Impulsive Rich Kid, Impulsive Poor Kid, an article about using CBT to fight impulsivity that leads to criminal behaviour, especially among young males from poor backgrounds.

How much crime takes place simply because the criminal makes an impulsive, very bad decision? One employee at a juvenile detention center in Illinois estimates the overwhelming percentage of crime takes place because of an impulse versus conscious decision to embark on criminal activity:

“20 percent of our residents are criminals, they just need to be locked up. But the other 80 percent, I always tell them – if I could give them back just ten minutes of their lives, most of them wouldn’t be here.”

...

The teenager in a poor area [who is] is not behaving any less automatically than the teenager in the affluent area. Instead the problem arises from the variability in contexts—and the fact that some contexts call for retaliation.” To illustrate their theory, they offer an example: If a rich kid gets mugged in a low-crime neighborhood, the adaptive response is to comply -- hand over his wallet, go tell the authorities. If a poor kid gets mugged in a high-crime neighborhood, it is sometimes adaptive to refuse -- stand up for himself, retaliate, run. If he complies, he might get a reputation as someone who is easy to bully, increasing the probability he will be victimized in the future. The two kids, conditioned by their environment, learn very different automatic responses to similar stimuli: someone else asserting authority over them.

The authors of “Thinking, Fast and Slow” extend the example further by asking you to imagine these same two kids in the classroom. If a teacher tells the rich kid to sit down and be quiet, his automatic response to authority on the street -- comply, sit down and be quiet -- is the same as the adaptive response for this situation. If a teacher tells the poor kid to sit down and be quiet, his automatic response to authority on the street -- refuse, retaliate -- is maladapted to this situation. The poor kid knows the contexts are different, but still on a certain level feels like his reputation is at stake when he’s confronted at school, and acts-out, automatically.

...

The researchers examined clinical studies of programs that keep this in mind and focus on teaching kids to regulate their automaticity. These interventions were designed to help young people, “recognize when they are in a high-stakes situation where their automatic responses might be maladaptive,” and slow down and consider them. One of the interventions studied was the Becoming a Man (BAM) program, conducted in public schools with disadvantaged young males, grades 6-12, on the south and west sides of Chicago.

“What makes the interventions we study particularly interesting is that they do not attempt to delineate specific behaviors as “good,” but rather focus on teaching youths when and how to be less automatic and more contingent in their behavior.”

Researchers randomly assigned students to have the opportunity to participate in BAM, as a course conducted once a week throughout the 2009-2010 school year.

The course is actually a program of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT helps people identify harmful psychological and behavioral patterns, and then disrupt them and foster healthier ones. It’s used by a wide range of people for a wide range of issues, including to treat depression, anger management, and anxiety disorders. The particular style of CBT used in BAM focuses on three fundamental skills:

1. Recognize when their automatic responses might get them into trouble,

2. Slow down in those situations and behave less automatically,

3. Objectively assess situations and think about what response is called-for. One thing participants are taught in BAM is that “a shift to an aversive emotion” is an important cue for when they are prone to act automatically. Anger, for example, was a common cue among participants in the study group. They were also taught tricks to help them slow down to consider their situation before acting: including deep breathing and other relaxation techniques. Lastly, they were guided through self-reflection and assessment of their own behavior: examining their “automatic” missteps, thinking about how they might have acted differently.

The researchers found that, during the program year, program participants had a 44% lower arrest rate for violent crimes than the control group. They repeated the intervention in 2013-2014 with a new group, and found that program participants had a 31% lower arrest rate for violent crimes than the control group.

The moral imperative for bioethics by Steven Pinker.

Biomedical research, then, promises vast increases in life, health, and flourishing. Just imagine how much happier you would be if a prematurely deceased loved one were alive, or a debilitated one were vigorous — and multiply that good by several billion, in perpetuity. Given this potential bonanza, the primary moral goal for today’s bioethics can be summarized in a single sentence.

Get out of the way.

A truly ethical bioethics should not bog down research in red tape, moratoria, or threats of prosecution based on nebulous but sweeping principles such as “dignity,” “sacredness,” or “social justice.” Nor should it thwart research that has likely benefits now or in the near future by sowing panic about speculative harms in the distant future. These include perverse analogies with nuclear weapons and Nazi atrocities, science-fiction dystopias like “Brave New World’’ and “Gattaca,’’ and freak-show scenarios like armies of cloned Hitlers, people selling their eyeballs on eBay, or warehouses of zombies to supply people with spare organs. Of course, individuals must be protected from identifiable harm, but we already have ample safeguards for the safety and informed consent of patients and research subjects.

Composing Music With Recurrent Neural Networks

It’s hard not to be blown away by the surprising power of neural networks these days. With enough training, so called “deep neural networks”, with many nodes and hidden layers, can do impressively well on modeling and predicting all kinds of data. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I recommend reading about recurrent character-level language models, Google Deep Dream, and neural Turing machines. Very cool stuff!) Now seems like as good a time as ever to experiment with what a neural network can do.

For a while now, I’ve been floating around vague ideas about writing a program to compose music. My original idea was based on a fractal decomposition of time and some sort of repetition mechanism, but after reading more about neural networks, I decided that they would be a better fit. So a few weeks ago, I got to work designing my network. And after training for a while, I am happy to report remarkable success!

Do Artificial Reinforcement-Learning Agents Matter Morally?

I've read this paper and find it fascinating. I think it's very relevant to Lesswrong's interests. Not just that it's about AI,but also that it asks hard moral and philosophical questions.

There are many interesting excerpts. For example:

The drug midazolam (also known as ‘versed,’ short for ‘versatile sedative’) is often used in procedures like endoscopy and colonoscopy... surveyed doctors in Germany who indicated that during endoscopies using midazolam, patients would ‘moan aloud because of pain’ and sometimes scream. Most of the endoscopists reported ‘fierce defense movements with midazolam or the need to hold the patient down on the examination couch.’ And yet, because midazolam blocks memory formation, most patients didn’t remember this: ‘the potent amnestic effect of midazolam conceals pain actually suffered during the endoscopic procedure’. While midazolam does prevent the hippocampus from forming memories, the patient remains conscious, and dopaminergic reinforcement-learning continues to function as normal.

CIA's The Definition of Some Estimative Expressions - what probabilities people assign to words such as "probably" and "unlikely".

CIA actually has several of these articles around, like Biases in Estimating Probabilities. Click around for more.

In hindsight, it seems obvious that they should.

Modafinil survey: I'm curious about how modafinil users in general use it, get it, their experiences, etc, and I've been working on a survey. I would welcome any comments about missing choices, bad questions, etc on the current draft of the survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ZNyGHl6vnHD62spZyHIqyvNM_Ts_82GvZQVdAr2LrGs/viewform?fbzx=2867338011413840797

A Scientific Look at Bad Science

By one estimate, from 2001 to 2010, the annual rate of retractions by academic journals increased by a factor of 11 (adjusting for increases in published literature, and excluding articles by repeat offenders) [2]. This surge raises an obvious question: Are retractions increasing because errors and other misdeeds are becoming more common, or because research is now scrutinized more closely? Helpfully, some scientists have taken to conducting studies of retracted studies, and their work sheds new light on the situation.

“Retractions are born of many mothers,” write Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, the co-founders of the blog Retraction Watch, which has logged thousands of retractions in the past five years. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reviewed 2,047 retractions of biomedical and life-sciences articles and found that just 21.3 percent stemmed from straightforward error, while 67.4 percent resulted from misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud (43.4 percent) and plagiarism (9.8 percent) [3].

Surveys of scientists have tried to gauge the extent of undiscovered misconduct. According to a 2009 meta-analysis of these surveys, about 2 percent of scientists admitted to having fabricated, falsified, or modified data or results at least once, and as many as a third confessed “a variety of other questionable research practices including ‘dropping data points based on a gut feeling,’ and ‘changing the design, methodology or results of a study in response to pressures from a funding source’ ” [4].

I just came across this: "You're Not As Smart As You Could Be", about Dr. Samuel Renshaw and the tachistoscope. This is a device used for exposing an image to the human eye for the briefest fraction of a second. In WWII he used it to train navy and artillery personnel to instantly recognise enemy aircraft, apparently with great success. He also used it for speed reading training; this application appears to be somewhat controversial.

I remember the references to Renshaw in some of Heinlein's stories, and I knew he was a real person, but this is the first time I've seen a substantial account of his work.

A few more references:

Wikipedia is rather brief.

Open access review article about work with the tachistoscope, in the Journal of Behavioral Optometry, 2003. This is the closest thing I've found to a modern reference.

An academic paper by Renshaw himself from 1945. Despite its antiquity, it is paywalled. I have not been able to access the full text.

This information is mostly rather old and musty, and there appears to be little modern interest. With current computers, it should be very easy to duplicate the technology, although low-level graphics expertise is likely needed to get very short, precise exposure times.

Even if half of what's posted here is at present beyond me or if I am not currently interested in a specific topic, I can learn a lot from this forum.

Is there a good book about how to read scientific papers? A book that neither says that papers should never trusted nor that is oblivious of the real world where research often doesn't replicate?

That goes deeper than just the password of correlation isn't causation? That not only looks at theoretical statistics but that's more empirical about heustritics for trusting papers to successfully replicate?

On the subject of prosociality / wellbeing and religion, a recent article challenges the conventional wisdom by claiming that, depending on the particular situation, atheism might be just as good or even better for prosociality / wellbeing than religion is.

Augur -- a blockchain general-purpose prediction market running on Ethereum.

Anyone knows anything about it? Gwern..?

The soon-to-be prisoner's dilemma in real life, no less :-)

Why Lonely People Stay Lonely

One long-held theory has been that people become socially isolated because of their poor social skills — and, presumably, as they spend more time alone, the few skills they do have start to erode from lack of use. But new research suggests that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the socially isolated. Lonely people do understand social skills, and often outperform the non-lonely when asked to demonstrate that understanding. It’s just that when they’re in situations when they need those skills the most, they choke.

In a paper recently published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Franklin & Marshall College professor Megan L. Knowles led four experiments that demonstrated lonely people’s tendency to choke when under social pressure. In one, Knowles and her team tested the social skills of 86 undergraduates, showing them 24 faces on a computer screen and asking them to name the basic human emotion each face was displaying: anger, fear, happiness, or sadness. She told some of the students that she was testing their social skills, and that people who failed at this task tended to have difficulty forming and maintaining friendships. But she framed the test differently for the rest of them, describing it as a this-is-all-theoretical kind of exercise.

Before they started any of that, though, all the students completed surveys that measured how lonely they were. In the end, the lonelier students did worse than the non-lonely students on the emotion-reading task — but only when they were told they were being tested on their social skills. When the lonely were told they were just taking a general knowledge test, they performed better than the non-lonely. Previous research echoes these new results: Past studies have suggested, for example, that the lonelier people are, the better they are at accurately reading facial expressions and decoding tone of voice. As the theory goes, lonely people may be paying closer attention to emotional cues precisely because of their ache to belong somewhere and form interpersonal connections, which results in technically superior social skills.

But like a baseball pitcher with a mean case of the yips or a nervous test-taker sitting down for an exam, being hyperfocused on not screwing up can lead to over-thinking and second-guessing, which, of course, can end up causing the very screwup the person was so bent on avoiding. It’s largely a matter of reducing that performance anxiety, in other words, and Knowles and her colleagues did manage to find one way to do this for their lonely study participants, though, admittedly, it is maybe not exactly applicable outside of a lab. The researchers gave their volunteers an energy-drink-like beverage and told them that any jitters they felt were owing to the caffeine they’d just consumed. (In actuality, the beverage contained no caffeine, but no matter — the study participants believed that it did.) They then did the emotion-reading test, just like in the first experiment. Compared to scores from that first experiment, there was no discernible difference in scores for the non-lonely, but the researchers did see improvement among the lonely participants — even when the task had been framed as a social-skills test.

It may be difficult to trick yourself into believing your nerves are from caffeine and not the fact that you really, really, really want to make a good impression in some social setting, but there are other ways to change your own thinking about anxiety. One of my recent favorites is from Harvard Business School’s Alison Wood Brooks, who found that when she had people reframe their nerves as excitement, they subsequently performed better on some mildly terrifying task, like singing in public. At the very least, this current research presents a fairly new way to think about lonely people. It’s not that they need to brush up on the basics of social skills — that they’ve likely already got down. Instead, lonely people may need to focus more on getting out of their own heads, so they can actually use the skills they’ve got to form friendships and begin to find a way out of their isolation.

Dead enough by Walter Glannon

To honour donors, we should harvest organs that have the best chance of helping others – before, not after, death

Now imagine that before the stroke our hypothetical patient had expressed a wish to donate his organs after his death. If neurologists could determine that the patient had no chance of recovery, then would that patient really be harmed if transplant surgeons removed life-support, such as ventilators and feeding tubes, and took his organs, instead of waiting for death by natural means? Certainly, the organ recipient would gain: waiting too long before declaring a patient dead could allow the disease process to impair organ function by decreasing blood flow to them, making those organs unsuitable for transplant.

But I contend that the donor would gain too: by harvesting his organs when he can contribute most, we would have honoured his wish to save other lives. And chances are high that we would be taking nothing from him of value. This permanently comatose patient will never see, hear, feel or even perceive the world again whether we leave his organs to whither inside him or not.

Being a comparatively new user, and thus having limited karma, I can't engage fully with The Irrationality Game. Seeing as how it's about 5 years out of date, is there any interest in playing the game anew? Are there rules on who should/can post such things?

Are there any guidelines for making comprehensive predictions?

Calibration is good, as is accuracy. But if you never even thought to predict something important, it doesn't matter if you have perfect calibration and accuracy. For example, Google recently decided to restructure, and I never saw this coming.

I can think of a few things. One is to use a prediction service like PredictionBook that aggregates predictions from many people. I never would have considered half the predictions on the site. Another is to get in the habit of recognizing when you don't think something will change and questioning that. E.g., I never would have thought not wearing socks would become stylish, but it seems to have caught on at least among some people.

Questioning literally everything you can think of might work, but it seems pretty inefficient. I'm interested in predictions which are important in some sense.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

If the Efficient Market Hypothesis is true, shouldn't it be almost as hard to lose money on the market as it is to gain money? Let's say you had a strategy S that reliably loses money. Shouldn't you be able to define an inverse strategy S', that buys when S sells and sells when S buys, that reliably earns money? For the sake of argument rule out obvious errors like offering to buy a stock for $1 more than its current price.

A database of philosophical ideas

Current Total Ideas: 17,046

Meta: How come there have been so many posts recently by the generic Username account? More people wanting to preserve anonymity, or just one person who can't be bothered to make an account / own up to most of what they say?

There's a new article on academia.edu on potential biases amongst philosophers of religion: Irrelevant influences and philosophical practice: a qualitative study.

Abstract:

To what extent do factors such as upbringing and education shape our philosophical views? And if they do, does this cast doubt on the philosophical results we have obtained? This paper investigates irrelevant influences in philosophy through a qualitative survey on the personal beliefs and attitudes of philosophers of religion. In the light of these findings, I address two questions: an empirical one (whether philosophers of religion are influenced by irrelevant factors in forming their philosophical attitudes), and an epistemological one (whether the influence of irrelevant factors on our philosophical views should worry us). The answer to the empirical question is a confident yes, to the epistemological question, a tentative yes.

A question that I noticed I'm confused about. Why should I want to resist changes to my preferences?

I understand that it will reduce the chance of any preference A being fulfilled, but my answer is that if the preference changes from A to B, then at that time I'll be happier with B. If someone told me "tonight we will modify you to want to kill puppies," I'd respond that by my current preferences that's a bad thing, but if my preferences change then I won't think it's a bad thing any more, so I can't say anything against it. If I had a button that could block the modification, I would press it, but I feel like that's only because I have a meta-preference that my preferences tend to maximizing happiness, and the meta-preference has the same problem.

A quicker way to say this is that future-me has a better claim to caring about what the future world is like than present-me does. I still try to work toward a better world, but that's based on my best prediction for my future preferences, which is my current preferences.

What examples are there of jobs which can make use of high general intelligence, that at the same time don't require rare domain-specific skills?

I have some years of college left before I'll be a certified professional, and I'm good but not world-class awesome at a variety of things, yet judging by encounters with some well and truly employed people, I find myself wondering how come I'm either not employed or duped into working for free, while these doofuses have well-paying jobs. The answer tends to be, for lack of trying on my part, but it would be quite a nasty surprise if I do begin to try and it turns out that my most relied-upon quality turns out not to be worth much. So, better to ask: how much is intelligence worth for earning money, when not supplemented by the relevant pieces of paper or loads of experience?

An Introverted Writer’s Lament by Meghan Tifft

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

I would like to see some targeted efforts to make the Sequences and other rationality materials available to less aspirational, curious or intellectual audiences.

Rationality fiction reaches out to curious audiences. Intellectual audiences may stumble upon rationality material while researching their respective fields of interest. Aspirants to rationality may stumble upon it while looking to better themselves and those around them.

Many ordinary people can benefit from the concepts here. And they will likely find their way to it, should their be an evident benefit to them, by contact with the the above classes of people who are in direct contact with first generation rationality materials produced here. I can see this at my local LW group, where it was hard to find someone who actually read LessWrong, based on my one visit. Though, it may be an artifact of the way the group was marketed in the past outside of the community.

Those who find learning difficult and distasteful can also benefit from rationality materials. So, I would like to start a discussion of suggestions by which material here could be adapted for use by a broader audience. I'll start us of by introducing the existing evidence on the subject of evidence-based teaching. This is easy, because a gentleman by the name of firstname Hattie synthesised 800 meta-analyses in education to figure that entire field out.

Using his own example, I will share a small mnemonic that future posters may like to keep in mind to keep things more accessible to those less cognitively flexible. It may be easier to take this approach, of consciously adopting writing styles that pander to the lowest common denominator, without reducing the sophistication of the content, than to restyle past discussions and sequences for that purpose.

DECIDES

D ecide on audience, goals, and position

E stimate main ideas and details

F igure best order of main ideas and details

E xpress the position in the opening

N ote each main idea and supporting points

D rive home the message in the last sentence

S earch for errors and correct

Has there been discussion of Jack Good's principle of nondogmatism? (see Good Thinking, page 30).

The principle, stated simply in my bastardized version, is to believe no thing with probability 1. It seems to underlie Good's type 2 rationality (to maximize expected utility, within reason).

This is (almost) in accord with Lindley's concept of Cromwell's rule (see Lindley's Understanding Uncertainty or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromwell%27s_rule). And seems to be closely related to Jaynes' mind projection fallacy.

I see yet another problem with the Singularity. Say that a group of people manages to ignite it. Until the day before, they, the team were forced to buy the food and everything else. Now, what does the baker or pizza guy have to offer to them, anymore?

The team has everything to offer to everybody else, but everybody else have nothing to give them back as a payment for the services.

The "S team" may decide to give a colossal charity. A bigger one than everything we currently all combined poses. To each. That, if the Singularity is any good, of course.

But, will they really do that?

They might decide not to. What then?

Important question that might affect the chances of humanity's survival:

Why is Bostrom's owl so ugly? I'm not much of a designer, but here's my humble attempt at a redesign :-)

Omega places a button in front of you. he promises that each press gives you an extra year of life, plus whatever your discounting factor is. If you walk away, the button is destroyed. Do you press the button forever and never leave?