How to Be Happy • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Be Happy

#181

Post by maaku » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 3:35 AM UTC

vesche wrote: post #39

Jweb_Guru wrote: post #10

Just for those of you who aren't aware, LessWrong is a site devoted to the cult of the "singularity." The site founder, Eliezer Yudkowsky, is a secular humanist who is probably most well-known for his Harry Potter fanfiction, "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality." His core beliefs include that the obvious goal of the human race is immortality, that it is justifiable to kill a man if it would remove a spec of…

>LessWrong is a site devoted to the cult of the "singularity." LessWrong is a discussion forum mostly pertaining to psychology, philosophy, cognitive biases, etc,. A frequent topic of discussion is artificial intelligence, but it is hardly centric. Saying that LessWrong is a hangout spot for "singularity cult members" (as you call them) is simply incorrect on multiple levels. Technological singularity is no more than…

> Yudkowsky is also a prominent researcher of a variety of artificial intelligence topics which is enhancing the field. Primarily he focuses not on developing a Strong AI (AGI), but rather focusing on safety issues that such a technology would pose.

Nice defense on the other points. But no, Eliezer Yudkowsky has no peer reviewed publications, open source code, or really anything else to point to which provides any independent assessment of his contribution to the field of AI.

He has a couple of blog posts and self-published white papers. Forgive me for being skeptical.

Re: How to Be Happy

#182

Post by maaku » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 3:37 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #159

lucisferre wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny but this article is actually the strongest evidence of cult behaviour. Teaching you how to be "happy" is pretty much the initial selling point of almost every cult out there. Just walk by any Scientology building. Also from the wiki you linked [1] > Some people familiar with the LessWrong memeplex have suffered serious psychological distress after contemplating basilisk-like ideas — even when they're fairl…

> It's funny but this article is actually the strongest evidence of cult behaviour. Teaching you how to be "happy" is pretty much the initial selling point of almost every cult out there. This is nonsense. It's an article posted to a curated community blog by some guy who happens to like reading tons of psychology papers and wanted to do some research into the state of scientific understanding of happiness. Is Wikipe…

> This is nonsense. It's an article posted to a curated community blog by some guy who happens to like reading tons of psychology papers and wanted to do some research into the state of scientific understanding of happiness...

...and is executive director of MIRI, the organization hosting and providing most of the content to Less Wrong.

Re: How to Be Happy

#183

Post by dllthomas » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 3:57 AM UTC

Jweb_Guru wrote: post #23

Traubert wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that it is justifiable to kill a man if it would remove a spec of dust from the eye of every other person on Earth Maybe Eliezer has argued that too, but I doubt it. He has said it about a much, much, much larger number of people than everyone on Earth.

Sure, it's probable that I'm misremembering the exact numbers. Though I realize that the numbers are critical to the proposition from his perspective, I think the fact that he would consider it at all probably differentiates his worldview from that of a lot of people.

"Sure, it's probable that I'm misremembering the exact numbers."

The exact number makes "the population of Earth" a tiny rounding error away from zero. Eliezer could be entirely right in his conclusion here ("core belief" is a gross mischaracterization - it follows from other things, not the other way around) and it could still be wrong to torture a man for a minute to spare dust specks in eyes of a billion Earths (and thats not even getting us much closer to the number in question).

That he would consider it at all differentiates his thinking only from those who don't think about these things. "What happens in the extreme?" is a useful question, when trying to pin down how systems work.

Re: How to Be Happy

#184

Post by dllthomas » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 4:04 AM UTC

id wrote: post #47

maaku wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Play fair. > His core beliefs include that the obvious goal of the human race is immortality "We should be allowed to live as long as we want to." Emphasis on the want. I don't find that very controversial. > that it is justifiable to kill a man if it would remove a spec of dust from the eye of every other person on Earth No, the setup was one person's torture for 50 years (not death), or specks of dust in the eyes o…

So annoying 3^^^3 people "for a fraction of a second, barely enough to make them notice" is worse than horribly torturing a single person for 50 years? Keep in mind that the 3^^^3 dust specks are spread across 3^^^3 people and their annoyance can't be simply added together.

It doesn't assume that we can simply add their annoyance together. It assumes that, whatever function computes the badness of some badness applied to multiple people, it diverges and does so fast enough (where "fast enough" will probably include "exceptionally slowly", but in principle there are sufficiently slow divergent functions).

I don't think this is well enough established, though it seems plausible.

Re: How to Be Happy

#185

Post by joesmo » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 5:03 AM UTC

namnatulco wrote: post #166

joesmo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Primarily he focuses not on developing a Strong AI (AGI), but rather focusing on safety issues that such a technology would pose. That's absurd at worst, science fiction at best, akin to worrying about manned flight safety in the 1500's.

Are you really trying to deny that google cars and other automated systems at least partially based on AI have safety issues? Even if we're talking autonomous, "life-like" AI, there is a long list of interesting philosophical and legal questions to be asked. I can't say I find any of the statements here or in the article very appealing, but you shouldn't dismiss real safety/security issues just because you don't like…

AI in the sense implied does not exist. Otherwise "would pose" would be "poses" in the sentence I quote.

Re: How to Be Happy

#186

Post by Tenoke » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 7:01 AM UTC

onetimeusename wrote: post #114

dominotw wrote: post #79

Can someone tell me how this 'cult of happiness' started in western culture. The obsession with happiness is so pervasive and absurd that people are depressed because they are not happy 24x7 not because of a personal tragedy. Why is some vaguely defined happiness sold as some holy grail that must be achieved at all costs. There are billion dollar industries built around selling happiness ( fashion industry, fitness i…

In the article, the writer mentioned he is rarely unhappy for more than 20 minutes. I don't understand this. Happiness is a result of something that is good and sadness is a result of something being bad. Emotions have a purpose. Emotions are not some sort of primitive remnant from prehistoric times we need to overcome. It's as if because of science we can now see what is good and what is bad and remove the bad emoti…

Tell that to someone with clinical depression.

Re: How to Be Happy

#187

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 8:17 AM UTC

maaku wrote: post #182

TeMPOraL wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's funny but this article is actually the strongest evidence of cult behaviour. Teaching you how to be "happy" is pretty much the initial selling point of almost every cult out there. This is nonsense. It's an article posted to a curated community blog by some guy who happens to like reading tons of psychology papers and wanted to do some research into the state of scientific understanding of happiness. Is Wikipe…

> This is nonsense. It's an article posted to a curated community blog by some guy who happens to like reading tons of psychology papers and wanted to do some research into the state of scientific understanding of happiness... ...and is executive director of MIRI, the organization hosting and providing most of the content to Less Wrong.

Which would be an equivalent of pg posting his essay to HN, and then people accusing HNers of cultishness because of that essay.

Hmm... actually, that happens every now and then and is exactly as fair as the accusations against lukeprog and LessWrong.

Also, MIRI was created years after LessWrong.

Re: How to Be Happy

#188

Post by yellow_and_gray » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 9:27 AM UTC

bitexploder wrote: post #141

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #132

At the time in my life when I stopped reading LessWrong I became remarkably happier within a week. I attribute this to two reasons: 1. LessWrong's focus on optimizing your life is so great that whenever I failed at something or didn't uphold something I said I would do I felt bad about it. 2. One thing that makes me happy (and I think most others would agree they're happiest when this occurs as well) is accomplishmen…

I think another key factor with a lot of modern unhappiness is that, as the article notes, money does not correlate to happiness as long as you are above the poverty line. We have lost the art of teaching people how to have a philosophy of life. We teach people how to have a craft. We teach basic morals. In religious households you may even be taught a pretty comprehensive "life philosophy", but it is often underpinn…

Thank you for writing this. Can you say more about the system you found, this binding strategy for "strategies for happiness"?

My judgements being wrong used to be a source of frustration for me too. Now I take them as a given. Being wrong is part of the process.

The biggest problem I have now is forgetting what strategy I had decided to follow. Mostly because there are too many things to decice. The process of me deciding doesn't ingrain each decision in me hard enough.

How do you deal with that?

Re: How to Be Happy

#189

Post by mansr » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 9:40 AM UTC

dllthomas wrote: post #184

id wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So annoying 3^^^3 people "for a fraction of a second, barely enough to make them notice" is worse than horribly torturing a single person for 50 years? Keep in mind that the 3^^^3 dust specks are spread across 3^^^3 people and their annoyance can't be simply added together.

It doesn't assume that we can simply add their annoyance together. It assumes that, whatever function computes the badness of some badness applied to multiple people, it diverges and does so fast enough (where "fast enough" will probably include "exceptionally slowly", but in principle there are sufficiently slow divergent functions). I don't think this is well enough established, though it seems plausible .

I'm inclined to think that there is some threshold below which that function is constant. "Dust in eye" is definitely below this threshold.

Re: How to Be Happy

#190

Post by coldtea » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 10:32 AM UTC

davidrusu wrote: post #174

coldtea wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? You can have a neural network that "learns" tic-tac-toe by itself in 100 lines of code. Does that prove anything?

AIXI is an artificial 'general' intelligence. It is not hard coded to do a specific task. That neural network is useless at doing anything other than playing tic tac toe

Actually no -- it's the neural network + biases, start values that's good at playing tic tac toe. The neural network code itself is not "hard coded" for any specific task.

You could use the same neural network with different inputs to do other stuff, like recognize characters, and all kind of pattern matching / classification.