Michael_Sullivan

• Michael_SullivanDec 20, 2012, 4:28 AM

  3 points

  on: 2012 Sur­vey Results

  I wouldn’t necessarily read too much into your calibration question, given that it’s just one question, and there was something of a gotcha.

  One thing I learned from doing calibration exercises is that I tended to be much too tentative with my 50% guesses.

  When I answered the calibration question, I used my knowledge of other math that either had to, or couldn’t have come before him, to narrow the possible window of his birth down to about 200 years. Random chance would then give me about a 20% shot. I thought I had somewhat better information than random chance within that window so I estimated my guess (IIRC) at 30%. I was, alas wrong, but I’m pretty confident that I would get around 30% of problems with a similar profile correct. If this problem was tricky, then it is more likely than average to be a problem that people get wrong in a large set. But this will be balanced by problems which are straightforward.

  Not to suggest that this result isn’t evidence of LW’s miscalibration. In fact, it’s strong enough evidence for me to throw into serious doubt the last survey’s finding that we were better calibrated than a normal population. OTOH neither bit of evidence is terribly strong. A set of 5-10 different problems would make for much stronger evidence one way or the other.

• Michael_SullivanNov 22, 2012, 4:34 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Why is Men­cius Mold­bug so pop­u­lar on Less Wrong? [An­swer: He’s not.]

  the running 11 year average of global temperature has not flattened since 1990, but continued upward at almost the same pace with only a moderate decrease in slope since the outlier 1998 year. The 11 years 2000-2010 global mean temperature is significantly higher than the 10 years 1990-2000.

  That is not “flat since the 90s”. The only way to get “flat since the 90s” is to compare 1998 to various more recent years noting that it was nearly as hot as 2005 and 2010 etc. and slightly hotter than other years in the 2000s, as if 1 year matters as much as 10 in a noisy data set.

  If he had said “flat since 1998” that might be technically true in a way, but it’s a little like saying the stock market has been flat since 2007.

  That doesn’t even consider using climate knowledge to adjust for some of the variance, for instance that El Niño years are hotter, and that 1998 was the biggest El Niño year on record.

• Michael_SullivanNov 18, 2012, 2:45 PM

  10 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Why is Men­cius Mold­bug so pop­u­lar on Less Wrong? [An­swer: He’s not.]

  Don’t worry, I just did reread it, and it is just as I remembered. A lot of applause lights for the crowd that believes that the current state of climate science is driven by funding pressure from the US government DoE. His “argument” is based almost exclusively on the tone of popular texts, and anecdotal evidence that Joe Romm was an asshole and pushing bad policy at DoE during the Clinton administration. Considerations of what happened during the 8 years of a GWB administration that was actively hostile to the people JoeR favored are ignored.

  Temperatures are described as “flat since the 90s” which is based on a massive misreading of the data, giving one exceptionally hot year (1998) the same evidentiary weight as the 8 of 10 hottest years on record which have occurred since then. Conveniently, when he wants to spread FUD about the current state of climate science, he will talk about natural variability and uncertainty in the climate. OTOH, he judges the shape of the data since the 1990s in a way that completely ignores that variability and uncertainty.

  Bollocks is spot on and I absolutely treat his writings on global warming as evidence against his other opinions. That said, I am hardly a fan, and consider his argumentation logically weak, full of applause lights and other confusing nonsense across the board. Generally in a agreement with lukeprog.

  I’ve read as much as I have, because he is from a vastly different tribe, and willing to express taboo opinions, which include some nuggets of truth or interesting mistakes worth thinking about.

• Michael_SullivanNov 12, 2012, 3:32 AM

  15 points

  on: 2012 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  Taken.

  As last year, I would prefer different wording on the P(religion) question. “More or less” is so vague as to allow for a lot of very different answers depending on how I interpret it, and I didn’t even properly consider the “revealed” distinction noted in a comment here.

  I appreciate the update on the singularity estimate for those of us whose P(singularity) is between epsilon and 50+epsilon.

  I still wonder if we can tease out the differences between current logistical/​political problems and the actual effectiveness of the science on the cryonics question. Once again I gave an extremely low probability even though I would give a reasonable (10-30%) probability that the science itself is sound or will be at some point in the near future. Or perhaps it is your intention to let a segment of the population here fall into a conjunctiveness trap?

  On the CFAR migraine treatment question I thought as follows:

  Gur pbeerpg nafjre jbhyq qrcraq ba jung lbh xarj nobhg gur crefba. Sbe nalbar noyr gb cebprff naq haqrefgnaq gur hgvyvgl genqrbssf naq jub jnf fhssvpvragyl ybj vapbzr gung O pbhyq pbaprvinoyl or n orggre pubvfr, V jbhyq tvir gurz obgu bcgvba N naq O naq rkcynva gur genqrbss pnershyyl, be nggrzcg gb nfpregnva gurve $inyhr bs 1 srjre zvtenvar ol bgure dhrfgvbaf naq gura znxr gur pbeerpg erpbzzraqngvba onfrq ba gung.

  Gjb guvatf ner dhvgr pyrne gb zr:

  1: pubbfvat gur zbfg rssvpvrag gerngzrag va grezf bs zvtenvarf erzbirq cre qbyyne, vf irel pyrneyl gur jebat nafjre.

  2: sbe >90% bs crbcyr va gur evpu jbeyq, gur pbeerpg nafjre fubhyq or N.

• Michael_SullivanNov 12, 2012, 3:08 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: magfrump’s comment on: 2012 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  I am a massive N on the meyers briggs astrology test, yes I scored 96% for openness on the big-5.

  I suspect our responses to questions like “I am an original thinker” have a lot to do with our social context. Right now, the people I run into day to day are fairly representative of the general population with little to skew toward toward the intellectual or original other than “people who hold down decent jobs, or did so until they retired”. It doesn’t take a great lack of humility to realize that compared to most of these people, I am a brilliant and original thinker.

  OTOH, it’s not like I’m Feynman or something. If I were working somewhere that filtered strongly for intelligence, like a hot tech startup or academe and had done so for long enough, I would probably feel relatively average and very focused on how to bridge the gap between me and those at the level or two above, vs. a dim awareness of the vast intellectual and originality gap between my associates and the typical person.

• Michael_SullivanAug 23, 2012, 1:26 PM

  7 points

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: AI timeline pre­dic­tions: are we get­ting bet­ter?

  You say that “There will never be any such thing”, but your reasons tell only why the problem is hard and much harder than one might think at first, not why it is impossible. Surely the kind of tech needed for self-driving cars, perhaps an order of magnitude more complicated, would make it possible to have safe, convenient, cheap flying cars or their functional equivalent.

  At worst, the reasons you state would make it AI-complete, and even that seems unreasonably pessimistic.

• Michael_SullivanAug 21, 2012, 2:40 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: JGWeissman’s comment on: How to get cry­ocras­ti­na­tors to ac­tu­ally sign up for cryonics

  It’s only a crazy thing to do if you are pretty sure you will need/​want the insurance for the rest of your life. If you aren’t sure, then you are paying a bunch of your investment money for insurance you might decide you don’t need (and in fact, you definitely won’t need financially once you have self-funded).

  If you are convinced that cryonics is a good investment, and don’t have the money to fund it out of current capital, then that seems like a good reason to buy some kind of life insurance, and a universal life policy is probably one of the better ways to do it.

  It’s probably a bit more expensive than buying term life and investing the difference[1], if you can and will invest reasonably well (it’s not actually all that complicated, but it is just enough so to be vulnerable to akrasia problems). Someone who geeks out on financial decisions and doesn’t find them uncomfortable or boring work may be better off doing it themselves. Others should go for the UL policy.

  If you have the money to fund it, some kind of trust is likely to be a much cheaper option for legal protection than an insurance policy.

  [1] there are some tax advantages to investing within the UL that can make it less expensive than term+invest for those who have already maxed out their tax-deferred savings in 401(k)/​IRA/​etc.

• Michael_SullivanJul 28, 2012, 5:44 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: Ghatanathoah’s comment on: The Mere Cable Chan­nel Ad­di­tion Paradox

  ″ It is the view that if the only ways Z and A differ is that Z has a higher population, and lower quality of life, then Z is preferable to A. This may not be how Parfit is correctly interpreted, but it is a common enough interpretation that I think it needs to be attacked.”

  Generally it’s a good idea to think twice and reread before assuming that a published and frequently cited paper is saying something so obviously stupid.

  Your edit doesn’t help much at all. You talk about what others “seem to claim”, but the argument that you have claimed Parfit is making is so obviously nonsensical, that it would lead me to wonder why anyone cites his paper at all, or why any philosophers or mathematicians have bothered to refute or support it’s conclusions with more than a passing snark. A quick google search on the term “Repugnant Conclusion” leads to a wikipedia page that is far more informative than anything you have written here.

• Michael_SullivanJul 28, 2012, 5:28 AM

  18 points

  in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: The Mere Cable Chan­nel Ad­di­tion Paradox

  Not even close. The primary content of the OP is based on a straw man due to a massive misunderstanding of the mathematical arguments about the Repugnant Conclusion.

  The conclusion of what Partfit actually demonstrated goes something more like this:

  For any coherent mathematical definition of utility such that there is some additive functions which allows you to sum the utility of many people to determine U(population), the following paradox exists:

  Given any world with positive utility A, there exists at least one other world B with more people, and less average utiity per person which your utility system will judge to be better, i.e.: U(B) > U(A).

  Parfit does not conclude that you necessarily reach world B by maximizing reproduction from world A nor that every world with more people and less average utility is better. Only worlds with a higher total utility are considered “better”. This of course implies either more resources, or more utility efficient use of resources in the “better” world.

  The cable channel analogy would be to say “As long as every extra cable channel I add provides at least some constant positive utility epsilon>0, even if it is vanishingly small, there is some number of cable channels I can put into your feed that will make it worth $100 to you.” Is this really so hard to accept? It seems obviously true even if irrelevant to real life where most of us would have diminishing marginal utility of cable channels.

  Parfit’s point is that it is hard for the human brain to accept the possibility that some world with uncounted numbers of people with lives just barely worth living could possibly be better than any world with a bunch of very happy high utility people (he can’t accept it himself), even though any algebraically coherent system of utility will lead to that very conclusion.

  John Maxwell’s comment gets to the heart of the issue, the term “just barely worth living”. Philosophy always struggles where math meets natural language, and this is a classic example.

  The phrase “just barely worth living” conjures up an image of a life that is barely better than the kind of neverending torture/​loneliness scenario where we might consider encouraging suicide.

  But the taboos against suicide are strong. Even putting aside taboos, there are large amounts of collateral damage from suicides. The most obvious is that anyone who has emotional or family connections to a suicide will suffer. Even people who are very isolated, will have some connection, and suicide could trigger grief or depression in any people who encounter them or their story. There are also some very scary studies about suicide and accident rates going up in the aftermath of publicized suicides or accidents, due to social lemming like programming in humans.

  So it is quite rational for most people to not consider suicide until their personal utility is highly negative if they care at all about the people or world around them. For most of us, a life just above the suicide threshold would be a negative utility life and a fairly large negative utility.

  A life with utility positive epsilon is not a life of sadness or pain, but a life that we would just barely choose to live, as a disembodied soul given a choice of life X or non-existence. Such a life, IMO will be comfortably clear of the suicide threshold, and would, in my opinion, represent an improvement in the world. Why wouldn’t it? It is by definition, a life that someone would choose to have rather than not have! How could that not improve the world?

  Given this interpretation of “just barely worth living”, I accept the so-called Repugnant conclusion, and go happily on my way calculating utility functions.

  RC is just the mirror image of the tortured person versus 3^^^^3 persons with dust specks in their eyes debate.

  Tabooing “life just barely worth living”, and then shutting up and multiplying led me to realize that the so-called Repugnant conclusion wasn’t repugnant after all.

  What links here?

  • Pop­u­la­tion Ethics Shouldn’t Be About Max­i­miz­ing Utility by Ghatanathoah (Mar 18, 2013, 2:35 AM; 4 points)
  • Kaj_Sotala's comment on Re­s­ur­rec­tion through simu­la­tion: ques­tions of fea­si­bil­ity, de­sir­a­bil­ity and some implications by jacob_cannell (Nov 29, 2013, 8:14 PM; 0 points)

• Michael_SullivanApr 22, 2012, 11:00 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Log­i­cal fal­lacy poster

  My understanding is that the “appeal to authority fallacy” is specifically about appealing to irrelevant authorities. Quoting a physicist on their opinion about a physics question within their area of expertise would make an excellent non-fallacious argument. On the other hand, appealing to the opinion of say, a politician or CEO about a physics question would be a classic example of the appeal to authority fallacy. Such people’s opinions would represent expert evidence in their fields of expertise, but not outside them.

  I don’t think the poster’s description makes this clear and it really does suggest that any appeal to authority at all is a logical fallacy.

• Michael_SullivanFeb 19, 2012, 12:36 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: Psychohistorian’s comment on: Hearsay, Dou­ble Hearsay, and Bayesian Updates

  Is it really off-topic to suggest that looking at the accuracy of the courts may amount to rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic in a context where we’ve basically all agreed that

  1. the courts are not terrible at making accurate determinations of whether a defendant broke a law

  2. The set of laws where penalties can land you in prison are massively inefficient socially and in most people’s minds unjust (when we actually grapple with what the laws are, as opposed to how they are usually applied to people like us, for those of us who are white and not poor).

  3. The system of who is tried versus who makes plea bargains versus who never gets tried is systematically discriminatory against those with little money or middle/​upper class social connections, and provides few effective protections against known widespread racial bias on the part of police, prosecutors and judges.

  How different is this in principle from TimS’s suggestion about lower hanging fruit within evidentiary procedure, just at a meta level? Or did you consider that off-topic as well?

• Michael_SullivanFeb 15, 2012, 12:12 PM

  15 points

  in reply to: skepsci’s comment on: The AI in a box boxes you

  Eliezer has proposed that an AI in a box cannot be safe because of the persuasion powers of a superhuman intelligence. As demonstration of what merely a very strong human intelligence could do, he conducted a challenge in which he played the AI, and convinced at least two (possibly more) skeptics to let him out of the box when given two hours of text communication over an IRC channel. The details are here: http://​​yudkowsky.net/​​singularity/​​aibox

• Michael_SullivanDec 14, 2011, 12:19 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: AlexMennen’s comment on: two puz­zles on ra­tio­nal­ity of defeat

  Confidence that the same premises can imply both ~T and T is confidence that at least one of your premises is logically inconsistent with he others—that they cannot all be true. It’s not just a question of whether they model something correctly—there is nothing they could model completely correctly.

  In puzzle one, I would simply conclude that either one of the proofs is incorrect, or one of the premises must be false. Which option I consider most likely will depend on my confidence in my own ability, Ms. Math’s abilities, whether she has confirmed the logic of my proof or been able to show me a misstep, my confidence in Ms. Math’s beliefs about the premises, and my priors for each premise.

• Michael_SullivanNov 27, 2011, 4:37 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: Ra­tional Ro­man­tic Re­la­tion­ships, Part 1: Re­la­tion­ship Styles and At­trac­tion Basics

  The present value of my expected future income stream from normal labor, plus my current estimated net worth is what I use when I do these calculations for myself as a business owner considering highly risky investments.

  For most people with decent social capital (almost anyone middle class in a rich country), the minimum base number in typical situations should be something >200kUS$ even for those near bankruptcy.

  Obviously, this does not cover non-typical situations involving extremely important time-sensitive opportunities requiring more cash than you can raise on short notice (such as the classic life-saving medical treatment required).

• Michael_SullivanNov 24, 2011, 2:29 AM

  9 points

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Value of In­for­ma­tion: Four Examples

  I, too, find it hard to care about Sleeping Beauty, which is perhaps why this post is the first time in years of reading LW, that I’ve actually dusted off my math spectacles fully and tried to rigorously understand what some of this decision theory notation actually means.

  So count me in for a rousing endorsement of interest in more practical decision theory.

• Michael_SullivanNov 24, 2011, 2:26 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Value of In­for­ma­tion: Four Examples

  I’m not sure it isn’t clearer with ’x’s, given that you have two different kinds of probabilities to confuse.

  It may just be that there’s a fair bit of inferential distance to clear, though in presenting this notation at all.

  I have a strong (if rusty) math background, but I had to reason through exactly what you could possibly mean down a couple different trees (one of which had a whole comment partially written asking you to explain certain things about your notation and meaning) before it finally clicked for me on a second reading of your comment here after trying to explain my confusion in formal mathematical terms.

  I think a footnote about what probability distribution functions look like and what the values actually represent (densities, rather than probabilities), and a bit of work with them would be helpful. Or perhaps there’s enough inferential work there to be worth a whole post.

• Michael_SullivanOct 7, 2011, 2:45 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Ab­sur­dity Heuris­tic, Ab­sur­dity Bias

  I think of this as “heresy”, and agree that it is a very useful concept.

• Michael_SullivanOct 7, 2011, 2:38 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: Luke_A_Somers’s comment on: Ab­sur­dity Heuris­tic, Ab­sur­dity Bias

  Bringing myself back to what I was thinking in 2007 -- I think we have some semantic confusion around two different sense of absurdity. One is the heuristic Eliezer discusses—the determination of whether a claim/​prediction has surface plausibility. If not we file it under “absurd”. An absurdity heuristic would be some heuristic which considers surface plausibility or lack thereof as evidence for or against a claim.

  On the other hand, we have the sense of “Absurd!” as a very strong negative claim about something’s probability of truth. So “Absurd!” stands in for “less than .01/​.001/​whatever”, instead of a term such as “unlikely” which might mean “less than .15”

  I was talking only about the first sense. It seemed to me that Eliezer was making a very strong claim that the absurdity heuristic (in the first sense) does no better than maximum entropy. That’s equivalent to saying that surface plausibility or lack thereof amounts to zero evidence. That allowing yourself to modify probabilities downward due to “absurdity” even a small amount would be an error.

  I strongly doubt that this is the case.

  I agree completely that a claim of “Absurd!” in the second sense about a long-dated future prediction cannot ever be justified merely by absurdity in the first sense.

• Michael_SullivanFeb 26, 2011, 1:24 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: datadataeverywhere’s comment on: Op­ti­mal Employment

  You have to be careful with counterfactuals, as they have a tendency to be counter factual.

  In a world in which soldiers were never (or even just very very rarely) deployed, what is the likelihood that they would be paid (between money and much of living expenses) anywhere near as well as current soldiers and yet asked to do very very little?

  The reason the lives of soldiers who are not deployed are extremely low-stress and not particularly difficult is because of deployment. They are being healed from previous deployments and readied for future deployments. In the current environment where soldiers are being deployed for much longer periods with much shorter dwell times, it’s very likely that the services are doing everything they can to make the dwell time as low-stress as possible. 3 hours at the gym and 3 hours doing a relatively low-stress job in your field sounds like what a lot of people I know who are “retired” do. It sounds like a schedule designed to make your life as easy as possible while still keeping you healthy and alert, rather than falling into depression.

  In a counter factual world where the army was almost never deployed, they would surely be used for some other purpose on a regular basis, police/​rescue/​disaster relief/​etc. or simply be much much smaller, with pay not needing to be as competitive. We’ve even experienced this to an extent—during peaceful times, the active duty military shrinks dramatically, and most of our army is in a reserve or national guard capacity, where they have day jobs, and do not get full time pay from the army unless they are called up to active service. This is still to most accounts a pretty good gig (especially if you use it to get free college tuition) even though it can’t replace full time work—as long as you don’t get called up.

  In fact, I think that’s what some of the people my age that I know in the service were expecting when they joined in peacetime. Very rare callups for crucial work they felt obligated to do well for the good of the country or world. Didn’t work out that way though.

• Michael_SullivanJun 10, 2008, 3:53 PM

  0 points

  on: Blog­ging­heads: Yud­kowsky and Horgan

  I would think the key line of attack in trying to describe why a singularity prediction is reasonable is in making clear what you are predicting and what you are not predicting.

  Guys like Horgan hear a few sentences about the “singularity” and think humanoid robots, flying cars, phasers and force fields, that we’ll be living in the star-trek universe.

  Of course, as anyone with the Bayes-skilz of Eliezer knows, start making detailed predictions like that and you’re sure to be wrong about most of it, even if the basic idea of a radically altered social structure and technology beyond our current imagination is highly probable. And that’s the key: “beyond our current imagination”. The specifics of what will happen aren’t very predictable today. If they were, we’d already be in the singularity. The things that happen will seem strange and almost incomprehensible by today’s standards, in the way that our world is strange and incomprehensible by the standards of the 19th century.

  The last 200 years already are much like a singularity from the perspective of someone looking forward from 15th century europe and getting a vision of what happened between 1800 and 2000, even though the basic groundwork for that future was already being laid.