haha, the “Baby you must be tired because you’ve been running through my mind all night!” let-me-out line.
Why would I give AI my precise brain scan, anyway?
edit: as for AI ‘extrapolating’ me from a bit of small talk, that’s utter nonsense along the lines of compressing an HD movie into few hundreds bytes.
I think making it depend to the birthday is also rational. Otherwise there is more possibility of some sort of resource congestion if horoscope compels every user (rather than 1/12th of the users) to do same thing. This is not a big concern in the Internet with few thousands users spread all over the world—but imagine a small village, where there’s just 1 horoscope, and it tells everyone to think about failure modes of their plans—they are all farmers, they all think what they’re gonna do if crops fail, they all try to buy same equipment at same day.
@Eliezer well that’s to me looks very dystopian future… the principle of protection of human autonomy was tossed away already when they legalize ‘non consensual’ anything where it is legal for human being A to impose his notions of fun on human being B against human being B’s will. So the mankind got raped very gently by superhappy—so what? They legalized this already, there’s a legal precedent for a far worse case that in your universe everyone agreed on.
Plus you give zero thought to concept of human beings as autonomous, each an agent upon himself. What I have immediately thought of is that I would have told the superhappy that due to communication bottleneck and biodiversity humans do not share identical values, have massively different neural wirings and as such they would have to integrate the values of each human personally etc. Not three worlds colliding but hundreds billions. I’d tell that the human neural system is so wired in many of the people that absence of pain would lead to diminished pleasure or failure to achieve sentience. I’d have told them the truth that facing such choice or having alteration forced on you results in extreme psychological pain that can disable and/or destroy some of the individuals. That we see gross modification of existing individuals as death. Etc.
Plus, of course, the fair ‘superhappy’ aliens are extremely vulnerable to mechanisms that homo sapiens has evolved to take advantage of naivity. You take some clinical psychopath, the smooth talking one (a corporate executive will do fine), get him to talk with the superhappy, and they’re toast. The 30x thought speed advantage won’t save them. The tech won’t save them. They’ll get owned by first nigerian prince. We have evolved for cognitive predator-prey interactions; 99% of the bias [as in , vast majority of, not as in exact number] that you’re overcoming here is the heuristics for those interactions, for surviving a smarter enemy who would convince you into doing something bad with arguments that are only subtly flawed, akin to proof that 1=2. Where do you think the bias and reluctance to accept reason comes from? Well guess what 99% of reason out there is predator’s blinky lights trying to subvert neural system of the prey, as in some squid versus some shrimp. The shrimp learnt to close the eyes. Reader, once you take into your mind what I just said there, even to parse what I said, you have to effectively execute truing-complete code in your head. In wetware with no process boundaries. The rationalism is inherently vulnerable.
They’re entirely toothless however, with no concept of biting and no carapace. Ditto for the babyeaters, really, sending off all their data, sending human data to the superhappy, and otherwise acting like total naive idiots instead of waging the cognitive warfare that humanity has perfected in the course of probably more than a million years. I say, in such an interaction, both of those alien races would get massively, massively exploited by humanity.
Anyone can see those things if looking at reflection of blue sky. Blue sky’s light is polarized. Ditto if looking at a reflection. But most people wouldn’t notice that, the effect is fairly faint. The person who could detect polarized light would notice that LCD displays are polarized and could tell you some are polarized other way than others.
Hmm, that is very interesting. I’m fairly good at imagining stuff but not to the point of e.g. looking at Rubik’s cube and then solving it blind.
I have a theory here. The mental imagery requires two things:
A: forming mental image somewhere in your brain—akin to how Boeing will simulate aircraft in computer.
B: perceiving it consciously.
Some people might lack B but possess some form of A which they could not consciously access.
I’m pretty sure that A can work without B in myself—e.g. good mechanical design can just pop in my mind, the kind of good mechanical design that absolutely requires some sort of simulation to produce. Yet I did not consciously imagine variations of that design.
The most important part of A for me is ability to imagine system and the rules and evolution of that system. For example I can even imagine configuration of conductors, and then imagine electric potential and electric field around them, from just the differential equations (i simply know how nabla squared times a looks). I can do that in 3D, and i imagine the 3D itself, not the 2D projection (which i can imagine if i need to). It’s a lot like imagining soap film surface (it obeys same equations).
The reason’s obvious for anyone who played chess. You see that knight is threatening this pawn, which is protected by this bishop, etc. You (well, me at least) literally see such relations when playing the chess, i.e. you train to see it at higher level just as we all train to see a 3d cube as a 3d cube rather than as shaded faces of said cubes. Someone who can’t do that, chances are, won’t be a good chess player.
There’s a picture of tiger: http://www.solarnavigator.net/animal_kingdom/animal_images/Tiger_panthera_tigris_tigris_Bengal.jpg How many stripes it has?
Turns out the number of stripes is not even well defined. Let alone can be told right away in an instant. Obviously one coming up with tiger example doesn’t have good enough mental imagery to see the flaw without looking at a photo of a tiger.
Non-consensual conversation is legal and socially approved.
The story is speaking of “non-consensual sex”, the illegal kind (rape), that was legalized. Great many actions are deemed illegal without consent as to protect autonomy of humans from other humans; when you start legalizing those actions, you drop off the autonomy. Especially major things.
Conversation is not illegal and thus can’t be “legalized”. Also, try having conversation with someone against their will, or when they are obviously busy. It is deemed impolite, and is not illegal simply because it doesn’t hurt too much—if you distract someone causing an injury you might very well get in trouble.
Meh. There are some differences, but not nearly as big as between two random minds.
What the hell is a random mind, a Boltzmann brain? See http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/
In context of the story—clearly some people would embrace superhappy and some would commit suicide at the thought. Sounds significant enough to me. Hell, the humans are in reality more diverse in their views than the babyeaters and superhappy are in the story.
“Yes, but it’s not that huge. It’s a rather isolated preference change.” well, in the story humans consider this preference change as sufficient to fear it nearly as much as death. It’s the self preservation instinct that kicks in.
“Can’t see why. They understand treating language as a vending machine—vibrations go in, behaviors come out.”
The story itself—the aliens act far too naive and in ways that are too exploitable and imply lack of understanding of untruth. The humans as well, though. That’s because this whole rationalism thing gets really messy and complicated when you start being rational about what you tell. In particular, superhappy gone into nearly shock state (lost part of crew!) over something that the babyeaters told them, without slightest thought as to the possibility that the babyeaters could perhaps have engineered an input to the superhappy which would damage the superhappy. (which is precisely what happened, except the creator of the story had engineered what the babyeaters tell as to be shocking)
Even more than this, the superhappy, despite being in position of power, are going for some supposedly fair 1⁄3 1⁄3 1⁄3 thing where everyone adjusts. Frankly it makes absolutely no sense and is not in the slightest rational, plus is clearly based on some failed logic and as such prone to manipulation (like every single human treated separately and they all dissolve).
Sorry, but many of those statements are simply vague (‘much the same’, does driving count? ‘often’ ?), and/or overgeneralised. Or non-informative, e.g. the statement that <50% of abused children become abusive adults. It’s much more interesting to compare that against the baseline. In a society where >50% of adults are abusive, you can expect most abused children to become abusive adults. The infants mirror self recognition is extremely variable, see this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouge_test
Speaking of which, something interesting. A vague statement is generally unsurprising and/or is predictable, as is negation of the vague statement, not because of some cognitive bias, but because of vagueness.
The point is that the real me knows that ‘simulated me’ is going to be different enough from real me, as to be an entirely different being which has in fact little in common with me. There’s bigger problem, the AI could simulate beings, and then torture them. But that AI would need a ton of computing power.
I think what would happen in the real world, is that nobody would believe that the AI is intelligent unless AI really goes out of the way to convince everyone that it is intelligent.
In good ol days there was concept of whose problem something is. It’s those people’s problem that their organs have failed, and it is traveller’s problem that he need to be quite careful because of demand for his organs (why he’s not a resident, btw? The idea is that he will have zero utility to village when he leaves?). Society would normally side with traveller for the simple reason that if people start solving their problems at other people’s expense like this those with most guns and most money will end up taking organs from other people to stay alive for longer, or indeed, for totally superfluous reasons. It is a policy issue and the correct policy is obvious.
You can just take organs away from traveller today, but travellers will start paying for a reliable service that finds people where organs end up, and assassinates them, and the patients will start paying for anonymous find the traveller and kill him and take his organs service, and those with most money will end up having the organs as a matter of luxury. Good thing that we live in the convenient world where it is not very practical, albeit happens to some extent. Otherwise you could’ve seen what you can’t think of in your neat little example.
With regards to the doctor, that issue is simply not his problem in the first place unless he’s being paid for it. He can make it his problem if he wants to, or he can make it his problem to kill everyone who has particular eye colour, we would deem one choice more moral than another due to better utility to the society but we would still not grant him enough autonomy to pursue this kind of stuff unhindered because a: he will be using it to solve his problems (saving relatives for example) and b: because he can just as well as to decide to do good, decide to cut up random people for no reason what so ever.
Other issue is, of course, that you are making up this kind of stuff in totally imaginary world, where those whose organs have been replaced have reasonable life expectancy, whereas this (people being cut up for organs) is a real world problem that exists right now in the real world where a bunch of other conditions apply, and I think it is you, not your friend, who completely missed the point in the first place. To complicate the issue: what if those people’s organs are failing due to their own fault? Their own stupid action? Suddenly you realize that different people have different worth.
With regards to the moral judgement: yes with absolutely equal worth of continuation of life of each of the people saved, and the traveller, the organs have to be transplanted. This, however, raises the question: what is the reason behind this exercise? You may be pursuing this topic idly. Other people are almost always more rational than this, more purpose-driven, and they pursue this topic if they want to make some inference to use in the real world. Especially, they ask a question like that if they want a confirmation which they will misuse. In fact you’re an extreme oddity, pursuing this unrealistic example for (giving you benefit of the doubt) other purpose than committing a logical fallacy in the real world after caching the conclusion (perhaps, or perhaps you just want to make a very long chain of tiny fallacies and do actually want to conclude something about real world based on your imaginary world). That is very odd, and most people don’t quite know how to react to such behaviour.
The interesting issue with reversible computation is that you do not need complete reversibility to reap nearly all the energy saving benefits of reversible computation. For example, a CPU built on perfect reversible logic, which would run normal irreversibly computing software, would still have ridiculously low energy requirements compared to today’s CPUs, as most of the irreversibility happens on the very low level (think intermediate steps when adding two numbers, think loss of state of each transistor in CPU at every clock cycle) and at the level of software the number of erased bits per cycle is actually rather small. edit: and can probably be further minimized by optimizing compiler without changing behaviour of program in any way or changing it’s memory requirements by more than a constant factor
The hypo here does not include the compatibility of traveller with everyone but their mutual transplant incompatibility. One has to fight the hypo (invent things that were omitted in the hypo) here not to arrive at alternative answer (sacrifice one of the patients). I think it is rude to expect people to fight for your hypo; if you are meaning it that the sacrifice of traveller is the only solution, then state it explicitly.
edit:
Furthermore, I’m not arguing what is polite. I’m discussing what is rational thing to do. There is example: someone asks me a question about electronics, with idealised components. I think of the real components that he likely has in mind, and see that the end result could burn down his house. I write an answer addressing a non-idealized circuit, perhaps outlining how to avoid the burn down house scenario. That person can find it impolite, of course, but it may often be a very good answer for that person to hear (and people are not very invested in their designs, usually, so it’s unlikely the person would be offended, and i would likely be thanked for that answer). The person may be talking hypothetically but in years since he may need to build this thing.
Well, then take my post as a thought experiment as well. A thought experiment creating the situation where it could be right to consider the practical difficulties even though the person asking you the question wants you not to.
edit: in particular, here, the person asking that question IMO could be rather more enlightened by the unwanted answer than by just giving him the answer that he wants to hear: “Yes, fine, the utility is maximized by killing the traveller” (or by some un-utilitarian stuff that he can consider irrational). The conversation involves giving people answers they may not want to hear.
Well, I think it is relevant to the question if the explicit set-up in the question permits alternative solution distinct from those listed. I’m not much of utilitarian either but I do believe that real world complications are extremely relevant to the morality.
It’s actually a very odd/special form of question, to those who grew up on write in rather than multiple choice answers. Here the person asking the question himself selects, out of multitude of possible solutions, one as special. While it is rude in some cultures to assume that not all of the solution space was explored, in other cultures it is not.
Precisely.
If a bunch of aliens were to start capturing bunch of humans (and other terrestrial animals) for food, or slave labour, or what ever, it would be rational for males to go after the aliens with sexy human females first. The torn clothing would likely be widespread, and selection by torn clothing (as torn clothing improves ability to select for sexiness) may also be rational when one wants to maximize the sexiness of mates that one takes for rebuilding the human race. :-)
edit: One should also look for signs of struggle (such as torn clothing), as one would be interested in the relevant genes for the successful counter-attack by the next generation.
I am a video game developer. I find most of this site fairly interesting albeit once in a while I disagree with description of some behaviour as irrational, or the explanation projected upon that behaviour (when I happen to see a pretty good reason for this behaviour, perhaps strategic or as matter of general policy/cached decision).
Looks like strategic thinking to me. If you are to organize yourself to be prone to be Pascal-mugged, you will get Pascal mugged, and thus it is irrational to organize yourself to be Pascal-muggable.
edit: It is as rational to introduce certain bounds on applications of own reasoning as it is to try to build reliable, non-crashing software, or to impose simple rule of thumb limits on the output of the software that controls positioning of control rods in the nuclear reactor.
If you properly consider a tiny probability of mistake to your reasoning, a mistake that may lead to consideration of a number generated by a random string—a lot of such numbers are extremely huge—and apply some meta-cognition with regards to appearance of such numbers, you’ll find that such extremely huge numbers are also disproportionally represented in products of errors in reasoning.
With regards to the wager, there is my answer: If you see someone bend over backwards to make a nickel, it is probably not Warren Buffett you’re seeing. Indeed the probability of that person who’s bending over backwards to make a nickel, having N$, would sharply fall off with increase of N. Here you see a being that is mugging you, and he allegedly has the power to simulate 3^^^^3 beings that he can mug, have sexual relations with, torture, what ever. The larger is the claim, the less probable it is that this is a honest situation.
It is however exceedingly difficult to formalize such answer or to arrive at it in a formal fashion. And for me, there could exist other wagers that are beyond my capability to reason correctly about.
For this reason as matter of policy I assume that I have an error per each inference step—the error that can result in consideration of an extremely huge number—and have an upper cut off on the numbers i’d use for considerations as an optimization strategy; if there is a huge number of this sort, more verification steps are needed. In particular, this has very high impact on morality on me. Any sort of situation where you are killing fewer people to save more people—those situations are extremely uncommon and difficult to conjecture—the appearance of such situation however can easily result from faulty reasoning.
Phew. This is just an ‘ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer’ situation.
Questions ‘why’ and ‘what is’ are metaphysical or semantic and have nothing whatsoever to do with science. The only reason why those are prevalent in education is that education sucks. Science is not a search for answers to “why X happens”, even though it is popularized as such.
My school physics wasn’t like this at all (eastern Europe here). I would have a problem to solve—how many watts of heating are required to maintain uniform temperature of 20 degrees Celsius in a 10x5x2.2m room with concrete walls of 20cm thickness and outside temperature of −20 degrees Celsius (you can look up thermal conductivity of concrete). A very reasonable question. In the end, you’re good in physics not when you have some warm inner feeling of understanding, not when you can ‘explain’ why something happens, but when you can PREDICT what will happen and/or make things happen. Nature couldn’t care less if you know or not “why” stone axe is good for killing a mammoth (or something), it doesn’t care if you call it ‘inertia’ or something else.