I just returned from the CFAR workshop! Would people be interested in a top-level Discussion post about this?
I was homeschooled. I have pretty mixed feelings on whether this was a good thing or not. Kawoomba asked, so here:
Pros:
No bullies
Teaches you how to teach yourself
No PE/sports
Go to college early
Cons:
Go to college early
Limited contact with others left me pretty socially inept.
No resources (chemistry experiments, etc)
After Algebra II, you're on your own.
With Saxon math books.
No sense of position among one's peers, no sense of why one might go to college, higher learning, etc. I'm maybe +1 S.D. appearance and +3? S.D. IQ but had no idea until much much later.
History books tend to be extremely biased (America is a christian nation, gosh darn it) (but my parents somehow mostly avoided this)
Biology books tend to be completely wrong because you have to lie a lot when you don't believe evolution (I'm still pissed about this)
Science/astronomy books tend to have wrong sections because you have to lie a lot when you believe the earth is 6000 years old
Of these problems, most of the really bad ones seem easy to prevent if you're aware of them. I expect I could do a really awesome job of homeschooling myself and a really terrible job of homeschooling a more normal ...
I thought I'd share this story about a recent, very strange event involving fixing a problem with a large inferential distance. I don't know what I should conclude from it, but, even with what I've said about "real understanding", I didn't expect this to happen.
At work, my technical lead wanted to spend a day with me to fix a bug that was causing major problems in our site. In order to be helpful on this task, however, I had to get up to speed on the infrastructure of the website. So my lead started the day by explaining it to me, and I made sure to ask for clarification on anything I either didn't understand OR (and this is important) that I could not connect with the rest of the system (in my mental model of it).
The discussion eventually turned to the matter of what happens when you commit a change to the code, i.e., update it to a slightly newer version.
On that topic, he eventually explained, "Next, the 1st server tells the other (redundant) servers to act as if they were upgraded to the new version of the code (in technical jargon, it changes the "dependencies" of the other servers and their resulting "virtual environment".) But before i...
I'm moving to Los Angeles. I leave on the 21st. If anyone along this or another route wants to give me a shower and bed for a night, it will soon be your chance to do so!
By the way, I am Grognor. I created this account because I didn't want to get karma for posting open threads or the monthly rationality quotes threads.
I'm writing this from an airplane on the way to Berkeley CA for the CFAR workshop. Thank you Yvain, Alicorn, and MBlume for lending me a couch before the workshop, and ShannonFriedman for doing the same after.
Edit: Thanks also to Shannon's Zendo housemates Nisan, AlexMennen, and Peter_de_Blanc.
I would like to be president. That way, I could do what I think would be best for the country. Now, people always like to be very very modest and say "Well, I don't particularly want to be the president, but if the people want me..." I think that's a lot of nonsense. If you are a politician and you're the leader of a party, then you should want to get government power in your hands that you may be able to work out all these ideas and visions that you've harbored so long for your country.
--Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma on BBC's Desert Island Disks.
I'm posting this because a while ago, someone linked to a Moldbug piece about it not being socially possible for politicians to admit that they want power. The interviewer says that Aung San Suu Kyi is the only politician she's interviewed who was willing to say that she wants power.
The other unique thing Aung San Suu Kyi did was to ask for a piece of music she hadn't heard before for one of her eight disks for the desert island.
I'm Starting a New Blog
As suggested by some I'm starting a new blog. I prefer communities to lonely things such as one man blogs, especially if the latter have long periods of inactivity. Originally discussed here.
Some problems have been noted by several users on discussing topics from a perspective rather interesting to me on LessWrong. I don't think this is likely to be a better venue for them in the future and has been degrading in this regard for several months, so we've decided to discuss them elsewhere. It still is a great site for some other topics and I may hang around for this, I don't want to be a splitter though we will probably have blackjack and hookers. LWers having blogs elsewhere is a good thing!
So far ErikM, nyan_sandwich, Athrelon, paper-machine, KarmaKaiser and MichaelAnissimov as well as several other LWers have said they would like to join as co-authors. If anyone else is interested please respond to this post or PM me your email adress? Details on the new blog will be discussed via email.
I don't have a good idea for a name yet, so I'd very much appreciate any suggestions. :)
I'm moving to SF bay area next month. (Hired by large well-known tech company!) It seems like a number of you live there. I'm interested in misc tips, suggestions on where to live, upcoming meetups, etc. I know a few people in the area, but not that many, so I'm looking to expand my social circle, something I'm traditionally not very good at... Feel free to PM me or comment here.
Link to an article polling attendants to a quantum foundations conference:
A Snapshot of Foundational Attitudes Toward Quantum Mechanics.
Those who chose Everett as their favorite interpretation were 18% (that is 6 respondents out of 33). Copenhagen (however interpreted) is still dominant, and only 9% believe in objective collapse.
I just finished Marginal Revolution University's first (and currently only) course, on Development Economics. My thoughts are: there's some pretty interesting content there, and the material itself seems correct & fair. There's no shortage of content, including far more material on India than I expected, and there's many interesting topics.
But the course has teething pains. What problems does it have?
How Bitcoin Dies by Mencius Moldbug
I encourage readers to see the whole thing, but I wished to emphasise a few points (bolded them).
...Obviously, I have no inside information at all and am just speculating - as a devout student of the fascinating organism that is USG. However, my guess is that this event will happen soon - ie, probably in 2013. Why? Because of the ECB report on Bitcoin, which quoth:
All these issues raise serious concerns regarding the legal status and security of the system, as well as the finality and irrevocability of the transactions, in a system which is not subject to any kind of public oversight. In June 2011 two US senators, Charles Schumer and Joe Manchin, wrote to the Attorney General and to the Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration expressing their worries about Bitcoin and its use for illegal purposes. Mr Andresen was also asked to give a presentation to the CIA about this virtual currency scheme.
Further action from other authorities can reasonably be expected in the near future.
Neighbor, if you're at all involved with BTC, I'd advise you to heed this remarkably direct warning. You'll note that (a) the people who wrote this report do ha
reads article
He seems to model government as a single agent that plans and executes according to its best interests.
I model government as a collection of agents, mostly incompetent, with different incentives and interests.
If BTC indeed drops to zero via the mechanism he outlines in the coming year, I will be impressed and increase my opinion of him, which is (at the moment) somewhat low (this article being the only thing of his I've read).
I see Moldbug continues to ignore TGGP's offer of a bet on his claim that Bitcoin will probably go to zero in 2013. I'd be happy to bet, say, $50 with either you or Konkvistador that it won't go to - zero seems unfair, so maybe 5 cents - in 2013.
I've noticed that LessWrong is really hard to read and navigate on a mobile device. The right side-bar takes up a significant amount of the screen, and when entering text into a comment box it tends to zoom in so that you can only see half of what you are typing. You can zoom out, but then it becomes rather hard to read. I'm using a fairly large Android phone with the default Chrome browser. When I switch to Firefox, there is a weird issue where sidebar text is tiny but main body text is readable. Is there any chance of a mobile-optimized version of the site?
Abstract:
Despite the prominent loss of motor skills, artistic capacities remain preserved in Parkinson's disease (PD). Furthermore, artistic creativity may emerge in art-naïve PD patients treated with levodopa and dopamine agonists. The present review discusses reported PD patients who developed enhanced artistic skills under anti-Parkinsonian therapy and the course of this phenomenon in the clinical context. It is unclear whether creative drive is related to dopamine dysregulation, and the mechanisms remain speculative. The delineation of the particular constellation that enables this emergence in PD patients may shed light on the comprehension of the concept of creativity in general.
From the OP's Science Daily link:
...It's possible that these patients are expressing latent talents they never had the courage to demonstrate before, she suggests. Dopamine-inducing therapies are also connected to a loss of impulse control, and sometimes result in behaviors like excessive gambling or obsessional hobbies. An increase in artistic drive could be linked to this lowering of inhibitions, allowing patients to embrace their creativity. Some patients have even reported
At a Meetup recently we were talking about various qualities people have. Someone mentioned agreeableness / disagreeableness. I consider myself agreeable while the group said that disagreeableness is a valuable quality (Steve Jobs was given as an example of someone highly successful & highly disagreeable). I brought up another quality, which I tried to describe as "true to self-ness" -- that is, I can get along with people easily, reply to things I disagree with by saying, "I see what you're saying", but in the end, my true belief i...
Funny, it's broken for me too. I know it was just working on 10 January because I did a full archive of all my comments/posts.
You know what, I bet that it was the update to the user profiles where http://lesswrong.com/user/gwern got moved to http://lesswrong.com/user/gwern/overview/
So probably an easy fix.
Yes, you're right, thanks for the diagnosis. It should be fixed now. Next time somebody please PM me, or reply to one of my comments, so I'll get the red envelope. (Or visit my website and email me, in case I take a break from LW.)
An early version of Suicide Rock.
(BTW, anyone played Adventure Story by Matt Roszak? Later levels feature a monster that made me think of Suicide Rock.)
I'm Starting a New Blog
As suggested by some I'm starting a new blog. I prefer communities to lonely things such as one man blogs, especially if the latter have long periods of inactivity. Originally discussed here.
Some problems have been noted by several users on discussing topics from a perspective rather interesting to me on LessWrong. I don't think this is likely to be a better venue for them in the future and has been degrading in this regard for several months, so we've decided to discuss them elsewhere. It still is a great site for some other topics ...
This article is interesting, particularly as the topic of LW parenting does come up occasionally.
What the author describes doesn't exactly promote rational thinking in the kids, rather telling them how to win arguments, but there is a degree of evaluation-of-argument in there ("Mary should give you the car because she's a pig?") and it teaches a useful skill early. Rationalists should win after all.
I recently noticed "The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant" under the front page's Featured Articles section, which caused me to realize that there's more to Featured Articles than the Sequences alone. This particular article (an excellent one, by the way) is also not from Less Wrong itself, yet is obviously relevant to it; it's hosted on Nick Bostrom's personal site.
I'm interested in reading high-quality non-Sequences articles (I'm making my way through the Sequences separately using the [SEQ RERUN] feature) relevant to Less Wrong that I might have miss...
I'm running a bookclub on my blog for Naming Infinity: A True Story of Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity about how the development of set theory was influenced by Russian Orthodox theology and vice versa. Folks are welcome to pop back in Feb, when posts on the topic go up, but you should PM or email me if you're interested in reading along and contributing guest posts.
I'm beginning research for a literature review on the up-and-coming use of Bayesian methods in experimental psychology (as part of my MSc course). Does anyone have any cool examples/references they'd like to point me at? Thanks!
Does the
"If you don't know what you need, take power"
quote have any origin before Final words? I searched for it but only found it in a post on heuristics that linked back there.
The quote appeals to me to the extent that I'm considering adopting it as a general life strategy, but I'd like more discussion around it and arguments for or against. (If you have any feel free to post here.)
Dear MIRI:
This is ludicrous behaviour.
What the fuck are you thinking? I mean, really. What the fuck?
No, you've "had less deletions" because you're often mistaken, but you're not a fucking troll and there's an obvious fucking difference. I don't think you've ever run afoul of the deletion policy unless you were in a general thread that was getting stomped.
It seems to me that the claim that criticism is being targeted for deletion is obviously false, and I remark that it is amazing what people will talk themselves into when they find it politically convenient to believe. But I'm not deleting your comments claiming so, because that's got nothing to do with the stated and practiced moderation policies.
Obviously, trolls will post "critical" comments to provoke reactions and so that they can scream censorship afterward (concern trolling) but there's lots, and lots, and LOTS of non-troll criticism on LW which doesn't get deleted. Like, you know, the meta stuff in this open thread. It brought the trolls out to play and the trolls got deleted - and what's left is more than 50% critical, which is a normal day on LW.
I hope that clears things up.
Some of what people call "trolling" (on the net in general, not LW specifically) amounts to asymmetrical resource starvation attacks against humans. This sort of troll can be modeled as thinking, "What's the least work I can do, that will elicit the costliest response from the mods / regulars / other suckers?"
If the process for dealing with alleged trolls is itself costly for mods or regulars, then it becomes a vulnerability.
So something I've mused about before..
I think it'd be good to train yourself as an accurate reporter somehow - for example the ability to accurately summarise an article, or report on something someone said.
This is an area where I feel personally slightly weak, in that I often tend to exaggerate and use hyperbole when it's not appropriate.
I have visions of some sort of game - one person picks an article, and the other has to write an accurate summary of it, without distortion. Maybe a third person then grades the two versions? I'm not sure how to inject the fun part.
It seems likely this is already some sort of recognised writing technique, perhaps studied by journalists.
Is there a discussion anywhere of the epistemic issues involved in timeless or acausal decision theory? For example, if it's about acausal trade between agents: how do you know about the other agent's existence and properties? How do you figure out what agents are out there, that care about what you do, and about whose actions you should care? If you don't have a rational basis for your beliefs about the existence and nature of the agents you imagine to be on the other side of an acausal trade, can you even be said to be trading?
Does anyone know about Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation? It can apparently be used to stimulate concentration, 'flow' and allow low level wireheading.
Seems like if its as easy as the article implies it might be cheaper and more effective than nootropics for cognitive enhancement etc.
What is the exact origin of the term 'confirmation bias'? Wikipedia asserts it was coined by Wason, but cites only a 2002 article (of which I can only see the abstract); the Wason paper linked by our own wiki article doesn't seem to use the phrase.
I'm seeing things like
P(A|B) = \frac{P(B | A)\, P(A)}{P(B)}
in the wiki (instead of rendered math), and I can't figure out why.
Empirical estimates suggest most published medical research is true
http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3718
OK, so now we need a meta-analysis of these meta-analyses...
So I was watching my daily Glenn Beck when I found this passionate video of his talking about a coming Singularity, uploaded 1/17/13.
Kurzweil, law of accelerating returns, exponential growth with that famous Chinese chess board example, the whole shebang.
Also doing powers of 2 like a baws.
Aaron Jacob aka Graaaaaagh, has been doing a reading of the Open Letter to Open Minded Progressives sequence from Moldbug on his Youtube channel. So far:
Nicotine gum users survey: http://www.stoptabac.ch/en/Gums/
Takes about 10 minutes; you can not answer any question that is inapplicable (as a great many of them are, since I have never used a tobacco product).
Past research using this survey:
Site question: In my miniprofile, near the karma score, there is another number. What is the meaning of that number?
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.