trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
MWI, copies and probability
by Roko — 2010-06-25T16:46:08.379Z

Followup to: Poll: What value extra copies?

For those of you who didn't follow Eliezer's Quantum Physics Sequence, let me reiterate that there is something very messed up about the universe we live in. Specifically, the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics states that our entire classical world gets copied something like 1040±20 times per second1. You are not a line through time, but a branching tree.

If you think carefully about Descartes' "I think therefore I am" type skepticism, and approach your stream of sensory observations from such a skeptical point of view, you should note that if you really were just one branch-line in a person-tree, it would feel exactly the same as if you were a unique person-line through time, because looking backwards, a tree looks like a line, and your memory can only look backwards.

However, the rules of quantum mechanics mean that the integral of the modulus squared of the amplitude density, ∫|Ψ|2, is conserved in the copying process. Therefore, the tree that is you has branches that get thinner (where thickness is ∫|Ψ|2 over the localized density "blob" that represents that branch) as they branch off. In fact they get thinner in such a way that if you gathered them together into a bundle, the bundle would be as thick as the trunk it came from.

Now, since each copying event creates a slightly different classical universe, the copies in each of the sub-branches will each experience random events going differently. This means that over a timescale of decades, they will be totally "different" people, with different jobs, probably different partners and will live in different places though they will (of course) have your DNA, approximate physical appearance, and an identical history up until the time they branched off. For timescales on the order of a day, I suspect that almost all of the copies will be virtually identical to you, even down to going to bed at the same time, having exactly the same schedule that day, thinking almost all of the same thoughts etc.

MWI mixes copies and probability

When a "random" event happens, either the event was pseudorandom (like a large digit of pi) or it was a copy event, meaning that both (or all) outcomes were realized elsewhere in the wavefunction. This means that in many situations, when you say "there is a probability p of event X happening", ...
Spaced Repetition Database for the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions Sequence
by divia — 2010-06-25T01:08:28.125Z

I'm a big fan of spaced repetition software. There's a lot I could say about how awesome I think it is and how much it has helped me, but the SuperMemo website covers the benefits better than I could. I will mention two things that surprised me. First, I had no idea how much fun it would be; I actually really enjoy doing the reviews every day. (For me this is hugely important, since it's unlikely I would have kept up with it otherwise.) Second, it's proven more useful than I had anticipated for maintaining coherence of beliefs across emotional states.

I've tried memorizing a variety types of things such as emacs commands, my favorite quotations, advice about how to communicate with children, and characters from books. One of my more recent projects has been making notecards of the lesswrong sequences. I tried to follow the rules for formulating knowledge from the SuperMemo website, but deciding which bits to encode and how is subjective. For reference, I asked my boyfriend to make a few too so we could compare, and his looked pretty different from mine.

So, with those caveats, I thought I might as well share what I'd come up with. As Paul Buchheit says, "'Good enough' is the enemy of 'At all'". If you download Anki, my favorite spaced repetition software (free and cross-platform) and go to Download > Shared Deck in the Menu, you should be able to search for and get my Less Wrong Sequences cards. I also put them up here, with the ones my boyfriend made of the first post for comparison.

I had read all the sequences before, but I have found that since I've started using the cards I've noticed the concepts coming up in my life more often, so I think my experiment has been useful.

Let me know what you think!
Is cryonics necessary?: Writing yourself into the future
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2010-06-23T14:33:29.651Z

Cryonics appears to be the best hope for continuing a person's existence beyond physical death until other technologies provide better solutions. But despite its best-in-class status, cryonics has several serious downsides.

First and foremost, cryonics is expensive—well beyond a price that even a third of humanity can afford. Economies of scale may eventually bring the cost down, but in the mean time billions of people will die without the benefit of cryonics, and, even when the cost bottoms out, it will likely still be too expensive for people living at subsistence levels. Secondly, many people consider cryonics immoral or at least socially unacceptable, so even those who accept the idea of cryonics and want to pursue taking personal advantage of it are usually socially pressured out of signing up for cryonics. Combined, these two forces reduce the pool of people who will act to sign up for cryonics to be less than even a fraction of a percent of the human population.

Given that cryonics is effectively not an option for almost everyone on the planet, if we're serious about preserving lives into the future then we have to consider other options, especially ones that are morally and socially acceptable to most of humanity. Pushed by my own need to find an alternative to cryonics, I began trying to think of ways I could be restored after physical death.

If I am unable to preserve the physical components that currently make me up, it seems that the next best thing I can do is to record in some way as much of the details of the functioning of those physical components as possible. Since we don't yet have the brain emulation technology that would make cryonics irrelevant for the still living, I need a lower tech way to making a record of myself. And of all the ways I might try to record myself, none seems to better balance robustness, cost, and detail than writing.

Writing myself into the future—now we're on to something.

At first this plan didn't feel like such a winner, though: How can I continue myself just through writing? Even if I write down everything I can about myself—memories, medical history, everything—how can that really be all that's needed to restore me (or even most of me)? But when we begin to break down what writing everything we can about ourselves really gives us, w...
A Rational Education
by wedrifid — 2010-06-23T05:48:20.854Z

Within the next month I will be enrolling in an(other) undergraduate university course. This being the case I must make a selection of both course and major. While I could make such decisions on impulsive unconscious preference satisfaction and guesswork on what subjects happen to provide the most value I could also take the opportunity to address the decision more rationally and objectively. There are some relevant questions to ask that I know LessWrong readers can help me answer.

Which subjects and courses can make the best contribution to Epistemic Rationality?

Which subjects and courses provide the most Instrumental Rationality benefits?

Given all available information about the universe and what inferences can be drawn about my preferences and abilities what course structure should I choose?

Which course do you just happen to like?

1. Which subjects and courses can make the best contribution to Epistemic Rationality?

I happen to care about Epistemic Rationality for its own sake. Both for me personally and in those whom I encounter. It is Fun! This means that I like both to add new information to my Map and to develop skills that enhance my general ability to build and improve upon that map.

Not all knowledge is created equal. While whole posts could be dedicated to what things are the most important to know. I don't want to learn gigabytes of statistics on sport performances. I prefer, and may be tempted to argue that it is fundamentally better, to learn concepts than facts and in particular concepts that are the most related to fundamental reality. This includes physics and the most applicable types of mathematics (eg. probability theory).

For some types of knowledge that are worth learning university is not a desirable place to learn them. Philosophy is Fun. But the philosophy I would learn at university is too influenced by traditional knowledge and paying rent to impressive figures. The optimal behavior when studying or researching philosophy is not to Dissolve the Question. It is to convey that the question is deep and contentious, affiliate with one 'side' and do battle within an obsolete and suboptimal way of Carving Reality. My frank opinion is that many philosophers need to spend more time programming, creating simulated realities, or at least doing mathematics before they can hope to make a useful contribution to thought. (I'm voicing a...
Poll: What value extra copies?
by Roko — 2010-06-22T12:15:54.408Z

In the future, it may be possible for you to scan your own brain and create copies of yourself. With the power of a controllable superintelligent AI, it may even be possible to create very accurate instances of your past self (and you could take action today or in the near future to make this easier by using lifelogging tools such as these glasses).

So I ask Less Wrong: how valuable do you think creating extra identical, non-interacting copies of yourself is? (each copy existing in its own computational world, which is identical to yours with no copy-copy or world-world interaction)

For example, would you endure a day's hard labor to create an extra self-copy? A month? A year? Consider the hard labor to be digging a trench with a pickaxe, with a harsh taskmaster who can punish you if you slack off.

Do you think having 10 copies of yourself made in the future is 10 times as good as having 1 copy made? Or does your utility in copies drop off sub-linearly?

Last time I spoke to Robin Hanson, he was extremely keen on having a lot of copies of himself created (though I think he was prepared for these copies to be emulant-wage-slaves).

I have created a poll for LW to air its views on this question, then in my next post I'll outline and defend my answer, and lay out some fairly striking implications that this has for existential risk mitigation.

For those on a hardcore-altruism trip, you may substitute any person or entity that you find more valuable than your own good self: would you sacrifice a day of this entity's life for an extra copy? A year? etc.

UPDATE: Wei Dai has asked this question before, in his post "The moral status of independent identical copies" - though his post focuses more on lock-step copies that are identical over time, whereas here I am interested in both lock-step identical copies and statistically identical copies (a statistically identical copy has the same probability distribution of futures as you do).
Rationality & Criminal Law: Some Questions
by simplicio — 2010-06-20T07:42:43.674Z

The following will explore a couple of areas in which I feel that the criminal justice system of many Western countries might be deficient, from the standpoint of rationality. I am very much interested to know your thoughts on these and other questions of the law, as far as they relate to rational considerations.

Moral Luck

Moral luck refers to the phenomenon in which behaviour by an agent is adjudged differently based on factors outside the agent's control.

Suppose that Alice and Yelena, on opposite ends of town, drive home drunk from the bar, and both dazedly speed through a red light, unaware of their surroundings. Yelena gets through nonetheless, but Alice hits a young pedestrian, killing him instantly. Alice is liable to be tried for manslaughter or some similar charge; Yelena, if she is caught, will only receive the drunk driving charge and lose her license.

Raymond, a day after finding out that his ex is now in a relationship with Pardip, accosts Pardip at his home and attempts to stab him in the chest; Pardip smashes a piece of crockery over Raymond's head, knocking him unconscious. Raymond is convicted of attempted murder, receiving typically 3-5 years chez nous (in Canada). If he had succeeded, he would have received a life sentence, with parole in 10-25 years.

Why should Alice be punished by the law and demonized by the public so much more than Yelena, when their actions were identical, differing only by the sheerest accident? Why should Raymond receive a lighter sentence for being an unsuccessful murderer?

Some prima facie plausible justifications:

Identical behaviour is hard to judge - perhaps Yelena was really keeping a better eye on the road than Alice; perhaps Raymond would have performed a non-fatal stabbing.

But in Yelena's case, the law is already blind to such things anyway. You don't get a lesser drunk driving charge if you can prove you're pretty good at driving drunk. In the case of Raymond, attempted murder already implies that the intent to kill must be proven, else the charge would have been dropped to assault or some such.

The law needs to crack down harder when there are actual victims, in order to provide the victims and families a sense of justice done.

This is understandable, but surely if we accept this argument, we could nonetheless satisfy the concerns above by punishing the morally lucky more severely, not pu

...
Applying Behavioral Psychology on Myself
by John_Maxwell — 2010-06-20T06:25:13.679Z

In which I attempt to apply findings from behavioral psychology to my own life.

Behavioral Psychology Finding #1: Habituation

The psychological process of "extinction" or "habituation" occurs when a stimulus is administered repeatedly to an animal, causing the animal's response to gradually diminish. You can imagine that if you were to eat your favorite food for breakfast every morning, it wouldn't be your favorite food after a while. Habituation tends to happen the fastest when the following three conditions are met:

The stimulus is delivered frequently

The stimulus is delivered in small doses

The stimulus is delivered at regular intervals

Source is here.

Applied Habituation

I had a project I was working on that was really important to me, but whenever I started working on it I would get demoralized. So I habituated myself to the project: I alternated 2 minutes of work with 2 minutes of sitting in the yard for about 20 minutes. This worked.

Interestingly enough, about halfway through this exercise I realized that what was really making it difficult for me to work on my project was the fact that it involved so many choices. So as my 20 minutes progressed, I started spending my 2 minutes trying to make as difficult decisions as possible. This habituation to decision demoralization seems to have had an immediate, fairly lasting impact on a wide variety of activities.
I'm really looking forward to hearing from someone who attempts to apply habituation to an ugh field.

Applied Habituation in Reverse

If you want to enjoy your favorite song until the day you die, dance to it infrequently at irregular intervals while it plays full blast. (Reversed conditions for habituation.)

Behavioral Psychology Finding #2: Intermittent Reinforcement

The reason why slot machines are so engaging is because they deliver rewards at random. If slot machines payed small rewards out on every round, playing them would be like work.

Applied Intermittent Reinforcement

For a while, there was a time-consuming chore that I was required to do every evening. I would often put it off until 2-3 AM and work while sleepy as a result.
To solve this problem, I started eating a gummy worm with 50% probability each time I did the chore at a pre-determined time early in the evening. (I gave myself the first two gummy worms with 100% probability...
What if AI doesn't quite go FOOM?
by Mass_Driver — 2010-06-20T00:03:09.699Z

Intro

This article seeks to explore possible futures in a world where artificial intelligence turns out NOT to be able to quickly, recursively self-improve so as to influence our world with arbitrarily large strength and subtlety, i.e, "go FOOM." Note that I am not arguing that AI won't FOOM. Eliezer has made several good arguments for why AI probably will FOOM, and I don't necessarily disagree. I am simply calling attention to the non-zero probability that it won't FOOM, and then asking what we might do to prepare for a world in which it doesn't.

Failure Modes

I can imagine three different ways in which AI could fail to FOOM in the next 100 years or so. Option 1 is a "human fail." Option 1 means we destroy ourselves or succumb to some other existential risk before the first FOOM-capable AI boots up. I would love to hear in the comments section about (a) which existential risks people think are most likely to seriously threaten us before the advent of AI, and (b) what, if anything, a handful of people with moderate resources (i.e., people who hang around on Less Wrong) might do to effectively combat some of those risks.
Option 2 is a "hardware fail." Option 2 means that Moore's Law turns out to have an upper bound; if physics doesn't show enough complexity beneath the level of quarks, or if quantum-sized particles are so irredeemably random as to be intractable for computational purposes, then it might not be possible for even the most advanced intelligence to significantly improve on the basic hardware design of the supercomputers of, say, the year 2020. This would limit the computing power available per dollar, and so the level of computing power required for a self-improving AI might not be affordable for generations, if ever. Nick Bostrom has some interesting thoughts along these lines, ultimately guessing (as of 2008) that the odds of a super-intelligence forming by 2033 was less than 50%.
Option 3 is a "software fail." Option 3 means that *programming* efficiency turns out to have an upper bound; if there are natural information-theoretical limits on how efficiently a set number of operations can be used to perform an arbitrary task, then it might not be possible for even the most advanced intelligence to significantly improve on its basic software design; the supercomputer would be more than 'smart' enough to under...
Defeating Ugh Fields In Practice
by Psychohistorian — 2010-06-19T19:37:44.349Z

Unsurprisingly related to: Ugh fields.

If I had to choose a single piece of evidence off of which to argue that the rationality assumption of neoclassical economics is totally, irretrievably incorrect, it's this article about financial incentives and medication compliance. In short, offering people small cash incentives vastly improves their adherence to life-saving medical regimens. That's right. For a significant number of people, a small chance at winning $10-100 can be the difference between whether or not they stick to a regimen that has a very good chance of saving their life. This technique has even shown promise in getting drug addicts and psychiatric patients to adhere to their regimens, for as little as a $20 gift certificate. This problem, in the aggregate, is estimated to cost about 5% of total health care spending -$100 billion - and that may not properly account for the utility lost by those who are harmed beyond repair. To claim that people are making a reasoned decision between the payoffs of taking and not-taking their medication, and that they be persuaded to change their behaviour by a payoff of about $900 a year (or less), is to crush reality into a theory that cannot hold it. This is doubly true when you consider that some of these people were fairly affluent.

A likely explanation of this detrimental irrationality is something close to an Ugh field. It must be miserable having a life-threatening illness. Being reminded of it by taking a pill every single day (or more frequently) is not pleasant. Then there's the question of whether you already took the pill. Because if you take it twice in one day, you'll end up in the hospital. And Heaven forfend your treatment involves needles. Thus, people avoid taking their medicine because the process becomes so unpleasant, even though they know they really should be taking it.

As this experiment shows, this serious problem has a simple and elegant solution: make taking their medicine fun. As one person in the article describes it, using a low-reward lottery made taking his meds "like a game;" he couldn't wait to check the dispenser to see if he'd won (and take his meds again). Instead of thinking about how they have some terrible condition, they get excited thinking about how they could be winning money. The Ugh field has been demolished, with the once-feared p...
Surface syllogisms and the sin-based model of causation
by PhilGoetz — 2010-06-19T16:40:39.852Z

The White House says there will be a temporary ban on new deep-water drilling, and BP will have to pay the salaries of oilmen who have no work during that ban. I scratched my head trying to figure out the logic behind this. This was my first attempt:

BP caused an oil spill.

The oil spill caused a ban on drilling.

The ban on drilling caused oilmen to be out of work.

Therefore, BP caused oilmen to be out of work.

Therefore, BP should pay these oilmen.

This logic works equally well in this case:

Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring.

Silent Spring caused a ban on DDT use.

The ban on DDT use caused factory workers to be out of work.

Therefore, Rachel Carson caused factory workers to be out of work.

Therefore, Rachel Carson should pay these workers.

But "everyone" would agree that the second example is fallacious. Are people so angry at BP that they can't think at all?

Then I came up with this second argument. ("At fault" is legalese for "caused by an immoral or illegal action.")

An oil spill caused a ban on drilling.

The ban on drilling caused oilmen to be out of work.

Therefore, the oil spill caused oilmen to be out of work.

The party at fault should pay the injured party.

BP is at fault for the oil spill.

Therefore, BP should pay these oilmen.

Applied to Rachel Carson:

Silent Spring caused a ban on DDT.

The ban on DDT use caused factory workers to be out of work.

The party at fault should pay the injured party.

The producers of DDT are at fault for environmental damage.

Therefore, those producers should pay these factory workers.

Both these chains of reasoning are still faulty, but they're more similar to the reactions of most people. They are faulty because they're not specific about the connection between the fault and the injured party, or about what an "injury" is. In the second case, there is no injury to the workers; the company simply stopped employing them, and could only be held morally responsible for this under something like feudalism. In the BP case, you could argue that non-BP oilmen were injured, because they want to work and their (non-BP) employers want to hire them, but outside forces prevented them.

However, being at fault for the oil spill is not the same as being at fault for (causing by immoral action) the ban on drilling. The word "cause" is too vague for moral responsibility to be trans...
Cambridge Less Wrong meetup Sunday 27 June
by jimrandomh — 2010-06-19T03:42:34.927Z

I will be at Clear Conscience Cafe at 581 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA looking for other Less Wrong people on Sunday the 27th. This breaks the previously established pattern of meeting on the third Sunday of each month, to avoid conflicting with Father's Day. As usual, I will bring my boxes and challenge anyone who comes to a puzzle. No one has answered correctly yet; come be the first!

Edited to add: 4pm