gilch

Karma: 2,457

gilch 18 Dec 2014 8:16 UTC
0 points
on: Help us name the Sequences ebook
Beisutsukai
The Way of Bayes
Getting What You Want
Future Thought
Man’s Final Invention
Intelligence: Evolved, Explained, Engineered
Friendly AI: Engineering God
Thinking is a Skill
The Science of Wisdom
The Art of Reason
Metapsyche
The Case for Reason
I Will Teach You to be Smart
Reason for 21st Century Humans
The Dawn Age

gilch 2 Mar 2015 1:38 UTC
1 point
on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 113
There are all sorts of ways to fight using partial transfiguration. Many of the obvious ones mentioned so far are too slow (tunneling through the ground, nerve gas), suicidal (micro black holes, antimatter, unununium, critical mass of enriched uranium, nitroglycerin, etc.) or too complicated.

only a fool would attempt a plot that was as complicated as possible, the real limit was two.

On the other hand, Dumbledore took the shotgun approach to plotting. Let’s take the best of both worlds.

Then the obvious answer is chain lightning! Transfigure the air into ions in a path connecting the Death Eater’s necks, including LV. This will likely go unnoticed since air is invisible. It might take a few seconds, but Harry can stall in Parseltongue. Then transfigure a cross section of the middle Death Eater’s spinal cord into pure electrons. You should be able to generate considerable voltage with minimal mass/volume/time. Repeat for the other Death Eaters. This gives us the possible instantaneous effects of:
- Blinding flash/deafening thunder
- Concussive shock
- Electrocution
- Combustion
- Death
To all present Death Eaters simultaneously, while not killing Harry outright, plus
- Paralysis
- Death
To the targeted middle Death Eater. Suffering even one of these effects will disable the other Death Eaters long enough to repeat the procedure. The initial strike will reinforce the ion channels, Harry won’t have to rebuild them.

Of course I’m assuming partial transfiguration doesn’t require Harry to actually aim his wand at the target, but is limited in size. I’m also assuming he can transfigure air, which is not clear from the story so far, as others have mentioned. But really, air is just atoms like everything else. A partial transfiguration should work. Aim should not be required. Contact should not be required. Just partially transfigure a ray of air into air in the intended direction, and terminating with the intended effect.

gilch 2 Mar 2015 19:53 UTC
0 points
in reply to: wobster109’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 113
I’ve been wondering for a while now: can you say Ththiss ssentensce iss a lie! in Parseltongue?

gilch 2 Mar 2015 20:17 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Apprentice’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 113
The problem with using transfiguration sickness as a threat is that LV possesses the Philosopher’s Stone and can easily make a transfiguration permanent once he notices it.

A better option would be to transfigure a massive dose of Ebolavirus in the Death Eater’s bodies. It will be deadly if made permanent. Once given a chance to reproduce, cancelling the transfiguration won’t save them either.

This seems kind of reckless even for Harry.

gilch 10 Dec 2015 6:54 UTC
1 point
in reply to: gwillen’s comment on: LessWrong 2.0
I’m not convinced this is a problematic bias. What’s your prior that the current implementation of LessWrong is near “optimal” in any sense? If it’s not, then we necessarily have to Do Something to improve it, don’t we? The question shouldn’t be if a change is required, but whether any proposed change is for better or worse. And then if it’s for the better, is it worth the cost?

Of course, this argument applied even when LW was “doing well”. The threat of shutdown is just a convenient excuse for us to participate in the improvement process. It even got a long time lurker like me to post a comment.

gilch 10 Dec 2015 7:16 UTC
12 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: LessWrong 2.0
Fair, point, but still. Wikipedia’s stated role is an aggregator and summarizer of existing knowledge. It’s standard is verifiability, not truth.

Many of the rationality community’s views are decidedly not mainstream, and better for it. Our standard is higher than theirs.

Despite its flaws, LW has a better signal-to-noise ratio than any other web resource I’ve found.

gilch 10 Dec 2015 19:13 UTC
22 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: LessWrong 2.0
Why is Google the biggest search engine even though it wasn’t the first? It’s because Google has a better signal-to-noise ratio than most search engines. PageRank cut through all the affiliate cruft when other search engines couldn’t, and they’ve only continued to refine their algorithms.

But still, haven’t you noticed that when Wikipedia comes up in a Google search, you click that first? Even when it’s not the top result? I do. Sometimes it’s not even the article I’m after, but its external links. And then I think to myself, “Why didn’t I just search Wikipedia in the first place?”. Why do we do that? Because we expect to find what we’re looking for there. We’ve learned from experience that Wikipedia has a better signal-to-noise ratio than a Google search.

If LessWrong and Wikipedia came up in the first page of a Google search, I’d click LessWrong first. Wouldn’t you? Not from any sense of community obligation (I’m a lurker), but because I expect a higher probability of good information here. LessWrong has a better signal-to-noise ratio than Wikipedia.

LessWrong doesn’t specialize in recipes or maps. Likewise, there’s a lot you can find through Google that’s not on Wikipedia (and good luck finding it if Google can’t!), but we still choose Wikipedia over Google’s top hit when available. What is on LessWrong is insightful, especially in normally noisy areas of inquiry.

gilch 10 Dec 2015 19:38 UTC
3 points
on: Rationalist Magic: Initiation into the Cult of Rationatron
Some other techniques to add to the list:
- Hypnosis
- Biofeedback
- Spaced repetition
- Fast mental arithmetic
- Speed reading
There’s also variant on Tulpas called a servitor, which is a hallucination of something inanimate instead of an intelligent companion. I’ve been wondering for a while if a notepad servitor or something could improve one’s working memory.

gilch 10 Dec 2015 21:14 UTC
0 points
on: Stupid Questions, December 2015
Why don’t ordinary photons spontaneously collapse into black holes? You should get a singularity if the energy density in any region of space is high enough. But you can pick an inertial reference frame such that any given photon has arbitrarily high frequency (and thus energy) due to blueshift. Since any inertial reference frame is as valid as any other due to relativity, why don’t all photons collapse under their own weight?

gilch 10 Dec 2015 21:20 UTC
2 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Stupid Questions, December 2015
I’ve found that breathing on my fingertips is enough to get a grip on paper. I don’t actually have to lick them. I’m not sure if breath is much more sanitary than spit though.

gilch 10 Dec 2015 21:33 UTC
0 points
in reply to: username2’s comment on: Stupid Questions, December 2015
There’s been some actual research into that, this talk is a good summary.

gilch 30 Dec 2015 8:14 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: LessWrong 2.0
Karma only gives you one bit of feedback per person voting. A [+] or [-], that’s it. We can probably do better. Even so, it’s much better than nothing.

I don’t have time to read every single comment when there are hundreds to sift through, but I can read the important ones. The only way to find the important ones without reading everything is through karma. For example, SSC posts can get a comparable number of comments, but I’ve given up reading them.

Adding even a few more bits per person to the signal could improve quality a lot. On the other hand, simplicity is one of the karma system’s strong points. The low effort required encourages participation, as you pointed out. I don’t want to complicate the system too much, but I don’t think the current version is optimal.

We could take an approach similar to Google’s PageRank, so votes by high-karma people carry more weight. This wouldn’t require any more effort for participation than it does now. We could perhaps keep the current one-bit system for determining karma score in the first place, but we would be able to sort posts/comments by the weighted score.

I’m not sure how hard this would be to implement. The database must have enough information to do this, since it tracks who made each vote. I’m also not sure how to set up the weighting function, but this sounds like a job for Bayesian methods—some of us are good at that, right? :)

Getting downvoted can be discouraging. People who get downvoted enough (or fear getting downvoted enough) may not participate. Sometimes this is a good thing (e.g. trolls). But in other cases, there could be people with important things to say, who could improve their quality with just a little guidance.

For anyone reading this, what are your usual reasons for downvoting?

Perhaps they fall into some common patterns we could enumerate. (Perhaps a fallacy or cognitive bias from the sequences?) If so, we could add flags for these common reasons to the comment system. Marking a flag would count as your downvote, but would provide much more valuable feedback to the commenter, and also to other newcomers. We could control these specific problems without discouraging participation as much as a simple “[-]. You’re wrong. About something.”, like we do now.

gilch 5 Jan 2016 5:55 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Good_Burning_Plastic’s comment on: Open Thread, January 4-10, 2016
I’ve heard of narrow AIs that can supposedly identify an author from their writings. I’m not certain how accurate they are, or how much material they need, but perhaps we could use such a system here to identify sockpuppets and make ban evasion more difficult.

gilch 5 Jan 2016 19:24 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open Thread, January 4-10, 2016

It’s not a “narrow AI”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_AI It is by that definition. Of course, words are only useful if people understand them. I know LW has some non-standard terminology. Point me to the definitions agreed upon by this community and I’ll update accordingly.

A voting sockpuppet doesn’t post except to get the initial karma.

Sounds like the initial karma threshold is too low. I have various other ideas about how to fix the karma system, but perhaps I should hold off on proposing (more) solutions before we’ve discussed the problem thoroughly. If that’s already been started I should probably continue from there, otherwise, do you think this issue (karma problems) merits a top-level discussion post?

gilch 6 Jan 2016 0:07 UTC
1 point
on: Raising the Sanity Waterline

When you consider it—these are all rather basic matters of study, as such things go. A quick introduction to all of them (well, except naturalistic metaethics) would be… a four-credit undergraduate course with no prerequisites?

I wonder what it would take to make and run a MOOC? I know that MOOC software has been open sourced (e.g. OpenMOOC, edX). If a single undergrad course could have that big an impact on the world, isn’t it worth doing?

gilch 6 Jan 2016 20:52 UTC
1 point
on: Fragile Universe Hypothesis and the Continual Anthropic Principle—How crazy am I?

Has this ever been seriously considered? (I’ve done some homework but undoubtedly not enough).

This idea is hardly new here. See Simulation, Consciousness, Existence by Hans Moravec, Permutation City by Greg Egan, and the Quantum Physics Sequence by our own Yudkowsky (especially the Many Worlds parts with the Ebborians, starting with Where Physics Meets Experience) and Robin Hanson’s mangled worlds, which might help to explain some of the odd probabilities we find in quantum mechanics.

gilch 6 Jan 2016 21:57 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Stupid Questions, December 2015
I think I see where you’re going with this. If I can answer the question of how the universe would be different if photons did collapse, that might help explain why they don’t.

That applies to anything, not just photons.

What would the world look like if, say, electrons were actually black holes with an electric charge? I do think black holes can be electrically charged, that is, charge is still conserved even if charged particles fall into a black hole. Same with angular momentum etc. We would expect black holes of electron mass to spontaneously decay via Hawking radiation. Into a shower of particles that in sum obey the conservation laws… in other words, into another electron. Hmm. That didn’t really change anything did it? It might help to explain quantum tunneling though.

I would also expect electrons to have an event horizon of finite radius, rather than behaving as an infinitesimal point. I don’t know enough general relativity to calculate how big this should be for a black hole of electron mass, but perhaps it’s too small for us to have observed yet. (Edit: asking Wolfram Alpha yields 1.353E-57 meters. Plank Length is only 1.616E-35 meters, far too small to observe.) An event horizon means that light can be trapped by the gravity of the electron. Which would give the black hole enough extra mass to spontaneously decay into more than just an electron. In the case a low-energy photon, into another electron and photon (explains photon scattering), or if high-enough energy, into heavier particles that add up to zero charge and spin, plus the election again. Like positron/electron pair production. Which has also been observed. Hmm. That still didn’t change anything, did it?

Maybe electrons really are black holes?

Oh, I know! Neutrinos are as massive as electrons (edit: not really, but they do have positive rest mass), but lack charge. If electrons are black holes, then neutrinos are also. The effect of gravitationally scattering light as described above should work for neutrinos too, but to my knowledge, they don’t. (Do they?)

gilch 22 Apr 2016 2:26 UTC
2 points
on: 3 Levels of Rationality Verification
I seem to be years late to this party, but I’ve heard the LW culture isn’t opposed to commenting on old posts. In the interest of “breadth” I’ll answer anyway after at least five minutes of thought, without looking at the other answers first (though I’ve probably seen subsequent posts that have been influenced by this one by now).

So there are three categories of tests here. In order of strictness: those for masters, those for students, and those for employees?

There are many skills under the “rationality” umbrella. Enumerate them and test separately. Maybe there are some we don’t know yet. How do we test for those? There’s also a difference between epistemic and instrumental rationality. Epistemic seems easier to test and is probably required for instrumental. But instrumental is what we really want. Some of my test suggestions will only test a part of “rationality”.

Schools and science have a lot of experience measuring things like this. Can we learn from them?

Every test I’ve come up with seems to be in one of two categories: toy problems, or real-life problems. The real-life problems are better for the masters, perhaps; and the toy problems for the students. The toy problems are less real, but more replicable. I thought we’re supposed to hold off on proposing solutions to avoid attractors like categorization prematurely limiting our scope. But we’ve been asked to brainstorm. Can we break out of these categories?

Some Ideas:
- Give the students a sum to invest for a small business, and time limit, then see how much they make. Require strict record keeping to prevent cheating. Noisy.
- Give them a sum to invest in a prediction market, then see how much they make.
- Use more direct calibration tests. Make students give probabilities for things. See how often they’re right.
- A student must catch specific examples of cognitive errors/fallacies in a video. (Arguably the important part is to catch one’s own errors, and the ability to find others’ errors doesn’t prove that.)
- Make a student write an essay before the term. The instructor will find examples of cognitive errors in it, but keep it secret. Then after the term, the student must review his essay and find as many errors in his former thinking as possible. This will measure personal improvement, but might not help measure relative to peers, since they’re all taking different “tests”.
- SAT-style multiple-choice exam. This can test knowledge of the material, and synthesis too (or so the test writers claim) to a limited extent.
- Like the three integers test, the master can play the role of nature, while the students play the role of a scientist, trying to figure out a simple rule by “experiment”. Grading can be on the number of questions asked, the time taken, the difficulty of the rule, or the number of these questions answered correctly. The instructor must be strictly forbidden from giving hints that could ruin the results. This is actually very similar to debugging software. Maybe this kind of test could be computerized, with “nature” as an opaque program and, students writing code that interacts with it as their “experiments”. They then may have to write code to emulate the rule. If it passes the unit tests, a human instructor can confirm if it implements the same rule. This can also give students a feel for what it’s like to do science correctly.
- Competition programming AI to win at game-theory-inspired challenges. See how they compare to well-known strategies. May be hard to keep challenges secret. Could the payoff grid be randomized?
- Life outcome survey over years. Are they “winning” more versus control group? May be hard to define. Slow. We should do this, but we shouldn’t wait for it before developing the program.
- Masters can actually try to accomplish something. Maybe improve life outcomes in a third-world country or something. To be meaningful, it would have a control group, competitors, a time limit and a budget.

gilch 23 Apr 2016 22:49 UTC
0 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Hyakujo’s Fox
First, grasp a branch. Then, ask the other man for help.

gilch 20 May 2016 2:22 UTC
1 point
on: “Open-Mindedness”—the video
The link appears to be broken, but it’s probably referring to this video.