My experiments with nootropics continue. A few days ago, I started taking sulbutiamine (350mg/day), a synthetic analog of thiamine which differs in that it crosses the blood-brain barrier more readily. The effects were immediate, positive, and extremely dramatic - on an entirely different order of magnitude than I expected, and probably the largest single improvement to my subjective well being I have ever experienced. A feeling of mental fatigue and not wanting to do stuff - a feeling that leads to spending lots of time on blogs, playing video games and otherwise killing time suboptimally (though not necessarily the only such feeling) - just up and vanished overnight. This was something that I had identified as a major problem, and believed to be purely psychological in nature, but was, in fact, entirely biochemical. On the first day I took sulbutiamine, I felt significantly better, worked three hours longer than normal, and went to the gym (which would previously have been entirely out of character for me).

That said, I do have a concrete reason to believe that this effect is atypical. Specifically, I believe I was deficient in thiamine; I believe this because I'm a type 1 diabetic, and according to the research reported in this article, that means my body uses up thiamine at a greatly increased rate; I was only getting the RDA of thiamine from a standard multivitamin; and the problems I had seem to match the symptoms of minor thiamine deficiency pretty well.

That said, searching the internet finds people without thiamine deficiencies who also benefited from sulbutiamine, albeit to a lesser degree. And trying sulbutiamine is safe (no credible reports of adverse effects ever) and cheap ($17 for an 85-day supply as bulk powder), so I recommend it.

Can't decide? With the Universe Splitter iPhone app, you can do both! The app queries a random number generator in Switzerland which releases a single photon into a half-silvered mirror, meaning that according to MWI each outcome is seen in one branch of the forking Universe. I particularly love the chart of your forking decisions so far.

Bridging the Chasm between Two Cultures: A former New Age author writes about slowly coming to realize New Age is mostly bunk and that the skeptic community actually might have a good idea about keeping people from messing themselves up. Also about how hard it is to open a genuine dialogue with the New Age culture, which has set up pretty formidable defenses to perpetuate itself.

Having a dog in the room made subjects 30% less likely to defect in Prisoner's Dilemma (article; sample size 52 people in groups of 4).

This changes my views on pet ownership completely.

I'm looking for something that I hope exists:

Some kind of internet forum that caters to the same crowd as LW (scientifically literate, interested in technology, roughly atheist or rationalist) but is just a place to chat about a variety of topics. I like the crowd here but sometimes it would be nice to talk more casually about stuff other than the stated purpose of this blog.

Any options?

A couple of viewquakes at my end.

I was really pleased when the Soviet Union went down-- I thought people there would self-organize and things would get a lot better.

This didn't happen.

I'm still more libertarian than anything else, but I've come to believe that libertarianism doesn't include a sense of process. It's a theory of static conditions, and doesn't have enough about how people actually get to doing things.

The economic crisis of 2007 was another viewquake for me. I literally went around for a couple of months muttering about how I had no idea it (the economy) was so fragile. A real estate bust was predictable, but I had no idea a real estate bust could take so much with it. Of course, neither did a bunch of other people who were much better paid and educated to understand such things, but I don't find that entirely consoling.

This gets back to libertarianism and process, I think. Protections against fraud don't just happen. They need to be maintained, whether by government or otherwise.

What fosters a sense of camaraderie or hatred for a machine? Or: How users learned to stop worrying and love Clippy

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703959704575453411132636080.html

I'm considering starting a Math QA Thread at the toplevel, due to recent discussions about the lack of widespread math understanding on LW. What do you say?

The welcome thread is about to hit 500 comments, which means that the newer comments might start being hidden for new users. Would it be a good thing if I started a new welcome thread?

While I'm at it, I'd like to add some links to posts I think are especially good and interesting for new readers.

Reasonable Doubt: Innocence Project Co-Founder Peter Neufeld on Being Wrong

I’m not sure whether the satanic ritual abuse and similar prosecutions of the 80s/90s have ever been discussed on LW in any detail (I couldn’t find anything with a few google searches), but some of the failures of rationality in those cases seem to fit into the subject matter here.

For those unfamiliar with these cases, a sort of panic swept through many parts of the United States (and later other countries) resulting in a number of prosecutions of alleged satanic ritual abuse or other extensive conspiracies involving sexual abuse, despite, in almost all cases, virtually no physical evidence that such abuse occurred. Lack of physical evidence, of course, does not always mean that a crime has not occurred, but given the particular types of allegations made, it was not credible in most cases that no physical evidence would exist. It is hard to choose the most outrageous example, but this one is pretty remarkable:

Gerald [Amirault], it was alleged, had plunged a wide-blade butcher knife into the rectum of a 4-year-old boy, which he then had trouble removing. When a teacher in the school saw him in action with the knife, she asked him what he was doing, and then told him not to do it again, a child said. On this testimony, Gerald was convicted of a rape which had, miraculously, left no mark or other injury.

Moreover, there were all sorts of serious problems with the highly suggestive techniques used in questioning the children to elicit the accusations of abuse. If one is inclined to be charitable to the investigators, some of the problems with the interviews could be chalked up to lack of understanding at the time of how problematic these techniques were, but the stories are pretty damning. A short description of the sorts of techniques can be found in this Wiki entry on one of the most prominent prosecutions, that involving the McMartin preschool.

Many, although by no means all, of the defendants in these sorts of cases have since been exonerated. I am posting this comment because a defendant in one of the cases, Jesse Friedman (one of the subjects of the documentary film Capturing the Friedmans), is in the news because of a recent federal appellate court decision (pdf), which denied relief to Friedman, but noted:

While the law may require us to deny relief in this case, it does not compel us to do so without voicing some concern regarding the process by which the petitioner’s conviction was obtained.

For anyone who would like a brief overview of the problems with these sorts of prosecutions, the court’s opinion linked above has a relatively concise but informative discussion at pp. 18-23. For anyone interested in a book length treatment, I also recommend No Crueler Tyrannies by Dorothy Rabinowitz. Tons of info on the Internet as well, of course.

GiveWell blog discusses SIAI:

http://blog.givewell.org/2010/06/29/singularity-summit/

I've been thinking more and more about web startups recently (I'm nearing the end of grad school and am contemplating whether a life in academia is for me). I'm no stranger to absurd 100 hour weeks, love technology, and most of all love solving problems, especially if it involves making a new tool. Academia and startups are both pretty good matches for those specs.

Searching the great wisdom of the web suggests that a good startup should be two people, and that the best candidate for a cofounder is someone you've known for a while. From my own perspective, I'd love to have a cofounder that was rational and open minded, hence LessWrong as a potential source.

I'm not pitching a startup idea here. What I'm pitching is promiscuous intellectual philandering. I'd like to shoot the shit about random tech ideas, gossip about other startups, and in general just see if I click with anyone here strongly enough to at some point consider buddying up to take on the world.

Thoughts on how best to do this? What's the internet equivalent of speed dating for finding startup cofounders? Maybe the best way is to just attend more LessWrong meetups?

[Originally posted this in the first August 2010 Open Thread instead of this Part 2; oops]

I've been wanting to change my username for a while, and have heard from a few other people who do too, but I can see how this could be a bit confusing if someone with a well-established identity changes their username. (Furthermore, at LW meetups, when I've told people my username, a couple of people have said that they didn't remember specific things I've posted here, but had some generally positive affect associated with the name "ata". I would not want to lose that affect!) So I propose the following: Add a "Display name" field to the Preferences page on LW; if you put something in there, then this name would be shown on your user page and your posts and comments, next to your username. (Perhaps something like "ata (Adam Atlas)" — or the other way around? Comments and suggestions are welcome.)

I'm willing to code this if there's support for it and if the administrators deem it acceptable.

I recently started taking piracetam, a safe and unregulated (in the US) nootropic drug that improves memory. The effect (at a dose of 1.5g/day) was much stronger than I anticipated; I expected the difference to be small enough to leave me wondering whether it was mere placebo effect, but it has actually made a very noticeable difference in the amount of detail that gets committed to my long-term memory.

It is also very cheap, especially if you buy it as a bulk powder. Note that when taking piracetam, you also need to take something with choline in it. I bought piracetam and choline citrate as bulk powders, along with a bag of empty gelatin capsules and a scale. (Both piracetam and choline citrate taste extremely vile, so the gel caps are necessary. Assembling your own capsules is not hard, and can be done at a rate of approximately 10/minute with a tolerance of +/- 10% once you get the hang of it.)

I strongly recommend that anyone who has not tried piracetam stop procrastinating and order some. Yes, people have done placebo-controlled studies. No, there are not any rare but dangerous side effects. Taking piracetam is an unambiguous win if you want to learn and remember things.

Quick question — I know that Eliezer considers all of his pre-2002 writings to be obsolete. GISAI and CFAI were last updated in 2001 but are still available on the SIAI website and are not accompanied by any kind of obsolescence notice (and are referred to by some later publications, if I recall correctly). Are they an exception, or are they considered completely obsolete as well? (And does "obsolete" mean "not even worth reading", or merely "outdated and probably wrong in many instances"?)

Is there a post dealing with the conflict between the common LW belief that there are no moral absolutes, and that it's okay to make current values permanent; and the belief that we have made moral progress by giving up stoning adulterers, slavery, recreational torture, and so on?

Quick question about time: Is a time difference the same thing as the minimal energy-weighted configuration-space distance?

A HN post mocks Kurzweil for claiming the length of the brain's "program" is mostly due to the part of the genome that affects it. This was discussed here lately. How much more information is in the ontogenic environment, then?

The top rated comment makes extravagant unsupported claims about the brain being a quantum computer. This drives home what I already knew: many highly rated HN comments are of negligible quality.

PZ Myers:

We cannot derive the brain from the protein sequences underlying it; the sequences are insufficient, as well, because the nature of their expression is dependent on the environment and the history of a few hundred billion cells, each plugging along interdependently. We haven't even solved the sequence-to-protein-folding problem, which is an essential first step to executing Kurzweil's clueless algorithm. And we have absolutely no way to calculate in principle all the possible interactions and functions of a single protein with the tens of thousands of other proteins in the cell!

(PZ Myers wrongly accuses Kurzweil of claiming he or others will simulate a human brain aided in large part by the sequenced genome, by 2020).

Kurzweil's denial - thanks Furcas - answers my question this way: only a small portion of the information in the brain's initial layout is due to the epigenetic pre-birth environment (although the evidence behind this belief wasn't detailed).

"But it’s better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing.
Oh, we’ll invoke lush clichés about the lonely heroism of Olympic athletes, the pain and analgesia of football, the early rising and hours of practice and restricted diets, the preflight celibacy, et cetera. But the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode.
We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way “up close and personal” profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life -- outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport.
We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It’s farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very small."

--David Foster Wallace, "The String Theory", July 1996 Esquire

I thought of Robin Hanson and ems as I read this:

"Joyce is, in other words, a complete man, though in a grotesquely limited way. But he wants more. He wants to be the best, to have his name known, to hold professional trophies over his head as he patiently turns in all four directions for the media. He wants this and will pay to have it -- to pursue it, let it define him -- and will pay up with the regretless cheer of a man for whom issues of choice became irrelevant a long time ago. Already, for Joyce, at twenty-two, it’s too late for anything else; he’s invested too much, is in too deep. I think he’s both lucky and unlucky. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well."

Informal poll to ensure I'm not generalizing from one example:

How frequently do you find yourself able to remember how you feel about something, but unable to remember what produced the feeling in the first place (ie: you remember you hate steve but can't remember why)?

It seems like this is a cognitive shortcut, giving us access only to the "answer" that's already been computed (how to act vis-a-vis steve) instead of wasting energy and working memory re-accessing all the data and re-performing the calculation.

Jaron Laier is at it again: The First Church of Robotics

Besides piling up his usual fuzzy opinions about AI Jaron claims, and I cannot imagine that this was done out of sheer ignorance, that "This helps explain the allure of a place like the Singularity University. The influential Silicon Valley institution preaches a story that goes like this: one day in the not-so-distant future, the Internet will suddenly coalesce into a super-intelligent A.I., infinitely smarter than any of us individually and all of us combined"; I cannot imagine that this is the Singularity University's official position, it's really just too stupid.

I understand SingU is not SIAI, but there is some affiliation and I hope someone speaks up for them.

I assume this is relevant enough to post in the open thread, though it may be old news to some of you. There is a purported proof that P!=NP. A wiki collecting discussion and links to discussions, as well as links to the paper draft, is here.

I bet a good way to improve your rationality is to attempt to learn from the writings of smart, highly articulate people, whom you consider morally evil, and who often use emotional language to mock people like yourself. So, for example, feminists could read Roissy and liberals could read Ann Coulter.

http://roissy.wordpress.com/ http://www.anncoulter.com/

A quick probability math question.

Consider a population of blobs, initially comprising N individual blobs. Each individual blob independently has a probability p of reproducing, just once, spawning exactly one new blob. The next generation (an expected N*p individuals) has the same probability for each individual to spawn one new blob, and so on. Eventually the process will stop, with a total blob population of P.

The question is about the probability distribution for P, given N and p. Is this a well-known probability distribution? If so, which? Even if not, are there things that can be said about it which are mathematically obvious? (Not obvious to me, obviously. I'd be interested in which gaps in my math education I'm revealing by even asking these questions.)

Last open thread I linked a Wired article on a argument-diagram software called ACH being open-sourced.

It's now available: http://competinghypotheses.org/

(PHP, apparently. Blech!)

I'm thinking of signing up for cryonics. However, one point that is strongly holding me back is that cryonics seems to require signing up for a DNR (Do not resuscitate). However, if there's a chance at resuscitation I'd like all attempts to be made and only have cryonics used when it is clear that the other attempts to keep me alive will fail. I'm not sure that this is easily specifiable with current legal settings and how cryonics is currently set up. I'd appreciate input on this matter.

File under "Less Wrong will rot your brain":

At my day job, I had to come up with and code an algorithm which assigned numbers to a list of items according to a list of sometimes-conflicting rules. For example, I'd have a list of 24 things that would have to be given the numbers 1-3 (to split them up into groups) according to some crazy rules.

The first algorithm I came up with was:

1. model each rule as a utility function over dollars
2. instantiate an ideally rational agent for each rule, which used the rule as its utility function.
3. give each agent a number of dollars (changing the amount of money they have is one way to change the weighting of the rules during conflicts)
4. let them negotiate until some equilibrium is reached.

Of course, I did not try to implement this algorithm. Rather, I ended up solving the problem (mostly) using about 100 lines of perl and no AI.

Pattern matching, signalling:

Way back when MSNBC used to do 6 hour stints with lawyers doing the color commentary on the court case of the day, I was a regular doing the defense side. Once an hour, we would be expected to sit at a desk and do a five minute stint, me and whoever was doing the "former prosecutor" job that day. Our five minutes would consist of two questions, each taking up about 90 seconds including some mischaracterization of the nature of the legal issue, and concluding with the words "how do you feel?" We had ten seconds to respond before the talking head turned elsewhere.

One slow day caught up with us. The "former prosecutor" and I got bored playing cards, waiting for our next stint, and there was absolutely nothing worthwhile to say on the case du jour. We had just finished our stint with Ashley Banfield (back when she was blond and didn't wear her "interested" glasses), and some unknown kid in a peculiar Caribbean-green-colored shirt was the next hour's anchor. We decided to goof with the kid by switching sides. I would take the prosecutor side and the former prosecutor would pretend to be the defense.

The anchor, Rick Sanchez, was very nice and solicitous, as they sat us at our desk, and we nodded nicely back, knowing that there would be someone else we didn't know there in an hour. He ran through his question and we responded. Just backward. Rick didn't skip a beat, and we filled our five minutes like good little lawyers. Just backward. Nobody, not Sanchez, not a producer, nobody, even noticed. Our sound bites were good. Our time was filled. And everybody was happy. It meant absolutely nothing.

Link from The Agitator.

Possible new barriers to Moore's Law where small chips won't have enough power to use the maximum transistor density they have available. The article also discusses how other apparent barriers (such as leaky gates) have been overcome in the past including this amusing line:

“The number of people predicting the end of Moore’s Law doubles every two years,” quips the Scandinavian Tryggve Fossum.

Problems with high stakes, low quality testing

The percentage of students falling below some arbitrary cutoff is a bad statistic to use for management purposes. (Again, this is Statistical QA 101 stuff.) It throws away information. Worse, it creates perverse incentives, encouraging schools to concentrate on the students performing at around the cut-off level and to neglect both those too far below the threshold to have a chance of catching up and those comfortably above it.

This may be a stupid question, but...

There're a couple of psych effects we have evidence for. Specifically, we have evidence for a sort of consistency effect. For example (relevant to my question) there's apparently evidence for stuff like if someone ends up tending to do small favors for others or being nice to them/etc, they'll be willing to continue to do so, more easily willing to do bigger things later.

And there's also willpower/niceness "used up"ness effects, whereby apparently (as I understand it), one might do one nice thing then, feeling they "filled up their virtue quota" be nasty elsewhere. (ie, apparently one of the less obvious dangers of religion is you, say, go to church or whatever, and thus later in the day you don't even bother tipping (or tip poorly) when you go to a restaurant because you're "already virtuous" and thus don't have to do any more.)

How is it that we can simultaneously have evidence of these two things when they directly contradict each other? Or am I being totally stupid here?

(EDIT: just to clarify, I meant I was asking "How can it be that the sum total of evidence support both these positions when they seem to me to directly contradict each other?")

I had a question. Other than Cryonics and PUA, what other "selfish" purposes might be pursued by an extreme rationalist that would not be done by common people?

On thinking on this for quite a while, one unusual thing I could think of was possibly, the entire expat movement, building businesses all across the world and protecting their wealth from multiple governments. I'm not sure if this might be classified as extreme rationality or just plain old rationality.

Switzerland seems to be a great place to start a cryonics setup as it is already a hub for people maintaining their wealth there. If cryonics was added, then your money and your life could be safe in switzerland.

Wanted ad: Hiring a personal manager

I will pay anyone I hire $50-$100 a month, or equivalent services if you prefer.

I've trying to overcome my natural laziness and get work done. For-fun project, profitable projects, SIAI-type research, academic homework -- I don't do much without a deadline, even projects that I want to do because they sound fun.

I want to hire a personal manager, basically to get on my case and tell/convince me to get stuff done. The ideal candidate would:

• Be online. As much as possible. I'm mostly looking for 22-08 GMT (4pm-3am EST) right now, but I won't be working full-time much longer, and after that I'll be working irregular hours.
• Have a solid grasp of rationality, which is why I'm posting on Less Wrong.
• Accept wild swings in job description as we figure out what I'm actually looking for instead of what I've posted here.

Please do post something here as well for onlookers to see what's going on, but if you're interested PM, post, or email me contact information so we can get together real-time. My email is vanceza+lesswrong@gmail.com (I will take my email address down in a week or two).

The Last Psychiatrist on a new study of the placebo effect.

I'm having trouble parsing his analysis (it seems disjointed) but the effect is interesting nonetheless.

Has anyone read, and could comment on, Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach by philosophers Howson and Urbach? To me it appears to be the major work on Bayes from within mainstream philosophy of science, but reviews are mixed and I can't really get a feel for its quality and whether it's worth reading.

ETA: Ag, just before posting this I realized Hal Finney had already basically raised this same point on the original thread! Still, I think this expands on it a little...

You know, if Wei Dai's alien black box halting decider scenario were to occur, I'm not sure there is any level of black-box evidence that could convince me they were telling the truth. (Note: To make later things make sense, I'm going to assume the claim is that if the program halts, it actually tells you the output, not just that it halts.)

It's not so much that I'm committed to the Turing notion of computability - presumably opening the box should, if they're telling us the truth, allow us to learn this new Turing-uncomputable physics; the problem is that - without hypercomputers ourselves - we don't really have any way of verifying their claim in the first place. Of course the set of halting programs is semicomputable, so we can certainly verify its yes answers (if not quickly), but no answers can only be verified in the cases where we ourselves have precomputed the answer by proving it for that particular case (or family of cases). In short, we can verify that it's correct on the easy cases, but it's not clear why we should believe it's correct on the hard cases that we actually care about it on. In other words, we can only verify it by checking it against a precomputed list of our own, and ISTM that if we precomputed it, they could have done the same.

If you're not being careful, you could just say justify the claim with "induction", but even without the precomputed list idea, induction also supports the hypothesis that it simply runs programs for a fixed but really long time and then reports whether they've halted, which doesn't require anything uncomputable and so is more probable a priori. (The fact that Wei Dai said nothing about the computation time makes this a bit trickier, but presumably they may have computation far faster than us.)

Now if it just claimed, say, that it was only necessarily correct for programs using polynomial space, then we'd be in better shape, due to IP=PSPACE; even if we couldn't replicate its results very fast, we could at least verify them quickly. We could actually give it hard cases, that we can't do (quickly) by hand, and then verify that it got them right. (Except actually I'm brushing over some problems here - IIRC it's uncomputable to determine whether a program will use polynomial space in the first place, so while it presumably doesn't have a precomputed list of inputs for the different programs, it might well have a precomputed list of which programs below a certain length are polynomial-space in the first place! And then just run those much faster than we can. We could just make it an oracle for a single PSPACE-complete problem, but then of course there's nothing uncomputable going on so no there's no real problem in the first place; it could just be a really fast brute-force solver. This would allow us to verify quickly that they have much more advanced computers than us, that can solve PSPACE-complete problems in an instant, but that's not nearly as surprising. Not sure if there's any way to make this example really work as intended.)

When we test our own programs, we have some idea of what's in the black box - we have some idea how they work, and we are just verifying that we haven't screwed it up. And on those, since we have some idea of the algorithm, we can construct tricky test cases to check the parts that are most likely to screw it up. And even if we're verifying a program from someone untrustworthy, SFAICT this is based on inferring what ways the program probably works, or what ways that look right but don't work on hard cases someone may have come up with, or key steps it will probably rely on, or ways it might cheat, and writing test cases for those. Of course you can't rule out arbitrarily advanced cheats this way, but we have other evidence against those - they'd take up too much space, or they'd be even harder than doing it correctly. In the case of a halting oracle, the problem there is no point where it would seem that such a ridiculous cheat would be even harder than doing it correctly.

So until the black box is opened, I'm not sure that this is a good argument against the universal prior, though I suppose it does still argue that the universal prior + Bayes doesn't quite capture our intuitive notion of induction.

Have advocates of the simulation argument actually argued for the possibility of ancestor simulations? It is a very counterintuitive idea, yet it seems to be invoked as though it is obviously possible. Aside from whatever probability we want to assign to the possibility that the future human race will discover strange previously-unknown laws of physics that make it more feasible, doesn't the idea of an ancestor simulation (a simulation of "the entire mental history of humankind") depend on having access to a huge amount of information that has presumably been permanently lost to entropy? Where is the future civilization expected to get all the mental structures needed to simulate the entire mental history of humankind (or a model of the early Earth implausibly precise enough that simulating it causes things to play out exactly as they really did)?

I just read and liked "Pascal's mugging." It was written a few years ago, and the wiki is pretty spare. What's the state of the art on this problem?

Light entertainment: this hyperboleandahalf comic reminded me of some of the FAI discussions that go on in these parts.

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/08/this-comic-was-inspired-by-experience-i.html

Apparently AGI, transhumanism, and the Singularity are a massive statist/corporate conspiracy, and there exists a vast "AGI Manhattan Project". Neat.

I just came across this article called "Thank God for the New Atheists," written by Michael Dowd, and I can't tell if his views are just twisted or if he is very subtly trying to convert religious folks into epistemic rationalists. Sample quotes include:

Religion Is About Right Relationship with Reality, Not the Supernatural

...

Because the New Atheists put their faith, their confidence, in an evidentially formed and continuously tested view of the world, these critics of religion are well positioned to see what’s real and what’s important today. It is thus time for religious people to listen to the New Atheists—and to listen as if they were speaking with God's voice, because in my view they are!

...

...we cannot understand religion and religious differences if we don’t understand how the human mind instinctually relationalizes—that is, personifies—reality.

...

God is still speaking, and facts are God’s native tongue—not Hebrew or Greek or King James English.

Ah, yes. The only way to true religious understanding is through science and realizing our anthropomorphic biases...uh, wait. What? This guy seems to be calling for a religion grounded in science and rationality, but then he says things like:

The bottom line is this: whenever we Christians slip into interpreting scripture literally, we belittle the Bible and dishonor God

So I'm confused. It makes me think that he's a crypto-rationalist trying to convert religious believers into rationalists. If that's true, it does seem like really effective strategy.

What does Less Wrong know about the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator? My sense is that it's a useful model for some things, but I'm most interested in how useful it is for relationships. This site suggests that each personality type pair has a specific type of relationship, while this site only comments on what the ideal pair is for any given type. But the two sites disagree about what the ideal pairings are.

Just watched Tyler Cowen at TEDx Mid-Atlantic 2009-11-05 talking about how our love of stories misleads us. We talk about good-story bias on the Wiki.

Is there a way good-story bias could be experimentally verified?

There's an article on rationality in Newsweek, with an emphasis on evo-psych explanations for irrationality. Especially: we evolved our reasoning skills not just to get at the truth, but also to win debates, and overconfidence is good for the latter.

There's nothing there that's new to readers of this blog, and the analysis is superficial (plus the writer makes an annoying but illustrative error while explaining why human intuition is poor at logic puzzles). But Newsweek is a large-circulation (second to Time) newsweekly in the U.S., so this is a pretty broad audience.

Perhaps this has been mentioned before, since it's been online for almost a week, but my parents' print copy was just delivered today, and that's what I read.

Value-sorting hypothetical:

If you had access to a time-machine and could transfer one piece of knowledge to an influential ancient (i.e. Plato), what would you tell him?

Something practical, like pasteurization, would almost certainly improve millions of lives, but it wouldn't necessarily produce people with values like ours. I can imagine a bishop claiming heat drives demons from milk.

Meta-knowledge, like a working understanding of the scientific method, might allow for thousands of other pasteurizations to be developed, or maybe it would remain unused throughout the Dark Ages.

Convincingly arguing for a philosophical conclusion, like materialism, might prevent the horror of the crusades, or maybe the now unaddressed emotional need for community would sooner be channeled into nationalism and hasten the coming of the world wars that terrorized the early 20th century.

Each side has its pluses and potential pitfalls. Which would you choose?

And should that therefore be the main thrust of your rationality-promoting conversations today?

After seeing the recent thread about proving Occam's razor (for which a better name would be Occam's prior), I thought I should add my own proof sketch:

Consider an alternative to Occam's prior such as "Favour complicated priors*". Now this prior isn't itself very complicated, it's about as simple as Occam's prior, and this makes it less likely, since it doesn't even support itself.

What I'm suggesting is that priors should be consistent under reflection. The prior "The 527th most complicated hypothesis is always true (probability=1)" must be false because it isn't the 527th most complicated prior.

So to find the correct prior you need to find a reflexive equilibrium where the probability given to each prior is equal to the average of the probabilities given to it by all the priors, weighted by how probable they are.

*This isn't a proper prior, but it's good enough for illustrative purposes.

I wish my long-term memory were better.

Am I losing out on opportunities to hold onto certain facts because I often rely on convenient electronic lookup? For instance, when programming I'll search for documentation on the web instead of first taking my best recollection as a guess (which, if wrong, will almost certainly be caught by the type checker). What's worse, I find myself relying on multi-monitor/window so I don't even need to temporarily remember anything :)

I'd like to hear any evidence/anecdotes in favor of:

1. habits that might improve my general ability to remember and/or recall (I'd guess that having enough sleep (and low enough stress) matters, for example.)

2. tricks for ensuring that particular bits of info are preferentially stored (As I mentioned, I imagine using a memory

3. consolation - perhaps being more forgetful than many other smart people is a trade-off with different advantages (I doubt it, although I've heard that we do some useful selective forgetting when we sleep, and I'm glad I don't remember every malformed thought I have while asleep)

Gelernter on "machine rights," I didn't know his anti-AI consciousness views were tied in with Orthodox Judaism.

IMO, the quality of comments on Overcoming Bias has diminished significantly since Less Wrong started up. This was true almost from the beginning, but the situation has really spiraled out of control more recently.

I gave up reading the comments regularly last year, but once a week or so, I peek at the comments and they are atrociously bad (and almost uniformly negative). The great majority seem unwilling to even engage with Robin Hanson's arguments and instead rely on shaming techniques.

So what gives? Why is the comment quality so much higher on LW than on OB? My first thought is karma, but OB didn't have karma when Eliezer Yudkowsky was posting, and the comments were pretty good back then. My best guess is that the good commenters were mostly Yudkowsky fans, and they left when EY left.

However, I don't know if anyone else shares my impression about OB commenter quality, so I may be completely misguided here.