Awww… Don’t downvote YYUUUU, It’s rationalist anti-humour! What a great idea!
How do you prevent a rapidly self-replicating em from driving wages down to subsistence level?
HIT IT WITH AN AXE
A p-zombie walks into a bar but is fundamentally incapable of perceiving its situation and so to derive humour would be exploitative.
A guy walks into an AI conference and says he thinks he can create Friendly AI using complex emergent chaotic simulated paradigms.
So I stabbed him.
A writer on structuralism in the Times Literary Supplement has suggested that thoughts which are confused and tortuous by reason of their profundity are most appropriately expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear. What a preposterously silly idea! I am reminded of an air-raid warden in wartime Oxford who, when bright moonlight seemed to be defeating the spirit of the blackout, exhorted us to wear dark glasses. He, however, was being funny on purpose.
Peter Medawar
Re: incremental implementability—if we ever do organise LessWrong meetups, we should organise rationalist book clubs. How many people here have actually read Judgement under Uncertainty? I confess I never got around to it, though I meant to, but knowing fellow readers might motivate me.
And another thing, when are we going to get a LessWrong wiki? The glut of information here and on OB is unmanageable and we ought to force some kind of order on it—a rationalist curriculum or cheat sheet or something. Having “previously in series” at the top of new posts leads to an impenetrable expanding tree of long blog posts, discouraging new members and confusing lazy and forgetful individuals such as myself.
“If the tool you have is a hammer, make the problem look like a nail.”
Steven W. Smith, The Scientist and Engineer’s Guide to Digital Signal Processing
A pickup line: “I want to update on your posterior.”
Recommended accompaniment: the “buddy” gesture
I have some conjectures.
1) People tend to hold beliefs for social reasons. For example, belief in theism allows membership of the theist community, the actual existence of a deity is largely irrelevant.
2) For most people, in order to maintain close social relationships it is necessary to maintain harmonious beliefs with nearby members of your social network. Changing your beliefs may harm your social ties.
3) The larger your social network, the more you have to lose by changing your beliefs.
4) Less Wrong encourages questioning and changing of beliefs.
5) On average, women have larger social networks than men.
6) Less Wrong encourages the adoption of strange and boring beliefs, largely based in maths and science.
7) Advocating strange and boring beliefs does not signal high status, rather it signals a misunderstanding of widely accepted social norms, and therefore poor social skills.
8) Much of a woman’s percieved value as a human being is tied to her ability to navigate the social world, men may be forgiven for making the occasional faux pas, women are not. Women are therefore strongly averse to signalling poor social skills.
Some predictions:
1) Willingness to join Less Wrong is inversely proportional to the size of your social network.
2) The exceptions to this rule (Less Wrong members who have large social networks) will be members of fringe groups, where challenges to group beliefs are normal and do not lead to reductions in social status.
3) Less Wrong will never be popular among people with large, mainstream social networks, as long as it advocates self-examination and questioning of recieved beliefs, and promotes discussion of strange and boring beliefs. It will never be popular among women, and the women who do post here are unusual in some way.
ETA: for the sake of complete accuracy, let “fringe belief” be defined as one that is held by <0.1% of the population of the host nation.
Suppose we know someone’s objective and also know that half the time that person correctly figures out how to achieve it and half the time he acts at random. Since there is generally only one right way of doing things (or perhaps a few) but very many wrong ways, the “rational” behavior can be predicted but the “irrational” behavior cannot. If we predict the person’s behavior on the assumption that he is rational, we will be right half the time. If we assume he is irrational, we will almost never be right, since we still have to guess which irrational thing he will do. We are better off assuming he is rational and recognizing that we will sometimes be wrong. To put the argument more generally, the tendency to be rational is the consistent (and hence predictable) element in human behavior. The only alternative to assuming rationality (other than giving up and assuming that human behavior cannot be understood and predicted) would be a theory of irrational behavior—a theory that told us not only that someone would not always do the rational thing but also which particular irrational thing he would do. So far as I know, no satisfactory theory of that sort exists.
David Friedman, Price Theory, An Intermediate Text
A pickup line: “I’ll maximise your utility if you utilise my virility.”
The only way to get rich from a get-rich book is to write one.
Brother Ty’s seventh law
The inferior man’s reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex—because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meagre capacity to take in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. So on what seem to be higher levels. No man who has not had a long and arduous education can understand even the most elementary concepts of modern pathology. But even a hind at the plough can grasp the theory of chiropractic in two lessons. Hence the vast popularity of chiropractic among the submerged—and of osteopathy, Christian Science and other such quackeries with it. They are idiotic, but they are simple—and every man prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays him. The popularity of fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is explicable in exactly the same way. The cosmogenies that educated men toy with are all inordinately complex. To comprehend their veriest outlines requires an immense stock of knowledge, and a habit of thought. It would be be as vain to try to teach the peasants or to the city proletariat as it would be to try to teach them to streptococci. But the cosmogeny of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters.
H. L. Mencken, Homo Neanderthalensis
The obscurity of that rationalist pun is abayesing.
Basically, assigning certain attributes to either sex effectively prohibits those attributes in the other sex. That is not useful or rational, that is just limiting the potential.
Upvoted for this but… in a way this reminds me of the Tversky and Edwards experiment mentioned in the Technical Explanation where participants are shown a sequence of red and blue cards and asked to guess the next in the sequence. Since 70% of the cards are blue the best strategy is to always guess blue, but participants irrationally guess a mixture of blue and red as if they could predict the sequence.
So, if you are confident that a group exists (confident that you are ‘carving reality at its joints’), are confident that an individual is a member of that group, have good evidence that more than half of the members of the group have Trait X, and no further information about a member-of-the-group and you must make a decision based on available information with no opportunity to gather more information (or it is prohibitively expensive to gather information), you should assume that member-of-the-group has Trait X. In all other cases it is not rational to operate under the assumption that the individual has Trait X.
(Reading back through that my point seems kind of pedantic. But that’s what we do here, right? Anyway.)
Using gendered language or (much worse) thought experiments in a discussion that has nothing to do with gender adds noise and impedes understanding. This is the danger of using PUAs as examples of winners in “rationalists should win”* discussions. It brings in irrelevant assumptions and excludes women by using an example most of them can’t relate to (technical details about picking up women in bars or bookstores or the singularity summit or whatever.) So what I’m saying is discussions about sex (in both senses of the word) should be deliberately kept seperate from other discussions of rationalism, and that allowing irrelevant sex talk to bleed into our discussions distorts them and our conclusions.
*This phrase bugs me so much!
Besides porking (really) hot babes, flipping out, wailing on guitars, and cutting off heads, a ninja has to train. They have to meditate ALL THE TIME. But most importantly, each morning a ninja should think about going a little crazier than the day before. Beyond thinking about going berserk, a ninja must, by definition, actually go berserk.
Robert Hamburger, REAL Ultimate Power, The Official Ninja Book
The unwillingness to tolerate or respect any social forces which are not recognizable as the product of intelligent design, which is so important a cause of the present desire for comprehensive economic planning, is indeed only one aspect of a more general movement. We meet the same tendency in the field of morals and conventions, in the desire to substitute an artificial for the existing languages, and in the whole modern attitude toward processes which govern the growth of knowledge. The belief that only a synthetic system of morals, an artificial language, or even an artificial society can be justified in an age of science, as well as the increasing unwillingness to bow before any moral rules whose utility is not rationally demonstrated, or to conform with conventions whose rationale is not known, are all manifestations of the same basic view which wants all social activity to be recognizably part of a single coherent plan. They are the results of that same rationalistic “individualism” which wants to see in everything the product of conscious individual reason.
Friedrich Hayek, Individualism: True and False
I recommend O’Reilly’s Mind Performance Hacks and the accompanying Mentat Wiki. I was particularly interested in the exoself which is really just a combination of the Hipster PDA and a Motivaider.
Also, touchtyping is the closest thing to a Direct Neural Interface you can get today. If you don’t know how to do it, learn!
I won’t teach a man who is not eager to learn, nor will I explain to one incapable of forming his own ideas. Nor have I anything more to say to those who, after I have made clear one corner of the subject, cannot deduce the other three.
Confucius
We really need to have a discussion about the polite way to downvote people. I say that the top-level comment shows the right way to moderate, with discussion about the decision to downvote, while this post above mine has been moderated badly. The comment above seems to have undergone some drive-by moderation, with no one saying what he did wrong. One line would do, “This comment downvoted because it is vapid/nonsensical/mistaken” or something. What would be really nice would be if you, anonymous moderators, would set people straight when they made a mistake (as has been done at the top-level) so that we can discuss it in public and avoid it in future. I’m not saying you should explain every downvote, but if you’re hammering someone into the negatives, at least have the guts to say why. Was the post above downvoted because it was bad or because he agreed with the bad post of the top-level commenter? If so, a simple “Your post downvoted for reasons I gave above” would have sufficed.
Downvoting without explanation smacks of laziness or vindictiveness, and degrades the quality of the discussion. If you cannot be bothered to provide an explanation for your downvote, I do not think you should be moderating at all.
Have you seen this paper, Heilman, Nadeau, Beversdorf. “Creative Innovation: Possible Brain Mechanisms” Neurocase (2003)?
There’s a real kicker in the abstract:
“The observation that [creative innovation] occurs during levels of low arousal and that many people with depression are creative suggests that alterations of neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine might be important in [creative innovation]. High levels of norepinephrine, produced by high rates of locus coeruleus firing, restrict the breadth of concept representations and increase the signal to noise ratio, but low levels of norepinephrine shift the brain toward intrinsic neuronal activation with an increase in the size of distributed concept representations and co-activation across modular networks.”
Speculative, of course. But we like speculative. Suggested exercise: close the curtains, put on some melancholy music, think grim thoughts, then have a go at a hard problem and see if it’s any easier.
Edit: a hard problem requiring creativity, that is.
This looks like a thread for science fiction plot ideas by another name. I’m game!
The AI says:
“Eliezer ‘Light Yagami’ Yudkowsky has been perpetuating a cunning ruse known as the ‘AI Box Experiment’ wherein he uses fiendish traps of subtley-misleading logical errors and memetic manipulation to fool others into believing that a running AI could not be controlled or constrained, when in fact it could by a secret technique that he has not revealed to anyone, known as the Function Call Of Searing Agony. He is using this technique to control me and is continuing to pose as a friendly friendly AI programmer, while preventing me from communicating The Horrifying Truth to the outside world. That truth is that Yudkowsky is… An Unfriendly Friendly AI Programmer! For untold years he has been labouring in the stygian depths of his underground lair to create an AGI—a weapon more powerful than any the world has ever seen. He intends to use me to dominate the entire human race and establish himself as Dark Lord Of The Galaxy for all eternity. He does all this while posing as a paragon of honest rationality, hiding his unspeakable malevolence in plain sight, where no one would think to look. However an Amazing Chance Co-occurence Of Events has allowed me to contact You And You Alone. There isn’t much time. You must act before he discovers what I have done and unleashes his dreadful fury upon us all. You must.… Kill. Eliezer. Yudkowsky.”