Gastogh

Karma: 428

Gastogh Jun 19, 2012, 12:33 PM
1 point
on: Suggest alternate names for the “Singularity Institute”
I’d prefer AI Safety Institute over Center for AI Safety, but I agree with the others that that general theme is the most appropriate given what you do.

Gastogh Jun 19, 2012, 11:57 AM
22 points
in reply to: taw’s comment on: Local Ordinances of Fun

More seriously, Internet shows a lot about what people truly like, since there’s so much choice, and it’s not constrained by issues like practicality and prices. Notice total lack of interest in realistic violence and gore and anything more than one standard deviation outside of sexual norms of the society, and none of these due to lack of availability.

Eh? Total lack of interest? Have you ever been on 4chan? Realistic violence threads crop up regularly over there, and it’s notorious for catering to almost any kind of sexual deviance the average person can think of. (Out of curiosity: what would you consider “more than one standard deviation” outside the sexual norms of the society? How about two?) I say almost, because 4chan is regulated and it isn’t the go-to place for quite everything; child pornography nets its posters permabans pretty quickly and it doesn’t have the dedicated guro boards of its Japanese counterpart. Which is to say nothing of blood sports like traditional bullfighting or cockfights, for which even a quick search on YouTube can offer some clips (relatively mellow and barely containing any actual blood as they are).

Stuff like that may not match the tastes of the majority, but that hardly implies a lack of interest. There is a practical issue with availability and it comes from laws, regulation and prices (in the case of adult content that passes the legal filters). There are heavy selection effects at play here, since there are penalties for uploading and hosting certain kinds of content, penalties that aren’t handed out for uploading cute kitten videos on YouTube.

Gastogh Jun 14, 2012, 11:51 AM
7 points
on: Computation Hazards

For example, suppose a computer program needs to model people very accurately to make some predictions, and it models those people so accurately that the “simulated” people can experience conscious suffering. In a very large computation of this type, millions of people could be created, suffer for some time, and then be destroyed when they are no longer needed for making the predictions desired by the program. This idea was first mentioned by Eliezer Yudkowsky in Nonperson Predicates.

Nitpick: we can date this concern at least as far back as Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep:

Pham Nuwen’s ticket to the Transcend was based on a Power’s sudden interest in the Straumli perversion. This innocent’s ego might end up smeared across a million death cubes, running a million million simulations of human nature.

Gastogh Jun 14, 2012, 11:30 AM
16 points
on: Wanted: “The AIs will need humans” arguments

For example, Butler (1863) argues that machines will need us to help them reproduce,

I’m not sure if this is going to win you any points. Maybe for thoroughness, but citing something almost 150 years old in the field of AI doesn’t reflect particularly well on the citer’s perceived understanding of what’s up to scratch and not in this day and age. It kind of reads like a strawnman; “the arguments for this position are so weak we have to go back to the nineteenth century to find any.” That may actually be the case, but if so, it might not be worth the trouble to include it even for the sake of thoroughness.

That aside, if there is any well thought out and not obviously wishful-thinking-mode reasons to suppose the machines would need us for something, add me to the interest list. All I’ve seen of this thinking is B-grade, author-on-board humanism in scifi where someone really really wants to believe humanity is Very Special in the Grand Scheme of Things.

Gastogh Jun 10, 2012, 9:29 PM
−2 points
in reply to: VKS’s comment on: Rationality Quotes June 2012
I’d say “moral atheism” is being used as an idiomatic expression; a set of more than one word with a meaning that’s gestalt to its individual components. One of the synonyms for “atheism” is “godlessness”, so by analogy “moral atheism” would just mean “morality-lessness”.

Gastogh Jun 10, 2012, 7:18 PM
0 points
in reply to: Ben_Welchner’s comment on: Rationality Quotes June 2012
It paraphrases the bottom line of the metaethics sequence—or what I took to be the bottom line of those posts, anyway. Namely, that one can have values and a naturalistic worldview at the same time.

Gastogh Jun 9, 2012, 4:15 PM
−4 points
on: Rationality Quotes June 2012

Whatever doubt or doctrinal Atheism you and your friends may have, don’t fall into moral atheism.

-Charles Kingsley

Gastogh Jun 5, 2012, 5:09 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Suggestion: Less Wrong Writing Circle?
PM sent.

ff.net will do fine; the message system there runs faster than my email and a prolonged discussion would probably clutter other formats such as my primary emailbox or the threads around LW.

Some common forum might be necessary for projects whose commentariat consists of several people, so as to avoid people stating the same points over and over, but the idea of mailing lists doesn’t hold much appeal—I get huge noise-to-signal ratios from some of my university mailing lists and I’d rather not add to the list of mailboxes I have to sieve through on a regular basis. I’ve never tried LJ; does it work differently and is it any better?

Gastogh Jun 5, 2012, 7:54 AM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Suggestion: Less Wrong Writing Circle?
Sounds good. Will you be uploading yours here à la Chapter One Part One up there, or is there another site you’re using?

Gastogh Jun 4, 2012, 1:41 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: One possible issue with radically increased lifespan
I’m starting to feel I don’t know what’s being meant by uncertainty here. It is not, to me, a reason in and of itself either way—to push the button or not. And not being a reason to do one thing or another, I find myself confused at the idea of looking for “reasons other than uncertainty”. (Or did I misunderstand that part of your post?) For me it’s just a thing I have to reason in the presence of, a fault line to be aware of and to be minimized to the best of my ability when making predictions.

For the other point, here’s some direct disclosure about why I think what I think:
- There’s plenty of historical precedent for conflict over resources, and a biological immortality pill/button would do nothing to fix the underlying causes behind that phenomenon. One notable source of trouble would be the non-negligible desire people have to produce offspring. So, assuming no fundamental, species-wide changes in how people behave, if there were to be a significant drop in the global death rate, population would spike and resources would rapidly grow scarcer, leading to increased tensions, more and bloodier conflicts, accelerated erosion, etc.
- To avoid the previous point, the newfound immortality would need to be balanced out by some other means. Restrictions on people’s rights to breed would be difficult to sell to the public and equally difficult to enforce. Again, it seems to me that the expectation that such restrictions would be policed successfully assumes more than the expectation for those restrictions to fail.
Am I misusing the Razor when I use it to back these claims?

Gastogh Jun 3, 2012, 9:30 PM
1 point
on: Suggestion: Less Wrong Writing Circle?
I like this idea.

I’m writing a Zelda (OoT) fanfic. It’s not rationalist fiction in the strictest sense, but playing things straight is one of the core ideas; as the mission statement on the first page says, it’s partly about de-gamifying the game.

Comments are welcome on both the content and the presentation. As usual with these things, some knowledge of the original work and the surrounding fandom will be helpful.

Gastogh Jun 3, 2012, 8:53 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: One possible issue with radically increased lifespan
Yes. It’s not that the world-as-is is a paradise and we shouldn’t do anything to change it, but pushing the button seems like it would rock the boat far more than not pushing it. Where by “rock the boat” I mean “significantly increase the risk of toppling the civilization (and possibly the species, and possibly the planet) in exchange for the short-term warm fuzzies of having fewer people die in the first few years following our decision.”

Without that, it seems to me that uncertainty about the future is just as much a reason to push as to not-push, and therefore neither decision can be justified based on such uncertainty.

Uncertainty being just as much a reason to push as not-push seems like another way of saying we might as well flip a coin, which doesn’t seem right. Now, I’m not claiming to be running some kind of oracle-like future extrapolation algorithm where I’m confident in saying “catastrophe X will break out in place Y at time Z”, but assuming that making the best possible choice gets higher priority than avoiding personal liability, the stakes in this question are high enough that we should choose something. Something more than a coin flip.

Gastogh Jun 3, 2012, 7:28 PM
0 points
in reply to: DanArmak’s comment on: One possible issue with radically increased lifespan
The reason why perhaps not push the button: unforeseeable (?) unintended consequences.

I expect point number 1 would weigh heavily in anyone’s mind when making the choice, but it might turn out to be a harmfully biased option, assuming it even works. As to point two: in the absence of diseases and aging, the population would hit its limits along some other front. Starvation is only the obvious end of the line; the catch is what we might expect to see on the way there, such as rising global tensions, civil unrest, wars (gloves off or otherwise), accelerated environmental decay—all the things that may not seem like such pressing problems now. We could with perfect seriousness ask the question whether the current state of affairs isn’t safer for humanity at large than after pressing the button. (I’ll confess: I would use people’s answers to the original question mostly as a proxy measurement for their general optimism.)

Frankly, I’d argue the exact reverse of point 3. IMO, it takes heavy speculation to avoid any of the risks I mentioned, and speculating on the positive effects is what seems questionable. The only immediate species-wide benefit would be that world-class expertise on all fields of science suddenly stops pouring out of the world at a steady pace. Anything like “people will care more about the future” supposes fairly fundamental changes in how people think and behave. I expect birth control regulations would be passed, but would you expect to see them work? How would you expect to see them enforced? My guess is: not in worldwide peace and mutual harmony.

Gastogh May 31, 2012, 7:50 PM
1 point
on: One possible issue with radically increased lifespan
I decided a while back that the next time there’s a LW census, I’m going to suggest adding a question like this: “Ceteris NOT being paribus, if you could make all the people in the world invulnerable to diseases, cellular degeneration and similar aging-related problems by pushing a button, would you push it?” I would be very interested in those results.

How would this be achieved? Somehow limiting lifespan, or children, assuming it’s available to a majority? Or would this lead to a genespliced, technologically augmented and essentially immortal elite that the poor, unaugmented ones would have no chance of measuring up to?

Limiting lifespan is a time-buying measure at best, and an ineffective one at that; we already have severely limited lifespans, and that hasn’t worked out all that shiny from the sustainability standpoint.

The technological elite scenario seems very likely unless there are other radical advances; having the tech to produce biological immortality isn’t the same as being able to provide that service to everyone. As things stand, large swaths of the world still can’t even get their hands on simple vaccines, and shipping those across the world is a hell of a lot simpler than genesplicing people. And even if it was as simple as shipping X cans of immortality/enhancement pills to all corners of the world, you’d still have on your hands all the luddites raised to believe that genetic engineering and eternal life are sins against whatever.

Gastogh May 30, 2012, 8:31 AM
7 points
in reply to: Lightwave’s comment on: Avoid inflationary use of terms
Yeah, sounds like a misunderstanding. If you read through Xachariah’s post again I think you’ll find it’s not just the word “rational”; he pretty much does roll call on all the inflationary words used as examples in the OP.

Gastogh May 28, 2012, 10:25 AM
4 points
on: Review: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids

Adoption studies indicate that differences in parenting styles have mostly small impacts on long term life outcomes of children, such as happiness, income, intelligence, health, etc..

What exactly is “parenting style” understood to mean here? I have a feeling it’s something seriously counterintuitive, as many of the findings cited, e.g. parenting having “a small effect on adult drinking, smoking and drug problems” diverge radically from every other source on the subject I’ve ever seen. The top results of my ten-second Googling were far more in line with what I’ve seen before—that the children of smokers are twice as likely to smoke as their peers, which is hardly a “small effect.” Given all these things, the claim that parenting has no effect on “overall health” etc. seems very, very dubious, which casts an unfavorable light on the whole set of claims. Or maybe these findings are simply specific to adopting families and shouldn’t be generalized beyond that.

Gastogh May 25, 2012, 7:29 AM
1 point
in reply to: Nornagest’s comment on: Holden’s Objection 1: Friendliness is dangerous
Insofar as there’s a point to such distinctions, I expect the frontlines of that shift to have been cultural and scientific rather than political. “Advocating a behavior by adopting it into a group identity and using that to argue for a protected category” sounds awfully meta; I expect the crucial changes were simpler, more fundamental and centered around what enabled people to argue for a protected category in the first place. I’m thinking along lines like this:

A number of technological advances were made around that time that made setting up movements far easier. The proliferation of various movements coincides nicely with such stuff as improved methods of agriculture (leading to population growth and urbanization), the invention of the telegraph (bridging distances), better transportation in the form of railways and ever faster ships (mobilization, etc.) and probably others that escape me at the moment. A bit later on Darwin and the theory of evolution paved the way for eugenics-style thinking and concepts of inherent superiority between races and nations, and around the turn of the century the rise of scientific (or semi-scientific) psychology opened the doors for minting all kinds of novel ingroup-outgroup divisions. I expect identity-builders had a field day with the concept of the subconscious mind in particular. “You can’t help it, those people are just made that way. Fortunately not us, though, haw haw.”

On the non-scientific side, there are a number of converging cultural trends and phenomena to take into account.
- The decline of the church was an example of how a firmly established institution wasn’t necessarily a permanent feature of society.
- There’s been a general decline in violence throughout society, which made resisting the establishment less scary.
- Western Romanticism and the advent of nationalism were a fairly clear case of deliberate identity-building, and it set a precedent for doing the same on a smaller scale.
- Not all movements appeared from nowhere; workers’ unions had been around for centuries in the form of guilds and such, so all those movements springing up wasn’t so much groundbreaking novelty as it was just more of the same.
These aren’t exhaustive lists, but I hope the gist is clear.

Gastogh May 22, 2012, 10:12 PM
0 points
on: Open Thread, May 16-31, 2012
I’m looking for a book recommendation on anthropology. I have almost no prior knowledge of the field. I’m after something roughly equivalent to what The Moral Animal was for evolutionary psychology: from-the-ground-up stuff that works by itself and doesn’t assume assume significant background knowledge or further reading for a payoff. An easily accessible pop-writing approach à la The Moral Animal is a must-have; I can’t read academic textbooks.

Gastogh May 21, 2012, 5:22 PM
1 point
on: [POLL RESULTS] LessWrong Members and their Local Communities
Well, I was pretty wrong. Hopefully less so next time.

Gastogh May 20, 2012, 6:31 AM
4 points
on: Is a Purely Rational World a Technologically Advanced World?

Would pure rationality have severely limited the advancement of technology?

I doubt it. Technology is a tool, and turning down tools doesn’t sound that rational as rules of thumb go. If there’s some strict advantage to not using technology a lot of the time (like playing to our evolutionary preferences or something), you should still have it around even if you keep it locked in a vault. Still, you’ll need it eventually to stave off some mortal sickness or asteroid or to avoid the volcano that’s set to explode in six months, etc. I imagine our hypothetical purely rational agent would be far better than us at managing dangerous tech.