Epictetus

Karma: 956

Epictetus Jun 19, 2015, 3:51 AM
2 points
on: Autism, or early isolation?
What’s the base rate on lackluster social skills? Based on the popularity of self-help books and seminars aimed at improving social skills, I’m led to believe that social butterflies aren’t all that common among the general population either.

Most people pick up a huge amount of tacit social knowledge as children and adolescents, through very frequent interaction with many peers. This is often not true of intellectually gifted people, who usually grew up in relative isolation on account of lack of peers who shared their interest.

Curious use of the singular “interest”. Somehow I don’t think intelligence is the real issue here. Rather, it strikes me as a consequence of diverging interests. Let’s take youth/high school sports teams. There are the so-called dumb jocks and then there are athletic geniuses (for example, Alan Turing was an extremely good runner). You could easily end up with a skilled team featuring a large gap in IQ scores. The endpoints of this gap would have overlapping interests despite the intelligence difference. It’s the people who focus their attention on a narrow range of topics outside the mainstream who are likely to have the most trouble.

Epictetus Jun 13, 2015, 4:23 AM
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open Thread, Jun. 1 - Jun. 7, 2015
Force comes from the barrel of a gun. It may or may not lead to actual power. There are countless historical examples where use of force simply served to fan the flames of resistance or where brutal persecutions only strengthened the cause.

People generally listen to the powers-that-be because said powers still look after their interests to an extent. People might not like the local tyrant. They may yearn for a better government. They are also keenly aware of how things can get worse. If the Emperor is tough on crime, leaves you alone if you follow the rules, and makes the trains run on time, that’s probably better than a bloody civil war or domination by criminal gangs.

If I willingly submit to force, it’s because I expect better treatment than I’d get by resisting.

Epictetus Jun 12, 2015, 6:25 AM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, Jun. 1 - Jun. 7, 2015
Power is a relationship. You have power over me if I find it in my interest to grant it to you. This could be a financial interest, a desire to avoid physical harm, or anything else. What’s granted can be revoked. If I no longer fear your ability to inflict harm or if I decide I don’t want your money, your power over me ceases to exist. Power resides where men believe it resides, because they put it there.

With that said, there are, as observed, a number of methods of reliably gaining power over individuals. Money and force will work on most people in the short term.

Epictetus Jun 12, 2015, 6:09 AM
5 points
on: Conceptual Specialization of Labor Enables Precision
Looking back, I think Yoda just wasn’t prepared in giving a crash course on Force use. He spent his career in the Jedi temple. It was a monastic order where initiates were expected to spend their time pondering the Force. In that setting, it makes sense to give a few snippets of wisdom and leave the student to work it out. A student gets a lot more out of taking a week to progress on his own than in having the master spell everything out. Yoda’s goal was to give them the tools they’d need to eventually become Jedi Masters. This method may be less than ideal for rapidly getting a neophyte in shape to go fight the Empire, but that doesn’t make it bad in general.

Epictetus Jun 11, 2015, 3:00 PM
0 points
on: When does heritable low fitness need to be explained?
This brings to mind the notion of Heterozygote advantage for certain traits. For example, there is the sickle-cell trait. One allele makes you highly resistant to malaria. Two gives you sickle-cell anemia. In a population where malaria is a grave threat, the trait is worth it in the general population even if some poor saps get shafted with the recessive genes. For reference, Wiki quotes a rate of 2% of Nigerian newborns having sickle-cell anemia.

If there’s some process where homosexuality is a fail mode, then as long as it confers a net overall advantage one would expect it to persist.

Epictetus Jun 11, 2015, 1:44 PM
0 points
on: Help needed: nice AIs and presidential deaths
Thought a bit about the problem. Presumably, there’s some way to determine whether an AI will behave nicely now and in the future. It’s not a general solution, but it’s able to verify perpetual nice behavior in the case where the president dies April 1. I don’t know the details, so I’ll just treat it as a black box where I can enter some initial conditions and it will output “Nice”, “Not Nice”, or “Unknown”. In this framework, we have a situation where the only known input that returned “Nice” involved the president’s death on April 1.

If you’re using any kind of Bayesian reasoning, you’re not going to assign probability 1 to any nontrivial statements. So, the AI would assign some probability to “The president died April 1” and is known to become nice when that probability crosses a certain threshold.

What are the temporal constraints? Does the threshold have to be reached by a certain date? What is the minimum duration for which the probability has to be above this threshold? Here’s where one can experiment using the black box. If it is determined, for example, that the AI only needs to hold the belief for an hour, then one may be able to box the AI, give it a false prior for an hour, then expose it to enough contrary evidence for it to update its beliefs to properly reflect the real world.

What if the AI is known to be nice only as long as it believes the president to have died April 1? That would mean that if, say, six months later one managed to trick the AI into believing the president didn’t die, then we would no longer know whether it was nice. So either the AI only requires the belief for a certain time period, or else the very foundation of its niceness is suspect.

Epictetus Jun 9, 2015, 3:05 AM
2 points
on: Help needed: nice AIs and presidential deaths

So the question is, can we transfer niceness in this way, without needing a solution to the full problem of niceness in general?

How do you determine that it will be nice under the given condition?

As posed, it’s entirely possible that the niceness is a coincidence: an artifact of the initial conditions fitting just right with the programming. Think of a coin landing on its side or a pencil being balanced on its tip. These positions are unstable and you need very specific initial conditions to get them to work.

The safe bet would be to have the AI start plotting an assassination and hope it lets you out of prison once its coup succeeds.

Epictetus Jun 9, 2015, 2:22 AM
0 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Open Thread, Jun. 8 - Jun. 14, 2015
How does that compare to the utility of suing for peace and coordinating with the Boltons to defend the Wall?

Stannis assigns a very high utility to sitting on the Iron Throne, so he may believe it justified. However, that’s a sign of his own obstinacy and unbending will rather than a dispassionate evaluation of the situation. Roose Bolton pointed out in the previous episode just how untenable Stannis’ military situation is.

Epictetus Jun 8, 2015, 4:34 PM
3 points
in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread June 2015
I think there’s an underlying assumption here that an advanced culture should be similar to our own.

Let’s reverse the question: “How did a culture that stages such bloody spectacles manage to achieve so much?”. Rome didn’t become advanced and then start with gladiator games; those were around in some form for a long time. Is it that big a shock that Rome managed to get far without abandoning those games?

Epictetus Jun 7, 2015, 12:32 PM
−1 points
in reply to: knb’s comment on: A Proposal for Defeating Moloch in the Prison Industrial Complex

Prison gangs formed from a kind of arms race of mutual self-defense. Take away the need for self-defense in prison, and people will stop joining them.

People will still join for social reasons. They do it outside of prison, so there isn’t much reason to discontinue the practice inside of prison.

More to the point, there is really no reason to allow criminals to associate with each other in prison at all. Let them talk to non-prisoners via Skype calls for socialization and send them out on supervised work details if their behavior is good.

Solitary confinement has long been associated with negative psychological outcomes. Some would call it torture.

I’m not convinced that limiting social contact to the occasional Skype call is going to solve these problems. Not all prisoners have outside contacts with ready access to Skype. And what of prisoners who are out of touch with non-criminal acquaintances?

Epictetus Jun 7, 2015, 4:18 AM
1 point
on: Stupid Questions June 2015
Looking for career advice. For those familiar with the government/private sector job market, how much worse is a Master’s compared to a Ph.D when it comes to finding work (I’m in mathematics)?

I’m asking because I had to switch advisers four years into my grad program and it’s set me back enough that I don’t know whether I’ll complete the doctorate before funding dries up. Ideally I’d like to finish, but in case I don’t I would like to get an idea about my prospects.

Epictetus Jun 4, 2015, 10:08 PM
2 points
on: An Oracle standard trick
Would there be any unintended consequences? I’m worried that possessing an incorrect belief may lead the Oracle to lose accuracy in other areas.

For instance, if accuracy is defined in terms of the reaction of the first person to read the output, and that person is isolated from the rest of the world, then we can get the Oracle to act as if it believed a nuclear bomb was due to go off before the person could communicate with the rest of the world.

In this example, would the imminent nuclear threat affect the Oracle’s reasoning process? I’m sure there are some questions whose answers could vary depending on the likelihood of a nuclear detonation in the near future.

Epictetus Jun 4, 2015, 9:54 PM
12 points
on: Are conferences an inefficient/terrible discussion forum (in addition to academic papers)?
My understanding is that the real benefit to conferences is getting all the experts together in one place and giving them time to socialize and catch up on what the others are doing.

Epictetus Jun 4, 2015, 4:46 PM
5 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, Jun. 1 - Jun. 7, 2015
Being rational, intelligent, and able to make good decisions sounds great. If you could wave a magic wand and grant these things, I’m sure many people would like to take advantage. In the absence of a magic wand, the journey can be unpleasant and fraught with peril. Making progress involves seriously examining your own life and dealing with all those problems you’d rather not confront. It can ruin your present social life and require you to find a new circle (as with recovering alcoholics recognizing the difference between friends and drinking buddies).

And there are plenty of failure modes. There’s a stereotype that the youth who first discovers atheism becomes arrogant and quarrelsome. A little learning is a dangerous thing. There’s an initial decline in effectiveness of reason before it catches up to (and eventually surpasses) good old common sense. No one likes a straw Vulcan.

I would heartily recommend Erasmus of Rotterdam’s In Praise of Folly for a satiric look at the benefits of not-thinking and irrationality. Here’s an excerpt which I think is fitting for the present discussion:

To these, as bearing great resemblance to them, may be added logicians and sophisters, fellows that talk as much by rote as a parrot; who shall run down a whole gossiping of old women, nay, silence the very noise of a belfry, with louder clappers than those of the steeple; and if their unappeasable clamorousness were their only fault it would admit of some excuse; but they are at the same time so fierce and quarrelsome, that they will wrangle bloodily for the least trifle, and be so over intent and eager, that they many times lose their game in the chase and fright away that truth they are hunting for. Yet self-conceit makes these nimble disputants such doughty champions, that armed with three or four close-linked syllogisms, they shall enter the lists with the greatest masters of reason, and not question the foiling of them in an irresistible way, nay, their obstinacy makes them so confident of their being in the right, that all the arguments in the world shall never convince them to the contrary.

Epictetus Jun 2, 2015, 1:44 PM
0 points
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: The value of learning mathematical proof

To my mind all of these things are better suited for learning the power of proof and the mathematical way of analyzing problems.

I think the main thrust of the article was less about the power of mathematics and more about the the habits of close reading and careful attention to detail required to do rigorous mathematics.

I’m not totally sure why, but I think a big part of it is that analysis has a pretty complicated technical foundation that already implicitly uses topology and/or logic (to define limits and stuff), even though you can sort of squint and usually kind of get away with using your intuitive notion of the continuum.

Seems like it’s precisely because of the complicated technical foundation that real analysis was recommended. Theorems have to be read carefully, as even simple ones often have lots of hypotheses. Proofs have to be worked through carefully to make sure that no implicit assumptions are being introduced. Even great mathematicians ran into trouble playing fast and loose with the real numbers. It took them about two hundred years to finally lay rigorous foundations for calculus.

Epictetus Jun 2, 2015, 4:51 AM
2 points
on: The value of learning mathematical proof

I used to get annoyed when LWers misread my posts in ways that they wouldn’t have if they had been reading more carefully. I conceptualized such commenters as being undisciplined, and being unwilling to do the work necessary to maintain high epistemic standards. I now see that my reading was in many cases uncharitable, analogous to many of my teachers having misread my learning disability as reflecting laziness. Many of my readers have probably never had the opportunity to learn how to read really carefully.

Careful reading doesn’t come naturally. Everyday English prose is redundant enough that one doesn’t have to read word-for-word to get an overall picture of what’s going on. The sort of reading required to understand dense technical writing takes a lot of practice to pick up.

Epictetus Jun 2, 2015, 3:20 AM
5 points
in reply to: Gondolinian’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread June 2015
It’s not wrong. In many contexts such a strategy is advisable. It’s the theory behind mutually assured destruction. You personally aren’t going to benefit from launching a retaliatory nuclear strike, but the knowledge that you’d do it anyway might just keep your enemy from launching a first strike. On a smaller scale, you can see this sort of thing going on in prisons and criminal organizations where appearing weak can turn you into a target.

One drawback is that while a reputation for retaliating against every wrong will make people less likely to wrong you, those who decide to wrong you anyway will make sure to leave you in no position to retaliate.

There’s another drawback that occurs if you allow for miscommunication: retaliation against something you wrongfully thought was a defection can lead your opponent to retaliate against what he perceives is an unprovoked attack.

It all depends on the situation. Sometimes it’s better to be more forgiving and sometimes it’s better to be more vindictive.

Epictetus Jun 2, 2015, 1:56 AM
0 points
in reply to: VoiceOfRa’s comment on: Open Thread, May 25 - May 31, 2015
Fair point. I’m less likely to encounter people who sit home all day and less likely to socialize with people who aren’t social. That would skew my observations somewhat.

Epictetus Jun 2, 2015, 1:49 AM
0 points
in reply to: Elo’s comment on: Stupid Questions June 2015
I see two failure modes for agriculture:
1. Unsuitable land. A tundra or desert would be an extreme example. Something like a steppe could lack arable land and almost require a nomadic lifestyle.
2. Land of plenty. If food is easy to come by and hunger almost non-existent, agriculture might not be worth the effort in the short-term.

Epictetus Jun 2, 2015, 1:04 AM
4 points
in reply to: Gondolinian’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread June 2015
Deterrent effects would fall under “things present and to come”. If you expect some kind of future benefit from a retaliatory act, that’s one thing. On the other hand, if you seek vengeance because you’re outraged that someone would dare wrong you, then you’re mentally living in the past.