Would anyone be interested in forming an R discussion/study/support group?
I have quite modest R skills, but I would like spectacular R skills that are the toast of the town and the envy of all who see them. I suspect I'm not the only person on LW with this desire, so I thought I'd sound out interest in a group to help mutually achieve this.
What I see such a group doing:
Anyone interested?
I am an active github R contributor and stackoverflow R contributor and I would be willing to coordinate. Send me an email: rkrzyz at gmail
I've been ignoring Open Threads throughout my time on LW, but I've found out recently that this was to my detriment. While there is much noise (i.e., stuff I personally don't care about), there are some genuinely interesting things here.
At the same time, I feel like Discussion for me has just died out and no longer has anything interesting, apart from the Open Threads.
The problem (for me), is that Discussion was very easy to follow, while Open Threads are very hard to follow.
Is there an easier way to follow Open Threads? And/or a way we could start moving some of the Open Thread stuff back to Discussion?
I phrased it as Good Stuff from OT rather than Best of OT because good stuff (possibly as a more dignified phrase) is easier to identify than best.
Are utilitarians theoretically obligated to prefer that Brazil win the world cup? Consider: of the 32 participating countries, only the USA has a larger population, but the central place of soccer in Brazilian culture, and their status as hosts mean that they have more at stake in this competition. So total utility would probably be maximized by a Brazil win.
These considerations would seem to make rooting for any other team immoral from a strict utilitarian perspective. This exposes some things I find problematic about utilitarianism. For example, I also have the intuition that it is okay for people to support their own team, even if that teams victory would make hundreds of millions of Brazilians unhappy. If you are a utilitarian player playing against Brazil, are you doing something morally wrong by trying to win? This seems absurd, but I can't see how to escape this conclusion.
These considerations would seem to make rooting for any other team immoral from a strict utilitarian perspective.
Only if rooting for a team makes it more likely for it to win. ;-)
I'm trying to track down a fallacy or effect that was once explained to me and which I found plausible: The idea that whoever has the more complex and detailed mental model of a topic under question wins a discussion about a question - independent of the actual truth of the matter (and assuming no malicious intent).
The example cited as I remember it was about visual (microscope) inspection of blood samples for some boolean factor (present or not). Two persons got the same samples and were trained to recognize the factor one was always told the truth and t...
Oh my dear sweet God YES, Goodman and Tenenbaum wrote a book on probabilistic models of cognition. With a programming language and exercises for writing and running the models.
[squee intensifies]
We often see people offering rewards for compelling arguments for changing their mind. Examples would be Sam Harris), for a counterargument for his book, Jonathon Moseley, for showing that separation of church and state is found in the First Amendment, and perhaps James Randi, for showing the existence of supernatural abilities, could be included. Of course, this sort of reward scheme creates a large incentive to not change your mind. Some of these are clearly publicity stunts, but if I sincerely wanted good evidence against my position, what would be the...
Does anyone have advice for effective learning in distracting/suboptimal environments? I know LW recommends textbooks and learning by accumulation instead of random walks, but I have at most 1-2 hours of uninterrupted time per day I can spend learning optimally vs. 8+ hours per day I could potentially use to learn sub-optimally (e.g. frequent distractions, sudden interruptions, hours between learning sessions) during downtime at work that is currently going to waste. Are there better formats than textbooks for these environments or would it be more effecti...
When I was in California I noticed that Benja Fallenstein seemed to have a much better thought out way of using TagTime than I did. I asked him for more details by email, and he gave me permission to share the below with all of you:
Most importantly, I make sure that all my tags fit on a single screen on my phone; and that most of my pings need to get only two of these tags: (a) a category, and (b) a Liekert scale rating from 1 to 7. (1 = very bad; 2 = bad; 3 = neutral to bad; 4 = neutral; 5 = neutral to good; 6 = good; 7 = very good)
I have TagTime linked...
Regarding the LW meetup feedback results, I said:
I'll be writing up an analysis of results, but that takes time.
That was a month ago. Since then, I've spent about two pomodoros on it, and didn't get much actually written during those. I have three or four other things that I want to spend pomodoros on, and this has fallen by the wayside.
I want this analysis to get written, but there's no particular reason that it needs to be me who writes it. So if someone else would volunteer to write it, I'd be very grateful. The sanitized results are here. I'm not g...
This isn't particularly deep analysis, more just aggregation. Here's my take on the results, though, after some totally biased and ad-hoc tallying:
A total of seventy-five users responded. Convenience, scheduling conflicts, and other personal issues were by far the most common reasons not to attend, as a factor in almost half of the responses. Unfortunately there's not much we can do about this, except possibly giving more thought to location when scheduling, and that seems unlikely to happen given the issues I've seen with finding space and time. Two people felt uncomfortable with an otherwise convenient meetup's location, with a third having no personal complaints but describing complaints from others.
After that, a perception of the participants as too nerdy, weird, or socially awkward seems to be the most common complaint, with ten people citing one or more. A couple of these respondents attended no meetups and were presumably working from perceptions of the LW community at large, but most had. This seems to be a pivotal issue with our community's perception, but I'm not sure what to do about it. I imagine many feel it's a feature rather than a bug.
A lack of structure is a...
Thanks for this summary! This is a very important thing for growing of the community.
I was thinking about whether being "too nerdy, weird, or socially awkward" is a bug or a feature, but it seems to me that we need to be more specific, to look into details. Some things in our community are inherently weird (unusual in the everyday discourse); debating artificial intelligence, for example. But some forms of social awkwardness (harassment, boredom, unproductive debates) can -- and should -- be fixed; I mean, not just for the PR purposes, but because that also is a part of "becoming stronger". Let's see how far towards pleasant interaction can we go without sacrificing other values (such as honesty). I guess we can -- and should -- improve here a lot.
Maybe it's an issue of going meta at solving the wrong problem. If I want to have a group of people who talk about artificial intelligence, I must focus not only on the "artificial intelligence" part, but also on the "having a group of people" part. This is probably our blind spot, because the former feels like an academic subject, while the latter feels almost like an opposite to the academia (so w...
Sam Harris recently responded to the winning essay of the "moral landscape challenge".
I thought it was a bit odd that the essay wasn't focused on the claimed definition of morality being vacuous. "Increasing the well-being of conscious creatures" is the sort of answer you get when you cheat at rationalist taboo. The problem has been moved into the word "well-being", not solved in any useful way. In practical terms it's equivalent to saying non-conscious things don't count and then stopping.
It's a bit hard to explain this to pe...
Quantum Mechanics In Your Face, a video debate between MWI, Collapse, Bohmian and QBism proponents, for those interested in this murky issue.
I have invented a wormhole with ends separated by ten seconds in time. Unfortunately the power requirements scale exponentially with size so its not practical for anything larger than photons, but it does mean I can send information back in time. How would you exploit this?
Have a program use its own output as input, effectively letting you run programs for infinite amounts of time, which depending on how time travel is resolved may or may not give you a halting oracle.
Also you can now brute force most of mathematics:
one way to do this is using first order logic which is expressive enough to state most problems. First order logic is semi-decidable which means that there are algorithms which will eventually return a proof for correct statements. Since your computer will take at most ten seconds to do this, you will have a proof after ten seconds or know that the statement was incorrect if your computer remains silent.
The NYT provides a nifty animated graphic visualizing the large sampling error associated with the monthly jobs report: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/02/upshot/how-not-to-be-misled-by-the-jobs-report.html (second screen). What's nice about it is that you can watch the various scenarios' random draws and see how easily you fall into pattern recognition mode, despite knowing it's a simulation.
Not being seduced by good-looking point estimates is one of those things you'd hope everyone would learn as part of basic statistical literacy, but seems to be very ra...
Link: Steve Yegge on why people who spend literally all day every day in front of a keyboard need to learn to type (2008). Much like many others, but still true. Also includes answers to "I am a special snowflake" objections to people who could learn but just don't.
I wrote a blog post on prediction markets, and specifically some of the problems with a popular conception of prediction markets that I've seen out in the wild. It may be of interest to people on LW, so I am including a link to it... here. (Robin Hanson already commented, and he didn't seem to hate it, so I feel pretty good about it already)
I also asked this in the previous Open Thread, but rather late, so I'm asking it again: I noticed that the dropbox link to te pdf of the 2012 Winter Solstice Ritual is dead and I was wondering if anyone had a mirror they'd be willing to share.
Hard question:
How should people facing colonization act to avoid cultural and economic subjugation?
Let's give some hindsight benefit - suppose you were transported back to America circa 1800 as a respected chieftain, how could you act to minimize the horrible stuff that would happen to the Native Americans over the next 100 years? What's the best you could hope for given that you couldn't magically make the USA behave better?
How should people facing colonization act to avoid cultural and economic subjugation?
They ought to subjugate themselves, obviously!
Or, to be a little less flip; if you are facing such a fate, it is because your society is overwhelmingly weaker than its rivals. Yes, as Lumifer, below, suggests, the Native Americans needed weaponry, but it's hardly an accident that they lacked it - they weren't capable of manufacturing such things for themselves, or of producing anything of value to offer in exchange for the weaponry. As a result, they were forced to rely on the goodwill and charity of their neighbours, which is just as disastrous for nations as is it for individuals. Even if the USA had left the natives well alone, the Mexicans, or the French, or some other predatory nation would have wiped them out.
What the Native Americans needed to do was to reorganise their society, to give up their traditional way of life, to live in cities, to adopt the settlers' customs, laws, methods of production, and so on. See, for example, the example of Japan 60 years later.
I am confused as to why your potted history indicates that Meiji Japan is a bad example of successful westernisation.
(Repost, because it didn't get much love in the older thread)
Merely knowing about the confirmation bias helps to avoid it.
Or so I think. Ever since reading about the confirmation bias and taking some time to think of examples where I fell prey to it I catch myself following up a thought of this makes so much sense or this fits my exerience so well with a simple confirmation bias and thinking of alternative explanations or counter examples. The use for myself is not yet obvious and it is obvious I do not do this with perfect consistency. Another observation...
I have lots of questions for experts in various fields. Some of the questions are very detailed and based on extensive research, while other questions are more along the lines of "I could research this subject for a long time and eventually find the answer to my question buried in some obscure article, or I could just ask you." The problem is, how do I go about asking these questions in such a way that I'll actually get answers?
I could of course just send out questions to a bunch of experts and see if any respond. But as I said I have a lot of qu...
Interview with Peter Unger focusing on his new book criticizing much of philosophy. I haven't read the book yet, but from the interview it looks like it would be of interest to people here (although it might be too much confirmation bias to read something that preaches this much to the choir).
I want to test my ideas, mostly ideas for technology projects and/or startup ideas. Doing scientific research is best but can be quite costly and time-consuming, so I assume it would be optimal to filter the ideas first in order to select the best ones for testing. I already do things like looking for problems and unintended consequences, looking for relevant studies, and showing them to people hoping to find flaws, but I would bet that somebody has created an idea review process that can be applied for even better preliminary filtering. It would be ide...
So, I'm curious - how should we update on the probability of time travel, given this?
(Sorry about the paywall. The content, filtered through my undergraduate understanding of QM: essentially, researchers prepared a quantum simulator mathematically equivalent to a CTC and got reasonable results from it that matched up with David Deutsch's predictions.)
Previous open thread
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.
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.