Your existence is informative

By Katja Grace · June 21, 2012 9:34 am · Comments (18)

Warning: this post is technical.

Suppose you know that there are a certain number of planets, N. You are unsure about the truth of a statement Q. If Q is true, you put a high probability on life forming on a given arbitrary planet. If Q is false, you put a low probability on this. You have a prior probability for Q. So far you have not taken into account your observation that the planet you are on has life. How do you update on this evidence, to get a posterior probability for Q? Since you don’t know which is ‘this’ planet, with respect to the model, you can’t update directly on ‘there is life on this planet’, by excluding worlds where this planet doesn’t have life. And you can’t necessarily treat ‘this’ as an arbitrary planet, since you wouldn’t have seen it if it didn’t have life.

I have an ongoing disagreement with an associate who suggests that you should take ‘this planet has life’ into account by conditioning on ‘there exists a planet with life’. That is,

P(Q|there is life on this planet) = P(Q|there exists a planet with life).

Here I shall explain my disagreement.

Nick Bostrom argues persuasively that much science would be impossible if we treated ‘I observe X’ as ‘someone observes X’. This is basically because in a big world of scientists making measurements, at some point somebody will make most mistaken measurements. So if all you know when you measure the temperature of a solution to be 15 degrees is that you are not in a world where nobody ever measures its temperature to be 15 degrees, this doesn’t tell you much about the temperature.

You can add other apparently irrelevant observations you make at the same time – e.g. that the table is blue chipboard – in order to make your total observations less likely to arise once in a given world (at its limit, this is the suggestion of FNC). However it seems implausible that you should make different inferences from taking a measurement when you can also see a detailed but irrelevant picture at the same time than those you make with limited sensory input. Also the same problem re-emerges if the universe is supposed to be larger. Given that the universe is thought to be very, very large, this is a problem. Not to mention, it seems implausible that the size of the universe should greatly affect probabilistic judgements made about entities which are close to independent from most of the universe.

So I think Bostrom’s case is good. However I’m not completely comfortable arguing from the acceptability of something that we do (science) back to the truth of the principles that justify it. So I’d like to make another case against taking ‘this planet has life’ as equivalent evidence to ‘there exists a planet with life’.

Evidence is what excludes possibilities. Seeing the sun shining is evidence against rain, because it excludes the possible worlds where the sky is grey, which include most of those where it is raining. Seeing a picture of the sun shining is not much evidence against rain, because it excludes worlds where you don’t see such a picture, which are about as likely to be rainy or sunny as those that remain are.

Receiving the evidence ‘there exists a planet with life’ means excluding all worlds where all planets are lifeless, and not excluding any other worlds. At first glance, this must be different from ‘this planet has life’. Take any possible world where some other planet has life, and this planet has no life. ‘There exists a planet with life’ doesn’t exclude that world, while ‘this planet has life’ does. Therefore they are different evidence.

At this point however, note that the planets in the model have no distinguishing characteristics. How do we even decide which planet is ‘this planet’ in another possible world? There needs to be some kind of mapping between planets in each world, saying which planet in world A corresponds to which planet in world B, etc. As far as I can tell, any mapping will do, as long as a given planet in one possible world maps to at most one planet in another possible world. This mapping is basically a definition choice.

So suppose we use a mapping where in every possible world where at least one planet has life, ‘this planet’ corresponds to one of the planets that has life. See the below image.

Which planet is which?

Squares are possible worlds, each with two planets. Pink planets have life, blue do not. Define 'this planet' as the circled one in each case. Learning that there is life on this planet is equal to learning that there is life on some planet.

Now learning that there exists a planet with life is the same as learning that this planet has life. Both exclude the far righthand possible world, and none of the other possible worlds. What’s more, since we can change the probability distribution we end up with, just by redefining which planets are ‘the same planet’ across worlds, indexical evidence such as ‘this planet has life’ must be horseshit.

Actually the last paragraph was false. If in every possible world which contains life, you pick one of the planets with life to be ‘this planet’, you can no longer know whether you are in ‘this planet’. From your observations alone, you could be on the other planet, which only has life when both planets do. The one that is not circled in each of the above worlds. Whichever planet you are on, you know that there exists a planet with life. But because there’s some probability of you being on the planet which only rarely has life, you have more information than that. Redefining which planet was which didn’t change that.

Perhaps a different definition of ‘this planet’ would get what my associate wants? The problem with the last was that it no longer necessarily included the planet we are on. So what about we define ‘this planet’ to be the one you are on, plus a life-containing planet in all of the other possible worlds that contain at least one life-containing planet. A strange, half-indexical definition, but why not? One thing remains to be specified – which is ‘this’ planet when you don’t exist? Let’s say it is chosen randomly.

Now is learning that ‘this planet’ has life any different from learning that some planet has life? Yes. Now again there are cases where some planet has life, but it’s not the one you are on. This is because the definition only picks out planets with life across other possible worlds, not this one. In this one, ‘this planet’ refers to the one you are on. If you don’t exist, this planet may not have life. Even if there are other planets that do. So again, ‘this planet has life’ gives more information than ‘there exists a planet with life’.

You either have to accept that someone else might exist when you do not, or you have to define ‘yourself’ as something that always exists, in which case you no longer know whether you are ‘yourself’. Either way, changing definitions doesn’t change the evidence. Observing that you are alive tells you more than learning that ‘someone is alive’.

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Plastination Is Near

By Robin Hanson · June 18, 2012 2:00 pm · Comments (53)

The biggest single charity donation I’ve made so far is ~$100. But now I’m donating $5000 to an exceptionally worthy cause. And I suggest you donate too. Here’s my cause:

People who “die” today could live again in the future, perhaps forever, as brain emulations (= uploads, ems), if enough info were saved today about their brains. (And of course if civilization doesn’t die, if someone in the future cares enough to bother, if you are your brain activity, etc.)

This is probably enough brain info: the spatial shape and location of each brain cell, including the long skinny parts that stick out to touch other cells, and two dozen chemical densities (at the skinny part scale) to help identify cell and connection types. Actually, it is probably enough to just get 95% of the connections right, and a half dozen chemical densities.

Today, the main way folks try to save such brain info is to pay a cryonics org to freeze their brain in liquid nitrogen, and keep it so frozen for a long time. Alas, this approach fails if this org ever even briefly fails at this task, letting brains thaw, an event I expect is more likely than not over a century timescale.

In addition, we don’t actually know that frozen brains preserve enough brain info. Until recently, ice formation in the freezing process ripped out huge brain chunks everywhere and shoved them to distant locations. Recent use of a special anti-freeze has reduced that, but we don’t actually know if the anti-freeze gets to enough places. Or even if enough info is saved where it does go.

The people who developed the anti-freeze published some 2D pictures that look good, but we don’t know how selectively these were chosen, or how much worse is the typical cryonics freezing process. Some good brain researchers are skeptical. (Yes, future folk might undo even very complex brain scrabbling, but don’t count on it.) And given my usual medical skepticism, I gotta be skeptical here too.

Though cryonics has been practiced for forty years, its techniques have improved only slowly; its few customers can only induce a tiny research effort. The much larger brain research community, in contrast, has been rapidly improving their ways to do fast cheap detailed 3D brain scans, and to prepare samples for such scans. You see, brain researchers need ways to stop brain samples from changing, and to be strong against scanning disruptions, just so they can study brain samples at their leisure.

These brain research techniques have now reached two key milestones:

  1. They’ve found new ways to “fix” brain samples by filling them with plastic, ways that seem impressively reliable, resilient, and long lasting, and which work on large brain volumes (e.g., here). Such plastination techniques seem close to being able to save enough info in entire brains for centuries, without needing continual care. Just dumping a plastic brain in a box in a closet might work fine.
  2. Today, for a few tens of thousands of dollars, less than the price charged for one cryonics customer, it is feasible to have independent lab(s) take random samples from whole mouse or human brains preserved via either cryonics or plastination, and do high (5nm) resolution 3D scans to map out thousands of neighboring cells, their connections, and connection strengths, to test if either of these approaches clearly preserve such key brain info.

An anonymous donor has actually funded a $100K Brain Preservation Prize, paid to the first team(s) to pass this test on a human brain, with a quarter of the prize going to those that first pass the test on a mouse brain. Cryonics and plastination teams have already submitted whole mouse brains to be tested. The only hitch is that the prize organization needs money (~25-50K$) to actually do the tests!

This is the exceptionally worthy cause to which I am donating $5K, and to which I encourage others to donate.  (More info here; donate here.) We seem close to having a feasible plastination technique, where for a few 10K$ or less one could fill a brain with plastic, saving its key brain info for future revival in an easily stored form. We may only lack donations of a similar amount to actually test that it does save this key brain info. (And if the first approach fails, perhaps to test a few revisions.)

I don’t understand why the cryonics community isn’t already all over this. To express my opinions to them more forcefully, I offer to bet up to $5K that plastination is more likely to win this full prize than cryonics. That is, if plastination wins but cryonics fails, I win the bet, and if cryonics wins but plastination fails, I lose. If they both win or both fail, the bet is called off. Any takers?

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I Talk At Oxford Wednesday

By Robin Hanson · June 18, 2012 7:30 am · Comments (2)

I’ll speak at Oxford this Wednesday, 4:00pm, on:

Em Econ 101

The three most disruptive transitions in our history coincided with the introduction of humans, farming, and industry. If another such transition lies ahead, a good guess for its source is artificial intelligence in the form of whole brain emulations, or “ems.” Most who consider ems discuss their implications for the philosophy of identity, or their feasibility and development paths. Those who consider em social implications gravitate toward heaven or hell scenarios, or invent entirely new economics, etc. for this new era.

In contrast, as a professor of economics I seek to straight-forwardly apply standard economic and other social science theory to these novel technical assumptions, to sketch rough outlines of a relatively-likely reference scenario set modestly far into a post-em-transition world. I consider how ems might change: reproduction, life plans, cycles of daily life, inequality, work training, property rights, families, firm management, industrial organization, urban agglomeration, security, and governance.

Location: Oxford Martin School, 34 Broad Street, OX1 3BG

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Resolving Paradoxes of Intuition

By Katja Grace · June 17, 2012 8:00 am · Comments (44)

Shelly Kagan gave a nice summary of some problems involved in working out whether death is bad for one. I agree with Robin’s response, and have posted before about some of the particular issues. Now I’d like to make a more general observation.

First I’ll summarize Kagan’s story. The problems are something like this. It seems like death is pretty bad. Thought experiments suggest that it is bad for the person who dies, not just their friends, and that it is bad even if it is painless. Yet if a person doesn’t exist, how can things be bad for them? Seemingly because they are missing out on good things, rather than because they are suffering anything. But it is hard to say when they bear the cost of missing out, and it seems like things that happen happen at certain times. Or maybe they don’t. But then we’d have to say all the people who don’t exist are missing out, and that would mean a huge tragedy is happening as long as those people go unconceived. We don’t think a huge tragedy is happening, so lets say it isn’t. Also we don’t feel too bad about people not being born earlier, like we do about them dying sooner. How can we distinguish these cases of deprivation from non-existence from the deprivation that happens after death? Not in any satisfactorily non-arbitrary way. So ‘puzzles still remain’.

This follows a pattern common to other philosophical puzzles. Intuitions say X sometimes, and not X other times. But they also claim that one should not care about any of the distinctions that can reasonably be made between the times when they say X is true and the times when they say X is false.

Intuitions say you should save a child dying in front of you. Intuitions say you aren’t obliged to go out of your way to protect a dying child in Africa. Intuitions also say physical proximity, likelihood of being blamed, etc shouldn’t be morally relevant.

Intuitions say you are the same person today as tomorrow. Intuitions say you are not the same person as Napoleon. Intuitions also say that whether you are the same person or not shouldn’t depend on any particular bit of wiring in your head, and that changing a bit of wiring doesn’t make you slightly less you.

Of course not everyone shares all of these intuitions (I don’t). But for those who do, there are problems. These problems can be responded to by trying to think of other distinctions between contexts that do seem intuitively legitimate, reframing an unintuitive conclusion to make it intuitive, or just accepting at least one of the unintuitive conclusions.

The first two solutions – finding more appealing distinctions and framings – seem a lot more popular than the third – biting a bullet. Kagan concludes that ‘puzzles remain’, as if this inconsistency is an apparent mathematical conflict that one can fully expect to eventually see through if we think about it right. And many other people have been working on finding a way to make these intuitions consistent for a while. Yet why expect to find a resolution?

Why not expect this contradiction to be like the one that arises if you claim that you like apples more than pears and also pears more than apples? There is no nuanced way to resolve the issue, except to give up at least one.  You can make up values, but sometimes they are just inconsistent. The same goes for evolved values.

From Kagan’s account of death, it seems likely that our intuitions are just inconsistent. Given natural selection, this is not particularly surprising. It’s no mystery how people could evolve to care about the survival of they and their associates, yet not to care about people who don’t exist. Even if people who don’t exist suffer the same costs from not existing. It’s also not surprising that people would come to believe their care for others is largely about the others’ wellbeing, not their own interests, and so believe that if they don’t care about a tragedy, there isn’t one. There might be some other resolution in the death case, but until we see one, it seems odd to expect one. Especially when we have already looked so hard.

Most likely, if you want a consistent position you will have to bite a bullet. If you are interested in reality, biting a bullet here shouldn’t be a last resort after searching every nook and cranny for a consistent and intuitive position. It is much more likely that humans have inconsistent intuitions about the value of life than that we have so far failed to notice some incredibly important and intuitive distinction in circumstances that drives our different intuitions. Why do people continue to search for intuitive resolutions to such problems? It could be that accepting an unintuitive position is easy, unsophisticated, unappealing to funders and friends, and seems like giving up. Is there something else I’m missing?

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Story Rules

By Robin Hanson · June 16, 2012 11:05 am · Comments (29)

Pixar Storyboard Artist Emma Coats has 22 Rules of Storytelling (as told by David Price, via Joshua Cohen). Here is my spin on nine of those rules:

1. You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
4. Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
16. Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
19. Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

That is, we like stories where someone is thrown into a difficult situation. We don’t care much about what caused that situation. We care more about admiring the way they handle the situation than if their approach works.

3. You won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
7. Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
14. Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.

That is, we care lots about how the way a story ends affirms our core beliefs on who should be admired for doing what in a crisis.

13. Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.
15. If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.

That is, our stories need lots of believable detail, so our subconscious minds of viewers can more easily see the story events as evidence supporting those core beliefs about what to admire.

All of which supports the idea that one of the main functions of stories in our lives is to help us create and signal our moral beliefs about how people should act – especially in crisis. After all, we have far more moral beliefs about how people should act in a crisis than how they should act in ordinary times.

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This Is A Group Blog Again

By Robin Hanson · June 15, 2012 12:00 pm · Comments (20)

The first stop to overcoming a problem is to admit you have one. So: I admit I’m addicted to blogging. In terms of total interesting intellectual insight, I’m actually pretty proud of my 5.5 years of blogging – I doubt I would have produced more insight had I blogged less. But my friends, colleagues, academia, patrons, etc. don’t want me to just find insights, they want me to gain prestige and have influence. And at this point in my life, they are right — intellectual influence *is what I should want. My insights will matter little if I can’t package them in a form that will tempt others to assimilate and build on them.

So, I am writing a book (which I’ll say more about in due time). Which feels great. Alas, I think readers prefer near-daily blogs, I’m reluctant to let this blog die, and as it is I get too easily engrossed in blog post topics. My solution: move Overcoming Bias back to a group blog, by including the young rising stars Katja Grace and Robert Wiblin, of whom I’ve long been a fan. We have mutual respect, similar interests, and similar styles of thought. With them posting more, I’ll hopefully be ok posting less. Overcoming Bias will continue at a similar rate and on similar themes, my less frequent posts will be more thoughtful and less newsy, and I’ll actually get a book written. What’s not to like? ;)

Btw, we aren’t seeking more authors – just the three of us are ok for a while.

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Pure Evil

By Robin Hanson · June 14, 2012 10:15 am · Comments (32)

This is about as close to pure evil as I’ve seen:

Destructive behavior has mostly been investigated by games in which all players have the option to simultaneously destroy (burn) their partners’ money. In the destructor game, players are randomly paired and assigned the roles of destructor versus passive player. The destructor player chooses to destroy or not to destroy a share of his passive partner’s earnings. The passive partner cannot retaliate. In addition, a random event (nature) destroys a percentage of some passive subject’s earnings. From the destructor player’s view, destruction is benefit-less, costless, hidden and unilateral. Unilateral destruction diminishes with respect to bilateral destruction studies, but it does not vanish: 15% of the subjects choose to destroy. This result suggests that, at least for some, destruction is intrinsically pleasurable. (more)

Mind you, its not an especially large evil. But it is an unusually pure evil. And 15% of lab subjects do it!

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Who Believes These?

By Robin Hanson · June 13, 2012 12:15 pm · Comments (18)

“Fifty Shades” … tells the story of Anastasia Steele, an inexplicably virginal recent college graduate, and Christian Grey, the impossibly handsome and twisted 27-year-old billionaire who falls for her. Boy meets girl, boy whips girl, boy loses girl. In the end, … Ana has it her way: She declines to sign Grey’s “submissive” contract; they keep on having kinky sex, but not too much; and Steele helps Grey recover from his wounded childhood. …

It has ushered in a moment of frank talk about women’s sexual needs and desires. … Leonard, the author, makes the key distinction: between women’s fantasies and their realities. “In real life, I think it’s something very, very different,” she told NBC. “You want someone who does the dishes.” (more)

A symbiotic relationship [is] developing between the Obama campaign, with its style-conscious first lady who dons a wide variety of American designers, and a deep-pocketed, largely Democratic fashion industry, which has been increasingly coordinating its support of Obama. … Name an American designer. Vera Wang. Michael Kors. Diane von Furstenberg. Michelle Obama wears these American luxury labels and a host of others, earning her consistent praise from a fickle industry. …

The first lady’s campaign spokeswoman Olivia Alair said: “The first lady thinks that women should wear whatever makes them feel good and be comfortable. That’s how the first lady chooses her own clothes and based on no other considerations.” (more)

Right. Most women have no interest in impossibly handsome 27 year old billionaires who don’t do the dishes. And Michelle Obama only wears Democrat donor fashion items because they just happen to be the most comfortable clothes available.

These people didn’t believe these things when they said them, and 95% of people who hear them don’t believe them either. Yet we all know they are the things these people are supposed to say to avoid seeming unacceptably cynical.

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Hypocrisy In The Lab

By Robin Hanson · June 12, 2012 8:20 pm · Comments (3)

We show with a laboratory experiment that individuals adjust their moral principles to the situation and to their actions, just as much as they adjust their actions to their principles. We first elicit the individuals’ principles regarding the fairness and unfairness of allocations in three different scenarios (a Dictator game, an Ultimatum game, and a Trust game). One week later, the same individuals are invited to play those same games with monetary compensation. Finally in the same session we elicit again their principles regarding the fairness and unfairness of allocations in the same three scenarios. Our results show that individuals adjust abstract norms to fit the game, their role and the choices they made. …

The strong side bends the norm in its favor and the weak side agrees : Stated fairness is a compromise with power. … The adjustment of principles to actions is mainly the fact of individuals who behave more selfishly and who have a stronger bargaining power. The moral hypocrisy displayed (measured by the discrepancy between statements and actions chosen followed by an adjustment of principles to actions) appears produced by the attempt, not necessarily conscious, to strike a balance between self-image and immediate convenience. (more; HT Dan Houser)

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War Injustice

By Robin Hanson · June 11, 2012 2:55 pm · Comments (19)

As frequent WWII movies continue to show, our culture uses that war as our clearest icon of a just war. So it is important to remember how much injustice there was on the “just” side:

Between 1945 and 1950, Europe witnessed the largest episode of forced migration, and perhaps the single greatest movement of population, in human history. Between 12 million and 14 million German-speaking civilians—the overwhelming majority of whom were women, old people, and children under 16—were forcibly ejected from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts of Poland. … They were deposited among the ruins of Allied-occupied Germany to fend for themselves as best they could. The number who died as a result of starvation, disease, beatings, or outright execution is unknown, but conservative estimates suggest that at least 500,000 people lost their lives in the course of the operation.

Most disturbingly of all, tens of thousands perished as a result of ill treatment while being used as slave labor in a vast network of camps extending across central and southeastern Europe—many of which, like Auschwitz I and Theresienstadt, were former German concentration camps kept in operation for years after the war. … Ironically, no more than 100 or so miles away from the camps being put to this new use, the surviving Nazi leaders were being tried by the Allies in the courtroom at Nuremberg on a bill of indictment that listed “deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population” under the heading of “crimes against humanity.”

By any measure, the postwar expulsions were a manmade disaster and one of the most significant examples of the mass violation of human rights in recent history. Yet although they occurred within living memory, in time of peace, and in the middle of the world’s most densely populated continent, they remain all but unknown outside Germany itself. …

Contradicting Allied rhetoric that asserted that World War II had been fought above all to uphold the dignity and worth of all people, the Germans included, thousands of Western officials, servicemen, and technocrats took a full part in carrying out a program that, when perpetrated by their wartime enemies, they did not hesitate to denounce as contrary to all principles of humanity. (more)

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