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The wonderful Ben Goldacre shares a fantastic 1971 story from the "king of evidence based medicine" Archie Cochrane.
I'm taking part in the SIAI Visiting Fellows program, and have been keeping a diary of the trip. If anyone's interested in the details of what people actually do in the program, the two most recent entries contain some stuff.
http://vigilantcitizen.com/?p=3563
When will anti-transhumanism become a serious political issue?
Non Sequitur presents The Bottom Line literally.
ETA: Reposted to the Bottom Line thread, for better future findability.
Just an idea: what about putting a "number of votes" next to the "vote total" score for posts and comments? That would distinguish cases where a subject was highly controvertial from those where no-one really cares.
String theory derives entropy for astrophysical black holes. Some references here.
For physics, I think this news is of fundamental significance. This is a huge step towards describing the real world in terms of string theory. The backstory is that almost 40 years ago, Bekenstein and Hawking came up with a formula for black hole entropy, but it was based on macroscopic behavior (like the Hawking temperature) and not on a counting of microscopic states. In the mid-90s you had the first microscopic derivation of black hole entropy in string theory, but it wa... (read more)
A father talks cryonics with his two daughters.
The always interesting Eric Falkenstein on Risk Taking.
Any tips on efficiently gathering information on controversial, non-technical subjects, such a "how to raise your kids" or "pros and cons of spanking your kids"? (those are relatively good examples because a lot of people have a strong opinion on them)
I usually look on Wikipedia first, but while it's good at giving a basic overview of a question, it's quite bad at presenting evidence in a properly organized way (I learnt first hand that improving a controversial article is hard).
Research papers are more rigorous and more likely to conta... (read more)
I noticed an apparently self-defeating aspect of the Boltzmann brain scenario.
Let's say I do find the Boltzmann brain scenario to be likely (specifically, that I find it likely that I myself am a Boltzmann brain), based on my knowledge of the laws of physics. Then my knowledge of the laws of physics is based on the perceptions and memories that I, as a Boltzmann brain, am arbitrarily hallucinating... in which case there is no reason for me to believe that the real universe (that is, whichever one houses the actual physical substrate of my mind) runs on tho... (read more)
Consider the Oyster: Why even strict vegans should feel comfortable eating oysters by the boatload.
http://www.slate.com/id/2248998/?from=rss
Don't Choke ("performing below skill level due to performance related anxieties"): http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/04/dont_choke.php
Today I heard a radio interviewer talking with a politician about House seats that could go to Republicans. It went like this:
Politician: "I think there may be 100 contested seats."
Reporter: "So you think 100 seats could go to the Republicans?"
Followed by confusion due to the fact that neither of them could work out how to use English to distinguish "there are 100 Democrat seats such that that seat could be won by Republicans in the next election" from "the Republicans could gain 100 seats in the next election".
A minor note of amusement: Some of you may be familiar with John Baez, a relentlessly informative mathematical physicist. He produces, on a less-than-weekly basis, a column on sundry topics of interest called This Week's Finds. The most recent of such mentions topics such as using icosahedra to solve quintic equations, an isomorphism between processes in chemistry, electronics, thermodynamics, and other domains described in terms of category theory, and some speculation about applications of category theoretical constructs to physics.
Which is all well and ... (read more)
The map image in the masthead confused me when I found LW, and might reduce the probability that casual Web-browsing would-be-rationalists would take the time to understand what LW actually is before moving on.
I'm new to the community; this post may not be structured like the ones you're used to. Bear with me.
If LW is anything like the few sites whose analytics numbers I've seen, a significant portion of traffic comes from Web searches (I would wildly guess 10-30% of their pageviews). According to the analytics I've seen on my own site, out of those landin... (read more)
An anecdote:
When I've had people shoulder surf while I was visiting the site, everyone asked, "LessWrong? What's that supposed to mean?" (5+ people). When I explained that it was a rational community where people tried to improve their thinking, they immediately began status attacks against me. One used the phrase "uber-intellectual blog" in a derogatory context and another even asked, "Are you going to come into work with a machine gun?" They often laughed at the concept.
Nobody commented on the graphic.
Terence Tao on the relationship between classical and Bayesian reasoning:
http://www.google.com/buzz/114134834346472219368/G5DnA8EL7D3/In-classical-logic-one-can-represent-ones
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1251183
Does the market for sperm and egg donors violate supply and demand?
... (read more)There's this upcoming meetup called Baloney Detection Workshop in Mountain View. It will probably be fairly basic compared to what's covered on LW, but I might go just for fun. Anyone else thinking of going? They're looking for people to give 10-minute talks on related subjects — maybe someone (possibly me, possibly not) could do one that introduces some of LW's matarial, something that can build off the usual skepticism repertoire and perhaps lead some people to LW. Maybe something on motivated/undiscriminating skepticism, really applying the techniques o... (read more)
Around here, we seem to have a tacit theory of ethics. If you make a statement consistent with it, you will not be questioned.
The theory is that though we tend to think that we're selfless beings, we're actually not, and the sole reason we act selfless at all is to make other people think we really are selfless, and the reason we think we're selfless is because thinking we're selfless makes it easier to convince others that we're selfless.
The thing is, I haven't seen much justification of this theory. I might have seen some here, some there, but I don't recall any one big attempt at justifying this theory once and for all. Where is that justification?
From Hal Daume's blog:
... (read more)If Airedale and I organized a meetup in the Chicago area, would anyone come? If there's nontrivial interest and we decide on going through with it, we'll make a top-level post with a place and time.
I have discovered myself to be in need of a statistical tool I do not possess. I am confident that a frequentist formula exists, based on the nature of the task to be executed, but it occurs to me that there may be people who would like to prove some point about Bayesianism vs. Frequentism - so here's a challenge for you all:
I am a mechanical engineer - numerate, literate, and reasonably intelligent - educated to the extent of one college course in basic probability and statistics. I have also been reading EY's essays for years, and am familiar (approachin... (read more)
I'm looking for a good textbook or two on Bayesian design of experiments. Any suggestions?
While I'm on the topic of Baysian textbooks, is the difference between the 1st and 2nd edition of Gelman's text big enough to be worth buying the 2nd edition over the 1st? (I have a couple of short texts already for one of my courses this semester, but I think the depth is lacking)
Wikipedia page on causal decision theory says:
... (read more)Are crush videos, as mentioned in http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/04/truetoleranc.html , actually bad, and if so, why?
I theorize that they are, based on what I've read about sex addiction and serial killers, but I'm not really prepared to rigorously defend that position.
Are crush videos, as mentioned in http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/04/truetoleranc.html , actually bad, and if so, why?
I theorize that they are, based on what I've read about sex addiction and serial killers, but I'm not really prepared to rigorously defend that position.
Are crush videos, as mentioned in http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/04/truetoleranc.html , actually bad, and if so, why?
I theorize that they are, based on what I've read about sex addiction and serial killers, but I'm not really prepared to rigorously defend that position.
I intend to start playing World of Warcraft when the summer break begins. Does anyone actually want to do this?
Heh, that is a topic that is very relevant to an article I was intending to post to Less Wrong today.
I've written it, but then noticed I have 17/20 of the required karma points.
Any three people wanna upvote this comment of mine so I can post my article?
If you had a million universes tiled with computronium, what would you do?
Is Pascal's wager terribly flawed and is this controversial?
"Magic everywhere in this bitch."
(For those who aren't aware of this act, yes, they're sincere and have a very sizeable following [the album this track is from peaked at #4 on the Billboard 200.])
Applied Rationality April Edition Take 2. Different technique this time.
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bu3yg/i_have_pancreatic_cancer_and_i_am_probably_going/c0okwsf
Sampling bias may have lead Paleontologists to believe that North American dinosaurs had much smaller ranges than they actually did. Link.
Same questions, new formulation.
It seems that here at Less Wrong, we discourage map/territory discrepancies and mind projection fallacies, etc.
However, "winning" is in the map not the territory.
In one extreme aesthetic, we could become agents that have no subjective beliefs about the territory. But then there would be no "winning"; we'd have to give up on that.
So instead we'd like to have our set of beliefs minimally include enough non-objectively-true stuff to make "winning" coherent. Given this, how can we draw a line abou... (read more)
In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution/all/1
Since I don't generally consider myself better informed than the market, I usually invest in index funds. At the moment, though, I find Thiel's diagnosis of irrational exuberance to be pretty reasonable, and I'd like to shift away from stocks for the moment.
My question: Is there an equivalent to index funds for bond markets— i.e. an investing strategy (open to small investors) which matches market performance rather than trying to beat it (at the risk of black-swan blowups)? Or alternately, is there a better investment strategy that I can put into place now and not worry about?
I wanted to ask the LW commentariat what they thought of the morality of the "false time constraint" PU ploy. I'm hereby prefacing that discussion with a meta-inquiry as to whether that conversation should even be opened at all. (The contentious ongoing discussion I found when I came here to make the query has made me gun-shy.)
Help me, LessWrong. I want to build a case for
These phrasings should mean the exact same thing. Correct me if they don't.
Elaboration: Most people readily agree that most information is good most of the time. I want to see if I can go all the way and build a convincing argument that all information is good all of the time, or as close to it as I can get. That misuse of information is problem about the misuser a... (read more)