Here is our monthly place to discuss Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts.
Here is our monthly place to discuss Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts.
Curious about Eliezer's claim that his posts were voted up less than others, I did some statistical analysis on the scores of Less Wrong posts. I took the list of all posts as of midnight Mar 28, excluding posts with negative scores (which weren't available to me), the ten most recent posts (which people haven't had a chance to vote on yet), and the twenty oldest posts (from when the site was brand-new, and people weren't around to vote or hadn't established their criteria for voting), for a total of 93 articles. Of these, 20 consist primarily of a link and quotation, or are otherwise very short. Short articles received much fewer upvotes than full-length articles.
All articles (93): Mean 17.0, Median 14
Short articles (20): Mean 6.9, Median 5
Full length articles (73): Mean 19.8, Median 18
Articles by Eliezer Yudkowsky (21): Mean 17.4, Median 18
Short articles by Eliezer Yudkowsky (5): Mean 3.8, Median 2
Full-length articles by Eliezer Yudkowsky (16): Mean 21.7, Median 20
No short articles by Yvain
Full-length articles by Yvain (18): Mean 28.9, Median 25
Full-length articles by all other authors (39): Mean 14.7, Median 12
The spreadsheet I used is at http://www.jimrandomh.org/misc/LWPosts.xls
Just a general hint: if you go to http://lesswrong.com/message/inbox/ , you can see all comments that have been posted in response to your comments. Discovered it by accident, but it really does make using LW easier.
A psychic medium.
My colleague, let’s call her Sally, tells me she is a psychic medium. She tells me she first spoke to a dead person when she was three: she was talking to a woman on the stairs, and her mother was concerned when she went to tell her mother about it. Now, she tends not to see people, she realises they are not physically present in the way that a living person is present, but she senses them.
She reports three ways in which the Dead communicate. Normally, it is as if she hears them speaking, and relays the message to the living. During her...
Requesting rationalist assistance:
Somebody is talking to me about either advanced physics or magic, and I can't tell which one.
He mentions electron tunneling, superstring theory and quantum mechanics, in explaining why positive thoughts attract positive things, he mentioned a book called The Physics Of Consciousness, something about a quantum level of the brain.
I know there's benefit to thinking positive, but isnt that explained by evolution? I didn't think that quantum mechanics or a universal attraction of things to other things was involved.
The underlying assertion of most of these goofy new-age claims is that consciousness is a quantum process. Of course, in a trivial sense it is quantum insofar that every process in the physical world seems to obey quantum mechanics. The exact claim is that something "essentially quantum" is behind the phenomenon of consciousness, that the computations of the brain actually exploit uninuitive quantum behaviours that cannot be explained by a classical physics picture -- the claim is that we're quantum computers.
You build a quantum computer by exploiting the fact that a simple, perfectly isolated physical entity does not act like a tiny billiard, but rather as a complex-valued wave that isn't in any particular place at a given time, it's spread out. We say that small systems can be in "superpositions" of multiple states. Now when the system interacts with the environment, by hitting a photon from our lasers, say, it will "collapse" into one state, we will see the photon bouncing off as though the particle had been at one particular place. (Parenthetically, It should be noted that "collapse" is not a real a-priori physical process, but only...
John H. Conway is giving a series of lectures on the "Free Will Theorem" of Conway and Kochen: videos available here.
One thing you don't mention is that Yvain's posts and writing style are simpler and easier to comprehend than Eliezer's. Yvain has also presented some posts on fairly basic topics that are probably familiar to most longtime OB readers but are new to readers just joining LW. [EDIT: I retract the last point. I was thinking of the 'priming' post and that there were others like this on basic heuristics and biases topics, but that seems like the only one.]
That is not to say that there's not also some bias. I think many of us probably consciously or unconsciously hold Eliezer to much higher standards than anybody else.
All the recent talk about cults and cult-like behavior has probably made some people more hesitant to vote up anything by Eliezer as well.
Not to be contrary, but I actually find Eliezer's posts easier to comprehend, partly due to better structure and pacing, partly due to a typical slightly higher informational content holding my attention better. I suspect this is mostly a function of Eliezer having more practice, and of my own short attention span, heh.
I was going to say that I expect the cultishness discussion to be more directly relevant to the upvoting penalty, but looking quickly at post scores doesn't seem to support that theory.