I started a meditation blog from a rationalist perspective. 10 posts so far.
(For the ten or fifteen people who care about Pearl's do-calculus):
There's a new paper on arXiv (54 pages) claiming a graphical method for determining when the effect of an intervention (on a single variable) is or is not identifiable. I've not read the paper in detail, but it is fairly readable (relative to the typical research paper).
Reading that paper led me to discover that the author has written an introduction to the do-calculus (16 pages) which is also quite readable. Lots of nice pictures for wrapping one's head around d-separation and the like.
A new study shows that a major part of the Flynn effect in the US was due to iodine in salt. The study suggests that around 15 points of the non-normalized IQ gain was due to this.
I don't know about Flynn, but this is in large part not new news: that the early 1920s US iodization led to measurable gains in enlistees for WWII has been in papers floating around for a while now; for example, "The Economic Effects of Micronutrient Deficiency: Evidence from Salt Iodization in the United States", Feyrer et al 2008. "The Impact of Iodine Deficiency Eradication on Schooling: Evidence from the Introduction of Iodized Salt in Switzerland", Politi 2010, is also cool. Also maybe even voting patterns.
(Citations borrowed from my iodine page.)
PROJECT: Inexpensive dry-erase surfaces.
Experiments:
Normal wall-hung whiteboards are the usual solution, but they are usually very expensive per square foot. Leverage Research found some used ones (with minor scuffs) for about $3/sqft at a nearby used office supplies liquidator, but if bought new they're more like $5.50/sqft. Note: paint thinner removes old ghosting from used boards.
"Whiteboard paint" like IdeaPaint lets you turn a whole wall into a whiteboard for about $4.50/sqft, but lots of reviews say it doesn't erase that well, and has other problems. Also, an organization I'm close to tried this and confirmed that IdeaPaint was terrible.
The best-quality (not most popular) "peel and stick" whiteboard appears to be Wall Pops. This has worked surprisingly well during its first week, but I don't know whether it will cling to the wall forever, and one thing to note is that it's so thin that it pics up the texture of the wall you stick it to. You can peel it off the wall and move it to a new location quite easily; it sticks by static. One particular black dry-erase marker didn't dry-erase from this surface hardly at all, for some reason.
Shower board (aka
I found an early description of b-money in parable form, which was sent on Jan 16, 1998 to a private mailing list (libtech) run by Nick Szabo. It may still be useful for getting an intuitive understanding of the basic principles behind b-money as well as Bitcoin (to some extent), so it seems a shame to just let it sit in my email archives.
Imagine that you are the first person to contact a previously isolated civilization. You discover that its people have not yet invented either commodity money or fiat money. Yet they do not use direct barter either. Instead everyone simply "remembers" how much money everyone else has. When Alice needs to pay Bob for services rendered, she simply shouts out "I give x dollars to Bob." and everyone else mentally subtracts x dollars from the amount of money Alice has and adds x dollars to the amount of money Bob has. (Everyone in this civilization is always within shouting distance of everyone else.) It is not possible for someone to have negative money, because everyone can easily alter their voice and appearance and create a new identity.
You find that disputes are resolved without any institutions vested with special powers. If A...
Ranty complaint: Someone always downvotes ONLY my meetup posts with no explanation. (I do not flood the list. My last post included topics for the next NINE meetups). I think whoever-they-are is an asshole.
Sites with votes always have a tiny proportion of people who engage in really really weird voting behavior IME.
If so, they're being inconsistent about it; I just checked my own meetup thread from a few days ago, and it has no downvotes.
I posted this comment on how to optimally (in the vast majority of situations) handle a break-up.
Since the parent thread was massively downvoted and my comment itself received relatively positive feedback, I thought it may be beneficial to post a link to the comment here.
Also, I'd like to note that LW massively helped me in getting through my break-up. It seems like a sort of trivial/silly situation to talk about on LW, but (at least for me previously) it's tough to understand just how painful heartbreak can be until it actually happens to you. If it were not for concepts like the Outside View or distinguishing between System 1 and System 2 thinking, I'd be in a worse place than I currently am; so, thank you.
Say you are old, beloved, ninety-nine,
Descendants, partners, and the best of friends,
Garlanded with achievement, all that's fine,
Along comes death and there the whole thing ends...Now you are gone and everyone will grieve,
And that still sucks like granite through a straw!
It was your very life you had to leave,
If it was good, the better cause for more.It makes me hopping mad it's so unfair
That everybody has to die and go.
We build a future that we will not share,
Work for a world that we can never know.Enjoy life while you can, and share the feast.
We all should live a thousand years at least.
--Jo Walton
My Granddad died today at the tragically young age of 72. This is basically what I was thinking but I couldn't articulate it to anyone.
Thanks.
I took an hour to draw up a list of personal bets I've made or tried to make with people. The list turns out to be surprisingly short and have resulted in next to no bets, implying that for all that people talk about bets, actual bets are far rarer than I had realized. This is a bit of a pity - so much cheap talk...
Here's a recent article by Andrew Gelman on how easy it is to find and publish completely meaningless "significant" results.
The key concept here is "researcher degrees of freedom": all of the things the researcher could have tested, but didn't, or did, but didn't bother to mention as there was no p<0.05 result.
The money quote (albeit buried at the very end of the article):
Even if something is published in the flagship journal of the leading association of research psychologists, there's no reason to believe it. The system of scientific publication is set up to encourage publication of spurious findings.
This is strong stuff too:
Researchers’ decisions about which variables to analyze may make perfect sense, but they indicate the difficulty of taking these p-values at anything like face value. There is no reason to assume the researchers were doing anything nefarious or trying to manipulate the truth. Rather, like sculptors, they were chipping away the pieces of the data that did not fit their story, until they ended up with a beautiful and statistically significant structure that confirmed their views.
On his blog he calls this "the scientific mass ...
Foc.us is a commercially available tDCS system marketed to gamers, and at a price that is almost affordable, depending on the actual benefits of the device. Does anyone here have experience, expertise, our any other insight with regards to this?
On August 4th, I will be turning 15, and I've decided to initiate a very large project, which for lack of a better name, I will dub "The Plan".
I intend to spend the days leading up to my 15th Birthday by taking information from an enormous variety of sources on what life improvements can be made, what skills are most useful, and what areas should be studied, to reach the ultimate goal of gaining as much benefit possible, as quick as possible.
There's tons of things to consider, even assuming I have a tireless work ethic and can implement this immediately. What types of utility increases are there? Which are more important? Should all time be devoted to the quickest increases in utility, or should energy be set aside for starting some long term goals early? Does it make more sense to improve yourself, so you can make more money? Or to make some money, and use it to improve yourself?
Obviously I'm not going to find a perfect answer, and attempting to plan out my whole life is doomed to fail, but I'd at least like to have a better idea of where to go from here. (Besides, I'll still have learned a lots of useful information.)
So, I pose this question to the LessWrong Community:
If you were me, and turning 15, what would you recommend that I do over the next year, to give me the biggest utility bonus the fastest, both in skill and wealth?
Hopefully, even if it proves an impossible question, we'll see some interesting discussion.
So, I just moved to Europe for two years and finally got finantial independence from my (somewhat) Catholic parents and I want to sign up for cryonics. Is there international coverage? Is there anything I should be aware of? Are there any steps I should be taking?
Idea: Perhaps animal rights activists could accomplish their goals more efficiently by promoting powder based foods along the lines of Soylent.
It isn't hard to make a cheaper soy based version, and the energy and cognitive benefits appear to still be there. Also, you don't have to directly sell people on the values shift where animal suffering matters in the same way human suffering does, rather you can put them in a position where they no longer feel obliged to defend animal suffering as less significant than human suffering because they just happen to no longer be eating animals.
It appears to have other utilitarian benefits as well, which is part of what makes it a potentially easier sell than ethically motivated veganism.
Speculatively (but reasonably, given the available anecdotal evidence): Higher average IQ in the population (which causes disproportionate economic gains relative to the individual economic benefit of higher IQ), higher economic productivity due to less sleep requirement and better energy levels, easier weight loss due to less exercise resistance.
Less speculatively: Reduced shipping costs (hence CO2) due to lack of water weight for the dry material, reduced heart attack rates due to increased oat flour and olive oil consumption, reduced food preparation time, more balanced/consistent nutrient intake.
This is a site functionality question, so I don't know if it goes here. Why can't I see my overview page? I mean the one with my karma and all the comments I've made. When I click on my username, in the top right corner or on a comment, it goes to a blank wiki page. The same thing happens for some other users, but not all of them. For some people it goes to their overview page, for some to the wiki page about them. Is there a way to get my overview page back without deleting my wiki account?
I second your question. I have no particular inclination to make myself a wiki page and so mine is blank too. I'd like it to be able to remove it entirely.
I in general find it a minor nuisance that I have an extra page load to do to reach the desired user page. I want to see the comments and posts not a profile. When I want to see interesting profile pages I'll go to OkCupid. (I wonder how long it would take to write a firebug script that took me to the appropriate page by default.)
A while back I saw a post or comment by someone in the London meetup, offering help to newcomers; I can't find the thread, so I'm posting here in the hope that someone in London will see it. I've been offered a job in London, and would like to ask some questions about prices, commute times, and crime rates, so I can decide whether the pay is reasonable. In particular, the job offer is a postdoc at Imperial; what sort of apartments (for a family of three) can one get in an area that's some combination of
a) Close to the campus b) Not too crime-ridden c) Cheap?
What sort of food, utilities, and entertainment (utilons?) budgets do people in London have?
Does anyone know of an easily-accessible compendium of language-independent programming exercises that are geared towards quickly determining one's mastery of a programming language, rather than testing general programming skill? The ideal here is a set of problems that aren't super challenging, so they can be finished quickly, but that require (or at least reward) knowledge of a wide range of syntactic constructs available in a typical modern high-level language. Bonus points for graded sets of problems that start out testing the more fundamental constructs but then gradually move on to testing knowledge of quite high level operations (like, say, regular expression matching).
Of course, I realize that I could probably just take the problems from, say, a Python textbook, and de-Pythonize them, but I'm wondering if there is a ready-made set of problems of this sort available on the internet.
Does anyone here think a Phoenix Wright style game could be useful as a medium for Rationalist fiction?
I prefer body weight exercises, essentially anything that does not need tools to be performed. Now, most of the 'literature' on how to gain strength is in terms of lifting weights. Is there some kind of chart that allows to translate weight lifted into body-weight exercise performed?
Also, the amount of information on this site is getting overwhelming, as is the content of the open threads. I have no suggestions on how to alleviate this.
I just found this delightful illustrated storybook about teaching logical falalcies to children. The art is kinda creepy, but the concept seems sound.
I'm currently reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, and while discussing how System 1 tends to jump to conclusions and the importance of preventing people from influencing each other before revealing their thoughts (in section I.7), he explains that
...The principle of independent judgments (and decorrelated errors) has immediate applications for the conduct of meetings. A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. ...The standard practice of o
Somewhat frequently while talking, either public speaking or just talking to a friend, my mind will suddenly go blank. I won't be able to remember what I'm talking about, and I have to retrace my thoughts to get back to where I was.
Is this something that dual n-back will help with?
(Isomorphic question: Is this a problem of working memory, or something else?)
This usually indicates a badly-initialised pointer - either it's zero and shouldn't be, or it is fooling a test-for-zero check through being filled with random garbage, and thus preventing program flow from correctly returning to the calling function. Suggest running the debugger to see if the problem goes away - this indicates the second issue, as the debugger will initialise all pointers not given an explicit value to zero; if it persists, you should at least be able to get a stack trace.
Someone has to remember each Monday.
I will be that person until further notice, if you'd rather not. I also endorse the weekly open threads.
Where should I go to find a good estimate of the body's nutrition requirements? (I want to make a soylent-like thing. I'd still be eating at least one "real food" meal per day. I'll be preferring whole foods over pure chemicals, when possible.) From a quick look around, I see a lot of people with very different conclusions that they are very sure are correct, and sometimes turning diet into something political or part of their self-image. This makes it really hard to know what is trustworthy.
I'm considering just doing what the USDA says, since th...
Kaj Sotala showed up on Peters Watts' blog (Peter Watts being a SF author who's neck-and-neck with Robin Hanson for dismal but hard-to-refute predictions).
Has the invention of the concept of utilitarianism had any significant consequences for the world? If you look at history - events, trends, culture - what are the biggest things of which one can say, that only happened because the idea "utilitarianism" existed, it wouldn't have happened otherwise?
If you look at history - events, trends, culture - what are the biggest things of which one can say, that only happened because the idea "utilitarianism" existed, it wouldn't have happened otherwise?
If Jeremy Bentham had not come up with utilitarianism, I don't think classical liberalism as we know it would exist today. He came up with a remarkable number of what we now consider "right" answers in the social sciences. And he obviously influenced plenty of important folks, including e.g. John Stuart Mill.
If that hadn't happened, I think other ideas would be more important instead, e.g. natural law and perhaps some vague appeals to egalitarianism.
Link to a forum discussion applying bayesian statistics to Magic the Gathering online game data.
Looks like nothing but an interesting exercise at the moment, but it would be interesting to create a MoneyBall-esk drafting strategy for creating high availability build, high effectiveness draft decks.
My boyfriend tells me that it's a fallacy to evaluate a country's financial activities in the same way that is prudent for an individual's or a business'. Specifically he said that there is no limit to how big the public debt:GDP ratio can be while still having a healthy economy. I don't remember his exact argument, but it had something to do with reducing the real debt with inflation and other monetary policies. On the face of it this seems like some kind of Ponzi scheme, but I know less about economics that he does, and I also may be misremembering his point. Does anyone have a link to a good explanation of how (or whether) good financial management at a country level differs from at a personal level?
A few weeks ago I saw a video of some city's underground car system. IIRC, users can hop in a 2-person tiny car, choose a destination on a touch screen, and get whisked away all the way to their destination without any transfers. Anyone know what I'm talking about? It must have been Singapore or Seoul or something, but I can't find it.
Meningitis vaccine in Europe-- QALYs and uncertainty.
The vaccine has been cleared for use, but in the face of not knowing what it will cost or how severe an outbreak might be, no government is willing to pay to support the use of the vaccine.
QALYs vary according to the lives people think are worth living, and that's complicated.
Just finished reading Neuropath by Scott Bakker. It deals with a radical vision of the reductionistic nature of consciousness, intentionality and personhood and now stands alongside Greg Egan's Permutation City and Diaspora as one of the most philosophically shocking books I have read.
I really don't recommend it to anyone who hasn't been very strongly innoculated against Existential Angst.
If Mitchell Porter has read it or is familiar with Bakker's ideas from other sources I'd be interested in hearing his thoughts, as the philsophy of Neuropath really challenges the credibility of any form of realism regarding qualia.
Does anyone have any resources/links on research into developing friendly AI by having 3 or more cooperative and competitive superintelligent agents?
How do you view saved articles on LessWrong? There's the little floppy/SD icon to save it, but where does it save to?
I wonder what is wrong with the SMBC solution to the problem of finite human lifespan? It's certainly cheaper and easier to achieve.
After reading a number of recent comments noting "Please use the standard font." I'm wondering if a technological block stopping people from using a nonstandard font would be a worthwhile use of programmer time. Thoughts? I myself don't have a strong opinion either way, but I figured the first thing to do was to get a better feel for current opinion.
Edit: Is there a way to correct spelling without destroying a poll?
[pollid:543]
Barring people from using their chosen fonts inhibits me from using a quick crank heuristic to save my time by ignoring them, so I would be against it. We should let them select themselves out of the memepool.
On Less Wrong, I guess this heuristic mainly ignores people who wrote their article in MS Word and have not lurked here long enough to be aware of this pitfall. Is that strongly correlated with low quality articles?
Can someone remind me of the formal name for these fallacies:
a) an event such as a death that happens near you is weighted more heavily than one that happens far away; even if far away there are many more deaths.
b) an event that happens to people more like you is weighted more heavily than one that happens to people less like you.
and in general any other fallacies that cause people to weight the deaths of unrelated people in their own country/culture more heavily than the deaths of people further removed from them. Thanks.
How's that a fallacy? The utility function is not up for grabs. If I care more about people I know than about people I don't know, I may be evil/selfish/whatever, but I'm not (epistemically) wrong just because of that.
Why is that a fallacy? You SHOULD weight deaths that happen to people closer to and more like you more heavily. They're more likely to be indicative of risk of death to yourself, they are more likely to affect you in other ways, and they're more likely to be affect able BY you.
Foc.us is a commercially available tDCS system marketed to gamers, and at a price that is almost affordable, depending on the actual benefits of the device. Does anyone here have experience, expertise, our any other insight with regards to this?
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.