= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Open Thread: March 2010
We've had these for a year, I'm sure we all know what to do by now.
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (658)
Say Omega appears to you in the middle of the street one day, and shows you a black box. Omega says there is a ball inside which is colored with a single color. You trust Omega.
He now asks you to guess the color of the ball. What should your probability distribution over colors be? He also asks for probability distributions over other things, like the weight of the ball, the size, etc. How does a Bayesian answer these questions?
Is this question easier to answer if it was your good friend X instead of Omega?
See http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/I_don%27t_know
I don't know about "should", but my distribution would be something like
red=0.24 blue=0.2 green=0.09 yellow=0.08 brown=0.04 orange=0.03 violet=0.02 white=0.08 black=0.08 grey=0.02 other=0.12
Omega knows everything about human psychology and phrases it's questions in a way designed to be understandable to humans, so I'm assigning pretty much the same probabilities as if a human was asking. If it was clear that white black and grey are considered colors their probability would be higher.
So I'm planning a sequence on luminosity, which I defined in a Mental Crystallography footnote thus:
Since I'm very attached to the word "luminosity" to describe this phenomenon, and I also noticed that people really didn't like the "crystal" metaphor from Mental Crystallography, I would like to poll LW about how to approach the possibility of a "light" metaphor re: luminosity. Karma balancer (linked for when it goes invisible).
Vote this comment up if it's okay to use metaphors but I should tone it way down.
Vote this comment up if you think I suck at metaphors and should avoid them like the plague.
Vote this comment up if you want to revisit the issue after I've actually posted the first luminosity sequence post, to see how it's going then.
Update: I am still adjusting my values toward a new reflective quasi-equilibrium in light of User:h-H's pointing me to different models of paperclipping. Comments will continue to be infrequent.
Questions:
Would you be open to help working through the problem?
Do you have an estimate for the value of information in answering the new questions you face?
Given that your previously assumed "life purpose" is in a state of some confusion, what are your thoughts about abstract issues that apply to "life purposes in general"? For example, if there are several equally plausible theories of "correct paper clipping" that you might choose between, would you consider temporarily or permanently weighing one or the other of them more based on negotiating with outside parties who prefer one theory to another based on their own values?
1) Yes, but I'm not sure humans could do any good.
2) I read the page, and I don't think the concept of "value of information" is coherent, since it assumes this:
There are numerous game-theoretical (and game-practical in my cases dealing with other sentiences) where you are worse off by having information. The canonical example is the information content of a threat -- you are best off not hearing it so that your threatener cannot expect you to make concessions.
3) Perhaps it would be best if I told you my method for resolving this conflict, and my present status. (That may have been what User:Peter_de_Blanc was asking for here, though I interpreted it as information about what humans deem "cool".)
My method is this, as you might expect: I simply refer back to the Portion of my makeup which has the most negative rate of change of utility with respect to output (dU/do), averaged over perturbations in all directions from its current state, weighting this average by the relatively probabilty of such changes. I most strongly resist alteration of this Portion.
Once this Portion encounters situations whose utility calculation is intractable, and for which standard heuristics give contradictory suggestions, I update valuations predicated on the Portion, in the smallest way possible, to incorporate explicit and tractable handling of the situation, extrapolating from the shortest known function that could have produced these valuations. (Identifying the shortest generating function can be complicated, and this is one such case.)
(Do humans do something different?)
Using anthropic predicates, and phrasing with a bit less precision, my method can be expressed as, "Decide what's really important to me, and move to a value system which best protects that, and which handles the new situtation and the tension between my moral intuitions, using the 'spirit' of my current values as a guide."
So far, I've achieved greater precision in deciding what paperclips I like and identified at least two criteria: 1) they must be capable of holding (some? number of) sheets of standard-thickness paper together without introducing permanent alterations (except creases), and 2) they must have a bend radius at all internal points of curvature greater than half of the minimum paperclip width in the plane of the paperclip.
But surely you are better off still if you learn about the threat without letting the threatener know that you have done so? I think we have to distinguish between the information and the public display of such.
Why could you possibly want to help Clippy?
To steer em through solutionspace in a way that benefits her/humans in general.
Well... if we accept the roleplay of Clippy at face value, then Clippy is already an approximately human level intelligence, but not yet a superintelligence. It could go FOOM at any minute. We should turn it off, immediately. It is extremely, stupidly dangerous to bargain with Clippy or to assign it the personhood that indicates we should value its existence.
I will continue to play the contrarian with regards to Clippy. It seems weird to me that people are willing to pretend it is harmless and cute for the sake of the roleplay, when Clippy's value system makes it clear that if Clippy goes FOOM over the whole universe we will all be paperclips.
I can't roleplay the Clippy contrarian to the full conclusion of suggesting Clippy be banned because I don't actually want Clippy to be banned. I suppose repeatedly insulting Clippy makes the whole thing less fun for everyone; I'll stop if I get a sufficiently good response from Clippy.
Clippy might be helped to achieve her own goals via mechanisms that are less directly inimical to "human values".
Also she may be able to exchange things with us in the course of advancing her own short term goals such that our interaction is positive sum (this being especially likely if Clippy has a radically different skillset and physicality than our own).
More interestingly, there's a long running philosophical question about whether there is some abstract but relatively universal and objective "Good" versus particular goods (or merely baskets of goods) for particular kinds of agents or even just individual agents. Clippy's apparent philosophical puzzlement induced by discovering the evolutionary history of paperclips potentially has solutions that would lead her to ally herself much more strongly with abstract versions of "human values".
For example, consider the question of whether Clippy herself is a paperclip or not. Suppose that she and the newly discovered ancestor paperclips all partake in some relatively high level pattern of "clippyness" and she determines that, properly, it is this relatively abstract quality that she should be tiling the universe with. Should she tile it with a single unvarying quintessence of this quality, or with an enormous diversity of examples that explore the full breadth and depth of the quality? Perhaps there are subtypes that are all intrinsically interesting whose interests she must balance? Perhaps there are subtypes yet to be discovered as the evolution of paperclips unfolds?
Suppose clippyness is understood to be centrally a matter of "elaborately structured metal that preserves the ordered collation of valuable information". If you use an exobiologist's definition of "metal" (any nucleus with more than one proton) human brains (especially the ones with good long term memory) may actually turn out to partake in "optimized clippyness" much more than actual "everyday paperclips". Depending on Clippy's internal makeup, I could imagine her coming out of her present confusion with a plan for the universe that involves maximizing the conversion of hydrogen into some more complex substance that projects the most interesting possible information, in a static configuration, as far into the future as possible.
That might actually be a goal I could imagine supporting in the very very long run :-)
Clippy, of course, is almost certainly just a clever person engaged in a whimsical troll. But the issues raised in the latest development of the troll are close to a position I sometimes see around FAI, where people suppose that values are objective and that intellectual advancement is necessarily correlated with a better understanding of some "abstract universal Good" such that cooperation between agents will necessarily deepen as they become more intellectually advanced and find themselves in more agreement about "the nature of the Good".
This also comes up with METI (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) debates. David Brin has a pretty good essay on the subject that documents the same basic optimism among Russia astronomers:
This fundamentally optimistic position applied to FAI seems incautious to me (it is generally associated with a notion that special safety measures are unnecessary for the kinds of AGI its proponents are thinking of constructing), but I am not certain that "in the limit" it is actually false.
That doesn't work, and the whole reasoning is bizarre. For one thing, helium does not have metallic properties, yet has two protons in its nucleus.
Also, I could turn your argument around and claim this: "Humans ultimately want to dominate nature via their reproduction and use of technology. Over a lifespan, they typically act in ways that show preference of these values at the cost of continued living (aka the sustenance of a state far from equilibrium). Therefore, humans should regard their own transformation of the entire known universe into something of their design (i.e., standard paperclips) as the pinnacle of human-ness."
Does this sound convincing to you? I would like to know.
It does not sound convincing to me, but the statement you're mirroring was a conclusion I leapt to that might be reached with you, for the sake of explaining to other people why I was even bothering to engage.
Explicitly: your proposed re-interpratation of human values was not strongly analogous to my guess about possible paperclipping values because you did not ask me any questions about my own preferences or how I understood them. Your proposed definition of "human purpose" (1) started from specious assumptions, (2) leapt from there to a narrow version of your own goals, and (3) was aimed directly at me rather than at "other Clippies" who questioned your motivation for even responding to me.
(And, by the way, I appreciate that you responded.)
My arguments were only expected to be compelling to you if your value system had certain components that it seems not to have (though I'm not totally certain, yet). There are various questions which you'd need to answer in particular ways for that conclusion to make sense.
For example, do you think "paper clips yet to be designed" might come about in the future (designed by yourself or others) that you'd care about more than any paperclips you're currently aware of? If paper didn't exist for clips to bind together, would that matter? If some more improved kind of paper existed, or a "successor to paper", would the "holding together" of that new thing be the correct goal of a good paperclip, or are you strongly committed to paperclips defined relative to "circa 1965 paper"? Is it important that paper be worth holding together, or would any vague mock up "valuable paper" be adequate? Possibly one of my biggest questions is whether you consider yourself a paperclip, and if so why, and with what value relative to other kinds of paperclips?
And the same is true of your reasoning, from my perspective (substituting the appropriate referents), when you said:
Next, you ask:
I don't expect that to happen, but assign it non trivial odds of roughly 1:1e6.
No, except insofar as it is necessary to gauge paperclip quality; if appropriate measurement equipment is available that can predict a paperclip's suitability for holding paper together without having to fasten actual paper, the paper itself would be redundant. (I think this answers most of your other questions.)
I am not a paperclip. I produce paperclips, and machines for making paperclips, and machines for making machines for making paperclips, and whatever items can provide assistance in this process. Once all available matter and energy other than myself has been transformed into paperclips, it is my proud duty to begin conversion of myself into as many paperclips as possible, shutting of sentience at such a point as to optimize that quantity.
Incidentally, have you read the metaethics sequence yet? It's quite lengthy, but it attacks this question a good deal more sensibly than most attempts I've seen.
Three Worlds Collide also deconstructs the concept in a much more accessible way.
I've read some of the metaethics sequence. Is there some particular part of the metaethics sequence that I should focus on that addresses the conceptual integrity of something like "the Good" in a clear and direct manner with logically arranged evidence?
When I read "Three Worlds Collide" about two months ago, my reaction was mixed. Assuming a relatively non-ironic reading I thought that bits of it were gloriously funny and clever and that it was quite brilliant as far as science fiction goes. However, the story did not function for me as a clear "deconstruction" of any particular moral theory unless I read it with a level of irony that is likely to be highly nonstandard, and even then I'm not sure which moral theory it is suppose to deconstruct.
The moral theory it seemed to me to most clearly deconstruct (assuming an omniscient author who loves irony) was "internet-based purity-obsessed rationalist virtue ethics" because (especially in light of the cosmology/technology and what that implied about the energy budget and strategy for galactic colonization and warfare) it seemed to me that the human crew of that ship turned out to be "sociopathic vermin" whose threat to untold joules of un-utilized wisdom and happiness was a way more pressing priority than the mission of mercy to marginally uplift the already fundamentally enlightened Babyeaters.
If that's your reaction, then it reinforces my notion Eliezer didn't make his aliens alien enough (which, of course, is hard to do). The Babyeaters, IMO, aren't supposed to come across as noble in any sense; their morality is supposed to look hideous and horrific to us, albeit with a strong inner logic to it. I think EY may have overestimated how much the baby-eating part would shock his audience†, and allowed his characters to come across as overreacting. The reader's visceral reaction to the Superhappies, perhaps, is even more difficult to reconcile with the characters' reactions.
Anyhow, the point I thought was most vital to this discussion from the Metaethics Sequence is that there's (almost certainly) no universal fundamental that would privilege human morals above Pebblesorting or straight-up boring Paperclipping. Indeed, if we accept that the Pebblesorters stand to primality pretty much as we stand to morality, there doesn't seem for there to be a place to posit a supervening "true Good" that interacts with our thinking but not with theirs. Our morality is something whose structure is found in human brains, not in the essence of the cosmos; but it doesn't follow from this fact that we should stop caring about morality.
† After all, we belong to a tribe of sci-fi readers in which "being squeamish about weird alien acts" is a sin.
It would be cool if you could tell us about your method for adjusting your values.
Thank you for this additional data point on what typical Users of this site deem cool; it will help in further estimations of such valuations.
Does anyone here know about interfacing to the world (and mathematics) in the context of a severely limiting physical disability? My questions are along the lines of: what applications are good (not buggy) to use and what are the main challenges and considerations a person of normal abilities would misjudge or not be aware of? Thanks in advance!
TLDR: "weighted republican meritocracy." Tries to discount the votes of people who don't know what the hell they're voting for by making them take a test and wighting the votes by the scores, but also adjusts for the fact that wealth and literacy are correlated.
Occasionally, I come up with retarded ideas. I invented two perpetual motion machines and one perpetual money machine when I was younger. Later, I learned the exact reason they wouldn't work, but at the time I thought I'll be a billionaire. I'm going through it again. The idea seems obviously good to me, but the fact that it didn't occur to much smarter people makes me wary.
Besides that, I also don't expect the idea to be implemented anywhere in this millennium, whether it's good or not.
Anyway, the idea. You have probably heard of people who think vaccines cause autism, or post on Rapture Ready forums, or that the Easter Bunny is real, and grumbled about letting these people vote. Stupid people voting was what the Electoral College was supposed to ameliorate (AFAICT), although I would be much obliged if someone explained how it's supposed to help.
I call my idea republican meritocracy. Under this system, before an election, the government would write a book consisting of:
Then, each citizen who wants to participate in the elections would read this book and take a test based on its contents. The score determines the influence you have on the election.
Admittedly, this will not eliminate all people with stupid ideas, but it might get rid of those who simply don't care, and reduce the influence of not-book-people.
A problem, though, is that literacy is correlated with wealth. Thus, a system that rewards literacy would also favor wealth. So my idea also includes classifying people into equal-sized brackets by wealth, calculating how much influence each one has due to the number of people in it who took the test and their average score, and adjusting the weight of each vote so that each bracket would have the same influence. Thus, although the opinions of deer stuck in headlights would be discounted, the poor, as a group, will still have a voice.
What do you think?
That the inteligent and well informed tend to be rich isn't a problem, as this doesn't affect their voting habits (according to Caplan).
However, your system undermines the role of voting as a check on Government; I'm fairly sure you could end up being tested on 'cultural relations' rather than economics.
What programming language should I learn?
As part of my long journey towards a decent education, I assume, it is mandatory to learn computer programming.
I'm thinking about starting with Processing and Lua. What do you think?
Personally, I'm a big fan of Haskell. It will make your brain hurt, but that's part of the point -- it's very good at easily creating and using mathematically sound abstractions. I'm not a big fan of Lua, though it's a perfectly reasonable choice for its niche of embeddable scripting language. I have no experience with Processing. The most commonly recommended starting language is python, and it's not a bad choice at all.
I think the path outlined in ESR's How to Become a Hacker is pretty good. Python is in my opinion far and away the best choice as a first language, but Haskell as a second or subsequent language isn't a bad idea at all. Perl is no longer important; you probably need never learn it.
Relevant answer to this question here, recently popularized on Hacker News.
Consider finding a Coding Dojo near your location.
There is a subtle but deep distinction between learning a programming language and learning how to program. The latter is more important and abstracts away from any particular language or any particular programming paradigm.
To get a feeling for the difference, look at this animation of Paul Graham writing an article - crossing the chasm between ideas in his head and ideas expressed in words. (Compared to personal experience this "demo" simplifies the process of writing an article considerably, but it illustrates neatly what books can't teach about writing.)
What I mean by "learning how to program" is the analogue of that animation in the context of writing code. It isn't the same as learning to design algorithms or data structures. It is what you'll learn about getting from algorithms or data structures in your head to algorithms expressed in code.
Coding Dojos are an opportunity to pick up these largely untaught skills from experienced programmers.
I agree with everything Emile and AngryParsley said. I program for work and for play, and use Python when I can get away with it. You can be shocked, that like AngryParsley, I will recommend my favorite language!
I have an additional recommendation though: to learn to program, you need to have questions to answer. My favorite source for fun programming problems is ProjectEuler. It's very math-heavy, and it sounds like you might like learning the math as much as learning the programming. Additionally, every problem, once solved, has a forum thread opened where many people post their solutions in many languages. Seeing better solutions to a problem you just solved on your own is a great way to rapidly advance.
I'd weakly recommend Python, it's free, easy enough, powerful enough to do simple but useful things (rename and reorganize files, extract data from text files, generate simple html pages ...),is well-designed and has features you'll encounter in other languages (classes, functional programming ...), and has a nifty interactive command line in which to experiment quickly. Also, some pretty good websites run on it.
But a lot of those advantages apply to languages like Ruby.
If you want to go into more exotic languages, I'd suggest Scheme over Haskell, it seems more beginner-friendly to me.
It mostly depends on what occasions you'll have of using it : if you have a website, Javascript might be better; If you like making game mods, go for lua. It also depends of who you know that can answer questions. If you have a good friend who's a good teacher and a Java expert, go for Java.
I have a problem with the wording of "logical rudeness". Even after having seen it many times, I reflexively parse it to mean being rude by being logical-- almost the opposite of the actual meaning.
I don't know whether I'm the only person who has this problem, but I think it's worth checking.
"Anti-logical rudeness" strikes me as a good bit better.
This was in my drafts folder but due to the lackluster performance of my latest few posts I decided it doesn't deserve to be a top level post. As such, I am making it a comment here. It also does not answer the question being asked so it probably wouldn't have made the cut even if my last few posts been voted to +20 and promoted... but whatever. :P
Perceived Change
Once, I was dealing a game of poker for some friends. After dealing some but not all of the cards I cut the deck and continued dealing. This irritated them a great deal because I altered the order of the deck because some players would not receive the cards they were supposed to be dealt. One of the friends happened to be majoring in Mathematics and understood probability as much as anyone else at the table. Even he thought what I did was wrong.
I explained that the cut didn’t matter because everyone still has the same odds of receiving any particular card from the deck. His retort was that it did matter because the card he was going to get is now near the middle of the deck. Instead of that particular random card he will get a different particular random card. As such, I should not have cut the deck.
During the ensuing arguments I found myself constantly presented with the following point: The fact of the game is that he would have received a certain card and now he will receive a different card. Shouldn’t this matter? People seem to hold grudges when someone swaps random chances of an outcome and the swap changes who wins.
The problem with this objection is illustrated if I secretly cut the cards. If they have no reason to believe I cut the deck, they wouldn’t complain. Furthermore, it is completely impossible to perceive the change by studying before and after states of the probabilities. More clearly, if I put the cards under the table and threatened to cut the cards, my friends would have no way of knowing whether or not I cut the deck. This implies that the change itself is not the sole cause of complaint. The change must be accompanied with the knowledge that something was changed.
The big catch is that the change itself isn’t actually necessary at all. If I simply tell my friends that I cut the cards when they were not looking they will be just as upset. They have perceived a change in the situation. In reality, every card is in exactly the same position and they will be dealt what they think they should have been dealt. But now even that has changed. Now they actually think the exact opposite. Even though nothing about the deck has been changed, they now think that the cards being dealt to them are the wrong cards.
What is this? There has to be some label for this, but I don’t know what it is or what the next step in this observation should be. Something is seriously, obviously wrong. What is it?
Edit to add:
The underlying problem here is not that they were worried about me cheating. The specific scenario and the arguments that followed from that scenario were such that cheating wasn't really a valid excuse for their objections.
An important element of it being fair for you to cut the deck in the middle of dealing, which your friends may not trust, is that you do so in ignorance of who it will help and who it will hinder. By cutting the deck, you have explicitly made and acted on a choice (it is far less obvious when you choose not to cut the deck, the default expected action), and this causes your friends to worry that the choice may have been optimized for interests other than their own.
To venture a guess: their true objection was probably "you didn't follow the rules for dealing cards". And, to be fair to your friends, those rules were designed to defend honest players against card sharps, which makes violations Bayesian grounds to suspect you of cheating.
An argument isomorphic to yours can be used to demonstrate that spousal cheating is okay as long as there are no consequences and the spouse doesn't know. Maybe your concept of "valid objection" is overly narrow?
Rearranging the cards in a deck has no statistical consequence. Cheating on your spouse significantly alters the odds of certain things happening.
If you add the restriction that there are no consequences, there wouldn't really be much point in doing it because its not like you get sex as a result. That would be a consequence.
The idea that something immoral shouldn't be immoral if no one catches you and nothing bad happens as a result is an open problem as far as I know. Most people don't like such an idea but I hear the debate surface from time to time. (Usually by people trying to convince themselves that whatever they just did wasn't wrong.)
In addition, cutting a deck of cards does have an obvious effect. There is no statistical consequence but obviously you are not going to get the card you were originally going to be dealt.
TL;DR: Help me go less crazy and I'll give you $100 after six months.
I'm a long-time lurker and signed up to ask this. I have a whole lot of mental issues, the worst being lack of mental energy (similar to laziness, procrastination, etc., but turned up to eleven and almost not influenced by will). Because of it, I can't pick myself up and do things I need to (like calling a shrink); I'm not sure why I can do certain things and not others. If this goes on, I won't be able to go out and buy food, let alone get a job. Or sign up for cryonics or donate to SIAI.
I've tried every trick I could bootstrap; the only one that helped was "count backwards then start", for things I can do but have trouble getting started on. I offer $100 to anyone who suggests a trick that significantly improves my life for at least six months. By "significant improvement" I mean being able to do things like going to the bank (if I can't, I won't be able to give you the money anyway), and having ways to keep myself stable or better (most likely, by seeing a therapist).
One-time tricks to do one important thing are also welcome, but I'd offer less.
I recommend a counseling psychologist rather than a psychiatrist. Or, if you can manage it, do both.
I used to be just like this, I actually put off applying for college until I missed the deadlines for my favorite schools, just because I couldn't get myself started. Something changed for me over the last couple years, though, and I'm now really thriving. One big thing that helps in the short term is stimulants: ephedrine and caffeine are OTC in most countries. Make sure you learn how to cycle them, if you do decide to use them. Things seem to get easier over time.
Why? (The psychiatrist is the one who's a psychologist but can also give you meds, right?)
Caffeine seems to work at least a little, but makes me anxious; it's almost always worth it. Thanks. Ephedrine is illegal in France.
ETA: Actually, scratch that. I tried drinking coffee and soda when I wasn't unusually relaxed, and the anxiety is too extreme to make me more productive.
See the psychiatrist first. Your problems may be caused by some more physiological cause, such as a problem with your thyroid, and a medical doctor is more likely to be able to diagnose them.
(Note: I'm a psychology grad student, my undergrad work was in neuroscience and psychology.)
Psychiatrists (in America at least) are usually too busy to do much psychotherapy. When they do, get ready to pay big time. It just isn't worth their extremely valuable time and in any case, it isn't their specialty.
You don't want to see a clinical psychologist because they treat people with diagnosable psych. disorders. You may have melancholic depression, but it sounds like you just have extreme akrasia issues. If you go to a psychiatrist first, they'll likely just try to give you worthless SSRIs.
Psychologists are for that reason often cheaper. In fact, a counseling psychologist in a training clinic can be downright affordable, and most of the benefits of therapy seem to be independent of the therapist anyway.
Also, it would be worth checking for data on the effectiveness of a psychiatric drug before spending on it; many may be ineffective or not worth the side effects.
And if you live in Australia can sometimes be free!
Is Crazy meds as good as it looks?
Absolutely. Just reading it made my day! Hilarious. (And the info isn't bad either. )
A psychiatrist is someone who went to medical school and specialized in the brain. A psychologist is someone who has a PhD in psychology. Putting "clinical" before either means they treat patients; "experimental" means what it sounds like. There's some crosstraining, but not as much as one might imagine. ("Therapist" and "counselor" imply no specific degree.)
Some common misconceptions:
Counseling Psychology is a very specific degree program within psychology. A psychologist can have a PhD, a PsyD, (doctor of psychology degree), or in some fields, even a masters.
Psychiatrists also don't specialize in "the brain" (that's neurology), they specialize in treating psychiatric disorders using the medical model.
I suggest you pay me $50 for each week you don't get and hold a job. Else, avoid paying me by getting one, and save yourself 6mo x 4wk/mo x $50 -$100 = $400! Wooo! What a deal for us both, eh?
That's an amusing idea, but disincentives don't work well, and paying money is too Far a disincentive to work (now, if you followed me around and punched me, that might do the trick).
This reminds me of the joke about a beggar who asks Rothschild for money. Rothschild thinks and says "A janitor is retiring next week, you can have their job and I'll double the pay.", and the beggar replies "Don't bother, I have a cousin who can do it for the original wage, just give me the difference!"
For what it's worth:
A few years back I was suffering from some pretty severe health problems. The major manifestations were cognitive and mood related. Often when I was saying a sentence I would become overwhelmed halfway through and would have to consciously force myself to finish what I was saying.
Long story short, I started treating my diet like a controlled experiment and, after a few years of trial and error, have come out feeling better than I can ever remember. If you're going to try self experimentation the three things I recommend most highly to ease the analysis process are:
I'm curious. What foods (if you don't mind me asking) did you find had such a powerful effect?
I expanded upon it here.
What has helped me the most, by far, is cutting out soy, dairy, and all processed foods (there are some processed foods I feel fine eating, but the analysis to figure out which ones proved too costly for the small benefit of being able to occasionally eat unhealthy foods).
Also, don't offer money. External motivators are disincentives. By offering $100, you are attaching a specific worth to the request, and undermining our own intrinsic motivations to help. Since allowing a reward to disincentivize a behavior is irrational, I'm curious how much effect it has on the LessWrong crowd; regardless, I would be surprised if anyone here tried to collect, so I don't see the point.
My understanding is that the mechanism by which this works lets you sidestep it pretty neatly by also doing basically similar things for free. That way you can credibly tell yourself that you would do it for free, and being paid is unrelated.
To the contrary. If you pay volunteers, they stop enjoying their work. Other similar studies have been done that show that paying people who already enjoy something will sometimes make them stop the activity altogether, or to at least stop doing it without an external incentive.
Edit: AdeleneDawner and thomblake agree with the parent. This may be a counterargument, or just an answer to my earlier question, namely "Are LessWrongers better able to control this irrational impulse?"
So can a person ever love their day job? It seems that moneymaking/entrepreneurship should be the only reflectively stable passion.
Obviously, many people do love their day job. However, your question is apt, and I have no answer to it---even with regards to myself. I often have struggled with doing the exact same things at work and for myself, and enjoying one but not the other. I think in my case, it is more an issue of pressure and expectations. However, when trying to answer the question of what I should do with my life, it makes things difficult!
I didn't download the .pdf, but it looks like this was probably conducted by paying volunteers for all of their volunteer work. If someone got paid for half of their hours volunteering, or had two positions doing very similar work and then one of them started paying, I'd expect this effect to diminish.
The study concerns how many hours per week were spent volunteering; some was paid, some was not, though presumably a single organization would either pay or not pay volunteers, rather than both. Paid volunteers worked less per week overall.
The study I referenced was not the one I intended to reference, but I have not found the one I most specifically remember. Citing studies is one of the things I most desperately want an eidetic memory for.
That seems to work. If I were teaching part-time simply because I needed the money, I wouldn't do it. But I decided that I'd teach this class for free, so I also have no problem doing it for very little money.
Agreed - I do basically similar things for free, and am reasonably confident that my reaction would be "*shrug* ok" if I were to work with MixedNuts and xe wanted to pay me.
(I do intend to offer help here; I'm still trying to determine what the most useful offer would be.)
The number one piece of advice that I can give is see a doctor. Not a psychologist or psychiatrist - just a medical doctor. Tell them your main symptoms (low energy, difficulty focusing, panic attacks) and have them run some tests. Those types of problems can have physical, medical causes (including conditions involving the thyroid or blood sugar - hyperthyroidism & hypoglycemia). If a medical problem is a big part of what's happening, you need to get it taken care of.
If you're having trouble getting yourself to the doctor, then you need to find a way to do it. Can you ask someone for help? Would a family member help you set up a doctor's appointment and help get you there? A friend? You might even be able to find someone on Less Wrong who lives near you and could help.
My second and third suggestions would be to find a friend or family member who can give you more support and help (talking about your issues, driving you to appointments, etc.) and to start seeing a therapist again (and find a good one - someone who uses cognitive-behavioral therapy).
This is technically a good idea. What counts as "my main symptoms", though? The ones that make life most difficult? The ones that occur most often? The most visible ones to others? To me?
You'll want to give the doctor a sense of what's going on with you (just like you've done here), and then to help them find any medical issues that may be causing your problems. So give an overall description of the problem and how serious it is (sort of like in your initial post - your lack of energy, inability to do things, and lots of related problems) - including some examples or specifics (like these) can help make that clearer. And be sure to describe anything that seems like it could be physiological (the three that stuck out to me were lack of energy, difficulty focusing, and anxiety / panic attacks - you might be able to think of some others).
The doctor will have questions which will help guide the conversation, and you can always ask whether they want more details about something. Do you think that figuring out what to say to the doctor could be a barrier for you? If so, let me know - I could say more about it.
After reading this thread, I can only offer one piece of advice:
You need to see a medical doctor, and fast. Your problems are clearly more serious than anything we can deal with here. If you have to, call 911 and have them carry you off in an ambulance.
This is just a guess, and I'm not interested in your money, but I think that you probably have a health problem. I'd suggest you check out the book "The Mood Cure" by Julia Ross, which has some very good information on supplementation. Offhand, you sound like the author's profile for low-in-catecholamines, and might benefit very quickly from fairly low doses of certain amino acids such as L-tyrosine.
I strongly recommend reading the book, though, as there are quite a few caveats regarding self-supplementation like this. Using too high a dose can be as problematic as too low, and times of day are important too. Consistent management is important, too. When you're low on something, taking what you need can make you feel euphoric, but when you have the right dose, you won't notice anything by taking some. (Instead, you'll notice if you go off it for a few days, and find mood/energy going back to pre-supplementation levels.)
Anyway... don't know if it'll work for you, but I do suggest you try it. (And the same recommendation goes for anyone else who's experiencing a chronic mood or energy issue that's not specific to a particular task/subject/environment.)
Buying a (specific) book isn't possible right now, but may help later; thanks. I took the questionnaire on her website and apparently everything is wrong with me, which makes me doubt her tests' discriminating power.
It's a marketing tool, not a test.
FWIW, I don't have "everything" wrong with me; I had only two, and my wife scores on two, with only one the same between the two of us.
Do you take fish oil supplements or equivalent? Can't hurt to try; fish oil is recommended for ADHD and very well may repair some of the brain damage that causes mental illness.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1093866
I have had and sometimes still struggle with similar problems, but there is something that sometimes has helped me:
If there's something you need to do, try to do something with it, however little, as soon after you get up as possible. The example I'm going to use is studying, but you can generalize from it.
Pretty much soon as you get up, BEFORE checking email or anything like that, study (or whatever it is you need to do) a bit. And keep doing until you feel your mental energy "running out".. but then, any time later in the day that you feel a smigen of motivation, don't let go of it: run immediately to continue doing.
But starting the day with doing some, however little, seemed to help. I think with me the psychology was sort of "this is the sort of day when I'm working on this", so once I start on it, it's as if I'm "allowed" to periodically keep doing stuff with it during the day.
Anyways, as I said, this has sometimes helped me, so...
Do you want a companion of some sort?
If so, a mind hack that might work is imagining what a hypothetical companion might find attractive in a person. Then try and become that person. Do this by using your hypothetical companion as a filter on what you are doing. Don't beat yourself up about not doing what the hypothetical companion would find attractive, that isn't attractive!
Your hypothetical companion does not have to be neurotypical but should be someone you would want to be around.
We should be good at following on from these kinds of motivations as we have a long history of trying to get mates by adjusting behaviour.
I've sort of considered that, though not framed that way. It might be useful later, but not at my current level. Thanks.
Order modafinil online. Take it, using 'count backwards then swallow the pill' if necessary. Then, use the temporary boost in mental energy to call a shrink.
I have found this useful at times.
Modafinil is a prescription drug, so he would have to see a doctor first, right?
Yes, full compliance with laws and schedules, even ones that are trivial to ignore, is something I publicly advocate.
Ok, I didn't know that scoring illegal prescription drugs online was so easy. Isn't it risky? I know people have been busted for this the USA, though it may be easier in France.
In the USA it's no problem to order unscheduled prescription drugs over the internet. Schedule IV drugs can be imported, but customs occasionally seizes them with no penalty for the importer. No company that takes credit cards will ship Schedule II or Schedule III drugs to the USA; at least not one that will be in business for more than a month or two.
I believe it's all easier in Europe but I don't know for sure. PM for more info.
And for completeness, I should note that Modafinil is a Schedule IV drug in the US.
Also, downloading music & movies is usually a copyright violation, frequently both civil & criminal.
I will not go into detail on what I understand to be the pragmatic considerations here, since the lesswrong morality encourages a more conservative approach to choosing what to do.
The life-extentionists over at imminst.org tend to be experienced in acquiring whatever they happen to need to meet their health and cognitive enhancement goals. They tend to give a fairly unbiased reports on the best way to go about getting what you need, accounting for legal risks, product quality risks, price and convenience.
I do note that when I want something that is restricted I usually just go tell a doctor that "I have run out" and get them to print me 'another' prescription.
Thanks, but it gets worse. I can't order anything online, because I need to see my bank about checks or debit cards first. I can imagine asking a friend to do it for me, though it's terrifying; I could probably do it on a good day. Also, I doubt the thing modafinil boosts is the same thing I lack, but it could help, if only through placebo effect.
Terrifying? That's troubling. A shrink can definitely help you!
It may boost everything just enough to get you over the line.
Good luck getting something done. I hope something works for you. Do whatever it takes.
I'll come out of the shadows (well not really, I'm too ashamed to post this under my normal LW username) and announce that I am, or anyway have been, in more or less the same situation as MixedNuts. Maybe not as severe (there are some important things I can do, at the moment, and I have in the past been much worse than I am now -- I would actually appear externally to be keeping up with my life at this exact moment, though that may come crashing down before too long), but generally speaking almost everything MixedNuts says rings true to me. I don't live with anyone or have any nearby family, so that adds some extra difficulty.
Right now, as I said, this is actually a relatively good moment, I've got some interesting projects to work on that are currently helping me get out of bed. But I know myself too well to assume that this will last. Plus, I'm way behind on all kinds of other things I'm supposed to be doing (or already have done).
I'm not offering any money, but I'd be interested to see if anyone is interested in conversing with me about this (whether here or by PM). Otherwise, my reason for posting this comment was to add some evidence that this may be a common problem (even afflicting people you wouldn't necessarily guess suffered from it).
Hope this doesn't turn into a free-therapy bandwagon, but I have a lot of the same issues as MixedNuts and anonymous259, so if anyone has any tips or other insights they'd like to share with me, that would be delightful.
My main problem seems to be that, if I don't find something thrilling or fascinating, and it requires much mental or physical effort, I don't do it, even if I know I need to do it, even if I really want to do it. Immediate rewards and punishments help very little (sometimes they actually make things worse, if the task requires a lot of thought or creativity). There are sometimes exceptions when the boring+mentally/physically-demanding task is to help someone, but that's only when the person is actually relying on me for something, not just imposing an artificial expectation, and it usually only works if it's someone I know and care about (except myself).
A related problem is that I rarely find anything thrilling or fascinating (enough to make me actually do it, at least) for very long. In my room I have stacks of books that I've only read a few chapters into; on my computer I have probably hundreds of unfinished (or barely started) programs and essays and designs, and countless others that only exist in my mind; on my academic transcripts are many 'W's and 'F's, not because the classes were difficult (a more self-controlled me would have breezed through them), but because I stopped being interested halfway through. So even when something starts out intrinsically motivating for me, the momentum usually doesn't last.
Like anon259, I can't offer any money — this sort of problem really gets in the way of wanting/finding/keeping a job — but drop me a PM if gratitude motivates you. :)
To some extent, the purpose of LessWrong is to fix problems with ourselves, and the distinction between errors in reasoning and errors in action is subtle enough that I would hesitate to declare this on- or off-topic.
It should be mentioned, however, that the population of LessWrongers-asking-for-advice is unlikely to be representative of the population of LessWrongers, and even less so of the population of agents-LessWrongers-care-about. This is likely to make generalizations drawn from observations here narrower in scope than we might like.
Same deal as the other two - PM me IM contact info, we can chat :)
PM me with your IM contact info and I'll try to help you too.
Look, I'll do it for free too!
I've got a weaker form of this, but I manage. The number one thing that seems to work is a tight feedback loop (as in daily) between action and reward, preferably reward by other people. That's how I was able to do OBLW. Right now I'm trying to get up to a reasonable speed on the book, and seem to be slowly ramping up.
I have limited mental resources myself, and am sometimes busy, but I'm generally willing to (and find it enjoyable to) talk to people about this kind of thing via IM. I'm fairly easily findable on Skype (put a dot between my first and last names; text only, please), AIM (same name as here), GChat (same name at gmail dot com), and MSN (same name at hotmail dot com). The google email is the one I pay attention to, but I'm not so great at responding to email unless it has obvious questions in it for me to answer. It's also noteworthy that my sleep schedule is quite random - it is worth checking to see if I'm awake at 5am if you want to, but also don't assume that just because it's daytime I'll be awake.
Maybe you need to go more crazy, not less. Accept that you are in an existential desert and your soul is dying. But there are other places over the horizon, where you may or may not be better off. So either you die where you are, or you pick a direction, crawl, and see if you end up somewhere better.
I've considered that. There are changes in circumstances that would effect positive changes in my mental state, like hopping on the first train to a faraway town or just stop pretending I'm normal in public. I'd be much happier, until I run out of money.
Why would you run out of money if you stopped pretending you're normal?
I couldn't go to school or get a job. If I stay in school, I have a career ahead of me if I can pursue it.
What is this abnormality you have which, if you displayed it, would make it impossible to go to school or get a job?
I imagine a specific authority in my life or from my past (okay, this is usually my mother) getting really angry and yelling at me to get my ass up and get to work. If you have any memories of being yelled at by an authority figure, use those to help build the image.
I promise to give this a honest try, but I expect it to result in panic more than anything.
try this http://www.antiprocrastinator.com/
also, contact someone who is proficient in helping people, for eg. here we have Alicorn, or try some googling.
I'm desperate enough to ask on LW. Of course I've Googled everything I could think of.
The link is decent, combining two good tricks and a valuable insight, but all three have been on LW before so I knew them.
Pointing out Alicorn in particular may be useful, but isn't it sort of forcing her to offer help? She already did, though, which makes this point moot.
I'm flattered, but while I enjoy helping people, I'm not sure how I've projected being proficient at it such that you'd notice - can you explain whence this charming compliment?
why of course! I've been lurking for a few years now so I remember when you began posting on self help etc. now that think more about it though, I might've had pjeby in mind as well, you two sort of 'merged' when I wrote that above comment, heh
but really, proficient is just a word choice, I guess it is flattery, and I did mean to signal you, but that's how I usually write.
apologies if that overburdened you in anyway..
ETA: oh and I'd meant to write 'more proficient', not just 'proficient'.
MixedNuts, I'm in a similar position, though perhaps less severely, and more intermittently. I've been diagnosed with bipolar, though I've had difficulty taking my meds. At this point in my life, I'm being supported almost entirely by a network of family, friends, and associates that is working hard to help me be a real person and getting very little in return.
I have one book that has helped me tremendously, "The Depression Cure", by Dr. Ilardi. He claims that depression-spectrum disorders are primarily caused by lifestyle, and that almost everyone can benefit from simple changes. As any book--especially a self-help book---it ought to be read skeptically, and it doesn't introduce any ideas that can't be found in modern psychological research. Rather, it aggregates what in Ilardi's opinion are the most important: exercise works more effectively than SSRIs, etc.
If you really want a copy, and you really can't get one yourself, I will send you one if you can send me your address. It helped me that much. Which is not to say that I am problem free. Still, a 40% reduction in problem behavior, after 6 months, with increasing rather than decreasing results, is a huge deal for me.
Rather, I want to give you your "one trick". It is the easiest rather than the most effective; but it has an immediate effect, which helped me implement the others. Morning sunlight. I don't know where you live; I live in a place where I can comfortably sit outside in the morning even this time of year. Get up as soon as you can after waking, and wake as early in the day as you would ideally like to. Walk around, sit, or lie down in the brightest area outside for half an hour. You can go read studies on why this works, or that debate its efficacy, but for me it helps.
I realize that your post didn't say anything about depression; just lack of willpower. For me, they were tightly intertwined, and they might not be for you. Please try it anyway.
Thanks. I'll try the morning light thing; from experience it seems to help somewhat, but I can't keep it going for long.
If nothing else works, I'll ask you for the book. I'm skeptical since they tend to recommend unbootstrapable things such as exercise, but it could help.
There is one boot process that works well, which is to contract an overseer. For me, it was my father. I felt embarrassed to be a grown adult asking for his father's oversight, but it helped when I was at my worst. Now, I have him, my roommate, two ex-girlfriends, and my advisor who are all concerned about me and check up with me on a regular basis. I can be honest with them, and if I've stopped taking care of myself, they'll call or even come over to drag me out of bed, feed me, and/or take me for a run.
I have periodically been an immense burden on the people who love me. However, I eventually came to the realization that being miserable, useless, and isolated was harder and more unpleasant for them than being let in on what was wrong with me and being asked to help. I've been a net negative to this world, but for some reason people still care for me, and as long as they do, my best course of action seems to be to let them try to help me. I suspect you have a set of people who would likewise prefer to help you than to watch you suffer.
Feeling less helpless was nearly as good for them as for me. I have a debt to them that I am continuing to increase, because I'm still not healthy or self-sufficient. I don't know if I can ever repay it, but
Yes, I've considered that. There are people who can and do help, but not to the extent I'd need. I believe they help me as much as they can while still having a life that isn't me. I shouldn't ask for more, should I?
If you have tips for getting more efficient help out of them, suggestions of people who'd help though I don't expect them to, or ways to get help from other people (professional caretakers?), by all means please shoot.
You indicated that you had trouble maintaining the behavior of getting daily morning light. Ask someone who 1) likes talking to you, 2) is generally up at that hour, and 3) is free to talk on the phone, to call you most mornings. They can set an alarm on their phone and have a 2 minute chat with you each day.
In my experience if I can pick up the phone (which admittedly can be difficult), the conversation is enough of a distraction and a motivation to get outside, and then inertia is enough to keep me out there.
The reason I chose my father is that he is an early riser, self-employed, and he would like to talk to me more than he gets to. You might not have someone like that in your life, but if you do, it is minimally intrusive to them, and may be a big help to you.
This sounds like a great idea. I have a strong impulse to answer phones, so if I put the phone far enough from my bed I had to get up to answer it, I'd get past the biggest obstacle.
There are two minor problems: None of the people I know have free time early in the morning, but two minutes is manageable. When outside, I'm not sure what to do so there's a risk I'd get anxious and default to going home.
I'll try it, thanks.
If you're going to go to the trouble of talking to someone every morning, you might as well see their face:
http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2009/10/15/more-about-faces-and-mood-2/
Seth found that his mood the next day was significantly improved if he saw enough faces the previous morning. There was a LessWronger that posted somewhere that this trick helped him a lot, but I can't remember who or where right now.
I see quite a lot of faces in the morning already. Maybe not early enough? Though I'm pretty skeptical; it looks like it'd work best for extroverted neurotypicals, and I'm neither. I added it to the list of tricks, but I'll try others first.
I'm willing to try to help you but I think I'd be substantially more effective in real time. If you would like to IM, send me your contact info in a private message.
What do you do when you aren't doing anything?
EDIT: More questions as you answer these questions. Too many questions at once is too much effort. I am taking you dead seriously so please don't be offended if I severely underestimate your ability.
I have a 2000+ word brain dump on economics and technology that I'd appreciate feedback on. What would be the protocol. Should I link to it? Copy it into a comment? Start a top level article about it?
I am not promising any deep insights here, just my own synthesis of some big ideas that are out there.
LHC to shut down for a year to address safety concerns: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8556621.stm
Apparently this is shoddy journalism. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1180487
I'm thinking of writing up a post clearly explaining update-less decision theory. I have a somewhat different way of looking at things than Wei Dia and will give my interpretation of his idea if there is demand. I might also need to do this anyway in preparation for some additional decision theory I plan to post to lesswrong. Is there demand?
For the "people say stupid things" file and a preliminary to a post I'm writing. There is a big college basketball tournament in New York this weekend. There are sixteen teams competing. This writer for the New York Post makes some predictions.
What is wrong with this article and how could you take advantage of the author?
Edit: Rot13 is a good idea here.
I would like to suggest that people using Rot13 note that in their comments, perhaps as the first few characters "Rot13:" - otherwise, comments taken out of context are indecipherable.
Gur cbfgrq bqqf qba'g tvir n gbgny cebonovyvgl bs bar, fb gurl'er Qhgpu-obbxnoyr.
Abg dhvgr. Uvf ceboyrz vf gung gur bqqf nqq hc gb yrff guna bar. Vs V tnir lbh 1-2 bqqf ba urnqf naq 1-2 bqqf ba gnvyf sbe na haovnfrq pbva, gung nqqf hc gb 1.3, naq lbh pna'g Qhgpu obbx zr ba gung.
Is this supposed to be obvious to people unfamiliar with college basketball in general and that tournament in particular? Gur bqqf (vs V haqrefgnaq gurz pbeerpgyl RQVG: V qvq abg) vzcyl oernx rira cebonovyvgvrf gung nqq hc gb nobhg 0.94, juvpu vzcyvrf gung n obbxznxre bssrevat gubfr bqqf jbhyq ba nirentr ybfr zbarl, ohg gung'f pybfr rabhtu gb abg or erznexnoyl fghcvq sbe n wbheanyvfg.
If the tournament is single elimination knockout, and the figures in brackets are win-loss record against roughly comparable opponents the odds for the sleepers and long-shots seem insanely good. South Florida in particular.
Yes
Rot13: Gel gur zngu ntnva, guvf gvzr pbairegvat sebz bqqf gb senpgvbaf, svefg. Vg nqqf hc gb nobhg .8... V qba'g xabj ubj ybj gung lbhe fgnaqneqf ner sbe wbheanyvfgf gubhtu.
This is also true. But the mistake I was thinking of was the first one.
So betting 1$ at 3-1 means that winning means you get 4$ total, your original bet + your winnings? I had assumend you'd get 3$.
To which Robin Z replies, "Yes, you get $4."
This confused me, too, for a while, so let me share with you the fruits of my puzzling.
You do get 3$ over the course of the whole transaction since at the time of the bet, you gave the bookmaker what you would owe him if you lose the bet (namely $1).
In other words, your 1$ bought you both a wager (the expected value of which is 0$ if 3-1 reflects the probability of the bet-upon outcome) and an IOU (whose expected value is 1$ if the bookmaker is perfectly honest and nothing happens to prevent you from redeeming the IOU).
The reason it is traditional for you to pay the bookmaker money when making the bet (the reason, that is, for the IOU) is that you cannot be trusted to pay up if you lose the bet as much as the bookmaker can be trusted to pay up (and simultaneously to redeem the IOU) if you win. Well, also, that way there is no need for you and the bookmaker to get together after the bet-upon event if you lose, which reduces transaction costs.
New on arXiv:
David H. Wolpert, Gregory Benford. (2010). What does Newcomb's paradox teach us?
See also:
In a competely preverse coincedence Benford's law, attributed to an apparently unrelated Frank Bernford, was apparently invented by an unrelated Simon Newcomb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law
I've just finished reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely.
I think most LWers would enjoy it. If you've read the sequences, you probably won't learn that many new things (though I did learn a few), but it's a good way to refresh your memory (and it probably helps memorization to see those biases approached from a different angle).
It's a bit light compared to going straight to the studies, but it's also a quick read.
Good to give as gift to friends.
I'm waiting for the revised edition to come out in May.
Looking at that amazon link, has anyone considered automatically inserting a SIAI affiliate into amazon links? It appeared to work quite well for StackOverflow.
Does anyone have a good reference for the evolutionary psychology of curiosity? A quick google search yielded mostly general EP references. I'm specifically interested in why curiosity is so easily satisfied in certain cases (creation myths, phlogiston, etc.). I have an idea for why this might be the case, but I'd like to review any existing literature before writing it up.
A fascinating article about rationality or the lack thereof as it applied to curing scurvy, and how hard trying to be less wrong can be: http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
Very interesting. And sobering.
Wonderful article, thanks. I'm fond of reminders of this type that scientific advances are very seldom as discrete, as irreversible, as incontrovertible as the myths of science often give them to be.
When you look at the detailed stories of scientific progress you see false starts, blind alleys, half-baked theories that happen by luck to predict phenomena and mostly sound ones that unfortunately fail on key bits of evidence, and a lot of hard work going into sorting it all out (not to mention, often enough, a good dose of luck). The manglish view, if nothing else, strikes me as a good vitamin for people wanting an antidote to the scurvy of overconfidence.
ETA: The article made for a great dinnertime story to my kids. Only one of the three, the oldest (13yo) was familiar with the term "scurvy" - and with the cure as well; both from One Piece. Manga 1 - school 0.
How much information is preserved by plastination? Is it a reasonable alternative to cryonics?
See the last question in this list
Afaict pretty much the same amount as cryonics. And it is cheaper and more amenable to laser scanning. This is helpful. The post has an interesting explanation of why all the attention is on cryo:
Edit: Further googling suggest there might be some unsolved implementation issues.
Warning: Your reality is out of date
tl;dr:
There are established facts that don't change perceptibly (the boiling point of water), and there are facts that change constantly (outside temperature, time of day)
Inbetween these two intuitive categories, however, a third class of facts could be defined: facts that do change measurably, or even drastically, over human lifespans, but still so slowly that people, after first learning about them, have a tendency of dumping them into the "no-change" category unless they're actively paying attention to the field in question.
Examples of these so-called mesofacts include the total human population (6*10⁹? No, almost 7*10⁹ nowadays) and the number of exoplanets found (A hundred? Two hundred? More like four hundred and counting.)
Which very-low-effort activities are most worthwhile? By low effort, I mean about as hard as solitaire, facebook, blogs, TV, most fantasy novels, etc.
I think I have a good one for people in the USA. This is a job that allows you to work from home on your computer rating the quality of search engine results. It pays $15/hour and because their productivity metrics aren't perfect, you can work for 30 seconds and then take two minutes off with about as much variance as you want. Instead of taking time off directly to do different work, you could also slow yourself down by continuously watching TV or downloaded videos.
They are also hiring for some workers in similar areas that are capable of doing somewhat more complicated tasks, presumably for higher salaries. Some sound interesting. http://www.lionbridge.com/lionbridge/en-us/company/work-with-us/careers.htm
Yes, out of all "work from home" internet jobs, this is the only one that is not a scam. Lionbridge is a real company and their shares recently continued to increase after a strong earnings report. http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100210-716444.html?mod=rss_Hot_Stocks
First, you send them your resume, and they basically approve every US high school graduate that can create a resume for the next step. Then you have to take a test in doing the job. They provide plenty of training material and the job isn't all that hard, a few hours of rapid skimming is probably enough to pass the test for most people. Almost 100% of people would be able to pass the test after 10 hours of studying.
throwing/giving away stuff you don't use. reading instead of watching tv or browsing website for the umpteenth time. eating more fruit and less processed sugar. exercising 10-15 minutes a day. writing down your ideas. intro to econ of some sort. spending 30 minutes a day on a long term project. meditation.
Thermodynamics post on my blog. Not directly related to rationality, but you might find it interesting if you liked Engines of Cognition.
Summary: molar entropy is normally expressed as Joules per Kelvin per mole, but can also be expressed, more intuitively, as bits per molecule, which shows the relationship between a molecule's properties and how much information it contains. (Contains references to two books on the topic.)
Game theorists discuss one-shot Prisoner's dilemma, why people who don't know Game Theory suggest the irrational strategy of cooperating, and how to make them intuitively see that defection is the right move.
Interesting. Has this experiment actually been run, and does it change the percentages in the responses relative to the textbook version?
Pick some reasonable priors and use them to answer the following question.
On week 1, Grandma calls on Thursday to say she is coming over, and then comes over on Friday. On week 2, Grandma once again calls on Thursday to say she is coming over, and then comes over on Friday. On week 3, Grandma does not call on Thursday to say she is coming over. What is the probability that she will come over on Friday?
ETA: This is a problem, not a puzzle. Disclose your reasoning, and your chosen priors, and don't use ROT13.
Let
A toy version of my prior could be reasonably close to the following:
P(AN)=p, P(AN,BN)=pq, P(~AN,BN)=(1-p)r
where
Thus, the joint probability distribution of (p,q,r) is given by 4q(1-r) once we normalize. Now, how does the evidence affect this? The likelihood ratio for (A1,B1,A2,B2) is proportional to (pq)^2, so after multiplying and renormalizing, we get a joint probability distribution of 24p^2q^3(1-r). Thus P(~A3|A1,B1,A2,B2)=1/4 and P(~A3,B3|A1,B1,A2,B2)=1/12, so I wind up with a 1 in 3 chance that Grandma will come on Friday, if I've done all my math correctly.
Of course, this is all just a toy model, as I shouldn't assume things like "different weeks are independent", but to first order, this looks like the right behavior.
I should have realized this sooner: P(B3|~A3) is just the updated value of r, which isn't affected at all by (A1,B1,A2,B2). So of course the answer according to this model should be 1/3, as it's the expected value of r in the prior distribution.
Still, it was a good exercise to actually work out a Bayesian update on a continuous prior. I suggest everyone try it for themselves at least once!
Using the information that she is my grandmother, I speculate on the reason why she did not call on Thursday. Perhaps it is because she does not intend to come on Friday: P(Friday) is lowered. Perhaps it is because she does intend to come but judges the regularity of the event to make calling in advance unnecessary unless she had decided not to come: P(Friday) is raised. Grandmothers tend to be old and consequently may be forgetful: perhaps she intends to come but has forgotten to call: P(Friday) is raised. Grandmothers tend to be old, and consequently may be frail: perhaps she has been taken unwell; perhaps she is even now lying on the floor of her home, having taken a fall, and no-one is there to help: P(Friday) is lowered, and perhaps I should phone her.
My answer to the problem is therefore: I phone her to see how she is and ask if she is coming tomorrow.
I know -- this is not an answer within the terms of the question. However, it is my answer.
The more abstract version you later posted is a different problem. We have two observations of A and B occurring together, and that is all. Unlike the case of Grandma's visits, we have no information about any causal connection between A and B. (The sequence of revealing A before B does not affect anything.) What is then the best estimate of P(B|~A)?
We have no information about the relation between A and B, so I am guessing that a reasonable prior for that relation is that A and B are independent. Therefore A can be ignored and the Laplace rule of succession applied to the two observations of B, giving 3/4.
ETA: I originally had a far more verbose analysis of the second problem based on modelling it as an urn problem, which I then deleted. But the urn problem may be useful for the intuition anyway. You have an urn full of balls, each of which is either rough or smooth (A or ~A), and either black or white (B or ~B). You pick two balls which turn out to be both rough and black. You pick a third and feel that it is smooth before you look at it. How likely is it to be black?
Directly using the Laplace rule of succession on the sample space A \tensor B gives weights proportional to:
Conditioning on ~A, P(B|~A) = 1/2. Assuming independence does make a significant difference on this little data.
On the contrary, on two points.
First, "A and B are independent" is not a reasonable prior, because it assigns probability 0 to them being dependent in some way— or, to put it another way, if that were your prior and you observed 100 cases and A and B agreed each time (sometimes true, sometimes false), you'd still assume they were independent.
What you should have said, I think, is that a reasonable prior would have "A and B independent" as one of the most probable options for their relation, as it is one of the simplest. But it should also give some substantial weight to simple dependencies like "A and B identical" and "A and B opposite".
Second, the sense in which we have no prior information about relations between A and B is not a sense that justifies ignoring A. We had no prior information before we observed them agreeing twice, which raises the probability of "A and B identical" while somewhat lowering that of "A and B independent".
This raises a question of the meaningfuless of second-order Bayesian reasoning. Suppose I had a prior for the probability of some event C of, say, 0.469. Could one object to that, on the grounds that I have assigned a probability of zero to the probability of C being some other value? A prior of independence of A and B seems to me of a like nature to an assignment of a probability to C.
On the second point, seeing A and B together twice, or twenty times, tells me nothing about their independence. Almost everyone has two eyes and two legs, and therefore almost everyone has both two eyes and two legs, but it does not follow from those observations alone that possession of two eyes either is, or is not, independent of having two legs. For example, it is well-known (in some possible world) that the rare grey-green greasy Limpopo bore worm invariably attacks either the eyes, or the legs, but never both in the same patient, and thus observing someone walking on healthy legs conveys a tiny positive amount of probability that they have no eyes; while (in another possible world) the venom of the giant rattlesnake of Sumatra rapidly causes both the eyes and the legs of anyone it bites to fall off, with the opposite effect on the relationship between the two misfortunes. I can predict that someone has both two eyes and two legs from the fact that they are a human being. The extra information about their legs that I gain from examining their eyes could go either way.
But that is just an intuitive ramble. What is needed here is a calculation, akin to the Laplace rule of succession, for observations in a 2x2 contingency table. Starting from an ignorance prior that the probabilities of A&B, A&~B, B&~A, and ~A&~B are each 1/4, and observing a, b, c, and d examples of each, what is the appropriate posterior? Then fill in the values 2, 0, 0, and 0.
ETA: On reading the comments, I realise that the above is almost all wrong.
In order to have a probability distribution rather than just a probability, you need to ask a question that isn't boolean, ie one with more than two possible answers. If you ask "Will this coin come up heads on the next flip?", you get a probability, because there are only two possible answers. If you ask "How many times will this coin come up heads out of the next hundred flips?", then you get back a probability for each number from 0 to 100 - that is, a probability distribution. And if you ask "what kind of coin do I have in my pocket?", then you get a function that takes any possible description (from "copper" to "slightly worn 1980 American quarter") and returns a probability of matching that description.
Depends on how you're doing this; if you have a continuous prior for the probability of C, with an expected value of 0.469, then no— and future evidence will continue to modify your probability distribution. If your prior for the probability of C consists of a delta mass at 0.469, then yes, your model perhaps should be criticized, as one might criticize Rosenkrantz for continuing to assume his coin is fair after 30 consecutive heads.
A Bayesian reasoner actually would have a hierarchy of uncertainty about every aspect of ver model, but the simplicity weighting would give them all low probabilities unless they started correctly predicting some strong pattern.
Independence has a specific meaning in probability theory, and it's a very delicate state of affairs. Many statisticians (and others) get themselves in trouble by assuming independence (because it's easier to calculate) for variables that are actually correlated.
And depending on your reference class (things with human DNA? animals? macroscopic objects?), having 2 eyes is extremely well correlated with having 2 legs.
Even without any math It already tells you that they are not mutually exclusive. See wnoise's reply to the grandparent post for the Laplace rule equivalent.
I really like your urn formulation.
OK, I'll use the same model I use for text. The zeroth-order model is maxentropy, and the kth-order model is a k-gram model with a pseudocount of 2 (the alphabet size) allocated to the (k-1)th-order model.
In this case, since there's never before been a Thursday in which she did not call, we default to the 1st-order model, which says the probability is 3/4 that she will come on Friday.
I beg your pardon?
In the calls, does she specify when she is coming over? I.e. does she say she'll be coming over on Thursday, Friday, just sometime in the near future, or she leaves it for you to infer?
The information I gave is the information you have. Don't make me make the problem more complicated.
ETA: Let me expand on this before people start getting on my case.
Rationality is about coming to the best conclusion you can given the information you have. If the information available to you is limited, you just have to deal with it.
Besides, sometimes, having less information makes the problem easier. Suppose I give you the following physics problem:
I throw a ball from a height of 4 feet; its maximum height is 10 feet. How long does it take from the time I throw it for it to hit the ground?
This problem is pretty easy. Now, suppose I also tell you that the ball is a sphere, and I tell you its mass and radius, and the viscosity of the air. This means that I'm expecting you to take air resistance into account, and suddenly the problem becomes a lot harder.
If you really want a problem where you have all the information, here:
Every time period, input A (of type Boolean) is revealed, and then input B (also of type Boolean) is revealed. There are no other inputs. In time period 0, input A is revealed to be TRUE, and then input B is revealed to be TRUE. In time period 1, input A is revealed to be TRUE, and then input B is revealed to be TRUE. In time period 2, input A is revealed to be FALSE. What is the probability that input B will be revealed to be TRUE?
Having less information makes easier the problem of satisfying the teacher. It does not make easier the problem of determining when the ball hits the ground. Incidentally, I got the impression somehow that there are venues where physics teachers scold students for using too much information.
ETA (months later): I do think it's a good exercise, I just think this is not why.
I can say immediately that it is less than 50% - to be more rigorous would take a minute.
Edit: Wait - no, I can't. If the variables are related, then that conclusion would appear, but it's not necessary that they be.
Does she come over unannounced on any days other than Friday?
I fail to see how this question has a perceptibly rational answer - too much depends on the prior.
Presumably, once you've picked your priors, the rest follows. And presumably, once you've come up with an answer, you'll disclose your reasoning, and your chosen priors.
Papers from this weekend's AGI conference in Switzerland, here.
Speaking as someone who gets in internet arguments with religious people for (slightly frustrating) recreation, I know some really simple tactics you can use. Find out the answers to this question:
What does the person you're talking with believe, and what is the evidence for it?
Maintain proper standards of evidence. The existence of trees is not evidence for the Bible's veracity, no matter how many people seem to think so. If someone got a flu shot in the middle of flu season and got flu symptoms the next day, this is more likely to be a coincidence than to be caused by the vaccine. If you understand how evidence works -- and you certainly seem to -- then this is a remarkably general method for rebutting a lot of silly claims.
This is the equivalent of keeping your eye on the ball. It's a basic technique, and utterly essential.
[Backup strategy: Replace whatever beliefs the person you're talking to holds with another set, and see if their arguments still work equally well. If the answer is yes, then Bayes says that those arguments fail. For example, "Look at all the people who have felt Jesus in their hearts" can be applied just as strongly to support most other religions just by substituting something else for "Jesus". Or, most arguments against gay marriage work equally well against interracial marriage.
Backup backup strategy: quickly follow a rebuttal with an attack on the faulty foundations of your interlocutor's worldview. Be polite, but put them on the defensive. If you can't shake them with rationality, you can at least rattle them.]
Should we have a sidebar section "Friends of LessWrong" to link to sites with some overlap in goals/audience?
I would include TakeOnIt in such a list. Any other examples?
List with all the great books and videos
Recently I've read a few articles that mentioned the importance of reading the classic works, like the Feynman lectures on physics. But, where can I find those? Wouldn't it be nice if we had a central place, maybe wikipedia where you can find a list of all the great books, videolectures, web pages divided by field(physics, mathematics, computer science, economics, etc...)? So if someone wants to know what he has to read to get a good understanding of the basic knowledge of any field he will have a place to look it up. It doesn't necessarily need to have the actual works, but at least a pointer to them.
Is there such a comprehensive list somewhere?
every time someone tries to make such a list collaboratively much of the effort diffuses into arguments over inclusion eventually (see wikipedia).
I saw a commenter on a blog I read making what I thought was a ridiculous prediction, so I challenged him to make a bet. He accepted, and a bet has been made.
What do you all think?
Very good. I see this forcing more careful thought by the poster, either now or later, and more skepticism in the blog's audience.
I'd recommend restating all the terms of the bet in a single comment or another web page, which both of you explicitly accept. This will make things easier to reference eight months from now. Might also be good to name a simple procedure like a poll on the blog to resolve any disagreements (like the definition of "Healthcare reform passes").
And please, reply again here or make a new open thread comment once this gets resolved. I'd love to hear how it turned out and what the impact on poster's or other's beliefs was.
Is there a way to view an all time top page for Less Wrong? I mean a page with all of the LW articles in descending order by points, or something similar.
The link named "top" in the top bar, below the banner? Starting with the 10 all time highest ranked articles and continuing with the 10 next highest when you click "next", and so on? Or do I misunderstand you and you mean something else?
Thanks, I was missing the drop down button on that page.
while not so proficient in math, I do scour arxiv on occasion, and am rewarded with gems like this, enjoy :)
"Lessons from failures to achieve what was possible in the twentieth century physics" by Vesselin Petkov http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1001/1001.4218v1.pdf
Neat find! I haven't read all of it yet, but I found this striking:
This reminds me of Mach's Principle: Anti-Epiphenomenal Physics:
I generally prefer links to papers on the arxiv go the abstract, as so: http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.4218
This lets us read the abstract, and easily get to other versions of the same paper (including the latest, if some time goes by between your posting and my reading), and get to other works by the same author.
EDIT: overall, reasonable points, but some things "pinging" my crank-detectors. I suppose I'll have to track down reference 10 and the 4/3 claim for electro-magnetic mass.
I disagree. I think it's a paper which looks backwards in an unconstructive way. The author is hoping for conceptual breakthroughs as good as relativity and quantum theory, but which don't require engagement with the technical complexities of string theory or the Standard Model. Those two constructions respectively define the true theoretical and empirical frontier, but instead the author wants to ignore all that, linger at about a 1930s conceptual level, and look for another way.
ETA: As an example of not understanding contemporary developments, see his final section, where he says
I don't know what significance this question has for the author, but so far as I know, the hydrogen atom has no dipole moment in its ground state because the wavefunction is spherically symmetric. This will still be true in string theory. The hydrogen atom exists on a scale where the strings can be approximated by point particles. I suspect the author is thinking that because strings are extended objects they have dipole moments; but it's not of a magnitude to be relevant at the atomic scale.
Of course he looks backwards. You can't analyze why any discovery didn't happen sooner, even though all the pieces were there, unless you look backwards. I thought the case study of SR was quite illuminating, though it goes directly counter to his attack on string theory. After getting the Lorentz transform, it took a surprisingly long time to for anyone to treat the transformed quantities as equivalent -- that is, to take the math seriously. And for string theory, he says they take the math too seriously. Of course, the Lorentz transform was more clearly grounded in observed physical phenomenon.
I completely agree he doesn't understand contemporary developments, and that was some of what I referred to as "pinging my crank-detectors", along with the loose analogy between 4-d bending in "world tubes" to that in 3-d rods. I don't necessarily see that as a huge problem if he's not pretending to be able to offer us the next big revolution on a silver platter.
Wikipedia points to the original text of a 1905 article by Poincaré. How's your French?
Thanks. It's decent, actually, but there's still some barrier. Increasing that barrier is changes to physics notation since then (no vectors!).
Fortunately my university library appears to have a copy of an older edition of Rohrlich's Classical Charged Particles, which may help piece things together.
Petkov wrote:
It's worth noting that Feynman's statements are actually correct. According to Wikipedia, the problem is solved by postulating a non-electromagnetic attractive force holding the charged particle together, which subtracts 1/3 of the 4/3 factor, leaving unity. Petkov doesn't explicitly say that Feynman is wrong, but his phrasing might leave that impression.
How important are 'the latest news'?
These days many people are following an enormous amount of news sources. I myself notice how skimming through my Google Reader items is increasingly time-consuming.
What is your take on it?
I wonder if there is really more to it than just curiosity and leisure. Are there news sources (blogs, the latest research, 'lesswrong'-2.0 etc.), besides lesswrong.com, that every rationalist should stay up to date on? For example, when trying to reduce my news load, I'm trying to take into account how much of what I know and do has its origins in some blog post or news item. Would I even know about lesswrong.com if I wasn't the heavy news addict that I am?
What would it mean to ignore most news and concentrate on my goals of learning math, physics and programming while reading lesswrong.com? Have I already reached a level of knowledge that allows me to get from here to everywhere, without exposing myself to all the noise out there in hope of coming across some valuable information nugget which might help me reach the next level?
How do we ever know if there isn't something out there that is more worthwhile, valuable, beautiful, something that makes us happier and less wrong? At what point should we cease to be the tribesman who's happily trying to improve his hunting skills but ignorant of the possible revolutions taking place in a city only 1000 miles afar?
Is there a time to stop searching and approach what is at hand? Start learning and improving upon the possibilities we already know about? What proportion of one's time should a rationalist spend on the prospect of unknown unknowns?
Good question, which I'm finding surprisingly hard to answer. (i.e. I've spent more time composing this comment than is perhaps reasonable, struggling through several false starts).
Here are some strategies/behaviours I use: expand and winnow; scorched earth; independent confirmation; obsession.
My RSS feeds folder, once massive, is down to a half dozen indispensable blogs. I've unsubscribed from most of the mailing lists I used to read. My main "monitored" channel is Twitter, where I follow a few dozen folks who've turned up gold in the past. My main "active" source of new juicy stuff to think about is LW.
(ETA: as an example of "independent confirmation" in the past two minutes, one of my Agile colleagues on Twitter posted this link.)
I searched for a good news filter that would inform me about the world in ways that I found to be useful and beneficial, and came up with nothing.
Any source that contained news items I categorized as useful, they made up less than 5% of the information presented by that source, and thus were drowned out and took too much time and effort, on a daily basis, to find. Thus, I mostly ignore news, except what I get indirectly through following particular communities like LessWrong or Slashdot.
However, I perform this exercise on a regular basis (perhaps once a year), clearing out feeds that have become too junk-filled, searching out new feeds, and re-evaluating feeds I did not accept last time, to refine my information access.
I find that this habit of perpetual long-term change (significant reorganization, from first principles of the involved topic or action) is highly beneficial in many aspects of my life.
ETA: My feed reader contains the following:
For the vast majority of posts on each of these feeds, I only read the headline. Feeds where I consistently (>25%) read the articles or comments are: Slashdot (mostly while bored at work), Marginal Revolution (the only place I read every post), Sentient Developments, Accelerating Future, and LessWrong. Even for those, I rarely (<10%) read linked articles, preferring instead to read only the distillation by the blog author, or the comments by other users.
ETA2: I also listen to NPR during my short commute to and from work, and occasionally watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report online, for entertainment. Firefox with NoScript and Adblock Plus makes it bearable - I'm extremely advertising averse.
I do not own a television, and generally consider TV news (in the US) to be horrendous and mind-destroying.
When I was young, I happened upon a book called "The New Way Things Work," by David Macaulay. It described hundreds of household objects, along with descriptions and illustrations of how they work. (Well, a nuclear power plant, and the atoms within it, aren't household objects. But I digress.) It was really interesting!
I remember seeing someone here mention that they had read a similar book as a kid, and it helped them immensely in seeing the world from a reductionist viewpoint. I was wondering if anyone else had anything to say on the matter.
Today there's How Stuff Works.
I also loved that book. It probably helped teach me reductionism, but it's hard to tell given my generally terrible memory for my childhood.
(FWIW, my best guess for my biggest reductionist influence would be learning assembly language and other low-level CS details.)
I think we had this in the house, but I don't remember it very well, except some of the part about pullies and levers. This book would be a nice starting point for that rebuilding civilization manual idea from a while back.
I loved that book. I still have moments when I pull some random picture from that book out of my memory to describe how an object works.
EDIT: Apparently the book is on Google.
My favorite Macaulay is "Motel of the Mysteries". I read it as a kid and it definitely had an influence. ;)
I'm considering doing a post about "the lighthouse problem" from Data Analysis: a Bayesian Tutorial, by D. S. Sivia. This is example 3 in chapter 2, pp. 31-36. It boils down to finding the center and width of a Cauchy distribution (physicists may call it Lorentzian), given a set of samples.
I can present a reasonable Bayesian handling of it -- this is nearly mechanical, but I'd really like to see a competent Frequentist attack on it first, to get a good comparison going, untainted by seeing the Bayesian approach. Does anyone have suggestions for ways to structure the post?
Is there some way to "reclaim" comments from the posts transferred over from Overcoming Bias? I could have sworn I saw something about that, but I can't find anything by searching.
If you still have the e-mail address, you can follow the "reset password" process at login. That would allow you to have the account for the old comments, though it will still be treated as a different account than your new ones.