I heard an interview on NPR with a surgeon who asked other surgeons to use checklists in there operating rooms. Most didn't want to. He convinced some to try them out anyway.

(If you're like me, at this point you need time to get over your shock that surgeons don't use checklists. I mean, it's not like they're doing something serious, like flying a plane or extracting a protein, right?)

After trying them out, 80% said they would like to continue to use checklists. 20% said they still didn't want to use checklists.

So he asked them, If they had surgery, would they want their surgeon to use a checklist? 94% said they would want their surgeon to use a checklist.

The Guardian published a piece citing Less Wrong:

The number's up by Oliver Burkeman

When it comes to visualising huge sums – the distance to the moon, say, or the hole the economy is in – we're pretty useless really

Recent observations on the art of writing fiction:

1. My main characters in failed/incomplete/unsatisfactory stories are surprisingly reactive, that is, driven by events around them rather than by their own impulses. I think this may be related to the fundamental attribution error: we see ourselves as reacting naturally to the environment, but others as driven by innate impulses. Unfortunately this doesn't work for storytelling at all! It means my viewpoint character ends up as a ping-pong ball in a world of strong, driven other characters. (If you don't see this error in my published fiction, it's because I don't publish unsuccessful stories.)

2. Closely related to the above is another recent observation: My main character has to be sympathetic, in the sense of having motivations that I can respect enough to write them properly. Even if they're mistaken, I have to be able to respect the reasons for their mistakes. Otherwise my viewpoint automatically shifts to the characters around them, and once again the non-protagonist ends up stronger than the protagonist.

3. Just as it's necessary to learn to make things worse for your characters, rather than following the natural impulse to

"Former Christian Apologizes For Being Such A Huge Shit Head All Those Years" sounds like an Onion article, but it isn't. What's impressive is not only the fact that she wrote up this apology publicly, but that she seems to have done it within a few weeks of becoming an atheist after a lifetime of Christianity, and in front of an audience that has since sent her so much hate mail she's stopped reading anything in her inbox that's not clearly marked as being on another topic.

Inspired by reading this blog for quite some time, I started reading E.T. Jaynes' Probability Theory. I've read most of the book by now, and I have incredibly mixed feelings about it.

On one hand, the development of probability calculus starting from the needs of plausible inference seems very appealing as far as the needs of statistics, applied science and inferential reasoning in general are concerned. The Bayesian viewpoint of (applied) probability is developed with such elegance and clarity that alternative interpretations can hardly be considered appealing next to it.

On the other hand, the book is very painful reading for the pure mathematician. The repeated pontification about how wrong mathematicians are for desiring rigor and generality is strange, distracting and useless. What could possibly be wrong about the desire to make the steps and assumptions of deductive reasoning as clear and explicit as possible? Contrary to what Jaynes says or at least very strongly implies (in Appendix B and elsewhere), clarity and explicitness of mathematical arguments are not opposites or mutually contradictory; in my experience, they are complementary.

Even worse, Jaynes makes several strong ... (read more)

After pondering the adefinitemaybe case for a bit, I can't shake the feeling that we really screwed this one up in a systematic way, that Less Wrong's structure might be turning potential contributors off (or turning them into trolls). I have a few ideas for fixes, and I'll post them as replies to this comment.

Essentially, what it looks like to me is that adefmay checked out a few recent articles, was intrigued, and posted something they thought clever and provocative (as well as true). Now, there were two problems with adefmay's comment: first, they had an idea of the meaning of "evidence" that rules out almost everything short of a mathematical proof, and secondly, the comment looked like something that a troll could have written in bad faith.

But what happened next is crucial, it seems to me. A bunch of us downvoted the comment or (including me) wrote replies that look pretty dismissive and brusque. Thus adefmay immediately felt attacked from all sides, with nobody forming a substantive and calm reply (at best, we sent links to pages whose relevance was clear to us but not to adefmay). Is it any wonder that they weren't willing to reconsider their definition of evi... (read more)

Okay, so....a confession.

In a fairly recent little-noticed comment, I let slip that I differ from many folks here in what some may regard as an important way: I was not raised on science fiction.

I'll be more specific here: I think I've seen one of the Star Wars films (the one about the kid who apparently grows up to become the villain in the other films). I have enough cursory familiarity with the Star Trek franchise to be able to use phrases like "Spock bias" and make the occasional reference to the Starship Enterprise (except I later found out that the reference in that post was wrong, since the Enterprise is actually supposed to travel faster than light -- oops), but little more. I recall having enjoyed the "Tripod" series, and maybe one or two other, similar books, when they were read aloud to me in elementary school. And of course I like Yudkowsky's parables, including "Three Worlds Collide", as much as the next LW reader.

But that's about the extent of my personal acquaintance with the genre.

Now, people keep telling me that I should read more science fiction; in fact, they're often quite surprised that I haven't. So maybe, while we're doing these... (read more)

In one of the dorkier moments of my existence, I've written a poem about the Great Filter. I originally intended to write music for this, but I've gone a few months now without inspiration, so I think I'll just post the poem to stand by itself and for y'all to rip apart.

The dire floor of Earth afore
saw once a fortuitous spark.
Life's swift flame sundry creature leased
and then one age a freakish beast
awakened from the dark.

Boundless skies beheld his eyes
and strident through the void he cried;
set his devices into space;
scryed for signs of a yonder race;
but desolate hush replied.

Stars surround and worlds abound,
the spheres too numerous to name.
Yet still no creature yet attains
to seize this lot, so each remains
raw hell or barren plain.

What daunting pale do most 'fore fail?
Be the test later or done?
Those dooms forgone our lives attest
themselves impel from first inquest:
cogito ergo sum.

Man does boast a charmèd post,
to wield the blade of reason pure.
But if this prov'ence be not rare,
then augurs fate our morrow bare,
our fleeting days obscure.

But might we nigh such odds defy,
and see before us cosmos bend?
Toward the heavens thy mind set,
and waver not: this proof, till 'yet,
did ne'er with man contend!

Suggested tweaks are welcome. Things that I'm currently unhappy with are that "fortuitous" scans awkwardly, and the skies/eyes rhyme feels clichéd.

I recently revisited my old (private) high school, which had finished building a new >$15 million building for its football team (and misc. student activities & classes).

I suddenly remembered that when I was much younger, the lust of universities and schools in general for new buildings had always puzzled me: I knew perfectly well that I learned more or less the same whether the classroom was shiny new or grizzled gray and that this was true of just about every subject-matter*, and even then it was obvious that buildings must cost a lot to build and... (read more)

Akrasia FYI:

I tried creating a separate login on my computer with no distractions, and tried to get my work done there. This reduced my productivity because it increased the cost of switching back from procrastinating to working. I would have thought that recovering in large bites and working in large bites would have been more efficient, but apparently no, it's not.

I'm currently testing the hypothesis that reading fiction (possibly reading anything?) comes out of my energy-to-work-on-the-book budget.

Next up to try: Pick up a CPAP machine off Craigslist.

Suppose we want to program an AI to represent the interest of a group. The standard utilitarian solution is to give the AI a utility function that is an average of the utility functions of the individual in the group, but that runs into the interpersonal comparison of utility problem. (Was there ever a post about this? Does Eliezer have a preferred approach?)

Here's my idea for how to solve this. Create N AIs, one for each individual in the group, and program it with the utility function of that individual. Then set a time in the future when one of those A... (read more)

I rewatched 12 Monkeys last week (because my wife was going through a Brad Pitt phase, although I think this movie cured her of that :), in which Bruce Willis plays a time traveler who accidentally got locked up in a mental hospital. The reason I mention it here is because It contained an amusing example of mutual belief updating: Bruce Willis's character became convinced that he really is insane and needs psychiatric care, while simultaneously his psychiatrist became convinced that he actually is a time traveler and she should help him save the world.

Perh... (read more)

Hello all,

I've been a longtime lurker, and tried to write up a post a while ago, only to see that I didn't have enough karma. I figure this is is the post for a newbie to present something new. I already published this particular post on my personal blog, but if the community here enjoys it enough to give it karma, I'd gladly turn it into a top-level post here, if that's in order.

Life Experience Should Not Modify Your Opinion http://paltrypress.blogspot.com/2009/11/life-experience-should-not-modify-your.html

When I'm debating some controversial topic wi... (read more)

This article about gendered language showed up on one of my feeds a few days ago. Given how often discussions of nongendered pronouns happen here, I figure it's worth sharing.

Suppose you could find out the exact outcome (up to the point of reading the alternate history equivalent of Wikipedia, history books etc.) of changing the outcome of a single historical event. What would that event be?

Note that major developments like "the Roman empire would never have fallen" or "the Chinese wouldn't have turned inwards" involve multiple events, not just one.