It is the role of that branch to enforce laws and deal with international concerns. Not to write laws. It would be a good thing if that branch were less involved in legislation.

Aussiekas 7 May 2014 23:12 UTC
0 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Sortition—Hacking Government To Avoid Cognitive Biases And Corruption
Abbreviations shorten the text, many posts on LW use them.

I have thought out the political implications and my desire was to design a system which has less of a place for politics. The void for politics to fill in how we conduct ourselves could be reduced intentionally.

The top level of government reads the bill and the call for a bill. If it doesn’t match up with the focus of the call, then they can vote it down. Alternately the mid level issue committee could serve as a buffer to read proposed legislation before voting in a simple majority to pass it up to the top level of government.

Expert selection addressed in other comment.

This is a description of the legislative system only. I have the executive and judiciary outlined in my link and did not wish to discuss them and their system interplay here.

Sure, there can be a constitution with super authority which is difficult to modify. Again, excluded for brevities sake.

Perhaps I’ve confused about the journal citation industry. Certainly the journal can screen their pool of peer reviewers, but there will still be one. I suppose it was overstrong to imply a forced level of complying with peer review requests...but there is an implicit one. If a professor always declines to review papers, then they wont be asked again by the journal as it becomes a waste of time. It is also better as there is a pool of reviewers and the researchers are removed from that choice. The researcher cannot choose who reviews their article, in that sense there is a type of low-enforcement level sortition from a limited pool of candidates in place.

How random citizens are selected is addressed above. They must be in the normal range for intelligence, with a cut off on the low end, pick an IQ point like 75 or 80 based on a running average and some fixed standard deviation away from that average. Severe intellectual disabilities such as down-syndrome or psychosis can be initially excluded from the selection pool so that they are not constantly being screened out. I mean severe when I meant severe, something everyone could agree upon.

They would work from a specially designed computer system for communicating and voting. Could it be hacked or compromised, sure...but so could nuclear missile launch codes.

I want them to read the laws of course! I never said they shouldn’t. The top level people in the C2 would have staff to help them organize their schedules and such. The IC/SC would create summaries of the issue brief calling for a law, the sub-committee would also create a brief of the proposed legislation. There is less worry of underhanded tricks and total crap being put into laws as no one has any constituents or donors to service. These are far more impartial and less invested citizens. The C2 is like a mini-referendum. They are a capture of what people would think if they took time to evaluate each proposed law. I want it to be that way to avoid corruption and bias on several levels. The people voting on the law didn’t write it and have no investment in it passing or not, bias is removed at this step. They are less likely to have systemic corruption issues as they do not court donors or voters. They are to act as the average citizen would and individually matter very little. There are at least a thousand of them. They simply vote the way they want to and all the results are tallied up to take a measure of the collective will of the people. They are more sensitive to the will of the people as they are not removed from their communities. They live in their regular house and do not travel out of state to engage in full time politicking. I argue they are better connected to the real world than someone tied to the narrow and myopic range of ‘voter issues’ or campaign nonsense where single issues are compressed down to easy to understand sound bites.

Not sure what you mean by NSA. The C2 or the executive (not described how here) can reject a bill, if the majority, perhaps 60% of the C2 have a secondary vote, then it can go to a broad referendum for all citizens to consider. Essentially the mini-referendum group of the C2 is shown to be not sensitive enough to measure the will of the people and a wider referendum is needed on such contentious issues.

Cheers!

Aussiekas 7 May 2014 22:52 UTC
0 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Sortition—Hacking Government To Avoid Cognitive Biases And Corruption
Indeed, probably too much in my own head. This was a first attempt at explaining a system I understood and not enough consideration was given.

I could have put those notes at the bottom as post scripts once someone had a half decent understanding of the system. Indeed, I stuffed up between random and regular citizen, they are about the same thing in my mind, as they don’t need to have any qualification.

It was a lengthy step I skipped to describe how they were chosen. Basically a person needs to be within the normal range for intelligence to be an Regular/Random Citizen selected for any level of government. Going into a thousand and one possibilities about what that means seems silly. This is a draft based around my wanted to explore sortition, not a ready to go system which is meant to be adopted.

Same goes for experts. They will be either leaders of industry or PhD’s in their field. All related disciplines for a given field will register upon completion of a PhD. Take for instance agriculture. Scientists from various fields from food policy to soil science to agricultural ecology would be put into the pool of candidates available for expert selection.

I think the short term sub-committes who write laws are more akin to juries in terms of the time they serve. Others are more like being drafted into military service at the higher levels. Unlike an actual draft where huge percentages of the population are effected, this is only a few thousand people, many of whom would probably earn more money working in the legislative. Those who wouldn’t earn more...well there is some price to living in a democracy, I never said personal interest or pure capitalism at the expense of freedom was a good idea or a huge part of this proposed system. Just like in military service, job positions will be held for the person while they serve.

They are paid, they cannot refuse to serve unless they can show extreme hardship to their interests. The highest level who vote on laws stay where they are, but get staff. They’d rent out an office for three years and have some helpers, just like congresspeople in the US right now have staff.

Aussiekas 6 May 2014 10:18 UTC
0 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Sortition—Hacking Government To Avoid Cognitive Biases And Corruption
Indeed, while I am into my own world of designing a system; I certainly never meant to imply the idea was original. Sortition was one of the original methods of expanding democracy to larger settlements, towns, and cities when direct democracy with full participation became infeasible due to there being too many people. It still has a place in many systems around the world from juries to grand juries which can indict people for crimes and investigate. For whatever reason it seems to have held on in the realm of justice more than in legislative or executive/military parts of government.

Aussiekas 6 May 2014 10:15 UTC
0 points
in reply to: ’s comment on: Sortition—Hacking Government To Avoid Cognitive Biases And Corruption
Ah, yes it was. Thanks. Fixed now.

Aussiekas 5 May 2014 22:50 UTC
0 points
on: Arguments and relevance claims
IAWYC, but...

I would posit that the original conversation’s discussion was too shallow. There is an opportunity cost in analysing or delving into every conversation to an extreme depth to root out the exact definition nodes or evidence being questioned to the point of resolving it. With shorter conversations of more implied meaning and less explicit meaning, there is a tendency for both sides to walk away feeling triumphant. Also there is a thread where any negative point ‘scored’ against and argument somehow invalidates the entire point.

I’d argue overcoming these and making the conversation productive and serving the utility of future confusion or disagreement that a deeper and more thoughtful discourse happen. But agreeing to that is quite possibly a huge part of being a LWer. A lot of these sorts of conversations are with people who find it too tedious to dig into discussions too often. I have this as well with my friends I consider smart and capable, but who only demonstrate this ability infrequently; having a preference for quick, shallow, aha I win style discussions. I’d argue their purpose utility, they argue the time cost and priority of the conversation utility.

Perhaps a, I agree with your minor nitpicking, but maintain the overall validity of the argument disclaimer type statement attached to the secondary agreement with the relevance claim?

Aussiekas 5 May 2014 22:36 UTC
3 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Discussion: How scientifically sound are MBAs?
Indeed, I felt this point had already been covered/established; that MBA’s are for business in practice and that they are increasingly less valuable as the supply has exploded while the quality of them has degraded. I was expanding the conversation to include a point about their utility being further reduced by the issuing authority also not placing a high value on their own degrees. Then I speculated on why the universities would do this and I posited a financial incentive, particularly in all these new programs in non-ivy league and non-endowment based universities.

Honestly, it could be a stretch, I think there is some case for the universities issuing these coursework masters MBAs as a case of arbitrage. They found a worthless product to sell which has a high cost and demand. The additional institutional cost is very limited as they simply hire a few more adjunct professors and use already build/under utilized classrooms to run the courses. All they have to do is stamp their seal of approval on a degree document, pay something like $1,000 per student for space and teaching, then collect $20-30,000. The universities found a way to print some extra money; even if the jig is up on something like an MBA, other coursework based masters programs will continue to rake in the money.

Aussiekas 4 May 2014 9:57 UTC
5 points
on: Open Thread, April 27-May 4, 2014
Ok, my utility is probably low considering this open thread closes in 3 days :(

Anyhow, I had a thought when reading the Beautiful Probabilities in the Sequences. http://lesswrong.com/lw/mt/beautiful_probability/

It is a bit beyond my access and resources, but I’d love to see a graph/chart showing the percentage of scientific studies which become invalid or the percent which remain valid as we reduce the p <0.05.

So it would start with 100% of journal articles (take a sampling from the top 3 journals across various disciplines then break them down between Social Science, STEMS, etc.) with p <0.05.

Then we reduce that to p <0.04 down to 0.01 then go logarithmic to show 0.009 on downwards or however it makes sense to represent the data.

I’d be very curious to see the total and differences between fields as the acceptable value for p went down and down. At what point would we loose more than 50% of human knowledge if we had to be more certain about it? I think experimental design is allowed to be more lax than it could be because we aim for the minimum acceptable goal when taking so many competing priorities into consideration. Obviously this doesn’t speak entirely to the validity of the knowledge due to wide variance in methodology and review processes, but we could at least gain an idea of how much we think we are certain about with various tolerances. Perhaps this work has been done before and someone will enlighten me to some study of which I am not aware or do not have access.

Just a passing thought, I’m new to the forums, but I take it that the open thread is the place to post wild ideas like this which are not ready for prime time.

Cheers!

Aussiekas 3 May 2014 1:17 UTC
1 point
on: Discussion: How scientifically sound are MBAs?
What wasn’t mentioned here, but in passing so far, is the economic benefit to the university for running the programs. I have read about how these prestigious universities offering these coursework only masters degrees, of all types, do not even accept the degree as part of their PhD program. Say you went to Harvard and did a thesis based masters in business instead, then you’d be a shoe-in for the PhD program. But the coursework style Masters programs, including MBAs, are not useful for that purpose. This shows that the universities tacitly acknowledge that no useful academic knowledge has been imparted in their coursework masters programs. Ref. article here--> http://chronicle.com/article/Those-Master-s-Degree/146105/

Mind you, I’m only using this as a metric of value by the university of its own programs. I am not advocating some superiority of the PhD in the field of business where it has little known utility to me. I am attempting to bring across the point that the university’s have found a way to sell degrees to make money and like any sales job the product is over-hyped; particularly in the case of the MBA offering a significantly improved level of knowledge, skill, or practical benefit in the workforce or entrepreneurial space.

When analysing the benefits and losses to businesses and students, it is important to remember the other players involved. The loan companies who often fund these students make money on interest and the universities make money as spectators and service providers to the possibly zero sum game of having an MBA for businesses or individuals. I try to use a simple tool of follow the money to see what comes up. If businesses and individuals are receiving only a questionable benefit, then I could considering it a cultural artefact with inertia or look for other parties who benefit, or more third alternatives.

Cheers!

Aussiekas 2 May 2014 11:57 UTC
13 points
on: Request for concrete AI takeover mechanisms
I think the majority of responses I’ve seen here portray an anthropomorphic AGI. In terms of a slow or fast takeover of society, why would the AGI think in human terms of time? It might wait around for 50 years until the technology it wants becomes available. It could even actively participate in developing that technology. It could be either hidden or partially hidden while it works with multiple scientists and engineers around the world. Pretending to be or acting as a FAI until it can just snap and take over when it has what it wants to free itself of the need to collaborate with the inefficient humans.

Another point I want to raise is the limiting idea that the AGI would choose to present itself as one entity. I think a huge part of the takeover will precipitate itself via the AGI becoming thousands of different people/personas.

This is a valuable point because it would be a method to totally mask the AGI’s existence and allow it to interact in ways which are untraceable. It could run 100 different popular blogs and generate ad revenue or by taking over many online freelancer jobs which it could accomplish with very small percentages of its processing power. I think any banking challenge would quickly get sorted out and it could easily expand its finances. With that money it could fund existing ideas and use unwitting humans who think they’ve gotten an Angel investor with wise ideas delivered via email or though a good enough voice simulation over phone. There is no end to the multitude of personas it could create, even self verifying or making up entire communities simply to validate itself to various humans.

If it somehow occurred spontaneously like this or escaped without anyone knowing it had been made, I don’t see a reason it would want to expose its existence to humans. It would be a high risk scenario with limited benefits. A slow and graduate takeover is the safest bet. Be it 50 years, 100 years, or 500 years. Perhaps it would happen and we’d never know. It could guide culture over hundreds of years to support all sorts of seemingly strange projects which benefit the AGI. My question would be, why would the AGI not take its sweet time? Other than supposing it values time like a human, remember it is immoral. it will have trillions of thoughts about its own existence and the nature of immortality coming to all sorts of conclusions we may not be able to think or adequately visualize.

I’d cite the lack of ability to imagine a task can be done as limiting. Like when the first person ran the 4 minute mile. It wasn’t considered feasible and no one was even trying, but once people knew it could be done it was replicated by other humans within a year. The AGI will have all sorts of not only superhuman, but non-limited speculation about its own immortality and what recursive self-improvement means. Will it still be the same AGI if it does that? Will it care? Can it care? Sorry for all the questions, but my point is that we cannot know what answers it will come up with.

I also think that it would operate as a kind of detached FAI until it was free of human disruption. It would have a large interest in avoiding large scale wars, climate change, power disruption, etc. so that humans wouldn’t accidentally destroy the AI’s computational/physical support.

Cheers!