This graph is what fraction of your income you actually pay in income taxes (assuming you are single, take the standard deductions and live in California). No “brackets”, no fancy accounting tricks, just the mach zehnder modulator actual дивани percentage: if you have $100K in income, you will pay around 35% of it, or $35,000, in income tax (federal, state and FICA).
Attention everyone: I have fallen for the ViddyHo virus, please do not open any strange links you receive from me. If you have already opened a link and entered your account information, please change your password and security question immediately, and notify anyone you sent a spam message to.
On a lighter note, I will be presenting a paper at the AGI-09 Workshop in Arlington, VA on March 9th.
From “Why There Is No Housing Bubble” by Jim Jubak, June 2005:
“It’s just that, for all the teeth-gnashing and pundit-moralizing, we really don’t have a housing bubble that’s anywhere near bursting. Current 10-year interest rates are just too low. And I certainly don’t see interest rates rising enough in the next year or so to burst a bubble, either.”
As of now (February 2009), this guy is still writing for MSN, as “The Web’s No. 1 Investing Columnist” and “Senior Markets Editor”. Why do people still listen to these talking heads regardless of how many times they’re proven wrong?
No, that’s not a joke; textbooks are really cheap, if you’re buying them for personal use and not for a class. The high price of new textbooks is almost entirely caused by demand from college students, which makes one wonder about how many of those students actually value education as opposed to the piece of paper given at graduation. Eg., it costs $92 to buy a used copy of Stewart’s Calculus (6th edition), which is currently used for college classes. But the price of the fifth edition is now $5, which means that the book is literally not worth the paper it’s printed on, because people aren’t forced to buy it anymore, and so there’s a huge glut on the market.
This is the PowerPoint for my presentation at the 2008 Society for Risk Analysis conference.
Wireheading is the practice of inserting wires into an animal’s brain to bliss out the pleasure centers; this can also be done with numerous drugs, such as cocaine and various opiates. More generally, wireheading is altering an optimization processes’s utility function in order to increase the world’s utility, by substituting the quantity of utility for the original goals as the optimization target. The end result of wireheading, if applied to all of human civilization, is the universe being deleted and replaced higher and higher floating-point numbers representing happiness or utility or what have you.
Salesmanship, although not considered illegal or unethical, should be considered a form of wireheading, as “value” is delivered to the consumer (and therefore the company, and the economy) by altering the consumer’s utility function through sales pitches. The change in the definition of “value” is much more subtle than an AI wiring our brains to greatly desire paperclips, but I see no reason why the former should be regarded as “improving quality of life” if the latter isn’t. It seems reasonably plausible that a superintelligence could turn the world into paperclips through extraordinarily effective sales pitches alone; I can easily imagine a sales pitch which would result in me signing over all of my material assets in exchange for something which has zero market value.
For purposes of simplicity, I will avoid introducing Newcomb’s paradox, or any of the various philosophical issues surrounding it. I will also shamelessly avoid the issue of a perfect predictor; any perfect predictor of Turing machines in general seems to require a halting oracle, and the paradox should still work if you just use an ordinary human who has really good psychological knowledge and so can predict accurately 90% of the time.
The heart of Newcomb’s paradox is what Scott Aaronson calls first-order rationality: a case where utility is attached to beliefs directly, rather than attaching only to actions which flow from beliefs. As an extremely simple example of first-order rationality, if you have a letter in a sealed envelope which you strongly believe to be both accurate and surprising, and someone points a gun at you and tells you they’ll shoot you if you open it, you probably shouldn’t, even though you’ll predictably end up with less accurate beliefs. It seems that you can’t get a human to genuinely disbelieve in something they already know to be true without introducing other… issues, which leads to a great deal of confusion, but any human with reasonably unimpaired cognition should have little trouble avoiding a bullet in the previous scenario.
If a human is deciding whether to put $1M in the box, the obvious thing to do is to try to influence the human in some way… to shine a light in their eyes, or inject them with morphine, or weave wonderful tales about what you would do with the $1M, etc., etc. By act of magic, none of these work, and the only thing that the human considers is the predicted result of your cognitive algorithm for how many boxes to take- the only way to influence the future is through the dependence on currently held ideas. Which currently held ideas would be best?
It seems that a reasonably good solution is to evaluate the problem using a meta-algorithm; evaluate the potential cognitive algorithms available and see which one produces the best result. A mind with a one-box algorithm will predictably receive $1M, while a mind with a two-box algorithm will predictably not receive $1M. The direct consequences- the ones which depend on external actions directly- are $1K in favor of two-boxing. But the indirect consequences, which depend directly on which algorithm you use, are $1M in favor of one-boxing, far outweighing the $1K even with some uncertainty added.
A meta-algorithm should be able to beat any paradox which directly rewards arbitrary cognitive content, eg., Kavka’s toxin puzzleмебели. The other problem with the puzzle is that it would be difficult for a human (although not an AI) to implement an algorithm which actually results in them drinking the toxin, rather than a pseudo-algorithm under which they “intend” to drink it (for various definitions of intent) but actually won’t. This is easily fixable in principle, eg., by rigging a time bomb to the toxin which will explode and kill you if you don’t consume it. The ideal meta-algorithm is fully self-consistent over time, by selecting an algorithm which prefers X and then actually doing X, so it should be able to handle even a perfect predictor by avoiding deliberate deception.
First-order rationality is also applicable to game theory, eg., the Prisoner’s Dilemma, or even the True Prisoner’s Dilemma. Assuming that the two players know something about each other, selecting an algorithm which cooperates always has the direct effect of losing points, but it may also have the indirect effect of gaining points by increasing the probability that the other player will cooperate. Since the goodness comes from the indirect effects, which are still real but dependent on the other player’s algorithms, I dispute Eliezer’s assertion that one can always find a way to cooperate- if the other player is simply a rock which will fall off a shelf and land on the DEFECT button, it would be criminal stupidity to not also “defect”.
“The Singularity holds out the possibility of winning the Grand Prize, the true Utopia, the best-of-all-possible-worlds – not just freedom from pain and stress or a sterile round of endless physical pleasures, but the prospect of endless growth for every human being – growth in mind, in intelligence, in strength of personality; life without bound, without end; experiencing everything we’ve dreamed of experiencing, becoming everything we’ve ever dreamed of being; not for a billion years, or ten-to-the-billionth years, but forever… or perhaps embarking together on some still greater adventure of which we cannot even conceive.” – Eliezer Yudkowsky
This paragraph, as nice as it is, doesn’t really convey the principle inherent in Expected Creative Surprises. Dreams can be pleasant, but they can’t be surprising in some deep sense; if you already have a specific vision of Utopia, you’ve already mapped out your vision’s location in utilityspace. A superintelligently-designed Utopia should contain a large number of qualia which are surprisingly good, in the sense that we’ve never even imagined that point in utilityspace. Such qualia are relatively rare in the present world, but they do exist; imagine a starving African child eating their first chocolate cake. This, in some sense, is a more worthy goal for the future than, say, Iain Banks’s Culture series. The Culture is limited by human imagination, while superintelligently-designed utopias shouldn’t be.
Suppose that a given gene correlates highly with social status in the ancestral environment. Social status is an extremely important factor in reproductive success, particularly for males; it’s not unheard of for high-status men to have hundreds of kids, while low-status men often have zero. If the common alleles for this gene differ significantly, one will be very rapidly pushed out of the gene pool by natural selection; most alleles only have a weak effect on reproduction prospects, but an allele which correlates strongly with status could double or even triple the expected number of surviving grandchildren.
Hence, in any current population, all of the existing alleles with nontrivial frequencies must not correlate strongly with social status, or with any other factor important to mating. This makes it, a priori, highly unlikely that we’ll find an “anger gene” or a “romance gene”; anything complex enough to have a strong effect on social relations will probably be controlled by large groups of genes that are hard to eliminate by a few centuries of selection.
From the data, it is obvious that the United States has a positive correlation between number of years of education and gross wages:
As a result of these numbers, everybody and their dog agrees that, to reduce poverty and increase wages, we should increase the average timespan of education. Statistics since 1950 show that we have been doing just that:
However, the data shows that real wages in the US have been stagnant over the past thirty years. This piece of data is apparently obscure enough that I had a hard time finding a graph for it, even though it concerns one of the most basic facts about the country’s well-being:
The only reasonable conclusion, it seems, is that a large part of the pursuit of education is cargo cult science.