Interesting comment by Gregory Cochran on torture not being useless as is often claimed.

Torture can be used to effectively extract information. I can give you lots of examples from WWII. People often say that it’s ineffective, but they’re lying or deluded. Mind you, you have to use it carefully, but that’s true of satellite photography. Note: my saying that it works does not mean that I approve of it.

... At the Battle of Midway, two American fliers, whose planes had been shot down near the Japanese carriers, were pulled out of the water and threatened with death unless they revealed the position of the American carriers. They did so, and were then promptly executed. Later, at Guadalcanal, the Japanese captured an American soldier who told them about a planned offensive – with that knowledge the Japanese withdrew from the area about to be attacked. I don’t why he talked [the guy didn't survive] – maybe a Japanese interrogator spent a long time building a bond of trust with that Marine. But probably not. For one thing, time was short. I see people saying that building such a bond is in the long run more effective, but of course in war, time is often short.

You could consider the va

AI Box Experiment Update

I recently played and won an additional game of AI Box with DEA7TH. Obviously, I played as the AI. This game was conducted over Skype.

I'm posting this in the open thread because unlike my last few AI Box Experiments, I won’t be providing a proper writeup (and I didn't think that just posting "I won!" is enough to validate starting a new thread). I've been told (and convinced) by many that I was far too leaky with strategy and seriously compromised future winning chances of both myself and future AIs. The fact that one of my gatekeepers guessed my tactic(s) was the final straw. I think that I’ve already provided enough hints for aspiring AIs to win, so I’ll stop giving out information.

Sorry, folks.

This puts my current AI Box Experiment record at 2 wins and 3 losses.

The Anti-Reactionary FAQ by Yvain. Konkvistador notes in the comments he'll have to think about a refutation, in due course.

I was thinking recently that if soylent kicks something off and 'food replacement' -type things become a big deal, it could have a massive side effect of putting a lot of people onto diets with heavily reduced animal and animal product content. Its possible success could inadvertently be a huge boon for animals and animal activists.

Personally, I'm somewhat sympathetic towards veganism for ethical reasons, but the combination of trivial inconvenience and lack of effect I can have as an individual has prevented me from pursuing such a diet. Soylent would allow me to do so easily, should I want to. Similarly, there are people who have no interest in animal welfare at all. If 'food replacements' become big, it could mean for the incidental conversion of those who might have otherwise never considered veganism or vegetarianism to a lifestyle that fits within those bounds, for only their personal cost or convenience reasons.

I know someone who has a young child who is very likely to die in the near future. This person has (most likely) never heard of cryonics. My model of this person is very unlikely to decide to preserve their child even if they knew about it.

I don't know if I should say something. At first I was thinking that I should because the social ramifications are negligible. After thinking about it for a while, I changed my mind and decided that possibly I was just trying to absolve myself of guilt at the cost of offending a grieving parent. I am not sure if this is just rationalization.

Advice?

What expert advice is worth buying? Please be fairly specific and include some conditions on when someone should consider getting such advice and focus on individuals and families versus, say, corporations.

I ask because I recently brainstormed ways that I could be spending my money to make my life better and this was one thing that I came up with and realized I essentially never bought except for visiting my doctor and dentist. Yet there are tons of other experts out there willing to give me advice for a fee: financial advisers, personal trainers, nutritionists, lawyers, auto-mechanics, home inspectors, and many more.

How many people here use Anki, or other Spaced Repetition Software (SRS)?

[pollid:565]

I'm finding it pretty useful and wondering why I didn't use it more intensively before. Some stuff I've been adding into Anki:

• Info about data structures and algorithms (I'm reading a book on them, and think it's among the most generally useful useful knowledge for a programmer)
• Specific commands for tools I use a lot (git, vim, bash - stuff I used to put into a cheat sheet)
• Some Japanese (seems at least half of Anki users use it to learn Japanese)
• Tidbits from lukeprog's posts on procrastination
• Some Haskell (I'm not studying it intensively, but doing a few exercises now and then, and adding what I learn in Anki)

I have much more stuff I'd like to Ankify (my notes on Machine Learning, databases, on the psychology of learning; various inspirational quotes, design patterns and high-level software architecture concepts ...).

Some ways I got better at using Anki:

• I use much less pre-made decks
• I control the new-cards-per-day depending on how much I care about a topic. I don't care much about vim, so have 3 to 5 new cards per day, but go up to 20 for procrastination or
• I reorder my decks according t

People who want to eat fewer animal products usually have a set of foods that are always okay and a set of foods that are always not (which sometimes still includes some animal products, such as dairy or fish), rather than trying to eat animal products less often without completely prohibiting anything. I've heard that this is because people who try to eat fewer animal products usually end up with about the same diet they had when they were not trying.

I wonder whether trying to eat more of something that tends to fill the same role as animal products would be an effective way to eat fewer animal products.

I currently have a fridge full of soaking dried beans that I have to use up, and the only way I know how to serve beans is the same as the way I usually eat fish, so I predict I'll be eating much less fish this week than I usually do (because if I get tired of rice and beans, rice and fish won't be much of a change). I'm not sure whether my result would generalize to people who use more than five different dinner recipes, though. I should also add that my main goal is learning how to make cheap food taste good by getting more practice cooking beans - eating fewer animal products would just be a side effect.

Now that I write this, I'm wishing I'd thought to record what food I ate before filling my fridge with beans. (I did write down what I could remember.)

I would like recommendations for a small, low-intensity course of study to improve my understanding of pure mathematics. I'm looking for something fairly easygoing, with low time-commitment, that can fit into my existing fairly heavy study schedule. My primary areas of interest are proofs, set theory and analysis, but I don't want to solve the whole problem right now. I want a small, marginal push in the right direction.

My existing maths background is around undergrad-level, but heavily slanted towards applied methods (calculus, linear algebra), statist... (read more)

Inaccessible Is Ungovernable

I sometimes use the term ‘accessible’ in the Microsoft sense.

The mouthful version of ‘accessible’ is something like this: To abstractly describe the character of a human interactive or processed experience when it is tailored to not exceed the limitations of the particular human being to which it is being presented.

So, if you are blind or paralyzed, your disability prevents you from using a computer terminal in the normal way without some assistive technology. If you are confined to a wheelchair, you cannot easily enter a bu

I recently found out a surprising fact from this paper by Scott Aaronson. P=NP does not (given current results) imply that P=BQP. That is, even if P=NP there may still be substantial speedups from quantum computing. This result was surprising to me, since for most computational classes we normally think about that are a little larger than P, they end up equaling P if P=NP. This is due to the collapse of the polynomial hierarchy. Since we cannot resolve that BQP lives in the polynomial hierarchy, we can't make that sort of argument.

Apparently recent work shows that direct giving of grants in developing countries has high rates of return. This more or less confirms what Givewell has said before about microfinance.

My current guide to reading LessWrong can be found here.

I would like to know what people think about my potentially adding it to the sequences page, along with Academian's and XiXiDu's guides.

Just looking for feedback. Cheers.

LW tells people to upvote good comments and downvote bad comments. Where do I set the threshold of good/bad? Is it best for the community if I upvote only exceptionally good comments, or downvote only very bad comments, or downvote all comments that aren't exceptionally good, or something else? Has this been studied? Is it possible to make a karma system where this question doesn't arise?

Why are AMD and Intel so closely match in terms of processor power?

If you separated two groups and incentivized them to develop the best processors and came back in 20 years, I wouldn't expect both groups to have done approximately comparably. Particularly so if the one that is doing better is given more access to resources. I can think of a number of potential explanations none of which are entirely satisfactory to me, though. Some possibilites:

• there is more cross-talk between the companies than I would guess (through hiring former employees, reading pa

I find in general very hard to predict what kind of acceptance will my post receive, basing on the karma point of each.
While as a policy I try not to post strategically (that is, rationality quotes, pandering to the Big Karmers, etc.), but just only those things I find relevant or interesting for this site, I have found no way to reliably gauge the outcome.
It is particularly bewildering to me that comments that (I hope) are insightful gets downvoted to the limit of oblivion or simply ignored while comments or requests of clarification are the most upvoted.
Have someone constructed a model of how the consensus works here on LW? Just curious...

I recently memorized an 8-word passphrase generated by Diceware.

Given recent advances in password cracking, it may be a good time to start updating your accounts around the net with strong, prescriptively-generated passphrases.

Added: 8-word passphrases are overkill for most applications. 4-word passphrases are fairly secure under most circumstances, and the circumstances where in which they are not may not be helped by longer passphrases. The important thing is avoiding password reuse and predictable generation mechanisms.

I find myself over sensitive to negative feedback and under-responsive to positive feedback.* Does anyone have any advice/experience on training myself to overcome that?

*This seems to be a general issue in people with depression/anxiety, I think its something to do with how dopamine and serotonin mediate the reward system but I'm not an expert on the subject. Curiously sociopaths have the opposite issue, underresponding to negative feedback.

I'd like to highly recommend Computational Complexity by Christos H. Papadimitriou. Slightly dated in a fast changing field, but really high quality explanations. Takes a bit more of a logic-oriented approach than Hopcroft and Ullman in Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation. I think this topic is extremely relevant to decision theory for bounded agents.

Those who have been reading LessWrong in the last couple of weeks will have little difficulty recognizing the poster of the following. I'm posting this here, shorn of identities and content, as there is a broader point to make about Dark Arts.

These are, at the time of writing, his two most recent comments. I will focus on the evidential markers, and have omitted everything else. I had to skip entirely over only a single sentence of the original, and that sentence was the hypothetical answer to a rhetorical question.

That's very interesting. At what point

Here is a problem that I regularly face:

I have a hard time terminating certain subroutines in my brain. This most regularly happens when I am thinking about a strategy game or math that I am really interested in. I will continue thinking about whatever it is that is distracting me even when I try not to.

The most visible consequence of this is that it sometimes interferes with my sleep. I usually get to bed at a regular time, but if I get distracted it could take hours for me to get to sleep, even if I cut myself off from outside stimulus. It can also be a ... (read more)

Has anyone had any experience with http://sundayassembly.com ?

I'd love to hear some first hand accounts. It sounds like all the things I enjoyed about going to church when I was a Christian, with the Christianity part.

Stock market investment would seem like a good way to test predictive skills, have there been any attempts to apply lw style rationality techniques to it?

Has anyone used fitbit or similar products for tracking activity and sleep?

Awhile back I posted a comment on the open thread about the feasibility of permanent weight-loss. (Basically: is it a realistic goal?) I didn't get a response, so I'm linking it here to try again. Please respond here instead of there. Note: most likely some of my links to studies in that comment are no longer valid, but at least the citations are there if you want to look those up.

I believe there is a named cognitive bias for this concept but a preliminary search hasn't turned anything up: The tendency to use measures or proxies that are easily available rather than the ones that most accurately measure the cared about outcome.

anyone know what it might be called?

Calling all history buffs:

I have this fragment of a memory of reading about some arcane set of laws or customs to do with property and land inheritance. It prevented landowners from selling their land, or splitting it up, for some reason. This had the effect of inhibiting agricultural development sometime in the feudal era or perhaps slightly after. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

(I'm aware of the opposite problem, that of estates being split up among all children (instead of primogeniture) which caused agricultural balkanization and prevented economies of scale.)

As I want to fix my sleep (cycle) I am looking for a proper full spectrum light to screw in my desk light. But when I shop for "full spectrum" light it turns out that they only have three peaks and do not even come near a black body in lighting. Is there something for less than a small fortune for a student like I am looking for? E27 socket, available in the EU.

I can ask more generally: What is the lighting situation at your desk and at your home? I aim for lighting very low in blue in the evening and as close to full daylight during work. For th... (read more)

I have a question about Effective Altruism:

The essence of EA is that people are equal, regardless of location. In other words, you'd rather give money to poor people in far away countries than people in your own country if it's more effective, even though the latter feel intuitively more close to you. People care more about their own countries' citizens even though they may not even know them. Often your own country's citizens are similar to you culturally and in other ways, more than people in far-way countries and you might feel a certain bond with your ... (read more)

So, what's all this about a Postivist debacle I keep hearing? Who were the positivists, what did we have in common with them, what was different, and how and why did they fail?

Positivism states that the only authentic knowledge is that which allows verification and assumes that the only valid knowledge is scientific.[2] Enlightenment thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon, Pierre-Simon Laplace and Auguste Comte believed the scientific method, the circular dependence of theory and observation, must replace metaphysics in the history of thought. Sociologica

How can I learn to sleep in a noisy environment?

For several years now I've lived in loud apartments, where I can often hear conversations or music late into the night.

I often solve this problem by wearing earplugs. However, I don't want to sleep with earplugs every night, and so I've made a number of attempts to adjust to the noise without earplugs, either going "cold-turkey" for as long as I can stand, or by progressively increasing my exposure to night-time noise.

Despite several years of attempts, I don't think I've habituated at all. What giv... (read more)

I've been on a scifi audio kick lately and was wondering are there any good sites other than sffaudio?

Let's assume society decides that eating meat from animals lacking self-awareness is ethical, and anything with self-awareness is not ethical to eat, and that we have a reliable test to tell the difference. Is it ethical to deliberately breed tasty animals to lack self-awareness, both before or after their species has self-awareness?

My initial reaction to the latter is 'no, it's not ethical, because you would necessarily be using force on self-aware entities as part of the breeding process'. The first part of the question seems to lean towards 'yes', but t... (read more)

I had a random-ish thought about programming languages, which I'd like comments on: It seems to me that every successful programming language has a data structure that it specialises in and does better than other languages. Exaggerating somewhat, every language "is" a data structure. My suggestions:

• C is pointers
• Lisp is lists (no, really?)
• Ruby is closures
• Python is dicts
• Perl is regexps

Now this list is missing some languages, for lack of my familiarity with them, and also some structures. For example, is there a language which "is" strings? And on this model, what is Java?