= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Open thread, Jan. 19 - Jan. 25, 2015
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. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (302)
Anyone have a source for a summary of full life extension testing/supplementation regime?
Thiel?Kurzweil?
I've let things slide for a while, and want to get back on track with a full regime, including hormones and pharmaceuticals. I'm thinking cardiovascular, blood sugar, hormone, and neuroprotection.
Start with medical tests for cholesterol, blood pressure, vitamin D, magnesium, diabetes and anything else your doctor recommends based on your age, family and disease history.
I would not recommend hormones. Beware of Algernon's law - if a simple biochemical tweak were always helpful, it'd probably already be that way. In particular a lot of things that try to work against 'aging' as opposed to specific dysfunctions will probably cause cancer. Thiel is a particular offender there, he recently started taking HGH with the justification "we'll probably have cancer licked in a decade or two". I read that statement to some people in my lab, where it provoked universal laughter.
The key question: helpful, for what?
There's no reason to think Evolution has optimized my machinery for longevity.
As for giggles, I'll bet on Kurzweil's predictions over the people in your lab.
The longer you live, and especially the longer you remain healthy, the more evolutionarily fit you are. At least insofar as it doesn't funge against other traits evolution cares even more about, there's every reason to think evolution has optimized your machinery for longevity. We might find the non-helpful side of the tradeoff to actually be beneficial to modern human eyes even if they're horrible evolutionarily, like an ideal one would be "doubles your lifespan, makes you infertile", but there won't be anything evolution would see as a free lunch or a good tradeoff.
CellBioGuy attributed the "cancer licked in a decade or two" prediction to Thiel, not Kurzweil, do you actually have a source for it from Kurzweil? And does he have any particular reasons for stating it? Because even as someone on board with the singularity thing, that sounds like an insane pipe dream.
A couple of remarks to expand on RowanE's points for anyone who may be skeptical that evolution cares at all about longevity past (something like) typical childrearing age:
This is all true. However buyandbuydavis has a point. Evolution optimizes for offspring and longevity is only selected for as a means to that end. When you selectively breed and mutate fruit flies and nematodes for lifespan over hundreds of generations you can double or triple them, universally at the expense of total offspring. Granted mammals are much more k selected, putting lots of effort into a few offspring, than those r selected species that throw hundreds or even thousands of eggs to the wind per generation so lifespan does matter at least some to us and we probably already lie somewhere along that evolutionary axis away from the flies. But you can still see how there might be some tension between the two optimizations and we're certainly not perfectly optimized for longevity.
That doesnt change my assessment that within any given existing evolved tuned organism a lot of the evidence ive seen suggests that mucking with hormone levels exogenously (as opposed to endogenously through general health activity diet etc) to try to keep energy or cell division or whatever up in the absence of an existing pathology of that hormone system will probably increase cancer rates.
Theres actually a promising line of research on a substance being developed by one of the scientific grandaddies of my current metabolism research that appears to be broadly neuroprotective via messing with regulation of aerobic respiration, something that also goes weird in muscles with age. I greatly look forward to seeing if it increases tumor rates too [there are biochemical mechanistic reasons i think it might] or if that particular dysregulation is something you can attack without nasty side effects (though i gotta say i would take a raised cancer risk to hold off alzheimers or parkinsonism or traumatic brain injury any day).
I don't know if this is what you meant by "summary", but Kurzweil's book (co-written with <edit> some homeopath) Transcend (Amazon) is his most up-to-date effort. I've read it mostly and it seems well researched and also explains the science behind its recommendations.
I also thought I'd mention that there are now certain compounds (Wikipedia) which show some evidence of initiating telomerase production in adult humans. If this drug works as well in humans as it has been shown to work in mice, it should significantly increase your healthspan.
Well...
Oh.
Remember the 80/20 rule. Don't over-optimize; it could be expensive and dangerous.
At least get your diet in line before you worry too much about pharmaceuticals.
Well, someone had to say it:
http://edge.org/response-detail/26073
Dylan Evans Founder and CEO of Projection Point; author, Risk Intelligence
The Great AI Swindle
Smart people often manage to avoid the cognitive errors that bedevil less well-endowed minds. But there are some kinds of foolishness that seem only to afflict the very intelligent. Worrying about the dangers of unfriendly AI is a prime example. A preoccupation with the risks of superintelligent machines is the smart person’s Kool Aid.
This is not to say that superintelligent machines pose no danger to humanity. It is simply that there are many other more pressing and more probable risks facing us this century. People who worry about unfriendly AI tend to argue that the other risks are already the subject of much discussion, and that even if the probability of being wiped out by superintelligent machines is very low, it is surely wise to allocate some brainpower to preventing such an event, given the existential nature of the threat.
Not coincidentally, the problem with this argument was first identified by some of its most vocal proponents. It involves a fallacy that has been termed "Pascal’s mugging," by analogy with Pascal’s famous wager. A mugger approaches Pascal and proposes a deal: in exchange for the philosopher’s wallet, the mugger will give him back double the amount of money the following day. Pascal demurs. The mugger then offers progressively greater rewards, pointing out that for any low probability of being able to pay back a large amount of money (or pure utility) there exists a finite amount that makes it rational to take the bet—and a rational person must surely admit there is at least some small chance that such a deal is possible. Finally convinced, Pascal gives the mugger his wallet.
This thought experiment exposes a weakness in classical decision theory. If we simply calculate utilities in the classical manner, it seems there is no way round the problem; a rational Pascal must hand over his wallet. By analogy, even if there is there is only a small chance of unfriendly AI, or a small chance of preventing it, it can be rational to invest at least some resources in tackling this threat.
It is easy to make the sums come out right, especially if you invent billions of imaginary future people (perhaps existing only in software—a minor detail) who live for billions of years, and are capable of far greater levels of happiness than the pathetic flesh and blood humans alive today. When such vast amounts of utility are at stake, who could begrudge spending a few million dollars to safeguard it, even when the chances of success are tiny?
Why do some otherwise very smart people fall for this sleight of hand? I think it is because it panders to their narcissism. To regard oneself as one of a select few far-sighted thinkers who might turn out to be the saviors of mankind must be very rewarding. But the argument also has a very material benefit: it provides some of those who advance it with a lucrative income stream. For in the past few years they have managed to convince some very wealthy benefactors not only that the risk of unfriendly AI is real, but also that they are the people best placed to mitigate it. The result is a clutch of new organizations that divert philanthropy away from more deserving causes. It is worth noting, for example, that Give Well—a non-profit that evaluates the cost-effectiveness of organizations that rely on donations—refuses to endorse any of these self-proclaimed guardians of the galaxy.
But whenever an argument becomes fashionable, it is always worth asking the vital question—Cui bono? Who benefits, materially speaking, from the growing credence in this line of thinking? One need not be particularly skeptical to discern the economic interests at stake. In other words, beware not so much of machines that think, but of their self-appointed masters.
Not me! As I fully expected, I've earned less than the minimum wage for my book on the singularity. And I get the impression that most people involved in the singularity movement are earning far less than they could given their skill set.
It seems to me that there are two key points in Evans's argument where he makes a controversial claim and needs to justify it, and that at both he kinda cheats.
The first is where he goes from a description of the "Pascal's Mugging" scenario to saying that that's a good way to describe concerns over unfriendly AI. (Rather than, e.g., seeing them as analogous to insurance, where one pays a modest but annoying sum for alleged protection against various unlikely but potentially devastating events.) He doesn't make any attempt at all to justify this; I think he just hopes that the reader won't notice.
The second is where he suggests that "some of those who advance [UFAI arguments]" are getting a lucrative income stream from doing so. It seems to me that actually awfully few are, and most of those could have got richer faster and more reliably by other more normal means. So if he's saying about their motives what he seems to be, then again he really owes the reader some justification. Which, again, is not there.
(Maybe there's a third. I think his last paragraph is just repeating the one that precedes it. But maybe he's suggesting some other, more powerful "economic interests" at work; if so, it's not at all clear to me who he has in mind.)
You say that as if the point of view expressed by Dylan Evans here is one that hasn't been expressed before. It seems to me more like what until recently was the default reaction to any concerns about unfriendly AI.
I've noticed a pattern: Someone implies that some (critical or controversial) position X isn't represented here, even though X is obviously represented, often by prominent posters in highly up-voted comments.
I think what happens is that some advocates of X literally cannot recognize their own position when it's presented in a non-tribal manner.
Alternately, claiming novelty is something akin to a bravery debate.
The idea that AI is a low probability risk is one that has some merit, but one doesn't need a Pascal's Mugging sort of scenario to consider it to be a problem. If it is only 5 or 10 percent of existential risk in the next century then it is already a serious problem. In general, all existential risks are underfunded by a lot. The only difference with AI is that for a long time it has been even more underfunded than other sources of existential risk.
I think the entire core of his argument is a sleight-of-hand between "improbable" and "the kind of absurd improbability involved in Pascal's wager", without even (as others have pointed out) giving any arguments for why it's improbable in the first place.
As long as the probability of receiving money tomorrow decreases faster than the increase in the amount of promised money, you never have to hand over your wallet.
A booster for getting AI values right is the 2 sidedness of the process. Existential risk and benefit.
To illustrate - You solve poverty, you still have to face climate change, you solve climate change, you still have to face biopathogens, you solve biopathogens, you still have to face nanotech, you solve nanotech, you still have to face SI. You solve SI correctly, the rest are all done. For people who use the cui bono argument, I think this answer is usually the best one to give.
This assumes that you get a very strong singularity with either a hard take off or a fairly fast takeoff. If someone doesn't assign that high a probability to AI engaging in recursive self-improvement this argument will be unpersuasive.
GiveWell recommends extremely few charities. Unless you similarly write off the Red Cross, United Way, the Salvation Army, and everyone else GiveWell doesn't recommend, this looks like motivated skepticism.
I think this is a bad line of thought even before we get to the hypothesis that people are pushing UFAI risks for the money.
For one thing, people just get things wrong a lot-- it doesn't take bad motivations.
For another, it's very easy to jump to the conclusion that what seems to be correct to you is so obviously correct that other people must be getting it wrong on purpose.
For a third, even if you're right that other people are engaged in motivated thinking, you might be wrong about the motivation. For example, concern about UFAI might be driven by anxiety, or by "ooh, shiny! cool idea!" more than by narcissism or money.
advancedatheist, how sure are you of your motivations?
Not Quite the Prisoner's Dilemma
Evolving strategies through the Noisy Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma has revealed all sorts of valuable insights into game theory and decision theory. Does anyone know of any similar tournaments where the payouts weren't constant, so that any particular round might or might not qualify as a classic Prisoner's Dilemma?
Do you have a link for the original tournament?
There have been many Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments; at least a couple were done here on Less Wrong. Most such tourneys haven't included noise; to find out about the ones that did, try googling for some combination of the phrases "contrite tit for tat", "generous tit for tat", "tit for two tats", "pavlov", and "grim".
Has there been research on Prisoner's Dilemma where the players have limited amounts of memory for keeping track of previous interactions?
Google gives these:
http://www.pnas.org/content/95/23/13755.full.pdf
http://www.icmp.lviv.ua/journal/zbirnyk.79/33001/art33001.pdf
http://www.complex-systems.com/pdf/19-4-4.pdf
https://editorialexpress.com/cgi-bin/conference/download.cgi?db_name=ASSET2007&paper_id=287
http://ms.mcmaster.ca/~rogern4/pdf/publications_2009/annie_ltm.pdf
http://210.26.51.93/chenlab/images/4/4e/025.pdf
(http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/genealogy.jpg
Genealogy of the ideas contained in Taleb's work. Pretty useful. I had it embedded but it took up the entire page for me.
In my small fourth grade class of 20 students, we are learning how to write essays, and get to pick our own thesis statements. One kid, who had a younger sibling, picked the thesis statement: "Being an older sibling is hard." Another kid did "Being the youngest child is hard." Yet another did "Being the middle child is hard", and someone else did "Being an only child is hard." I find this as a rather humorous example of how people often make it look like they're being oppressed.
Does anyone know why people do this?
The more you can blame whatever difficulties and frustrations you have on things outside your control, the less you have to think of them as your own fault. People like to think well of themselves.
Taken at face value, the four statements aren't incompatible. Saying that being X is hard in an absolute sense isn't the same as saying that being X is harder than being Y in a relative sense, or that X people are being oppressed.
Sure, but the point is that the same argument applies to the flipside: everyone could've written essays like "X is fun" or "Y is fun" without contradiction. But they chose "hard" instead. Why?
There were sixteen other students in the class. For all we know, theses about fun things could have been in the majority.
If you accept what I wrote in the GP, where do you see a contradiction in the four statements? And if you don't, could you try to articulate why?
Yeah, maybe.
No, no I don't think you had a contradiction either. I was just saying that you could do the same thing with "fun." And maybe other kids did, as you say.
It is much easier to notice the things in your situation that don't go well than notice all the things that happen in someone else's situation.
I'm curious; have you pointed this out to the students? If so, how did they react?
Alex Miller, my son, is one of the students.
Ah, that clarifies that. I think I read "we are learning" as the teacher saying that since I've seen teachers use that language (e.g. "next week we'll learn about derivatives").
Alex greatly enjoyed being mistaken for his teacher.
So nice that you two are able to enjoy LessWrong together. Given that this is an open threat, is there anything you (or Alex) would like to share about raising rationalists? My daughters are 3yo and 1yo, so I'm only beginning to think about this...
EDIT: I made a top-level post here.
Alex loves using rationality to beat me in arguments, and part of why he is interested in learning about cognitive biases is to use them to explain why I'm wrong about something. I have warned him against doing this with anyone but me for now. I recommend the game Meta-Forms for your kids when they get to be 4-6. When he was much younger I would say something silly and insist I was right to provoke him into arguing against me.
Be charitable; don't assume they're trying to present themselves as martyrs. Instead they could be outlining the peculiar challenges and difficulties of their particular positions.
Life is hard for everyone at times.
Anybody should be able to write an essay "why my life is hard." They should also be able to write an essay "why my life is easy." It might be a great exercise to have every student write a second essay on a thesis which is essentially the opposite of the thesis of their first essay.
I wouldn't ascribe conscious intent to their actions, but it may be that making your own life seem harder is an evolved social behavior. Remember, humans are adaptation-executors, not fitness-maximizers, so it's entirely possible that the students thought they were being honest, when in fact they may have been subconsciously exaggerating the difficulties they were facing in day-to-day life.
Related: Why Does Power Corrupt?
If it's given how successful you were, it looks better if it was under worse circumstances. Thus, people benefit from overstating their challenges. Since people aren't perfect liars, they also overestimate their challenges.
Because running in the oppression olympics is the easiest way to gain status in most western societies. Looks like even children are starting to realise that, or maybe they're being indoctrinated to do so in other classes or at home.
Maybe they are friends and discussed their thesis topics with each other. I find it unlikely that 4 out of 20 students would come up with sibling related topics independently.
Or maybe they picked them out loud in class, and some of those were deliberate responses to others.
So what happens is: Albert is an oldest child whose younger sister is loud and annoying and gets all the attention. He says "I'm going to write about how being an older sibling is hard". Beth is a youngest child whose older brothers get all the new clothes and toys and things; she gets their hand-me-downs. She thinks Albert's got it all wrong and, determined to set the record straight, says "I'm going to write about how being the youngest child is hard." Charles realises that as a middle child he has all the same problems Albert and Beth do, and misses out on some of their advantages, and says he's going to write about that. Diana hears all these and thinks, "Well, at least they have siblings to play with and relate to", and announces her intention to explain how things are bad for only children.
Notice that all these children may be absolutely right in thinking that they have difficulties caused by their sibling situation. They may also all be right in thinking that they would be better off with a different sibling situation. (Perhaps there's another youngest child in the class who loves it -- but you didn't hear from him.)
Yeah, that sounds like the most likely possibility actually.
A lot of times different ways that people act are different ways of getting emotional needs, even if that isn't a conscious choice. In this case it is likely that they want recognition and sympathy for different pains they have have. Or, it's more likely the case that the different hurts they have (being lonely, being picked on, getting hand-me-downs, whatever) are easily brought to mind. But when the person tells someone else about the things in their life that bother them, it's possible that someone could say "hey, it sounds like you are really lonely being an only child" and they would feel better.
Some different example needs are things like attention, control, acceptance, trust, play, meaning. There is a psychological model of how humans work that thinks of emotional needs similar to physical needs like hunger, etc. So people have some need for attention, and will do different things for attention. They also have a need for emotional safety, just like physical safety. So just like if someone was sitting on an uncomfortable chair will move and complain about how their chair is uncomfortable, someone will do a similar thing if their big brother is picking on them.
Another reason people often make it look like they are being oppressed is that they feel oppressed. I don't know if you are mostly talking about people your age, or everyone, but it is not a surprise to me that lots of kids feel oppressed, since school and their parents prevent them from doing what they want. Plenty of adults express similar feelings though, i just expect not as many.
Each experience has its own difficulties that are unknown unless you've lived it.
Corollary: one's own difficulties always seem bigger than everyone else's.
We're looking for beta testers for the 16th "annual" Microsoft puzzle hunt. Interested folks should PM me, especially if you're in the Seattle area.
What app does less wrong recommend for to-do lists? I just started using Workflowy (recommended from a LW friend), but was wondering if anyone had strong opinions in favor of something else.
P.S. If you sign up for workflowy here, you get double space.
EDIT: The above link is my personal invite link, and I get told when someone signs up using it, and I get to see their email address. I am not going to do anything with them, but I feel obligated to give this disclaimer anyway.
I'm using workflowy as well, and it's the only to-do list software I've ever actually used for more than a few days.
One feature that I've wanted for a while is dependencies. Let's say you need to print out a form, but you need to purchase printer ink first. Being able to hide "print out form for xyz" until "buy printer ink" is completed would be great.
I've found success with OmniFocus.
I've tried a bunch, but Todoist is the only one that's powerful, flexible, quick, and easy enough for me to want to use.
I use a paper notebook, inspired by bullet journal and autofocus for daily/weekly goals when the list stays under 20 or so items. Recently a project started ballooning into more items than this system could handle, so I picked up todo.txt a month ago. I've been very happy with it so far. The system works with just a regular text editor and keeping all the lines in the file lexically sorted, but it's also a markup format that can be used with specific tools. I keep the project-specific list synced with a symbolic directory link from the project directory tree to Dropbox, and currently use the Simpletask app to update the list on my phone. Seems to work well for everything I need.
It depends on why I'm making the list.
If I'm making a todo list for a project I'm working on, Workflowy is good because its simple and supports hierarchical lists.
For longer lived stuff where I add and delete stuff like grocery/shopping lists or books to read, I use wunderlist because they have an android app, a standalone windows app and it looks pretty. Browser-based apps annoy me so I like the windows app and the android app is nice to have when I'm actually in the grocery store.
When I'm making a list because I need to be productive and not as a way to plan, I use a paper todolist: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0006HWLW2/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o08_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1. Checking things off on paper does wonders for productivity and having the printed thing helps set the mood.
Since Eliezer has forsaken us in favor of posting on Facebook, can somebody with an account please link to his posts? His page cannot be read by someone who is not logged in, but individual posts can be read if the url is provided. As someone who abandoned his Facebook account years ago, I find this frustrarting.
Here's a month's worth:
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153041257924228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153033570824228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153030238814228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153021749629228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152977126839228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152972605814228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152972301299228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152964087234228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152957903859228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152947952344228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152946520029228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152945423789228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152941108249228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152940624254228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152938634304228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152937953959228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152933586294228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152929868929228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152919146569228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152918491764228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152915799124228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152912313154228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152908949454228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152904788444228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152902713609228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152900703339228
Thank you! This is great.
Why would you not create a sockpuppet facebook account for the purposes of reading posts you want to read?
Not speaking for above poster: because that's not actually trivial - you need a real fake phone number to receive validation on, etc. Also, putting fake data into a computer system feels disvirtuous enough to put me off doing it further.
At one point there was a significant amount of discussion regarding Modafinil - this seems to have died down in the past year or so. I'm curious whether any significant updating has occurred since then (based either on research or experiences.)
(This is a repost from last week's open thread due to many upvotes and few replies. However, see here for Gwern's response.)
I meant to post something about my experience with armodafinil about a year ago, but I never got around to it. My overall experience was strongly negative. Looks like I did write a long post in a text file a day or so after taking armodafinil, so here's what I had to say back then:
Some background:
I'm a white male in my mid-20s. I have excessive daytime sleepiness, and I believe this is because I'm a long sleeper who has difficulty getting an adequate duration of sleep. There are several long sleepers in my family. My mother and I tend to not like how stimulants make us feel, e.g., pseudoephedrine makes us fairly nervous, though it will help our nasal congestion from allergies and help wake us up. I was interested in trying modafinil because I hear it has proportionally less of the negative effects compared against its wake-promoting effects.
My neurologist gave me a few samples of armodafinil, which is basically a variant of modafinil. I was busy in the month after I met my neurologist last and didn't think about taking it at all, but come mid-February I remembered to try it.
Saturday, Feb. 15, 2014:
I woke up at 8:30 am, as I usually did, and started eating a chocolate chip muffin for breakfast. During the breakfast I took 4000 IU of vitamin D and 150 mg of armodafinil. I took these at 8:37 am.
I started organizing files on my computer. I still felt fairly tired, and considered going back to sleep, but I did not because I try to keep a very regular sleep schedule. I will take naps in the afternoon (before 8 pm, or so, to avoid delaying my bedtime) if necessary, but I try to wait until then. Until around 10:30 am, I thought armodafinil was doing absolutely nothing. I know armodafinil takes some time to kick in, but I didn't expect that long. Maybe I'm one of the people for which modafinil doesn't work?
At around 11 am I realized that I felt weird. It was obvious that the armodafinil had kicked in fierce at that point. I checked my heart rate: 75 bpm, which is higher than normal, though not as high as other stimulants take me. I wouldn't quite describe how I felt as more awake, though I don't think I could involuntarily fall asleep now. It felt as if I could fall asleep if I wanted to, but I didn't want to. I felt a bit more nervous, perhaps, but that might just be the placebo effect. It certainly was not as strong as what 60 mg of pseudoephedrine does to me. I got a phone call from my apartment manager saying that they'll be showing my apartment today, so I (slowly) started sweeping and vacuuming to make my apartment a bit more presentable. I was pacing around like crazy while doing this.
At about 11:30 am I took a shower. I started realizing that I have no impulse control. Instead of washing myself, I'd start, get distracted by some thought, think about that for a while, realize I'm in the shower, forget where I was in my shower routine, etc. I started thinking that armodafinil might have given me ADHD, which is odd given that I've read it might be useful for the treatment of ADHD.
After the shower I consulted the note packet that came with the armodafinil. Given what these notes said, I think I was experiencing a side effect. The notes said to discontinue use of armodafinil if you experience these symptoms. "Okay, can do." is what I thought.
I went to the LessWrong meetup and told Vaniver that I think armodafinil is not doing nice things for me. Another LWer suggested that perhaps these effects go away with repeated use; I said that I didn't know, but I don't intend to find out. During the entire meetup I had a lot of difficulty sitting still. I got up a few times to get water, or a napkin, or a bag of chips, but I don't think I actually wanted any of those things; I guess I just didn't want to stay still.
The early afternoon is the hardest time for me to stay awake, and this meetup spanned that time entirely. I yawned a few times during the meetup, but I didn't become so drowsy that I had to take a nap, as I often do. I take this as evidence that armodafinil helps my EDS, though it's not that strong because I never really felt "awake" during this entire process. I felt really weird in a way that I can't quite describe.
After the meetup (about 4 pm), I rode my bike to the downtown library to return a book. Purely subjectively, I'd say armodafinil increased my endurance. I'm in reasonable shape now, but I felt that I could maintain 20+ mph easier today than a few days ago. Objectively, though, it doesn't seem that my average speed increased much if at all; it was about 13 mph on Saturday and 12 to 13 on most days.
When I got back to my apartment, I felt a little better. Still fidgety and easily distracted, but slightly better. Perhaps the exercise helps, or the armodafinil was wearing off? I go running around now usually anyway, so I hoped this would help more. I went on a run, but it didn't have quite the effect the bike ride did. I then started making dinner, but I was continually distracted by my computer through that.
I noticed that my tinnitus was much worse today. Not sure if this was due to the armodafinil, but it sounded at least 10 dB louder than usual. Ambient noises could not mask it.
Around 10 pm, I started feeling more tired, so I figured the armodafinil must be wearing off. I still felt odd and easily distracted, though. I read on my couch for a while until I felt as if I could fall asleep quickly, and I slept briefly on my couch. I woke up and moved to my bed, where it took me a while to fall asleep again, but I did. I woke up several times during the night and felt I had to try quite a few positions before I found something comfortable. This wasn't particularly restful. Otherwise, I don't think armodafinil did much to my nighttime sleep. I think if it hadn't caused some manic symptoms, I probably wouldn't have had any issues sleeping.
Sunday, Feb. 16, 2014:
I still felt a little odd when I woke up, but it was very obvious now that these effects were wearing off. I had read that armodafinil has a half-life of about 12 to 15 hours, so using a simple exponential decay with a conservative half-life, I saw that I still had the equivalent of about 45 mg of armodafinil in my system. Tomorrow morning that decrease to about 15 mg; after the third day it's down to 5 mg. I can't wait for this to be out of my system.
Overall, I'd say taking armodafinil was worthwhile as I learned something about myself, which is that I probably should avoid stimulants as much as possible.
(Not from my original intended post: I want to note that I'm doing much better now, after getting more sleep. No stimulants necessary. I haven't seen a neurologist since I wrote the post above and probably won't again.)
Your main complaints about your drug experience seem to be (a) feeling unusual, (b) having some difficulty managing your attention, (c) feeling excessively fidgety, (d) louder tinnitus, and (e) sleep difficulty. As someone who has experimented with psychoactive drugs a fair amount, including modafinil, my impression is that (a) and (b) are pretty common with psychoactive drugs and are almost always transient and harmless (unless you're driving a car, biking, operating heavy machinery, etc.). ((c) is less common but definitely present with some, e.g. coffee. (d) and (e) are probably good reasons to stop using a particular drug.) In fact, I've gotten to the point where I consider feeling unusual and having my attention work differently to be fun, interesting experiences to observe and learn from.
So my thought is that before trying modafinil, maybe people should experiment with small doses of strongly psychoactive drugs that don't have a 12-hour half life, perhaps in a safe & supervised environment, to learn that altered mental states aren't scary and can be pretty useful for certain tasks--they're like distinct mental gears you can enter using cheap, reliable external aids.
(For example, drink half a cup of coffee, then a full cup of coffee, then two cups of coffee on separate days to know what it's like to be highly stimulated, and a cup of beer, two cups of beer, and four cups of beer on separate days to know what it's like to be highly disinhibited. Kratom is another highly useful but little known legal psychoactive; for example, this successful blogger primarily credits kratom with his success at building his online empire, and I'm not surprised at all given my kratom experiences... any resistance I have to doing tasks seems to just melt away on kratom.)
(Disclaimer: I'm a foolish young person and maybe you should ignore everything I'm saying. Also if you really did experience stimulant induced mania you should probably follow the instructions on the label.)
Mixed feelings. If you need wakefullness it's available on tap, but with a side of anxiety and trouble going to sleep later if your dosage is not perfectly calibrated.
I've been thinking about (and writing out my thoughts on) the real meaning of entropy in physics and how it relates to physical models. It should be obvious that entropy(physical system) isn't well-defined; only entropy(physical model, physical system) is defined. Here, 'physical model' might refer to something like the kinetic theory of gases, and 'physical system' would refer to, say, some volume of gas or a cup of tea. It's interesting to think about entropy from this perspective because it becomes related to the subjectivist interpretation of probability. I want to know if anyone knows of any links to similar ideas and thoughts.
If you haven't already read Jaynes derivation of maxent, and the further derivation of much of statistical mechanics from those principles, that would be a good place to start.
In this way entropy is not much different from energy. The latter also depends on the model as much as on the physical system itself.
I'm going to disagree with you here. Not that energy doesn't depend on our models. It just depends on them in a very different way. The entropy of a physical system is the Shannon entropy of its distribution of 'microstates'. But there is no distribution of microstates 'out there'. It's a construction that purely exists in our models. Whereas energy does exist 'out there'. It's true that no absolute value can be given for energy and that it's relative, but in a way energy is far more 'real' than entropy.
Potential energy depends on what you set the zero level to, but I agree that this is very different than entropy. In particular, the difference in energy between two systems is well-defined.
"Out there" are fields, particles, interacting, moving, bumping into each other, turning into each other. Energy is a convenient description of some part of this process in many models. Just like with Jaynes' entropy, knowing more about the system changes its energy. For example, just like knowing about isotopes affects the calculated entropy of a mixed system, knowing about nuclear forces changes the calculated potential energy of the system.
Again, this is very different from the situation with entropy. I think you're confusing two meanings of the word 'model'. It's one thing to have an incomplete description of the physics of the system (for instance, lacking nuclear forces, as you describe). It's another to lack knowledge about the internal microstates of the system, even if all relevant physics are known. (In the statistics view, these two meanings are analogous to the 'model' and the 'parameters', respectively). Entropy measures the uncertainty in the distribution of the parameters. It measures something about our information about the system. The most vivid demonstration of this is that entropy changes the more you know about the parameters (microstates) of the system. In the limit of perfect microstate knowledge, the system has zero entropy and is at absolute zero. But energy (relative to ground state) doesn't change no matter how much information you gain about a system's internal microstates.
I understand what you are saying, but I am not convinced that there is a big difference.
How would you change this uncertainty without disturbing the system?
How would you gain this information without disturbing the system (and hence changing its energy)?
EDIT: see also my reply to spxtr.
You have to define what 'disturbing the system' means. This is just the classical Maxwell's demon question, and you can most definitely change this uncertainty without changing the thermodynamics of the system. Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon#Criticism_and_development
Especially, the paragraph about Landauer's work is relevant (and the cited Scientific American article is also interesting).
I agree with passive_fist, and my argument hasn't changed since last time.
If we learn that energy changes in some process, then we are wrong about the laws that the system is obeying. If we learn that entropy goes down, then we can still be right about the physical laws, as Jaynes shows.
Another way: if we know the laws, then energy is a function of the individual microstate and nothing else, while entropy is a function of our probability distribution over the microstates and nothing else.
I agree that it feels different. It certainly does to me. Energy feels real, while entropy feels like an abstraction. A rock falling on one's head is a clear manifestation of its potential (turned kinetic) energy, while getting burned by a hot beverage does not feel like a manifestation of the entropy increase. it feels like the beverage's temperature is to blame. On the other hand, if we knew precisely the state of every water molecule in the cup, would we still get burned? The answer is not at all obvious to me. Passive_fist claims that the cup would appear to be a absolute zero then:
I do not know enough stat mech to assess this claim, but it seems wrong to me, unless the claim is that we cannot know the state of the system unless it's already at absolute zero to begin with. I suppose a toy model with only a few particles present might shed some light on the issue. Or a link to where the issue is discussed.
If you know precisely the state of every water molecule in the system, there's no need for your finger to get burned. Just touch your finger to the cup whenever a slow-moving molecule is approaching, and remove it whenever a fast-moving molecule is approaching (Maxwell's demon).
Right, supposing you can have a macroscopic Maxwell's demon. So the claim is not that it is necessarily at absolute zero, but that it does not have a well-defined temperature, because you can choose it to behave (with respect to your finger) as if it were at any temperature you like. Is this what you are saying?
Well, no.
Temperature is the thermodynamic quantity that is shared by systems in equilibrium. "Cup of tea + information about all the molecules in the cup of tea" is in thermodynamic equilibrium with "Ice cube + kinetic energy (e.g. electricity)", in that you can arrange a system where the two are in contact but do not exchange any net energy.
Note that it is NOT in thermodynamic equilibrium with anything hotter than an ice cube, as Eliezer described in spxtr's linked article: http://lesswrong.com/lw/o5/the_second_law_of_thermodynamics_and_engines_of/
Basically, if you, say, try to use the information about the water and a Demon to put the system in thermal equilibrium with some warm water and electricity, you'll either be prevented by conservation of energy or you'll wind up not using all the information at your disposal. And if you don't use the information it's as if you didn't have it.
The salient point is that the system is not in thermal equilibrium with anything 'warmer' than "Ice cube + free energy."
If you know everything about the cup of tea, it really is at absolute zero, in the realest sense you could imagine.
Hm. I have to think more about this.
An easy toy system is a collection of perfect billiard balls on a perfect pool table, that is, one without rolling friction and where all collisions conserve energy. For a few billiard balls it would be quite easy to extract all of their energy as work if you know their initial positions and velocities. There are plenty of ways to do it, and it's fun to think of them. This means they are at 0 temperature.
If you don't know the microstate, but you do know the sum of the square of their velocities, which is a constant in all collisions, you can still tell some things about the process. For instance, you can predict the average number of collisions with one wall and the corresponding energy, related to the pressure. If you stick your hand on the table for five seconds, what is the chance you get hit by a ball moving faster than some value that will cause pain? All these things are probabilistic.
In the limit of tiny billiard balls compared to pool table size, this is the ideal gas.
I made a post about this a month or so ago. Yay!
That's pretty much exactly what I had in mind. Thanks.
There are approximations in figuring entropy and thermal statistics that may be wrong in very nearly immeasurable ways. The one that used to stick in my head was the calculation of the probability of all the gas in a volume showing up briefly in one-half the volume. Without doing math I figured it is actually much less than the classic calculated result, because the classic result assumes zero correlation between where any two molecules are, and once any kind of significant density difference exists between the two sides of the volume this will break.
But entropy is still real in the sense that it is "out there." An entire civilization is powered (and cooled) by thermodynamic engines, engines which quite predictable provide useful functionalities in ways predictable in detail from calculations of entropy.
A glass of hot water burns your skin even if you know the water and the skin's precise characterization in parameter space before they come in contact. Fast moving (relative to the skin) molecules of water break the bonds of some bits of skin they come in contact with. On the micro scale it may look like a scene from the matrix with a lot of slow moving machine gun bullets. The details of the destruction may be quite beautiful and "feel" cold, but essentially thanks to the central limit theorem, a whole lot of what happens will be predictable in a quite useful, and quite unavoidable way without having to appeal to the detail.
I think the only sense in which you can extract energy from water with a specially built machine that is custom designed for the current parameter space of the water, it is the machine which is at 0 or at least low temperature. And so the fact that useful energy can be extracted from the interaction of finite temperature water and a cold machine is totally consistent with entropy being real, thermal differences can power machines. And they do, witness the cars, trucks, airplanes and electric grid that are essential for our economy. The good news is you can get all the energy you need without knowing the detailed parameter space of the hot water, which is helpful because you then don't have to redesign your cold machine every few microseconds as you bring in new hot water to it from which to extract the next bit of energy.
Entropy is as real as energy whether it feels that way or not, and that is why machines work even when left unattended by consciousnesses to perceive their entropy and its flows.
Both the "entropy is in the mind" and "entropy is real" explanations seem plausible to me (well, I am not a physicist, so anything may seem plausible), so now that I think about it... maybe the problem is that even if we would be able to know a lot of stuff, we might still be limited in ways we can use this knowledge. And the knowledge you can't realistically use, it's as if you wouldn't even have it.
So, in theory, there could be a microscopical demon able to travel between molecules of boiling water without hitting any of them -- so from the demon's point of view, there is nothing hot about that water -- the problem is that we cannot do this with real stuff; not even with nanomachines probably. Calculating the path for the nanomachine would be computationally too expensive, and it is probably too big to fit between the molecules. So the fact is that a few molecules are going to hit that nanomachine, or any greater object, anyway.
Or perhaps we could avoid the whole paradox by saying: "Actually no, you cannot have the knowledge about all molecules of the boiling water. How specifically would you get it, and how specifically would you keep it up to date?"
This is pretty much it, and it's a really subtle detail that causes a lot of confusion. This is why the real problem with Maxwell's demon isn't how you obtain the information, it's how you store the information, as Landauer showed. To extract useful work you have to erase bits ('forget' knowledge) at some point. And this raises the entropy.
I think you're getting several things wrong here.
The assumption of zero correlation is valid for ideal gases. It will not break if there is a density difference. We're talking about statistical correlation here.
"Entropy is in the mind" doesn't mean that you need consciousness for entropy to exist. All you need is a model of the world. Part of Jaynes' argument is that even though probabilities are subjective, entropy emerges as an objective value for a system (provided the model is given), since any rational Bayesian intelligence will arrive at the same value, given the same physical model and same information about the system.
Statistical independence means the chance that a molecule is at a particular spot depends not at all on where the other molecules are. Certainly if the molecules never hit each other, they only bounce off the walls of the volume, then this would be true as the molecules don't interract with each other so their probability of being one place or another is not changed by putting the other molecules anywhere, as long as they don't interract.
But molecules in a gas do interact they bounce off each other. Even an ideal gas. There is an average distance they travel before bouncing off another molecule called a mean free path. A situation where the mean free path is << size of volume is typical at STP.
Does this interaction break non-correlation? My intuition is that it does. But the thing I know for sure is that the only derivation I have ever seen for calculating the probability that all the gas is in 1/2 the volume was done with the assumptions of zero correlations, which we only know is the case for zero interaction, which is NOT an assumption required in the ideal gas models. And is certainly not true of any real gases.
This is as true for Entropy as it is for Energy. By this standard, Entropy and Energy are both in the mind, neither one is "realer" than the other.
Entropy is in the mind in exactly the same sense that probability is in the mind. See the relevant Sequence post if you don't know what that means.
The usual ideal gas model is that collisions are perfectly elastic, so even if you do factor in collisions they don't actually change anything. Interactions such as van der Waals have been factored in. The ideal gas approximation should be quite close to the actual value for gases like Helium.
Without a link! So I went to the sequences page in the wiki and the word entropy doesn't even appear on the page! Good job referring me there without a link.
Okay... Is that the same sense in which Energy is in the mind? Considering that this seems to be my claim that you are responding to, AND there is no reasonable way to get to a sequence page that corresponds to your not-quite-on-topic-but-not-quite-orthogonal response, that would be awfully nice to know.
Are you agreeing with me and amplifying, or disagreeing with me and explaining?
Probability is in the Mind.
THank you.
The thing that leaps out at me is that the rhetorical equation in that article between the sexiness of a woman being in the mind and the probability of two male children being in the mind is bogus.
I look at a woman and think she is sexy. If I assume the sexiness is in the woman, and that an alien creature would think she is sexy, or my wife would think she is sexy, because they would see the sexiness in her, then the article claims I have been guilty of the mind projection fallacy because the woman's sexiness is in my mind, not in the woman.
The article then proceeds to enumerate a few situations in which I am given incomplete information about reality and each different scenario corresponds to a different estimate that a person has two boy children.
BUT... it seems to me, and I would love to know if Eliezer himself would agree, even an alien given the same partial information would, if it were rational and intelligent, reach the same conclusions about the probabilities involved! So... probability, even Bayesian probability based on uncertainty is no more or less in my head than is 1+1=2. 1+1=2 whether I am an Alien mind or a Human mind, unlike that woman is sexy which may only be true in heterosexual male, homosexual female, and bisexual human minds, but not Alien minds.
But be that as it may, your comment still ignores the entire discussion, which is is Entropy and more or less "real" than Energy? The fact is that Aliens who had steam engines, internal combustion engines, gas turbines, and air conditioners would almost certainly have thermodynamics, and understand entropy, and agree with Humans on the laws of thermodynamics and the trajectories of entropy in the various machines.
If Bayesian probability is in the mind, and Entropy is in the mind, then they are like 1+1=2 being in the mind, things which would be in the mind of anything which we considered rational or intelligent. They would NOT be like "sexiness."
They don't change ANYTHING? Suppose I start with a gas of molecules all moving at the same speed but in different directions, and they have elastic collisions off the walls of the volume. If they do not collide with each other, they never "thermalize," their speeds stay the same forever as they bounce off the walls but not off each other. But if they do bounce off each other, the velocity distribution does become thermalized by their collisions, even when these collisions are elastic. So collisions don't chage ANYTHING? They change the distribution of velocities to a thermal one, which seems to me to be something.
So even if an ideal gas maintained perfect decorrelation between molecule positions in an ideal gas with collisions, which I do not think you can demonstrate (and appealing to an unlinked sequence does not count as a demonstration), you would still have to face the fact that an actual gas like Helium would be "quite close" to uncorrelated, which is another way of saying... correlated.
Recently, there has been talk of outlawing or greatly limiting encryption in Britain. Many people hypothesize that this is a deliberate attempt at shifting the overton window, in order to get a more reasonable sounding but still quite extreme law passed.
For anyone who would want to shift the overton window in the other direction, is there a position that is more extreme than "we should encrypt everything all the time" ?
Assuming you just want people throwing ideas at you:
Make it illegal to communicate in cleartext? Add mandatory cryptography classes to schools? Requiring everyone to register a public key and having a government key server? Not compensating identity theft victims and the like if they didn't use good security?
This is already the case in Estonia, where every citizen over the age of 14 has a government-issued ID card containing two X.509 RSA key pairs. TLS client authentication is widely deployed for Estonian web services such as internet banking.
(Due to ideological differences regarding the centralization of trust, I think it's unlikely that governments will adopt OpenPGP over X.509.)
Giving people an official RSA keypair in their smartcard government IDs is fine. That solves all sorts of problems, and enables a bunch of really cool tech.
Requiring that every public key used in any context be registered with the government, or worse, some sort of key escrow, is a totally different matter.
I was thinking less "everyone must register all their public keys, and you can't have a second identity with its own key" and more "everyone has to have at least 1 public key officially associated with them so that they can sign things and be sent stuff securely." And that Estonian system sounds pretty cool.
What would you estimate the probability of ever having the former without the latter being? Of having that happy state last for more than a few years?
Well the former pretty much describes the current state of affairs. Anyone with a government ID card or national healthcare ID probably has a chip embedded with an escrowed signing key. There's really nothing unique about Estonia here -- they're using the same system everyone else is using. Even if your country, like the USA, doesn't have a national ID of some kind or doesn't have a chip embedded, your passport does. The international standard governing "smart passports" being issued by just about every country in existence for the past 5-10 years includes embedded digital signature capability.
Now I don't really know how to estimate the probability of sliding into the latter case. I don't see them as intrinsically connected however.
Generating private/public key pairs is trivially easy.
To be a bit more specific than "we should encrypt everything all the time":
Mandatory full-disk encryption on all computer systems sold, by analogy to mandatory seat belts in cars — it used to be an optional extra, but in the modern world it's unsafe to operate without it.
Frame attempts to limit the use of encryption as unilateral disarmament, and name specific threats.
As in, if the government "has your password", how sure are you that your password isn't eventually going to be stolen by Chinese government hackers? Putin? Estonian scammers? Terrorists? Your ex-partner? And you know that your allies over in (Germany, United States, Israel, France) are going to get their hands on it too, right? And have you thought about when (hated political party) gets voted into power 5 years from now?
A second good framing is used by the ACLU representative in the Guardian article: You won't be able to use technologies X Y and Z, and you'll fall behind other countries technologically and economically.
The criminalization of all encryption in the U.S. is just one big terrorist attack away.
Doubtful. Too much of the economy takes place online today - you can't have e-banking without strong crypto.
Good point. I revise my prediction to "after the next big terrorist attack the U.S. will heavily regulate encryption."
You can have e-banking and e-commerce with "key escrow", though. That didn't fly in the 90s, and it's always been an inane idea, but I could definitely imagine "you should hide from hackers, but not from the police" PR spin ramping up again.
True. That said, the Internet has proven very good at defending its essential infrastructure, and I suspect it will continue to do so in future.
It already did -- see David Cameron's new stance on encryption e.g. here or elsewhere. He's not shy about it.
Tell us about your feed reader of choice.
I've been using Feedly since Google Reader went away, and has enough faults (buggy interface, terrible bookmarking, awkward phone app that needs to be online all the time) to motivate me towards a new one. Any recommendations?
After Reader was shut down, instead of trusting my RSS feeds to another always-online provider I decided to use local clients. I use dropbox to maintain the feed list and read status synchronised between all devices I need it on.
I use newsblur and it's fine, but I don't use bookmarking or an app or basically anything interesting.
I use rawdog. It runs on my computer and generates a single HTML file, which contains a nice unified list of articles (rather than the common alternative, a list of feeds which I then have to drill down into). It doesn't rely on any external services other than the feeds themselves. By diddling with the template it uses to generate the HTML, I have given it a little interactivity (e.g., I can tell it to "collapse" some feeds so that they show only article titles rather than content; I can then un-collapse individual articles).
Last I checked, it didn't work on Windows but could be coerced into doing so by fiddling with the source code (it's in Python).
There is a thing called Tiny Tiny RSS that, from what others have said, I suspect may offer kinda-similar functionality but better (with perhaps a bit more effort to get it set up initially). I keep meaning to check it out but failing to do so.
I used Safari until Apple removed the RSS functionality, then switched to Vienna. OSX only.
I switched to The Old Reader, which, as the name suggests, is pretty close to Google Reader in functionality.
I use Firefox's built-in "live bookmarks".
I've found Feedly on a browser is much more manageable than the Android app.
Feedly's default settings on the app are intolerable. It can be mostly fixed with settings changes though. I actually prefer the ap to the desktop now because I use it to pack dead time with reading my RSS feed instead of productive time.
I use Vienna.
I use Digg Reader. It does not have any social networking features, but otherwise it basically works like Google Reader did.
For a while I was also using The Old Reader, but I switched away when it briefly looked like they were going to shut down. Digg Reader and The Old Reader seem very similar.
I use RSS Feed Reader(Chrome plugin). It's been fairly good to me, though I have noticed a couple of my feeds disappearing over time. Unsure if this is due to abandonment by the feed admins or due to software issues. I'd still recommend it as a decent option, but I'd believe that better ones exist elsewhere.
Digg is good for me.
I've tried TheOldReader, which worked well, even when they had to handle the sudden influx of Google Reader refugees. I'm currently using InoReader, which works very well, and Bloglines, which seems to be broken (for nearly a week now IIRC, and not for the first time in the last year).
Do you pay for The Old Reader?
I simply use the wordpress.com reader (I have a blog that I update through there, so it consolidates the tools I use). I notice it tends to have a bit of a delay in getting new posts, but I don't mind not being absolutely to-the-minute up to date.
I tried using RSS readers, but I tended to forget to check their websites or apps. I could have trained myself to check them more often but I ended up using https://blogtrottr.com/ instead. It sends RSS feeds to your email inbox, so I can check blogs along with my email in the morning.
I haven't had any issues so far. They send you ads along with the feed to generate revenue. Having a revenue model is a solid plus in my book.
What I don't like about it: they don't have accounts so managing subscriptions is a little hard.
There seem to be some parents (and their children) here. I myself am the father of 3yo and 1yo daughters. Is there any suggestions you have for raising young rationalists, and getting them to enjoy critical, skeptical thinking without it backfiring from being forced on them?
Julia Galef, President and Co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, has video blogged on this twice. The first was How to Raise a Rationalist Kid, and the second is Wisdom from Our Mother, which might be a bit more relevant to you because, in that video, her brother Jesse specifically discusses what his mother did in situations where he wasn't enthusiastic about learning something. I should say that it has more to do with when your kids think that they're bad at things than with when they reject something out of hand. To that I would say, and I think many others would say: Kids are smart and curious, rationalism makes sense, and if they don't reject everything else kids have learned throughout history out of hand, then they probably won't reject rationalism out of hand.
I know of families who have used the "tooth fairy" as an opportunity to do critical thinking. I think it has gotten mentioned here before. Apparently sometimes children do this on their own. This post is relevant.
[This isn't a direct response to Mark, but a reply to encourage more responses]
To add another helpful framing, if you don't have children, but think as an adult part of your attraction to LessWrong was based on how your parents raised you with an appreciation with rationality, how did that go? Obvious caveats about how memories of childhood are unreliable and fuzzy, and personal perspectives on how your parents raised you will be biased.
I was raised by secular parents, who didn't in particular put a special emphasis on rationality when raising me, compared to other parents. However, for example, Julia and Jesse Galef have written on their blog of how their father raised them with rationality in mind.
Thanks for the call to action. In my own case I became a rationalist in spite of my upbringing. So people like me who don't have that background could really use advice from those who do :)
They left Scientific American lying around a lot. The column that had the fewest prerequisites was Michael Shermer's skepticism column. Also, people around me kept trying to fix my brain, and when I ran into cognitive bias and other rationality topics, they were about fixing your own brain, so then I assumed that I needed to fix it.
In terms of religion stuff: My parents raised me with something between Conservative and Reform Judaism, but they talked about other religions in a way that implied Judaism was not particularly special, and mentioned internal religious differences, and I got just bored enough in religious services to read other parts of the book, which had some of the less appealing if more interesting content. (It wasn't the greatest comparative religious education: I thought that the way Islam worked was that they had the Torah, the New Testament, and the Qur'an as a third book, sort of the way the Christians had our religious text as well as the New Testament as a second book.)
I also am the father of 3yo and 1yo daughters. One of the things I try to do is let their critical thinking or rationality actually have a payoff in the real world. I think a lot of times critical thinking skills can be squashed by overly strict authority figures who do not take the child's reasoning into account when they make decisions. I try to give my daughters a chance to reason with me when we disagree on something, and will change my mind if they make a good point.
Another thing I try to do, is intentionally inject errors into what I say sometime, to make sure they are listening and paying attention. (e.g. This apple is purple, right? ) I think this helps to avoid them just automatically agreeing with parents/teachers and critically thinking through on their own what makes sense. Now my oldest is quick to call me out on any errors I may make when reading her stories, or talking in general, even when I didn't intentionally inject them.
Lastly, to help them learn in general, make their learning applicable to the real world. As an example, both of my daughters, when learning to count, got stuck at around 4. To help get them over that hurdle, I started asking them questions like, "How many fruit snacks do you want?" and then giving them that number. That quickly inspired them to learn bigger numbers.
This sounds like solid parenting; my only concern is that you might not be taking the psychology of children into account. Children sometimes really do need an authority figure to tell them what's true and what isn't; the reason for truth is far less important at that stage (and can be given later, maybe even years later).
One issue that could arise is that if you don't show authority then your child may instead gravitate to other authority figures and believe them instead. A child may paradoxically put more faith in the opinions of someone who insists on them irrationally than someone who is willing to change their beliefs according to reason or evidence (actually, this applies to many adults too). It's possible that "demeanor and tone of voice" trumps "this person was wrong in the past."
The point is that children's reasoning is far far less developed than adults and you have to take their irrationalities into account when teaching them.
The best thing about my Catholic high school was that it was run by the Salesian Order, which prefers a preventive method based on always giving good reasons for the rules.
I am also father of four boys now 3, 6, 8 and 11. You can find some parenting resources linked on my user page.
I've never studied any branch of ethics, maybe stumbling across something on Wikipedia now and then. Would I be out of my depth reading a metaethics textbook without having read books about the other branches of ethics? It also looks like logic must play a significant role in metaethics given its purpose, so in that regard I should say that I'm going through Lepore's Meaning and Argument right now.
Does it matter? It's not very hard to get up to speed on ethics. Either skim an introductory textbook, or spend a few hours on the Stanford Philosophy encyclopedia.
The best way to tell is to read the metaethics textbook and see what happens. If it turns out you need a crash course on (say) utilitarian thinking, you can always do that and then return to metaethics.
What is your reason for wanting to read a metaethics textbook? I ask because the most obvious reason (I think) is "because I want to live a good life, so I want to figure out what constitutes living a good life, and for that I need a coherent system of ethics" but I'd have thought that most people thinking in those terms and inclined to read philosophy textbooks would already have looked into (at least) whatever variety of ethics they find most congenial.
Good point. I ordered it yesterday, and it's supposed to be an easy introduction, so we'll see what happens.
Well it seems to me that there are so many different schools of normative ethics, that unless we're all normative moral relativists (I don't think we are), most people must be wrong about normative ethics. I've seen claims here that mainstream metaethics has it all wrong, I just found out that lukeprog's got his own metaethics sequence, and some of the things that he claims to resolve seem like they would have profound implications for normative ethics. I guess I feel like I'm saving myself time not reading about a million different theories of normative ethics (kind of like I think I'm saving myself time not reading about a million different types of psychotherapy, unless it's for some sort of test) and just learning about where the mainstream field of metaethics is, and then seeing where Eliezer and Luke differ from it, and if I agree.
Is it crazy to want to have some idea of what ethical statements mean before I use them as a justification for my behavior? That you say "whatever variety of ethics they find most congenial," makes me think that you might not think it is that crazy. And I mean, I'm at least not murdering anyone right now; I have time for this. And if I don't ever take the time, then I could end up becoming the dreaded worse-than-useless.
I'm also curious about FAI so I'm generally schooling myself in LW-related stuff, hence the books on logic and AI and ethics. I'm working towards others as well.
I was looking at this article as a starting point. I end up at either error theory or non-cognativism. Is there value in reading further down the tree or would it be like learning more phlogiston theory (at least for me)?
You could dip a toe on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
I found my own answer in the comments of the course recommendations for friendliness thread. Luke says:
On normative ethics, Luke says elsewhere:
From what I see, he seems to attribute a similarly low significance to most of contemporary normative ethics.
Also, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has been suggested twice, in case I do need to know anything in particular about normative ethics. I'll keep that in mind.
For posterity, as far as I can tell, the most popular undergraduate text on normative ethics is Rachels' The Elements of Moral Philosophy. The 7th edition has good reviews on Amazon. Apparently the 8th edition is too new to have reviews.
Where is this 2nd attempt to explain metaethics by Eliezer?
I'm pretty new, I couldn't tell you for sure. I'm pretty sure it's two posts in that second sequence: Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project and By Which It May Be Judged. I'm pretty sure the rest of the sequence at least is necessary to understand those.
Oxford's Rhetoric could be helpful in this area.
How long do the effects of caffeine tolerance, where when you're not on caffeine you're below baseline and caffeine just brings you back to normal, last? If I took tolerance breaks inbetween stretches of caffeine use, could I be better off on average than if I simply avoided it entirely?
I think you are thinking about this the wrong way. People become caffeine tolerant quickly, but tolerance goes away pretty quickly too. You would get more benefit out of the opposite approach - spending most of your time without caffeine, but drinking a cup of coffee rarely, when you really need it. You would effectively be caffeine naive most of the time, with brief breaks for caffeine use, and this never develop much of a tolerance. If it's been a long time since that first cup of coffee that you don't remember it, trust me, the effects of caffeine on a caffeine-naive brain are incredible.
I know I once read a study that says you can get back to caffeine naive in two weeks if you go cold turkey, but I can't find anything on it again for the life of me. I do remember distinctly that going cold turkey is a bad plan, as the withdrawal effects are pretty unpleasant - slowly lowering your dose is better.
On a more practical level, it is certainly possible to have relatively little caffeine, such that you aren't noticeably impaired on zero caffeine, while still having some caffeine. The average coffee drinker is far beyond this point. I would try to lower your daily dose over the course of a month or so until you are consuming less than a cup of coffee a day - ideally, a lot less, like no cups of coffee. Try substituting tea (herbal or otherwise) if you need something hot to drink to help kill the craving - herbal tea has no caffeine, black tea has about 1/4 of the caffeine per cup, and if you add cream and sugar the taste will be familiar.
EDIT: VincentYu's comment above is interesting in light of this. I am not going to perform my own meta analysis on this, but there are a great deal of studies that find that caffeine tolerance and caffeine withdrawal are real things - a quick Google Scholar search for "caffeine tolerance" will find them.
I am now very interested in a large study on this without the possible conflict of interest. Also, I find it odd that they choose to not include studies before 1992.
This is a hypothesized explanation for the acute performance-enhancing effects of caffeine that fits well with the Algernon argument, but it is not a conclusive result of the literature. For instance, the following recent review disputes that.
Einöther SJL, Giesbrecht T (2013). Caffeine as an attention enhancer: reviewing existing assumptions. Psychopharmacology, 225:251–74.
Abstract (emphasis mine):
The authors' conclusions:
Note the following conflict of interest:
I have a slate of questions that I often ask people to try and better understand them. Recently I realized that one of these questions may not be as open-ended as I'd thought, in the sense that it may actually have a proper answer according to Bayesian rationality. Though, I remain uncertain about this. The question is actually quite simple and so I offer it to the Less Wrong community to see what kind of answers people can come up with, as well as what the majority of Less Wrongers think. If you'd rather you can private message me your answer.
The question is:
Truth or Happiness? If you had to choose between one or the other, which would you pick?
I don't think this question is sufficiently well-defined to have a true answer. What does it mean to have/lack truth, what does it mean to have/lack happiness, and what are the extremes of both of these?
If I have all the happiness and none of the truth, do I get run over by a car that I didn't believe in?
If I have all the truth but no happiness, do I just wish I would get run over? Is there anything to stop me from using the truth to make myself happy again? Failing that is there anything that could motivate me to sit down for an hour with Eliezer and teach him the secrets of FAI before I kill myself? This option at least seems like it has more loopholes.
I admit this version of the question leaves substantial ambiguity that makes it harder to calculate an exact answer. I could have constructed a more well-defined version, but this is the version that I have been asking people already, and I'm curious how Less Wrongers would handle the ambiguity as well.
In the context of the question, it can perhaps be better defined as:
If you were in a situation where you had to choose between Truth (guaranteed additional information), or Happiness (guaranteed increased utility), and all that you know about this choice is the evidence that the two are somehow mutually exclusive, which option would you take?
It's interesting that you interpreted the question to mean all or none of the Truth/Happiness, rather than what I assumed most people would interpret the question as, which is a situation where you are given additional Truth/Happiness. The extremes are actually an interesting thought experiment in and of themselves. All the Truth would imply perfect information, while all the Happiness would imply maximum utility. It may not be possible for these two things to be completely mutually exclusive, so this form of the question may well just be illogical.
Defining happiness as "guaranteed increased utility" is questionable. It doesn't consider situations of blissful ignorance, where
For simplicity's sake, we could assume a hedonistic view that blissful ignorance about something one does not want is not a loss of utility, defining utility as positive conscious experiences minus negative conscious experiences. But I admit that not everyone will agree with this view of utility.
Also, Aristotle would probably argue that you can have Eudaimonic happiness or sadness about something you don't know about, but Eudaimonia is a bit of a strange concept.
Regardless, given that there is uncertainty about the claims made by the questioner, how would you answer?
Consider this rephrasing of the question:
If you were in a situation where someone (possibly Omega... okay let's assume Omega) claimed that you could choose between two options: Truth or Happiness, which option would you choose?
Note that there is significant uncertainty involved in this question, and that this is a feature, rather than a bug of the question. Given that you aren't sure what "Truth" or "Happiness" means in this situation, you may have to elaborate and consider all the possibilities for what Omega could be meaning (perhaps even assigning them probabilities...). Given this quandary, is it still possible to come up with a "correct" rational answer?
If it's not, what additional information from Omega would be required to make the question sufficiently well-defined to answer?
Great question! I'm glad you brought it up!
Personally, it's a bit of an ugh field for me. And is something I'm confused about, and really wish I had a good answer to.
To me, this get's at a more general question of, "what should your terminal values be?". It is my understanding that rationality can help you to achieve terminal values, but not to select them. I've thought about it a lot and have tried to think of a reason why one terminal value is "better" or "more rational" than another... but I've pretty much failed. I keep arriving at the conclusion that "what should your terminal values be?" is a Wrong Question, which becomes pretty obvious once it's dissolved.
But at the same time... it's such an important question that the slightest bit of uncertainty really bothers me. Think of it in terms of expected value - a huge magnitude multiplied by a small probability can still be huge. If I misunderstood something and I'm pursuing the wrong terminal goal(s)... well that'd be bad (how bad depends on how different my current goals are from "the real goals").
I'd love to hear others' takes on this. It appears that people live their lives as if things other than Your Happiness matter. Like Altruism and Truth. Ie, people pursue terminal values other than their own happiness. Is this true? I've really be interested in seeing a LW survey on terminal goals.
Something I frequently see from people defending free speech is some variant of the idea "in the marketplace of ideas, the good ones will win out". Is anyone familiar with any deeper examination of this idea? For instance, whether an idea market actually exists, how much it resembles a marketplace for goods, how it might reliably go wrong, etc.
I think you're better off looking into theories of memetics; that is, a marketplace doesn't seem to be as good an analogy as an ecology. That makes the somewhat less cheery argument that 'good' doesn't mean 'true' so much as 'effective at spreading,' and in particular memes can win by poisoning their competitors through allelopathy, just like an oak tree.
This video is somewhat on topic: The New (and Old) Attacks on Free Thought: Jonathan Rauch on Kindly Inquisitors
Jonathan Rauch discusses the new edition of his book, Kindly Inquisitors, and presents a thoughtful and rational defense of free speech. I believe he makes some comparisons between the marketplace of ideas and economic markets and he certainly makes an argument similar to the one that you mention. It is an excellent video, IMO, and well worth watching.
Here's Scott Alexander discussing this concept in the context of lifehacks: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/03/do-life-hacks-ever-reach-fixation/
General question: I've read somewhere that there's a Bayesian approach to at least partially justifying simplicity arguments / Occam's Razor. Where can I find a good accessible explanation of this?
Specifically: Say you're presented with a body of evidence and you come up with two sets of explanations for that evidence. Explanation Set A consists of one or two elegant principles that explain the entire body of evidence nicely. Explanation Set B consists of hundreds of separate explanations, each one of which only explains a small part of the evidence. Assuming your priors for each individual explanation is about equal, is there a Bayesian explanation for our intuition that we should bet on Explanation Set A?
What about if your prior for each individual explanation in Set B is higher than the priors for the explanations in Set A?
Example:
Say you're discussing Bible Criticism with a religious friend who believes in the traditional notion of complete Mosaic authorship but who is at least somewhat open to alternatives. To your friend, the priors for Mosaic authorship are much higher than the priors for a documentary or fragmentary hypothesis. (If you want numbers, say that your friend's priors are .95 in favor of Mosaic authorship.)
Now you present the arguments, many of which (if I understand them correctly) boil down to simplicity arguments:
The question is, is your friend justified in rejecting your simplicity-based arguments based on his high priors? What about if his priors were lower, say .6 in favor of Mosaic authorship? What about if he held 50-50 priors?
I think you'll get somewhere by searching for the phrase "complexity penalty." The idea is that we have a prior probability for any explanation that depends on how many terms / free parameters are in the explanation. For your particular example, I think you need to argue that their prior probability should be different than it is.
I think it's easier to give a 'frequentist' explanation of why this makes sense, though, by looking at overfitting. If you look at the uncertainty in the parameter estimates, they roughly depend on the number of sample points per parameter. Thus the fewer parameters in a model, the more we think each of those parameters will generalize. One way to think about this is the more free parameters you have in a model, the more explanatory power you get "for free," and so we need to penalize the model to account for that. Consider the Akaike information criterion and Bayesian information criterion.
The B approach to Occam's razor is just a way to think carefully about your possible preference for simplicity. If you prefer simpler explanations, you can bias your prior appropriately, and then the B machinery will handle how you should change your mind with more evidence (which might possibly favor more complex explanations, since Nature isn't obligated to follow your preferences).
I don't think it's a good idea to use B in settings other than statistical inference, or probability puzzles. Arguing with people is an exercise in xenoanthropology, not an exercise in B.
Upvoted for
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this. Do you mean that Bayesianism is inappropriate for situations where the data points are arguments and explanations rather than quantifiable measurements or the like? Do you mean that it shouldn't be used to prefer one person's argument over another's?
In any case, could you elaborate on this point? I haven't read through much of the Sequences yet (I'm waiting for the book version to come out), but my impression was that using Bayesian-type approaches outside of purely statistical situations is a large part of what they are about.
Not sure I understand this. Assuming you're both trying to approach the truth, arguing with others is a chance to get additional evidence you might not have noticed before. That's both xenoanthropology and Bayesianism.
Yes. I disagree.
Look at our good friend Scott Alexander dissecting arguments. How much actual B does he use? Usually just pointing out basic innumeracy is enough "oh you are off by a few orders of magnitude" (but that's not B, that's just being numerate, e.g. being able to add numbers, etc.)
I think the kind of stuff folks in this community use to argue/update internally is all fine, but I don't think it's a formal B setup usually, just some hacks along the lines of "X has shown herself to be thoughtful and sensible in the past, and disagrees w/ me about Y, I should adjust my own beliefs."
This will not work with outsiders, since they generally play a different game than you. I think the dominating term in arguments is understanding social context in which the other side is operating, and learning how they use words. If B comes up at all, it's just easy bookkeeping on top of that hard stuff.
I don't understand what people here mean by "B." For example, using Bayes theorem isn't "B" because everyone who believes the chain rule of probabilities uses Bayes theorem (so hopefully everyone).
Seems they're referring to Bayesian Epistemology / Bayesian Confirmation Theory, along with informal variants thereof. Bayesian Epistemology is a very well respected and popular movement in philosophy, although it is by no means universally accepted. In any case, the use of the term "Bayesian" in this sense is certainly not limited to LessWrong.
This is a good question, but not when applied to the origin of the Torah example. There a more appropriate discussion is of the motivated cognition of the original Talmudic authors, who would have happily attributed 100% of the Torah to the same source, were it not for the 8 verses which do not fit. For a Christian these authors are already suspect because they denied the first coming of the Messiah, so one's priors of their trustworthiness should be low to begin with.
Public voting and public scoring
I am sure this has been debated here before but I keep dreaming of it anyway. Let's say everyone's upvotes and downvotes were public and you could independently score posts using this data with your own algorithm. If the algorithms to score posts were also public then you could use another users scoring algorithm instead of writing your own (think lesswrong power-user).
As a simple example, lets say my algorithm is to average the score of userRational and userInsightful and userRational algorithm is just lesswrong regular score minus Usertroll's votes.
The benefits would be a better curated garden, more users, and more discussion.
Currently, the backlog to changing the codebase here is so big and there's so little work going on it that even if there was a consensus for this change it would be unlikely to happen.
More specific to this proposal, there are at least two problems with this idea: First: it could easily lead to further group think: Suppose a bunch of Greens zero out all voting by certain people who have identified as Blues and a bunch of Blues do the same. Then each group will see a false consensus for their view based on the votes. Second, making votes public by default could easily influence how people vote if they are intimidated by repercussions for downvoting high-status users or popular arguments, or even just not downvoting because it could make enemies.
Yeah, I suspect this would just move the game one step more meta. Instead of attacking enemies by mass downvoting now people would attack their enemies by public campaigns based on alleged patterns in the targets' votes. Then we could argue endlessly about what patterns are okay or not okay.
I agree there still would be very easy ways to punish enemies or even more common 'friends' that don't toe the line.
I do think it would identify some interesting cliques or color teams. The way I envision using it would be more topic category based. For instance, for topic X I average this group of peoples opinions but a different group on topic Y.
On the positive side, if you have a minority position on some topic that now would be downvoted heavily you could still get good feedback from your own minority clique.
Is there an eReader version of the Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners sequence anywhere?
More on Slate Star Codex than on LessWrong, there is discussion of memes as a useful concept for explaining or thinking about cultural evolution. The term 'memetics' is thrown around to correspond to the theory of memes as a field of inquiry. I want to know more about memetics, lest I would consider it not worth my time to think about it more deeply. More broadly, if not definitely a pseudoscience, it skirts that border more frequently. I expect the discourse on memes might be at least a bit less speculative if us amateur memeticists here knew more about it. Thus, I've generated a post covering memetics. Some of them are notes on the history of memetics as a field, and others are interesting. I don't go in-depth in explaining any idea, but sources are provided so readers can pursue individual, uh, memes...from within memeplexes themselves:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/evan-gaensbauer/notes-of-interest-on-memetics-part-i/10153033128194461
That's a link to the note as published by me on Facebook, as I don't have my own blog. It should be accessible publicly. If you can't access it, logged into Facebook or not, let me know, and I'll see if I can solve that problem.
You could post this as a top level discussion post here, if you want to make it more available and reduce trivial inconveniences to those without access to facebook.
Scott Alexander, alias Yvain, conducted a companion survey for the readership of his blog, Slate Star Codex, to parallel and contrast with the survey of the LessWrong community. The issue I ponder below will likely come to light when the results from that survey are published. However, I'm too curious thinking about this to wait, even if present speculation is later rendered futile.
Slate Star Codex is among my favorite websites, let alone blogs. I spend more time reading it than I do on LessWrong, and it may only be second to Wikipedia or Facebook for website which I spend the most time on. Anyway, like almost everyone else reading this, I migrated to Slate Star Codex from LessWrong. So, in my mind, it seems alien to me that Slate Star Codex would have a readership that doesn't have virtually complete overlap with the LessWrong readership.
I imagine readers of Slate Star Codex not familiar with LessWrong include: * medical professionals within a couple of degrees, socially, of Scott's professional circles * some neoreactionaries, and social justice activists, from across the blogosphere
Does anyone else have an impression of who might read Slate Star Codex who doesn't read LessWrong? Alternatively, if you don't like Slate Star Codex, or are turned off by it, I'm curious as to why. I've encountered virtually unanimous appreciation of Slate Star Codex from among my friends who read LessWrong, so I'm fascinated by the possibility of outlying opinions.
SSC seems to have a pretty wide fanbase on Tumblr. I'm sure he's picked up a very large non-LW fanbase over the years; he's been blogging forever.
A number of SSC posts have gone viral on Reddit or elsewhere. I'm sure he's picked up a fair number of readers from the greater internet. Also, for what it's worth, I've turned two of my friends on to SSC who were never much interested in LW.
But I'll second it being among my favourite websites.
Didn't get a response in the last thread, so I'm asking again, a bit more generally.
I've recently been diagnosed with ADHD-PI. I'm wondering how to best use that information to my advantage, and am looking for resources that might help manage this. Does anyone have anything to recommend?
In the short-term I'm trying to lower barriers for things like actually eating by preparing snacks in snaplock bags, printing out and laminating checklists to remind me of basic tasks, and finding more ways to get instant feedback on progress in as many areas as I can (for coding, this means test-driven development).
My experience of ADHD includes a tendency to become distracted by thought while moving between tasks or places. I have found that headphones with an audiobook help lock my attention down to two tracks instead of half a dozen: I'm either thinking about my task, or the words in my ear. Obviously your mileage may vary, but ADHD people develop all sorts of coping methods, so my broad advice is "experiment with lots of things to help get things done, even if other people are skeptical of their effectiveness."
Keep forgetting to say thanks for the advice. Haven't had the chance to give it a shot yet, but once I get some headphones I will.
You can get accommodations for many academic activities if you are still a student.
I'm looking at setting up my own website, both for the experience and to allow hosting of some files for a game I'm making. What I'd like is to register a domain, probably (myrealname).com and/or .ca, both of which are available, set up a wiki on it, and host a few(reasonably large) files. Thing is, I have a computer that stays on 24/7, and I'm generally competent with computers, so I suspect I can probably get by without paying for hosting, which appeals to me.
Can anyone link me to guides on how to do this? My Googling is turning up shockingly little, just "Pay someone for hosting!". I've registered domains before, but never done any hosting.
Acquiring hosting is straightforward. Pick a company with a good reputation, a reasonable price, and all the features you need, sign up, and pay. (I can't be of much help here, as I've used the same hosting company since 2004 or so, and I'm not sure if I could get a better deal elsewhere.)
The remainder is more specific, and that might be why you are having trouble finding tuturials. E.g., uploading and setting up a wiki could mean you read tutorials on SSH or FTP, tutorials on file permissions, and/or tutorials on the wiki-specific details of setting up a wiki. All of this depends on your experience level. When I started out, I knew none of this, and I basically figured it out as I went along.
You'll need to configure and run a web server on your computer. The most commonly used, publicly documented, free and accessible to people just trying stuff out is LAMP. You'll then need to point your domain at the IP address of your server.
What kind of hardware are we talking about? How much traffic are you looking at supporting? What kind of internet connection do you have at home? Are you familiar with the concept of mathematical multiplication?
Regular home PC, fairly dated at this point. Not much traffic is intended, though - it'll have a fairly quiet home page for my job(I'm not allowed to have more, for tedious reasons of legal compliance in advertising), and a hidden wiki that'll be seen by maybe a dozen friends. It's a toy site, not anything serious.
Re mathematical multiplication, I assume you don't mean 3x4=12. Is this some sort of traffic collision issue?
As it happens, I do. Depending on what you're planning on hosting, even trying to serve "a few reasonably large files" may be unreasonably slow on a home internet connection. Divide your upload speed by the number of concurrent users you expect - that's the theoretically maximal download speeed they can expect from your site.
The two relevant questions here are:
What's your ISP's upload speed and stated policy towards home servers? A lot of ISPs prohibit servers for residential customers, though actual enforcement is rare.
Are you sure you're up to the task of handling security for your home server that will be exposed to the 'net?
You're right, it's prohibited. That doesn't concern me too much.
Frankly, no, I'm not sure at all. Good point :/
Follow-up question: What sort of domain/hosting sites can give me, say, a gig of storage and a few gigs a month of bandwidth for a low price?
Precommitting to a secret prediction which I'll reveal on April 15. MD5 hash for the prediction is 38bd807a6872f6a5622aa2b011fd8f03 .
I just realized that editing the grammar above was an issue since it doesn't show when the edit occurred so repeating the hash here in a comment which will remain unedited: 38bd807a6872f6a5622aa2b011fd8f03 .
Hash copy: 38bd807a6872f6a5622aa2b011fd8f03
This is advance notice that unless your prediction is a short bit of plaintext that obviously doesn't have more than a few bits' worth of scope for massaging, your use of MD5 is likely to be taken as showing that you cheated.
Valid point. Here is the SHA-1 hash: f886dee5be3192819b3cd596cd73919f5c1e0a2c .
Copy of JoshuaZ's SHA-1 hash as of 2015-01-20 18:06 GMT: f886dee5be3192819b3cd596cd73919f5c1e0a2c .