Just a meta-comment for admins. The "Sequence Reruns" tag in the discussion section is now so common relative to the other tags, it's forced all the others in the tag cloud in the sidebar to the same relative size. That seems to be defeating the point a bit.
While I didn't think much of the discussion in the recent creepy thread, I'm very much enjoying a series on a related subject written by Yvain.
I strongly recommend the whole blog - that guy should post on LessWrong or something!
Those posts are followed by:
I really liked the series. He should make a discussion post on LW linking to these with some commentary. I he doesn't I think I will. What he shouldn't do is make a neutered special needs padded "safe for LessWrong" version.
Activist and Less Wrong user Aaron Swartz has been charged with 13 felonies for downloading millions of academic articles from JSTOR.
I'm trying to find the existing research on the topic Paul Graham discusses in this article (regarding the relative merits of programming languages in footnote 3 and surrounding text) and which EY touches on here (regarding Turing tarpits).
Basically, within the realm of Turing-complete languages, there is significant difference in how easy it is to write a program that implements specific functionality. That is, if you want to write a program that takes a bunch of integers and returns the sum of their squares, then it's possible to do it by writing in machine code, assembly, brainfsck, BASIC, C, Java, Python, Lisp, but it's much easier (and more concise, intuitive, etc) in some than others.
What's more, Graham speculates there's a ranking of the languages in which programmers too comfortable in one of the languages "don't get" the usefulness of the features in languages above it. So BASIC-addicts might not appreciate what they can do with recursion or structured programming (i.e. by abolishing go-to statements); C-addicts might not appreciate what they can do with functions as first class objects, and Python-addicts might not appreciate what they can do with Lisp macros....
Graham speculates there's a ranking of the languages in which programmers too comfortable in one of the languages "don't get" the usefulness of the features in languages above it. So BASIC-addicts might not appreciate what they can do with recursion or structured programming (i.e. by abolishing go-to statements); C-addicts might not appreciate what they can do with functions as first class objects, and Python-addicts might not appreciate what they can do with Lisp macros.
If "enlightening people about better programming languages" ever becomes a higher priority than "enlightening people about superior status of X language users", I think a good strategy would be to explain those possible insights in a simplest possible form, without asking people to learn the guru's favorite programming language first.
For example, to show people the benefits of the recursion, I would have to find a nice example where recursion is the best way to solve the given problem; but also the problem should not feel like an artificial problem created merely for the sake of demonstrating usefulness of recursion.
I can use recursion to calculate the factorial of N... but I can us...
The new Richard Carrier book, Proving History, is fantastic. Basically it's an introduction to Bayesian thinking for people who think in words. You'll enjoy it.
I think this is worth it's own post but in light of my last discussion catching fire and burning to the ground, I have decided to request a critique on this one before posting in discussions:
Cryonics Moral Dilemma
Since joining LessWrong, I've been thinking about cryo a lot, and have encountered a dilemma:
According to GiveWell, "We estimate that giving a few thousand dollars to AMF likely saves a person's life." (They do malaria bed nets if you're not familiar).
Cryo costs tens of thousands of dollars, and it's not guaranteed to save even one life.
I don't see how I would ever justify signing up, myself, unless I show that I'm capable of making a large enough difference in the world that rescuing my difference making abilities justifies the risk and cost.
This also means "Reddit, help me find some peace I'm dying young" is a cute puppy dog cause. :/
Does anyone relate? What are your thoughts?
please critique the proposed discussion post
(: Thanks, Shminux.
I have finally gotten the ass-kicking I needed. Though not especially in my elitism thread, it was spread out... Wedrifid showed me arguments good enough to corner mine. Kindly provided a wonderfully devastating critique of my poll. Gwern's website shows that he's so well-read that I felt like an idiot. Eliezer's "The Magnitude of His Own Folly" depicted a deep acknowledgement of the terrible nature of reality that I found moving because it made him neither paranoid or unambitious - I relate to this but I haven't seen anyone like that before. You always seem to be there to say something snide, making my overconfidence think twice while Morendil typed me up a refreshing batch of sanity.
These are exciting.
I haven't felt so much respect and faith in humanity for a long time.
I was getting apathetic because of it.
Now my self-confidence is right about where it should be.
I decided to commit to reading the major sequences, and I'm considering reading them all. I previously did lots of things like learning about logical fallacies and razing my cached thoughts years ago, so these aren't as dense in new information as they'd be otherwise, but I'm learning to communicate with you guys and I'm enjoying Eliezer's brilliance.
Geoff Anders just showed me this PowerPoint prepared by U.S. Air Force's Center for Strategy and Technology, the same group that produced this bombastic 'future of the air force' video.
Slide 18 makes a point I often make when introducing people to the topic: the military's policy assumption is that humans will always be in the loop, but in reality there will be constant pressure to pull humans out of the loop (see e.g. Arkin's military-funded Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots). The slide concludes: "In fact, exponential technological chan...
Almost a Century Ahead of The New York Times
...Many of the influential thinkers, prestigious publications, and important articles of that bygone era are almost totally unknown today, even to many specialists, and the vacuum produced by that loss of historical knowledge has often been filled with the implied histories of modern Hollywood movies and television shows, some of which are occasionally not totally accurate or realistic. Indeed, a casual perusal of the major writings of the past often seems somewhat akin to entering a science fictional alternate-re
Evidence is building that High intensity interval training, e.g. Tabata sprints, is more effective at physical conditioning than low intensity endurance techniques. In terms of weightlifting, "low-rep, high-weight" workouts seem to be better than "high rep, low-weight" workouts.*
I wonder if something analogous is true for mental training. E.g., will you improve mathematical ability faster by grinding through a bunch of relatively easy problems, or by spending a shorter amount of time mentally exhausting yourself on problems that push yo...
Good news for EY: Akinator can recognize him and unequivocally believes that he's 'famous'. Bad news for EY: Akinator also believes that he uses 'green energy' to 'power up'. I'm not sure if that refers to an environmentally clean power source or literally green supervilllain rays of death, like those of the Necrons in WH40k. Probably the latter. In any case, it hardly improves SIAI's public image :(
Kind of a stupid question:
It's a truism in the efficient charity community that when giving to charity, we should find the most efficient group and give it our entire charity budget; the common practice of spreading donations among groups is suboptimal. However, in investing it's considered a good idea to diversify. But it seems that giving to charity and investing are essentially the same activity: we are trying to get the highest return possible, the only difference is who gets it. So why is diversification a good idea for one and not the other?
It's a truism in the efficient charity community that when giving to charity, we should find the most efficient group and give it our entire charity budget; the common practice of spreading donations among groups is suboptimal. However, in investing it's considered a good idea to diversify. But it seems that giving to charity and investing are essentially the same activity: we are trying to get the highest return possible, the only difference is who gets it. So why is diversification a good idea for one and not the other?
If you are attempting to maximise expected returns from your personal investment you would not diversify (except within resources that have identical expected returns). However with personal investments you have some degree of risk aversion. That is, you don't value money linearly all the way from 0 to $10,000,000 and so splitting the investment between multiple stocks gives higher expected utility even though the expected returns in $ will be slightly lower.
This differs when it comes to charitable giving because it is assumed that your personal donations aren't sufficient to change the marginal utility significantly. Personally owning $10,000 rather than $0 is much more useful than owning $20,000 instead of $10,000 but after you give $10,000 to The Society For Cute Puppies And Mosquito Nets the value of giving another $10,000 to TSFCPaMN has probably barely changed at all. Diversifying becomes important again when you have enough financial power to change the margin all on your own.
You've pinpointed it: the only difference is who gets it. When investing, diversification as the receiver of the return is useful because you'd rather gain slightly less than often lose everything. When ... living, diversification as the receiver of the return is useful for the same reason.
When investing, you'd like your buyers to diversify... but there's only one buyer, so that buyer needs to diversify. But when giving charitably, the world would like its buyers to diversify, and there are lots of buyers. Assuming its buyers are sufficiently independent, the world gets enough diversification just because its buyers make different decisions. So as long as sufficiently many people make different charitable giving decisions than you, feel free to buy only what you think are the most efficient charities.
The world doesn't care how much you help it, the world only cares how much it gets helped overall.
Reposting a comment I made on Yvain's livejournal:
There's a standard argument about "efficient charity" that says you should concentrate all your donations on one charity, because presumably you have preferences over the total amounts of money donated to each charity (not just your own donations), so choosing something like a 50/50 split would be too sensitive to other people's donations.
I just realized that the argument applies in equal force to politics. If you're not using "beliefs as attire" but actually care about politics, your participation in politics should be 100% extremist. That's troubling.
How many threads and discussions have we had about LessWrong readers joining or participating in online classes? How many about forming study and reading groups for such classes or textbooks? Please help me complete this list. I'm interested in getting a quick idea of what works and what doesn't in trying to educate parts of the community as whole. I think it is relevant to the problem of our subculture not updating as well as some other efforts I'm currently working on.
Online Classes
...I've enrolled in 3 Coursera classes as a kind of warm-up for (possibly) going back to school to study computer science (if my start-up succeeds before then). They are:
Reply to this comment or PM me if you are interested in collaborating.
Luck egalitarianism
...Luck egalitarianism is a view about distributive justice espoused by a variety of egalitarian and other political philosophers. According to this view, justice demands that variations in how well off people are should be wholly attributable to the responsible choices people make and not to differences in their unchosen circumstances. This expresses the intuition that it is a bad thing for some people to be worse off than others through no fault of their own.
Luck egalitarians therefore distinguish between outcomes that are the result of
On LW we talk occasionally about "life-hacks" (simple but non-obvious ways of solving common problems/becoming more productive, etc.) However, these are often considered too off-topic for LW. I distinctly remember reading a long list of life-hack ideas on some website, and a lot of them seemed very promising, but I apparently never bookmarked it.
Is there any good place on the Net to find the more effective hacks? It seems like there are a number of easy-to-implement ideas out there that would help a lot of people, but they are not concentrated...
I've finished transcribing the classic sociology paper "The Iron Law Of Evaluation And Other Metallic Rules"; LWers or libertarians may enjoy it.
I posted earlier on the advantages of incorporating audiobooks into your study methods. One of the main problems I desribed was that there was poor selection with regards to audiobooks and particularly with regard to higher level subjects. I've recently found a way around this that makes using audiobooks even more of an obvious decision for me. I've started using text to speech conversion to make audiobooks from ebooks. The inspiration was from wedrifid.
Here is a sample of the best TTS voice I have been able to find. This method produces suprisingly high q...
Random idea: LW would benefit from some good feminism articles. Someone with more money than me (CFAR) should incentivise creation of them with a suitable prize.
Inventor of "Out Of Africa" hypothesis says it's probably quite a bit more complicated than that. Transcription of edge.org talk.
The Spirit Catches Lia Lee, RIP
..."First published in 1997, Anne Fadiman's book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, a chronicle of a Hmong refugee family's interactions with the American medical system in the face of a child's devastating illness, has become highly recommended, if not required, reading for many medical students and health care professionals, over the past 15 years quietly changing how young doctors approach patients from different cultures. On August 31, with little publicity, Lia Lee, the young girl who inspired the book, af
Movement toward taking a statistical approach to the quality of evidence from fingerprint similarity
Before you read that article, what was your opinion of fingerprint evidence? [pollid:74]
My first exposure to the idea that fingerprint evidence might not be all that good was in L. Neil Smith's The Probability Broach, in which the viewpoint character, a policeman, wonders whether all fingerprints really are unique, and also wonders whether the government might disappear people who had identical fingerprints.
(Surprisingly to me, the Salon article mentions tha...
Garbriel Kolko on the New Deal
If this is accurate, history is more complicated and less dramatic than usually thought, as is commonly the case.
In the honor of our swanky new poll tech, help me determine which post I should write next. (By next, I mean "in parallel with a chapter-by-chapter review of Causality and my rationalist MLP fanfic," so no guarantees which gets done first.)
The main candidates are:
Rereading An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem, I was struck by how uninformative the introduction was. Why do you want to learn Bayes? Because it's cool! It seems like a post explaining what mindset / worldview would find Bayes useful might be a useful complement to that.
About
"Religious issues" in hardware and software
Apparently, it's not just politics that is the mind-killer. When it comes to one's tool of choice, one can get as irrationally fanatical as it gets. From the Jargon Dictionary
...“What is the best operating system (or editor, language, architecture, shell, mail reader, news reader)?”, “What about that Heinlein guy, eh?”, “What should we add to the new Jargon File?”
Great holy wars of the past have included ITS vs.: Unix, Unix vs.: VMS, BSD Unix vs.: System V, C vs.: Pascal, C vs.: FORTRAN, KDE vs, GNOME, v
Alvin Plantinga is renowned as one of the finest philosophers and theologians that the theist world has to offer. Maarten Boudry (the guy who did the Sokaling I note a couple of posts down) absolutely obliterates the painfully awful bloviations on science and evolution to be found in Plantinga's latest book. PDF, p21 on. If you enjoy LessWrong, you will enjoy this example of a good philosopher skewering bad philosophy.
Related: I have finally written up the recent history of the phrase "sophisticated theology" as used by New Atheists and their fan...
Just a few days ago it occurred to me that reductionism is the inevitable result of strictly local causality -- or putting it differently, any universe with a speed-limit in causality (in our universe this seems to be c) must by necessity be a reductionist universe.
The conclusion seems obvious but the connection between the two had never before occurred to me.
Maybe this has been discussed here, but I wanted to see what you guys think of the surprise test paradox.
The paradox goes like this: it is impossible to give a surprise test.
Say a teacher tells her class on Monday that there will be a surprise test this week. The test cannot be on Friday, because when no test has been given by end-of-class Thrusday, everyone will know that the test is on Friday, and so it won't be a surprise. The test cannot be on Thursday. Having established that the test cannot be on Friday, if no test has been given by end-of-class on W...
My 7-year-old son likes computer programming and I suspect has a lot of innate aptitude for it. We have worked out a system that for every X minutes of learning he does with me he gets X minutes of computer gaming time. What kind of learning exercises could help him be a better programmer when he becomes an adult? Should I focus on him doing lots of coding or, for example, would he be better served by learning additional math?
For those of you who are adult computer programmers (and please identify yourself as such in your response) what, if anything, could you have done at a young age that you think would have caused you to now be a better programmer?
I'm a hobbyist computer programmer considering a career in it.
When I was 6, I met a friend who was into star-trek and science and such. We used to talk about science stuff and dig up "dinosaurs" and attempt to build spaceships. I think a lot of my intellectual personality came from being socialized by him. The rest came from my dad, who used to teach me things about electricity and physics and microeconomics (expected value and whatnot).
I learned to program when someone introduced it to me and I realized I could make video games. (I was 18) I absorbed a lot of knowledge quickly, and didn't get much done. I would find some little problem, and then go and absorb all the relevant knowledge I could to get it exactly right. Even tho I didn't accomplish much, now I know a lot about computer science, which is helpful. Having some thing I was trying to do put a powerful drive behind my learning, even if I didn't actually act in a strategic or effective way.
My dad occasonally told me the importance of finishing the last project before beginning the next, but I don't think it properly transferred. I still have lots of trouble shipping.
One thing that bit me a lot was regressing into...
I am a software developer, and have glimpsed over many similar questions. To summarize: There are enormous individual differences in how one can become a better programmer, and even more so on the opinions on it. It is not even easy to agree on what basic skills should be there at the "end" (i.e., the beginning, after your first two years real experience), much less on how to get those skills.
That said, most commonplace advice is valid here:
On skill-set:
I'm thinking of starting a meetup group in Auckland, NZ, but would like to gauge the interest in such a group first. I know I'm supposed to just plan a meetup, but from a search of the site it looks like Auckland groups have failed to get momentum in the past, so I'd like to arrange for a time and place such that at least a couple of people can definitely attend.
Reply if you're interested, and then we'll sort something out.
Most economists seem to agree that the costs of voting outweigh the benefits. I've been considering whether it might be worth trying to use the threat of voting to get people to do something costly (from their perspective) which serves my values. Here is how I would picture it working:
So for exampl...
How does ambient decision theory work with PA which has a single standard model?
It looks for statements of the form Myself()=C => Universe()=U
(Myself()=C), and (Universe()=U) should each have no free variables. This means that within a single model, their values should be constant. Thus such statements of implication establish no relationship between your action and the universe's utility, it is simply a boolean function of those two constant values.
What am I missing?
After reading comments to a certain work of fiction published here I was surprised to discover strong negative reaction to smoking of the protagonist. (personally, I found this part a nice touch as far as its literary qualities) Thus for my fiction-writing purposes I would like to know:
What is the general stance on drug usage in fiction?
Smoking marijuana
Using psychedelic substances
Using unidentified or fictional substances of supposedly psychoactive nature, but with their full effect or social status unmentioned.
New post idea:
"Female Test Subject - Convince Me To Get Cryo"
(Offering myself for experimentation, of course.)
What do you think? Should I post it? [pollid:110]
on hpmor: harry seems to be very manipulative but almost in a textbook kind of way. I take it eliezer got this from somewhere but cannot figure out where. I'd love to read more about this, could it have come from "the strategy of conflict"?
Cheers
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.
