If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
It's funny time now in Slovakia; as if someone declared a call: "Irrational people of all beliefs, unite!"
It started two years ago with the so-called "Gorilla scandal". (TL;DR: Not a real gorilla, just a nickname of some criminal who was investigated by the secret service. By wiretapping his house the investigation revealed that almost all of our political parties, both left and right, participated in economical crime, cooperating with the same small group of people. The transcripts of the investigation were leaked to internet.) It was followed by a few demonstrations, after which pretty much nothing happened. Realizing that most media in our country actually belong to people involved in the scandal, so they don't have an incentive to investigate and report on the scandal, an internet radio called "the free broadcast" was created. From that point, it gradually went downhill.
By deciding to focus on 'news that don't have place in the official media', the radio was gradually selecting for hoaxes, conspiracy theories, etc. Which probably led to saner people leaving the radio, concentrating the irrationality of the remaining ones. One year later, it was mos...
Sounds like an interesting real-world example of http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beliefs/
On the plus side, now you have all the material you need to write a satirical novel.
I used to wish that people be more interested in how society works, go outside of their homes and try to improve things. After seeing this, I just wish they all lost interest, returned home, a started watching some sitcoms.
I wasn't sure whether this largely political comment was okay to write on LW, but then I realized LW is pretty much the only place I know where I could write such comment without receiving verbal abuse, racist comments, explanations that homosexuality really is the greatest danger of our civilization, or offended complaints about how I am insensitive towards religion. Recently, LW feels like an island of sanity in the vast ocean of madness.
Perhaps this will give me more energy to promote rationality in my country. I already arranged another LW meetup after a few months pause.
Martin Odersky, the inventor of the Scala programming language, writes regarding a recent rant against Scala publicized on Hacker News:
Seems hardly a weekend goes by these days without another Scala rant that makes the Hacker news frontpage. [...]
There certainly seems to be a grand coalition of people who want to attack Scala. Since this has been going on for a while, and the points of critique are usually somewhere between unbalanced and ridiculous, I have been curious why this is. I mean you can find things that suck (by some definition of "suck") in any language, why is everybody attacking Scala? Why do you not see articles of Rubyists attacking Python or of Haskellers attacking Clojure?
The quotation is remarkable for its absolute lack of awareness of selection bias. Odersky doesn't appear to even consider the possibility that he might be noticing the anti-Scala rants more readily than rants against other programming languages. Not having considered the possibility of the bias, he has no chance to try and correct for it. The wildly distorted impression he's formed leads him to language bordering on conspiracy theories ("grand coalition of people who want to a...
I think if you read what he wrote less ungenerously (e.g. as if you were reading a mailing list post rather than something intended as a bulletproof philosophical argument), you'll see that his implicit point - that he's just talking about the reaction to Scala in particular - is clear enough, and - and this is the important point - the eventual discussion is productive in terms of bringing up ideas for making Scala more suitable for its intended audience. Given that his post inspired just the sort of discussion he was after, I do think you're being a bit harsh on him.
Yesterday I received the following message from user "admin" in my Less Wrong inbox:
We were unable to determine if there is a Less Wrong wiki account registered to your account. If you do not have an account and would like one, please go to your preferences page.
But the link goes to a 404.
Petition to the FDA not to ban home genomic kits like 23andMe. I recommend people here interested in personalized medicine, transhumanism, or have any libertarian bent consider reading and signing.
I added my own comment
I am an Ashkenazi Jew. We are a population with many well-documented diseases tied to recessive alleles. It is unfair to force a minority population to have to pay massive sums of money so that we have to find out our own genetic situation. This applies to genes such as BRCA1, which causes cancer, or the alleles which causeTay Sachs and autonomic neuropathy type III, all cases where the documentation is strong. Ashkenazic Jews are not the only group in this situation, and there are also bad alleles which are not more common with specific ethnic or racial groups. The individuals with those genes deserve the same benefits.
The FDA's move is a step in the wrong direction which interferes with the fundamental right to know about one's own body.
The last line I added in part to aim at the current left-wing attitudes about personal bodily integrity. I stole the less well known disease from Yvain's excellent letter here, where I got to find about yet one more fun disease potentially in my gene pool. I strongly recommend people read Yvain's letter.
One piece of common wisdom on LW is that if you expect that receiving a piece of information will make you update your beliefs in a certain direction, you might as well update already instead of waiting. I happened to think of one exception: if you expect that something will cause a change in your beliefs when it shouldn't, because it uses strong rhetorical techniques (e.g. highlighting highly unrepresentative examples) whose effect you can't fully eliminate even when you know that they're there.
(I have a feeling that this might have been discussed before, but I don't remember where in that case.)
One piece of common wisdom on LW is that if you expect that receiving a piece of information will make you update your beliefs in a certain direction, you might as well update already instead of waiting.
It's more like, if you expect (in the statistical sense) that you will rationally update your beliefs in some direction upon receiving some piece of evidence, then your current probability assignments are incoherent, and you should update on pain of irrationality. It's not just that you might as well update now instead of waiting. But this only applies if your expected future update is one that you rationally endorse. If you know that your future update will be irrational, that it is not going to be the appropriate response to the evidence presented, then your failure to update right now is not necessarily irrational. The proof of incoherence does not go through in this case.
I've been teaching myself the basics of probability theory (I'm sixteen) but I'm having trouble on the first step. My basic definitions of probabilities are all frequentist, and I don't know a good Bayesian source appropriate for a secondary school student. Is Jaynes' PT:LOS able to be read by moi, given that I know basic set theory? If not, can anyone recommend a different textbook?
Jayne's book probably requires a university undergraduate-level familiarity with probability theory to fully appreciate.
I'd say that for the time being you don't need to worry about bayesianism vs. frequentism. Just learn the basics of probability theory and learn how to solve problems.
With math, it's useful to be able to distinguish books you can't understand because you're missing prerequisite knowledge from books you can't understand because you just aren't reading them carefully enough. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that you can't really expect to be able to follow Jaynes through if you pick it up as your first serious textbook on probability.
An interesting factoid. Drawing implications is left as an exercise for the reader.
"...for two decades, all the Minuteman nuclear missiles in the US used the same eight-digit numeric passcode: 00000000. ... And while Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara directly oversaw the installation of PALs on the US-based ICBM arsenal, US Strategic Command generals almost immediately had the PAL codes all reset to 00000000 to ensure that the missiles were ready for use regardless of whether the president was available to give authorization." (source)
Looking for people older than me (I'm 26) to tell me their memories of what kind of nutrition messages they remember getting from Nutrition Authority Type People (USDA or whatever).
The reason I ask is because I read a bunch of Gary Taubes over the weekend, and at first glance his claims about what mainstream nutritionists have been saying strike me as... not what I've experienced, to put it mildly. In particular, the nutritiony stuff I learned as a kid was always pretty clear on sugary soda and snacks being bad for you. Charitable hypothesis: maybe mainstream nutrition messaging was much crazier in the 80s? I don't actually think this is likely but I thought I'd ask.
I would like some feedback on a change I am considering in my use of some phrases.
I propose that journal articles be called "privately circulated manuscripts" and that "published articles" should be reserved for ones that be downloaded from the internet without subscription. A more mild version would be to adopt the term "public article" and just stop using "published article."
I think that if you do this and few others do, the main result will be to confuse your readers or hearers -- and of those who are confused, when you've explained I fear that a good fraction of those who didn't already agree with you will pigeonhole you as a crank.
Which is a pity, because it would be good for far more published work to be universally accessible than presently is.
A possibly-better approach along similar lines would be to find some term that accurately but unflatteringly describes journals that are only accessible for pay (e.g., "restricted-access") and use that when describing things published on such terms. That way you aren't redefining anything, you aren't saying anything incorrect, you're just drawing attention to a real thing you find regrettable. You might or might not want a corresponding flattering term for the other side (e.g. "publicly accessible" or something). "There are three things worth reading on this topic. There's a book by Smith, a restricted-access journal article by Jones, and a publicly-accessible paper by Black."
"Privately circulated" implies something that's only available to a very small group and not widely available. This might be a fair characterization in the case of some very obscure journals, but we might reasonably expect that most of the universities in the world would have subscriptions to journals such as Nature. According to Wolfram Alpha, there are 160 million students in post-secondary education in the world, not including faculty or people at other places that might have an institutional subscription.
Even taking into account the fact that not all of "post-secondary education" includes universities but probably also includes more vocational institutions that likely don't subscribe to scientific journals, we can probably expect the amount of people who have access to reasonably non-niche journals to be in the millions. That doesn't really fit my understanding of "privately circulated".
Would you consider Harry Potter not to have been published because it is not being given away for free? Why should "published articles" be defined differently from "published books"?
Wouldn't it be more practical to simply adopt a personal rule of jailbreaking (if necessary) any paper that you cite? I know this can be a lot of work since I do just this, but it does get easier as you develop the search skills and is much more useful to other people than an idiosyncratic personal vocabulary.
Any how-to-advice on jailbreaking?
I think there have been past threads on this. The short story is Google Scholar, Google, your local university library, LW's research help page, /r/Scholar, and the Wikipedia Resource Request page.
I wonder if "pirating" papers has any real chance of adverse repercussions.
I have 678 PDFs on gwern.net alone, almost all pirated, and perhaps another 200 scattered among my various Dropboxes. These have been building up since 2009. Assuming linear growth, that's something like 1,317 paper-years (((678+200)/2)*3) without any warning or legal trouble so far. By Laplace, that suggests a risk of trouble per paper-year of 0.076% (((1+0)/(1317+2)) * 100). So, pretty small.
Is there a better expression for the "my enemy must be the friend of my other enemy" fallacy, or insistence on categorizing all your (political or ideological) opponents as facets of the same category?
Recently found this paper, entitled "On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science" by Dijkstra (plaintext transcription here). It outlines ways in which computer programming had failed to (and still has) actually jump across the transformative-insight gap that led to the creation of the programmable computer. Probably relevant to many of this crowd, and very reminiscent of some common thoughts I've seen here related to AI design.
In the same place I found this paper discussed, there was mention of this site, which was recommended as teaching computer science in a way implementing Dijkstra's suggestions and this textbook, similarly. I can't vouch for them personally yet, but this might be an appropriate addition to the big list of textbooks.
LW meta (reposted, because a current open thread did not exist then): I have received a message from “admin”:
We were unable to determine if there is a Less Wrong wiki account registered to your account. If you do not have an account and would like one, please go to your preferences page.
I have seen, indeed, options to create a wiki account. But I already have one; how do I associate the existing accounts?
It looks like the Sheep Marketplace is done since a major heist for its bitcoins took place. At least one part of this prediction worked out.
Today I skim-read Special Branch (1972), the first book-length examination of Good's "ultra-intelligent machine."
It is presented in the form of a 94-page dialogue, and the author (Stefan Themerson) is clearly not a computer scientist nor an analytic philosopher. So the book is largely a waste of attempted "analysis." But because I'm interested in how ideas develop over time and across minds, I'll share some pieces of the dialogue here.
A detective superintendent from "special branch," named Watson, meets up with the author (the...
Make sure you use the tag "open_thread" so that it will show up in the latest open thread on the sidebar.
Here are two (correct) arguments that are highly analogous.
Brownian motion, the fact that a particle in water or air does not come to rest, but dances at a minimal rate is an important piece of evidence for the atomic hypothesis. Indeed, Leucippus and Democritus are said to have derived the atomic hypothesis from Brownian motion; certainly Lucretius provided it as evidence.
Similarly, Darwin worried that "blending" inheritance would destroy variation in quantitative traits. He failed to reach the conclusion that heredity should be discrete, though.
I'm planning to run a rationality-friendly table-top roleplaying game over IRC and am soliciting players.
The system is Unknown Armies, a game of postmodern magic set in a creepier, weirder version of our own world. Expect to investigate crimes, decipher the methods behind occult rituals, interpret symbols, and slowly go mad. This particular game will follow the misadventures of a group of fast food employees working for an occult cabal (well, more like a mailing list) that wants to make the world a better place.
Sessions will be 3-4 hours once a week over I...
I̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶n̶a̶m̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶h̶a̶l̶o̶ ̶e̶f̶f̶e̶c̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶w̶o̶r̶d̶s̶?̶ ̶ ̶T̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶s̶h̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶e̶x̶a̶m̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶"̶O̶v̶e̶r̶d̶r̶a̶f̶t̶ ̶P̶r̶o̶t̶e̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶"̶.̶
EDIT: I am specifically referring to Debit Card Overdraft p̶r̶o̶t̶e̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ service
EDIT 2: I have been made aware that I am using the wrong term, overdraft service is the term most commonly used by major banks to refer to the "service" they offer on debit card overdrafts. If you see me refer to somethin...
Computer programs which maximize entropy show intelligent behavior.
Kevin Kelly linked to it, which means it might make sense, but I'm not sure.
It sounds like Prigogine (energy moving through a system causes local organization), but I'm not sure about Prigogine, either.
Louie on G+ links an interesting pair of philosophy papers: http://plus.google.com/104557909419304580033/posts/jNdsspkqGH8 - An attempt to examine the argument from disagreement ('no two people seem able to agree on anything in ethics') by using computer simulations of belief convergence. Might be interesting reading.
There are a couple of commercially available home eeg sets available now, has anyone tried them? Are they useful tools for self monitoring mental states?
I've been diagnosed with avoidant personality disorder and obsessive compulsive personality disorder, as well as major depression, about 4 months ago, and even though my depression has been drastically reduced by medication, I still often have suicidal thoughts. Does anyone have advice on dealing with this? It's just hard to cope with feeling like I'm someone that it isn't good or healthy to be around.
Evolution in humans does not work to produce an integrated intellectual system but produces the set of hacks better suited to the ancestral environment than any other human. Thus we should expect the average human brain to have quite insular but malleable capabilites. Indeed I have the impression that old arts like music try to repurpose those specific pathways in novel ways. Are there parts of our brains we can easily repurpose to aid in our quest for rationality?
I am trying to find a post here and am unable to find it because I do not seem to have the right keywords.
It was about how the rational debate tradition, reason, universities, etc. arose in some sort of limited context, and how the vast majority of people are not trained in that tradition and tend to have emotional and irrational ways of arguing/discussing and that it seems to be the human norm. It was not specifically in a post about females, although some of the comments probably addressed gender distributions.
I read this post definitely at least six months and probably over a year ago. Can anyone help me?
Someone led me to Emotional Baggage Check. The idea appears to be that people can leave an explanation of what's troubling them, or respond to other people's issues with music or words of encouragement. It sounds like a good idea (the current popular strategy of whining on a public forum seems to be more trouble than it's worth). It doesn't look particularly troll-proof, though.
If nothing else, I'd like to look at them in a year or so and see how it's turned out.
Can someone change the front page so it doesn't say "Lesswrong:Homepage"? This sounds like it is a website from 1995. Almost any other plausible wording would be better.
Directed Technological Change and Resources
http://whynationsfail.com/blog/2013/11/26/directed-technological-change-and-resources.html
"Temporary interventions are sufficient to redirect technological change..."
I've been teaching myself the basics of probability theory (I'm sixteen) but I'm having trouble on the first step. My basic definitions of probabilities are all frequentist, and I don't know a good Bayesian source appropriate for a secondary school student. Is Jaynes' PT:LOS able to be read by moi, given that I know basic set theory? If not, can anyone recommend a different textbook?