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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.
Anybody else think the modern university system is grossly inefficient? Most of the people I knew in undergrad spend most of their time drinking to excess and skipping classes. In addition, barely half of undergraduates get their B.A in 6 years after starting. The whole system is hugely expensive in both direct subsidies and opportunity costs.
I think that society would benefit from switching to computer based learning systems for most kinds of classes. For example, I took two economics courses that incorporated CBL elements, and I found them vastly more engrossing and much more time-efficient than the lecture sections. Instead of applying to selective universities (which gain status by denying more students entry than others) people could get most of their prerequisites out of the way in a few months with standard CBL programs administered at a marginal cost of $0.
Repost from last open thread in the desperate hope that the lack of interest was only due to people not seeing it all the way at the bottom:
I'll be in London on April 4th and very interested in meeting any Less Wrongers who might be in the area that day. If there's a traditional LW London meetup venue, remind me what it is; if not, someone who knows the city suggest one and I'll be there. On an unrelated note, sorry I've been and will continue to be too busy/akratic to do anything more than reply to a couple of my PMs recently.
Request for help: I can do classroom programming, but not "real-world" programming. If the problem is to, e.g. take in a huge body of text, collect aggregate statistics, and generate new output based on those stats, I can write it. (My background is in C++.)
However, in terms of writing apps with a graphical user interface, take input in real-time, make use of existing code libraries, etc., I'm at a loss. I'd like to know what would be a good introduction to this more practical level.
To better explain where I am, here is what I have tried so far: I've downloaded a lot of simple open source programs that have a lot of source files. But strangely, whenever I compile them myself and get them to run, it just runs on the command screen blindingly fast and then closes, as if I'm missing some important step. (How are you normally expected to compile open-source programs?)
I've also worked with graphics libraries and read a book (IIRC, Zen and the Art of Direct3D Game Programming) and was able to use that for writing algorithms that determine the motion of 3D objects, given particular user inputs, but it was pretty limited in domain.
I've downloaded Visual C# Express, which was...
A quick solution to the FizzBuzz quiz:
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
UP VAR!!1
IZ VAR LEFTOVER 15 LIEK 0?
YARLY VISIBLE "FizzBuzz"
NOWAI IZ VAR LEFTOVER 3 LIEK 0?
YARLY VISIBLE "Fizz"
NOWAI IZ VAR LEFTOVER 5 LIEK 0?
YARLY VISIBLE "Buzz"
NOWAI VISIBLE VAR
KTHX
IZ VAR NOT SMALR THAN 100? KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE
How should rationalists do therapy?
As a community, we should have resources to help people who might otherwise be helped by clerics, quacks, or psychics. We should certainly cover things like minor depression and grief at the death of a loved one.
Should we just look at what therapies have the best outcome for various situations and recommend those?
Should we use what we know about cognition to suggest new therapies? Should we make a "Grief Sequence"?
If I have no memory of some period in my past, then should I be pleased to discover that was happy during that period? Or is it that past experiences are valuable only through the pleasure their memories give us in the present?
You should be at least as pleased as you would be to discover that someone else was happy during that period.
This is a draft of a post I'm planning to send to my everything-list, partly to invite them to join Less Wrong. I'd appreciate comments and feedback on it.
Recently I heard the news that Max Tegmark has joined the Advisory Board of SIAI (The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, see http://www.singinst.org/blog/2010/03/03/mit-professor-and-cosmologist-max-tegmark-joins-siai-advisory-board/). This news was surprising to me, but in retrospect perhaps shouldn't have been. Out of the three authors of papers I cited in the original everything-list c...
Frank Lantz: The Truth in Game Design
Players keep complaining about the random number generators being "unfair" in games that involve randomness, so game developers have started tweaking the generators to behave according to gambler's fallacy. Now results that are adverse to the player increase the chance of beneficent future results. Lantz notes that making games systems to conform to common fallacies might not be that good an idea, since games could also be used as great teaching devices on how all sorts of complex systems really work. Of cours...
This Nature article ("Quantum ground state and single-phonon control of a mechanical resonator") is making headlines in various media, and seems to be about large-scale quantum superposition, but it's always hard to tell what's getting lost in translation when you're not an expert. I'd prefer to put my trust in people here who think they're qualified to comment. Anyone?
Hearing that Max Tegmark joined SIAI's board reminded me of a top-level post I was thinking of doing. In it, I would present what I think is a very strong but heretofore underemphasized argument for the Mathematical Universe/Level IV Multiverse hypothesis — specifically, an argument for why it is actually a satisfactory answer to the ultimate question of why anything bothers to exist at all — particularly targeted at people who aren't familiar with it or are skeptical of it (I was in the latter category when I first learned of it, remained there for a coup...
Is anyone familiar with a possible evolutionary explanation of the placebo effect? It seems strange to me that the body would have a limit to the degree it heals itself, and that this limit gets bypassed by the belief that one is receiving treatment.
The only explanation I could string together is that the body limits how much it heals itself because it's conserving energy/resources/whatever it might need for other things (periods of scarcity, danger, etc.) Receiving medicine sends the signal that the person is being taken care of and thus at a much lower r...
This will be preaching to the converted here, but worthy of note: "Odds Are, It's Wrong".
It's about the continued use of frequentist significance tests.
ETA: I've found the web site flaky today. Here's Google's cached copy.
I haven't seen this posted yet and it seems it might be of interest, from a link on Hacker News:
...Science fails to face the shortcomings of statistics
For better or for worse, science has long been married to mathematics. Generally it has been for the better. Especially since the days of Galileo and Newton, math has nurtured science. Rigorous mathematical methods have secured science’s fidelity to fact and conferred a timeless reliability to its findings.
During the past century, though, a mutant form of math has deflected science’s heart
A survey on cryonics laws:
Should it become legal for a person with a degenerative disease (Alzheimer's, etc.) to choose to be cryonically preserved before physiological death, so as to preserve the brain's information before it deteriorates further? Should a patient's family be able to make such a choice for them, if their mind has already degenerated enough that they are incapable of making such a decision, or if they are in a coma or some other unconscious or uncommunicative state?
Should it become legal for a person to choose to be cryonically preser
Mentally Subtracting Positive Events Improves People’s Affective States, Contrary to Their Affective Forecasts
..."Even if the event’s nearly $200,000 worth of tickets sell out, less than $8,000 from the sales will go to the cause."
"No hard and fast guidelines exist on how much money raised in a benefit should go for expenses, and it is not unusual for galas to raise little money or even lose it."
"Overhead at Carnegie accounts for about one-third of the expenses. The hall costs $13,785 to rent. Then there is $6,315 for ushers; $2,300 for security; and $42,535 for stagehand labor, long recognized as a major cost o
This afternoon I identified a way in that I strongly need to be more rational, and I wondered if there has been anything written about it on Less Wrong.
A few hours ago, I was picking up my two children from their school. They're at a very young age so my heuristic is: near a parking lot, hang on to them.
While we were exiting the school building, another small child ran from his mother and slipped through the door between me and my youngest child. I feebly tried to grab the boy's shirt but he tugged away and then I just watched as he ran into the parking l...
Buying someone on the internet a pizza seems to be a cheap and easy way of buying a lot of fuzzies. Behold, Mr. wongwong, the most generous man in the world.
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/bd3fb/dear_reddit_can_you_order_me_a_pizza/
Poll: when making a new substantive top-level post, what kinds of summary are acceptable?
This is a checkbox poll, and therefore votes for multiple options may be entered - for each option, a separate karma balance will be offered. In the event that some important option is immediately noticed to be missing, another poster may offer an option-karma balance pair without destroying the poll.
QALYs and how they are arrived at. "Quality Adjusted Life Years" are the measure used by UK drug approval bodies in deciding which treatments to approve. They aim to spend no more than £30,000 per QALY.
Has anybody else wished that the value of the symbol, pi, was doubled? It becomes far more intuitive this way--this may even affect uptake of trigonometry in school. This rates up with declaring the electron's charge as negative rather than positive.
An amusing view of charity and utility, as told by Monty Python: Merchant Banker. I was trying to remember what thought experiment it reminded me of, but I couldn't find it...
This is totally irrelevant, but I just had to share it.
I use the Tony Marloshkovips system for memorizing numbers, such as phone numbers, Social Insurance Numbers, physical constants, product codes at the grocery store, etc. It's very handy.
Anyway, I had to identify myself with my SIN today on the phone for loan purposes. But there was no record of my SIN number in their database. I repeated it - still wrong. Got through finally by telling the chap on the phone my date of birth.
Turns out the number I was telling him was the speed of light in m/s (299 792 4...
An interesting dialogue at BHTV abot transhumanism between cishumanist Massimo Pigliucci and transhumanist Mike Treder. Pigliucci is among other things blogging at Rationally Speaking. This BHTV dialogue is partly as a follow-up to Pigliucci's earlier blog-post the problems with transhumanism . As I (tonyf, July 16, 2009 8:29 PM) commented then, despite the title of his blog-post, it was more of a (I think) misleading generalisation from an article by some Munkittrick than by an actual study of the "transhumanist" community that was the basis fo...
I'd appreciate some feedback on a brain dump I did on economics and technology. Nothing revolutionary here. Just want people with more experience on the tech side to check my thinking.
Thanks in advance
http://modeledbehavior.com/2010/03/11/the-economics-of-really-big-ideas/
One career path I'm sort of musing about is working to create military robots. After all, the goals in designing a military robot are similar to those in designing Friendly AI: the robot must know somehow who it's okay to harm and what "harm" is.
Does this seem like a good sort of career path for someone interested in Friendly AI?
If you work on AGI and you make actual progress, then you have a moral obligation to keep it away from people who can't be trusted with it. You cannot satisfy this obligation while working for a military or a military contractor.
I'm not an expert, but I don't think there is much more overlap with FAI than other domain AI projects have. The problems for military robots probably are more of the machine vision kind than of the meta-ethics kind.
It's some kind of crazy ethical blindness that most Homo sapiens seem to have for some reason, where "our guys" are human beings, but arbitrarily chosen foreigners deserve whatever they get
Fixed it for you.
And the reason is evolved psychological instincts with pretty obvious selection benefits.
I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it.
-- Jack Handey's Deep Thoughts
The scrutiny isn't so bad. They're mainly looking for illegality or potential for corruption. And even if you've committed illegal acts, so long as you own up to it, and it wasn't in the recent past (5 to 7 years), it's generally OK. Felonies are a different matter, of course.
A secret clearance is an interview, taking fingerprints, interviews of family and friends, interviews of neighbors, a credit check, and will likely require drug testing. Top secret clearances and above lead to polygraphs and heavy grilling, with monitoring for new developments. They're renewed every few years, going through the process again.
Most of the military drone programs would be given to one large contractor like Lockheed Martin or NGIT, with lots of smaller subcontractors. A security clearance at secret level or above takes up to 9 months, costs the company over $10,000, and adds that much or more to that person's annual salary potential, so it's not something they hand out lightly.
Most contracting agencies put a small, already-cleared team on the activities that require it, and farm out most of the work (documentation, mundane code, etc.) to people without clearances. If they need more people with clearances, they tend to get temporary waivers for the duration of the work (90 days or less, for example). Most only see a small part of the whole, and you don't choose your projects; your company does.
These are not good environments to learn complex, high-level things like Friendliness.
This is from the friendly AI document:
...Unity of will occurs when deixis is eliminated; that is, when speaker-dependent variables are eliminated from cognition. If a human simultaneously suppresses her adversarial attitude, and also suppresses her expectations that the AI will make observer-biased decisions, the result is unity of will. Thinking in the third person is natural to AIs and very hard for humans; thus, the task for a Friendship programmer is to suppress her belief that the AI will think about verself in the first person (and, to a lesser exte
The prince of one hundred thousand leaves is, among other things, a sort of fictionalized open-source project for horrifying eutopias. It might provide useful insights about that which we are least willing to consider.
Nanotech robots deliver gene therapy through blood
Einstein's Gravity Confirmed on a Cosmic Scale
or
Confirmation of general relativity on large scales from weak lensing and galaxy velocities
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7286/full/nature08857.html
Has there been any activity on the Craigslist charity idea? If people are pursuing it, is there someplace to post updates, or an email list to join?
Spirit on the Brain is a blog and a book in progress by Geoffrey Falk about the neurophysical sources of religion, which will make interesting reading for anyone wanting to know about the aetiology of the religious pathology.
I have a program that estimates the chances that one gene has the same function as another gene, based on their similarity. This is estimated from the % identity of amino acids between the proteins, and on the % of the larger protein that is covered by an alignment with the shorter protein.
For various reasons, this is done by breaking %id and %len into bins, eg 20-30%id, 30-40%id, 40-50%id, ... 30-40%len, 40-50%len, ... and estimating a probability for each bin that two proteins matched in that way have the same function.
What I want to do is to reduce the...
I shared this argument against cryonics here, but cyphergoth, the original poster of that thread noted that he prefers that discussion to focus on the technical feasibility of cryonics. This is not my actual opinion, just my solution to an intellectual puzzle: how can a rational person skip cryonics, even if he believes in its technical feasibility?
Let us first assume that I don't care too much about my future self, in the simple sense that I don't exercise, I eat unhealthy food, etc. Most of us are like that, and this is not irrational behavior: We simply...
If you want to write UIs, Lisp and friends would probably not be first choice, but since you mentioned it...
For Lisp, you can of course install Emacs, which (apart from being an editor) is a pretty convenient way to play around with Lisp. Emacs-Lisp may not be a start of the art Lisp implementation, but it certainly good enough to get started. An because of the full integration with the editor, there is this instant-gratification when you can use some Lisp to glue to existing things together into something useful. Emacs is available for just about any self...
Vote this down for karma balance.