Many people I know report having much lower-quality experiences on Facebook than mine. The algorithm for improving the quality of the Facebook experience is fairly straightforward: if someone posts content you don't want to see, hide them. If someone makes comments on your statuses you don't want, unfriend them. Repeat. At some point you may need to find new friends, or at least follows.

Not any more than I'm bothered by a million other ambiguous words. (Also, as a mathematician, I'm comforted by the fact that there are many precise notions of "opposite" in mathematics.)

I'd say that opposite means the opposite side of the spectrum, and not means something other then.

The opposite of hot is cold, and not hot is not hot.

Often when people want to emphasize that what they mean is not the complement of the referent, they say "diametrically opposed" or "direct opposite" or "antipode": "the complement of hot [in the set of all temperature perceptions] is not-hot, but the direct opposite of hot is cold".

For a psychological basis, check out the research on how humans basically represent everything on a single scale (book recommendation: Thinking, Fast and Slow).

In Esperanto, prefix "mal-" means the opposite, "ne-" means the negation.

English equivalents would be "anti-" and "non-".

The antonym of hot is cold.

The negation of hot is not-hot.

I sometimes use "negation of X" to refer to the logical operator NOT-X.

The other-side-of-a-continuum relationship I don't have a single word for. I might say that the "complement" of green is red, but that's specific to color. I often use "opposite" when I want a generic term here, with the understanding that I'm using it colloquially.

"Complement" is sort of a word for the second one.

Add a meetup with Philadelphia in the location field?

I suppose this does mean that no-one should believe any claims he makes before checking them first.

I mean this literally, I am actually physically frightened.

Why are you physically frightened of a random Internet blowhard?

The clearest statement of Chu view (from the comment thread) seems to be: "As a very tentative general heuristic ... major ideologies that attempt to validate some form of the just-world fallacy should be terminated with extreme prejudice." He correctly names sexism ("Men have all the power because they're just better!") and racism ("Europeans have all the power because they're just better!") as examples.

But the obvious problem is, if you buy the neo-reactionary model of how "the Cathedral" works, then social-justice progressivism is a clear-cut example of a massive just-world-fallacy in action! What's more, I'd hardly expect Moldbug or other neo-reactionaries to take the view that "the world is inherently fair" seriously, even as hidden, low-level implication. And whether Moldbug's worldview is right about the Cathedral is an empirical question that would seem to require serious, rational investigation, not just faith-based political commitment.

Frankly, he has my sympathies, and I say this speaking as one who is now officially and technically a fucking scientific racist, and is hating every minute of it. The increase in knowledge doesn't even seem worth the sacrifice; we're talking about differences in average IQ between 95, 105, 110, 115. For one such as I, who's got an IQ of 168, this degree of difference seems unimpressive, and, frankly, worth ignoring/not worth knowing.

"You're telling me all these massive groups of people have these slight differences in average between them? About one standard deviation? Of what use could this information possibly be?" "Let's forbid entrance to my particular country to immigrants from the inferior races, namely, people of 'african' and 'hispanic' ancestry; it's cheaper than giving everyone an IQ test. Is this not a clever idea that advances my nation's interest and saves taxpayer money?"

And then I sigh at the stupidity of people with high IQ's, myself included.

Nevertheless, pianoforte, you're definitely overreacting. Do give your friend Arthur some references on Ethical Injunctions and remind him of our Litanies. Even if you did nothing, I do not expect Arthur, or any lesswronger for that matter, to present a level of threat worth having actual cold sweats over.

Here's another argument you can give him; social justice seeks to achieve just ends, and to do so requires just means, an image of justice as well as a just system. To seek social justice is to seek righteousness, and to seek to be right; it demands that you be scrupulously rational. Since You Provably Can't Trust Yourself, you should not, cannot allow yourself to employ the methods of evil, of which irrationality, stupidity and incoherence are the very essence. Throughout my life, I have been in contact with all kinds of people who invested huge amounts of effort in struggling for the betterment of mankind, and, whenever they started thinking in martial terms, of Us Versus Them (see Robbers-Cave experiment), of a struggle where one allows oneself all dirty tricks because so does "the other side", Arguments Are Soldiers, and they lose themselves and their ability to identify the truth when it doesn't fit their narrative. And that's a huge handicap.

Keeping a clear mind and remaining open to the truth, no matter how inconvenient, is, I think, the only way to live through one's life, and remain sane to the very end. Once you forfeit your sanity, no matter your successes, you have lost.

FWIW, I liked it a lot! Your summary is good.

Been discussed here several times. GIYF.

Add ?before=t_1 to the URL: you. If you want to page forward from there also add &count=100000: you.

The comments pages of a user have urls of the form

http://lesswrong.com/user/falenas108/comments/?count=25&after=t1_3mby

I'm not quite sure how they work, but the last 4 characters seem to give the index of the last comment on the page before (i.e. later than) the one it shows you (in base 36 or something), so you can try binary searching through these.

I think the link I gave is your earliest comments.

You could try simply loading all your comments: http://www.ibiblio.org/weidai/lesswrong_user.php?u=falenas108

Click on your username.

I haven't tried this, but you could get a white noise generator, or download a white noise app for your phone, or use http://simplynoise.com/ . Or you could wear a headband over your ears, or (what I do) play ASMR over sleep-compatible headphones.

I've had success with Mack's soft silicone earplugs.

The problem is it's so complex that I don't see anyone implementing it anytime soon.

It seems to be a straightforward way to implement a new altcoin.

If someone pays 200,000$ for two man years of programmer time to implement this and then makes 10 million$ with the altcoin that seems to me like a valid business model.

Wouldn't evil people farm consensus karma via specifically constructed bets?

Though prediction markets have their potential problems, this could be the first in a long series of ever better decentralised prediction markets. I wonder what the legalities will be, similar to how Intrade got into trouble with the US government over regulations regarding commodity derivatives.

This is isomorphic to the problem (edit: not impossibility) of coming up with a fully mind-neutral definition of information entropy, is it not?

Omohundro has a paper on instrumental goals that many/most intelligences would converge on. For instance, they would strive to model themselves, to expand their capabilities, to represent their goals in terms of utility functions, to protect their utility functions against change, etc. None of these are universally true because we can just posit a pathological intelligence whose terminal goal is to not do these things. (And to some extent e.g. humans do in fact behave pathologically like that.)

We can say very little "optimizers over possible futures" in full generality, because that concept can be very broad if you define "optimizer" sufficiently broadly. Is a thermostat an intelligence, with the goal of achieving some temperature? Or consider a rock - we can see it as a mind with the goal of continuing its existence, and thus decides to be hard.

Can one detect intelligence in retrospect?

Let me explain. Let's take the definition of an intelligent agent as an optimizer over possible futures, steering the world toward the preferred one.

Yes, at least some of the time. Evolution fits your definition and we know about that. So if you want examples of how to deduce the existence of an intelligence without knowing its goals ahead of time, you could look at the history of the discovery of evolution.

Also, Eliezer has has written an essay which answers your question, you may want to look at that.

Let's take the definition of an intelligent agent as an optimizer over possible futures, steering the world toward the preferred one.

That's a very low bar for intelligence, it looks more like a definition of life. Most or all living creatures do this. Some pretty simple software would fit the bill, too.

I found a watch upon the heath.

Anyway, I think there are enough instrumental goals that even without human-like goals we should be able to recognize crafted tools like watches, hammers, and whatnot.

Well, normally you sneeze (too much) either because the room is too dusty, or because you have a mild allergy to something in that room.

Does the room look dusty? If you don't wipe a horizontal surface, how much dust would accumulate in, say, a week?

The allergy thing is more complicated, but one way to test it would be to take some OTC anti-hystamine and see if that stops your sneezing. If it does you should update towards being allergic to something in that room.

Bad is hard to quantify.

What particular aspect of bad air quality makes you sneeze? Once we narrow that down we can review options.

You can put an air filter in the room for a while and see if there's a noticeable change. If you want to be scientific about it you can ask a friend to turn it on and off at random while you're out of the room

Couldn't he just publish the lists of errors anonymously?

I found that post pretty confusing. It turns out that it's about control of databases, and i think copyright is a red herring. He wants to run his program over all published papers and find problems with them. He needs permission of the publisher to do this. He claims that his interpretation of the boiler-plate license doesn't allow that. I think he's mistaken and that in any event he could get permission if he asked. What he really wants to do (from other posts on the blog), that he definitely couldn't get permission for, is to synthesize the literature into a database of chemicals; which the publishers won't allow because they do that by hand.

Also, the title (which you didn't quote) is nonsense. There is no legal obstacle to the editor or referee using computers on new papers, which is the usual meaning of "referee." The problem there is getting the editor to try something new and to put in the necessary effort. Maybe it's easier for this guy to run his software on all papers ever written than to convince lots of editors to run it ahead of time, but difficulty is not a legal difficulty. Everyone would love it if these mistakes were caught in the refereeing process, rather than after the fact.

Gosh, that site is addictive.

While expanding your selection pool has obvious benefits, I think there is a good alternative route with regards to your tiny circle of friends and acquaintances.

Suppose you can easily quantify the partner-compatibility of a person, let's say on a 0-10 scale, probably exponential distribution. The best you can find among your friends is a 6. That's unsatisfactory, so you start searching, and after a while you find an 8, which is satisfactory, and you marry them.

However, this model is flawed: The grades can change over time - both the other person and you can change. These changes are more likely to happen earlier in life, such as during teen years or early twenties. Thus the model would have to be expanded to account for the potential compatibility, or even a function how the compatibility changes with time.

If we were to look at this model, that 6 from high school has a much better potential. In a long term relationship, people effect other people, slowly changing them towards themselves. This process works both ways, so you have two entities slowly pulling each other closer. What can easily happen is that in a few years time that it took to find the 8, you have created an 8. Furthermore, since you were also changed in the process, that 8 might no longer be an 8. It could be a 7, or a 9. It could also have a better rate of change, meaning a potential 10.

I would, however, assume the rate of change slows down as people grow older (I haven't any data to confirm this assumption), meaning a change from a self-made 8 to a natural 8 wouldn't yield much benefits.

To expand on the business metaphor: You are running a business, and you need someone to take the position of CTO. You can look for skilled CTOs, but your existing employees have the advantage of already knowing the company and the business process. No doubt, many external applicants, given two years would be better than any of the existing employees, but how many would be better than existing employee with two extra years of experience as CTO? Basically, you need to plot grade(time) for all applicants, see how long will it take for one of the external ones to beat the employee, and decide whether the loss is worth it.

If you’re running a business, conventional wisdom states that you’re a much more effective business owner if you study business in school, create well thought-out business plans, and analyze your business’s performance diligently. But if someone went to school to learn about how to pick a life partner and take part in a healthy relationship, if they charted out a detailed plan of action to find one, and if they kept their progress organized rigorously in a spreadsheet, society says they’re A) an over-rational robot, B) way too concerned about this, and C) a huge weirdo.

No, when it comes to dating, society frowns upon thinking too much about it, instead opting for things like relying on fate, going with your gut, and hoping for the best. The respectable way to meet a life partner is by dumb luck, by bumping into them randomly or being introduced to them from within your little pool.

As the article mentions later, it's not just the society, it's also biology. Well, in the ancient evolutionary environment "your little pool" is all humans that don't try to kill you at the first sight, so it makes sense to find a mate there; and the pool does not change dramatically, so you can pick right now.

if we want to find a happy marriage, we need to think small—we need to look at marriage up close and see that it’s built not out of anything poetic, but out of 20,000 mundane Wednesdays.

No one wants to spend 50 years fake laughing. A life partner doubles as a career/life therapist, and if you don’t respect the way someone thinks, you’re not going to want to tell them your thoughts on work each day, or on anything else interesting that pops into your head, because you won’t really care that much what they have to say about it. Secrets are poison to a relationship, because they form an invisible wall inside the relationship, leaving both people somewhat alone in the world—and besides, who wants to spend 50 years lying or worrying about hiding something?

This is probably also a greater problem now than in the past, because the increasing inferential distances make communication more difficult.

I am disturbed to see it announced explicitly as a good and noble goal, by the upcoming generation is concerning.

On the other hand, the most-upvoted comments on the article are encouraging. :)

Ironically enough, it's somewhat surprising that The Crimson didn't censor this article, as it was bound to attract negative press.

I'm hoping the fact that this is just an opinion piece, and that the article is currently in circulation on the internet as an example of what's wrong with academia, and that all the comments are opposed to it, is a sign that this is just the internet bringing the worst things to my attention, and that such thinking will never actually be reflected in any formal policy...if not, I've got some updating to do.

I think "from the Harvard Crimson" is a misleading description.

One of their undergraduate columnists had a very silly column. Undergraduates do that sometimes. Speaking as a former student newspaper columnist, often these columns are a low priority for the authors, and they're thrown together in a hurry the night before they're due. The column might not even represent what the author would think upon reflection, let alone what the editorial board of the Crimson as a whole believes. So I wouldn't read too much into this.

(For non-US readers: The Harvard Crimson is the student-produced newspaper of Harvard University. The editors and writers are generally undergraduates and they don't reflect any sort of institutional viewpoint.)

announced explicitly as a good and noble goal, by the upcoming generation

Undergrad publications print the craziest shit imaginable and sometimes even mean it. I wouldn't expect them to "think" the same way a few years after graduation, though.

When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.

By the way, this is stupid even from the "we only care about the 'good' people (women, black, trans, etc.)" viewpoint, because the consequences sometimes look like this:

1) Someone suggests there could be biological differences between men and women. Angry screams, research abandoned.

2) Medical research done on volunteers (the expendable males) finds a new cure.

3) It appears that the cure works better for men, and may be even harmful for women (because it was never tested on women separately, and no one even dared to suggest it should be). Angry screams again -- unfortunately no reflection of what actually happened; instead the usual scapegoat blamed again.

More meta lessons for the LW audience: The world is entangled, you can't conveniently split it into separate magisteria. If you decide to remove a part of reality from your model, you don't know how much it will cost you: because to properly estimate the cost of X you need to have X in your model.