Xachariah

Karma: 3,634

Xachariah Mar 23, 2013, 9:26 PM
15 points
on: Personal Evidence—Superstitions as Rational Beliefs
Woah woah woah, back up here. Why would you want to move out of this goldmine? Lets assume that you’re correct and it’s a real haunted house and not schizophrenia/people-in-the-walls/mental-abuse-by-your-sister.

You were in a house where objects were repeatedly, purposefully moved without human intervention. Just take a look at the incident where key lime juice got into the oven: either the haunted house teleported it from your fridge to your oven, or the haunting house generated action-without-reaction and floated it from the fridge to the oven.

[*] In case A, you’ve just broken the Theory of Relativity and can help humans colonize the stars with instant teleportation. Please collect your 100 nobel prizes, 100 billion dollars, and knowledge that you’ve protected all of humanity from any possible existential risk.

[*] In case B, you’ve just broken the Laws of Thermodynamics and can help humanity defeat entropy itself. Please collect your 200 nobel prizes, 500 billion dollars, and the knowledge that you’ve literally saved all of existence for all time.

You’ve gotten the most valuable thing that has ever existed on this planet living in your house, and you want to give up ownership.

Either that or your sister is crazy and hates key lime juice. ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ equally likely.

Xachariah Mar 8, 2013, 1:04 AM
17 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
In a study of children in schools, setting up a ‘handwashing event’ 4x per day cut sick days in half. Another controlled study on hand sanitizer showed a 20% decrease in sick days.

Here’s a replication on sanitizer showing 20% reduction in illness rate for college students.
http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/dailys/03/Sept03/090203/75n-0183h-c000075-att-14-vol154.pdf

Here’s one in Pakistan where incidence of Pneumonia and Diarrhea in children were cut in half.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16023513

Here’s one in China where intensive handwashing programs for child schools cut sickness by ~40%. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17556631

The short of it is 20% to 50% fewer contagious sicknesses, depending on your current habits (assuming what holds true for children or college students holds true for you).

Xachariah Mar 1, 2013, 5:40 AM
2 points
in reply to: Salivanth’s comment on: Need help with an MLP fanfiction with a transhumanist theme.
I can see the problem with a powerless entity trying to advance arguments against those vastly more powerful than them.

What about an equally powerful entity to alicorns? Discord for example, might be opposed to it for his own reasons but adopt any argument that makes it less likely. (Though he, stylistically, may not fit at all into your fic anyhow.) Although, I can see how people may not like that evil guy is advancing the opposing argument. There are other immortal entities. Dragons perhaps. Whatever employs Cerberus or Ahuizotl.

Or political opponents like Zebra or Gryphon could have reasons to disagree with the plan (like I assume they would dislike the pony hegemony that would occur if everypony became alicorns tomorrow.) They wouldn’t be strictly equal to alicorns on the same power level, but would have some ability to back up their arguments with force, unlike a social representative.

As a side note, I’m a bit confused about Cadence and Twilight. I know that Twilight is sometimes heroically compulsive, but isn’t Cadence the avatar of love or something? I would imagine she’d be a lot more empathetic about suffering ponies and that Twilight would be more disposed to studying.

Xachariah Mar 1, 2013, 2:56 AM
1 point
in reply to: Salivanth’s comment on: Need help with an MLP fanfiction with a transhumanist theme.
If I were in Celestia’s shoes, my strategy would be to take the top .001% ‘friendliest[*]’ of the population each generation and turn them into alicorns. Fewer if some generations don’t have good candidates, and more if some generations are exceptional. The number of alicorns would grow exponentially as the population experienced exponential growth. From the other end of the equation, I’d use my influence as the God Empress to gradually raise the ‘friendliness waterline’ so that I could gradually lower the requirements from top .001% to top 1% to top 10% to eventually allowing everyone in.

Though this would be a process that could take, literally, millennia to fully complete (though it could probably be accelerated to ‘only’ a couple hundred years safely). I could easily envision Celestia seeing it utterly reasonable to have a multi-thousand year plan where pony wellfare steadily increases, the proportion of immortal ponies gradually increase as a fraction of the population, and risk is as minimized as possible. The plan is benevolent, meritocratic, and safe.

… but if I were Twilight? I’m not sure I would be comfortable waiting that long or seeing most of my family and acquaintances die first, (even assuming my friends, the other elements of Harmony, eventually become alicorns too). The plan is slow, needlessly callous, and accepts millions of unnecessary deaths.

Shifting my point of view from one side to the other drastically changes how acceptable I find each strategy. I suppose that is the mark of a good disagreement.

[*] Friendly as in FAI friendly or friendship=magic in pony terms. Not just the most effusive ponies.

Xachariah Mar 1, 2013, 12:00 AM
2 points
in reply to: Salivanth’s comment on: Need help with an MLP fanfiction with a transhumanist theme.
The weaker alicorns are, the safer it is to create them and the more wiling Celestia would be to make them. If every alicorn could literally control the rotation of the entire planet with telekinesis on the first day, I think Celestia would probably be even more discerning than uplifting Twilight. Twilight might be a paragon of virtue, but she’s still the type of filly who will cast a spell given to her even when she has no idea what it does and it’s labeled as powerful and experimental. Conversely, if alicorns were just immortal winged unicorns with no extra powers, I assume the name of the show would be My Little Alicorn, with 99%+ of the population being alicorns. At least, I’d hope that would be the case given how benevolent Celestia seems.

For each level of power, there’s a different maximally safe rate of alicornification. Whether or not Celestia is already uplifting at that rate is a point of debate. (As a side note, the idea of Twilight discovering there’s a new magic to turn ponies into alicorns and then just casting it right away is such a Twilight thing to do.)

It’s an interesting analog to one of the ethical problems of uploading. Imagine a known serial killer is released from jail on his 100th birthday since he’s not a danger to the populace anymore. He knows he’s going to die soon, so he comes to your newly successful upload company. Do you allow him to upload? If you don’t he’ll die within ~5 years, if you do, he’ll do god-knows-what on the system.

My willingness to upload him would be based on how much damage he could do. I wouldn’t let him upload 1st for sure, or even within the top 10. But I probably wouldn’t be distressed after 10,000 uploads and we’ve already had a chance to see what hostile uploads can do (and it turns out not-so-bad).

Xachariah Feb 28, 2013, 10:29 AM
0 points
in reply to: Salivanth’s comment on: Need help with an MLP fanfiction with a transhumanist theme.
(There’s actually a comic regarding Chrysalis’ return. I haven’t read it, but from what I understand Chrysalis specifically targets Twilight to feed on her magic because she recognizes her as unusually powerful. Judging by how much magic in the MLP universe is modified by emotions, my guess is that it’s an additive or multiplicative factor for changlings when they feed. (As an aside, I’d totally choose Rainbow Dash in a fight. She punches houses into rainbow explosions.))

I’d assume that any future sight is extraordinarily limited, magically costly, and marginally useful. I’d guess Celestia uses it is the first episode, maybe uses it in Dragonshy, then notably doesn’t use it for 1st Discord or Chrysalis, then uses it again for the Crystal Empire and 2nd Discord.

In both episodes we see causality-breaking effects (Pinkie Keen and It’s About Time), it results in closed loop time travel. I haven’t invested too much thought into it, but can closed loop time travel be exploited via traveling to the future? It seems a very risky proposition, since we’ve already determined that time-travel can and will force paradoxes. You may only get one shot at seeing a future (and you can’t avoid the consequences), rather than being able to pick-and-choose possible futures. In this case, the more vague the future is, the better.

As an aside...I just remembered Twilight can already time travel. Yeah… that would make for some confusing debates.

Xachariah Feb 28, 2013, 8:49 AM
10 points
in reply to: Salivanth’s comment on: Need help with an MLP fanfiction with a transhumanist theme.

all comprised of ponies Celestia trusted sufficiently

You’re a god. You’ve got the ability to make other gods. You’ve got literally a million years to find people trustworthy enough. A single failure is a possible extinction event, and that nearly happened once already. How high do you set the bar for ‘trust sufficiently’?

She’s already working on the problem (and communicating with other alicorns about it, as seen at the end of S3Ep2). She’s increased the number by two within the last couple decades or so (Twilight, and I assume Cadance is young). Is the problem just that she’s going too slowly and cautiously?

(I do want to note I’m not trying to be hostile in any way. I just find this sphere of thought very intriguing.)

Xachariah Feb 28, 2013, 8:29 AM
3 points
in reply to: Salivanth’s comment on: Need help with an MLP fanfiction with a transhumanist theme.
The extinction-level battles portrayed in the show do not seem to run off of the rules of warfare, but off of an entirely binary system. None of the situations people were in trouble with would have been helped by having more Alicorns.

Queen Chrysalis gains her strength from feeding off the emotions of others, and the more magically powerful her subjects are, the more powerful she becomes. She became a God tier threat by feeding off Cadence/Shining. More alicorns would have only meant more super powered pegacorn changlings. She won initially because she acted first, then she was destroyed by a spell which was uncounterable (seemingly, as she doesn’t attempt to counter it).

Discord was infinitely more powerful than Celestia, until the Elements of Harmony came out then he was infinitely weaker. He invaded her own sanctum, took the Elements, then proceeded to wreck whatever he felt like. Later, Celestia’s magic protection on the Elements completely trumps Discord’s magic. In none of these cases do they seem to battle it out; they just understand that magic has a priority order. Whoever’s magic has higher priority, wins.

King Sombra, as a unicorn, singlehoofedly dominated then eliminated an empire full of unicorns. Again, offense beats defense. What’s the alicorn version of that after given time to reach full potential … a solar system? It’s a universe where everypony could already have an atomic bomb in their head. And then grant the option to add an order of magnitude more power by making them an alicorn.

The only occasion where a squad of alicorns would be useful would be in dealing with Nightmare Moon. And arguably things could have come out far worse if Nightmare Moon had been able to sway more alicorns to her side (NB: mind control magic exists in MLP universe). Also from Celestia’s perspective, the only other alicorn[*1] she ever knew almost succeeded at killing everything on the planet 1000 years before show start. She doesn’t know if the friendliness chance for an alicorn is ⁵⁰⁄₅₀, or if every alicorn except 1 is good, or if every alicorn except 1 is evil. And if she makes a mistake everybody, forever, dies.

As for the FAI parallel: Celestia is a lot smarter than other ponies but not orders of magnitude smarter. However, precognition and time travel exist in this universe. Celestia has, at times, shown unbelievable prescience with in her ‘wisdom’.[*2] Heck, in the first episode she either 1) saw the future or 2) is the least-responsible / most-lucky ruler ever. Sufficient ability to see the future is indistinguishable from super-intelligent decision making (though I grant that it doesn’t help for pattern matching or other benefits of intelligence). I’m not sure how much I could question the decisions of someone who could actually see the future.

[*1]I’m assuming it was just her and Luna then and that Cadence was a relatively recent addition.
[*2]She has a track record of doing excellent versus foreseen problems and terrible versus unforeseen problems. Presumably her future-viewing is limited in scope and has some sort of resource cost.

Xachariah Feb 28, 2013, 4:41 AM
11 points
on: Need help with an MLP fanfiction with a transhumanist theme.

Argument: Harder to keep the populace in line, if everyone has more power.

I think you’re missing the existential risk inherent in Alicorns or how precariously Equestria is balanced on the knife edge of extinction. Here’s a short list of possible extinction events: Nightmare Moon, Parasprites (Twilight enhanced), Discord, King Sombra, and god-knows-what from Star-Swirl the Bearded’s library. ‘Mere’ civilization ending events are Smarty Pants Doll (enchanted), Parasprites (unmodified), Windegos, Changelings, and the duplicating mirror. This is a world with Cuban Missile Crisis going on every other month and a rogue AI power-equivelent popping up every year . Imagine if Twilight had accidentally made parasprites carnivorous in addition to eating non-edibles? Game over, for everyone, forever. It’s not a world made safer by having more Alicorns. God-tier magic seems to override other Got-tier magic; in all God-tier confrontations, victory always goes to the initiator of each round of any fight. TLDR; offense > defense.

Also, you need to look at what Celestia herself has to gain. Right now she’s the God Empress of ponies. The only people capable of challenging her are her sisters and other deity class entities. If the world were to be eaten by omnivorous Von-Neuman parasprites tomorrow, she could teleport to another planet and (presumably) re-start the pony race. She’d be sad, but life would still go on. The only way that ponykind could experience a true extinction would be if she and her sisters were to die. For every pony that Celestia decides to uplift, she makes herself a little more vulnerable. What motivation does she have to do that?

Celestia is very selective about who she uplifts, judging by Twilight. Notably, Celestia makes sure that Twilight benevolent, very grounded with friendship, selfless, understands the nature of when (and when not to) use magic, understands the existential risks of magic (firsthand), has dealt with god-tier entities and understands their limitations. There’s a musical number about how Celestia’s been testing her to see if Twilight’s the kind of person who’d kill or enslave everypony if given limitless power. Twilight only gets uplifted when she passes all the tests.

Here’s a related question: You have just been uplifted by an immortal, Friendly AI. How do convince it that you should start uplifting everybody who asks instead of people whom the AI deems non-dangerous? …and why do you even want to convince it?

Xachariah Feb 14, 2013, 1:55 AM
4 points
in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Is suicide high-status?
Regarding your traffic example, there’s a striking difference in the behavior between young adults who want to signal (and sometimes go through with) committing suicide and older adults who actually want to die.

According to a report released by the American Association of Suicidology1, there are 25 attempts at suicide for every one success.

In young people (aged 15 − 24), the odds are between 100 and 200 to 1 against. The elderly seem a lot more successful at 4:1.

For someone who actually wants to die in the EEA, suicide seems trivially easy. Pick a direction and start walking, if you find water you can drown; if you don’t find water, you’re dead anyways. If you find animals, some of them want to kill you; if you don’t find animals, the environment probably wants to kill you. If you hurt yourself in any way (cutting self, fall from height, eating poisonous food, etc) then you can easily die even if you change your mind and even if somebody can find you (which they won’t if you just walked for a day).

For young adults who want to signal suicide, I imagine things would look relatively similar to modern life (minus guns). Jump off high things, eat a lot of things that ‘should kill you’, self-harm, etc. By a factor of 200:1, the goal of suicide isn’t to succeed, it’s to make a credible threat (and arguably, that 1-in-200 just messes up). You can make that threat just as easily in the EEA. You don’t have to beat your own survival instinct for suicide to be successful, you just have to beat your tribesmates in chicken.

Xachariah Feb 13, 2013, 9:39 AM
9 points
in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Is suicide high-status?
Aside from firearms in the US, the big methods of suicide are hanging/strangulation, drowning, poison, and fall from heights. Of these, poisoning and falling seem limited in the EEA depending on where you live. Although I have no idea how common poisonous plants were.

However, given that there existed wild animals, zero medical treatment, low population density, and little rescue capability, I assume that it would be significantly easier to commit suicide back then than today.

Xachariah Feb 13, 2013, 7:51 AM
16 points
on: Is suicide high-status?
It’s intuitively obvious to me that suicide served some evolutionary benefit in the past; you don’t get such complex behavior in such predictable clusters without there being a reproductive benefit. As I understand, suicide has three different mechanisms each from different evolutionary pressures.

1) Negotiation suicide
2) Apoptosis suicide
3) Malfunction suicide

Negotiation suicide is attempting to get high status by threatening suicide. This is the teen suicide, jilted lover suicide, or ‘cry for help’ suicide. These are usually accompanied by vocal warnings and are generally done in flashy, ineffective manners. This suicide strategy is usually adopted by currently low status individuals who have the potential to be high status in the future (eg teens). The theory is that this form of suicide is a mixed strategy to achieve higher status and allotment of resources by threatening suicide. It has to be mixed strategy because if you never committed suicide you wouldn’t get the increased resources (food/attention/status/etc), but if you always committed suicide you’d kill off the genes that caused it pretty quick. Unfortunately, humans are set to ‘risk’ suicide for status at a rate that used to be helpful 100,000 years ago, and not so much now.

Apoptosis suicide is when people sacrifice themselves so that their genes (children/family/tribe/country) can have better chances of propagation via kin selection. Note that these suicides are rarely preceded by any sort of warning and are usually done in very effective, premeditated manners. The prototypical example would be an elderly blind man with health problems choosing to die-with-dignity, and poisoning himself after having a chance to visit his grandkids one last time. Rates of suicide go up with advanced age and go up with disability. Suicide rates dramatically go up with vision impairment, which was a pretty huge hindrance in hunter-gatherer times.

The last type of suicide is just when something goes wrong in the brain. Drugs, alcohol, etc can cause this (eg Cobain). Brain damage is a cause of suicide as well, like in football players and boxers (eg Jr Seau). Bipolar, schizophrenia, and other mental illnesses also are massive risk factors in suicide, though this may arguably be apoptosis instead. Malfunction suicide could also partially account for some teen suicides, given how wild a ride hormones are.

NB: I’m working off memory of a past LW post that I can’t seem to locate now on the evolutionary basis of depression and suicide, which had the actual cites.

Edit: To more directly address your point, it doesn’t make sense to “say that you are too good for this game and check-out”. This is almost negotiation suicide except you’re using a shitty, losing strategy to do so. You only check-out if there’s an advantage to be gained. It’s effective to credibly threaten to check out if that can secure you more resources with the threat. The only way your brain can credibly threaten is if it’s prepared to actually go all the way and some percentage of people go through with it. However, life is a game you can only win if you keep playing.

Xachariah Jan 31, 2013, 4:16 PM
8 points
in reply to: wuncidunci’s comment on: Singularity Institute is now Machine Intelligence Research Institute
I had overlooked that I was trying to hide from Google using their own software. Of course they wouldn’t have provided it if it worked against them. Silly of me in retrospect.

A handful of proxies verify that it is indeed Malaysia first and Star Trek second.

Xachariah Jan 31, 2013, 3:56 PM
2 points
in reply to: wuncidunci’s comment on: Singularity Institute is now Machine Intelligence Research Institute
What do you get when you use incognito mode? I checked with that and got the same Star Trek result. I think incognito pops Google’s filter bubble, although I’m not certain.

Though other search engines do give me the Malaysian town.

Xachariah Jan 31, 2013, 11:10 AM
86 points
on: Singularity Institute is now Machine Intelligence Research Institute
The new acronym for the Singularity Institute is MIRI.

The first google hit is the wikipedia page for the Star Trek: TOS episode Miri (S1E8). It’s about how 90% of the population of not-Earth was destroyed by an existential threat leaving nothing but irrational children. The crew find themselves under a death sentence from this threat and try to find a solution, but they need the children’s help. However the children think themselves immune and immortal and won’t assist. In the last seconds, the crew manages to convince the children that the existential threat cannot be ignored and must be solved or the kids will eventually die too. With their help, the crew saves the day and everyone lives happily ever after. Also, the episode was so ahead of it’s time that even though it was reviewed as excellent, it got so many complaints that it was never rebroadcast for 20 years.

I think my symbolism detector just pegged off the charts then exploded.
What links here?
- lukeprog's comment on Thoughts on the January CFAR workshop by Qiaochu_Yuan (Jan 31, 2013, 9:07 PM; 13 points)

Xachariah Jan 5, 2013, 6:32 AM
1 point
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: How to Teach Students to Not Guess the Teacher’s Password?
He’s doing that and more. He’s showing the children that math is more than the memorization of it’s parts. Math is not an arbitrary set of rules that we learn because… adults make them learn it.

He’s showing them that the universe runs on predictable rules. Math just happens to be how we express those rules. Even more important than building intrinsic motivation is that they get to see what a reductionist universe looks like.

Xachariah Jan 5, 2013, 5:45 AM
6 points
on: How to Teach Students to Not Guess the Teacher’s Password?
Are you familiar with Dan Meyer’s “Math Makeover” Tedx Talk? I’d highly recommend it.

It covers almost exactly this topic on the subject of math. He’s also got curricula on a link on his blog (though it is a bit hard to locate in the sidebar). Also, in his talk he mentions people send him all sorts of stuff for different subjects, and a cursory look at the blog shows a ton of links, so you may be able to do more than just math work with pre-made lesson plans that require minimal tweaking.

Xachariah Jan 5, 2013, 5:00 AM
3 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Just One Sentence
It would be no different than how “germs cause diseases” would be dismissed as not trusting in evil spirits, or the atomic hypothesis being the rantings of a madman. Presumably anything we tell them they’ll have to take on faith until they can check for themselves.

And by the time they’re putting up orbital telescopes to look for possible gamma ray burst candidates, I think humanity will be in a safe enough position.

Xachariah Jan 5, 2013, 4:49 AM
8 points
in reply to: WrongBot’s comment on: Just One Sentence
If you just want incentives then I’d go with—“In 500 years, a gamma ray burst will wipe out all humanity unless you colonize distant stars, so get to work.”

Afterall, ‘powerful weapons’ presumably caused the problem in the first place. A burning, racially/religious/culturally rooted drive to reach the stars would be far more useful in the long run than a desire to conquer our enemies, even if it is based on a lie.

Xachariah Jan 5, 2013, 4:09 AM
0 points
in reply to: Alsadius’s comment on: Politics Discussion Thread January 2013
If there are objections on the soul level, you should still expect to see a hierarchy based on preventing/allowing fertilization per birth control.

For example: Going by pure number of ‘abortions’ (counting as any termination of a fertilized ovum), there is a continuum for birth control. IIRC it’s pill → patch → condoms → spermicide+condoms → shot → implant → IUD → surgery. Implants and especially IUDs cause up to an order of magnitude fewer of these ‘instant abortions’ compared to the pill.

We should expect to see pro-life campaigns saying “get an IUD, NOT the pill!” (Or supporting vasectomy / tubal ligation, but fat chance on those.) But again, we don’t see that. Because those 99.9% effective things will lead to sin.