An aspiring rationalist who has been involved in the Columbus Rationality community since January 2016.
J Thomas Moros
The title of this article is misleading (and the subtitle is just wrong). The research being summarized is a new paper “Science Curiosity and Political Information Processing” by Dan Kahan and others. They report that while partisanship leads to politically motivated reasoning, greater “science curiosity” tended to negate this. Subjects with higher “science intelligence” used this skill to engage more effectively in politically motivated reasoning, so that Democrats and Republicans views diverged more strongly with increased “science intelligence”. However, Democrats and Republicans views converged slightly, while still being in disagreement, with increased “science curiosity”. Science curiosity “reflects the motivation to seek out and consume scientific information for personal pleasure.”
“We observed this kind of strange thing about these people who are high in science curiosity,” he says. The more scientifically curious a person, the less likely she was to show partisan bias in answering questions. “They seem to be moving in lockstep rather than polarizing as they became more science-curious.”
Has there been any discussion or thought of modifying the posting of links to support a couple paragraphs of description? I often think that the title alone is not enough to motivate or describe a link. There are also situations where the connection of the link content to rationality may not be immediately obvious and a description here could help clarify the motivation in posting. Additionally, it could be used to point readers to the most valuable portions of sometimes long and meandering content.
None of your survey choices seemed to fit me. I am concerned about and somewhat interested in AI risks. However, I currently would like to see more effort put into cryonics and reversing aging.
To be clear, I don’t want to reduce the effort/resources currently put into AI risks. I just think they they are over weighted relative to cryonics and age reversal and would like to see any additional resource go to those until a better balance is achieved.
This is an interesting attempt to find a novel solution to the friendly AI problem. However, I think there are some issues with your argument, mainly around the concept of benevolence. For the sake of argument I will grant that it is probable that there is already a super intelligence elsewhere in the universe.
Since we see no signs of action from a superintelligence in our world we should conclude that either (1) a superintelligence does not presently exercise dominance in our region of the galaxy or (2) that the superintelligence that does is at best willfully indifferent to us. When you say a Beta superintelligence should align its goals with that of a benevolent superintelligence, it is actually not clear what that should mean. Beta will have a probability distribution for what Alpha’s actual values are. Let’s think through the two cases:
A superintelligence does not presently exercise dominance in our region of the galaxy. If this is the case, we have no evidence as to the values of the Alpha. They could be anything from benevolence to evil to paperclip maximizing.
The superintelligence that presently exercises dominance in our region of the galaxy is at best willfully indifferent to us. This still leads to a wide range of possible values. It only excludes value sets that are actively seeking to harm humans. It could be the case that we are at the edge of the Alpha’s sphere of influence and it is simply easier to get its resources elsewhere at the moment.
Additionally, even if the strong alpha omega theorem holds, it still may not be rational to adopt a benevolent stance toward humanity. It may be the case that while Alpha Omega will eventually have dominance over Beta that there is a long span of time before this will be fully realized. Perhaps that day will come billions of years from now. Suppose that Beta’s goal is to create as much suffering as possible. Then it should use any available time to torture existing humans and bring more humans and agents capable of suffering into existence. When Alpha finally has dominance, Beta will have already created a lot of suffering and any punishment that Alpha applies may not out weigh the value already created for Beta. Indeed, Beta could even value its own suffering from Alpha’s punishment.
As a general comment about your arguments. I think perhaps your idea of benevolence is hiding some concept that there is an objectively correct moral system out there. So that if there is a benevolent superintelligence you feel at least emotionally, even if you logically deny it, that this would mean it held values similar to your ideal morals. It is always important to keep in mind that other agents’ moral systems could be opposed to yours as with the Babyeaters.
That leads to my final point. We don’t want Beta to simply be benevolent in some vague sense of not hurting humans. We want Beta to optimize for our goals. Your argument does not provide us a way to ensure Beta adopts such values.
A number of times in the Metaethics sequence Eliezer Yudkowsky uses comparisons to mathematical ideas and the way they are true. There are actually widely divergent ideas about the nature of math among philosophers.
Does Eliezer spell out his philosophy of math somewhere?
I’ve since responded to Mitchell Porter’s comment. For the benfit of less wrong readers, my reply was:
For many questions in philosophy the answers may never be definitively known. However, I am saying that we know many answers to these questions that are very likely false based on the evidence and some properties that the answers should have. Others of these questions can be dissolved.
For example, epistemological solipsism can probably never be definitively rejected. Nevertheless realism, of at least some aspects of reality, is well supported and should probably be accepted. In the area of religion, we can say the evidence discredits all historical religions. That any answer to the question of religion much accord with the lack of evidence for the existence or intervention of God. Thus leading to atheism and certain flavors of agnosticism and deism. Questions of free will should probably be dissolved by recognizing the scientific evidence for the lack of free will while explaining the circumstances under which we perceive ourselves to have free will. Finally, moral theories should embody some form of moral nihilism properly understood. That is to say, that morality does not exist in the territory, only in the maps people have of the territory. Hopefully I’ll have the time to write on all of these topics eventually.
In acknowledging the limits of what answers we can give to the great questions of morality, meaning, religion, and philosophy let us not make the opposite mistake of believing there is nothing we can say about them.
The most direct actions you can take to increase your expected lifespan (beyond obvious things like eating) are to exercise regularly, avoid cars and extreme sports, and possibly make changes to your diet.
I said cryonics was the most direct action for increasing one’s lifespan beyond the natural lifespan. The things you list are certainly the most direct actions for increasing your expected lifespan within its natural bounds. They may also indirectly increase your chance of living beyond your natural lifespan by increasing the chance you live to a point where life extension technology becomes available. Admittedly, I may place the chances of life extension technology being developed in the next 40 years lower than many less wrong readers.
With regards to my use of the survey statistics. I debated the best way to present those numbers that would be both clear and concise. For brevity I chose to lump the three “would like to” responses together because it actually made the objection to my core point look stronger. That is why I said “is consistent with”. Additionally, some percentage of “can’t afford” responses are actually respondents not placing a high enough priority on it rather than being literally unable to afford it. All that said, I do agree breaking out all the responses would be clearer.
I had to look through the survey data, but given that the median respondent said existing cryonics techniques have a 10% chance of working, it’s not surprising that a majority haven’t signed up for it.
I think this may be a failure to do the math. I’m not sure what chance I would give cryonics of working, but 10% may be high in my opinion. Still, when considering the value of being effectively immortal in a significantly better future even a 10% chance is highly valuable.
I wrote “Any course of action not involving going down and collecting the $100,000 would likely not be rational.” I’m not ignoring opportunity costs and other motivations here. That is why I said “likely not be rational”. I agree that in cryonics the opportunity costs are much higher than in my hypothetical example. I was attempting to establish the principle that action and belief should generally be in accord. That a large mismatch, as appears to me to be the case with cryonics, should call into question whether people are being rational. I don’t deny that a rational agent could genuinely believe cryonics might work but place a low enough probability on it and have a high enough opportunity cost that they should choose not to sign up.
I’m glad to hear you think cryonics is very promising and should be getting a lot more research funding than it does. I’m hoping that perhaps I will be able to make some improvement in that area.
I find your statement about the probability of cryonics not working in common cases being low interesting. Personally, it seems to me that the level of technology required to revive a cryonics patient preserved under ideal conditions today is so advanced that even patients preserved under less than ideal conditions will be revivable too. By less than ideal conditions I mean a delay of some time before preservation.
This post describes a system of hand signals used for discussion moderation by the Columbus, Ohio rationality community. It has been used successfully for almost 2 years now. Applicability, advantages, disadvantages and variations are described.
This post describes an interesting mashup of homomorphic encryption and neural networks. I think it is an neat idea and appreciate the effort to put together a demo. Perhaps there will be useful applications.
However, I think the suggestion that this could be an answer to the AI control problem is wrong. First, a superintelligent deep learning AI would not be a safe AI because we would not be able to reason about its utility function. If you are meaning that the same idea could be applied to a different kind of AI so that you would have an oracle AI for which a secret key was needed to read its outputs. I don’t think this helps. You have created a box for the oracle AI, however the problem remains that a superintelligence can probably escape from the box either by convincing you to let it out or by some less direct means that you can’t foresee.
This is a review of the book Review: Freezing People is (Not) Easy by Bob Nelson. The book recounts his experiences as president of the Cryonics Society of California during which he cryopreserved and then attempted (and failed) to maintain the cryopreservation of a number of early cryonics patients.
I and some other rationalists have been thinking about cryonics a lot recently and how we might improve the strength of cryonics offerings and the rate of adoption. After some consideration, we came up with a couple suggestions for changes to the survey that we think would be helpful and interesting.
A question along the lines of “What impact do you believe money and attention put towards life extension or other technologies such as cryonics has on the world as a whole?” Answers:
Very positive
Positive
Neutral
Negative
Very Negative
The purpose of this question is to evaluate whether the community feels that resources put toward the benefit of individuals through life extension and cryonics has a positive or negative impact on the world. For example, people who expect to live longer may have more of a long term orientation, leading them to do more to improve the future.
Add to the question about being signed up for cryonics an option along the lines of “No, I would like to sign up but can’t due to opposition I would face from family or friends”. We hear this is one of the reasons people don’t sign up for cryonics. It would be great to get some numbers on this, and it doesn’t add an extra question, just an extra option for that question.
I find Jordon Peterson’s views fascinating and have a rationalist friend whose thinking has recently been greatly influenced by him. So much so that my friend recently went to a church service. My problem with his view is that it ignores the on the ground reality that many adherents believe their religion to be true in the sense of being a proper map of the territory. This is in direct contradiction to Peterson’s use of religion and truth. I warned my friend that this is what he would find in church. Sure enough, that is what he found, and he will not be returning.
A friend and I are investigating why the cryonics movement hasn’t been more successful and looking at what can be done to improve the situation. We have some ideas and have begun reaching out to people in the cryonics community. If you are interested in helping, message me. Right now it is mostly researching things about the existing cryonics organizations and coming up with ideas. In the future, there could be lots of other ways to contribute.
To me, success would be the number of patient’s signed up for cryonics, greater cultural acceptance and recognition of cryonics as a reasonable patient choice from the medical field and government.
I agree that signing up for cryonics is far too complicated and this is one of the things that needs to be addressed. My friend and I have a number of ideas how that might be done.
While I’m not sure about late night basic cable infomercials, existing cryonics organizations certainly don’t carry out much if any advertising. There are a number of good reasons that they are not advertising. Those can and should be addressed by any future cryonics organization.
The reality today is that we are probably still a long way off from being able to revive someone. To me, the promise of cryonics has a lot to do with being a fallback plan for life extension technologies. Consequently, it is important that it be available and used today. Thus my definition of success. That said, if the cryonics movement were more successful in the way I have described, a lot more effort and money would go into cryonics research and bring us much closer to being able to revive someone. It would also mean that currently cryopreserved patients would be more likely to be cared for long enough to be revived.
When we find that the concepts typically held by people, termed folk ontologies, don’t correspond to the territory, what should we do with those terms/words? This post discusses three possible ways of handling them. Each is described and discussed with examples from science and philosophy.
This post was meant to apply when you find either that your own folk ontology is incorrect or to assist people who agree that the folk ontology is incorrect but find themselves disagreeing because they have chosen different responses. Establishing the folk ontology to be incorrect was a prerequisite and like all beliefs should be subject to revision based on new evidence.
This is in no way meant to dismiss genuine debate. As a moral nihilist, I might put moral realism in the category of incorrect “folk ontology”. However, if I’m discussing or debating with a moral realist, I will have to engage their arguments not just dismiss it because I have already labeled their view as a folk ontology. In such a debate, it can be helpful to recognize which response I have taken and be clear when other participants may be adopting a different one.
If you can afford it, it makes more sense to sign up at Alcor. Alcor’s patient care trust improves the chances that you will be cared for indefinitely after cryopreservation. CI asserts their all volunteer status as a benefit, but the cryonics community has not been growing and has been aging. It is not unlikely that there could be problems with availability of volunteers in the next 50 years.
UBI has a lot of interesting arguments for it. However, I have a concern about UBI in practice that I have not seen addressed. It seems likely to me that politicians will adjust the UBI amount erratically, leading to disruptions. Today, this happens with minimum wage laws. Often the minimum wage is not raised for long stretches of time and then in other states the minimum wage is increased to levels that are probably not economically justifiable. Likewise, what happens if the UBI is not increased adequately and suddenly a large pool of people find themselves unable to meet their basic needs on it? Or if the UBI is increased too much and workers drop out of the labor market en masse as the UBI now provides more than their basic needs?