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On the suggestion of Gunnar_Zarncke, this comment has been transformed into a Discussion post.
This should at least be in Discussions. It is very valuable high level feedback about the value of LessWrong.
If you agree and if you want to avoid duplicating it you can remove the body of the text and replace it with a link to the Discussions post.
At the rationality meetup today, there was a great newcomer. He's read up most of Eliezer's Yudkowsky's original Sequences up to 2010, and he's also read a handful of posts promoted on the front page. As a landing pad for the rationalist community, to me, Less Wrong seems to be about updating beyond the abstract reasoning principles of philosophy past, toward realizing that through a combination of microeconomics, probability theory, decision theory, cognitive science, social psychology, and information theory, that humans can each hack their own minds, and notice how they use heuristics, to increase their success rate at which they form functional beliefs, and achieve their goals.
Then, I think about how if someone has only been following the rationalist community of Less Wrong for the last few years, and then they come to a meetup for the first time in 2014, everyone else who's been around for a few years will be talking about things that don't seem to fit with the above model of what the rationalist community is about. Putting myself back into a newcomer/outsider perspective, here are some memes that don't seem to immediately, obviously follow from 'cultivating rationality habit...
Scott is a LW member who has posted a few articles here
This seems like a significant understatement given that Scott has the second highest karma of all-time on LW (after only Eliezer). Even if he doesn't post much here directly anymore, he's still probably the biggest thought leader the broader rational community has right now.
I started keeping a diary about a month ago. The two initial reasons I had for adopting this habit were that, first of all, I thought that I would enjoy writing, and second of all, I wanted to have something relaxing to do for half an hour before my bedtime every evening, because I often have trouble getting to sleep at night.
I have found that I generally end up writing about my day-to-day social interactions in my journals. One really nice benefit of keeping a journal that I hadn't expected to reap was that writing has helped me weakly precommit to performing certain actions that help me improve at being sociable. For example, a few weeks back, there were a couple nights where I wrote about how I felt bad about how a new transfer student to my school didn't seem to know anyone in the class which we had together. A couple days after writing about this, I ended up asking him to hang out with me, which was something that I normally would have been too shy to do.
Another thing that I learned is that writing about your problems can help you digest them in ways which are helpful to you. On a meta- level, I think that writing about my social interactions with others has helped me realize ...
Here's a fun game: concepts, ideas, institutions and features of the world we (let's say 21st Century Westerners) think of as obvious, but aren't necessarily so. Extra points for particularly visceral or captivating cases.
For example: at some point in human history, the idea of a false identity or alias wouldn't have even made sense, because everyone you met would be either known to you or a novel outsider. These days, anyone familiar with, say, Batman, understands the concept of an assumed identity, it's that endemic in our culture. But there presumably must have been a time when you would have had to go to great lengths to explain to someone what an assumed identity was.
A few examples:
Accurate timekeeping and strict schedules (a very famous example). Although sundials and water clocks were known since antiquity, they weren't very accurate and the length of an hour varied with the length of the day. It was rare for an average person to have a strict schedule. Even in monasteries and churches schedules probably could not be very strict, as although clocks did strike hours usually they weren't very accurate (13th-14th century mechanical clocks had no faces at all, and it wasn't until late 17th century when they became precise enough to justify regular use of minute hands) and they would likely regularly be reset at local high noon each day. In fact, it was only after the invention of pendulum clock by Christiaan Huygens in 1656 that timekeeping became accurate and independent of the length of the day, however, as late as 1773, towns were content to order clocks without minute hands as they saw no need for them. In 1840 railway time was invented. It was "the first recorded occasion when different local times were synchronised and a single standard time applied. Railway time was progressively taken up by all railway companies in Great Britain o
Historian David Wootton argues that until mid-19th century and the discovery of germ theory physicians did more >harm than good to their patients. Nowadays most people expect positive results when they go to the doctor.
This raises two questions:
1) Why, despite this, doctor was in general respected and well-paid profession?
2) What would have happened if use of statistics in medicine became widespread before germ theory. Could it lead to ban on medicine?
1) Why, despite this, doctor was in general respected and well-paid profession?
The faith-healing preacher, the witch-doctor, and the traditional healer are respected professions in the cultures where they occur. The Hippocratic physician was basically the traditional healer of Western civilization. He offered interventions that might kill, might cure, and were certainly impressive.
(It's worth noting that surgery was not within the traditional province of physicians. The original Hippocratic oath forbids physicians from doing surgery since they were not trained in it.)
For example: at some point in human history, the idea of a false identity or alias wouldn't have even made sense
I don't know about that -- the Odyssey, for example, doesn't have any trouble with the idea of a false identity...
Technically you are correct, of course, I don't know if the concept of false identity would have made sense to a paleolithic tribe, and if it did we can always go earlier until it wouldn't. But at this stage, a LOT of contemporary concepts would disappear.
As to your game, I think you need to limit it in some way, otherwise too much stuff (from women's rights to telecommunications) qualifies.
But there presumably must have been a time when you would have had to go to great lengths to explain to someone what an assumed identity was.
That time is clearly before the Arthurian cycle, which contains several instances of knights taking someone else's armour and being taken for that person - most famously, Kay the Seneschal and Lancelot. Arguably also before the period in which Greek myths were composed; Zeus occasionally disguises himself as someone's husband for purposes of seduction. In the Bible, Jacob disguises himself as his brother Esau to obtain their father's blessing, although admittedly the deception hinges on their father being blind. Mistaken identity seems to be a fairly old concept, then.
Homosexual identity. Over much of human history men and woman did engage in homosexual activity but they didn't made it a matter of personal identity.
I wonder whether we can distinguish between these two hypotheses:
I have the impression that until recently most cultures have either (1) regarded same-sex sex as abominable and shameful, or (2) regarded it as a perfectly normal activity for anyone (at least in certain circumstances). In case 1, a few percent of (what we would now call) homosexual people would be best advised to try to avoid being noticed. In case 2, they might be lost in the noise. In neither case is it clear that we'd expect to see much written about (what we would now call) actually homosexual people.
(I am vastly ignorant of history, and would not be very surprised to find that the impression reported in the previous paragraph is wrong.)
Tentatively: that tolerance and intolerance of strangers should be a matter of law rather than local impulse.
The ideal existed since antiquity, but — as today — wasn't consistently practiced.
"Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt." — Exodus 22:21
"The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God." — Leviticus 19:34
"And I charged your judges at that time, 'Hear the disputes between your people and judge fairly, whether the case is between two Israelites or between an Israelite and a foreigner residing among you.'" — Deuteronomy 1:16
(All quotations NIV.)
Low infant mortality. In many time periods, you could expect to witness as many (more?) deaths before adulthood as deaths from old age.
The concept of adolescence:
Although the first use of the word “adolescence” appeared in the 15th century and came from the Latin word “adolescere,” which meant “to grow up or to grow into maturity” (Lerner & Steinberg, 2009, p.1), it wasn’t until 1904 that the first president of the American Psychological Association, G. Stanley Hall, was credited with discovering adolescence (Henig, 2010, p. 4). In his study entitled "Adolescence," he described this new developmental phase that came about due to social changes at the turn of the 20th century. Because of the influence of Child Labor Laws and universal education, youth had newfound time in their teenage years when the responsibilities of adulthood were not forced upon them as quickly as in the past. http://www.massculturalcouncil.org/services/BYAEP_History.asp
With the trend towards an expectation of college education, we will need an extended concept to include the early twenties.
Edit: "Emerging adulthood is a phase of the life span between adolescence and full-fledged adulthood, proposed by Jeffrey Arnett in a 2000 article in the American Psychologist."
Obvious notion that shouldn't be obvious: Getting what you want.
If you've had a good education, lived in an affluent society all your life, and learned useful social skills, the notion that goals are achievable will sound ridiculously redundant to you, barely worth pointing out in words.
Hypothesis: Poor societies do not develop game theories.
Machiavelli's "The Prince" is very illustrative in that regard. He spends a few pages arguing that men can indeed control his own fate instead of just being at whim to the grace of God.
Here's a proposal: popular books for statistically literate people.
I've read several books from the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series. I like the general idea of these books: roughly 140 A6 pages concisely introducing a subject, and a list of further reading if you want it.
In practice, the ones on quantitative/scientific disciplines seem to put a lot of time and effort into writing around public ignorance of statistics. Those 140 pages would go a lot further if the author could just assume familiarity with statistical research methods.
This seems like a consistent enough body of knowledge to "factor out" of a lot of material, as much educational material with prerequisites does.
Here's an offer for anyone who writes blog posts or LW articles: I'm willing to proofread as well as provide feedback on your drafts. I would probably give the most useful feedback on material concerning computer science, personal productivity and ethics, as that's where most of my experience is allocated. However, I'd be glad to read just about anything.
Excellent news.
A promising idea in macroeconomics is that of NGDP level targetting. Instead of targetting the inflation rate, the central bank would try to maintain a trend rate of total spending in the economy. Here's Scott Sumner's excelent paper making the case for NGDP level targetting. As economic policy suggestions go, it's extremely popular among rationalists - I recall Eliezer endorsing it a while back.
At the moment we have real-time market-implied forecasts for a variety of things; commodity prices, interest rates and inflation. These inflation expectations acted as an early warning sign of the great recession. Unfortunately, at present there does not exist a market in NGDP futures, so it's hard to get real-time information on how the economy as a whole is doing.
Fortunately, Scott Sumner is setting up a prediction market for NGDP targetting in New Zealand. A variety of work, including some by Robin Hanson, suggests that even quite small prediction markets can create much more accurate predictions than teams of experts. The market is in the early stages of creation, but if anyone was interested in supply technical skills or financial assistance*, this could potentially have...
Optimization as Hobby
This may belong more in the Rational Diary; however, as it is not an account of any physical efforts, but rather a train of thought, I’ll put it here.
As of late (over the last three months), I’ve been suffering from ennui and listlessness. Several objectives (begin an independent study habit on Spanish and economics, write a novel, contribute to the online efforts of a library or archive) have proved either unfeasible or have had no success. Some of my other objectives (establish a daily exercise habit, begin writing again, obtain a t...
I'm trying to post an article on discussion about a personally important topic, but it's not going through. Any thoughts? It won't even save the material in drafts. I haven't posted much before, but this is a question that I think Less Wrong could be a great help on. It says I have enough karma, so that shouldn't be the problem.
I have started reading Qualia the Purple, a manga strongly recommended by a few LWers, such as Eliezer and Gwern. In his recommendation, Eliezer wrote: "The manga Qualia the Purple has updated with Ch. 14-15. This is what it looks like to “actually try” at something."
Does anyone else know good examples of "actually trying" in other media? Over the LW IRC channel, Gwern linked to this page (Warning, TV Tropes), and specifically recommended Monster. Any other suggestions?
[tangential] The price of Bitcoin has been dropping significantly in the past few weeks, and dropped below $300 yesterday. I've read many theories as to how this can't happen, but it is. What's going on?
That only puts an upper limit on the price of a bitcoin. The lower limit is set by what they are useful for, and how much more useful than the 500 or so other cryptocurrencies: transactions and contracts with security and anonymity properties that ordinary money does not provide.
For the last few weeks, I've been using an alarm app that forces me to take a picture of my front door before it turns off. Previously, I had been using one that forced me to do two difficult arithmetic problems. This meant that I woke up mentally, but was still unwilling to leave my bed, and instead spend half an hour checking fb and browsing the net on my phone. Now, the design of the clock forces me to leave my room, which makes it much easier for me to start my day more quickly. The photo recognition is not great, so normally I need to take 2 or 3 phot...
Long time lurker here, I just recently got accepted to App Academy (A big part of my inspiration for applying came from this post) And I'm really excited to attend some meetups in the area.
I have a few questions for Less Wrong people in the area, and this seemed like a good place to post them:
I'll be going in December, any chance I'll have Less Wrong company?
I understand that at least a few folks from here have been to app academy. Any advice? I've got an Associates in CS, and none of the prep work they've given me is too difficult, but is there anyth
I'm looking for research (for instance from psychology) showing that detailed feedback and criticism improves performance greatly and would be very grateful if I could get any tips in this regard. (I think I've heard that this is the case but can't find any papers on this.) I'm especially interested in how criticisms of texts can improve authors' writings but am also interested in examples from other fields.
I'm thinking that such feedback could improve performance via (at least) two mechanisms:
a) It teaches you exactly what you're doing right and what you'...
Are there any existing libraries for generating Anki decks?
It feels like generating Anki decks from data sources with defined object-relational schemas should be easy and fruitful. Alternatively, generating them from something like an R data frame seems like it could be worth doing.
ETA: I have Googled this before asking, by the way, but there are so many Anki decks about programming languages that it seems resistant to the obvious search terms.
I'm having trouble posting an article, so any help would be appreciated. I've tried to make a discussion post, and whenever I click "submit," it says, "submitting..." for a few seconds. However, the thread never appears in the discussion section. Also, when I try to close out of the submit article page, it says, "you've made changes to the article, but haven't submitted it." Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this? My only idea is that the target and class of hyperlinks aren't set, or that the article's too long; it's 27 pages.
Happy to see Elon Musk continuing to speak out about AI risk:
The first NGDP futures market is getting started based on the ideas of economist Scott Sumner. The idea is that the expected U.S. NGDP (nominal gross domestic product) is the single most important macroeconomic variable, and that having a futures (prediction) market will provide valuable information into this variable (Scott estimates that if it works, it will be worth hundreds of billions of dollars).
Unfortunately, due to US gambling laws (I think), the market will be based in New Zealand and U.S. citizens will not be allowed to participate.
Formatting stories - any good evidence?
I've started toying around with setting up my story at its permanent website, and have put a test page of the first chapter at this page (NSFW due to image of tasteful female nudity). I find myself faced with all sorts of options - font? line width? dark on light or light on dark? inline style or CSS? spot colors? hyphens or em-dashes? straight or curly quotes? etc, etc? - and I don't have a lot of evidence to base any answers on.
As a preliminary set of answers, I've drawn on Butterick's Practical Typography, even tho...
You could just answer it experimentally with A/B tests measuring time-on-page or leaving a review or something like that.
I see you're running off Apache on Dreamhost, so there's no doubt plenty of libraries to help you there, but there's other strategies: static sites can, with some effort, hook into Google Analytics to record the effect of an experiment, which is the approach I've used on gwern.net since I didn't want to manage a host like Dreamhost.
If I knew when I started what I know now, I would have begun with a large multifactorial experiment of the tweaks I tested one by one as I thought of them. It sounds like you are aware of the options you want to test, so you have it easy in that regard. (With the Abalytics approach, testing all those options simultaneously would be a major pain in the ass and probably hamper page loads since all possibilities need to be specified in advance in the HTML source, but I suspect any Apache library for A/B testing would make it much more painless to run many concurrent interventions.)
It'll probably take a few thousand visits before you have an idea of the larger effects, but that just means you need to leave the test running for a few months.
This seems like an obvious enough thought experiment there is probably a literature on it, but I have not found any: how much vacation would it be ethical for a superhero to take? The kneejerk reaction seems to be first none. Assuming even one life saved per hour, he'd be "killing" a handful of people even going on a date (beyond or assuming away a bare psychological minimum for sanity or cetera). The next kneejerk reaction is that the first one is nuts. Thoughts/references?
And despite involving superheroes, I am seriously interested.
As long as we're talking psychologically human superheroes rather than, say, aliens with perfect ethics and unlimited willpower from the planet Krypton, this seems equivalent to the problem of maximizing worker productivity (adjusted if necessary for the type of work). There's a substantial literature on that.
I've been reading studies on interventions to improve mood.
It seems worth taking seriously the possibility that we live in a world in which all single interventions have small to tiny effect sizes, and that, once we've removed factors known to have large negative impact, the mutable difference between people with mostly good mood and people with poorer mood comes down to a huge number of these small differences.
Some forms of therapy resemble this (examining a bunch of different thought patterns in CBT). Some studies claim to examine "lifestyle chang...
A question regarding polls: I have used the polls feature quite a bit now and I got the feeling that many more people vote on the poll options than on the poll comment. Given that there mostly is an option "just show me" which could be taken to interpreted as "I don't care about this poll but want to satisfy my curiosity" we could estimate the number of people who like the poll. Shouldn't these also up-vote the poll-comment as a whole? Is it just lazyness to not up-vote or is there same higher standard for LW comments than I think?
Has the activity on LessWrong changed since Spring (see this post])?
[pollid:779]
Where 'before' refers to the time in spring when this was on topic. And the middle option refers to the state at that time.
Random thought.
So, minor changes in designs of things sometimes result in better versions of things. You then build those things, and make minor design changes there. Repeat. Eventually you often get a version of a thing that no longer sees improvement from minor change.
"Global maximum!" declares a PhD biologist at a good university.
How common is this defect?
Criticize the following idea at will: let's see if there's a nugget of truth in it or if it busts under its own weight.
Moral progress can be modeled as the strengthening of a society memetic immune system.
Two extreme cases to illustrate this: a society where the power is held by an elite with very strict and very uniform moral code. In that case, any stray meme will likely be in conflict with the elite's memeplex, and so it poses a threat to the society itself. The immune system is very weak, the society is very oppressive. Another case: a society where p...
Anyone have general thoughts on distributed computing/grid computing projects? Any in the following list interest you? Any in the following list appear to be a waste of resources?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects
I'm Giving Away Money!
I recently posted about a writing wager I have developed for myself and a group of friends. The wager is simple: everyone chooses a charity and writes a novel. Finish the novel: donate to your charity. Give up or go a month without progress: donate to another charity (we have yet to decide whether it should be one charity or all three other charities).
I plan to choose an effective charity, however I am still in the decision process. So, here's you're chance to influence who gets money: tell me who I should donate to.
I'd like to hear ...
Why is Quixey associated with rationalism? From its website it doesn't seem different from any of many other startups.
Question: Say someone dramatically increased the rate at which humans can learn mathematics (over, say, the Internet). Assume also that an intelligence explosion is likely to occur in the next century, it will be a singleton, and the way it is constructed determines the future for earth-originating life. Does the increase in math learning ability make that intelligence explosion more or less likely to be friendly?
Responses I've heard to questions of the form, "Does solving problem X help or hinder safe AGI vs. unsafe AGI?":
Improvements in ratio
Umm, would anybody here have invites for torrent trackers for textbooks (e.g. BitMe, The Geeks, Bibliotik)? PM me.
Cryonics and transhumanism are laughably irrational. Guess that's what happens with a cult based on a Harry Potter fanfiction by a dropout
Question: Say someone dramatically increased the rate at which humans can learn mathematics (over, say, the Internet). Assume also that an intelligence explosion is likely to occur in the next century, it will be a singleton, and the way it is constructed determines the future for earth-originating life. Does the increase in math learning ability make that intelligence explosion more or less likely to be friendly?
Responses I've heard to questions of the form, "Does solving problem X help or hinder safe AGI vs. unsafe AGI?":
Improvements in rationality help safe AI, because sufficiently rational humans usually become unlikely to create unsafe AI. Most other improvements are a wash, because they help safe AI and unsafe AI equally.
Almost any improvement in productivity will slightly help safe AI, because more productive humans have more unconstrained time (i.e. time not spent paying the bills). Humans tend to do more good things and move towards rationality in their less constrained time, so increasing that time is a net win.
Not sure how I feel about these responses. But neither of them directly answers the question about math.
One answer would be that improving higher math education would be a net win because safe AI will definitely require hard math, whereas improving all math education would be a net loss because, like Moore's Law, it would increase cognitive resources across the board, pushing the timeline further up. Note that if we ignore network effects (researchers talking to researchers, convincing them to not work on unsafe AI), the question becomes: Is the effect of improving X more like shifting the timeline forward by Y years, as in increasing computing power, or is it more like stretching the timeline by some linear factor, as in increasing human productivity? Thoughts?
I would think that FAI requires mathematics a lot more than does UFAI, which can be created through trial and error.