Example #149 of why it's difficult to specify bets...
Louie texted me a screenshot showing that Zagat had given an opinion on Subway (the fast-food chain). My girlfriend said "No way," so we both specified a bet that if we went to the Zagat website, we wouldn't be able to find a Zagat rating for Subway. She said 40% and I said 65%. When we checked, it turned out Zagat had conducted a survey of people who visit fast food joints, and Subway had been one of the restaurants they got survey results for. So does that count as Zagat giving Subway a rating? I don’t know. I was just thinking of "official Zagat ratings," rather than survey ratings, but it's technically true that there's a rating for Subway on the Zagat website because of that survey of random people who eat fast food.
What i really need is a panel of 5 trusted judges to decide whether my bets are right or wrong, in contested cases.
Digging behind the bet, I think you were betting that Louie had been spoofed. If
the screenshot Louie sent was really sourced in zagat and not spoofed, then
zagat did indeed have the opinion lukeprog thought it didn't.
2Douglas_Knight9y
If the purpose of bets is measure your model against the world, it seems to me
that the more valuable lesson is how often you are surprised in the process of
evaluating the bet than how often you are correct. If you put 40 or 65% on the
hypothesis that the restaurant falls in a particular bin, you aren't surprised
either way by the answer, but you both erred in believing that there were just
two bins.
I tried to code a simple bot for recurring threads on LW based on bots written for Reddit. It doesn't work as there is apparently no API or a different one from the vanilla version of Reddit. If there is an API is there a documentation for it that I can access?
I was looking for an old Robin Hanson post to use as an example in an upcoming post of mine, and tried to get there through the Opposite Sex, an old post of Eliezer's. When I click that link, though, I get a "You aren't allowed to do that." error, which appears to be a change in the last two years. Anyone know what happened? (My guess is Eliezer or someone decided to retract the article, but it would be nice to know for sure.)
On Facebook one time, there was some discussion or other about gender, and a link to the post was made. EY said something to the effect of 'I no longer endorse that post sufficiently enough to keep it up', and took it down.
Being sick makes me stupid. Yesterday I was teaching economics while I had a mild cold. I made multiple simple math mistakes, far more than normal. I need to be mindful that being sick reduces my cognitive capacities.
At my workplace, the question came up of how best to publicly recognise people for good work, while minimising the amount of politics/friction/jealousy that comes about as a direct result of it. We have only just grown past the point where we all know each other well; hence why this sort of thing is becoming interesting.
My initial response to the question was "Make being praised unpleasant, using ugly trophies (sports team strategy) or stupid hats (university graduation strategy)" but I would like to say something more upbeat as well.
Is anyone aware of good writing on the subject/google keywords I could use to find the literature?
You don't want to make being praised unpleasant for the recipient -- that leads to perverse incentives. And you don't want to give an award a stupid name or an embarrassing shape -- part of the point of this sort of thing is that it looks good on your resume or perched over your desk. You want to mark their achievement in a way they'll genuinely appreciate, but simultaneously add symbolism to make their coworkers feel that their status hasn't been diminished.
I think what you're looking for is a little temporary public humiliation, not intrinsic to the award but coming along with more standard recognition. You could do this in several different ways. If it's a fairly small group and the awards are a fairly big deal, for example, you could run a roast) as part of the party following the award. You could probably contrive ways to add this kind of symbolism to physical awards, too.
Most people rather like it. It appears you don't; what makes you dislike it?
4kalium9y
Public attention of any kind is just embarrassing. Probably not unrelated to
past experience of politics, friction, and jealousy resulting from praise in the
past. But if I were threatened with public praise in my job I would be strongly
tempted to quit before it could strike.
2Punoxysm9y
Woah, that's paranoid!
3Sabiola9y
Find a way to make it non-zero-sum. Only 1 person can be employee of the year,
so others lose out and may resent their colleague. Maybe a gold/silver/bronze
border around your portrait on the intranet, with a tooltip that explains what
you got it for?
1James_Miller9y
Money. Give the person a token bonus and let it be known that if you get a bonus
you are not supposed to tell other people about it.
"The technique involves replacing all of a patient's blood with a cold saline solution, which rapidly cools the body and stops almost all cellular activity. "If a patient comes to us two hours after dying you can't bring them back to life. But if they're dying and you suspend them, you have a chance to bring them back after their structural problems have been fixed," says surgeon Peter Rhee at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who helped develop the technique."
I welcome criticism of my new personal favorite population axiology:
The value of a world-history that extends the current world-history is the average welfare of every life after the present moment. For people who live before and after the current moment, we need to evaluate the welfare of the portion of their life after the current moment. The welfare of a person's life is allowed to vary nonlinearly with the number of years the person lives a certain kind of life, and it's allowed to depend on whether the person's experiences are veridical.
This axiology implies that it's important to ensure that the future will contain many people who have better lives than us; it's consistent with preferring to extend someone's life by N years rather than creating a new life that lasts N years. It's immune to Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion, but doesn't automatically fall prey to the opposite of the Repugnant Conclusion. It implies that our decisions should not depend on whether the past contained a large, prosperous civilization.
There are straightforward modifications for dealing with general relativity and splitting and merging people.
The one flaw is that it's temporally consistent: If future generations average the welfare of lives after their "present moments", they will make decisions we disapprove of.
I build a robot that hibernates until the last person presently alive dies, then
exterminates all people who are poor, unhappy, or don't like my robot. Good
thing?
4Nisan9y
A person that has a life worth living could have the welfare of their life
increase monotonically with their lifespan. In that case, ending a life usually
makes the world-history worse.
4philh9y
Can you give an example? It seems to me that if they decide at t_1 to maximise
average welfare from t_1 to ∞, then given that welfare from t_0 to t_1 is held
fixed, that decision will also maximise average welfare from t_0 to ∞.
Edit: oh, I was thinking of an average over time, not people.
8Nisan9y
Earth produces a long and prosperous civilization. After nearly all the
resources are used up, the lean and hardscrapple survivors reason, "let's figure
out how to squeeze the last bits of computation out of the environment so that
our children will enjoy a better life than us before our species goes extinct".
But from our perspective, those children won't have as much welfare as the vast
majority of human lives in our future, so those children being born would bring
our average down. We would will the hardscrapple survivors to not produce more
people.
2shminux9y
Are you swiping the complexity of value under the terms "better" and
"veridical"? Does following your axiology prevent humanity from evolving into a
race of happy-go-lucky clones?
6Nisan9y
Yes. It's hard enough to come up with a decent way of aggregating individual
welfares without making a comprehensive theory of value.
0VAuroch9y
Is this different from whether their perception of their experiences is correct,
or is it jargon?
1Nisan9y
Yes, I mean (for example) that if a person believes they're married to someone,
their life's welfare could depend on whether their spouse is a real person or if
it's a simple chatbot. Also, if a person feels that they've discovered a deep
insight, their life's welfare could depend on whether they have actually
discovered such an insight.
It took me a long time to find LessWrong and I found it through a convoluted and ultimately entirely random series of events. Though English is neither my first language nor do I live in an anglophone country so I'd love to find a similar community in my language, German, or more generally interesting smaller, though active, communities in other languages than English. How would I go about that?
I'm pretty sure that due to the free rider problem
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem], active and lively communities
are much more likely to grow via word of mouth than via public advertising or
easily googled websites.
Maybe try Mensa? I don't know if they're any good, but they're in Germany and
they're big enough to know an LWish community if one is available.
1ChristianKl9y
In Berlin we found that having Quantified Self events in English makes more
sense then holding them in German. All the interested people speak English. Our
local Berlin LW meetups are also in English. There no good reason to use German
if you want to discuss intellectual topics on a deep level. English is the
language of science. English is the language of programming.
That said, see whether there a LW meetup, QS meetup, Chaos Computer Club Erfa or
Hackerspace at your city. That's were the kind of people who are here hang out.
Meetup.com in general is good to find interesting groups.
When the Chaos Computer Congress was still in Berlin I went there multiple years
in a row. Now I don't travel to Hamburg but if you are free on 27-30 December
going there, is a very worthwhile experience to be in the company of very smart
people.
As far as general strategies for finding communities, talk to people. Ask them
to which communities they belong.
2Emile9y
At Paris meetups we occasionally have more people who speak German than people
who speak French :)
0ChristianKl9y
Who actually speak it at the meetup or who can speak it? People in Paris
speaking German at a public meetup would go against my idea of French people
looking out to protect their language.
1Emile9y
Who can speak it; we usually speak English though not if all participants speak
good French.
LW may be interested to learn about Amazon Smile, which gives 0.5% of your Amazon purchases to charity, and the Smile Always Chrome extension that will route your browser to smile.amazon.com by default. (Yes, you can support MIRI through Amazon Smile.) Total setup time estimated at under 5 minutes.
Oh yeah, it looks like they're having some kind of promotion where if you sign up and make a purchase by March 31, they will give an extra $5 to your chosen charity.
I have been using Amazon Smile and Smile Always for MIRI for about a year.
IIRC, Amazon Smile used to be listed on MIRI's Donate for free page
[http://intelligence.org/get-involved/#give], but has since been replaced by
"Good Shop". Good Shop appears to give a higher percentage, but I was unable to
get the browser extension working so that it happened automatically, so I still
use Smile. If anyone knows of a way to get it working, I'd be happy to hear it.
But I tried to do it manually for a while, and I just don't remember often
enough.
2Metus9y
Is this for the EU too? 0.5% seems a bit low, for every $200 you'd spend the
charity receives $1. Then again, it is about the aggregate effect.
Edit: Browsing through the charities, they are all located in the US, so it
seems specific to there.
Facebook bought Oculus Rift for $2 billion. What makes this, and so many other large deals, such clean numbers? Are the press rounding the details? Are the companies only releasing approximate or estimate numbers? Can the value of a company like Oculus really not be estimated to the nearest 10%? Or do these whole numbers just serve as nice Schelling points on which to hinge a bargain? Or am I forgetting lots of ugly-numbered deals?
(WhatsApp purchase was 2 significant figures, and this list on Wikipedia does show mostly 2-3 significant figures though some figures are probably converted from other currencies.)
In cases like this, a large portion of the "money" paid is actually in the form
of shares, which can vary wildly on a day-to-day basis (especially during a
takeover!). It doesn't make sense to specify the value of it too precisely
because nobody knows what the shares are going to be worth tomorrow.
0Douglas_Knight9y
That's a good reason for the press to round such figures, but the actual figure
is round, on the day it was decided, and that itself is mysterious.
7[anonymous]9y
What makes you think that these numbers are determined by some kind of rational
cost-benefit analysis rather than those with the money rattling off numbers
until those with the property give in?
5gwern9y
Why not all of the above? We can see some rounding already;
http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=835447
[http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=835447] says
There's rounding right there (23.1m * 69.35 is not a round number). And there's
plenty of uncertainty about how much they will actually pay: how can anyone know
how much of that earn-out will ultimately be paid?
3Douglas_Knight9y
That sounds backwards to me. It looks to me like they started at the round 2.0,
set 20% in cash, 80% in stock, found that required 23.1m shares of facebook and
rounded that to three digits to get within 2% of the 1.6 they wanted.
Also, the incentive pay of 300m is 15% of the fixed payment, less uncertainty
than rounding to 1 significant figure.
0tgb9y
It absolutely could be all of the above! But see I write questions like this
fairly frequently: I notice something surprising and don't have a good
explanation for it. I then write down the question and pose a couple possible
explanations which makes me think of more possible explanations. Frequently I
realized that taken together the possibilities I thought of are enough to
explain what I was surprised at and I don't even ask the question. Other times,
like this one, I still feel like I'm missing something. So I ask the question.
In this case it looks like the biggest thing I missed was how much these sales'
values depend upon the moment-to-moment stock prices of the parties involved and
so that not rounding them hardly even makes sense, as you and bramflakes point
out. Thanks!
1Squark9y
Google's IPO was e * 10^9$
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(mathematical_constant\]#In_computer_culture) :)
no matter how much is discovered about neurobiology and the measurable correlates of consciousness, it seems to me that stoners will always be able to ask each other, “dude, what if like, my red is your blue?”
Lol.
Seriously though, that's a really bad argument, why have you added it here?
4shminux9y
You can read the full argument in the comments to
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1753
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1753]
2fubarobfusco9y
"Dude, what if, like there's a number in between zero and the smallest positive
real?" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surreal_numbers]
0XiXiDu9y
Are you indicating that only the relation between wavelengths and the brain's
information processing counts, and that differing conscious perceptions of these
wavelengths are analogous to the use of different sets of symbols used to denote
the additive relationship between "two-ness" and "four-ness" (two plus two
equals four and deux plus deux égalent quatre)?
4Ben Pace9y
No, I just meant that, just because a 'stoner' can ask a question, doesn't mean
the answer to the question is permanently unknowable.
Edit: Or even that difficult to answer. In fact, that a stoner can ask a
question is almost no evidence of anything at all. Applying principle of
charity, if Scott meant that anyone can always ask that question, that's true
for any question; you can always keep asking if two plus two equals four. Now,
if in fact Aaronson wants to present evidence for the claim that we can never
know if your and my 'blues and reds' are the same, that would be cool, but there
was no real argument given.
Recently I changed some of my basic opinions about life, in large part because of interaction with LessWrong (mostly along the axes Deism -> Atheism, ethical naturalism -> something else (?)).
It inspired me to try to summarize my most fundamental beliefs. The result is as follows:
Epistemology
1.1. Epistemic truth is to be determined solely by the scientific method / Occam's razor.
1.2. The worldview of mainstream science is mostly correct.
1.3. The many religious / mystical traditions are wrong.
Updateless decision theory
[http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Updateless_decision_theory].
1fubarobfusco9y
Is this an epistemic truth?
0Squark9y
No :) See below [http://lesswrong.com/lw/jy6/open_thread_2430_march_2014/ar2m].
0[anonymous]9y
1.1- Disagree, but I may not understand the claim (what's 'epistemic truth'?).
1.2- Agree. 1.3- Agree. 2.1- Agree that consciousness is the result of computing
processes in the brain, disagree that a machine implementing the same
computations would necessarily be conscious. (i.e. agree with physicalism, don't
agree with functionalism). 2.2- I don't understand the claim. But I think I
disagree. 3.1- Agnostic. 3.2- Disagree. 3.3- Disagree, especially with the claim
that this is the only meaningful interpretation of 'should'. 4.1- Agnostic. 5.1-
Agnostic. 5.2- I don't understand this at all. 5.3- I don't understand your use
of the word 'real'.
0Squark9y
By "epistemic truth" I mean truth regarding the physical universe. Maybe that is
a poor choice of words. Physical truth?
0[anonymous]9y
So do you mean 'the only grounds for knowledge about the physical universe is
the scientific method/Occam's razor'?
0Squark9y
Yep. Although under a UDT / multiverse interpretation it becomes "knowledge
about the region of the multiverse in which I am located".
Morality is a fundamental component of human cultures and has been defined as prescriptive norms regarding how people should treat one another, including concepts such as justice, fairness, and rights. Using fMRI, the current study examined the extent to which dispositions in justice sensitivity (i.e., how individuals react to experiences of injustice and unfairness) predict behavioral ratings of praise and blame and how th
I've seen a lot of discontent on LW about exercise. I know enough about physical training to provide very basic coaching and instruction to get people started, and I can optimize a plan for a variety of parameters (including effectiveness, duration of workout, frequency of workout, cost of equipment, space of equipment, gym availability, etc.). If anyone is interested in some free one-on-one help, post a request for your situation, budget, and needs and I'll write up some basic recommendations.
I don't have much in the ways of credentials, except that I've... (read more)
I've been reading a bit of books that I guess could be classified as "pop psychology" and "pop economics" lately. (In this concept I include books like Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. Hence what I mean is by "pop" is not that it's shallow but rather that it has a wide lay audience.) Now I'd like to turn to sociology - arguably the most general and allencompassing of the social sciences. But when I google "pop sociology", all the books seem to have been written by economists or psychologists or non-academics such a... (read more)
Sociology: A Very Short Introduction (published Oxfrod University Press)
[http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/nav/i/category/academic/series/general/vsi/9780192853806/R/browse+within+this+series/social+sciences/n/4294921793.do]
0iarwain19y
You can try Everything Is Obvious
[http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Obvious-Common-Sense-Fails/dp/0307951790/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=]
by Duncan Watts. He's a multi-disciplinary type, but he is at least partially a
sociologist. He also discusses a lot in there about sociology as a discipline.
0Douglas_Knight9y
Erving Goffman is said to be accessible and said to be a sociologist. One issue
is that "sociology" has several meanings. His version shades into psychology.
0[anonymous]9y
The sociologist Charles Murray
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Murray_(author\]) says interesting things.
I don't usually agree with them, but they make me think.
I'm currently learning about hypothesis testing in my statistics class. The idea is that you perform some test and you use the results of that test to calculate:
P(data at least as extreme as your data | Null hypothesis)
This is the p-value. If the p-value is below a certain threshold then you can reject the null hypothesis (which is the complement of the hypothesis that you are trying to test).
Put another way:
P(data | hypothesis) = 1 - p-value
and if 1 - p-value is high enough then you accept the hypothesis. (My use of "... (read more)
This is correct.
This is not correct. You seem to be under the impression that
P(data | null hypothesis) + P(data | complement(null hypothesis)) = 1,
but this is not true because
1. complement(null hypothesis) may not have a well-defined distribution
(frequentists might especially object to defining a prior here), and
2. even if complement(null hypothesis) were well defined, the sum could fall
anywhere in the closed interval [0, 2].
More generally, most people (both frequentists and bayesians) would object to
"accepting the hypothesis" based on rejecting the null, because rejecting the
null means exactly what it says, and no more. You cannot conclude that an
alternative hypothesis (such as the complement of the null) has higher
likelihood or probability.
0[anonymous]9y
Huh? P(X|Y) + P(X|Y') = P(X) and an event that has already occurred has a
probably of one. Am I missing something?
2pcm9y
That may be true if you have little influence over what data is available.
Frequentists are mainly interested in situations where they can create
experiments that cause P(hypothesis) to approach 0 or 1. The p-value is intended
to be good at deciding whether the hypothesis has been adequately tested, not at
deciding whether to believe the hypothesis given crappy data.
2Oscar_Cunningham9y
Your conclusion
is correct. Frequentists do indeed claim that P(hypothesis | data) is
meaningless for exactly the reasons you gave. However there are some little
details in the rest of your post that are incorrect.
The hypothesis you are trying to test is typically not the complement of the
null hypothesis. For example we could have:
where theta is some variable that we care about. Note that the region theta<0
isn't in either hypothesis. If we were instead testing
then frequentists would suggest a different test. They would use a one-tailed
test to test H1 and a two-tailed test to test H1'. See here.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-_and_two-tailed_tests]
No. This is just mathematically wrong. P(A|B) is not necessarily equal to
1-P(A|¬B). Just think about it for a bit and you'll see why. If that doesn't
work, take A="sky is blue" and B="my car is red" and note that P(A|B)=P(A|¬B)~1.
1IlyaShpitser9y
It's not meaningless, but people who follow R. A. Fisher's ideas for rejecting
the null do not use p(hypothesis | data). "Meaningless" would be if frequentists
literally did not have p(hypothesis | data) in their language, which is not true
because they use probability theory just like everybody else.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don't ask lesswrong about what frequentists claim, ask frequentists. Very few
people on lesswrong are statisticians.
0Douglas_Knight9y
Many frequentists do insist that P(hypothesis) are meaningless, despite "using
probability theory."
0IlyaShpitser9y
Could you give me something to read? Who are these frequentists, and where do
they insist on this?
0Douglas_Knight9y
Let us take a common phrase from the original comment "the hypothesis is either
true or false"
[https://www.google.com/search?q="hypothesis+is+either+true+or+false"]. The
first google hit [http://strata.uga.edu/6370/lecturenotes/errors.html]:
0IlyaShpitser9y
So from this statement you conclude that frequentists think P(hypothesis) is
meaningless? Bayesians assign degrees of belief to things that are actually true
or false also. The coin really is either fair or not fair, but you will never
find out with finite trials. This is a map/territory distinction, I am surprised
you didn't get it. This quote has nothing to do with B/F differences.
A Bayesian version of this quote would point out that it is a type error to
confuse the truth value of the underlying thing, and the belief about this truth
value.
0Oscar_Cunningham9y
You have successfully explained why it is irrational for frequentists to
consider P(hypothesis) meaningless. And yet they do. They would say that
probabilities can only be defined as limiting frequencies in repeated
experiments, and that for a typical hypothesis there is no experiment you can
rerun to get a sample for the truth of the hypothesis.
0IlyaShpitser9y
You guys need to stop assuming frequentists are morons. Here are posts by a
frequentist:
http://normaldeviate.wordpress.com/2012/12/04/nate-silver-is-a-frequentist-review-of-the-signal-and-the-noise/
[http://normaldeviate.wordpress.com/2012/12/04/nate-silver-is-a-frequentist-review-of-the-signal-and-the-noise/]
http://normaldeviate.wordpress.com/2012/11/17/what-is-bayesianfrequentist-inference/
[http://normaldeviate.wordpress.com/2012/11/17/what-is-bayesianfrequentist-inference/]
Some of the comments are good as well.
3Oscar_Cunningham9y
Yes, you're right. Clearly many people who identify as frequentists do hold
P(hypothesis) to be meaningful. There are statisticians all over the B/F
spectrum as well as not on the spectrum at all. So when I said "frequentists
believe ..." I could never really be correct because various frequentists
believe various different things.
Perhaps we could agree on the following statement: "Probabilities such as
P(hypothesis) are never needed to do frequentist analysis."
For example, the link you gave suggests the following as a characterisation of
frequentism:
Since frequency guarantees are typically of the form "for each possible true
value of theta doing the construction blah on the data will, with probability at
least 1-p, yield a result with property blah". Then since this must hold true
for each theta, the distribution for the true value of theta is irrelevant.
-1IlyaShpitser9y
The interesting questions to me are: (a) "what is the steelman of the
frequentist position?" (folks like Larry are useful here), and (b) "are there
actually prominent frequentist statisticians who say stupid things?"
By (b) I mean "actually stupid under any reasonable interpretation."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Quote from the url I linked:
"Keep your identity small" -- advice familiar to a LW audience.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I guess you disagree with Larry's take: B vs F is about goals not methods. I
could do Bayesian looking things while having a frequentist interpretation in
mind.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the spirit of collaborative argumentation, can we agree on the following:
We have better things to do than engage in identity politics.
0Lumifer9y
It is not the same thing and knowing P(hypothesis | data) would be very useful.
Unfortunately, it is also very hard to estimate because usually the best you can
do is calculate the probability, given the data, of a hypothesis out of a fixed
set of hypotheses which you know about and for which you can estimate
probabilities. If your understanding of the true data-generation process is not
so good (which is very common in real life) your P(hypothesis | data) is going
to be pretty bad and what's worse, you have no idea how bad it is.
0Douglas_Knight9y
Not having a good grasp on the set of all hypotheses does not distinguish
bayesians from frequentists and does not seem to me to motivate any difference
in their methodologies.
Added: I don't think it has much to do with the original comment, but testing a
model without specific competition is called "model checking." It is a common
frequentist complaint that bayesians don't do it. I don't think that this is an
accurate complaint, but it is true that it is easier to fit it into a
frequentist framework than a bayesian framework.
-2Lumifer9y
I have said nothing about the differences between bayesians and frequentists. I
just pointed out some issues with trying to estimate P(hypothesis | data).
I don't think that's really the fallacy of grey, if I have to map it to a piece
of LessWrong-speak, I'd call it privileging the hypothesis; it's not saying you
can't be sure of anything, if you're a good Bayesian it's not really telling you
anything new there, it's just bringing one particular super-implausible
hypothesis to your attention so it occupies much more of your mind than it has
any right to.
I am assembling a list of interesting blogs to read and for that purpose I'd love to see the kind of blog the people in this community recommend as a starting point. Don't see this just as a request to post blogs according to my unknown taste but as a request to post blogs according to your taste in the hope that the recommendation scratches an itch in this community.
John Baez, "from math to physics to earth science and biology, computer science and the technologies of today and tomorrow," plus stuff on catastrophic risk w.r.t. climate change.
Andrew Gelman, pointing out bad statistics in social science. More than once, I've revised my beliefs about some study months later when he points out a failure to replicate or other problem.
Timothy Gowers, math, analysis I stuff recently, mostly over my head
Terry Tao, math, number theory, mostly over my head
I have to admit the intersection with my feed list is most definitely non-empty:
I'd add Good Math Bad Math [http://www.goodmath.org/blog], mathematics, computer
science and, sometimes, recipes and playlists.
3sixes_and_sevens9y
After discussing diffusion of interesting news at the most recent London meetup,
I was planning on asking something like this myself.
Futility Closet [http://www.futilitycloset.com] is nothing but "interesting
stuff". It describes itself as "a collection of entertaining curiosities in
history, literature, language, art, philosophy, and mathematics, designed to
help you waste time as enjoyably as possible". It has more chess than I
personally care for, but is updated with what I find to be novel content three
times a day.
Conscious Entities [http://www.consciousentities.com/] is a blog on Philosophy
of Mind. It takes an open position on a lot of questions we would consider to be
settled on LessWrong, but I think it has value in a steel-manning /
why-do-people-believe-this capacity.
(The categories on my feed reader are "Blogs", "CS", "Dance", "Econ",
"Esoterica", "Maths/Stats", "Philosophy", "Science" and "Webcomics". I'd be
interested in finding out how other people classify theirs.)
0labachevskij9y
I have: "News", "Friends", "Comics", "RPG", "Android", "LW" , "Climbing" and
"Maths".
3Bobertron9y
There are some blogs mentioned on the wiki
[http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/External_resources].
2beoShaffer9y
Mr.Money Mustache [http://www.mrmoneymustache.com] on personal finance.
2ChristianKl9y
In the Pipeline [http://pipeline.corante.com/] is a very good blog to keep up
with what's happen in big pharma and chemistry in general. It written by someone
employed inside a pharma company, and not someone who criticizes pharma policy
from a outsider standpoint. There are some posts about specific chemical
reactions that I skip but if you want to understand how the healthcare industry
works, I can recommend the blog very much. It also provides good coverage if a
new relevant biomedical finding comes in the news. The comment section is
usually full of people with domain experience.
I used to read Matt Talibies Rolling Stones blog column for Finanical news.
Stories about Libor
[http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425]
are explained in detail on that blog.
Matt now left the Rolling Stones and will lead his own magazine under the
heading of First Look Media [https://firstlook.org/] which is funded by the tech
billionaire of ebay cofounder Pierre Morad Omidyar. At the moment First Look
Media already publishes Glenn Greenwald & company which the primary job of still
processing the pile of Snowden documents.
I used to read Glenn Greenwald for a long time but reading every other day about
the NSA, used to become boring so I won't read everything that comes out in the
Intercept [https://firstlook.org/theintercept/] but I subscribe to the feed.
As a German speaking independent news sources I read hintergrund
[http://www.hintergrund.de/], fefe [http://blog.fefe.de/] and the indepth
podcast Alternativlos [http://alternativlos.org/].
Alternativlos is an interesting project. Two members of the Chaos Computer Club
basically concluded that speaking to the public and explaining them how things
work politically is "without alternative" and started to explain topics in 2
hours. It explains a topic like stuxnet in detail in a detail that explains what
exploits cost on the black market.
Today some public radio st
1pragmatist9y
I don't really read many blogs frequently. The one sort-of-bloggish site I visit
daily is 3 Quarks Daily [http://www.3quarksdaily.com]. They link to a number of
interesting articles every day, and their taste in topics coincides quite nicely
with mine.
Passive voice / finding causes is hard / compare LA and SF.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is not really a haiku.
2Vaniver9y
Some factors pointing towards an increase: decreased emotional, health, and
financial cost of commutes.
Some factors pointing towards a decrease: decreased cost and increased
flexibility and convenience of car-sharing services, which work better in higher
density locations.
I think the primary driver of urban sprawl is schooling (and thus home prices),
not commuting. The growing acceptance of online schooling will likely decrease
urban sprawl significantly.
1Daniel_Burfoot9y
Here's an economics analysis: self-driving cars reduce the effective cost of a
commute, by allowing the passenger to focus on other things than driving during
the commute (reading, watching TV, playing games, etc). Since a significant
limit to sprawl is the cost, broadly construed, of long commutes, self-driving
cars will increase sprawl.
1Nornagest9y
Based on the idea that you get what you incentivize, and irrespective of other
factors, I'd expect a marginal to mild increase. Self-driving cars can make
commutes a bit more pleasant and substantially less dangerous, but they can't
reduce commute times (until they reach saturation or close to it), and time's
the main limitation.
2Douglas_Knight9y
Actually, I think that there is great potential for self-driving cars to reduce
congestion and thus commute time.
0Dan_Moore9y
Some of the effects will depend on details of the implementation. For example,
if self-driving cars are constrained to obey highway speed limits, the commute
time may increase in some cases, at least initially. Upon achieving saturation
of self-driving cars, I would expect shorter commute times on non-highways.
Also, upon saturation, it may be seen as desirable to raise the highway speed
limit.
0[anonymous]9y
Keep in mind that non-self-driving cars will always be cheaper and will always
have a market no matter how good autonomous ones get since autonomous vehicles
have more parts and maintenance needs. You will never have an area with only
autonomous vehicles, absent massive government intervention.
5Izeinwinter9y
I place the likelyhood of massive government intervention or the equivalent
(insurance becoming flat out unavailable for manual drivers) at somewhere north
of 90 %. Driver error has a really high cost in quality adjusted life years,
every year. If eliminating that cost becomes an option, it will get used.
A friend of mine has mild anorexia (she's on psych meds to keep it contained) and recently asked me some advice about working out. She told me that she is mainly interested in not being so skinny. I offered to work out with her one day of the week to make sure she's going about things correctly, with proper form and everything.
The thing is, just going to the gym and working out isn't effective if her diet and sleeping cycle aren't also improved. I would normally be really blunt about these other facts, but her dealing with anorexia probably complicates thi... (read more)
If she's on medicine to contain her anorexia she knows she has an issue. You
could start with simple asking her what she eats and listen empathically.
I would also suggest that you think about your relationship with her. What does
she want? Does she want your approval? Does she want that you tell her what to
do, to not have to take the responsibility for herself? Does she care about
looking beautiful to you? Does she want a relationship with you? Do you want a
relationship with her?
Knowing answers to questions like that is important when you deal with deep
psychological issues. It shapes how the words you say will be understood.
5NancyLebovitz9y
Do you have any thoughts about whether she's at risk for an exercise disorder?
0JQuinton9y
That's actually a good question. Without disclosing too much of her psych
history, she seems to be really impulsive and might even be prone to addiction.
I suppose she could get an exercise disorder... this makes it even more
complicated than I thought.
1shokwave9y
I'd caution that suspecting (out loud) that she might develop an exercise
disorder would be one of those insulting or belittling things you were worried
about (either because it seems like a cheap shot based on the anorexia
diagnosis, or because this might be one approach to actually getting out from
under the anorexia by exerting control over her body).
Likely a better approach to this concern would be to silently watch for those
behaviours developing and worry about it if and when it actually does happen.
(Note that refusing to help her with training and diet means she gets this help
from someone who is not watching out for the possibility of exercise addiction).
There are a few approaches that might work for different people:
* Talk as though she doesn't have anorexia. Since you are aware, you can tailor
your message to avoid saying anything seriously upsetting (i.e you can
present the diet assuming control of diet is easy, or assuming control of
diet is hard). I don't recommend this approach.
* Confront the issue directly ("Exercise is what tells your body to grow
muscle, but food is what muscles are actually built out of, so without a
caloric surplus your progress will be slow. I'm aware that this is probably a
much harder challenge for you than most people..."). I don't recommend this
approach.
* Ask her how she feels about discussing diet. ("Do you feel comfortable
discussing diet with me? Feel free to say no. Also, don't feel constrained by
your answer to this question; if later you start wishing you'd said no, just
say that, and I'll stop."). I recommend this approach.
In any case, make it clear from the outset you want to be respectful about it.
3polymathwannabe9y
You may directly ask her in what terms she prefers to discuss those matters.
That way you'll get across your message, i.e. that proper diet is worth talking
about, with little risk of involving the wrong message in the mix.
1VAuroch9y
This form of question seems no less likely to raise problems than asking about
the topic itself.
I'd suggest something more along the lines of "This is pretty standard advice,
and it works for most people, but it's built on some assumptions about an
average diet. How much should I be tailoring it for you?" Which is basically an
indirect request for a status report, without implying anything about whether or
not her current eating pattern is unhealthy. From that response, you can
probably gauge to what degree you can safely bring it up directly.
0ephion9y
If she wants to get bigger, then I'd get her started with Greyskull LP. It's a
fairly basic beginner weight lifting program that, when combined with a caloric
surplus, will get good results for size and strength. There isn't much work
involved (just three sets on 2-3 exercises; doing more is counterproductive for
beginners) so it won't use as much energy as a cardio or circuit intensive
routine.
A couple of protein shakes with milk/almond milk are enough to get a caloric
surplus going. You only need 250-500 extra calories to make good gains, and you
can easily get that with a shake or two.
-4Daniel_Burfoot9y
I don't have good ideas about dealing with anorexia, but I think you should
suggest to your friend that she is being used as a pawn by the
psycho-pharmaceutical industry to extract dollars from her health insurance
provider.
5erratio9y
Evidence? Is this just a general anti-psych-meds comment or do you have a basis
for thinking that in this particular case they're problematic?
Every "proof" of Godel's incompleteness theorem I've found online seems to stop after what I would consider to be the introduction. I find myself saying "yes, good, you've shown that it suffices to prove this fixed point theorem... now where's the proof of the fixed point theorem, surely that's the actual meat of the proof?" Anyone have a good source that shows the full proof, including why for a particular encoding of sentences as numbers the function "P -> P is not provable" must have a fixed point?
Here's a cute/vexing decision theory problem I haven't seen discussed before:
Suppose you're performing an interference experiment with a twist: Another person, Bob, is inside the apparatus and cannot interact with the outside world. Bob observes which path the particle takes after the first mirror, but then you apply a super-duper quantum erasure to Bob so that they remember observing the path of the particle, but they don't remember which path it took. Thus, at least from your perspective, the superposed versions of Bob interfere, and the particle always ... (read more)
I disagree that Bob's expected value drops to -0.5$ during the experiment. If
Bob is aware that he will be "super-duper quantum memory erased", then he should
appropriately expect to receive 1$.
There may be more existential dread during the experiment, but the expectations
about the outcome should stay the same throughout.
0Nisan9y
Ok, User:Manfred makes the same point here
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/jy6/open_thread_2430_march_2014/aqar]. It implies that
at any point, heretofore invisible worlds could collide with ours, skewing the
results of experiments and even leaving us with no future whatsoever (although
admittedly with probability 0). Would you agree with that?
0Strilanc9y
No, I don't think that's likely at all.
Worlds only interfere when they evolve into the same state. Because the state
space is exponentially large, only worlds that are already almost-equivalent to
our world are likely to "collide with us".
If you've based a decision on some observation, worlds where that observation
didn't happen are not almost-equivalent. They differ in trillions (note: massive
underestimate) of little ways that would all need to be corrected
simultaneously, lest the differences continue to compound and push things even
further apart. Their contributions to the branch we're in is negligible.
Your thought experiment used a "super duper quantum eraser", but in reality I
don't think such a thing is actually possible. The closest analogue I can think
of is a quantum computer, but those prevent decoherence/collapse. They don't
undo it.
1Manfred9y
Bob cannot become entangled with the outside world while in the middle of a
quantum erasure experiment, or else it doesn't work. So he doesn't really get to
do anything :P
If Bob knows that the particle becomes entangled with him, then he still makes
the same predictions.
0Nisan9y
Ok, that's surprising. Here's why I thought otherwise: From Bob's perspective, a
particle is prepared in a superposition of states B and C. Then Bob observes or
becomes entangled with the particle, thus collapsing its state. Then the
super-duper quantum erasure is performed, which preserves the state of the
particle. Then the particle strikes the second half-silvered mirror. A collapse
interpretation tells Bob to expect two outcomes with equal probability. Is this,
then, an experiment where a collapse interpretation and a many-worlds
interpretation give different predictions?
1Oscar_Cunningham9y
The collapse interpretation predicts that you can't do the super-duper quantum
erasure. Once the collapse has occurred the wavefunction can't uncollapse.
1Manfred9y
Basically, there are a variety of collapse interpretations depending on where
you make the collapse happen. Every time we've tested these hypotheses (e.g. by
this sort of experiment
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler's_delayed_choice_experiment]), we haven't
been able to see an early collapse.
At this point, all actual physicists I know just postpone the collapse whenever
necessary to get the right answer.
1Nisan9y
Hm, so that means that quantum physics predicts that our observations depend on
the presence of parallel worlds in the universal wavefunction, which in theory
might interfere with our experiments at any time, right?
2Manfred9y
Calling them parallel worlds is as always dangerous (you can't go all buckaroo
bonzai on them), but basically yes.
0Oscar_Cunningham9y
He can, in theory, make bets. Just so long as the bet he makes doesn't depend on
which way he saw the particle go.
0Manfred9y
Hm, good point. We could set aside a few instants for him to send a few photons
that wouldn't depend on the state of the particle. From a practical standpoint
that's pretty impossible, but forget practicality.
So, sure; Bob should accept the bet. Although if he makes his answer to the bet
depend on the state of the particle at all, then he shouldn't accept the bet :P
There might be some interesting applications of this, say where the option
"don't accept" has some positive payoff if the particle changes directions. Bob
can precommit to send out an entangled qubit to get some chance at that reward.
Rational thinking against fear in a TED talk by (ex) astronaut Chris Hadfield. Has anyone else seen it? I really enjoyed it, in particular the spider example.
It seems clear that for people with a bachelor's in CS, from a purely monetary viewpoint, getting a master's in the same area usually is dumb unless you plan on programming a long time.
This article says the average mid-career pay for MSc holders is $114,000. This says the mid-career bachelor's salary is $102,000. A master's means 12 to 24 months of lost pay and anywhere from a $20,000/year salary in some lucky cases to a $50,000+ debt. You need at least a decade of future work to justify this. And that likely overstates the benefits since it does not cont... (read more)
FYI, it is possible to do a part-time masters program and some employers will
pay for you to get a graduate degree (usually as part of an agreement to keep
working for the company several years afterwards).
1Squark9y
IMO the real problem is that academia teaches computer science whereas what
programmers need to know to be valuable is software engineering. Those seem to
be rather different disciplines.
Disclaimer: I didn't study CS myself and this opinion is based on indirect
evidence.
So I've kind of formulated a possible way to use markets to predict quantiles. It seems quite flawed looking back on it two and a half weeks later, but I still think it might be an interesting line of inquiry.
You want options (as in, the financial market instruments called "options").
A sufficiently deep and wide options market basically provides most of the
market-expected distribution of the future value of the underlying.
My comments [http://lesswrong.com/lw/j1v/wolframs_new_cloud_initiative/a1n9]
earlier. Wolfram is a beautiful language with well designed libraries. If you
are new to programming, you will learn a lot mucking about with it. It's
probably not going to take the world by storm.
0NancyLebovitz9y
I'm not sure whether this is a bigger problem than already exists in general,
but if some of the information in the libraries is out of date or just plain
wrong, it would be a challenge to notice that there's a problem.
Apparently, founding mathematics on Homotopy Type Theory instead of ZFC makes automated proof checking much simpler and more elegant. Has anybody tried reformulating Max Tegmark's Level IV Multiverse using Homotopy Type Theory instead of sets to see if the implied prior fits our anthropic observations better?
Homotopy type theory differs from ZFC in two ways. One way is that it, like
ordinary type theory, is constructive and ZFC is not. The other is that it is
based in homotopy theory. It is that latter property which makes it well suited
for proofs in homotopy theory (and category theory). Most of the examples in
slides you link to are about homotopy theory.
Tegmark is quite explicit that he has no measure and thus no prior. Switching
foundations doesn't help.
0khafra9y
I found a textbook [http://homotopytypetheory.org/book/] after reading the
slides, which may be clearer. I really don't think their mathematical
aspirations are limited to homotopy theory, after reading the book's
introduction--or even the small text blurb on the site:
2asr9y
Which implied prior? My understanding is that the problem with Multiverse
theories is that we don't have a way to assign probability measures to the
different possible universes, and therefore we cannot formulate an unambiguous
prior distribution.
0VAuroch9y
The two usual implied prior taken from Level IV are a)that every possible
universe is equally likely and b)that universe are likely in direct proportion
to the simplicity of their description. Some attempts have been made to show
that the second falls out of the first.
-2khafra9y
Well, I don't really math; but the way I understand it, computable universe
theory suggests Solomonoff's Universal prior, while the ZFC-based mathematical
universe theory--being a superset of the computable--suggests a larger prior;
thus weirder anthropic expectations. Unless you need to be computable to be a
conscious observer, in which case we're back to SI.
I enjoy reading perceptive / well-researched futurism materials. What are some good resources for this? I'm looking for books, blogs, newsfeeds, etc.. Also, I'm only looking for popular-level rather than academic material - I have neither the time nor the knowledge to read through most scholarly articles on the subject.
Example #149 of why it's difficult to specify bets...
Louie texted me a screenshot showing that Zagat had given an opinion on Subway (the fast-food chain). My girlfriend said "No way," so we both specified a bet that if we went to the Zagat website, we wouldn't be able to find a Zagat rating for Subway. She said 40% and I said 65%. When we checked, it turned out Zagat had conducted a survey of people who visit fast food joints, and Subway had been one of the restaurants they got survey results for. So does that count as Zagat giving Subway a rating? I don’t know. I was just thinking of "official Zagat ratings," rather than survey ratings, but it's technically true that there's a rating for Subway on the Zagat website because of that survey of random people who eat fast food.
What i really need is a panel of 5 trusted judges to decide whether my bets are right or wrong, in contested cases.
I tried to code a simple bot for recurring threads on LW based on bots written for Reddit. It doesn't work as there is apparently no API or a different one from the vanilla version of Reddit. If there is an API is there a documentation for it that I can access?
I was looking for an old Robin Hanson post to use as an example in an upcoming post of mine, and tried to get there through the Opposite Sex, an old post of Eliezer's. When I click that link, though, I get a "You aren't allowed to do that." error, which appears to be a change in the last two years. Anyone know what happened? (My guess is Eliezer or someone decided to retract the article, but it would be nice to know for sure.)
On Facebook one time, there was some discussion or other about gender, and a link to the post was made. EY said something to the effect of 'I no longer endorse that post sufficiently enough to keep it up', and took it down.
Being sick makes me stupid. Yesterday I was teaching economics while I had a mild cold. I made multiple simple math mistakes, far more than normal. I need to be mindful that being sick reduces my cognitive capacities.
At my workplace, the question came up of how best to publicly recognise people for good work, while minimising the amount of politics/friction/jealousy that comes about as a direct result of it. We have only just grown past the point where we all know each other well; hence why this sort of thing is becoming interesting.
My initial response to the question was "Make being praised unpleasant, using ugly trophies (sports team strategy) or stupid hats (university graduation strategy)" but I would like to say something more upbeat as well.
Is anyone aware of good writing on the subject/google keywords I could use to find the literature?
You don't want to make being praised unpleasant for the recipient -- that leads to perverse incentives. And you don't want to give an award a stupid name or an embarrassing shape -- part of the point of this sort of thing is that it looks good on your resume or perched over your desk. You want to mark their achievement in a way they'll genuinely appreciate, but simultaneously add symbolism to make their coworkers feel that their status hasn't been diminished.
I think what you're looking for is a little temporary public humiliation, not intrinsic to the award but coming along with more standard recognition. You could do this in several different ways. If it's a fairly small group and the awards are a fairly big deal, for example, you could run a roast) as part of the party following the award. You could probably contrive ways to add this kind of symbolism to physical awards, too.
Cryonics ideas in practice:
"The technique involves replacing all of a patient's blood with a cold saline solution, which rapidly cools the body and stops almost all cellular activity. "If a patient comes to us two hours after dying you can't bring them back to life. But if they're dying and you suspend them, you have a chance to bring them back after their structural problems have been fixed," says surgeon Peter Rhee at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who helped develop the technique."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129623.000-gunshot-victims-to-be-suspended-between-life-and-death.html
I welcome criticism of my new personal favorite population axiology:
The value of a world-history that extends the current world-history is the average welfare of every life after the present moment. For people who live before and after the current moment, we need to evaluate the welfare of the portion of their life after the current moment. The welfare of a person's life is allowed to vary nonlinearly with the number of years the person lives a certain kind of life, and it's allowed to depend on whether the person's experiences are veridical.
This axiology implies that it's important to ensure that the future will contain many people who have better lives than us; it's consistent with preferring to extend someone's life by N years rather than creating a new life that lasts N years. It's immune to Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion, but doesn't automatically fall prey to the opposite of the Repugnant Conclusion. It implies that our decisions should not depend on whether the past contained a large, prosperous civilization.
There are straightforward modifications for dealing with general relativity and splitting and merging people.
The one flaw is that it's temporally consistent: If future generations average the welfare of lives after their "present moments", they will make decisions we disapprove of.
It took me a long time to find LessWrong and I found it through a convoluted and ultimately entirely random series of events. Though English is neither my first language nor do I live in an anglophone country so I'd love to find a similar community in my language, German, or more generally interesting smaller, though active, communities in other languages than English. How would I go about that?
There are LessWrong meetups in many countries, in particular there are 4 in Germany.
See http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Less_Wrong_meetup_groups
LW may be interested to learn about Amazon Smile, which gives 0.5% of your Amazon purchases to charity, and the Smile Always Chrome extension that will route your browser to smile.amazon.com by default. (Yes, you can support MIRI through Amazon Smile.) Total setup time estimated at under 5 minutes.
Oh yeah, it looks like they're having some kind of promotion where if you sign up and make a purchase by March 31, they will give an extra $5 to your chosen charity.
Facebook bought Oculus Rift for $2 billion. What makes this, and so many other large deals, such clean numbers? Are the press rounding the details? Are the companies only releasing approximate or estimate numbers? Can the value of a company like Oculus really not be estimated to the nearest 10%? Or do these whole numbers just serve as nice Schelling points on which to hinge a bargain? Or am I forgetting lots of ugly-numbered deals?
(WhatsApp purchase was 2 significant figures, and this list on Wikipedia does show mostly 2-3 significant figures though some figures are probably converted from other currencies.)
No open_thread tag. ('Latest Open Thread' doesn't link to here)
Edit: For some reason the one before doesn't have the tag either..
Scott Aaronson on subjectivity of qualia:
How to learn charisma.
Book on the subject
Recently I changed some of my basic opinions about life, in large part because of interaction with LessWrong (mostly along the axes Deism -> Atheism, ethical naturalism -> something else (?)).
It inspired me to try to summarize my most fundamental beliefs. The result is as follows:
1.1. Epistemic truth is to be determined solely by the scientific method / Occam's razor.
1.2. The worldview of mainstream science is mostly correct.
1.3. The many religious / mystical traditions are wrong.
2.1. Consciousness is the result ... (read more)
The Good, the Bad, and the Just: Justice Sensitivity Predicts Neural Response during Moral Evaluation of Actions Performed by Others.
... (read more)I've seen a lot of discontent on LW about exercise. I know enough about physical training to provide very basic coaching and instruction to get people started, and I can optimize a plan for a variety of parameters (including effectiveness, duration of workout, frequency of workout, cost of equipment, space of equipment, gym availability, etc.). If anyone is interested in some free one-on-one help, post a request for your situation, budget, and needs and I'll write up some basic recommendations.
I don't have much in the ways of credentials, except that I've... (read more)
I've been reading a bit of books that I guess could be classified as "pop psychology" and "pop economics" lately. (In this concept I include books like Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. Hence what I mean is by "pop" is not that it's shallow but rather that it has a wide lay audience.) Now I'd like to turn to sociology - arguably the most general and allencompassing of the social sciences. But when I google "pop sociology", all the books seem to have been written by economists or psychologists or non-academics such a... (read more)
Am I confused about frequentism?
I'm currently learning about hypothesis testing in my statistics class. The idea is that you perform some test and you use the results of that test to calculate:
P(data at least as extreme as your data | Null hypothesis)
This is the p-value. If the p-value is below a certain threshold then you can reject the null hypothesis (which is the complement of the hypothesis that you are trying to test).
Put another way:
P(data | hypothesis) = 1 - p-value
and if 1 - p-value is high enough then you accept the hypothesis. (My use of "... (read more)
Extreme fallacy of gray illustrated by SMBC.
I am assembling a list of interesting blogs to read and for that purpose I'd love to see the kind of blog the people in this community recommend as a starting point. Don't see this just as a request to post blogs according to my unknown taste but as a request to post blogs according to your taste in the hope that the recommendation scratches an itch in this community.
Here's a sampling of the best in my RSS reader:
- Scott Aaronson, theoretical computer science/physics
- Tyler Cowen, economics, Cowen is good about sharing surprising info
- Lambda the Ultimate, programming language theory
- John Baez, "from math to physics to earth science and biology, computer science and the technologies of today and tomorrow," plus stuff on catastrophic risk w.r.t. climate change.
- Jeremy Kun, computer science mostly
- The n-Category Cafe, "A group blog on math, physics and philosophy"
- Andrew Gelman, pointing out bad statistics in social science. More than once, I've revised my beliefs about some study months later when he points out a failure to replicate or other problem.
- Timothy Gowers, math, analysis I stuff recently, mostly over my head
- Terry Tao, math, number theory, mostly over my head
- matthen, math visualizations
- Gödel’s Lost Letter, theoretical computer science, complexity theory, often funny
- MIRI blog, interviews, research recaps, computer sciencey
- Overcoming Bias, X isn't about Y
- Dart Throwing Chimp, global politics
- Carl Shulman, effective altruism, thoughtful analysis
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, webcomic
- So Your Life is Meaningle
... (read more)I am wondering about the effect of the advent of self-driving cars on urban sprawl. Will it increase or decrease sprawl?
Urban sprawl is said to be an unintended consequence of the development of the US interstate highway system.
A friend of mine has mild anorexia (she's on psych meds to keep it contained) and recently asked me some advice about working out. She told me that she is mainly interested in not being so skinny. I offered to work out with her one day of the week to make sure she's going about things correctly, with proper form and everything.
The thing is, just going to the gym and working out isn't effective if her diet and sleeping cycle aren't also improved. I would normally be really blunt about these other facts, but her dealing with anorexia probably complicates thi... (read more)
Every "proof" of Godel's incompleteness theorem I've found online seems to stop after what I would consider to be the introduction. I find myself saying "yes, good, you've shown that it suffices to prove this fixed point theorem... now where's the proof of the fixed point theorem, surely that's the actual meat of the proof?" Anyone have a good source that shows the full proof, including why for a particular encoding of sentences as numbers the function "P -> P is not provable" must have a fixed point?
Here's a cute/vexing decision theory problem I haven't seen discussed before:
Suppose you're performing an interference experiment with a twist: Another person, Bob, is inside the apparatus and cannot interact with the outside world. Bob observes which path the particle takes after the first mirror, but then you apply a super-duper quantum erasure to Bob so that they remember observing the path of the particle, but they don't remember which path it took. Thus, at least from your perspective, the superposed versions of Bob interfere, and the particle always ... (read more)
Rational thinking against fear in a TED talk by (ex) astronaut Chris Hadfield. Has anyone else seen it? I really enjoyed it, in particular the spider example.
Analyzing people's premises by thinking about comments-- the example was a recent tailgating incident.
It seems clear that for people with a bachelor's in CS, from a purely monetary viewpoint, getting a master's in the same area usually is dumb unless you plan on programming a long time.
This article says the average mid-career pay for MSc holders is $114,000. This says the mid-career bachelor's salary is $102,000. A master's means 12 to 24 months of lost pay and anywhere from a $20,000/year salary in some lucky cases to a $50,000+ debt. You need at least a decade of future work to justify this. And that likely overstates the benefits since it does not cont... (read more)
So I've kind of formulated a possible way to use markets to predict quantiles. It seems quite flawed looking back on it two and a half weeks later, but I still think it might be an interesting line of inquiry.
How big a deal is this? I only just recently started learning programming so I don't know enough to understand the implications.
Apparently, founding mathematics on Homotopy Type Theory instead of ZFC makes automated proof checking much simpler and more elegant. Has anybody tried reformulating Max Tegmark's Level IV Multiverse using Homotopy Type Theory instead of sets to see if the implied prior fits our anthropic observations better?
I enjoy reading perceptive / well-researched futurism materials. What are some good resources for this? I'm looking for books, blogs, newsfeeds, etc.. Also, I'm only looking for popular-level rather than academic material - I have neither the time nor the knowledge to read through most scholarly articles on the subject.