I just read the last chapter — and it’s not finished yet! I have to wait for Yukowsky to write more chapters!

I hope he’s doing more on a regular basis. Do not start reading this unless you are a masochist.

Yudkowsky, please stop wasting your time doing stupid stuff like trying to figure out how to give AIs a sense of ethics.

Finish the damn story!
[/update]

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Via Eric S. Raymond. It’s useless quoting from the story itself, so let me just give you Raymond’s review:

Oh Thoth Trismegistus, oh Ma’at, oh Ganesha, oh sweet lady Eris…I have not laughed so hard in years!

Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of the brightest people I’ve ever met in a lifetime of seeking out gifted- to genius-grade thinkers because people who aren’t usually bore me pretty quickly. Eliezer has spent years studying the deep structure of rationality and probably understands the systematic sources of bias and irrationality in the shared architecture of the human mind as comprehensively as anyone alive. I have previously commented on some of his writings.

Usually Eliezer thinks about questions like how to build human-compatible ethical reasoning into AIs. Serious, deep stuff. When he turns the vast and imponderable force of his intellect to writing, of all things, Harry Potter fanfic, a quite unexpected degree of hilarity ensues.

Read it and laugh. Read it and learn. Eliezer re-invents Harry Potter as a skeptic genius who sets himself the task of figuring out just how all this “magic” stuff works. The science is real – it really would be a lot harder to explain transformation from a human into a cat than mere levitation, for example. When Harry, confronted with a magical time-travel device, is immediately terrified that he might be holding an antimatter bomb, this is actually a more justified fear than many readers may understand.

But the characters are not slighted. Eliezer is very good at giving them responses to the rather altered and powered-up Harry that are consistent with canon. The development of Minerva McGonagall is particularly fine.

Strongly recommended. And if you manage to learn about sources of cognitive bias like the Planning Fallacy and the Bystander Effect (among others) while your sides are hurting with laughter, so much the better.

It helps if you have some familiarity with the Potter cycle, but since that is itself a mish-mash of traditional child’s fantasy, you probably will recognize most what’s being built on here.

And it’s what’s being built that you need to read anyway. Gods, I wish I’d this when I was twelve.

No, wait: one quote from the story:

…It is a sad rule that whenever you are most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when you are most likely to forget it.

What is truth? There are complicated ways of explaining “truth” that get all tangled up in questions about reality and perception, but we’re going to use a very simple one: truth is what makes the future less surprising.

No matter what you think you are and no matter what “reality” may be, the experience that you have to deal with (like every other human being) is of being thrown into a surrounding that does things independently of your thoughts. Shit happens, and you have to deal with it. The first step to dealing with it is to be able to predict it.
…
All truth claims can be unpacked as predictions.
…
If anyone makes a “truth” claim at you that you can’t unpack into testable predictions, be careful. It may be that you don’t understand the claim but it’s still true – if you don’t know what the properties of an electron are, for example, you’re not going to get much meaning out of the truth claim “Electricity is a flow of electrons”.

But it may also be that the claim is meaningless. A classic example is the sentence “Green ideas sleep furiously.” How would you tell if this is true? What consequences could you check? You can only assign a meaning to this sentence if you can answer these questions.

A more concise way of putting it is that every truth claim corresponds to a set of experiments, not necessarily in the formal sense with test tubes and lab coats but in the informal way that we might stick a hand out a window to see if water falls on it.

And now we can say what “reality” is; it’s wherever the experiments happen. It’s whatever observables are accessible to us.

We can also say what “theory” is. A theory is just a machine for generating predictions. We judge the theory’s “truth” by whether those predictions are correct. And, remember, we make predictions because we need to cope with the shit that happens. A theory is a survival adaptation: we are theory-builders because we are prediction-needers because we are goal-seekers because we are survival machines.

[My emphasis.]
There are three four possible responses to this essay.

• You can recognize the ideas in it, and nod your head, surprised only that you’ve never heard them put so plainly and compactly. (In addition, you may have had some version of the thought, “Best bitch-slap to Pilate ever.”)
• You can receive a thunderbolt of enlightenment.
• You can nod, wait for the glaze over your eyes to dissolve, and say, “Interesting. Hey, did you see that last episode of Glee?“
• You can click away in disgust at Raymond’s simplistic, naive assertion that there is anything like “truth”.

And let me make this prediction: If you are in the last group, you are likely to have a college degree, likely in the Humanities, especially Lit Crit, Gender Studies, Race Studies, or Poli Sci. You are also likely to vote Democratic, or to regard yourself as a socialist or even a communist.

And you are my enemy, as you are the enemy of civilization itself.

This pushes my previous favorite definition of truth to second place, but does not replace it:

Truth is that which, if explained so as to be understood, must be believed.

By the way, I’m very fond of the idea of “unpacking”, which I’ve been hearing more and more lately, even in the mouths of politicians and bureaucrats. I think it originally referred to techniques for storing and manipulating decimal numbers in binary computers in a minimum amount of storage. As Raymond uses it here, it’s the process of looking at a term and picking out the concepts it refers to. Here, I have attempted to recursively unpack “unpacking”.

I only know that this is something that has to get out there, that as many people as possible need to hear Prager’s message.

0:30
The greatest threat to America?
“We have not passed on what it means to be an American to this generation.”

3:00
“The fact that the United States of America is about to confirm to the U.S. Supreme Court a woman who banned the military from her campus gives you an idea of how deep this problem is. That that is not disqualifying — to Democrats! To Democrats! — That it is not disqualifying is a moment of darkness in American history.”

4:15
“This is not a Presidential election, and is the most important election in modern American history, this November. This November is a referendum on what we want America to be.”

That last…Yes, I know. “We are not going to vote our way out of this crisis.” I hear you, Beck, Vanderboegh, Venlet, I hear you all loud and clear, and I agree.

But we are not ready to take our country back. Too many of us don’t understand what it is to be an American. We need time, another two years at least, to get folks up to speed. The biggest thing about McDonald is not that the Supremes found against Chicago, but that all over the land, Americans found that they agreed with McDonald, and agreed that Baron Daley looks like a thug in his petulant moves to regulate the right to death.

It’s a great start, but it’s just a start. Two more years, and then the socialists can do anything they want, because by then, folks will know enough to ignore them, or fight back.

I’ve been thinking about not voting this fall. I take it back. I will vote. I will even campaign, if only at a Tea Party office. I will not work for a specific candidate, but I will work to spread ideas, and to call candidates for both parties out.

I have no hope, no hope at all, that any candidate that wins in any race will “take back” Congress, or any other office. That’s not the point. The point is gaining time, to throw the people who are paddling like mad for the waterfall overboard, and settle for those who will do no more than let us drift.

Two years of charade, two years of blogging, two years to teach, and train, and stock up.

That has to be enough, because I deeply fear the next Presidential election, no matter who stands for office, no matter who wins.

update: OK, I looked him up. Prager’s a radio host, among other things.

Everyone is capable of managing their own lives.

No one is capable of managing other people’s lives.

Oh, sure, there are exceptions and caveats and details, like fer instance, Children are obviously not included. And this limits governments, not individuals, except inviduals who want to act for or be the government.

Your turn, in comments, please. But note I’m trying for the basic principle, one or two sentences, not a new Constitution, much less a new Atlas Shrugged.

I wrote:
@Kreitman: “Do you think [Beckheads] will go on to read Hayek’s “Why I am not a conservative” essay?”
I am not a Beckhead, but I do follow Hayek, and thus believe in strictly limited government. I have also read “Why I am not a conservative”, and largely agree with it.

The problem with “conservative/right” and “liberal/left” is that those terms have been ripped loose from their historical foundations. “Left/Right” originally referred to the seating in the 18th century French parliament. “Conservative/Liberal” referred to supporters of the nobility and existing social, political, and religious institutions versus a more fluid, egalitarian, humanistic society. The original conservative v. liberal fight is, in the light of the American revolution, essentially over in the US and nations modeling themselves on the US success. The liberals won.

The current fight is between collectivists and individualists. The true modern political spectrum runs from tyranny to anarchy. Both extremes are, ahem, extremely dangerous; anarchy is also unstable and quickly collapses into tyranny.

The descriptions and labels of the two camps are incommensurate; they’re talking about different things. Worse, the basic vocabulary has been set by the statist/collectivist/socialist/communist wing, which has taken to itself the liberal/left label, and applied the right/conservative/capitalist labels to the individualist/minarchist/free market/entrepreneurial wing, which has no widely accepted terms of its own to apply to the debate.

A good example of the conflict is the differing interpretations of “the people”. Collectivists regard “the people” and “the state” as the same thing, with the state being the mechanism for achieving the most good for society as a whole by leading the people to act in concert for common ends; see various local and state courts, where the prosecution is announced as representing “the people” against individual members of same. Individualists regard “the people” as the aggregate of individual citizens acting in their own best interests; see “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”, which makes no sense under the collectivist understanding. Then there’s the differing interpretations of “the right of the people to keep and bear arms”….

Another example is “class”. Originally, this referred to the idea that people were either, by birth, “noble” or “common”, and that there was little mobility between the two. However, socialists have redefined it to mean “rich” versus “poor”, and “capitalist” v. “worker”, again assuming a rigid hierarchy. Thus, advocates of a free market enabling individuals to make their own decisions regarding the best use of the resources available to them, within the constraints of the rule of law, find themselves conflated with advocates of unconstrained robber barons and the divine right of kings.

Obviously, when such fundamental terms have such disparate definitions, it’s almost impossible to have an intelligible conversation.

[I have made some minor tweaks to the version posted here.]

Also see:

Enumerated Powers — The People as the Fourth Branch

Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture website is here. There’s a book, and you get the lecture on DVD. There are class and book group study guides.

I just watched the whole thing again, and folks, this is something everybody needs to watch, and hear.

There’s a lot of gloom and doom on this site — in my heart and mind, to tell the truth. Things are about to get really, really, bad.

“The best gold,” says Pausch, “is at the bottom of a barrel of crap.”

We’re about to be swimming in oceans of crap.

The gold at the bottom is going to be just fabulous.

In its whole history, religion has killed fewer people than the rationalist political philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Tell you anything?

Followed up here:

[Cover your eyes, CSS hacks. Yes, it's a damn table.]

From the very provocative essay which follows said table [hahaha!]:

The truth is that religion, and specifically Christianity more than any other religion, has been a mitigating factor against death, a net positive for humankind. It was Christianity and its empowerment of individuals that produced Isaac Newton, Leonardo da Vinci, and ultimately Louis Pasteur and Watson and Crick. Science keeps acting as if it were some kind of Goddess Athena, self-born from the head of a digital Zeus. It isn’t. Science was spawned, in fact, by Christianity. Yes, the Church may have suppressed Galileo and it killed as many as 3,600 (!) people in the Inquisition, but its record is far superior to that of Islam, which may, in a moment of atypical clarity, have given the world algebra but went on to ossify its peoples in a permanent state of devout semi-consciousness. It was left to Newton to give the world calculus and the Jew Einstein quantum physics and relativity theory. Who’s ahead on points here?

There’s more, much more, and you should read all of it.

Am I turning Deist? No. The idea of a supernatural God is intellectually repugnant to me. I can find no way to believe, and I want to, far more fervently than any Mulder.

But there is clearly something about the religious view of the world, particularly the Jewish and Christian views, that is powerfully good for people.

I will join any church that can rip the superstitious, down right magical Nicene Creed out of its liturgy and replace it with a summary of the beliefs about how people should live with each other.

1. Someone introduces Gödel to a UTM, a machine that is supposed to be a Universal Truth Machine, capable of correctly answering any question at all.
2. Gödel asks for the program and the circuit design of the UTM. The program may be complicated, but it can only be finitely long. Call the program P(UTM) for Program of the Universal Truth Machine.
3. Smiling a little, Gödel writes out the following sentence: “The machine constructed on the basis of the program P(UTM) will never say that this sentence is true.” Call this sentence G for Gödel. Note that G is equivalent to: “UTM will never say G is true.”
4. Now Gödel laughs his high laugh and asks UTM whether G is true or not.
5. If UTM says G is true, then “UTM will never say G is true” is false. If “UTM will never say G is true” is false, then G is false (since G = “UTM will never say G is true”). So if UTM says G is true, then G is in fact false, and UTM has made a false statement. So UTM will never say that G is true, since UTM makes only true statements.
6. We have established that UTM will never say G is true. So “UTM will never say G is true” is in fact a true statement. So G is true (since G = “UTM will never say G is true”).
7. “I know a truth that UTM can never utter,” Gödel says. “I know that G is true. UTM is not truly universal.”

The problem is, “smart” and “liberal” aren’t synonyms, and worse, far worse, “smart” doesn’t trump “local” and “personal”. A dumb man swinging a hammer on the scene very often trumps a smart man answering an email a thousand miles away, because the local guy knows intimately exactly what his situation is.

M.K. Freeberg, in The House of Eratosthenes, draws attention to yet another thread in the same hangman’s noose:

What we have here, I think, is a confusion between wisdom and irony. If you listen to these people prattle on for a good long time, you’ll notice something rather shocking: The “smart” decision, with regard to each and every question that comes up, is never, ever, ever ever ever the simple one.

Global warming is more dangerous than radical Islamic terrorism.

Queen Latifah is sexier than Beyonce Knowles.

To keep from going broke, we’ve got to spend more money.

A real man is in touch with his feelings and isn’t afraid to cry.

If there is a problem, the best thing to do is to make sure no one can ever make a profit producing a solution to it.

If innocent people could be harmed by a terrorist act, and it could be prevented by bringing physical pain to an evil man, decent people will make sure this doesn’t happen and let the innocent people go ahead and die.

If you’re a baby and you’ve crossed that Magical Vaginal Finish Line you’ve got rights to womb-to-tomb health care, a living wage whether you’re competent or not, a vote in all our elections whether you have common sense or not — but if you’re not there yet, then you don’t even exist as a person. It’s a matter of inches, and that’s just the way it is!

This is the part that scares the hell out of me. These people are not capable of recognizing or responding to the situation in which the simple, common sense answer is the right one. Right, as in — go ahead, put on a magical thinking cap and boost your IQ by a thousand points, you’ll still decide it the same way. This doesn’t work for them, because in their world you have to show off your smarts by deciding the opposite.

Therefore, when this happens they will consistently demand the choice that is made by these smart people, is the wrong one.

Read the whole thing. Freeberg is a very smart guy; he just doesn’t assume his smart is better than yours.

There are forces out there that want you to destroy yourself, that tell you that you are worthless, that you are surplus to requirements, that the very Earth rejects your burden.

They are the same forces telling you that you hurt everyone around you, that you are too stupid and ignorant to run your own life, that they know better than you what you should want and how you should live.

They are the same forces telling you that you are too old, too fat, too fecund.

They are the same forces telling you that your life should be easy, simple, fun; and that if it’s not, you should just give up.

They are the same forces telling you to kill your babies in your womb, because you need to find a perfect mate, find a career, find yourself.

They lie.

This is the truth:

If you’ve been telling yourself that no one will miss you when you’re gone, you are wrong. Your suicide would tear a hole through the future, and nothing could ever fill the space where you used to be.

Read it all. Somewhere in there you will find your reason to defy those who tell you to lay down and die.

The worst thing? The very worst thing?

They are the ones telling you that they bring hope, and change, and help.

They lie.

They are evil.