Gwern Facts Thread
Because we already have an Eliezer Yudkowsky one and this website is awesome.
Found in Yvain's blog post:
Doesn't this mean that I must be wrong about its excellent safety profile? No. See for example Gwern's research on the subject. About half the people reading this paragraph are going to say "Wait, don't the FDA and the entire decision-making apparatus of the United States government have more data and credibility than one guy with a website?" The other half of the people know Gwern.
Unlike Odin, Gwern has plucked out both his eyes for wisdom, knowing the value of double blindness.
Come on, Gwern deserves more than a favorable comparison to the FDA.
I know several people who have more credibility than the "FDA and the entire decision-making apparatus of the United States government", at least when it comes to drugs. Not because I know so many cool folks, but because drug regulation is a paramount example of government irrationality.
Gwern's reality marble, Unlimited Essay Works, is the original, of which Unlimited Blade Works is a mere copy.
I went on an interview with Google. They told me that if I was hired, I'd be working on a unique innovation. When I asked what it was, they told me "We want to make an app that will search this guy named Gwern."
In the right-hand navigation bar of the site, there is a "Tags" box which lists the most popular post tags. This box has a feature whereby the tags are rendered in a font size proportional to their frequency of occurrence.
Over time, the attribution of the "sequence_reruns" tag to sequence rerun posts has made this feature inoperative: because it's the single most used tag, and no other tag even comes close in frequency, every tag is now rendered at precisely the same font size except for "sequence_reruns".
I had no idea it had already been reported, but I see it's been corrected now.
No, it hasn't. There are two different tag clouds, one for Main and one for Discussion. It's the Discussion one that faces the problem.
You should edit your original comment to indicate this, so that other people don't think it has been corrected.
Today my 16yo son asked a classmate for a confidence interval on his grade at their latest assignment, after giving one of his own. That's after all 3 of my kids attended a workshop I gave (mixed in with adults, 20 total) on calibrated probability statements and scoring.
Never mind that he gave a 90% interval and missed (due to getting full marks), I'm inordinately proud of him for actually applying the lessons.
I just want to double check something with LWers.
Incest among adults is also sex between consenting adults. At least some such relationships are happy ones. Most arguments against incest are arguments where the bottom line is already written since they are made by people who just don't want to admit they are plain grossed out by it. Not only the motivation, but many of the arguments are basically the same as arguments in favour of homophobia. If the person has an identity centred on fighting "bigotry" cognitive dissonance hilarity ensues.
Bonus round: Arguments against incestuous couples having children is a fundamentally eugenicist argument. Applying it like a consequentalist results in concluding many other kinds of couples should be discouraged just as much (perhaps even with imprisonment since that is the price of discovered incest in many countries) or incest being legalized.
German incest couple lose rights ruling
The ECHR said the main basis of punishment for incestuous relationships was “the protection of marriage and the family”, and because it blurs family roles.
It also noted “the risk of significant damage” to children born of such a relationship.
Incest among adults is also sex between consenting adults.
True, but that's largely a noncentral fallacy.
Most arguments against incest are arguments where the bottom line is already written since they are made by people who just don't want to admit they are plain grossed out by it.
If I'm grossed out by it, why am I watching lesbian incest hentai? :-)
Not only the motivation, but many of the arguments are basically the same as arguments in favour of homophobia. If the person's has an identity centred on fighting "bigotry" cognitive dissonance hilarity ensues.
Agreed. But not all the arguments are basically the same. Some of the arguments are more like the "teachers shouldn't date their students" argument and the "psychologists shouldn't date their patients" or even "50-year olds shouldn't date 20-year olds" argument, and reflect on the likely unhealthy effects of power-imbalance.
The power-imbalance in intergenerational incest is obvious. In intragenerational incest it can of course be significantly less clear; especially in cases like the German couple where the siblings only met during adulthood.
...Bonus round: Arguments against ince
So, Yvain posted a blog post recently. I was disappointed. I'm posting about it here because I'll have an easier time following a conversation about my thoughts here than in livejournal comments. I will note that he claims the post is, at most, 60% serious, but that seems at least ten thousand times too high.
A major supporting claim is that if modafinil were legal, it would become expected, and everything would be harder to match the increased ability of humans to be productive.
So the religious people flunk out, everyone else has to work much harder, and in the end no student gains. Arguably future patients might gain from having better trained doctors, but I think this wildly overestimates the usefulness of the medical education system.
A parable:
In the Old Country, the people once did not know of iodine. It was not illegal, but only a very specific kind of geek would eat dried seaweed carried long miles on the backs of beasts and men. One day, a stranger came to the village, preaching of this mysterious substance, claiming that its consumption would make all men cleverer.
The elders convened and discussed this 'boon,' if you could call it that. If one man is cleverer, he profit...
What is his main proposition? He has a model of the world in which enormous amounts of energy and money are being spent running a rat race where the satisfaction only comes from winning it, not from running it, and meanwhile there are numerous places where just a small fraction of that energy and money could be spent, creating great and lasting benefits. His proposition is that in the current situation, modafinil is known mostly to a minority which includes people working on some of those important neglected matters, but if modafinil becomes as well known as Prozac or Viagra, its main consequence will be that the rats in the rat race will all run faster, with no net benefit.
Your comments imply that you disagree with this model, but you need to say where and why.
I think that Yvain's thoughts on the matter are poisoned by working in a poisoned field. Would doctors be better if they studied 16 hours a day, instead of 10? Some, but not much. Perhaps people would live a bit longer- but better for everyone to adopt intermittent fasting than to slightly improve the quality of doctors.
But why only give modafinil to studying medical students, and not those who hold lives in their tiring hands instead of books? Given the hideous prevalence of medical errors, and their known association to fatigue, I would far prefer a doctor chemically warded against fatigue to one without such armor.
(I might agree that financiers all turning to modafinil would not noticeably improve the world, and make them worse off- but, truly, he made his example doctors?)
Few engineers, scientists, or programmers that I know would give voice to the complaint that others might work harder. Their whole fields are suffused with positive externalities. When the other groups in my field discover more truths, I am enlightened by their work. When an engineer designs a better device, I am the richer for it. When a programmer writes more and better code, the world hums along more smoot...
Given the hideous prevalence of medical errors, and their known association to fatigue, I would far prefer a doctor chemically warded against fatigue to one without such armor.
No, the new equilibrium would be 96-hour shifts, with doctors to their physical limits and making as many errors (modulo differences in attention at constant fatigue induced by modafinil, if any).
That's a very long winded way of objecting to Yvain's model of the American economy as largely zero-sum games (eg. poker). If the village is a static economy with fixed output... Then sure, modafinil is fairly questionable. But this story is a way of asserting it is not with hypothetical examples.
Of course, it's not obvious that iodine is necessarily a good thing. Malthusian models come to mind: if intelligence has no effect on subsistence wage, then it can have no effect on per capita wealth and so any effects are redistributional, and if you want to argue it's a good thing you need to appeal to extra things like quality of life... which actually probably would affect subsistence wage since now you don't need so much wages, your quality of life has been improved. Intelligence might come with a one-time increase in wealth, which of course simply causes the population to expand and that the temporarily-increased-per-capita-wealth will eventually fall back down to equilibrium as people reproduce more. :)
"It was a bit sloppy essay of Yvain - cool idea, kinda weak execution" is what I might say if he had posted it to Main instead of his blog.
I disapprove of this thread on the principle that people should be able to idly speculate on their own blog without being harangued elsewhere.
I disapprove of your use of parables to smuggle in your economic hypotheses, rather than arguing for them competently and clearly.
I disapprove of your commentary, because I agree with wedrifid here:
(Claiming to have) mind read negative beliefs and motives in others then declaring them publicly tends to be frowned upon. Certainly it is frowned upon me.
I disapprove of this thread on the principle that people should be able to idly speculate on their own blog without being harangued elsewhere.
Is this meant to apply just to LessWrongers? Because it seems kosher to discuss and critique blog posts generally in open threads.
On second thought, you make a good point. The problem wasn't Vaniver bringing it up, the problem was me not putting clear muflax-like epistemic state warnings on my blog.
I disapprove of your use of parables to smuggle in your economic hypotheses, rather than arguing for them competently and clearly.
Very well.
First, people prefer longer lives to shorter ones.
Second, just as it is difficult to think of goods that are only absolute, it is difficult to think of goods that are only positional. The used car provides $4,500 in transportation value; the Ferrari provides $50,000 in transportation value.
Third, many professions create durable value and large positive externalities. 25% more lawyering or 25% more derivative trading may not have obvious positive benefits, but 25% more programming or 25% more engineering or 25% more science obviously do. Crunch time may be 20 hours a day instead of 16, and so the programmers have just as little time to themselves, but the product will actually be superior, which seems like a Pareto gain.
Fourth, phase changes have effects that are difficult to anticipate. A world that moved at startup speed- where more people were massively productive and focused- could be far more glorious, delightful, and pleasant than our world. It is difficult to imagine just how miserable conditions were when society was liquid, rather t...
Yvain has seen the misery of Haiti and India firsthand; but it seems only with his eyes.
I very specifically mentioned potential First World outlays to Third World countries as exceptions to my point. For example, I said:
There may be useful indirect actions, like advancing technology, increasing tax revenue that can be spent on useful absolute goods, and increasing the amount that flows as charity to the Third World (emphasis added)
Other than that, my entire argument was based on the "happiness follows economic growth up to a certain point, then stops" argument that has been mentioned here so many times before. That means a parable talking about how great certain interventions could be for the Third World is irrelevant; the post was very specifically and explicitly aimed at the First.
(I also think the benefits from lack of iodine deficiency are a lot less siphon-away-able)
The "60% serious" number may indeed be too high, though. I meant it to signal that I thought the argument was correct in all of its main points, but probably falls apart because the increase in productivity would produce very small benefits rather than no benefits, and "very small benefits" multiplied by the entire economy still end out pretty huge, especially if some of them end out in the Third World through the indirect methods I mentioned earlier.
if modafinil were legal, it would become expected, and everything would be harder to match the increased ability of humans to be productive.
I tend to agree that this is a silly argument, especially given that it can be applied to coffee as much as to modafinil, so we better ban coffee, lest those allergic to it be at a disadvantage.
Or indeed to any technology. You may think you are better off using a combine harvester instead of a sickle, but actually it just shifts the expectation of how much grain you need to produce.
It bothers me that no one is applying a reversal test here. The paper even calls out intelligence augmentation as the prime example!
I'm inclined to trust Bostrom's well thought out paper on the matter, but I'd be curious to hear opposing views.
This doesn't quite answer the question. I would be very happy if my place of work were closed and I could do fun things for two weeks. My objection to working isn't that work is unpleasant; it's that there's a high opportunity cost [all the fun people I could hang out with, the great books I could read, etc]. A better question is "imagine you are asked for your employer to take part in an experiment where you instead have your brain turned off. Your body ages by eight hours, but your brain experiences it as "you step into the office, then step out".
It retains the silliness but solves the opportunity cost problem.
As long as I'm demanding that LessWrong provide me with the answers to my personal problems, I find myself becoming more and more misanthropic as time goes on. I genuinely like only about five people out of everyone I've ever met, two of whom are family. I feel like almost everyone else is borderline homogeneous, originality seems extremely scarce and I'm bored whenever I try to talk to most people.
Context: I'm in college and not making friends. This is largely because I don't drink or follow or play in sports, I think. I'm bad at small talk. It's also because I'm unhappy with lots of what's perceived as normal around here (eg the subtle dehumanization of women).
I don't really know what to do. I believe humans are social animals and that I'd be happier with friends, but at the same time I really don't like any of the people who I talk to here. Any social advice at all would be useful for me, and anything that deals with the specifics of my situation doubly so. Misanthropy is obviously bad, but I don't know how to transition from my dislike of most people to becoming friends with them, nor am I positive that it's the right thing for me to do in this situation.
I had very few (physical) friends in college and even fewer now. I find that I get enough social interaction online and with my family (I'm married). Of course everyone is different but you may not need as many friends as you currently seem to think.
If I may offer some advice: Be careful not to rationalize social anxiety with "they are homogeneous, they dehumanize women, they aren't as original as I am, they bore me". That's externalizing an internal problem.
There are people of considerable intellectual caliber who have no qualms engaging in random small talk (a required skill in many career paths), and you'll only find out who they are once you get past that barrier.
No simple solution, but nosce te ipsum applies.
Perhaps start by actively distinguishing between "people I actively dislike" and "people who I don't actively dislike, and am assigning the dislike label to based solely on my prior that I dislike most people".
Also, in regard to inauthenticity, do you regard making small talk as inauthentic, even if you are saying true things? For example, is it inauthentic to pay someone a compliment if you honestly believe the compliment, but are only making it as a way to start a conversation and find out whether you like them? If yes, I suggest you taboo "inauthentic" and explain why you don't like that approach. I suspect that exploring that label more generally may be fertile ground.
More generally, do you have a problem with people who are not bothered by inauthentic conversation, but also are happy to have authentic conversations? If so, I suggest asking whether this is an area where you should work to cultivate tolerance of tolerance.
To distinguish these people, I would ask what sorts of conversations you consider authentic (again, taboo that word!), and think about what sorts of authentic conversations are easier to start up than others, and what sorts of sett...
My first idea is to ask your brother for advice - he probably has some friends, and if he's good at correcting you in a way you can appreciate, he might be able to figure out what's wrong on your end and help you fix it.
Additionally, I think many social norms are morally wrong and I'm not willing to engage in them.
Can you be more specific? Different subcultures use different social norms. There might be one compatible with you.
other people would still dislike me unless I engaged in the kind of behavior that I hate.
I think you're underestimating human heterogeneity. The fix for this is to meet many different people, not engage in the kind of behavior you hate, and not bother hanging out with anyone who is put off after you learn that they were put off. You are not overwhelmingly likely to run out of people unless you live in the middle of nowhere. (Do you?)
I think you're underestimating human heterogeneity. The fix for this is to meet many different people, not engage in the kind of behavior you hate, and not bother hanging out with anyone who is put off after you learn that they were put off. You are not overwhelmingly likely to run out of people unless you live in the middle of nowhere. (Do you?)
I strongly second this. The people who are like you and who you would like most likely also hate the behaviors you don't want to engage in. By not engaging in them, you may alienate the people you dislike, but you'll make yourself more interesting to the people you actually do want to hang out with.
As a non-mathematician, I enjoyed an old blog post from Dick Lipton, Guessing the Truth, which lists a bunch mathematical conjectures incorrectly expected to be true, along with their resolutions. There's also a great comment by Terry Tao on kinds of evidence for mathematical conjectures. For example:
Attempts at disproof run into interesting obstacles. This one is a bit hard to formalise, but sometimes you can get a sense that attempts to disprove a conjecture are failing not due to one’s own lack of ability, or due to accidental contingencies, but rather due to “enemy activity”; some lurking hidden structure to the problem, corners of which emerge every time one tries to build a counterexample. The question is then whether this “enemy” is stupid enough to be outwitted by a sufficiently clever counterexample, or is powerful enough to block all such attempts. Identifying this enemy precisely is usually the key to resolving the conjecture (or transforming the conjecture into a stronger and better conjecture).
Real numbers are not "real". (Inspired by Imaginary numbers are not real, an elementary introduction to Clifford Algebra I came across a long time ago).
I find it a bit funny that people tend to think of real numbers as "real" numbers, as opposed to, say, imaginary numbers, which are not only not real, but also not "real" in a way a Realist would use the word. The paper above even takes pride in not using i in calculations. There is also an occasional discussion in philosophy papers and online of the wave function in QM not being "real" because it uses imaginary numbers.
I find it funny because real numbers are no more "real" than any other numbers. Even the set of all integers is not very "real", as basically everything in the Universe is finite, due to the cut-offs at various scales, such as the Planck scale and the age of the Universe, and whenever you try to disregard these cut-offs, things tend to blow up in your face.
One can potentially consider finite integers as the most "real", given that they correspond to discrete objects we can see, count and calculate. The rest are simply useful mathematical abstracti...
MathOverflow thread on mathematical habits of thought and action which would be of use to non-mathematicians.
Economics also has the tradition of ordering authors alphabetically. And economists with earlier-letter surnames end up having more successful careers, quite possibly as a result of that tradition.
Via John Baez: Mathematics for theoretical physics, a 700-odd page self-contained reference to all the maths you supposedly need to have some idea what contemporary theoretical physicists are talking about.
Course Builder is some software Google used for making an online course, and now it is available, also with free webhosting if you don't have too many students.
Has anyone tried this? Is anyone interested in this? Are there other easy ways to make and publish online lessons without paying money? I did not have time to explore this product deeply yet, but it was easy to download and install.
Could this be useful to provide some CFAR lessons online? Convert the Sequences into Videosequences? ;-)
Free TEDYouth Event in NYC for High Schoolers
Taken from the TEDYouth event description page:
...Held annually in New York City, TEDYouth is a day-long event for high school students that includes live speakers, hands-on activities, demonstrations and an opportunity for the youth attendees and speakers to connect. TEDYouth coincides with more than 100 self-organized TEDxYouthDay events happening worldwide over a 48-hour period.
This year’s TEDYouth conference will be held on Saturday, November 17th, 2012, at the Times Center in Manhattan, from 1pm-6pm.
More th
I'm finding the resources on akrasia that I've encountered on this site to be inadequate. I need help.
I usually have problems being motivated with big goals at all, but I've finally triggered one (unwarranted immediate attraction to someone, which I would like to use as a convenient hack to make myself work out and actually put some effort into my school studies). Hopefully, I'll be able to capitalize on that and start to implement good habits.
Links. I need them. Please?
What is the most effective chain of thoughts that a theist can make, that will make him realise that there is no God? Efficiency could be measured in the number of thought steps. I'm especially interested in references to articles that considers question.
What is the most effective chain of thoughts that a theist can make, that will make him realise that there is no God?
"People not in my tribe are sexy and cool. I want to be like and/or mate with those people. I believe I have a sufficient chance of successfully joining and gaining status within the tribe with sexy and cool people in it. I will now change my signalling beliefs."
Why I defend scoundrels, an awesome essay by Yvain. Seriously how can his blog be so good? I find myself linking to it all the time.
Virtualization. I think if you are virtualized (uploaded to a computer, or copied into a new brain), you still die. I keep running into people on here who seem to think that if you copy someone, this prevents them from dying. It seems that I am in the minority on this one. Am I? Has this been thoroughly debated before? I would like to start a discussion on this. Good idea / bad idea tips on presentation?
I think the LW consensus is that the copy is also you, and personal identity as we think of it today will have to undergo significant change once uploads and copies become a thing.
Contemporary people are more or less completely bamboozled by the whole topic of minds, brains, and computers. It's like in the early days of language, when some people thought that reality was created by a divine breath speaking the true names of things, or that the alphabet existed before the universe alongside God, and so on. Language was the original information technology that was made into an idol and treated like magic because it seemed like magic. The current attitudes to computers and computation are analogous, except that we really can culture neurons and simulate them, so we are going to be creating hybrid entities even more novel, in evolutionary terms, than a primate with a verbalizing stream of consciousness (which was a hybrid of biology and language).
What is the computational paradigm of mind? Often this paradigm floats free of any material description at all, focusing solely on algorithms and information. But if we ask for a physical description of computation, it is as follows: There is an intricate physical object - a brain, a computer. Mostly it is scaffolding. There are also non-computational processes happening in it - blood circulating, fan spinning. But amo...
What's the best place for LW feature requests: I'd like to be able to walk up comments all the way to the top comment, using "Show more comments above". As it is currently implemented, there is no way to differentiate between "button does nothing because it only work a certain number of levels up", and "reached the highest level, i.e. the top level comment".
Are you a Bigot? --- a good 5 minute youtue video, it works as introductory level rationality material
I've been looking for a site that offers calibration tests from a farily large bank of questions, but I haven't really been able to find any. I found some resources from the last place this was discussed, but none of the sites had very many questions and most of the questions were very US centric.
Does anyone know of anything else?
So I was musing about 'one man's modus tollens is another man's modus ponens', and about how you would put that in probabilistic terms.
It seems to be applicable to when you have a probability for P(A v B), update on positive evidence to P(A' v B'), but instead of AB' (or same thing, A>A' and B<B').
I'm just wondering what additional stuff you need to get that; nothing mentally pops out for me as relevant.
I'm writing my CV now and was wondering whether I should indeed be "as confident as possible" (which basically means, according to some people, that I'm limited to sentences that don't even contain words like "but", "mostly", "although" etc.). Overconfidence is a killer of rationality, and displaying it might signal that you're irrational. I would personally trust much more someone who actively doubts in many things he says, rather than someone who is always confident. However, some people say the opposite.
I was wond...
Yes you should be as confident as possible.
In interview, you can admit that you used to have flaws, which you identified and corrected, but this is as close as you can get.
Dr Doug works through all the numbers for the UK National Lottery: Mistaken gambling, The secret thing, The Lottery Thing. (And, before: Making a hash of it, Making the future.)
I have seen people mention two algorithms to decide whether to upvote or downvote a comment: 1) upvote/downvote it if you'd like to see more/fewer comments like that, and 2) assign it a karma score you think it deserves, look at its current karma, and upvote/downvote it if the former is above/below the latter. I've recently thought about a compromise: 3) assign it a karma score you think it deserves, multiply its current karma by a, and upvote/downvote it if the former is above/below the latter. Note that 3) reduces to 1) as a approaches 0 and to 2) as a approaches 1. (I'm using a = 0.5.)
Does this have any obvious drawback that neither 1) nor 2) has?
Recent arXiv pre-prints
arXiv is a well-known preprint server for mathematics, computer science, physics, etc. In exchange for weakening the demands of peer review, it encourages people to share articles at a much faster pace than would be possible otherwise. I've been a long-time subscriber of their RSS feed, which helps me keep abreast of developments in my field. On a typical day, between 100~150 new preprints are submitted, of which I usually find five or six "interesting."
So in accordance with this I have added this week an additional "i...
During a recent real life encounter I saw something that I am almost certain is a statistical fallacy, and I am trying to find the formal name for it. As the incident involved a political topic I am filling the serial numbers off. Someone pointed out that in population P, a rather nonstandard group, subgroups a and b suffered from (high number)% frequency of untimely death and presented this as evidence that a and b were being discriminated against, without provided the base rate for population P/ the death toll for non a, non b, members of P. Can anyone help me out here?
edited for grammar/clarity
Why wasn't slavery outlawed quickly after the US started? I would expect the free non-slaveholders would vote against slavery, since they wouldn't want to compete with slaves, and they'd outnumber the slaveholders.
I don't know anything about the politics of slavery in the US at the time, but in general, a relevant question is: how strongly did the non-slaveholders desire slavery to be outlawed, as compared to their desires with regard to other issues?
In general, in politics it's quite common that the majority of the populace has a moderate preference to do X, a much smaller fraction of the populace has a very strong preference to not do X, and the desires of the minority win out. For the majority, the issue might not be important enough that they'd change their vote because of it, especially if the politician in question supports other issues who the people feel are more important. For the minority, however, the issue may be important enough to be the deciding factor in whom they vote. So the politican will maximize their votes by doing what the minority wants with regard to issue X, and what the majority wants with regard to everything else. At the same time, if the minority and majority vote for different politicians, then it's beneficial for the elected politicians to barter votes, so that the majority "buys" the minority's support for laws that they might not be able to pass ot...
[LINK] A short article on and pictures of cryonics: http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2012/10/murray-ballard-cyronics/?pid=3577&viewall=true
I don't see a Myers-Briggs personality survey anywhere on LessWrong but I would like to make one. I also have predictions, and I think it would be neat to see if I'm correct (predictions below in an unedited comment.)
I am aware that the Myers-Briggs is considered to have inaccuracies - for instance, I've scored different types at different times. I do not feel that this makes it useless but that it reflects the fact that your personality can change due to things like (for me) switching from doing a lot of art and people work (feeler type) to doing more i...
Any good books on mathematics for software engineers? I've been looking at the best universities in UK, they all have much more mathematics in their degree than what I'm taught.
Also, any good books for probability theory and all the things needed for AI development? I'm doing this course: https://www.edx.org/courses/BerkeleyX/CS188.1x/2012_Fall/about
Edit: These are the programs I've been talking about.
Imperial college: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/ugprospectus/facultiesanddepartments/computing/computingcourses http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/computing/teaching/u...
I assume they teach mathematics, because it's useful for software engineers.
Be aware that computer science and software engineering are different disciplines, and don't assume that people who design university curricula are experts on teaching software engineering. You can find top-notch computer scientists at universities, but top-notch software engineers tend to end up in the industry instead of academia.
There is at least one post on LW about undergraduate application essays. Instead of writing a similar post detailing my specific circumstance, I am posting on the Open Thread in search of people who would be interested in talking to me/private messaging me about undergraduate application essays. I imagine that I would benefit from reading some successful and unique essays, perhaps about the subjects we discuss on LW. Since UChicago is my "dream school", I imagine I would also benefit from reading successful application essays for their provocativ...
I would like advocates of TDT, UDT, etc, to comment on the following scenario.
Suppose I think of a possible world where there is a version of Genghis Khan who thinks of this version of me. Then I imagine Genghis imagining my responses to his possible actions. Finally I imagine him agreeing to not kill everyone in the next country he invades, if I commit to building a thirty-meter golden statue of him, in my world. Then I go and build the statue, feeling like a great humanitarian because I saved some lives in another possible world.
My questions are: Is this crazy? If so, why is it crazy? And, is there an example of similar reasoning that isn't crazy?
As LW garners more traffic, it also becomes a larger target for (commercial) spam. The wiki in particular seems to lack some basic protection:
See this very recent wiki spam post.
A possible solution would be to require users who edit the wiki to have, say, 1 karma (if the user databases are synchronized).
Also, just from the "recent wiki edits" and its smörgåsbord of sketchy new user names ("IvanosbevfkwwbBohan"), it seems that the user creation process is in urgent need of a good CAPTCHA, which may also help with the first problem.
Old material
Related to: List of Public Drafts on LessWrong
This stuff is obsolete or just plain old, it can still serve as draft material:
Has anybody been using the brainstorming techniques I posted about a while ago? I'd be interested to hear about your results.
Personally, I haven't been using them much since making that post, so I don't really have anything interesting to share. That's a failure on my part, though, not the techniques.
I found this interesting. I personally don't think it's a paradox, but I think it's interesting that the logic behind it works.
A query about The Dark Knight on Marginal Revolution originally from Brad Allen:
...I was watching the Dark Knight on a bus yesterday evening (I’m not sure how familiar you are with the movie) – there was a scene that I thought was pretty interesting to think through, and was curious how you might go about it.
There is a scene where the Joker kills a mob boss, and then gives his 3 subordinates one half broken pool cue – and basically tells them that to live, the other two have to die. You don’t see what happens, but what do you think happens? Is it advantageo
What's the name of the idea that morality is a scalar rather than a binary property (i.e., rather than asking whether A is moral, one should ask whether A is more moral or less moral than B)? I'm pretty sure I recently saw a discussion of that somewhere in a SEP article, linked to from a comment on LW, but I can't find it now -- and I've been searching for a while.
EDIT: Larks nailed it.
Noah Smith wrote up a humorous piece about the different kinds of economics blog trolls. Where does Robin Hanson fit in?
CogPrime
An indepth description of CogPrime's architecture by Ben Goertzel:
http://wiki.opencog.org/w/CogPrime_Overview CogPrime: An Integrative Architecture for Embodied Artificial General Intelligence
I have finally added some improvements to my web page, including responsive design and Atom feeds.
Here is an article (first in a series) about my summer 2012 in USA. This includes the Rationality Minicamp in July (although the first article does not get there yet).
For anyone interested, the Atom feed is: http://bur.sk/en.atom
I am musing about writing fiction. I would like get help on the following questions:
What forums to ask the following questions can you recommend?
What is the general rule on including real living people in fiction? I'm afraid that it's hard and fast "Don't." Where does it become ok to include real people in fiction? (sometime after they die?) Is it ok if fictional character strongly resembles a living person, but some details are left out so that one can write it off as a coincidence?
How many threads to the story can I have? The more the mer
What is Science? From Global Warming to Evolution
...ABSTRACT
Presented by Michael Vassar.
What is science? Are science and rationality the same thing? If science was something new, what sort of a new thing was science? I will discuss different ways of knowing, focusing on the differences between the analytic method of the enlightenment and the synthetic method of romanticism (and scholarship classically). These methods should be used together, but in fact their practitioners have been at war since Marx and Rousseau, leading to a schism in Western intellectual
Interesting podcast interview, from December 2011 with Michael Vassar
I've been playing around with the poll on isidewith.com. It's a questionnaire on political issues that matches your views up against those of the US 2012 presidential candidates. It's supposed to give you an idea of who you should vote for. I have a few criticisms of the way the poll is designed, but I still think the concept itself is interesting.
Could a well designed poll like this help raise the sanity waterline? Here's what I'm thinking:
A PDF of the original paper whose title is the origin of the phrase "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution", by Theodosius Dobzhansky, from The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Mar., 1973), pp. 125-129.
Can anyone help explain this to me? Quantum measurements leave Schrodinger's Cat Alive
I don't have that great of a background in physics. If my understanding is correct, this just turned all of quantum mechanics on its head (if it's accurate). That doesn't seem particularly likely to me. Has anyone else seen this yet, and what do you make of it?
Ah, I see. I don't think reading the sequence would have helped you here, because this is a subtle issue that wasn't (as far as I recall) covered in the sequence. In fact, it isn't even covered in most undergraduate courses on QM, so your assumption that measurements must destroy superpositions doesn't indicate a glaring lack of knowledge of QM.
It is standardly taught that the outcome of a measurement is an eigenvalue, which would mean that (at least within a particular branch) the quantum system "collapses" to a determinate state, and is no longer in a superposition. However, this standard story depends on treating the measurement device itself as a classical system, which is usually not a bad approximation.
But measurement devices are quantum systems, and in the late 80s some theorists demonstrated that this fact lets us obtain information about a quantum system without destroying a superposition. The procedure is called "weak measurement", and the basis for it is that there is some quantum uncertainty about the reading of the measuring device itself (uncertainty about the position of a pointer on the device, for instance). One can arrange it so that the measu...
Interesting blog by someone trying out mindfulness practices for managing stress and anxiety. I'll be following it to see how it goes, as mindlfulness has been recommended to me.
Interesting blog by someone trying out mindfulness practices for managing stress and anxiety. I'll be following it to see how it goes, as mindlfulness has been recommended to me.
Quantum proofs of classical theorems is a review article about how ideas and techniques from quantum information and computing have been used for proofs in classical computer science. I thought it was pretty fun. Are reviews of "proof techniques" common in math/CS theory? Are they actually useful for researchers or for students in those fields? I really like the idea; even well-developed techniques aren't the kinds of things textbooks emphasize. (At least the textbooks I read tend to focus more on the "content" of theorems and so on--ma...
Today my 16yo son asked a classmate for a confidence interval on his grade at their latest assignment, after giving one of his own. That's after all 3 of my kids attended a workshop I gave (mixed in with adults, 20 total) on calibrated probability statements and scoring.
Never mind that he gave a 90% interval and missed (due to getting full marks), I'm inordinately proud of him for actually applying the lessons.
Less-than-sincere modesty is probably the culprit for missing the interval.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.