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.
Luke quotes from Superforecasting on his site:
"Doug knows that when people read for pleasure they naturally gravitate to the like-minded. So he created a database containing hundreds of information sources—from the New York Times to obscure blogs—that are tagged by their ideological orientation, subject matter, and geographical origin, then wrote a program that selects what he should read next using criteria that emphasize diversity. Thanks to Doug’s simple invention, he is sure to constantly encounter different perspectives."
wishing to get his hands on this program.
Does anyone know of something similiar, or who this 'Doug' may be? I wonder if this may be as simple as simply asking this man. The book gives 'Doug Lorch' as his full name. Google gives a facebook account as first result, but I have no idea if this is an actual match.
If any moderator is reading this: user denature123 has posted large quantities of ugly spammy comments; if s/he and they could be blown away, that would be nice.
The scientists encouraging online piracy with a secret codeword
What if you're a scientist looking for the latest published research on a particular subject, but you can't afford to pay for it?
...
Andrea Kuszewski, a cognitive scientist and science writer, invented the tag, which uses a code phrase: "I can haz PDF" - a play on words combining a popular geeky phrase used widely online in a meme involving cat pictures, and a common online file format.
"Basically you tweet out a link to the paper that you need, with the hashtag and then your email address," she told BBC Trending radio. "And someone will respond to your email and send it to you." Who might that "someone" be? Kuszewski says scientists who have access to journals, through subscriptions or the institutions they work at, look out for the tag so they can help out colleagues in need.
Think you have a finely callibrated and important information diet? Imagine if you had the world's strongest intelligence agency tailor the news for you. Well, you don't have to imagine, because the president's daily briefs have just been declassified. If you're interested, you can collaborate with researchers to get a better handle on it. Enjoy.
Given the absence of a boasting thread recently. Here's a little boasting:
Helped monitor and proxy for these publically/non-internet user accessible (meaning multiple people can use and post with them through me) Reddit accounts
Identified a potent research interest
Monitored and learning from responses to my LW content as appropriate
Just a quick dump of what I've been thinking recently:
A train of thought is a sequence of thoughts about a particular topic that lasts for some time, which may produce results in the form of decisions and updated beliefs.
My work, as a technical co-founder of a software company, essentially consists of riding the right trains of thought and documenting decisions that arise during the ride.
Akrasia, in my case, means that I'm riding the wrong train of thougt.
Distraction means some outside stimulus that compels my mind to hop to a different train of th
It's often entertained on LessWrong that if we live in some sort of a big world, then conscious observers will necessarily be immortal in a subjective sense. The most familiar form of this idea is quantum immortality in the context of MWI, but arguably a similar sort of what I would call 'big world immortality' is also implied if, for example, we live in another sort of multiverse or in a simulation.
It seems to me that big world scenarios are well accepted here, but that a lot of people don't take big world immortality very seriously. This confuses me, and...
So, should we take big world immortality seriously?
Whether or not we take it seriously doesn't seem to have any effect on how we should behave as far as I can tell, so what would taking it seriously imply?
UN climate reports are increasingly unreadable
...The climate summary findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are becoming increasingly unreadable, a linguistics analysis suggests.
IPCC summaries are intended for non-scientific audiences. Yet their readability has dropped over the past two decades, and reached a low point with the fifth and latest summary published in 2014, according to a study published in Nature Climate Change1.
The study used the Flesch Reading Ease test, which assumes that texts with longer sentences and more compl
I've been thinking about some of the issues with CEV. It's come up a few times that humanity might not have a coherent, non-contradictory set of values. And the question of how to come up with some set of values that best represents everyone.
It occurs to me that this might be a problem mathematicians have already solved, or at least given a lot of thought. In the form of voting systems. Voting is a very similar problem. You have a bunch of people you want to represent fairly, and you need to select a leader that best represents their interests.
My favorite ...
Autonomous Vehicles Need Experimental Ethics: Are We Ready for Utilitarian Cars?
...The wide adoption of self-driving, Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) promises to dramatically reduce the number of traffic accidents. Some accidents, though, will be inevitable, because some situations will require AVs to choose the lesser of two evils. For example, running over a pedestrian on the road or a passer-by on the side; or choosing whether to run over a group of pedestrians or to sacrifice the passenger by driving into a wall. It is a formidable challenge to define the alg
Thanks to Turing completeness, there might be many possible worlds whose basic physics are much simpler than ours, but that can still support evolution and complex computations. Why aren't we in such a world? Some possible answers:
1) Luck
2) Our world has simple physics, but we haven't figured it out
3) Anthropic probabilities aren't weighted by simplicity
4) Evolution requires complex physics
5) Conscious observers require complex physics
Anything else? Any guesses which one is right?
what is the future of electronics technicians? Are they a good career choice? Will their skills quickly begun obsolete due to coming hardware changes?
Do people take advantage of instant run-off voting to "not throw away their vote"?
What do they do in Australia? Where else do people have such systems? I suppose I could just look up Australia, but I fear it might be hard to interpret and I’d rather hear from someone with experience of it.
I ask because the recent British Labour leadership election was very different from the last. I suspect that there was a substantial portion of the electorate who preferred, say, Abbot in 2010, but didn't vote for her because she was not viable. The whole compli...
More spam: someone called "lucy" is posting identical nonsense about vampires to multiple threads. Less obnoxious than denature123 yesterday, but still certainly spam.
(I've been assuming that, given that we have multiple moderators, it's better to post comments like this than to PM one or more individual moderators. I will be glad of correction from actual moderators if some other approach is better.)
'Zeno effect' verified: Atoms won't move while you watch
One of the oddest predictions of quantum theory – that a system can’t change while you’re watching it – has been confirmed in an experiment by Cornell physicists.
...
...Graduate students Yogesh Patil and Srivatsan K. Chakram created and cooled a gas of about a billion Rubidium atoms inside a vacuum chamber and suspended the mass between laser beams. In that state the atoms arrange in an orderly lattice just as they would in a crystalline solid.,But at such low temperatures, the atoms can “tunnel” fr
There is significant progress in genetic modification of humans and in physical modification/augmentation of humans. It is plausible we will have genetically modified and/or physically modified human intelligence before we have artificial intelligence.
FAI is the pursuit of artificial intelligence constrained in a way that it will not be a threat to unmodified humans. Or at least that is what it seems to be to me as an observer of discussions here, is this a reasonable description of FAI?
It occurs to me that natural human intelligence has certainly no...
I notice I boast about things without even considering if they're things others will find impressive or shameful - like not attending class. it's a bad habit not to exercise my consideration, empathy and/or theory of mind more. Reckon I've identified the right failure mode here or I'm misattributing?
Munchkining real estate http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/this-startup-tracks-america-s-murder-houses (I'm referring to the resellers mentioned in the article, not the actual startup covered).
I've finally gotten to reading a bunch of MIRI papers. I don't pretend to understand as they are meant to be understood. Can it be predicted whether a maths problem is solved, solvable, unsolved or unsolvable? I feel really...dismayed and discouraged reading through MIRI's work. I feel as though they are trying to solve questions that cannot be solved. Though, many famous maths problem go from unsolved to solved, and I struggled with high school maths so I certainly would prefer to defer to some impressive reasoning from you, my peers at LessWrong before I abandon my support for MIRI.
You should worry more about whether MIRI's way of doing problems is a good way of solving hard problems, not how hard the problems are.
Problem difficulty is a constant you cannot affect, social structure is a variable.
As any other amateur who reads Eliezer’s quantum physics sequence, I got caught up in the “why do we have the Born rule?” mystery. I actually found something that I thought was a bit suspicious (even though lots of people must have thought of it, or experimentally rejected this already.) Note that I'm deep in amateur swamp, and I'll gleefully accept any "wow, you are confused" rejections.
Here is my suggestion:
What if the universes, that we live in, are not located specifically in configuration space, but in the volume stretched out between config...
How do you feel about floating posts in the Discussion section?
Like: electing a few threads that stay at top for the month/week they are active, the open threads, the monthly media thread, etc.
Is that even possible with LW code?
I have a few questions and think the guys at LW probably can help. I'm not sure LW is the best place to ask this, but I don't really know any other place.
Many people (politicians, famous, or what-have-you) have a website and have a "contact" page. How can I write a message that will have an impact? I'm assuming that:
Those are the things that pop out of my head right now, anyt...
How well can you disambiguate someone's notes to the self? I'd like to calibrate my powers of mentalisation!
Here are some hypothetical goals someone may have. For those that are a unclear or odd, would you like propose what you think they may really be saying and how you came to that conclusion. Can you even infer which of them mean what they say and which mean something secret?
I'll give you feedback, cause I generated and obfuscated the writing myself!
What website would you suggest for looking into medical research, for someone who's not versed in reading medical literature? I'm specifically looking for any developments or studies into the treatment of urethral strictures for my own reference.
Final Kiss of Two Stars Heading for Catastrophe
Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, an international team of astronomers have found the hottest and most massive double star with components so close that they touch each other. The two stars in the extreme system VFTS 352 could be heading for a dramatic end, during which the two stars either coalesce to create a single giant star, or form a binary black hole.
I have a Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps on my mobile (iphone).
Can I streamline (reduce the number of) my apps without losing functioning?
Attention everyone excellent, in one way or another!
What are the determinants of success for an amateur on their path to expertise in an area you are exceptional at that isn't already described accurately on Lesswrong?
Describe a rough estimate of the variance in the success of entrants to the field that can be attributed to each determinant you identify?
No time for modesty now, you're hear to teach and learn!
Ask not what LessWrong can do for you, but what you can do for LessWrong!
Is there any work on developing brain implants or similar for pain moderation in case of sudden injury and you want to down regulate pain so you can think clearly and get help and function?
I don't feel safe knowing I have to wait for an ambulance to get access to serious pain killers and such.
It's probably best, since they are often harmful and liable to abuse, but surely someone is working on solving these issues.
The Intelligence Agent's forum looks very active. I'm glad it has taken off.
Can I solicit any reviews about anyone's experience with it so far?
The content itself is beyond me. I'm curious whether I should refer to it intermittently while still learning MIRI's research syllabus or whether the expectation is to have a command of everything before starting. I suspect the latter given the caliber of posts, but that may simply be the founder effect and unintended.
It just struck me...I have no idea about the room for more funding considerations for MIRI. Googling after it suggests that question hasn't even been seriously analysed before. Surely I'm missing something...
Why do I find nasal female voices so sexy? Even languages that emphasise nasality are sexy to me, like Chinese or French, whereas their language group companions with other linguistic similarities do not (e.g. Spanish in the case of French). Is there anything I can do to downregulate my nasal voice fetish?
Do we know whether quantum mechanics could rule out acausal between partners outside eachother's lightcone? Perhaps it is impossible to model someone so far away precisely enough to get a utility gain out of an acuasal trade? I started thinking about this after reading this wiki article on the 'Free will theorem' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem .
Critical thinking is a responsibility for every intelligent agent, just as the benefaction of the critical thought of others ought to be a right for all sufferable life. Millions of hollocaust victims were at the mercy of men just following orders. Never again
Imperialism and a defence of inequality in capitalist republics
Who was is that first articulated the argument that: Since money flows to those can anticipate and predict the need of others, those who get power are those who can do that and therefore if those people are caring then they are the best capable of looking after the rest
And, what strong critiques are available
I'm troubleshooting my ongoing failures in sustained, romantic relationships. My social cognition is impaired, and so too is the social cognition of autistic people. With some googling about feelings of inadequacy and asperges, I found a book that documents feelings of inadequacy in asperger's men as they relate to relationships with women that proposes one conditional stimuli (women 'performing' (better in relationships) than them) to explain this phenomenon:
...Men (with asperg syndrome)...may suffer feelings of inadequacy if they appear to be performing
I'm so over getting super fascinated by someone and thinking they're the sun and moon then talking to them more and realise they're just human like the rest of us...agh. I'm so bad with romance haha. I don't know how to stop idealising people who seem like perfect matches at the time, but then as I talk to them I realise their just a regular person. What can I do about this?
I would be interested to see a kind of survey where anyone can rate each active or interested LWer on their profficiency on the content of each sequence. It's somewhat annoying how my interpretation of the sequence would appear to cut down on a good deal of the questions asked and reasked in discussion comments by some very active. But perhaps it's me that's ignorant. This could be an enlightening self awareness exercise for many of us, improve the calibre of posts by shaming people who would otherwise claim profficiency when their peers may be skeptical, and raise the sanity waterline among LW ourselves.
The whole point of acausal trading is that it doesn't require any causal link. I don't think there's any rule that says it's inherently hard to model people a long way away.
Imagine being an AI running on some high-quality silicon hardware that splits itself into two halves, and one half falls into a rotating black hole (but has engines that let it avoid the singularity, at least for a while). The two are now causally disconnected (well, the one outside can send messages to the one inside, but not vice versa) but still have very accurate models of each other.
Yes, I understand the point of acausal trading. The point of my question was to speculate on how likely it is that quantum mechanics may prohibit modeling accurate enough to make acausal trading actually work. My intuition is based on the fact that in general faster than light transmission of information is prohibited. For example, even though entangled particles update on each others state when they are outside of each others light cone, it is known that it is not possible transmit information faster than light using this fact.
Now, does mutually enhan... (read more)