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3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Eliezer Yudkowsky is writing a new sequence called "Yudkowsky’s Abridged Guide to Intelligent Characters." On the one hand, it's great; quite interesting to read and very useful to rational fiction writers. On the other hand, I'm kinda saddened that Eliezer appears to have given up on LessWrong; the sequence is posted entirely on his Tumblr, and uses his Facebook as a discussion forum.
I'm curious as to why he's given up on lesswrong. My knee-jerk reaction would be "because the attitude on lesswrong is now incredibly bad and fully counter to the goals he had for the place", but I'd like to know in his own words why he's less active in the LW community.
I can't find the link now, but I seem to recall him saying that Facebook was more hedonic than LessWrong because he could simply delete and block people who lowered the discussion quality without technical obstacles or social controversy.
Well, if posting on LW is no longer fun, shouldn't we try to go more meta and fix the problem?
Of course, this shouldn't be Eliezer's top priority. And generally, it shouldn't be left to Eliezer to fix every single detail.
I think it would be good to have some kind of psychological task force on LessWrong. By which I mean people who actually study and apply the stuff, in the same way we have math experts here.
The next step in the Art could be to make rationality fun. And I don't mean "do funny things that signal your membership in LW community" but rather invent systematic ways how to make instrumentally rational things feel better, so you alieve they are good.
More generally, to overcome the disconnection between what we believe and how we feel. I think many people are doing the reversed stupidity here. We have learned that letting our emotions drive our thoughts is wrong. So the solution was to disconnect emotions from thoughts. That is a partial solution which works, but has a costly impact on motivation. Eliezer wrote that it is okay to accept some emotions, if they are compatible with the rational thoughts. But the full solution would be to let our thoughts drive our em...
the sequence is posted entirely on his Tumblr
It's also posted in a weird way? Despite following him when he first advertised his Tumblr, I don't see it on my Tumblr dash (but obviously following the links works).
Person A is an Olympic-level athlete. He can perform amazing physical feats. The limits of his ability can be scored against some sort of metric (lap time, distance jumped, etc.), and since he's working to improve on them, his own personal limits are known to him.
Person B is of average physical fitness.
Person C has a moderate chronic illness. He struggles to perform basic physical feats, but can function independently with some difficulty.
If all three of these people were secretly transplanted into an environment with lower oxygen levels and began to experience mild hypoxia, it seems that Persons A and C would both be more sensitive to this change than Person B. Person A would notice it because he would no longer be able to perform outstanding physical feats to the level he's accustomed to. Person C would notice it because he'd struggle to carry out basic activities.
[Edit for clarity: I'm not saying that Person B would never notice this, but that he would be less sensitive to it, because his performance is higher-variance and subject to less of a "state change", and doesn't have a fine, frequently-scrutinised boundary between what he can and can't do.]
Alternatively:
Pers...
I think the basic difference is that people B and E just don't care and are less likely to notice these things because they're not interested in them.
Replace your person B with a person B' who is also of average fitness but recently started a new fitness regime and has been busy quantifying himself. He will notice his mild hypoxia as soon as A.
A and C are much closer to the limits of their respective physical bodies than B. A - due to his high motivation (he is a maximizer, while B is a satisficer, if A didn't have a motivation to maximize his results, he could do the same (or better) as B), C - due to his limited physical abilities. Therefore, they have lower tolerance for the worse environment. In other words, if we plot physical abilities on x axis and the expected/desired result (i.e.result that they have a motivation to achieve) on y axis, we would probably obtain a convex function whose graph is below the line y=x (which corresponds to pushing the physical limits of the body).
I recently asked about the ethics of writing articles explaining how people applied the dark arts in practice. Hopefully, such an article would help people resist those dishonest approaches more than it would aid people in employing them.
So here you go: How to Pitch a Growth Stock: Cognitive Bias Edition. I'm not sure of what LW thinks about cross-posting in general, so here is just a highlight:
...The key principle here is the conservation of conservativeness. You want an estimate for them that is both very large and sounds conservative. To do this, you take advantage of scope insensitivity and arbitrage between the TAM stage and the company-specific stage. By making the company-specific stages (market share, profit margin, valuation) sufficiently conservative sounding, you can get away with an aggressive TAM [Total Addressable Market] estimate while keeping the whole thing sounding conservative. Scope-insensitivity means you can increase the TAM estimate at a lower cost of conservativeness than you can the company-specific elements, so there are gains from trade.
So once you’ve multiplied your TAM, market share, profit margin and valuation, you come up with an estimate for what this
I built my first arduino project this month! I was Alina Starkov, the Sun Summoner, for Halloween, so I built accelerometer controlled LED gauntlets so I could turn the lights at my wrists on and off with gestures.
The instructable I wrote is here.
I had an enormous amount of fun, and the arduino system (I was using LilyPad, since I needed it to be sewable) was very beginner friendly. Glad to answer questions/provide encouragement!
Oh, and here are pics of the final costume. (I ran into a HJPEV at my Halloween party)
You still have time to register for the END DEATH Cryonic Convention in Laughlin, Nevada, this coming week end:
A Story on MIRI in the Financial Times.
Luke wrote a post on MIRI's blog acknowledging the story and making a few clarifications.
FAI concerns seem to be getting more and more high profile lately. MIRI, too, seem more competent now than ever, especially when compared to how they were only a few years ago. Am I alone in thinking these kinds of thoughts? Do others feel like these trends will continue?
It just occured to me.. is there such a thing as Friendship Research? There's a lot of research on eros, sexuality and romance, and on family relations, storge, and on general altruism, agape, but what about plain old Friendship/Phileo?
Years ago a friend let me try his Zelda videogame to have a chance to poke unabashed fun at my clumsiness with console controls, but had a funnier time with my in-world cluelessness. At one moment, I was trapped in a cave whose exit was too high for walking, and I was armed only with a ranged weapon. Atop the exit was a ladder. I was lost. Exasperated, my friend showed me how to get out of there. Never in a million years would I have deduced that I was supposed to shoot the ladder so it would fall to the floor and let me climb to the exit. I was about 23 years old.
More recently, I helped my boss install some applications in Android tablets. I had (and have) never received formal training in the Android OS, and after testing several applications I found the problem of how to close them. I ended up developing the habit of going into the task manager to manually terminate any program I wanted to close. It would never have occurred to me that going into the open programs list and swiping them off the screen would close them, which I only learned two years later by accidentally watching someone else do it.
Programmers and I have clearly different ideas on what is intuitively obvious and what is not, but maybe it's just me being a clueless 1980s dinosaur. Opinions?
I've recently begun to experiment with alcohol for entertainment. While intoxicated I attempt to retain my mental control despite handicaps as a challenge in rationality. This has led me to observe my thinking patterns while sober more often--to a hypothetical superrational being, humans in the best scenario must seem at least as impaired as those beings would in their version of drunkedness. Some of the things I'm hoping to test are how my ability to analyze logical propositions, assign probability to various outcomes, or determine the choice that maximizes utility decline.
While testing my physical capabilities is straightforward (line walking, raise one foot and count), testing mental capabilities is much harder and I'm struggling to think of tests that are simple enough to self-administer in a handicapped state and produce results that I can analyze then or later. This will help me answer the question of How scratched can the lens be before it can no longer can see its flaws? Any suggestions of tests would be appreciated.
I enjoy taking long walks outside, but it's starting to get cold out. I'd like to continue my walks, but I need better protective gear.
People who live in cold climates: How do you dress up to stay warm for long periods outside when it's freezing / windy / snowing? What advice would you give for choosing appropriate clothing? Any specific brands you'd recommend? Any links to guides for choosing appropriate clothing?
My area (Baltimore, MD) doesn't usually get much colder than around 0 degrees Fahrenheit even with the wind chill, so I don't need the type of gear that really cold climates require.
If you want to be comfortable for an extended period the key is to have insulation everywhere.
Find boots that keep your feet dry and warm, use thick socks. You can cheap out on everything but boots, buy good boots.
Get two layers on your legs, long underwear and pants might cut it, but ski pants make a night and day difference.
Find a coat that is not drafty, if it is not warm enough, layer sweaters and long sleeve shirts until it is.
Toque (I've heard them called beanies) and scarf. Always cover your head and neck.
Gloves or mitts, go overboard on these nothing ruins your fun like cold hands. Wool is always warmer than it looks.
I touched on layering a few times, if you are not familiar with it it is the secret to staying warm (and comfortable, if the day warms up you just shed layers). Layers trap warm air and become more than a sum of the parts, for your core you don't need high quality attire, just something to block the wind and a few layers to trap air.
0 degrees Fahrenheit
For our readers who like to use SI units: That is about -17.7°C
The trick to surviving in colder climates is layering. T-Shirt plus shirt plus pullover plus a good winter jacket should do the trick. Some people like to layer trousers but for me a good pair of jeans does the trick. Look for good winter boots as feet loose a lot of heat. Cover your head with a hat, wear a scarf. Experiment with these things as there is comfort and aesthetics to be considered. Wear gloves or start getting used to walking with your hands in your pockets. If you do wear gloves take them off to shake someones hand, anything else is extremely rude.
Long underwear is less ridiculous than actually layering trousers.
Don't forget to layer your socks! Feet are really important.
I'm going to be graduating with my PhD in physics (theory) this coming spring and am beginning to look for jobs.
Any tips? Any mistakes you made when looking for jobs that you can tell me about? For those already with jobs in the technology industry: if you could go back in time what would you change about the way you searched for jobs?
Less likely but still worth asking: if you happen to know of a job in either the Baltimore/Washington/Virginia area or in the Bay area that I might be qualified for don't hesitate to tell me about it.
Oh my goodness are you doing it wrong. Your next employer will ask what your last salary was. Yes, of course they will ask. But woe to you if you actually answer! You have much to learn young padawan.
My father, Wendell Potts, died on Friday:
http://www.wassonfuneralhome.com/obituaries/Wendell-Potts/#!/Obituary
He suffered from some sort of dementia, and like a lot of people in that situation he faded away physically as well as mentally.
Years ago, before Dad became ill, we had discussed cryonics, and he said he didn't want it. I respected his wishes, so my sister Michele and agreed I to have his remains cremated.
Yet this coming week end I will help to run a cryonics convention in Laughlin, Nevada, for people who talk about "living forever," depending on how you define that phrase.
I was recently linked to this Wired article from a few months back on new results in the Bohmian interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-new-quantum-reality/
Should we be taking this seriously? The ability to duplicate the double slit experiment at classical scale is pretty impressive.
Or maybe this is still just wishful thinking trying to escape the weirdnesses of the Copenhagen and Many Worlds interpretations.
Working on a near future hard sci fi story. What are plausible economic reasons to have a fair number of space stations? (generally earth orbit but can be further out)
Arthur Clarke's idea of reduced gravity prolonging significantly human life. Sadly, the available evidence does not quite point in this direction. But for a sci-fi story it might be quite OK (e.g. it is discovered that microgravity prevents Alzheimers').
Not an expert, but my understanding (from reading Heinlein, and I think other sources) is that it's hard to dissipate heat in space, because there's nothing to conduct it away.
Cooling is much easier on the ground.
In space you can only dissipate heat by radiation. In an atmosphere you can also transfer excess heat into matter that you can carry away and dump elsewhere, using conduction, convection, and forced circulation.
For a concrete example, consider Google's average 2011 power consumption of 258MW. What happens if they do all that in a huge server farm in space? Assume the exterior is a perfect black body and the interior is a perfect thermal conductor.
From the Stefan-Boltzmann law, for the equilibrium surface temperature to be at the boiling point of water, the surface area must be 235000 sq.m., or the area of a sphere of diameter 387m. Alternatively, if it was a large flat shape, edge-on to the Sun, it could be a 350m square.
Increasing the surface area with lots of large parallel fins, like on a heatsink, only works when immersed in a thermally conductive circulating medium. In space, the fins just block each others' view, and the effective radiative area is that of the convex hull.
I watched a video about a Baptist minister trying to find a Christian in Sweden. It's amusing but not too surprising (he finds a Christian, but she's not from there, he finds someone who believes in God, but he's a Muslim), but then he finds someone who believes in Kopimism-- a religion in which copying is sacred.
Kopimism made simple:[9]
All knowledge to all;
The pursuit of knowledge is sacred;
The circulation of knowledge is sacred;
The act of copying is sacred
.
According to the Kopimist constitution:[10]
Copying of information is ethically right;
Disseminatio...
What is the current status on formalizing timeless decision theory? I am new to LW, and have a mathematics background and would like to work on decision theory (in the spirit of LW). However, all I can find is some old posts (2011) of Eliezer saying that write ups are in process, as well as a 120 page report by Eliezer from MIRI which is mostly discussing TDT in words as well as the related philosophical problems. Is there a formal self contained definition of TDT out there?
I just went through a big pile of paper notes.
Only to find out that I already digitized all the stuff I deemed relevant into Evernote resulting in a full trash can. On a more positive note, I gained some perspective that the stuff that was important or a big problem at that time isn't one anymore, giving some tranquility in the long run.
Speaking of books, is there place where iI can buy a printed version of the sequences? Reading on a screen is not as comfortable as a classical book for various reasons.
For most of my life, I've heard weather forecasts in the news be described as infamously unreliable. Has there been any serious advance in this field? Is the unreliability of weather forecasts just another of those too-popular memes about things we love to hate?
Dan Carlin talks about AI in the context of existential risks in a recent episode of his podcast Common Sense. The discussion on AI starts around 33 mins.
He does a pretty good job of introducing relevant concepts to his audience, and includes quotes from Steven Hawking, Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom.
I just got warm fuzzies from this video, where His Cleverness Elon Musk says (about the necessity of soliciting negative feedback when starting a company):
You should take the approach that you the entrepreneur are wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.
He also says in this much longer interview at MIT that unfriendly AI is "probably" "our biggest existential threat".
Understanding how rights work:
This topic still confuses me greatly. Let's take the example of the "Right to Life, Liberty and the Security of Person". Can a "Right to Cryogenic Treatment" be argued from there? Would that, in turn, simply entail that I get to sign up for cryogenic treatment without obstacles and cannot be forbidden from doing so (for instance, cryo is illegal in France), or could it be spun otherwise?
Nearly all of Ritalin's recent comments have been downvoted, most of them twice. Granted, some of them aren't exactly brilliant, but I don't think such a massive downvoting is warranted. What gives?
There is Superintelligence reading group going on and I realised that I am actually member in another reading group. Which made me wonder: Is there a general website for reading groups? My reading list is long and I could use the mild social incentive to read through it. Also the discussion usually is very valuable.
What are excellent nonfiction books available in audio format? I'm especially looking for audio books in the following categories:
Nothing that requires knowledge of calculus, please.
[Should I have posted this somewhere in the media thread?]
Can anyone recommend any good books/resources on dyspraxia?
Ideally suitable for adults with a reasonable background understanding of psychology. Most of the stuff I've been able to find has been aimed for teachers/parents.
How often do you post on Twitter, on average?
[pollid:792]
I am asking this to improve my model of how is Twitter typically used. Because I have seen people with wildly different patterns.
On Facebook, I ran a quasi-experiment on if it was possible to nerd-snipe philosophers. My conclusion is that it worked to a mild degree. Further conclusions on whether this is the sort of debates people should try avoiding pending.
I linked to this a few days ago. I've been experimenting with using the technique described over the past few days, and it seems to work pretty well. For example, trying to spend all of my mental bandwidth noticing good things (re-noticing good things I already noticed was allowed) seemed to get me out of a depressive funk in an hour or two. The technique also has some other interesting benefits: some of the positive things I notice are good things that I did, which has the effect of reinforcing those behaviors, and by noticing the good things that are going on in social interactions, I enjoy myself more and become more relaxed and fun to be around (in theory at least--only limited experience with this one thus far), and sometimes I get valuable ideas through realizing that something that initially seemed bad actually has a hidden upside (reminds me of research I've read about lucky people).
At this point, I'm left wondering why humans evolved to be so gosh-darn negative all the time. It feels like there must be some hidden upside to being negative that just hasn't occurred to me.
It's not so much that there's an upside to negativity as that continued positivity is evolutionarily useless. Evolution wants you to "chase the dragon" of steep, exciting highs rather than maintain a reasonably happy steady-state or, worse yet from Its perspective, "go full transhuman" and rewrite your own mind-design to bring Being Happy and Doing the Right Things into perfect alignment (which we can't do yet, but probably will be able to someday).