Example #149 of why it's difficult to specify bets...

Louie texted me a screenshot showing that Zagat had given an opinion on Subway (the fast-food chain). My girlfriend said "No way," so we both specified a bet that if we went to the Zagat website, we wouldn't be able to find a Zagat rating for Subway. She said 40% and I said 65%. When we checked, it turned out Zagat had conducted a survey of people who visit fast food joints, and Subway had been one of the restaurants they got survey results for. So does that count as Zagat giving Subway a rating? I don’t know. I was just thinking of "official Zagat ratings," rather than survey ratings, but it's technically true that there's a rating for Subway on the Zagat website because of that survey of random people who eat fast food.

What i really need is a panel of 5 trusted judges to decide whether my bets are right or wrong, in contested cases.

I tried to code a simple bot for recurring threads on LW based on bots written for Reddit. It doesn't work as there is apparently no API or a different one from the vanilla version of Reddit. If there is an API is there a documentation for it that I can access?

I was looking for an old Robin Hanson post to use as an example in an upcoming post of mine, and tried to get there through the Opposite Sex, an old post of Eliezer's. When I click that link, though, I get a "You aren't allowed to do that." error, which appears to be a change in the last two years. Anyone know what happened? (My guess is Eliezer or someone decided to retract the article, but it would be nice to know for sure.)

At my workplace, the question came up of how best to publicly recognise people for good work, while minimising the amount of politics/friction/jealousy that comes about as a direct result of it. We have only just grown past the point where we all know each other well; hence why this sort of thing is becoming interesting.

My initial response to the question was "Make being praised unpleasant, using ugly trophies (sports team strategy) or stupid hats (university graduation strategy)" but I would like to say something more upbeat as well.

Is anyone aware of good writing on the subject/google keywords I could use to find the literature?

I welcome criticism of my new personal favorite population axiology:

The value of a world-history that extends the current world-history is the average welfare of every life after the present moment. For people who live before and after the current moment, we need to evaluate the welfare of the portion of their life after the current moment. The welfare of a person's life is allowed to vary nonlinearly with the number of years the person lives a certain kind of life, and it's allowed to depend on whether the person's experiences are veridical.

This axiology implies that it's important to ensure that the future will contain many people who have better lives than us; it's consistent with preferring to extend someone's life by N years rather than creating a new life that lasts N years. It's immune to Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion, but doesn't automatically fall prey to the opposite of the Repugnant Conclusion. It implies that our decisions should not depend on whether the past contained a large, prosperous civilization.

There are straightforward modifications for dealing with general relativity and splitting and merging people.

The one flaw is that it's temporally consistent: If future generations average the welfare of lives after their "present moments", they will make decisions we disapprove of.

It took me a long time to find LessWrong and I found it through a convoluted and ultimately entirely random series of events. Though English is neither my first language nor do I live in an anglophone country so I'd love to find a similar community in my language, German, or more generally interesting smaller, though active, communities in other languages than English. How would I go about that?

LW may be interested to learn about Amazon Smile, which gives 0.5% of your Amazon purchases to charity, and the Smile Always Chrome extension that will route your browser to smile.amazon.com by default. (Yes, you can support MIRI through Amazon Smile.) Total setup time estimated at under 5 minutes.

Oh yeah, it looks like they're having some kind of promotion where if you sign up and make a purchase by March 31, they will give an extra $5 to your chosen charity.

Facebook bought Oculus Rift for $2 billion. What makes this, and so many other large deals, such clean numbers? Are the press rounding the details? Are the companies only releasing approximate or estimate numbers? Can the value of a company like Oculus really not be estimated to the nearest 10%? Or do these whole numbers just serve as nice Schelling points on which to hinge a bargain? Or am I forgetting lots of ugly-numbered deals?

(WhatsApp purchase was 2 significant figures, and this list on Wikipedia does show mostly 2-3 significant figures though some figures are probably converted from other currencies.)

No open_thread tag. ('Latest Open Thread' doesn't link to here)

Edit: For some reason the one before doesn't have the tag either..

Scott Aaronson on subjectivity of qualia:

no matter how much is discovered about neurobiology and the measurable correlates of consciousness, it seems to me that stoners will always be able to ask each other, “dude, what if like, my red is your blue?”

Recently I changed some of my basic opinions about life, in large part because of interaction with LessWrong (mostly along the axes Deism -> Atheism, ethical naturalism -> something else (?)).

It inspired me to try to summarize my most fundamental beliefs. The result is as follows:

1. Epistemology

1.1. Epistemic truth is to be determined solely by the scientific method / Occam's razor.

1.2. The worldview of mainstream science is mostly correct.

1.3. The many religious / mystical traditions are wrong.

1. Philosophy of mind

2.1. Consciousness is the result ... (read more)

I've been reading a bit of books that I guess could be classified as "pop psychology" and "pop economics" lately. (In this concept I include books like Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. Hence what I mean is by "pop" is not that it's shallow but rather that it has a wide lay audience.) Now I'd like to turn to sociology - arguably the most general and allencompassing of the social sciences. But when I google "pop sociology", all the books seem to have been written by economists or psychologists or non-academics such a... (read more)

Am I confused about frequentism?

I'm currently learning about hypothesis testing in my statistics class. The idea is that you perform some test and you use the results of that test to calculate:

P(data at least as extreme as your data | Null hypothesis)

This is the p-value. If the p-value is below a certain threshold then you can reject the null hypothesis (which is the complement of the hypothesis that you are trying to test).

Put another way:

P(data | hypothesis) = 1 - p-value

and if 1 - p-value is high enough then you accept the hypothesis. (My use of "... (read more)

Extreme fallacy of gray illustrated by SMBC.

I am assembling a list of interesting blogs to read and for that purpose I'd love to see the kind of blog the people in this community recommend as a starting point. Don't see this just as a request to post blogs according to my unknown taste but as a request to post blogs according to your taste in the hope that the recommendation scratches an itch in this community.

I am wondering about the effect of the advent of self-driving cars on urban sprawl. Will it increase or decrease sprawl?

Urban sprawl is said to be an unintended consequence of the development of the US interstate highway system.

A friend of mine has mild anorexia (she's on psych meds to keep it contained) and recently asked me some advice about working out. She told me that she is mainly interested in not being so skinny. I offered to work out with her one day of the week to make sure she's going about things correctly, with proper form and everything.

The thing is, just going to the gym and working out isn't effective if her diet and sleeping cycle aren't also improved. I would normally be really blunt about these other facts, but her dealing with anorexia probably complicates thi... (read more)

Every "proof" of Godel's incompleteness theorem I've found online seems to stop after what I would consider to be the introduction. I find myself saying "yes, good, you've shown that it suffices to prove this fixed point theorem... now where's the proof of the fixed point theorem, surely that's the actual meat of the proof?" Anyone have a good source that shows the full proof, including why for a particular encoding of sentences as numbers the function "P -> P is not provable" must have a fixed point?

Here's a cute/vexing decision theory problem I haven't seen discussed before:

Suppose you're performing an interference experiment with a twist: Another person, Bob, is inside the apparatus and cannot interact with the outside world. Bob observes which path the particle takes after the first mirror, but then you apply a super-duper quantum erasure to Bob so that they remember observing the path of the particle, but they don't remember which path it took. Thus, at least from your perspective, the superposed versions of Bob interfere, and the particle always ... (read more)

It seems clear that for people with a bachelor's in CS, from a purely monetary viewpoint, getting a master's in the same area usually is dumb unless you plan on programming a long time.

This article says the average mid-career pay for MSc holders is $114,000. This says the mid-career bachelor's salary is $102,000. A master's means 12 to 24 months of lost pay and anywhere from a $20,000/year salary in some lucky cases to a $50,000+ debt. You need at least a decade of future work to justify this. And that likely overstates the benefits since it does not cont... (read more)

So I've kind of formulated a possible way to use markets to predict quantiles. It seems quite flawed looking back on it two and a half weeks later, but I still think it might be an interesting line of inquiry.

How big a deal is this? I only just recently started learning programming so I don't know enough to understand the implications.

Apparently, founding mathematics on Homotopy Type Theory instead of ZFC makes automated proof checking much simpler and more elegant. Has anybody tried reformulating Max Tegmark's Level IV Multiverse using Homotopy Type Theory instead of sets to see if the implied prior fits our anthropic observations better?

I enjoy reading perceptive / well-researched futurism materials. What are some good resources for this? I'm looking for books, blogs, newsfeeds, etc.. Also, I'm only looking for popular-level rather than academic material - I have neither the time nor the knowledge to read through most scholarly articles on the subject.