If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one.
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
I happened to see this paper, which may be of interest to those experimenting with Soylent. The title is "Long-term feeding on powdered food causes hyperglycemia and signs of systemic illness in mice".
They fed different batches of mice the same food, except that one was in the usual pellet form and one was powdered and needed no chewing. They also tested both short- and long-term feeding on powdered food. Their conclusion:
The hyperglycemia associated with long-term powdered-food feeding may lead to certain systemic illness signs, such as elevations of blood glucose, hypertension, and abnormal behaviors in mice. Mastication of food of adequate hardness may be very important for the maintenance of systemic (physical and mental) health, possibly via reduction in the levels of blood glucose and/or adrenal stress hormones (catecholamines and glucocorticoids).
Yvain also found a curious link a while ago http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/10/links-for-february-2014/ :
One of my interests is weird ways the face interacts with the brain, so I enjoyed this study: "Masticatory deficiency as a risk factor for cognitive dysfunction". People (and lab rats) without their teeth or with otherwise impaired chewing ability become demented much more quickly than controls, apparently because the mechanics of chewing help stimulate or oxygenate certain parts of the brain. No word yet as to whether you can become a super-genius by chewing everything all the time.
The abstract of the paper:
...Several studies have demonstrated that chewing helps to maintain cognitive functions in brain regions including the hippocampus, a central nervous system (CNS) region vital for memory and learning. Epidemiological studies suggest that masticatory deficiency is associated with development of dementia, which is related to spatial memory deficits especially in older animals. The purpose of this paper is to review recent work on the effects of masticatory impairment on cognitive functions both in experimental animals and humans. We show that several mechanisms
MealSquares are made of solid food... we're currently running a semi-formal beta test. Sign up for our mailing list to get notified when we launch :)
The most relevant part is probably another study mqrius mentions, "The effect of the loss of molar teeth on spatial memory and acetylcholine release from the parietal cortex in aged rats", Kato et al 1997 (available through Libgen):
After the molar teeth of rats were extracted, the rats were fed with powdered food for 135 weeks. Although the performance in the radial arm maze was progressively acquired by daily training, an increase in the number of errors and a decrease in the initial correct responses were observed in the teethless aged rats compared to the control aged rats, indicating impaired acquisition of spatial memory in the teethless aged rats...the extracellular ACh level of the teethless aged rats under high-concentration of K+ and atropine sulfate stimulation was significantly low compared to that of the control aged rats. These results suggest that the impairment of spatial memory in the teethless aged rats may be due to the functional deterioration of the cholinergic neuronal system induced by tooth loss
It's not a long paper. Skimming, the major problems I see:
Some people treat LessWrong as just a philosophical exercise, but "Rationality" and its little brother "Critical Thinking" really can make you a rockstar in the corporate world if you so choose. I'm going to give a bit of background on some things that I've managed to accomplish in the last couple years by thinking when no one else would, then I'd hope to get some feedback and suggestions for future optimizations. Feel free to skip to the "-----------" below if you want to skip my brag section, though I am writing it to help give an idea of the landscape.
At the SaaS startup I work at, I've worked in a few different departments. I started in Support and decided we needed training videos and better articles to reduce the load on Support reps, so I made them and set up a process for forwarding people to the appropriate video/article instead of answering questions directly. This saved Support Rep's time.
When I moved into Account Management and Implementation, every new client account needed a minimum of 5 hours of AM training time. I decided this was inefficient and recorded some more training videos, then set up an LMS so our clients could do self-pa...
The quantified risks of gay sex post is in the early stages of development. If you are a mod and think such a post would have negative value, pianoforte611 and I would appreciate hearing your concerns before we invest our time in it. If you are not a mod but want to make some pre-emptive suggestions, those are welcome too.
A few nuances that I would like to see in the paper:
*Not all gay men have anal sex, many chose not to in favor of other activities.
*Also, not having the assumption that only gay/bi men have anal sex.
*A distinction between transmission rates if people chose to use condoms vs not, because part of the reason the rate is higher is condoms are much less common in the gay community.
*A disclaimer about how not all men have penises, and sex≠gender≠genitalia would be nice.
Massachusetts Supreme Court says it can order you to decrypt your computer
Imagine a computer decryption program that creates a random number of nonsense files that look like encrypted files but for which no password will work. Now, if the government orders you to decrypt all of your files and you have a file you don't want to decrypt the government won't be able to prove that you have the password to that file since given that you are using the program there will definitely exist files you can't decrypt.
This is basically the idea behind TrueCrypt hidden volumes and similar: there should be no way for the police to prove that there exists additional volumes which you have not decrypted for them.
But afaik, no case in the United States so far has involved an order to just "decrypt all your files". In all the cases I have heard about, they had something specific that they wanted the key for, and they had separate evidence that the defendant knew the key. In that case no technical solution can help you.
What makes you think a court would believe your story about a memory palace, precommitment or no, and not throw you in jail indefinitely for contempt of court until you retrieve the files for them?
Demonstrating mnemonics abilities if demanded to do so is easy and there are various outside mnemonics experts that can attest to the fact that it's possible to do so.
Yes, but you need to be demonstrating the forgetting exists and is accidental. 'Oh, I'm sorry judge, I totally forgot! also, this is totally not destruction of evidence so please don't have me up on either contempt of court or obstruction of justice!'
You could also take a polygraph to verify that you tell the truth about having deleted the password.
Polygraphs aren't very reliable for verifying you're telling the truth and I think judges know that by this point. Plus, that could easily backfire the other way: you could be nervous enough that your readings are consistent with lying.
You have three months to live, a five year old child, and you just told her. And she tearfully asks: "When you're dead, will you still love me?"
How do you respond?
I found my own reply, although it took me longer than that hypothetical child would have waited for it. I'm more interested in yours, but mine follows below...
"Look, I hold you with these arms. My arms extend from my right hand to my left hand, so this much is my reach. When I walk over here, I can't hold you - but I still love you. There's only distance between us, that doesn't change the love. But there's not just space, there's also time. In time, I extend from my birth to my death, like from my right hand to my left hand. So again, outside this time from birth to death, I can't hold you - but that doesn't change the love. There will only be time between us."
How do you respond?
Yes, while I'm under Alcor's care the part of my brain that holds my love for you will remain intact.
That will comfort the five year old child only because it's predictable that the five year old child misunderstands it, and the misunderstanding will comfort the child.
In that case, you may as well just lie directly.
Something useful to those of you who use Spaced Repetition Software:
I made a little ruby script that can turn ordered and unordered lists into easily memorable diagrams like this:
https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=51A281FEEAA3C35!1455&authkey=!AKtQ02Ji961f_n8&v=3&ithint=photo%2c.png https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=51A281FEEAA3C35!1457&authkey=!AMtC38EHOFcImTI&ithint=folder%2c https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=51A281FEEAA3C35!1458&authkey=!AOIm4ua5-c1TFsQ&ithint=folder%2c
It's pretty hacky (the script opens a bunch of google image searches so that you can download the pictures) but combined with the image occlusion anki addon, it has allowed me to memorize sets that are 3 time larger than I can normally memorize with Anki.
The script requires Graphviz, as well the launchy ruby gem. It can be found here: https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=51A281FEEAA3C35!1459&authkey=!ACtSe9c5YnpYk9Q&ithint=file%2c.rb
Quick readme:
We've had a bit of an attendance drop recently at our local Meetup Group (London). This could be because of a lot of things, but it seems to roughly coincide with the change to where Meetups are posted on Lesswrong. Have any other Groups experienced anything of the sort?
I've collected some quotes from Beyond Discovery, a series of articles commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences from 1997 to 2003 on paths from basic research to useful technology. My comments there:
The articles (each around 8 pages) are roughly popular-magazine-level accounts of variable quality, but I learned quite a bit from all of them, particularly from the biology and medicine articles. They're very well written, generally with input from the relevant scientists still living (many of them Nobel laureates). In particular I like the broad view of history, the acknowledged scope of the many branches leading to any particular technology, the variety of topics outside the usual suspects, the focus on fairly recent technology, and the emphasis bordering on propagandist on the importance and unpredictability of basic research. It seems to me that they filled an important gap in popular science writing in this way.
I'm interested in histories of science that are nonstandard in those and other ways (for example, those with an unusual focus on failures or dead ends), and I'm slowly collecting some additional notes and links at the bottom of that page. Do you have any recommendations? Or other comments?
You've added the wrong tags - it should be 'open_thread'. Less importantly, the thread should finish on Sunday (the 6th), not the 7th (Monday).
AI Box experiment over!
Just crossposting.
Khoth and I are playing the AI Box game. Khoth has played as AI once before, and as a result of that has an Interesting Idea. Despite losing as AI the first time round, I'm assigning Khoth a higher chance of winning than a random AI willing to play, at 1%!
http://www.reddit.com/r/LessWrong/comments/29gq90/ai_box_experiment_khoth_ai_vs_gracefu_gk/
Link contains more information.
EDIT
AI Box experiment is over. Logs: http://pastebin.com/Jee2P6BD
My takeaway: Update the rules. Read logs for more information.
On the other han...
I'm not sure where, but I remember Eliezer writing something like ~"one of the biggest advances in the economy is the fact that people have internalized that they should invest their money, instead of having it lying around".
I'm looking for 2 things:
I cut out caffeine almost completely almost a month ago, after drinking large amounts of it daily since I was twelve. I have noted that I no longer have difficulty rising from bed in the morning, I no longer get headaches specifically due to missing coffee, etc., that's all very nice. Unfortunately I've also noticed that I sort of feel dumber and less motivated. I had a double shot of espresso this morning and suddenly feel like my old self again - sharp, quick, motivated. So I find myself in the unfortunate position of wondering if I actually need caffeine to feel like I think of as normal. Has anyone else experienced this phenomenon? If I stay off caffeine long enough will I eventually feel normal without it?
I struggle with an issue that I would call, for a lack of a better term, an intellectual fear of missing out.
Some context: I studied and work in a traditional, old-fashioned area of engineering (civil). I like my job. On the other hand, reading about things discussed here and in similar places - progress in software, applied statistics, AI, automatization, Big Data analysis, machine learning etc. - makes me want to participate somehow in those grand changes happening during my lifetime. However, the sheer amount of available MOOCs and books kind of scares ...
I went to my university psych center to get evaluated . Everything is pretty good , except my processing speed was below average. Since there are guys who know a lot about cognitive science here , is there a way to improve or at least ameliorate that? Any links to stuff would be appreciated.
Why the Many-Worlds Formulation of Quantum Mechanics is Probably Correct by Sean Carroll.
...Our only assumption was that the apparatus obeys the rules of quantum mechanics just as much as the particle does, which seems to be an extremely mild assumption if we think quantum mechanics is the correct theory of reality. Given that, we know that the particle can be in “spin-up” or “spin-down” states, and we also know that the apparatus can be in “ready” or “measured spin-up” or “measured spin-down” states. And if that’s true, the quantum state has the built-in a
Hi, an old discussion
http://lesswrong.com/lw/56m/the_conjunction_fallacy_does_not_exist/
gives the error, "The page you requested does not exist"
I have the right link. It's actually still linked from:
http://lesswrong.com/user/curi/submitted/
I wanted to check something from that discussion. As you can see from my submitted page, there were 113 comments. Why doesn't it exist? What's going on? Can someone help?
I didn't find any contact info except a bug tracker that didn't seem to have much activity since 2012, and my first guess is not a software bu...
What do you guys think about memory palaces? http://www.wikihow.com/Build-a-Memory-Palace I heard of it in Sherlock.
If I chatter like an idiot today, it's because I'm trying not to think about this shit. The worst thought at a time of tragedy is, "This did not have to happen."
None of it has to happen. But I can't see a way to make it stop happening.
Fuck.
People dead are always a tragedy. But keep in mind availability bias. The first sentence for this article is "This city’s 471st homicide of 2012 happened in the middle of the day, in the middle of a crowd, on the steps of the church where the victim of homicide 463 was being eulogized."
There were 506 homicides in one city, Chicago. And they were not tortured, but in this case that is outweighed by sheer numbers. If you're putting effort into decreasing the number of murders in the world, do it effectively.
So why is the goal of utilitarianism to maximize the sum of utilities?
Rather than, say, to maximize the minimal utility being considered?
I ask because the torture/dust specks question seems to be down to whether you think the way to combine multiple people's utility functions is by
a) Summing them (ie: "shut up and multiply"), or
b) Only looking at the worst-off individual (ie: "raise the floor")
And I can't find actual mathematical arguments about this.
(I know I'm years late, so if this is well settled, a quick pointer to that settlement would be much appreciated!)
I really don't like happiness as a terminal value, yet I don't know anything that can replace it. The only thing I can think of is satisfaction, but it appears to be just a sneaky way to say happiness.
Any ideas?
Where could one find many, many past exam papers for university undergraduate courses? I find attempting them under exam conditions the ideal way of preparing for exams, and really excellent at pointing out where there are gaps in my knowledge and I need to revise. I'm particularly interested in psychology exam papers.
Has something changed about the voting rules the last week or so? I started to get the "You don't have enough karma to downvote. You need three more points" message again. But it is always three points (no other number) even though I haven't lost karma and still am able to downvote some comments/sometimes.
I’m looking for information about rationalist houses, but the wiki page on the subject is sparse.
The most salient questions for me are:
What (if any) relationship is there between the homotopy/homology of a directed graph and its causal structure?
Posting this again from the last open thread because I am still researching and would still appreciate assistance or links:
"I've begun researching cryonics to see if I can afford it/want to sign up. Since I know plenty here are already signed up, I was hoping someone could link me to a succinct breakdown of the costs involved. I've already looked over Alcor's webpage and the Cryonics Institute, but I'd like to hear from a neutral party. Membership dues and fees, average insurance costs (average since this would change from person to person), even peri...
One Inconvenient Application of Utiliarism:
Given a class of chores which provide benefit but are disliked to perform by most people (and cannot be dealt away with). Also assume that these chores can be performed by most people. Further take another class of tasks that can be performed by a subset of the population only and comes with less displeasure. Also add some neutral tasks.
An set of example task could be dealing with garbage, solving complex math problems and child care.
How should you assign the tasks from these classes to people?
It appears that th...
The article "Tolerate Tolerance" contains a hyperlink to "M*nt*f*x"; twice. When I click on the link, my anti-virus software warns me about "potentially unwanted" content on the page. (What does that mean? It's usually the kind of software that could have a legitimate use, but is also frequently abused, so it is a good idea to warn all users, and allow specific users to disable the warning for specific software. For example: a keylogger.)
I have no idea what kind of "potentially unwanted" software is on the page, and ...
Interesting discussion on philosophical methodology and intuitions in a recent book. http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/39362-philosophy-without-intuitions/
Ran Prieur linked to this comment on reddit that speculates that processed food (specifically Soylent) is causing colorectal cancer. How plausible is it?
Why do you think EY uses conspiracy in his fictional writing? He seems to use them in positive or at least not clearly negative light, which is not how I think of conspiracies at all. I notice that I am confused, so I'm trying to gather some other opinions.
The anecdote in this post, about Fermi, Rabi and Szilard considering keeping the possibility of practical nuclear fission a secret, may shed some light on the subject. He thinks that some knowledge is dangerous enough that people who know it may reasonably want to keep it secret.
(much more recently, there has been some controversy about the publication of a way of obtaining a particularily infectious strain of a certain virus, but I can't find any references for that right now)
I think it stems from the Brennan's World weirdtopia, and the idea that making knowledge freely available makes it feel worthless, while making it restricted to members of a secretive group makes it feel as valuable and powerful as it actually is.
HJPEV is a drama queen and likes acting as if he's badass (ignore for the moment whether he is) and sinister and evil: Look at what he calls his army and how he acts around them. Hence calling his thing with Draco the Bayesian Conspiracy. Not everything that takes place in an author's fiction is indicative of something they support.
Conspiracy is the default mode of a group of people getting anything done. Every business is a conspiracy. They plot and scheme within their "offices", anonymous buildings with nothing but their name on the front door. They tell no-one what they're doing, beyond legal necessity, and aim to conquer the world by, well, usually the evil plan is to make stuff that people will want to buy.
No organisation conducts all its business in public, whatever its aims. Even if you find one that seems to, dollars to cents you're not looking at its real processes. There needn't be anything sinister in this, although of course sometimes there is.
Every one of us is a conspiracy of one.
"Conspiracy" doesn't mean "people working where you can't tell what they are doing".
It means "people working where you can't tell what they are doing and you worry that you wouldn't like it".
The most relevant part is probably another study mqrius mentions, "The effect of the loss of molar teeth on spatial memory and acetylcholine release from the parietal cortex in aged rats", Kato et al 1997 (available through Libgen):
It's not a long paper. Skimming, the major problems I see:
they didn't show removing teeth caused lower performance, they showed removing teeth and feeding on a liquid diet caused lower performance. (On the plus side, they say they anesthesized both groups, so that removes a serious confound.)
The experimental group had its teeth removed & also was fed liquid, while the control group kept its teeth & also ate normal pellets. Hence, the decreased performance could've been caused (ignoring the issues of bias and sampling error) by either the removal of teeth, the liquid food, or some interaction thereof (perhaps liquid food aggravating tooth infection caused by the surgery?). They do say
but I haven't looked at it and in any case, given how much varies from lab to lab, this is a basic issue which needs to be verified in your own sample, and not just hope that it's a universal. Also, if Kawamura finds that liquid food on its own damages learning & memory compared to a solid diet, how are you showing anything new by looking at liquid+surgery & finding damage...?
Their data is purely a post-comparison. They say they did the surgery, and then apparently left the rats alone for 135 weeks before doing the radial arm maze test.
So there's no way to know what the decline looked like or when it happened. It's perfectly possible that the toothless rats suffered a single sudden shock to their system from the surgery and that permanently degraded their memory, or that they had ongoing chronic inflammation or infection.
Worse, the difference may have been there from the start, they never checked. Randomization with such small n can easily fail to balance groups, that's one reason for pre-tests: to verify that a difference in the groups on the post-test wasn't there from the start but can be attributed to the experimental condition.
I'm not sure this can be described as a true 'randomized experiment'. They never actually say that the selection of rats was random or how the animals were picked for their group, and there's a weird pattern in the writing where they only ever write about the toothless rats being subjected to procedures even though logically you'd say stuff like 'all the rats were tested on X'; eg:
Plus, Figure 1 reports 9/10 rats, but by Figure 2, we're down to 5/5 rats. Huh? This makes me wonder if they're reusing control rats from a previous experiment, or reusing their data, and only actually had experimental rats. (The use of "historical controls" is apparently not uncommon in animal research.)
This would massively compromise their results because rats change over time, litters of rats will correlate in traits like memory, and these effects are all large enough to produce many bogus results if you were to, say, take 10 rats from 1 litter as your control group and 9 rats from another litter as your experimental group. Just like with humans, one family of rats may have a very different average from another family. (See the very cool paper “Design, power, and interpretation of studies in the standard murine model of ALS”, Scott et al 2008, which helpfully notes on pg5 that when you have a mouse study with 10/10 mice similar to this study and the null is true, "an apparent effect [of >5% difference in survival] would be seen in 58% of studies". Which really makes you think about a small difference in # of errors in maze performance.)
Their reward may have been a bit screwy in the memory task:
If this description is literally accurate, there's a problem. They don't mention the setup differing between groups! So this "food pellet" is the reward which gives the rats motivation to solve the maze... but you've removed the teeth from half the rats and can only feed them liquid. And you're surprised the toothless rats perform worse? I'm reminded of the reward confounds in much animal intelligence research.
the authors mention excluding the other maze performance variable:
One wonders if the # of initially correct responses would have reached p<0.05. Good old researcher degrees of freedom...
So overall, I would have to say this result seems to be extremely weak.