The September Open Thread, Part 2 has got nearly 800 posts, so let's have a little breathing room.
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
I recently read an anecdote (so far unconfirmed) that Ataturk tried to ban the veil in Turkey, but got zero compliance from religious people, who simply ignored the law. Instead of cracking down, Ataturk decreed a second law: all prostitutes were required to wear a veil. The general custom of veil-wearing stopped immediately.
This might be the most impressive display of rationality I've ever heard of in a world leader.
As a Turk, I strongly believe that story is fictional.
Where and how was this ban issued? Can you give more details?
You may be hearing some fictional story based on his social reforms.
See here
And the veil, currently banned in public universities, is still very much a hot button issue. Also, a large segment of the Turkish population still wears the veil. The country is deeply divided over this issue.
Now that I think about it, believing the story requires ignoring how strongly many people who follow modesty rules are apt to be attached to them.
If a western ruler announced that prostitutes were required to cover their breasts, do you think respectable women would start going topless?
I believe the point is that if prostitutes are required to wear veils, then whether they do or not, the veil is immediately stigmatized.
I expect people will be interested to hear that Eliezer's TDT document has now been released for general consumption.
Does anyone else agree that, as a piece of expository writing, that document sucks bigtime?
111 pages! I got through about 25 and I was wondering why Eliezer thought I needed to hear about how his four friends had decided when presented with the Newcomb's soda problem and how some people refer to this problem as Solomon's problem. So, I decided to skim ahead until he started talking about TDT. So I skimmed and skimmed.
Finally, I got to section 14, entitled "The timeless decision procedure". "Aha!", I think. "Finally." The first paragraph consists of a very long and confusing sentence which at least seems to deal with the timeless decision procedure.
The timeless decision procedure evaluates expected utility conditional upon the output of an abstract decision computation - the very same computation that is currently executing as a timeless decision procedure - and returns that output such that the universe will possess maximum expected utility, conditional upon the abstract computation returning that output.
It might be easier to understand if expressed as an equation or formula containing, you know, variables and things. So I read on, hopi...
Easier if also expressed that way. You need the prose to know what the symbols mean, but the math itself is incredibly clearer when done as symbols.
Thanks for the link! I just read it all. The good: it's very, very smooth reading - I know how well Eliezer can write, and even I was surprised at the quality - and it has some very lucid explanations of tricky matters (like why Pearlean causality is useful). The bad: it's kinda rambling, contains many standard sci-fi LW arguments that feel out of place in a philosophy paper, and it doesn't make any formal advances beyond what we already know here (I'd hoped to see at least one). The verdict: definitely read the first half if you're confused about this whole "decision theory" controversy, it'll get you unconfused in a pinch. Take the second half with a grain of salt because it's still very raw (unmixed metaphor award!)
A Redditor recently posted asking all atheists what they thought happened after death. The standard, obvious, and true response was given -- your mind is annihilated and you experience nothing. The OP then responded with "doesn't that scare you?"
((moved here from the suffocating depths of open thread part 2))
Back when I first heard of "timeless decision theory", I thought it must have been inspired by Barbour's timeless physics. Then I got the idea that it was about treating yourself as an instance of a set of structurally identical decision-making agents from across all possible worlds, and making your decision as if you had an equal chance of being any one of them (which might be psychologically presented to yourself as making the decision on behalf of all of them, though that threatens to become very confused causally). But if the motivation was to have a new theory of rationality which would produce the right answer for Newcomb's "paradox" (and maybe other problems? though I don't know what other problems there are), then it sounded like a good idea.
But the discussion in this thread and this thread makes it look as if people want this "new decision theory" to account for the supposed success of "superrationality", or of cooperative acts in general, such as voting in a bloc. There are statements in those threads which just bemuse me. E.g. at the start of the second thread where V...
People understand aspects of life that they don’t have good words for. Math could supply them with some names for these concepts.
I'd like to remind everyone that I have continued to work on predictionbook.com, and now it's up to ~1800 predictions, and for those of you in a hurry, there are dozens/hundreds of interesting predictions coming due in the next year or 3: http://predictionbook.com/predictions/future
Remember, signing up for Intrade is hard and it's not profitable to wager on many of its long-term contracts, but PB is absolutely free!
(One thing is for sure: with ~443 predictions registered, I should eventually be pretty well-calibrated...)
EDIT: Hanson on the value of track r...
Have people discussed the field complementary to the ugh field? We might call these "mmm fields".
An "mmm field" could be thought of as a mental cluster that has a tantalizing glow of positive affect. One subtly flinches toward such a cluster whenever possible, which results in one getting "stuck" there and cycling through the associated mental sequences.
Among other things, it could be used to describe those troublesome wireheading patterns. I'm personally interested in using it in the post I'm writing on meditation.
The name i...
I'm working on a top-level post about AI (you know what they say, write what you don't know), and I'm wondering about the following question:
Can we think of computer technologies which were only developed at a time when the processing power they needed was insignificant?
That is, many technologies are really slow when first developed, until a few cycles of Moore's Law make them able to run faster than humans can input new requests. But is there anything really good that was only thought of at a time when processor speed was well above that threshold, or anything where the final engineering hurdle was something far removed from computing power?
To clarify the question a bit, I would consider dividing software technologies into three categories:
Technologies developed while the necessary computing resources were still unavailable or too expensive, which flourished later when the resources became cheap enough. For example, Alan Turing famously devised a chess program which he could only run using paper and pencil.
Technologies that appeared very soon after the necessary computing resources became available and cheap enough, suggesting that the basic idea was fairly straightforward after all, and it was only necessary to give smart people some palpable incentive to think about it. Examples such as the first browsers and spreadsheets would be in this category.
Technologies for which the necessary computing resources had been cheaply available for a long time before someone finally came up with them, suggesting an extraordinary intellectual breakthrough. I cannot think of any such examples, and it doesn't seem like anyone else in this thread can either.
This reinforces my cynical view of software technologies in general, namely that their entire progress in the last few decades has been embarrassingly limited consideri...
"Incredibly Depressing Mega Millions Lottery Simulator!" — this may be helpful to show to people who don't quite grasp probability theory well enough to break habits like playing the lottery and other forms of gambling.
There is a new discussion section on LessWrong.
This is to:
provide a place you can post with lower karma consequences than the main site
provide a place you can discuss things you think are not worthy of the main site
provide a place you can work with the community to tune something up until it's ready for the main site
give you guys an opportunity to make up your own uses for this part of the site.
(There's a link to there at the top right, under the banner)
I used to post here on LessWrong and left for various reasons. Someone recognized my name earlier today from my activity here and I just so happened to have thought of LessWrong during a conversation I had with a friend of mine. The double hit was enough to make me curious.
So how's it going? I am just stopping by to say a quick, "Hello." It seems that Open Threads are no longer the way things work but I didn't notice anything else relevant in the Recent Posts. The community seems to be alive and thriving. Congratulations. :)
Nate Silver has just begun a new series of posts on 538 addressing the conflict between his model numbers and intuition - the first part, The Uncanny Accuracy of Polling Averages*, Part I: Why You Can’t Trust Your Gut, and second part, The Uncanny Accuracy of Polling Averages*, Part 2: What the Numbers Say, are up.
A money quote for Less Wrong users who remember The Bottom Line:
...Politicians — the ones worth their salt, anyway — are exceptionally skilled at making believers out of people, and they’ll try to make a believer out of you. Some of the time, they
After This Discussion I made a private google group to discuss working together for profit.
Email me at james.andrix@gmail.com and I'll add you to the list.
One thing people often seem to miss on LW, when discussing cryonics, is the cost of the operation. People seem to often operate under illusion that if the cost of process is, say, $50 000, you don't need to worry about it that much since you can get a insurance, and thus pay only few hundred a year or so. This has made me wonder, since, insurance most likely makes it cost more, not less, and only works to offer protection from the case of you dying a lot earlier than insurance company would predict, which, you know, is unlikely.
This combined with the fact ...
Don't forget that if it works, you probably get immortality too. If you were already immortal, would you be willing to become mortal for $500 000?
I seem to be unable to downvote. I don't downvote all that often, so there's no way I've used up my downvotes allowance. Is this because I'm trying to access LW from Austria, or for some other reason (e.g., is downvoting broken overall)? I am unable to downvote in either of the two browsers I tried.
Does anyone else remember a short article by Asimov presenting the idea of an intelligence explosion? I read it in the mid-80s in a collection of his essays I checked out from the library (so it wasn't necessarily recently published); if I remember right and I'm not confabulating, the essay had been written years before for an airline in-flight magazine. If it mentioned I.J. Good's paper, I don't recall it.
This was the first I encountered the idea, as a teenager, and obviously it stuck with me.
The community doesn't seem to be resolved. Should I model willpower as a muscle or as a battery? Or should I abandon both and model myself in terms of incentives/signaling?
If you fall into either camp, why do you believe what you believe? Links to studies where scientists used a particular framework obviously doesn't count. Is there any evidence constantly challenging your willpower makes it stronger in the long run?
Links to studies where scientists used a particular framework obviously doesn't count. Is there any evidence constantly challenging your willpower makes it stronger in the long run?
Well. Now I don't know what to say.
I wonder if there would be a market for rationalist councilors who would talk one-on-one with their "patients" as Psychologists and Social Workers do today. You would probably need some impressive credentials to get started such as a Ph.d. from a well-known school. I have been thinking about running advertisements to see if I could get anyone to pay me for rationalist services. As I'm an economist I would stress my capacity to give financial advice. I would want some way of protecting myself from lawsuits, however, by purchasing insurance or working through some personal service organization.
I recently started graduate school in mathematics, and I have been having some difficulty focusing on studying. Reading through various posts on Akrasia and a few posts on Overcoming Bias (I don't remember which ones and they aren't directly relevant) I came to the (tepid) conclusion that I don't feel like I will gain status by being good at math.
Has there been discussion of or does anyone have ideas about how to raise the status of an activity in one's own mind?
The specifics of my situation make it difficult for me to find students and faculty to become accountable to in the short term, so something that would be internal would probably be ideal for me. I'm also interested in seeing a more general discussion.
Review of Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting it Right When You Have To
“My research team and I have found that highly skilled golfers are more likely to hole a simple 3-foot putt when we give them the tools to stop analyzing their shot, to stop thinking,” Beilock said. “Highly practiced putts run better when you don’t try to control every aspect of performance.” Even a simple trick of singing helps prevent portions of the brain that might interfere with performance from taking over, Beilock’s research shows.
...In one study, resear
This reminded me: it's important to engage critically with ideas that I learned before I knew how to engage critically with ideas. I'm not at all confident that I would have balked at the teacher's explanation of lift even now, and that's a little alarming!
I like how the home page of the discussion sub-site (/r/discussion/) shows just the titles of the posts, not the whole post or all the paragraphs "above the fold" and wish there was a similar way to browse the main site.
Actually there is! I didn't know about it till now because it never occurred to me till now to click the title of the "Recent Posts" section of the sidebar on the right.
Today, my downvotes stopped working. I can press the buttons, but after refreshing downvote marks disappear, while upvote marks stay (which means that the scripts at least partially work; I also tried another browser). No message to the effect that I'm not allowed to downvote ever appears. I suppose I could've made 25000 downvotes, counting 10x post downvotes, to hit the 4*karma limit, but it seems unlikely, and there should be a message if that limit is reached in any case.
Regarding optimal mental performance: I've bought some modafinil and piracetam recently. I think I remember hearing some people on LW use these drugs. Does anybody have any wisdom or experiences they would like to share? How significant are the effects? Were your experiences good or bad?
This reminded me: it's important to engage critically with ideas that I learned before I knew how to engage critically with ideas. I'm not at all confident that I would have balked at the teacher's explanation of lift even now, and that's a little alarming!
If I live in a universe which is not Turing computable but try and apply Solomonoff induction, I may end up in trouble--I may be unable to accept the existence of a black box for the halting problem, for example, even when believing in such a thing is useful. There are several possible solutions to this problem, but I have not seen any here which I find satisfactory.
My solution is this. Instead of considering a prior on the space of models for the universe (since you can't really have a prior on the uncountable space of ways the universe could work if it w...
To clarify the question a bit, I would consider dividing software technologies into three categories:
Technologies developed while the necessary computing resources were still unavailable or too expensive, which flourished later when the resources became cheap enough. For example, Alan Turing famously devised a chess program which he could only run using paper and pencil.
Technologies that appeared very soon after the necessary computing resources became available and cheap enough, suggesting that the basic idea was fairly straightforward after all, and it was only necessary to give smart people some palpable incentive to think about it. Examples such as the first browsers and spreadsheets would be in this category.
Technologies for which the necessary computing resources had been cheaply available for a long time before someone finally came up with them, suggesting an extraordinary intellectual breakthrough. I cannot think of any such examples, and it doesn't seem like anyone else in this thread can either.
This reinforces my cynical view of software technologies in general, namely that their entire progress in the last few decades has been embarrassingly limited considering the amount of intellectual power poured into them.
Here's an interesting related thought experiment that reinforces my cynicism further. Suppose that some miraculous breakthrough in 1970 enabled the production of computers equally cheap, powerful, compact, and easily networked as we have today. What do we have today in terms of software technology that the inhabitants of this hypothetical world wouldn't have by 1980?
Chess had steady algorithmic improvements on the same order as the gains from hardware: Deep Fritz and Rybka both got to better performance per FLOP than Deep Blue, etc. More generally, I think that looking at quantitative metrics (as opposed to whole new capabilities) like game performance, face recognition, image processing, etc, will often give you independent hardware and software components to growth.