tech: Filtered Extropians (fwd)

[Eugene Leitl <Eugene.Leitl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 9 May 2001 16:17:18 -0700 (PDT)
From: Damien Sullivan <damien@mindstalk.net>
To: select-l@ugcs.caltech.edu
Subject: Filtered Extropians

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky  How You *Say* You Tell the Truth (a reply to Robin's paper)
Bryan Moss            Re: How You Do Not Tell the Truth
Robin Hanson          Re: How You Do Not Tell the Truth
Robin Hanson          Re: How You Do Not Tell the Truth
Robin Hanson          Re: How You Do Not Tell the Truth
Mark Plus             PSYCH/ECON:  "A Cure for Poverty"
To extropians@extropy.org  Re: PSYCH/ECON:  "A Cure for Poverty"
Mark Plus             Re: PSYCH/ECON: "A Cure for Poverty"
James Rogers          Re: PSYCH/ECON: "A Cure for Poverty"
Anders Sandberg       Re: Tipler's Conjectures
Amara Graps           Re: Tipler's Conjectures
James Rogers          Re: Keeping AI at bay (was: How to help create a singularity)
James Rogers          Re: Keeping AI at bay (was: How to help create a singularity)
James Rogers          Re: Keeping AI at bay (was: How to help create a singularity)
James Rogers          Re: Keeping AI at bay (was: How to help create a singularity)
GBurch1@aol.com       Re: Michael Crichton on science & the media
CurtAdams@aol.com     Opinions as Evidence: Should Rational Bayesian Agents Commonize Priors?
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky  Re: Opinions as Evidence: Should Rational Bayesian Agents Commonize
Max More              NEWS: Information Week on Ellison, anti-aging, ExI mention


From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>
Date: Wed, 02 May 2001 20:00:18 -0400
Subject: How You *Say* You Tell the Truth (a reply to Robin's paper)

Robin and Tyler wrote:
>
>     How *You* Do Not Tell the Truth
>
> Yeah you. Not those other billions of poor souls who don’t have the
> advantage of your intelligence and deep insight. Not in some abstract
> “I fix the imperfections I see but I > must still be imperfect in ways
> I can’t now see.” And not just in your love life, or with your children,
> but in the heart of your professional life. You academics disagree with
> each other constantly, and such disagreement is just not rational for
> people concerned with knowing and telling the truth. Not only that,
> alerting you to this fact will not much change your behavior. So you
> either do not want to know the truth, do not want to tell the truth,
> or simply cannot be any other way.

The problem, Robin, is that, even under your theory, the observed data is
consistent with a world in which rational people do exist, but are so
sparsely distributed that they rarely run into each other.  Not only does
this mean that the majority of observed cases will be persistent
disagreements; it further means that even two rational individuals, on
interacting for the first time, will assume that the other is irrational
by default.  You say that *most* people cannot rationally believe that
they are more meta-rational than the most of the population, but this does
not change the fact that - if, say, levels of meta-rationality are
distributed along a Gaussian curve - some people will *be* more
meta-rational than the rest of the population.

Actually, given the fact that highly intelligent groups such as scientific
conferences and Foresight Gatherings still exhibit lack of convergence,
the curve is either not Gaussian, or the curve for meta-rationality is not
associated with intelligence, or else the three-sigma level of a Foresight
Gathering is still not enough intelligence to eliminate self-deception.
I'd pick the third possibility.  Foresight Gatherings do show *some*
improvement.

But anyway, let me see if I can predict the general reaction to your
paper's abstract:

"I already knew that Other People are often highly silly in the way that
they argue and think.  Since I expected this to be the case, your paper
does not provide new and unexpected information in the Bayesian sense, and
can therefore not cause a change to my underlying model, in which *I* am
one of the sparsely distributed rational people."

Of course, since the vast majority of Other People will read your paper's
title and *incorrectly* reply with the above counterargument, the above
must not be a sufficient counterargument.  In fact, seeing someone emit
the above counterargument provides no Bayesian information at all about
her spiritual advancement.  By an extension of this principle, the
fact of *observing yourself* to think up this particular counterargument
does not license you to conclude that you are rational.

In the case of those individuals that are spiritually advanced enough to
see this problem, they will probably tack on some bit of information to
the generic rejoinder - i.e., "My experience in the Korean War enabled me
to stop being self-deceptive" - which is not shared by all parties.  Since
this hypothesized underlying cause is unique to the individual in question
- since the thought, considered in isolation, is unique - it can be
internally processed as a sufficient cause to conclude rationality,
without implying that the Other People are licensed to conclude their own
rationality.

Of course, all the Other People can do the same thing - tack on an extra
cause.  (Although someone spiritually advanced enough to appreciate the
Bayesian need to tack on an additional cause *is* likely to be less
self-deceptive than the average.)  An external observer, though, is likely
to abstract away the idea of an extra added underlying cause and see all
proffered excuses as identical, or belonging to the same class of
propositions:  "I am *not* silly because of Cause X, which is unique to
me", and to regard the utterance of such a sentence as providing little or
no Bayesian information about the utterer.

In this way, we finally arrive at a situation in which some observers may
reason themselves into a corner from which *no* utterance allows you to
conclude that a party is not being silly, even if that party is really and
truly Not Silly.  Even a genuinely non-silly, non-self-deceptive AI, who
truthfully says "I am not silly because I am an AI and I do not share the
evolved causes of silliness", will simply be heard by all observers as
saying "I am *not* silly because of Cause X, which is unique to me".  The
observers will have to rely on their Bayesian priors to determine how
likely an AI is to be silly, or will need to observe the AI's behavior
directly.

I, of course, have been placed in the same situation by the title of Robin
Hanson's paper.  I am in fact substantially less self-deceptive than even
Robin Hanson or Marc Stiegler, or so I evaluate.  However, there
is no utterance on my part which can convince you of this, which is why
this particular reply to this particular paper is perhaps the only
possible context in which I could air my actual opinion of myself without
it being instantaneously dismissed.  After all, if Robin Hanson knows that
I know as much as he does about Bayesian self-discounting of statements of
non-self-deception, and I state I'm non-self-deceptive *anyway*, even he,
an external observer, might consider that we appear to have the same
priors...

Obviously, this is a general problem for evolved entities trying to
convince each other of competence.  An observer can only determine
competence by observing the first entity's actual work, and not by
reference to the first entity's statements of competence.  There is no way
to speed that process up unless a third party intervenes to confirm the
first party's competence, and even then, the third party may be biased.
However, once the first party is known to be *mostly* rational or
meta-rational, further statements by the first party may be taken more at
face value.

On a first meeting, however:

Any direct statement about my own competence which I generate could have
been generated by a liar or self-deceiver, and so - no matter how hard I
try - I cannot directly provide Bayesian information about my own
competence.  Indeed, statements about personal competence may be taken as
Bayesian information indicating *incompetence*.  Suppose that the genius
level is taken as being 1,000,000:1.  Suppose also that, ignoring
contextual information and intonation, the verbal utterances produced by
an actual genius saying "I am a genius" and an overconfident fool saying
"I am a genius" are identical.  Even an actual genius, if she comes out
and says "I am a genius", will be plugged into a Bayesian prior that
estimates a million-to-one chance for genius and a ten-to-one chance for
self-overestimation, producing an estimated prior of 100,000:1 that the
speaker is an overconfident fool.   If we assume that most geniuses
realize this and either lie or avoid being forced into making unsupported
honest statements about their own intelligence, the odds are even worse.

In other words, saying "I am a genius" proves that you are either
extremely smart or stupid, but the Bayesian priors indicate you are more
likely to be stupid.  This is an emergent social pressure in genuinely
rational listeners which can force geniuses to either lie about their own
self-evaluation or avoid discussing it, depending on their commitment to
honesty.

--

I <heart> the Bayesian Probability Theorem.  More and more, I have come
to realize that the Bayesian Probability Theorem exceeds even Google as
the Source of All Truth.  I also find that Robin Hanson's more recent
papers bear a remarkable resemblance to concepts that appear in "Friendly
AI".  Since self-deception and stupidity generally allow for arbitrary
factors to creep in, the fact of convergence probably implies that one or
both of us is getting smarter and less self-deceptive.

--              --              --              --              --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence


From: "Bryan Moss" <bryan.moss@btinternet.com>
Date: Sat, 5 May 2001 15:38:08 +0100
Subject: Re: How You Do Not Tell the Truth

Hal wrote:

> [...]
> It would be interesting to have a group where disagreements
> were essentially forbidden.  Talk about groupthink!  Would
> it be a cult?  Would the members be brainwashed?  Or would
> this be the ultimate in rationality?

This could be interesting.  How about forming a discussion
list where, instead people stating opinions and then arguing,
they would bring up points of controversy, which list members
would then have to reach consensus on?  For example, someone
might submit a point of political controversy; list members
would then attempt to reply without disagreement.  Initial
replies might take the form of a statement of facts we all
know to be true, from these tentative steps would be taken to
reach a conclusion.

BM


From: Robin Hanson <rhanson@gmu.edu>
Date: Sun, 06 May 2001 13:36:35 -0400
Subject: Re: How You Do Not Tell the Truth

hal@finney.org wrote:

> So maybe what we need to do is to start a Society, a Bayesian Society,
> for people who understand the theorem about disagreements.  The founding
> principle of the Society would be that you could not "agree to disagree".
> You can only either say that someone is lying about his sincere desire
> to reach the truth, or else you must come to agreement.

Disagreement is a symptom of a diseases, i.e., non-truth-seeking.  But its
not always a good idea to just directly eliminate symptoms.  Pain is a
symptom of bodily harm, but if we just eliminate pain direcly, we risk
not attending to real harms.  Similarly, directly eliminating disagreement
might be done via means other than inducing real truth-seeking.



From: Robin Hanson <rhanson@gmu.edu>
Date: Mon, 07 May 2001 13:17:14 -0400
Subject: Re: How You Do Not Tell the Truth

Samantha Atkins responds to Eliezer Yudkowsky:
> > Essentially, Robin's paper gives a rigorous mathematical proof that for
> > two people to (a) disagree and (b) maintain their disagreement after
> > interaction, one or both of the parties must believe that they are more
> > likely to be rational than the other person.  ...
>
>This seems a bit strained to me.  That A has a strong argument for X
>that I cannot defeat logically does not compell me to accept X at that
>time.  I may believe the argument leaves out something crucial than I
>have as yet been unable to identify.  ... It is quite
>unlikely that only our conscious evaluations and adhering only to them
>at all points will generally bring us closer to truth in all
>circumstances.

I think you've missed the point.  My argument is not about responding to
arguments at all - it is about responding to opinions, and hence about
responding to all those unconscious processes you celebrate.  You have
unconscious processes and so do they.  To prefer the output of your
processes to theirs you have to assume that you are more meta-rational.


Robin Hanson  rhanson@gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323


From: Robin Hanson <rhanson@gmu.edu>
Date: Tue, 08 May 2001 09:19:49 -0400
Subject: Re: How You Do Not Tell the Truth

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> > I think you've missed the point.  My argument is not about responding to
> > arguments at all - it is about responding to opinions, and hence about
> > responding to all those unconscious processes you celebrate.  You have
> > unconscious processes and so do they.  To prefer the output of your
> > processes to theirs you have to assume that you are more meta-rational.
>
>Eeensy-weensy correction:  To prefer the output of your processes to
>theirs, you have to assume that you are better-informed or a better
>thinker.  This does not mean disagreement, however; you may both believe
>that Pat is the better-informed of the two, and adjust the "compromise"
>opinion to be primarily weighted towards Pat's.  ...

I meant to be talking about this point in time after you have each considered
the other's opinion, and each updated your opinion based on theirs.


Robin Hanson  rhanson@gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323


From: "Mark Plus" <markplus@hotmail.com>
Date: Sat, 05 May 2001 07:54:17 -0700
Subject: PSYCH/ECON:  "A Cure for Poverty"

From:

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/magazine/06POVERTY.html?pagewanted=all

(registration required)

May 6, 2001


A Cure for Poverty

By ANDREW SOLOMON


What if you could help end people's economic problems by treating their
depression?

Wendy was born just below the poverty line, where she spent the next 30
years of her life. These were grim times for her. When she was 6, a disabled
friend of her alcoholic grandmother began abusing her sexually. In seventh
grade she began to withdraw. "I felt there was no reason to go on," she
says. "I did my schoolwork and everything, but I was not happy in any way. I
would just stay to myself. Everyone thought I couldn't talk for a while,
because for a few years there I wouldn't say anything to anyone." Her first
boyfriend, from her neighborhood in the slums around Washington, was
physically and verbally brutal. After the birth of her first child, when she
was 17, she managed to "escape from him, I don't know how." Not long after,
Wendy, a petite African-American woman with grave eyes and a wide mouth, was
raped by a family friend. Soon after that, under pressure from her family,
she married a man who was also abusive. She had three more children by him
in the next two years. "He was abusing the children too, even though he was
the one who wanted them, cursing and yelling all the time, and the
spankings, I couldn't take that, over any little thing, and I couldn't
protect them from it." She also had to assume responsibility at this time
for her sister's children, because the sister was addicted to crack cocaine.

Wendy began to experience major depression -- not simply the generalized
despair that might be expected of someone in her position, but an organic
illness that was utterly disabling: "I'd had a job, but I had to quit
because I just couldn't do it. I didn't want to get out of bed, and I felt
like there was no reason to do anything. I'm already small, and I was losing
more and more weight. I wouldn't get up to eat or anything. I just didn't
care. Sometimes I would sit and just cry, cry, cry. Over nothing. I had
nothing to say to my own children. After they left the house, I would get in
bed with the door locked. I feared when they came home, 3 o'clock, and it
just came so fast. I was just so tired." Wendy began to take pills, mostly
painkillers. "It could be Tylenol or anything for pain, a lot of it, though,
or anything I could get to put me to sleep."


Finally one day, in an unusual show of energy, Wendy went to the
family-planning clinic to get a tubal ligation. At 28, she was responsible
for 11 children, and the thought of another one petrified her. She happened
to go in when Jeanne Miranda, an associate professor of psychiatry at
Georgetown University, was screening subjects for a study of poor people
suffering from depression. "She was definitely depressed, about as depressed
as anyone I'd ever seen," recalls Miranda, who gave Wendy the diagnosis and
swiftly put her into group therapy. "It was a relief to know there was
something specific wrong," Wendy says. "They asked me to come to a meeting,
and that was so hard. I didn't talk. I just cried."

On any given day, roughly 18 million Americans meet the diagnostic criteria
for mood disorders, meaning that they have reached an emotional low that
impairs their functioning. Three million of those are children. Depression
claims more years of useful life in America than war, cancer and AIDS put
together, according to the World Health Organization's World Health Report
2000. And the indigent depressed are among the most severely disabled
populations in this country. There are no reliable figures on how many of
these people there are, but 13.7 percent of Americans live below the poverty
line, and according to one recent study, about 42 percent of heads of
households receiving Aid to Families With Dependent Children meet the
criteria for clinical depression -- more than three times the national
average.


Despite the extended debates in the last decade about depression's causes,
it seems fairly clear that it is usually the consequence of a genetic
vulnerability activated by external stress. Most people have some level of
genetic vulnerability. Those with a high vulnerability can have it triggered
by a fairly minor event; those with a low degree of vulnerability will be
triggered only by more significant trauma. But among the indigent, the
traumas are so terrible and so frequent, says Miranda, that searching for
the depressed among them is like checking for emphysema among coal miners.
The depression rate among the poor is the highest of any social grouping in
the United States, so high that many don't notice or question it. "If this
is how all your friends are," Miranda says, "it begins to have a certain
terrible normality to it."

In travels to some fairly remote parts of the world, I found that much the
same rules apply to trauma-prone populations everywhere. Survivors of the
Khmer Rouge in Cambodia have an extremely high rate of depression. Phaly
Nuon, a Cambodian woman who has founded a treatment center and an orphanage
in Phnom Penh, describes seeing women who had made it through the horrific
years of war only to become so depressed afterward that they let their own
children starve to death in the resettlement camps. She said that these
women, born to grim lives of rural poverty, had been disabled by what they
had seen. I found similar phenomena among the Inuit of Greenland, tribal
peoples in Senegal, the urban poor in Russia. Depression rates are very high
all around the world among people with hard lives, and these people tend to
be disproportionately poor.

Depression can be difficult enough to recognize among the affluent, but if
you're way down the socioeconomic ladder, the signs may be even harder to
distinguish. When someone in the middle classes becomes depressed and
suddenly finds that he can't function at a high level, can't work, begins to
withdraw, he is likely to attract the attention of friends and family
members. But if you're poor, these symptoms don't seem much of a change.
Your life has always been lousy; you've never been able to get or hold a
decent job; you've never expected to accomplish much; and you've never
entertained the idea that you have much control over what happens to you.

The depressed poor perceive themselves to be supremely helpless -- so
helpless that they neither seek nor embrace support. This means that most
people who are poor and depressed stay poor and depressed. Poverty is
depressing, and depression, leading as it does to dysfunction and isolation,
is impoverishing.

The poor tend to have a passive relationship to fate: their lack of
self-determination makes them far more likely to accommodate problems than
to solve them (they are, by extension, far less likely to commit suicide
than are the empowered). This passivity also causes them to accept treatment
as passively as they accept their own misery, which means they can be helped
through programs of assertive outreach. Medicaid recipients qualify for
extensive care, but they have to claim it, and depressed people do not
exercise rights or claim what should be theirs, even if they have the rare
sophistication to recognize their own condition. They can be saved only by
pressing insight onto them, often through muscular exhortation.

Miranda is one of a small group of therapists who embrace this idea of
assertive intervention. "If you treat their depression," says Miranda, "you
give them a new world."

Wendy was not an easy subject at first. On more than one occasion a member
of Miranda's staff had to go to her house and persuade her to come out. She
said she had no time. She was taciturn and kept people at a distance. "Then
they kept calling, telling me to come, pestering and insisting, like they
wouldn't let go. I didn't like the first meetings. But I listened to the
other women and realized that they had the same problems I was having, and I
began to tell them things. I'd never told anyone those things. And the
therapist asked us all these questions to change how we thought. And I just
felt myself changing, and I began to get stronger."

After two months of group therapy, Wendy told her husband that she was
leaving. "There was no arguing because I just didn't argue back. I just told
him, 'I'm gone.' I was so strong. I was so happy."

It took two more months of therapy before Wendy found a job. Now, while she
goes to work at a child-care center for the Navy, her children and her
sister's go to school or another local child-care center. With her new
salary, she has set herself and the children up in a new apartment. And a
year into her group therapy, she plans to continue for as long as Miranda's
program is operating. "My kids are so much happier," Wendy says. "They want
to do things all the time now. We talk for hours every day. We read and do
homework all together. We joke around. We all talk about careers, and before
they didn't even think careers. I talk to them about drugs, and they've seen
my sister, and they keep clean now. They don't cry like they used to. They
don't fight like they did.

"I never thought I would get this far. It feels good to be happy. I don't
know how long it's going to last, but I sure hope it's forever." She smiles
and shakes her head in wonder. "And if it weren't for Dr. Miranda and that,
I'd still be at home in bed, if I was still alive at all." Miranda says,
"There are thousands of success stories as magical as this one, just waiting
for appropriate interventions."

The treatments Wendy received did not include psychopharmaceutical
intervention. What was it that enabled this metamorphosis? In part, it was
simply the steady glow of attention from the doctors with whom she worked.
In part, it was a cognitive shift. Miranda described Wendy as "clearly"
having depression, but this had not been clear to Wendy even when she
suffered extreme symptoms. The labeling of her complaint was an essential
step toward her recovery from it. What can be named and described can be
contained: the word "depression" separated Wendy's illness from her
personality. If all the things she disliked in herself could be grouped
elegantly together as aspects of a disease, that left her good qualities as
the "real" Wendy, and it was much easier for her to like this real Wendy and
to turn this real Wendy against the problems that afflicted her. To be given
the idea of depression is to master a socially powerful linguistic tool.
There are no people so starved for this vocabulary as the indigent
depressed, which is why basic tools like cognitive group therapy can be so
utterly transforming for them.

Many women in Wendy's situation would be even more expeditiously helped by
pharmaceuticals. There are four impediments to such broadband treatment
programs. The first is that the indigent populations who might be helped by
medication have never really been identified. The second is that to be
effective, antidepressant medications must be taken on an ongoing basis over
an extended period of time. The lower people's education levels, the less
likely they are to take a medication that does not have any immediately
palpable effect when they take it. Such people are also unlikely to continue
to take their pills once their symptoms have lifted. The third, of course,
is cost, though in absolute terms it costs less to provide medication than
it does to provide the social services that the indigent require. The fourth
is a mode of transmission. Pharmaceutical executives to whom I mentioned all
the above said they would willingly set up programs to discount medication
for use in these populations if there were a way to convey it. "I simply
didn't know that such a phenomenon existed on the scale you are describing,"
one executive told me. In the absence of government programs to facilitate
the distribution of antidepressants to this population, however, even the
most well-intentioned members of the pharmaceutical industry are stymied.

The privately financed Treatment Advocacy Center is the most conservative
body issuing policy on treatment, and its position is that people whose
condition can be improved through treatment should receive it whether they
want to or not. It is their view that those who resist treatment place an
unconscionable and unnecessary burden on society. The Bazelon Center for
Mental Health Law, a nonprofit policy group at the other end of the
spectrum, believes that commitment should almost always be voluntary and
defines mental illness as interpretive. The A.C.L.U. takes the middle
ground. It has published a statement that "the freedom to be wandering the
streets, psychotic, ill and untreated, when there is a reasonable prospect
of effective treatment, is not freedom; it is abandonment" -- though it also
supports the right of people to make decisions about their own lives. The
problem is that desperate people often dislike help because they do not
believe that help will set them free. The answer is neither forced treatment
nor abandonment; it is a process of forceful seduction predicated on the
principle that those who are treated will be glad after the fact to have
received such attention.

Joseph Rogers, the head of the Mental Health Association of Southeastern
Pennsylvania, was indigent and depressed himself at one time; he spent a
year living on a bench in Central Park before being drawn into an outreach
program. "People who are isolated and lost are usually desperate for a
little human connection," Rogers says. "Outreach can work. You just have to
be willing to go out and engage them and re-engage them until they're ready
to come with you." Rogers has helped to make Pennsylvania one of the most
progressive states in the nation for mental health. In fact many people from
neighboring states get shipped into Pennsylvania so they can take advantage
of the systems there.

Rogers also has created a chain of what he calls "drop-in centers," which
are street-level storefronts, usually staffed by people who are themselves
recovering from mental illnesses. This creates employment for the people who
are just beginning to cope with a structured environment, and it gives
people who are in bad shape a place to go and receive advice. Drop-in
centers provide a transit zone between mental isolation and companionship.

Popular wisdom holds that you need to address unemployment before you start
worrying about the fancy business of the mental health of the unemployed.
And greater prosperity is a good trigger for recovery. But it is perhaps
easier and equally reasonable to treat the depression itself so that these
people can alter their own lives.

Our failure to identify and treat the indigent depressed is not only cruel
but also costly. Many of the depressed poor are welfare recipients who
cannot hold jobs. They are given to substance abuse and other
self-destructive behaviors. They are sometimes violent. Infants of depressed
mothers show brain-wave patterns different from those of other infants,
according to a study by Tiffany Field, chair of the Touch Research
Institute. These altered patterns seem to relate to the closing down of
essential brain circuits that, if they do not function in childhood, are
probably inoperative later on. Treat the depression in the mother, and the
infant's brain waves are likely to normalize. When a depressed mother is not
treated, her children tend to end up in the welfare and prison systems: the
sons of mothers with untreated depression are eight times more likely to
become juvenile delinquents as are other children. Daughters of depressed
mothers will have earlier puberty than other girls, according to a recent
paper by Bruce Ellis and Judy Garber in the journal Child Development. And
early puberty is usually associated with promiscuity, early pregnancy and
mood disorders.

According to the 1998 Green Book of the House of Representatives Committee
on Ways and Means, state and federal government spends roughly $20 billion
on cash transfers to poor nonelderly adults and their children, and roughly
the same amount for food stamps for such families. If one makes the
conservative estimate that 25 percent of people on welfare are depressed,
that half of them can be treated successfully and that of that percentage,
two-thirds could return to productive, at least part-time, work, factoring
in treatment costs, that would still reduce welfare costs by as much as 8
percent -- a savings of almost $3.5 billion per year. Because the federal
government also provides health care and other transfers for such families,
the true savings could be quite a bit higher.

The dollar cost of interventionist treatment of depression is really quite
small; the dollar cost of not treating depression is enormous. "Postponement
of intervention does not result in savings," Representative Marge Roukema, a
Republican from New Jersey and the co-chairwoman of the Working Group on
Mental Illness, says. "You're really building in greater costs."

For more than a decade, Glenn Treisman of Johns Hopkins University has been
studying and treating depression among indigent H.I.V.-positive and AIDS
populations in Baltimore, most of whom are also substance-abusers. "Many
people get H.I.V. when they can't muster the energy to care anymore,"
Treisman says. "These are people who are utterly demoralized by life and
don't see any point in it. If we had treatments more broadly available for
depression, I would guess from my clinical experience that the rate of
H.I.V. infection in this country would be cut in half at least, with
enormous consequent public-health savings."

Mental-Health Services are still focused primarily on the noisy disorders,
with schizophrenia and mania at the top of the list. "Of course we want to
help nonviolent mentally ill people just as much as we want to help violent
ones," Roukema told me. "But to draw any kind of substantial support, we
have to show people that it serves their urgent self-interest to do
something about mental-health care for the poor. We have to talk about
preventing atrocious crimes that could be visited on them or their
constituents at any moment. We can't talk simply about a better and more
prosperous and more humane state."

There is no discussion in Congress at present about depression among the
uninsured. Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico, who has been the joint
sponsor of several important mental-health bills, says this situation is
unlikely to change. "If you're asking whether we can expect much change
simply because that change would serve everyone's advantage in immediate
economic and human terms," Domenici says, "I regret to tell you that the
answer is no."

It is hard to find anyone in Congress who is opposed on principle to healing
the mentally ill. "The opposition is competition," says Representative John
Porter, an Illinois Republican who until January was the chairman of the
Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee.
Nonetheless, while declarations about the tragic nature of suicide and the
danger of psychiatric complaints accumulate on the Congressional record,
legislation pertinent to these statistics does not pass easily. "Progress
here is excruciatingly gradual," says Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota,
who has made regular attempts to introduce comprehensive legislation for
mental-illness coverage. "The uninsured haven't even made it onto the radar
screen around here yet."

There are programs, even some good ones, that are available to the poor
mentally ill, but they exist inside hospitals. You have to find them
yourself. Public-relations campaigns for treating mental illnesses -- signs
on buses, TV ad spots and so on -- have had some success at bringing people
into clinics, but the idea that indigent depressed people will ever have the
wherewithal to seek and find help, even if they did figure out for
themselves that they were depressed, is ludicrous. A program that did a
basic mental-health screening at family-planning clinics or at job centers
or at places where welfare checks are distributed might allow us at least to
identify the people who are currently suffering from illness.

But the best place to start would probably be the welfare rolls. Major
depression is frequently triggered by stresses, and there is no question
that the lives of welfare recipients are extremely stressful. At the moment,
however, welfare officers do no significant screening for depression.
Welfare programs are essentially run by administrators, who do little or no
actual social work. What tends to be noted in welfare reports as
noncompliance is in many instances motivated by psychiatric trouble.

Some pilot studies are under way on the treatment of depression among the
poor, and the results appear surprisingly consistent. I was given full
access to subjects from several of these studies -- some involved therapy,
others medication, still others a combination of the two. To my surprise,
everyone I met felt that his or her lot had improved during treatment. They
felt better about their lives, and they lived better. Even when faced with
insurmountable obstacles, they progressed, often fast and sometimes far.
Over and over again, as I spoke to more poor people who had been treated for
depression, I heard tones of astonishment. How, after so many things had
gone wrong for them, had they been swept up by this help that had changed
their entire lives? "I asked the Lord to send me an angel," one woman told
me. "And he answered my prayers."

Andrew Solomon is the author of "The Noonday Demon," to be published in June
by Scribner.


_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com


From: Damien Sullivan <phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu>
Date: Sat, 5 May 2001 22:51:01 -0700
Subject: Re: PSYCH/ECON:  "A Cure for Poverty"

> constituents at any moment. We can't talk simply about a better and more
> prosperous and more humane state."
>
> There is no discussion in Congress at present about depression among the
> uninsured. Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico, who has been the joint
> sponsor of several important mental-health bills, says this situation is
> unlikely to change. "If you're asking whether we can expect much change
> simply because that change would serve everyone's advantage in immediate
> economic and human terms," Domenici says, "I regret to tell you that the
> answer is no."

Futarchy is looking pretty good, here.

Think about how broken a system has to be -- to naive (children's?) thought --
such that a quick monotonic improvement like that can't be taken.

-xx- Damien X-)


From: "Mark Plus" <markplus@hotmail.com>
Date: Sat, 05 May 2001 08:43:55 -0700
Subject: Re: PSYCH/ECON: "A Cure for Poverty"

This article asks,


>
>What if you could help end people's economic problems by treating their
>depression?
>

As is usual in journalism about social problems, this article confuses
"earning more money in wages" with "becoming non-poor."  Despite the
bestsellerdom of Stanley and Danko's book, apparently it still hasn't sunk
in that being well-paid is a long way from being non-poor.  If you make
$100,000/year in wages but lack sufficient invested savings to supply a
subsistence income, then when for whatever reason your wage income stops, in
short order you'll become as effectively destitute as the people described
in this article.  I've been saying for years that America's "affluence" is
really a clever illusion, given the relatively small numbers of people who
wind up financially independent even after decades of work.

Trans-millennially yours,

Mark Plus, Expansionary
"Working to make religion and death obsolescent in the 21st Century."


_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com


From: James Rogers <jamesr@best.com>
Date: Sun, 06 May 2001 10:16:37 -0700
Subject: Re: PSYCH/ECON: "A Cure for Poverty"

> As is usual in journalism about social problems, this article confuses
> "earning more money in wages" with "becoming non-poor."  Despite the
> bestsellerdom of Stanley and Danko's book, apparently it still hasn't sunk
> in that being well-paid is a long way from being non-poor.  If you make
> $100,000/year in wages but lack sufficient invested savings to supply a
> subsistence income, then when for whatever reason your wage income stops, in
> short order you'll become as effectively destitute as the people described
> in this article.


I strongly agree that there is a disparity between income and net worth; the
media does a disservice to everyone by frequently equating one with the
other.  Furthermore, this disparity is encouraged by a government (in the
U.S., but probably in Europe as well) that stiffly penalizes people who make
enough to have substantial savings.  These days, every extra penny I make
between January 1st and April 15th has to be saved to cover the difference
between what is withheld from my income and what the punitive tax rates
require me to pay.  Sure, I may still manage to actually save money 6 months
out of the year, but a moderately high gross income doesn't imply vast
quantities of net income after taxes and basic living expenses.

Given this situation, the fraction of the money I earn that I am able to
save seems to be largely invariant of my actual gross income, despite the
apparent reality that more-or-less fixed expenses should allow me to save
more.  Because of this, I don't think it is substantially easier to save
money with an upper-middle class gross income than it is with a lower-middle
class gross income.


> I've been saying for years that America's "affluence" is
> really a clever illusion, given the relatively small numbers of people who
> wind up financially independent even after decades of work.


Despite my mini-tirade above, eventual financial independence is easily
within reach of pretty much everyone, except perhaps for people with
pathological psychological conditions.  The "illusion of affluence" exists
mostly because it is easier to maintain the illusion of affluence than it is
to actually *be* affluent.  The biggest problem is finding the discipline to
build real affluence, and recognizing this at a young enough age that it can
really make a difference.  Too many people, like my parents, don't start
thinking about these things until they are in their forties.

-James Rogers
 jamesr@best.com


From: Anders Sandberg <asa@nada.kth.se>
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 10:03:28 +0200
Subject: Re: Tipler's Conjectures

> Yes.  But this immediately brings up the question of whether the
> singularity has a general S or sigmoid shape or not.  If there is
> an upper level of progress, (i.e. computation density, speed-up
> factor, and so on), then your observation is exactly right.
>
> But if there is no upper limit---which many of the people who have
> been thinking more about the singularity than I have    appear to
> believe---then it's not clear that any information from these
> remote sources would be of any interest whatsoever (except perhaps
> to satisfy historical antiquarian instincts).  In other words, to
> the extent that the "singlularity" indeed is a true singularity,
> then data from elsewhere becomes redundant as well as boring.

Just because they have thought a lot about it doesn't make it the least
bit plausible. The fundamental limitations on information storage due to
Heisenberg/Bekenstein, thermodynamics (energy costs of irreversible
operations), lightspeed etc appear to form a very plausible barrier
limiting how much computation you can get. Claiming that a sufficiently
advanced intelligence can circumvent them is handwaving.

Besides, if lightspeed is a limit but you can get infinite computation
locally, then you get something like the Jeans collapse of a gas cloud:
intelligences shrink more and more, but then separate into ever smaller
disjoint regions that shrink into new regions. The result is an infinity
of hyposcale omegas.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y


From: Amara Graps <Amara.Graps@mpi-hd.mpg.de>
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 16:43:49 +0200 (MET DST)
Subject: Re: Tipler's Conjectures


More information for the discussion.

Amara


http://xxx.uni-augsburg.de/abs/gr-qc/0105002
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology, abstract
gr-qc/0105002

From: "Marcelo J. Reboucas" <reboucas@cbpf.br>
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 00:49:39 GMT   (147kb)

Detectability of Cosmic Topology in Almost Flat Universes

Authors: G.I. Gomero, M.J. Reboucas, R. Tavakol
Comments: 18 pages, 3 figures, LaTeX2e

     Recent observations suggest that the ratio of the total density to
     the critical density of the universe, $\Omega_0$, is likely to be
     very close to one, with a significant proportion of this energy
     being in the form of a dark component with negative pressure.
     Motivated by this result, we study the question of observational
     detection of possible non-trivial topologies in universes with
     $\Omega_0 \sim 1$, which include a cosmological constant. Using a
     number of indicators we find that as $\Omega_0 \to 1$, increasing
     families of possible topologies become either undetectable or can
     be excluded observationally. Furthermore, given a non-zero lower
     bound on $|\Omega_0 - 1|$, we can rule out families of topologies
     as possible candidates for the shape of our universe. We
     demonstrate these findings concretely by considering families of
     topologies and employing bounds on cosmological parameters from
     recent observations. We find that given the present bounds on
     cosmological parameters, there are families of both hyperbolic and
     spherical manifolds that remain undetectable and families that can
     be excluded as the shape of our universe. These results are of
     importance in future search strategies for the detection of the
     shape of our universe, given that there are an infinite number of
     theoretically possible topologies and that the future observations
     are expected to put a non-zero lower bound on $|\Omega_0 - 1|$
     which is more accurate and closer to zero.

Paper: Source (147kb), PostScript, or Other formats

-- 

*********************************************************************
Amara Graps               | Max-Planck-Institut fuer Kernphysik
Interplanetary Dust Group | Saupfercheckweg 1
+49-6221-516-543          | 69117 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Amara.Graps@mpi-hd.mpg.de * http://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/dustgroup/~graps
*********************************************************************
      "Never fight an inanimate object." - P. J. O'Rourke



From: James Rogers <jamesr@best.com>
Date: Sun, 06 May 2001 10:34:28 -0700
Subject: Re: Keeping AI at bay (was: How to help create a singularity)

On 5/6/01 8:34 AM, "Jim Fehlinger" <fehlinger@home.com> wrote:
>
> Still too static, folks, to be a basis for AI.  When are we going to have
> hardware with the sort of continual plasticity and dynamism that nerve tissue
> has? (I know it's going to be hard.  And, in the meantime, evolved FPGAs
> might have their uses, if people can trust them to be reliable).


The plasticity of the hardware is utterly irrelevant.  It is the interaction
and complexity of the *data* that matters, which is why one should be able
to do AI on just about any reasonable piece of silicon.  There is no magic
in evolvable hardware, it is simply a fast way of evolving data interactions
that could be done completely in software on a boring von Neumann machine.
Hardware and software are equivalent things; hardware is faster, software is
cheaper, and you balance the two depending on the specifications of the
project at hand.

Give me just one example of something you can do in high-plasticity
evolvable hardware that can't be done in software.


-James Rogers
 jamesr@best.com


From: James Rogers <jamesr@best.com>
Date: Sun, 06 May 2001 14:21:05 -0700
Subject: Re: Keeping AI at bay (was: How to help create a singularity)

On 5/6/01 10:45 AM, "Jim Fehlinger" <fehlinger@home.com> wrote:
> James Rogers wrote:
>>
>> Give me just one example of something you can do in high-plasticity
>> evolvable hardware that can't be done in software.
>
> Give **me** an example of just one out of the trillions of instances
> of high-plasticity evolvable hardware runnning around on this
> planet that's been successfully replicated in software!


What the hell does evolvable hardware have to do with this?  If you want to
make a straight hardware comparison to the human brain, you'll win some and
lose some.  You've basically ceded the argument.  Who cares if we haven't
done something as long as we know that its possible (realizing that any
argument to the contrary would be invoking magic)?  It took mankind a while
to learn powered flight as well.

Give me a processor that can properly utilize as many transistors as the
brain has neurons, and it would be a fair comparison.

Cheers,

-James Rogers
 jamesr@best.com


From: James Rogers <jamesr@best.com>
Date: Sun, 06 May 2001 15:09:32 -0700
Subject: Re: Keeping AI at bay (was: How to help create a singularity)

On 5/6/01 1:40 PM, "Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de"
<Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de> wrote:
> James Rogers wrote:
>
>> Hardware and software are equivalent things; hardware is faster, software is
>> cheaper, and you balance the two depending on the specifications of the
>> project at hand.
>
> Basically, you don't balance very much, for most current purposes hardware
> is a constant. If you want the most of crunch these days it means investing
> in air conditioning and a hall full of PCs, and a large number of fat
> switches.


Evolvable hardware has the same limitations.  Good FPGAs aren't free or even
cheap.  The limitation is transistor count and transistor technology, not
how the transistors are arranged.


>> Give me just one example of something you can do in high-plasticity
>> evolvable hardware that can't be done in software.
>
> Speed, of course. That was easy.


First, that doesn't really answer the question, and second, I would have to
ask "fast at what?".  Are you really going to claim that dollar for dollar
an FPGA can do everything a CPU/DSP can and faster?  The current state of
the computing market isn't completely arbitrary.  Transistor for transistor,
FPGAs offer few advantages (speed or otherwise) outside of specific niche
markets.

-James Rogers
 jamesr@best.com



From: James Rogers <jamesr@best.com>
Date: Sun, 06 May 2001 15:09:32 -0700
Subject: Re: Keeping AI at bay (was: How to help create a singularity)

On 5/6/01 10:57 AM, "Jim Fehlinger" <fehlinger@home.com> wrote:
> James Rogers wrote:
>> one should be able to do AI on just about any reasonable piece
>> of silicon.
>
> Ah, now **there**'s the heart of the question, as far as I'm
> concerned.  Don't matter what kind of software you write, if
> you don't have big enough iron to run it on.  And what, precisely,
> will constitute "reasonable" hardware for this particular job?


Not relevant.  AI is AI is AI, even if we don't have the hardware to run it
fast enough to be useful.

I don't think you understand the problem fully.  Any evolvable hardware
architecture capable of doing AI implies the capability to generate a more
traditional architecture with roughly the same capability, just utilized
differently.  Any algorithm is reducible to an optimal form for any
architecture, and given the proper utilization of the implied circuit
generation capabilities, should give within an order of magnitude of the
same performance.  Evolvable hardware necessarily has a lot of overhead that
would be unnecessary on non-evolvable hardware, which is the trade-off for
speed at a specific task.  You can't claim massive technological
improvements in evolvable hardware without applying the same technological
improvements to non-evolvable hardware.  In the end, given a finite number
of transistors (or whatever) you can only squeeze out a certain amount of
computing power, whether the architecture is evolvable or not (ignoring
intentional stupidity on the part of the designer).  So it is pretty much
six of one, half a dozen of the other (yada yada Kolmogorov yada yada yada).


> It ain't gonna be silicon, I can tell you that...


What then?

-James Rogers
 jamesr@best.com


From: GBurch1@aol.com
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 18:40:09 EDT
Subject: Re: Michael Crichton on science & the media

In a message dated 4/17/01 8:11:05 PM Central Daylight Time,
fehlinger@home.com writes:

> I stumbled across a Web article today entitled
>  "Why Science Is Media-Dumb", a transcript of an
>  address delivered by author Michael Crichton
>  (_The Andromeda Strain_, _Jurassic Park_, etc.)
>  to the American Association for the Advancement
>  of Science in January 1999, and broadcast later
>  that year  by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
>
>  It's very entertaining.
>
>  http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/crichton/story.htm

Very apt, and if anyone has the credentials to make the observations he does,
it's Chricton.  I just watched "The Sixth Day" last night and, as usual, was
angry at the end at the characterization of transhumanist technologies.  Of
course, it would have been perfectly possible to make a film with just as
much dramatic tension, just as many shoot-em-ups and obligatory parking
garage blood-fests, except in which the real bad guys were the biological
fundamentalists.  There were moments in the film when I had hope . . . but,
alas, I'm afraid it just isn't meant to be (the pro-science, pro-reason
Hollywood film, that is.)

       Greg Burch     <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
      Attorney  :::  Vice President, Extropy Institute  :::  Wilderness Guide
         http://www.gregburch.net   -or-   http://members.aol.com/gburch1
                                           ICQ # 61112550
        "We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
        enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
       question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
                                          -- Desmond Morris


From: CurtAdams@aol.com
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 00:05:43 EDT
Subject: Opinions as Evidence: Should Rational Bayesian Agents Commonize Priors?

I consider the situation of two uninformed Bayesian agents becoming aware of=
=20
differences in priors about a binary world-state.  I derive their confidence=
=20
functions in the binary world-state upon the information of the other=E2=80=
=99s=20
priors and show the confidence functions coincide only if priors are drawn=20
from one particular distribution strongly informative on the world-state.  I=
=20
non-rigorously prove the result generalizes to a world with any finite numbe=
r=20
of possible states and to Bayesian agents with access to common public=20
information.  I present arguments for the conjecture that the result further=
=20
generalizes to worlds with infinite states and to Bayesians with private=20
information.  Hence, rational Bayesians with initially differing priors=20
should continue to disagree even when fully informed of each other=E2=80=99s=
 beliefs.

Take a world with two possible states, Q and ~Q.  Assume two Bayesian agents=
=20
with prior degrees of belief in Q, denoted as A and B, and degrees of belief=
=20
in ~Q of (1-A) and (1-B).  For notational convenience in text transmission,=20=
I=20
denote the degree of belief of a Bayesian agent with initial degree of belie=
f=20
X, given information Y, as (X)Y.  Priors provide information in that they=20
depend on the state of the world; for any given prior P there is a=20
probability P|Q of that prior in world with Q and P|~Q in worlds with ~Q. =20
This defines a function f(P) =3D (P|Q)/(P|~Q) which eases notation of=20
confidence functions upon the information of a new agent with prior P.

On learning of B, A should now have a degree of belief in Q of A*B|Q and a=20
degree of belief in ~Q of (1-A)*(B|~Q).  Normalizing A=E2=80=99s total degre=
e of=20
belief to 1 and using f(B) to simplify notation, I derive:
(A)B =3D A*f(B)/( A*f( B)+(1-A))  (1)

And by symmetry

(B)A =3D B*f(B)/(B*f(A) + (1-B))   (2)

If A and B commonize their priors on learning of each other, (A)B =3D (B)A
Solving for f:

A*f(B)/(A*f(B) + 1-A) =3D B*f(A)/(B*f(A) + 1-B)
A*f(B)(B*f(A) + 1-B) =3D B*f(A)( A*f(B) + 1-A)=20
AB*f(B)*f(A) + A(1-B)f(B) =3D AB*f(B)*f(A) + B(1-A)f(A)
A(1-B)f(B) =3D B(1-A)f(A)
F(A)/f(B) =3D A(1-B)/B(1-A)  (3)

This requires f(A) =3D cA/(1-A) (4), with some arbitrary constant c.  Hence=20
priors must be highly dependent on the world-state.  In particular,=20
completely uninformed individuals are almost never profoundly wrong: given=20
world-state Q, the chance of a prior with low A (relatively strong disbelief=
=20
in the actual world-state) goes to 0 as A goes to zero, and does so rather=20
rapidly.  This disagrees markedly with actual experience, which shows most=20
completely uninformed people have very incorrect beliefs.

Let us suppose the agents with priors A and B have access to additional=20
public information E prior to learning each other=E2=80=99s priors.  If they=
 concur=20
at this stage, then ((A)E)B =3D ((B)E)A.  By standard Bayesian inference,=20
((A)E)B =3D ((A)B)E  so ((A)B)E =3D ((B)A)E.  Hence, by Bayesian rules (A)B)=
 =3D=20
(B)A.  Hence two Bayesian agents with access to public information will=20
concur only under exactly the same restrictive conditions required to concur=
=20
in the absence of public information.

A world with three states Q, R, and S can be described with the binary=20
beliefs Q/~Q and R/~R, given that Q implies ~R.  In order for two agent to=20
agree on degrees of belief to all three states, they must concur on both Q=20
and R.  The requirements to concur on binary beliefs Q and R are as above. =20
By induction, two agents will concur on finite multi-state worlds only if th=
e=20
probability of a degree of belief AN in each particular state N follows the=20
condition p(AN) =3D cAN(1-AN).

Even if the world consist of an infinite set of possible states, these can b=
e=20
partitioned into two sets, each of which can be partitioned into two sets,=20
etc., leading to a sequence of binary possibilities Q1, Q2, Q3,=E2=80=A6  Fo=
r two=20
agents to concur on the confidence function over all sets, it seems intuitiv=
e=20
they must concur on Q1, Q2, Q3 =E2=80=A6, with each concurrence requiring th=
e=20
distribution of priors on each Q follow condition (4).

Finally, if Bayesian agents with private information meet, the conclusion=20
above follows by replacing prior A with private-informed degree of belief A.=
 =20
The requirement in (4) still holds, except that now private-informed beliefs=
,=20
rather than priors, must follow the distribution.  I conjecture that if, in=20
some world, (4) holds for private-informed beliefs, gain or loss of private=20
information would in general cause (4) to no longer hold. =20

My personal experience is that priors and private information are only weakl=
y=20
informative; i.e., even given world-state Q obtains, it isn=E2=80=99t partic=
ularly=20
difficult to find uninformed individuals with strong disbelief in Q.  Given=20
this, the probability of a given degree of belief A in Q varies only mildly=20
with whether Q obtains.  Hence the information derived from a given person=20
holding a degree of belief Q is small and a rational Bayesian should have=20
only a small change in belief on learning another=E2=80=99s opinions.  Ratio=
nal=20
Bayesians, then, generally should maintain differences of opinion due to=20
differences in priors.  Under most circumstances, for two agents to commoniz=
e=20
priors requires a violation of Bayesian inference.


From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>
Date: Mon, 07 May 2001 13:04:13 -0400
Subject: Re: Opinions as Evidence: Should Rational Bayesian Agents Commonize

CurtAdams@aol.com wrote:
>
> My personal experience is that priors and private information are only weakly
> informative; i.e., even given world-state Q obtains, it isn't particularly
> difficult to find uninformed individuals with strong disbelief in Q.  Given
> this, the probability of a given degree of belief A in Q varies only mildly
> with whether Q obtains.  Hence the information derived from a given person
> holding a degree of belief Q is small and a rational Bayesian should have
> only a small change in belief on learning another's opinions.  Rational
> Bayesians, then, generally should maintain differences of opinion due to
> differences in priors.  Under most circumstances, for two agents to commonize
> priors requires a violation of Bayesian inference.

What your analysis leaves out (I think) is the possibility of symmetry
between the observers.  Of course it isn't rational for a perfect Bayesian
reasoner to adjust vis opinions based on what humans think - at most, vis
opinions should be adjusted when ve encounters a human who could plausibly
be making vis conclusions based on novel but correct information.
However, a human, encountering another human, must consider the
possibility of an internal mistake as well as an external mistake.  That
all humans evaluate themselves as having a considerably above-average
meta-rationality, and hence a considerably lower-than-average possibility
of underestimating how likely an internal mistake is, is not compatible
with rationality on the part of all observers; it implies an evolved bias
to overestimate rationality or meta-rationality.

--              --              --              --              --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence


From: Max More <max@maxmore.com>
Date: Sun, 06 May 2001 22:36:17 -0700
Subject: NEWS: Information Week on Ellison, anti-aging, ExI mention

Hmm, I'm mentioned in the same paragraph as Bill Gates and Larry Ellison.
Clearly this is an omen portending that one day I am going to be *really*
rich.  ;-)

Oracle CEO Funds Age-Control Research

If the best way to beat your enemies is to outlive them, then that may
explain one of Larry Ellison's favorite investment projects: side-stepping
the Grim Reaper. The Oracle CEO is one of the largest private supporters of
research to control aging, investing millions toward the cause via his
Ellison Medical Foundation.

Bill Gates has also invested millions in biotech, but his funding seems to
be more focused on curing disease, says Max More, president of the Extropy
Institute: "Ellison is more interested in funding research for dramatic
extension of the human life span." One Ellison Medical Foundation grant
went to a University of Idaho researcher who's studying the longevity of
birds, which can live six times longer than mice, even with similar
metabolism and body size.

And the last paragraph is at:

http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20010504S0001


_______________________________________________________

Max More, Ph.D.
max@maxmore.com or more@extropy.org
http://www.maxmore.com
President, Extropy Institute. http://www.extropy.org
Senior Content Architect, ManyWorlds Inc.: http://www.manyworlds.com
Chair, Extro-5: Shaping Things to Come, http://www.extropy.org/ex5/extro5.htm
_______________________________________________________



http://www.homoexcelsior.com/archive/technology/