And happy new year to everyone.

Related to: Utilons vs. Hedons, Would Your Real Preferences Please Stand Up

And I don't mean that question in the semantic "but what is happiness?" sense, or in the deep philosophical "but can anyone not facing struggle and adversity truly be happy?" sense. I mean it in the totally literal sense. Are wireheads having fun?

They look like they are. People and animals connected to wireheading devices get upset when the wireheading is taken away and will do anything to get it back. And it's electricity shot directly into the reward center of the brain. What's not to like?

Only now neuroscientists are starting to recognize a difference between "reward" and "pleasure", or call it "wanting" and "liking". The two are usually closely correlated. You want something, you get it, then you feel happy. The simple principle behind our entire consumer culture. But do neuroscience and our own experience really support that?

I would like to propose this as a thread for people to write in their predictions for the next year and the next decade, when practical with probabilities attached. I'll probably make some in the comments.

In case you missed the notice at the SIAI Blog, the Singularity Institute's next Challenge Grant is now running - $100,000 of matching funds for all donations until February 28th, 2010.  If you want your donation to be tax-deductible in the U.S. for 2009, donations postmarked by December 31st will be counted for this tax year.

"Human nature 101.  Once they've staked their identity on being part of the defiant elect who know the Hidden Truth, there's no way it'll occur to them that they're our catspaws." - Mysterious Conspirator A

This sentence sums up a very large category of human experience and motivation. Informally we talk about this all the time; formally it usually gets ignored in favor of a simple ladder model of status.

In the ladder model, status is a one-dimensional line from low to high. Every person occupies a certain rung on the ladder determined by other people's respect. When people take status-seeking actions, their goal is to to change other people's opinions of themselves and move up the ladder.

But many, maybe most human actions are counterproductive at moving up the status ladder. 9-11 Conspiracy Theories are a case in point. They're a quick and easy way to have most of society think you're stupid and crazy. So is serious interest in the paranormal or any extremist political or religious belief. So why do these stay popular?

[This post is an expansion of my previous open thread comment, and largely inspired by Robin Hanson's writings.]

In this post, I'll describe a simple agent, a toy model, whose preferences have some human-like features, as a test for those who propose to "extract" or "extrapolate" our preferences into a well-defined and rational form. What would the output of their extraction/extrapolation algorithms look like, after running on this toy model? Do the results agree with our intuitions about how this agent's preferences should be formalized? Or alternatively, since we haven't gotten that far along yet, we can use the model as one basis for a discussion about how we want to design those algorithms, or how we might want to make our own preferences more rational. This model is also intended to offer some insights into certain features of human preference, even though it doesn't capture all of them (it completely ignores akrasia for example).

In honor of today's Schelling-pointmas, a true Schelling-inspired story from a class I was in at a law school I did not attend:

As always, the class was dead silent as we walked to the front of the room.  The professor only described the game after the participants had volunteered and been chosen; as a result, we rarely were familiar with the games we were playing, which the professor preferred because his money was on the line.

Both of us were assigned different groups of seven partners in the class. I was given seven slips of paper and my opponent was given six.  Our goal was to make deals with our partners about how to divide a dollar, one per partner, and then write the deal down on a slip of paper.  Whoever had a greater total take from the deals won $20.  All negotiations were public.

The professor left the room, giving us three minutes to negotiate.  The class exploded.

And then I hit a wall.  Everybody with whom I was negotiating knew the rules, and they knew that I cared a hell of a lot more about the results of the negotiation than they did.  I was getting offers on the order of $.20 and less--results straight from the theory of the ultimatum game--and no amount of begging or threatening was changing that.

There will be a LessWrong Meetup on the Friday December 25th (day after tomorrow.)  We're meeting at 6:00 PM at Pan Tao Restaurant at 1686 South Wolfe Road, Sunnyvale, CA the SIAI House in Santa Clara, CA for pizza or whatever else we can figure out how to cook.  Consider it an available refuge if you haven't other plans.

Please comment if you plan to show up!

Continuing my special report on people who don't think human reasoning is all that bad, I'll now briefly present some studies which claim that phenomena other researchers have considered signs of faulty reasoning aren't actually that. I found these from Gigerenzer (2004), which I in turn found when I went looking for further work done on the Take the Best algorithm.

Before we get to the list - what is Gigerenzer's exact claim when he lists these previous studies? Well, he's saying that minds aren't actually biased, but may make judgments that seem biased in certain environments.

Table 4.1 Twelve examples of phenomena that were first interpreted as "cognitive illusions" but later revalued as reasonable judgments given the environmental structure. [...]

The general argument is that an unbiased mind plus environmental structure (such as unsystematic error, unequal sample sizes, skewed distributions) is sufficient to produce the phenomenon. Note that other factors can also contribute to some of the phenomena. The moral is not that people would never err, but that in order to understand good and bad judgments, one needs to analyze the structure of the problem or of the natural environment.

On to the actual examples. Of the twelve examples referenced, I've included three for now.

As Eliezer and many others on Less Wrong have said, the way the human species rose to dominate the Earth was through our intelligence- and not through our muscle power, biochemical weapons, or superior resistance to environmental hazards. Given our overwhelming power over other species, and the fact that many former top predators are now extinct or endangered, we should readily accept that general intelligence is a game-changing power on the species level.

Similarly, one of the key ingredients in the birth of the modern era was the discovery of science, and its counterpart, the discovery of the art of Traditional Rationality. Armed with these, the nations of Western Europe managed to dominate the entire rest of the world, even though, when they began their explorations in the 15th century, the Chinese were more advanced in many respects. Given how Western Europe, and the cultures derived from it, has so completely surpassed the rest of the world in terms of wealth and military might, we should readily accept that science and rationality is a game-changing power on the civilization level.

However, neither of these imply that intelligence, science, and rationality, as a practical matter, are the best way to get things done by individual people operating in the year 2009. We can easily see that many things which work on the species level, or the civilization level, do not work for individuals and small groups. For instance, until the discovery of nuclear weapons, armed conflict was often a primary means of settling disputes between nation-states. However, if you tried to settle your dispute with your neighbor, or your company's dispute with its competitor, using armed force, it would achieve nothing except getting you thrown in prison.

People are crazy and the world is mad, but it does not necessarily follow that we should try to solve our own problems primarily by becoming more sane. Plenty of people achieve many of their goals despite being completely nuts. Adolf Hitler, for example, achieved a large fraction of his (extremely ambitious!) goals, despite having numerous beliefs that most of us would recognize as making no sense whatsoever.

We know, as a matter of historical fact, that Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party, despite being generally incompetent, unintelligent, irrational, superstitious and just plain insane, managed to take over a country of tens of millions of people from nothing, in the span of fifteen years. So far as I am aware, no group of people has managed to achieve anything even remotely similar using, not only rationality, but any skill involving deliberative thought, as opposed to skills such as yelling at huge crowds of people. However, it is a corollary to the statement that no one knows what science doesn't know that no one knows what history doesn't know, so it is entirely possible, perhaps likely, that there is something I am overlooking. To anyone who would assert that intelligence, science or rationality is the Ultimate Power, not just on the level of a species or civilization, but on the level of an individual or small group, let them show that their belief is based in reality.