I made some comments on the recently-deleted threads that got orphaned when the whole topic was banned and the associated posts were taken down. Currently no-one can reply to the comments. They don't related directly to the banned subject matter - and some of my messages survive despite the context being lost.

Some of the comments were SIAI-critical - and it didn't seem quite right to me at the time for the moderator to crush any discussion about them. So, I am reposting some of them as children of this comment in an attempt to rectify things - so I can refer back to them, and so others can comment - if they feel so inclined:

I came across a blurb on Ars Technica about "quantum memory" with the headline proclaiming that it may "topple Heisenberg's uncertainty principle". Here's the link: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/08/quantum-memory-may-topple-heisenbergs-uncertainty-principle.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

They didn't source the specific article, but it seems to be this one, published in <i>Nature Physics</i>. Here's that link: http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys1734.html

This is all well above my paygrade. Is this all conceptual? Are the scientists involed anywhere near an experiment to verify any of this? In a word, huh?

P ≠ NP : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1585850

As people are probably aware, Hitchens has cancer, which is likely to kill him in the not-too-distant future. There does not seem to be much to be done about this; but I wonder if it's possible to pass the hat to pay for cryonics for him? Apart from the fuzzies of saving a life with X percent probability, which can be had much cheaper by sending food to Africa, it might serve as marketing for cryonics, causing others to sign up. Of course, this assumes that he would accept, and also that there wouldn't be a perception that he was just grasping at any straw available.

Has there ever been a practical proof-of-concept system, even a toy one, for futarchy? Not just a "bare" prediction market, but actually tying the thing directly to policy.

If not, I suggest a programming nomic (aka codenomic) for this purpose.

If you're not familiar with the concept of nomic, it's a little tricky to explain, but there's a live one here in ECMAScript/Javascript, and an old copy of the PerlNomic codebase here. (There's also a scholarly article [PDF] on PerlNomic, for those interested.)

Also, if you're not familiar with the concept of nomic, you don't read enough Hofstadter.

I've heard many times here that Gargoyles involved some interesting multilevel plots, but the first few episodes had nothing like it, just standard Disneyishness. Anyone recommendations which episodes are best of the series, so I can check them out without going through the boring parts?

Some, if not most, people on LW do not subscribe to the idea that what has come to be known as AI FOOM is a certainty. This is even more common off LW. I would like to know why. I think that, given a sufficiently smart AI, it would be beyond easy for this AI to gain power. Even if it could barely scrape by in a Turing test against a five-year-old, it would still have all the powers that all computers inherently have, so it would already be superhuman in some respects, giving it enormous self-improving ability. And the most important such inherent power is the one that makes Folding@home work so well - the ability to simply copy the algorithm into more hardware, if all else fails, and have the copies cooperate on a problem.

So what could POSSIBLY slow this down, besides the AI's keepers intentionally keeping it offline?

India Asks, Should Food Be a Right for the Poor?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/world/asia/09food.html?hp

why don't more male celebrities sell their semen?

A comic about the lancet liver fluke.

If you have many different (and conflicting, in that they demand undivided attention) interests: if it was possible, would copying yourself in order to pursue them more efficiently satisfy you?

One copy gets to learn drawing, another one immerses itself in mathematics & physics, etc. In time, they can grow very different.

(Is this scenario much different to you than simply having children?)

I would like feedback on my recent blog post:

http://www.kmeme.com/2010/07/singularity-is-always-steep.html

It's simplistic for this crowd, but something that bothered me for a while. When I first saw Kurzweil speak in person (GDC 2008) he of course showed both linear and log scale plots. But I always thought the log scale plots were just a convenient way to fit more on the screen, that the "real" behavior was more like the linear scale plot, building to a dramatic steep slope in the coming years.

Instead I now believe in many cases the log plot is closer to "the real thing" or at least how we perceive that thing. For example in the post I talk about computational capacity. I believe the exponential increase is capacity translates into a perceived linear increase in utility. A computer twice as fast is only incrementally more useful, in terms of what applications can be run. This holds true today and will hold true in 2040 or any other year.

Therefore computational utility is incrementally increasing today and will be incrementally increasing in 2040 or any future date. It's not building to some dramatic peak.

None of this says anything against the possibility of a Singularity. If you pass the threshold where machine intelligence is possible, you pass it, whatever the perceived rate of progress at the time.

There's an idea I've seen around here on occasion to the effect that creating and then killing people is bad, so that for example you should be careful that when modeling human behavior your models don't become people in their own right.

I think this is bunk. Consider the following:

--

Suppose you have an uploaded human, and fork the process. If I understand the meme correctly, this creates an additional person, such that killing the second process counts as murder.

Does this still hold if the two processes are not made to diverge; that is, if they are deterministic (or use the same pseudorandom seed) and are never given differing inputs?

Suppose that instead of forking the process in software, we constructed an additional identical computer, set it on the table next to the first one, and copied the program state over. Suppose further that the computers were cued up to each other so that they were not only performing the same computation, but executing the steps at the same time as each other. (We won't readjust the sync on an ongoing basis; it's just part of the initial conditions, and the deterministic nature of the algorithm ensures that they stay in step after that.)

Suppose that the computers were not electronic, but insanely complex mechanical arrays of gears and pulleys performing the same computation -- emulating the electronic computers at reduced speed, perhaps. Let us further specify that the computers occupy one fewer spatial dimension than the space they're embedded in, such as flat computers in 3-space, and that the computers are pressed flush up against each other, corresponding gears moving together in unison.

What if the corresponding parts (which must be staying in synch with each other anyway) are superglued together? What if we simply build a single computer twice as thick? Do we still have two people?

--

No, of course not. And, on reflection, it's obvious that we never did: redundant computation is not additional computation.

So what if we cause the ems to diverge slightly? Let us stipulate that we give them some trivial differences, such as the millisecond timing of when they receive their emails. If they are not actively trying to diverge, I anticipate that this would not have much difference to them in the long term -- the ems would still be, for the most part, the same person. Do we have two distinct people, or two mostly redundant people -- perhaps one and a tiny fraction, on aggregate? I think a lot of people will be tempted to answer that we have two.

But consider, for a moment, if we were not talking about people but -- say -- works of literature. Two very similar stories, even if by a raw diff they share almost no words, are of not much more value than only one of them.

The attitude I've seen seems to treat people as a special case -- as a separate magisterium.

--

I wish to assert that this value system is best modeled as a belief in souls. Not immortal souls with an afterlife, you understand, but mortal souls, that are created and destroyed. And the world simply does not work that way.

If you really believed that, you'd try to cause global thermonuclear war, in order to prevent the birth of billions or more of people who will inevitably be killed. It might take the heat death of the universe, but they will die.

Some hobby Bayesianism. A typical challenge for a rationalist is that there is some claim X to be evaluated, it seems preposterous, but many people believe it. How should you take account of this when considering how likely X is to be true? I'm going to propose a mathematical model of this situation and discuss two of it's features.

This is based on a continuing discussion with Unknowns, who I think disagrees with what I'm going to present, or with its relevance to the "typical challenge."

Summary: If you learn that a preposterous hypothesis X is believed by many people, you should not correct your prior probability P(X) by a factor larger than the reciprocal of P(Y), your prior probability for the hypothesis Y = "X is believed by many people." One can deduce an estimate of P(Y) from an estimate of the quantity "if I already knew that at least n people believed X, how likely it would be that n+1 people believed X" as a function of n. It is not clear how useful this method of estimating P(Y) is.

The right way to unpack "X seems preposterous, but many believe it" mathematically is as follows. We have a very low prior probability P(X), and then we have new evidence Y = "many people believe X". The problem is to evaluate P(X|Y).

One way to phrase the typical challenge is "How much larger than P(X) should P(X|Y) be?" In other words, how large is the ratio P(X|Y)/P(X)? Bayes formula immediately says something interesting about this:

P(X|Y)/P(X) = P(Y|X)/P(Y)

Moreover, since P(Y|X) < 1, the right-hand side of that equation is less than 1/P(Y). My interpretation of this: if you want to know how seriously to take the fact that many people believe something, you should consider how likely you find it that many people would believe it absent any evidence. Or a little more precisely, how likely you find it that many people would believe it if the amount of evidence available to them was unknown to you. You should not correct your prior for X by more than the reciprocal of this probability.

Comment: how much less than 1 P(Y|X) is depends on the nature of X. For instance, if X is the claim "the Riemann hypothesis is false" then it is unclear to me how to estimate P(Y|X), but (since it is conceivable to me that RH is false, but still it is widely believed) it might be quite small. If X is an everyday claim like "it's a full moon tomorrow", or a spectacular claim like "Jesus rose from the dead", it seems like P(Y|X) is very close to 1. So sometimes 1/P(Y) is a good approximation to P(X|Y)/P(X), but maybe sometimes it is a big overestimation.

What about P(Y)? Is there a way to estimate it, or at least approach its estimation? Let's give ourselves a little more to work with, by quantifying "many people" in "many people believe X". Let Y(n) be the assertion "at least n people believe X." Note that this model doesn't specify what "believe" means -- in particular it does not specify how strongly n people believe X, nor how smart or expert those n people are, nor where in the world they are located... if there is a serious weakness in this model it might be found here.

Another application of Bayes theorem gives us

P(Y(n+1))/P(Y(n)) = P(Y(n+1)|Y(n))

(Since P(Y(n)|Y(n+1)) = 1, i.e. if we know n+1 people believe X, then of course n people believe X). Squinting a little, this gives us a formula for the derivative of the logarithm of P(Y(n)). Yudkowsky has suggested naming the log of a probability an "absurdity," let's write A(Y(n)) for the absurdity of Y(n).

d/dn A(Y(n)) = A(Y(n+1)|Y(n))

So up to an additive constant A(Y(n)) is the integral from 1 to n of A(Y(m+1)|Y(m))dm. So an ansatz for P(Y(n+1)|Y(n)) = exp(A(Y(n+1)|Y(n)) will allow us to say something about P(Y(n)), up to a multiplicative constant.

The shape of P(Y(n+1)|Y(n)) seems like it could have a lot to do with what kind of statement X is, but there is one thing that seems likely to be true no matter what X is: if N is the total population of the world and n/N is close to zero, then P(Y(n+1)|Y(n)) is also close to zero, and if n/N is close to one then P(Y(n+1)|Y(n)) is also close to one. I might work out an example ansatz like this in a future comment, if this one stands up to scrutiny.

http://antiwar.com/ I use this site to get most of 'world news', what about you guys?

An amusing case of rationality failure: Stockwell Day, a longstanding albatross around Canada's neck, says that more prisons need to be built because of an 'increase in unreported crime.'

As my brother-in-law amusingly noted on FB, quite apart from whether the actual claim is true (no evidence is forthcoming), unless these unreported crimes are leading to unreported trials and unreported incarcerations, it's not clear why we would need more prisons.

I think one of the other reasons many people are uncomfortable with cryonics is that they imagine their souls being stuck-- they aren't getting the advantages of being alive or of heaven.

I’m not yet good enough at writing posts to actually properly post something but I hoped that if I wrote something here people might be able to help me improve. So obviously people can comment however they normally would but it would be great if people would be willing to give me the sort of advice that would help me to write a better post next time. I know that normal comments do this to some extent but I’m also just looking for the basics – is this a good enough topic to write a post on but not well enough executed (therefore, I should work on my writing). Is it not a good enough topic? Why not? Is it not in depth enough? And so on.

Is your graph complete?

The red gnomes are known to be the best arguers in the world. If you asked them whether the only creature that lived in the Graph Mountains was a Dwongle, they would say, “No, because Dwongles never live in mountains.”

And this is true, Dwongles never live in mountains.

But if you want to know the truth, you don’t talk to the red gnomes, you talk to the green gnomes who are the second best arguers in the world.

And they would say. “No, because Dwongles never live in mountains.”

But then they would say, “Both we and the red gnomes are so good at arguing that we can convince people that false things are true. Even worse though, we’re so good that we can convince ourselves that false things are true. So we always ask if we can argue for the opposite side just as convincingly.”

And then, after thinking, they would say, “We were wrong, they must be Dwongles, for only Dwongles ever live in places where no other creatures live. So we have a paradox and paradoxes can never be resolved by giving counter examples to one or the other claim. Instead of countering, you must invalidate one of the arguments.”

Eventually, they would say, “Ah. My magical fairy mushroom has informed me that Graph Mountain is in fact a hill, ironically named, and Dwongles often live in hills. So yes, the creature is a Dwongle.”

The point of all of that is best discussed after introducing a method of diagramming the reasoning made by the green gnomes. The following series of diagrams should be reasonably self explanatory. A is a proposition that we want to know the truth of (the creature in the Graph Mountains a Dwongle) and not-A is its negation (the creature in the Graph Mountains is not a Dwongle). If a path is drawn between a proposition and the “Truth” box, then the proposition is true. Paths are not direct but go through a proof (in this case P1 stands in for “Dwongles never live in mountains” and P2 stands in for “Only Dwongles live in a place where no other creatures live). The diagrams connect to the argument made above by the green gnome. First, we have the argument that it mustn’t be a Dwongle because of P1. The second diagram shows the green gnome realising that they have an argument that it must be a Dwongle too due to P2. This middle type of diagram could be called a “Paradox Diagram.”

Figure 1. The green gnomes process of argument.

In his book, Good and Real, Gary Drescher notes that paradoxes can’t be resolved by making more counterarguments (which would relate to the approach shown in figure 2 before, which when considered graphically is obviously not helpful, we still have both propositions being shown to be true) but rather, by invalidating one of the arguments. That’s what the green gnomes did when they realised that Graph Mountain was actually a hill and that’s what the final diagram in figure 1 shows the result of (when you remove a vertex, like P1, you remove all the lines connected to it as well).

Figure 2. Attempting to resolve a paradox via counter arguments rather than invalidation.

The interesting thing in all of this is that the first and third diagrams in figure 1 look very similar. In fact, they’re the same but simply with different propositions proven. And this raises something: It can be very difficult to tell the difference between an incomplete paradox diagram and a completed proof diagram. The difference between the two is whether you’ve tried to find an argument for the opposite of the proposition proven and, if you do find one, whether you’ve managed to invalidate that argument.

What this means is, if you’re not confident that your proof for a proposition is true, you can’t be sure that you’ve taken all of the appropriate steps to establish its truth until you’ve asked: Is my graph complete?

I've been on a Wikipedia binge, reading about people pushing various New Age silliness. The tragic part is that a lot of these guys actually do sound fairly smart, and they don't seem to be afflicted with biological forms of mental illness. They just happen to be memetically crazy in a profound and crippling way.

Take Ervin Laszlo, for instance. He has a theory of everything, which involves saying the word "quantum" a lot and talking about a mystical "Akashic Field" which I would describe in more detail except that none of the explanations of it really say much. Here's a representative snippet from Wikipedia:

László describes how such an informational field can explain why our universe appears to be fine-tuned as to form galaxies and conscious lifeforms; and why evolution is an informed, not random, process. He believes that the hypothesis solves several problems that emerge from quantum physics, especially nonlocality and quantum entanglement.

Then we have pages like this one, talking more about the Akashic Records (because apparently it's a quantum field thingy and also an infinite library or something). The very first sentence sums it up: "The Akashic Records refer to the frequency gird programs that create our reality." Okay, actually that didn't sum up crap; but it sounded cool, didn't it? That page is full of references to the works of various people, cited very nicely, and the spelling and grammar suggest someone with education. There are a lot of pages like this floating around. The thing they all have in common is that they don't seem to consider evidence to be important. It's not even on their radar.

Scholarly writings from New Age people is a pretty breathtaking example of dark side epistemology, if anybody wants a case study in exactly what not to do. It's pretty intense.

Cryronics Lottery.

Would it be easier to sign up for cryonics if there was a lottery system? A winner of the lottery could say "Well, I'm not a die-hard cryo-head, but I thought it was interesting so I bought a ticket (which was only $X) and I happened to win, and it's pretty valuable, so I might as well use it."

It's a sort of "plausible deniability" that might reduce the social barriers to cryo. The lottery structure might also be able to reduce the conscientousness barriers - once you've won, then the lottery administrators (possibly volunteers, possibly funded by a fraction of the lottery) walk you through a "greased path".

It might be useful to have a short list of English words that indicate logical relationships or concepts often used in debates and arguments, so as to enable people who are arguing about controversial topics to speak more precisely.

Has anyone encountered such a list? Does anyone know of previous attempts to create such lists?

PZ Meyers' comments on Kurzweil generated some controversy here recently on LW--see here. Apparently PZ doesn't agree with some of Kurzweil's assumptions about the human mind. But that's besides the point--what I want want to discuss is this: according to another blog, Kurzweil has been selling bogus nutritional supplements. What does everyone think of this?

Followup to: Making Beliefs Pay Rent in Anticipated Experiences

In the comments section of Making Beliefs Pay Rent, Eliezer wrote:

I follow a correspondence theory of truth. I am also a Bayesian and a believer in Occam's Razor. If a belief has no empirical consequences then it could receive no Bayesian confirmation and could not rise to my subjective attention. In principle there are many true beliefs for which I have no evidence, but in practice I can never know what these true beliefs are, or even focus on them enough to think them explicitly, because they are so vastly outnumbered by false beliefs for which I can find no evidence.

If I am interpreting this correctly, Eliezer is saying that there is a nearly infinite space of unfalsifiable hypotheses, and so our priors for each individual hypothesis should be very close to zero. I agree with this statement, but I think it raises a philosophical problem: doesn't this same reasoning apply to any factual question? Given a set of data D, there must be an nearly infinite space of hypotheses that (a) explain D and (b) make predictions (fulfilling the criteria discussed in Making Beliefs Pay Rent). Though Occam's Razor can help us to weed out a large number of these possible hypotheses, a mind-bogglingly large number would still remain, forcing us to have a low prior for each individual hypothesis. (In philosophy of science, this is known as "underdetermination.") Or is there a flaw in my reasoning somewhere?

Here's a thought experiment that's been confusing me for a long time, and I have no idea whether it is even possible to resolve the issues it raises. It assumes that a reality which was entirely simulated on a computer is indistinguishable from the "real" one, at least until some external force alters it. So... the question is, assuming that such a program exists, what happens to the simulated universe when it is executed?

In accordance with the arguments that Pavirta gives below me, redundant computation is not the same as additional computation. Executing the same program twice (with the same inputs each time) is equivalent to executing it once, which is equivalent to executing it five times, ten times, or a million. You are just simulating the same universe over and over, not a different one each time.

But is running the simulation once equivalent to running it ZERO times?

The obvious answer seems to be "no", but bear with me here. There is nothing special about the quarks and leptons that make up a physical computer. If you could make a Turing machine out of light, or more exotic matter, you would still be able to execute the same program on it. And if you could make such a computer in any other universe (whatever that might mean), you would still be able to run the program on it. But in such considerations, the computer used is immaterial. A physical computer is not a perfect Turing machine - it has finite memory space and is vulnerable to physical defects which introduce errors into the program. What matters is the program itself, which exists regardless of the computer it is on. A program is a Platonic ideal, a mathematical object which cannot exist in this universe. We can make a representation of that program on a computer, but the representation is not perfect, and it is not the program itself. In the same way, a perfect equilateral triangle cannot actually be constructed in this universe; even if you use materials whose length is measured down to the atom, its sides will not be perfectly straight and its angles will not be perfectly equal. More importantly, if you then alter the representation to make one of the angles bigger, it does not change the fact that equilateral triangles have 60° angles, it simply makes your representation less accurate. In the same way, executing a program on a computer will not alter the program itself. If there are conscious beings simulated on your computer, they existed before you ran the program, and they will exist even if you unplug the computer and throw it into a hole - because what you have in your computer is not the conscious beings, but a representation of them. And they will still exist even if you never run the program, or even if it never occurs to anyone on Earth that such a program could be made.

The problem is, this same argument could be used to justify the existence of literally everything, everywhere. So we are left with several possible conclusions: (1)Everything is "real" in some universe, and we have no way of ever finding such universes. This cannot ever be proved or falsified, and also leads to problems with the definition of "everything" and "real". (2)The initial premise is false, and only physical objects are real: simulations, thoughts and constructs are not. I think there is a philosophical school of thought that believes this to be true, though I have no idea what its name is. Regardless, there are still a lot of holes in this answer. (3)I have made a logical mistake somewhere, or I am operating from an incorrect definition of "real". It happens.

It is also worth pointing out that both (1) and (2) invalidate every ethical truth in the book, since in (1) there is always a universe in which I just caused the death of a trillion people, and in (2) there is no such thing as "ethics" - ideas aren't real, and that includes philosophical ideas.

Anyway, just bear this in mind when you think about a universe being simulated on a computer.

Eliezer has written a post (ages ago) which discussed a bias when it comes to contributions to charities. Fragments that I can recall include considering the motivation for participating in altruistic efforts in a tribal situation, where having your opinion taking seriously is half the point of participation. This is in contrast to donating 'just because you want thing X to happen'. There is a preference to 'start your own effort, do it yourself' even when that would be less efficient than donating to an existing charity.

I am unable to find the post in question - I think it is distinct from 'the unit of caring'. It would be much appreciated if someone who knows the right keywords could throw me a link!

Alright, I've lost track of the bookmark and my google-fu is not strong enough with the few bits and pieces I remember. I remember seeing a link to a story in a lesswrong article. The story was about a group of scientists who figured out how to scan a brain, so they did it to one of them, and then he wakes up in a strange place and then has a series of experiences/dreams which recount history leading up to where he currently is, including a civilization of uploads, and he's currently living with the last humans around... something like that. Can anybody help me out? Online story, 20 something chapters I think... this is driving me nuts.

Not that many will care, but I should get a brief appearance on Dateline NBC Friday, Aug. 20, at 10 p.m. Eastern/Pacific. A case I prosecuted is getting the Dateline treatment.

Elderly atheist farmer dead; his friend the popular preacher's the suspect.

--JRM

The visual guide to a PhD: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

Nice map–territory perspective.

John Baez This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics has its 300th and last entry. He is moving to wordpress and Azimuth. He states he wants to concentrate on futures, and has upcoming interviews with:

Tim Palmer on climate modeling and predictability, Thomas Fischbacher on sustainability and permaculture, and Eliezer Yudkowsky on artificial intelligence and the art of rationality. A Google search returns no matches for Fischbacher + site:lesswrong.com and no hits for Palmer +.

That link to Fischbacher that Baez gives has a presentation on cognitive distortions and public policy which I found quite good.

Where should the line be drawn regarding the status of animals as moral objects/entities? E.G Do you think it is ethical to boil lobsters alive? It seems to me there is a full spectrum of possible answers: at one extreme only humans are valued, or only primates, only mammals, only veterbrates, or at the other extreme, any organism with even a rudimentary nervous system (or any computational, digital isomorphism thereof), could be seen as a moral object/entity.

Now this is not necessarily a binary distinction, if shrimp have intrinsic moral value it does not follow that they must have a equal value to humans or other 'higher' animals. As I see it, there are two possibilities; either we come to a point where the moral value drops to zero, or else we decide that entities approach zero to some arbitrary limit: e.g. a c. elegans roundworm with its 300 neurons might have a 'hedonic coefficient' of 3x10^-9. I personally favor the former, the latter just seems absurd to me, but I am open to arguments or any comments/criticisms.

I've written a post for consolidating book recommendations, and the links don't have hidden urls. These are links which were cut and pasted from a comment-- the formatting worked there.

Posting (including to my drafts) mysteriously doubles the spaces between the words in one of my link texts, but not the others. I tried taking that link out in case it was making the whole thing weird, but it didn't help.

I've tried using the pop-up menu for links that's available for writing posts, but that didn't change the results.

What might be wrong with the formatting?

Say a "catalytic pattern" is something like scaffolding, an entity that makes it easier to create (or otherwise obtain) another entity. An "autocatalytic pattern" is a sort of circular version of that, where the existence of an instance of the pattern acts as scaffolding for creating or otherwise obtaining another entity.

Autocatalysis is normally mentioned in the "origin of life" scientific field, but it also applies to cultural ratchets. An autocatalytic social structure will catalyze a few more instances of itself (frequently not expanding without end - rather, a niche is filled), and then the population has some redundancy and recoverability, acting as a ratchet.

For example, driving on the right(left) in one region catalyzes driving on the right(left) in an adjacent region.

Designing circular or self-applicable entities is kindof tricky, but it's not as tricky as it might be - often, theres an attraction basin around a hypothesized circular entity, where X catalyzes Y which is very similar to X, and Y catalyzes Z which is very similar to Y, and so focusing your search sufficiently, and then iterating or iterating-and-tweaking can often get the last, trickiest steps.

Douglas Hofstadter catalyzed the creation (by Lee Sallows) of a "Pangram Machine" that exploits this attraction basin to create a self-describing sentence that starts "This Pangram contains four as, [...]" - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangram

Has there been any work on measuring, studying attraction basins around autocatalytic entities?

With regard to the recent proof of P!=NP: http://predictionbook.com/predictions/1588

"The differences are dramatic. After tracking thousands of civil servants for decades, Marmot was able to demonstrate that between the ages of 40 and 64, workers at the bottom of the hierarchy had a mortality rate four times higher than that of people at the top. Even after accounting for genetic risks and behaviors like smoking and binge drinking, civil servants at the bottom of the pecking order still had nearly double the mortality rate of those at the top."

"Under Pressure: The Search for a Stress Vaccine" http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/07/ff_stress_cure/all/1

Would people be interested in a place on LW for collecting book recommendations?

I'm reading The Logic of Failure and enjoying it quite a bit. I wasn't sure whether I'd heard of it here, and I found Great Books of Failure, an article which hadn't crossed my path before.

There's a recent thread about books for a gifted young tween which might or might not get found by someone looking for good books..... and so on.

Would it make more sense to have a top level article for book recommendations or put it in the wiki? Or both?

LW database download?

I was wondering if it would be a good idea to offer a download of LW or at least the sequences and Wiki. In the manner that Wikipedia is providing it.

The idea behind it is to have a redundant backup in case of some catastrophe, for example if the same happens to EY that happened to John C. Wright. It could also provide the option to read LW offline.

I think I may have artificially induced an Ugh Field in myself.

A little over a week ago it occurred to me that perhaps I was thinking too much about X, and that this was distracting me from more important things. So I resolved to not think about X for the next week.

Of course, I could not stop X from crossing my mind, but as soon as I noticed it, I would sternly think to myself, "No. Shut up. Think about something else."

Now that the week's over, I don't even want to think about X any more. It just feels too weird.

And maybe that's a good thing.

What simple rationality techniques give the most bang for the buck? I'm talking about techniques you might be able to explain to a reasonably smart person in five minutes or less: really the basics. If part of the goal here is to raise the sanity waterline in the general populace, not just among scientists, then it would be nice to have some rationality techniques that someone can use without much study.

Carl Sagan had a slogan: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." He would say this phrase and then explain how, when someone claims something extraordinary (i.e. something for which we have a very low probability estimate), they need correspondingly stronger evidence than if they'd made a higher-likelihood claim, like "I had a sandwich for lunch." Now, I'm sure everybody here can talk about this very precisely, in terms of Bayesian updating and odds ratios, but Sagan was able to get a lot of this across to random laypeople in about a minute. Maybe two minutes.

What techniques for rationality can be explained to a normal person in under five minutes? I'm looking for small and simple memes that will make people more rational, on average. I'll try a few candidates, to get the discussion started.

Candidate 1: Carl Sagan's concise explanation of how evidence works, as mentioned above.

Candidate 2: Everything that has an effect in the real world is part of the domain of science (and, more broadly, rationality). A lot of people have the truly bizarre idea that some theories are special, immune to whatever standards of evidence they may apply to any other theory. My favorite example is people who believe that prayers for healing actually make people who are prayed for more likely to recover, but that this cannot be scientifically tested. This is an obvious contradiction: they're claiming a measurable effect on the world and then pretending that it can't possibly be measured. I think that if you pointed out a few examples of this kind of special pleading to people, they might start to realize when they're doing it.

Candidate 3: Admitting that you were wrong is a way of winning an argument. There's a saying that "It takes a big man to admit he's wrong," and when people say this, they don't seem to realize that it's a huge problem! It shouldn't be hard to admit that you were wrong about something! It shouldn't feel like defeat; it should feel like victory. When you lose an argument with someone, it should be time for high fives and mutual jubilation, not shame and anger. I know that it's possible to retrain yourself to feel this way, because I've done it. This wasn't even too difficult; it was more a matter of just realizing that feeling good about conceding an argument was even an option.

Anti-candidate: "Just because something feels good doesn't make it true." I call this an anti-candidate because, while it's true, it's seldom helpful. People trot out this line as an argument against other people's ideas, but rarely apply it to their own. I want memes that will make people actually be more rational, instead of just feeling that way.

Any ideas? I know that the main goal of this community is to strive for rationality far beyond such low-hanging fruit, but if we can come up with simple and easy techniques that actually help people be more rational, there's a lot of value in that. You could use it as rationalist propaganda, or something.

EDIT: I've expanded this into a top-level post.

Scenario: A life insurance salesman, who happens to be a trusted friend of a relatively-new-but-so-far-trustworthy friend of yours, is trying to sell you a life insurance policy. He makes the surprising claim that after 20 years of selling life insurance, none of his clients have died. He seems to want you to think that buying a life insurance policy from him will somehow make you less likely to die.

How do you respond?

edit: to make this question more interesting: you also really don't want to offend any of the people involved.

Goodhart sighting? Misunderstanding of causality sighting? Check out this recent economic analysis on Slate.com (emphasis added):

For much of the modern American era, inflation has been viewed as an evil demon to be exorcised, ideally before it even rears its head. This makes sense: Inflation robs people of their savings, and the many Americans who have lived through periods of double-digit inflation know how miserable it is. But sometimes a little bit of inflation is valuable. During the Great Depression, government policies deliberately tried to create inflation. Rising prices are a sign of rising output, something that would be welcome in the current slow-motion recovery.

(He then quotes an economist that says inflation would also prop up home values and prevent foreclosures.)

Did I get that right? Because inflation has traditionally been a sign of (caused by) rising output, you should directly cause inflation, in order to cause higher output. (Note: in order to complete the case for inflation, you arguably have to do the same thing again, but replacing inflation with output, and output with reduced unemployment.)

A usual, I'm not trying to start a political debate about whether inflation is good or bad, or what should be done to increase/decrease inflation. I'm interested in this particular way of arguing for pro-inflation policies, which seems to even recognize which way the causality flows, but still argue as if it runs the opposite direction.

Am I misunderstanding it?

LW Goodhart article