Against all odds, it turns out I'm a grown-up now. If I die, go missing, or am rendered incapable of looking after myself, significant sums of money become available to my next-of-kin. I've started assembling a document for them to hold onto in case of these eventualities.
I have two questions to throw at LWers who may have dealt with this sort of thing before:
1) The whole process of making a will seems a bit excessive to my needs. I don't have a complicated estate or children or anything, and trust my next-of-kin to respect my wishes or act in my best interests if it becomes necessary. Solicitor's fees seem like an unnecessary expense. I just want to collect all the salient details into one location for convenience. Are there any good reasons why I might want to revise this judgement?
2) The basic document so far consists of a list of bank accounts, financial assets, insurance policy numbers, contact numbers for my GP, workplace, etc., and miscellaneous other details that might prove useful. Are there any sensible bits of information I might want to bundle up with this that I probably haven't thought about?
The Ethereum pre-sale has begun.
Given that Ethereum is explicitly designed as a platform for distributed decentralized applications, it seems to me like it could be the next big cryptocurrency after Bitcoin. I'm not terribly confident in this assessment, however. Do people here have an opinion on how likely it is that it'd be the "next tech gold rush"?
Sometime in the near future, I will be running an iterated prisoner's dilemma tournament in which bots can access their opponents' source code, similar to the IPD tournament that was held last year. This tournament will be open to the Internet at large (i.e. not just LW) and will probably include some Hacker News folks and some folks from my real-life social network, who are primarily programmers and people in the finance world. Once everything is officially announced, there will be a large window (a month?) in which users can submit entries before the tou...
I have written a set of course notes for a course in applied causal inference. I am thinking about adapting these notes to a Less Wrong sequence.
This is not intended to be a rigorous treatment of causal inference for mathematicians, computer scientists or theorists. However, I hope my sequence may help improve people's intuition about what causal inference is, and serve as a simplified epistemology for applied scientists and readers of correlation studies.
If anyone has time to read the drafts before I publish, please send me a private message and I'll send you the link!
I'm always fascinated at the ginormous arguments that this picture is guaranteed to cause, and I wonder at what kind of experiments you could do with it to investigate people's different intuitions of physics.
Do we have a "How Have You Helped Save the World" thread and, if not, why not?
We have the Group Rationality Diary, which is very useful for personal accountability, and the Bragging Thread, which helps encourage brag-worthy behaviors, but as far as I am aware, we do not have a "How You've Helped Save the World" thread.
Does this seem useful? A way to encourage people to recognize how their actions make the world a better place. Not every post need be about "invented friendly AI," "cured an illness," "created a ...
Can someone point me to an argument or evidence supporting the suggestion that short polyphasic sleep allows most people to decrease their sleep requirements without negative cognitive, physical, or health consequences?
I'm a long sleeper (my sleep requirements are on the higher side), and I am interested in reducing my sleep requirements. I encountered the idea of polyphasic sleep after learning quite a bit about sleep. Polyphasic sleep is often touted as a way to decrease sleep need, via making your body quickly go into REM sleep. Quickly going into REM w...
Can anyone suggest a good book, article, or discussion thread about office politics? (Someone keeps coming to me for advice, even though I told them I haven't worked in an office since 2002 and I didn't pay any attention to interpersonal relationships when I did work. I want to try to avoid disappointing them on the powers of rationality and general intelligence, if possible. :)
I have devised a software which is able (among other things) to construct 3D crosswords.
I don't consider it AI, but "stupid".
Even so, (English) 3D crosswords without black fields are currently very rare, to nonexistent.
If I wanted to learn about, and understand correctly, UDT, where should I look / who should I ask?
Publicly available information is terribly scattered and outdated.
Good article about existential risks in the Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/21/five-biggest-threats-human-existence
Question about Bayesian updates.
Say Jane goes to get a cancer screening. 5% prior of having cancer, the machine has a success rate of 80% and a false positive rate of 9%. Jane gets a positive on the test and so she now has a ~30% chance of having cancer.
Jane goes to get a second opinion across the country. A second cancer screening (same success/false positive rates) says she doesn't have cancer. What is her probability for having cancer now?
This just showed up on my google reader.
http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/07/25/electricity-solarstorms-kemp-idINL6N0PZ5D120140725
My immediate thought was about this storm actually hitting in 2012. The mayan apocalypse was predicted on that year. The civilizational challenge to rebuild would have been substantial. But even more, the epistemic state of the civilization that recovered would almost have been permanently compromised. It would appear to most people that an ancient prophecy of a civilization that was brutally crushed was actually true.
What w...
There are a lot of games that can be played with a standard deck of playing cards, but it has occurred to me that I've never heard of a skill-based strategy game that minimizes luck-of-the-draw, meant for ordinary playing cards.
So, I tried my hand at inventing such a game.
Unfortunately, I have no practical way to play-test it, so I'm putting it out there for other people to try.
Suggestions on a name for the game are welcome. I have considered and dismissed "Card Chess" as derivative and inaccurate.
If the Born probabilities were ultimately based on the relative Kolmogorov complexities of the possible outcomes, what would that look like? Would we see it break down from the pure randomness we normally see at the macro scale?
This occurred to me, and while it's outlandish and unlikely I'd like to figure out why it's wrong, rather than just dismiss it.
Regarding Kurzweil's claim of the added neocortex mass in humans resulting in a qualitative leap of human abilities, and also that there are levels of abstraction in the neurons. It seems strange to me because 1) humans have had the same brain for tens of thousands of years, yet the brain was completely reliant on per chance technological discoveries. Additional neurons enable addition complexity in signaling, but the signaling comes from the environment, and so it seems to me humans may have just gotten lucky with their environment, especially with things...
Some major cultures and some individuals mistrust happiness (see article for reasons)-- if happiness is not a major value, how does this affect ethics/utilitarianism?
What upcoming MOOCs will you be attending? I ask to get some inspiration and some opinions as the selection can be quite overwhelming.
Quick question on karma: why is my score for the past 30 days greater than my total score?
I have a friend who currently works on toxicology as a grad-student and secretly wants to fight ageing. Are there labs in North America who do that kind of research? Or Europe?
I have a website I plan to launch soon, and I'd like to get some early feedback before I start spreading it around. It's basically a collection of my favorite stuff from around the web.
It's currently accessible from http://chuuni.org. I'm taking suggestions for a better name/domain.
I also want to build a community around it, sort of like how LW is a community built around the Sequences. If anyone can help me with the software side, it would be appreciated.
I like the site. Although I suspect that the goal of the site (saving precious time by not consuming anything but the best) is contradictory to building a community around it.
Look at all the "social networks", they are procrastination maximizers. Rationally people want to save time, but emotionally your heart is where you spend a lot of time. So if someone is saving your time, you will thank them, and then you'll forget them. If someone takes all your free time in a way that is not completely repulsive, they will become your tribe.
Something similar is visible on LW. On one hand, we are complaining that LW is just another shiny toy for procrastination. On the other hand, if there is a week without too many articles (the best time to stop procrastinating and actually do something), we complain that LW is dying because of too much censorship or negativity or whatever. Maybe the best thing for most LWers would be if Eliezer would simply turn off the whole website for a month, and only display a text "stop procrastinating, go out and win; the website will be back on September 1st when all of you are expected to report your progress in a special Thread". But would they hate it? Absolutely. Also, they would simply spend the whole August watching kitten videos on YouTube and refreshing HP:MoR homepage.
The only way to build an online community is to create a site where people can procrastinate.
Maybe the best thing for most LWers would be if Eliezer would simply turn off the whole website for a month, and only display a text "stop procrastinating, go out and win; the website will be back on September 1st when all of you are expected to report your progress in a special Thread". But would they hate it?
I would love that. Eliezer, please do this.
But yeah, I would spend the whole August reading old Unqualified Reservations comment threads or something like that (I don't fancy kitten videos).
Why do transhumanists keep setting arbitrary (and frankly nonsensical) "immortality" dates in this century, like 2045?
One, these dates fall within the life expectancies of people alive in 2014. Plenty of people alive now could survive another 30 years and a few months any way, just through natural maturation and aging; they won't mysteriously "become immortal" by making it to January 1, 2045.
Two, you can't tell if a longevity breakthrough has occurred any faster than the rate at which humans happen to live. You would need institutions ...
Quite rigid doesn't tell you at all what you need to do to mess with them and reprogram the brain to do something different.
It's theoretically possible that you can change some mental patterns if you exert strong enough stress. People are certainly possible to switch up their circadian rhythms after having jet lag produced through a intercontinental flight.
I was unclear. There are a number of ways to influence your circadian rhythm. These do allow you to change time zones, etc. It is not clear that these can be taken advantage of for short polyphasic sleep. However, speculation is not necessary, as Dr. Stampi addresses this point in his book (p. 174-175):
Circadian rhythms do not appear to be affected (with the exception of minor phase-shifts found in some studies) during polyphasic sleep schedules, but more detailed studies are required. Preferred times for sleepiness bouts and the "forbidden zone" to sleep tend to occur at circadian times similar to normal monophasic conditions. Anchor-sleep periods at constant times definitely appear to improve stability of circadian rhythms. Data presented in this review suggest also that in designing polyphasic schedules the timing of sleep periods should respect the underlying dynamics of biological rhythms.
The data available verifies my view that a successful polyphasic schedule must respect the circadian drive. Schedules like Uberman seem much less plausible, and other schedules with a "core" period more plausible, but unlikely to be better than monophasic or biphasic (long night sleep with afternoon nap), as those schedules respect the circadian rhythm by their nature.
There one theory not yet covered in our discussion. It possible to imaging sleep as a garbage collection process. After N hours of being awake the body needs N/2 hours of sleep to get sort through all the information stored while being awake. It's also possible that it needs (N^2)/32 hours of sleep to sort through all the information.
Both formula suggest a monophasic sleep schedule of 8 hours for a 24 hour day but the second one also allows Uberman sleep to work. I'm not aware that the academic sleep literature proves that the relevant formula is linear and not quadratic.
This is an intriguing suggestion. Stampi discusses this possibility as well (p. 18-19):
In other words, the recuperative value of sleep on performance may not be linearly correlated with sleep duration; this is suggested by many studies presented in this volume. Indeed, even under sleep deprivation, short naps normally produce remarkable recuperative effects, disproportionate to their duration.
First, I am not aware of any work in the academic sleep literature that directly addresses this question aside from the few studies into short polyphasic sleep. Based on my quick reading of a few sections of Stampi's book, these studies seem to have a number of methodological problems, mainly that they had small sample sizes, but I highlight another major one later in this post (sleep inertia).
I'm happy to see others mention a counterexample (that staying awake for a long period of time requires proportionally less sleep to recover) I was detailing as well. I'll agree that this is not so convincing, as it necessarily involves sleep deprivation. However, it does show that sleep can be more recuperative under certain circumstances, which may be good or bad for proponents of short polyphasic sleep.
Stampi discusses a few other factors in his book that must be factored in. These include the minimum amount of time required for sleep to have any recuperative value, sleep inertia (post-nap grogginess), and the time to fall asleep. It is possible that whatever process that occurs during sleep could be made more efficient in some sense by breaking sleep into multiple instances. That is speculation, however, and what is not speculation is that naps have significant overhead costs associated with them. Stampi seems to recognize that falling asleep fast is difficult if you are well rested and don't have the help of your circadian drive, as well as the very real effect of sleep inertia. He proposes that people might be able to train themselves to fall asleep or wake up fully on demand. Either would be remarkably useful to people with insomnia or hypersomnia, and I am not aware of any technique that's fast enough to work here (the closest I can think of is the Bootzin technique for conditioned insomnia).
In Stampi's book, it's suggested that none of the testing done on subjects on short polyphasic sleep schedules were done within 20 to 30 minutes of them waking from a nap. This strikes me as a significant source of bias in those studies.
There also is the issue that it appears sleep serves multiple purposes, only one of which may be garbage collection. I think it's likely that some purposes are better served by polyphasic sleep in line with the argument you've just made, but others are not.
(I should also note that this analysis totally ignores the circadian rhythm. The recuperative value of sleep and feelings of alertness are both functions of location in the circadian cycle.)
That makes a difference for the spread of memes, if you are interested in why the meme spreads.
With respect to polyphasic sleep as a meme, what bothers me so much is that many rationalists did not do their homework before diving in. I don't know about others, but I at least do some fact checking before doing anything odd. Polyphasic sleep should have set off a few red flags right off the bat, yet best I can tell, even something as easily shown as the problems with the REM claims never were mentioned on LessWrong.
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.
