Gall's Law

I really like this law. Anyone know how true it is?

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

It seems to say something like: 'You can't solve an optimization problem directly, you have to iterate'.

Although I can think of immediate counterexamples when it's stated like that, it brings to mind Galois' discovery that you can't directly solve a quintic equation by arithmetic plus extraction of roots. And so I wonder if that itself might be an example of a much more general truth along the lines of 'general solutions are always more complicated than the problems they solve, and so the direct solution to any sufficiently complicated problem is usually uncomputable except by approximation methods'.

So, can anyone think of any complex systems designed from scratch that worked?
Or complex problems that have easily computed solutions?

But actually Gall's Law says more than that. It says that if you've got a starting point of great complexity, your iteration process will work better if you give up and start again.

That again seems likely in the context of numerical solution of polynomials. Pick a random number as the start of your search and unless you're unreasonably lucky then the search will take longer than if you seeded the search with zero.

So, can anyone think of any complex systems designed from scratch which, although they didn't work to start with, quickly converged to working systems without going back through previous known working designs?

Consequentialism FAQ

This is very good, if you like this sort of thing: http://www.raikoth.net/consequentialism.html

 I think I might be more sympathetic to consequentialism after reading it.

Brave 3D (Film)

This film in no way perpetuates cultural or gender stereotypes.

Fierce flame-haired daughters should be taken to see it, that they may learn humility and obedience.

Intelligence Explosion : We Already Have The Hardware

We have an example of an intelligence made out of matter, our own brain.

Whatever human-level intelligence is, it can be done on hardware of that complexity.

So it's worth asking what the complexity of that hardware is.

We think that whatever it is the brain actually does, the important level for understanding it is the neuron/synapse level.

Neurons look like transistors with thousands of legs and one output. Synapses are the connections between them.

The transistors that we know invariably have two legs. But we can chain them together to make a structure with a thousand legs and one output. We need a thousand transistors to do that.

So it could be that to make a working model of a brain, which implements the same algorithm, we'd need as many transistors as the human brain has synapses.

It's estimated that there are 100 000 000 000 000 000 synapses in a brain! (10^14)

Our largest commercial processors have something like 1 000 000 000 transistors (10^9).

So at first glance, it looks like we're five orders of magnitude short. That's a long way. It's the difference between a 1950s computer and a year 2000 computer. And we've got absolutely no way to predict whether the development of computers will continue at the astonishing rate that it's been going at over the last half of the twentieth century.

So most people who worry about the Singularity think that it's waiting on the hardware, and that the necessary hardware may never come.

But consider. The rate at which neurons can fire is something like 1000Hz. The speed of transistors in current chips is more like 3 GHz. That's six orders of magnitude.

It's always been our experience that making a computer ten times faster gives it more speed than making it ten times larger.

So I reckon that if we could work out what it is the brain is actually doing, then we could, on the sort of cheap hardware that lives in your desktop computer, make something that could do what the brain does, but at 10 times the speed.

And all my estimates above are highly conservative. Individual transistors can run much faster than GHz speeds. The speed limit for processor chips is to do with heat output and synchronization of the clock pulses across the entire chip. A neuron with 1000 inputs and one output probably can't do as much information processing as 1000 transistors.

And Moore's Law is currently continuing steadily. And whatever the brain does it is highly parallel, and nothing stops us linking processors together to get more total transistors, so if we knew how the brain worked and had a proper research budget to build a good one with, we should be able to make a brain that ran at least 1000 times faster than our own brains do.

But a lot of what our brains do is stuff like speech recognition, or vision. Computationally very hard, but not what we think of when we think of 'intelligence'. Whenever humans try to think about engineering problems, we run into having to do mathematics, or memorizing complex things. We are unbelievably slow at that sort of thing, which is actually computationally very simple.

At calculation, memory, symbolic manipulation, almost all the things that human intellectuals have traditionally found most difficult and most impressive, computer brains just blow us away by factors of billions.

These things are not natural for us. They take a great deal of training and practice. Consider the difference between a human child learning her own language and a human child learning the calculus.

Or your own ability to read emotions on strangers' faces versus your ability to solve simple probability questions.

This says to me that in order to do those things, we're in fact using mechanisms that were designed (by evolution) to do something else, and our schooling is a process of carefully repurposing and perverting these mechanisms to do new things, but to do them really badly and slowly.

A real computer brain could probably outspeed us by a factor of 1000 at the things that we're really good at, and that the great majority of humans can do very well, like catching cricket balls, or walking on two legs over rough ground, or imagining what is going on in other human brains, or finding our way home along a route after we've just walked a long way without a map, or recognising where would be a nice place to live, or throwing rocks, or throwing punches.

But at the things that we've traditionally thought of as our highest intellectual achievements, the things that very few humans can do well, which look more like accidental consequences of whatever our brains are actually for, things like mathematics and planning and logic and probability and scientific discovery, I would imagine that the speed factor would be more like several billion.

Luckily, we have absolutely no idea how the brain works, or what computations it performs.

If we knew how the brain worked, and what information processing it performed to work its miracles, and someone were fool enough to build a computer to do those computations, then they would have created a being which could recapitulate the whole of human scientific thought from Aristotle to Einstein in a few minutes.

That wouldn't really be something I'd like to play chess with. I've no idea how it would play. But I'm damned sure it would win.

A Slightly Harder Problem in Decision Theory

I'd be surprised if a cat could do this. But it think it uses the exact same tools as the easy one. 

The eccentric millionaire Oswald Mega walks into a bar and he says:

"This morning, I was showing my newborn about Dungeons and Dragons. We took a couple of six sided dice and rolled them, and wrote the results, which are just numbers from 2 to 12, on a piece of paper with 2D6 written at the top.

Then we took a twelve sided dice, and we wrote 1D12 at the top of a piece of paper, and then we rolled it lots and wrote down the results, numbers between 1 and 12, on the paper.

How she laughed at the difference in the patterns! Truly fatherhood is a joy.

Now, I've brought one of the pieces of paper with me, and if you can tell me which one it is, I'll give you £1000.

How much would you be willing to pay me to know the value of the first number on the sheet?"

And actually there might be some feline subsystem that solves a problem a bit like this.

A Deepness in the Sky (Vernor Vinge)

Vernor Vinge is a modern prophet. The inventor and populariser of the idea of a Singularity. Like Niven, a mathematician as well as a science fiction writer.

His most famous book is A Fire Upon the Deep. It's a clever and enjoyable book containing several excellent ideas, and it has a minor character in it called Pham Nuwen, who vaguely remembers the Slow Zone and the trading empire called the Qeng Ho.

Vinge's Universe is divided into regions, in order to avoid the modern science fiction writer's difficulty that even the very near future is likely to be incomprehensibly weird.

Gravity is opposed to Mind and Speed, so that the center of the Galaxy, the Unthinking Depths, is a place where no mind can exist at all.

The Slow Zone, which contains the Earth, can support human-level organic minds, and slower than lightspeed travel, but that's it.

Further from the core, you get the Beyond, where you can go as fast as you like and good computers are possible.

And after that, the Transcend, where intelligent minds become Gods and there is a Power known as The Old One, because it has been in continuous existence for ten full years.

I'm pretty sure that the reason for this scheme is that Vinge can't see how to set an interesting future story in the real laws of physics, where any technology much in advance of ours will just undergo Singularity and become a sphere of incomprehensible superintelligence expanding and destroying at the speed of light. He wants to play with these ideas but he has to keep a place where humans can exist in order to tell a story.

I was expecting the sequel, A Deepness in the Sky to be more of the same, to be honest.

But actually no, it's set entirely in the Slow Zone. It tells the story of Pham Nuwen and the Qeng Ho, and it tells this story as part of telling another excellent story about a single incident towards the end of Pham Nuwen's life, when he becomes involved in a first contact mission to an alien civilization.

The Spiders are the sympathetic characters here. They're very believable and actually quite interestingly alien, but also recognisably mid-20th century British. While the humans are the weird, monstrous lurking evil presence in space.

By the end of the book, you're completely rooting for the lovable aliens against the human space monsters.

The nice thing is that this is done whilst telling the entire story from the human point of view, and despite the fact that most of the humans are themselves sympathetic and likeable.

It's an unbelievable tour de force of shifting viewpoints and interwoven stories. Roles change around as the stories unfold and there are real and unexpected heroes and villians and victims.

This joins "Protector" and "The Sparrow" on my list of favourite books of all time. It's just much much better than its predecessor (and sequel) A Fire Upon the Deep, which is itself an entertaining, imaginative, thoughtful and important novel.

If I wrote science fiction, I'd like it to be like this. In the way that Sinatra sings the way I'd sing if I could. I'm now going to methodically hunt down and read everything Vinge has ever written.

Shangri-La Diet : Trouble in Paradise

Over the last couple of days, I've noticed a return of appetite. Nothing major, but I'm certainly remembering what it's like to feel peckish.

In particular, I've noticed that I'm actually looking forward to my couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Indeed I've been watching myself looking for excuses to have a third spoonful.

This is rather worrying. If Seth Robert's theory is true, then what that means is that I've managed to learn the flavour of the stuff and associate it with the extra calories that it's providing.

Shangri-La now predicts that it will act as a set-point raiser and my appetite should return in full force.

That means that Sainsbury's Mild Olive Oil is now just a normal food for me.

Oh well, off to the supermarket looking for oils that are unlikely to taste of anything at all.

Reading the labels when you know that what you're looking for is 'tasteless dregs ripped from the corpses of olives by unnatural means after all the good stuff is gone' is a most enlightening experience.

After a process of eliminating anything that claims to have any sort of taste, the candidates are:

Borges Extra Light Olive Oil
"True to the land and true to a long and deep-rooted family tradition"
"the result of an extraordinary blend of high quality refined oil and a slight touch of Extra Virgin Olive Oil"

I'm assuming that by 'slight touch' they mean 'homeopathic quantities'. It tastes pretty damned bland, but there's a slight nasty aftertaste.

Napolina Light and Mild Olive Oil
"Expertly blended for a softer and more delicate taste"
"composed of refined olive oils and virgin olive oils. comprising exclusively olive oils that have undergone refining and oils obtained directly from olives"

Ugh! This is actually bitter. If you put this on food it would make it inedible. What in the name of God do you have to do to olive oil before you're no longer allowed to claim that it has been obtained directly from olives?


Filippo Berio Mild and Light Olive Oil
"All the benefits of Olive Oil without a distinct olive flavour"
"composed of refined olive oils and virgin olive oils. comprising exclusively olive oils that have undergone refining and oils obtained directly from olives"

Notice that the second text is the same as the Napolina version. I wonder if they're the same company. If not, has one set of weasels actually stolen the weasel-words from the other set of weasels?

This is actually not bad stuff. It's very like the Sainsbury's stuff except even blander. Unfortunately I think I like it a bit too much. It's presumably the same taste as the stuff I've habituated to.

And finally for completeness:

Sainsbury's Vegetable Oil
"We're sure you'll love this product. If you don't simply return for a full refund"
"rapeseed oil"

I wholeheartedly approve of the lack of weaselling here. No one is even pretending that this is good for anything other than frying chips.

As far as I can tell, this tastes of absolutely nothing at all. I neither like nor dislike it. It is therefore declared the victor.

Sure enough, a hearty swig from the bottle is in no way a pleasant experience, and thirty minutes later I can no longer remember why anyone would ever want to eat anything ever.

I am changing my experimental protocol to read "Two Tablespoons of Sainsbury's Vegetable Oil" instead of "Two Tablespoons of Sainsbury's Mild Olive Oil"

I don't think I'm cheating here. Anyone disagree?

And does anyone want three bottles of nasty olive oil? Otherwise they're going on the common in the hope that something will enjoy them and that they won't kill the grass. No way is any of these horrors going anywhere near actual food.

The things I do for Science. I'm not even fat.

Intelligence Explosion

Recently I've been asking for help battling against an overwhelming complex of science-fictiony beliefs that I'm coming to hold. I hate having these beliefs, mainly because they feel uncannily like what I'd imagine a new religion must feel like to an early believer. It's very much not compatible with my self-image to fall for a millennial cult, and I trust that feeling.

So I've asked various friends to have a look at this belief-complex, in the hope that they can point out where it's a load of rubbish.

I'd actively like to be ridiculed here.

I once started feeling all spiritual after a particularly pleasant evening in King's College Chapel listening to Bach, and a few minutes of ridicule was enough to dispel the feeling and save me from the hideous mind-virus that is Christianity.

Unfortunately, the point in this set of ideas that people are consistently choosing to attack is the idea of an intelligence explosion. The same friend who saved my soul from Christ just looked at the idea of an intelligence explosion and said 'Nah, can't happen', and then stopped thinking.

The possibility of Intelligence Explosion is something that I've been worried about for many years, and it's not the bit that feels religious. It just feels like a threat that ought to be taken seriously. A bit like 'Earth might be Hit by an Asteroid', or 'Global Warming', or 'Nanotechnology Eeek!' or 'Nuclear War', or 'Flu Epidemic', or 'Worldwide Dictatorship', or 'Surveillance State', or 'Terrorists Who are Actually Good at it Rather than Mediaeval Halfwits with Towels on they Heads'.

i.e. It's a horrible existential risk, but there's bugger all I can do about it, and it's fun to think about, and it probably won't happen in my lifetime anyway.

I don't have children, I don't plan to, and although I care about you and your children, and hope for immortality myself, I don't care/believe enough to mean that I can't think straight about these problems and look them in the face.

And the idea of an intelligence explosion is just obvious in retrospect, isn't it? Like the idea of a chain reaction, or the infinity of the prime numbers. I'd never have thought of it myself, but once someone points it out, your head would have to be way broken not to take it seriously.

And it occurs to me that if I think it's that obvious, and I think that I am good at explaining ideas, then I should be able to make it obvious to other people. And so I'm going to try.

A Very Easy Problem in Decision Theory

Honestly, I reckon a cat could do this one, mutatis mutandis:

A barrell contains 25% diamonds, and 75% circles.

10% of the diamonds are blue, the rest are red.

80% of the circles are blue, the rest are red.

One of the objects is pulled out at random, and you're told the colour.

You can take a guess at the shape. If you're right, then you get $10, if you're wrong then you get a $1 for your trouble.

You do pretty well if you always guess circle. Can you do better?

In fact it could be argued that a cat is a mechanism for solving such problems, amongst others.

Is Murder Immoral? Is it Possible to Achieve Immortality by Not Dying?

It seems to me that if you're a materialist, then Cryonics is a pretty good bet.

When you die, you get your ass frozen in liquid nitrogen.

The argument that convinces most programmers that this might work is: 'this is not a secure delete algorithm'. If you take the hard drive out of a computer and put it in a fridge, then later on, you can read the data off it even if the mechanism's buggered.

If you want to make sure the data is not recovered, then you have to work a bit harder. If you put it on a bonfire for example, then that data is never coming back.

All the traditional methods of corpse disposal are bonfire-like. No way to reconstruct the information that was once there.

But cryonics will preserve the brain in the state it was a few hours after your heart stops, and at that point, we can imagine (with some difficulty) reading out the connections between the neurons. If that's all there is to being you (which is our best guess), then we can either (with difficulty) rebuild a brain with that wiring, or (easily) run a computer simulation of one.

And any good materialist has to reason: "I can have a conversation with this new person/computer program, and he will claim both to be conscious, and to be John, and be quite sincere in that, so I had better accept that he is John."

But of course, once we've done this, do we destroy the original body? Do we destroy the records?

What if, one day, long after your new self has headed off swanning around the Milky Way, someone finds a way to resurrect the actual body, rather than just the pattern? Which of these two people is you? What if they just make two copies of you? What if they slow down the clock on the computer simulation so much that the next scheduled tick is after the heat death of the universe? Have you just died again? Should you mind?

It looks like we're about to build a transporter. In our real universe, not our fictional one. Which of course is why I'm currently worrying about the morality of Star Trek. It's easier to think about, but the issues are the same.

It gets worse.

If you throw your hands up and decide that the future cop(y/ies) of you aren't you in any sense that matters to you (no one else will notice any problem), then consider the following:

When you go to sleep, you lose consciousness. Overnight, the configuration of your brain, the very atoms of your brain change much more than they would in an hundred years of cryonic storage.

If the cryonic you isn't you, then neither is the you that will be tomorrow.

Do you believe that you die every night, and someone else wakes up every morning?

If that's true, it's not so bad. We've been putting up with it for ages, and never suffered the slightest inconvenience by it.

If you give someone a drug that makes them sleep for days, have you killed them?

If you give them a drug that makes them sleep for years, have you killed them?

If you freeze them while they are asleep and wake them up thousands of years later, have you killed them?

If you freeze them while they are asleep, keep them revivable but never revive them, at what point did you kill them?

What the hell does it even mean, to be immortal?

Consciousness, we directly experience. No philosophy that does not account for it is acceptable to me.

Continuity of consciousness, not so much. Why should I care whether or not someone who isn't quite me, but who is quite like me, rises from the dead in 100 years time?

But then if I buy that and decide I don't care, why should I care if someone who isn't me, but who is quite a bit less like me that the revived cryonics patient would be, rises from my bed tomorrow morning?

So can anyone come up with an argument against cryonics (which costs around £30000 plus hassle) that doesn't also imply that if I thought someone was trying to kill me in my sleep I shouldn't mind?

Does Smoking Prevent Lung Cancer?

In 1964 the US Surgeon General released a famous report showing that smokers were much more likely to die of lung cancer.

This report came under attack from statisticians all over the world, since it had reported a correlation and inferred a causation.

The legendary Hans Eysenck, who coincidentally at the time was receiving a very large amount of research money from the tobacco companies, proposed that there might be some sort of hidden factor which caused both smoking and lung cancer.

This argument was greeted with the derision it deserved, and served mainly to discredit Eysenck in the eyes of the public, and cement the reputation of the tobacco companies as weaselly amoral murderers ( I speak as a happy customer of many years. )

But ridicule and cries of "come off it" shouldn't be enough to demolish an argument. I believe that they laughed at Christopher Columbus, when he said the world was round[1]

Can we make Eysenck's argument look good?

Well, suppose that there were a vitamin deficiency disease, associated with the currently undiscovered Vitamin N.

Primarily it affects the lungs. If you're deficient in this vitamin, your lungs don't work so well, and you have a tendency to develop lung cancers in later life.

As it happens, one of the hundreds of ingredients in tobacco smoke is chemically close to Vitamin N. When people with the deficiency smoke, they find that they enjoy it! A bit like if you haven't eaten fruit for a while, Vitamin C tablets taste extra-nice.

If this was the whole story, then we'd expect to see that non-smokers died of lung cancer much more often than smokers. Which we obviously don't see.

But what's a vitamin and what isn't is genetically determined. Almost all animals can make their own vitamin C. For some reason, the fruit-eating great apes, who have a lot of it in their diet anyway, have lost the ability. Humans are a type of great ape. So we don't have the ability either, but we've moved away from the diet of fresh fruit without regaining the ability.

Without a source of vitamin C, we die of scurvy. Luckily we can get it from fruit or fresh meat. If we start trying to live on preserved foods, without taking precautions, we die.

But there must have been a point in the history of the great apes where there were some apes who had the ability to make vitamin C, and some who didn't. It just didn't matter very much when they lived on fruit.

So suppose there's a gene for making vitamin N. Some people have it, and some don't.

Let's say that half of people have the gene.

They don't tend to take up smoking because it doesn't cure any lack they have, so they never 'get the taste'. Suppose 20% of them smoke. And they're unlikely to get cancer. Say 20% chance. But if they smoke, it does protect them a bit, so they only have a 5% chance.

But the other half of the people don't have the gene. Unaided by tobacco, they'll have a full 90% chance of spontaneously contracting lung cancer. If they're lucky enough to try smoking at school, then they'll find it very enjoyable, will likely continue to smoke all their lives (80% chance) and it will reduce their death rate to 80% (it's not a very good substitute for vitamin N, but it does some good).

What will the numbers look like in this world? ( Which I find all too plausible. Nature is always playing nasty tricks like this. )

Consider 200 people:

100 of them have the gene, 20 of those smoke, and 1 gets cancer. 80 don't smoke, and 16 get cancer.

100 of them don't have the gene, 80 of them smoke, of whom 64 get cancer. 20 don't, and 18 of them get it.

So if we don't know about vitamin N or the gene for it, and we do a cancer study, then

100 smokers, 65 cancers
100 non-smokers, 34 cancers

and the US Surgeon General issues his report, and up goes a huge public outcry against tobacco, and a few statisticians point out that correlation is not causation, and are ignored.


Exercises for the Reader:

This argument is utter bollocks from start to finish. But why?

Next time someone publishes a study saying that vitamin supplements shorten life expectancy, what will you believe?

The standard answer to this sort of question is a controlled randomized trial. Consider how the idea of an experiment where you ask people to take up smoking is likely to go down at the ethics committee meeting that decides whether you're allowed to do it.

No, you can't do it on dogs. Dogs don't get scurvy either. They can make their own vitamin C. That's why they can live on tinned meat and dry biscuits.


----------------------------------------------------------------

1/ Actually sailors have always known the world was round. They laughed at Christopher Columbus for badly miscalculating the size of the thing and thinking he could sail to India the long way round. The error should have killed him and his men, but they got lucky and found the Caribbean Islands instead. I believe that Colombus died thinking that he had found a nice short route to India. Jamaicans today immortalize this mistake by calling themselves West Indians.

Simpson's Paradox

Suppose that you went to the doctor, and he told you that you had cancer.

And he said that there were two possible drugs, placebifen and nogudox, which he could give you.

And luckily there had just been a big survey done, where they tracked the progress of lots of cancer sufferers, taking both drugs, and a higher fraction of people taking nogudox recovered.

Which of the two would you ask him to prescribe, do you think?

A while later, you're at the pharmacist, collecting your nogudox, and the chemist tells you that he has just seen a large survey published in the science supplement of the Wisbech Advertiser, where for males like yourself, placebifen proved to be the better drug.

And because this is the twenty first century, and the Advertiser has an online edition, you go googling, and actually it is worse than that.

In the WA survey, placebifen was indeed slightly better for males with your type of cancer, but it was also slightly better for females.

So now you are a bit confused. If you are a man, placebifen works better, and if you are a woman, placebifen works better, but if you are a person, then you should go for nogudox.

What on earth do you think is going on?

As fine a place as the internet is, it's probably time to talk to your doctor. He looks at both surveys, and looks a bit grave. It turns out that the Advertiser has published the same survey as he read in the Lancet, but they put the conclusions in the other order. (Obviously no-one ever troubles to read the bits in the middle. In fact many journals, to save on typesetting expenses, simply replace everything between abstract and conclusion with

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec a diam lectus. Sed sit amet ipsum mauris. Maecenas congue ligula ac quam viverra nec consectetur ante hendrerit. Donec et mollis dolor. Praesent et diam eget libero egestas mattis sit amet vitae augue. Nam tincidunt congue enim, ut porta lorem lacinia consectetur. Donec ut libero sed arcu vehicula ultricies a non tortor. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aenean ut gravida lorem. Ut turpis felis, pulvinar a semper sed, adipiscing id dolor. Pellentesque auctor nisi id magna consequat sagittis. Curabitur dapibus enim sit amet elit pharetra tincidunt feugiat nisl imperdiet. Ut convallis libero in urna ultrices accumsan. Donec sed odio eros. Donec viverra mi quis quam pulvinar at malesuada arcu rhoncus. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. In rutrum accumsan ultricies. Mauris vitae nisi at sem facilisis semper ac in est.

Here are the conclusions of the survey:

In the Lancet:

            survival rate
placebifen  26%
nogudox     28%


In the Advertiser:

for males only

            survival rate
placebifen  20%
nogudox     15%

for females only

            survival rate
placebifen  40%
nogudox     35%

Pretty clearly, placebifen has a 5% advantage as a cancer cure, whether you're male or female.

Just as clearly, nogudox has a 2% advantage as a cancer cure if you're either.

If you're anything like me, and you haven't seen this sort of thing before, then you're staring in disbelief at these numbers, thinking 'But maths just can't work that way'.

That goes to show just how bad our intuitions are on matters of statistics and probability. I've seen this several times before, and I just constructed this example, and there is still a little voice shouting 'It cannot be'.

Here are the  actual numbers from the survey:

males given placebifen:   lived 40  died 160
males given nogudox:      lived 15  died 85
females given placebifen: lived 40  died 60
females given nogudox:    lived 70  died 130

Check the percentages yourself.

Death is Bad

Nick Bostrom has just dropped this anvil on my head with extreme force with his short story:

http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

Shangri-La Diet II: Details of Test and Predictions for Second Month

The variables I can measure are:

favourite belt notch (1-6, where 1 is fat and 6 is thin)
appetite loss (subjective, I'll say can be either perceptible or not.)

My current state:

belt: 3 (that's comfy in the morning and stays comfy all day. Any looser and my trousers head south, any tighter and I'm conscious of wearing it too tight. Although when sitting down for long periods the damned thing cuts into my waist, so I tend to remove it entirely.)

appetite: I usually seem to be eating a fairly light 'brunch' and then not wanting anything else all day.
This is unbelievable for me. When people suggest going out for dinner I either go for social reasons and eat small amounts, or sometimes I just can't face it at all. Twice during the last month I have refused to go for a curry with old friends I don't see that often. I'm fairly sure that I have never done that before in my whole life and it felt weird. I was keen on the idea of the conversation and the taste, and I think commensal eating is very important for social reasons, but I just couldn't face the idea of eating.
(Even more weirdly, I've gone off fags and coffee, my skin and hair seem softer than usual, and various joint aches that have been building up over a misspent middle age have cleared up. As if someone was oiling them! That's just got to be psychosomatic, hasn't it?)

My original state:

Before I tried this I was at belt 2 in the morning, moving to 1 in the evening, and my appetite was "normal for me" (i.e. I don't think about eating usually, and in fact sometimes forget to eat and am reminded by headache or weakness, but become ravenous in the presence of food and eat vast amounts.)

The actual predictions of my six theories for the end of the month of August I decree to be:

Helplessness (weight stays the same, some loss of appetite to compensate for oil):

     1  2  3   4 5 6
yes  1  25 50 25 1 1
no   1  25 50 25 1 1
(total 203)

Willpower (no appetite loss, weight gain)

    1 2   3 4 5 6  
yes 5 5   5 5 1 1
no  5 75 25 5 1 1
(total 134)

Shangri-La (appetite loss, further weight loss)

    1 2  3  4   5 6
yes 1 5 25  75 25 5
no  1 5  5  5   5 5
(total 134)


I don't know what the Ruth theories predict about appetite loss, but if it works like Seth Roberts says, then learning the new flavours should bring back my appetite, so:

Ruth I (appetite returns, rebound back to original weight, possible overshoot)

    1   2 3 4 5 6
yes 5   5 5 1 1 1
no  25 50 5 1 1 1
(total 166)

Ruth II (have lost weight for month 1, will now plateau for 2 and 3, hard rain to fall in 4)

    1  2  3 4 5 6
yes 5 25 50 5 1 1
no  5 25 50 5 1 1
(total 174)

Ruth III (continue to lose weight as before, expect plateau 3 and 4, rebound months 5 and 6)

     1 2  3  4  5 6
yes  1 5 25 50 25 5
no   1 5  5  5  5 5
(total 137)


And what I think I should currently believe is represented by: 


H40:W36:S9:RI5:RII5:RIII5

If anyone is still reading this and can spot any place where I seem to be trying to fool myself, I'd very much appreciate correcting. I have a horrible feeling that if I was trying to test aromatherapy as a weight-loss technique I'd be writing similar posts and believing similar things.

Shangri-La Diet II: Another Go with More Theories

I'm going to carry on with the crazed oil-eating for another month and see what happens.

Currently my belt likes to be on its third notch all day.

My plan is to drink two tablespoons of (to me, utterly tasteless) Sainsbury's Mild Olive Oil as soon as I get up, then not to allow myself to touch anything I can taste (including toothpaste) for the next hour (best accomplished by going back to bed for an extra hour). After that I'm trying to deliberately forget that I'm trying to lose weight and eat what I like, when I like.

I called the three models that I had Willpower, Helplessness, and Shangri-La, and they make the following predictions:

Willpower: Eating 300kcals worth of oil every day on top of eating normally should result in weight gain.

Helplessness: Slight appetite loss should compensate exactly for extra calories, no change.

Shangri-La: Severe appetite loss should result in further weight loss.

I also want to introduce a new theory, which I shall call "Ruth". Ruth on the basis of many experiences with diets thinks that any new diet will work for a while, but after a bit you'll put all the weight back on.

That strikes me not compatible with the willpower model. If it's just to do with how much you eat over how much you exercise, then once you've lost the weight there's no reason that it should go back on.

But it is compatible with helplessness. By force of conscious will you can make yourself eat less, but your weight will drop below your 'set point', and the pressure from your subconscious to eat will grow greater, until you break and start eating enough to get your weight back up to where it's supposed to be.

And it's also compatible with the theory behind Shangri-La. As far as I understand it, Seth Roberts also predicts weight loss from any strange new diet. Your set point drops in response to not tasting familiar tastes as often, but after a while you adjust to associate the new tastes with calories, and then your set point returns to normal. In fact it was noticing this effect in both rats and on himself that prompted him to start trying to break that link. As I remember he predicts that the time lag for learning the new flavours is around a week. I'm pretty sure that's not happening to me. If it was, I'd be looking forward to my daily olive oil dose by now. As it is, it still tastes entirely neutral. I neither like nor dislike it.

Ruth doesn't say how long the cycle should take. So I'm going to split her theory into three: Ruth I, which says that you should lose weight on a new diet for one month, and then the next month should return to normal. Ruth II gives you two months of weight loss and two months of regain, and Ruth III is the three month version.

I think Ruth knows what she's talking about: Apparently the only robust result in nutrition science is that any attempt at weight loss eventually fails and the weight goes back on.

So I'm going to mess with my prior (currently H55:W36:S9). Ruth's theories seem like versions of my Helplessness scheme, so I'm going to take 15 points from that, and split it three ways between RI, RII, and RIII.

So, my prior beliefs are now frigged to be (H40:W36:S9:RI5:RII5:RIII5).

I must say that this really doesn't feel like what I actually believe. After last month's dramatic success I have a strong hunch that Seth Roberts is right. But I'm trying to use Bayes' Theorem to keep me honest.

So my official rational beliefs are now that last month's weight loss was a fluke, and that either the traditional Willpower (eat less, exercise more to lose weight), or my own Paleo/Helplessness theory (as long as you avoid fast carbs it doesn't matter what you eat, your weight will stay at its set point, bad luck if your set point is too high or too low) are true.

But I'm now allowing a combined quarter chance to a combination of Seth Robert's Shangri La Diet theory and Ruth's rebound theories.

And because my actual emotional belief has shifted strongly towards 'Roberts is right', I'll need to watch myself very carefully looking for ways in which I'm screwing up my observations or my priors to fool myself.

Never trust a brain! I'll repeat "If it's true I want to believe it's true. If it's false I want to believe it's false." several times every morning in the hope that it will magically make the untrusted hardware I'm running on more sciency!

Shangri La Diet: It Works!

This post is getting a lot of hits, months after I wrote it, so I ought to qualify it. In the initial month of trying the Shangri-La diet, it seemed to work a treat. After that it got complicated, and there are several further posts on this blog about what went wrong and how I tried to get it working again.  

I certainly weigh less than before I tried it, but the amazing initial success lasted for exactly a month and then failed, in exactly the manner that habitual dieter friends have told me that any 'miracle diet' always does. 

After that, I had to hack it a bit to get it to start working again, and that required that I understood the mechanism by which it is supposed to work. I then experienced a couple of months of slow weight loss.

I am sure that this (modified version) works for me. Your mileage may vary, but I do recommend you try it. You'll know quickly whether it works for you, but if it does, watch out carefully for signs that you're getting used to the taste of the tasteless calorie source, and take appropriate action. The version that worked for me is:

Drink 300 calories worth of extra-light olive oil first thing every morning and immediately wash the taste away with water. Let nothing except plain water pass your lips for one hour after that. Apart from that, eat whatever you like, whenever, for whatever reason. It doesn't matter in the slightest if you miss the odd day.

Here's the original post:

---

Well, in a qualified way.

The favourite notch on my belt has moved one place smaller. I'm visibly thinner and feel it. And the appetite loss is undeniable. I've pretty much forgotten what it's like to be hungry.

I'm slightly annoyed to have found evidence for something so silly on my first attempt to run an experiment on myself, and I strongly suspect that I've done something wrong, but I can't figure out what.

There are various reasons to believe that I've fooled myself here, but I don't find any of them really convincing:

Primarily, I've smoked more this month than I was expecting: There've been many cricket matches to play, many birthdays to celebrate, an old friend died and there were two associated wakes, and the Town Bumps races led to entire week of heavy drinking.

So I've essentially been drunk for the entire month. When you're drunk your willpower goes, and this tends to lead to smoking. But I'm nowhere near back to my usual rate.

But this may well be the whole reason for the weight loss. If a mild increase in smoking works this well I'm surprised it's not recommended for health reasons. I mean, it's obviously deadly, but I think most people would swap ten years of old age for a lifetime of obesity. And I've never heard anyone recommending heavy drinking as a route to weight loss!

My second reason for doubting myself is that I found I wanted the Shangri-La diet to work. It's clearly ridiculous, in fact if you were wanting to come up with a parody Placebo-Diet backed up with crazy pseudoscience you'd be hard-pressed to do better than this. The only improvement I can think of is to use sugar-pills instead of olive oil. And that's apparently pretty much what the original version Seth Roberts came up with was like.

Originally I was interested in checking out a hoax that appears to have convinced many people despite a complete lack of rigorous evidence. But the minute I noticed the appetite loss I started to believe, and I found I wanted it to be true. Around half-way through the month I noticed that I could wear my belt comfortably on a tighter notch in the morning, and I found myself trying to wear it on that notch throughout the day even though it became uncomfortable.

However, I've noticed this effect, and I've tried to counter it, using the defence that Eliezer Yudkowsky has called the Litany of Tarski: "If this works then I want to think it works. If this does not work then I want to think it does not work. Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want."

And I'm pretty sure now, after 30 days, that it's moved slightly more than a whole notch. My belt is comfortable on its third notch in the morning and stays there all day now. At the beginning of the month I wrote that it was notch two in the morning and needing loosening to notch one as the day wore on.

So I'm calling this as a qualified success for Seth Roberts and Shangri-La. I'll update as planned so:

The odds of this result for the Willpower theory I guessed at 5/126. for Shangri La 50/137. For Helplessness 5/126

And I took my prior to be H60:W39:S1

So I update to H 60*5/126: W 39*5/126 : S 50/137

Multiplying through and rounding off: H55:W36:S9

And suddenly I'm shocked! This doesn't reflect my current beliefs at all.

I've tried this new thing. It clearly works. Emotionally I'm convinced that it works, and I'm going to keep trying it for the next month and I now confidently expect that it will continue to work.

Bayes is telling me that I don't have enough evidence to update my beliefs like this.

Given how unlikely I thought this theory was a priori, the fact that my test has landed on its central prediction should most likely indicate that some other theory is true, but that my weight loss happened by accident.

I can completely buy that now I've thought about it. The helplessness and willpower theories have had some of their probability mass stolen by the mad Shangri-La theory, but a one-person test (even if I had made accurate priors and controlled outside factors, which I didn't even attempt), is nowhere near enough to give Shangri-La an edge.

In fact the sheer dodginess of my one-person trial, and the placebo effect and various other expectation effects mean that I shouldn't update even this much, but if I had found no effect and refused to do the full update then I'd accuse myself of being biased, so sod that.

So I'm going to try to believe that there's a ten per cent probability that the Shangri-La Diet works. I don't think my brain's really set up for that!

Counterfactual Blackmail

So I just want to mention a couple more horrors that are new to me and that we have to deal with if we are going to think morally about Star Trek.

Counterfactual Blackmail (due, I think, to Yudkowsky/Less Wrong and allies)

Imagine you are Captain Kirk and you are heading home after a hard day's teleportation and hoping that not too many people will be there.

And you meet a Romulan!

And the Romulan says: Not only did we mess with the transporter, we made a tape of exactly how to build a Kirk.

And as it happens we have holodecks.

So we have made a lot of new copies of you, and they are all in holodecks, and all having the same experience as the real Kirk, who has just met a Romulan while walking home.

And in every holodeck, the Romulan is demanding 50p, and if they do not hand it over, the holodeck is going to turn into a horrible torture chamber and we are going to extract the maximum amount of pain from every copy of Kirk that we can.

So give me 50p, or else...

You now have to ask yourself, well, this all sounds plausible. Do you feel lucky? It is only 50p, after all.

Romulans are known for keeping their promises.

All Kirks will make identical decisions, obviously. Why would one of them choose differently?

If you hand over the 50p, then you are either going to feel a bit of a fool, or you are going to cease to exist as the Romulans turn off the holodeck and disassemble you. Which as we've previously discussed, you can't work out whether you object to or not.

If you bravely reply "Fie upon thee, counterfactual scrounging-man", then maybe you can afford a Mars bar on the way home, but most likely you are going to get tortured to death.

They don't lie much, the Romulans.

Zombie Interlude

Now to my friends I am sometimes known as Space Cadet. And although I have never got to the bottom of the mystery of why, exactly, they chose this nickname, I feel that it might be something to do with the long term effects of having all these transporter-thoughts crashing around in my head when I was about twelve years old. I remember the exact Art lesson in which I decided that I didn't exist.

Luckily my grandfather (to whom I owe much in many ways) had read enough philosophy to tell me about "cogito ergo sum". Which is a branch to hang on to when you are swirling down the creek and the problem is not so much no paddle as no water.

So thanks Rene Descartes and Donald Phelan because I think that without that it might have gone badly for my infant psyche. But even now I think I could have a decent go at convincing a jury in a capital case that I have no idea how to tell right from wrong.

My eventual conclusion was "There is a me. But it is the thing that hears my thoughts, not the thing that thinks them. The universe proceeds lawfully. And I get to watch, but I have no influence. Somehow what I am tags along with physical bodies, and if I got duplicated, then presumably it would tag along with one or the other copy, or who knows? Maybe it hops from place to place and time to time and person to person. How would I know? I am the thing that exists now. I have no evidence that I existed earlier. I have no evidence that I will exist later. I have no evidence that such an inner listener exists anywhere else. Maybe I am all alone and only exist for this millisecond and that's it. But whatever. None of this can affect how I act or need affect how I feel. I might as well just imagine that everyone else feels the same and it is all just a big mystery."

As a philosophy that worked out just fine for many years. It sails through the free will vs determinism debate that seemed to so exercise the philosophers of my youth.

It actually had excellent positive consequences. As a twenty year old, I didn't identify with my forty year old self at all. I felt free to raise hell and to do many unwise things. That could have all gone badly wrong, but it didn't. And as a forty year old I'm quite grateful for that, since I've got lots of interesting memories to play with in my private Cartesian Theatre.

Unfortunately it doesn't work. Because if I'm the inner listener who hears my thoughts, but cannot influence them, who the hell is moving my fingers in such a way as to write the theory down?

It took me a while to notice this problem. But when I did, I just gave up and stopped thinking about it entirely. Which is probably the sensible thing to do.

But others are clearly more mad than me, and carried on thinking when I gave up, oh yes...

Recently I have read Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness Explained", and although I am reasonably sure that "Consciousness Denied" would be a better title, it is a riveting book full of cleverness and by the end of it I am actually pretty sure that I myself do not have the Cartesian Theatre that I am perceiving directly as I write.

But I am still sure that I exist. And there is no room for me in Dennett's philosophy. Although it is very possible that I have failed to understand him.

And I only have Eliezer Yudkowsky's word for this, because I have not read David Chalmers' thoughts on this in the original (it's on the stack, ok?), but apparently David Chalmers is also even more mad than I am, because he kept thinking about the inner listener even though he noticed that it didn't just listen, and apparently the theory isn't quite killed by this observation.

But Chalmers has elaborated in great detail just how completely insane the universe would have to be if you had both an inner listener and a zombie brain that thought exactly the same thoughts whether they were true or not.

And that is very insane indeed. And quite complicated, so I'm not going into it.

On the one side, you got Eliezer Yudkowsky and Daniel Dennett, who are proper 'it is all billiard balls' materialists, and who are obviously correct. Except that they are denying the central fact that is the only thing that I directly know about the universe: "I think therefore I am." And I am pretty close to believing that they must be zombies. Except that if they are, how would they be able to let their brains know?

And on the other side, you got David Chalmers, who sounds like his personal experience of the world is like mine. Except that if it is, how does he let his brain know? He says that he doesn't. His brain writes it all down anyway without knowing whether it's true or not. So his theory is exactly the same as Dennett/Yudkowsky, except that it has this extra bit where I exist. Which sounds like an important and necessary bit, even though it leads directly to the complete insanity of the theory.

Earlier, I called Dennett's position 'wrong' and Chalmers' 'mad'. But to be honest I take them both very seriously indeed and I have no idea what to think except that I am very very very confused.

I group the 'wrong' and the 'mad' into the camp 'right-thinking', because they make identical correct-sounding predictions about what we will actually see and feel when we do stuff.

Straightforward Cartesian Dualism. That sounds like it might be right. Except that if we have a transporter then we have an experimental test for it, and I bet it isn't. And if the mind-stuff acts on the world then it doesn't help at all, because it's still lawful billiard balls. But maybe one of the things about primitive mind-stuff is that there's something that it feels like to be it. Pah! No way. That's bonkers too and it's not going to be that easy or we would have sorted it already.

Can Murder be Immoral in Star Trek IV?

So, in the Star Trek universe, if we are right-thinking people, it looks like we can't really decide whether murder is wrong or not.

If Kirk wants to save the world while not breaking a lunch appointment, he can just send a copy of himself off to die heroically, and go for lunch. The copy can feel free to die heroically in a good cause, and if he doesn't, he can teleport home safe in the knowledge that he will never get there.

Oh come off it! At some point we have to draw the sodding line and say that randomly creating copies of people and then painlessly killing them is wrong, don't we?

But notice that there is no difference at all in the predictions of our various theories of consciousness and personal identity.

The only one that made a difference to what we anticipate seeing is Cartesian Dualism / Souls. The first time you operate a transporter you get a guy going "Grr.. Aaargh.. Brainszzz.. ", remember?

So we ruled that one in or out early doors.

All the other theories are about what it feels like to be transported. But we can't find out without actually being transported.

All the other theories make exactly the same predictions about what other people will say about the experience. They will say things like "Relax, don't worry. You step into the transporter, and then you step out on Mars. Doesn't hurt a bit. Feels like your soul comes along with you."

They don't even make any predictions about what you remember. You remember being transported hundreds of times. It's always fine. Works just like it says on the adverts.

And if the right-thinking people are right, that's just what's happening.

And if they're not, when you step into the transporter you die.

Won't actually make any difference, mind. You'll get out the other end and say: "No, feels fine.", "Looks like materialism is the way to think about all this.".

And you'll still be thinking along these lines when you get home and find the real you fucking your wife.

Can Murder be Immoral in Star Trek III?

Well, you don't kill Captain Kirk that easy, Romulan filth.

Of course he gets out of the transporter booth. He just nuts it until the plasteel breaks.

He determines that his copy is on the mother, saving the world-wise, and knocks off for an early lunch.

His wife is pleased to see him back.

When New Kirk has saved the world, he takes the transporter home. Anticipating a certain frostiness at home, Spock and Scottie frig it so that only the disassembler works, and no new Kirk appears back on earth to spoil the happy reunion.

Do you notice what has just happened here? Captain Kirk has just saved the world by having lunch, and Spock and Scottie have just murdered him for his own good.

But the final state of the world is not terribly different from what would have happened had the transporter worked fine. There is a lunch missing. Captain Kirk doesn't remember how he saved the world. Those don't look like major differences to me.

So that is pretty much that for utilitarianism and indeed all forms of consequentialist moralities, I would say.

And maybe next time you approach a transporter booth, you will be a little bit worried?

Especially if you are Kirk. Romulan spies are everywhere.

Shangri La Experiment: More Priors

Forgot that I should write down the predictions of each of my three theories in advance.
I did make some in my head, but I never got round to writing them down.

As I remember my prior predictions were:

There'll be two measurable variables:

Favourite Belt Notch (1,2,3,4,5,6) and Perceptible Loss of Appetite (yes/no)

I'll build prior probabilities by distributing 100 points around the likely predictions, and then putting 5 points in neighbouring cells, and 1s everywhere else.

Willpower (no loss of appetite, some increased girth)

     1   2  3 4 5 6
yes  5   5  5 1 1 1
no   75 25  5 1 1 1


total 126

Shangri-La (huge loss of appetite, loss of girth)

    1 2  3  4  5 6
yes 1 5 50 25 25 5
no  1 5  5  5  5 5


total 137

Helplessness (some loss of appetite, may or may not be noticeable, no change of girth)
 
    1   2 3 4 5 6
yes 5  50 5 1 1 1 
no  5  50 5 1 1 1


total 126

So for instance, if at the end of the month I am on belt notch 2, with noticeable loss of appetite, which was my actual prediction, then I can Bayesify matters thus:

prior H60:W39:S1

likelihood ratios H 50/126: W 5/126: S 5/137

new beliefs H 60*50/126: W 39*5/126: S 1*5/137

H 60*50*137: W 39*5*137: S 5*126

H 411000: W 26715: S 630

rounding:

H 937: W 60: S 1

Which looks right. If the experiment agrees with my pet theory, then I should believe in it lots.
If it disagrees with a mad theory that I don't believe in to start with, I should pretty much give up on that theory, and Willpower is getting dissed because it doesn't say I should notice a loss of appetite if I eat more.

Of course, loss of appetite is highly subjective, and I'm going to be tempted to try to make my experiment come out the way I want, which is essentially 'go, go Shangri-La, fuck off Willpower', so I should also consider what goes on if I report 'no loss of appetite, notch 2'

prior H60:W39:S1

likelihood ratios H 50/126:  W 25/126: S 5/137

new beliefs H 60*50*137: W 39*25*137: S 5*126

H 411000 : W 133575 : S 630

H753: W244: S1

Which also looks right. W is getting penalised for favouring weight gain that didn't happen more than H is getting penalised for hedging its bets on appetite loss. S is getting kicked out into the dark for getting it wrong on both counts.

etc. etc.

Can Murder be Immoral in Star Trek II?

So last post I came up with some semi-plausible bullshit to forestall objections of the 'but that couldn't possibly be true' type that for instance my father and all my friends always say straight out the box whenever I am getting all spectral.

So now let us forget about all that and just talk about the transporter from Star Trek, like men.

This wor.. (and if it doesn't in fact work this way then I could not care less and I decree the existence of a series called Space Trek that has played in selected Cartesian Theaters where it does work this way)

This works thus:

A complete scan is made of a man, and in the process his body is disassembled, and the information is transmitted, and then at the other end, the information is used to build the man up again. At which point he starts saying 'phasers to stun' and we are done.

What is it like to live in the Star Trek universe?

Well, for one thing, you know that Cartesian Dualism is wrong, and that souls do not exist.

Why? Because Captain Kirk says 'phasers to stun', instead of 'grr.. aargh.. brainszzz.. foam..', which is what he would say if his soul was missing. If adolescent-oriented speculative fiction has taught us anything it has taught us that if you suddenly rip the soul out of a man's body, that is what he will say.

So that leaves us with two forms of property dualism, and materialism, and they all make exactly the same prediction, which is that Captain Kirk gets out the transporter station at the other end and heroically saves the situation.

Now in Star Trek, nobody thinks anything of this. It is obvious why. Transporters have been used over and over again and everyone is used to them and it would just be too horrible to think that they had been ripping peoples' souls away and leaving them as epiphenomenal zombies.

As Yudkowsky has written: "How sure are we of this terrible fact?" "As sure as we can be in the total absence of evidence".

So in the Star Trek universe, I step into the transporter without the slightest worry, and it rips my soul away and I am dead. But there is a new me, and he goes home to my wife and they are both quite uncomplicatedly pleased with that.

Maybe. That's what happens if Property Dualism is true. Ouch.

The Property Dualists can argue amongst themselves whether the new guy is conscious or a zombie, but no-one but him is ever going to know one way or another, and if he is a zombie there isn't even anyone there to know. Even if my wife is Mary the Colour Scientist she is not going to have a clue about any of this.

And actually I think I do Property Dualists a disfavour here. Some of them (Chalmers e.g.) think that everything will still be ok, because not only is the new guy conscious, he is me.

So let us call them Property Dualists of type C, and let us from now on not bother to distinguish them from the Materialists.

Materialism is the default, obvious, scientific, rational form of philosophy where the mind is made of quarks and neurons and stuff and they all just bang around and stuff like consciousness and free will and stuff are a bit puzzling but words like 'emergent' tend to get banged around and everyone pretends not to notice that they deny the central fact of human existence which is impossible to express but that I personally feel very strongly about even though I totally agree that if it wasn't true I would be writing this anyway.

You may guess from this that my sympathies are not far from the Materialist and Property Dualist of type C positions, even though the first seems wrong and the second seems mad.

But I am going to create a new category unifying the wrong and the mad, who seem to make the same predictions even from a subjective experience point of view, and call it R, for right-thinking people.

So if you are a right-thinking person, like everyone in Star Trek is, you do not think it a moral obscenity that Captain Kirk goes home to his wife after a day being transported around.

But imagine now that there is a terrible transporter accident, which results in Captain Kirk's body being disassembled a minute fraction of a second after it would normally be.

If you find that terrifying, make the minute fraction of a second shorter as need be until it is not terrifying.

If you do not find that terrifying, make the interval a bit longer.........

Captain Kirk goes into the transporter, and the scanning process happens, but Spock is still there on the other side of the room, and raises an eyebrow in surprise, and Kirk, realising what is about to happen, shouts 'Stop it!', but it is too late. There is a click, and the disassembly beam comes on, and Captain Kirk is killed.

Later on, Captain Kirk goes home to his wife.

I think at this point I can say vAA!

Killing is hard to define in the Star Trek universe.

Now you tell me what is so different about it from our own dear universe where we have the Sanctity of Life.

Can Murder be Immoral in Star Trek?

I claim independent invention of these ideas, as a little boy watching Star Trek.
As an adolescent I even considered writing them up, but there wasn't Blogger. Anyway apparently they're pretty mainstream philosophy, cause I've just read about them in a paper by David Chalmers, and he references Derek Parfitt who must have been watching Star Trek at about the same time. And I've written them up using the standard language.

Right. A transporter works by scanning someone's body, to find out where all the atoms are and how they are moving, and then transmitting that information to somewhere else, where the body is reconstructed.

And this works by what in Star Trek is called 'magic'.

But can it really be done?

Well, I don't see why it would contradict any fundamental physical laws. It looks like it might be non-trivial in the extreme to actually do it, but how close could we get practically?

Here's a plan. Take a scan of someone's body which shows you where all the cells are (Cells come in discrete types. Surely this is hard, surely this is possible).

Take a stem cell from the someone, and clone and specialize by devious means that cell, until you have enough of each type of specialized cell.

Put those cells back together in the pattern you stored earlier.

And bingo! There may be some technical difficulties, but I reckon they are solvable, and I reckon what you got at the end is a pretty good copy of the original guy, except that probably he feels a bit unwell on account all his hormone balances are wrong, but with any luck this does not kill him and a night's sleep or so and he is cool. And in fact maybe he is better off, but that is for another day.

Now the problem here is that suddenly you have got two guys! Because we've totally forgotten to disassemble the previous one while we were scanning him.

And at this point there are various predictions we can make.

If we are Religious, or we are Cartesian Dualists (or members of an allied trade), then we imagine that the second guy has no soul. And we predict that he falls on the floor and flops around and maybe says 'brainzz...' or something.

If we are Property Dualists of the type that I will call type I, then we imagine that the second guy has no epiphenomenal consciousness. But we do not predict that he will start with the 'soulzzz...', because this is an epiphenomenal difference and so it can make no difference to our physical predictions, so there is absolutely no way we can tell the difference between our position and :

If we are Property Dualists of the type that I will call type II, then we imagine that the second guy does have an epiphenomenal consciousness because one just goes with having a brain. But again, this is an epiphenomenal fact, so it makes no difference at all between our predictions and those of :

The Materialists: The second guy, having an identical brain to the first guy, is fully conscious, fully a person.


So that's nice, because now we have an experimental test that we can do, that will rule out or rule in Cartesian Dualism/Souls.

In fact I will volunteer for it, given that some nice guys somewhere will give me say £250,000 because if the second guy starts going around saying 'I am John Aspden and I am a fully conscious being and it is my clear perception that I used to have the following things', I may well be able to convince him that he is the Second John Aspden, but he is going to find this a lot easier to accept if he has his own narrowboat and some money and so on.

On the other hand, although having an identical twin who knows all my secrets might be a bit of a head-fuck, I imagine it will be nice to have someone who is interested in the same sorts of things to have lunch with from time to time. And I am sure my parents will be pleased, because now I will be at home eight weeks a year instead of just the four.

But if the Souls guys are right, then there is going to be a copy of me rolling around foaming at the mouth and the only option is going to be to beat him to death with a shovel. And I am going to need £250000 of recreational drugs to get over it.

Sock Problem

Got it out of a book. Dead Easy. Cat could do it.

A priest has some red socks, some black.

He takes two socks out of the draw. The chances of him getting a red pair is 1/2.

How many socks has he got at least?

What about if he's got an even number of black socks?

Any more?

Hat Problem

Imre Leader via Paul Cook. Two two-hour thinking sessions got me not very far with this, and then the following morning I woke up with the answer fully formed in my mind. I felt a bit robbed. Like I'd been told the answer while asleep. Stick at it. Those who like this sort of thing will like this very much.

There are six people.

For each person, you roll a dice, and write the number on the hat.

They all close their eyes, and you put on each person his hat.

They all open their eyes. Without any communication whatsoever and without looking at their own hat they have to guess the number on their own hat.

If any one of them gets it right then you give them all gold and elsewise you shoot them, or something. You know the score with psychotic maths problems.

Anyway the guys are conferring before the game. What is their plan?

In general choose n, a natural number. n people, n hats, n-sided dice, n pots of gold, n bullets.

An Argument I've seen a Million Times

You got these two things, Alice, and a Banana.

Alice is 'hoopy', but the Banana is 'not hoopy'

But suddenly you are noticing this thing Alana, which is between Alice and the Banana.

And the question is: Is Alana hoopy, or not?

So perhaps you are unwise enough to pick one of these answers. Perhaps you say that Alana is not hoopy.

Aha!, says your interlocutor. Between Alice and Alana is this new thing, which is called Alica.

And at the end of this very long process you are ending up with Albracadabra von Helsingstein and Albracadabra von Helsingstien and only an idiot would claim that one was hoopy and one was not hoopy and so something somewhere must be terribly wrong.

Now I apologize that I am not used the traditional meta-syntactical variables here, like x and y and P and so on and so forth but I think it is maybe cuter with the Banana, and less frightening.

If you want a couple of real examples try (Alice, Banana, Conscious), or (Alice, Rock, Alive), or (Alice, computer simulation of Alice, Morally Significant), (At A, At B, Where) and so on.

If you have maybe spent too much time in maths lectures in your misspent youth you might just say:

Suppose P is a continuous function from a connected space into a discrete space, then P is one-valued.

And this is so obvious that I do not think it is thought of as a theorem. Sorry Dr von Evilfiend if it is really von Evilfiend's Lemma or something.

I am sick of it.

I claim.

From now on it is von Aspdenstein's Argument, and if you want to show that consciousness is not possibly an on-off thing as long as we can move neuron by neuron between Alice and a simulation of Alice then all you have to say is "vAA!", and you are done, and you can move on to discussing exactly where the discontinuity might be, or whether the property might be a function into a connected space like [0,1] or R, or C or a mobius strip and so on.

"vAA!".

I never wish to read this argument again, philosophers.

So next time you are proving that there can't only be five social classes or forty five colours or three musketeers because blah blah blah...

If you feel you have to write it out in full then at least put <vAA!> </vAA!> round it so that I can skip efficiently.

Help! I'm Spalding

I think I am about to join a cult.

This (http://facingthesingularity.com) is the clearest expression so far of the beliefs of this cult. Nothing in it seems surprising or new to me. All of it seems true, except the bit at the end where Luke imagines what a positive singularity might bring, which seems a bit pedestrian and conservative, a bit like an unimaginative Christian's idea of Heaven. And I suspect that Luke knows this perfectly well and is toning it down a bit so as not to scare people.

I believe, as I have mentioned before, that a singularity will occur in the near future, and that its most likely effect is to kill every living human and leave the universe boring, worthless and repetitive.

This belief appears these days to me as well founded as my belief in Fourier Analysis.

Which is to say that I don't understand it intuitively in the same way that I understand addition, but that I can examine every bit of it and see no obvious flaws, and that many of the component parts seem intuitively obvious. I wouldn't be surprised if the details weren't quite what I'd imagined, but I'd bet my life at very poor odds on the general framework.

When I first read about the idea of a paperclip maximizer it immediately struck me as obvious and unarguable and a very real threat.

I filed it in the mental box reserved for sexy doom scenarios which may very well be true but which you can do nothing about, and reacted in my usual way (Global Warming: Say Bollocks to It and Enjoy the Sunshine While You Still Can, etc..).

What I didn't initially believe is the idea that there might actually be something we can do about it.

After a couple of years of thinking about it, and reading the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky, I'm starting to believe that there might indeed be something we can do about it. That we might be able to turn it to our advantage. To make a God who will act as we would wish a God to act.

And I certainly believe that if we don't, we're doomed. One way or another. We are acquiring more and more of the powers of gods, and seven billion half-witted gods aren't going to be sharing a single world in any great comfort as far as I can imagine.

------------

I have worked not terribly hard at all to build myself a pleasant and enjoyable life in a city I love with friends that I love, and I feel that if I ignore the coming Singularity everything will be great and I can carry on like this for the next thirty years and die confident of having lived a life as happy as any human can ever hope to live. Which was always the plan.

And that, sometime, probably after I'm safely dead, everything will suddenly go completely pear-shaped without very much warning, and everything that I cared about will suddenly cease to be.

To be honest, I am not terribly uncomfortable with that.

But if this 'positive singularity' can be pulled off somehow, then I might end up immortal, and happier than any human can possibly imagine.

So this looks a bit like Pascal's Wager. A very small chance of a very large reward.

The small chance has almost no dependence on my actions, and certainly no dependence on whether I 'have faith' or anything silly like that. So I could just carry on as is and reap the vast rewards anyway, if they're there for the reaping.

----------------------------

It occurs to me that I am being underconfident, both in my beliefs and in my abilities. Maybe there is something I can do to change the probability. One obvious thing I could do would be to work a bit harder and donate the extra money to the Singularity Institute.

A minute change to a tiny probability of a vast reward. Paid for by using time that I'd usually spend reading and thinking and watching films in some ghastly office working for venal idiots and giving the money away.

I never give money to charity. I tried occasionally in my youth, but I found that the charities respond to this by sending you vast amounts of disturbing literature about starving people and horrible diseases and endless numbers of emotionally affecting pictures of suffering animals and it had the opposite effect on me to that which was doubtless intended.

The Singularity Institute hasn't done this. It has confined itself to creating large quantities of entertaining philosophical argument and leaving it around where I can find it. For the sheer pleasure of reading Eliezer's philosophy I owe it something.

-----------------------

But Jesus! guys, I know what I'm experiencing here.

This is a religious conversion, pure and simple. This is what the founders of the Jehovah's witnesses must have been thinking, when they discovered the one true way to read the Bible. This is what the latter-day saints and the calvinists and the fucking scientologists for fuck's sake must feel like as their pathetic brains fall for the lame arguments of con-men who have found a clever way to extract money and power from bunches of bloody fools by explaining the mysteries of the universe to them in a way that they can actually "understand".

I don't fall for this crap! I take nothing and no-one seriously (except perhaps myself), and I can feel my natural contrariness and scepticism calling sadly to me as I contemplate jumping off the cliff.

Once I'm gone, I'm gone. Once I'm publically committed to this foolishness, I'm going to turn into a scary swivel-eyed fanatic who can't listen to counter-argument and won't accept that he's wrong out of sheer terror of looking like an idiot and admitting that he's thrown away his life in service to an idea that is just a bit stupid.

And the only thing I can think of is Doctor Who. I can't remember the episode.

The Doctor needs some keys, or something. They are locked in a safe. And there are Daleks coming, or something. And there is this guy, who is a decent and honourable man, who has sworn not to give the keys to anyone under any circumstances.

So he is understandably a little reluctant to give the keys to the Doctor. And the Doctor says 'And when you are standing on your burnt-out world in the shattered remains of your civilization, at least you will know that your personal honour remains intact.'

That seems a powerful argument to me. I think I am brave enough to look like a fool in front of myself if it might save the world.

And I really think it might.

Please help.

I need counterarguments. Read Luke's lovely clear summary of what I have come to believe and tell me whether it's just a load of horseshit for some easy reason I have missed.

Since I need counter-arguments, I am going to try and come up with some myself.

I have gone into King's College and I have hugged my favourite tree, that was my friend when I was an undergraduate, and I have asked it what I should do. And it responded without hesitation "You know what you should do. Yudkowsky is possibly right and no-one else even seems to care about the problem. Most people making counter-arguments are just obviously wrong."

Well. I am not enormously interested in the opinions of vegetation per se, but that lets me know that my unconscious mind has already gone over to the enemy.

Try again.

The Singularity. The Rapture of the Nerds. Eliezer Yudkowsky as the Messiah. Immortality. The End is Nigh. Give us Money. How much more pattern-matching to a bloody religion does a man need!?? Run away. Religions are bad memes that use minds to adapt to infect minds and clever sceptical people fall for them all the bloody time and what makes you think you are special? You have been predicting for ages that religion will evolve round humanity's new sceptical defences until it is capable of infecting any reasonable man again. You expected it to take longer, but maybe this is what is happening.

Nothing about me is special. That's what I'm scared is happening. Maybe if I fall for it I can actually help to make it even more convincing. I always thought I'd be a good priest if I actually believed in anything.

And yet. And yet. What if the Witnesses had been right? What sort of bloody fool would have ignored the evidence of his own mind and damned himself if they'd been right? I have to decide what the truth is, and I can only use my own mind to do it. And my mind is rubbish. That is the whole problem.

So maybe I should wait. Wait until the religious feelings have died down a bit. See how I feel in a year's time.

If I feel like this, there must be many other people who feel like this. Maybe once a few people give significant amounts of money to the SI there will be an avalanche of money going their way.

They seem like nice guys. If they win they'll save me anyway. I don't have to do anything.

Maybe I should bung them £1000 or so and be public about it, in the hope that that will maybe contribute to the avalanche beginning. I've been known to spend more than that on opera tickets, so it's not going to make me look that foolish if it turns out that SI are just a load of blowhards.

Trust your own mind John. It doesn't usually fail you in embarrassing ways. And it's not like you really hate embarrassment that much anyway. What the hell are you worrying about? Why is your whole brain full of flashing alarms and ringing bells?

There needs to be a name for this emotion. Conversion-terror or something. Perhaps we could play Liff with it and pick the name of a nearby village. Spalding.

I am in a state of terrible spalding. Please help. If you have counterarguments to singularity-nonsense that I haven't heard I need to hear them before I turn into a full-blown raving religious idiot.

Cox-Zucker Machine

Bets are invited on whether this is a real thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox-Zucker_machine

Shangri La Experiment Prior Beliefs and Biases

As a good Bayesian, I should work out what my priors and predictions are. 

As a good sceptic, I should work out what I want to be true so that I can be suspicious of it.

Models

Shangri-La: Appetite will collapse. Weight will drop significantly. Over a month belt notch will move to 3 or 4.

Willpower: Appetite won't change. Weight will increase. Belt will move to last notch and probably become unwearable in the evening.

Helplessness: Appetite will decline very slightly to compensate for extra calories (probably unnoticeably). Weight will stay pretty much the same. Belt notch will stay as it is.

Call these S,W,H for short

Current beliefs

S: fad diet. lots of people think it works, but anecdote only. You get the same evidence for chiropractic, aromatherapy, homeopathy, prayer, acupuncture, etc, etc.

No rational reason that this should be true except that it's got a story that sounds good to me.

Give it a 1% chance. There's a stack of crap in the world, and this is just some that happens to appeal to me.

W: Very much the standard model. It's obviously and uncontroversially true that weight loss = calories in - calories out. The bit I don't like is that 'eat less and exercise more' doesn't seem to be good advice. The world is full of skinny people eating whatever they like and hopeless fatties trying to live on lettuce and rice and making themselves completely miserable. It's probably true that if you eat less and exercise more you'll lose weight, I just don't think it's humanly possible to defy your basic drives by exercise of willpower.

Nevertheless, this is what most people believe, and that gives it respect. I'll give it a half chance of being the truth. (i.e. I notice my confusion and make no prediction)

I also notice in passing that I dislike this model because it means that all the smug types who think that fatties deserve it and that anorexics should just stop starving themselves to death for no reason are right.

And I also note that I dislike the 'soft sciences' and medicine because even though their subject is very hard they pretend to scientific infallibility as if they were physicists. So I love it when they're wrong even though I'd like them to find out the truth (and I accept that they are trying!)

So I'm really badly biased against this model, and I should watch myself for evidence that I'm frigging my own experiment in order to attack it.


H: I hate this model but it looks more true. It says that your weight has a set point that you can do almost nothing about. Fatties stay fat, the scrawny stay feeble. By immense exercise of will you can change yourself slightly but once you stop with the willpower, you'll go back to normal.

This is what I think is true and I've got personal and anecdotal evidence that it is. I'll give it a prior of 90% truth. I'd be surprised if it was wrong, but not nearly surprised enough to disbelieve the evidence.

I notice that I'm baised towards this model because it's mine and I've advocated it publically. I'm also biased against it because I don't like helplessness. I'd prefer either of the others to be the truth.

Immediately I notice that my priors add up to 141% (so what the hell is my brain thinking).

I'll assume that there are only three possibilities and normalize (roughly) to:

H60:W39:S1

Irrelevances

I also note that I believe the following things, and that they make no sense in terms of model W, but that none of them are relevant to this test so I'm ignoring them:

Smoking moves your set point downwards. Unnaturally fast carbohydrate foods (rice, wheat, sugar, potatoes, etc) screw with the system and make you more hungry than you should be, leading to steady weight gain and eventually morbid obesity. The Lord alone knows what is going on with anorexia but it's probably something to do with long term voluntary starvation somehow moving your set point unhealthily low.

Shangri-La Diet Experiment

I'm going to try to run a fad-diet experiment on myself. Here's the protocol:

Experiment

For the whole of July, when I first wake up every morning, I'm going to drink two tablespoons of Sainsbury's Mild Olive Oil. As far as I can tell, this stuff is absolutely tasteless. The only way you can tell you've swallowed it is that your teeth feel oily.

After that, for one hour, I'm not going to let anything that tastes of anything into my mouth. Not tea, not toothpaste. Water is ok, but nothing with flavour. It strikes me that the easiest way to manage this will just be to go to sleep for an extra hour, but if I don't feel sleepy then I'll just read a book or go for a walk or something.

That's it. After that hour is over I'll just completely forget about it, and eat what I like when I'm hungry, and do as much exercise as I feel like.

Models

I have three models for what will happen, and I'm trying to distinguish between them:

Shangri-La: Seth Roberts is right. My appetite should lessen dramatically, and as a result of eating less my weight should drop by a considerable amount. Some advocates have been reporting 2-3lbs a week. That's a vast difference, a stone over a month,  and should be easily noticeable. I'd imagine that my favourite place for a belt will move a couple of notches.

Willpower: The 'standard model' weight change = calories in - calories out. Notable both for its obvious thermodynamic truth, and for the persistent hopeless failure of its (naive) prescription ( try to eat less and do more exercise to lose weight ) over many years. I'll be consuming around 300 kilocalories a day extra, and so after 30 days I should have 9000 extra calories of fat, which is about 3lbs. That should be noticeable. 

Helplessness: My own theory is that a set point weight exists for each person, and that any exercise you do will be compensated for by increased appetite. (Fast carbs can screw up this system and cause obesity, and it appears that smoking can screw it up and cause leanness.), and that the extra 300 kcal should be precisely balanced by a loss of appetite at other times, and at the end of the month there should be no difference at all.

There's obviously also the confounding factor that I'm probably still adjusting to semi-giving up smoking. I can't say whether that will currently be moving my weight up or down, but let's just assume that after six months the effect either way will be small.

Current State

At the moment I don't know my weight and I don't care either. Within reason, muscles are good, fat is bad, and they both weigh something. What I care about is the increasing spare tyre round my waist.

My waist measurement is currently a whopping 37". In the morning, my belt feels comfortable on its second notch. On the first notch it doesn't hold my trousers up. On the third it feels a bit tight and I get the urge to loosen it when I sit down. As the day wears on, I tend to need to loosen it a bit.