Open Thread August 31 - September 6

Tumblr user su3su2u1 (probably most known to LWers for his critiques of HPMOR's scientific claims, and subsequent fallout with Eliezer) has an interesting post about MIRI's research strategy. I think it has some really good ideas. What do other folks think?

[-]Gavin9y140

It seems like a lot of focus on MIRI giving good signals to outsiders. The "publish or perish" treadmill of academia is exactly why privately funded organizations like MIRI are needed.

The things that su3su2u1 wants MIRI to be already exist in academia. The whole point of MIRI is to create an organization of a type that doesn't currently exist, focused on much longer term goals. If you measure organizations on the basis of how many publications they make, you're going to get a lot of low-quality publications. Citations are only slightly better, especially if you're focused on ignored areas of research.

If you have outside-view criticisms of an organization and you're suddenly put in charge of them, the first thing you have to do is check the new inside-view information available and see what's really going on.

[-]cousin_it9y230

Ever since I started hanging out on LW and working on UDT-ish math, I've been telling SIAI/MIRI folks that they should focus on public research output above all else. (Eliezer's attitude back then was the complete opposite.) Eventually Luke came around to that point of view, and things started to change. But that took, like, five years of persuasion from me and other folks.

After reading su3su2u1's post, I feel that growing closer to academia is another obviously good step. It'll happen eventually, if MIRI is to have an impact. Why wait another five years to start? Why not start now?

2IlyaShpitser9y

[-]Stingray9y170

The whole point of MIRI is to create an organization of a type that doesn't currently exist, focused on much longer term goals. If you measure organizations on the basis of how many publications they make, you're going to get a lot of low-quality publications. Citations are only slightly better, especially if you're focused on ignored areas of research.

Just because MIRI researchers' incentives aren't distorted by "publish or perish" culture, it doesn't mean they aren't distorted by other things, especially those that are associated with lack of feedback and accountability.

[-]IlyaShpitser9y160

If MIRI doesn't publish reasonably frequently (via peer review), how do you know they aren't wasting donor money? Donors can't evaluate their stuff themselves, and MIRI doesn't seem to submit a lot of stuff to peer review.

How do you know they aren't just living it up in a very expensive part of the country doing the equivalent of freshman philosophizing in front of the white board. The way you usually know is via peer review -- e.g. other people previously declared to have produced good things declare that MIRI produces good things.

[-]gwern9y180

If MIRI doesn't publish reasonably frequently (via peer review), how do you know they aren't wasting donor money?

How did science get done for the centuries before peer review? Why do you place such weight on such a recently invented construct like peer review (you may remember Einstein being so enraged by the first and only time he tried out this new thing called 'peer review' that he vowed to never again submit anything to a 'peer reviewed' journal), a construct which routinely fails anytime it's evaluated and has been shown to be extremely unreliable where the same paper can be accepted and rejected based on chance? If peer-review is so good, why do so many terrible papers get published and great Nobel-prize-winning work rejected repeatedly? If peer review is such an effective method of divining quality, why do many communities seem to get along fine with desultory use of peer review where it's barely used or left as the final step long after the results have been disseminated and evaluated and people don't even bother to read the final peer-reviewed version (particularly in economics, I get the impression that everyone reads the preprints & working papers and the final pu... (read more)

7IlyaShpitser9y

Is this an "arguments as soldiers" thing? Compare an isomorphic argument: "how did medicine get done for the centuries before antibiotics." Leaving aside that this an argument from authority, there is also selection bias here: peer review may well not be crucial -- if you happen to be of Einstein's caliber. But: "they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." I am sure plenty of Bozos are enraged at peer review too, unjustly rejecting their crap. There is a stochastic element to peer review, but in my experience it works remarkably well, given what it is. Good papers are very likely to get a fair shake and get published. I routinely get very penetrating comments that greatly improve the quality of the final paper. I almost always get help with scholarship from reviewers (e.g. this is probably a good paper to cite.) A bigger issue I saw was not chance, but ideology from reviewers. I very occasionally get bad reviews (<5% chance) and associate editors (people who handle the paper and assign reviewers) are almost always helpful in such cases. I asked you this before, gwern, how much experience with actual peer review (let's say in applied stats journals, as that is closest to what you do) do you have? Absolute numbers are kind of useless here. Do you have some work in mind on false positive and false negative rates for peer review? I don't think we disagree here, I think this is a form of peer review. I routinely do this with my papers, and am asked to look over preprints by others. I think this is fine for certain types of papers (generally very specialized or very large/weighty ones). The worry is MIRI's conception of what a "peer" is basically ignores the wider academic community (which has a lot of intellectual firepower), so they end up in a bubble. The other worry is people who worry about getting tenured are incentivized to be productive (albeit imperfectly). MIRI is not incentivized to be productive except in some vague "saving the world" sense. And indeed, MIRI a

[-]gwern9y150

Is this an "arguments as soldiers" thing? Compare an isomorphic argument: "how did medicine get done for the centuries before antibiotics."

That's not isomorphic. To put it bluntly, medicine didn't. It only started becoming net beneficial extremely recently (and even now tons of medicine is harmful or a pure waste), based on copying a tremendous amount of basic science like biology and bacteriology and benefitting from others' discoveries, and importing methodology like randomized trials (which it still chafes at) and not by importing peer review. Up until the very late 1800s or so, you would have been better off often ignoring doctors if you were, say, an expecting mother wondering whether to give birth in a hospital pre-Semmelweiss. You can't expect too much too much help from a field which published its first RCT in 1948 (on, incidentally, an antibiotic).

Leaving aside that this an argument from authority,

I include it as a piquant anecdote since you seem to have no interest in looking up any of the statistical evidence on the unreliability and biases (in the statistical senses) of peer review, or the absence of any especial evidence that it works.

But:

... (read more)

1IlyaShpitser9y

Medicine was often harmful in the past, with some occasional parts that helped, e.g. amputating gangrenous limbs was dangerous and people died, but probably was still a benefit on net. Admiral Nelson had multiple surgeries and was in serious danger of infection and death afterwards, but he would have been a goner for sure without surgery. Science was pretty similar, it was mostly nonsense with occasional islands of sense. It didn't really get underway until, what, Francis Bacon wrote about biases and empiricism? That is not very long ago. The early "gentlemen scholars" all did informal peer review by sending their stuff to each other (they also hid discoveries from each other due to competition and egos, but this stuff happens today too). ---------------------------------------- Gwern, peer review is my life. My tenure case will be decided by peer review, ultimately. I do peer review myself as a service, constantly. I know all about peer review. The burden of proof is on MIRI, not on me. MIRI is the one that wants funding and people to save the world. It's up to MIRI to use all available financial and intellectual resources out there, which includes engaging with academia. I really think you should moderate your criticism of peer review. Peer review for data analysis papers is very different from peer review for mathematics or theoretical physics. Fields are different and have vastly different cultural norms. Even in the same field, different conferences/journals may have different norms. I do a lot of theory. When I do data analysis, my collabs and I try to lead by example. What is the point of being angry? Angry outsiders just make people circle the wagons.

1Vaniver9y

This argument seems exactly identical to the argument for trepanning, even including the survivorship bias. (One of the suspected uses of trepanning was to revive people otherwise thought dead.) While we're looking at anecdotes, this bit of Nelson's experience with surgery seems relevant: I'm not sure I'd count that as a win for surgery, or evidence that he couldn't have survived without it! But this means that, unless you're particularly good at distancing yourself from your work, you should expect to be worse at judging it than a disinterested observer. The classic anecdote about "which half?" comes to mind, or the reaction of other obstetricians to Semmelweis's concerns. Regardless, we would expect that, if studies are better than anecdotes, studies on peer review will outperform anecdotes on peer review, right?

0IlyaShpitser9y

It's not identical because we know, with benefit of hindsight, that amputating potentially gangrenous limbs is a good idea. The folks in the past had solid empirical basis for amputations, even if they did not fully understand gangrene. Medicine was mostly, but not always nonsense in the past. A lot of the stuff was not based on the scientific method, because they had no scientific method. But there were isolated communities that came up with sensible things for sensible reasons. This is one case when standard practices were sensible (there are other isolated examples, e.g. honey to disinfect wounds). Ok, but isn't this "incentive tennis?" Gwern's incentives are clearer than mine here -- he's not a mainstream academic, so he loses out on status. So a "low motive" interpretation of the argument is: "your status castle is built on sand, tear it down!" Gwern is also pretty angry. Are we going to stockpile argument ammunition [X] of the form "you are more biased when evaluating peer review because of [X]"? For me, peer review is a double edged sword -- I get papers rejected sometimes, and at other times I get silly reviewer comments, or editors that make me spend years revising. I have a lot of data both ways. The point with peer review is I sleep better at night due to extra sanity checking. Who sanity-checks MIRI's whiteboard stuff? A "low motive" argument for me would be "keep peer review, but have it softball all my papers, they are obviously so amazing why can't you people see that!" A "low motive" argument for MIRI would be "look buddy, we are trying to save the world here, we don't have time for your flawed human institutions. Don't you worry about our whiteboard content, you probably don't know enough math to understand it anyways." MIRI is doing pretty theoretical decision theory. Is that a good idea? Are they producing enough substantive work? In standard academia peer review would help with the former question, and answering to the grant agency and tenure

1Vaniver9y

I would put the start of solid empirical basis for gangrene treatment at Middleton Goldsmith during the American Civil War (dropping mortality from 45% to 3%), about sixty years after Nelson. I think this is putting too much weight on superficial resemblance. Yes, gangrene treatment from Goldsmith to today involves amputation. But that does not mean amputation pre-Goldsmith actually decreased mortality over no treatment! My priors are pretty strong that it would increase it, but going into details on my priors is perhaps a digression. (The short version is that I take a very Hansonian view of medicine and its efficacy.) I'm not aware of (but would greatly appreciate) any evidence on that question. (To see where I'm coming from, consider that there is a reference class that contains both "trepanning" and "brian surgery" that seems about as natural as the reference class that includes amputation before and after Goldsmith.) But this only makes sense if peer review actually improves the quality of studies. Do you believe that's the case, and if so, why? I think my argument is domain expert tennis. That is, I think that in order to evaluate whether or not peer review is effective, we shouldn't ask scientists who use peer review, we should ask scientists who study peer review. Similarly, in order to determine whether a treatment is effective, we shouldn't ask the users of the treatment, but statisticians. If you go down to the church/synagogue/mosque, they'll say that prayer is effective, and they're obviously the domain experts on prayer. I'm just applying the same principles and same level of skepticism. I am not sure what the relevance of either of these are. If anything, the latter suggests that we need to make the case for peer review field by field, and so proponents have an even harder time than they do without that claim!

1IlyaShpitser9y

I think treating gangrene by amputation was well known in the ancient world. Depending on how you deal w/ hemorrhage/complications you would have a pretty high post-surgery mortality rate, but the point is, it is still an improvement on gangrene killing you for sure. Actually, while I didn't look into this, I expect Jewish and Greek surgeons would have been pretty good compared to medieval European ones. I don't have data from the ancient world :). But mortality from gangrene if you leave the dead tissue in place is what, >95%? Amputation didn't have to be perfect or even very good, it merely had to do better than an almost certain death sentence. Well, because peer review would do things like say "your proof has a bug," "you didn't cite this important paper," "this is an exact a very minor modification of [approach]." Peer review in my case is a social institution where smart knowledgeable people read my stuff. You can say that's heavily confounded by your field, the types of papers you write (or review), etc., and I agree! But that is of little relevance to gwern, he thinks the whole thing needs to be burned to the ground. Not following. The claim "peer review sucks for all X," is stronger than the claim "peer review sucks for some X." The person making the stronger claim will have a harder time demonstrating it than the person making the weaker claim. So as a status quo defender, I have an easier time attacking the stronger claim.

1Vaniver9y

I think you missed the meat of my claim; yes, al-Zharawi said to amputate as a response to gangrene, but that is not a solid empirical basis, and as a result it is not obvious that it actually extended lifespans on net. We don't have the data to verify, and we don't have reason to trust their methodology. Now, maybe gangrene is a case where we can move away from priors on whether archaic surgery was net positive or net negative based on inside view reasoning. I'm not a doctor or a medical historian, and the one place I can think of to look for data (homeopathic treatment of gangrene) doesn't seem to have any sort of aggregated data, just case reports of survival. Perhaps an actual medical historian could determine it one way or the other, or come up with a better estimate of the survival rate. But my guess is that 95% is a very high estimate. I could, but why? I'll simply point out that is not science, and that it's not even trying to be science. It's raw good intentions. Suppose that the person on the street thinks that price caps on food are a good idea, because it would be morally wrong to gouge on necessities and the poor deserve to be able to afford to eat. Then someone comes along and points out that the frequent queues, or food shortages, or starvation, are a consequence of this policy, regardless of the policy's intentions. The person on the street is confused--but food being cheap is a good thing, why is this person so angry about price caps? They're angry because of the difference between perception of policies and their actual consequences. The claim I saw you as making is that peer review's efficacy in field x is unrelated to its efficacy in field y. If true, that makes it harder for either of us to convince the other in either direction. I, with the null hypothesis that peer review does not add scientific value, would need to be convinced of peer review's efficacy in every field separately. The situation is symmetric for you: your null hypothesis t

1IlyaShpitser9y

Why do you suppose he said this? People didn't have Bacon's method, but people had eyes, and accumulated experience. Neolithic people managed, over time, to figure out how all the useful plants in their biome are useful, how did they do it without science? "Science" isn't this thing that came on a beam of light once Bacon finished his writings. Humans had bits and pieces of science right for a long time (heck, my favorite citation is a two arm nutrition trial in the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament). We can ask a doc, but I am pretty sure post-wound gangrene is basically fatal if untreated. What is not science? My direct experience with peer review? "Science" is a method you use to tease things out from a disinterested Nature that hides the mechanism, but spits data at you. If you had direct causal access to a system, you would examine it directly. If I have a computer program on my laptop, I am not going to "do science" to it, I am going to look at it and see what it does. Note that I am only talking about peer review I am familiar with. I am not making claims about social psychology peer review, because I don't live in that world. It might be really bad -- that's for social psychologists to worry about. In fact, they are doing a lot of loud soul searching right now: system working as intended. The misdeeds of social psychology don't really reflect on me or my field, we have our own norms. My only intersection with social psychology is me supplying them with useful mediation methodology sometimes. I expect gwern's policy of being really angry on the internet is going to have either a zero effect or a mildly negative effect on the problem. The consequences of peer review for me is, on the receiving end, is generally people improve my paper (and sometimes are picky for silly reasons). The consequences of peer review for me, on the giving side, is I reject shitty papers, and make good and marginal papers better. I don't need to "do science" to know this, I can

0Vaniver9y

On the subject of medical advice, Scott and Scurvy reminded me of this conversation.

0Vaniver9y

Sure. I think al-Zharawi got observational evidence, but I think that there are systematic defects in how humans collect data from observation, which makes observational judgments naturally suspect. That is, I'm happy to take "al-Zharawi says X" as a good reason to promote X as a hypothesis worthy of testing, but I am more confident in reality's entanglement with test results than proposed hypotheses. I very much agree that science is some combination of methodology and principles which was gradually discovered by humans, and categorically unlike revealed knowledge, whose core goal is the creation of maps that describe the territory as closely and correctly as possible. (To be clear, science in this view is not 'having that goal,' but actions and principles that actually lead to achieving that goal.) I asked history.stackexchange; we'll see if that produces anything useful. Asking doctors is also a good idea, but I don't have as easy an in for that. Not quite--what I had in mind as "not science" was confusing your direct experience with peer review and evaluation of the intentions as a scientific case for peer review. Right now, sure, but we got onto this point because you thought not publishing with peer review means we can't be sure MIRI isn't wasting donor money, which makes sense primarily if we're confident in peer review in MIRI's field. Eh. While I agree that being angry on the internet is unsightly, it's not obvious to me that it's ineffective at accomplishing useful goals. "Whole system" seems unclear. It's pretty obvious to me that gwern wants to kill a specific element for solid reasons, as evidenced by the following quotes:

0Lumifer9y

Would you agree that some parts of the system should be burned to the ground?

4Viliam9y

Peer review seems like a form of costly signalling. If you pass peer review, it only demonstrates that you have the ability to pass peer review. On the other hand, if you don't pass peer review, it signals that you don't have even this ability. (If so much crap passes peer review, why doesn't your research? Is it even worse than the usual crap?) This is why I recommend to treat "peer review" simply as a hoop you have to jump through, otherwise people will bother you about it endlessly. To remove the suspicion that your research is even worse than the stuff that already gets published.

3Lumifer9y

Mostly by well-off people satisfying their personal curiosity. Other than that, by finding a rich and/or powerful patron and keeping him amused :-D I agree that the cult of peer review is overblown. But does MIRI produce any relevant and falsifiable output at all?

1Jiro9y

I would answer differently than you: "Very inefficiently and with lots of errors".

4Good_Burning_Plastic9y

As opposed to quick, reliable present-day peer-reviewed science? ;-)

4Lumifer9y

Well, not that this has changed...

0Douglas_Knight9y

What leads you to that conclusion? When do you think peer review began and how do you judge efficiency before and after?

0Vaniver9y

I think this isn't really cutting to the heart of things--which seems to be 'reputation among intellectuals,' which is related to 'reputation among academia,' which is related to 'journal articles survive the peer review process.' It seems to me that the peer review process as it exists now is a pretty terrible way of capturing reputation among intellectuals, and that we could do something considerably better with the technology we have now.

0Lumifer9y

Anyone suggested a system based on blockchain yet? X-)

1Viliam9y

I imagine a system where new Sciencecoins could be mined by doing valid scientific research, but then they could be used as a usual cryptocurrency. That would also solve the problem of funding research. :D

7[anonymous]9y

I think there's definitely not enough thought given to this, especially when they say one of the main constraints is getting interested researchers.

3Viliam9y

Isn't it "cultish" to assume that an organization could do anything better than the high-status Academia? :P Because many people seem to worry about publishing, I would probably treat it as another form of PR. PR is something that is not your main reason to exist, but you do in anyway, to survive socially. Maximizing the academic article production seems to fit here: it is not MIRI's goal, but it would help to get MIRI accepted (or maybe not) and it would be good for advertising. Therefore, AcademiaPR should be a separate department of MIRI, but it definitely should exist. It could probably be done by one person. The job of the person would be to maximize MIRI-related academic articles, without making it too costly for the organization. One possible method that didn't require even five minutes of thinking: Find smart university students who are interested in MIRI's work but want to stay in academia. Invite them to MIRI's workshops, make them familiar with what MIRI is doing but doesn't care about publishing. Then offer them to become co-authors by taking the ideas, polishing them, and getting them published in academic journals. MIRI gets publications, the students get a new partially explored topic to write about; win/win. Also known as "division of labor".

4IlyaShpitser9y

Really? You can't think of another reason to publish than PR?

0Viliam9y

I can. But PR also plays a role here, and this is how to fix it relatively cheaply. And it would also provide feedback about what people outside of MIRI think about MIRI's research.

2IlyaShpitser9y

I think the primary purpose of peer review isn't PR, but sanity checking. Peer reviewed publications shouldn't be a concession to outsiders, but the primary means of getting work done.

1ChristianKl9y

It seems that writing publishable papers isn't easy.

0IlyaShpitser9y

Yes, GP's is an extremely myopic and dangerous attitude.

-1passive_fist9y

One dictionary definition of academia is "the environment or community concerned with the pursuit of research, education, and scholarship." By this definition MIRI is already part of academia. It's just a separate academic island with tenuous links to the broader academic mainland. MIRI is a research organization. If you maintain that it is outside of academia then you have to explain what exactly makes it different, and why it should be immune to the pressures of publishing. Low-quality publications don't get accepted and published. I know of no universities that would rather have a lot of third-rate publications than a small number of Nature publications. I'll agree with you that things like impact factor aren't good metrics but that's somewhat missing the point here.

2passive_fist9y

A very reasonable suggestion, and I'm not just saying that because I have a PhD. I'm saying it because it's so easy to reinvent the wheel and think you're doing original research when you're really just re-discovering other people's work in a different context. It's very hard to root out these sorts of errors; when I was doing a PhD I thought the work I was doing in developmental biology was new and unique until about a year later I found that the 'new' mathematical problems I had solved had actually been widely used in polymer science for years. I just wasn't able to find the research because none of the search terms matched. A link to the wider academic community would do a lot to help in MIRIs goals, and a very good way to do this would be undertaking PhDs. It should be a snap for the MIRI folks...

0NancyLebovitz9y

Do you have any ideas about how it could be made easier to find out whether you're just rediscovering previous work?

0passive_fist9y

Eliminate context, reduce problems to their abstract fundamentals, collaborate with other people who might have a chance of having been exposed to similar problems in other domains.

[-]Panorama9y100

Julian Savulescu: The Philosopher Who Says We Should Play God

Australian bioethicist Julian Savulescu has a knack for provocation. Take human cloning. He says most of us would readily accept it if it benefited us. As for eugenics—creating smarter, stronger, more beautiful babies—he believes we have an ethical obligation to use advanced technology to select the best possible children.

A protégé of the philosopher Peter Singer, Savulescu is a prominent moral philosopher at the University of Oxford, where he directs the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. He also edits the Journal of Medical Ethics. Savulescu isn’t shy about stepping onto ethical minefields. He sees nothing wrong with doping to help cyclists climb those steep mountains in the Tour de France. Some elite athletes will always cheat to boost their performance, so instead of trying to enforce rules that will be broken, he claims we’d be better off with a system that allows low-dose doping.

So does Savulescu just get off being outrageous? “I actually think of myself as the voice of common sense,” he says, though he admits to receiving his share of hate mail. He’s frustrated by how hard it is to have reasoned arguments about loaded issues without getting flamed on the Internet. Savulescu thinks we need to become far more adept at sorting out difficult moral issues. Otherwise, he says, the human species will face dire consequences in the coming decades.

[-]Lumifer9y90

An interesting paper by the name of Fuck nuance.

Abstract:

Seriously, fuck it.

No, I'm not kidding, this is the actual abstract at the beginning of the paper.

Technically, it's about sociological theories, but I feel the general principle applies much more widely.

(Normally I would quote a teaser chunk of the paper here, but this PDF file seems unusually resistant to copy-and-paste-as-text and I don't feel like manually inserting back all the spaces between the words...)

[-]PhilGoetz9y100

Nancy Leibowitz was quoting this. Having spent the weekend reading 20th century French philosophers, this was refreshing. From the paper:

To make a loose statistical analogy, [asking for more nuance] is a little like continuing to add variables to a regression on the grounds that the explained variance keeps going up.

It's not a loose analogy. It's a literal description of an example of the sort of thing that should happen in the reality underlying the theory.

There is another aspect to nuance that I don't yet see mentioned in the paper. In French philosophy, the nuance is nuance of interpretation, not an attempt to handle more cases. Many theories are presented without having any cases at all that they handle! Jacques Lacan, for instance, only described one case history during his entire career; he presented detailed theories of personality development with no citations or data.

This happens with many who descend academically from Hegel: Marx, Lacan, Derrida. The model is not "nuanced" in the sense of handling many cases; it is never demonstrated to handle any data at all, or at best one over-simplified case (a general claim, or a particular sentence which the philosophe... (read more)

7NancyLebovitz9y

Thanks for mentioning that I'd already brought up the paper. I've got three quotes here. My last name is Lebovitz. I think of the way people tend to get it wrong as a rationality warning. I know about those errors because I have an interest in my name, but the commonness of the errors suggests that people get a tremendous amount wrong. How much of it matters? How could we even start to find out?

1PhilGoetz9y

Sorry for misspelling your name. I don't think memory errors are rationality errors.

0NancyLebovitz9y

Memory errors have a bearing on rationality because you need accurate data to think about, and one of the primary causes of not remembering something is not having noticed it. I can say my name twice, spell it, and show people a business card, and still have them get it wrong. If you want more about how little people perceive, I recommend Sleight of Mind, a book about neurology and stage magic.

0OrphanWilde9y

Judging by the particular way you mis-spelled the name, I'd guess your memory is more auditory in nature?

4Lumifer9y

It's not a memory error, it's a hasty pattern-match error.

2btrettel9y

Excellent point. These errors are fairly common. When I use this username, I somewhat frequently see people write it as brettel. I guess that means that they interpret it as brett-el, when in reality it's b-trettel. I can understand this.

3[anonymous]9y

Eh, you're lucky. I always read 'malcolmocean' as 'macromole - wait'.

0PhilGoetz9y

I think it's a strong-prior error. There are many different spellings, one or two letters apart, and I pick the one I've seen most often.

0NancyLebovitz9y

I agree that it's a pattern-match error, but I think I'd classify that as a type of memory error.

4Lumifer9y

I think of memory errors as retrieving something other than what was stored. In this case I doubt people "stored" your name correctly -- most likely they interpreted it wrong to start with. It's a perception error, then.

[-]NancyLebovitz9y80

Gwern rubbishes longevity research.

I think he's taking about the dream of achieving indefinite numbers of healthy years.

However, there are some people who live into their 90s in pretty good health, and they're far from the majority. What's the likelihood of just making good health into one's 90s much more likely? I'm not talking about lifestyle improvement-- I'm talking about some technological fix.

[-]Vaniver9y100

So, he's specifically talking about the failures of previous longevity research. It seems to me that modern longevity research has portions that are considerably better (among other things, the reductionistic view appears to be the dominant view among the top researchers). Consider this section in particular:

I could wish Stambler made more of an effort to evaluate researchers on scientific grounds and give a better idea of where ideas have been vindicated or refuted by subsequent work.

That Stambler spent too little time on whether or not they actually got the science right / pushed in the right or wrong direction, and spent too much time focusing on their political persuasion, strikes me as highly relevant and interesting when it comes to scientific history (and the modern versions--namely, choosing who to fund or not, and what experiments to pursue or not).

1NancyLebovitz9y

Gwern also makes a more general claim that aging is too complex for any simple solution to be plausible.

1knb9y

I don't think SENS is one of the simple approaches Gwern was referring to in context. The simple approaches are things like turning off a genetically coded "mortality switch," lengthening telomeres, calorie-restriction mimetics, or just getting tons of antioxidants in your diet. Here's a recent Aubrey de Grey interview.

[-]Richard_Kennaway9y80

Could a moderator please nuke the swidon account and all of its posts?

6NancyLebovitz9y

The account is nuked. I need to find out how to remove posts.

0Elo9y

agreed.

[-]username29y80

Someone changed the password on the Username public throwaway account. It's a shame a troll finally got to it after several years.

2gjm9y

It's worth contacting a moderator and seeing whether they can do anything about it.

0ChristianKl9y

Even if they set the password it's a nature of a public account that the PW can always be set differently.

3username29y

How about make the password reset automatically every X minutes ?

1Dahlen9y

I actually meant to ask at some point whether the Username account would have protection against people changing passwords willy-nilly, but I didn't because, you know... information hazards and all that. Didn't want to give people the idea. But now that it's happened, I suppose I could ask retrospectively: how come nobody ensured some protection against that?

4ChristianKl9y

Because in general a forum that's designed to allow anonymous comments would allow anonymous comments and not let people go through the hack of using a separate account for it. The account wasn't created by any moderator but simple by a using who thinks that such an account would be good to have. While being in infohazard territory: It's not only possible to change passwords. It's also possible to delete accounts.

0MrMind9y

Then nuke the account and recreate it with the old password.

0moridinamael9y

I always assumed that was just one person. I feel like someone died. (Not really. But, how was I supposed to know it was an open account?)

5username29y

The beauty of the account laid in the fact that it was not publicized, so only people who were long-time lurkers would know about it.

0[anonymous]9y

Far out, that was an excellent account and several people had clearly used it to make important contributions. It would be nice if there was a way to memorialize the posts or something externally. Or, perhaps the moderators could implement an 'official' throw-away to protect against this. I have been a beneficiary of comments from the Username account and believe it does...or did a true service to the community. Thank you for taking it upon yourself to report this and making a new account.

6entirelyuseless9y

While I had no objection to the existence of the account and in fact used it several times myself, it was a bit annoying to me that someone was using it as his personal account rather than bothering to create his own.

[-][anonymous]9y80

This was a productive use of my time - a panel with Peter Thiel, Audrey de Grey (who I don't know) and Eliezer Yudhowsky.

[-]Panorama9y80

Solving a Non-Existent Unsolved Problem: The Critical Brachistochrone

During my research I came across an obscure mathematical physics problem whose established answer was wrong. I attempted to solve this unsolved problem, and eventually found out that I was the one who was wrong.

As part of my paper on falling through the centre of the Earth, I studied something called the brachistochrone curve....

8Elo9y

I think you were the person using the username account to post in this style. Thank you for making an account and welcome :)

[-]Richard_Kennaway9y70

"Do Artificial Reinforcement-Learning Agents Matter Morally?" Yes, says Brian Tomasik, even present-day ones (by a very small but nonzero amount). He foresees their ethical significance increasing in the near future, and he isn't talking about strong AI, but an increase in the ordinary applications of reinforcement learning to our technology.

The argument is, briefly: for various claims about what consciousness physically is, RL programs display these features to some extent as well. Therefore they have a nonzero degree of consciousness, and so a... (read more)

1Manfred9y

I would be much more morally concerned about reinforcement learning agents if this were a functional distinction.

1Richard_Kennaway9y

He discusses that point in the paper.

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke9y70

I'm looking for for a high quality parenting blog, one with relatively frequent well written content and which might accept guest contribution - or one with a discussion forum that's not just gossiping. Can be English speaking or German. I'd like to try my hand on some posts before opening my own blog. Any ideas?

[-][anonymous]9y70

Tweet Sized Insight Porn

Hope LW likes it. Open for tweet suggestions.

[-][anonymous]9y60

What hypothesis are you testing, or is gnawing at the back of your mind, in relation to LessWrong, as you surf LessWrong right now? Or perhaps you're just surfing idly.

For me its: Has anyone experimented with replacing their socialising with friends time with LessWrong exclusively? I wonder if the benefits associated with socialising such as increased well-being can be substituted for interaction in online communities.

Though, I suspect the nature of the community would be a strong determinant of the outcome. For instance, facebook would probably be unhealt... (read more)

[-][anonymous]9y60

In digital markets with extremely quick liquidity like the stock exchange, Is investing based on macroeconomic factors and megatrends foolhardy? Is it only sensible to invest when one has privellaged information including via analysis of public data at a level no one else has done?

3Dagon9y

Unpack the question. What do you mean by "foolhardy"? What is your next-best option for your money? In almost all cases, you should opt not to make a wager on a topic where you are at an information disadvantage. However, investments are not purely a wager - they're also direction of capital and sharing of risk (and reward) with for-profit organizations. It's quite possible that you can lose the wager part of your investment and still do fairly well on the long-term rewards of corporate shared ownership.

3UtilonMaximizer9y

One shouldn't expect to systematically beat the market without privileged information. But even "trying to beat the market" (depending on what exactly that strategy entails) or doing what you describe is often better than what most people do in terms of actually growing their savings. Financial securities (especially stocks) have high enough long-run expected returns such that a "strategy" of routinely accidentally slightly overpaying for them and holding them still results in a lot more money than not investing at all. Not investing is far worse than shoving your money into random stocks and committing to reinvest all dividends for the next 50 years.

2[anonymous]9y

Is there absolute utilitty maximisation in portfolio diversification or is that just a risk control mechanism? Could I pick one random stock and put a whole lot of money in it? I suspect I may be commiting the law of large numbers here (or the gambler's fallacy).

2Dagon9y

Look at Kelly Betting for some information on why "risk control" is utility maximization. Presuming you have declining marginal utility for money, picking one random stock gives you the same average/expected monetary outcome, but far lower utility.

1SilentCal9y

If you're not familiar with it, you should check out www.bogleheads.com for investment/finance advice. (Not trying to discourage you from discussing this here... just that if you don't know bogleheads, it's quite valuable)

0UtilonMaximizer9y

It's purely for risk control, but most people are extremely loss averse and so do well to diversify. You could. It's a bet with positive expectation and a really risky one. But people do much dumber things with their money. Having said that, I'd recommend an index fund instead if you're plopping a whole lot of money in.

[-]Panorama9y60

Famous neurologist and science popularizer Oliver Sacks has died. Which of his books are your favorites?

6[anonymous]9y

Awakenings is a perennial favorite, a cohort of people with severe Parkinsonism given levodopa all at once (and going through the several month long process of becoming nearly completely functional with the quirks that come from excess dopamine, then their brains slowly losing homeostasis in the face of the exogenous uncontrolled neurotransmitters). Seeing Voices, a look into the perceptions of the deaf and the nuances of signed languages, was fascinating to me.

[-]Panorama9y60

The macro/micro validity tradeoff

Many economists insist that the realism of their assumptions is not important - the only important thing is that at the end of the day, the model fits the data of whatever phenomenon it's supposed to be modeling. This is called an "as if" model. For example, maybe individuals don't have rational expectations, but if the economy behaves as if they do, then it's OK to use a rational expectations model.
So I realized that there's a fundamental tradeoff here. The more you insist on fitting the micro data (plausibilit

... (read more)

[-]Panorama9y50

Inability and Obligation in Moral Judgment

It is often thought that judgments about what we ought to do are limited by judgments about what we can do, or that “ought implies can.” We conducted eight experiments to test the link between a range of moral requirements and abilities in ordinary moral evaluations. Moral obligations were repeatedly attributed in tandem with inability, regardless of the type (Experiments 1–3), temporal duration (Experiment 5), or scope (Experiment 6) of inability. This pattern was consistently observed using a variety of moral v

... (read more)

[-]ike9y40

One of my professors claimed that postmodernism, and particularly its concept of "no objective truth", is responsible for much of the recent liberalism of society, through the idea of "live and let live". (Specific examples given were attitudes towards legalization of gay marriage and drugs.) I pointed out that libertarianism and liberalism predated postmodernism historically, and they said that that's true, but you can still trace the popularity back to postmodernism.

Is this historically accurate? If not, is there something I can point... (read more)

0Viliam9y

I don't know about history, but this reminds me of a "valley of bad rationality". Assuming that the historical hypothesis is true, I would treat it as just another example that if your belief system is sufficiently insane, another false belief does not necessarily make it worse, and could actually neutralize some more harmful beliefs. If you map is worse than noise, even beliefs like "there is no reality" could improve your thinking.

[-]hg009y40

Here's one for the "life pro tips" category since Less Wrong users are mostly male. It seems as though the best way to deal with balding is to catch it as early as possible, because that's the time drug treatments (well Finasteride at least) are most effective. Of the "big 3" baldness treatments, ketoconazole shampoo is available over the counter and has few side effects reported online. (It's also used as an anti-dandruff shampoo.) (EDIT: Looks like it is not recommended to take orally, although I don't see anyone saying that topic... (read more)

1[anonymous]9y

BTW, there's the 'Boring advice repository', consider cross-posting or linking to this there, so that it would not get lost.

0knb9y

Catching it early is important for sure. I've been using minoxidil for 3 years since my early twenties and my hairline has not receded at all since then, but it also hasn't recovered much. The generic minoxidil is quite cheap, I pay about 40 dollars a year. Edit: I haven't tried Finasteride as I hear rumors of awful sexual symptoms.

[-][anonymous]9y40

How to perform surgery on yourself with Clarity

I do irrational things. The other day I bought a flight interstate, somewhat impulsively, to a conference I knew next to nothing about for complicated reasons. Instantregret, but the cancellation fee is about half the price of the ticket. I also got some art professionally designed for a few hundred dollars, that I didn't need or want. I've also lost thousands gambling and on the stock exchange. I'm stupid in many ways, but I'm also capable enough to be able to share insights from the other side of sanity with... (read more)

1NancyLebovitz9y

Voted up for honesty. Do you know anything about the difference between the times when your irrational impulses fade and the times when you act on them?

2[anonymous]9y

Ahh, the miracle question. I had forgotten about those. Thank you for asking. My answer is currently no. Here's what I currently suspect, but I don't have the present of mind to be confident in this assessment. I'm particularly vulnerable to gambling and sexual and aesthetic impulses like compulsively listening to music, or staring at art. For instance, just I recently signed up for an international share trading account because I intended to bet about 1/4 of my assets (yes, I still am not convinced by either the kelly criterion nor modern portfolio theory since no free lunches!) on this one stock where I had very little knowledge of. Luckly for me, it takes 5 days to process the int. trading account application and I found it hard to get my mind of the stock so I started looking up more in depth information and realised it's not the undervalued, cheap, super awesome stock I thought it would be. When I'm with people, I also tend to be less goal-oriented and give into impulses more readily. Another consideration for me is whether these impulses are the same class as say the surgical impulse, since that sounds more delusional than impulsive. None of these categorisations are clear. You've inspired me to sit down properly in the near future and map out different behaviours then try to summarise underling commonalities and potential control measures note to self. The times when irrational impulse fades, in contrast, is times when I can use strict decision theoretic tools to explain to myself why it's irrational. That's why LessWrong is my scaffold out of insanity. If I can analyse a particular scenario and see that one particular choice dominates another, or I can model a particular impulse as my tendency to compensate for a sunk cost when I ought to be thinking at the margin, for instance, I can grit my way out of it. Perhaps things are hardest when I'm dealing with extremely high subjective value options (e.g. jerking off to porn when I'm really horny), or bettin

2gjm9y

How do you get from "no free lunches" to disagreement with either Kelley or portfolio theory?

0[anonymous]9y

No free lunches & MPT I could enunciate it, but wikipedia has an explanation. I honestly don't understand the Wikipedia explanation, but I would expect that it explains my intuitions in a more technical way than I do. If you have a specific point of disagreement, I'm happy to map out my logic and explore the evidence with you. I vaguely remember reading an article on the topic, too. Optimal bet sizing and expected utility I'd expect a theorem to maximise utility via diversification would entail some prediction that the utility of subsequent/other/more investments will be greater than the utility of the first/reference investment. If that isn't the case, it will lower the average expected utility of one's portfolio. I don't see the rationale behind the Kelly criterion as it related to any of my existing knowledge about maximising utility.

0gjm9y

MPT: How can I have a specific point of disagreement with something as nonspecific as "I am not convinced by modern portfolio theory because no free lunches"? The particular but of the Wikipedia article you linked to actually says (correctly, so far as I can see) that minimising unsystematic risk through diversification (as indicated by MPT) is "one of the few free lunches available" because unsystematic risk isn't associated with higher expected returns. Kelley: Actually most of the paragraph ostensibly about this seems to be still about MPT. Anyway, I'm afraid your expectation is just wrong. Diversifying can be a win even if what you diversify with is (on its own) lower-utility. Suppose someone offers you a bet that will pay you $1M if some event E occurs and cost you $900k if not, and suppose you reckon E very close to 50% likely. You probably don't take that bet because losing $900k would hurt you more than gaining $1M would help you. Now someone else offers you another bet, where you stand to gain $950k and lose $900k. Clearly you don't take that bet either, and clearly it's whose than the first. But now suppose the first bet party's you when E happens and the second very party's you when not-E happens. The two bets together are a guaranteed >=$50k gain; provided you trust your counterparties you should absolutely take them. So aging the second bet helped you even though on its own it was worse than the first. Kelley, really: again I'm not sure what I can say to something as unspecific as "I don't see the rationale". I suppose I can briefly explain the rationale, so here goes. 1: if the utility you get from your money is proportional to log (amount), which may or may not be roughly true for you (I think it is for me) then placing a Kelley-sized bet is higher expected-utility than placing a bet of any other size at the same odds. (Assuming your utility I'd unaffected by the event the bet I'd on other than through its effect on your wealth.) 2: your long-term w

0Elo9y

There was a guide online about all factors to consider when being a medical professional in a place with no medical infrastructure. it was basically a "how to do everything" guide. I can't recall the keyword name to find it now, but it was online and free. Not sure if I should encourage you; but reading a lot more will probably satisfy your interest in the topic.

0[anonymous]9y

I'm interested in the guide and haven't found it without several related google searches. Are you sure the guide wasn't on a tangential topic?

[-]Lumifer9y40

An argument by Stephen Hsu that boosted-IQ humans will appear before Artifical Intelligence and will co-evolve with AI after that.

2Viliam9y

Seems to me these two things are incomparable in speed. Imagine that research in genetic engineering will allows us to make each generation have IQ 20 points higher than the previous one. Could even such IQ-boosted humans compete with a superhuman AI which can rewrite its own source code? Of course I am making many assumptions here, but the idea is that biological humans will probably still have to go through the cycle of birth and maturation, and face various biological constraints, while AI will not have these obstacles.

[-]taygetea9y40

Is anyone willing to share an Anki deck with me? I'm trying to start using it. I'm running into a problem likely derived from having never, uh, learned how to learn. I look through a book or a paper or an article, and I find it informative, and I have no idea what parts of it I want to turn into cards. It just strikes me as generically informative. I think that learning this by example is going to be by far the easiest method.

4Vaniver9y

There are many shared Anki decks. In my experience, the hardest thing to get correct in Anki is picking the correct thing to learn, and seeing someone else's deck doesn't work all that well for it because there's no guarantee that they're any good at picking what to learn, either. Most of my experience with Anki has been with lists, like the NATO phonetic alphabet, where there's no real way to learn them besides familiarity, and the list is more useful the more of it you know. What I'd recommend is either picking selections from the source that you think are valuable, or summarizing the source into pieces that you think are valuable, and then sticking them as cards (perhaps with the title of the source as the reverse). The point isn't necessarily to build the mapping between the selection and the title, but to reread the selected piece in intervals determined by the forgetting function.

2taygetea9y

Alright, I'll be a little more clear. I'm looking for someone's mixed deck, on multiple topics, and I'm looking for the structure of cards, things like length of section, amount of context, title choice, amount of topic overlap, number of cards per large scale concept. I am really not looking for a deck that was shared with easily transferrable information like the NATO alphabet, I'm looking for how other people do the process of creating cards for new knowledge. I am missing a big chunk of intuition on learning in general, and this is part of how I want to fix it. I also don't expect people to really be able to answer my questions on it, and I don't expect that I've gotten every specification. Which is why I wanted the example deck. Edit: So I can't pull a deck off Ankiweb because I want the kind of decks nobody puts on Ankiweb.

0eeuuah9y

I could send you some of my anki cards, but I don't know that you'll get useful structural information out of them. They tend to be pretty random bits that I think I'll want to know or phrases I want to build associations between. For most things, I take actual notes (I find that writing things down helps me remember the shape of the idea better, even if I never look at them), and only make flashcards for the highest value ideas. It took me several months of starting and quitting anki to start to get the hang of it, and I'm still learning how to better structure cards to be easier to remember and transmit useful information. I found this blog post and the two it links to at the top to be useful descriptions of an approach to learning, which incorporates anki among other things

0Barry_Cotter9y

Based on my own experience I strongly suspect the only way to do this is to fail repeatedly until you succeed. That said the following rules are very, very good. If you really, really want an example I can send you my Developmental Psychology and Learning and Behaviour Deck. It consists of the entirety of a Cliff's Notes kind of Developmental Psychology book, a better dev psych's summary section and an L&B book's summary section. In retrospect the Cliff's Notes book was a mistake but I've invested enough in it now that I may as well continue it, most of the cards are mature anyway. I would recommend finding a decent book on the topic you're learning, and writing your own summaries or heavily rewording their summaries and using lots and lots of cloze deletions. I just found this guide to using Anki. http://alexvermeer.com/anki-essentials/ It's possible it may be worth looking at. If you really want my deck pm me your email address. http://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm Here again are the twenty rules of formulating knowledge. You will notice that the first 16 rules revolve around making memories simple! Some of the rules strongly overlap. For example: do not learn if you do not understand is a form of applying the minimum information principle which again is a way of making things simple: Do not learn if you do not understand Learn before you memorize - build the picture of the whole before you dismember it into simple items in SuperMemo. If the whole shows holes, review it again! Build upon the basics - never jump both feet into a complex manual because you may never see the end. Well remembered basics will help the remaining knowledge easily fit in Stick to the minimum information principle - if you continue forgetting an item, try to make it as simple as possible. If it does not help, see the remaining rules (cloze deletion, graphics, mnemonic techniques, converting sets into enumerations, etc.) Cloze deletion is easy and effective - completing a de

0Elo9y

I don't know if this question will help: What is the least-bad way of doing the thing you want to do that you can think of? (apologies I can be no help because I don't anki; but I wonder if answering this question will help you)

[-]Elo9y40

Meta: in posting the open thread at this time I note that it is Monday where I am in Sydney Australia; even if this is roughly 6-12 hours earlier than usual to start the open thread. (hope you all have a good week ahead)

4Gunnar_Zarncke9y

I like Comic Sans too, but is it intended?

5Elo9y

apologies again! (same as last OT)

[-]Elo9y30

Update on the Slack: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mpq/lesswrong_real_time_chat/

A list of our topics:

AI
Film making
Goals of lesswrong (and purposes)
Human Relationships
media
parenting
philosophy
political talk
programming
real life
Resources and links
science
travelling
and some admin channels; the "welcome", "misc", and "RSS" feed from the lw site

These are expected to grow and change as we need them. I count 58 people who have joined so far today. Feel free to PM me as well.

It's worth noting that parenting just... (read more)

[-]Panorama9y30

A Defense of the Rights of Artificial Intelligences by Eric Schwitzgebel and Mara [official surname still be decided]

There are possible artificially intelligent beings who do not differ in any morally relevant respect from human beings. Such possible beings would deserve moral consideration similar to that of human beings. Our duties to them would not be appreciably reduced by the fact that they are non-human, nor by the fact that they owe their existence to us. Indeed, if they owe their existence to us, we would likely have additional moral obligations

... (read more)

[-]btrettel9y30

Does anyone know of a good life expectancy calculator? Preferably one which has good justification behind the model, and also has been tested.

I tried this calculator, but I noticed a few issues. First, it sells me I should start doing conditioning exercise... when I did check that off. I think that part of the calculator is broken. It also seems to think that taller people live longer, when from what I understand it's well accepted that the opposite is true. Some of its other features seem unjustified to me, for example, it seems to think you get a life ex... (read more)

3Lumifer9y

A good life expectancy calculator implies a good model of which factors drive longevity. I don't believe such a model exists (for healthy people -- the effects of various illnesses on your life expectancy are known much better). There are a lot of correlation studies but correlations and causality are not quite the same thing. "Some sort of a model" is a very low bar -- presumably you would like the model to be good. People who will be able to make a good comprehensive model of how various health/diet/lifestyle/etc. interventions affect longevity will probably be in the running for a Nobel. It's like saying that you found online some investment advice which doesn't look too good, perhaps some LW people would like to construct a model of the markets that will give better advice. Well...

1btrettel9y

Fair points. I'm don't think what we understand about longevity is as bad as what we understand about investments. I suppose what I'm looking for is a model which 1) doesn't have any obvious bugs, 2) doesn't contradict anything we do know, and 3) has at least some evidence behind the model. If it produces a fairly wide distribution because that represents the (poor) state of our knowledge, I think that's fine. The issue of correlation vs. causation also is important, and I'm not sure what we could do about it short of allowing someone to turn off certain features of the model if they believe them to be untrustworthy. For example, I've seen a fair bit about how marriage is correlated with an increase in longevity, and it seems obvious to me that any similar sort of social structure where one has frequent socialization and possibly receives feedback and care is probably where the real benefit is. So I think you can say you are married if you believe your situation is equivalent in some way. Obviously these details need to be shown more rigorously, but this is the basic argument.

[-]WhyAsk9y3