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.
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3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
I'm drafting a post for Discussion about how users on LessWrong who feel disconnected from the rationalist community can get involved and make friends and stuff.
What I've got so far: Where everybody went away from LessWrong, and why How you can keep up with great content/news/developments in rationality on sites other than LessWrong *Get involved by going to meetups, and using the LW Study Hall
What I'm looking for:
A post I can link to about why the LW Study Hall is great.
Testimonials about how attending a meetup transformed social or intellectual life for you. I know this is the case in the Bay Area, and I know life became much richer for some friends e.g., I have in Vancouver or Seattle.
A repository of ideas for meetups, and other socializing, if somebody planning or starting a meetup can't think of anything to do.
How to become friends and integrate socially with other rationalists/LWers. A rationalist from Toronto visited Vancouver, noticed we were all friends, and was asking us how we became all friends, rather than a circle of individuals who share intellectual interests, but not much else. The only suggestions we could think of were:
...Be friends with a couple people
Fyi my expectation is to start posting on March 1 a daily sequence of articles on the fundamentals of economics. There are 18 of them last I counted. If all goes well, have plans for and am working on 2.5 more sequences of similar length on the price system, welfare economics, general equilibrium theory....
A few days back I made a ZeeMap for LessWrong and promised to post it in an Open Thread, so here it is: https://www.zeemaps.com/map?group=1323143
It's basically a way of finding people that share a particular interest living nearby. There is no need to register - just add your marker and keep an eye out for someone living near you.
How do you get a high verbal IQ, boundary-testing, 10-year-old child not to swear? Saying "don't swear" causes him to gleefully list words asking if they count as swear words. Telling him a word counts as profanity causes him to ask why that specific word is bad. Saying a word doesn't count causes him to use it extra amounts if he perceives it is bad, and he will happily combine different "legal" words trying to come up with something offensive. All of this is made more difficult by the binding constraint that you absolutely must make sure he doesn't say certain words at school, so in terms of marginal deterrence you need the highest punishment for him saying these words.
Is there a good reason why he shouldn't swear, in private, at least? I can see how swearing at school could get him and/or you in a fair bit of trouble, which should be reason enough on its own to stay on the safe side of speech when he's there, but if your True Rejection to his swearing in general is something to do with tradition or innocence or something like that, I don't see how you can rightly punish him for saying what he wants to say.
Alex, if you're reading this, please, seriously, be careful about what you say in public, especially at school. It's not fair that your father is liable for what you do, but that's the way the system works, and I think it's important to put yourself in his shoes so to speak, and think how you would feel if you were responsible for someone who was knowingly taking risks at your expense in addition to his own. Having said that, I feel you have the right to say whatever you want to say, up to and including strong swears, as long as it doesn't adversely affect other people. The catch though is that it's hard to know what will adversely affect other people ahead of time, which is why I strongly advise you to err on the side of caution. Remember that I am 16, and thus still a minor in the eyes of the law and society, as you are.
People use PredictionBook to make predictions about many heterogeneous questions, in order to train calibration. Couldn't we train calibration more efficiently by making a very large number of predictions about a fairly small, homogeneous group of questions?
For instance, at the moment people are producing a single probability for each of n questions about e.g. what will happen in HPMOR's final arc. This has a high per-question cost (people must think up individual questions, formalize them, judge edge cases, etc.) and you only get one piece of data from ea...
In India, there's been a move away from simple questions about general knowledge towards complex questions which take a combination of general knowledge and deduction.
Deductive questions would probably be harder for a computer program than general knowledge questions, and inventing good deductive questions would be a lot harder.
I had the idea a long time ago to make a PredictionBook commandline tool, but I never got past designing the interface and outlining what the basic functionality should be. So I'm dropping it here in case anyone might find it interesting.
pb-search argument
Interface to google.com: "argument site:predictionbook.com -site:predictionbook.com/users/"
Returns: select all hits, spit out the pages, newline delimited:
1. Title
2. due date
3. creator: probability
4-n. author: probability: comment
n+1. double-newline
pb-new -u user password -p/--predictioHow much of a solved problem is ergonomics when using computers?
I did some googling and found a lot of conflicting information, but I seem to remember there being at least some discussion on ergonomics on LW before.
This is potentially high value topic, since many people spend a lot of time at their computers and there are also likely some low hanging fruit for people who are doing things drastically wrong.
I'm particularly interested in the best choices for computer mice, and which would be best for avoiding RSI and carpal tunnel and the like. I hear things about trackballs and vertical mice?
I've recently seen several unconventional business models proposed. For instance:
Maybe walking backwards in familiar surroundings can be used for self-calibration? Immediate feedback, freedom to optimize study conditions ( and so make a prior estimate of how well you expect it to work)...maybe a forest/park is better than house, if there are fewer turns to make and you can instead ask yourself 'will there be an oak right now?', having passed it on your way forwards...
Yet another candidate for an alternative model for Quantum Mechanics: Announcement, Pre-print
Of course the prior for such a thing being true is incredibly low. Presumably if these superfluids only satisfy Maxwell's equations to first order, it may be possible to construct experiments decisively ruling it out.
I've been thinking this for a while: here on LW evolution is often portrayed as a weak algorithm that procedes to explore the genetic landscape fumbling around with random mutations. And this is certainly true for natural selection.
We have though also sexual selection: 'suddenly' you can choose which genome gets to reproduce thanks to a brain! In principle, brains are Turing complete, and this means that evolution could be much smarter. Of course, even that program is determined by your genetics, and sometimes things can go awry. Still, and more cogent for humans, there is the possibility of 'smarting up' evolution.
I've decided to turn supervillain.
As the "Mad Homeopath", I'm going to gather water with really bad memories, dilute it a hundred times and pour it in my city water supply, demanding they give me absolute control or they will all suffer. HA HA HA! (I probably still have to practice my maniacal laughter).
I'm searching for ideas on how to impress the public with it, how to make it known to the media, how to publish it anonymously (yes, I appreciate the irony of demanding that the mayor cedes control to an anonymous villain).
I can see this going one...
I thought of a situation in which individuals seem to act irrationally, but I don’t know of any cognitive bias that would cause them to. Some individuals seem willing to fight in wars to “help out” in it despite having a small risk of being killed in it. E.g. some are willing to have a 1/100 chance of being killed if they have a 1/100,000 chance of causing their nation to win the war, meaning that if they decided not to join the war, their nation would be 1/100,000 more likely to lose. However, people seem much less willing to have a 1/1 chance of being ki...
Fellow effective altruists and other people who care about making things better, especially those of you who mostly care about minimising suffering: how do you stay motivated in the face of the possibility of infinities, or even just the vast numbers of morally relevant beings outside our reach?
I get that it's pretty silly to get so distressed over issues there's nothing I can do about, but I can't help feeling discouraged when I think about the vast amount of suffering that probably exists - I mean, it doesn't even have to be infinite to feel like a botto...
rants I'm readying the 'politics' section of the Sequences now. The comments are so full of references to pop-culture, I am tempted to either move on or start adding to the pool. Seriously, people, it's annoying.
Is there anything on why people prefer to consume, rather than make things themselves?
This thought crossed my mind when my mom bought cookies today. She always buys them, never makes them.
I'm compelled to say something like "lazyness", but I could say this only applies to my mom. But on a larger scale, what makes people consume, but never produce?
(no ad hominem please)
I'd have thought it pretty much has to be a combination of
I don't think laziness and impatience are necessarily vices in this sense. Sometimes you have very good reason to want something quickly. Sometimes you have very good reason to want something without having to spend a lot of effort on it.
Making a batch of cookies takes maybe an hour of work plus a couple of hours of delay (depending on exactly what sort of cookies). More, if you don't have ingredients to hand. So if you're in WANT COOKIES NOW mode, or if you don't enjoy making cookies, or if you have more important things to do, it's not hard to see how getting them from a shop might seem preferable.
Personally, I love making tasty things and at least 90% of the cookies and cake I eat I've made myself. On the other hand, I have no interest in making clothes or bookcases or houses or cars. I do enjoy making software but am orders of magnitude short of having enough time to make better word processors and web browsers and operating systems than the Usual Suspects. I don't see that any of this is terribly surprising.
There's another answer,...
Economics 101.
There are factories that are really efficient at producing cookies cheaply. Making them yourself takes more effort. For most people in Western society it's more worthwhile to invest effort into their work to earn money to then buy products other people produced.
People use PredictionBook to make predictions about many heterogeneous questions, in order to train calibration. Couldn't we train calibration more efficiently by making a very large number of predictions about a fairly small, homogeneous group of questions?
For instance, at the moment people are producing a single probability for each of n questions about e.g. what will happen in HPMOR's final arc. This has a high per-question cost (people must think up individual questions, formalize them, judge edge cases, etc.) and you only get one piece of data from each question (the probability assigned to the correct outcome).
Suppose instead we get some repeatable, homogeneous question-template with a numerical answer, e.g. "what time is it?", "how many dots are in this randomly-generated picture?", or "how long is the Wikipedia article named _?". Then instead of producing only one probability for each question, you give your {1,5,10,20,...,90,95,99}-percentile estimates. Possible advantages of this approach:
Possible disadvantages of this approach:
Overall, I'd guess:
An alternative, roughly between the two groups discussed above, would be to find some repeatable way of generating questions that are at least slightly interesting. For instance, play online Mafia and privately make lots of predictions about which players have which roles, who will be lynched or murdered, etc. Or predict chess or poker. Or predict karma scores of LW/Reddit comments. Or use a spaced repetition system, but before showing the answer estimate the probability that you got the answer right. Any better ideas?
You can predict how long tasks/projects will take you (stopwatch and/or calendar time). Even if calibration doesn't generalize, it's potentially useful on its own there. And while you can't quite mass-produce questions/predictions, it's not such a hassle to rack up a lot if you do them in batches. Malcolm Ocean wrote about doing this with a spreadsheet, and I threw together an Android todo-with-predictions app for a similar self experiment.