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.
http://mindhacks.com/2015/11/16/no-more-type-iii-error-confusion/#comments
Use "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" as a mnemonic. His first error is type 1 (claiming a wolf as present when there wasn't one). His second error is type 2 (people don't notice an existing wolf).
Nice.
To fight back against terrible terminology from the other side (i.e., producing rather than consuming) I suggest a commitment to refuse to say "Type I error" or "Type II error" and always say "false positive" or "false negative" instead.
LW displays notifications about replies and private messages in the same place, mixed together, looking the same. Note that top-level comments on your articles are also considered replies to you (this is a default behavior, you could turn it off, but it makes sense so you will probably leave it turned on).
This has the disadvantage that when you post an article which receives about 20 comments and someone sends you a private message, it is very easy to miss the message. Because in your inbox you just see 21 entries that look almost the same.
Suggestion: The easiest fix would probably be to change the appearance of private messages in your inbox. Make the difference obvious, so you can't miss it. For example, add a big icon above each private message.
The latest New Yorker has a lengthy article about Nick Bostrom and Superintelligence. It contains a good profile of Bostrom going back to his graduate school days, his interest in existential threats in general, and how that interest became more focused on the risk of AGI specifically. Many concepts frequently discussed at LW are mentioned, e.g. the Fermi paradox and the Great Filter, the concept of an intelligence explosion, uploading, cryonics, etc. Also discussed is the progress that Bostrom and others have made in getting the word out regarding the threat posed by AGI, as well as some opposing viewpoints. Various other AI researchers, entrepreneurs and pundits are mentioned as well (although neither EY nor LW is mentioned, unfortunately).
The article is aimed at a general audience and so it doesn't contain much that will be new to the typical LWer, but it is an interesting and well-done overview, IMO.
As soon as I have two Karma points, I will post a 2000 word article on bias in most LW posts (which I would love to have your feedback on) with probably more to follow. However, I don't want to search for some more random rationality quotes to meet that requirement. Note to the administrators: Either you are doing a fabulous job at preventing multiple accounts or registration is currently not working (tried multiple devices, email addresses, and other measures).
I've been hearing about all this amazing stuff done with recurrent neural networks, convolutional neural networks, random forests, etc. The problem is that it feels like voodoo to me. "I've trained my program to generate convincing looking C code! It gets the indentation right, but the variable use is a bit off. Isn't that cool?" I'm not sure, it sounds like you don't understand what your program is doing. That's pretty much why I'm not studying machine learning right now. What do you think?
ML is search. If you have more parameters, you can do more, but the search problem is harder. Deep NN is a way to parallelize the search problem with # of grad students (by tweaks, etc.), also a general template to guide local-search-via-gradient (e.g. make it look for "interesting" features in the data).
I don't mean to be disparaging, btw. I think it is an important innovation to use human AND computer time intelligently to solve bigger problems.
In some sense it is voodoo (not very interpretable) but so what? Lots of other solutions to problems are, too. Do you really understand how your computer hardware or your OS work? So what if you don't?
I did my PhD thesis on a machine learning problem. I initially used deep learning but after a while I became frustrated with how opaque it was so I switched to using a graphical model where I had explicitly defined the variables and their statistical relationships. My new model worked but it required several months of trying out different models and tweaking parameters, not to mention a whole lot of programming things from scratch. Deep learning is opaque but it has the advantage that you can get good results rapidly without thinking a lot about the problem. That's probably the main reason that it's used.
RNNs and CNNs are both pretty simple conceptually, and to me they fall into the class of "things I would have invented if I had been working on that problem," so I suspect that the original inventors knew what they were doing. (Random forests were not as intuitive to me, but then I saw a good explanation and realized what was going on, and again suspect that the inventor knew what they were doing.)
There is a lot of "we threw X at the problem, and maybe it worked?" throughout all of science, especially when it comes to ML (and statistics more broadly), because people don't really see why the algorithms work.
I remember once learning that someone had discretized a continuous variable so that they could fit a Hidden Markov Model to it. "Why not use a Kalman filter?" I asked, and got back "well, why not use A, B, or C?". At that point I realized that they didn't know that a Kalman filter is basically the continuous equivalent of a HMM (and thus obviously more appropriate, especially since they didn't have any strong reason to suspect non-Gaussianity), and so ended the conversation.
http://boingboing.net/2015/11/16/our-generation-ships-will-sink.html
Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the new scifi novel Aurora and back in the day the Mars trilogy, on how the notion of interstellar colonization and terraforming is really fantasy and we shouldnt let it color our perceptions of the actual reality we have, and the notion of diminishing returns on technology.
He doesnt condemn the genre but tries to provide a reality check for those who take their science fiction literally.
Is he wrong though? Sometimes I feel I'm getting tired of humanity, because it makes everything about status.
I found out about Omnilibrium a couple months ago, and I was thinking of joining in eventually. I was also thinking of telling some friends of mine who might want to get in on it even more than I do about it. However, I've been thinking if I told lots of people, or they themselves told lots of people, then suddenly Omnilibrium might get flooded with dozens of new users at once. I don't know how big that is compared to the whole community, but I was thinking Omnilibrium would be averse to it growing it too big, as well-kempt gardens die by pacificism and al...
Recommended: a conversation between Tyler Cowen and Cliff Asness about financial markets. Especially recommended for people who insist that markets are fully efficient.
Samples:
A momentum investing strategy is the rather insane proposition that you can buy a portfolio of what’s been going up for the last 6 to 12 months, sell a portfolio of what’s been going down for the last 6 to 12 months, and you beat the market. Unfortunately for sanity, that seems to be true.
and
...One thing I should really be careful about. I throw out the word “works.” I say “This s
Disinformation review, a weekly publication, which collects examples of the Russian disinformation attacks.
...The main aim of this product is to raise the awareness about Russian disinformation campaign. And the way to achieve this goal is by providing the experts in this field, journalists, academics, officials, politicians, and anyone interested in disinformation with some real time data about the number of disinformation attacks, the number of countries targeted, the latest disinformation trends in different countries, the daily basis of this campaign,
How are you all doing today? I'm having a pretty good start of my day(it's 11:42 am) here :P
I have found Krushke's bayesian data analysis & Gelman's text to be pretty good companions to each other and I'm glad I bought both. Personally I also found that building a physical personal library was much better for my person development than probably any other choice I made throughout the last year and a half. Libraries are definitely antifragile.
Also http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0471257095/ref=dp_olp_all_mbc?ie=UTF8&condition=all Feller vol 2 paperback is 8 dollars used.
I'm curious about how others here process study results, specifically in psychology and the social sciences.
The (p < 0.05) threshold for statistical significance is, of course, completely arbitrary. So when I get to the end of a paper and the result that came in at, for example, (p < 0.1) is described as "a non-significant trend favoring A over B," part of me wants to just go a head and update just a little bit, treating it as weak evidence, but I obviously don't want to do even that if there isn't a real effect and the evidence is unrelia...
I've never understood the appeal of uploading.
I've seen just once someone talk about an idea which I strongly doubt is the mainstream, that there's this question about which hardware "you" will "wake up" in. Surely not. Both would be conscious, right?
If I upload myself, there are two of me.
But this doesn't make me feel like I don't mind dying. What do I care if the world will continue with another of me? I want to live. It's not that I want someone who is me to keep existing, I want to keep living myself.
Am I confused about why people think of this as a life extension possibility?
Finally, someone with a clue about biology tells it like it is about brain uploading
http://mathbabe.org/2015/10/20/guest-post-dirty-rant-about-the-human-brain-project/
In reading this, suggest being on guard against own impulse to find excuses to dismiss the arguments presented because they call into question some beliefs that seem to be deeply held by many in this community.
The human brain project is largely not study, its a huge pointless database and 'simulation' (without knowing what you are simulating) project for its own sake. Which is why so many scientists hate it, for its pointlessness and taking research money that could actually be productive rather than buzzword salad elsewhere.
What do people think of the “When should I post in Discussion, and when should I post in Main?” section in the FAQ?
I find myself looking less and less in Main because I don’t see much content in there besides the meetup posts. I have a suggestion which might improve this and that is to update the FAQ so that it encourages reposting highly voted content in discussion into Main. This would have couple of benefits:
I think we should get rid of "main" and "promoted" .
Right now there's four tiers: open thread, discussion, main, and main promoted.
at least once a week I see a comment that says "this should be in main," "this shouldn't be in main", "this should be in the open thread," or "this shouldn't be in the open thread, it should be it's own post".
I think the two tier system of open thread/discussion would suffice, and the upvote downvote mechanism could take care of the rest.
Right now there's four tiers: open thread, discussion, main, and main promoted.
And the "main" tier is actually worse than the "discussion" tier. :(
So I'd recommend removing only the dysfunctional part, and have: open thread, discussion, discussion promoted.
Yvain, #2 in all-time LW karma, has his own blog which is pretty great. The community has basically moved there and actually grown substantially... Yvain's posts regularly get over 1000 comments. (There's also Eliezer Yudkowsky's facebook feed and the tumblr community.) Turns out online communities are hard, and without a dedicated community leader to tweak site mechanics and provide direction, you are best off just taking a single top contributor and telling them to write whatever they want. Most subreddits fail through Eternal September; Less Wrong is the only community I know of that managed to fail from the opposite effect of setting an excessively high bar for itself. Good online communities are an unsolved and nontrivial problem (but probably worth solving since the internet is where discussions are happening nowadays--a good solution could be great for our collective sanity waterline).
I haven't visited Hacker News for a while, but it seemed like the leadership there was determined to create a quality community by whatever means possible, including solving Eternal September without oversolving it. I'll bet there is a lot to learn from them.
I've been thinking about this for a few months. I'm pointing this out to commit to writing a main-level article by December 1st, hopefully earlier.
Live in LA? On the autism spectrum? Got social anxiety or social phobia? You're elegible for legal MDMA therapy. Congrats. For the rest of you out there, take it from me, don't do extasy, it's unreliabe. The tests are shitty.
Live in Canada and got an addiction? Ayahuasca for you!. Live in Australia with PTSD? Soon.
A Quasipolynomial Time Algorithm for Graph Isomorphism: The Details
...Laszlo Babai has claimed an astounding theorem, that the Graph Isomorphism problem can be solved in quasipolynomial time. On Tuesday I was at Babai’s talk on this topic (he has yet to release a preprint), and I’ve compiled my notes here. As in Babai’s talk, familiarity with basic group theory and graph theory is assumed, and if you’re a casual (i.e., math-phobic) reader looking to understand what the fuss is all about, this is probably not the right post for you. This post is research lev
Has anybody donated a car to charity before (in the US? CA in particular, but I imagine it'll generalize outside of location-specific charities).
The general advice online is useful but not very narrowly-tailored. Couple points I'm looking for information on:
1) Good charities (from an EA perspective)
2) Clarification on the tax details (when car's fair market value is between $500 and $5000)
Would appreciate any advice.
My girlfriend's cat poops on the carpet. The cat does poop in the litter boxes some of the time, and always urinates in them, but she also poops on the carpet several times a day in different places. (She also never buries her poop when she does use the boxes.) Any advice?
There are profit (and income) premiums in vice industries from non-competitive behaviour by moralists. Wouldn't be suprised if moral entrepreneurs intersect with actual entrepreneurs.
Feeling like you're an expert can make you closed-minded
...Victor Ottati at Loyola University and his colleagues manipulated their participants (US residents, average age in their 30s) to feel relative experts or novices in a chosen field, through easy questions like “Who is the current President of the United States?” or tough ones like “Who was Nixon's initial Vice-President?” and through providing feedback to enforce the participants’ feelings of knowledge or ignorance. Those participants manipulated to feel more expert subsequently acted less open-minde
[Stanford researchers uncover patterns in how scientists lie about their data(http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/november/fraud-science-papers-111615.html)
...Even the best poker players have "tells" that give away when they're bluffing with a weak hand. Scientists who commit fraud have similar, but even more subtle, tells, and a pair of Stanford researchers have cracked the writing patterns of scientists who attempt to pass along falsified data.
The work, published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, could eventually help scientists i
...Focus on a new frame of reference, not on technique. Clients need to shift away from content—“it’s about my heart/ my debt/ the safety of the plane/ germs”—and toward the very best strategies to recover from their anxiety disorder. These strategies will always address the intentions that currently motivate their actions. Most decisions by anxious clients have two functions:
1) to only take actions that have a highly predictable, positive outcome
2) to stay comfortable
And that makes sense. Everyone seeks comfort. And everyone wants to feel confident about ce
I bought a visa prepaid debit card that's expiring in a month. I have a bank account. How do I get the money from the debit card (anonymous, not attached to my name and has no online account associated with it) into my bank account? There's no payment gate in my online bank account.
A meta-ethics reflection about the three chimps.
We know that chimps societies are in a meta-stable Molochian equilibrium of violence, but you can tip them off with more resources into a more pacific state.
There is supposedly a "universal" progress of society towards a more moral baseline, such as less slavery, less torture, more freedom, but there were also notable exception. I was thinking about the seventeen's century Venice, which was freer than contemporary Venice. But at the time Venice was one the most powerful city-state in the Mediterrane...
Writing high-quality content is one problem, selecting high-quality content is another. This is the advantage of one-person blogs, where if the author consistently writes high-quality content, both problems are solved at the same time.
The role of author is difficult and requires some level of talent, but it can also be emotionally rewarding. The author gets fans, maybe even money: from context advertising, asking for donations, selling their own product or services.
The role of censor (the person who filters what other people wrote) is emotionally punishing. Whatever you do, some people will hate you. If you remove an article, the author of the article, plus everyone who liked the article, will hate you. If you don't remove an article, everyone who disliked the article will hate you. There are not exact rules; some cases are obvious, but some cases are borderline and require your personal choice; and however you choose, people who would choose otherwise will hate you. People will want mutually conflicting things: some of them prefer higher quality, some of them prefer more content, and both of them will suspect that if you would do your job right, the website would have content both excellent and numerous. It is very difficult for the censor to learn from feedback, because the feedback will be negative either way, thus it does not work as an evidence for doing the job correctly or not.
The author writes when he or she wishes. The censor works 24/7. Etc.
Give me a perfect (x-rational, unbiased, and tireless) censor, and we can have a great rationalist website. Here is how -- In version 1.0, the censor would create a subreddit. Then he would look at a few rationalist blogs (and facebook pages, and tumblr pages, etc.), and whatever passes his filter, he would post it in the subreddit. Also, anyone would be allowed to post/link things on subreddit, and the censor would delete them if they are not good enough. Also, the censor would delete comments, and possibly ban users, if they are not enough.
This is all that is necessary to create a great rationalist debate forum. But it is very difficult. Not to do it once -- but to keep doing it every day, for months and years, despite getting only negative feedback.
There might be clever ways to distribute the job of censor, e.g. have an initial cadre of trusted users and ban any newcomer that gets voted down too much by your trusted users. Someone gets added to the trusted users if the existing trusted users vote them up sufficiently. Or something like that. But I expect you would need someone to experiment with the site full time for a while (years?) before the mechanics could be sufficiently well worked out.