Monthly Archives: August 2010

New Hard Steps Results

By Robin Hanson · August 7, 2010 6:00 am · Comments (11)

If planets like ours are common but intelligent life like ours is rare, then it should be rare that life on a planet evolves to our level of development before life is no longer possible on that planet.  If Earth was “lucky” in this way, and if life had to go through a series of stages of varying difficulty to reach our level, how long should each stage have taken?

Now these stages could be of quite different difficulties, taking quite different unconditional expected times to complete.  But back in ’98 I noticed (and posted) an interesting non-intuitive result: if each stage is “exponential,” with a constant per time chance c to jump to the next level, then all “hard step” durations are similarly distributed, no matter what their relative difficulty.  (Joint step times are drawn from a uniform distribution.)  So we should see a history of roughly equally spaced hard step transition events in Earth’s history.

Prof. David J. Aldous, of U.C. Berkeley Dept. of Statistics, has just posted some generalizations of this result. While my result generalizes trivially to any per time success chance function C(t) that is nearly a constant C(t) = c near t=0, Aldous also generalized my similarly-distributed result to any function that is nearly linear C(t) = c*t near t=0.  He also generalized my result to any arbitrary tree of possible paths.  Each link in the tree can have arbitrarily varying difficulty, at each node in the tree many processes compete to be the first to succeed, and the one that wins this contest determines the system’s direction in the tree.

While Aldous warns us against over-reliance on simple models, this does I think gives a bit more reason to expect our history to consist of a sequence of roughly equally spaced hard step transitions.

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Meat Philosophy

By Robin Hanson · August 6, 2010 6:00 am · Comments (45)

[We] surveyed several hundred philosophers and non-philosophers on their opinions about various moral issues; we also asked survey respondents to describe their own behavior on those same issues. … The biggest divergences in moral opinion concerned our question about “regularly eating the meat of mammals such as beef and pork”. 60% of ethics professor respondents rated mammal-meat consumption as morally bad, compared to 45% of non-ethicist philosophers and just 19% of non-philosophers. Opinion also divided by gender and age. … Fully 81% of female philosophers born in 1960 or later said it was morally bad to regularly eat the meat of mammals. To put this degree of consensus in perspective, … only 82% of philosophers endorsed non-skeptical realism about the existence of an external world. …

38% of [young female philosophers] reported having eaten the meat of a mammal at their previous evening meal — a rate not statistically different from the 39% reported rate among respondents overall. … Similarly, despite the difference in normative view, there was no statistically detectable difference in the mean age of respondents who said they had eaten the meat of a mammal at their previous evening’s meal. … 78% of those who reported that they never eat mammal meat said eating mammal meat is bad, compared to 32% of those who reported sometimes eating meat. However, it seems that among non-vegetarians there is little if any relationship between normative ethical view and actual meat consumption. (more; HT Stefano Bertolo)

So why, among all the moral issues on which one could be hypocritical, and people which could be hypocritical, is the observed worst case young female philosophers on eating meat?

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Far is Overconfident

By Robin Hanson · August 4, 2010 11:00 pm · Comments (12)

Since our minds are smaller than the world, the world tends to be more complicated than our mental models of it. Yes, sometimes we think things are more complex than they really are, but far more often reality is more complex than we appreciate. All else equal, since far mode makes us neglect detail, it tends to make us think things are even simpler, thus increasing our error. So far mode is a major source of human overconfidence. From the latest JPSP:

People generally tend to believe they are more competent than they actually are, and this effect is particularly pronounced among poor performers. … One striking demonstration, the illusion of explanatory depth (IOED), arises when people overestimate their ability to explain mechanical and natural processes. For example, people know that a zipper closes because it has teeth that somehow interlock, but they know very little about how the teeth actually interlock to enable the bridging mechanism. Similarly, many people know vaguely that an earthquake occurs because two geological plates collide and move relative to one another, but again they know little about the mechanism that initially produces these collisions. Nonetheless, people believe they understand these concepts quite deeply and are surprised by the shallowness of their own explanations when prompted to describe the concepts thoroughly. …

People who construe a ballpoint pen abstractly are more likely to focus on the pen’s function and perhaps its global appearance. In contrast, people who construe the pen concretely are more likely to focus on how well they understand how its parts work together to enable the pen to function—in this case, the appropriate metacognition. Accordingly, people are less likely to overestimate their understanding of how the pen works when their introspections focus appropriately on the pen’s concrete features rather than its abstract features. …

In six studies, we showed that IOEDs arise at least in part because people sometimes adopt an inappropriately broad or abstract construal style when evaluating their understanding of concrete processes. … Participants … experienced larger IOEDs the more abstractly they construed 13 basic human behaviors. … Participants rated their knowledge of how three mechanical devices worked more accurately when the devices were framed more narrowly according to their component parts. When asked to express how those devices worked, only participants in the broad construal condition were surprised by the incompleteness of their explanations. …

Participants were induced to adopt a concrete or an abstract mindset by expressing how (concrete) or why (abstract) they engage in certain everyday processes, like getting dressed in the morning. Again, participants in an abstract mindset tended to show a significantly greater IOED. … Participants … reported understanding their favored 2008 Presidential candidate’s policies better than they actually did when asked to express those policies in writing. … Participants who adopted a more abstract construal style showed a more pronounced illusion of political sophistication. …

Our findings suggest that … when adopting an abstract construal style, people might therefore be systematically overconfident about what the future holds and how well they understand themselves and others. … The IOED is both similar to and distinct from a range of overconfidence biases documented. … According to one account, egocentric over-confidence effects tend to emerge because people anchor on their own subjective experiences and fail to adequately account for the experiences and abilities of other people. … Other researchers have suggested that people are overconfident because … their memories tend to be overpopulated with successes rather than failures.

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Am I A Sim?

By Robin Hanson · August 3, 2010 5:30 pm · Comments (78)

The simulation argument says that IF you:

  1. expect a substantial chance Q of our civilization surviving a long time,
  2. given survival, expect a vast number V of subjective years of experience by future descendants, in total across the whole future,
  3. expect them to spend a substantial fraction F of their per-person-subjective-year resources R running simulations of their distant past, for entertainment, research, or other purposes,
  4. expect a fraction A of such sim resources to go to sim this our current year, 2010, on Earth, and
  5. expect a fraction B of these 2010 sim resources to go to sim fully conscious humans unaware they are in a sim, where each such creature costs on average C per subjective year of experience.

THEN you should expect there will be on average of N = A*B*Q*V*F*R/C sim creatures who assume they are humans living in 2010. If your N >> 1010 (current human population), then unless there is some particular reason to think your life is much less likely than average to be the sort of life that a sim lives, you should strongly expect that you are such a creature; you are a sim.  (Of course you should then question how much you know about the sort of universe you live in, which may change your N estimate. Even so that probably won’t drastically reduce your estimated chance you are a sim.)

For example, if Q = 10-2, V = 1030, F = 10-4, A = 10-9, B = 10-2, R/C = 101, then N = 1014; you are a sim.

While I published back in ’01 on how to live your life differently if you might be a sim, it took Charlie Stross pondering the topic recently to remind me that I’ve never fully engaged the argument, by trying to come up with my own best estimate of N.  So what do I think?

Let’s break it down by purpose.  First, consider entertainment.  Even compared to other humans, we today spend record large fractions of our income on tv, movies and video games; we are in the process of reacting to the development of unprecedented hyper-stimuli.  Humans in general are also clearly unusual compared to other animals, who spend almost nothing on anything sim-like.  And humans are mainly interested in simulations of other humans; we hardly have movies or games about monkey life.

So if our descendants become better adapted to their new environment, they are likely to evolve to become rather different from us, so that they spend much less of their income on sim-like stories and games, and what sims they do like should be overwhelmingly of creatures much like them, which we just aren’t. Furthermore, if such creatures have near subsistence income, and if a fully conscious sim creature costs nearly as much to support as future creatures cost, entertainment sims containing fully conscious folks should be rather rare.

Now, consider academic study of history.  Once economic growth and tech innovation slows to a near halt, I expect far less interest in learning new things, which includes learning new history.  The little learning that remains should mostly be done to signal future folk good features, and so they’ll much prefer to pay one future person to think carefully about the past, rather than spend similar resources to sim one person from the distant past.

Full scale simulations of the entire Earth over many years should be very rare, and perhaps non-existent. Similar understanding would come much cheaper from sims that only model a few people in enough detail to make them fully conscious.  Modeling a few such folks in detail and then having most other modeled folks just act in ways that are statistically similar to those few detailed folks is probably good enough for most purposes. Perhaps there will be other reasons to run sims containing fully conscious creatures, but I expect those to be even more rare.

Bottom line: I expect R/C near one, even if Q=1, and expect A*B*F to be smaller than 1010/V. So, I’m probably not a sim.

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Look But Don’t Touch

By Robin Hanson · August 2, 2010 4:50 pm · Comments (41)

In both male and female demand, sex and looks are complements; all else equal, the better someone looks, the more you want sex with them.  In male sex supply, sex and looks seem unrelated; how much sex a man offers has little to do with his looks.  In female sex supply, however, it seems that sex and looks are substitutes; the better she looks the less sex she offers. Supporting data:

  • “Overweight or obese teenage girls are more likely than their recommended-weight peers to engage in certain types of risky sexual behavior but not others.” (more)
  • “Women on campuses where they comprise a higher proportion of the student body give more negative appraisals of campus men and relationships, go on fewer traditional dates, are less likely to have had a college boyfriend, and are more likely to be sexually active.” (more)
  • “Women in their 30s and early 40s are significantly more sexual than younger women. Women ages 27 through 45 report not only having more sexual fantasies (and more intense [ones]) than women ages 18 through 26 but also having more sex, period. And they are more willing than younger women to have casual sex, even one-night stands.” (more)

Apparently less-demanded women compensate by offering more sex, by requiring fewer “traditional dates,” and less insisting on official “boyfriend” status.  They are, for example, more willing to be a second woman on the sly.  Many don’t want to fully admit to making this tradeoff, however, and so would rather blame the men. (On the age effect, the study authors actually prefer to explain it as compensation for falling female fertility.  But male fertility also falls, yet men don’t show this age effect.)

So why is the relation between sex and looks so different in female sex supply, relative to other gender and supply vs. demand combos?   On obvious answer is that for women relations are primary and sex is more instrumental; women offer just as much sex as needed to get a man.  For men, in contrast, sex seems primary while relations seem instrumental; men more enter into relations in order to get sex.

A related datum:

  • “Binge drinking significantly increases participation in sex, promiscuity, and the failure to use birth control.” (more)

Why do woman need to get drunk to have sex?  It seems a way to stay in denial about intending to have sex – they can say they got drunk “for fun” and then the sex “just happened.”  Are women in more denial than men about intending to have sex?  That would make sense, if women were traditionally expected to exert more self-control on sex.

Added 5p: I should clarify that by “looks” I mean most any attractive feature, not just physical appearance.

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Immortality Distracts

By Robin Hanson · August 1, 2010 5:45 pm · Comments (57)

A recent NYT book review:

In his new book, “Long for This World,” Weiner makes similar use of another brilliant theoretical scientist, the English gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, a tireless proselytizer for radical life extension. … The inspiration for de Grey’s scientific quest for immortality came in a flash one sleepless night: “What these [aging] troubles all have in common is that they fill the aging body with junk. Maybe we can just clean up all the scree and rubble that gathers in our aging bodies.” The beauty of this view is that “curing” aging requires no special knowledge of design, or any understanding of just how the cellular junk got there in the first place. It only requires that we get rid of it. As de Grey sees it, there are seven types of cellular junk. … De Grey’s dream of conquering death may seem far-fetched and unreal, but Big Pharma is already at work on some of these ideas. …

As Weiner points out, there is a big problem with immortality. Traditionally, we have viewed our lives as unfolding in stages: … Immortality could wind up being a terrible stasis. “A huge part of the action and the drama in the seven ages comes from the sense of an ending, the knowledge that all these ages must have an end,” Weiner writes. We might live forever in a state of unending boredom. And the technology might benefit the wrong people: … Mao Zedong might still be alive.” … My patients were dying young and felt cheated out of their best years. They did not want immortality, just the chance to live the life span that their peers could expect. What de Grey and other immortalists seem to have lost sight of is that simply living a full life span is a laudable goal.

As with cryonics, a proposal to extend life substantially is greeted with bizarre concerns about living too long, or the wrong people living longer. Why not apply such complaints to ordinary medical gains?

A big part of the problem, I think, is that talk of “immortality” invokes an extremely far view. But finite increases in lifespan really have little to do with immortality. Immortality means you never die, ever. But forever is a really really long time! In fact, nothing you can imagine is remotely as long.

De Grey seems to be part of the problem here. Some times he say things like:

I have a lot of problems with the use of the word immortality to describe what I do because it’s taken by religion. Immortality means inability to die; it means inability to actually be killed by anything, and I don’t work on that. I work on stopping people from getting sick. I do not work on stopping people from being hit by trucks.

But if you search for his name and “immortality” you will find he is associated with that word quite often, including in the title of many interviews of him.  He’s even listed as an advisor to the Immortality Institute. And you’ll find things like:

De Grey says he is talking about the “indefinite extension of longevity.” “Average life spans would be in the region of 1,000 years,” he says. “Seriously.” … So humans will be just as spry at 500 as we were at 25? “If you have difficultly imaging this, think about the situation with houses. With moderate maintenance they stay up, they stay intact, inhabitable more or less forever. It’s just that we have to do a bit of maintenance to keep them going. And it’s going to be the same with us,” says de Grey. …

“The first generation [of new med tech] will give us maybe 30 extra years of healthy lifespan,” says de Grey. “So, beneficiaries of those first therapies will still be around to benefit from improved therapies that will give them another 30 or 50 years and so on. So this is basically staying one step ahead of the problem.” … De Grey acknowledges that immortality will not be cheap. “We are talking about serious expenditure here.”

Are houses immortal? Very few (no?) thousand year old houses still function, and maintenance costs probably makes them cost more overall than just building a new house. Old houses are even more expensive if you want to retrofit them with modern conveniences, such as lights or air conditioning, or if you consider the opportunity cost of the land on which they sit. And even if, with sufficient expenditure, houses could last a thousand years, that should be little comfort to those who can’t possibly afford such expense. Furthermore, lasting a thousand years is nothing like being immortal!

A thousand year lifespan would be fantastic, relative to our lifespan. I want it! But it is nothing like immortality. It would have clear stages, and a very real end to anticipate. Anyone with a halfway decent imagination couldn’t remotely run out of new interesting things to do, places to visit, people to see, etc. Yes they’d have time for twenty times as many careers, hobbies, marriages, and vacations as we do now, but it should only take a moment’s reflection to realize you there are far more than twenty times as many things to do than we manage in our lives. For example, any decent library holds twenty times more books than you’ve ever read.

Yes it may be logically possible to live forever, and yes you can’t do that if you die now, so not dying now keeps open that logical possibility. But I expect each new scale of lifespan to offer new novel, difficult, and expensive obstacles to living that long.  If you agree, you should seriously doubt your ability to keep beating such odds forever.

Yes, keep trying to live if you love life, and rage, rage against the dying of the light. Do better; live longer. But why confuse everyone by talking as if you expect to achieve the literally infinite success of “immortality”? It is fine to say “let’s extend lives as much as we can.” But must you really talk as if nothing less than infinite success will do?  Can’t you see that makes you sound rather crazy?

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Open Thread

By Robin Hanson · August 1, 2010 10:00 am · Comments (16)

This is our monthly place to discuss related topics that have not appeared in recent posts.

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