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.

Very interesting. And sobering.

Some googling around yielded a pdf about a controversial use of Bayes in court. The controversy seems to center around using one probability distribution on both sides of the equation. Lesser complaints include mixing in a frequentist test without a good reason.

what's depressing is the vast disconnect between how well marketers understand super stimulus and how poorly everyone else does.

also this: http://www.theonion.com/content/video/new_live_poll_allows_pundits_to

Neat!

I think of LessWrong from a really, really pragmatic viewpoint: it's like software patches for your brain to eliminate costly bugs. There was a really good illustration in the Allais mini-sequence - that is a literal example of people throwing away their money because they refused to consider how their brain might let them down.

Edit: Related to The Lens That Sees Its Flaws.

It shows you that there is really more to most things than meets the eye, but more often than not much less than you think. It shows you that even smart people can be completely wrong but that most people are not even wrong. It tells you to be careful in what you emit and to be skeptical of what you receive. It doesn't tell you what is right, it teaches you how to think and to become less wrong. And to do so is in your own self interest because it helps you to attain your goals, it helps you to achieve what you want. Thus what you want is to read and participate on LessWrong.

the main hurdle in my experience is getting people over biases that cause them to think that the future is going to look mostly like the present. if you can get people over this then they do a lot of the remaining work for you.

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).

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

It feels to me that rationalist principles are most useful in avoiding failure modes. But they're much less useful in coming up with new things you should do (as opposed to specifying things you shouldn't do).

I'd start by asking whether the unknowns of the problem are primarily social and psychological, or whether they include things that the human intuition doesn't handle well (like large numbers).

If it's the former, then good news! This is basically the sort of problem your frontal cortex is optimized to solve. In fact, you probably unconsciously know what the best choice is already, and you might be feeling conflicted so as to preserve your conscious image of yourself (since you'll probably have to trade off conscious values in such a choice, which we're never happy to do).

In such a case, you can speed up the process substantially by finding some way of "letting the choice be made for you" and thus absolving you of so much responsibility. I actually like to flip a coin when I've thought for a while and am feeling conflicted. If I like the way it lands, then I do that. If I don't like the way it lands, well, I have my answer then, and in that case I can just disobey the coin!

(I've realized that one element of the historical success of divination, astrology, and all other vague soothsaying is that the seeker can interpret a vague omen as telling them what they wanted to hear— thus giving divine sanction to it, and removing any human responsibility. By thus revealing one's wants and giving one permission to seek them, these superstitions may have actually helped people make better decisions throughout history! That doesn't mean it needs the superstitious bits in order to work, though.)

If it's the latter case, though, you probably need good specific advice from a rational friend. Actually, that practically never hurts.

A few principles that can help in such cases (major decision, very little direct data):

• Outside view. You're probably more similar to other people than you like to think. What has worked for them?
• Far vs Near mode: beware of generalizations when visualizing distant (more than a few weeks!) results of a choice. Consider what daily activities will be like.
• Avoiding oversimplified modeling: With the exceptions of procreation and suicide, there are almost no life decisions that are permanent and unchangeable.
• Shut up and multiply, even for yourself: Many times it turns out that minor-but-frequent issues dominate your happiness. Weight your pros/cons for future choices based on this, not just on how important something "should" be.

...I don't suppose you can tell us what? I expect that if you could, you would have said, but thought I'd ask. It's difficult to work with this little.

I could toss around advices like "A lot of Major Life Decisions consist of deciding which of two high standards you should hold yourself to" but it's just a shot in the dark at this point.

I am not that far in the sequences, but these are posts I would expect to come into play during Major Life Decisions. These are ordered by my perceived relevance and accompanied with a cool quote. (The quotes are not replacements for the whole article, however. If the connection isn't obvious feel free to skim the article again.)

To do better, ask yourself straight out: If I saw that there was a superior alternative to my current policy, would I be glad in the depths of my heart, or would I feel a tiny flash of reluctance before I let go? If the answers are "no" and "yes", beware that you may not have searched for a Third Alternative. ~ The Third Alternative

The moral is that the decision to terminate a search procedure (temporarily or permanently) is, like the search procedure itself, subject to bias and hidden motives. You should suspect motivated stopping when you close off search, after coming to a comfortable conclusion, and yet there's a lot of fast cheap evidence you haven't gathered yet - Web sites you could visit, counter-counter arguments you could consider, or you haven't closed your eyes for five minutes by the clock trying to think of a better option. You should suspect motivated continuation when some evidence is leaning in a way you don't like, but you decide that more evidence is needed - expensive evidence that you know you can't gather anytime soon, as opposed to something you're going to look up on Google in 30 minutes - before you'll have to do anything uncomfortable. ~ Motivated Stopping and Continuation

I suspect that a more powerful (and more difficult) method is to hold off on thinking of an answer. To suspend, draw out, that tiny moment when we can't yet guess what our answer will be; thus giving our intelligence a longer time in which to act. ~ Hold Off On Proposing Solutions

"Rationality" is the forward flow that gathers evidence, weighs it, and outputs a conclusion. [...] "Rationalization" is a backward flow from conclusion to selected evidence.
~ Rationalization

Your effectiveness as a rationalist is determined by whichever algorithm actually writes the bottom line of your thoughts. If your car makes metallic squealing noises when you brake, and you aren't willing to face up to the financial cost of getting your brakes replaced, you can decide to look for reasons why your car might not need fixing. ~ The Bottom Line

Hope that helps.

One problem is that I just don't have enough "evidence" to make meaningful probability estimates. Another is that I'm only weakly aware of my own utility function.

Based on those two lucid observations, I'd say you're doing well so far.

There are some principles I used to weigh major life decisions. I'm not sure they are "rationalist" principles; I don't much care. They've turned out well for me.

Here's one of them: "having one option is called a trap; having two options is a dilemma; three or more is truly a choice". Think about the terms of your decision and generate as many different options as you can. Not necessarily a list of final choices, but rather a list of candidate choices, or even of choice-components.

If you could wave a magic wand and have whatever you wanted, what would be at the top of your list? (This is a mind-trick to improve awareness of your desires, or "utility function" if you want to use that term.) What options, irrespective of their downsides, give you those results?

Given a more complete list you can use the good old Benjamin Franklin method of listing pros and cons of each choice. Often this first step of option generation turns out sufficient to get you unstuck anyway.

Just remembered: I managed not to be stupid on one or two times by asking whether, not why.

I just came out of a tough Major Life Situation myself. The rationality 'tools' I used were mostly directed at forcing myself to be honest with myself, confronting the facts, not privileging certain decisions over others, recognizing when I was becoming emotional (and more importantly recognizing when my emotions were affecting my judgement), tracking my preferred choice over time and noticing correlations with my mood and pertinent events.

Overall, less like decision theory and more like a science: trying to cut away confounding factors to discover my true desire. Of course, sometimes knowing your desires isn't sufficient to take action, but I find that for many personal choices it is (or at least is enough to reduce the decision theory component to something much more manageable).

The dissolving the question mindset has actually served me pretty well as a TA - just bearing in mind the principle that you should determine what led to this particular confused bottom line is useful in correcting it afterwards.

Behind a paywall

But freely available from one of the authors' website.

Basically, pigeons also start with a slight bias towards keeping their initial choice. However, they find it much easier to "learn to switch" than humans, even when humans are faced with a learning environment as similar as possible to that of pigeons (neutral descriptions, etc.). Not sure how interesting that is.

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.

To modify RobinZ's hypothesis:

Rather than focusing on any Bayesian evidence for cheating, let's think like evolution for a second: how do you want your organism to react when someone else's voluntary action changes who receives a prize? Do you want the organism to react, on a gut level, as if the action could have just as easily swung the balance in their favor as against them? Or do you want them to cry foul if they're in a social position to do so?

Your friends' response could come directly out of that adaptation, whatever rationalizations they make for it afterwards. I'd expect to see the same reaction in experiments with chimps.

It's a side effect.

Yes, they were being irrational in this case. But the heuristics they were using are there for good reason. Suppose they had money coming to them and you swooped in and took it away before it could reach them, they would be rational to object, right? That's why those heuristics are there. In practice the trigger conditions for these things are not specified with unlimited precision, and pure but interruptible random number generators are not common in real life, so the trigger conditions harmlessly spill over to this case. But the upshot is that they were irrational as a side effect of usually rational heuristics.

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.

Interesting article, but the title is slightly misleading. What he seems to be complaining are people who mistake picking up a superficial overview of a topic for actually learning a subject, but I rather doubt they'd learn any more in school than by themselves.

Learning is what you make of it; getting a decent education is hard work, whether you're sitting in a lecture hall with other students, or digging through books alone in your free time.

I partially agree with this. Somewhere along the way, I learned how to learn. I still haven't really learned how to finish. I think these two features would have been dramatically enhanced had I not gone to school. I think a potential problem with self-educated learners (I know two adults who were unschooled) is that they get much better at fulfilling their own needs and tend to suffer when it comes to long-term projects that have value for others.

The unschooled adults I know are both brilliant and creative, and ascribe those traits to their unconventional upbringing. But both of them work as freelance handymen. They like helping others, and would help other people more if they did something else, but short-term projects are all they can manage. They are polymaths that read textbooks and research papers, and one has even developed a machine learning technique that I've urged him to publish. However, when they get bored, they stop. The chance that writing up his results and releasing them would further research is not enough to get him past that obstacle of boredom.

I have long thought that school, as currently practiced, is an abomination. I have yet to come up with a solution that I'm convinced solves its fundamental problems. For a while, I thought that unschooling was the solution, but these two acquaintances changed my mind. What is your opinion, on the right way to teach and learn?

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 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.

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.)

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.

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?

I fail to see how this question has a perceptibly rational answer - too much depends on the prior.

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?

This is somewhat similar to the question I asked in Reacting to Inadequate Data. It was hit with a -3 rating though... so apparently it wasn't too useful.

The consensus of the comments was that the correct answer is .5.

Also of note is Bead Jar Guesses and its sequel.

What probability should you assign as a Bayesian to the answer of a yes/no question being yes if you have absolutely no clue about what the answer should be?

If you truly have no clue, .5 yes and .5 no.

For example, let's say you are suddenly sent to the planet Progsta and a Sillpruk comes and asks you whether the game of Doldun will be won by the team Strigli.

Ah, but here you have some clues, which you should update on, and knowing how is much trickier. One clue is that the unkown game of Doldun could possibly have more than 2 teams competing, of which only 1 could win, and this should shift the probabilities in favor of "No". How much? Well that depends on your probability distribution for an unknown game to have n competing teams. Of course, there may be other clues that should shift the probabilty towards "yes".

Well, there's still intermittent fasting.

IF would get around

"The non-aging-related causes of death included monkeys who died while taking blood samples under anesthesia, from injuries or from infections, such as gastritis and endometriosis. These causes may not be aging-related as defined by the researchers, but they could realistically be adverse effects of prolonged calorie restrictions on the animals’ health, their immune system, ability to handle stress, physical agility, cognition or behavior."

and would also work well with the musings about variability and duration:

"From an evolutionary standpoint, he explained, mice who subsist on less food for a few years is analogous, in terms of natural selection, to humans who survive 20-year famines. But nature seldom demands that humans endure such conditions.

Similar conclusions were reached by Dr. Aubrey D.N.J. de Grey with the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge, UK. Species have widely evolved to be able to adapt to transient periods of starvation. “What has been generally overlooked is that the extent of the evolutionary pressure to maintain adaptability to a given duration of starvation varies with the frequency of that duration,” he said."

(Our ancestors most certainly did have to survive frequent daily shortfalls. Feast or famine.)

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 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.

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.

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.

Today there's How Stuff Works.

It's not anti-logical, it's rude logic. The point of Suber's paper is that at no point does the logically rude debater reason incorrectly from their premises, and yet we consider what they have done to be a violation of a code of etiquette.

It makes the hurdle less likely to be before the fish stage, so more likely to be after the fish stage. While the biggest increase in probability is immediately after the fish stage, all subsequent stages are a more likely culprit now (especially as we could simply have missed fossils/their not have been formed for the post-fish stages).

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

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

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

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?

In an amazing coincidence, many of the suggestions you get will be the suggester's current favorite language. Many of these recommendations will be esoteric or unpopular languages. These people will say you should learn language X first because of the various features language X. They'll forget that they did not learn language X first, and while language X is powerful, it might not be easy to set up a development environment. Tutorials might be lacking. Newbie support might be lacking. Etc.

Others have said this but you can't hear it enough: It is not mandatory to learn computer programming. If you force yourself, you probably won't enjoy it.

So, what language should you learn first? Well the answer is... (drumroll) it depends! Mostly, it depends on what you are trying to do. (Side note: You can get a lot of help on mailing lists or IRC if you say, "I'm trying to do X." instead of, "I'm having a problem getting feature blah blah blah to work.")

I have no particular goal in mind that demands a practical orientation. My aim is to acquire general knowledge of computer programming to be used as starting point that I can build upon.

I paused after reading this. The main way people learn to program is by writing programs and getting feedback from peers/mentors. If you're not coding something you find interesting, it's hard to stay motivated for long enough to learn the language.

My advice is to learn a language that a lot of people learn as a first language. You'll be able to take advantage of tutorials and support geared toward newbies. You can always learn "cooler" languages later, but if you start with something advanced you might give up in frustration. Common first languages in CS programs are Java and C++, but Python is catching on pretty quickly. It also helps if your first language is used by people you already know. That way they'll be able to mentor/advise you.

Finally, I should give some of my background. I've been writing code for a while. I write code for work and leisure. My first language was QBasic. I moved on to C, C++, TI-BASIC, Perl, PHP, Java, C#, Ruby, and some others. I've played with but don't really know Lisp, Lua, and Haskell. My favorite language right now is Python, but I'm probably still in the honeymoon phase since I've been using it for less than a year.

Argh, see what I said at the start? I recommended Python and my favorite language is currently Python!

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.

As mentioned in another comment, the best introduction to programming is probably SICP. I recommend going with this route, as trying to learn programming from language-specific tutorials will almost certainly not give you an adequate understanding of fundamental programming concepts.

After that, you will probably want to start dabbling in a variety of programming styles. You could perhaps learn some C for imperative programming, Java for object-oriented, Python for a high-level hybrid approach, and Haskell for functional programming as starters. If you desire more programming knowledge you can branch out from there, but this seems to be a good start.

Just keep in mind that when starting out learning programming, it's probably more important to dabble in as many different languages as you can. Doing this successfully will enable you to quickly learn any language you may need to know. I admit I may be biased in this assessment, though, as I tend to get bored focusing on any one topic for long periods of time.

Processing and Lua seem pretty exotic to me. How did you hear of them? If you know people who use a particular language, that's a pretty good reason to choose it.

Even if you don't have a goal in mind, I would recommend choosing a language with applications in mind to keep you motivated. For example, if (but only if) you play wow, I would recommend Lua; or if the graphical applications of Processing appeal to you, then I'd recommend it. If you play with web pages, javascript...

At least that's my advice for one style of learning, a style suggested by your mention of those two languages, but almost opposite from your "Nevertheless, I want to start from the very beginning," which suggests something like SICP. There are probably similar courses built around OCaml. The proliferation of monad tutorials suggests that the courses built around Haskell don't work. That's not to disagree with wnoise about the value of Haskell either practical or educational, but I'm skeptical about it as an introduction.

ETA: SICP is a textbook using Scheme (Lisp). Lisp or OCaml seems like a good stepping-stone to Haskell. Monads are like burritos.

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.

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.

Relevant answer to this question here, recently popularized on Hacker News.

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 considered putting that link here in the open thread after I read about it on Marginal Revolution, but I read the paper and found it weak enough to not really be worth a lengthy response.

What annoyed me about it is how Albert's title is "Why Bayesian Rationality Is Empty," and he in multiple places makes cute references to that title (e.g. "The answer is summarized in the paper’s title") without qualificaiton.

Then later, in a footnote, he mentions "In this paper, I am only concerned with subjective Bayesianism."

Seems like he should re-title his paper to me. He makes references to other critiques of objective Bayesianism, but doesn't engage them.

I think they are legitimate objections, but ones that have been partially addressed in this community. I take the principle objection to be, "Bayesian rationality can't justify induction." Admittedly true (see for instance Eliezer's take). Albert ignores sophisticated responses (like Robin's) and doesn't make a serious effort to explain why his alternative doesn't have the same problem.

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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.

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.