Ishaan

Karma: 2,220

Ishaan 30 Jun 2013 6:44 UTC
29 points
in reply to: Ritalin’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 19, chapter 88-89

If she had died in Azkaban or from a Kiss or from a Malfoy-funded assassination, that would have perhaps felt better. But the lamest warmup boss of the canon? Offscreen?

Isn’t that the point, though? Hasn’t that been the theme? That reality doesn’t care about the narrative arcs that you make in your head? That at any time, the universe is allowed to kill you, your notion of the plot be damned? What you are feeling seems to be more or less the author’s intention—the sign of a good story.

Mind you, if this was the real world. Harry would have found out about Hermione’s death 2-3 days later, not dramatically just in time. From a realism perspective, there was way more closure than anyone ever actually gets when it comes to violent death.

Ishaan 30 Jun 2013 7:52 UTC
6 points
on: Why one-box?
The optimal thing would be to have Omega think that you will one-box, but you actually two box. You’d love to play Omega for a fool, but the problem explicitly tells you that you can’t, and that Omega can somehow predict you.

Omega has extremely good predictions. if you’ve set your algorithm in such a state that Omega will predict that you one-box, you will be unable to do anything but one-box—your neurons are set in place, causal lines have already insured your decision, and free will doesn’t exist in the sense that you can change your decision after the fact.

Ishaan 4 Jul 2013 16:13 UTC
4 points
in reply to: William_Quixote’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 21, chapters 91 & 92

Figuring out the way the brain connects to the body and reconnecting all the individual nerve connections makes the challenge much harder.

I study neuroscience. You may know something I don’t, but I think body transplants would be a lot easier than resurrecting the dead, as long as you save the first few sections of the spinal chord as well—repairing broken spinal chords, albeit imperfectly, is somewhat in the realm of current technology. If we’re talking magic, I don’t think spinal chord injuries would even be a big deal.

Edit: never mind everything written below about the freezing

I was quite disappointed when Harry just froze her like that. The rapidly expanding ice will destroy much of her data—in real cryonics you pump ’em full of antifreeze to prevent this. Even if he revives her, she might not quite be the same now. He should have transfigured her head into a small crystalline structure and later found some way to securely maintain the spell (and if no one knows he did it, the pesky authorities won’t try to take off the spell).

Ishaan 4 Jul 2013 16:23 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Intrism’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 21, chapters 91 & 92
Oops...somehow my imagination inserted freezing! In that case, he really aught to contact a team of muggle and wizard doctors and have them swap knowledge immediately...(might be too risky for other reasons, of course)

Ishaan 8 Jul 2013 2:38 UTC
2 points
in reply to: elharo’s comment on: Optimizing Workouts for Intellectual Performance

Short version of Taubes’ recommendations, which are essentially the same as Atkins, LCHF, Paleo, and other low-carb plans:

Minor correction: The paleolithic diet does actually allow potatoes and other tubers, as well as honey and fruit sugar (as those are all foods that were eaten prior to agriculture). They argue specifically against eating agricultural staples such as legumes, grains, and possibly dairy...not carbohydrates in general.

Ishaan 8 Jul 2013 14:52 UTC
0 points
in reply to: elharo’s comment on: Optimizing Workouts for Intellectual Performance

However I’m not aware of any studies that attempt to distinguish between the various flavors of low-carb diets like paleo vs. Atkins.

The main difference is that the organizing principle of LCHF/Atkins is just that—replacing carbohydrate with fat, sometimes even to the point of ketosis. Studies that compare fat/carb ratio in diets to health factors are applicable to the whole carb vs. fat debate.

The organizing principle of the Paleo memeplex is that there are a few key things about modern lifestyles that negatively impact health—some popular targets include shoe-wearing, chairs, sit-down toilets, sedentary lifestyles, and most famously high grain consumption.

It’s true that the paleo diet ends up being relatively low carb, since grains are the major carbohydrate source...but the central claim doesn’t actually make any testable predictions about carb/fat ratios. Rather, the major testable prediction of the Paleo diet is that the human body is ill equipped to digest ]large amounts of grain.

So the relevant studies would be those that look at the effects of grains and components such as phytates, gluten, lectin...etc, on leaky gut syndrome, digestive gut flora, inflammation, nutrient absorption, and such—there wouldn’t be much overlap between these studies and carb/fat ratio studies.

There’s enough to justify elevating some form of low-carb to the null hypothesis.

Maybe? It’s difficult to make broad prescriptive claims in nutrition, and I’m not sure “low fat” and “low carb” are precise enough categories. My guess would be that both low fat and low carb win out over the standard diet simply because cutting out either one is likely to cause some calorie reduction and a compensatory increase in vegetable consumption.

The argument from the Paleo-memeplex would be the “null hypothesis” for diet should be based off of what we ate prior to agriculture. In the absence of evidence, evolutionarily novel foods are guilty until proven innocent, while ancestral foods are innocent until proven guilty. (Of course, the question of what exactly constitutes an evolutionarily novel food is not simple)

Fruit and honey I find much more questionable, especially honey. But I suppose if you limit yourself to honey you’ve personally harvested from wild beehives without the benefits of modern technology like bee suits, you’ll probably be fine. :-)

Hehe—well, as a sweetener it’s certainly an improvement on straight sugar and as a calorie source it’s an improvement over starch.

Not sure what the objection to fruit would be, though. Fruit juice, maybe, since it’s easy to over-eat when your food is in liquid form.

Advocates of the Paleo diet would claim that that the ideal diet has near zero grain content. Sugar, on the other hand, is not intrinsically harmful...it’s just that we frequently overdose. The ideal diet does contain some sugars.

Ishaan 21 Jul 2013 22:17 UTC
6 points
on: [Link] Sparrows may be vulnerable to sunk-cost-like effects
Of course, it doesn’t actually matter which one is chosen in this scenario. They could easily have gone one step further to see if they could use this effect to make the sparrows prefer the worse of the two deals—that would be much more interesting.

Ishaan 21 Jul 2013 23:16 UTC
0 points
in reply to: drethelin’s comment on: [Link] Sparrows may be vulnerable to sunk-cost-like effects
Agreed that it’s not quite the same—that’s why I had to say “sunk-cost-like”.

I’d definitely rather get the candy that is usually 10 dollars even if I thought they were pretty much the same because I would assume the person costing the candies knows why one is worth 8 dollars more normally than the other.

Perhaps, but the sparrows are (presumably) unaware that any sort of transaction is being made. Although I suppose it’s possible that they dimly perceive that the apparatus which they are interacting with is somewhat agent-like, the same way we might view a vending machine as more agent=like than a plant even if we didn’t know that someone had fashioned it with the intention of trading with us.

But even so—they’ve already sampled the rewards that each choice provides during the training tasks. So if you’ve tasted the candies and know what you are getting, why should it matter how much the other person thinks they should cost?

Ishaan 23 Jul 2013 1:46 UTC
0 points
in reply to: elharo’s comment on: [Link] Sparrows may be vulnerable to sunk-cost-like effects
Oh...thanks! I seem to have made a rather large number of tiny factual errors in posting this link, for some reason.

Ishaan 23 Jul 2013 1:54 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Randaly’s comment on: Superrationality and network flow control
Is there any way in which The Prisoner’s Dilemma and The Tragedy of the Commons do not describe identical games? (I mean, any way other than that the former is traditionally conceptualized as a two-player game while the latter can have any number of players.)

Ishaan 1 Sep 2013 23:18 UTC
12 points
on: P/S/A—Sam Harris offering money for a little good philosophy
Here’s my response. I had a LW-geared TL:DR which assumed shorter inferential distance and used brevity-aiding LW jargon, but then I removed it because I want to see if this makes sense to LW without any of that.

This debate boils down to a semantic confusion.

Lets consider the word “heat(1)”. Some humans chose the word “heat” to mean “A specific subset of environmental conditions that lead to the observation of feeling hot, of seeing water evaporate...” and many other things too numerous to mention.

Once “heat” was defined, science could begin to quantify how much of it there was using “temperature”. We can use our behavior to increase or decrease the heat, and some behaviors are objectively more heat-inducing than others.

But who defined heat in the first place? We did. We set the definition. It was an arbitrary decision. If our linguistic history had gone differently, “heat” could have meant any number of things.

If we were lucky, a neighboring culture would use “heat(2)” to mean “the colors red and yellow” and everyone would recognize that these were two separate words that meant different things but happened to be homonyms with a common root—since most warm things are red or yellow, it’s easy to see how definitions diverge. No one would be so silly as to argue about heat(1) and heat(2). If we were unlucky, a neighboring culture might decide to use “heat(3)” to mean “subjective feelings resulting from temperature-receptor activation”, and we’d have endless philosophical debates about what heat really is. All this useless debate because one culture decided to use “heat(3)” to refer to the subjective feeling of being hot, while another culture decided to use “heat(1)” to refer to a complex phenomenon which causes a bunch of observable effects, one of which is usually but not always the subjective experience of feeling hot.

One day, a group of humans which included one named Sam Harris decided to define “Good(1) and Best(1)” as “Well-Being among all Conscious Beings”. (Aside—In an effort to address the central theme and avoid tangents, let’s just assume that “Conscious Beings” here means “regular humans” and not create hypothetical situations containing eldritch beings with alien goals. Since we haven’t rigorously defined “Well-Being” and “Conscious-Being”, we won’t go into the question of whether “Well-Being” is a coherent construct for all “Conscious Beings” . We can deal with that problem later—that’s not the central issue. For now, we will simply go by our common intuitions of what those words mean.)

Can you measure “well-being” in humans? Sure you can! You can use questionnaires to measure satisfaction, you can measure health and vibrancy and do all sorts of things. And you can arrange your actions to maximize these measurements, creating the Best(1) Possible Universe. And some hypothesis about what actions you aught to take to reach the Best(1) Possible Universe are incorrect, while others are correct.

One day, a group of humans which did not include one named Sam Harris decided to define “Good(2)” as “The sum of all my goals”. Can science measure that? Actually, yes! - I can measure my emotional response to various hypothetical situations, and try to scientifically pinpoint what my goals are. I can attempt to describe my goals, and sometimes I will be incorrect about my own goals, and sometimes I will be correct—we’ve almost all been in situations where we thought we wanted something, and then realized we didn’t. Likewise, there is a certain set of actions that I can take to maximize the fulfillment of my goals, to reach my Best(2) Possible Universe. And I can use observation and logic to measure your goals as well, and calculate your Best(2) Possible Universe.

But can my goals themselves be incorrect? No—my goals are imbedded in my brain, in my software. My goals are physically a part of the universe. You can’t point to a feature of the universe and call it “incorrect”. You can only say that my goals are incompatible with yours, that our Best(2) Possible Universes are different. Mine is Better(2) for me, yours is Better(2) for you.

Our culture is unlucky, because Good(1) and Good(2) are homonyms whose definitions are far too close together. It doesn’t make sense to ask which definition is “correct” and which is “wrong”, any more than it makes sense to ask whether “Ma” means Mother (English) or Horse (Chinese). The entire argument stems from the two sides using the same word to mean entirely different things. It’s a stupid argument, and there are no new insights gained from going back and forth on the matter of which arbitrary definition is better. If only Good(1) and Good(2) didn’t sound so similar, there would be no confusion.

(Note: Of course, I’ve ridiculously oversimplified both Good(1) and Good(2), and I haven’t gone into Good 1.1, Good 1.2, Good 2.1, Good 2.2, etc. But I think it’s safe to say that most definitions of Good currently fall into either camp 1 or camp 2, and this argument is a misunderstanding between the definitional camps)

Ishaan 1 Sep 2013 23:56 UTC
6 points
in reply to: shminux’s comment on: P/S/A—Sam Harris offering money for a little good philosophy
Well shit...your post made me realize I’ve never really changed my mind on any non-empirical issue—although I have had blank spaces filled in, of course.

Would you consider EY prominant? He is here, at least. Here is a description of his conversion from the (I say surely false) belief that Aumann’s agreement theorem would cause rational agents to behave morally to the (I say surely true) belief in No Universally Compelling Arguments. He did it at age 18 and wrote essays on it too, so its not like he just filled in an empty space—he actually had to reject a previous belief, which he had given a lot of thought about.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/u2/the_sheer_folly_of_callow_youth/

Ishaan 2 Sep 2013 7:35 UTC
0 points
in reply to: printing-spoon’s comment on: P/S/A—Sam Harris offering money for a little good philosophy
oops. I guess it could be interpreted that way.

I meant that the argument between good(1) and good(2) is stupid. Harris is just one side of the debate—i’m saying the entire debate is misguided in the first place, much like it would be stupid to argue the meaning of Ma.

Using good(1) isn’t stupid, and neither is using good(2). It’s just stupid to argue which one good really means.

Ishaan 2 Sep 2013 15:48 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Carinthium’s comment on: P/S/A—Sam Harris offering money for a little good philosophy
I neither disagree nor agree with Harris (see my post for what I actually think), but I don’t think you’ve understood the argument sufficiently to refute it. I’ll pretend to be Harris and counter your arguments:

1) Scientific inquiry elucidates all facts that are available to our perception. Morality is a perception, therefore science can study it.

2) Yeah, so? Science doesn’t force us to be moral—but it can tell us what is moral and what is not. The scientific psychopath would know that his behavior was immoral, and wouldn’t care.

3, 4) Science will discover whether or not those humans are correct to believe that that course of actions is moral.

Read here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/fv3/by_which_it_may_be_judged/ to get Harris’s viewpoint, stated more articulately

Ishaan 2 Sep 2013 15:59 UTC
2 points
in reply to: calef’s comment on: P/S/A—Sam Harris offering money for a little good philosophy
Harris’s semantics would say that the human CEV is probably good while the alien CEV is something else.

Harris’s semantics are actually somewhat similar to Eliezer’s, actually.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/fv3/by_which_it_may_be_judged/

Ishaan 3 Sep 2013 5:53 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Carinthium’s comment on: P/S/A—Sam Harris offering money for a little good philosophy

this begs questions of why human brains are the only ones that are taken into account.

Harris has decided to define “good” as “that thing in human brains which typically corresponds to the word good”.

Under this definition, an agent using orange/blue compass rather than a black/white compass doesn’t have a different morality—rather, it’s simply unconcerned with moral questions. “Good” and “Moral” are defined as the human-specific-value-thingies. That is why only human brains are taken into account—because they are embedded in his definition of “good”.

Ishaan 3 Sep 2013 6:26 UTC
0 points
on: Advanced Placement exam cutoffs and superficial knowledge over deep knowledge

It’s natural to ask what effect this has on incentives. Note that AP courses are taught to prepare students to get high marks on the AP exams, so that the grading scheme for AP exams propagates backward to the grading schemes for courses, which feed into college admissions. Taking many AP courses and performing just above the “5” level looks better than taking few AP courses and performing at the ~90% level.

Oh, so is that why schools use grades rather than percentages—an attempt to disincentive overspecialization and/or reduce pressure to overachieve? I’ve always wondered about that.

A more sane way to do this would be to give a percentage, but obfuscate it above a certain level. As in, John is at 78%, Wang is at 79%, but Ajeet, Alisha, Antwan are at 80%+ and the exact number shall not be revealed.

This keeps the disadvantage of undue emphasis on cut-off numbers (the 1% point that distinguishes C+ from B-) to a minimum while retaining the desired effect on incentives. There would still be a disadvantage at the single cut-off point (since 79% is significantly worse than 80+%) but at least the harm is contained around just one cut off point instead of several.

Ishaan 4 Sep 2013 22:23 UTC
2 points
on: Which subreddits should we create on Less Wrong?
The categories of stuff on LW as I perceive them (in no particular order) are:

Philosophy

-Values and ethics (human, utilitarian, alien, or otherwise)

-Game Theory (subset of instrumental rationality)

-Epistemology (epistemic rationality)

Activism

-Effective Altruism (Givewell, 8000hours, meta charity)

-X-risk reduction

-investment in far future

Personal Development

-happiness-boosting

-Fighting Akrasia (procrastination, motivation, willpower)

-optimizing your organism (body, mind, nootropics, supplements,exercise, etc)

-good habits and heuristics (especially organization, decision making)

-tools and educational resources

-bias recognition and reduction

Self Referential

-about Lesswrong and associated blogosphere

-book reviews and views of various philosophers

-rationalist fiction, especially hpmor

Checking back, they line up well with yours.

However, as someone who is interested in all of these things, for me a more pressing problem is: how can we collate past content so that it will be easy to access now? There are a lot of great posts that aren’t in the sequences, that I don’t want to spend lots of time digging through and finding.

I think most people interested in one LW topic tend to be interested in others, so I’m not sure how much creating separate subreddits will improve anything.

Ishaan 5 Sep 2013 23:10 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: P/S/A—Sam Harris offering money for a little good philosophy
I don’t think he would disagree if he read it, which is why I thought it was worth submitting. i’m not attempting to change his opinion so much as attempting to dissolve the debate which he is attempting to take sides on. Sam Harris’s argument is right if we accept the premise that good=good(1), but wrong if we accept the premise that good=good(2).

My purpose is merely to point out that the choice of whether to use good(1) or good(2) is arbitrary. My aim is to make it explicit. The debate as framed by Sam Harris implicitly assigns good the value of good(1). You can’t just do that implicitly when the crux of the debate is about the definition of good.

Ishaan 5 Sep 2013 23:16 UTC
0 points
in reply to: kalium’s comment on: Advanced Placement exam cutoffs and superficial knowledge over deep knowledge
Percentile is good when you want to identify where an individual is with respect to peers. You use it when you don’t care about cohort effects and stuff like that. If I need 10 doctors, and I want the best doctors, then I can take the top 10 percentile in a class of 100. Even if they are all shitty MCAT scorers, I can’t do without doctors so I’ve got to take the best of what I have. Likewise, even if they are all amazing scorers, I can’t possibly take them all, so I’ll just take the best.

Percentage is good when you want to identify an absolute level of skill. For example, if you wanted to see which students in a class of 100 were ready for algebra, you’d want to measure their absolute addition/subtraction/multiplication skills, not relative skills. If everyone is ready, then everyone can go on to Algebra. Likewise if no one is ready, they can all stay behind. I don’t care where people are with respect to peers—I only care where they are.

I suppose the types of situations where you would attempt obfuscation would usually be of the “percentile” variety.