TimFreeman

Karma: 753

TimFreeman 22 Apr 2015 5:52 UTC
2 points
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on: Models as definitions
Humans can be recognized inductively: Pick a time such as the present when it is not common to manipulate genomes. Define a human to be everyone genetically human at that time, plus all descendants who resulted from the naturally occurring process, along with some constraints on the life from conception to the present to rule out various kinds of manipulation.

Or maybe just say that the humans are the genetic humans at the start time, and that’s all. Caring for the initial set of humans should lead to caring for their descendants because humans care about their descendants, so if you’re doing FAI you’re done. If you want to recognize humans for some other purpose this may not be sufficient.

Predicting human behavior seems harder than recognizing humans, so it seems to me that you’re presupposing the solution of a hard problem in order to solve an easy problem.

An entirely separate problem is that if you train to discover what humans would do in one situation and then stop training and then use the trained inference scheme in new situations, you’re open to the objection that the new situations might be outside the domain covered by the original training.

TimFreeman 11 Mar 2015 15:09 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: “Spiritual” techniques that actually work thread
Hyperventilating leads to hallucinations instead of stimulation. I went to a Holotropic Breathwork session once. Some years before that, I went to a Sufi workshop in NYC where Hu was chanted to get the same result. I have to admit I cheated at both events—I limited my breathing rate or depth so not much happened to me.

Listening to the reports from the other participants of the Holotropic Breathwork session made my motives very clear to me. I don’t want any of that. I like the way my mind works. I might consider making purposeful and careful changes to how my mind works, but I do not want random changes. I don’t take psychoactive drugs for the same reason.

TimFreeman 20 Mar 2014 15:26 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: The Problem with AIXI
If you give up on the AIXI agent exploring the entire set of possible hypotheses and instead have it explore a small fixed list, the toy models can be very small. Here is a unit test for something more involved than AIXI that’s feasible because of the small hypothesis list.

TimFreeman 28 Feb 2014 6:58 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Group Rationality Diary, January 16-31
Getting a programming job is not contingent on getting a degree. There’s an easy test for competence at programming in a job interview: ask the candidate to write code on a whiteboard. I am aware of at least one Silicon Valley company that does that and have observed them to hire people who never finished their BS in CS. (I’d rather ask candidates to write code and debug on a laptop, but the HR department won’t permit it.)

Getting a degree doesn’t hurt. It might push up your salary—even if one company has enough sense to evaluate the competence of a programmer directly, the other companies offering jobs to that programmer are probably looking at credentials, so it’s rational for a company to base salaries on credentials even if they are willing to hire someone who doesn’t have them. Last I checked, a BS in CS made sense financially, a MS made some sense too, and a PhD was not worth the time unless you want a career writing research papers. I got a PhD apparently to postpone coming into contact with the real world. Do not do that.

If you can’t demonstrate competent programming in a job interview (either due to stage fright or due to not being all that competent), getting a degree is very important. I interview a lot of people and see a lot of stage fright. I have had people I worked with and knew to be competent not get hired because of how they responded emotionally to the interview situation. What I’m calling “stage fright” is really cognitive impairment due to the emotional situation; it is usually less intense than the troubles of a thespian trying to perform on stage. Until you’ve done some interviews, you don’t know how much the interview situation will impair you.

Does anyone know if ex-military people get stage fright at job interviews? You’d think that being trained to kill people would fix the stage fright when there’s only one other person in the room and that person is reasonably polite, but I have not had the opportunity to observe both the interview of an ex-military person and their performance as a programmer in a realistic work environment.

TimFreeman 28 Feb 2014 6:10 UTC
9 points
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on: Lifestyle interventions to increase longevity
I have experienced consequences of donating blood too often.The blood donation places check your hemoglobin, but I have experienced iron deficiency symptoms when my hemoglobin was normal and my serum ferritin was low. The symptoms were twitchy legs when I was trying to sleep and insomnia, and iron deficiency was confirmed with a ferritin test. The iron deficiency symptoms went away and ferritin went back to normal when I took iron supplements and stopped donating blood, and I stopped the iron supplements after the normal ferritin test.

The blood donation places will encourage you to donate every 2 months, and according to a research paper I found when I was having this problem essentially everyone will have low serum ferritin if they do that for two years.

I have no reason to disagree with the OP’s recommendation of donating blood every year or two.

TimFreeman 27 Oct 2013 19:39 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Quantum Mechanics and Personal Identity
Well, I suppose it’s an improvement that you’ve identified what you’re arguing against.

Unfortunately the statements you disagree with don’t much resemble what I said. Specifically:

The argument you made was that copy-and-destroy is not bad because a world where that is done is not worse than our own.

I did not compare one world to another.

Pointing out that your definition of something, like harm, is shared by few people is not argumentum ad populum, it’s pointing out that you are trying to sound like you’re talking about something people care about but you’re really not.

I did not define “harm”.

The disconnect between what I said and what you heard is big enough that saying more doesn’t seem likely to make things better.

The intent to make a website for the purpose of fostering rational conversation is good, and this one is the best I know, but it’s still so cringe-inducing that I ignore it for months at a time. This dialogue was typical. There has to be a better way but I don’t know what it is.

TimFreeman 26 Oct 2013 5:52 UTC
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in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Quantum Mechanics and Personal Identity
Nothing I have said in this conversation presupposed ignorance, blissful or otherwise.

I give up, feel free to disagree with what you imagine I said.

Check out Argumentum ad Populum. With all the references to “most people”, you seem to be committing that fallacy so often that I am unable to identify anything else in what you say.

TimFreeman 25 Oct 2013 5:50 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Quantum Mechanics and Personal Identity

This reasoning can be used to justify almost any form of “what you don’t know won’t hurt you”. For instance, a world where people cheated on their spouse but it was never discovered would function, from the point of view of everyone, as well as or better than the similar world where they remained faithful.

Your example is too vague for me to want to talk about. Does this world have children that are conceived by sex, children that are expensive to raise, and property rights? Does it have sexually transmitted diseases? Does it have paternity tests? Does it have perfect contraception? You stipulated that affairs are never discovered, so liberal use of paternity tests imply no children from the affairs.

I’m also leery of the example because I’m not sure it’s relevant. If you turn off the children, in some scenarios you turn off the evolution so my idea of looking at evolution to decide what concepts are useful doesn’t work. If you leave the children in the story, then for some values of the other unknowns jealousy is part of the evolutionarily stable strategy, so your example maybe doesn’t work.

Can you argue your point without relying so much on the example? “Most of us think X is bad” is perhaps true for the person-copying scheme and if that’s the entire content of your argument then we can’t address the question of whether most of us should think X is bad.

TimFreeman 21 Oct 2013 15:44 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: Quantum Mechanics and Personal Identity

OTOH, some such choices are worse than others.

If you have an argument, please make it. Pointing off to a page with a laundry list of 37 things isn’t an argument.

One way to find useful concepts is to use evolutionary arguments. Imagine a world in which it is useful and possible to commute back and forth to Mars by copy-and-destroy. Some people do it and endure arguments about whether they are still the “same” person when they got back, some people don’t do it because of philosophical reservations about being the “same” person. Since we hypothesized that visiting Mars this way is useful, the ones without the philosophical reservation will be better off, in the sense that if visiting Mars is useful enough they will be able to out-compete the people who won’t visit Mars that way.

So if you want to say that going places by copy-and-destroy is a bad thing for the person taking the trip, you should be able to describe the important way in which this hypothetical world where copy-and-destroy is useful is different from our own. I can’t do that, and I would be very interested if you can.

Freezing followed by destructive upload seems moderately likely to be useful in the next few decades, so this hypothetical situation with commuting to Mars is not irrelevant.

TimFreeman 23 Jun 2013 18:34 UTC
0 points
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on: Open Problems Related to Solomonoff Induction
Suppose we define a generalized version of Solomonoff Induction based on some second-order logic. The truth predicate for this logic can’t be defined within the logic and therefore a device that can decide the truth value of arbitrary statements in this logical has no finite description within this logic. If an alien claimed to have such a device, this generalized Solomonoff induction would assign the hypothesis that they’re telling the truth zero probability, whereas we would assign it some small but positive probability.

I’m not sure I understand you correctly, but there are two immediate problems with this:
- If the goal is to figure out how useful Solomonoff induction is, then “a generalized version of Solomonoff Induction based on some second-order logic” is not relevant. We don’t need random generalizations of Solomonoff induction to work in order to decide whether Solomonoff induction works. I think this is repairable, see below.
- Whether the alien has a device that does such-and-such is not a property of the world, so Solomonoff induction does not assign a probability to it. At any given time, all you have observed is the behavior of the device for some finite past, and perhaps what the inside of the device looks like, if you get to see. Any finite amount of past observations will be assigned positive probability by the universal prior so there is never a moment when you encounter a contradiction.
If I understand your issue right, you can explore the same issue using stock Solomonoff induction: What happens if an alien shows up with a device that produces some uncomputable result? The prior probability of the present situation will become progressively smaller as you make more observations and asymptotically approach zero. If we assume quantum mechanics really is nondeterministic, that will be the normal case anyway, so nothing special is happening here.

TimFreeman 23 Jun 2013 18:02 UTC
2 points
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on: Open Problems Related to Solomonoff Induction

Consider an arbitrary probability distribution P, and the smallest integer (or the lexicographically least object) x such that P(x) < 1/3^^^3 (in Knuth’s up-arrow notation). Since x has a short description, a universal distribution shouldn’t assign it such a low probability, but P does, so P can’t be a universal distribution.

The description of x has to include the description of P, and that has to be computable if a universal distribution is going to assign positive probability to x.

If P has a short computable description, then yes, you can conclude that P is not a universal distribution. Universal distributions are not computable.

If the shortest computable description of P is long, then you can’t conclude from this argument that P is not a universal distribution, but I suspect that it still can’t be a universal distribution, since P is computable.

If there is no computable description of P, then we don’t know that there is a computable description of x, so you have no contradiction to start with.

TimFreeman 23 Jun 2013 16:49 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: Kenny’s comment on: Crisis of Faith

You’re absolutely right that learning to lie really well and actually lying to one’s family, the “genuinely wonderful people” they know, everyone in one’s “social structure” and business, as well as one’s husband and daughter MIGHT be the “compassionate thing to do”. But why would you pick out exactly that option among all the possibilities?

Because it’s a possibility that the post we’re talking about apparently did not consider. The Litany of Gendlin was mentioned in the original post, and I think that when interpreted as a way to interact with others, the Litany of Gendlin is obviously the wrong thing to do in some circumstances.

Perhaps having these beautifully phrased things with a person’s name attached is a liability. If I add a caveat that it’s only about one’s internal process, or it’s only about communication with people that either aspire to be rational or that you have no meaningful relationship with, then it’s not beautifully phrased anymore, and it’s not the Litany of Gendlin anymore, and it seems hopeless for the resulting Litany of Tim to get enough mindshare to matter.

But where exactly is the boundary dividing those things that, however uncomfortable or even devastating, must be said or written and those things about which one can decieve or dupe those one loves and respects?

Actually it wasn’t a rhetorical question. I was genuinely curious how you’d describe the boundary.

I’m not curious about that, and in the absence of financial incentives I’m not willing to try to answer that question. There is no simple description of how to deal with the world that’s something a reasonable person will actually want to do.

TimFreeman 22 Jun 2013 19:55 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Kenny’s comment on: Crisis of Faith

You seem to think that if you can imagine even one possible short-term benefit from lying or not-disclosing something, then that’s sufficient justification to do so.

That’s not what I said. I said several things, and it’s not clear which one you’re responding to; you should use quote-rebuttal format so people know what you’re talking about. Best guess is that you’re responding to this:

[learning to lie really well] might be the compassionate thing to do, if you believe that the people you interact with would not benefit from hearing that you no longer believe.

You sharpened my “might be” to “is” just so you could disagree.

But where exactly is the boundary dividing those things that, however uncomfortable or even devastating, must be said or written and those things about which one can decieve or dupe those one loves and respects?

This is a rhetorical question, and it only makes sense in context if your point is that in the absence of such a boundary with an exact location that makes it clear when to lie, we should be honest. But if you can clearly identify which side of the boundary the alternative you’re considering is on because it is nowhere close to the boundary, then the fact that you don’t know exactly where the boundary is doesn’t affect what you should do with that alternative.

You’re doing the slippery slope fallacy.

Heretics have been burned at the stake before, so compassion isn’t the only consideration when you’re deciding whether to lie to your peers about your religious beliefs. My main point is that the Litany of Gendlin is sometimes a bad idea. We should be clear that you haven’t cast any doubt on that, even though you’re debating whether lying to one’s peers is compassionate.

Given that religious relatives tend to fubar cryonics arrangements, the analogy with being burned at the stake is apt. Religious books tend to say nothing about cryonics, but the actual social process of religious groups tends to be strongly against it in practice.

(Edit: This all assumes that the Litany of Gendlin is about how to interact with others. If it’s about internal dialogue, then of course it’s not saying that one should or should not lie to others. IMO it is too ambiguous.)

TimFreeman 24 Dec 2012 23:34 UTC
2 points
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on: The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet

Just drink two tablespoons of extra-light olive oil early in the morning… don’t eat anything else for at least an hour afterward… and in a few days it will no longer take willpower to eat less; you’ll feel so full all the time, you’ll have to remind yourself to eat.

...and then increase the dose to 4 tablespoons if that doesn’t work, and then try some other stuff such as crazy-spicing your food if that doesn’t work, according to page 62 and Chapter 6 of Roberts’ “Shangri-La” Diet” book. I hope you at least tried the higher dose before giving up.

TimFreeman 31 Oct 2012 4:33 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: Secrets of the eliminati

How do you add two utilities together?

They are numbers. Add them.

So are the atmospheric pressure in my room and the price of silver. But you cannot add them together (unless you have a conversion factor from millibars to dollars per ounce).

Your analogy is invalid, and in general analogy is a poor substitute for a rational argument. In the thread you’re replying to, I proposed a scheme for getting Alice’s utility to be commensurate with Bob’s so they can be added. It makes sense to argue that the scheme doesn’t work, but it doesn’t make sense to pretend it does not exist.

TimFreeman 29 May 2012 3:57 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: On Being Okay with the Truth

I would expect that peer pressure can make people stop doing evil things (either by force, or by changing their cost-benefit calculation of evil acts). Objective morality, or rather a definition of morality consistent within the group can help organize efficient peer pressure.

So in a conversation between a person A who believes in objective morality and a person B who does not, a possible motive for A is to convince onlookers by any means possible that objective morality exists. Convincing B is not particularly important, since effective peer pressure merely requires having enough people on board and not having any particular individual on board. In those conversations, I always had the role of B, and I assumed, perhaps mistakenly, that A’s primary goal was to persuade me since A was talking to me. Thank you for the insight.

TimFreeman 10 Oct 2011 18:56 UTC
−5 points
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in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Morality is not about willpower

The fallacy is the one I just described: attaching a utility function post hoc to what the system does and does not do.

A fallacy is a false statement. (Not all false statements are fallacies; a fallacy must also be plausible enough that someone is at risk of being deceived by it, but that doesn’t matter here.) “Attaching a utility function post hoc to what the system does and does not do” is an activity. It is not a statement, so it cannot be false, and it cannot be a fallacy. You’ll have to try again if you want to make sense here.

The TSUF is not a utility function.

It a function that maps world-states to utilities, so it is a utility function. You’ll have to try again if you want to make sense here too.

We’re nearly at the point where it’s not worth my while to listen to you because you don’t speak carefully enough. Can you do something to improve, please? Perhaps get a friend to review your posts, or write things one day and reread them the next before posting, or simply make an effort not to say things that are obviously false.

TimFreeman 10 Oct 2011 18:30 UTC
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in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Morality is not about willpower

With [the universal] prior, TSUF-like utility functions aren’t going to dominate the set of utility functions consistent with the person’s behavior

How do you know this? If that’s true, it can only be true by being a mathematical theorem...

No, it’s true in the same sense that the statement “I have hands” is true. That is, it’s an informal empirical statement about the world. People can be vaguely understood as having purposeful behavior. When you put them in strange situations, this breaks down a bit and if you wish to understand them as having purposeful behavior you have to contrive the utility function a bit, but for the most part people do things for a comprehensible purpose. If TSUF’s were the simplest utility functions that described humans, then human behavior would be random, which is isn’t. Thus the simplest utility functions that describe humans aren’t going to be TSUF-like.

TimFreeman 10 Oct 2011 0:21 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: kjmiller’s comment on: Morality is not about willpower

Some agents, but not all of them, determine their actions entirely using a time-invariant scalar function U(s) over the state space.

If we’re talking about ascribing utility functions to humans, then the state space is the universe, right? (That is, the same universe the astronomers talk about.) In that case, the state space contains clocks, so there’s no problem with having a time-dependent utility function, since the time is already present in the domain of the utility function.

Thus, I don’t see the semantic misunderstanding—human behavior is consistent with at least one utility function even in the formalism you have in mind.

(Maybe the state space is the part of the universe outside of the decision-making apparatus of the subject. No matter, that state space contains clocks too.)

The interesting question here for me is whether any of those alternatives to having a utility function mentioned in the Allais paradox Wikipedia article are actually useful if you’re trying to help the subject get what they want. Can someone give me a clue how to raise the level of discourse enough so it’s possible to talk about that, instead of wading through trivialities? PM’ing me would be fine if you have a suggestion here but don’t want it to generate responses that will be more trivialities to wade through.

TimFreeman 9 Oct 2011 23:59 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Morality is not about willpower

This is the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy again. Labelling what a system does with 1 and what it does not with 0 tells you nothing about the system.

You say “again”, but in the cited link it’s called the “Texas Sharpshooter Utility Function”. The word “fallacy” does not appear. If you’re going to claim there’s a fallacy here, you should support that statement. Where’s the fallacy?

It makes no predictions. It does not constrain expectation in any way. It is woo.

The original claim was that human behavior does not conform to optimizing a utility function, and I offered the trivial counterexample. You’re talking like you disagree with me, but you aren’t actually doing so.

If the only goal is to predict human behavior, you can probably do it better without using a utility function. If the goal is to help someone get what they want, so far as I can tell you have to model them as though they want something, and unless there’s something relevant in that Wikipedia article about the Allais paradox that I don’t understand yet, that requires modeling them as though they have a utility function.

You’ll surely want a prior distribution over utility functions. Since they are computable functions, the usual Universal Prior works fine here, so far as I can tell. With this prior, TSUF-like utility functions aren’t going to dominate the set of utility functions consistent with the person’s behavior, but mentioning them makes it obvious that the set is not empty.