I don't post things like this because I think they're right, I post them because I think they are interesting. The geometry of TV signals and box springs causing cancer on the left sides of people's bodies in Western countries...that's a clever bit of hypothesizing, right or wrong.

In this case, an organization I know nothing about (Vetenskap och Folkbildning from Sweden) says that Olle Johansson, one of the researchers who came up with the box spring hypothesis, is a quack. In fact, he was "Misleader of the year" in 2004. What does this mean in terms of his work on box springs and cancer? I have no idea. All I know is that on one side you've got Olle Johansson, Scientific American, and the peer-reviewed journal (Pathophysiology) in which Johansson's hypothesis was published. And on the other side, there's Vetenskap och Folkbildning, a number of commenters on the SciAm post, and a bunch of people in my inbox. Who's right? Who knows. It's a fine opportunity to remain skeptical.

-- Jason Kottke

(So this is just about the first real post I made here and I kinda have stage fright posting here, so if its horribly bad and uninteresting and so please tell me what I did wrong, ok? Also, I've been frying to figure out the spelling and grammar and failed, sorry about that.) (Disclaimer: This post is humorous, and not everything should be taken all to seriously! As someone (Boxo) reviewing it put it: "it's like a contest between 3^^^3 and common sense!")

1) My analysis of http://lesswrong.com/lw/kn/torture_vs_dust_specks/

Lets say 1 second of torture is -1 000 000 utilions. Because there are about 100 000 seconds in a day, and about 20 000 days in 50 years, that makes -2*10^15 utilions.

Now, I'm tempted to say a dust speck has no negative utility at all, but I'm not COMPLETELY certain I'm right. Let's say there's a 1/1000 000 chance I'm wrong*, in which case the dust speck is -1 utilion. That means the the dust speck option is -1 * 10^-6 * 3^^^3, which is approximately -3^^^3.

-3^^^3 < -10^15, therefore I chose the torture.

2) The ant speck problem.

The ant speck problem is like the dust speck problem, except instead of being 3^^^3 humans that get specks in their eyes, it's 3^^^3 ordinary ants, and it's a billion humans being tortured for a millennia.

Now, I'm bigoted against ants, and pretty sure I don't value them as much as humans. In fact, with 99.9999% certain I don't value ants suffering at all. The remaining probability space is dominated by that moral value is equal to 1000^[the number of neurons in the entity's brain] for brains similar to earth type animals. Humans have about 10^11, ants have about 10^4 That means an ant is worth about 10^(-10^14) as much as a human, if it's worth anything at all.

Now lets multiply this together... -1 utilions * 10^(-10^14) discount * 1/10^6 that ants are worth anything at all * 1/10^6 that dust specks are bad * 3^^^3... That's about -3^^^3!

And for the other side: -10^15 for 50 years. Multiply that with 20, and then with the billion... about -10^25.

-3^^^3 < -10^25, therefore I chose the torture!

((*I do not actually think this, the numbers are for the sake of argument and have little to do with my actual beliefs at all.))

3) Obvious derived problems: There are variations of the ant problem, can you work out and post what if...

• The ants will only be tortured if also all the protons in the earth decays within one second of the choice, the torture however is certain?

• Instead of ants, you have bacteria, with behaviour as complicated as to be equivalent of 1/100 neurons?

• The source you get the info from is unreliable, there's only a 1/googol chance the specks could actual happen, while the torture, again, is certain?

• All of the above?

Reading Michael Vassar's comments on WrongBot's article (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2i6/forager_anthropology/2c7s?c=1&context=1#2c7s) made me feel that the current technique of learning how to write a LW post isn't very efficient (read lots of LW, write a post, wait for lots of comments, try to figure out how their issues could be resolved, write another post etc - it uses up lots of the writer's time and lot's of the commentors time).

I was wondering whether there might be a more focused way of doing this. Ie. A short term workshop, a few writers who have been promoted offer to give feedback to a few writers who are struggling to develop the necessary rigour etc by providing a faster feedback cycle, the ability to redraft an article rather than having to start totally afresh and just general advice.

Some people may not feel that this is very beneficial - there's no need for writing to LW to be made easier (in fact, possibly the opposite) but first off, I'm not talking about making writing for LW easier, I'm talking about making more of the writing of a higher quality. And secondly, I certainly learn a lot better given a chance to interact on that extra level. I think learning to write at an LW level is an excellent way of achieving LW aim of helping people to think at that level.

I'm a long time lurker but I haven't even really commented before because I find it hard to jump to that next level of understanding that enables me to communicate anything of value. I wonder if there are others who feel the same or a similar way.

Good idea? Bad idea?

Sparked by my recent interested in PredictionBook.com, I went back to take a look at Wrong Tomorrow, a prediction registry for pundits - but it's down. And doesn't seem to have been active recently.

I've emailed the address listed on the original OB ANN for WT, but while I'm waiting on that, does anyone know what happened to it?

UDT/TDT understanding check: Of the 3 open problems Eliezer lists for TDT, the one UDT solves is counterfactual mugging. Is this correct? (A yes or no is all I'm looking for, but if the answer is no, an explanation of any length would be appreciated)

Why are Roko's posts deleted? Every comment or post he made since April last year is gone! WTF?

Edit: It looks like this discussion sheds some light on it. As best I can tell, Roko said something that someone didn't want to get out, so someone (maybe Roko?) deleted a huge chunk of his posts just to be safe.

Something I wonder about just how is how many people on LW might have difficulties with the metaphors used.

An example: In http://lesswrong.com/lw/1e/raising_the_sanity_waterline/, I still haven't quite figured what a waterline is supposed to mean in that context, or what kind of associations the word has, and neither had someone else I asked about that.

Are there any Less Wrongers in the Grand Rapids area that might be interested in meeting up at some point?

Something weird is going on. Every time I check, virtually all my recent comments are being steadily modded up, but I'm slowly losing karma. So even if someone is on an anti-Silas karma rampage, they're doing it even faster than my comments are being upvoted.

Since this isn't happening on any recent thread that I can find, I'd like to know if there's something to this -- if I made a huge cluster of errors on thread a while ago. (I also know someone who might have motive, but I don't want to throw around accusations at this point.)

Is it my imagination, or is "social construct" the sociologist version of "emergent phenomenon"?

Slashdot having an epic case of tribalism blinding their judgment? This poster tries to argue that, despite Intelligent Design proponents being horribly wrong, it is still appropriate for them to use the term "evolutionist" to refer to those they disagree with.

The reaction seems to be basically, "but they're wrong, why should they get to use that term?"

Huh?

This is my PGP public key. In the future, anything I write which seems especially important will be signed. This is more for signaling purposes than any fear of impersonation -- signing a post is a way to strongly signal its seriousness.

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Given all the recent discussion of contrived infinite torture scenarios, I'm curious to hear if anyone has reconsidered their opinion of my post on Dangerous Thoughts. I am specifically not interested in discussing the details or plausibility of said scenarios.

Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola on Preachers who are not believers:

There are systemic features of contemporary Christianity that create an almost invisible class of non-believing clergy, ensnared in their ministries by a web of obligations, constraints, comforts, and community. ... The authors anticipate that the discussion generated on the Web (at On Faith, the Newsweek/Washington Post website on religion, link) and on other websites will facilitate a larger study that will enable the insights of this pilot study to be clarified, modified, and expanded.

A second post has been banned. Strange: it was on a totally different topic from Roko's.

Interesting thread on self-control over on reddit

http://www.reddit.com/r/cogsci/comments/ctliw/is_there_any_evidence_suggesting_that_practicing/

So I was pondering doing a post on the etiology of sexual orientation (as a lead-in to how political/moral beliefs lead to factual ones, not vice versa).

I came across this article, which I found myself nodding along with, until I noticed the source...

Oops! Although they stress the voluntary nature of their interventions, NARTH is an organization devoted to zapping the fabulous out of gay people, using such brilliant methodology as slapping a rubber band against one's wrist every time one sees an attractive person with the wrong set of chromosomes. From the creators of the rhythm method.

Look at that article, though. And look at the site's mission statement, etc. while you're at it. The reason I posted this is because I was disturbed by how well the dark side has done here, rhetorically. And also by how they have used true facts (homosexuality is definitely not even close to 100% innate) to argue for something which is (1) morally questionable at best, given the possibility of coercion and the fact that you're fixing something that's not broken, (2) not even efficacious (no, I am not thrilled with that source).

Rationality applied to swimming

The author was a lousy swimmer for a long time, but got respect because he put in so much effort. Eventually he became a swim coach, and he quickly noticed that the bad swimmers looked the way he did, and the good swimmers looked very different, so he started teaching the bad swimmers to look like the good swimmers, and began becoming a better swimmer himself.

Later, he got into the physics of good swimming. For example, it's more important to minimize drag than to put out more effort.

I'm posting this partly because it's always a pleasure to see rationality, partly because the most recent chapter of Methods of Rationality reminded me of it, and mostly because it's a fine example of clue acquisition.

Do you like the LW wiki page (actually, pages) on Free Will? I just wrote a post to Scott Aaronson's blog, and the post assumed an understanding of the compatibilist notion of free will. I hoped to link to the LW wiki, but when I looked at it, I decided not to, because the page is unsuitable as a quick introduction.

EDIT: Come over, it is an interesting discussion of highly LW-relevant topics. I even managed to drop the "don't confuse the map with the territory"-bomb. As a bonus, you can watch the original topic of Scott's post: His diavlog with Anthony Aguirre

Has anyone been doing, or thinking of doing, a documentary (preferably feature-length and targeted at popular audiences) about existential risk? People seem to love things that tell them the world is about to end, whether it's worth believing or not (2012 prophecies, apocalyptic religion, etc., and on the more respectable side: climate change, and... anything else?), so it may be worthwhile to have a well-researched, rational, honest look at the things that are actually most likely to destroy us in the next century, while still being emotionally compelling enough to get people to really comprehend it, care about it, and do what they can about it. (Geniuses viewing it might decide to go into existential risk reduction when they might otherwise have turned to string theory; it could raise awareness so that existential risk reduction is seen more widely as an important and respectable area of research; it could attract donors to organizations like FHI, SIAI, Foresight, and Lifeboat; etc.)

Thought without Language Discussion of adults who've grown up profoundly deaf without having been exposed to sign language or lip-reading.

Edited because I labeled the link as "Language without Thought-- this counts as an example of itself.

There is something that bother's me and I would like to know if it bothers anyone else. I call it "Argument by Silliness"

Consider this quote from the Allais Malaise post: "If satisfying your intuitions is more important to you than money, do whatever the heck you want. Drop the money over Niagara Falls. Blow it all on expensive champagne. Set fire to your hair. Whatever."

I find this to be a common end point when demonstrating what it means to be rational. Someone will advance a good argument that correctly computes/deduces how you should act, given a certain goal. In the post quoted above, that would be maximizing your money. And in order to get their point across, they cite all the obviously silly things you could otherwise do. To a certain extent, it can be more blackmail than argument, because your audience does not want to seem a fool and so he dutifully agrees that yes, it would be silly to throw your money off of Niagara Falls and he is certainly a reasonable man who would never do that so of course he agrees with you.

Now, none of the intelligent readers on LW need to be blackmailed this way because we all understand what rationality demands of us and we respond to solid arguments not rhetoric. And Eliezer is just using that bit of trickery to get a basic point across to the uninitiated.

But the argument does little to help those who already grasp the concept improve their understanding. Absurdity does not mean you have correctly implemented a "reductio ad absurdum" technique. You have to be careful because he appealed to something that is self-evidently absurd and you should be wary of anything considered self-evident. Actually, I think it is more a case of being commonly accepted as absurd, but you should be just as wary of anything commonly accepted as silly. And you should be careful about where you think it is the former but it's actually the later.

The biggest problem, however, is that silly is a class in which we put things that can be disregarded. Silly is not a truth statement. It is a value statement. It says things are unimportant, not that they are untrue. It says that according to a given standard, this thing is ranked very low, so low in fact that it is essentially worthless.

Now, disregarding things is important for thinking. It is often impossible to think through the whole problem, so we at first concern ourselves with just a part and put the troublesome cases aside for later. In the Allais Malaise post, Eliezer was concerned just with the minor problem of "How do we maximize money under these particular constraints?" and separating out intuitions was part of having a well-defined, solvable problem to discuss.

But the silliness he cites only proves that the two standards - maximizing money and satisfying your intuitions - conflict in a particular case. It tells you little about any other case or the standards themselves.

The point I most want to make is "Embrace what you find silly," but since this comment has gone on very long, so I am going to break this up into several postings.

Luke Muehlhauser just posted about Friendly AI and Desirism at his blog. It tends to have a more general audience than LW, comments posted there could help spread the word. Desirism and the Singularity

Desirism and the Singularity, in which one of my favourite atheist communities is inching towards singularitarian ideas.

Two things of interest to Less Wrong:

First, there's an article about intelligence and religiosity. I don't have access to the papers in question right now, but the upshot is apparently that the correlation between intelligence (as measured by IQ and other tests) and irreligiosity can be explained with minimal emphasis on intelligence but rather on ability to process information and estimate your own knowledge base as well. They found for example that people who were overconfident about their knowledge level were much more likely to be religious. There may still be correlation v. causation issues, but tentatively it looks like having fewer cognitive biases and having better default rationality actually makes one less religious.

The second matter of interest to LW: Today's featured article on the English Wikipedia is the article on confirmation bias.

Paul Graham on guarding your creative productivity:

I'd noticed startups got way less done when they started raising money, but it was not till we ourselves raised money that I understood why. The problem is not the actual time it takes to meet with investors. The problem is that once you start raising money, raising money becomes the top idea in your mind. That becomes what you think about when you take a shower in the morning. And that means other questions aren't. [...]

You can't directly control where your thoughts drift. If you're controlling them, they're not drifting. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want think about.

Looks like Emotiv's BCI is making noticeable progress (from the Minsky demo)

http://www.ted.com/talks/tan_le_a_headset_that_reads_your_brainwaves.html

but still using bold guys :)

What's current thought about how you'd tell that AI is becoming more imminent?

I'm inclined to think that AI can't happen before the natural language problem is solved.

Is there a bias, maybe called the 'compensation bias', that causes one to think that any person with many obvious positive traits or circumstances (really attractive, rich, intelligent, seemingly happy, et cetera) must have at least one huge compensating flaw or a tragic history or something? I looked through Wiki's list of cognitive biases and didn't see it, but I thought I'd heard of something like this. Maybe it's not a real bias?

If not, I'd be surprised. Whenever I talk to my non-rationalist friends about how amazing persons X Y or Z are, they invariably (out of 5 or so occasions when I brought it up) replied with something along the lines of 'Well I bet he/she is secretly horribly depressed / a horrible person / full of ennui / not well-liked by friends and family". This is kind of the opposite of the halo effect. It could be that this bias only occurs when someone is asked to evaluate the overall goodness of someone who they themselves have not gotten the chance to respect or see as high status.

Anyway, I know Eliezer had a post called 'competent elites' or summat along these lines, but I'm not sure if this effect is a previously researched bias I'm half-remembering or if it's just a natural consequence of some other biases (e.g. just world bias).

Added: Alternative hypothesis that is more consistent with the halo effect and physical attractiveness stereotype data: my friends are themselves exceptionally physically attractive and competent but have compensatory personal flaws or depression or whatever, and are thus generalizing from one or two examples when assuming that others that share similar traits as themselves would also have such problems. I think this is the more likely of my two current hypotheses, as my friends are exceptionally awesome as well as exceptionally angsty. Aspiring rationalists! Empiricists and theorists needed! Do you have data or alternative hypotheses?

Are any LWer's familiar with adversarial publishing? The basic idea is that two researchers who disagree on some empirically testable proposition come together with an arbiter to design an experiment to resolve their disagreement.

Here's a summary of the process from an article (pdf) I recently read (where Daniel Kahneman was one of the adversaries).

1. When tempted to write a critique or to run an experimental refutation of a recent publication, consider the possibility of proposing joint research under an agreed protocol. We call the scholars engaged in such an effort participants. If theoretical differences are deep or if there are large differences in experimental routines between the laboratories, consider the possibility of asking a trusted colleague to coordinate the effort, referee disagreements, and collect the data. We call that person an arbiter.
2. Agree on the details of an initial study, designed to subject the opposing claims to an informative empirical test. The participants should seek to identify results that would change their mind, at least to some extent, and should explicitly anticipate their interpretations of outcomes that would be inconsistent with their theoretical expectations. These predictions should be recorded by the arbiter to prevent future disagreements about remembered interpretations.
3. If there are disagreements about unpublished data, a replication that is agreed to by both participants should be included in the initial study.
4. Accept in advance that the initial study will be inconclusive. Allow each side to propose an additional experiment to exploit the fount of hindsight wisdom that commonly becomes available when disliked results are obtained. Additional studies should be planned jointly, with the arbiter resolving disagreements as they occur.
5. Agree in advance to produce an article with all participants as authors. The arbiter can take responsibility for several parts of the article: an introduction to the debate, the report of experimental results, and a statement of agreed-upon conclusions. If significant disagreements remain, the participants should write individual discussions. The length of these discussions should be determined in advance and monitored by the arbiter. An author who has more to say than the arbiter allows should indicate this fact in a footnote and provide readers with a way to obtain the added material.
6. The data should be under the control of the arbiter, who should be free to publish with only one of the original participants if the other refuses to cooperate. Naturally, the circumstances of such an event should be part of the report.
7. All experimentation and writing should be done quickly, within deadlines agreed to in advance. Delay is likely to breed discord.
8. The arbiter should have the casting vote in selecting a venue for publication, and editors should be informed that requests for major revisions are likely to create impossible problems for the participants in the exercise.

This seems like a great way to resolve academic disputes. Philip Tetlock appears to be an advocate. What do you think?

John Hari - My Experiment With Smart Drugs (2008)

How does everyone here feel about these 'Smart Drugs'? They seem quire tempting to me, but are there candidates that have been in use long and considered safe?

Nobel Laureate Jean-Marie Lehn is a transhumanist.

We are still apes and are fighting all around the world. We are in the prisons of dogmatism, fundamentalism and religion. Let me say that clearly. We must learn to be rational ... The pace at which science has progressed has been too fast for human behaviour to adapt to it. As I said we are still apes. A part of our brain is still a paleo-brain and many of reactions come from our fight or flight instinct. As long as this part of the brain can take over control the rational part of the brain (we will face these problems). Some people will jump up at what I am going to say now but I think at some point of time we will have to change our brains.

Do the various versions of the Efficient Market Hypothesis only apply to investment in existing businesses?

The discussions of possible market blind spots in clothing makes me wonder how close the markets are to efficient for new businesses.

So my brother was watching Bullshit, and saw an exorcist claim that whenever a kid mentions having an invisible friend, they (the exorcist) tell the kid that the friend is a demon that needs exorcising.

Now, being a professional exorcist does not give a high prior for rationality.

But still, even given that background, that's a really uncritically stupid thing to say. And it occurred to me that in general, humans say some really uncritically stupid things to children.

I wonder if this uncriticality has anything to do with, well, not expecting to be criticized. If most of the hacks that humans use in place of rationality are socially motivated, we can safely turn them off when speaking to a child who doesn't know any better.

I wonder how much benefit we'd get, then, by imagining ourselves in all our internal dialogues to be speaking to someone very critical, and far smarter than us?

There's a course "Street Fighting Mathematics" on MIT OCW, with an associated free Creative Commons textbook (PDF). It's about estimation tricks and heuristics that can be used when working with math problems. Despite the pop-sounding title, it appears to be written for people who are actually expected to be doing nontrivial math.

Might be relevant to the simple math of everything stuff.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewrongstuff/archive/2010/06/28/risky-business-james-bagian-nasa-astronaut-turned-patient-safety-expert-on-being-wrong.aspx

This article is pretty cool, since it describes someone running quality control on a hospital from an engineering perspective. He seems to have a good understanding of how stuff works, and it reads like something one might see on lesswrong.

Have any LWers traveled the US without a car/house/lot-of-money for a year or more? Is there anything an aspiring rationalist in particular should know on top of the more traditional advice? Did you learn much? Was there something else you wish you'd done instead? Any unexpected setbacks (e.g. ended up costing more than expected; no access to books; hard to meet worthwhile people; etc.)? Any unexpected benefits? Was it harder or easier than you had expected? Is it possible to be happy without a lot of social initiative? Did it help you develop social initiative? What questions do you wish you would have asked beforehand, and what are the answers to those questions?

Actually, any possibly relevant advice or wisdom would be appreciated. :D

I'm trying to think of conflicts between subsystems of the brain to see if there's anything more than a simple gerontocratic system of veto power (i.e. evolutionarily older parts of the brain override younger parts). Help?

I've got things like:

• Wanting to eat but not wanting to spend money on food but wanting to signal wealth.
• Wanting to breathe when underwater but wanting to surface for breath first but wanting to signal willpower to watching friends.
• Wanting to survive but wanting to die for one's country/ideals/beliefs. (This is a counterexample to the gerontocratic hypothesis, no?)
• Wanting to appear confident but wanting to appear modest. (Not necessarily opposed, but there is some tradeoff.)

What types of internal conflicts am I missing entirely?

I think in dialogue. (More precisely, I think in dialogue about half the time, in more bland verbal thoughts a quarter of the time, and visually a quarter of the time, with lots of overlap. This also includes think-talking to myself when it seems internally that there are 2 people involved.)

Does anyone else find themselves thinking in dialogue often?

I think it probably has something to do with my narcissistic and often counterproductive obsession with other people's perceptions of me, but this hypothesis is the result of generalizing from one example. If it turns out cognitive styles are linked with certain personality traits to a significant degree that would be rather interesting. Have there been studies on this? Anyone have any theories?

I'm very curious about others' cognitive styles, whether not they're similar to my own.

So, LW: how do you think?

I figure the open thread is as good as any for a personal advice request. It might be a rationality issue as well.

I have incredible difficulty believing that anybody likes me. Ever since I was old enough to be aware of my own awkwardness, I have the constant suspicion that all my "friends" secretly think poorly of me, and only tolerate me to be nice.

It occurred to me that this is a problem when a close friend actually said, outright, that he liked me -- and I happen to know that he never tells even white lies, as a personal scruple -- and I simply couldn't believe him. I know I've said some weird or embarrassing things in front of him, and so I just can't conceive of him not looking down on me.

So. Is there a way of improving my emotional response to fit the evidence better? Sometimes there is evidence that people like me (they invite me to events; they go out of their way to spend time with me; or, in the generalized professional sense, I get some forms of recognition for my work). But I find myself ignoring the good and only seeing the bad.

An object lesson in how not to think about the future:

http://www.futuretimeline.net/

(from Pharyngula)

Day-to-day question:

I live in a ground floor apartment with a sunken entryway. Behind my fairly large apartment building is a small wooded area including a pond and a park. During the spring and summer, oftentimes (~1 per 2 weeks) a frog will hop down the entryway at night and hop around on the dusty concrete until dying of dehydration. I occasionally notice them in the morning as I'm leaving for work, and have taken various actions depending on my feelings at the time and the circumstances of the moment.

1. Action: Capture the frog and put it in the woods out back. Cost: ~10 seconds to capture, ~2 minutes to put into the woods, getting slimy frog on my hands and dew on my shoes. Benefit: frog potentially survives.
2. Action: Capture the frog and put it in the dew-covered grass out front. Cost: ~10 seconds to capture, ~20 seconds to put into the grass, getting slimy frog on my hands. Benefit: no frog corpses in the stairwell after I get home from work, and it has a possibility of surviving.
3. Action: Either of the above, but also taking a glass of warm water and pouring it over the frog to clean off the dust and cobwebs from hopping around the stairwell. Cost: ~1 minute to get a glass of water, consumption of resources to ensure it's warm enough not to cause harm, ~10 seconds of cleaning the frog. Benefit: makes frog look less deathly, potentially increases chances at survival.
4. Action: Leave the frog in the stairwell. Cost: slight emotional guilt at not helping the frog, slight advance of the current human-caused mass extinction event. Benefit: no action required.
5. Action: As above, but once the frog is dead, position it in the stairwell in such a way as to be aesthetically pleasing, as small ceramic animals sometimes are. Cost: touching a dead frog, being seen as obviously creepy or weird. Benefit: cute little squatting frog in the shade under the stairwell every morning.

What would you do, why, and how long would you keep doing it?

From a recent newspaper story:

The odds that Joan Ginther would hit four Texas Lottery jackpots for a combined $21 million are astronomical. Mathematicians say the chances are as slim as 1 in 18 septillion — that's 18 and 24 zeros.

• http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38229644/ns/us_news-life

I haven't checked this calculation at all, but I'm confident that it's wrong, for the simple reason that it is far more likely that some "mathematician" gave them the wrong numbers than that any compactly describable event with odds of 1 in 18 septillion against it has actually been reported on, in writing, in the history of intelligent life on my Everett branch of Earth. Discuss?

I'm curious what peoples opinions are of Jeff Hawkins' book 'on intelligence', and specifically the idea that 'intelligence is about prediction'. I'm about halfway through and I'm not convinced, so I was wondering if anybody could point me to further proofs of this or something, cheers

I was examining some of the arguments for the existence of god that separate beings into contingent (exist in some worlds but not all) and necessary (exist in all worlds). And it occurred to me that if the multiverse is indeed true, and its branches are all possible worlds, then we are all necessary beings, along with the multiverse, a part of whose structure we are.

Am I retreating into madness? :D

On the complete implausibility of the History Channel.

When thinking about my own rationality I have to identify problems. This means that I write statements like "I wait to long with making decisions, see X,Y". Now I worry that by stating this as a fact I somehow anchor it more deeply in my mind, and make myself act more in accordance with that statement. Is there actually any evidence for that? And if so, how do I avoid this problem?

I just finished polishing off a top level post, but 5 new posts went up tonight - 3 of them substantial. So I ask, what should my strategy be? Should I just submit my post now because it doesn't really matter anyway? Or wait until the conversation dies down a bit so my post has a decent shot of being talked about? If I should wait, how long?

The selective attention test (YouTube video link) is quite well-known. If you haven't heard of it, watch it now.

Now try the sequel (another YouTube video).

Even when you're expecting the tbevyyn, you still miss other things. Attention doesn't help in noticing what you aren't looking for.

More here.

How facts Backfire

Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information.

There are a number of ways you can run with this article. It is interesting seeing it in the major press. It is also a little ironic that it is presenting facts to try and overturn an opinion (that information cannot be good for trying to overturn an opinion).

In terms of existential risk and thinking better in general. Obviously sometimes facts can overturn opinions but it makes me wonder, where is the organisation that uses non-fact based methods to sway opinion about existential risk. It would make sense if they were seperate, the fact based organisations (SIAI, FHI) need to be honest so that people that are fact-phillic to their message will trust them. I tend to ignore the fact-phobic (with respect to existential risk) people. But if it became sufficiently clear that foom style AI was possible, engineering society would become necessary.