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.
Image recognition, courtesy of the deep learning revolution & Moore's Law for GPUs, seems near reaching human parity. The latest paper is "Deep Image: Scaling up Image Recognition", Wu et al 2015 (Baidu):
...We present a state-of-the-art image recognition system, Deep Image, developed using end-to-end deep learning. The key components are a custom-built supercomputer dedicated to deep learning, a highly optimized parallel algorithm using new strategies for data partitioning and communication, larger deep neural network models, novel data augmentation approaches, and usage of multi-scale high-resolution images. On one of the most challenging computer vision benchmarks, the ImageNet classification challenge, our system has achieved the best result to date, with a top-5 error rate of 5.98% - a relative 10.2% improvement over the previous best result.
...The result is the custom-built supercomputer, which we call Minwa 2 . It is comprised of 36 server nodes, each with 2 six-core Intel Xeon E5-2620 processors. Each sever contains 4 Nvidia Tesla K40m GPUs and one FDR InfiniBand (56Gb/s) which is a high-performance low-latency interconnection and supports RDMA. The peak single
People often talk about clusters of ideas. A common context here is the various different contrarian clusters. But ideas can often cluster for historical reasons that don't have a coherent reason to connect. That's well known. What may be less well known is that there are examples where one idea in a cluster can be discredited and as a result other, correct ideas in the same cluster can fall into disrepute. I recently encountered an example while reading Cobb and Goldwhite's "Creations of Fire" which is a history of chemistry.
In the early 1800s Berthollet had hypothesized (with a fair bit of experimental evidence) that one could make the same compound with different ratios of substances. He also hypothesized what would later become to be known as the law of mass action. When the first claim was shown to be wrong, the law of mass action was also rejected, and would not become accepted again for about 50 years.
The upshot seems to be that we should be careful not to reject ideas just because they come from the same source as other, ideas which we've assigned low probabilities.
At one point there was a significant amount of discussion regarding Modafinil - this seems to have died down in the past year or so. I'm curious whether any significant updating has occurred since then (based either on research or experiences.)
As far as I know, no important news or research has come out about modafinil. Things have been quiet lately, even on the black-markets.
I'm taking a seminar course taking a computational approach to emotions: there's a very interesting selection of papers linked from that course page that I figure people on LW might be interested in.
The professor's previous similar course covered consciousness, and also had a selection of very interesting papers.
Random thought: revealing something personal about yourself is a very powerful "dark art". People will feel strong pressure to reciprocate.
I confess that I've sort of used it before. Ie. if I want to get information out of someone, I might reveal something personal about myself (I'm comfortable talking about a lot of things, so often times it really isn't even that personal).
I can't recall ever having had bad intentions though. I recall using it to get a friend to open up about something that I think would be beneficial for them, but that is difficult for them to do.
The real trick to both use and deflect this is to have some piece of information about yourself that sounds very personal but that you would be fine sharing with everyone. I use autism disclosure this way, not only for this purpose, but also so that when people who I have met try to think of examples of autism, they don't just think of fictional evidence.
Also, this shows up in HPMoR's chapter 7, titled Reciprocation.
It's not just pressure to reciprocate - revealing something very personal is an extremely strong signal of honesty. (Edit: And also confidence)
And while I didn't do this intentionally per se, I do remember the first conversation I had with my girlfriend involved me telling her about the time I failed out of my program in university. That worked out pretty well, I'd say.
Languages create selections effects that influence our perceptions of other nations.
Most notably, the prevalence of English as a second language means that more people outside of the Anglo-sphere have access to a wide range of Anglo-sphere media and conversation partners, whereas countries that mostly speak English will have a more filtered selection of international sources. For example, there are more people in Slovakia who can read major US newspapers than people in the US who can read major Slovakian newspapers.
A second class of effects occur on the scale of individuals. Second-language use may stem from a direct ancestral link, as in the case of immigration. Second-language use is sometimes related to higher levels of education. Finally, individual interest can influence the choice of acquired second-languages.
I'm curious how this model seems to people living in non-English countries.
As a monolingual, it does seem clear that I'm getting a very filtered sampling of the residents of foreign countries, even relative to all the normal filtering that happens in communication. I frequently catch myself thinking "How can country X be so dysfunctional? All the people I've every met from X are highly-skilled immigrants and people who choose to hang out on the same English-language science and philosophy forums as me!". The dysfunction of an English-speaking country never puzzles me, since I've met far too many of the residents :)
Interesting. So the educational filter should make people in Slovakia appear smarter to Americans (if they notice this country at all) simply because the worst stupidity won't get translated, and the lowest-class people will not travel to USA. You will not be regularly exposed to things like this.
On the other hand, this effect is probably much smaller than noise created by random American journalists or bloggers writing made-up stuff about Slovakia, or depictions of "Slovakia" in movies (example here, or shortly here). If for whatever reason a popular writer would decide that Slovakia is e.g. inhabited by vampires, there is pretty much nothing we could do about it.
All the people I've every met from X are highly-skilled immigrants
Maybe the right question to ask yourself when you meet a smart immigrant is: "Why did they have to leave their country?" Probably not polite to ask them, but you should assume there was a reason. And if the answer seems to be "poverty", well, poverty is usually caused by something, so unless the country is just one huge empty desert, there are other things wrong there, too.
Since no one answered on the stupid questions tread:
Why did LessWrong split off from Overcoming Bias?
Does anyone know?
Avoiding trivial inconveniences that effectively discourage wider participation?
I was reminded of this recently by Eliezer's Less Wrong Progress Report. He mentioned how surprised he was that so many people were posting so much stuff on Less Wrong, when very few people had ever taken advantage of Overcoming Bias' policy of accepting contributions if you emailed them to a moderator and the moderator approved. Apparently all us folk brimming with ideas for posts didn't want to deal with the aggravation.
My impression from the outset was that Eliezer and Robin were posting very different sorts of stuff, not having much to do with each other. It was two blogs shoehorned into one. The question for me is not why did they split, but why were they ever together?
I've recently been diagnosed with ADHD (predominantly inattentive). Does anyone here share this, and if so, what resources or books on the topic would you recommend?
Hey...
I'm new here. Hi.
I was recently re-reading the original blogs (e-reader form and all that), and noticed a comment by Eliezer something to the effect of "Someone should really write 'The simple mathematics of everything' ".
I would like to write that thing.
I'm currently starting my PhD in mathematics, with several relevant side interests (physics, computing, evolutionary biology, story telling), and the intention of teaching/lecturering one day.
Now... If someone's already got this project sorted out (it has been a few years), great... however...
Any other comments/advice/whatever?
I think I have noticed a frequent failure pattern when people try writing about complicated stuff. It goes like this:
Instead, this is what seems like a successful pattern:
Seems to me that Eliezer followed the latter pattern when writing Sequences. There is no part saying "this will make sense to you only after you read the following chapters I haven't written yet". Bu...
(request for guidance from software engineers)
I'm a recent grad who's spent the last six years formally studying mathematics and informally learning programming. I have experience writing code for school projects and I did a brief but very successful math-related internship that involved coding. I was a high-performing student in mathematics and I always thought I was good at coding too, especially back in high school when I did programming contests and impressive-for-my-age personal projects.
A couple months ago I decided to look for a full-time programmi...
In the vein of asking personal questions of Less Wrong, I need career advice. Or advice on finding useful career advice.
I'm an undergraduate student, my course is "Mathematics & Theoretical Physics", BSc, but I'm already convinced I don't want to try to be a career scientist. Long-term, my career goals are to retire early (I've felt comfortable enough on what I live on as a student that the MrMoneyMustache approach seems eminently doable), with the actual terminal values involved being enjoyment and lack of stress, so becoming a quant also se...
Reposting this because I posted it at the very end of the last open thread and hence, I think, missed the window for it to get much attention:
I'm vegetarian and currently ordering some dietary supplements to help, erm, supplement any possible deficits in my diet. For now, I'm getting B12, iron, and creatine. Two questions:
Sebastian Seung’s Quest to Map the Human Brain By GARETH COOK JAN. 8, 2015
Q&A with Zoltan Istvan, Transhumanist Party candidate for the US President
Sebastian Seung’s Quest to Map the Human Brain By GARETH COOK JAN. 8, 2015
I recently attended a biology conference where, among many other things, I got to see a talk by Dr. Jeff Lichtman of Harvard University on brain connectomics research.
It's very interesting stuff. He has produced a set of custom equipment that can scan brain tissue (well, any tissue, but he's interested in brain tissue) at 5x5x30 nm resolution. His super-duper one of a kind electron microscope can at this point scan about 0.3 cubic millimeters in 5 weeks, if I'm not mistaken. It spits out a dataset in the fractional-petabytes range. He's had one such dataset for a full 3-4 years but is encountering major problems with analysis - tracing cells and fibers over their full path is a very difficult problem. Automatic cell-tracer programs are good enough over the number of slices that makes up a cell-body but utterly fail at identifying things like synaptic vesicles reliably and when tracing fibers over their full lengths. To the point that most of his good data that he showed us has been manua...
I'm a programmer with a fair amount of reasonably diverse experience, e.g. C, C#, F#, Python, Racket, Clojure and I'm just now trying to learn how to write good Java. I think I understand most of the language, but I don't understand how to like it yet. Most Java programmers seem to basically not believe in many of the ways I have learned to write good software (e.g. be precise and concise, carefully encapsulate state, make small reusable modular parts which are usually pure functions, REPL-driven development, etc. etc.) or they apply them in ways that seem...
I'm going to CFAR, this week. I'll have pretty much a full day before the workshop, where I have nothing planned. Are there any cool rationalist things I should see or do in SF? Or even non-rationalist, but worthwhile things?
Are there any "landmarks" where I can just drop by (or maybe call ahead first)? I don't suppose MIRI welcomes merely -curious tourists /Pilgrims.
Here’s a self-improvement tip that I’ve come up with and found helpful. It works particularly well with bad habits, which are hard to fix using other self-improvement techniques as they’re often unconscious. To take one example, it’s helped improve my posture significantly.
1) List your bad habits. This is a valuable exercise in its own right! Examples might include bad posture (or, more concretely, crossing your legs), mumbling, vehicular manslaughter, or something you often forget to do.
2) Get in the habit of noticing when they o...
Positive reinforcement works better than negative. If noticing is followed by a punishment you are disincentivizing yourself to notice. This is bad because noticing is its own super power. Instead maybe try congratulating yourself for noticing, and then replacing the negative habit with some other reward. Eating too many gummy bears in the short term is probably worth it to repair bad habits in the long term for instance.
Death by Robot by Robin Marantz Henig
Part of the hidden ethicist agenda to reveal everyone's systems of morality via discussion of self-driving cars.
Is there any way to block distracting software on my computer? There are a blue million apps that will block websites, but I can't find any that will stop me from playing games I've installed. Ideally, I'd like some software that lets me play my games, but only after a 10 minute wait. But I'd settle for anything now that can restrict my access to games without uninstalling them entirely.
I'm looking for an old post of Eliezer's. If I remember the post correctly, he was commenting that a lot of the negative reaction to evopsych might come from having first encountered it in the hands of dumb internet commentators, instead of .
I don't remember the title he referenced, and the search function is failing me. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
I have heard that in economics and possibly other social sciences Ph.D. students can staple together three journal articles, call it a dissertation and get awarded their doctorate. But I've recently read "Publication, Publication" by Gary King, which I interpret as saying a very bright and hardworking undergraduate can write a quantitative political science article in the space of a semester, while carrying a normal class load.
This is confusing. Now, Dr. King teaches at Harvard so all his students are smart and it's two students writing one paper...
I don't know about social sciences, but the situation in math isn't that far off. The short answer is that the papers done by the undergraduates are real papers but the level of papers which are of the type and quality that would be stapleable into a thesis are different (higher quality, more important results) than would be the sort done in undergraduate research.
Is there a better search term than "self-modification," or a better place to look other than LW, for self-modification ideas/experiments, of the "when system 1 and system 2 are in conflict, listen to system 2" type? Any comments like "This particular thing worked for me and here's a link to it" are welcome.
Filing with the minimum of trivial impediments
This is a system designed especially for people who suffer from depression-- one of the symptoms is difficulty with making decisions, so the idea is to require as few decisions as possible-- for example, just file the envelope full of stuff from your bank instead of sorting out the advertising.
There's also minimization of the demands on memory-- for example, writing payments on bills.
The piece that really struck me was the recommendation of having a place for the stuff you're going to file, instead of letting it get scattered and lost.
I've never studied any branch of ethics, maybe stumbling across something on Wikipedia now and then. Would I be out of my depth reading a metaethics textbook without having read books about the other branches of ethics? It also looks like logic must play a significant role in metaethics given its purpose, so in that regard I should say that I'm going through Lepore's Meaning and Argument right now.
From an economics perspective, the stapler dissertation is real. The majority of the time, the three papers haven't been published.
It's also possible to publish empirical work produced in a few months. The issue is where that article is likely to be published. There's a clear hierarchy of journals, and a low ranked publication could hurt more than it helps. Dissertation committees have very different standards depending on the student's ambition to go into academia. If the committee has to write letters of rec to other professors, it takes a lot more work to be sufficiently novel and interesting. If someone goes into industry, almost any three papers will suffice.
I've seen people leave because they couldn't pass coursework or because they felt burnt out, but the degree almost always comes conditional on writing something and having well-calibrated ambitions.