Received word a few days ago that, (unofficially, pending several unresolved questions) my GJP performance is on track to make me eligible for "super forecaster" status (last year these were picked from the top 2%).
I'm glad to report that I am one of those who make this achievement possible by occupying the other 98%. Indeed I believe I am supporting the high ranking of a good 50% of the forecasters.
Congratulations! I also received it (thanks not the least to your posts). I
wonder how many other LWers participate and who else (if anybody) got their
invitations.
2ITakeBets10y
I participate and was invited the first season to be a super-forecaster in the
second. It is kind of a lot of work and I have been very busy, so I really quit
doing anything about it at all pretty early on, but mysteriously have been
invited to participate again in the third season.
0Morendil10y
We may find out a little about that; super-forecasters will form teams, so it's
somewhat likely some of us will end up on the same team.
Congrats to the others too, anyway!
0gwern10y
I participate
(http://www.gwern.net/Prediction%20markets#iarpa-the-good-judgment-project
[http://www.gwern.net/Prediction%20markets#iarpa-the-good-judgment-project]);
and haven't been invited. (While I stopped trying in season 2, my season 1
scores were merely great & not stellar enough to make it plausible that I could
have made it.)
For kicks, and reminded by all my recent searching for digging up long-forgotten launch and shut down dates for Google properties, I've compiled a partial list of times I've posted searches & results on LW:
It appears to me that in half of these examples people hadn't tried to google at
all. It doesn't seem particularly likely to me that the class would develop such
a habit. Not that I have a better idea.
My belief is that the more familiar and skilled you are with a tool, the more willing you are to reach for it. Someone who has been programming for decades will be far more willing to write a short one-off program to solve a problem than someone who is unfamiliar and unsure about programs (even if they suspect that they could get a canned script copied from StackExchange running in a few minutes). So the unwillingness to try googling at all is at least partially a lack of googling skill and familiarity.
Of more interest is the discussion thread on Hacker News regarding cryonics. There's a lot of cached responses and misinformation going around on both sides.
Great point [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5496086] I saw in the
discussion:
6Multiheaded10y
It's really, really saddening that he of all people has been an outspoken
deathist and now it's depriving him of any chance whatsoever. (Well, except for
hypothetical ultra-remote reconstruction by FAI or something.)
In the Culture novels, he has all humans just sorta choosing to die after a millennium of life, despite there being absolutely no reason for humans to die since available resources are unlimited, almost all other problems solved, aging irrelevant, and clear upgrade paths available (like growing into a Mind).
Its not entirely clear cut. He has had characters from outside the culture
describing it as a 'fashion' and a sign of the culture's decadence. And the
characters we do see ending their lives are generally doing it for reasons of
psychological trauma.
Either way, thinking a thousand years in the culture is enough doesn't mean he
thinks 70 years on earth is enough. Has he ever made a direct comment about
cryonics? I can't find any. So its still possible eh would eb open to it given
up to date information.
5gwern10y
Stories would tend to focus on characters who are interested or involved in
traumatically interesting events, so not sure how much one could infer from
that.
A thousand years instead of 70 is just deathism with a slightly different n.
A thousand years instead of 70 is just deathism with a slightly different n.
Eh, I kinda agree with you in a sense, but I'd say there's still a qualitative difference if one has successfully moved away from the deathist assumption that the current status quo for life-span durations is also roughly the optimal life-span duration.
Then some form of deathism may be the truth anyway.
On the other hand, I can't remember Banks ever suggesting that organics in the
Culture would want to die after a thousand years, only that if they wanted to
die they would be able to. I don't think the later is incompatible with
anti-deathism -- is Lazarus Long a deathist, after all?
EDIT: On the gripping hand, there's also a substantial bit of business in the
Culture about subliming.
Instead of arguing on in this vein, I know that he's made comments in the past
about how he believes death is a natural part of life. I just can't find the
right interview now that "Iain Banks death" and variants are nearly-meaningless
search terms.
now that "Iain Banks death" and variants are nearly-meaningless search terms
If you want to search the past, go to google, search, click "Search tools," "Any time," "Custom range..." and fill in the "To" field with a date, such as "2008."
I don't recall seeing any people who are supposed to be older than a thousand
years without mechanics like cryostorage/scanning; if you present a world in
which pretty much everyone does want to die after a trivial time period, you're
presenting a deathist world and you may well hold deathist views.
About not subliming, specifically.
2RolfAndreassen10y
Such a character appears in the latest Culture novel, "The Hydrogen Sonata". But
he is stated to be extremely unusual.
1[anonymous]10y
IIRC, most inchoate Minds sublime during construction, but I could be wrong
about that.
4[anonymous]10y
"A Few Notes on the Culture [http://nuwen.net/culture.html]":
I'm on the fence as to whether or not this really constitutes full-blown
deathism or just a belief that sentient beings should be permitted to cause
their own death.
4TheOtherDave10y
I suspect that any cultural norm inconsistent with treating the death of
important life forms as an event to be eradicated from the world is at least an
enabler to "deathism" as defined locally.
2Nornagest10y
There seems to be some appeal to nature floating around in it, at the very
least.
Sure, death is natural. So is Ophiocordyceps
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis], but that doesn't
mean I want parasitic mind-altering fungi in my life.
0Kawoomba10y
Hopefully he'll get around to doing some sort of "where I wanted to take the
Culture series; ideas which I may have spun into novels" brain dump, before he
dies.
I realise it's a constructed example, but a videogame that would be even remotely accurate in modelling the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire strikes me as unrealistically ambitious. I would at any rate start out with Easter Island, which at least is a relatively small and closed system.
Another point is that, if you gave the player the same levers that the actual emperors had, it's not completely clear that the fall could be prevented; but I suppose you could give points on doing better than historically.
Do we need a realistic simulation at all? I was thinking about how educational
games could devolve into, instead of "guessing the teacher's password",
"guessing the model of the game"... but is this a bad thing?
Sure, games about physics should be able to present a reasonably accurate model
so that if you understand their model, you end up knowing something about
physics... but with history:
actually, what's the goal of studying history?
* if the goal is to do well on tests, we already have a nice model for that,
under the name of Anki. Of course, this doesn't make things really fun, but
still.
* if we want to make students remember what happened and approximately why
(that is, "should be able to write an essay about it"), we can make up an
arbitrary, dumb and scripted thing, not even close to a real model, but
exhibiting some mechanics that cover the actual reasons. (e.g. if one of the
causes would have been "not enough well-trained soldiers", then make "Level 8
Advanced Phalanx" the thing to build if you want to survive the next wave of
attacks.)
* if we'd like to see students discover general ideas throughout history, maybe
build a game with the same mechanics across multiple levels? (and they also
don't need to be really accurate or realistic.)
* and finally, if we want to train historians who could come up with new
theories, or replacement emperors to be sent back in time to fix Rome...
well, for that we would need a much better model indeed. Which we are
unlikely to end up with. But do we need this level in most of the cases?
TL;DR by creating games with wildly unrealistic but textbook-accurate mechanics
we are unlikely to train good emperors, but at least students would understand
textbook things much more than the current "study, exam, forget" level.
9Vaniver10y
If what they learned about "evolution" comes from Pokemon, then yes.
0lfghjkl10y
When did Pokemon become an educational game about evolution?
Pokemon is an example of what an educational game which doesn't care about realism could look like. People should be expected to learn the game, not the reality, and that will especially be the case when the game diverges from reality to make it more fun/interesting/memorable. If you decide that the most interesting way to get people to play an interactive version of Charles Darwin collecting specimens is to make him be a trainer that battles those specimens, then it's likely they will remember best the battles, because those are the most interesting part.
One of the research projects I got to see up close was an educational game about the Chesapeake; if I remember correctly, children got to play as a fish that swum around and ate other fish (and all were species that actually lived in the Chesapeake). If you ate enough other fish, you changed species upwards; if you got eaten, you changed species downwards. In the testing they did afterwards, they discovered that many of the children had incorporated that into their model of how the Chesapeake worked; if a trout eats enough, it becomes a shark.
I'd like to hear more about that Chesapeake result.
4Vaniver10y
I'm seeing if I can find a copy of their thesis. I'll share it if I manage to.
The GAMER thesis is here
[ftp://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/sourceforge/a/ad/adayinthebay/adayinthebay/Thesis%20Paper/Team_GAMER_thesis.pdf].
(Also looking for an official copy.)
The ILL thesis is here [http://drum.lib.umd.edu//handle/1903/10087].
5RolfAndreassen10y
It's true that you don't need a model that lets you form new theories of the
downfall of the Empire; but my point is that even the accepted textbook causes
would be very hard to model in a way that combines fun, challenge, and even the
faintest hint of realism. Take the theory that Rome was brought down partly by
climate change; what's the Emperor supposed to do about it? Impose a carbon tax
on goats? Or the theory that it was plagues what did it. Again, what's the lever
that the player can pull here? Or civil wars; what exactly is the player going
to do to maintain the loyalty of generals in far-off provinces? At least in this
case we begin to approach something you can model in a game. For example, you
can have a dynastic system and make family members more loyal; then you have a
tradeoff between the more limited recruiting pool of your family, which
presumably has fewer military geniuses, versus the larger but less loyal pool of
the general population. (I observe in passing that Crusader Kings II does have a
loyalty-modelling subsystem of this sort, and it works quite well for its
purposes. Actually I would propose that as a history-teaching game you could do
a lot worse than CKII. Kaj, you may want to look into it.) Again, suppose the
issue was the decline of the smallholder class as a result of the vast
slaveholding plantations; to even engage with this you need a whole system for
modelling politics, so that you can model the resistance to reform among the
upper classes who both benefit by slavery and run most of your empire. Actually
this sounds like it could make a good game, but easy to code it ain't.
1Eugine_Nier10y
It gets even more complicated when these causes interact. A large part of the
reason for the decline of smallholders and the rise of vast manors using serfs
(slavery was in decline during that period), was the fact that farmers had to
turn to the lords for protection from barbarians and roving bandits. The reason
there were a lot of marauding bandits is that the armies were to busy fighting
over who the next emperor was going to be to do their job of protecting the
populace.
2OrphanWilde10y
Dynasty Warriors and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, while heavily stylized and
quite frequently diverging from actual history, nevertheless do a pretty good
job of conveying the basics of the time period and region.
6Viliam_Bur10y
A big part of education today is memorization. Perhaps it is wrong
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/iq/guessing_the_teachers_password/], but it is going to
stay here for a while anyway. And at least partially it is necessary; how else
would one learn e.g. a vocabulary of a foreign language?
So while it is great to invent games that teach principles instead of
memorization, let's not forget that there is a ton of low-hanging fruit in
making the memorization more pleasant. If we could just take all the
memorization of elementary and high school, and turn it into one big cool game,
it would probably make the world a much better place. How much resources
(especially human resources) do we spend today on forcing the kids to learn
things they try to avoid learning? Instead we could just give them a computer
game, and leave teachers only with the task of explaining things. Everyone could
get today's high school level education without most of the frustration.
Recently I started using Anki for memorization, and it seems to work great. But
I still need some minimum willpower to start it every day. For me that is easy,
because with my small amounts of data, I get usually 10-20 questions a day. But
if I tried to use it in real time for high-school knowledge, that would be much
more. Also, today I know exactly why I am learning, but for a small child it is
an externally imposed duty, with uncertain rewards in a very far future. So some
additional rewards would be nice.
It could be interesting to make a school where in the morning the students would
play some gamified Anki system, and in the afternoon they would work in groups
or discuss topics with teachers.
2Kaj_Sotala10y
Sure, that's big too. I just didn't talk about it as much because everyone else
seems to be talking about it already.
2Armok_GoB10y
These games already exist for many things, good enough that watching Letsplays
of them are probably more efficient than most deliberately educational videos.
It's just finding them and realizing it's that tricky.
Games relevant to this discussion include Rome: Total War and Kerbal Space
Program. Look them up.
8drethelin10y
I think I would really enjoy watching civ 5 lps that simultaneously discuss
world history.
0[anonymous]10y
That would be super cool.
2Kaj_Sotala10y
Yes, these are good examples.
2latanius10y
Have you played the Portal games? They include lots of things you mention...
they introduce how to use the portal gun, for example, not by explaining stuff
but giving you a simplified version first... then the full feature set... and
then there are all the other things with different physical properties. I can
definitely imagine some Portal Advanced game when you'll actually have to use
equations to calculate trajectories.
Nevertheless... I'd really like to be persuaded otherwise, but the ability to
read Very Confusing Stuff, without any working model, and make sense of it can't
really be avoided after a while. We can't really build a game out of every
scientific paper, due to the amount of time required to write a game vs. a page
of text... (even though I'd love to play games instead of reading papers. And it
sounds definitely doable with CS papers. What about a conference accepting games
as submissions?)
0Kaj_Sotala10y
I've played the first Portal game for a bit, and I liked it, but haven't
finished it because puzzle games aren't that strongly my thing. I wonder whether
not liking them much is a benefit or a disadvantage for an edugame designer. :-)
True enough. But I don't think that very much of education consists of trying to
teach this skill in the first place (though one could certainly argue that it
should be taught more), and having a solid background in other stuff should make
it easier when you do get to that point.
1Bobertron10y
What I found fascinating about Portal is the effort they made in testing the
game on players. There is a play-mode with developer commentary (thought perhaps
it's only available after the first play-through) in which they comment on all
the details they changed to make sure that the players learned the relevant
concepts, that they didn't forget them and that they have enough hints to solve
the puzzle (for example, it's difficult to make a player look up). It'd be
awesome if educational material (not necessarily just edugames) or even whole
courses were designed and tested that well.
0Kaj_Sotala10y
Thanks, I saw the developer commentary option but didn't try it out. Now that
you've told me what it consists of, I'll have to check it out.
0John_Maxwell10y
One point is that while memorizing specific causes of the fall of the roman
empire may not be especially useful, acquiring the self-discipline necessary to
do this without a game to motivate you might be very useful.
2Kaj_Sotala10y
Perhaps, but if the task doesn't also feel interesting and worthwhile by itself,
then we're effectively teaching kids that much of learning is dull, pointless
and tedious, detached from anything that would have any real-world significance,
and something that you only do because the people in power force you to. That's
one of the most harmful attitudes that anyone can pick up. Let's associate
learning with something fun and interesting first, and then channel that
interest into the ability to self-motivate yourself even without a game later
on.
0[anonymous]10y
There are many people having thoughts along these lines, I think. Before forging
ahead too much on your own it would be worth poking around to see what's already
being done (e.g. Valve started some kind of initiative to get Portal played in
schools as part of physics classes or something).
I mentioned that I was attending a Landmark seminar. Here is my review of their free introductory class that hopefully adds to the conversation for those who want to know:
Coaches -
They are the people who lead the class and I found them to be genuine in their belief in the benefits of taking the courses. These coaches were unpaid volunteers. I found their motives for coaching were for self-improvement and to some degree altruism. In short, it helped them, and they really want to share it.
Material -
The intro course consists of more informative ideas rather than exercises. Their informative ideas are also trade-marked phrases, which makes it gimmicky and gives it more importance than an idea really warrants. We were not told these ideas were evidence-based. Lots of information on how to improve one's life was thrown around but no research or empirical evidence was given. Not once was the words " cognitive science" or "rationality" used. I speculate that the value the course gives its students is not from their informative ideas, but probably from the exercises and motivation that one gets from being actively pushed by their coaches to pursue goals. ... (read more)
I am generally still very bad at steelmanning, but I think I am now capable of a very specific form of it. Namely, when people say something that sounds like a universal statement ("foos are bar") I have learned to at least occasionally give them the benefit of the doubt instead of assuming that they literally mean "all foos are bar" and subsequently feeling smug when I point out a single counterexample to their statement. I have seen several people do this on LW lately and I am happy to report that I am now more annoyed at the strawmanners than the strawmanned in this scenario.
It sounds to me like it has a lot in common with the noncentral fallacy
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst_argument_in_the/].
There's a general tendency to think of groups in terms of their central members
and not their noncentral ones. This both makes sneaking in connotations by
noncentral labels possible, and makes "all central foos are bar" feel like the
same thing as "all foos are bar".
0Thomas10y
Even more so with the "No foo is a bar". Those statements are most probably
either very common definitions like "no mammal is a bird" and therefore not very
informative, either they are improbable. Like "no man can live more than X
minutes without oxygen, ever".
In the last case, even if the X is huge, we can assume that maybe it can be done
under some (unseen yet) circumstances.
In other words, don't be too hasty with universal negations!
-1John_Maxwell10y
Why can't people say "some foos are bar" or "foos tend to be bar"? My default
interpretation of "foos are bar" is "all foos are bar". I tend to classify
confident assertions that "foos are bar" with clear counterexamples as
blustering. We already know from Philip Tetlock's work that hedgehogs who make
predictions based on simple models tend to be more confident, more widely quoted
in the media, and more wrong than foxes who make equivocal, better-calibrated
predictions based on more complicated models.
I think there may actually be a bit of a group coordination problem
here--hedgehogs gain status from appearing confident and getting quoted in the
media, but they're spreading low-quality info. So it's a case of personal gain
at the expense of group loss. I'm inclined to call people out for hedgehog-style
behavior as a way of dealing with this coordination problem. (In case it's not
obvious, I frequently see hedgehog-style predictions from LW-affiliated people
and find them annoying and unconvincing.)
5Qiaochu_Yuan10y
I mean, of course they can, but sometimes they won't. People aren't careful with
their language and it's uncharitable to assume that people mean what you think
their words should have meant instead of what they most likely actually meant.
I also think you have a different prototypical case in mind than I do. I'm
thinking the kind of nitpicking where someone says something like "fire is hot"
and someone responds "nuh-uh, there's a special type of fire you can make that
is actually cool to the touch" or something like that.
1John_Maxwell10y
Fair.
0elharo10y
People can't/don't say that "some foos are bar" or "foos tend to be bar" because
it is often less accurate than "all foos are bar" or better yet "foos are bar".
This is because truth is fuzzy, not binary or digital. For example, "some humans
have two arms" gives you very little information. Do 10 out of seven billion
humans have two arms? 6.99999 billion out of 7 billion? Maybe half of humans?
By contrast the statement, "humans each have two arms" or even "all humans have
two arms" is mostly true, probably better than 99% true, despite the existence
of rare counter examples. You can make useful plans based on the knowledge that
"all humans have two arms".
If we see truth as binary, and allow a mostly true statement to be invalidated
by a single rare counterexample, we have lost a lot of real information. If I
know that 100% of humans have two arms, I have a more complete and accurate,
though imperfect, view of the world than if I know only that "some humans have
two arms".
Best of all of course is if I know that 99.9834% +/- 0.0026% of humans have two
arms. However absent such precise information, the statement "humans have two
arms" is a pretty accurate and useful representation of reality.
Looks like Scott Adams has given Metameda mention. (lotta m's there...)
I find it particularly interesting because a while back he himself was a great example of a patient independently discovering, against official advice, that their rare, debilitating illness could be cured -- specifically, that of losing his voice due to a neurological condition. He doesn't mention it in the blog post though.
(At least, I think this is a better example to use than woman who found out how to regenerate her pinky.)
[Aside] I'm not sure how I feel about Scott Adams in general. I enjoyed his work a lot when I was younger, but he seems very prone to being contrarian for its own sake and over-estimating his competence in unrelated domains.
I was a big Dilbert fan in my mid-teens and bought all his books. In one of them
(The Dilbert Future, I think), he has this self-confessedly serious chapter
about questioning received assumptions and thinking creatively. As an example,
he suggests an alternate explanation for gravity, which he claims is empirically
indistinguishable from the standard theory (prima facie, at least). His bold new
theory: everything in the universe is just getting bigger all the time. So when
we jump in the air the Earth and our bodies get bigger so they come back into
contact. Seriously. Even as a fourteen-year-old, it took me only a few minutes
to think of about five reasons this could not be true.
I read that book in the late 90s, and I've read very little by Scott Adams since
then. In recent years, I've heard a few people cite him as a generally smart and
thoughtful guy, and I have a very hard time reconciling that description with
the author of that monumentally stupid chapter.
3NancyLebovitz10y
It's conceivable that he focuses down on things that are important to him, and
is quite content to do more or less humorous BS the rest of the time.
2maia10y
IIRC, in that chapter, he also discussed how quantum mechanics (specifically the
double slit experiment) meant that information could travel backwards in time...
5pragmatist10y
I don't remember that specifically, but it would be one of the less crazy things
he says. There are sound theoretical motivations
[http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.3230] for a retro-causal account of quantum
mechanics, although a successful retro-causal model of the theory is yet to be
constructed (John Cramer's transactional interpretation
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/ee4/debugging_the_quantum_physics_sequence/] comes
close).
However, I do remember Adams endorsing something like The Secret
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_(book\]) in the chapter, where you can
change the world to your benefit merely by wanting it enough. I don't entirely
recall if he sees this as a consequence of quantum retro-causality, but I think
he does, and if that's the case then yeah, the quantum stuff is batshit too.
1maia10y
Yes, he does. It's not necessarily "wanting it enough," though; he specifically
instructs that you have to pick a sentence that describes what you want, such as
"I want to get rich in the stock market" - specific, but not too specific - and
write it, by hand, in a notebook designated for this purpose, at least 10 times
each night. He claims that doing this, he did in fact make a lot of money in the
stock market, and became the mostt popular cartoonist in the world by a metric
he specified (some index, I don't remember which).
Not really connected to the quantum stuff, and possibly not as crazy. I think he
mentions some possibility that all it actually does is force you to focus on
your goals, which subconsciously makes you more responsive to opportunities, or
something.
1SilasBarta10y
Confession: I was taken in by that section too for a while ... a long while. In
fact, when Eliezer's quantum physics series started, my initial reaction was,
"oh, I wonder how he's going to handle the backwards-in-time stuff!"
5SilasBarta10y
I agree in a lot of respects. But if you can cure such a major disorder when
professionals, who are supposed to know this stuff, think it's impossible, and
do it by your own research ... well, you have credibility on that issue.
9NancyLebovitz10y
I'm a little surprised he didn't try Alexander Technique
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_technique], an efficient movement method
which was developed by F.M. Alexander to cure his serious problems with
speaking-- problems which sound a good bit like vocal dystonia.
The problem may be that F.M. Alexander was an actor, and his technique has
remained best known in the theater arts community.
In other news, Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight
[http://www.amazon.com/Loud-Bright-Fast-Tight-Overstimulating/dp/0060932929] is
about people whose range of sensory comfort is mismatched to what's generally
expected. It's a problem that doesn't just happen to people on the autistic
spectrum.
There's some help for it-- what was in the book was putting people in a
non-stressful environment and gradually introducing difficult stimuli-- but
working with this problem is cleverly concealed under occupational therapy,
where no one is likely to find it.
The idea is to collate as many shuttered Google services/products as possible, and still live services/products, with their start and end dates. I'm also collecting a few covariates: number of Google hits, type (program/service/physical object/other), and maybe Alexa rank of the home page & whether source code was released.
This turns out to be much more difficult than it looks because many shut downs are not prominently advertised, and many start dates are lost to our ongoing digital dark age (for example, when did the famous & popular Google Translate open? After an hour applying my excellent research skills, #lesswrong's and no less than 5 people on Google+'s help, the best we can say is that it opened some time between 02 and 08 March 2001). Regardless, I'm up to 274 entries.
The idea is to graph the data, look for trends, and do a survival analysis with the covariates to extrapolate how much longer random Google things have to live.
Does anyone have suggestions as to additional predictive variables which could be found with a reasonable amount of effort for >274 Google things?
Do you have registered user numbers for those services where this is meaningful?
Also, I assume you've see this
[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/2013/03/google_reader_joins_graveyard_of_dead_google_products.html]
and this
[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/03/google_reader_why_did_everyone_s_favorite_rss_program_die_what_free_web.html],
but just in case you hadn't . . .
2gwern10y
Hm, no. I figured that I would be able to get such numbers for a handful of
services at best, and it wasn't worth the effort. (I mean, Google didn't even
release user count for Reader as far as I know. So I'd be able to get random
user counts for like YouTube and Gmail and that's it. If even those.)
Yeah, I've seen those.
2TimS10y
Might the possibility of registering be an interesting variable? Or the
possibility of paying money for the service?
Confession: I'm interested in this type of study because the second article I
referenced mentioned that Google Voice seemed on a doomed trajectory, and I use
Google Voice all the time.
3gwern10y
Update: I've finished, and I'm afraid it doesn't look good for Voice
[http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns#predictions].
2TimS10y
I appreciate - I suspected as much based on the Slate article. Even before
reading it, I was constantly surprised that Google hadn't announced Voice would
cost money. And Voice is hardly central to Google's apparent mission, the way
you correctly note Calendar seems central.
I'm trying to estimate how much longer it will last - i.e. when I should start
looking for a different service. Given the low likelihood of five-year survival,
and that the product is about five years old, I should probably get a move on
it.
2gwern10y
Ah, that's a good suggestion: 'is someone paying Google for this?' This subsumes
the advertising covariate I was musing about (I didn't bring it up because
looking at a bunch of the dead services, I didn't know how I could possibly
check whether advertising was involved). I'll add that.
And yes, I would be worried about Voice's long-term prospects, but my impression
is that it won't be going away within the next 5 years, say. They've sunsetted
the Blackberry app, and neglected the service, but that still leaves the main
service and 3 other apps/services according to my current list.
3TimS10y
You might want to distinguish between free, freemium (like Google Drive, with a
free intro tier), and paid.
0gwern10y
At this point I'm up to 123, so I'm not really keen on going back and recoding
all of them; it's a lot of work, and the profit variable is already a decent
predictor.
It was recently brought to my attention that Eliezer Yudkowsky regards the monetary theories of Scott Sumner (short overview) to be (what we might call) a "correct contrarian cluster", or an island of sanity when most experts (though apparently a decreasing number) believe the opposite.
I would be interested in knowing why. To me, Sumner's views are a combination of:
a) Goodhart's folly ("Historically, an economic metric [that nobody cared about until he started talking about] has been correlated with economic goodness; if we only targeted this metric with policy, we would get that goodness. Here are some plausible mechanisms why ..." -- my paraphrase, of course)
b) Belief that "hoarded" money is pure waste with no upside. (For how long? A day? A month?)
If you are likewise surprised by Eliezer's high regard for these theories, please join me in encouraging him to explain his reasoning.
To address your (a) comment, some countries have implemented close
approximations to NGDP level targeting after the 2008 crisis, and have done
well. They include most obviously Iceland (despite a severe financial crisis),
and some less obvious instances like Australia, Poland and Isreal. One could
point to the UK as the clearest counterexample, but just about everyone agrees
that they have severe structural problems, which NGDPLT is not intended to
address. And even then, monetary easing has allowed the conservative government
to implement fiscal austerity without crashing the economy - this was widely
expected to happen and there was a lot of public concern (compare the situation
in the US wrt the "fiscal cliff" and "sequestration" scares. Here too, the Fed
offset the negative fiscal effect by printing money).
As for (b), nobody argues that money hoarding is a bad thing per se. But it
needs to be offset, because practically all prices in the economy are expressed
in terms of money, and the price system cannot take the impact without severe
side effects and misallocations. Inflation targeting is a very rough way of
doing this, but it's just not good enough (see George Selgin's book Less than
Zero for an argument to this effect). ISTM that this is not well understood in
the mainstream ("NK") macro literature, where supply shocks are confusingly
modeled as "markup shocks". I have seen cutting-edge papers pointing out that
these make inflation targeting unsound (sorry for not having a ref here).
1SilasBarta10y
None of the examples have targeted NGDP, which is what Sumner needs to be true
to have supporting evidence. Rather, they had policies which, despite not
specifically intending to, were followed by rising NGDP. The purported
similarity to NGDPLT is typically justified on the grounds that the policy
caused something related to happen, but there is a very big difference between
that and directly targeting NGDP. And hence why it can't demonstrate why
targeting a metric (that, again, no one even cared about until Sumner started
blogging about it) will have the causal power that is claimed of it.
I disagree; I have yet to see any anti-hoarders mention anything positive
whatsoever about hoarding and take it as a given that eliminating it is bad.
Landsburg says it better
[http://www.thebigquestions.com/2011/10/10/islmic-extremism/] than I can: the
very people promoting anti-hoarding policies lack any framework in which you can
compare the benefits of hoarding to the hoarders against its costs, and thus
know whether it's on net bet. The best answer he gets is essentially, "well,
it's obvious that there's a shortfall that needs to be rectified" -- in other
words, it's just assumed.
To find an example of anyone saying anything positive about hoarding, you have
to go to fringe Austrian economists, like in this article
[http://mises.org/daily/3449].
But until you've quantified (or at least acknowledged the existence of) the
benefits of hoarding, you can't know if these supposed misallocations are worse
than the benefits given by the hoarding. You can't even know if they are
misallocations, properly understood.
For once you accept that there's a benefit to hoarding, then the changes in
prices induced by it are actually vital market signals, just like any price.
Which would mean that you can't eliminate the price change without also
destroying information that the market uses to improve resource use. I mean, oil
shocks cause widespread price changes, but any attempt to stop th
1bogus10y
I think my examples do constitute supporting evidence of some kind. Yes, it
would be good to have examples of countries specifically targeting NGDP, to
prevent spurious correlations or Lucas critique problems. But even so, Iceland
and to a lesser extent, Poland - and, to be fair, the UK - specifically accepted
a rise in inflation in order to sustain demand - it wasn't a simple case of
exogenously strong RGDP growth. (I think this might also apply to Australia,
actually. Their institutional framework would certainly allow for that.) This
makes the evidence quite credible, although it's not perfect by any means.
Also, Sumner was not at all the first economist to care about NGDP as a possible
target. He is a prominent popularizer, but James Meade and Bennett McCallum had
proposed it first.
Your example of the "benefits of hoarding" doesn't address the very specific
problems with hoarding the unit of account for all prices in the economy, when
prices are hard to adjust. Yes, money has a real option value, so money hoarding
might signal some kind of uncertainty. However, you have not made the case that
this "signaling" has any positive effects, especially when the operation of the
price system is clearly impaired. By analogy, if peanuts were the unit of
account and medium of exchange, then widespread hoarding of peanuts might signal
uncertainty about the next harvest. But it would still cause a recession, and it
wouldn't actually cause the relative price of peanuts to rise (or rise much at
any rate), which is what might incent additional supply.
Moreover, in practice, an uncertain agent can attain most (if not all) of the
benefit of hoarding money by holding some other kind of asset, such as low-risk
bonds, gold or whatever the case may be. It's not at all clear that hoarding
money specifically provides any additional benefit, or that such incremental
benefits could be sustained without inflicting greater costs on other agents.
1Ante10y
Yes!
The comment is from hacker news thread about Bitcoin hitting $100. It would be
cool to have him also expand more on bitcoin itself which he seems to regard as
destructive but not necessarily doomed to fail? Here
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5403212] he entertains the idea about
combining NGDP level targeting (which I don't understand) with the best parts of
Bitcoin. This all sounds very interesting.
0A1987dM10y
I downloaded a Bitcoin client a couple weeks and was going to buy a few
bitcoins, but the inconvenience
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/] of having to get a
Mt Gox account or something made me keep on putting that off. Whoops. Hopefully
this'll teach me to be less of a procrastinator.
5Kaj_Sotala10y
You think that's bad? I considered buying a ~hundred Bitcoins after the last
crash, when they were going for at less than $1, but could never be bothered.
:-)
4Kawoomba10y
Bitcoin is a form of currency that's supposed to be used. Now that so many
people jump on the speculation train, and the rest mostly hold onto their
bitcoins in the hope the price keeps rising, the practical viability of bitcoins
can be called into question. I saw a stick of RAM for sale for the equivalent of
over a thousand dollars. For a currency to rise so fast is terribly disruptive,
and the rise (lack of supply in relation to demand) itself creates a vicious
circle, since the faster it rises the more many bitcoin holders are tempted to
further keep their bitcoins out of circulation.
If the price is then calculated by only the very small portion that's up for
sale (with the rest being held for often speculative purposes) - compared to a
lot of prospective buyers like you who want to join the gold rush - what do you
think could easily happen once some people start cashing in, the price drops,
seeing the price dropping more people want to cash in, and suddenly there's a
very large portion up for sale, in conjunction with a loss of interested buyers
(most don't buy into a falling market, tautologically)?
My advice, which I may even follow myself: buy at 100, sell at 150, never look
back.
0A1987dM10y
Well... what I expected to happen when I downloaded the client was for the value
of bitcoins to stay about the same (as it had done in the last couple months of
2012) or to rise by 10%-ish per week (as it had done in the first couple months
of 2013). If I had bought some when they were at 50-ish, I would definitely be
selling most of them now. And right now I don't feel buying something that costs
20% more than it did literally yesterday.
And right now I don't feel buying something that costs 20% more than it did literally yesterday.
Forgive me for stating the obvious: this sounds like the sunk cost fallacy. There's a cost in that you did not buy coins when they were cheaper, and though this does affect how you feel about the issue, it shouldn't (instrumental-rationally) affect your choices.
I did buy coins when they were at ~40$, and I was then regretting that I hadn't bought more when two weeks earlier they were at 10$. When they were at 70$ I chose to buy some more -- and I regretted not buying more when they were at 40$. But both my buy at 40$ and my buy at 70$ were good ones.
Now bitcoins are at around 141$ to 143$. Whether to buy or not buy at this point should depend on an estimation of whether the price is going to go up or down from here -- and your estimation of how soon and how far the price of bitcoin is going to rise or crash from this point onwards. There's always a risk and a chance.
I was going to reply “Actually, I meant it in the sense that given that their
price has changed so quickly, I don't trust their price to not fall by 40% while
I'm sleeping”, but I'm afraid that that would just be a rationalization. (I
might buy some if their price doesn't change so much in the next couple days.)
5ArisKatsaris10y
Okay, then let me just warn people in general that transferring money from a
bank to the usual bitcoin exchanges (mtgox, bitstamp, etc) may by itself take a
couple days -- they don't tend to accept some of the faster methods like paypal.
0A1987dM10y
That's what prevented me from owning bitcoins yesterday afternoon while their
price halved.
0ArisKatsaris10y
This delay has both accidentally helped and hindered me in the past -- it helped
when it prevented me from buying in at 30 before the first crash in 2011; it had
hindered me now, when I couldn't buy in at 90 as I had wanted before the price
rose to 140.
My bitcoin transactions during the last couple months have perhaps gotten me a
5000$ gain (or so) on the whole. It's sad to think that I could have gained four
times as much if I had sold one day earlier than I did; still I came out of this
round benefitting, as I did back in 2011 (back then I had perhaps gotten a 2000
or 3000$ gain).
Now, I'm debating with myself whether to reinvest the money I got on bitcoin, or
if the price is going to drop further... (it's currently around 70$ in the
exchanges which are still open like bitstamp.net)
0A1987dM10y
You see that cute nice near-vertical drop
[http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/btc24EUR#rg2zig5-minztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv] around
15:00 UTC yesterday? That was while I was on the bus on my way home, when I had
about 0.42 bitcoins on bitcoin-24.com (I'm not crazy enough to play with more
money that that at the moment). #$%&. (By this morning, I had somehow managed to
get back all of the value through sheer luck by repeatedly selling and buying at
the right times. Now bitcoin-24.com is down, and I don't know whether that
happened before or after my offer to sell most of the bitcoins I had left at
€80/BTC was accepted. (From this graph
[http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/btc24EUR#rg1zig5-minztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv] I guess
I was lucky.)
0A1987dM10y
Sounds like maybe it wasn't just timing
[http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c77qg/bitcoin24_down_after_a_corrupt_trade_engine_gives/].
:-|
0[anonymous]10y
So do you have a to-do list that you wrote down "buy a few bitcoins" in? If not,
maybe you didn't actually procrastinate; maybe you just forgot.
3A1987dM10y
I don't.
More like, first the former, then the latter. ;-)
The free will page is obnoxious. There have been several times in recent months when I have needed to link to a description of the relationship between choice, determinism and prediction but the wiki still goes out of its way to obfuscate that knowledge.
One of the easiest hard questions, as millennia-old philosophical dilemmas go. Though this impossible question is fully and completely dissolved on Less Wrong, aspiring reductionists should try to solve it on their own.
That's a nice thought. But it turns out that many lesswrong participants don't try to solve it on their own. They just stay confused.
There have been some other discussions of the subject here (and countless elsewhere). Can someone suggest the best reference available that I could link to?
From this day forward all speculation and armchair theorizing on LessWrong
should be written in Comic Sans.
4A1987dM10y
For some reason, my mind is picturing that sentence written in Comic Sans.
(Similar things often happen to me with auditory imagery, e.g. when I read a
sentence about a city I sometimes imagine it spoken in that city's accent, but
this is the first time I recall this happening with visual imagery.)
1David_Gerard10y
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Green_ink
7SilasBarta10y
Shouldn't it? Isn't epistemic hygiene correlated with font choice in known
cases? I mean, if someone posts something in Comic Sans ...
0A1987dM10y
I'd expect that to be mostly screened off by e.g. grammar and wording, though.
(If I had read that passage about asteroids as existential risk written in Comic
Sans, I would probably have assumed that the person who chose the font wasn't
the same person who wrote the passage.)
3itaibn010y
Eyeballing this, the effect size is tiny. Looking at their own measurements, it
is statistically significant, but barely.
ADDED: Hmm... I missed the second page. Over there is more explanation of the
analysis. In particular:
Point taken. This is large enough that it might be useful. However, I don't
think it is a large enough bias to be important for rationalist.
2gwern10y
Depends. It would certainly be interesting to know for, say, the LW default CSS.
I think I'll A/B test this Baskerville claim on gwern.net at some point.
EDIT: in progress: http://www.gwern.net/a-b-testing#fonts
[http://www.gwern.net/a-b-testing#fonts]
0gwern10y
My A/B test has finished: http://www.gwern.net/a-b-testing#fonts
[http://www.gwern.net/a-b-testing#fonts]
Baskerville wasn't the top font in the end, but the differences between the
fonts were all trivial even with an ungodly large sample size of n=142,983
(split over 4 fonts). I dunno if the NYT result is valid, but if there's any
effect, I'm not seeing it in terms of how long people spend reading my website's
pages.
I’m doing a research project on attraction and various romantic strategies. I’ve made several short online courses organizing several different approaches to seduction, and am looking for men 18 and older who are interested in taking them as well as a short pre and post survey designed to gauge the effectiveness of the techniques taught. If you are want to sign up, or know anyone who might be interested you can use this google form to register. If you have any questions comment or PM me and I’ll get back to you.
ETA:Since someone mentioned publication I thought I should clarify. This is specifically a student research project so, unlike a class project, I am aiming for a peer-reviewed publication, however the odds are much slimmer than if someone more experienced/academically higher status were running it. Also, even if it doesn't get formally published I will follow the "Gwern model". That is to say I'll publish my results online along with as much as my materials as I can (the courses are my own work + publicly available texts, but I only have a limited license for the measures I'm using).
Excellent! An area in which there has been far less formal research than the
usefulness of the knowledge calls for. I'll be interested in seeing your results
once you publish them.
2Adele_L10y
Are you also going to try to gauge how friendly to women each technique is?
2beoShaffer10y
That is not something the study is designed to study, however, it was a major
consideration in designing the curriculums.
1Adele_L10y
Alright.
0ChristianKl10y
Your sign up form doesn't say anything about the amount of time/effort that you
expect students to invest into the course.
0beoShaffer10y
Thanks for catching that. I’ve edited the instructions to be clearer. For
reference here is the added text. The basic lesson format is a short reading (a
few pages), an assignment applying the reading to your life, and a short
follow-up/written reflection. There is some variability, but the assignments
tend to be short (in the vicinity of 5 minutes) and/or designed to be worked
into normal social interaction. That said, the normal social interaction part
does assume that you are frequently around women that you some interest in
flirting with, asking out ect. If this is not the case finding suitable women to
interact with could take significantly more time
Here is a blog which asserts that a global conspiracy of transhumanists controls the media and places subliminal messages in pop music such as the Black Eyed Peas music video "Imma Be" in order to persuade people to join the future hive-mind. It is remarkably lucid and articulate given the hysterical nature of the claim, and even includes a somewhat reasonable treatment of transhumanism.
Transhumanism is the name of a movement that claims to support the use of all forms of technology to improve human beings. It is far more than just a bunch of harmless and misguided techie nerds, dreaming of sci-fi movies and making robots.
It is a highly organized and well financed movement that is extremely focused on subverting and replacing every aspect of what we are as human beings – including our physical biology, the individuality of our minds and purposes of our lives – and the replacement of all existing religious and spiritual beliefs with a new religion of their own – which is actually not new at all.
EDIT: I see this was previously posted back in 2010, but if you haven't witnessed this blog yet it is worth a look.
Good to know that someone's keeping the ol' Illuminati flame burning. Pope Bob would be proud.
The thing I find most curious about the Illuminati conspiracy theory is that if you look at the doctrines of the historical Bavarian Illuminati, they are pretty unremarkable to any educated person today. The Illuminati were basically secular humanists — they wanted secular government, morality and charity founded on "the brotherhood of man" rather than on religious obedience, education for women, and so on. They were secret because these ideas were illegal in the conservative Catholic dictatorship of 18th-century Bavaria — which suppressed the group promptly when their security failed.
If CFAR becomes at all successful, conspiracists will start referring to it as an Illuminati group. They will not be entirely wrong.
Might I interest you in the theories of Mencius Moldbug?
4A1987dM10y
Please give the poor sap a link to a summary of them; even “A gentle
introduction to Unqualified Reservations” made me go tl;dr a third of the way
through Part 1.
(What little I know about reactionary ideas comes from this
[http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/],
but I don't know how accurate that is.)
0ChristianKl10y
They modeled themselves after the Freimauers and draw a lot of their membership
from them. Being a member of the Illuminati required a pledge of obedience. I
would be very surprised if CFAR introduces that kind of behavior. You don't need
pledges of obedience to advocate secular humanism.
Like the Freemansons the Illuminati also performed secret rituals.
That not really true. Karl Theodor who banned them was a proponent of the
Englighement. He didn't want secret groups that pledge obedience to get
political power. He didn't want his government to be overturned. A lot of French
people died in the French revolution.
Offhand, I haven't seen any LWers write about having chemical addictions, which seems a little surprising considering the number of people here. Have I missed some, or is it too embarrassing to mention, or is it just that people who are attracted to LW are very unlikely to have chemical addictions?
Add a poll to your top-level comment. Suggested options: no chemical addiction,
had one in the past, have one today.
2drethelin10y
Caffeine addiction is pretty popular, and I bet we have quite a few on adderall.
Is that not what you mean?
1NancyLebovitz10y
Have you had a chemical addiction? [pollid:422]
Unfortunately, the poll options don't seem to include ticky-boxes, so I don't
see an elegant way to ask about which chemicals.
As usual, caffeine addiction is so common that it needs to either be explicitly excluded or else its inclusion pointed out so readers know how meaningless the results may be for what they think of as 'chemical addiction'.
I wouldn't say so. The definition of addiction is foggy enough that some
discussion first would be a good idea if I want to do a more substantial poll.
4OrphanWilde10y
Nicotine, caffeine, simple carbohydrates. (Didn't even realize the last one
until I started getting hit with withdrawal - I've never been addicted to sugar
before. But since I've cut it out of my diet this last time, which I've done
many times before without issue, I've started getting splitting headaches that
are rapidly remedied by eating an orange.)
I have alcohol cravings from time to time, but I'm not addicted, since drinking
is actually infrequent for me, and not doing so doesn't cause me any issue.
That's another recent development which is making me consider clearing out the
liquor cabinet. (I did have alcohol cravings once before, after my grandfather
died. And my grandmother just died after a few years of progressive decline -
she had a form of dementia, possibly Alzheimer's - so it may be depression. I
don't -feel- depressed, but I didn't feel depressed last time I was, either, and
it was only obvious in retrospect.)
0NancyLebovitz10y
Thanks for writing that up. I probably should have realized that cravings can
vary a lot for individuals, but I hadn't thought about it. I've also never heard
of a sugar craving which manifests as headaches-- my impression is that typical
sugar cravings manifest as obsessive desire without more obviously physical
symptoms.
0OrphanWilde10y
I've actually never had a desire for sugar. Not even when I was a child - we
kept a bowl full of candy and chocolate which I almost never touched. (I
preferred, odd as it may sound, things like brussel sprouts, although I've
stopped having any desire for -those- after getting moldy ones once too often)
I crave spicy foods the way most people crave sweet foods. My favorite is spicy
pickled asparagus, which is impossible to find. (Spicy pickled okra is easier,
and almost as good, though.) That may actually count as an addiction as well,
come to think of it. (Apparently spicy foods induce endorphin and dopamine
production?)
0NancyLebovitz10y
So you've got a strong withdrawal reaction to sugar without having a desire for
it?
0A1987dM10y
Sometimes something similar happens to me with food in general -- if I have
eaten very little in the past dozen hours, sometimes I start feeling dizzy,
lazy, and sad but not unusually hungry. (I haven't tested whether different food
groups have different effects.)
(For example, I woke up at noon this morning and now it's almost 2 p.m., but I
don't feel particularly motivated to getting out of bed; but I know that if I
got up and went eat something I'd feel much more energetic.)
0Eugine_Nier10y
This is starting to remind me of the dihydrogen monoxide joke.
0Decius10y
Does having ATP withdrawal symptoms count as an addiction?
2evand10y
Does my caffeine addiction count? If I stop drinking coffee, I anticipate mild
withdrawl symptoms. I periodically do this when I find myself drinking lots of
coffee; a few days without increases the effectiveness of the caffeine later.
I take prescription adderall, and am decidedly less functional without it. I
sometimes skip a day on the weekends. I anticipate no withdrawl symptoms, but
would be far less willing to stop taking it than the caffeine.
One evening a number of years ago, I smoked a couple cigarettes at a party. For
almost two weeks afterwards, I reacted to seeing or smelling cigarettes by
wanting one. I didn't have any more, and those thoughts went away.
Which of those would you count as addictions? I can imagine plenty of obvious
cases either way, but the boundary seems awkward to define, and very common in
the case of things like caffeine and sucrose. (I answered yes in the poll,
because of the caffeine.)
0NancyLebovitz10y
For what it's worth, what I was interested in was getting deep enough into the
obvious life-wreckers that it was urgent to stop using them. Even that's vague,
of course. Alcohol has short term emotional/cognitive effects which cause much
more damage faster than cigarettes can.
0Desrtopa10y
It may be worth creating another poll which clarifies whether or not to count
socially accepted addictions such as caffeine; some people seem to have answered
on the assumption that it doesn't count, while others have answered on the
assumption that it does.
0Decius10y
Caffeine here; based on serious withdrawal symptoms on quitting.
0coffeespoons10y
I used to be a smoker, and I went through a phase of drinking too much alcohol
when I was younger (this was especially worrying as there are many alcoholics in
my family). I managed to give up smoking and my alcohol consumption is much
healthier now.
I've also noticed that I haven't seen many people on LW worrying about how to
cut down on/give up drinking, smoking or drugs. My impression is that LWers are
not all that likely to do things that are self destructive in that way.
0A1987dM10y
I answered “No”, but one might quibble about whether I actually qualify as not
addicted to caffeine. (I'm operationalizing “addiction” as ‘my performances when
I don't use X for a couple days are substantially worse than the baseline level
before I started regularly using X in the first place, or when I stop using X
for several months’. I am a bit less wakeful if I let go of caffeine for a
couple days than the level I revert to when I let go of it for months, but not
terribly much so and there are all sorts of confounds anyway.)
I get the impression that there is something extremely broken in my social skills system (or lack there of). Something subtle, since professionals have been unable to point this out to me.
I find that my interests rarely overlap with anyone else's enough to sustain (or start, really) conversation. I don't feel motivated to force myself to look at whatever everyone else is talking about in order to participate in a conversation about it.
But it feels like there's something beyond that. I was given the custom title of "the confusenator" on one forum.... (read more)
Your writing isn't very clear.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ou/if_you_demand_magic_magic_wont_help/8o31
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/ou/if_you_demand_magic_magic_wont_help/8o31] is a good
example. To me it isn't clear what point you want to make with that post.
I get the impression that you try to list a few facts that you consider to be
true instead of trying to make a point. It might help you to edit your writing
to remove words that don't help you to make the point that you want to make.
When it comes to real life conversations, lack of interest overlap is rarely the
main problem. Even if you know nothing about a topic you can have a conversation
where the other person explains you something about the topic.
The problem is more emotional. If you are anxious than it's hard for a
conversation to flow.
*For disclosure, my own writing isn't the clearest either. It's still a lot
better than it was in the past.
1NancyLebovitz10y
If you supply a sample or two of your writing in context from other forums,
perhaps it will be easier for someone here to see a pattern of what you're
doing.
If I stay up ~4 hours past my normal waking period, I get into a flow state and it becomes really easy to read heavy literature. It's like the part of my brain that usually wants to shift attention to something low effort is silenced. I've had a similar, but less intense increase in concentration after sex / masturbation.
A very common phenomenon is that people are inhibited from doing work because
they don't like the quality of what they produce. If they are a little
sleep-deprived or drunk, they can avoid this inhibition. I think you're talking
about something else, though.
0RomeoStevens10y
this seems like a super important insight for creativity. Is there a way to
practice caring less about initial quality? I'm thinking the obvious of just
brainstorming and stream of consciousness writing with as little filter as
possible.
2NancyLebovitz10y
How about meditation? Or the cognitive approach of reminding yourself that the
path to excellence requires both mistakes and messing around?
0Qiaochu_Yuan10y
Or the even more obvious of just getting drunk?
0RomeoStevens10y
Yes, I meant cultivating it in a non-impaired state.
2Qiaochu_Yuan10y
You don't think practice while drunk would transfer to non-drunk? I guess
there's the issue of state-dependent memory, but I think a plausible strategy is
to start your creative sessions drunk and then gradually decrease the amount of
alcohol involved over time.
0Zaine10y
Alcohol is a depressant - it binds to pre-synaptic receptors for the brain's
major inhibitory neurotransmitter, gamma aminobutyric acid (GABA). The delta
subunit [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2040048/] containing GABA
receptor, to which alcohol's ethanol has now bound, allows for influx of
negatively charged Chlorine into the pre-synaptic GABAergic (GABA transmitting)
cell; the cell's charge is lowered, which inhibits further action potentials.
Cells that transmit GABA will inhibit other cells; hyperpolarising (making the
cell's net charge negative) the inhibitory pre-synaptic GABAergic cell
dis-inhibits the post-synaptic cell, which may be excitatory or inhibitory. In
the general case of the post-synaptic cell being excitatory, one's brain will
become less inhibited - which is not a good thing for cognitive computation.
Due to physics I confess to not presently comprehend, an entirely uninhibited
brain will fire in synchrony. Synchrony of action potential frequency has been
observed and mathematically measured
[http://complex.gmu.edu/people/ernie/publications/publications.html] to result
in decreased cognitive performance: asynchronous brain activity is high
performance brain activity (beta waves). I understand it from a reactivity
perspective - in order to respond quickly to a stimulus, one needs to inhibit
their current action and respond to that stimulus; GABAergic neurones are
critical to that inhibition.
In sum, while a buzzed person may feel very happy and jumpy, their reduced
cognitive ability to inhibit active firing patterns hinders cognitive
performance (they are jumpy because motor neurones are being dis-inhibited,
too).
With sufficient ethanol saturation voltage-gated sodium channels become less
able to detect changes in the charge of their proximity; non-polar lipid-like
ethanol does not conduct electricity. Impaired ability to respond to
environmental changes around the cell fetters neurone firing, leading to a
drunkard's depressed,
0Kawoomba10y
While ethanol is neurodepressant overall, its effects can initially mirror those
of a stimulant [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6131652] ('biphasic').
0Zaine10y
It's still depressing neurones; the neurones it's depressing are inhibitory
neurones, which dis-inhibits excitatory neurones. Your comment prompted me to do
a research-check, and it turns out I was completely wrong (don't theorise beyond
your nose, eh?). The above comment now reflects reality.
3OrphanWilde10y
~5 hours after I usually go to bed is an incredibly productive period of time
for me. So the timing doesn't correspond, but the "part of my brain that usually
wants to shift attention" does.
Is there any particular protocol on reviving previously-recurring threads that are now dormant? I had some things to put in a Group Rationality Diary entry, but there hasn't been a post since early January. I sent cata a message a few days ago; haven't heard back.
Strong AI is hard to predict: see this recent study. Thus, my own position on Strong AI timelines is one of normative agnosticism: "I don't know, and neither does anyone else!"
Increases in computing power are pretty predictable, but for AI you probably need fundamental mathematical insights, and it's damn hard to predict those.
In 1900, David Hilbert posed 23 unsolved problems in mathematics. Imagine trying to predict when those would be solved. His 3rd problem was solved that same year. His 7th problem was solved in 1935. His 8th problem still h... (read more)
you probably need fundamental mathematical insights, and it's damn hard to predict those.
We can still try. As it happens, a perfectly relevant paper was just released: "On the distribution of time-to-proof of mathematical conjectures"
What is the productivity of Science? Can we measure an evolution of the production of mathematicians over history? Can we predict the waiting time till the proof of a challenging conjecture such as the P-versus-NP problem? Motivated by these questions, we revisit a suggestion published recently and debated in the "New Scientist" that the historical distribution of time-to-proof's, i.e., of waiting times between formulation of a mathematical conjecture and its proof, can be quantified and gives meaningful insights in the future development of still open conjectures. We find however evidence that the mathematical process of creation is too much non-stationary, with too little data and constraints, to allow for a meaningful conclusion. In particular, the approximate unsteady exponential growth of human population, and arguably that of mathematicians, essentially hides the true distribution. Another issue is the incompleteness of t
I've been looking at postgraduate programmes in the philosophy of Artificial intelligence, (primarily but not necessarily in the UK). Does anyone have any advice or suggestions?
Why so narrow as to exclude good computer science, cognitive science, philosophy
of mind, etc...programs from consideration?
2FiftyTwo10y
No particular reason. I am looking at general Philosophy programmes and
cognitive science as well.
I ask specifically about AI programme's because its a very specialised field and
it is difficult to distinguish which programmes are worth doing (as certain
institutions have started up 'AI' programmes that are little more than
pre-existing modules rearranged to make money). I figure there are enough people
involved in the field here that they would have relevant expertise.
2Manfred10y
No advice from me, sorry. But I am interested in what you'd be doing. To be
succinct, do you want to write for a philosophy audience, or an AI researcher
audience?
I'm going to Hacker School this summer, and I need a place to stay in NYC between approximately June 1 and August 23. Does anyone want an intrepid 20-year-old rationalist and aspiring hacker splitting the rent with them?
Also, applications for this batch of Hacker School are still open, if you're looking for something great to do this summer.
After rereading the metaethics sequence, it occurred to me a possible reason why people can enjoy (the artistic genre) of tragedy. I think there's an argument to be made along the lines of "watching tragedy is about not feeling guilty when you can't predict the future well enough to see what right is."
Grading is the bane of my existence. Every time I have to grade homework assignments, I employ various tricks to keep myself working.
My normal approach is to grade 5 homework papers, take a short break, then grade 5 more. It occurred to me just now that this is similar to the "pomodoro" technique so many people here like, except work-based instead of time-based. Is the time-based method better? Should I switch?
I think using Pomodoros is more fun because you can do things like record how
many assignments you grade per Pomodoro. Now you can keep track of your "high
score" and try to break it. Competition is fun and worth leveraging for
motivation, even if it's with your past selves.
2jooyous10y
But doesn't that make you inclined to not read as carefully or grade as
thoroughly or not leave as many comments? "Oh whatever, that was mostly right.
Yay, high score!"
4Qiaochu_Yuan10y
If you're at the point where you need to employ tricks to finish the grading at
all, then I think this is unfortunately a secondary concern. Once you can
consistently finish the grading, then I think you can start worrying about its
quality.
2jooyous10y
See, I always worry that the easiest way to get through grading is to just give
everyone A's regardless of what they turned in. So I feel like you somehow have
to factor in a reward for quality or that's what your system will collapse into?
2Qiaochu_Yuan10y
I would never be tempted to do that, but that comes from a strong desire to tell
people when they're wrong which is not necessarily a good thing overall.
I've known for a while that for every user there's an RSS feed of their comments, but for some reason it's taken me a while to get in the habit of adding interesting people in Google Reader. I'm glad I have.
(Effort in adding them now isn't wasted, since when I move from Google Reader I'll use some sort of tool to move all my subscriptions across at once to whatever I move to)
CFAR's notion of agency is roughly "the opposite of sphexishness
[http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sphexish]," a concept named after the behavior of
a particular kind of wasp:
So ants don't have agency. The difference between intelligence and agency seems
to me to vanish for sufficiently intelligent minds but is relevant to humans.
Like ArisKatsaris I think that for humans, intelligence is the ability to solve
problems but agency is the ability to prioritize which problems to solve. It
seems to me to be much easier to test for intelligence than for agency; I
thought for a little bit awhile ago about how to test my own agency (and in
particular to see how it varies with time of day, hunger level, etc.) but didn't
come up with any good ideas.
One sign of sphexishness in humans is chasing after lost purposes
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/le/lost_purposes/].
2ArisKatsaris10y
How about "agency" as the extent by which people are moved to action by
deliberate thought and by preferences they're aware of -- as opposed to by
habit, instinct, social expectations or various unconscious drives.
That's pretty much similar to Luke's definition I guess.
It's different in that it also chooses which problems to seek to solve, in
accordance to one's own self-aware preferences .
Lots of intelligent non-agents -- a pocket calculator for example.
Do you mind pointing out exactly where he says that?
2ArisKatsaris10y
Chapter 2 [http://hpmor.com/chapter/2]: "You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You
violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied
by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then
you get FTL signalling! "
Eliezer discussed this point in a reddit thread about a month ago
[http://www.reddit.com/r/HPMOR/comments/19z9sw/help_understanding_harrys_rant_in_ch2/]
- but I'm not qualified to judge how good his physics on this point are.
3shminux10y
It's not very good. Energy changing in time does not violate unitarity, so you
cannot destroy pieces of the wave function and so you don't get FTL in the
regular quantum mechanics. You do get FTL this way in general relativity, but
this is outside Harry's knowledge (because it's outside Eliezer's). To actually
kill a part of the wave function, you need this subsystem to have complex
energy. I cannot comment on the quantum computing party of it, it's not my area.
Edit: I'll have to look closer at his partial cancellation argument and see if
it can work.
1shminux10y
After some more thinking, I'm still having trouble following this logic:
Specifically, I am not sure in what sense he uses the word "branches". If this
is an MWI concept, then different branches do not cancel, since they do not
interact. Maybe it means different additive terms in the wave function of some
subsystem? But those correspond to different orthogonal eigenstates and so they
don't cancel out, either. Maybe it is meant in terms of constructive/destructive
interference, only with the destructive part in one place not being compensated
by the constructive part elsewhere? This interpretation at least makes sense if
you associate branches with propagation paths, but I still have no clue how to
use time-dependent energy states to terminate rather than displace (in a
perfectly sub-light way) interference maxima and minima.
Maybe someone else can speculate more successfully.
-4ThrustVectoring10y
As far as I know, it's because breaking conservation of energy means that
relativity is borked.
Let me explain. Conservation of energy is a logical consequence of the fact that
experiments performed in different places or at different speeds turn out the
same way. In other words, "how fast you are going doesn't matter" ->
"conservation of energy". Equivalently, "no conservation of energy" -> "how fast
you are going can change things".
We believe relativity is true in large because of how speed and position are
invariant in physics (iirc, this is the insight used to generate the theory of
relativity in the first place). Once the reasons to believe in relativity go out
the window, so does its baggage - specifically, the injunction against FTL.
8shminux10y
As a trained (though non-practicing) physicist, I would like to point out that
your comment varies between wrong and meaningless. Conservation of energy is a
consequence of the time symmetry, i.e. the time variable not being explicitly
present in the Lagrangian or Hamiltonian description of the system under
consideration (see Noether's theorem). There are perfectly good relativistic
Lagrangians where energy is not conserved (usually because the system is not
closed).
That describes conservation of momentum, if anything.
Also note that "global" energy is most emphatically not conserved in our
expanding universe, and not even well-defined. All that is defined and (locally)
conserved is the stress-energy tensor field.
There is also no injunction against FTL in either special or general relativity,
though for different reasons. In SR FTL leads to time travel, while in GR it
leads to the initial value problem being not well-posed, a rather technical
point.
I had some students complaining about test-taking anxiety! One guy came in and solved the last midterm problem 5 minutes after he had turned in the exam, so I think this is a real thing. One girl said that calling it something that's not "exam" made her perform better. However, it seems like none of them had ever really confronted the problem? They just sort of take tests and go "Oh yeah, I should have gotten that. I'm bad at taking tests."
Have any of you guys experienced this? If so, have you tried to tackle it head-on? It seems like ... (read more)
Is this meant to imply that you didn't previously think this is a real thing or
that you hadn't heard of it until now? It's apparently a well-studied phenomenon
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_anxiety], I think I know people who
experience it, and it's completely consistent with my current model of human
psychology.
1jooyous10y
Nono, I believed it. I just didn't want people commenting "your students are
just complaining to weasel out a better grade from you," because I had some
people telling me that students sometimes try to befriend TA's and suck up to
them. Though I guess it's not that relevant that these particular students had
it. I was just surprised at how bad it was. It's almost like as soon as the test
is over, you can think again? I sorta figured people would seek treatment for
something that serious.
3Qiaochu_Yuan10y
I think there's a double typical mind fallacy here. You were surprised because
your mind doesn't work their way, and it doesn't occur to them to do anything
about it because they just think that's what tests feel like. Also, an anxiety
disorder is tantamount to a mild mental illness, and people still have a lot of
hangups about seeking mental health services in general.
2jooyous10y
Yeah, I think you're right because when when people say they get nervous before
tests, I think, "Oh sure, I get nervous too!" But not to the point where I spend
half the time sitting there, unable to write anything down.
I'm a bit concerned that a lot of the treatment options on that page are drugs.
Is it really safe to drug people before their brain is supposed to do mathy
things? Is it cheating? Do any of the people you know have any handy CBT-style
rituals that help calm them down? I think from now on I'm also going to persuade
professors to call exams "quizzes" or something.
2wedrifid10y
Probably not more unsafe than drugging them other times. As for performance...
most anxiolytic substances impair mental function somewhat. It's what they are
notorious for (ie. Valium and ethanol). Still, the effects aren't strong enough
that crippling anxiety wouldn't be worse. On the other hand a few things like
phenibut and aniracetam could lead to somewhat increased performance even beside
from anxiolytic effects.
No. There isn't (usually) a rule against it so it isn't cheating. (Sometimes
there are laws against prescription substances, but that is different. That
makes you a criminal not a cheater!)
4jooyous10y
I guess I understand using drugs for other mental disorders (the persistent ones
that interfere with more areas of life) but it weirds me out that we create this
bizarre social construct called "tests" that give people crippling anxiety ...
and then we solve the problem with drugs. Instead of developing alternative
models for testing people. (Although there are probably correlations and people
with test anxiety might get it for other things as well?)
0Qiaochu_Yuan10y
I got nothin'. Have you tried making an anonymous survey and surveying your
Facebook friends? That's what I would try.
1RomeoStevens10y
I think this has to do with the difference between work and curiosity mode. In
curiosity mode solving problems is much easier, but stress reliably kills it.
Once the stress is gone, the answers come pouring out.
0OrphanWilde10y
It's extremely common with certain learning disabilities, like dyslexia and to a
lesser extent dyscalculia. For many people, it's the time limit, rather than the
seriousness of the task itself, and eliminating the time limit to take the test
permits them to finish it without issue (frequently within the time limit!).
0latanius10y
In the class I TA for, the students can go to the professor's office hours after
the midterm / final, and if they can solve the problem there, they still get...
half of the points? I wonder how that one affects test-taking performance.
Also, this whole thing seems to be annoyingly resistant to Bayesian updates...
"Every time I'm anxious I perform bad, and now I'm worried about being too
worried for this exam", and, since performing bad is a very valid prediction in
this state of mind, worry is there to stay.
Maybe if the tests are called "quizzes" the students end up in the other stable
state of "not being worried"?
1jooyous10y
I feel like it's the students' responsibility to calibrate their own personal
correct amount of worry that it takes to make them study, regardless of what the
thing is called? (Like if I say "This quiz is worth 50% of your grade," they
should be able to tell that it's not really a quiz.) But at the same time, it
sounds like some brains have this worry horizon where once they start worrying,
then it's all they can do. So we need to somehow calibrate the scariness of
exams so that only a very small percentage of people fall off the worry horizon,
because people who fail from not studying can just start studying. The stable
state of not being worried is a good place! ^_^
This kind of reminds me of all of the (non-technical) articles about game
addiction and how it's in the designers' best interest to keep everyone hooked
but still high-functioning enough that we won't outlaw WoW the way we outlaw
harmful, addictive narcotics.
Brains are such a mess. ^_^
I watched an awesome movie, and now I'm coasting in far mode. I really like being in far mode, but is this useful? What if I don't want to lose my awesome-movie high?
Are there some things that far mode is especially good for? Should I be managing finances in this state? Reading a textbook? Is far mode instrumentally valuable in any way? Or should I make the unfortunate transition back to near mode?
Based on the description at the LW wiki, it sounds like far mode is a good time
to evaluate how risk-averse you've been and whether there are risky
opportunities you should be taking that you previously weren't taking because of
risk-aversion.
How much do we know about reasoning about subjective concepts? Bayes' law tells you how probable you should consider any given black-and-white no-room-for-interpretation statement, but it doesn't tell you when you should come up with a new subjective concept, nor (I think) what to do once you've got one.
You may be interested in the literature on "concept learning", a topic in
computational cognitive science. Researchers in this field have sought to
formalize the notion of a concept, and to develop methods for learning these
concepts from data. (The concepts learned will depend on which specific data the
agent encounters, and so this captures the some of the subjectivity you are
looking for.)
In this literature, concepts are usually treated as probability distributions
over objects in the world. If you google "concept learning" you should find some
stuff.
0Qiaochu_Yuan10y
"Subjective" seems uselessly broad. Can you give a more specific example?
0[anonymous]10y
Well, I guess that by "subjective concepts", I mean every concept that doesn't
have a formal mathematical definition. So stuff like "simple", "similar",
"beautiful", "alive", "dead", "feline", and so on through the entire dictionary.
The only theory-of-subjective-concepts I've come across is the example of bleggs
and rubes. Suppose that, among a class of objects, five binary variables are
strongly correlated with each other; then it is useful to postulate a latent
variable stating which of two types the object is. This latent variable is the
"subjective concept" in this case.
2Qiaochu_Yuan10y
Think of subjective concepts as heuristics that help you describe models of the
world. Evaluate those models based on their predictions. (Grounding everything
in terms of predictions is a great way to keep your thinking focused. Otherwise
it's too easy to go on and on about beauty or whatever without ever saying
anything that actually controls your anticipations.)
Have you read the rest of 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/]?
Does anyone here have thoughts on the x-risk implications of Bitcoin? Rebalancing is a way to make money off of high-volatility investments like Bitcoin (the more volatility, the more money you make through rebalancing). If lots of people included Bitcoin in their portfolios, and started rebalancing them this way, then the price of Bitcoin would also become less volatile as a side effect. (It might even start growing in price at whatever the market rate of return for stocks/bonds/etc. is, though I'd have to think about that.)
So given that I could spread this meme on how you can get paid to decrease Bitcoin's volatility, should I do it?
It would take time and effort and having Bitcoin be a legitimate alternative
currency might have unforseen negative consequences, e.g.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/13/beyond-the-bitcoin-bubble/
[http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/13/beyond-the-bitcoin-bubble/]
So I'm running through the Quantum Mechanics sequence, and am about 2/3 of the way through. Wanted to check in here to ask a few questions, and see if there aren't some hidden gotchas from people knowledgeable about the subject who have also read the sequence.
My biggest hangup so far has been understanding when it is that different quantum configurations sum, versus when they don't. All of the experiments from the earlier posts (such as distinct configurations) seem to indicate that configurations sum when they are in the "same" time and place.... (read more)
I assume you mean this section:
He's not exactly saying that brains only work digitally -- they don't; neuron
activation isn't only about electrical impulses -- he's just talking about one
particular process that happens in the brain. At least, as far as I can tell.
0CoffeeStain10y
They certainly don't work only digitally, but the suggestion seems to be that
for most brain states at the level of "belief" it is required that at least some
neurons have definite states, if only in the sense of "neuron A is firing at
some definite analog value."
I don't know anything about quantum computing, so please tell me if this idea makes sense... if you imagine many-worlds, can it help you develop better intuitions about quantum algorithms? Anyone tried that? Any resuts?
I assume an analogy: In mathematics, proper imagination can see you some results faster, even if you could get the same results by computation. For example it is easier to imagine a "sphere" than a "set of points with distance at most D from a given center C". You can see that an intersection of a sphere and a plane is a ... (read more)
Are you familiar with the Quantum Bomb Tester
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitzur%E2%80%93Vaidman_bomb_tester]?
3Douglas_Knight10y
Are you aware that David Deutsch is (1) the loudest proponent of MWI and (2) the
inventor* of the quantum computer? Moreover, he claimed that MWI lead him there.
He also predicted that quantum computers would convince everyone else of MWI. So
far, that claim doesn't look very plausible.
I am skeptical of the possibility of many worlds contributing to imagination. I
prefer the phrase "no collapse" to the phrase "many worlds" because there are a
lot of straw men associated with the latter phrase. But phrasing it as a
negative shows that's it's really a subset of Copenhagen QM, and thus shouldn't
require more or different imagination. You might say that the first incarnation
of many worlds is Schrödinger's Cat, which everyone talks about, regardless of
interpretation.
There is some discussion of the fruitfulness here
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=613]; in particular Scott Aaronson
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=613#comment-23305] says "I think
Many-Worlds does a better job than its competitors...at emphasizing the aspect
of QM—the exponentiality of Hilbert space—that most deserves emphasizing."
* Manin, Feynman, and maybe other people could claim that title, too, but I
think they were all independent. Moreover, I think Deutsch was the first person
to produce a quantum algorithm that he could prove was better than a classical
algorithm; he exploited QM rather than saying it was hard. It is this
exploitation that he attributes to MWI.
Deutsch
[https://web.archive.org/web/20030915061044/http://www.qubit.org/oldsite/resource/deutsch85.pdf]
discusses his predecessors, but he didn't know about Manin. I think Manin's
contribution is all in the 3 paragraph Appendix (p25)
[http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9903008/].
0Viliam_Bur10y
I didn't know about David Deutsch, thanks for the information!
Then perhaps the only advantage is that you don't have to waste your time
worrying "what if my proposed solution is already so big that the wavefunction
will collapse before it computes the result". But to get this advantage, you
don't really have to believe in MWI. It's enough to profess belief in colapse,
but ignore the consequences of that belief while designing algorithms, which is
something humans excel at.
Recently, for a philosophy course on(roughly) the implications of AI for society, I wrote an essay on whether we should take fears about AI risks seriously, and I had the thought that it might be worth posting to LW discussion. Is there/would there be interest in such a thing? THB, there's not a great deal of original content, but I'd still be interest in the comments of anyone who is interested.
I'm not sure if this is the right place for this, but I've just read a scary article that claims that "The financial system as a whole functions as a hostile AI", and I was wondering what LW thinks of that.
There have been various threads in the past about whether corporations can be
considered AIs. The general consensus seems to be "not in the sense of 'AI' that
this community is concerned with."
In Anki, LaTeX is rendered too large. Does anyone know an effective fix?
EDIT: I found one. In Anki, LaTeX is rendered to an image and from then on treated as one. Adding
img{ zoom: 0.6;}
to a new line of the "Styling" section of the "Card Type" for whatever Note you're using rescales all the images in that card type. So provided you don't use LaTeX and images on the same Note then this fixes all your problems.
Damn, I'm embarrassed to say the tradeoff had never occurred to me. Even after
doing research on other similar types of power consumption. I guess I had just
assumed processor power was a fixed overhead.
When somebody attempts to post a comment with the words "why", "comment", and "downvoted", it should open a prompt directing them to an FAQ explaining most likely reasons for their downvote, and also warning them prior to actually submitting the comment that it's likely to be unproductive and just lead to more downvotes.
(Personally I think this site needs to have a little more patience with people asking these questions, as they almost always come from new users who are still getting accustomed to the community norms, but that's just me.)
This suggestions conflicts with the advice of the Welcome Thread
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/h3p/welcome_to_less_wrong_5th_thread_march_2013/],
which says:
6OrphanWilde10y
And yet I persistently see requests for explanations downvoted. The advice of
the welcome thread does not actually correspond to downvoting behavior.
Do the requests remain downvoted? In my experience, they may be downvoted for a
while, but then get voted back up.
4TimS10y
It depends a bit on why the original post was downvoted. Asking for explanation
when the problem is obvious, or on a forbidden topic tends not to get back to
neutral.
3OrphanWilde10y
Obvious to regular users != obvious to new user
3TimS10y
Monkeymind [http://lesswrong.com/user/Monkeymind/overview/] knew why he was
being downvoted.
Edit: But, I agree with your point that many community norms that will get one
downvoted are not accessible to new members.
-1Kawoomba10y
The Welcome Thread doesn't set official policy.
6Viliam_Bur10y
In my opinion, downvoting is necessary for forum moderation, and people don't
downvote enough. It is rather easy to get a lot of karma by simply writing a
lot, because the average karma of a comment (this is just my estimate) is around
1. I would prefer if the average was closer to 0.
Asking about downvoting is ok, per se (assuming that the person does not do it
with every single damned comment which fell to -1 temporarily). But sometimes it
seems to contain a connotation that "you should not downvote my comments unless
you explain why". Which I completely disagree with and consider it actively
harmful, so I automatically downvote any comment that feels like this. (Yes,
there is a chance that I misunderstood the author's intentions. Well, I am not
omniscient, and I don't want to get paralyzed by my lack of omniscience.)
2[anonymous]10y
This and other variants of it have been tried on other forums before, with no
real change in new user behavior.
1drethelin10y
I just downvote people complaining about downvotes
7NancyLebovitz10y
Do you make a distinction between complaining and asking?
8drethelin10y
A little? Most "asking about downvotes" are functionally indistinguishable from
complaints although phrased as a question in the sense of "I don't understand
why I'm getting downvoted (implying it doesn't make sense and you are wrong to
do so)". If someone posts an in depth post and it gets downvoted and they ask
for which specific parts of their giant post were bad, I give that more leeway.
-1NancyLebovitz10y
If I see a question about downvotes that's below 0, I'm going to upvote it.
8NancyLebovitz10y
I don't think I need to ask why that got downvoted.
Remember, today is "Base Rate Neglect Day," also known as April Fool's.
I propose "Confusion Awareness Day".
Received word a few days ago that, (unofficially, pending several unresolved questions) my GJP performance is on track to make me eligible for "super forecaster" status (last year these were picked from the top 2%).
ETA, May 9th: received the official invitation.
I'm glad to report that I am one of those who make this achievement possible by occupying the other 98%. Indeed I believe I am supporting the high ranking of a good 50% of the forecasters.
More seriously, congratulations. :)
For kicks, and reminded by all my recent searching for digging up long-forgotten launch and shut down dates for Google properties, I've compiled a partial list of times I've posted searches & results on LW:
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... (read more)http://lesswrong.com/lw/h4e/differential_reproduction_for_men_and_women/8ovg
http://lesswrong.com/lw/h2h/i_hate_preparing_food_my_solution/8o19
http://lesswrong.com/lw/h1t/link_the_power_of_fiction_for_moral_instruction/8nkc
http://lesswrong.com/lw/gnk/link_scott_and_scurvy_a_reminder_of_the_messiness/8gfc
http://lesswrong.com/lw/g75/psa_please_list_your_references_dont_just_link/87ds
http://lesswrong.com/lw/f8x/rationality_quotes_november_2012/7tdc
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3dq/medieval_ballistics_and_experiment/7i2k
http://lesswrong.com/lw/e26/who_wants_to_start_an_important_startup/7adg
http://lesswrong.com/lw/if/your_strength_as_a_rationalist/768t
http://lesswrong.com/lw/dzb/draft_get_lucky/760r
http://lesswrong.com/lw/dx7/link_holistic_learning_ebook/74yj
http://lesswrong.com/lw/c3g/seq_rerun_quantum_nonrealism/6h7e
http://lesswrong.com/lw/bws/stupid_questions_open_thread_round_2/6g25?context=1#6g25
http://lesswrong.com/lw/bg0/cryonics_without_
My belief is that the more familiar and skilled you are with a tool, the more willing you are to reach for it. Someone who has been programming for decades will be far more willing to write a short one-off program to solve a problem than someone who is unfamiliar and unsure about programs (even if they suspect that they could get a canned script copied from StackExchange running in a few minutes). So the unwillingness to try googling at all is at least partially a lack of googling skill and familiarity.
Iain (sometimes M.) Banks is dying of terminal gall bladder cancer.
Of more interest is the discussion thread on Hacker News regarding cryonics. There's a lot of cached responses and misinformation going around on both sides.
In the Culture novels, he has all humans just sorta choosing to die after a millennium of life, despite there being absolutely no reason for humans to die since available resources are unlimited, almost all other problems solved, aging irrelevant, and clear upgrade paths available (like growing into a Mind).
Eh, I kinda agree with you in a sense, but I'd say there's still a qualitative difference if one has successfully moved away from the deathist assumption that the current status quo for life-span durations is also roughly the optimal life-span duration.
If you want to search the past, go to google, search, click "Search tools," "Any time," "Custom range..." and fill in the "To" field with a date, such as "2008."
I've been writing blog articles on the potential of educational games, which may be of interest to some people here:
I'd be curious to hear any comments.
I realise it's a constructed example, but a videogame that would be even remotely accurate in modelling the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire strikes me as unrealistically ambitious. I would at any rate start out with Easter Island, which at least is a relatively small and closed system.
Another point is that, if you gave the player the same levers that the actual emperors had, it's not completely clear that the fall could be prevented; but I suppose you could give points on doing better than historically.
Pokemon is an example of what an educational game which doesn't care about realism could look like. People should be expected to learn the game, not the reality, and that will especially be the case when the game diverges from reality to make it more fun/interesting/memorable. If you decide that the most interesting way to get people to play an interactive version of Charles Darwin collecting specimens is to make him be a trainer that battles those specimens, then it's likely they will remember best the battles, because those are the most interesting part.
One of the research projects I got to see up close was an educational game about the Chesapeake; if I remember correctly, children got to play as a fish that swum around and ate other fish (and all were species that actually lived in the Chesapeake). If you ate enough other fish, you changed species upwards; if you got eaten, you changed species downwards. In the testing they did afterwards, they discovered that many of the children had incorporated that into their model of how the Chesapeake worked; if a trout eats enough, it becomes a shark.
I mentioned that I was attending a Landmark seminar. Here is my review of their free introductory class that hopefully adds to the conversation for those who want to know:
Coaches - They are the people who lead the class and I found them to be genuine in their belief in the benefits of taking the courses. These coaches were unpaid volunteers. I found their motives for coaching were for self-improvement and to some degree altruism. In short, it helped them, and they really want to share it.
Material - The intro course consists of more informative ideas rather than exercises. Their informative ideas are also trade-marked phrases, which makes it gimmicky and gives it more importance than an idea really warrants. We were not told these ideas were evidence-based. Lots of information on how to improve one's life was thrown around but no research or empirical evidence was given. Not once was the words " cognitive science" or "rationality" used. I speculate that the value the course gives its students is not from their informative ideas, but probably from the exercises and motivation that one gets from being actively pushed by their coaches to pursue goals. ... (read more)
I am generally still very bad at steelmanning, but I think I am now capable of a very specific form of it. Namely, when people say something that sounds like a universal statement ("foos are bar") I have learned to at least occasionally give them the benefit of the doubt instead of assuming that they literally mean "all foos are bar" and subsequently feeling smug when I point out a single counterexample to their statement. I have seen several people do this on LW lately and I am happy to report that I am now more annoyed at the strawmanners than the strawmanned in this scenario.
Looks like Scott Adams has given Metamed a mention. (lotta m's there...)
I find it particularly interesting because a while back he himself was a great example of a patient independently discovering, against official advice, that their rare, debilitating illness could be cured -- specifically, that of losing his voice due to a neurological condition. He doesn't mention it in the blog post though.
(At least, I think this is a better example to use than woman who found out how to regenerate her pinky.)
[Aside] I'm not sure how I feel about Scott Adams in general. I enjoyed his work a lot when I was younger, but he seems very prone to being contrarian for its own sake and over-estimating his competence in unrelated domains.
I'm working on an analysis of Google services/products shutdown, inspired by http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/mar/22/google-keep-services-closed
The idea is to collate as many shuttered Google services/products as possible, and still live services/products, with their start and end dates. I'm also collecting a few covariates: number of Google hits, type (program/service/physical object/other), and maybe Alexa rank of the home page & whether source code was released.
This turns out to be much more difficult than it looks because many shut downs are not prominently advertised, and many start dates are lost to our ongoing digital dark age (for example, when did the famous & popular Google Translate open? After an hour applying my excellent research skills, #lesswrong's and no less than 5 people on Google+'s help, the best we can say is that it opened some time between 02 and 08 March 2001). Regardless, I'm up to 274 entries.
The idea is to graph the data, look for trends, and do a survival analysis with the covariates to extrapolate how much longer random Google things have to live.
Does anyone have suggestions as to additional predictive variables which could be found with a reasonable amount of effort for >274 Google things?
It was recently brought to my attention that Eliezer Yudkowsky regards the monetary theories of Scott Sumner (short overview) to be (what we might call) a "correct contrarian cluster", or an island of sanity when most experts (though apparently a decreasing number) believe the opposite.
I would be interested in knowing why. To me, Sumner's views are a combination of:
a) Goodhart's folly ("Historically, an economic metric [that nobody cared about until he started talking about] has been correlated with economic goodness; if we only targeted this metric with policy, we would get that goodness. Here are some plausible mechanisms why ..." -- my paraphrase, of course)
b) Belief that "hoarded" money is pure waste with no upside. (For how long? A day? A month?)
If you are likewise surprised by Eliezer's high regard for these theories, please join me in encouraging him to explain his reasoning.
Forgive me for stating the obvious: this sounds like the sunk cost fallacy. There's a cost in that you did not buy coins when they were cheaper, and though this does affect how you feel about the issue, it shouldn't (instrumental-rationally) affect your choices.
I did buy coins when they were at ~40$, and I was then regretting that I hadn't bought more when two weeks earlier they were at 10$. When they were at 70$ I chose to buy some more -- and I regretted not buying more when they were at 40$. But both my buy at 40$ and my buy at 70$ were good ones.
Now bitcoins are at around 141$ to 143$. Whether to buy or not buy at this point should depend on an estimation of whether the price is going to go up or down from here -- and your estimation of how soon and how far the price of bitcoin is going to rise or crash from this point onwards. There's always a risk and a chance.
The free will page is obnoxious. There have been several times in recent months when I have needed to link to a description of the relationship between choice, determinism and prediction but the wiki still goes out of its way to obfuscate that knowledge.
That's a nice thought. But it turns out that many lesswrong participants don't try to solve it on their own. They just stay confused.
There have been some other discussions of the subject here (and countless elsewhere). Can someone suggest the best reference available that I could link to?
You know you spend too much time on LW when someone mentioning paperclips within earshot startles you.
How many people will agree with a statement depends on what typeface it's written in.
I’m doing a research project on attraction and various romantic strategies. I’ve made several short online courses organizing several different approaches to seduction, and am looking for men 18 and older who are interested in taking them as well as a short pre and post survey designed to gauge the effectiveness of the techniques taught. If you are want to sign up, or know anyone who might be interested you can use this google form to register. If you have any questions comment or PM me and I’ll get back to you.
ETA:Since someone mentioned publication I thought I should clarify. This is specifically a student research project so, unlike a class project, I am aiming for a peer-reviewed publication, however the odds are much slimmer than if someone more experienced/academically higher status were running it. Also, even if it doesn't get formally published I will follow the "Gwern model". That is to say I'll publish my results online along with as much as my materials as I can (the courses are my own work + publicly available texts, but I only have a limited license for the measures I'm using).
Here is a blog which asserts that a global conspiracy of transhumanists controls the media and places subliminal messages in pop music such as the Black Eyed Peas music video "Imma Be" in order to persuade people to join the future hive-mind. It is remarkably lucid and articulate given the hysterical nature of the claim, and even includes a somewhat reasonable treatment of transhumanism.
http://vigilantcitizen.com/musicbusiness/transhumanism-psychological-warfare-and-b-e-p-s-imma-be/
EDIT: I see this was previously posted back in 2010, but if you haven't witnessed this blog yet it is worth a look.
Good to know that someone's keeping the ol' Illuminati flame burning. Pope Bob would be proud.
The thing I find most curious about the Illuminati conspiracy theory is that if you look at the doctrines of the historical Bavarian Illuminati, they are pretty unremarkable to any educated person today. The Illuminati were basically secular humanists — they wanted secular government, morality and charity founded on "the brotherhood of man" rather than on religious obedience, education for women, and so on. They were secret because these ideas were illegal in the conservative Catholic dictatorship of 18th-century Bavaria — which suppressed the group promptly when their security failed.
If CFAR becomes at all successful, conspiracists will start referring to it as an Illuminati group. They will not be entirely wrong.
Offhand, I haven't seen any LWers write about having chemical addictions, which seems a little surprising considering the number of people here. Have I missed some, or is it too embarrassing to mention, or is it just that people who are attracted to LW are very unlikely to have chemical addictions?
To busy with the internet addictions?
As usual, caffeine addiction is so common that it needs to either be explicitly excluded or else its inclusion pointed out so readers know how meaningless the results may be for what they think of as 'chemical addiction'.
*wants to change answer now*
Yeah me too, I drink the stuff like water.
I started a blog about a month or two ago. I use it as a "people might read this so I better do what I'm committing to do!" tool.
Link: Am I There Yet?
Feel free to read/comment.
I get the impression that there is something extremely broken in my social skills system (or lack there of). Something subtle, since professionals have been unable to point this out to me.
I find that my interests rarely overlap with anyone else's enough to sustain (or start, really) conversation. I don't feel motivated to force myself to look at whatever everyone else is talking about in order to participate in a conversation about it.
But it feels like there's something beyond that. I was given the custom title of "the confusenator" on one forum.... (read more)
If I stay up ~4 hours past my normal waking period, I get into a flow state and it becomes really easy to read heavy literature. It's like the part of my brain that usually wants to shift attention to something low effort is silenced. I've had a similar, but less intense increase in concentration after sex / masturbation.
Anyone else had that experience?
Is there any particular protocol on reviving previously-recurring threads that are now dormant? I had some things to put in a Group Rationality Diary entry, but there hasn't been a post since early January. I sent cata a message a few days ago; haven't heard back.
Strong AI is hard to predict: see this recent study. Thus, my own position on Strong AI timelines is one of normative agnosticism: "I don't know, and neither does anyone else!"
Increases in computing power are pretty predictable, but for AI you probably need fundamental mathematical insights, and it's damn hard to predict those.
In 1900, David Hilbert posed 23 unsolved problems in mathematics. Imagine trying to predict when those would be solved. His 3rd problem was solved that same year. His 7th problem was solved in 1935. His 8th problem still h... (read more)
We can still try. As it happens, a perfectly relevant paper was just released: "On the distribution of time-to-proof of mathematical conjectures"
... (read more)I've been looking at postgraduate programmes in the philosophy of Artificial intelligence, (primarily but not necessarily in the UK). Does anyone have any advice or suggestions?
I'm going to Hacker School this summer, and I need a place to stay in NYC between approximately June 1 and August 23. Does anyone want an intrepid 20-year-old rationalist and aspiring hacker splitting the rent with them?
Also, applications for this batch of Hacker School are still open, if you're looking for something great to do this summer.
After rereading the metaethics sequence, it occurred to me a possible reason why people can enjoy (the artistic genre) of tragedy. I think there's an argument to be made along the lines of "watching tragedy is about not feeling guilty when you can't predict the future well enough to see what right is."
Grading is the bane of my existence. Every time I have to grade homework assignments, I employ various tricks to keep myself working.
My normal approach is to grade 5 homework papers, take a short break, then grade 5 more. It occurred to me just now that this is similar to the "pomodoro" technique so many people here like, except work-based instead of time-based. Is the time-based method better? Should I switch?
Anyway, back to grading 5 more homework papers.
I've known for a while that for every user there's an RSS feed of their comments, but for some reason it's taken me a while to get in the habit of adding interesting people in Google Reader. I'm glad I have.
(Effort in adding them now isn't wasted, since when I move from Google Reader I'll use some sort of tool to move all my subscriptions across at once to whatever I move to)
Trying to get a handle on the concept of agency. EY tends to mean something extreme, like "heroic responsibility", where all the non-heroic rest of us are NPCs. Luke's description is slightly less ambitious: an 'agent' is something that makes choices so as to maximize the fulfillment of explicit desires, given explicit beliefs. Wikipedia defines is as a "capacity to act", which is not overly useful (do ants have agency?). The LW wiki defines it as the ability to take actions which one's beliefs indicate would lead to the accomplishment ... (read more)
In HP:MoR, Harry mentioned that breaking conservation of energy allows for faster-than-light signalling. Can someone explain how?
I had some students complaining about test-taking anxiety! One guy came in and solved the last midterm problem 5 minutes after he had turned in the exam, so I think this is a real thing. One girl said that calling it something that's not "exam" made her perform better. However, it seems like none of them had ever really confronted the problem? They just sort of take tests and go "Oh yeah, I should have gotten that. I'm bad at taking tests."
Have any of you guys experienced this? If so, have you tried to tackle it head-on? It seems like ... (read more)
I watched an awesome movie, and now I'm coasting in far mode. I really like being in far mode, but is this useful? What if I don't want to lose my awesome-movie high?
Are there some things that far mode is especially good for? Should I be managing finances in this state? Reading a textbook? Is far mode instrumentally valuable in any way? Or should I make the unfortunate transition back to near mode?
How much do we know about reasoning about subjective concepts? Bayes' law tells you how probable you should consider any given black-and-white no-room-for-interpretation statement, but it doesn't tell you when you should come up with a new subjective concept, nor (I think) what to do once you've got one.
Hazards of botched IT Cost overruns are nothing compared to what can go wrong when you actually use the software.
Software which can answer "is this obviously stupid?" would be a step towards FAI.
Toby Ord gave a Google Tech Talk on efficient charity and QALYs this march.
Does anyone here have thoughts on the x-risk implications of Bitcoin? Rebalancing is a way to make money off of high-volatility investments like Bitcoin (the more volatility, the more money you make through rebalancing). If lots of people included Bitcoin in their portfolios, and started rebalancing them this way, then the price of Bitcoin would also become less volatile as a side effect. (It might even start growing in price at whatever the market rate of return for stocks/bonds/etc. is, though I'd have to think about that.)
So given that I could spread this meme on how you can get paid to decrease Bitcoin's volatility, should I do it?
So I'm running through the Quantum Mechanics sequence, and am about 2/3 of the way through. Wanted to check in here to ask a few questions, and see if there aren't some hidden gotchas from people knowledgeable about the subject who have also read the sequence.
My biggest hangup so far has been understanding when it is that different quantum configurations sum, versus when they don't. All of the experiments from the earlier posts (such as distinct configurations) seem to indicate that configurations sum when they are in the "same" time and place.... (read more)
I don't know anything about quantum computing, so please tell me if this idea makes sense... if you imagine many-worlds, can it help you develop better intuitions about quantum algorithms? Anyone tried that? Any resuts?
I assume an analogy: In mathematics, proper imagination can see you some results faster, even if you could get the same results by computation. For example it is easier to imagine a "sphere" than a "set of points with distance at most D from a given center C". You can see that an intersection of a sphere and a plane is a ... (read more)
Shameless self-promotion:
http://sthomme.wordpress.com/
Recently, for a philosophy course on(roughly) the implications of AI for society, I wrote an essay on whether we should take fears about AI risks seriously, and I had the thought that it might be worth posting to LW discussion. Is there/would there be interest in such a thing? THB, there's not a great deal of original content, but I'd still be interest in the comments of anyone who is interested.
LW Women: Submissions on Misogyny was moved to main, but the article doesn't show up as New, Promoted, or Recent.
I'm not sure if this is the right place for this, but I've just read a scary article that claims that "The financial system as a whole functions as a hostile AI", and I was wondering what LW thinks of that.
Sudden Clarity.
(The OB memes wasn't me.)
In Anki, LaTeX is rendered too large. Does anyone know an effective fix?
EDIT: I found one. In Anki, LaTeX is rendered to an image and from then on treated as one. Adding
to a new line of the "Styling" section of the "Card Type" for whatever Note you're using rescales all the images in that card type. So provided you don't use LaTeX and images on the same Note then this fixes all your problems.
ignore this experiment
ignore this experiment.
What can you usefully do with underutilised processing power? (E.g. spare computer and server time).
So far the best I can come up with is running Folding@home. But it seems like there should be a way to sell server space etc.
Remember the power consumption entailed: http://www.gwern.net/Charity%20is%20not%20about%20helping
Site suggestion:
When somebody attempts to post a comment with the words "why", "comment", and "downvoted", it should open a prompt directing them to an FAQ explaining most likely reasons for their downvote, and also warning them prior to actually submitting the comment that it's likely to be unproductive and just lead to more downvotes.
(Personally I think this site needs to have a little more patience with people asking these questions, as they almost always come from new users who are still getting accustomed to the community norms, but that's just me.)
If the advice of the welcome thread doesn't match the actual LW norms, we should change either the welcome thread or the norms.