If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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I have a problem. I refuse to sleep.
I don't mean I can't sleep. I've done experiments where I go to bed with some audio playing that I know, from say a movie, and the next morning I do not remember anything past 5-10 minutes into it. I mean that I just don't sleep. If I have nothing going on in the morning I will stay up until the wee hours of the morning shortly before sunrise regardless of how much sleep I have gotten lately or when I woke up. The only thing that drives me to go to bed is the knowledge that I simply cannot function and feel horrible on less than three hours of sleep. I can also tell after the fact that I am quite foggy on less than 7 hours, but at the time it doesn't feel terribly odd.
I've been tracking my sleep with a tablet under my pillow for over a year now and I average between just under and just over 5 hours a night, depending on the particular month, but the standard deviation is at least two hours and it varies from 2 to 9 hours a night chaotically with no apparent pattern. Worse, in the last six months I think my age (25) is catching up to me - my productivity on low-sleep days has dropped precipitously, and nights that I used to go with 3 or 4 h...
Just in case it helps to know you aren't alone: I have a similar problem (and always have, to varying degrees; I'm substantially older than you are). I don't think mine is as severe as yours.
The good news is that it doesn't seem to have wrecked my life too badly. The bad news is that after all these years I haven't fixed it. The good news is that I haven't really tried super-hard. The bad news is that if your character resembles mine in other ways you probably also won't try super-hard. Make of all that what you will.
Kind of a silly question, but it came up in our Sequences reading group yesterday: in EY's An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem, we found the following statement:
It's like the experiment in which you ask a second-grader: "If eighteen people get on a bus, and then seven more people get on the bus, how old is the bus driver?" Many second-graders will respond: "Twenty-five."
Anybody have any idea where this finding comes from initially? We found several people who referenced EY's post, including one second-grade teacher who claimed that he'd been largely able to replicate it (a case of guessing the teacher's password, presumably), plus a bunch of "jokes" where the reader is the driver (so the correct answer is the reader's age), but I didn't see an original source for the experimental result. Maybe my Google-fu is weak but I'm curious if anybody knows...
The original source is Reusser 1986 p25 (26), who reports that 3/4 of first and second graders give a numerical answer. I learned that from Kaplinsky's 2013 replication, not with eight-year-olds, but with eighth graders (video). He credits Merseth 1993 with popularizing it. Kaplinsky via Gwern.
A late descendent of the joke appears in Science Made Stupid (1986), which I highly recommend.
Are there things we should be doing now to take advantage of future technology. What I mean would be something like people who bank umbilical cord fluid for potential future stem cell usages. Another example would be if we had taken a lot of pictures of a historical building which is now gone, then we could use modern day photogrammetry to make a 3d model of it. A potential current example, suppose we recorded a ton of our day to day vocal communication. Then, some day in the future, a new machine learning algorithm could make use of the data. So what I am looking for is whether there are any potential 'missed opportunity' of this type we should be considering (posted similar question on futurology subreddit).
Also consider risks from future technology. For example, we might be able to "deanonymize" various public data records.
Somebody is going to mention cryonics here, so it might as well be me: Cryonic preservation! We don't have the brain scanning technology that would be needed to reproduce someone's mind based on physical access to their brain yet, but we can preserve the brain in good condition such that someone's mind could be reproduced/revived after their death in the future.
Also, about the getting lots of voice data for machine learning purposes: I'm sure the NSA has been doing something like that. If you just want to record yourself, a typical iPod Touch has good storage capacity for hours of audio and can record from inside a bag. The one thing is that some states require 2-party consent before a private conversation can be legally recorded, so even if you consent to record yourself, you might have to ask the other person for permission or stop recording. On the other hand, you probably wouldn't get in trouble for having an illicit audio recording unless you do something with it that leads to you getting caught, so just recording a conversation for personal use and not using it as evidence or posting it online would probably not get you in trouble.
Just read this article on the double life of chassidic atheists. While I'm aware of this sort of thing previously, an additional thought occurred to me; are we in general underestimating the current sanity water line because there are actually lots of professed irrational beliefs that people don't actually believe?
Why people find it emotionally difficult to keep secrets?
The dynamic shows up very early in childhood (search for "google: louise ck secret"), it can involve self-sacrifice (confessing to a crime), and people find it relieving to share secrets even in completely anonymous and impersonal ways ("google: the confession bear meme").
Secrets require cognitive effort. You need to keep track of what you can say to whom. Who told you what and when and why. It often involves lying or omitting information, both of which require additional effort and care in your conversation. I also find that it messes up some interpersonal relationships and habits. I'm not prone to keeping secrets and withholding information to my partner, family or friends, so if friend X tells me not to tell something to friend Y it forces me to act different from what feels natural.
I'm not sure how to ask this... but is anyone like really and genuinely happy on a day-to-day basis? Hour-to-hour? I'm curious as to what the upper bounds of human happiness are. In my 22 years experience of observing humans, I can't recall anyone I've ever met who appeared to be "really and genuinely" happy on a day-to-day basis. Everyone I've ever met seems to be what I'd describe as "chugging along".
Another way to possibly pose my thought - assume that I'm average, and consider the top 10% of my experiences to be Happiness. Does anyone's median experience fall within my top 10%?
Looks like Less Wrong limits password lengths to 20 characters, which makes it hard to use "correct horse battery staple"-style password schemes.
It also raises worrying considerations about how passwords are stored in the database. Passwords should never be stored in plain text, nor with reversible encryption. Instead, each account should store a password verifier value (and a salt, unique to the user).
A password verifier is the result of running a password, its salt, and possibly another input that isn't kept in the DB all through a function that produces some deterministic value that is nigh-impossible to brute force. A property of password verifiers is that they produce output of a constant length, regardless of the input length. This makes it easy to allow arbitrary-length passwords because any actual limit you impose is artificial and exists for some reason other than your database schema.
For those familiar with hash functions: a raw hash, even a long or fancy one like the new SHA3 family, is a bad password verifier function. However, it does exhibit the desired properties with regard to length. In fact, you can build a decent PVF out of cryptographic hash functions; see PBKDF2.
I recently got into practicing meditation, and got a lot out of the old LW posts about it. I was wondering if there is any interest to have a meditation retreat for rationalists?
Congratulations! Your employer and I have agreed to offer you a bonus week of paid vacation, complete with a personal assistant that handles all your affairs while you’re away at the world’s hottest new resort…Mac’s Wirehead Homestead.
Mac’s Wirehead Homestead is guaranteed to provide a week of pure bliss. No side effects, no addiction, no risks, just happiness.
So, can I sign you up for this free vacation?
[pollid:817]
I found it difficult to "feel" the no addiction and no risk things. If I spend a full week on pure bliss, is the rest of my life going to feel drab or painful by comparison? If you do something that makes you happy, you generally want more of that so if Mac's Wirehead Homestead makes you perfectly happy for a week, aren't you going to crave more of it?
Doesn't that describe all of life? Why waste years of your life on something you won't even remember afterwards?
What's the deal with General Biotics? They first promised a study on January 15th, then they said it would need 15 more days, and to check back Feb 1st. Feb 1st rolls around, nothing for a few days, then that page is gone, and the home page then says that the study is slated for completion mid year. It would be nice to have an actual record of the constantly changing date, but they've been blocking the Internet Archive (since December 2014 or earlier, which to me does not look as bad as if it was a very recent change): http://web.archive.org/web/20141217104405/http://www.generalbiotics.com/robots.txt
I have an exercise in "thinking about the problem for 5 minutes before proposing solutions" for everyone.
I am a member of a small group of physics graduate students in charge of a monthly series of public science lectures. The lectures are aimed at local high school students, and we have many high school teachers who encourage their students to attend by offering extra credit. The audience of each talk (typically around 100) is composed almost wholly of students who have come solely because they want a few extra points in chemistry or whatever.
In...
I found this exercise surprising and useful. Supposing we accept the standard model that our utility is logarithmic in money. Let's suppose we're paid $100,000 a year, and somewhat arbitrarily use that as the baseline for our utility calculations. We go out for a meal with 10 people where each spends $20 on food. At the end of the meal, we can either all put in $20 or we can randomize it and have one person pay $200. All other things being equal, how much should we be prepared to pay to avoid randomization?
Take a guess at the rough order of magnitude. The...
Conversly, if you'd pay much more than this, you are absurdly risk averse: Here's a pdf of a classic paper by Rabin: Risk Aversion and Expected-Utility Theory: A Calibration Theorem
Abstract:
Within the expected-utility framework, the only explanation for risk aversion is that the utility function for wealth is concave: A person has lower marginal utility for additional wealth when she is wealthy than when she is poor. This paper provides a theorem showing that expected-utility theory is an utterly implausible explanation for apprecia- ble risk aversion over modest stakes: Within expected-utility theory, for any concave utility function, even very little risk aversion over modest stakes implies an absurd degree of risk aversion over large stakes. Illustrative calibrations are provided
Improper measurements. You can't compare a time-based number (annual income) to a one-time decision (lump sum of $0, $20 or $200). W should be something like "expected future lifetime spending" in order for this to be a reasonable risk-preference calculation. Further comments assume these are quite poor folks who'll only ever consume $100k in the rest of their lives.
I guessed high by about 5x. The choice is even more trivial than I thought. I will continue happily playing credit card roulette :)
Is there a good way to save all of my browsing data locally? I'd ideally want something that gets anything fetched on my computer, including headers and any signatures needed to prove that a site really sent something. I also want it to be searchable easily by keyword and site.
That's both wasteful on bandwidth as everything is downloaded twice, and anything not public needs to be done manually with cookies.
But it's dead-simple and robust compared to some sort of in-browser extension which saves the rendered DOM in the background.
He also can't prove that they came from a site even if it used https.
I've never needed to prove that. My concern is usually having a copy at all, and the IA is trusted enough that it's a de facto proof.
But it's possible:
Has anybody else acquired a feeling, that recently the pace of progress in AI field - has increased?
Or it's just me?
Speaking as a mathematician who wrote one of the papers cited there, the concept isn't very interesting at all. It is the sort of recreational mathematics that we enjoy playing with and is fairly natural but it isn't the sort of thing that is going to lead to deep insights or structural mathematics. The bar of being interesting enough to have papers written on it is really low.
I am thinking about having a small side income, but without advertising to anyone who types my name in Google. The plan is roughly the following:
I will make computer games and publish them on Google Play and/or Steam. To increase visibility, I will also have a Facebook page, and write a blog about making these games. Just for the sake of experiment, I will also make a Patreon and/or Gratipay account and ask for donations. For these purposes, I will use a pseudonym; the same one for all the platforms, to build brand awareness. I will also use this pseudonym...
I've had a (not so) weird dream yesterday, I need to share it here.
Undoubtably it was primed, just before going to bed, by seeing the 17th episode of the 3rd season of Person of Interest, where Fnznevgna vf nobhg gb or npgvingrq (no spoiler, please).
I basically dreamed that China had won the AI race, and at the beginning I dreamt in a bird's-eye view, just like the Machine has, of Chinese ideograms overriding the programming of Russian's and American's satellites, granting them access to the global nuclear arsenal, thereby imposing a sort of Chinese 'pax r...
I seem to recall a discussion thread about ways one can spend money to save time (e.g. paying to get one's laundry done), together with estimates for their respective dollar/hour rates. I'm moving from unemployed to full-time employment this week, so the appropriate dollar value of my time is about to shift dramatically, and as such, I'd like to give this thread another look over, but I can't find it. Can anyone else remember what I'm talking about and/or provide a link? Thanks.
If you want some free warm fuzzies, here's an example of a mutual update, in three comments at the end of a long discussion.
It's worthwhile discussing why most individuals don't learn about rationality, as once we learn this, we could potentially address it, which would result in more people learning about it. Does anyone have any ideas?
Did Elon Musk give a nod to LessWrong in this interview?
"You should take the approach that...you the entrepreneur are wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong."
There's a lot of attention to self-driving cars in the US, but it seems worth noting that similar work is being done in other places. There's a recent test of a Dutch self-driving truck reported here and South Australia is discussing making self-driving cars legal there.
Does anyone have any tips or advice on how to handle anger and frustration? Particularly anger and frustration from dealing with stupid people. I try to just keep reminding myself that it's simply an optimization problem.
How many gigabytes of text is LW? I guess it'd probably be under a terabyte, and therefore, fairly cheap for even a lay person to backup.
Back of envelope: suppose one 200-byte comment/post per minute every day for 5 years (I guess 200b is below mean length, 1/minute is above mean frequency, and I think LW is older than 5 years but younger than 10). That's 5 x 365 x 24 x 60 x 200 bytes. Round everything off to powers of 2 and 5: 5 x 400 x 25 x 50 x 200 = 500MB. So, less than a gigabyte, never mind a terabyte.
I have a question regarding Rejection Therapy. I see that this is advertized as a self-help method for social fears and there are quite a few LW results for this. This is also related to CFARs CoZE unit. My question is: What is the empirical base for this. Does it work? Why and when does it work? I ask because I can't find any serious references.
Confidence levels inside and outside an argument: in doing a quick analysis of the veracity of a database leak, is the probability of a particular test coming out as it did 0.00000000019323% or... 90%?
Well, that will depend on how true your assumption of independent samples is! See
What do you know, HuffPost actually has something good to say about the 50 Shades book/movie. Finally someone pointed out that Christian Grey was written from a totally female perspective. Most reviews just drone on through the standard faux-feminist talking points.
The review sounds to me like: "He is an abusive psycho, but he is commited and pays attention. Guys, you should learn from him, because this is cool."
Okay, this is a dangerous territory, but this review is a part of what I hate: media sending mixed messages to men, demanding contradictory things, then criticizing men for failing to do the contradictory things. On Monday, you are told to make sure that your t-shirt is politically correct, never invite a woman to a coffee, and stop being an entitled whiny nice guy. On Tuesday, you are told to look at this charming psycho and realize how inferior you are compared with him.
The solution for me is to ignore what media say, which probably is a generally good strategy.
Most of the complaints I've heard about it have nothing much to do with feminism (unless you define that term really broadly). The complaints are (1) that it's really badly written and (2) that it appears to celebrate abuse in the guise of BDSM. (I am told that actual BDSM folks are generally very, very careful about consent, for obvious reasons.)
I am not endorsing either criticism, not least because I haven't read the book. (It seems to me that #2 might be an unfair criticism, on the grounds that FSOG shouldn't be thought of as a book about domination fantasies and how people play them out, but as a domination fantasy itself.) But unless "sexual abuse and rape are bad" has become a specifically feminist (or even faux-feminist) claim now, I don't see that feminism should get either credit or blame for these criticisms.
CBHacking isn't the only one with silly questions here. Here's another one!
What's the best way to make a facebook account? What can I do in order to not look like one of those silly dating sites profiles we all know and laughed about? I have a feeling photos are basically key here - so what's the best way to have a good photo? The goal is to make a minimalistically attractive facebook profile. Minimalistically because I like minimalism and because it's a fresh profile, so I won't have too much content to put on.
Facebook isn't a dating website. It would be strange for a facebook profile to look like a dating profile as that suggests you don't have a social life. A facebook profile normally grows organically over time.
There are three main photos:
(1) Your Avatar/profile picture. It should show your face. Humans use the availability heuristic. Make it easy to recognize yourself on the small thumbnails in conversations.
The avatar is placed at the left of the screen. As a result it makes sense that the body is turned towards the right, in the direction of the text.
Have open body language. You don't want to be turned inward but you want to be turned outward. It's good if the facial muscles are relaxed. It might be worthwhile to spend 30 minutes before taking the photo to get into a good physical state.
Wear clothes that signal what you want to signal. Logos can signal tribal affiliations. Depending on who you are and who you want to express different choices can make sense.
(2) Cover photo. I don't have a good idea and probably will soon choose a new one for myself. A good strategy would be to illustrating a hobby or value that you have.
(3) General tagging. Go to a few social events that produce photos. Get photos of you participating in any hobby that you like. Photos are often made for event promotion.
Salsa Congress for example usually have a photographer that posts pictures on facebook that show of that the event is cool.
I recently re-read some old Less Wrong posts on status. It struck me that none of them really capture what I mean by the word.
I have been wondering if it makes sense to operationalize status as a measure of the extent to which other individuals have a rational self-interest in cooperating with you. Specifically, if you want to know the status of an individual, you estimate the probability that an arbitrarily chosen member of the group will get higher utility from cooperating than defecting in a two-player game.
I have been thinking about writing a full ...
For the expression ~(A & B), B ∴ ~A, I came up with the following truth table, where a '+' indicates a column of truth values for a premise:
| A | B | ~ | (A & B) | , | B | ∴ | ~A |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| T | T | F | T | T | F | ||
| F | T | T | F | T | T | ||
| T | F | T | F | F | F | ||
| F | F | T | F | F | F | ||
| + | + |
The solution in the book, however lists the conclusion in the fourth row is true rather than false:
| A | B | ~ | (A & B) | , | B | ∴ | ~A |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| T | T | F | T | T | F | ||
| F | T | T | F | T | T | ||
| T | F | T | F | F | F | ||
| F | F | T | F | F | T | ||
| + | + |
Have I made a mistake or is this an error?
For the expression ~(A & B), B ∴ ~A, I came up with the following truth table, where a '+' indicates a column of truth values for a premise:
A B ~ (A & B) , B ∴ ~A
T T F T T F F T T F T T T F T F F F F F T F F F
+ +
The solution in the book, however lists the conclusion in the fourth row is true rather than false:
A B ...
The idea for a set of posts on 'Rationality and Memetics' popped into my head this afternoon. I figure that's pretty important if you want rationalism to become a common thing. I'm reading the Sequences in chronological order and I just got to the meat of the posts that were later reorganized into the 'The Simple Math of Evolution' minor sequence. I want to get this out there in case I'm wasting my time, but nevertheless I'm really not ready to write it quite yet because:
1) I want to know more about the existing works on memetics, and of course, evolutiona...
Would it be possible to include an archive of the posts in Main or Discussion by year and then by month somewhere on the site, as featured on some blogging platforms? Many interesting things get discussed on LW, but it's a pity that there's no easy way to browse past discussions, other than endlessly clicking on Next/Previous buttons.
Hm, reading up a bit about SSL/TLS, it seems this will not work. Apparently it uses a Message Authentication Code to ensure authenticity, not a signature. But that means that even if you have all the data sent by the server, you still can't prove to a third party that you didn't modify it.
I'm not sure, but possibly you could prove that you did an SSL handshake with the server at a given time, so you can prove that the server sent "something", but not necessarily the particular thing you have. :)