CoffeeStain

Karma: 343

CoffeeStain Aug 5, 2013, 7:34 AM
3 points
on: Open thread, August 5-11, 2013
Can somebody explain a particular aspect of Quantum Mechanics to me?

In my readings of the Many Worlds Interpretation, which Eliezer fondly endorses in the QM sequence, I must have missed an important piece of information about when it is that amplitude distributions become separable in timed configuration space. That is, when do wave-functions stop interacting enough for the near-term simulation of two blobs (two “particles”) to treat them independently?

One cause is spatial distance. But in Many Worlds, I don’t know where I’m to understand these other worlds are taking place. Yes, it doesn’t matter, supposedly; the worlds are not present in this world’s causal structure, so an abstract “where” is meaningless. But the evolution of wavefunctions seems to care a lot about where amplitudes are in N-dimensional space. Configurations don’t sum unless they are the same spatial location and are representing the same quark type, right?

So if there’s another CoffeeStain that splits off based on my observation of a quantum event, why don’t the two CoffeeStains still interact, since they so obviously don’t? Before my two selves became decoherent with their respective quantum outcomes (say, of a photon’s path), the two amplitude blobs of the photon could still interact by the book, right? On what other axis has I, as a member of a new world, split off that I’m a sufficient distance from my self that is occupying the same physical location?

Relatedly, MWI answers “not-so-spooky” to questions regarding the entanglement experiment, but a similar confusion remains for me. Why, after I observe a particular polarization on my side of the galaxy and fly back in my spaceship to compare notes with my buddy on the other side of the galaxy, do I run into one version of him and not the other? They are both equally real, and occupying the same physical space. What other axis have the self-versions separated on?

CoffeeStain Jul 30, 2013, 7:55 AM
0 points
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Arguments Against Speciesism

I suspect that those would be longer than should be posted deep in a tangential comment thread.

Yeah probably. To be honest I’m still rather new to the rodeo here, so I’m not amazing at formalizing and communicating intuitions, which might just be boilerplate for that you shouldn’t listen to me :)

I’m sure it’s been hammered to death elsewhere, but my best prediction for what side I would fall on if I had all the arguments laid out would be the hard-line CS theoretical approach, as I often do. It’s probably not obvious why there would be problems with every proposed difficulty for additive aggregation. I would probably annoyingly often fall back on the claim that any particular case doesn’t satisfy the criteria but that additive value still holds.

I don’t think it’d be a lengthy list of criteria though. All you need is causal independence. The kind of independence that makes counterfactual (or probabilistic) worlds independent enough to be separable. You disvalue a situation where grandma dies with certaintly equivalently with a situation where all of your 4 grandmas (they got all real busy after the legalization of gay marriage in their country) are subjected to 25% likelihood of death. You do this because you value the possible worlds equally according to their likelihood, and you sum the values. My intuition that refusing to not also sum the values in analogous non-probabilistic circumstances would cause inconsistencies down the line, but I’m not sure.

CoffeeStain Jul 29, 2013, 9:57 PM
−1 points
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Arguments Against Speciesism

They do not, because if I value grandma N, a chicken M, where N > 0, M > 0, and N > M, then there exists some positive integer k for which kM > N. This means that for sufficiently many chickens, I would choose the chickens over my grandmother. That is the incorrect answer.

I do appreciate the willingness to shut up and do the impossible here. Your certainty that there is no amount of chickens equal to the worth of your grandmother makes you believe you need to give up one of 3 plausible-seeming axioms, and you’re not willing to think there isn’t a consistent reconciliation.

My point about your preferred ethical self is that for him to be a formal agent that you wish to emulate, he is required to have a consistent reconciliation. The suggestion is that most people who claim M = 0, insofar as it relates to N, create inconsistencies elsewhere when trying to relate it to O, P, and Q. Inconsistencies which they as flawed agents are permitted to have, but which ideal agents aren’t. The theory I refer to is the one that takes M = 0.

These are the inconsistencies that the multi-level morality people are trying to reconcile when they still wish to claim that they prefer a dying worm to a dying chicken. Suffice to say that I don’t think an ideal rational agent can reconcile them, but other point was that our actual selves aren’t required to (but that we should acknowledge this).

CoffeeStain Jul 29, 2013, 9:46 AM
0 points
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Arguments Against Speciesism

So I don’t think I ought to just say “eh, let’s call grandma’s worth a googolplex of chickens and call it a day”.

Why not? Being wrong about what ideally-solved-metaethics-SaidAchmiz would do isn’t by itself disutility. Disutility is X dead grandmas, where X = N / googleplex.

If we are using real-valued utilities, then we’re back to either assigning chickens 0 value or abandoning additive aggregation.

Why? I take it that for the set of all possible universe-states under my control, my ideal self could strictly order those states by preference, and then any real-value assignment of value to those states is just adding unneeded degrees of freedom. It’s just that real values happen to be also be (conveniently) strictly ordered and, when value is actually additive, produce proper orderings for as-yet-unconsidered universe-states.

As this comment points out, the additivity of the value of two events which have dependencies has no claim on their additivity when completely independent. Having two pillows isn’t having one pillow twice.

Any chance of saving my grandmother is worth any number of chickens.

So I actually don’t think you have to give this up to remain rational. Rationality is creating heuristics for the ideal version of yourself, a self of course which isn’t ideal in any fundamental sense but rather however you choose to define it. Let’s call this your preferred self. You should create heuristics that cause you to emulate your preferred self such that your preferred self would choose you out of any of your available options for doing metaethics, when applying you to the actual moral situations you’ll have in your lifetime (or a weighted-by-probability integral over expected moral situations).

What I’m saying is that I wouldn’t be surprised if that choice has you taking the Value(Chicken) = 0 heuristic. But I do think that the theory doesn’t check out, that your preferred self only has theories that checks out, and that most simple explanation for how he forms strict orderings of universe states involves real-number assignment.

This all to say, it’s not often we need to weigh the moral value of googleplex chickens over grandma, but if it ever came to that we should prefer to do it right.

CoffeeStain Jul 28, 2013, 11:29 PM
1 point
in reply to: JonahS’s comment on: Norbert Wiener on automation and unemployment

Automation could reduce the cost of hiring.

Take Uber, Sidecar, and Lyft as examples. I can’t find any data, but anecdotally these services appear to reduce the cost, and increase the wages, for patrons and drivers respectively by between 20 and 50%, with increased convenience for both. You know it’s working when entrenched, competing sectors of the industry are protesting and lobbying.

Eliezer’s suggestion about forgotten industries (maids and butlers) seems much more on point if automatic markets can remove hiring friction. Ride sharing has a rapidly-converging rating system that, with high-success, pairs drivers and riders, a paradigm that seems like it could succeed elsewhere with (if slow) changes in legality and public perception. Twenty years ago it would have nothing but incredible to not hold in your hand items costing a month’s wage before buying them and waiting two days for them to appear on your doorstep. If there’s a coming analogous revolution for the workforce, it could be even shorter, which puts it far out of reach of major AGI advances.

CoffeeStain Jul 28, 2013, 10:54 PM
6 points
in reply to: So8res’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)
...

We need to talk more.

CoffeeStain Jul 25, 2013, 8:11 AM
12 points
on: Useful Questions Repository
“What is the part of me that is preventing me from moving forward worried about?”

Be careful not to be antagonistic about the answer. The goal is to make that part of you less worried, thus making you more productive overall, not just on your blocked task. The roadblock is telling you something that you haven’t yet explicitly acknowledged, so acknowledge it, thank it, incorporate it into your thinking, and resolve it.

Example: “I’m not smart enough to solve this math problem.” Worry: “I would need to learn a textbook’s worth of math right now in order to solve it. I must go learn it now.” Resolution: “It’s fine that I don’t have the ability to solve the problem, and learning the math in 5 minutes is impossible and not necessary to satisfy my goals here. Trying to solve it the best I can will help me learn the math for future problems.”

CoffeeStain Jul 24, 2013, 8:38 AM
1 point
on: The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ
Does anybody have any data or reasoning that tracks the history of the relative magnitude of ideal value of unskilled labor versus ideal minimum cost of living? Presumably this ratio has been tracking favorably, even if in current practical economies the median available minimum wage job is in a city with a dangerously tight actual cost of living.

What I’d like to understand is, outside of minimum wage enforcement and solvable inefficiencies that affect the cost of basic goods, how much more economic output does an unskilled worker have over the cost what she needs to survive with health insurance?

It would be interesting if it could be projected that the value of a newly minted independent adult’s average labor abilities will, in the period of object-level AI, far surpass the cost of resources needed to keep that person alive and healthy.

Unemployment then wouldn’t be the issue. Boredom would.

CoffeeStain Jul 15, 2013, 10:52 PM
6 points
0
on: For Happiness, Keep a Gratitude Journal
Conversely, it is also good to limit reading about what other people are grateful for, especially if you’re feeling particularly ungrateful and they have things you don’t. Facebook is a huge offender here, because people tend to post about themselves when they’re doing well, rather than when they’re needing support. Seeing other people as more happy than they are leaves you wondering why you aren’t as happy as they are. It also feeds the illusion that others do not need your help.

CoffeeStain Jul 15, 2013, 10:29 AM
1 point
on: Model Combination and Adjustment
Doesn’t the act of combining many outside views and their reference classes turn you into somebody operating on the inside view? This is to say, what is the difference between this and the type of “inside” reasoning about a phenomenon’s causal structure?

Is it that inside thinking involves the construction of new models whereas outside thinking involves comparison and combination of existing models? From an machine intelligence perspective, the distinction is meaningless. The construction of new models is the extension of old models, albeit models of arbitrary simplicity. Deductive reasoning is just the generation of some new strings for induction to operate on to generate probabilities. Induction has the final word; that’s where the Bayesian network is queried for the result. Logic is the intentional generation of reference classes, a strategy for generating experiments that are likely to quickly converge that probability to 0 or 1.

Inside thinking also, analogously in humans, is the generation of new reference classes; after casting the spell called Reason, the phenomenon now belongs to a class of referents that upon doing so produce a particularly distinguishing set of strings in my brain. The existence of these strings, for the outside thinker, is strong evidence about the nature of the phenomenon. And once the strings exist, the outside thinker is required to combine the model that includes them with her existing model. And unbeknownst to the outside thinker, the strategy of seeking new reference classes is inside thinking.

CoffeeStain Jul 15, 2013, 4:39 AM
19 points
on: Writing Style and the Typical Mind Fallacy
So, I’ll say this. Eliezer’s posts put the nail in the coffin of my Theism in the matter of a couple months. My mind had to wait to be told the story of how I could sit, ponder, and wonder for night after night and allow my entire mind to get on board with a major worldview shift. Each individual post assailed the narratives I was telling myself; without the conclusions given to me up front, I was able to travel the journey to the conclusion on my own, which ended up far more compelling than previously read arguments with a more explicit agenda.

That said, now that I find myself much closer to both of your worldviews, I find your posts much more efficient, and I more often recommend yours to others over Eliezer’s. I do this because I expect more impatience on the part of others than I do in myself.

This is a problem I feel with Less Wrong in general, although I know little of what could be done. I often recommend posts to outsiders, only to receive little else than skepticism and comments at the styles or apparent agendas of the authors. “But the logic and evidence awareness make them unassailable!” does little to established narratives. Narratives which suggest that coffee-table books by authors on the New York Times bestsellers list who give TED talks are the quickest route to insight. This was never a narrative I had, and was already looking for insight in new places, and so the initial thrust of taking the time to read the Sequences was all I really needed to be carried along by them more or less to their finish line.

Your point about different audiences is at point here. For most of the world, the Sequences and the scattershot back-referenced posts here are completely irrelevant to established patterns of trawling trusted mediums for dinner-party political wisdom. But giving in to that attitude would heavily decrease the value of this site to most of its current participants. Especially me, so don’t do it, yo.

CoffeeStain Jul 14, 2013, 4:56 AM
1 point
in reply to: gothgirl420666’s comment on: “Stupid” questions thread
Thank you, so very much.

I often forget that there are different ways to optimize, and the method that feels like it offers the most control is often the worst. And the one I usually take, unfortunately.

CoffeeStain Jul 14, 2013, 3:41 AM
0 points
in reply to: drethelin’s comment on: “Stupid” questions thread
The above musings do not hinge on the ratio of people in a group believing things for the right reasons, only that some portion of them are.

Your consideration helps us assign probabilities for complex beliefs, but it doesn’t help us improve them. Upon discovering that your beliefs correlate with those of your parents, you can introduce uncertainty in your current assignments, but you go about improving them by thinking about good arguments. And only good arguments.

The thrust of the original comment here is that discovering which arguments are good is not straightforward. You can only go so deep into the threads of argumentation until you start scraping on your own bias and incapacities. Your logic is not magic, and neither are intuitions nor other’s beliefs. But all of them are heuristics that you can account when assigning probabilities. The very fact that others exist who are capable of digging as deep into the logic and being as skeptical of their intuitions, and who believe differently than you, is evidence that their opinion is correct. It matters little if every person of that opinion is as such, only that the best do. Because those are the only people you’re paying attention to.

CoffeeStain Jul 14, 2013, 3:22 AM
4 points
in reply to: drethelin’s comment on: “Stupid” questions thread
As often noted, most nonreligious parents have nonreligious children as well. Does that mean that people do not disbelieve religions on the basis of good arguments?

Your comment is subject to the same criticism we’re discussing. If any given issue has been raised, then some smart religious person is aware of it and believes anyway.

CoffeeStain Jul 14, 2013, 12:03 AM
0 points
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: “Stupid” questions thread
It seems to me that people who find utilitarianism intuitive do so because they understand the strong mathematical underpinnings. Sort of like how Bayesian networks determine the probability of complex events, in that Bayes theorem proves that a probability derived any other way forces a logical contradiction. Probability has to be Bayesian, even if it’s hard to demonstrate why; it takes more than a few math classes.

In that sense, it’s as possible for utilitarianism to be false as it is for probability theory (based on Bayesian reasoning) to be false. If you know the math, it’s all true by definition, even if some people have arguments (or to be LW-sympathetic, think they do).

Utilitarianism would be false is such arguments existed. Most people try to create them by concocting scenarios in which the results obtained by utilitarian thinking lead to bad moral conclusions. But the claim of utilitarianism is that each time this happens, somebody is doing the math wrong, or else it wouldn’t, by definition and maths galore, be the conclusion of utilitarianism.

CoffeeStain Jul 13, 2013, 11:46 PM
0 points
in reply to: gothgirl420666’s comment on: “Stupid” questions thread
I have found this argument compelling, especially the portion about assigning a probability to the truth of Christian belief. Even if we have arguments that seem to demonstrate why it is that radically smart people believe a religion without recourse to there being good arguments for the religion, we haven’t explained why these people instead think there are good arguments. Sure, you don’t think they’re good arguments, but they do, and they’re rational agents as well.

You could say, “well they’re not rational agents, that was the criticism in the first place,” but we have the same problem that they do think they themselves are rational agents. What level do we have to approach that allows you to make a claim about how your methods for constructing probabilities trump theirs? The highest level is just, “you’re both human,” which makes valid the point that to some extent you should listen to the opinions of others. The next level “you’re both intelligent humans aimed at the production of true beliefs” is far stronger, and true in this case.

Where the Wager breaks down for me is that much more is required to demonstrate that if Christianity is true, God sends those who fail to produce Christian belief to Hell. Of course, this could be subject to the argument that many smart people also believe this corollary, but it remains true that it is an additional jump, and that many fewer Christians take it than who are simply Christians.

What takes the cake for me is asking what a good God would value. It’s a coy response for the atheist to say that a good God would understand the reasons one has for being an atheist, and that it’s his fault that the evidence doesn’t get there. The form of this argument works for me, with a nuance: Nobody is honest, and nobody deserves, as far as I can tell, any more or less pain in eternity for something so complex as forming the right belief about something so complicated. God must be able to uncrack the free will enigma and decide what’s truly important about people’s actions, and somehow it doesn’t seem that the relevant morality-stuff perfectly is perfectly predicted by religious affiliation. This doesn’t suggest that God might not have other good reasons to send people to Hell, but it seems hard to tease those out of yourself to a sufficient extent to start worrying beyond worrying about how much good you want to do in general. If God punishes for people not being good enough, the standard) method of reducing free will to remarkably low levels makes it hard to see what morality-stuff looks like. Whether or not it exists, you have the ability to change your actions by becoming more honest, more loving, and hence possibly more likely to be affiliated with the correct religion. But it seems horrible for God to make it a part of the game for you to be worrying about whether or not you go to Hell for reasons other than honesty or love. Worry about honesty and love, and don’t worry about where that leads.

In short, maybe Hell is one outcome of the decision game of life. But very likely God wrote it so that one’s acceptance of Pascal’s wager has no impact on the outcome. Sure, maybe one’s acceptance of Christianity does, but there’s nothing you can do about it, and if God is good, then this is also good.

CoffeeStain Jul 13, 2013, 11:17 PM
14 points
on: “Stupid” questions thread
How do I get people to like me? It seems to me that this is a worthwhile goal; being likable increases the fun that both I and others have.

My issue is that likability usually means, “not being horribly self-centered.” But I usually find I want people to like me more for self-centered reasons. It feels like a conundrum that just shouldn’t be there if I weren’t bitter about my isolation in the first place. But that’s the issue.
What links here?
- Don’t Be Afraid of Asking Personally Important Questions of Less Wrong by Evan_Gaensbauer (Mar 17, 2015, 6:54 AM; 80 points)

CoffeeStain Jul 7, 2013, 1:21 AM
1 point
in reply to: MixedNuts’s comment on: Beeminding Sin
Lust seems to be closely related to envy, but more visceral and with more brain chemicals. Wanting what you can have, and which is good for you, is okay. Getting off to what you can’t have is likely less so.

Porn is a potentially addictive cycle of erotically pretending you have something you don’t. Its current widespread availability is a completely new innovation that we shouldn’t prima facie expect to be healthy, although it’s possible it could be shown to be so for reasonable portions of the population.

I don’t have an unbiased sample on quitting porn, as I only know the outcomes of those who have done so and succeeded, including myself. I’ve been meaning to do a survey of actual studies and potentially report it in Discussion. I can only say for myself and a lot of others that making the choice has shown the greatest productivity increase of any small life-tweak I’ve tried, an improvement far beyond just regaining the time previously spent directly on it.

The community I joined for it doesn’t strike me as the most scientifically minded, and the information often passed around there hinges on hearsay. I’d be interested in the other side of things, or rather the whole story as understood by the best research.

CoffeeStain Jul 6, 2013, 12:25 AM
12 points
on: Beeminding Sin
Ironically, many Christians (of the Protestant variety?) would be opposed to such a program) of tracking your sinlessness. The idea, as far as I understand it, is that you end up with a sort of meta-problem with Pride, where you’re so convinced of your method of eradicating sin that you fail to notice where you were incapable of seeing your sin in the first place.

With actualized divine intervention, the danger is obvious. You prevent the real work of the the Spirit’s intervention from fixing you. To paraphrase Lewis, you’re busy rearranging the rooms of your house where Jesus wants to come along and build you a new house.

There is probably a secular analogue here. The idea of Grace) is that you need not worry overmuch about your current failures, because you’re mindful that your optimal self is just so far removed from yourself in the long term. Failures at local optimization then are of such drastic difference in magnitude as failures at global optimization. Becoming too cozy in solving the faults you do see can damage your ability to find bigger faults.

It all depends whether the moral landscape is riddled with local maxima.

CoffeeStain Jul 2, 2013, 6:36 AM
1 point
in reply to: PhilosophyStudent’s comment on: Why one-box?
As the argument goes, you can’t control your past selves, but that isn’t the form of the experiment. The only self that you’re controlling is the one deciding whether to one-box (equivalently, whether to be a one-boxer).

See, that is the self that past Omega is paying attention to in order to figure out how much money to put in the box. That’s right, past Omega is watching current you to figure out whether or not to kill your daughter / put money in the box. It doesn’t matter how he does it, all that matters is whether or not your current self decides to one box.

To follow a thought experiment I found enlightening here, how is it that past Omega knows whether or not you’re a one-boxer? In any simulation he could run of your brain, the simulated you could just know it’s a simulation and then Omega wouldn’t get the correct result, right? But, as we know, he does get the result right, almost all of the time. Ergo, the simulated you looks outside, it sees a bird on a tree. If it uses the bathroom, the toilet might clog. Any giveaway might make the selfish you try to two-box while still one-boxing in real life.

The point? How do you know that current you isn’t the simulation past Omega is using to figure out whether to kill your daughter? Are philosophical claims about the irreducibility of intentionality enough to take the risk?