trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Ethics as a black box function
by Kaj_Sotala — 2009-09-22T17:25:47.094Z

(Edited to add: See also this addendum.)

I commented on Facebook that I think our ethics is three-tiered. There are the things we imagine we consider right, the things we consider right, and the things we actually do. I was then asked to elaborate between the difference of the first two.
For the first one, I was primarily thinking about people following any idealized, formal ethical theories. People considering themselves act utilitarians, for instance. Yet when presented with real-life situations, they may often reply that the right course of action is different than what the purely act utilitarian framework would imply, taking into account things such as keeping promises and so on. Of course, a rule utilitarian would avoid that particular trap, but in general nobody is a pure follower of any formal ethical theory.
Now, people who don't even try to follow any formal ethical systems probably have a closer match between their first and second categories. But I recently came to view as our moral intuitions as a function that takes the circumstances of the situation as an input and gives a moral judgement as an output. We do not have access to the inner workings of that function, though we can and do try to build models that attempt to capture its inner workings. Still, as our understanding of the function is incomplete, our models are bound to sometimes produce mistaken predictions.

Based on our model, we imagine (if not thinking about the situations too much) that in certain kinds of situations we would arrive at a specific judgement, but a closer examination of them reveals that the function outputs the opposite value. For instance, we might think that maximizing total welfare is always for the best, but then realize that we don't actually want to maximize total welfare if the people we consider our friends would be hurt. This might happen even if you weren't explicitly following any formal theory of ethics. And if *actually* faced with that situation, we might end up acting selfishly instead.
This implies that people pick the moral frameworks which are best at justifying the ethical intuitions they already had. Of course, we knew that much already (even if we sometimes fail to apply it - I was previously puzzled over why so many smart people reject all forms of utilitarianism, as ultimately everyone has to perform some sort of expected utility calculations in or...
Why do animal lovers want animals to feel pain?
by KatjaGrace — 2009-09-21T09:00:21.000Z

Behind the vail of (lots of) ignorance, would you rather squished chickens be painless?

We may soon be able to make pain-free animals, according to New Scientist. The study they reported on finds that people not enthused by creating such creatures for scientific research, which is interesting. Robin Hanson guessed prior to seeing the article that this was because endorsing pain free animals would require thinking that farmed animals now were in more pain than wild animals, which people don’t think. However it turns out that vegetarians and animal welfare advocates were much more opposed to the idea than others in the study, so another explanation is needed.

Robert Wiblin suggested to me that vegetarians are mostly in favor of animals not being used, as well as not being hurt, so they don’t want to support pain-free use, as that is supporting use. He made this comparison:

Currently children are being sexually abused. The technology now exists to put them under anaesthetic so that they don’t experience the immediate pain of sexual abuse. Should we put children under anaesthetic to sexually abuse them?

A glance at the comments on other sites reporting the possibility of painless meat suggests vegetarians cite this along with a lot of different reasons for disapproval. And sure enough it seems mainly meat eaters who say eliminating pain would make them feel better about eating meat. The reasons vegetarians (and others) give for not liking the idea, or for not being more interested in pain-free meat, include:

The animals would harm themselves without knowing

Eating animals is bad for environmental or health reasons

Killing is always wrong

Animals have complex social lives and are sad when their family are killed, regardless of pain

Animals are living things [?!]

There are other forms of unpleasantness, such as psychological torture

How can we tell they don’t feel pain?

We will treat them worse if we think they can’t feel it, and we might be wrong

There are better solutions, such as not eating meat

It’s weird, freaky, disrespectful

It’s selfish and unnecessary for humans to do this to animals

Many reasonable reasons. The fascinating thing though is that vegetarians seem to consistently oppose the idea, yet not share reasons. Three (not mutually exclusive) explanations:

Vegetarians care more about animals in general, so

...
The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-09-20T17:21:08.994Z

So I'd intended this story as a bit of utterly deranged fun, but it got out of control and ended up as a deep philosophical exploration, and now those of you who care will have to wade through the insanity. I'm sorry. I just can't seem to help myself.

I know that writing crossover fanfiction is considered one of the lower levels to which an author can sink. Alas, I've always been a sucker for audacity, and I am the sort of person who couldn't resist trying to top the entire... but never mind, you can see for yourself.

Click on to read my latest story and first fanfiction, a Vernor Vinge x Greg Egan crackfic.
How to use SMILE to solve Bayes Nets
by Johnicholas — 2009-09-20T12:08:10.702Z

This is an account of downloading and using SMILE, a free-as-in-beer-but-not-open-source bayes net library. SMILE powers GENIE, a graphical bayes net tool. SMILE can do a lot of things, but I only used the simplest features - building a network and, given evidence, inferring probability distributions on the unobserved features.

After registering, there is a download page, containing binary distributions for various operating systems and architectures, including a .tar.gz intended for 32-bit Linux, which is what I picked. Possibly someone else can describe the experience of using it from Windows. The tarball turned out to contain about 50 .h files (C++ header files) and two .a files (statically linked libraries). I also downloaded the "smilehelp.zip", which turned out to contain a .chm (compiled hypertext help). I didn't have a viewer at the time, but gnochm worked out of the box. Most of the smilehelp text was only moderately helpful, but the appendices with tutorial code were very helpful.

As I understand it, there are a lot of different things that one could be interested in doing (influence diagrams, learning parameters, learning structure) I did the very simplest thing, building a net and performing inference on it. This is basically "tutorial 2" from the reference manual. (Note: The tutorial 2 code is not correct, but the appendix tutorial 2 code is).

The experience of using the library was not magically smooth, but then, the number of large-ish old-ish libraries which are magically smooth to use can probably be counted on the fingers of one foot. It might be obvious to some, but the friction impressed on me that even if some people are getting solid results that they trust from SMILE, I need to verify my use of it independently. Even straightforward uses of a trusted library could be buggy or (less likely) an unusual usage could reveal bugs internal to the library which existing users never encounter.

The two annoyances that I encountered were Law of Demeter ugliness and the flat conditional probability tables. The Law of Demeter is the principle that interfaces should not reveal their implementations, or alternatively, clambering through object graphs is a bad idea. It is a version of the general programmer injunction: "Decouple!". Of course, once an interface is published, it is very hard to break backwards compatibility and revise away from it - there a...
Reason as memetic immune disorder
by PhilGoetz — 2009-09-19T21:05:07.256Z

A prophet is without dishonor in his hometown

I'm reading the book "The Year of Living Biblically," by A.J. Jacobs. He tried to follow all of the commandments in the Bible (Old and New Testaments) for one year. He quickly found that

a lot of the rules in the Bible are impossible, illegal, or embarassing to follow nowadays; like wearing tassels, tying your money to yourself, stoning adulterers, not eating fruit from a tree less than 5 years old, and not touching anything that a menstruating woman has touched; and

this didn't seem to bother more than a handful of the one-third to one-half of Americans who claim the Bible is the word of God.

You may have noticed that people who convert to religion after the age of 20 or so are generally more zealous than people who grew up with the same religion. People who grow up with a religion learn how to cope with its more inconvenient parts by partitioning them off, rationalizing them away, or forgetting about them. Religious communities actually protect their members from religion in one sense - they develop an unspoken consensus on which parts of their religion members can legitimately ignore. New converts sometimes try to actually do what their religion tells them to do.

I remember many times growing up when missionaries described the crazy things their new converts in remote areas did on reading the Bible for the first time - they refused to be taught by female missionaries; they insisted on following Old Testament commandments; they decided that everyone in the village had to confess all of their sins against everyone else in the village; they prayed to God and assumed He would do what they asked; they believed the Christian God would cure their diseases. We would always laugh a little at the naivete of these new converts; I could barely hear the tiny voice in my head saying but they're just believing that the Bible means what it says...

How do we explain the blindness of people to a religion they grew up with?

Cultural immunity

Europe has lived with Christianity for nearly 2000 years. European culture has co-evolved with Christianity. Culturally, memetically, it's developed a tolerance for Christianity. These new Christian converts, in Uganda, Papua New Guinea, and other remote parts of the world, were being exposed to Christian memes for the first time, and had...
Hypothetical Paradoxes
by Psychohistorian — 2009-09-19T06:28:06.637Z

When we form hypotheticals, they must use entirely consistent and clear language, and avoid hiding complicated operations behind simple assumptions. In particular, with respect to decision theory, hypotheticals must employ a clear and consistent concept of free will, and they must make all information available to the theorizer available to the decider in the question. Failure to do either of these can make a hypothetical meaningless or self-contradictory if properly understood.

Newcomb's problem and the the Smoking Lesion fail to do both. I will argue that hidden assumptions in both problems imply internally contradictory concepts of free will, and thus both hypotheticals are incomprehensible and irrelevant when used to contradict decision theories.

And I'll do it without math or programming! Metatheory is fun.

Newcomb's problem, insofar as it is used as a refutation of causal decision theory, relies on convenient ignorance and a paradoxical concept of free will, though it takes some thinking to see why, because the concept of naive free will is such an innate part of human thought. In order for Newcomb's to work, there must exist some thing or set of things ("A") that very closely (even perfectly) link "Omega predicts Y-boxing" with "Decider takes Y boxes." If there is no A, Omega cannot predict your behaviour. The existence of A is a fact necessary for the hypothetical and the decision maker should be aware of it, even if he doesn't know anything about how A generates a prediction.

Newcomb's problem assumes two contradictory things about A. It assumes that, for the purpose of Causal Decision Theory, A is irrelevant and completely separated from your actual decision process; it assumes you have some kind of free will such that you can decide to two-box without this decision having been reflected in A. It also assumes that, for purposes of the actual outcome, A is quite relevant; if you decided to two-box, your decision will have been reflected in A. This contradiction is the reason the problem seems complicated. If CDT were allowed to consider A, as it should be, it would realize:

(B), "I might not understand how it works, but my decision is somehow bound to the prediction in such a way that however I decide will have been predicted. Therefore, for all intents and purposes, even though my decision feels free, it is not, and, insofar as it feels free, deciding

...
Minneapolis Meetup: Survey of interest
by JustinShovelain — 2009-09-18T18:52:50.278Z

Frank Adamek and I are going to host a Less Wrong/Overcoming Bias meetup tentatively on Saturday September 26 at 3pm in Coffman Memorial Union at the University of Minnesota (there is a coffee shop and a food court there). Frank is the president of the University of Minnesota transhumanist group and some of them may be attending also. We'd like to gauge the level of interest so please comment if you'd be likely to attend.

(ps. If you have any time conflicts or would like to suggest a better venue please comment)
MWI, weird quantum experiments and future-directed continuity of conscious experience
by SforSingularity — 2009-09-18T16:45:47.741Z

Response to: Quantum Russian Roulette

Related: Decision theory: Why we need to reduce “could”, “would”, “should”

In Quantum Russian Roulette, Christian_Szegedy tells of a game which uses a "quantum source of randomness" to somehow make a game which consists in terminating the lives of 15 rich people to create one very rich person sound like an attractive proposition. To quote the key deduction:

Then the only result of the game is that the guy who wins will enjoy a much better quality of life. The others die in his Everett branch, but they live on in others. So everybody's only subjective experience will be that he went into a room and woke up $750000 richer.

I think that Christian_Szegedy is mistaken, but in an interesting way. I think that the intuition at steak here is something about continuity of conscious experience. The intuition that Christian might have, if I may anticipate him, is that everyone in the experiment will actually experience getting $750,000, because somehow the word-line of their conscious experience will continue only in the worlds where they do not die. To formalize this, we imagine an arbitrary decision problem as a tree with nodes corresponding to decision points that create duplicate persons, and time increasing from left to right:

The skull and crossbones symbols indicate that the person created in the previous decision point is killed. We might even consider putting probabilities on the arcs coming out of a given node to indicate how likely a given outcome is. When we try to assess whether a given decision was a good one, we might want to look at the utilities on the leaves of the tree are. But what if there is more than one leaf, and the person concerned is me, i.e. the root of the tree corresponds to "me, now" and the leaves correspond to "possible me's in 10 days' time"? I find myself querying for "what will I really experience" when trying to decide which way to steer reality. So I tend to want to mark some nodes in the decision tree as "really me" and others as "zombie-like copies of me that I will not experience being", resulting in a generic decision tree that looks like this:

I decorated the tree with normal faces and zombie faces consistent with the following rules:

At a decision node, if the parent is a zombie then chil

...
Quantum Russian Roulette
by Christian_Szegedy — 2009-09-18T08:49:43.865Z

The quantum Russian roulette is a game where 16 people participate. Each of them gets a unique four digit binary code assigned and deposits $50000. They are put to deep sleep using some drug. The organizer flips a quantum coin four times. Unlike in Russian roulette, here only the participant survives whose code was flipped. The others are executed in a completely painless manner. The survivor takes all the money.
Let us assume that none of them have families or very good friends. Then the only result of the game is that the guy who wins will enjoy a much better quality of life. The others die in his Everett branch, but they live on in others. So everybody's only subjective experience will be that he went into a room and woke up $750000 richer.
Being extremely spooky to our human intuition, there are hardly any trivial objective reasons to oppose this game under the following assumptions:

Average utilitarianism

Near 100% confidence in the Multiple World nature of our universe

It is possible to kill someone without invoking any negative experiences.

The natural question arises whether it could be somehow checked that the method really works, especially that the Multiple World Hypothesis is correct. At first sight, it looks impossible to convince anybody besides the participant who survived the game.
However there is a way to convince a lot of people in a few Everett branches: You make a one-time big announcement in the Internet, TV etc. and say that there is a well tested quantum coin-flipper, examined by a community consisting of the most honest and trusted members of the society. You take some random 20 bit number and say that you will flip the equipment 20 times and if the outcome is the same as the predetermined number, then you will take it as a one to million evidence that the Multiple World theory works as expected. Of course, only people in the right branch will be convinced. Nevertheless, they could be convinced enough to make serious thoughts about the viability of quantum Russian roulette type games.

My question is: What are the possible moral or logical reasons not to play such games? Both from individual or societal standpoints.

[EDIT] A Simpler version (single player version of the experiment): The single player generates lottery numbers by flipping quantum coins. Sets up an equipment that kills him in sleep if the generated numbers don't coincide w...
Sociosexual Orientation Inventory, or failing to perform basic sanity checks
by taw — 2009-09-16T10:00:06.816Z

I just did some reading about "Sociosexual Orientation Inventory", a simple 7-item test designed to measure one's openness to sex without love and long term commitment.

Here are the questions. How long will it take you to spot the huge problem ahead...

With how many different partners have you had sex (sexual intercourse) within the last year.

How many different partners do you foresee yourself having sex with during the next five years? (Please give a specific, realistic estimate)

With how many different partners have you had sex on one and only one occasion?

How often do (did) you fantasize about having sex with someone other than your current (most recent) dating partner? (1 never ... 8 at least once a day)

"Sex without love is OK" (1 strongly disagree ... 9 stronly agree)

"I can imagine myself being comfortable and enjoying `casual' sex with different partners (1 strongly disagree ... 9 stronly agree)

"I would have to be closely attached to someone (both emotionally and psychologially) before I could feel comfortable and fully enjoy having sex with him or her" (1 strongly disagree ... 9 stronly agree)

Score is: 5 x item1 + 1 x item2 (capped at 30) + 5 x item3 + 4 x item4 + 2 x (mean of item5, item6, and reversed item7)

Do you see the problem already?

Quite predictably, researchers report that men have much higher SOI scores than women in all countries. But the first three questions (ignoring non-1:1 gender ratios, differently biased sampling for different genders, different rates of homosexuality between genders, different behaviour of homosexuals of different genders, 30 partners cap on the second item, differently biased forecasts of the second item and other small details that won't affect the score much) - simply have to be identical for men and women, so the entire difference would have to be explained by items 4 to 7, which have relatively low weights!

The differences between men and women can be really extreme for some countries, Ukraine has 50.79±28.92 (mean±sd) for men, and 17.36±8.65 for women, which means that either Ukrainian men, or Ukrainian women, or both, are notoriously lying when asked about past and future sex partners. In most countries the differences are more moderate, with total 48-country sample's scores being 46.67±29.68 for men, and 27.34±19.55 for women. Latvia leads the way with smallest diffe...
What is the Singularity Summit?
by Liron — 2009-09-16T07:18:06.675Z

As you know, the Singularity Summit 2009 is on the weekend of Oct 3 - Oct 4. What is it, you ask? I'll start from the beginning...

An interesting collection of molecules occupied a certain tide pool 3.5 to 4.5 billion years ago, interesting because the molecule collection built copies of itself out of surrounding molecules, and the resulting molecule collections also replicated while accumulating beneficial mutations. Those molecule collections satisfied a high-level functional criterion called "genetic fitness", and it happened by pure chance.

If you think about all the possible arrangements of atoms that can occupy a 1-millimeter by 1-millimeter by 1-millimeter cube of space, most of them are going to suck at causing the future universe to contain copies of themselves. Genetic fitness is a vanishingly small target in configuration-space.
And if you studied the universe 5 billion years ago, you would not see a process capable of hitting such a small target. No physical process could create low-entropy collections of atoms satisfying high-level functional criteria. The second law of thermodynamics thus ensured that mice, as well as mousetraps, were physically impossible.

Then a mutating replicator randomly emerged, and suddenly Earth was home to something special: the process of Natural Selection. Natural Selection optimizes for genetic fitness. It squeezes the space of possible futures into a tiny subspace -- the space of universes that contain self-replicators which are very good at self-replicating. And it remained a flickering candle of optimization in a dark, random universe for three billion years.
An interesting product of Natural Selection occupied a certain region of savannah 100 thousand to 2 million years ago, interesting because it could form internal representations of the world around it and predict the consequences of its own actions. By pure chance, Natural Selection had created its successor.
Thought is a more powerful process than Natural Selection. Thought can optimize atom configurations much faster than Natural Selection can. It takes much less time to think of a big design improvement for an organism, than to breed it for as many generations as it takes for a specimen to manifest one.
Now remember, Natural Selection emerged by coincidence -- not by Natural Selection. Processes that optimize for genetic fitness were previously not to be...