trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Mach's Principle: Anti-Epiphenomenal Physics
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-05-24T05:01:35.000Z

Previously in series: Many Worlds, One Best Guess
Followup to: The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle

Warning: Mach's Principle is not experimentally proven, though it is widely considered to be credible.

Centuries ago, when Galileo was promoting the Copernican model in which the Earth spun on its axis and traveled around the Sun, there was great opposition from those who trusted their common sense:

"How could the Earth be moving? I don't feel it moving! The ground beneath my feet seems perfectly steady!"

And lo, Galileo said: If you were on a ship sailing across a perfectly level sea, and you were in a room in the interior of the ship, you wouldn't know how fast the ship was moving. If you threw a ball in the air, you would still be able to catch it, because the ball would have initially been moving at the same speed as you and the room and the ship. So you can never tell how fast you are moving.

This would turn out to be the beginning of one of the most important ideas in the history of physics. Maybe even the most important idea in all of physics. And I'm not talking about Special Relativity.

Suppose the entire universe was moving. Say, the universe was moving left along the x axis at 10 kilometers per hour.

If you tried to visualize what I just said, it seems like you can imagine it. If the universe is standing still, then you imagine a little swirly cloud of galaxies standing still. If the whole universe is moving left, then you imagine the little swirly cloud moving left across your field of vision until it passes out of sight.

But then, some people think they can imagine philosophical zombies: entities who are identical to humans down to the molecular level, but not conscious. So you can't always trust your imagination.

Forget, for a moment, anything you know about relativity. Pretend you live in a Newtonian universe.

In a Newtonian universe, 3+1 spacetime can be broken down into 3 space dimensions and 1 time dimension, and you can write them out as 4 real numbers, (x, y, z, t). Deciding how to write the numbers involves seemingly arbitrary choices, like which direction to call 'x', and which perpendicular direction to then call 'y', and where in space and time to put your origin (0, 0, 0, 0), and whether to use meters or miles to measure distance. But once y...
My Childhood Role Model
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-05-23T08:51:04.000Z

When I lecture on the Singularity, I often draw a graph of the "scale of intelligence" as it appears in everyday life:

But this is a rather parochial view of intelligence. Sure, in everyday life, we only deal socially with other humans—only other humans are partners in the great game—and so we only meet the minds of intelligences ranging from village idiot to Einstein. But what we really need to talk about Artificial Intelligence or theoretical optima of rationality, is this intelligence scale:

For us humans, it seems that the scale of intelligence runs from "village idiot" at the bottom to "Einstein" at the top. Yet the distance from "village idiot" to "Einstein" is tiny, in the space of brain designs. Einstein and the village idiot both have a prefrontal cortex, a hippocampus, a cerebellum...

Maybe Einstein has some minor genetic differences from the village idiot, engine tweaks. But the brain-design-distance between Einstein and the village idiot is nothing remotely like the brain-design-distance between the village idiot and a chimpanzee. A chimp couldn't tell the difference between Einstein and the village idiot, and our descendants may not see much of a difference either.

Carl Shulman has observed that some academics who talk about transhumanism, seem to use the following scale of intelligence:

Douglas Hofstadter actually said something like this, at the 2006 Singularity Summit. He looked at my diagram showing the "village idiot" next to "Einstein", and said, "That seems wrong to me; I think Einstein should be way off on the right."

I was speechless. Especially because this was Douglas Hofstadter, one of my childhood heroes. It revealed a cultural gap that I had never imagined existed.

See, for me, what you would find toward the right side of the scale, was a Jupiter Brain. Einstein did not literally have a brain the size of a planet.

On the right side of the scale, you would find Deep Thought—Douglas Adams's original version, thank you, not the chessplayer. The computer so intelligent that even before its stupendous data banks were connected, when it was switched on for the first time, it started from I think therefore I am and got as far as deducing the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to shut it off.

Toward the right side of the scale, you would ...
That Alien Message
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-05-22T05:55:13.000Z

Imagine a world much like this one, in which, thanks to gene-selection technologies, the average IQ is 140 (on our scale). Potential Einsteins are one-in-a-thousand, not one-in-a-million; and they grow up in a school system suited, if not to them personally, then at least to bright kids. Calculus is routinely taught in sixth grade. Albert Einstein, himself, still lived and still made approximately the same discoveries, but his work no longer seems exceptional. Several modern top-flight physicists have made equivalent breakthroughs, and are still around to talk.

(No, this is not the world Brennan lives in.)

One day, the stars in the night sky begin to change.

Some grow brighter. Some grow dimmer. Most remain the same. Astronomical telescopes capture it all, moment by moment. The stars that change, change their luminosity one at a time, distinctly so; the luminosity change occurs over the course of a microsecond, but a whole second separates each change.

It is clear, from the first instant anyone realizes that more than one star is changing, that the process seems to center around Earth particularly. The arrival of the light from the events, at many stars scattered around the galaxy, has been precisely timed to Earth in its orbit. Soon, confirmation comes in from high-orbiting telescopes (they have those) that the astronomical miracles do not seem as synchronized from outside Earth. Only Earth's telescopes see one star changing every second (1005 milliseconds, actually).

Almost the entire combined brainpower of Earth turns to analysis.

It quickly becomes clear that the stars that jump in luminosity, all jump by a factor of exactly 256; those that diminish in luminosity, diminish by a factor of exactly 256. There is no apparent pattern in the stellar coordinates. This leaves, simply, a pattern of BRIGHT-dim-BRIGHT-BRIGHT...

"A binary message!" is everyone's first thought.

But in this world there are careful thinkers, of great prestige as well, and they are not so sure. "There are easier ways to send a message," they post to their blogs, "if you can make stars flicker, and if you want to communicate. Something is happening. It appears, prima facie, to focus on Earth in particular. To call it a 'message' presumes a great deal more about the cause behind it. There might b...
Don’t change your mind, just change your brain
by KatjaGrace — 2008-05-21T16:34:00.000Z

The best way to dull hearts and win minds is with a scalpel.
Give up your outdated faith in the pen over the sword! With medical training and a sufficiently sharp but manoeuvrable object of your choice, you can change anyone’s mind on the most contentious of moral questions. All you need to make someone utilitarian is a nick to the Ventromedial Pre­frontal Cortex (VMPC), a part of the brain related to emotion.

When pondering whether you should kill an innocent child to save twenty strangers, eat your pets when they die, or approve of infertile siblings making love in private if they like, utilitar­ians are the people who say “do whatever, so long as the outcome maximises overall happiness.” Others think outcomes aren’t everything; some actions are just wrong. According to research, people with VMPC damage are far more likely to make utilitar­ian choices.

It turns out most people have conflicting urges: to act for the greater good or to obey rules they feel strongly about. This is the result of our brains being composed of interacting parts with different functions. The VMPC processes emotion, so in normal people it’s thought to compete with the parts of the brain that engage in moral rea­soning and see the greatest good for the greatest number as ideal. If the VMPC is damaged, the ra­tional, calculating sections are left unimpeded to dispassionate­ly assess the most compassionate course of action.

This presents practical oppor­tunities. We can never bring the world in line with our moral ide­als while we all have conflicting ones. The best way to get us all on the same moral page is to make everyone utilitarian. It is surely easier to sever the touchy feely moral centres of people’s brains than to teach them the value of utilitarianism. Also it will be for the common good; once we are all utilitarian we will act with everyone’s net benefit more in mind. Partial lo­botomies for the moralistic are probably much cheaper than policing all the behaviours such people tend to disapprove of.

You may think this still doesn’t make it a good thing. The real beauty is that after the procedure you would be fine with it. If we went the other way, everyone would end up saying ‘you shouldn’t alter other people’s brains, even if it does solve the world’s problems. It’s naughty and unnatural. Hmph.’

Unfortunate...
Milk, bread, insert catheter…
by KatjaGrace — 2008-05-21T16:16:00.000Z

Making lists to guide medical procedures saves lives but is unethical, say Americans.
What if a way was found to rescue hun­dreds of thousands of the sickest people in the world’s hospitals, at the cost of a sheet of paper each? Michigan would take up the idea, Spain and a couple of US states would be interested, and then it would be banned in the US for being unethical.
Being in intensive care is dan­gerous. Not only because having all your organs fail or your brain bleed everywhere is unhealthy, but also because the care is, well… intense. To look after a person in intensive care for a day, a hundred and seventy eight pro­cedures have to be done on av­erage. Each procedure involves multiple steps and is performed by a collection of professionals struggling to keep their patients alive as different parts of their body fail. Small chances of in­evitable human error add up, no matter how good the doctors and nurses are, amounting to about two errors per patient each day.

Finger pointing and suing doesn’t work to reduce these fig­ures, so what will? You could say human error is inevitable and congratulate doctors and nurses for keeping it as low as they do in a hectic and complex situation. Or, as Peter Pronovost, a critical care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, realised, you could take the same precautions with criti­cally ill patients as you do with shopping or making a cake.

He made a list. It was a list for one procedure: putting in a cath­eter, the tube for getting fluids in and out of people. Four per cent of catheters develop infections, which means some eighty thou­sand people per year in the US. Between five and twenty eight percent, depending on circum­stances, subsequently die.

The list had five steps. It seemed so simple as to be use­less. Surely people performing cutting edge surgery can remem­ber to wash their hands before they do a routine job? For the first month he just gave his list to nurses and asked them to note how often the doctors missed a step. It turned out they missed at least one in about a third of cases. He then asked the nurses to remind the doctors when they missed a step. The catheter in­fection rate over the next year at Johns Hopkins Hospital dropped from eleven per cent to nothing.

Pronovost made more lists and asked doctors and nurses to make their own. These lists pr...
Einstein's Speed
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-05-21T02:48:34.000Z

Yesterday I argued that the Powers Beyond Science are actually a standard and necessary part of the social process of science. In particular, scientists must call upon their powers of individual rationality to decide what ideas to test, in advance of the sort of definite experiments that Science demands to bless an idea as confirmed. The ideal of Science does not try to specify this process—we don't suppose that any public authority knows how individual scientists should think—but this doesn't mean the process is unimportant.

A readily understandable, non-disturbing example:

A scientist identifies a strong mathematical regularity in the cumulative data of previous experiments. But the corresponding hypothesis has not yet made and confirmed a novel experimental prediction—which his academic field demands; this is one of those fields where you can perform controlled experiments without too much trouble. Thus the individual scientist has readily understandable, rational reasons to believe (though not with probability 1) something not yet blessed by Science as public knowledge of humankind.

Noticing a regularity in a huge mass of experimental data, doesn't seem all that unscientific. You're still data-driven, right?

But that's because I deliberately chose a non-disturbing example. When Einstein invented General Relativity, he had almost no experimental data to go on, except the precession of Mercury's perihelion. And (AFAIK) Einstein did not use that data, except at the end.

Einstein generated the theory of Special Relativity using Mach's Principle, which is the physicist's version of the Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle. You begin by saying, "It doesn't seem reasonable to me that you could tell, in an enclosed room, how fast you and the room were going. Since this number shouldn't ought to be observable, it shouldn't ought to exist in any meaningful sense." You then observe that Maxwell's Equations invoke a seemingly absolute speed of propagation, c, commonly referred to as "the speed of light" (though the quantum equations show it is the propagation speed of all fundamental waves). So you reformulate your physics in such fashion that the absolute speed of a single object no longer meaningfully exists, and only relative speeds exist. I am skipping over quite a bit here, obviou...
Faster Than Science
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-05-20T00:19:59.000Z

I sometimes say that the method of science is to amass such an enormous mountain of evidence that even scientists cannot ignore it; and that this is the distinguishing characteristic of a scientist, a non-scientist will ignore it anyway.

Max Planck was even less optimistic:

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

I am much tickled by this notion, because it implies that the power of science to distinguish truth from falsehood ultimately rests on the good taste of grad students.

The gradual increase in acceptance of many-worlds in academic physics, suggests that there are physicists who will only accept a new idea given some combination of epistemic justification, and a sufficiently large academic pack in whose company they can be comfortable. As more physicists accept, the pack grows larger, and hence more people go over their individual thresholds for conversion—with the epistemic justification remaining essentially the same.

But Science still gets there eventually, and this is sufficient for the ratchet of Science to move forward, and raise up a technological civilization.

Scientists can be moved by groundless prejudices, by undermined intuitions, by raw herd behavior—the panoply of human flaws. Each time a scientist shifts belief for epistemically unjustifiable reasons, it requires more evidence, or new arguments, to cancel out the noise.

The "collapse of the wavefunction" has no experimental justification, but it appeals to the (undermined) intuition of a single world. Then it may take an extra argument—say, that collapse violates Special Relativity—to begin the slow academic disintegration of an idea that should never have been assigned non-negligible probability in the first place.

From a Bayesian perspective, human academic science as a whole is a highly inefficient processor of evidence. Each time an unjustifiable argument shifts belief, you need an extra justifiable argument to shift it back. The social process of science leans on extra evidence to overcome cognitive noise.

A more charitable way of putting it is that scientists will adopt positions that are theoretically insufficiently extreme, compared to the ideal positions that scienti...
Conference on Global Catastrophic Risks
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-05-19T22:13:39.000Z

FYI: The Oxford Future of Humanity Institute is holding a conference on global catastrophic risks on July 17-20, 2008, at Oxford (in the UK).

I'll be there, as will Robin Hanson and Nick Bostrom.

Deadline for registration is May 26th, 2008. Registration is £60.
Changing the Definition of Science
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-05-18T18:07:35.000Z

New Scientist on changing the definition of science, ungated here:

Others believe such criticism is based on a misunderstanding. "Some people say that the multiverse concept isn't falsifiable because it's unobservable—but that's a fallacy," says cosmologist Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He argues that the multiverse is a natural consequence of such eminently falsifiable theories as quantum theory and general relativity. As such, the multiverse theory stands or fails according to how well these other theories stand up to observational tests.
[...]
So if the simplicity of falsification is misleading, what should scientists be doing instead? Howson believes it is time to ditch Popper's notion of capturing the scientific process using deductive logic. Instead, the focus should be on reflecting what scientists actually do: gathering the weight of evidence for rival theories and assessing their relative plausibility.

Howson is a leading advocate for an alternative view of science based not on simplistic true/false logic, but on the far more subtle concept of degrees of belief. At its heart is a fundamental connection between the subjective concept of belief and the cold, hard mathematics of probability.

I'm a good deal less of a lonely iconoclast than I seem. Maybe it's just the way I talk.

The points of departure between myself and mainstream let's-reformulate-Science-as-Bayesianism is that:

(1) I'm not in academia and can censor myself a lot less when it comes to saying "extreme" things that others might well already be thinking.

(2) I think that just teaching probability theory won't be nearly enough. We'll have to synthesize lessons from multiple sciences like cognitive biases and social psychology, forming a new coherent Art of Bayescraft, before we are actually going to do any better in the real world than modern science. Science tolerates errors, Bayescraft does not. Nobel laureate Robert Aumann, who first proved that Bayesians with the same priors cannot agree to disagree, is a believing Orthodox Jew. Probability theory alone won't do the trick, when it comes to really teaching scientists. This is my primary point of departure, and it is not something I've seen suggested elsewhere.

(3) I think it is possible to do better in the real world. In the extreme case, a Ba...
No Safe Defense, Not Even Science
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-05-18T05:19:24.000Z

I don't ask my friends about their childhoods—I lack social curiosity—and so I don't know how much of a trend this really is:

Of the people I know who are reaching upward as rationalists, who volunteer information about their childhoods, there is a surprising tendency to hear things like: "My family joined a cult and I had to break out," or "One of my parents was clinically insane and I had to learn to filter out reality from their madness."

My own experience with growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family seems tame by comparison... but it accomplished the same outcome: It broke my core emotional trust in the sanity of the people around me.

Until this core emotional trust is broken, you don't start growing as a rationalist. I have trouble putting into words why this is so. Maybe any unusual skills you acquire—anything that makes you unusually rational—requires you to zig when other people zag. Maybe that's just too scary, if the world still seems like a sane place unto you.

Or maybe you don't bother putting in the hard work to be extra bonus sane, if normality doesn't scare the hell out of you.

I know that many aspiring rationalists seem to run into roadblocks around things like cryonics or many-worlds. Not that they don't see the logic; they see the logic and wonder, "Can this really be true, when it seems so obvious now, and yet none of the people around me believe it?"

Yes. Welcome to the Earth where ethanol is made from corn and environmentalists oppose nuclear power. I'm sorry.

(See also: Cultish Countercultishness. If you end up in the frame of mind of nervously seeking reassurance, this is never a good thing—even if it's because you're about to believe something that sounds logical but could cause other people to look at you funny.)

People who've had their trust broken in the sanity of the people around them, seem to be able to evaluate strange ideas on their merits, without feeling nervous about their strangeness. The glue that binds them to their current place has dissolved, and they can walk in some direction, hopefully forward.

Lonely dissent, I called it. True dissent doesn't feel like going to school wearing black; it feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.

That's what it takes to be the lone voice who says, "If you really think you know who's goin...