DanielH

• DanielH 11 Jul 2012 3:00 UTC

  7 points

  on: Wel­come to Less Wrong!

  TL;DR: I found LW through HPMoR, read the major sequences, read stuff by other LWers including the Luminosity series, and lurked for six months before signing up.

  My name, as you can see above if you don’t have the anti-kibitzing script, Daniel. My story of how I came to self-identify as a rationalist, and then how I later came to be a rationalist, breaks down into several parts. I don’t remember the order of all of them.

  Since well before I can remember (and I have a fairly good long-term memory), I’ve been interested in mathematics, and later science. One of my earliest memories, if not my earliest, is of me, on my back, under the coffee table (well before I could walk). I had done this multiple times, I think usually with the same goal, but one time in particular sticks in my memory. I was kicking the underside of the coffee table, trying to see what was moving. This time, I moved it, got out, and saw that the drawer of the coffee table was open; this caused me to realize that this was what was moving, and I don’t think I crawled under there again.

  Many years later, I discovered Star Trek TNG, and from that learned a little about Star Trek. I wanted to be more rational from the role models of Data and Spock, and I did not realize at the time how non-rational Spock was. It was very quickly, however, that I realized that emotions are not the opposite of logic, and the first time I saw the TOS episode that Luke references [here][http://​​facingthesingularity.com/​​2011/​​why-spock-is-not-rational/​​], I realized that Spock was being an idiot (though at the time I thought it was unusually idiotic, not standard behavior; I hadn’t and still haven’t seen much of the original series). It was around this time that I thought I myself was “rational” or “logical”.

  Of course, it wasn’t until much later that I actually started learning about rationalism. Around Thanksgiving 2011, I was on fanfiction.net looking for a Harry Potter fanfic I’d seen before and liked (I still haven’t found it) that I stumbled upon Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I read it, and I liked it, and it slowly took over my life. I decided to look for other works by that author, and went to the link to Less Wrong because it was recommended (not realizing that the Sequences were written by the same person as HPMoR yet). Since then, I’ve read the sequences and most other stuff written by EY (that’s still easily accessible and not removed), and it all made sense. I finally understood that yes, in fact, I and the other “confused” students WERE correct in that probability class where the professor said that “the probability that this variable is in this interval” didn’t exist, I noticed times when I was conforming instead of thinking, and I noticed some accesses of cached thoughts. At first I was a bit skeptical of the overly-atheistic bit (though I’d always had doubts and was pretty much agnostic-though-I-wouldn’t-admit-it), until I read the articles about how unlikely the hypothesis of God was and thought about them.

  I did not know much about Quantum Mechanics when I read that sequence, but I had heard of the “waveform collapse” and had not understood it, and I realized fairly quickly how that was an unnecessary hypothesis. When I saw one of the cryonics articles (I’m cryocrastinating, trying to get my parents to sign up) taking the idea seriously, I thought “Oh, duh! I should have seen that the first time I heard of it, but I was specifically told that the person involved was an idiot and it didn’t work, so I never reevaluated” (later I remembered my horror at Picard’s attitude in the relevant TNG episode, and I’ve always only believed in the information-theoretic definition of “death”).

  After I read the major sequences, I read some other stuff I found through the Wiki and through googling “Less Wrong __” for various things I wanted the LW community opinion on. I found my favorite LW authors (Yvain, Luke, Alicorn, and EY) and read other things by them (Facing the Singularity and Luminosity). I subscribed to the RSS feed (I don’t know how that’ll work when I want to strictly keep to anti-kibitzing), and I now know that I want to help SIAI as much as possible (I was planning to be a computer scientist anyway); I’m currently reading through a lot of their recommended reading. I’m also about to start GEB, followed by Jaynes and Pearl. I plan to become a lot more active comment-wise, but probably not post-wise for a while yet. I may even go to one of the meetups if one is held somewhere I can get to.

  Now we’ve pretty much caught up to the present. Let’s see… I read some posts today, I read Luke’s Intuitive Explanation to EY’s Intuitive Explanation, I found an error in it (95% confidence), I sent him an email, and I decided to sign up here. Now I’m writing this post, and I’m supposed to put some sort of conclusion on it. I estimate that the value of picking a better conclusion is not that high compared to the cost, so I’ll just hit th submit button after this next period.

  Edit: Wow, I just realized how similar my story is to parts of Comment author: BecomingMyself’s. I swear we aren’t the same person!

• DanielH 18 Jul 2012 2:03 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong!

  I did not mean to imply that I had actual knowledge of QM, just that I had more now than before. If I was interested in understanding QM in more detail, I would take a course on it at my college. It turns out that I am so interested, and that I plan to take such a course in Spring 2013.

  I also know that there are people on this site, apparently a greater percentage than with similar issues, who disagree with EY about the Many Worlds Interpretation. I have not been able to follow their arguments, because the ones I have seen generally assume a greater knowledge of quantum mechanics than I possess. Therefore, MWI is still the most reasonable explanation that I have heard and understood. Again, though, that means very little. I hope to revisit the issue once I have some actual background on the subject.

  EDIT: To clarify, “similar issues” means issues where the majority of people have one opinion, such as theism, the Copenhagen Interpretation, or cryonics not being worth considering, while Less Wrong’s general consensus is different.

• DanielH 7 Aug 2012 1:48 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Au­gust 2012

  Playing chess for 5 hours a day does not make chess your “sole study and business” unless you have some disorder forcing you to sleep for 19 hours a day. If you spent the rest of your waking time studying chess, playing practice games, and doing the minimal amount necessary to survive (eating, etc.), THEN chess is your “sole study and business”; otherwise, you spend less than ¹⁄₃ your waking life on it, which is less than people spend at a regular full time job (at least in the US).

Men­tion­ing cry­on­ics to a dy­ing person

• DanielH 17 Aug 2012 19:18 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Men­tion­ing cry­on­ics to a dy­ing person

  As I understand it, the money is available.

• DanielH 17 Aug 2012 19:31 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Men­tion­ing cry­on­ics to a dy­ing person

  With cryonics, if somebody messes up at any point (the cryonics company goes broke, the LN2 production company experiences unexpected problems and any local stores are running low, an employee mishandles your body, etc.) then you are unlikely to be revived. With plastination, there’s a lot less that can go wrong; even if the future caretakers of your brain don’t believe it will work, it is more effort to destroy your brain than to leave it be. They may decide to bury it in a graveyard, but that’s less likely to prevent revival than thawing from cryonics.

  In either case, the probability that revival will be technologically and socially possible given it’s physically possible approaches 1 as time approaches infinity, and the probability that something bad and irreversible happens to you given that you aren’t revived also approaches 1 as time approaches infinity. In either case, you’re betting that the former happens before the latter. However, this seems a much better bet with plastination than cryonics because it’s a lot harder for something bad to happen to you.

• DanielH 17 Aug 2012 19:55 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Men­tion­ing cry­on­ics to a dy­ing person

  I considered this because of your article Light Arts, and rejected it because I disagree with that article in at least some cases, this being one of them. I could talk about it as I think about it—a good idea that people, even scientists who should know better, reject because of unwillingness to think about death and unwillingness to believe it isn’t final—and let him draw his own opinions on why it isn’t common knowledge (like I could prevent him anyway), but saying myself that it has a reasonable chance of being a conspiracy, or even implying it, is not something I could do.

• DanielH 17 Aug 2012 20:10 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: brilee’s comment on: Men­tion­ing cry­on­ics to a dy­ing person

  As others have said, that option is no longer available. I don’t find it as bad as you do though, for three reasons:

  • She’s a relative, not a stranger, so this kind of discussion would have happened anyway if I’d cleared my cryonics cache before six months ago

  • She has reasons to accept it that she accepts; the problem with a lot of religious conversions is that the only reason I should believe in the religion is because it says to and anecdotal evidence; for cryonics, the reason to believe in it is the standardly-accepted science and evident technological progress, both things most people at least claim to accept, but without any anecdotal evidence that it works.

  • I am disgusted by people who think that something is that important but don’t do anything about it. My standard example is vegetarians who believe that animals are conscious sentient beings whose death is as tragic as a human’s, but don’t attempt to persuade others not to eat meat. Of course, if they did persuade others, everybody else would be annoyed, but if they’re committing murder and you can get them to stop, you should. Similarly, if somebody is dying and you can potentially stop them, you should.

  Edit: formatting

• DanielH 17 Aug 2012 20:28 UTC

  −1 points

  in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Men­tion­ing cry­on­ics to a dy­ing person

  If this post had the irony suggested by brilee, I wasn’t able to pick it up and am responding as though it is serious.

  As I said in response to Alicorn, I refuse to use dark arts. Not only would I not be good at it, it violates my morality in many ways. You’d have better luck convincing EY to use the dark arts for Singularity talks, simply because that’s a bigger issue. If he’s not willing to use dark arts when it’s the entire world or more at stake, it’s his Something To Protect and he needs to Shut Up and Do The Impossible, then I have no excuse using them simply to save just one person.

  As for my mom, I believe that is her true rejection. She readily admits that the technology is feasible, but doesn’t see why somebody would revive her and things it somewhat plausible that it will be illegal to keep frozen bodies around between now and then.

• DanielH 17 Aug 2012 20:31 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Epiphany’s comment on: Men­tion­ing cry­on­ics to a dy­ing person

  This can help when a discussion is started, but it cannot really help start the discussion. It is useful, though, and I’ll remember it. Thanks.

• DanielH 29 Aug 2012 21:52 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Simulacra’s comment on: The Lifes­pan Dilemma

  I haven’t studied this in nearly enough detail to be sure of what I’m saying, but it is my understanding that we quite possibly ARE wrong about the observable universe’s size, simply given the newness of the science saying there is an “observable universe”. Newton was wrong about gravity, but mostly in edge cases (pun intended); could Hubble et. al. be wrong about the observable universe’s size? Could we find a way to send messages faster than light (there are several theories and only one need work)? Or could we possibly cram more people into the universe than seems possible now due to simulations, building smaller but equivalent brains, or otherwise?

  If the answer to ANY of these questions could be less, then we could indeed be wrong about the size observable universe (if observable is defined in terms of light even after we develop FTL communication, travel, or observation, then that’s stupid (like the current definition of clinical death) and you can replace “observable universe” with some similar phrase).

  Besides, it may in fact be worth considering what happens outside the observable universe. We can make some predictions already, such as similar laws of physics and the continuing existence of anything which we could previously observe but has since passed over the cosmological event horizon. If people eventually become one of the things that passes over this event horizon, I’ll still care about them even though my caring can not affect them in any way.

  Note again that I don’t know much about this, and I may be babbling nonsense for most of these points. But I do know that Hubble may be wrong, that humans keep doing things that they’d previously thought scientifically impossible, and that without an observable universe boundary there are still things which are causally unrelated to you in either direction but that you still may care about.

• DanielH 24 Jul 2013 2:34 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: [Link] Eliezer, PZ, Brin, and me on Immortality

  In the top-right corner of the Hangouts window is a light-grey-on-white button of a gear (along with other similarly-colored buttons). The gear indicates settings, which in this case means webcam, microphone, and speaker settings. From there you can set up your microphone better.

  In my experience (though I believe other people have differing experience in this regard), once you find this button, you can get Google Hangouts to properly use any audio equipment that your computer and OS can recognize and use.

• DanielH 24 Jul 2013 2:49 UTC

  1 point

  on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 24, chap­ter 95

  I recently started yet another re-read of HPMoR, and noticed something I don’t think has been discussed before.

  In chapter 1, Petunia is talking about Lily making her pretty (which I believe she did using a potion of eagle’s splendor with the blueberries replaced by Thestral blood), and says

  And Lily would tell me no, and make up the most ridiculous excuses, like the world would end if she were nice to her sister, or a centaur told her not to—the most ridiculous things, and I hated her for it.

  I used to think that Lily just wanted to protect Petunia from the danger and possibly other reasons. However, after hearing the prophesy in Chapter 89, I’m updating in favor of Lily telling the truth as she understood it. Centaurs are, after all, great at divination, especially astrology (tangent: I’ve never understood how that can be used for predicting the future on Earth, because it seems like anybody for the last several hundred years could have then, in a vague way, predicted the entire course of human history at least until the Space Age) and may be able to see this coming. Usually astrology isn’t the precise, at least not in canon HP, but when it predicts the destruction of the “very stars in heaven”, it may be more precise (and the centaurs may care more).

• DanielH 24 Jul 2013 2:54 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: elharo’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 24, chap­ter 95

  I thought approximately the same thing, but along the lines of wanting the student to focus on the tone, meter, and rhythm (which apparently carry much of the meaning) so taking away the meaning of the actual words to remove distractions.

• DanielH 24 Jul 2013 23:44 UTC

  5 points

  on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 24, chap­ter 95

  I had this theory before the current arc, but updated towards it once it became more important to Harry in chapter 89.

  In Humanism, Harry thinks about vanquishing future death, but that would not help the majority of the world’s population (which has already died). What with the only known method of backwards time travel creating stable time loops, and with people already having died, this makes sense to a degree. But if he were to find a way to upload just prior to death, then technically everybody would have died, but in most ways that count they would not. As people have died more than six hours ago, this also seems impossible with known methods of time travel. However, Harry was (understandably) too distracted when learning about Time-Turners to notice that the six-hour limit could not possibly be fundamental. I believe I have a way around this limit, using only Time-Turners and Muggle understanding of physics. It does rely on the following assumptions:

  1. Magic works very far away (many light-hours at least) from Earth

  2. Time-Turners deposit you stationary w.r.t. Earth’s rotating frame of reference.

  3. Magic can reinforce Time-Turners and wizards to be able to withstand incredible accelerations (at least 2000 g)

  4. Magic and science combined can maintain a space-worthy vessel at these accelerations

  5. Time-Turners take you back the appropriate number of hours in whatever frame you happen to be in when you engage the Time-Turner.

  6. Magic and science combined can create space suits that allow survival several light-years from Earth for extended periods of time OR devices that can maintain themselves in such conditions for extended periods of time and can operate Time-Turners.

  7. Magic would allow the below scenario to play out (no DO NOT MESS WITH TIME notes). For safety, this should only be attempted after adding explicit protocols for those notes should they prove necessary; that’s better than conjuring arbitrary obstacles with Time-Turners.

  8. The below calculations are approximations based on my incomplete understanding of special relativity, but could almost certainly be improved by somebody with a better physical understanding than mine.

  Not all of these conditions are strictly necessary, but the details of the situation would need to be modified to suit them better. I will now illustrate how to prove to somebody that you can go back in time more than six hours (specifically, six hours and five minutes); extending this to allow for remote unobservable uploading is left as an exercise to the reader.

  1. Create a space ship traveling at 88.5% of the speed of light in uniform circular orbit of the Earth, matching the Earth’s natural rotation direction and speed. This will require it to be 3.38 light-hours from Earth and accelerating at almost 2000 g, but we’re already assuming we can do that.

  2. On that ship, have somebody/​something capable of receiving messages, using a Time-Turner, and sending messages after using said Time-Turner.

  3. Find somebody to agree to this experiment, and to agree on a protocol. Verification can include hashing (“I believe one cannot reverse an MD4 hash, even with magic, in less than 6 hours”), trusted third party (“I doubt that Chief Warlock Dumbledore would lie about what time you gave him a message”), or any other scheme that everybody agrees on.

  4. On Earth, get a means to listen to a light-speed message sent by the person/​thing in step 2. When it receives a message, tell the person from step 3 and prepare verification, but do not tell the person from step 3 what the message is.

  5. Have the person from step 3 wait six hours and one minute before deciding on a message to send, and have them give you this message.

  6. Complete verification that the message was received when claimed. The person from step 3 now believes you sent a message back more than 6 hours.

  7. Send the person/​thing from step 2 the message at light speed.

  8. Over three hours later, the person/​thing from step 2 receives the message, goes back in time six hours (local reference frame)/​13 hours (Earth reference frame), and sends it. Over three hours later, step 4 completes.

  EDIT: Fixed the link for acceleration calculation by escaping parentheses

• DanielH 27 Jul 2013 4:32 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: saturn’s comment on: The Lifes­pan Dilemma

  It gets even worse than that if you want to keep your intuitions (which are actually partially formalized as the concept natural density). Imagine that T is the set of all Unicode text strings. Most of these strings, like “🂾⨟ꠗ∧̊⩶🝍”, are gibberish, while some are valid sentences in various languages (such as “The five boxing wizards jump quickly.”, “print ‘Hello, world!’”, “ἔσχατος ἐχθρὸς καταργεῖται ὁ θάνατος·”, or “וקראתם בשם אלהיכם ואני אקרא בשם יהוה והיה האלהים אשר יענה באש הוא האלהים ויען כל העם ויאמרו טוב הדבר”). The interesting strings for this problem are things like “42“, “22/​7”, “e”, “10↑↑(10↑↑10)”, or even “The square root of 17”. These are the strings that unambiguously describe some number (under certain conventions). As we haven’t put a length limit on the elements of T, we can easily show that every natural number, every rational number, and an infinite number of irrational numbers are each described by elements of T. As some elements of T don’t unambiguously describe some number, our intuitions tell us that there are more text files than there are rational numbers.

  However, a computer (with arbitrarily high disk space) would represent these strings encoded as sequences of bytes. If we use a BOM in our encoding, or if we use the Modified UTF-8 used in Java’s DataInput interface, then every sequence of bytes encoding a string in T corresponds to a different natural number. However, given any common encoding, not every byte sequence corresponds to a string, and therefore not every natural number corresponds to a string. As encoding strings like this is the most natural way to map strings to natural numbers, there must intuitively be more natural numbers than strings.

  We have thus shown that there are more strings than rational numbers, and more natural numbers than strings. Thus, any consistent definition of “bigger” that works like this can’t be transitive, which would rule out many potential applications of such a concept.

  EDIT: Fixed an error arising from my original thoughts differing from the way I wanted to explain them

• DanielH 27 Jul 2013 5:05 UTC

  0 points

  on: The Lifes­pan Dilemma

  I would definitely take the first of these deals, and would probably swallow the bullet and continue down the whole garden path . I would be interested to know if Eliezer’s thinking has changed on this matter since September 2009.

  However, if I were building an AI which may be offered this bet for the whole human species, I would want it to use the Kelly criterion and decline, under the premise that if humans survive the next hour, there may well be bets later that could increase lifespan further. However, if the human species goes extinct at any point, then game over, we lose, the Universe is now just a mostly-cold place with a few very hot fusion fires and rocks throughout.

  The Kelly criterion is, roughly, to take individual bets that maximize the expected logarithm instead of expected utility itself. Despite the VNM axioms pretty much definining utility as that-which-is-to-be-maximized, there are theorems (which I have seen, but for which I have not seen proofs yet) that the Kelly criterion is optimal in various ways. I believe, though I don’t know much about the Kelly criterion so there’s a high probability I’m wrong, that it applies to maximizing total lifespan in addition to maximizing money.

  So what happens if we try to maximize log(lifespan)? The article implies we should still take the bets, but I think that’s incorrect and we wouldn’t take even one deal (except for the total freebie before the tetration garden path). To see this, note that we only care about the 80% of the worlds where we could have survived (unless Omega offers to increase this probability somewhere...), so we’ll just look at that. Now we have to choose between a 100% chance of log(life) being 10,000,000 (using base-10 log and measuring life in years), or a 99.9999% chance of log(life) being 10^10,000,000 and a 0.0001% chance of log(life) being -∞. A quick calculation shows that E(log(life)) in this case is -∞, which is far less than the E(log(life)) of 10,000,000 we get from not taking the deal.

  In short, even if you accept a small chance of you dying (as you must if you want to get up in the morning), if you want the long range maximum lifespan for the human race to be as high as possible, you cannot accept even the tiniest chance of it going extinct.

  This is why existential risk reduction is such a big deal; I hadn’t actually made that connection when I started writing this comment.

• DanielH 28 Jul 2013 4:13 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 25, chap­ter 96

  It does seem that a large number of people (Dumbledore, Snape, Quirrell, and Hermione—all intelligent, but not all likely to credit random crackpot theories) all know about the Cloak, and Quirrell at least has heard of the Stone and credits if existence if not the standard explanation for its powers. There’s no evidence that many people know of the Wand, but the subject has never really come up so we wouldn’t know if that’s common knowledge. I expect that those who study wandlore would know about it, as in canon.

  Probably all three artifacts’ existence is common knowledge, and that they are connected in some way (I think most people would notice, upon hearing The Tale of the Three Brothers, that all three exist; additionally, Hermione recognizes “the Charm which [...] would not reveal the Cloak, but would tell you whether it or certain other artifacts were nearby.”). However, even if people know about the Deathly Hallows as real objects, they may not know details (such as the sign, or the connection to the Peverells, or what “conqueror of Death” actually means). I doubt anybody today except Harry, Lupin, and possibly Dumbledore (who may have noticed it when taking Lily and James to the Hall of Prophesy) know about the prophesy; Harry and Lupin know the contents but not that it’s a prophesy, while Dumbledore may know there is a prophesy but not the contents.

• DanielH 28 Jul 2013 4:16 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: BT_Uytya’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 25, chap­ter 96

  I’m not sure about the disappearing of Hermione’s body. I believe that Dumbledore believes that Harry did not take Hermione’s body. I’m not sure if I agree with that—Harry didn’t seem too worried about its disappearance despite taking the five Rs as his stages of grief—but I doubt he’d take Voldemort stealing the body as evidence that Harry wants to resurrect her.

• DanielH 28 Jul 2013 4:33 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 25, chap­ter 96

  That would, aside from being completely impossible in various ways, actually answer a few questions. Such as how the Defense Professor (don’t want to assign him an actual name when talking about who he might be) is able to do intricate and powerful magic in any body he wears. It would be, to use his word, inefficient to just be that powerful and that in control of his magic. We already know, from Tonks-as-Susan, that a Metamorphmagus can do amazing magic while Metamorphed (probably because they have no “natural” form and are equally comfortable with any humanoid body); this makes it likely that the Defense Professor is a Metamorphmagus somehow. Of course, that doesn’t explain why he needs to “rest”, which other theories do, so we’d need both this and a completely separate explanation of the resting, which are less probably by conjunction.

  Also, on an out-of-world note, I doubt Eliezer Yudkowsky would have made the particular comment above if the Defense Professor were a Metamorphmagus; he would be more likely to say Sprout, McGonagall, or Hannah Abbott.