Pearl has a new book out: Causal Inference in Statistics: A Primer (with Glymour and Jewell also as authors), already available on Kindle and paperback coming out the 26th. You can find the Table of Contents and chapter previews here.

At 150 pages, 4 chapters, and with homework exercises, this looks like the introductory causality work that I've wanted to exist for a few years.

I recently attended a 10 day intensive Vipassana meditation retreat. Would a write-up of the experience be something LWers are interested in as an article for discussion?

I had minimal to moderate experience in meditation before this but now feel much more comfortable with it. I can see potential rationality relevance through,

* Discipline
* Concentration
* Emotion and habit regulation
* Seeing reality as it is

If there is interest then I would appreciate it if someone is willing to look over a draft of the article for me as I haven't written for LW before.

A cautionary statement about betting on your beliefs from Tyler Cowen:

Bryan Caplan is pleased that he has won his bet with me, about whether unemployment will fall under five percent. ... The Benthamite side of me will pay Bryan gladly, as I don’t think I’ve ever had a ten dollar expenditure of mine produce such a boost in the utility of another person.

That said, I think this episode is a good example of what is wrong with betting on ideas. Betting tends to lock people into positions, gets them rooting for one outcome over another, it makes the denouement of the bet about the relative status of the people in question, and it produces a celebratory mindset in the victor. That lowers the quality of dialogue and also introspection, just as political campaigns lower the quality of various ideas — too much emphasis on the candidates and the competition.

I just got the weirdest piece of direct messaging spam from a 0 karma account:

Hi good day. My boss is interested on donating to MIRI's project and he is wondering if he could send money through you and you donate to miri through your company and thus accelertaing the value created. He wants to use "match donations" as a way of donating thats why he is looking for people in companies like you. I want to discuss more about this so if you could see this message please give me a reply. Thank you!

I'm not sure exactly what the scam is in the above,... (read more)

On the betting market PredictIt you can by a contract for 38 cents that pays $1 if the Democratic party doesn't win the next U.S. presidential election. This seems like an amazingly good bet. (I have 1158 shares) Do others who follow U.S. politics agree that the chance of the Democrats not winning the election is well above 38%?

I think my girlfriend needs psychiatric help - she has visual hallucinations and other symptoms I've promised to keep confidential. She doesn't want to see a psychiatrist, as she and her family attribute her symptoms to supernatual causes; they believe that the "spirits" she sees actually exist. (Another family member - not a blood relative - also has psychiatric symptoms that are being treated and managed.) I really don't want to go into further details because one time I promised not to tell my psychiatrist about her issues and then told him an... (read more)

What do you consider the most interesting clinical trials that are currently running?

Seen on MR: the Conspira-Sea Cruise, through the eyes of a skeptical journalist. (It's exactly what it sounds like: a 7-day cruise for believers in conspiracy theories.)

At the end of last year there were a lot of news articles about like this about Metformin as the first anti-aging drug trial. I can't find the exact trial on clinicaltrials.gov. Can you?

What is the central claim in Buddhism?

In Buddhist phenomenology and soteriology, the skandhas (Sanskrit) or khandhas (Pāḷi) are the five functions or aspects that constitute the sentient being. In English, these five aspects are known as the five aggregates. The five aggregates are: material form, feelings, perception, volition (sometimes translated as mental formations), and sensory consciousness. Considering that the five aggregates continuously arise and cease within our moment-to-moment experience, the Buddha teaches that nothing among them is really

What are your favorite recent (2011-present) Science Fiction novels?

Yvain's 2016 nootropics survey has opened: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1DFP4bSS00i_zQJ3nlw8KJxhUJjmrH9DA8cq0BsQciOc/viewform

The previous survey's data & results: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/16/nootropics-survey-results-and-analysis/

Seeking socio-econo-political organizing methods

How many useful ways are there for an uploaded mind, an em, to organize copies of itself to maximize the accuracy of their final predictions?

The few that I've been able to think of:

• "Strict hierarchy". DPR.2.1 can advise DPR.2, but DPR.2's decision overrides DPR.2.1's.
• "One em, one vote". DPR.2 gets a vote, and so does DPR.2.
• "One subjective year, one vote". DPR.2.1 is running twice as fast as DPR.2, and so DPR.2.1 gets twice as many votes.
• "Prediction market". The DPR

Why does GiveWell prefer dalys to qalys?

If GiveWell cared more about QALY's than DALY's, would their recommendations be different?

Is there an argument that society undervalues and/or underfunded paternalistic preventative health interventions for the wrong reasons? Is there a compelling reason that normal market forces will not solve the task of preventative health?

Should I be an organ donor? Should I tell others to be donors? Should you be a donor?

Two studies report on the QALY impact of organ donation in the Cost Effectiveness Analysis Registry. Whiting et al (2004) Canadian study reports that kidney transplantation alone results in a gain of 1.99 QALYs over a 20-year time compared with waiting on dialysis. Kontodimopoulos and Niakis's (2008) Greek study reports a 16.11-4.37=11.74 and 16.11-3.94=12.17 for the Lifelong QALY difference for hemiodialysis and peritoneal dialysis respectively against renal replacement t... (read more)

Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger

This is the first direct detection of gravitational waves and the first observation of a binary black hole merger.

LIGO detects gravitational waves -- Press Conference

Press Release

To people interested in status and long-term relationships: here, have fun :-)

In general, hypothesis testing is overrated and hypothesis generation is underrated

Andrew Gelman

An interesting discussion -- in the comments -- about meta-uncertainty or probabilities of probabilities. I say it's turtles all the way down :-)

Just to orient my exposition, which one do you prefer: the long or the short explanation?

The longer one:

"Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are models of computation that simulate the way the neural tissue in animals computes.

Neural tissue is made up by a large number of interconnected neurons: each neuron is a cell which has numerous locations, called synapses, that receive the electrochemical signals of hundred or thousands of other neurons. When the combined potential of all those rises above a certain threshold, a chemical transmissions is initiated... (read more)

Why do people spend much, much more time worrying about their retirement plans than the intelligence explosion if they are a similar distance in the future? I understand that people spend less time worrying about the intelligence explosion than what would be socially optimal because the vast majority of its benefits will be in the very far future, which people care little about. However, it seems probable that the intelligence explosion will still have a substantial effect on many people in the near-ish future (within the next 100 years). Yet, hardly anyone worries about it. Why?

Succession planting

Intelligent gardener: growing nutrient dense food

Although popular opinion believes that Prohibition failed, it succeeded in cutting overall alcohol consumption in halfduring the 1920s, and consumption remained below pre-Prohibition levels until the 1940s, suggesting that Prohibition did socialize a significant proportion of the population in temperate habits, at least temporarily. Some researchers contend that its political failure is attributable more to a changing historical context than to characteristics of the law itself. Criticism remains that Prohibition led to unintended consequences such as the

http://www.metaculus.com/questions/ seems to be a good successor to predictionbook. Does anybody know who's responsible for it?

A US based philanthropic organisation is very keen to fund me for something here in Australia. They have a shit-tonne of money. Though, it's not in a uncertain effectiveness cause error (GiveWell says they aren't ready release their OPP report on it yet). It's stressful pitching this opportunity for career capital against the impact I could have putting my time and resources in an 'effective' cause area. If I assume effectiveness will become increasingly valued in the world, taking their funds (which isn't even diverting it from better causes since it's ca... (read more)

I'm thinking a bit about AI safety lately as I'm considering writing about it for one of my college classes.

I'm hardly heavy into AI safety research and so expect flaws and mistaken assumptions in these ideas. I would be grateful for corrections.

1. An AI told to make people smile tiles the world with smiley faces but an AI told to do what humans would want it to do might still get it wrong eg. Failed Utopia #4-2 . However, wouldn't it research further and correct itself (and before that, have care to not do something un-correctable)? Reasoning as follows: l

Whenever I used to think of nationalising industries, I would think of industries relating to critical infrastructure or 'prestige industries'. Reading the following threw my intuitions overboard!

A tobacco industry buy-out

In the current model, the tobacco industry has a corporate mission of selling unhealthy products so as to profit its shareholders. Its aims and purposes are intrinsically misaligned with the public good and will ever remain so. However, if the tobacco industry were nationalised, with the intent of winding down operations, the interests