Recently I've been carrying textbooks and reading them over lunch, which is not my normal pattern. A friend asked me about it. A brief discussion of AI risk ensued, resulting in this quote:
Wow. Ten minutes ago, if you had given me a button and said "This button will put a random AI onto your computer", I would have pushed it. Now that seems like a really bad idea.
This startled me at first, and worried me greatly (as we both work at Google, and our peers are working on AI.) Upon reflection, I realized that I shared the same sentiment up until last year.
This episode really drove the False Consensus Effect home for me.
Speaking of False Consensus Effect, when you say this, are you mentioning
something which is already public knowledge, like self-driving cars or Google
now, or are you talking about some other project that perhaps people outside of
Google haven't even heard of and you can't talk about in detail? There are a lot
of things that someone might call to mind when they hear someone else say "our
peers are working on AI." But I wouldn't be surprised if I was getting the
entirely wrong impression from this sentence and I should try to avoid that.
3So8res10y
I was referring to things like the youtube-trained visual learner
[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-of-computers-evidence-of-machine-learning.html?_r=0]
and some other public knowledge
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ox4EMFMy48&feature=player_embedded#t=0].
A few weeks ago I started assessing my own calibration, using tools such as the CFAR calibration game. I got fairly good and concluded that I am relatively well calibrated.
When given a question, my instincts would immediately throw out a number. I'd unpack it and adjust it in accordance to known biases. (Avoid representativeness, start from base rates, treat the initial number as a degree of support, factor in strength of evidence, etc.)
Yesterday, an assessment of probability came up in conversation. Immediately, my instincts threw out the number "80%". My thoughts went like this:
My gut says 80%. I'm well calibrated, so 80% is probably right.
I opened my mouth to speak.
Then I shut my mouth.
I understand Löb's theorem on an intuitive level now.
I achieved good calibration by paying attention to evidence and avoiding known biases as well as I was able. Once I had established reliable calibration, I experienced temptation to justify my first intuitive instinct by asserting my own calibration.
My calibration was based upon mediating my intuitions with reason. I can't invoke it to trust any old estimate that comes out of my mouth: if I did then I could say whatever I want and trust it to be calibrated (which would yield probability estimates out of touch with reality). Hence the parallels to Löb's theorem.
TIL this app exists. Thank you.
After using it for half an hour it turns out that I am well calibrated at
probabilities except 80% and 90%. Weird.
Anyhow, could this be combined with a program such as Anki? Meaning, that you
place the answer in your head and indicate how certain you are in percent. If
correct, the card will be placed accordingly into the future. This should work
splendidly with learning vocab for linguistically close languages.
0westward10y
Hey, thanks for mentioning this. I hadn't heard about it.
I've tried my hand at this app (50 questions or so), and it seems like the
correct strategy, for me, is to go 50% for anything I have a little doubt on,
and 99% for that I'm sure about. Maybe 5% of the questions fall into the 60%-90%
range.
I'm still working to understand the tutorial and how to interpret my results.
5So8res10y
:-)
It's not particularly hard to "perfect" your calibration in that game -- if
you're over/under on a certain percentile, you can throw questions where you're
confident into percentiles where you're "poorly calibrated" in order to spoof a
good calibration curve.
The trick to that game, if you actually want to asses your calibration, is to
play for points rather than for a good curve. Being well-calibrated means that
when you play for points, you have a good curve automatically.
(I wish that they'd show you your curve less often, perhaps only when you leave
the game. It's hard to resist cheating the curve. Then again, I'm not sure of a
better way to provide the necessary feedback.)
0westward10y
I'm not strong enough in math to figure out how the scoring actually works
without spending some time with it, and I wouldn't "throw" questions anyway. But
I do like seeing that, say, on my 60%s I'm actually right 70% of the time. So
when I'm feeling "60%" I should actually go with 70% more often. I think I'm
afraid of getting questions wrong because the score penalty appears so high
relative to the score bonus (I know that's likely appropriate, even though I
don't understand the actual log bits, etc of scoring ).
3Viliam_Bur10y
The scoring is done so that if you have 70% of your answers right, then you get
the best average score by guessing 70%, not 60%. The increased penalty you get
for getting 30% of those answers wrong is smaller than the increased gain for
getting 70% of them right.
But that's true only as long as you really get 70% of them right; so changing
your answer e.g. to 80% while being only 70% correct would decrease the average
score, because then the increased penalty for getting 30% of those answers wrong
would be greater than the increased gain for getting the 70% right.
Without understanding the log bits, you can easily verify this in a spreadsheet
calculator. Make a formula saying how many points you get if you report
probability R and if you really get P answers right. Playing with numbers, you
will find out that for a given P, you get the highest average score for R = P.
Debating etiquette: If you assert that X is "obvious", "blatantly obvious" or "so fucking obvious you'd have to be an evil, low-status person not to see it" then you are not allowed to provide any arguments or evidence for X unless you first concede that X is not obvious. None of this "Anyone with half a brain can see why X is true, but here's for paragraphs arguing for X anyway" nonsense.
People who do this are trying to double dip. By claiming their point is obvious they can shame their opponents for being too stupid to understand the plain truth. But since what they're saying isn't actually obvious, they layer arguments to make X look more obvious. If X is obvious, you should say "X" and everyone will know you are right. But if you find the need to defend X with arguments, don't try and shame the people who disagree that X.
That seems like a great norm... under assumption that the goal of the debate is
to speak meaningfully, as opposed to trying to get more power to one's group.
Because, if the true goal is more power to the tribe, then declaring all
opponents stupid or evil and repeating the party line in a situation where it
cannot be opposed is obviously the winning strategy.
But this could be a funny game -- be the first person to declare that some
applause light of the given group is "obvious", and then support it with a wrong
argument. The goal is to calibrate the level of wrongness precisely so that
someone within the group will recognize the wrongness, but they will be a very
small minority and afraid to speak loudly against the applause lights. (And if
they speak, then attack them and let them feel the wrath of the group.)
Uhm, to excuse this evil game, I should probably find some positive purpose.
So... let's say that it teaches people to examine the arguments critically even
if they already agree with the conclusion.
Here is an (imaginary) example:
At a meeting of Amnesty International: "Everyone knows that racism is evil and
unscientific. I don't want to hear any more of this bullshit of innate racial
differences in IQ. Cognitive science has proved that intelligence is not a
function of brain, but of kidneys, and all races have exactly the same kidneys.
So I ask all racists to please shut up." A wave of applause. Then, a silent
trembling voice: "Are you sure intelligence is in the kidneys? I never heard
about such research and I am a cognitive scientists..." Acting offended: "Shut
up, you nazi, how dare you!"
-3Lumifer10y
Clearly you have not spent much time on teh interwebs... :-D
A few days ago I was talking with two people who had "experienced" total brain inactivity for some period of time before (one for a few days on ice!). I tried asking what they thought about the discontinuous experience/identity and associated philosophical issues that e.g. cryonics or other forms of not-being-alive for a while entails, but I couldn't get them to interpret the question as anything besides "what do you think of the personality changes that might happen from such an event?".
This sounds exceedingly interesting. Please clarify on the "few days on ice,"
does that mean they were cryogenically frozen, or...
6jamesf10y
She had cardiac arrest and they cooled her down to prevent organ damage. Now
that I research it more, probably not enough to completely stop brain activity,
though that was the premise of the question and they seemed to understand that
part.
1Pentashagon10y
I've wondered if that sort of dramatic cooling is more of an optimal path to
cryonic preservation than the current method of waiting for "natural" death and
then immediate perfusion. E.g. since it's an official medical treatment, get
cooled significantly "to prevent organ damage" and kept in that state until some
measure of clinical death occurs, at which point it may be more likely to avoid
ischemia.
I looked into cold-water drownings for similar reasons but it appears to me that
what actually happens is just a preservation of oxygen in the brain and heart
and lungs by the mammalian diving reflex and not necessarily any reduction in
risk from ischemia during subsequent cryonic suspension. But being pre-cooled
may still have some advantages.
1[anonymous]10y
Cooling to a few degrees below normal body temperature for a few days after
ishchemia does help keep down reperfusion injury and after-the-fact inflammatory
brain damage and is indeed now the standard of care at some heart centers around
the US now...
3sketerpot10y
Maybe a naive question, but you've got me curious: why is it the standard of
care at some heart centers, rather than most or none? Is it a matter of cost, or
are the benefits you mentioned not well-established, or are heart centers slow
to change their standard of care? Or is it some fourth thing I didn't think of?
2[anonymous]10y
It was recommended as potentially useful all the way back in the 2005 American
Heart Association guidelines for CPR, actually, and there's been spotty
literature even further back.
It isn't so much about preserving function during hypoxia (that damage is
already done by the time they get to the hospital) as preventing the subsequent
damage that happens both immediately after and over several days after
restoration of bloodflow. This is due to reperfusion injury as cells poison
themselves due to metabolisms disrupted by the hypoxia, and slower issues caused
by the immune system reacting via inflammation against very slight brain damage
and thus greatly exascerbating it (a useful response to physical damage in
peripheral tissue but problematic if you manage to restart someone's heart).
I suspect the reasons for slow adoption consist of it having a focus that is
very different than the ususal 'get the blood flowing again' aspect, where the
bloodflow and proper immune function is actually the problem, and the fact that
you need the equipment procedures and institutional coordination to integrate
another step of care for a day or more after the acute treatment. I don't think
its so much a question of cost as setting up all the procedures and conditionals
and institutional experience to do it reliably and automatically.
Course that leaves institutional inertia or laziness as additional prime
obstacles.
See http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/812407-overview
[http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/812407-overview]
When a friend of the family had a heart attack resulting in temporary cardiac
arrest recently this aspect of treatment consisted of keeping them in a
chemically induced coma for several days after the incident and cooling them to
somewhere around ~34 C (I'm estimating based on what I heard), then slowly
warming them and withdrawing the drugs.
What are the reasons to go to family meetings, and meet the subset of family members who happen to be (1) Stupid (2) Religious (3) Non-rationalists (4) Absolutely clueless about reality (5) Pushy about inserting their ideas/ideals/weltenshaaung/motifs into you?
Of the top of my mind:
[1] Avoid losing inheritance money
[2] Avoid losing reputation with related family members who are not so silly
[3] Avoid losing reputation with other people who may give you inheritance money
[4] It is an investment in the far future, if you break a leg, or something, family members are more likely to take you to a hospital
These 4 reasons do not seem sufficient to me. Personally I don't think (a) You owe them, for their past good deeds towards you (b) Sharing genes is an important property or (c) One should love one's relatives.... have any truth in them. So do you have any extra arguments besides the 4 above that may be more convincing? Or should I abdicate the meetings alltogether?
Having observed several people in a similar situation, I saw them go through the reasoning you describe. If you discard the virtue-ethics non-consequentialist reasons, like "One should love one's relatives" (regardless of how bad they are), or "You owe them, for their past good deeds " (despite all the poisonous and mean stuff they inflicted on you), you are left with enumerating options and calculating utilities.
At least one person I know had decided that the emotional damage of maintaining contact outweighs any potential financial benefits and severed her connections with one part of the family entirely, instead relying on her friends for socializing and emotional support. When her parents passed away some years later, they left their millions to some church charity and nothing to her, but that was already factored in her decision and so was not a big upset.
Another managed to learn to detach himself emotionally from whatever is going on at the meetings, by treating his family as low-level NPCs who simply follow their faulty programming and are no more worthy of being upset at than a wordprocessor program with a bug in it. ... (read more)
Do you know where I might find information about implementing this technique? It
sounds really useful. Did your friend follow some methodology for accomplishing
this?
4Lumifer10y
Keep in mind that the definition of a sociopath is more or less "one who treats
other people as low-level NPCs".
3patrickmclaren10y
Indeed, and people would do well to remember that there may be situations
wherein you are in fact the relatively "low-level NPC".
-1shminux10y
Also known as "the mark". The good news is that you are rarely aware of being
one.
3Lumifer10y
I am not sure this is good news from the standpoint of consequences...
3John_Spickes10y
Point well taken! However, this still seems like a potentially useful skill to
have when you must interact with someone but wish to defend yourself
emotionally.
3shminux10y
I don't know of any sources he used. This is one of those hard
self-modifications that require highly developed emotional intelligence and
introspection skills.
I know that when I tried to do something like that (not getting annoyed at a
person for constantly bringing up the same settled point over and over for
years), I failed. Basically, the feeling of annoyance flares up before I have a
chance to consciously deconstruct it. I managed to quell it quicker, but not
prevent it from happening. I tried preparing myself for the situation in
advance, but that only made it worse, as I would get annoyed and upset during
the simulation, as well. Actually alieving that a person close to you is
basically a moist robot
[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=moist%20robot] is hard.
1NancyLebovitz10y
Might it help to think of the person as running on habit about a particular
subject or in response to a particular stimulus rather than them being
pseudo-conscious in general?
0[anonymous]10y
Brian Tomasik gives some tips in a recent essay
[http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/tolerance.html]:
Such "intrapsychic
[http://ebooks.cambridge.org/chapter.jsf?bid=CBO9780511806421&cid=CBO9780511806421A022]"
strategies seldom work for me, however. I find the "extrapsychic" approach of
just avoiding irritating people much more effective. (This may require
terminating a relationship which, if maintained, would expose you to such people
on a regular basis.)
-1Vladimir_Nesov10y
Over time, they can be reprogrammed to some extent, if you are not just
straightforwardly responding to their actions or ignoring them. Raise your own
status in their eyes and then teach them skills that enable more accurate
control (i.e. more efficiently changing their minds as opposed to facing
pointless arguing or deep wisdom). Finer control can be used for further skill
development and for making them more useful or pleasant to be around (including
developing their cynicism, so that they become capable of not responding
negatively to things like this comment).
3wedrifid10y
Ignoring them is actually an extremely powerful tool for reprogramming people,
particularly when it comes to the kind of toxic emotional interaction habits
that can be failure modes in family relationships. I'd go as far as to say it is
one of the best.
They keep you well calibrated about the level of insanity in the society. They allow you to not only have a good model of the society, but to also feel it on a gut level.
Advice that you probably don't need to hear, but might be useful to someone in a similar situation:
If you do cut family ties, try to do so without hurting anyone or burning any bridges. The outside view says you're likely to reconcile in 5-10 years, and that's a lot easier if you drifted apart than if you had a big cathartic fight.
I'll just vanish slowly, no fight intended.
I don't think fighting is worth it most of the times it occurs, do people
disagree?
3Ben_LandauTaylor10y
Strong agreement.
In one's personal life, fighting is occasionally better than no action at all,
but (effectively) never the best action.
5drethelin10y
meet potential allies who are by default more loyal to you than other people. if
you can act nice to family they will like you way more than strangers will and a
network of people you can rely on and who can rely on you is a useful and
awesome thing to have. meeting the few members of your family that agree with
you can also be positive and fun.
4Ben Pace10y
Don't forget to add status quo bias. Most people think its important to care
about horrible family members, and not doing so because you obviously shouldn't
just seems weird.
2ChristianKl10y
Deciding that you don't really care about continuing your relationship with
those family members can be freeing because it means that you can do anything in
their presence.
It can be fun when you talk with a religious person to just argue a more
fundamentalist position then them for one meeting and see how they will deal
with it.
Some things that I noticed I had to keep looking up: which is which between SQL left and right joins; the argument order to python's datetime.datetime.strptime function; the spellings of irrelevant and separate
I think only the latter group have had any use worth speaking of so far, though the third and fourth are things that I have more than once wanted to know and not known. The first two may just be almost-useless (though I like knowing them, so not necessarily worthless).
Things I kind of want to remember but suspect they wouldn't be worth it include other alphabets, and locations of countries/US states/UK counties/London underground stops (the aggregate may be useful, but there's an awful lot of cards there).
Pharmacy stuff Brand & generic name pairs for prescription drugs. Classes &
mechanisms of action for prescription drugs. 1st line therapies for various
diseases. Etc.
Mandarin Chinese *Mostly just doing vocab at the moment, but have used it for
listening (MP3 clips), writing, & grammar.
Misc work stuff Names of new employees (they're Chinese names, so difficult to
remember) Who is the contact person for what (eg if you want a new email
account, you need to contact Mrs. Wu YiJun for approval)
3maia10y
I don't really see much use for Anki for everyday life, honestly, because I
don't have too many things I need to memorize right now.
However, some people at the LessWrong DC group have started learning Lojban, and
Anki is just the biggest possible stick to hit the "learn words in a new
language" problem with. I've learned a lot of words just doing that for a week.
I still have to learn grammar concepts, but having a bigger vocabulary at my
fingertips is pretty great.
2David_Gerard10y
If you live in London, the tube map can become suffiiciently memorised to serve
for pegs in itself.
6Risto_Saarelma10y
London cabbies probably have a great foundation for building memory palaces.
2niceguyanon10y
Mnemonics
Using anki to memorize a complete 3 digit peg list allows you to do some pretty
impressive memory feats, including recalling long lists in order, and memorizing
really long numbers.
0Risto_Saarelma10y
What kind of images do you use for the pegs?
2niceguyanon10y
Many people use the Major Method
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system] to come up with peg
words/images so that the number to word relationship is nonrandom and easier to
commit to memory. Here [http://www.buildyourmemory.com/pegging.php] is an
example of how it should work.
I choose to use peg words that are objects and not abstract verb/ideas. The
number 201 can be 'nest' or 'incite', both of which satisfy the major mnemonic
method, but using 'nest' as your peg word is better because it is an object that
you can better picture in your head and create interactions between it and other
peg objects, to create a string of events.
2Risto_Saarelma10y
I've got a major system peg list of a 100 English words, but even there it was
hard to come up with a word for a concrete object for all the combinations. Can
you really find concrete object names for all of the 1000 sound combinations?
There's an online list [http://www.rememberg.com/Peg-list-1000/], but it has
words that aren't concrete objects and several of the words don't seem to
actually encode right (eg. its word for 55 is 'hello', which has only a single
L-sound, and isn't an object. Mine is 'lily')
2niceguyanon10y
This is what I did, and its far from complete, I took the rememberg list and
copied it to a txt file and then uploaded it to an anki deck, then I went
through each peg word to make sure I like it, if not I replace it.
Rememberg uses the typographic system which is why 'hello' is is 55. I
personally prefer the phonetic system. Also, I wouldn't like 'hello', as 'lily'
is so much better.
2Antisuji10y
Background: I've been using Anki for about 2.5 years. I have done the following:
* (+3) assorted unusual English vocabulary (English is my first language)
* (+1) the NATO phonetic alphabet
* (+2) hiragana and katakana
* (0) phone numbers of family and friends
* (+2) the streets of San Francisco
* (+1) assorted technical concepts, some LW-related
The numbers in parentheses are my rough impression of usefulness and/or
enjoyment on a possibly [http://lesswrong.com/lw/1sm/akrasia_tactics_review/]
familiar
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/i0e/akrasia_tactics_review_2_the_akrasia_strikes_back/]
scale of -10 to +10. When I was first getting used to Anki and only using it for
English, the usefulness was around (-1), for reasons I can get into if anyone's
interested.
My biggest problems with Anki are first that it's a pain to input cards in a
useful way, and second that for some things (e.g. hiragana and katakana) a more
structured format would be strictly better.
4[anonymous]10y
I'm currently using anki just for English, so I'd be interested in what you
found harmful.
2Antisuji10y
It was a few different things, and it only lasted for the first month or so of
using Anki. During that time I occasionally had moments in conversation when I
grasped for one of the words in my deck, when normally I would smoothly talk
around the idea with simpler words. Sometimes I succeeded in incorporating a new
word into my speech, but the usage was awkward. Sometimes my interlocutor didn't
know what the new word meant, and not only did I have to explain in simpler
terms, I came off as out of touch and a bit of a know-it-all. It was a little
uncomfortable at the time, but the harmful effects did fade as I became more
aware of which words were ok to say in what contexts.
The primary benefit has been a better understanding of the written word rather
than a larger productive vocabulary
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocabulary#Productive_and_receptive].
2Micaiah_Chang10y
Using Antisuji's system:
* (+3) Emacs Keybindings + Listing good usecases for the bindings
* (+1) Git commands
* (+2) Compound Kanji
* (+1) Basic Unix Command Line
* (+0/+0.5) C I/O Function prototypes
* (+3) Gaussian Integrals
* (+4) Addresses
* (+1) GRE Vocabulary words (All of it from taking the GRE, not from general
usage)
I've considered adding all of my family's birthday's to the list but 1) I'm too
embarrassed to ask 2) Calenders are an easier solution. Has anyone else done
something similar?
Also, indirectly, I teach a class of about 25~ students every quarter and while
I don't put them in a deck, I make sure that I'm exposed to the entire classes'
names in a roughly spaced repetition way (First class I attempt to say
everyone's name twice, grade different assignments at the appropriate spacing
and 'reset' my schedule for mistaken names). This has caused my students to
respect me as a teacher much more (No other Teaching Assistant knows everyone's
name!) and slightly deters people from being quiet when they don't understand
something (as I can just call out their name).
0Douglas_Knight10y
Next time (right now?), why don't you try the students using anki and see how it
compares? Does the school give you their pictures ahead of time?
2Micaiah_Chang10y
There's no pictures and the first time I get the dossier is on the day I teach
my class. It's slightly premature optimization to start an anki before the first
week of TAing, because about 5 or so students shuffle in an out during the first
two or so weeks. Currently though, I'm applying for a physics major only class
where there would be pictures and the class size is much more static.
Thanks for suggesting an out and out comparison. It hadn't really occurred to me
to do this if I do land the other job.
2Risto_Saarelma10y
My more recent failed attempt to get an Anki habit going involved using Vim and
a text file to input cards, instead of the tedious Anki GUI. I write lines of
three tab-separated sections into the deck text file, with the first being the
question, the second the answer and the third the card tags. Anki's import will
ignore lines that start with # as comments. This lets me do batch editing of the
cards using the macros, search-and-replace and block editing functions in the
text editor.
Problems with this approach is that I need the Anki software to preview my Latex
formatting and I need to write raw HTML into the import if I want to use
formatting or images. Anki should support card text with newlines if it's
enclosed in quotes, but I don't seem to have cards using this in my example
deck. Another problem is that Anki uses the question field of the card as a
primary key and keeps the old deck when importing, so if I edit a question in
one of the cards, I'll either need to completely regenerate my deck from the txt
source or manually delete the card with the old question from the Anki database.
As a Vim-specific tweak, my text file has the modeline
This disables physical autowrap of long lines, ensures that pressing tab emits
physical tab characters and makes long physical lines visually wrap at the word
break and indent the continuation of the physical line on the next visual line
by two spaces so it's easy to tell apart from the next item.
The text file approach does not store the review data for cards, to if I should
lose the Anki database, I could reimport my deck but would have to go through
all the cards with zero review data. More experienced Anki users can maybe tell
how big a problem this would be.
For all this interest into making the thing technically nice to use, still
haven't found a suitably big and growable set of stuff I want to memorize to
bother with the habit.
29eB110y
The street grid layout for the city you live in, if relevant. Not very hard and
allows you to understand locations much more easily if you live in a city where
people speak in terms of cross streets. Don't go overboard trying to remember
places you'll never go and other exceptional situations.
0Emile10y
Some stuff I used Anki for:
* Japanese (I have decks for kana, vocabulary, grammar rules...), that's the
one I've used the most consistently for the past six months or so.
* Paris subway map (which color is line 8? Which is the green subway line? What
lines pass at Montparnasse-Bienvenue? What is the east terminus of line 1?);
not particularly useful but should help consolidate my mental map of Paris; I
haven't been reviewing that very consistenly but know it pretty well by now.
* A few misc. facts in AI and robotics; I made the mistake of putting too much
stuff I don't really care about, and despite a few cleanups haven't been
reviewing this consistently
A couple years ago I had used Anki with some pre-made decks (German, Lesswrong
sequences), but reviewing it started feeling like a chore, and I stopped. It's
easier to stay focused with cards I made myself.
When I'm in Japan I jot down all the phrases I learn on a piece of paper, and
then later on enter them into Anki (I also have a running list of "things I
would like to be able to say").
0[anonymous]10y
A related question: What sort of time per card have long-term Anki users
experienced?
As a first "project" with Anki, I've been learning english vocabulary. Half are
new words, and half are words I recognized but understood only vaguely. I have
2300 cards, and spent around 18 hours reviewing and 8 hours collating cards,
which is around 40 seconds per card. Three months out, I'm reviewing ~30 cards a
day in ~2 minutes.
I feel like a fool when I think that I've spent 26 hours studying vocabulary
this summer, but I'm pretty pleased with the equivalent "40 seconds to learn a
new word". More generally, the cumulative time spent on any habit will sound
pyschotic when quoted over long time periods: 4 minutes a day is 24 hours over a
year.
0Larks10y
CFA exam: There are many dry facts to be learnt.
Driving Theory Test: What different roadsigns mean and so on.
Sports teams: I don't care about sports but it's handy to be able to understand
colleagues' conversations.
Genocides: Because it is sad nobody even remembers most of them.
Latin phrases: A part of my education I missed.
The Lord's Prayer: Because going to hell is a bad idea.
Facts from books I have read: Because otherwise I'd just forget them in a year.
Small exponents: e.g. 6^3.
I'm tired of people never, ever, ever, EVER stopping 2 hours to 1) Think of what their goals are 2)Checking if their current path leads to desired goals 3)Correcting course and 4)Creating a system to verify, in the future, whether goals are being achieved. I'm really tired of that. Really.
Does anyone know of any job opportunities with constraints reasonably like this?
In the US (ideally California, for the climate)
Software development, ideally on GPUs (not graphics, but massively parallel number-crunching)
Reasonably low risk (no two-person startups)?
My qualifications are, extremely briefly, a physics PhD and two years' experience as architect and lead developer of the GooFit framework for maximum-likelihood fits.
Edit to clarify: I'm not asking people to google for me! I was thinking more in terms of networking, as in "do you kno... (read more)
The NERSC suoercomputing facility, which I believe is adjunct to Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, would be worth looking into. Or the Computational
Research Division also at LBNL. I know other California national labs are
heavily into supercomputing as well. It's a government job so the risk is pretty
low.
0RolfAndreassen10y
Come to think of it, I have a network connection there; I will shake it and see
if anything falls out.
2Nornagest10y
I've seen a few similar positions recently. Haven't been paying that much
attention to them, since they're usually looking for deeper graphics experience
than I have, but I expect you ought to be able to find something.
This Monster posting
[http://jobview.monster.com/Senior-Graphics-Engineer-3D-Math-C-C-Direct3D-Job-San-Francisco-CA-124965691.aspx]
seems representative.
0RolfAndreassen10y
I'll edit my post to clarify, but my experience is not with graphics per se, it
is with use of GPUs for general processing, ie number-crunching.
1VincentYu10y
D. E. Shaw Research [https://www.deshawresearch.com/] hires algorithm and
software developers:
They are in NYC. I've heard that they offer outstanding salaries (considering
the wealth of the founder [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._Shaw], they
are unlikely to run out of funds).
0RolfAndreassen10y
Thanks, I will give it a shot.
0gwern10y
If you do manage to get a job at Shaw, I'd be grateful if you could get me
numbers on how much energy their Anton supercomputer uses. (Their publications
don't seem to say, and my emails have gotten no responses.)
My wife has constant pain. She describes most if it as "joint pain" and some in her right arm as "nerve pain". The joint pain has been around for about a decade and the right arm pain for about 3 years, ever since what certainly looked like a repetitive stress injury at work (lots of mousing with a desk that was too high).
Doctors have checked her out and haven't found a cause for either. Our possible next steps are:
Get 2nd (actually 3rd-4th) opinions from local doctors. This feels futile but may still be helpful.
A doctor friend's sister-in-law suffers similar pain. My friend and I discussed her condition, and he told me in private "yeah, she's screwed". From what I recall of the conversation, doctors have just no idea what do to with a patient like this.
I'm not sure how to go about this but it feels like it should be possible for some price.
That, in a nutshell, is the reason we spend so much on healthcare for remarkably little effect.
MetaMed [http://www.metamed.com/]? (See also.
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/gvi/metamed_evidencebased_healthcare/]) (And also.
[http://www.metamed.com/financial-aid])
4John_Spickes10y
My wife has similar-sounding pain. She was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia (which,
as far as I can tell so far, appears to be in many cases a diagnosis of
exclusion - we don't know what causes this, so we'll put it in the Fibromyalgia
bucket) and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which makes her connective tissues weaker
than normal.
We have tried quite a few things with varying degrees of success.
* Trigger Point Therapy - A type of massage therapy that focuses on treating a
muscular phenomenon named (poorly, in my opinion) "trigger points". In brief,
these are small regions of muscle that become constantly contracted and
unable to relax. I'm not aware of the specific mechanism that causes this.
Trigger points can have strange effects, including pain appearing in
different parts of the body than where the muscular problem exists. The best
resource we have found on this is this work by Travell and Simons
[http://www.amazon.com/Myofascial-Pain-Dysfunction-Trigger-Manual/dp/0683083635/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377715340&sr=8-1&keywords=myofascial+pain+and+dysfunction+the+trigger+point+manual].
Here is the volume for the lower extremeties
[http://www.amazon.com/Myofascial-Pain-Dysfunction-Trigger-Extremities/dp/0683083678/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1377715578&sr=8-2&keywords=myofascial+pain+and+dysfunction+the+trigger+point+manual].
We have had good success with this sort of treatment, but we have to keep
treating. It's worth investigating, even if the problems seem like joint or
nerve pain. Many of the referred pain patterns appear in joints, for example.
I don't know how well-researched this phenomenon is - many doctors seem to be
unaware of it's existence.
* Other forms of massage therapy give her some temporary relief.
* Aquatic physical therapy - This involved exercises and stretching in a pool
kept at about 80F, and it seemed to have a large positive effect. I'm not
certain of the exact exercises done, but if you're interested I c
4scotherns10y
Have they checked for rheumatoid arthritis (and not just with a blood test, it
doesn't always show)? It took many doctors vists for them to get the correct
diagnosis for my wife (despite a history of it in her family).
2GuySrinivasan10y
Rheumatoid arthritis: Blood tests negative, specialist declared after the second
visit that RA was very unlikely. Blood tests did show a slightly positive ANA.
3Lumifer10y
Is the joint pain constant or on movement? Does it react to heat/cold?
IANAD (I Am Not A Doctor) but I'd check a variety of inflammation markers (the
more the better) with special attention paid to possible autoimmune issues. I
assume the usual suspects (arthritis, gout) were ruled out?
If I were you I'd try more doctors (third, fourth, fifth, etc.) hoping to hit
one of three: (1) someone highly competent; (2) someone lucky to order the right
test; (3) someone with determination to figure it out.
2NancyLebovitz10y
See also Scott Sonnon [http://www.rmaxinternational.com] -- he's got a system of
joint mobility exercises that seems to be gentle and effective. I find that the
series that starts here [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAHGmwhAHVo] is the
easiest to follow.
1JQuinton10y
A friend of mine suffered from undiagnosable pain in her joints for about a
decade as well. About a year ago she discovered it was lime disease. Have any
doctors you've talked to already eliminated that possibility?
2GuySrinivasan10y
Blood tests were negative for Lyme.
2NancyLebovitz10y
Nitpick: Lyme disease.
0JQuinton10y
I thought it was spelled that way, but Firefox said it was wrong :/
5Douglas_Knight10y
Firefox is correct: "lyme disease" is wrong. What's wrong is not the spelling
but the capitalization.
When I right-click on "lyme" in firefox, it suggests capitalization, just like
it does for "firefox."
0NancyLebovitz10y
I didn't know about right-clicking on words that a spell-checker says are wrong.
2NancyLebovitz10y
You can't trust spell-checkers-- their vocabulary lists tend to be incomplete.
I recommend at least going to a search engine if you have a strong intuition
about how a word should be spelled.
It's not that intuition is entirely reliable, either. It was a hard fight to
convince me that it should be irrelevant rather than irrelevent. Now they both
look wrong.
0ChristianKl10y
I would try some form of bodywork.
The Taoist standing meditation that NancyLebovitz suggest would be one way. If
you don't want to do something that comes from a religion Feldenkrais would be a
good choice.
0blogospheroid10y
I'm not sure if you have already tested for this. Please have the test for
hyperthyroidism done. My wife had a problem with a finger ache and after many
tests, we eventualy zero-ed in on hyperthyroidism.
As we don't know the content of the logs it's difficult to assess the value that
conceiling the logs has to Eliezer. Without a person who would plausible pay
real money to him for revealing the logs I don't think it makes sense for
Eliezer to give you a $ number.
0drethelin10y
that doesn't make any sense at all. ELIEZER knows how valuable they are to him.
He's rational enough that if he thinks about it he would realize there is an
amount of dollars someone could pay him that would get him to reveal it, and
it's in his interest to be paid those dollars since by definition it's a
profitable transaction. And it can only take place if he says what the price is.
Any tips on journal keeping, specifically the format or style of writing?
I've been keeping a journal but I am unsatisfied with the result. I have no methodology, some days I write as if speaking to a future me, some I write as if to an audience, and some days I write essays, and others I just list what I have done. As a result, my journal is difficult to read, it doesn't have a consistent feel.
are your expectations for more structure useful for your purposes in keeping a
journal?
0patrickmclaren10y
I write paragraphs beneath headings, to prevent rambling.
0wadavis10y
My journal is primarily is revision record for my life, something Future Me can
look up and cross reference against memory to refresh on why certain choices
were made or how landmark events made me feel. The second purpose is to
brainstorm on and explore upcoming choices and current events, to be honest with
myself on how I feel. As a result my journal is a shameless full-disclosure
letter to Future Me, and that works for me.
Ask yourself why you keep a journal? What is the goal? Then write to achieve
your goal.
If that doesn't work, split your existing entries into similar groups.
* Notes to future self.
* Messages to an audience.
* essays.
Now work backwards from those groups to assess your motivations. Perhaps you
want to split your journal into three sections, one to address your future self,
one to vent into and get stuff off your chest, and one to explore and summarize
ideas.
Please provide feedback.
Is it effective to study by writing down all the information you want to learn? When I'm faced with the task of studying from some source, say a textbook, my first impulse is to write all of it in a notebook. But recently I've been worrying that this makes me shift my focus away from learning and towards doing a scribe's work -- and also I think I'd be a little more motivated to start studying if my mental image of the activity involved less writing and more reading.
How does this method compare, in terms of information retention per time spent, with other study methods?
When I was a student I spent a lot of time in class writing down what was being
said, and reading my notes later on, there's a lot of stuff I don't remember
learning. When I look stuff up on Wikipedia because I'm curious, I don't think I
remember less than when I was writing everything down.
Now I tend to only write down a very short summary of the most
interesting/surprising bits, ideally with a diagram or silly drawing, but then I
haven't been reading much textbooks recently. If I was back in "I nead to learn
all this new information" mode, I'd probably do a mix of exercises, and Anki.
-2Nornagest10y
Depends how well you retain it. Note-taking is a highly effective mnemonic
technique for some people; not so much for others.
If you're going to be doing the work of transcribing it anyway, it might be a
good idea to put it into an Anki deck or other spaced repetition framework, so
as to make later reinforcement easier if you need it.
0RolfAndreassen10y
Question:
Answer:
Gosh, do you really think so?
1Alsadius10y
Thing is, there's no better answer than that, because it's too variable. You
have to experiment for yourself.
Is it better for the last million people of a certain population to die, or for two million people all around the world, randomly selected and evenly distributed, to die? For the first group, their death would not just result in loss of human life, but potentially loss of a lot of cultural information; their language, their religion, their mythology and folklore, their music. I feel like this cultural information has value.
I would generally value a million lives over cultural information. We're always producing more culture, anyway; it's kind of what we do, as a species. Any particular set of in-jokes, songs, and stories is, I think, less valuable than a million people who will make more.
I would kill the million, every time. (I can imagine populations of size
1,000,000 which I would value more than 2,000,000 random humans, but I don't
think any have yet existed.)
What about 1,000,000 versus 1,000,001? I'm not sure. I think that could depend
on the population in question.
6Oscar_Cunningham10y
I'd like to preserve the culture, but not at the cost of a million lives.
3Emile10y
Depends on whether that culture was going to disappear anyway (quite a few
cultures seem doomed today), and how valuable and unique it is. It's sad that we
lost a lot of information about the ancient greeks, but information about say
the various central asian seems less regretted.
3Pentashagon10y
That depends on how you define the population. Killing the worst 1 million
people (people who have caused the most harm to other people, and would continue
to cause significant harm) instead of 2 million random people would be a very
large net benefit. There have probably been few or no traditional populations
(nations, cultures, political movements, etc.) that would be worth completely
eradicating, and probably never an entire 1 million people in such a population
worth killing out of hand, but if I was forced to choose, I think I could find
examples in the 20th century.
2linkhyrule510y
That depends. Is knowledge of a culture worth a million people's lives?
0ChristianKl10y
What do you mean with "certain population"? Any selection of one million people
describes a population.
0drethelin10y
people are mostly interchangeable. i'd save the million.
0NancyLebovitz10y
Fortunately, it's not the kind of choice we're generally offered in the real
world.
Yes it is. We can focus on preserving culture, or we can focus on preserving life. We only have a finite amount of money, so we have to decide which is more important, or if something else altogether is.
To give a concrete example, it is compulsory for school-children in Wales to
learn the Welsh language, even if they are not ethnically Welsh, and even though
most people in Wales do not speak Welsh. This public policy choice is justified
on the grounds of preserving Welsh culture. Whether or not you approve of this
decision, it's clearly an allocation of limited time and money which could be
put to other uses.
0A1987dM10y
My first guess on reading Bill_McGrath's thought experiment was indeed that he
had in mind something about Irish-language-related public policy choices.
1RolfAndreassen10y
Generally it's good to have choices. :)
0shminux10y
You might find the last couple of paragraphs of this quote
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/idz/lesswrong_philosophy_and_personal_identity/9mpu]
useful.
-2Izeinwinter10y
In order:
1:This kind of thing does not come up.
2:If it did, the moral obligation is to find a third option.
3: The million would be the lesser evil, but is exceedingly unlikely to to
actually die, as an identifiable group faced with the prospect of a loosing that
high a number of its membership is going to exert a lot more leverage than the
world at large is going to exert over a one in 3.500 chance of death.
I seek help on a problem that I stumbled upon when thinking about a rational teleporter's story.
As typical of such protagonists, he finds that he can teleport and teleport a human's mass sideways with him, seemingly unharmed. As befits a rational protagonist, he experiments and finds out that he can teleport animals and after a demonstration to a very reluctant brother, he realises that he can teleport a human being, unharmed. After a crazy week of teleporting, he realises that he needs approximately 3 minutes to recuperate after a teleport to really do th... (read more)
One option is to have clients enter their source, destination, bid, and the
range of times when they'd be willing to travel, and to have an algorithm for
selecting the highest revenue path (which won't always mean accepting the
highest bid, if slightly lower bids can chain together destinations and
sources). (There could also be a secondary market to fill any otherwise-empty
legs in this path.) The operations problem of creating this algorithm seems
related to the traveling salesman problem (it's a different problem, but may
involve similar math).
But I expect that, to maximize revenue, satisfying the highest-paying clients
will be more important than efficiency in maximizing the number of paying
clients per hour. Prices of trips are likely to vary by more than an order of
magnitude, and trips with a fixed source, destination, and time would tend to
get lower bids. He might even want to give some of these otherwise-empty trips
away for free, (e.g., as "upgrades" to airline passengers who were scheduled on
that route, in order to build goodwill with airlines who are now sharing the
airport with him, and who may be able to do him favors like transporting
passengers who he has to cancel on).
There are complications in terms of the timing of booking (regardless of whether
there are secondary auctions), because some high-paying clients will want to
book at the last minute and get a trip ASAP, while others will want to book in
advance and have a guarantee that the trip will go as scheduled. So the
revenue-maximizing strategy would probably involve a mix of trips booked in
advance and trips booked closer to the departure time, with some preference for
clients who are more flexible about timing or cancellations.
0ChristianKl10y
I think the correct solution probably involves hiring secretaries to manage the
whole affair instead of bidding on a website.
I want to learn American Sign Language. As a kid I grew up know some Deaf people and am attracted to the culture. It is also very relevant to my current job and my work will pay for me to learn (both my time and expenses).
I spent last semester taking classes at the local community college and while I learned the expected amount of ASL, I also learned I don't like going to classes. It feels like a good portion (>50%) is a waste of time. I'm conversing with other hearing students who don't know the language either; some things I already... (read more)
But that's a good thing, isn't it? I mean, that's what rational Harry Potter
would do.
Try finding a tutor that will let you make short videos of them doing the signs,
and then you can put those videos into Anki. (At least I hope it is possible to
put videos in Anki, never tried. Or maybe photos.) Could be more efficient than
usual learning.
Decide in advance how much is acceptable for you. Find out the minimum hourly
wage in your area. Those are your limits. You can start by offering something in
the middle of this interval.
1palladias10y
I paid $25/hr for an ASL tutor in Washington DC. I found it to be a lot worse
than taking a community college class. My tutor was Deaf, but didn't have a lot
of teaching experience. She wasn't very good at steering the convos into new
vocabulary ("Tell me about what you did last week" involved a lot of
repetition). And she was much better at helping me pick up vocab (which I was
decent at on my own) than grammar/expression. I ended up stopping the lessons
and looking for a better option.
Any examples of total recursive functions that are not primitive recursive and do not violently explode?
The set of primitive recursive functions is interesting because it is pretty inclusive, (lots of functions have a primitive recursive implementation) and primitive recursive functions always terminate. I'm interested in trying to implement general purpose machine learning by enumerating primitive recursive functions. Which raises the question of just how general the primitive recursive functions really are.
Ackermann's function gives an example of what yo... (read more)
The inverse of the Ackermann function grows very slowly but is not primitive
recursive. That is, the function f where f(n) is the smallest m such that A(m)
exceeds n. Of course, this is hardly a different method of proof.
Is Friendly AI or more specifically CEV predicated on Eliminative Materialism being false? To what extent is FAI predicated on folk psychological theories of mental content turning out to accurately reflect human neurobiology?
From the article:
Modern versions of eliminative materialism claim that our common-sense understanding of psychological states and processes is deeply mistaken and that some or all of our ordinary notions of mental states will have no home, at any level of analysis, in a sophisticated and accurate account of the mind. In other words,
Let me see if I can unpack this idea a bit more.
CEV is based on the idea that there is an algorithm that can look at the state
of my brain, filter out various kinds of noise, and extrapolate what sort of
desires and values I'd want to have if I lived in a kinder more benevolent
society, wasn't subject to nearly as many serious cognitive biases, etc.
The problem I'm seeing is that the origin and meaning of terms like 'desire' and
'value' are in prescientific culture - folk psychology. they were created by
people in absolute ignorance about how brains work, and it seems increasingly
plausible that these concepts will be totally inadequate for any accurate
scientific explanation of how brains produce human behaviour.
It seems to be common sense that desires and values and the like are
indispensable theoretical posits simply because they are all we have. Our
brains' extremely limited metacogntive abilities prevent us from modelling
ourselves as brains, so our brains invent a kind of mythology to explain their
behaviour, which is pure confabulation.
If these ideas are right, by asking CEV to consider folk psychological ideas
like desires and values, we would be committing it to the existence of things
that just aren't really present in our brain states in any objective sense.
In the worst case, running CEV might be somewhat analogous to asking the AI to
use Aristotelian physics to build a better airplane.
What we perceive as the fragility and complexity of human based values might not
map onto brain states at all - 'values' as we wish to conceive of them may not
exist outside of narrative fiction and philosophy papers.
My recent thinking on these topics has been heavily influenced by the writings
of Scott Bakker
[http://rsbakker.wordpress.com/essay-archive/to-be-and-not-to-be-some-radical-reflections-on-the-origins-and-extent-of-the-hard-problem/]
, Daniel Hutto [http://philpapers.org/rec/HUTFPA] and Peter Watts' Blindsight
I hope I'm wrong about this stuff, but
2Wei_Dai10y
You may be interested in Yvain's Blue-Minimizing Robot sequence, which addresses
these concerns. To read it, go to
http://lesswrong.com/user/Yvain/submitted/?count=25&after=t3_8kn
[http://lesswrong.com/user/Yvain/submitted/?count=25&after=t3_8kn], and read the
posts from "The Blue-Minimizing Robot" to "Tendencies in reflective
equilibrium".
2Panic_Lobster10y
Thanks! I've read some of the stuff by Yvain but not these posts.
So, question - has anyone written a proof that Bayes' Theorem works on log-odds? It's a pretty simple proof, but I couldn't actually find it anyone on LW, which seems odd.
If it hasn't already been written I might toss it up as a back-to-basics post.
I think it's in chapter 3 of Jaynes' *Probability theory". Also (google is your
friend), check here
[http://lesswrong.com/search/results?cx=015839050583929870010%3A-802ptn4igi&cof=FORID%3A11&ie=UTF-8&q=log-odds&sa=Search&siteurl=lesswrong.com%2Fr%2Fdiscussion%2F]
or here [http://lesswrong.com/lw/mp/0_and_1_are_not_probabilities/].
Open subcomment thread: If you think it's worth saying, but not worth its own top-level reply in the open comment thread, you're too much of a nitpicker and seriously need to recalibrate your expectations of either what's worth saying or how much a comment costs.
Recently I've been carrying textbooks and reading them over lunch, which is not my normal pattern. A friend asked me about it. A brief discussion of AI risk ensued, resulting in this quote:
This startled me at first, and worried me greatly (as we both work at Google, and our peers are working on AI.) Upon reflection, I realized that I shared the same sentiment up until last year.
This episode really drove the False Consensus Effect home for me.
A few weeks ago I started assessing my own calibration, using tools such as the CFAR calibration game. I got fairly good and concluded that I am relatively well calibrated.
When given a question, my instincts would immediately throw out a number. I'd unpack it and adjust it in accordance to known biases. (Avoid representativeness, start from base rates, treat the initial number as a degree of support, factor in strength of evidence, etc.)
Yesterday, an assessment of probability came up in conversation. Immediately, my instincts threw out the number "80%". My thoughts went like this:
I opened my mouth to speak.
Then I shut my mouth.
I understand Löb's theorem on an intuitive level now.
I achieved good calibration by paying attention to evidence and avoiding known biases as well as I was able. Once I had established reliable calibration, I experienced temptation to justify my first intuitive instinct by asserting my own calibration.
My calibration was based upon mediating my intuitions with reason. I can't invoke it to trust any old estimate that comes out of my mouth: if I did then I could say whatever I want and trust it to be calibrated (which would yield probability estimates out of touch with reality). Hence the parallels to Löb's theorem.
Debating etiquette: If you assert that X is "obvious", "blatantly obvious" or "so fucking obvious you'd have to be an evil, low-status person not to see it" then you are not allowed to provide any arguments or evidence for X unless you first concede that X is not obvious. None of this "Anyone with half a brain can see why X is true, but here's for paragraphs arguing for X anyway" nonsense.
People who do this are trying to double dip. By claiming their point is obvious they can shame their opponents for being too stupid to understand the plain truth. But since what they're saying isn't actually obvious, they layer arguments to make X look more obvious. If X is obvious, you should say "X" and everyone will know you are right. But if you find the need to defend X with arguments, don't try and shame the people who disagree that X.
A few days ago I was talking with two people who had "experienced" total brain inactivity for some period of time before (one for a few days on ice!). I tried asking what they thought about the discontinuous experience/identity and associated philosophical issues that e.g. cryonics or other forms of not-being-alive for a while entails, but I couldn't get them to interpret the question as anything besides "what do you think of the personality changes that might happen from such an event?".
I found this miscommunication highly informative.
There's a new chapter of HPMOR and it's pretty fun. The terrorists have won and now all citizens must go to the toilet in groups of three.
What are the reasons to go to family meetings, and meet the subset of family members who happen to be (1) Stupid (2) Religious (3) Non-rationalists (4) Absolutely clueless about reality (5) Pushy about inserting their ideas/ideals/weltenshaaung/motifs into you?
Of the top of my mind: [1] Avoid losing inheritance money [2] Avoid losing reputation with related family members who are not so silly [3] Avoid losing reputation with other people who may give you inheritance money [4] It is an investment in the far future, if you break a leg, or something, family members are more likely to take you to a hospital
These 4 reasons do not seem sufficient to me. Personally I don't think (a) You owe them, for their past good deeds towards you (b) Sharing genes is an important property or (c) One should love one's relatives.... have any truth in them. So do you have any extra arguments besides the 4 above that may be more convincing? Or should I abdicate the meetings alltogether?
It's a hard decision, I feel for you.
Having observed several people in a similar situation, I saw them go through the reasoning you describe. If you discard the virtue-ethics non-consequentialist reasons, like "One should love one's relatives" (regardless of how bad they are), or "You owe them, for their past good deeds " (despite all the poisonous and mean stuff they inflicted on you), you are left with enumerating options and calculating utilities.
At least one person I know had decided that the emotional damage of maintaining contact outweighs any potential financial benefits and severed her connections with one part of the family entirely, instead relying on her friends for socializing and emotional support. When her parents passed away some years later, they left their millions to some church charity and nothing to her, but that was already factored in her decision and so was not a big upset.
Another managed to learn to detach himself emotionally from whatever is going on at the meetings, by treating his family as low-level NPCs who simply follow their faulty programming and are no more worthy of being upset at than a wordprocessor program with a bug in it. ... (read more)
They keep you well calibrated about the level of insanity in the society. They allow you to not only have a good model of the society, but to also feel it on a gut level.
Advice that you probably don't need to hear, but might be useful to someone in a similar situation:
If you do cut family ties, try to do so without hurting anyone or burning any bridges. The outside view says you're likely to reconcile in 5-10 years, and that's a lot easier if you drifted apart than if you had a big cathartic fight.
What (not necessarily LW-related) things do people find useful to Anki? (Or have Ankied but they turned out not to be useful, etc.)
Some things I have:
the NATO phonetic alphabet
mass of Earth/Moon/Sun, radius of Earth/Moon
log_2 of 1.25, 1.5 and 1.75, and log_10 of 2 through 9
The 68-95-99.7 rule
Some things that I noticed I had to keep looking up: which is which between SQL left and right joins; the argument order to python's
datetime.datetime.strptimefunction; the spellings of irrelevant and separateI think only the latter group have had any use worth speaking of so far, though the third and fourth are things that I have more than once wanted to know and not known. The first two may just be almost-useless (though I like knowing them, so not necessarily worthless).
Things I kind of want to remember but suspect they wouldn't be worth it include other alphabets, and locations of countries/US states/UK counties/London underground stops (the aggregate may be useful, but there's an awful lot of cards there).
If you are going to memorize any logs, you should only bother memorizing logs of primes, since you can add those together to get other numbers.
This took me a minute. Just to unpack for the dense ones like me:
log(a * b) = log(a) + log(b)
so if you memorize log(7) and log (11), log(77) is easy as pi.
I'm tired of people never, ever, ever, EVER stopping 2 hours to 1) Think of what their goals are 2)Checking if their current path leads to desired goals 3)Correcting course and 4)Creating a system to verify, in the future, whether goals are being achieved. I'm really tired of that. Really.
Does anyone know of any job opportunities with constraints reasonably like this?
My qualifications are, extremely briefly, a physics PhD and two years' experience as architect and lead developer of the GooFit framework for maximum-likelihood fits.
Edit to clarify: I'm not asking people to google for me! I was thinking more in terms of networking, as in "do you kno... (read more)
My wife has constant pain. She describes most if it as "joint pain" and some in her right arm as "nerve pain". The joint pain has been around for about a decade and the right arm pain for about 3 years, ever since what certainly looked like a repetitive stress injury at work (lots of mousing with a desk that was too high).
Doctors have checked her out and haven't found a cause for either. Our possible next steps are:
- Get 2nd (actually 3rd-4th) opinions from local doctors. This feels futile but may still be helpful.
- Hire a doctor whose j
... (read more)A doctor friend's sister-in-law suffers similar pain. My friend and I discussed her condition, and he told me in private "yeah, she's screwed". From what I recall of the conversation, doctors have just no idea what do to with a patient like this.
That, in a nutshell, is the reason we spend so much on healthcare for remarkably little effect.
Ah good, I forgot :-)
How much would it cost to get Eliezer to reveal the logs of his AI box games?
Link: The Man Who Invented Modern Probability — Mathematics: Chance encounters in the life of Andrei Kolmogorov.
Any tips on journal keeping, specifically the format or style of writing?
I've been keeping a journal but I am unsatisfied with the result. I have no methodology, some days I write as if speaking to a future me, some I write as if to an audience, and some days I write essays, and others I just list what I have done. As a result, my journal is difficult to read, it doesn't have a consistent feel.
The septic tank is full: the official unfiltered dump thread has been archived 'cos it's six months old; need to start another one (or not).
We were a loud mob throwing rocks at a lion to steal its prey?
Is it effective to study by writing down all the information you want to learn? When I'm faced with the task of studying from some source, say a textbook, my first impulse is to write all of it in a notebook. But recently I've been worrying that this makes me shift my focus away from learning and towards doing a scribe's work -- and also I think I'd be a little more motivated to start studying if my mental image of the activity involved less writing and more reading.
How does this method compare, in terms of information retention per time spent, with other study methods?
I have a moral question.
Is it better for the last million people of a certain population to die, or for two million people all around the world, randomly selected and evenly distributed, to die? For the first group, their death would not just result in loss of human life, but potentially loss of a lot of cultural information; their language, their religion, their mythology and folklore, their music. I feel like this cultural information has value.
Thoughts?
I would generally value a million lives over cultural information. We're always producing more culture, anyway; it's kind of what we do, as a species. Any particular set of in-jokes, songs, and stories is, I think, less valuable than a million people who will make more.
Yes it is. We can focus on preserving culture, or we can focus on preserving life. We only have a finite amount of money, so we have to decide which is more important, or if something else altogether is.
Is there anything in the works for a mobile-friendly version of Less Wrong?
I seek help on a problem that I stumbled upon when thinking about a rational teleporter's story.
As typical of such protagonists, he finds that he can teleport and teleport a human's mass sideways with him, seemingly unharmed. As befits a rational protagonist, he experiments and finds out that he can teleport animals and after a demonstration to a very reluctant brother, he realises that he can teleport a human being, unharmed. After a crazy week of teleporting, he realises that he needs approximately 3 minutes to recuperate after a teleport to really do th... (read more)
Tutoring vs Classes
I want to learn American Sign Language. As a kid I grew up know some Deaf people and am attracted to the culture. It is also very relevant to my current job and my work will pay for me to learn (both my time and expenses).
I spent last semester taking classes at the local community college and while I learned the expected amount of ASL, I also learned I don't like going to classes. It feels like a good portion (>50%) is a waste of time. I'm conversing with other hearing students who don't know the language either; some things I already... (read more)
Any examples of total recursive functions that are not primitive recursive and do not violently explode?
The set of primitive recursive functions is interesting because it is pretty inclusive, (lots of functions have a primitive recursive implementation) and primitive recursive functions always terminate. I'm interested in trying to implement general purpose machine learning by enumerating primitive recursive functions. Which raises the question of just how general the primitive recursive functions really are.
Ackermann's function gives an example of what yo... (read more)
Is Friendly AI or more specifically CEV predicated on Eliminative Materialism being false? To what extent is FAI predicated on folk psychological theories of mental content turning out to accurately reflect human neurobiology?
From the article:
... (read more)So, question - has anyone written a proof that Bayes' Theorem works on log-odds? It's a pretty simple proof, but I couldn't actually find it anyone on LW, which seems odd.
If it hasn't already been written I might toss it up as a back-to-basics post.
This seems appropriate, considering the recent post on reality being weirdly normal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ritaljhhk7s
Open comment thread:
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own top-level comment in the open thread, it goes here.
(Copied since it was well received last time.)
ETA: Recur further at your own risk. :)
Open subcomment thread: If you think it's worth saying, but not worth its own top-level reply in the open comment thread, you're too much of a nitpicker and seriously need to recalibrate your expectations of either what's worth saying or how much a comment costs.