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Karma: 1,107

Toggle 10 Jul 2014 2:06 UTC
26 points
on: [QUESTION]: What are your views on climate change, and how did you form them?
I am highly confident that anthropogenic warming is occurring, with some concern that institutional pressures will tend to exaggerate the amplitude of warming predictions. As an aspiring geologist (master’s level, for now), I’m unusually well-informed on the issue; I have spent considerable time discussing climate changes with geoscientists of various specialties (in particular, chemical oceanography, isotopic geochemistry, paleobotany, regional weather forecasting, and geobiology), and I have the education to read the primary literature comfortably. Working in the same labs as the experts has been especially helpful, since they have universally been happy to discuss complexities and uncertainties as I encounter them in my own studies. It’s worth pointing out that my own work is not directly related to modern climate change, so my own ‘insider status’ is questionable.

I was less confident when I first entered the sciences than I am now, although I didn’t ever qualify as a ‘climate skeptic’ except insofar as I was a skeptic with thoughts about the climate. The increase in confidence has been ongoing, with many causes- I recall a particularly visceral shift in perspective came when I saw researchers working with the concept of global reservoirs, a framework that clarified some issues for me and satisfied on an analytical level. (i.e. quantified global carbon budgets )

The up-close experience has also given me a good view of the structural distortions caused by scientific praxis generally and the enormous quantity of global warming funding in particular. The challenge in publishing negative results is well known; in the case of climate modeling, this tends to create a situation where researchers are constantly discovering that ‘climate change may be even worse than we thought!!!!’ and we never seem to hear ‘actually, increased evapotranspiration may promote cloud cover and increase Earth’s albedo, as a negative feedback loop to warming trends’. It’s less clear to me that the extraordinary funding incentives are silencing doubtful researchers or skewing results towards a particular conclusion; the primary effect I’ve seen in the acadame has been some strained explanations about why the circulation patterns of epicontinental seas in the Pennsylvanian era are going to teach us about anthropogenic climate change. It’s rather ironic that my concerns about the amplitude of IPCC predictions have more to do with broad scientific habits than with the politicization of the field.

If any of the climate researchers I worked with had reservations about the consensus in their field, they didn’t say so publicly, or provide any hints I could detect.

[This is a first post, so I apologize for any formatting errors or breaches of protocol.]

Toggle 10 Jul 2014 7:21 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Desrtopa’s comment on: Rationality Quotes July 2014
I suspect that it helped to signal his status as a member of the philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment, and of the French Revolution that was framed in Enlightenment terms. To the extent that the Enlightenment was focused on experimentation with new forms of government, its adherents tended to favor the republic structurally. (Not universally, of course). He also pushed through a number of reforms with the same flavor, and his status in that group seems to have accounted for at least some of his popularity in France.

There may also be a subtle religious dimension here. Recall that the Enlightenment entertained Deism and a comparatively radical heterodoxy; using the word ‘republic’ might have evoked pagan Rome, great icons of the Renaissance (i.e. Florence), and his own enlightened France, while neatly skipping over the most notable Christian theocratic/monarchist governments.

Toggle 10 Jul 2014 18:10 UTC
5 points
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: [QUESTION]: What are your views on climate change, and how did you form them?
Is there a reason why you’re limiting yourself to evolutionary innovations that occurred after human speciation? Most of our thermoregulation techniques are at least as old as the Triassic, which was much warmer.

Conversely, less elaborate adaptations can happen very quickly. The pale skin of Europeans seems to have originated after the end of the last ice age, for example.

It’s also worth pointing out that our species seems to have been basically regional until about 60,000 years ago. So even if we limit ourselves to the last 200,000 years of adaptation, we should calibrate those expectations based on the African regional temperatures rather than a global average. Humans living in New England today may well be experiencing colder temperatures than their ice age ancestors.

Toggle 11 Jul 2014 6:38 UTC
2 points
on: [QUESTION]: Driverless car forecasts
With due respect to the predictions of legal experts concerning the liability issues, I think market forces may well accelerate that development significantly, mostly because I expect ‘automatic taxis’ to be more common than personally owned vehicles. If you made me pick an actual number, I’d guess nine years with a standard deviation of about eighteen months until autonomous vehicles are a significant part of traffic in urban areas.

I live in a very ‘driving culture’ area. We don’t have much in the way of sidewalks, bike lanes, or public transportation, so owning a car is a basic but expensive necessity. But my car spends the majority of its time in the driveway. An automatic taxi would be more efficient in this regard, because it can bounce around wherever it’s needed. If a single car were enough to serve the needs of 2-4 people on average, then you could run a profitable company by charging a monthly fee of (say) ~$180 per person. $180 per month is a fair bit less than the individual costs of maintenance, fuel, and insurance, so it helps people that struggle with those costs. But the owner of the company can combine these payments, so they’ve got something like $500 per month per car to pay for fuel and maintenance and pocket the rest. Of the costs of car ownership only fuel scales linearly with distance traveled- insurance and mechanical upkeep get more efficient as you scale up.

This is a recipe for large, centralized taxi service companies. In addition, that kind of obvious revenue stream tends to attract significant capital investment by economic powerhouses- and in the case of driverless cars, this will tend to include those that can best maximize alternative revenue streams that derive from the service (I have no doubt that there is a room in Google headquarters full of engineers that are, as we speak, thinking of ways to improve targeted advertising through their automobile division). In other words, groups that have a large amount of legal clout and congressional influence will be pushing a product that improves environmental impacts and reduces human mortality while making transportation more accessible.

Toggle 11 Jul 2014 15:19 UTC
1 point
on: [LINK] Scott Aaronson on Integrated Information Theory
Here’s one particularly weird consequence of IIT: a zeroed-out system has the same degree of consciousness as a dynamic one, because it’s a structural measure of a system. For example, a physical, memrister based neural net has the same degree of integrated information when it’s unplugged. Or, to chase after a more absurd-seeming conclusion, human consciousness is not reduced immediately upon death (assuming no brain damage), instead slowly decreasing as the cellular arrangement begins to decay.

Given that, I agree with Scott- while interesting, IIT doesn’t track particularly well with ‘consciousness’ in the conceptual sense.

Toggle 14 Jul 2014 19:57 UTC
13 points
in reply to: sediment’s comment on: Open thread, 14-20 July 2014
I just want to say that this is extremely similar to my struggles with a Master’s degree. Mine is in geology, so your username continues the parallels amusingly. I’m a bit further along, with some marginal successes in efficiency. Here are some of the tactics that I have tried:

*Excercise. My diet is pretty terrible, but regular exercise to offset that has been invaluable. I used weight lifting (if I have a high-calorie diet, then I might as well put the energy to use)- the 5x5 schedule is a good way to gamify things a bit without introducing more complexity than its mindshare allows. This is probably the most useful habit that I have been able to maintain.

*Nootropics. Cautiously. 500mg Choline and about 1600mg Piracetam per day. These are cheap and extremely safe, with moderate-to-questionable benefits. Under this regimen, I have seen quantifiable improvements, including competitive game performance and concentration length. The placebo effect is a strong contender, but rationality means winning, so why not? Previously, I relied on caffeine as my performance enhancer, but the addictive downsides became distracting at the volumes I was using. I don’t know much about Modafinil, however.

*Pens. This one may be very specific to me and my response to tactile stimuli, but the consequences are good enough to be worth a shot. For the prose sections of your thesis, write in pen on paper. The paper doesn’t matter, but make sure to use a very comfortable pen (the Pilot G2 is my brand). This has three benefits- one, it adds a physicality to the process of writing, which helps to fight distraction with a range of physical inputs that a computer doesn’t provide. (Roughly similar to the process of reading or writing in a public place with white noise and background activity, I think.) Two, it is very hard to delete everything you just wrote and start over. This increases the volume of writing your produce in any given time interval, although it will need considerable editing after the fact. Three, it means that you can write in a room without computer or internet access. Leave your phone elsewhere, and you’ve taken away a large majority of potential distractions. If your brain is missing a detail, it is often possible to just bracket the [thing you don’t remember] and keep writing, rather than stopping to look it up and risking an infinite Wikipedia loop.

*Meditation. I tried this also, with some success- that is, I can achieve the mental state usually described as the desired goal. Detachment, hyper-awareness, etc. Philosophically, it has been extremely interesting to see the consequences of this achievement, but it didn’t improve productivity any. In fact, the results may have been negative (see ‘detachment’). Piercing the veil of the self is not a particularly efficient way to accumulate utils, but it does lower stress.

*Natural light patterns. Try to find a workspace with large windows and plenty of sunlight. Then, avoid turning on room lights except during ‘daylight’ hours. If you live in high latitudes, you may prefer to artificially extend your light periods to a full twelve hours during the winter. After the sun/‘sun’ goes down, dim your monitor significantly. This will regulate your sleeping schedule (and thus help build other habits). It will also keep you connected to other humans a bit better, which can stave off loneliness and increase happiness in subtle ways. And of course, this is also a good way to keep up your vitamins and so on.

*Accountability. I am much more productive when I am making regular status updates, with explicit expectations, to the people around me. My proposal was rapidly completed as soon as I began weekly meetings with my advisor, for example. But interested friends can be just as useful, as long as they’re reasonably competent to understand what you have achieved, and willing to spend a few minutes at regular intervals discussing your accomplishments. This is up there with my lifting routines in terms of importance, but your mileage may vary depending on your relationship with social power structures.

To emphasize, none of these were a magic bullet that changed my overall lifestyle. There’s still a very obvious pattern of procrastination, distraction, and last-minute binge work, and like you, I’m getting really nervous about how this will manifest itself in my career.

It’s also the case that a master’s degree is really, really hard to get, and the ability to summon an entire thesis from the ether is a part of that difficulty. Most people probably could not achieve such a degree at all; framing your struggles in terms of a deficiency relative to some loosely-defined average is unrealistic and unhelpful. This is true for your colleagues as well- each is an outlier, and the motivating factors that got them to this point are not likely to be directly comparable to your own. You are awesome enough that the bell-curve is not a useful self-assessment, so focus on tactics and not on placing yourself along a continuum.

Toggle 15 Jul 2014 2:32 UTC
4 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Why I Am Not a Rationalist, or, why several of my friends warned me that this is a cult
The ‘veto method’ has worked quite well for me, although I haven’t tested it for groups larger than about ten.

Assuming that the group has reached a consensus on eating, any member of the group is free to suggest a restaurant. After the location is suggested, any member of the group can veto that suggestion, but in exchange the vetoing member is required to suggest a different restaurant. Repeat until a suggestion is made that no member of the group vetoes.

Toggle 17 Jul 2014 17:53 UTC
4 points
in reply to: kilobug’s comment on: The Correct Use of Analogy
If you’re interested in the actual software implementations of his ideas, I’d also highly recommend Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, as a review of some very interesting technical projects. The program ‘Copycat’ (and iterations such as Metacat ) is particularly noteworthy.

Toggle 18 Jul 2014 6:50 UTC
13 points
on: [LINK] Another “LessWrongers are crazy” article—this time on Slate
Looks like a fairly standard parable about how we should laugh at academic theorists and eggheads because of all those wacky things they think. If only Less Wrong members had the common sense of the average Salon reader, then they would instantly see through such silly dilemmas.

Giving people the chance to show up and explain that this community is Obviously Wrong And Here’s Why is a pretty good way to start conversations, human nature being what it is. An opportunity to have some interesting dialogues about the broader corpus.

That said, I am in the camp that finds the referenced ‘memetic hazard’ to be silly. If you are the sort of person who takes it seriously, this precise form of publicity might be more troubling for the obvious ‘hazard’ reasons. Out of curiosity, what is the fraction of LW posters that believes this is a genuine risk?

Toggle 18 Jul 2014 15:47 UTC
8 points
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: [LINK] Another “LessWrongers are crazy” article—this time on Slate
That’s a valid point.

To the extent that the article is narrowly targeted at this website, it could be read as an ‘expose’ on groupthink or the dangers of epistemic closure. That’s a more charitable reading. But consider sentences like: “What you are about to read may sound strange and even crazy, but some very influential and wealthy scientists and techies believe it.” Which is to say, the author seems to be using LW as a centered example of the social category “intellectuals with a focus on science and technology”, rather than using LW as a test case of a community with unusual conventions.

Toggle 18 Jul 2014 16:02 UTC
19 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: [LINK] Another “LessWrongers are crazy” article—this time on Slate
This isn’t a particularly noteworthy attribute of Less Wrong discussion; most groups below a certain size will find it interesting when a major media outlet talks about them. I’m sure that the excellent people over at http://www.clown-forum.com/ would be just as chatty if they got an article.

I suppose you could say that it gives journalists an incentive to write about the groups below that population threshold that are likely to generate general interest among the larger set of readers. But that’s just the trivial result in which we have invented the human interest story.

Toggle 18 Jul 2014 16:06 UTC
28 points
in reply to: Tenoke’s comment on: [LINK] Another “LessWrongers are crazy” article—this time on Slate
It sounds like the actual unusual paradigm on LW is not so much “worried about the basilisk” as it is “unusually accommodating of people who worry about the basilisk”.

Toggle 18 Jul 2014 22:16 UTC
16 points
in reply to: pewpewlasergun’s comment on: Effective Writing
Unfortunately, there aren’t too many ways to cheat the learning curve. “Write a lot” really is the first-order answer, and it’s usually the one given by professionals that don’t stand to make any money from their answer. Writing workshops and other ‘accelerants’ seem to be very questionable.

A friend who was recently signed as a science fiction author at Tor suggests that you could try compressing things that you have already written. Take something like a blog post, and express the same ideas and content using half the words. This will help with clarity and concision, as you get better at the exercise- one of the telltale signs of an amateur writer is that they use words inefficiently.

Toggle 19 Jul 2014 3:37 UTC
2 points
on: Be Wary of Thinking Like a FAI
What’s the alternative? The question isn’t whether this moral heuristic is flawed (it is), but whether it’s advantageous.

That, in turn, will depend on more than your expectation of FAI behavior. How do those FAI expectations differ from your existing moral framework?

Toggle 19 Jul 2014 19:06 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Scott Garrabrant’s comment on: LINK: Top HIV researcher killed in plane crash
Excellently put. But polymathwannabe gives us the interesting question of whether the punishment for murder should be tied to the instrumental utility of the victim, rather than their terminal value as a human being.

I would say no, for at least two reasons.

The first is that quantifying the instrumentality of a particular person with confidence is functionally very challenging and existentially problematic. If a thorough review of these researchers’ work established that they were pursuing unhelpful avenues of investigation, and that the new wave of scientists will therefore advance the timetable of AIDS treatment by years, shall we remove years from the murderers’ sentence? Who is qualified to make such a determination?

The second is that it leads very quickly to the appearance of class favoritism in the criminal justice system. Broadly speaking, members of the wealthy and middle classes have higher instrumentality than the poor, so this system would produce lighter punishments for the murder of poor and disenfranchised groups. That, in turn, would lower confidence in the justice system as a whole and erode the state’s monopoly on violence.

All this said, my emotional response to this event is not nearly so measured. I can’t justify it and won’t use it, but there’s a whole lot of “Hulk smash” going on inside my head.

Toggle 20 Jul 2014 16:44 UTC
21 points
on: Experiments 1: Learning trivia
If your goal is conversational acuity, I’d suggest narrowing your focus to trivia about people, and about the categories that they are likely to use about themselves. I got this trick from a guy who worked at a hotel desk night shift for a year or two, and spent the time training up his skill at conversations with strangers.

Step 1: During the standard greeting protocol, think about the ways in which the person you are talking to might self-identify. Are they in uniform? Does context provide you any clues? Usually you can ask about this directly in polite ways- “So, what brings you here?”, etc. You are looking for identity groups- professions, hobbies, communities. Identities related to race and gender are best avoided for first meetings, so discard those.

Step 2: Make a comment that affirms their identity directly and pleasantly. This is where the trivia comes in handy. If the person is on a football team, compliment them on some specific event that showed off the team’s skill. If they are a medical professional, you might comment about a new hospital that was recently constructed in your neighborhood (thus implying that their profession is successful). Jokes are fine, as long as they are lighthearted and demonstrate a degree of ‘insider knowledge’. But the key here is that unusual and insightful observations about people’s identities will typically garner a disproportionately positive response, as long as the tone stays affirming- knowing a lot of rare trivia about these identities can be enormously helpful during this step.

Step 3: Shut up and ask questions. Once you have identified and affirmed a specific aspect of somebody’s identity, you can start with the seeds of what you do know, and use that as a basis for open-ended questions. Since you have demonstrated solidarity with their ‘team’, at this point most people will be more than willing to answer such questions in depth. The conversation can then continue for an arbitrarily long period of time (with the other person supplying most of the information), and as a bonus you will pick up more trivia and generally improve your understanding of society. If you continue to make observations about their identity during this time, and use those observations to ask further questions, people will usually think of you as intelligent.

Toggle 21 Jul 2014 19:49 UTC
3 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Open thread, July 21-27, 2014
Arguably, many consequentialists already fall in to this category. If you are unsettled by the image of a universe composed entirely of undifferentiated orgasmium, then it’s a fair bet that happiness is not your (only) terminal value. To return to a common sentiment, “I don’t want to maximize my happiness, I want to maximize my awesomeness.”

That said, happiness is usually of some value to students of ethics. A system in which it had zero value could conceivably still be pretty happy for instrumental reasons, since happiness makes humans more efficient in the pursuit of most things that we can expect to be valued. Once you start creating non-human entities from the ground up, you would expect happiness to become rare, although not necessarily to be replaced with misery. (The paperclipper is such a force.)

Toggle 21 Jul 2014 22:50 UTC
7 points
in reply to: blacktrance’s comment on: Open thread, July 21-27, 2014
Being a member of the Star Trek Borg Collective is preferred by all members of the Borg Collective who have gotten over their hangups about it.

And yet.

Toggle 25 Jul 2014 17:50 UTC
8 points
on: Ethics in a Feedback Loop: A Parable
As it is, I have trouble considering the ethical implications of this system because I keep reflexively ‘anthropomorphizing’ your parable-humans and imagining ways in which they might resolve the double binds to mutual satisfaction. If I’m reading your intentions correctly, it might be better to use ‘Red Martians’ instead of humans. Suppose that 5% of all Martians are born Red, and are thrown in to a terrible and incoherent rage whenever they see or communicate with another Red Martian- so they cannot coordinate their responses and must live isolated among Blue and Green Martians that love to tickle them, and tend to accept Green and Blue social values that tickling need not be consensual. Does this preserve the moral problems you are trying to examine?

(This may undermine the allegorical clarity of your scenario, but that could be an advantage if you’re trying to think through a particular ethical problem in isolation.)

EDIT: Now that I know what the allegory actually is, I am fairly uncomfortable with the fact that this variant seemed reasonable. I’ll leave this comment here for legacy purposes and to respect PeerGynt’s preferred method of approaching the problem, but I want to clarify that this was not intended to be commentary on gender or PUA strategies in any way.

Toggle 27 Jul 2014 18:30 UTC
12 points
in reply to: ialdabaoth’s comment on: Ethics in a Feedback Loop: A Parable
The word ‘desperation’ really jumped out at me here. I’m very sorry you feel desperate and lonely. I agree that it can be very hard to tell the difference between a straight guy who thinks he deserves a woman, and a straight guy who thinks he deserves to be loved, and that often people don’t work as hard as they should to distinguish between the two. (Often including, I must add, the guys themselves.)

But a lot of your descriptions of reality strike me as almost mythic. I don’t mean that they are supernatural or inconsistent with the reality I know; it’s just that they seem highly oriented towards an explanation of your world and its inevitability, rather than towards power over your world through predictive utility. You use evolutionary psychology, feminist dialectic, and PUA identity categories to ‘explain’ your desperation- but all without, it seems to me, gaining the ability to make different and better choices about it. Might as well say that you’re cursed by Zeus, yeah?

One of the really tricky parts of social interaction is that the agents are all as intellectually complex as you are. The space of all social interactions is truly, mind-bendingly, absurdly, ridiculously large. Myth is especially poisonous in such a situation, both because it will lead to a narrow subjective framing and because it will narrow your own contributions in turn. The problem is hard (and almost certainly uncomputable!), so you might find considerable value in the concession that even the best models have very little power to predict what a given person can contribute to social bonding, or what factors explain that capacity. Begin with curiosity, and a keen sense of your own ignorance, and you are more likely to discover interesting choices that can offer happiness.