trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
State your physical account of experienced color
by Mitchell_Porter — 2012-02-01T07:00:39.913Z

Previous post: Does functionalism imply dualism? Next post: One last roll of the dice.

Don't worry, this sequence of increasingly annoying posts is almost over. But I think it's desirable that we try to establish, once and for all, how people here think color works, and whether they even think it exists.

The way I see it, there is a mental block at work. An obvious fact is being denied or evaded, because the conclusions are unpalatable. The obvious fact is that physics as we know it does not contain the colors that we see. By "physics" I don't just mean the entities that physicists talk about, I also mean anything that you can make out of them. I would encourage anyone who thinks they know what I mean, and who agrees with me on this point, to speak up and make it known that they agree. I don't mind being alone in this opinion, if that's how it is, but I think it's desirable to get some idea of whether LessWrong is genuinely 100% against the proposition.

Just so we're all on the same wavelength, I'll point to a specific example of color. Up at the top of this web page, the word "Less" appears. It's green. So, there is an example of a colored entity, right in front of anyone reading this page.

My thesis is that if you take a lot of point-particles, with no property except their location, and arrange them any way you want, there won't be anything that's green like that; and that the same applies for any physical theory with an ontology that doesn't explicitly include color. To me, this is just mindbogglingly obvious, like the fact that you can't get a letter by adding numbers.

At this point people start talking about neurons and gensyms and concept maps. The greenness isn't in the physical object, "computer screen", it's in the brain's response to the stimulus provided by light from the computer screen entering the eye.

My response is simple. Try to fix in your mind what the physical reality must be, behind your favorite neuro-cognitive explanation of greenness. Presumably it's something like "a whole lot of neurons, firing in a particular way". Try to imagine what that is physically, in terms of atoms. Imagine some vast molecular tinker-toy structures, shaped into a cluster of neurons, with traveling waves of ions crossing axonal membranes. Large numbers of atoms arranged in space, a few of them executing motions which are relevant for the information processing. Do...
Writing rationalist fiction: Improving an existing setting?
by DataPacRat — 2012-01-31T23:05:07.130Z

I currently 'have' a minor SF setting, for which there exists a few short stories, comics, pictures, and the like, created by a variety of artists and authours. I'd like future contributions to be as rationalist as possible - for as many characters within the setting as possible to be Rationalist!Heroes, or even Rationalist!Villains. Do you have any advice that might help me try to nudge the various amateur artists and authours involved in that direction?

(In case you're curious, the setting's current reftext is here. The basic underlying question I'm basing it around is, "As technology advances, it becomes possible for smaller and smaller groups to kill more and more people. How can society survive, let alone develop, when individuals have the power to kill billions?" So far, most of the creations have been developing the overall background and characters, rather than focusing on that question directly.)
Hugo Awards - HP:MoR (part 2)
by Eneasz — 2012-01-31T21:11:02.625Z

Summary: please nominate HPMoR:Podcast for consideration to the brand-new FanCast category.

The Hugo Awards, as many are probably aware, are awards given to outstanding Science Fiction/Fantasy works, as voted upon by the reading public. They work by letting anyone who attends the annual World Science Fiction Convention nominate & vote on their favorite works. The Hugos and the Nebulas are generally considered the two major awards of the SF/F genre.
Last year I suggested nominating HPMoR, which was complicated by the fact that it's not complete, is fanfic, and isn't "published" in the traditional sense.
However this year there is a Special Category called Best FanCast, defined as “Any non-professional audio- or video-casting with at least four (4) episodes that had at least one (1) episode released in 2011.” (There is an amendment to the WSFS Constitution pending ratification at Chicon 7 that would make Best Fancast a permanent category.)
This seems like a perfect fit for HP:MoR The Podcast.

If you are already participating in this year's Hugos or participated in last year's Hugos, you are eligible to nominate works. Please consider nominating it. A nomination could help bring knowledge of MoR to many more people, regardless of a win. And it's not terribly hard to get nominated, especially in these smaller catagories. Last year Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury was nominated to the final ballot in "Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form" with only 50 nominations.
If you aren't participating yet, well, there may still be a chance to sign up, depending on when you're reading this. Turns out the deadline for buying into the convention is 11:59pm 1/31/12. You can get a full ticket (admission to the con plus the voting packet) for $195, or simply buy a "supporting membership" for $50. The supporting membership only lets you nominate and vote - not attend the con - but it does get you a "voting packet" which is the full text of all the nominated novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories (five nominees in each catagory) for free in multiple formats (.epub, MOBI, txt, and Word, I believe). If you buy a lot of SF anyway it's a decent deal, and you get to be a small part of SF history in the process. :) But it isn't an efficient use of money if you're simply nominating HPMoR, so this is really more of a request to those who are a...
"The Conditional Fallacy in Contemporary Philosophy"
by gwern — 2012-01-31T21:06:12.040Z

Split from "Against Utilitarianism: Sobel's attack on judging lives' goodness" for length.

Robert K. Shope, back in his 1978 paper "The Conditional Fallacy in Contemporary Philosophy", identified a kind of argument that us transhumanists will find painfully familiar: you propose idea X, the other person says bad thing Y is a possible counterexample if X were true, so X can't be true - ignoring that Y may not happen, and X can just be modified to deal with Y if it's really that important.

("If we augment our brains, we may forget how to love!" "So don't remove love when you're augmenting, sheesh." "But it might not be possible!" "But wouldn't you agree that augmentation without loss of love would be better than the status quo?")

Excerpts follow:

1 I. ONE VERSION OF THE CONDITIONAL FALLACY

A mistake one makes in analyzing or defining a statement p by presenting its truth as dependent, in at least some specified situations, upon the truth (falsity) of a subjunctive conditional O3 of the form: ‘If state of affairs a were to occur, then state of affairs b would occur’,4 when

(Version 1) one has failed to notice that the truth value of p sometimes depends on whether a actually occurs and does not depend merely upon the truth value of the analysans or definiens; moreover, one has failed to notice this because one has overlooked the fact that in some of the specified situations:

conditional O is true (false),

the analysans or definiens is true,

state of affairs a does not occur, and

if a were to occur then the occurrence of a or the occurrence of b or their combination (the occurrence of a or the absence of b or their combination) would be at least part of the cause of something that would make p true, although is actually false.

2 II. A SECOND VERSION OF THE CONDITIONAL FALLACY

…An illustration of a second version of this mistake appears in the following definition, offered by Keith Lehrer: “But what does it mean to say that reasons give a man knowledge? It means that if he were asked, ‘How do you know that?’ and he were to give those reasons, his answer would be correct. Those reasons explain how he knows.”5 But suppose that Mr. Silent, the only friend of Mr. Faker, knows that they will remain friends in the immediate future. Yet Mr. Faker pretends to all others that he himself is a misanthrope, and t

...
Existential risk for non-consequentialists
by vallinder — 2012-01-31T21:03:55.180Z

Many people on Less Wrong believe reducing existential risk is one of the most important causes. Most arguments to this effect point out the horrible consequences: everyone now living would die (or face something even worse). The situation becomes even worse if we also consider future generations. Such an argument, as spelt out in Nick Bostrom's latest paper on the topic, for instance, should strike many consequentialists as persuading. But of course, not everyone's a consequentialist, and on other approaches it's far from obvious that existential risk should come out on top. Might it be worth to spend some more time investigating arguments for existential risk reduction that don't presuppose consequentialism? Of course, "non-consequentialism" is a very diverse category, and I'd be surprised if there were a single argument that covered all its members.
Is risk aversion really irrational ?
by kilobug — 2012-01-31T20:34:13.529Z

Disclaimer: this started as a comment to Risk aversion vs. concave utility function but it grew way too big so I turned it into a full-blown article. I posted it to main since I believe it to be useful enough, and since it replies to an article of main.

Abstract

When you have to chose between two options, one with a certain (or almost certain) outcome, and another which involves more risk, even if in term of utilons (paperclips, money, ...) the gamble has a higher expectancy, there is always a cost in a gamble : between the time when you take your decision and know if your gamble fails or succeeded (between the time you bought your lottery ticket,and the time the winning number is called), you've less precise information about the world than if you took the "safe" option. That uncertainty may force you to make suboptimal choices during that period of doubt, meaning that "risk aversion" is not totally irrational.

Even shorter : knowledge has value since it allows you to optimize, taking a risk temporary lowers your knoweldge, and this is a cost.

Where does risk aversion comes from ?

In his (or her?) article, dvasya gave one possible reason for it : risk aversion comes from a concave utility function. Take food for example. When you're really hungry, didn't eat for days, a bit of food has a very high value. But when you just ate, and have some stocks of food at home, food has low value. Many other things follow, more or less strongly, a non-linear utility function.

But if you adjust the bets for the utility, then, if you're a perfect utility maximizer, you should chose the highest expectancy, regardless of the risk involved. Between being sure of getting 10 utilons and having a 0.1 chance of getting 101 utilons (and 0.9 chance to get nothing), you should chose to take the bet. Or you're not rational, says dvasya.

My first objection to it is that we aren't perfect utility maximizer. We run on limited (and flawed) hardware. We have a limited power for making computation. The first problem of taking a risk is that it'll make all further computations much harder. You buy a lottery ticket, and until you know if you won or not, every time you decide what to do, you'll have to ponder things like "if I win the lottery, then I'll buy a new house, so is it really worth it to fix that broken door now ?" Asking yourself all those questions mean you're less Free to Optimize, ...
Darwin Day: Good Evolution Games?
by Raemon — 2012-01-31T19:58:41.237Z

Darwin's birthay is on February 12th, which is a Sunday. I'd kinda like to do something fun to celebrate.

I was wondering if anyone knew of any good games that feature natural selection? Video games would work if necessary (to run through a lot of iterations quickly), but I'd prefer something closer to a board game, that has a party feel.

What's coming to mind is an activity from 10th grade biology: you get a bunch of skittles, and place them on a yellow background, and then you go through iterations of "eat the first skittle you see as fast as possible", and then for each remaining skittle, add two more skittles of the same color. Within a few generations they're all yellow because those were harder to see.

That framework is nice, but doesn't really produce an interesting result. I'm trying to think of something that, over the course of an afternoon, without computer simulation, produce some interesting emergent phenomena.

Anyone have thoughts? Does anything like this already exist?
Doing Science! Open Thread Experiment Results
by daenerys — 2012-01-31T07:57:09.228Z

Early in the month I announced that I was doing an experiment: I was going to start two Open Threads in January (one on the 1st, and the other on the 15th) and compare the number of comments on these threads to those of other months. My hypothesis was that having two Open Threads would raise the overall number of comments.

The reason for this experiment was recent discussions regarding how useful threads such as these were quickly buried. Well, the experiment is over now, and here are the results:

I did a search for Open Threads, and entered all the monthly ones I could find into an Excel spreadsheet. I made them into a graph, and I discovered an anomaly. There was an 8-month timespan from February 2010-September 2010, in which the comment counts were extremely high (up to 2112). Many of these threads had 2, 3, or 4 parts, because they were getting filled up.

I wasn't around LW back then, and I don't feel like reading through them all, so I don't know why this time period was so active. My current hypothesis (with P=.75) is that anomalous time period was before the Discussion section was created. I'm sure I could look it up to see if I'm right, but I bet one of the long-term LWers already knows if this is true or not, so I'll crowd-source the info. (Comment below if you know that I am correct or incorrect in my hypothesis.)

Now for the data:

The January 1-15, 2012 thread had: 122 comments
The January 16-31, 2012 thread had: 236 comments

For a grand total of: 358 comments in Jan 2012

The average Open Thread had: 448.6 comments
The median Open Thread had: 204 comments
The average OT of the past 14 mo's: 126.5 comments

So overall, the January thread had LESS than the average monthly thread, but more than the median.

IF however we look at the past 14 months (which was the end of the anomaly), then the January 2012 Open Thread had almost THREE TIMES the average.

My original hypothesis had probabilities assigned to various increases in comment rate, but I was way off because I didn't at all think it would shrink (if we include the anomaly) or that it would be 300% bigger (if we don't)

Here's a handy-dandy chart, because everything is better with pictures in!
Risk aversion vs. concave utility function
by dvasya — 2012-01-31T06:25:39.218Z

In the comments to this post, several people independently stated that being risk-averse is the same as having a concave utility function. There is, however, a subtle difference here. Consider the example proposed by one of the commenters: an agent with a utility function

u = sqrt(p) utilons for p paperclips.

The agent is being offered a choice between making a bet with a 50/50 chance of receiving a payoff of 9 or 25 paperclips, or simply receiving 16.5 paperclips. The expected payoff of the bet is a full 9/2 + 25/2 = 17 paperclips, yet its expected utility is only 3/2 + 5/2 = 4 = sqrt(16) utilons which is less than the sqrt(16.5) utilons for the guaranteed deal, so our agent goes for the latter, losing 0.5 expected paperclips in the process. Thus, it is claimed that our agent is risk averse in that it sacrifices 0.5 expected paperclips to get a guaranteed payoff.

Is this a good model for the cognitive bias of risk aversion? I would argue that it's not. Our agent ultimately cares about utilons, not paperclips, and in the current case it does perfectly fine at rationally maximizing expected utilons. A cognitive bias should be, instead, some irrational behavior pattern that can be exploited to take utility (rather than paperclips) away from the agent. Consider now another agent, with the same utility function as before, but who just has this small additional trait that it would strictly prefer a sure payoff of 16 paperclips to the above bet. Given our agent's utility function, 16 is the point of indifference, so could there be any problem with his behavior? Turns out there is. For example, we could follow the post on Savage's theorem (see Postulate #4). If the sure payoff of

16 paperclips = 4 utilons

is strictly preferred to the bet

{P(9 paperclips) = 0.5; P(25 paperclips) = 0.5} = 4 utilons,

then there must also exist some finite δ > 0 such that the agent must strictly prefer a guaranteed 4 utilons to betting on

{P(9) = 0.5 - δ; P(25) = 0.5 + δ) = 4 + 2δ utilons

- all at the loss of 2δ expected utilons! This is also equivalent to our agent being willing to pay a finite amount of paperclips to substitute the bet with the sure deal of the same expected utility.

What we have just seen falls pretty nicely within the concept of a bias. Our agent has a perfectly fine utility function, but it al...
Against Utilitarianism: Sobel's attack on judging lives' goodness
by gwern — 2012-01-31T05:45:35.817Z

Luke tasked me with researching the following question

I‘d like to know if anybody has come up with a good response to any of the objections to ’full information’ or ‘ideal preference’ theories of value given in Sobel (1994). (My impression is “no.”)

The paper in question is David Sobel’s 1994 paper “Full Information Accounts of Well-Being” (Ethics 104, no. 4: 784–810) (his 1999 paper, “Do the desires of rational agents converge?”, is directed against a different kind of convergence and won’t be discussed here).

The starting point is Brandt’s 1979 book where he describes his version of a utilitarianism in which utility is the degree of satisfaction of the desires of one’s ideal ‘fully informed’ self, and Sobel also refers to the 1986 Railton apologetic. (LWers will note that this kind of utilitarianism sounds very similar to CEV and hence, any criticism of the former may be a valid criticism of the latter.) I’ll steal entirely the opening to Mark C Murphy’s 1999 paper, “The Simple Desire-Fulfillment Theory” (rejecting any hypotheticals or counterfactuals in desire utilitarianism), since he covers all the bases (for even broader background, see the Tanner Lecture “The Status of Well-Being”):

An account of well-being that [Derek] Parfit labels the ‘desire-fulfillment’ theory (1984, 493) has gained a great deal of support as the most plausible account of what makes a subject well-off. According to the desire-fulfillment, or DF, theory, an agent’s well-being is constituted by the obtaining of states of affairs that are desired by that agent.1 Importantly, though, while all DF theorists affirm that an account of what makes an agent well-off must ultimately refer to desire, there now appears to be a consensus among those defending DF theories that it is not the satisfaction of the agent’s actual desires that constitutes the agent’s well-being, but rather the satisfaction of those desires that the agent would have in what I will call a ‘hypothetical desire situation.’ Just as Rawls holds (1971, 12) that the principles of right are those that would be unanimously chosen in a hypothetical choice situation, that is, a setting optimal for choosing such principles, defenders of DF theo

...
[SEQ RERUN] Fallacies of Compression
by MinibearRex — 2012-01-31T05:16:56.824Z

Today's post, Fallacies of Compression was originally published on 17 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

You have only one word, but there are two or more different things-in-reality, so that all the facts about them get dumped into a single undifferentiated mental bucket. It's part of a detective's ordinary work to observe that Carol wore red last night, or that she has black hair; and it's part of a detective's ordinary work to wonder if maybe Carol dyes her hair. But it takes a subtler detective to wonder if there are two Carols, so that the Carol who wore red is not the same as the Carol who had black hair.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Replace the Symbol with the Substance, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Does functionalism imply dualism? 
by Mitchell_Porter — 2012-01-31T03:43:51.973Z

This post follows on from Personal research update, and is followed by State your physical explanation of experienced color.

In a recent post, I claimed that functionalism about consciousness implies dualism. Since most functionalists think their philosophy is an alternative to dualism, I'd better present an argument.

But before I go further, I'll link to orthonormal's series on dissolving the problem of "Mary's Room": Seeing Red: Dissolving Mary's Room and Qualia, A Study of Scarlet: The Conscious Mental Graph, Nature: Red in Truth, and Qualia. Mary's Room is one of many thought experiments bandied about by philosophers in their attempts to say whether or not colors (and other qualia) are a problem for materialism, and orthonormal presents a computational attempt to get around the problem which is a good representative of the functionalist style of thought. I won't have anything to say about those articles at this stage (maybe in comments), but they can serve as an example of what I'm talking about.

Now, though it may antagonize some people, I think it is best to start off by stating my position plainly and bluntly, rather than starting with a neutral discussion of what functionalism is and how it works, and then seeking to work my way from there to the unpopular conclusion. I will stick to the example of color to make my points - apologies to blind and colorblind readers.

My fundamental thesis is that color manifestly does exist - there are such things as shades of green, shades of red, etc - and that it manifestly does not exist in any standard sort of physical ontology. In an arrangement of point particles in space, there are no shades of green present. This is obviously true, and it's equally obvious for more complicated ontologies like fields, geometries, wavefunction multiverses, and so on. It's even part of the history of physics; even Galileo distinguished between primary qualities like location and shape, and secondary qualities like color. Primary qualities are out there and objectively present in the external world, secondary qualities are only in us, and physics will only concern itself with primary qualities. The ontological world of physical theory is colorless. (We may call light of a certain wavelength green light or red light, but that is because it produces an experience of seeing green or seeing red, not because the light itself is gre...
Meetup : Cambridge UK 
by rebellionkid — 2012-01-30T23:36:12.764Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge UK

WHEN:
05 February 2012 11:00:00AM (+0000)

WHERE:
JCR, Trinity College, Cambridge, CB2 1TQ, UK

Meet at the Great Gate if you dont know where the JCR is. Great Gate is on St. John's Street opposite the bookshop "Heffers".

Topic this week: "Is AI the biggest class of x-risk?"

Hopefully this should now be a regular meeting. Join the google group at http://groups.google.com/group/cambridgelesswrong

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge UK