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.
In the last few days, a few people have newly joined LW, posting only in a welcome thread and in articles about Gleb_Tsipursky's "Intentional Insights" work. Their comments have been very enthusiastic about II.
Now here's the thing. Intentional Insights is based in the US. Everyone on its leadership team (I think) and advisory board is in the US. Most of its activity, so far as I can see, is focused on promoting ... whatever exactly II promotes ... in US-based media like the Huffington Post. But it just happens that two of these people are a brother and sister (I think) from Nigeria, and a chap from the Philippines. The last person I recall turning up on LW and gushing about how great II is and how wonderful GT's articles are was also from the Philippines. Isn't that odd?
(For the avoidance of doubt, of course there's nothing in any way wrong about being from Nigeria or the Philippines. I'm just asking: isn't this a rather improbable sequence of events?)
Now, Gleb has an answer, sort of:
...In fact, many of the people who engage with Intentional Insights content are from developing countries, as we collaborate with international skeptic and reason-oriented organizations such a
Sarginlove, that is, Sargin Rukevwe, works as a "virtual assistant". Basically you hire him to do whatever and in this case he seems to have been hired to promote InIn.
It's interesting that his page says he graduated from the Polytechnic in 2013, but his introductory post here says he is a student at that school.
Let me repeat the observation I've made before -- Gleb_Tsipursky is a very clear case of cargo-cult behaviour. He has no clue about marketing, but he's been told which motions to make so that the planes will come and he's making them very earnestly. One of these motions is "native" (or covert) promotion which is designed to look like spontaneous endorsement -- and so he hires a lad from Lagos to post cringeworthy stuff here and everywhere...
P.S. Hey, look, Sarginlove has a Google+ account and his entire post history consists of -- drumroll, please! -- InIn reposts.
I guess he was hired on Dec 3, 2015, amiright?
If someone turns up saying "I've just discovered X and I love it", the information I gain from that is quite different in the cases (1) where they really have just discovered X and love it and (2) where they're saying it because someone paid them to.
Indeed, the fact that these people are presumably being paid isn't the point. The fact that they are promoting something dishonestly is the point. The fact that they're being paid is relevant only as evidence that their promotion is dishonest.
Why not ban me?
Because your ranting is not in fact particularly insane, and because your participation in the LW community is not confined to ranting about hypothyroidism.
If you talked about literally nothing else, and if it transpired that you're only promoting your theory because someone paid you to drum up sales for thyroid hormone supplements, then you'd probably be contributing nothing of value. (Whether banning you would be a good response is a different question.) I mean, it might turn out that actually what you're saying about thyroid hormones is right (or at least enlightening) even though you were saying it on account of being paid, but the odds wouldn't be good.
What if I was so convinced I was right that I started a 'Rational Thyroid Treatment Corporation'? (Just teasing now, sorry)
If you would then hire Nigerians to promote it on LW, we would have a problem.
moderator action: Torchlight_Crimson is banned
Another account of Eugine_Nier / Azathoth123 / Voiceofra / The_Lion / The_Lion2 / Old_Gold is banned, effective now. This is an enforcement of the already existing ban, therefore only this message in Open Thread.
EDIT: Also Crownless_Prince.
How I see it, deleting of Eugine's new accounts is a continuous enforcement of the permanent ban from 2014 (explained here). Whether he continues in his previous behavior should in theory be irrelevant; I would delete his new accounts anyway because that's what "permanent" means. But in practice, he continues with his old behavior, which makes him easier to detect, and motivates me to overcome my laziness.
t;dr how do you cope with death?
My dog has cancer in his liver and spleen, and learning this has strongly exacerbated some kind of predisposition towards being vulnerable to depression. He's an old dog so it probably wouldn't have changed his life expectancy THAT much, but it's still really sad. If you're not a pet person this might be counterintuitive, but to me it's losing a friend, and the things people say to me are mostly unhelpful. Which is why I'm posting it here specifically: the typical coping memes about doggy heaven or death as some profoundly important part of Nature are ruined for me. So I wanted to ask how people here deal with this sort of thing. Especially on the cognitive end of things, what types of frames and self talk you used. I do already know the basics, like exercise and diet and meditation, but I sure wouldn't mind a new insight on getting myself to actually do that stuff when I'm this down.
I've thought about cryopreserving him, but even if that were a good way to use the money I just don't think I can afford it. All I'll have is an increasingly vague and emotionally distant memory, I guess, and it sucks. I've been regretting not valuing him more during his...
Finding comments on LW is more painful than it should be because sometimes this happens:
Here's a typical example; it happens to use only Z (I picked one of my comments from a couple of weeks ago) but including X and Y seldom helps.
I just tried the equivalent search in Bing and the results were more satisfactory, but only because the comment in question happened to appear fairly near the top of the overview page for the user I was replying to. I would guess that Bing isn't act...
Is there a way to make the dynamically-generated sidebar stuff on LW pages invisible to Google's crawler? It looks like there is. Should I file an issue on GitHub?
Yes, you should do this.
Andrew Gelman mentioned "the Kahneman-Gigerenzer catfight, or more generally the endless debate between those who emphasize irrationality in human decision making and those who emphasize the adaptive and functional qualities of our shortcuts." This looked worth checking, so I followed the link to the following statement by Gigerenzer:
...The “half-empty” versus “half-full” explanation of the differences between Kahneman and us misses the essential point: the difference is about the nature of the glass of rationality, not the level of the water. For
How many of you guys keep a journal? How many of you would like to? What do you specifically write down?
I feel like it should help, but I have trouble coming up with a structure with which it could: Opening up a journal, with separate sections for work done, (and TODOs for the future, and how these two diverged), exercise, and others seems more useful than one with a massed 'Dear Diary' format.
From Bruce Schneier (who knows Alice and Bob's shared secret), a very relevant observation:
...Cryptography is harder than it looks, primarily because it looks like math. Both algorithms and protocols can be precisely defined and analyzed. This isn't easy, and there's a lot of insecure crypto out there, but we cryptographers have gotten pretty good at getting this part right. However, math has no agency; it can't actually secure anything. For cryptography to work, it needs to be written in software, embedded in a larger software system, managed by an operati
Out of curiosity, is LW doing some sort of A/B testing? visualwebsiteoptimizer.com wants to run an awful lot of scripts on the page...
Not according to Razib Khan who writes in part:
"A new paper on which has some results on life satisfaction, intelligence and the number of social interactions one has has generated some mainstream buzz....The figure above shows the interaction effect between intelligence, life satisfaction, and number of times you meet up with friends over the week. What you see is that among the less intelligent more interactions means more life satisfaction and among the more intelligent you see the reverse...But take a look at the y-axis...The effect here is very small....These are not actionable results for anyone."
I'm making a list of common arguments that can all be resolved in the same way the "tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound" argument can be resolved.
Namely, by tabooing a key word and substituting a non-ambiguous, comprehensive description, and then finding out you were never disagreeing about anything in the first place.
Examples so far:
Is Islam a "religion of peace?"
Is there a "wall of separation between Church and State" in the US?
Is America a "Christian nation?"
Are Catholics/Mormons/Jehovah's Witnesses/etc &...
What does Nassim Taleb think about existential risks and existential risk research? He sounds like a kind of person who might be interested in such things?
Seeking ideas: Stupid Em Tricks
To help with one of my story projects; how many (useful, interesting, other) things can an uploaded mind do that a meat-based person can't?
I've got a GDoc with an initial set of basic ideas here, and I've temporarily turned on worldwide editing and commenting. I'd appreciate all the useful suggestions you can think of, there or here.
Has there been any response to Brett Hall's critique of Bostrom's Superintelligence? What do y'all think? http://www.bretthall.org/superintelligence.html
I wish I had read the ending first; Hall is relying heavily on Deutsch to make his case. Deutsch has come up on LW before, most relevantly here. An earlier comment of mine still seems true: I think Deutsch is pointing in the right direction and diagnosing the correct problems, but I think Deutsch underestimates the degree to which other people have diagnosed the same problems and are working on solutions to address those problems.
Hall's critique is multiple parts, so I'm writing my response part by part. Horizontal lines distinguish breaks, like so:
It starts off with reasoning by analogy, which is generally somewhat suspect. In this particular analogy, you have two camps:
Builders, who build ever-higher towers, hoping that they will one day achieve flight (though they don't know how that will work theoretically).
Theorists, who think that they're missing something, maybe to do with air, and that the worries the builders have about spontaneous liftoff don't make sense, because height doesn't have anything to do with flight.
But note that when it comes to AI, the dividing lines are different. Bostrom gets flak for not knowing the details of modern optimization and machine learn...
I have a maths question. Suppose that we are scoring n individuals on their performance in an area where there is significant uncertainty. We are categorizing them into a low number of categories, say 4. Effectively we're thereby saying that for the purposes of our scoring, everyone with the same score performs equally well. Suppose that we say that this means that all individuals with that score get assigned the mean actual performance of the individuals with that that score. For instance, if there were three people who got the highest score, and their pe...
Your problem is called a clustering problem. First of all, you need to answer how you measure your error (information loss, as you call it). Typical error norms used are l1 (sum of individual errors), l2 (sum of squares of errors, penalizes larger errors more) and l-infinity (maximum error).
Once you select a norm, there always exists a partition that minimizes your error, and to find it there are a bunch of heuristic algorithms, e.g. k-means clustering. Luckily, since your data is one-dimensional and you have very few categories, you can just brute force it (for 4 categories you need to correctly place 3 boundaries, and naively trying all possible positions takes only n^3 runtime)
Hope this helps.
Excellent piece of epistemology from Yudkowsky, someone put this in main right now.
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154067130774228
AllLivesMatterButBlackLivesAreEspeciallyLikelyToBeEndedByPolice AndItsOkayForNationalPoliticsToFocusOnThatPartForAWhile
Running this through my parser I was able to extract the statement "All live matter but black lives are especially likely to be ended by police and it's okay for national politics to focus on that part for awhile".
Containment thread
1. Negotiating self defense
Stranger A: I'm going to beat you up
Stranger B: I have photographic memory and illustrate professionally.
Stranger A: I could kill, blind or main you.
Stranger B: I could escape then submit your likeness to the authorities
2. Experimental philosophy
Is anyone here an ethical intuitionist or not?
3. Happy home
Observational studies suggest distance to work is associated with happiness. I moved about 15km closer to work and now walk there, and guess what, I'm a lot happier! Potential confounders: moved out of family hom...
Clarity has a habit of shotgunning shards of his mind dumps across multiple comments. He has been trying to limit the spread, though, and place most of these shards within a "containment thread" the purpose of which is to be a designated place for the shards and thus constrain the collateral damage.
Is there a continuum of realizing that you are dreaming? I ask because I sometimes dream of the city where I live, and I would go, 'oh, this is my Dream Kyiv, with steep wooded slopes and broken bridges and a cathedral of The College (all somewhat resembling real places), let's see what we'll get now...' and when I wake up I often remember th overall image.
http://setosa.io/ev/conditional-probability/
Visualisation of conditional probability. It makes it very clear and takes a very short time to understand.
Politically charged comment coming in the wake of the Brussels attack.
I just realized that the deep-sounding question "should we be tolerant of intolerance" is trivially solved by game theory. It's exactly the same question as "should I play Cooperate against someone who plays Defect". The right answer is "no". The people who answer "yes" are just trying to appear virtuous.
Upvoted, I appreciate the concern, and thanks for expressing it! Some other folks might have noticed this and been concerned without expressing it openly, so it's good to get this out into the open.
Intentional Insights has an international reach and aim. While we are based in the US, less than a third of our traffic comes from there, and the next three highest venues are India, Philippines, and Pakistan. We write regularly for internationally-oriented venues. We have plenty of volunteers who are from those places as well, and I encourage them regularly to join Less Wrong after they have engaged sufficiently with InIn content.
Most are currently lurkers, but as I have seen positive changes coming with the LW 2.0 transformation, I encouraged a number to be active contributors to the site. So some have responded, and naturally talked about how they found LW. I'm sad, but unsurprised, to see this met with some suspicion.
Sargin in particular volunteers at Intentional Insights for about 25 hours, and gets paid as a virtual assistant to help manage our social media for about 15 hours. He decided to volunteer so much of his time because of his desire to improve his thinking and grow more rational. He's been improving through InIn content, and so I am encouraging him to engage with LW. Don't discourage him please, he's a newbie here.
However, he made a mistake by not explicitly acknowledging that he works at InIn as well as volunteers at it. It's important to be explicit about stuff like this - his praise for InIn content should be taken with a grain of salt, just like praise from CFAR staff for CFAR content should be taken with a grain of salt. Otherwise, there is an appearance of impropriety. I added a comment to his welcome thread to make that clear.
Thanks for raising this issue, gjm, appreciate it!
EDIT: Edited with a comment I made on Sargin's welcome thread.
Ah, planning fallacy. If you're not surprised by the negative turn of event, you could have possibly anticipated it and corrected.