I would post a link on the latest Open Thread - I don't believe an explicit protocol exists.

I have to use IE6!

I'm so sorry.

I'm probably missing something important. Could someone please point it out?

That most people, historically, have been morons.

Basically the same question: Why are you limited to humans? Even supposing you could make a clean evolutionary cutoff (no one before Adam gets to vote), is possessing a particular set of DNA really an objective criterion for having a single vote on the fate of the universe?

See the posts linked from

• http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Complexity_of_value
• http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Fake_simplicity
• http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Magical_categories

You might also try my restatement.

Human nature is more complicated by far than anyone's conscious understanding of it. We might not know that future was missing something essential, if it were subtle enough. Your journalist ex machina might not even be able to communicate to us exactly what was missing, in a way that we could understand at our current level of intelligence.

You roll a 16...

Duplicate.

Apparently this is shoddy journalism. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1180487

So do we count this as additional evidence that some anthropic selection is in effect even though it is causally connected to the earlier breakdown?

If and only if you can explain UDT in text at least as clearly as you explained it to me in person; I don't think that would take a very long post.

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.

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.

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

Okay, now that I've read section 2 of the paper (where it gives the two decompositions), it doesn't seem so insightful. Here's my summary of the Wolpert/Benford argument:

"There are two Bayes nets to represent the problem: Fearful, where your decision y causally influences Omega's decision g, and Realist, where Omega's decision causally influences yours.

"Fearful: P(y,g) = P(g|y) * P(y), you set P(y). Bayes net: Y -> G. One-boxing is preferable.
"Realist: P(y,g) = P(y|g) * P(g), you set P(y|g). Bayes net: G -> Y. Two-boxing is preferable."

My response: these choices neglect the option presented by AnnaSalamon and Eliezer_Yudkowsky previously: that Omega's act and your act are causally influenced by a common timeless node, which is a more faithful representation of the problem statement.

Self-serving FYI: In this comment I summarized Eliezer_Yudkowsky's list of the ways that Newcomb's problem, as stated, constrains a Bayes net.

For the non-link-clickers:

• Must have nodes corresponding to logical uncertainty (Self-explanatory)

• Omega's decision on box B correlates to our decision of which boxes to take (Box decision and Omega decision are d-connected)

• Omega's act lies in the past. (ETA: Since nothing is simultaneous with Omega's act, then knowledge of Omega's act screens off the influence of everything before it; on the Bayes net, Omega's act blocks all paths from the past to future events; only paths originating from future or timeless events can bypass it.)

• Omega's act is not directly influencing us (No causal arrow directly from Omega to us/our choice.)

• We have not found any other property which would screen off this uncertainty even when we inspect our own source code / psychology in advance of knowing our actual decision, and that our computation is the only direct ancestor of our logical output. (Seem to be saying the same thing: arrow from computation directly to logical output.)

• Our computation is the only direct ancestor of our logical output. (Only arrow pointing to our logical output comes from our computation.)

Questions:

1. Would you be open to help working through the problem?

2. Do you have an estimate for the value of information in answering the new questions you face?

3. 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?

It would be cool if you could tell us about your method for adjusting your values.

I'm waiting for the revised edition to come out in May.

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.

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:

Freezing has a certain subjective appeal. We freeze foods and rewarm them to eat. We read stories about children who have fallen into ice cold water and survived for hours without breathing. We know that human sperm, eggs, and even embryos can be frozen and thawed without harm. Freezing seems intuitively reversible and complete. Perhaps this is why cryonics quickly attained, and has kept, its singular appeal for life extensionists.

By contrast, we tend to associate chemical preservation with processes that are particularly irreversible and inadequate. Corpses are embalmed to prevent decay for only a short time. Taxidermists make deceased animals look alive, although most of their body parts are missing or transformed. “Plastinated” cadavers are used to demonstrate surface anatomy in schools and museums. No wonder, then, that cryonicists routinely dismiss chemopreservation as a truly bad idea.

Edit: Further googling suggest there might be some unsolved implementation issues.

I notice the figure for cell phone connectivity is three years old. :P

Yes, the math works out - ig'f whfg n erfgngrzrag bs gur pynvz gung gur nofrapr bs rivqrapr vf rivqrapr bs nofrapr.

Yes, even without the extra condition. Let a = P(A), b = P(B), c = P(A & B).

P(B|A) > P(B) is equivalent to c > ab.

P(~B|~A) > P(~B) is equivalent to 1-a-b+c > (1-a)(1-b) = 1 - a - b + ab, which is equivalent to c > ab, which is the hypothesis.

As a check that the conventional definition of P(B|A)=0 when P(A)=0 doesn't affect things, if P(A)=0, P(A)=1, P(B)=0, or P(B)=1, then P(B|A) = P(B), making the antecedent false and the proposition trivially true.

Yes, assuming 0 and 1 are not probabilities.

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.

Interesting. Has this experiment actually been run, and does it change the percentages in the responses relative to the textbook version?

Let

• AN = "Grandma calls on Thursday of week N",
• BN = "Grandma comes on Friday of week N".

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

• the distribution of p is uniform on [0,1]
• the distribution of q is concentrated near 1 (distribution proportional to f(x)=x on [0,1], let's say)
• the distribution of r is concentrated near 0 (distribution proportional to f(x)=1-x on [0,1], let's say)

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

I personally don't really care about spoilers, and having read the story now the passage you quote doesn't seem all that terribly spoilerish to me anyway, but you should note that spoiler protection has been enforced for "spoilers" considerably less spoilerish than that around here.

I have read through some of Eliezer's posts, but his tactics to come up with though-provoking counter-questions seem to rely heavily on superior intellect and knowledge. And I am also not in for memorizing question/counter-question pairs.

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.]

every time someone tries to make such a list collaboratively much of the effort diffuses into arguments over inclusion eventually (see wikipedia).

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.

Good job.

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?

Neat find! I haven't read all of it yet, but I found this striking:

It was precisely the view, that successful abstractions should not be regarded as representing something real, that prevented Lorentz from discovering special relativity. He believed that the time t of an observer at rest with respect to the aether (which is a genuine example of reifying an unsuccessful abstraction) was the true time, whereas the quantity t of another observer, moving with respect to the first, was merely an abstraction that did not represent anything real in the world. Lorentz himself admitted the failure of his approach:

The chief cause of my failure was my clinging to the idea that the variable t only can be considered as the true time and that my local time t must be regarded as no more than an auxiliary mathematical quantity. In Einstein's theory, on the contrary, t plays the same part as t; if we want to describe phenomena in terms of x , y , z , t we must work with these variables exactly as we could do with x, y, z, t.

This reminds me of Mach's Principle: Anti-Epiphenomenal Physics:

When you see a seemingly contingent equality - two things that just happen to be equal, all the time, every time - it may be time to reformulate your physics so that there is one thing instead of two. The distinction you imagine is epiphenomenal; it has no experimental consequences. In the right physics, with the right elements of reality, you would no longer be able to imagine it.

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.

When you try to mentally visualize an image, for example a face, can you keep it constant indefinitely?

Not indefinitely, but the limiting factor is my attention quality and span. If I get distracted, the image disappears; if I try to pay attention to other things while continuing to visualize something, the visualization can subtly morph in response to the other things I'm thinking about, and it's hard to tell if it's morphing or not. (This effect seems closely related to priming.)

If yes, would you describe yourself as a visual thinker? Are you good at drawing? Good at remembering faces?

I'm a very visual thinker. I'm not good at drawing, but that appears to be a function of poor fine motor control and lack of practice; I have been known to surprise myself and others with how well I draw for someone who almost never does so. I'm not very good at remembering faces, either, but again other factors affect that; I tend to avoid looking at faces in the first place, since I find eye contact overwhelming. I seem to be very good at remembering other complex visual things, though.

I can hold an image/face steady for about a full second just sitting here. I could probably do better while meditating; so I think it's more an issue of 'can you concentrate' than anything else.

(I'm a pretty visual thinker, but my hearing-impairment also means I'm anomalous.)

"compartmentalization". But damn, is that word ugly!

It has never bothered me.

yeah, news is usually a time/attention sink, I go to my bookmarked blogs etc whenever I feel like procrastinating.

15-20 minutes of looking at the main news sites/blogs should be enough to tell you what the biggest developments are, but really, I read them for entertainment value as much as for anything else.

as a side note, antiwar is good site for world news.

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.

• "expand and winnow": after finding an information source I really like (using the term "source" loosely, a blog, a forum, a site, etc.) I will often explore the surrounding "area", subscribe to related blogs or sources recommended by that source. In a second phase I will sort through which of these are worth following and which I should drop to reduce overload
• "scorched earth": when I feel like I've learned enough about a topic, or that I'm truly overloaded, I will simply drop (almost) every subscription I have related to that topic, maybe keeping a major source to just monitor (skim titles and very occasionally read an item)
• "independent confirmation": I do like to make sure I have a diversified set of sources of information, and see if there are any items (books, articles, movies) which come at me from more than one direction, especially if they are not "massively popular" items, e.g. I'd discard a recommendation to see Avatar, but I decided to dive into Jaynes when it was recommended on LW and my dad turned out to have liked it enough to have a hard copy of the PDF
• "obsession": there typically is one thing I'm obsessed with (often the target of an expand and winnow operation); e.g. at various points in my life I've been obsessed with Agora Nomic, XML, Java VM implementation, Agile, personal development, Go, and currently whatever LW is about. An "obsessed" topic can be but isn't necessarily a professional interest, but it's what dominates my other curiosity and tends to color my other interests. For instance while obsessed with Go I pursued the topic both for its own sake and as a source of metaphors for understanding, say, project management or software development. I generally quit ("scorched earth") once I become aware I'm no longer learning anything, which often coincides with the start of a new 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:

• Accelerating Future - futurism
• Alcor News - cryonics
• Ars Technica - tech industry
• Get Rich Slowly - personal finances
• IEET - futurism (currently considering dropping, as it contains quite a bit of ill-thought politics)
• io9 - science fiction, comic books, etc. (very high volume, sometimes NSFW)
• LessWrong - rational thinking
• Lifehacker - personal productivity
• Marginal Revolution - economics and well-thought politics
• Overcoming Bias - thought... stuff... (only recently added back after LW split when I noticed Nick Bostrom was contributing, still evaluating)
• Sentient Developments - futurism
• Singularity Institute - SIAI news
• Slashdot - tech industry and various topics
• WoW.com - World of Warcraft
• two feeds related to my job.

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.

I have fond childhood memories of many hours tracing the circuit diagram of the adding circuit : ) God, I was so nerdy. I wanted to know how a computer worked and that book helped me avoid a mysterious answer to a mysterious question. Learning, in detail, how a specific logic circuit works really drove home how much I had yet to learn about the rest of the workings of a computer.

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 was going to get that for me younger brother when I next see him :)

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 don't have the book you're referring to. Are you essentially going to walk through a solution for this [pdf], or at least to talk about point #10?

This is a Bayesian problem; the Frequentist answer is the same, just more convoluted because they have to say things like "in 95% of similar situations, the estimate of a and b are within d of the real position of the lighthouse". Alternately, a Frequentist, while always ignorant when starting a problem, never begins wrong. In this case, if the chose prior was very unsuitable, the Frequentist more quickly converges to a correct answer.

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.

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).

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:

• Don't eat things with ingredients in them, instead eat ingredients
• Limit each meal to less than 5 different ingredients
• Try and have the same handful of ingredients for every meal for at least a week at a time.