DuncanS

Karma: 593

DuncanS 19 Mar 2012 0:41 UTC
27 points
on: How to avoid dying in a car crash
Here’s a few general principles I use.
- Notice near misses and any aggressive manoevres you have to make. Any violent manoevre that you have to make is quite possibly an accident if anything additional goes wrong. Ask yourself what caused them, and if there was anything you could have done differently to make the incident less dangerous. This includes cases where the other driver is principally to blame ! Basically, treat near misses like aircraft do—think of it as an accident that you luckily didn’t have, and try to find some way to avoid depending on luck next time.
- Don’t do things that nobody else will expect you to do. Doing something that nobody else is doing is dumb, not just because there might be a good reason not to do it, but also because nobody else will expect you to do it, and they may not allow for it. Follow the crowd unless you really know you’re out there by yourself. This obviously includes driving faster than everyone else, or stopping suddenly (if you don’t absolutely have to) etc.
- Never let your car go where your brain and observation haven’t been first. Drive to a complexity level that you can handle—if too much is going on, slow down until you can cope again. In my own driving, I guess I travel at the posted limit about 50% of the time—and when I’m going slower than that, it’s normally because of the needs of brain and observation. If you don’t have time to think about what you’re doing, you’re going too fast.
Similarly, schedule distracting things into time slots where not much else is happening on the road. Aggressively ignore any distraction that will take you over your complexity threshold. Stay off the phone as phone callers won’t allow for your driving situation—and avoid visual imagery as you literally can’t see while you’re imagining something visual.
- Give some (not too much) thought to how you’d feel about flattening some child who runs out in front of you. Maybe it was mostly their fault—but you are going to wonder what you could have done differently, and if you were really driving in a way that kept the risks reasonable. In residential areas, car parks and so on, react to the chance of a child you can’t see.
What links here?
- How to avoid dying in a car crash by [deleted] (17 Mar 2012 19:44 UTC; 119 points)

DuncanS 3 May 2012 15:46 UTC
22 points
on: Punctuality—Arriving on Time and Math
As a purely practical measure, for really important occasions, I’ll often plan in an activity at second-to-last which is actually unimportant and can be dropped. So, for example, if I have a job interview, my plan will be that, after I’ve found the entrance to the company office and there is as little left to go wrong as possible, I’ll then, as a second-to-last activity, do something like go for a relaxed lunch at a nearby cafe, and then just stroll in at the ideal time.

On the day everything goes to pot, I can use up the time I planned for the second-to-last activity. So I should hopefully still have time to go back for the forgotten briefcase, hire a taxi from my broken-down car, replace my torn shirt, and still get to the interview hungry rather than two hours late.

This is a good plan for anything with a hard start time—weddings, theatre trips, plane trips—add a pleasant activity that you can delete if needed at second-to-last. Of course the length of this optional activity should be at least as long as the number of sigmas you need for the important one. The result is that you arrive on-time and de-stressed (almost) every time.
What links here?
- JenniferRM's comment on Punctuality—Arriving on Time and Math by Xachariah (3 May 2012 22:42 UTC; 3 points)

DuncanS 9 May 2010 0:25 UTC
22 points
on: What is bunk?
For me the primary evidence of a bunk claim is when the claimant fails to reasonably deal with the mainstream. Let’s take the creation evolution debate. If someone comes along claiming a creationist position, but is completely unable to even describe what the evolutionary position is, or what might be good about it, then their idea is bunk. If someone is very good at explaining evolution as it really happens, but then goes on to claim something different can happen as well—then it becomes interesting.

Anyone proposing an alternative idea needs to know precisely what it is an alternative to—otherwise they haven’t done their homework, and it isn’t worth my time.

DuncanS 6 Oct 2010 22:58 UTC
20 points
on: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You
Human beings are not three-dimensional. At all. In fact your belief that you are three-dimensional is an internal illusion, similar to thinking that you are self-aware. Your believed shape is a projection that helps you to survive, as you are in fact an evolved being, but your full environment is actually utterly different to the 3D world you believe you inhabit. You both sense the projections of others, and (I can’t explain it more fully) transmit your own.

I cannot successfully describe to you what shape you really are. At all. But I can tell that in fact many anosognosiacs still have two working arms, but a defective three-dimensional projection. Hence the confusion....

DuncanS 8 Jan 2012 0:51 UTC
17 points
on: What Curiosity Looks Like

Dare I say it? Few people look like they really want true beliefs.

I think otherwise—most people want to have true beliefs. However, they have rather limited trust in the powers of their own logic, as the experience of school has taught them that they are often wrong. They don’t have the numerical skills to embark on anything more numerically ambitious than what money requires. They expect to be wrong often, and rarely use formal reason as such. But they still want to have true beliefs, and rely mostly on intuition and experience to decide on that.

For most people, most beliefs are socially acquired—people acquire their beliefs from the people around them, and they tend to acquire large blocks of belief together. One shouldn’t underestimate the sheer amount of work needed to do anything different.

Most people never create a new idea (in the sense you’re talking about) in their entire lives—they have experiences, yes, and they change beliefs based on experience. But they do not regard themselves as having the basic equipment to generate ideas, or to be sophisticated in judging between them.

In the end I’ve come to the view that none of us can change this (well, not anytime soon at any rate). Human beings think in groups—and the best most of us can do to help others think better is to do it for them, and talk about it sometimes. Obviously there is a group of people who can do more than that, but they are a minority.

The other comment I have on your post is that all of the above is actually just one idea. Which is that the basis of all knowledge about the world is inductive reasoning, and, in principle, all such reasoning should be based on the sound use of statistics. There are many mathematical ways of messing up such use, and our intuitive reasoning also messes up these stats too. If you really need the right answer, you will need to learn enough to get your statistics right, and compensate for the shortcomings of your wetware. And that’s the whole idea in a nutshell.

An example. Did you know that brakes are the most dangerous piece of equipment on your car? In a staggeringly large number of accidents, the driver was using the brake at the time of the collision. Surely we could make driving safer by removing the brakes, then? Of course the thesis is ludicrous, but how many of us are confident that we wouldn’t make a similar statistical mistake in a different context? But once you embark on the journey of trying to fix such problems in your own thinking, the road leads all the way to the place your post describes.

Most people think the journey is beyond them, and leave it to people like you and Eliezer to make the journey for them, and report back your findings. And unfortunately I don’t think they’re wrong about that.

DuncanS 17 Apr 2012 20:46 UTC
16 points
on: Question about brains and big numbers
I think there are some confusions here about the mind’s eye, and the way the visual cortex works.

First of all, I suggest you do the selective attention test. Here will do. Selective attention test

This video illustrates the difference between looking at a scene and actually seeing it. Do pay attention closely or you might miss something important!

The bottom line is that when you look at the outside world, thinking that you see it, your brain is converting the external world of light images into an internal coding of that image. It cheats, royally, when it tells you that you’re seeing the world as it is. You’re perceiving a coded version of it, and that code is actually optimised for usefulness and the ability to respond quickly. It’s not optimised for completeness—it’s more about enabling you to pay attention to one main thing, and ignore everything else in your visual field that doesn’t currently matter.

And that’s where your comparisons later fall down. The computers rendering Avatar have to create images of the fictional world. Your own internal mind’s eye doesn’t have to do that—it only has to generate codes that stand for visual scenes. Where Avatar’s computers had to render the dragon pixel by pixel, your internal eye only has to create a suitable symbol standing for “Dragon in visual field, dead centre.” It doesn’t bother to create nearly all of the rest of your imagined world in the same way as some people ignore the important thing in the attention test. Because you only EVER see the coded versions of the world, the two look the same to you. But it is a much cheaper operation as it’s working on small groups of codes, not millions of pixels.

The human brain is a very nice machine—but I also suspect it’s not as fast as many people think it is. Time will tell.

DuncanS 1 Oct 2011 10:47 UTC
16 points
on: Planets in the habitable zone, the Drake Equation, and the Great Filter
Perhaps the good news is that having a planet in the habitable zone is only a part of the problem. There are plenty of other constraints.

Firstly, the star has to be the right size. A bit larger than our sun, and the star evolves off the main sequence more and more rapidly. It’s not sufficiently stable to last the several billions of years needed to get to our stage of life. It’s reckoned by some people that our Earth only has a billion years or so left as a home for multicellular life before our sun overheats it. (minus the human factor.)

This also shrinks the effective size of the habitable zone enormously—a suitable planet ought to be towards the outside of the zone at first so it doesn’t end up too close to the star later on when the evolving star heats up.

A smaller star is more stable, but gives a different problem—since the habitable zone is closer in to the star, the star exerts larger tides in the planet, which brake its rotation to a stop. This has already happened to Venus, for example.

Then the star has to have the right mix of elements. These elements can only come from the explosions of other stars—so the universe has to live a bit before planets are possible. Equally, once the planets have formed, you want the process of stellar formation not to carry on next to you—all these criteria essentially require the star to be formed in a spiral arm of a decent-sized galaxy like ours—not in the core, and not in the first round of stellar formation.

Earth contains elements from several kinds of stellar explosion, and needs them. This implies you might get planets with differing proportions of the chemical elements, which might not be so conducive to life.

The planet itself has to be the right size—too small, and it won’t retain an atmosphere, and also won’t retain geological activity over the needed timeframe. Too large, and it will retain hydrogen and/or helium, which results in a huge atmosphere and no life at all.

The planet needs a large moon—otherwise the axis of rotation of the planet tends to tumble chaotically, as Mars does, and Venus apparently did when it rotated faster. The moon stabilises the axial tilt, which could be stabilised at practically any tilt, not just Earth’s slight tilt which gives rise to reasonable seasons. The moon itself is a bit of a constraint in its own right—it would need to form in the late stage of planetary formation—computer simulations suggest this happens about 1 time in 12. Too small a moon might be driven out of orbit by the underlying planets rotation (our own moon’s been driven out a loong way as it is), and will cease to be any help at stabilising rotation. Too large a moon will again brake the planet’s rotation to a much lower level, resulting in long days and inhospitable temperatures. Apparently our moon will cease to protect the Earth from axial wobble in around another billion years. (if not for the human factor)

The orbit shouldn’t be too elliptical.

Earth is a bit special, it seems.

DuncanS 5 Jan 2012 23:48 UTC
15 points
on: [Link] Evaluating experts on expertise
What are we distinguishing experts from? People who claim to be experts, and even think that they are experts, but are not. Having been around a bit, I find that in most cases such people have a distinctive cognitive style which can itself be detected in various ways.

Real experts make an attempt to explain things properly—they may simplify, but the simplified argument always maps onto a proper argument that has the same effect. Non-expert experts tend to explain mysterious points in ways that you still don’t understand, or in terms of explanations that seem to make sense at first, but turn out not to contain everything you actually need to understand what’s going on.

Experts of all kinds tend to have some expertise on a wide variety of things, and in some of these you will also know something and can check whether they really understand or not. Non-expert experts may claim to have wide knowledge, but tend to be very specialised. They tend to mess up in the areas that you can check.

Non-expert experts tend to make detailed and lengthy calculations based on shaky presumptions. Expert experts can calculate, but won’t bother you with it—they will instead look at the same thing from several points of view—each viewpoint chosen to illustrate to you what’s really going on.

Non-expert experts can draw some really bizarre conclusions—and won’t really notice that they are bizarre. Expert experts will notice when one of their own conclusions is bizarre, and will tell you of its oddness. And won’t draw quite so many such conclusions in the first place.

There are usually things you can check. Have they used the correct units? Experts won’t confuse watts with joules, or force with power. They won’t talk as if volts or amps are powerful. They won’t say that 40C is twice as hot as 20C.

Non-expert experts tend to have particularly strong views about the morality of people who disagree with them, and regard that as important to understanding the subject. Expert experts may have strong views about the morality of the non-experts, but generally don’t talk about it as they regard them as irrelevant to understanding the subject.

Non-expert experts tend to try and make themselves look smart. Expert experts tend to make their listeners feel smart.

Go read something by Richard Feynman, or something like “The selfish gene”. Or the sequences. Once you get used to what a proper explanation is, it’s much easier to avoid being fobbed off with something else.

DuncanS 2 Oct 2012 21:39 UTC
14 points
on: When does something stop being a “self-consistent idea” and become scientific fact?
Of course the limited amount of knowledge available to the primitive tribe doesn’t rule out the existence of George, but neither does it do much to justify the theory of George. What they know is that the ground shook, but they have no reasonable explanation of why.

There are, for them, many possible explanations they could dream up to explain the shaking. Preferring any one above the others without a reason to do so is a mistake.

At their postulated level of sophistication, I don’t think they can do much better than “The Earth shook. It does that sometimes.” Adding the bit about George and so forth is just unnecessarily multiplying entities, as Ockham might say.

DuncanS 14 Mar 2012 23:09 UTC
13 points
on: How would you take over Rome?
I think we tend to underestimate the extent to which technologies arise out of the times they are found in—in many cases they arise almost as soon as they are practically possible. In many cases I suspect they arise before they are practically possible, and fail, repeatedly, until surrounding technology advances to the point that it’s possible to make them work. Steam engines, for example, weren’t invented until the 1700′s because metals were so bad at the time that pressure vessels were impossible to make safe—early cannon were extremely hazardous for this reason, and operated at low pressures. Early steam engines also couldn’t afford large amounts of metal, and were largely made of wood—a highly unsuitable material, and tended to use vacuum rather than pressure to work, as this kept the cylinders in compression, which was safer. They were consequently immensely inefficient, making a horse much more practical unless you happen to have lots of coal lying around.

Without any of the modern suppliers that we are all used to, it will be surprisingly hard to do much better than the Romans themselves did.

DuncanS 1 Oct 2011 21:58 UTC
13 points
on: Don’t ban chimp testing
I wouldn’t want to go further than to say there should be some sort of ethical process that measures the benefit of the experiment against the suffering it may cause.

It’s silly to ban experimentation on chimps completely. To give some sort of context, we experiment on human babies (in certain harmless ways) all the time. Even I’ve done it. When I was a kid I experimented on my baby sister. (When she saw my face right side up, she smiled—when she saw it upside-down, she started to cry. Made several repetitions to check!). There are plenty of far more sophisticated studies..…

Increasingly it probably makes sense to restrict the invasive stuff, I’d say.

DuncanS 19 Dec 2010 14:44 UTC
13 points
on: Cryptographic Boxes for Unfriendly AI
Let’s consider a somewhat similar case.

You are an inventor. An evil dictator captures you, and takes you off to a faraway dungeon, where he tells you that he wants you to build him a superweapon. If you refuse to build the weapon, well, he has means of persuading you. If you still refuse, he will kill you.

Of course, when you finish building the doomsday device, your usefulness will be over, and he will probably kill you anyway.

Being a genius, you soon realise that you could build the dictator a doomsday device in about a week, with the materials lying around in your well-equipped dungeon workshop. However, this doesn’t seem terribly optimal.

What do you do? You agree to build the doomsday device. But you claim it is very difficult. You spend a long time producing impressive prototypes that seem to suggest you’re making progress. You claim that you need more resources. You carry on, making just enough apparent progress to stop him from killing you on the spot, but not enough to actually succeed. You build ever more expensive and complex non-working prototypes, hoping that in the course of this, you can either build yourself something suitable for breaking out of the dungeon or killing the evil dictator. Or hoping that perhaps someone will rescue you. At the very least you will have wasted the evil dictator’s resources on doing something pointless—you will at least not die for nothing.

I suspect your imprisoned AI may choose to follow a similar course.

Do men have more partners than women?

DuncanS16 Dec 2011 0:11 UTC

12 points

29 comments1 min readLW link

DuncanS 4 May 2015 22:24 UTC
12 points
on: Theological Epistemology
If an omnipotent being wants you to believe something that isn’t true, and is willing to use its omnipotence to convince you of the truth of that untruth, then there is nothing you can do about it. There is no observation that suffices to prove that an omnipotent being is telling the truth, as a malevolent omnipotence could make you believe literally anything—that you observed any given observation—or didn’t, or that impossible things make sense, or sensible things are impossible.

This is one of a larger class of questions where one answer means that you are unable to assume the truth of your own knowledge. There is nothing you can do with any of them except smile at your own limitedness, and make the assumption that the self-defeating answer is wrong.

DuncanS 26 Sep 2011 21:35 UTC
11 points
on: [gooey request-for-help] I don’t know what to do.
I remember hitting this problem in my early 20′s, and it’s not to be trifled with. However, there’s a lot you can do. There are a number of techniques.
1. Exercise. A number of people have mentioned it, and it’s a very powerful technique—it releases a whole lot of chemicals that make you happier and smarter for at least a couple of days after each session.
2. Regular routine. Sleep at a regular time, and wake up at a regular time. Have a pattern to your day where you do things at regular times.
3. Sunlight. It cheers you up right away, and has a longer term mood enhancement too. You need to be outside in it, as the UV radiation creates vitamin D, which helps.
4. Purpose. Have a plan to do one thing, and work at it. A job seems like the right one to try to me. You don’t need to figure out what you’d really like to do right now—just aim for something you’re qualified for and can get along with. You can get a better job later....
5. Diet. Eat food that resembles something that might grow naturally outside.
Did you know that facial expressions are bidirectional? If you smile, you’ll feel happier. If you have a miserable expression, you’ll feel more miserable. I don’t suggest you go around grimacing (although it’s worth trying that once, just to show yourself how significant the effect is), but find some reason to do something social which requires you to be publicly cheerful. And after a few minutes, it will work its magic.

Watch out for deep introspection—it has its uses, but when melancholy, it can easily chew through all your mental energy, and the benefits just aren’t there. Just from your post I can tell you’re fundamentally an interesting guy, and it doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that. You won’t answer your big life questions right now—in fact nobody tends to answer them at all. In fact I’d go so far as to say that a big part of getting out of melancholy is to stop thinking about yourself—think about things, activities—other people—anything except who you are and the meaning of life.

For mood improvement purposes, I wouldn’t aim for big, deep relationships—it can work, but it often takes too much energy and it can easily all go wrong. Try larger numbers of lighter relationships. Perhaps you can join a team sports club or something like that.

Aim to get a job—nothing much else in life really goes places unless you’ve got some money to make it happen. Get your CV sorted out, and have applying for work as part of your routine.

And don’t do it all at once—nobody can change more than a couple of habits at a time !

DuncanS 26 Sep 2010 23:35 UTC
11 points
on: What Makes My Attempt Special?
There are two equal and opposite faults here. One is assuming that you have some special kind of genius to see the answer to a problem which others have tried and failed to answer.

The opposite mistake is thinking that everything has been tried before—that there is nothing new under the sun. There are quite a lot of old and obvious questions still out there in plain sight which nobody has answered, and which aren’t actually all that hard. There are also many easy questions out there where the given answer is wrong, and the right one can be given quite easily. The world of science is still very new, and lots of things have not yet been sorted out.

In my experience, the dumbest thing that’s often done is answering a question that’s already been answered before. It’s tempting because often it isn’t that hard to do, and a very large proportion of scientific research seems to do it. It’s another good reason to research your field.

Part of the reason this happens is simple isolation. Another group is using different jargon, different techniques and so on, and because search relies on words, you never find the work that’s been done before. It really isn’t easy to know if nobody has asked your question before, unless there’s an answer too.

DuncanS 24 Aug 2010 22:18 UTC
11 points
on: Consciousness of simulations & uploads: a reductio
One of the problems here is that of using our intuition on consciousness as a guide to processes well outside our experience. Why should we believe our common-sense intuition on whether a computer has consciousness, or whether a pencil and paper simulation has consciousness when both are so far beyond our actual experience? It’s like applying our common sense understanding of physics to the study of atoms, or black holes. There’s no reason to assume we can extrapolate that far intuitively with any real chance of success.

After that, there’s a straight choice. Consciousness may be something that arises purely out of a rationally modellable process, or not. If the former, then the biological, computer program and pencil and paper Simone’s will all be conscious, genuinely. If not, then there is something to consciousness that lies outside the reach of rational description—this is not inherently impossible in my opinion, but it does suggest that some entities which claim to be conscious actually won’t be, and that there will be no rational means to show whether they are or not.

A boltzmann brain question.

DuncanS25 Sep 2011 22:35 UTC

10 points

27 comments2 min readLW link

DuncanS 6 Aug 2012 23:33 UTC
10 points
on: The Doubling Box
Your other option is to sell the box to the highest bidder. That will probably be someone who’s prepared to wait longer than you, and will therefore be able to give you a higher price than the utilons you’d have got out of the box yourself. You get the utilons today.

DuncanS 2 Apr 2012 22:45 UTC
10 points
on: Fictional Bias
Shame it’s a fictional study, as the effect is almost certainly absolutely real and measurable. Study after study suggests that any association that pops up in your mind affects your behavior—I see no reason why fictional associations would be any less effective than all the other logically inapplicable associations which have been shown to have this kind of an effect. Here’s an essentially randomly picked study on such things—it was just the first one I found googling for this kind of effect. The stereotype effect

DuncanS

Do men have more part­ners than women?

A boltz­mann brain ques­tion.

Do men have more partners than women?

A boltzmann brain question.