One way of testing: Have two questions just like in Allais experiment. Make the experiment in five different versions where choice 1B has increasing complexity but same expected utility. See if 1B-aversion correlates with increasing complexity.
PuyaSharif
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The self-fooling problem.
What jobs are safe in an automated future?
This problem reminds me of the movie Memento. The lead character was unable to make any new memories and his mind was reset every two or three minutes. Nevertheless was he trying to find his wifes killer, and kept record of new leads by taking pictures with a Polaroid camera, keeping notes and tattooing pieces of information to his body. Great movie!
Since ten years back a sub-field of quantum information theory has emerged, quantum game theory. Regard it as the intersection of quantum mechanics and game theory. It deals with game theoretical situations where the participants use entangled quantum states, quantum superposition and unitary operations as resources to gain advantages compared to classical counterparts.
I am designing and (trying) solving a quantum game using three level quantum states, qutrits (compared to the usual qubits, two level systems).
When I was eight or nine i got one of those electricity/magnetism experiment kits. Boy, did I love that kit! I did that motor, electric bell and electromagnet experiment over and over again for maybe a year and then moved on to building my own electronic stuff from components I found tearing old TV’s and radios apart. I soon had a little club at home teaching my friends!
Some years ago when my cousin just had turned nine I got him a kit and hoped to see him become as interested in electronics as I was in his age. But he hardly opened the box, and when I came to visit a year later that kit was long gone and forgotten. It simply could not stand the competition against the video games and toy guns.
I don’t want to demotivate you with this story. Just want to say that stimulating a kid towards some interest is much more than buying a set of object for them. The key is the time you spend and how you spend it. Make it a step by step project. Ask her; maybe there are things among your alternatives that are more interesting to her than other. Followup and communicate. Visit museums etc..
Rational to distrust your own rationality?
This is fantastic! I came across this site a while back and promised myself that I would submit something as soon as I could find the time. Then it slipped my occupied mind and I forgot about the very existence of LW! I happened to take a look inside tonight and the first thing I see is that there is a meetup here in Stockholm 36 hours and 15 minutes from now. What a nice coincidence! I’ll be very happy to join. I’m a sucker for all kinds of discussions. Game theory, economy, politics, decision theory, technology, artificial intelligence, fundamental questions in philosophy, physics, you name it. See you guys!
Calculus, mechanical physics, chemistry, microbiology etc are areas describing objective reality. They explain how the world we live in works on a fundamental level, i.e the very fabric of reality. Not only do they give answers to basic questions of human life, they also activate the students toward systematic analytical thinking and questioning.
Do you really mean that people would be better off never being exposed to (“interesting but useless”) natural science? Would you prefer a society where most people doesn’t have a clue about how things around them came to be or how they work? How would a potential engineer or a researcher build up its interest towards science if never exposed to it systematically?
Learning about music and art is good, but not at expense of science!
Why interfering and not letting your kid develop his own ways? Answering “How are you?” in detail sounds to me as a fantastic trait of his personality.
When I was 7-years old I stopped calling my parents mom and dad and switched over to calling them by their names. I just couldn’t understand the logic of other people call them one thing and me calling the something else. Happily nobody tried to “correct” me according to social rules, and still today it wouldn’t cross my mind to call my mother ‘mother’!
I agree that the conceptual (non-simply-symbol-processing) part of theoretical physics is the tricky part to automate, and even if I am willing to accept that that last 1% will be kept in the monopoly of human beings, but then that’s it; theoretical physics will asymptotically reduce to that 1% and stay there until AGI arrives. Its not bound to change over night, but the change will be the product of many small changes where computers start to aid us not by just doing the calculations and simulations but more advanced tasks where we can input sets of equations from two different sub-field and letting the computers using evolutionary algorithms try different combinations, operate on them and so on and find links. The process could end where a joint theory in a common mathematical framework succeeds to derive the phenomena in both sub fields.
EDIT: Have to add that it feels a bit awkward to argue against the future necessity of my “profession”..
‘Rational’ as in rational agent is a pretty well defined concept in rational choice theory/game theory/decision theory. That is what I refer to when I use the word.
For example, music composition, writing fiction, and similar artistic endeavors require that the artist know what people enjoy. I think that that will be done by humans for the foreseeable future.
Regarding music composition; there are already algorithms being developed for predicting the potential of a song becoming a hit. Next step could be algorithms that creates the songs by themselves. Its all about optimization with positive feedback. Algorithm: Create a piece of art A such that A has a high probability of satisfying the ones experiencing it. Input statistics about human nature + reaction to previous generations + reactions to man made art of the same sort. Most people wouldn’t care about how that piece of art was made. (But I guess this will take a while)
You see, the reason for why it is discussed as an “effect” or “paradox” is that even if your risk aversion (“oh no what if I lose”) is taken into account, it is strange to take 1A together with 2B. A risk averse person might “correctly” chose 1A, but that for person to be consistent in its choices has to chose 2A. Not 1A and 2B together.
My suggestion is that the slight increase in complexity in 1A adds to your risk (external risk+internal risk) and therefore within your given risk profile makes 1A and 2B a consistent combination.
It depends on how you define ‘use’. People are trying to make sense of reality all the time. Different scenarios needs different tools and different ways of thinking. Basic high school science helps you understand parts of the news flow, some aspects of the mechanisms of your household appliances, transportation related concepts like time, velocity, acceleration, your body and so on.
Even I have a chapter in a textbook, its not a measure of quality :) Conference proceedings sometimes are published as a book, with ISBN and all.
Yes I am, and I’ll soon start looking for PhD-positions either in physics or some interdisciplinary field of interest. I know I seem a bit over-optimistic, and that such radical changes may take maybe at least 30-50 years, but I’d guess most of us will be alive by then so its still relevant. My main point is that step by step theoretical tasks will move to the space of computation and the job of the theoretician will evolve to something else. If one day our computers in our computer aided research starts to output suggestions for models, or links between sets of data we haven’t thought about comparing wouldn’t those results actually be a collaboration between us and that system? You maybe cant imagine automating everything you do, but I’m sure you can imagine parts of your research being automated. That would allow you to use more mental resources for the conceptual and creative part of the research and so on..
My goal was/is to start a discussion around: 1. Strategies today for maximizing probability of being needed in the future. 2 Even more interesting, what tasks are hard/easy to automate and why? 3 The consequences automation will have on global economy. So far, the comments covers a little bit of all.
1 Hindsight bias? Quite a diagnosis there. I never specified the level of those algorithms.
2 Which part of theoretical physics is not math? Experiments confirm or reject theoretical conclusions and points theoretical work in different directions. But that theoretical work is in the end symbol processing—something that computers are pretty good at. There could be a variety of ways for a computer to decide if a theorem is interesting just as for a human. Scope, generality and computability of the theorems could be factors. Input Newtonian mechanics and the mathematics of 1850 and output Hamiltonian mechanics just based on the generality of that framework.
1 Maybe I should clarify: Are the tasks previously done by bank tellers becoming automated? Yes. The fact that the number bank tellers has increased does not invalidate my statement. If there were no internet banking or ATMs then increase would be much larger right? So its trivial to see that the number of bank tellers can increase at the same time as bank teller jobs are lost to automated systems.
2 I’ll give you an extreme one. I am a few steps away of earning a degree in theoretical physics specializing in quantum information theory. Theoretical quantum information theory is nothing but symbol manipulation in a framework on existing theorems of linear algebra. With enough resources pretty much all of the research could be done by computers alone. Algorithms could in principle put mathematical statements together, other algorithms testing the meaningfulness of the output and so on.. but that a discussion interesting enough to have its own thread. I just mean that theoretical work is not immune to automation.
Organize all the known mathematics and physics of 1915 in a computer running the right algorithms, the ask it: ‘what is gravity?’ Would it output General theory of relativity? I think so.