SolTerrasa posted:

I'm going to end this post there; but it gets more interesting from here; they've finally hit the core of their disagreement. It's about what they're going to start calling "total war". Yudkowsky says that an AI would never willingly give up information about its advances to potential enemies, and Hanson says "economics seems to suggest that it's actually optimal to trade information about advances."

Tunicate posted:

The funny thing is, the best futurist I've seen wrote for the Ladies Home Journal in 1900

SolTerrasa posted:

-snip-

Pavlov posted:

Wow, this Hanson guy must be the most even-headed guy alive to go that long arguing with Yudkowsky and still remain that civil. Also he seems pretty smart. I think I'm just going to go read his site instead of worrying about Yudkowsky now.

Robin Hanson posted:

Unequal Inequality
By Robin Hanson · February 2, 2007 6:00 am

President Bush just spoke of "income inequality" for the first time, Tyler Cowen (the most impressive mind I’ve met) said last week that "inequality as a major and chronic American problem has been overstated," while Brad DeLong just said that "on the level of individual societies, I believe that inequality does loom as a serious political-economic problem."

I find it striking that these discussions focus almost entirely on the smallest of these seven kinds of inequality:

1. Inequality across species
2. Inequality across the eras of human history
3. Non-financial inequality, such as of popularity, respect, beauty, sex, kids
4. Income inequality between the nations of a world
5. Income inequality between the families of a nation
6. Income inequality between the siblings of a family
7. Income inequality between the days of a person’s life

Consider that "sibling differences [within each family] account for three-quarters of all differences between individuals in explaining American economic inequality" and that "eliminating income inequality within all nations would reduce global income inequality by no more than one-third." So why do we talk mainly about financial inequality between a nation’s families, when each of these other six inequalities is arguably larger?

DeLong’s excuse is that "It is hard … to envision alternative political arrangements or economic policies during the past 50 years that would have transferred any significant portion of the wealth of today’s rich nations to today’s poor nations." But surely we could have transferred wealth if we had wanted to, just as parents could teach their children to share income if they wanted. We could compensate for unequal beauty by transferring from the pretty to the ugly. And we could reduce species and era inequalities by sacrificing less for rich future generations and sacrificing more for other species.

Clearly, we do not just have a generic aversion to inequality; our concern is very selective. The best explanation I can think of is that our distant ancestors got into the habit of complaining about inequality of transferable assets with a tribe, as a way to coordinate a veiled threat to take those assets if they were not offered freely. Such threats would have been far less effective regarding the other forms of inequality.

Added 5/7/07: There is also a huge ignored inequality between actual and possible siblings.

SolTerrasa posted:

The Sequences Digression 1 - Hanson / Yudkowsky AI FOOM Debate, part two

Yudkowsky posted:

This is how I see the story of life and intelligence - as a story of improbably good designs being produced by optimization processes. The "improbability" here is improbability relative to a random selection from the design space, not improbability in an absolute sense - if you have an optimization process around, then "improbably" good designs become probable.

He thinks that the important things about an optimization process is what it optimizes, and according to what rules. That's actually pretty reasonable-sounding to me. He believes that there is a firm distinction between two levels of optimization. There's the "object level", that is, the metric or system which is being optimized. In his examples, this is "replication -> survival / dominance", "cells -> reproduction", "animal brains -> reproduction, also some goals", "human brains -> a staggering array of goals". Then there's the "meta-level", which is things like "sexual reproduction as a method of introducing mutation" and "natural selection of asexual populations".

Lottery of Babylon posted:

Don't, he's a dumbass too, just not in quite the same way as Yudkowsky.


"Lie-berals claim they want to fix inequality, but if that were true, why do babies make less money than adults? Why haven't they built a time-machine to give iPhones to people in the fifteenth century? Why haven't they created a government-enforced rape program to give me the sex I deserve? Why aren't dogs as powerful as humans? Why do people who exist have more money than people who don't exist? Makes u think. In conclusion, taxes are the devil, gently caress the poor."

Spoilers Below posted:

It's amazing how wrong he is here. Life on Earth has progressed by doing the absolute bare minimum capable for reproduction, leaving in all the useless poo poo and not bothering to correct all the quite obvious design flaws from one model to the next providing that the thing can reproduce. There is no optimization whatsoever. There is simply what can survive to the next generation and what can't. It isn't necessarily better or superior, smarter or cleverer. It simply managed to have sex at least once and produce viable offspring. There are innumerable examples of how flawed human beings are in so many different ways, and how many different reactions we have that simply aren't necessary or optimal anymore, let alone throughout the animal kingdom.

It's like reading someone who kinda-sorta understands Hegel try to explain what they think they heard about what Darwin and Nietzsche believed.

Pavlov posted:

Ok, technically biological evolution is a form of optimization. Its generally categorized as something called 'hill climbing', which is generally a pretty poor form of optimization, but it still counts. Yud's argument still doesn't make that much sense though.

Pavlov posted:

Ok, technically biological evolution is a form of optimization. Its generally categorized as something called 'hill climbing', which is generally a pretty poor form of optimization, but it still counts. Yud's argument still doesn't make that much sense though.

Hanson posted:

1. Inequality across species
2. Inequality across the eras of human history
3. Non-financial inequality, such as of popularity, respect, beauty, sex, kids
4. Income inequality between the nations of a world
5. Income inequality between the families of a nation
6. Income inequality between the siblings of a family
7. Income inequality between the days of a person’s life

...

Added 5/7/07: There is also a huge ignored inequality between actual and possible siblings.

Mr. Sunshine posted:

6 is likewise nonsensical - you don't give your toddler the same allowance as your teenager.

Robin Hanson posted:

Chris, there is an obvious channel to transfer between siblings: parents.

Robin Hanson posted:

If you thought that parents did not have enough influence to get their kids to share income, you might favor the government giving parents the legal power to transfer wealth between their kids. I don't see how this could be more objectionable than the government directly transferring wealth between citizens.

Mr. Sunshine posted:

His point is either that if we strive to achieve greater economic equality, we must strive towards complete equality between all timelines, all species and all existing and non-existing beings - or his point is that striving for greater equality is an irrational pursuit. I don't know which one makes me more angry.

Robin Hanson posted:

A year ago I wrote two controversial posts (each 150 comments) that compared cuckoldry to rape. I was puzzling over why our law punishes rape far more than cuckoldry, arguing:

Biologically, cuckoldry is a bigger reproductive harm than rape, so we should expect a similar intensity of inherited emotions about it.

Counter arguments included:

* what the cuckold doesn’t know can’t hurt him
* lots of men don’t mind raising genetically unrelated kids
* rape victims are more socially disapproved of
* rape has direct physical effects, while cuckoldry does not
* rape victims are more often diagnosed “post traumatic stress”
* rape victims they know seem more expressively upset

I presented evidence that most men would rather be raped than cuckolded, and that even though men complain less, they gain and suffer more from marriage and divorce, and the birth and death of kids. Someone noted that many past societies did punish cuckoldry more than rape.

It occurred to me recently that we can more clearly compare cuckoldry to gentle silent rape. Imagine a woman was drugged into unconsciousness and then gently raped, so that she suffered no noticeable physical harm nor any memory of the event, and the rapist tried to keep the event secret. Now drugging someone against their will is a crime, but the added rape would add greatly to the crime in the eyes of today’s law, and the added punishment for this addition would be far more than for cuckoldry.

Now compare the two cases, cuckoldry and gentle silent rape. One remaining difference is that the rapist might be a stranger, while a cuckolding wife is not. But we could consider cases where the rapist isn’t a stranger. Another difference might be that punishing the cuckolding mother financially may punish her innocent kid. But we could specify the punishment to be non-financial, perhaps torture. Consider also that it tends to be easier to prove cuckoldry than rape, so if we avoid applying the law to hard-to-prove harms, that should favor punishing cuckoldry more than rape.

Even after all these attempts to make the cases comparable, however, I suspect most people will still say the law should punish rape far more than the cuckoldry. This even though most farming societies had the opposite attitude (I’m not sure on foragers). A colleague of mine suggests this is gender bias, pure and simple; women seem feminist, and men chivalrous, by railing against rape, but no one looks good complaining about cuckoldry. What other explanations you got?

Hanson posted:

2. Inequality across the eras of human history
...
And we could reduce species and era inequalities by sacrificing less for rich future generations and sacrificing more for other species.

WTF? posted:

Biologically, cuckoldry is a bigger reproductive harm than rape, so we should expect a similar intensity of inherited emotions about it.

Moddington posted:

What the gently caress.

e: Seriously, what kind of hosed up things does he believe to even lead to the conclusion "adultery is worse than rape"?

Robin Hanson posted:

Thank you ma’am, may I have another?
By Robin Hanson

We often see a women complaining about a men, to that man or to other women. We less often see the gender-reversed scenario. At least that is what I see, in friends, family, movies, and music. Yes, men roll their eyes, and perhaps in general women talk more about people. But women complain more, even taking these into account. Why?

The politically correct theory is that women’s lives are worse, so they have more to complain about.

After all, men often ignore, disrespect, and abandon, even beat and rape, women. But slaves weren’t know for being complainers, and they had the most to complain about.

Women also ignore, disrespect, abandon, and beat men. Women rarely rape men, but they do cuckold them. Men suffer more health and violence problems, and the standard evolutionary story is that men suffer a higher outcome variance, and so have more disappointments.

The opposite theory is that women complain because their lives are better; complaints could be weak version of tantrums, which can be seen as status symbols. But even relatively low status women seem to complain a lot.

Clearly part of the story is that when women complain, others tend to sympathize and take their side, but when men complain, others tend to snicker and think less of them. But why are their complaints treated so differently?

One factor is that we value toughness more in men than women. Another factor is that men seem to signal their devotion to women more than vice versa. But I’m not sure why these happen, or if they are sufficient explanations.

Whatever the true story, the politically correct theory, that women complain more due to worse lives, seems both wrong and biased. Surely most people know enough men and women to see that their quality of life is not that different, at least compared to their complaint rates.

(Obscure title explained.)

Wikipedia posted:

Hanson is credited with originating the concept of the Policy Analysis Market (PAM), a DARPA project to implement a market for betting on future terrorist attacks.

NGDBSS posted:

Thing being said, it looks like PAM got canned due to the proposed implementation being quite tasteless and inappropriately specific.

Qwertycoatl posted:

NGDBSS posted:

The purpose of such a project (in the category of prediction markets) is to get a handle on the likelihoods of various scenarios for the purpose of risk analysis and such, and given regression to the mean it's going to give you decently accurate (if general) answers. (There are other assumptions necessary for a prediction market to be mathematically sound, mind, but they are a thing.) Thing being said, it looks like PAM got canned due to the proposed implementation being quite tasteless and inappropriately specific.

SolTerrasa posted:

Jesus Christ. They really do belong together, Yud and Hanson. What IS it about internet rationalists? Why does it draw so many people who just can't stand being wrong?

NGDBSS posted:

The purpose of such a project (in the category of prediction markets) is to get a handle on the likelihoods of various scenarios for the purpose of risk analysis and such, and given regression to the mean it's going to give you decently accurate (if general) answers. (There are other assumptions necessary for a prediction market to be mathematically sound, mind, but they are a thing.) Thing being said, it looks like PAM got canned due to the proposed implementation being quite tasteless and inappropriately specific.

SolTerrasa posted:

Jesus Christ. They really do belong together, Yud and Hanson. What IS it about internet rationalists? Why does it draw so many people who just can't stand being wrong?

Tunicate posted:

The funny thing is, the best futurist I've seen wrote for the Ladies Home Journal in 1900

Dabir posted:

The "rays of invisible light" at the end are a bit of a cheat, since that was written in 1900 and X-rays were discovered in 1895.

Literally Kermit posted:

Holy poo poo, this guy really was "less wrong" than the others. Some of it was spot on despite not even having the vocabulary. We indeed "telephone" live concerts into our homes in multiple ways, and regulate air in our homes although not with spigots.

Would be rad having a pneumatic tube network though. And free education and healthcare.

Xander77 posted:

2. Am I misunderstanding something, or does the man actually think that IQ tests measure intelligence? In the year of our lord 2014?

Xander77 posted:

2. Am I misunderstanding something, or does the man actually think that IQ tests measure intelligence? In the year of our lord 2014?

Robin Hanson posted:

cuck cuck cuck

Strategic Tea posted:

E: And come to think of it, that's probably why people like Yud so often turn to poo poo like utilitarianism.

Xander77 posted:

Is that a problem now? Are we sliding into... eh, let's not name fallacies as to avoid the similarity of expression. Is everything "people like Yud" like now tainted by association?