Comments - Less Wrong Discussion

tut on Open thread, May 17-31 2013

2013-05-25T07:33:32.258953+00:00

If the harm can be something that only occurs under some circumstances that didn't obtain in the EEA, 100%

tut on Open thread, May 17-31 2013

2013-05-25T17:32:21.917635+10:00

That would explain the evolutionary value of Seasonal Affective Disorder.

There are more people with SAD who get depressed in the spring than in early winter or the darkest part of winter.

pragmatist on Morality should be Moral

2013-05-25T07:08:47.969206+00:00

Empirical disputes tend to move from generalizations to particulars, since perception is regarded as the ultimate arbiter, and our perception is of particulars. So if two people disagree about whether oppositely charged objects attract or repel one another (a generalization), one of them might say, "Well, let's see if this positively charged metal block attracts or repels this negatively charged block." We rely on the fact that agents with similar perceptual systems will often agree about particular perceptions, and this is leveraged to resolve disagreement about general claims.

Moral disputes, on the other hand, tend to move in the opposite direction, from particulars to generalizations. Disputants start out disagreeing about the right thing to do in a particular circumstance, and they attempt to resolve the disagreement by appeal to general principles. In this case, we think that agents with similar biological and cultural backgrounds will tend to agree about general moral principles ("avoidable suffering is bad", "discrimination based on irrelevant characteristics is bad", etc.) and leverage this agreement to attempt to resolve particular disagreements. So the direction of justification is the opposite of what one would expect from the perceptual model.

This suggests to me that if there are moral truths, then our knowledge of them is probably not best explained using the perceptual model. I do agree that moral disagreements aren't entirely like mathematical disagreements either, but I only brought up the mathematical case as an example of there being other "kinds of truth". I didn't intend to claim that morality and mathematics will share an epistemology. I would say that knowing moral truths is a lot more like knowing truths about, say, the rules for rational thinking.

DanielLC on Orwell and fictional evidence for dictatorship stability

2013-05-25T06:28:08.011669+00:00

I wonder if it's possible to get Candle Jack and the Thought Police to fi--

Douglas_Knight on [LINK] Raw Story: US seizes operator accounts of a subsidiary of Mt. Gox

2013-05-25T16:25:19.289611+10:00

Yes, if the price on other markets hasn't collapsed, then this isn't terrible news for bitcoin; if the price on MtGox doesn't deviate from other markets, then it isn't terrible news for MtGox. But you seem to imply that a high price on MtGox is a good sign for bitcoin and MtGox. This seems backwards to me: if MtGox were about to collapse, the natural response would be to turn account dollars into account bitcoins and thence real bitcoins, driving up the cost of bitcoins on that system. Or to put it another way, seizing dollars turns account dollars into fractionally backed paper, a third currency that people might not like.

DanArmak on Orwell and fictional evidence for dictatorship stability

2013-05-25T06:12:23.077812+00:00

That sounds like a definitional difference, then. Is the following a fair summary of your position?

Take all autocratic states. Those that have strong, legitimate successors, normally by primogeniture ("monarchies") are therefore more stable. Those that do not ("dictatorships") are therefore less stable. This happens because a weak successor (or pretender, or rebel leader) needs a power base, and appeals to the masses by relaxing his predecessor's rule.

(Summary ends)

If so, I think the stability distinction is meaningful, but it doesn't fall along the lines people normally call "dictatorships" and "monarchies". Many monarchies have had weak or contested successors, or outright succession wars. And many dictatorships have had strong successors who were just as despotic once they established their rule.

A weak successor can seek support from a court party, the army, the rich, the church, or other privileged groups. All these groups are often united against the broader population, no matter what faction they support in court politics.

Finally, there's a selection bias here. When we look at the worst recent dictators (Stalin, Mao) we see that their successors were less despotic. But that's because we selected the most despotic outliers, so of course there was regression to the mean afterwards. We could as easily ask: when Stalin or Mao were rising to power and still weak, why did they turn out to be more despotic than their predecessors?

DanArmak on Orwell and fictional evidence for dictatorship stability

2013-05-25T16:08:53.453330+10:00

I think there's a selection bias here. When we look at the worst recent dictators (Stalin, Mao) we see that their successors were less despotic. But that's because we selected the most despotic outliers, so of course there was regression to the mean afterwards. We could as easily ask: when Stalin or Mao were rising to power and still weak, why did they turn out to be more despotic than their predecessors?

Also, the states that Stalin and Mao built were stable, even if successorship wasn't clear.

RomeoStevens on Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions

2013-05-25T15:19:02.429203+10:00

There's Renaissance technologies making obscene returns consistently for decades.

Douglas_Knight on Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions

2013-05-25T15:07:48.318487+10:00

Yes, people who short are usually loud about it. The sooner people agree with them, the sooner the bubble pops.

DataPacRat on Is a paperclipper better than nothing?

2013-05-25T15:06:57.154824+10:00

Assuming the non-existence of some entity which eventually disassembles and records everything in the entire universe (and thus finds the library, violating your condition that it's never found)? Then, at least to me, the answer to your question is: nope.

CronoDAS on Is a paperclipper better than nothing?

2013-05-25T14:38:20.654232+10:00

Let's try a variant...

Consider two planets, both completely devoid of anything resembling life or intelligence. Anyone who looks at either one of them sees an unremarkable hunk of rock of no particular value. In one of them, the center consists of more unremarkable rock. In the other, however, hidden beneath the surface is a cache that consists of replicas of every museum and library that currently exists on Earth, but which will never be found or seen by anyone (because nobody is going to bother to look that hard at an unremarkable hunk of rock). Does the existence of the second hunk of rock have more value than the first?

jsalvatier on Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions

2013-05-25T14:16:02.549036+10:00

Convincing the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank to adopt more intelligent monetary policy (something like NGDP targeting) would be big win for the world.

jsalvatier on Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions

2013-05-25T14:07:52.404865+10:00

Bubble != recession

waveman on A Rationalist's Account of Objectification?

2013-05-25T12:53:21.711159+10:00

Note that this study deliberately excluded shipwrecks where it was known women had survived at higher rates.

My reading of the evidence is that, where time exists for an orderly exit, women did better. In exigent circumstances, where it was everyone for themselves, men fared better because they are stronger, better swimmers, etc.

It is interesting that on the Titanic, women survived at much higher rates than children.

Vaniver on Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions

2013-05-25T12:51:02.876423+10:00

I don't find this at all convincing

It seems to me to be weak support for the claim "if top tier math/physics talent went into finance, they could plausibly make billions, since fourth tier talent make millions." (Fourth tier meant in the sense of this comment, but third tier might be more appropriate.)

There are also famous high-profile failures, though, such as Scholes at LTCM. (He did only win the Nobel prize in Econ, though, which is not a particularly strong predictor of math ability.)

waveman on A Rationalist's Account of Objectification?

2013-05-25T12:49:21.585818+10:00

However, that doesn't preclude the conceptualization of "women and children first" from being sexist against women

This is a classic move, first dissected in Jean Curthoys's "Feminist Amnesia".

When you are losing the debate about real human beings, when people start to point out pesky facts like the death gap, the homelessness gap, the conscription exemption, the violence gap, the infanticide gap, then change the subject to the concepts of man / women. Abuse Pythagoras for making up a list in which "male" is preferred to "female". And ignore all the ways that female is preferred to male (nurturing, cooperative, caring, nice, sharing, etc etc).

The trouble with this move is that whatever we may conclude about the relative merit of concepts, the dead men are still dead.

It would be more honest to do a scorecard and see if, on average, men have it better than women. Not the top 0.01%of men, but men in general. According to the OECD's analysis, in most countries they do not. http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/#/11111111111

Even better, one could analyze how well off people are, and try and work out the factors that contribute to that. It may well be that the usual suspects are not the most important. As long as we stick to crude and prescientific techniques like picking out some semi-random characteristics as important, we are not going to get very far. A case in point: should Barack Obama's (obviously black, female) daughters qualify for affirmative action and preference getting into college, over a white male who was brought up in poverty?

sceaduwe on [LINK] Soylent crowdfunding

2013-05-25T12:47:20.986514+10:00

Blog post on Soylent by Kurtis Frank

Eliezer_Yudkowsky on Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions

2013-05-25T12:46:40.734597+10:00

The Sumner critique says that the Great Recession was more 'caused' by failure to supply enough money (when the market was clearly anticipating almost zero inflation) to keep NGDP on a level growth path, suggesting that the main path toward resolving this problem would be figuring some way to further convince the Federal Reserve to adopt NGDP level targeting. Also, as I understand it, even some of the people making money off shorting the housing market were quite loud about it - it's not obvious that a lack of transparency is the problem. To make money you need to time your short correctly which the now-famous winners may have done by coincidence, and this is always the problem with bubbles. For that matter, it's not obvious that the housing market would still have collapsed if the Fed had committed to an NGDP path.

Decius on Maximizing Financial Utility and Frugality (Formerly: A Rational Financial Planning Overview)

2013-05-25T12:45:26.664983+10:00

Oddly enough, a recent study finds that subjective well-being is positively correlated with income, and found no satiation point; instead, a linear-log relationship is found with no satiation point identifiable.

Eliezer_Yudkowsky on Is a paperclipper better than nothing?

2013-05-25T12:43:56.051723+10:00

Desires and preferences about paperclips can be satisfied. They can sense, learn, grow, reproduce, etc.

Do you take that personally seriously or is it something someone else believes? Human experience with desire satisfaction and "learning" and "growth" isn't going to transfer over to how it is for paperclip maximizers, and a generalization that this is still something that matters to us is unlikely to succeed. I predict an absence of any there there.

CronoDAS on Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions

2013-05-25T12:27:06.936553+10:00

True, but you don't always need everyone. How many "greater fools" do you actually need to have an asset price bubble?

Subissue 1: You can find lots of financial analyses around, some available for free, some not. Why should this one be given any more weight than others, when you can find someone else with good credentials saying the exact opposite? And accurately assessing the quality of an analysis is almost as hard as doing the analysis yourself; it's very easy to be fooled by bullshit.
Subissue 2: When you have the appearance of equal and opposite experts, many people are going to end up believing what they want to believe, and acting accordingly.

wedrifid on Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions

2013-05-25T12:11:09.477941+10:00

Actually, as soon as I posted this I thought about how MIRI does exactly this! But this is just one group, and we would need more data.

Of course, much of what MIRI hires mathematicians for is to do mathematics research.

cousin_it on Open thread, May 17-31 2013

2013-05-25T12:09:35.327909+10:00

Maybe I'll ask a really stupid question here because it's the middle of the night and my brain doesn't work. What's the "official" Bayesian response to this joke (see part 2)? To summarize, when a Bayesian talks about a coin with unknown bias, that involves a prior over possible biases, i.e. a subjective probability distribution over objective probability distributions. But Bayesians are supposed to think that objective probabilities don't exist ("meaningless speculations about the propensities of different coins"). So how does that make sense?

lukeprog on LessWrong help desk - free paper downloads and more

2013-05-25T02:08:41.453268+00:00

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=6577844

J_Taylor on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 18, chapter 87

2013-05-25T02:05:15.284481+00:00

I wonder how the Imperius curse resolves loops.

knb on Potential Impacts of Climate Change

2013-05-25T12:02:22.351830+10:00

Even if you think animal suffering is bad enough that it would be a good idea to kill them all, reglaciation is just a bizarre way of achieving this. First of all it doesn't actually kill off all animals. Also it would be an amazingly slow and destructive and expensive and... stupid way of killing things.

someonewrongonthenet on [LINK] Soylent crowdfunding

2013-05-25T11:50:50.529747+10:00

Which is an order of magnitude less than the 200,000 years that we've been anatomically modern - although who is to say that they didn't gather wild grains back then, too.

Of course, even 10,000 years is more than enough time for evolution to change us.

gwern on [LINK] Raw Story: US seizes operator accounts of a subsidiary of Mt. Gox

2013-05-25T11:43:06.050704+10:00

I don't think it is; you can't even frame it as 'the beginning of the end' because the market doesn't seem perturbed at all - the current MtGox rate is $132!

However, this is a good excuse to post an interesting excerpt I found recently as any. On 11 January 2009, Hal Finney wrote:

As an amusing thought experiment, imagine that Bitcoin is successful and becomes the dominant payment system in use throughout the world. Then the total value of the currency should be equal to the total value of all the wealth in the world. Current estimates of total worldwide household wealth that I have found range from $100 trillion to $300 trillion. With 20 million coins, that gives each coin a value of about $10 million. So the possibility of generating coins today with a few cents of compute time may be quite a good bet, with a payoff of something like 100 million to 1! Even if the odds of Bitcoin succeeding to this degree are slim, are they really 100 million to one against? Something to think about...

If Bitcoin goes to $10m per coin, does that mean we get an anti-anti-Pascal's-mugging rhetorical weapon where we can say '100m to one payoffs do exist in the real world, look at Bitcoin!'?

Prismattic on Orwell and fictional evidence for dictatorship stability

2013-05-25T11:40:41.122292+10:00

I've seen governments organized in a 2x2 categorization where the two factors are despotism (whether or not the ruling power is arbitrary) and penetration (how much capacity to interfere in the lives of its subjects does the ruling power have).

Possibly by accident of history (most monarchies are pre-modern and most dictatorships are modern) monarchies have generally been high despotism, low penetration, while dictatorships have been high despotism, high penetration.

(A functioning modern democracy would be an example of low despotism, high penetration -- it can interfere in many ways in the lives of the citizenry, but doesn't generally do so arbitrarily.)

Prismattic on [LINK] Soylent crowdfunding

2013-05-25T11:29:07.046985+10:00

Although agriculture is only about 10,000 years old, humans have been gathering and eating wild grains for 30,000.

Prismattic on [Link] More Right launched

2013-05-25T11:26:25.162218+10:00

While I disagree with the grandparent's conflation of the least extreme version of feminism with all feminism, I think you're being a bit obtuse about her intended connotation. It would be more typical lesswrongian language to phrase it as "Feminism is the belief that women are agents [and should be treated as such]".

JonahSinick on Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions

2013-05-25T11:19:39.672148+10:00

Can you flesh out your thoughts here? Surely not everyone in a position of influence has a vested interest in seeing the analysis not acted on.

JonahSinick on Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions

2013-05-25T11:16:38.647617+10:00

Much of what you say seems like valid counterpoint. I'm getting out of my depth, insofar as I know very little about finance :-). I hope that other more knowledgable people will step in.

A professor in his 40s once told me that the department where he got his PhD had run the numbers, and financial success was inversely correlated with grades / research skills / intellectual ability; the top people got professorships and were middle class, whereas the people who were at the bottom of the class had left academia, and several of them made millions on Wall Street.

I don't find this at all convincing, e.g.:

It's only one department
He may have been misremembering the situation
"Bottom of the class" could reflect motivation rather than just intellectual ability.
It's well known that academia doesn't pay so well.

CronoDAS on Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions

2013-05-25T11:11:07.347640+10:00

The problem is not doing transparent high quality analysis... it's getting that analysis believed and acted upon. And this becomes much harder when there are people with a vested interest in seeing that analysis not acted upon. As the Upton Sinclair quote says, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

JonahSinick on Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions

2013-05-25T11:08:17.719951+10:00

There's a disclaimer at the beginning :-).

Note that I wrote "Mathematicians who are motivated to learn these skills are well positioned to do so," which is a weaker claim than that mathematicians are known to have highly transferable skills. I'm fairly confident that what I said is true in most cases, but this is based on a lot of tacit knowledge, which is difficult to externalize.

Jayson_Virissimo on [LINK] Raw Story: US seizes operator accounts of a subsidiary of Mt. Gox

2013-05-25T11:06:08.672460+10:00

Yes, I too am very interested in Bitcoin, but why is this relevant to Less Wrong?

Vaniver on Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions

2013-05-25T01:01:37.466478+00:00

Nevertheless, it seems possible that the financial success of Paulson and others was a consequence of careful analysis and shrewdness, and that other people of sufficiently high intellectual caliber and rationality would have been able to predict it as well.

I have an economist friend who predicted the tech bubble, but shorted too early, and ended up losing quite a bit of money in the process. Knowing that chickens are coming home to roost is not enough; you need a good idea of when they're going to arrive, and to have the solvency to be able to stick to your beliefs. (If Keynes's comment--"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"-- fits you, then shorting bubbles seems unwise.)

As is always the case in finance, those who recognized the impending pop of the housing bubble kept their analysis secret

I do believe there were people predicting the bubble would burst before it burst, and some of them were even people who don't predict a bubble bursting every year. It's not clear to me that a handful more mathematicians pointing out impending disaster would significantly shift public opinion, and hoping that the government would act to burst a bubble early rather than keep it inflated seems like an antihistorical hope.

Often having left-wing political beliefs

One wonders if they would have seen the minority aspect of the meltdown coming, then. Qualitative reasoning can be as suspect as quantitative reasoning, and it's not clear to me mathematicians are that much less prone to qualitative errors.

What I find most interesting about this is that the situation is not that Simons succeeded where other mathematicians of the same caliber had failed – rather, Simons is virtually the only pure mathematician of his caliber to have left academia.

A professor in his 40s once told me that the department where he got his PhD had run the numbers, and financial success was inversely correlated with grades / research skills / intellectual ability; the top people got professorships and were middle class, whereas the people who were at the bottom of the class had left academia, and several of them made millions on Wall Street.

I also hear that the supply of physicists as quants is much larger now than it was ~20 years ago, and so it's a respectable living but not a massively profitable one; it's not clear that you could start a competitor to Medallion today and do nearly as well.

falenas108 on Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions

2013-05-25T10:56:57.800929+10:00

Actually, as soon as I posted this I thought about how MIRI does exactly this! But this is just one group, and we would need more data.

There's no problem with suggesting a hypothesis based on a limited data set, but that's not how the post reads. It sounds like it is making a definitive claim, but does not present the evidence to back this up.

CronoDAS on Orwell and fictional evidence for dictatorship stability

2013-05-25T10:46:26.704017+10:00

Orwell did write that Oceana wasn't robust to genuine external threats, but his fictional world lacked them. Also, I suspect that a sufficiently bad natural disaster could also disrupt things enough to shut down the system and force people to start over.

Pentashagon on Is a paperclipper better than nothing?

2013-05-25T10:39:08.480240+10:00

Replace "paperclip maximizer" with "RNA maximizer." Apparently the long-term optimization power of a maximizer is the primary consideration for deciding whether it is ultimately better or worse than nothing. A perfect paperclipper would be bad but an imperfect one could be just as useful as early life on Earth.

atucker on Problems with Academia and the Rising Sea

2013-05-25T10:35:15.022147+10:00

Textbooks replace each other on clarity of explanation as well as adherence to modern standards of notation and concepts.

Maybe just cite the version of an experiment that explains it the best? Replications have a natural advantage because you can write them later when more of the details and relationships are worked out.

Jayson_Virissimo on Orwell and fictional evidence for dictatorship stability

2013-05-25T10:17:57.422123+10:00

We were discussing the British situation. How did we suddenly jump to Guantanamo?

Because there were British detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

John_Baez on Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions

2013-05-25T10:05:40.563310+10:00

According to Wikipedia:

As of December 31, 2012, the Treasury had received over $405 billion in total cash back on Troubled Assets Relief Program investments, equaling nearly 97 percent of the $418 billion disbursed under the program.

But TARP was just a small part of the whole picture. What concerns me is that there seem to have been somewhere between $1.2 trillion and $16 trillion in secret loans from the Fed to big financial institutions and other corporations. Even if they've been repaid, the low interest rates might represent a big transfer of wealth from the poor to the wealthy. And the fact that I'm seeing figures that differ by more than an order of magnitude is far from reassuring, too! The GAO report seems to be worth digging into. If not mathematicians, at least accountants could be helpful for things like this!

AspiringRationalist on Orwell and fictional evidence for dictatorship stability

2013-05-24T23:54:25.854781+00:00

We were discussing the British situation. How did we suddenly jump to Guantanamo?

CarlShulman on Is a paperclipper better than nothing?

2013-05-25T09:53:31.416282+10:00

This is a different and cleaner question, because it avoids issues with intelligent life evolving again, and the paperclipper creating other kinds of life and intelligence for scientific or other reasons in the course of pursuing paperclip production.

And:

I can't figure out how any of the welfare theories you specify could make paperclippers better than nothing?

Desires and preferences about paperclips can be satisfied. They can sense, learn, grow, reproduce, etc.

DataPacRat on Is a paperclipper better than nothing?

2013-05-25T09:50:44.604494+10:00

Would it be possible to estimate how /much/ worse than nothing you consider a paperclipper to be?

DataPacRat on Is a paperclipper better than nothing?

2013-05-25T09:48:52.514993+10:00

A cleaner question would compare a paperclipper with a sterile universe.

I really wanted to ask that question, but I'm not actually very confident in my estimate of how sterile our own universe is, over the long term, so I'm afraid that I waffled a bit.

grendelkhan on Preparing for a Rational Financial Planning Sequence

2013-05-25T09:44:42.992679+10:00

a Rational (tm) Work Out sequence

Liam Rosen's FAQ, i.e. "the sticky" from /fit/, struck me as being an island of reasonableness in an ocean of bad advice and broscience.

DataPacRat on Is a paperclipper better than nothing?

2013-05-25T09:43:48.011967+10:00

It's an interesting question; so far, the closest I have to an answer is that any timeline which doesn't have minds within it to do any caring, seems to be to not be worth caring about. Which leads to the answer to your question of 'nope'.

JonahSinick on Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions

2013-05-25T09:29:17.452944+10:00

Can you give a reference?

ice9 on Potential Impacts of Climate Change

2013-05-25T09:23:50.184755+10:00

If your utility function includes stuff you want to minimize, then you cannot a priori rule out that freezing the world may be the best outcome, as this would depend on empirical circumstances. It seems weird to me why anyone would reject a value judgement based on a conclusion that is a possibility for all value systems (or at least the ones that contain minimization); this would be getting it backwards, I think.

Also note that my initial comment was about reglaciation, which doesn't necessarily imply the extinction of all life on earth. All else being equal, wouldn't it be better to reduce the amount of wild animals, if it is empirically the case that the vast majority of wild animals die shortly after birth in ways that are presumably painful? If your answer is "That looks like deathophilia", then I'm somewhat lost to be honest.

Finally, depending one one's view, there is a relevant difference between death an non-existence. One could think that one poses a problem whereas the other doesn't.

Eliezer_Yudkowsky on Is a paperclipper better than nothing?

2013-05-25T09:22:55.494011+10:00

Paperclippers are worse than nothing because they might run ancestor simulations and prevent the rise of intelligent life elsewhere, as near as I can figure. They wouldn't enjoy life. I can't figure out how any of the welfare theories you specify could make paperclippers better than nothing?

someonewrongonthenet on [SEQ RERUN] My Way

2013-05-25T09:20:07.054251+10:00

So this about my gender politics: Unlike the case with, say, race, I don't think that an optimal outcome consists of gender distinctions being obliterated.

This seems a bit silly to me.

What does it mean to say that "race distinctions are obliterated"?

Someone looks at my outward appearance and then makes some inferences about what sort of person I must be.

What does it mean to say that "gender distinctions are obliterated"?

Someone looks at my outward appearance and then makes some inferences about what sort of person I must be.

What's the difference between the two?

Most people believe gender differences in psychology are both genetic and non-genetic, whereas most people believe race differences in psychology are only non-genetic.

From a social standpoint, why does it matter if the distinctions are genetic or not? Self-awareness of myself with respect to gender is not conceptually different from self awareness of myself with respect to culture. Since they are isomorphic, they should both be "obliterated" or both be accepted...why the double standard? I'd argue that either you condone the use of both heuristics, or neither...

I think the problem stems from OP being a gender essentialist, but not a racial essentialist.

For my own part...I think it's possible to use gender and race as heuristics without implicitly retreating into essentialism.

I think that men should become more aware of themselves as men, so that being female isn't any more special or unusual or abnormal or worthy-of-remark than being male.

I like this on one level - it's good in that it encourages men not to view themselves as "default". I don't see why it's restricted to men though -I think it can be applied to any privileged group.

On another level, you don't really need to use heuristics to conceptualize yourself...you already know a lot about yourself, and comparing your own actions to gender/race heuristics won't really further that knowledge.

Larks on Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions

2013-05-25T09:17:45.745735+10:00

It’s been claimed that the cost to US taxpayers in bank bailouts was $9 trillion.

No! The bailouts, and the loans, have been paid back; the government made a profit on the AIG bailout. There was risk, but long run tax burden has not risen by $9 trillion.

Larks on Orwell and fictional evidence for dictatorship stability

2013-05-25T09:12:28.880679+10:00

You mean the French revolution, which happened in 1787, was what caused the Great Reform Act, in 1832? According to wikipedia:

Support for parliamentary reform plummeted after the launch of the French Revolution in 1789. Reacting to the excesses of the revolution, English politicians became steadfastly opposed to any major political change.

Pentashagon on Problems with Academia and the Rising Sea

2013-05-25T09:08:14.604290+10:00

Yes, two people getting a P<0.05 and both setting up the experiment are better than one.

How many false-positives get published as opposed to negatives (or rarely even false-negatives)? If the ratio is too high then you'll need more than just two positive studies. If, as claimed in the quoted article, 70% of papers in a field are not reproducible that implies finding papers at random would require about nine positive studies to reach a true P<0.05, and that's only if each paper is statistically independent from the others.

If there is financial incentive to reproduce existing studies when there is a ready-made template to copy and paste into a grant-funding paper I think the overall quality of published research could decline. At least in the current model there's a financial incentive to invent novel ideas and then test them, versus just publishing a false reproduction.

Vladimir_Nesov on Open thread, May 17-31 2013

2013-05-25T09:06:46.614616+10:00

These texts can work as an introductory undergraduate sequence (with "Sets for Mathematics" going after enough exposure to rigor, e.g. a real analysis course, maybe some set theory and logic, and Awodey's book after a bit of abstract algebra, maybe functional programming with types, as in Haskell/Standard ML/etc.):

F. W. Lawvere & S. H. Schanuel (1991). Conceptual Mathematics: A First Introduction to Categories. Buffalo Workshop Press, Buffalo, NY, USA.
F. W. Lawvere & R. Rosebrugh (2003). Sets for Mathematics. Cambridge University Press.
S. Awodey (2006). Category Theory. Oxford Logic Guides. Oxford University Press, USA.

elharo on Maximizing Financial Utility and Frugality (Formerly: A Rational Financial Planning Overview)

2013-05-25T09:04:44.734548+10:00

Historically would you in fact have lost everything in a longterm position in the German stock market in World War I and II? Not necessarily. It certainly wasn't a good place to invest, but there are companies such as Daimler that predate World War I and still exist today. Personal risk, of course, might depend on citizenship and ethnicity. I'm not sure if foreign investors (neutral, allied, or axis) were treated differently. E.g. I don't know whether a young German/Swiss/British citizen who bought and held shares in Daimler in 1910 would still have owned them in 1960 absent an explicit sale or not. But I suspect at least some subset of hypothetical 1910 shareholders would not have lost everything over the ensuing 50 years.

someonewrongonthenet on Googling is the first step. Consider adding scholarly searches to your arsenal.

2013-05-25T09:03:04.959040+10:00

No matter what I enter, it just goes to http://www.kremlin.ru/

Am I doing something wrong?

Larks on [Link] More Right launched

2013-05-25T08:58:48.702747+10:00

Much as I hate to reply,

Feminism is the belief that women are people too.

is definitely false, because

I'm a feminist, but women are universally incapable of rational thought and shouldn't vote

cannot be coherently asserted, but

I believe people in comas are universally incapable of rational thought and shouldn't vote

can be coherently asserted, so it cannot be the belief that women are people that is generating the contradiction. Regardless of what else one might believe about feminism, I think this line of argument shows some it has both necessary moralised element and a necessary non-trivial positive element.

someonewrongonthenet on Googling is the first step. Consider adding scholarly searches to your arsenal.

2013-05-25T08:50:29.993376+10:00

Taking everything into account is difficult, especially when you have no idea exactly what you aught to be taking into account. Even if you manage to do that exactly right, there is still publication bias to deal with. And if you are using science for practical purposes, it's even harder to make sure that the research is answering the right question in the first place, Sieben's comments sound anti-science...but really they are frustration directed towards a real problem. There really is a lot of bad science out there, sometimes it is even published in top journals - and even good science is usually extremely limited insofar as you can use it in practice.

I think it's just important to remember that while scientific papers should be given more weight than almost every other source of evidence, that's not actually very much weight. You can't instrumentally rely on a scientific finding unless it's been replicated multiple times and/or has a well understood mechanism behind it.

JonahSinick on Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions

2013-05-25T08:50:13.642834+10:00

As I said, these are very preliminary thoughts. I don't yet have access to such data, and would welcome pointers to possible sources.

shminux on Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013

2013-05-24T22:50:06.832872+00:00

Two-boxers live in a should-universe, given how they insist on following "logic" over evidence.

Vladimir_Nesov on Is a paperclipper better than nothing?

2013-05-25T08:45:53.761251+10:00

I'm thinking of having feelings. I care about many critter-like things which can't think abstractly, but do feel. But just having senses is not enough for me.

What you care about is not obviously the same thing as what is valuable to you. What's valuable is a confusing question that you shouldn't be confident in knowing a solution to. You may provisionally decide to follow some moral principles (for example in order to be able to exercise consequentialism more easily), but making a decision doesn't necessitate being anywhere close to being sure of its correctness. The best decision that you can make may still in your estimation be much worse than the best theoretically possible decision (here, I'm applying this observation to a decision to provisionally adopt certain moral principles).

Vladimir_Nesov on Is a paperclipper better than nothing?

2013-05-25T08:36:34.814316+10:00

I chose A

(This phrases the answer in terms of identity. The question should be about the abstract choice itself, not about anyone's decision about it. What do we understand about the choice? We don't actually need to decide.)

someonewrongonthenet on Googling is the first step. Consider adding scholarly searches to your arsenal.

2013-05-25T08:32:32.943949+10:00

Also, as long as we're picking on specific examples...

doing 45 minutes of cardio every day

I'm confused by the inclusion of this. Is the jury not yet settled on the benefits of daily cardio?

Vladimir_Nesov on Is a paperclipper better than nothing?

2013-05-25T08:25:09.820243+10:00

If we ignore the possibility of future life arising again after human extinction, paperclipper seems (maybe, a bit) better than extinction because of the possibility of acausal trade between the paperclipper and human values (see this comment and preceding discussion).

The value of possible future life arising by chance is probably discounted by fragility of value (alien values might be not much better than paperclipper's), the risk of it not arising at all or getting squashed by its own existential risks (Fermi paradox), the risk of it also losing its values (e.g. to an UFAI), the astronomical waste of not optimizing the universe in the meantime, and possibly time discounting of the (very distant) future.

(All of this discounting might still be smaller than what takes acausal trade to work out, so it's not clear which choice is better. A cleaner question would compare a paperclipper with a sterile universe.)

falenas108 on Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions

2013-05-25T08:24:11.076975+10:00

Interesting idea.

However, if you're trying to prove that mathematicians are known to have highly transferable skills, don't cite a few famous people, I would expect that in any field. Cite companies hiring mathematicians with the intent on training them in a different area.

Mestroyer on Is a paperclipper better than nothing?

2013-05-25T08:22:33.366681+10:00

In other words, you're changing the thought experiment.

rocurley on Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013

2013-05-24T22:17:32.228759+00:00

That's what two-boxers do.

Two boxers don't only do wrong things, and it's not obvious this is actually related to two-boxing.

falenas108 on Orwell and fictional evidence for dictatorship stability

2013-05-24T22:16:24.102589+00:00

I would have put the probability of the government having recordings of all phone calls at about 75%. I'm slightly more surprised at emails and online chat messages, but not overly so. The U.S. government has gained a lot of power in their surveillance ability, there was even a time where the government interpreted the PATRIOT act as allowing them to put a wire tap without a warrant, though that was overturned by the Supreme Court.

I know there are a ton of things the government does that I am completely unaware of, and that I wouldn't approve of a lot of it. But I don't think it's much worse now than it was in the past. Random example I found with 5 minutes of googling: http://www.aclu.org/aclu-history

Thousands of people were arrested and treated badly by the police without a warrant. This sounds far worse in terms of violated rights than anything they do today.

Incidentally, this link describes the ACLU, a group dedicated to protecting civil liberties.

I misread your first comment as arguing that society was becoming like an Orwellian dictatorship, I apologize for that.

PhilGoetz on Social intelligence, education, & the workplace

2013-05-25T08:14:41.997963+10:00

Good point.

someonewrongonthenet on [LINK] Soylent crowdfunding

2013-05-25T07:49:24.466260+10:00

From an evolutionary standpoint, legumes, milk, and grains are "artificial" food, at least for humans. Agriculture is a recent thing. Would you also endorse the Paleolithic diet movement?

(I do actually endorse the paleolithic diet as probably optimal at the moment and I agree with your central point - I just want to point out that even unprocessed modern diets are already rather unnatural.)

lukeprog on AGI Quotes

2013-05-25T07:47:08.469070+10:00

"Speculations concerning the first ultraintelligent machine" started with the dubious sentence "The survival of man [sic] depends on the early construction of an ultraintelligent machine." That might have been appropriate during the Cold War. Today I suspect that the word survival should be replaced by extinction.

I.J. Good (1998)

rxs on Open thread, May 17-31 2013

2013-05-25T07:46:07.059245+10:00

Category theory gives a few hits at LW, but doesn't seem to be recognized very wildly. On a first glance it seems to be relevant for Bayes nets, cognitive architectures and several other topics. Recent text book that seems very promising:

Category theory for scientists by David I. Spivak: http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.6946

Abstract: There are many books designed to introduce category theory to either a mathematical audience or a computer science audience. In this book, our audience is the broader scientific community. We attempt to show that category theory can be applied throughout the sciences as a framework for modeling phenomena and communicating results. In order to target the scientific audience, this book is example-based rather than proof-based. For example, monoids are framed in terms of agents acting on objects, sheaves are introduced with primary examples coming from geography, and colored operads are discussed in terms of their ability to model self-similarity.

passive_fist on Potential Impacts of Climate Change

2013-05-25T07:43:25.416910+10:00

Loss of biodiversity has definitely been highlighted frequently, although it is often done without reference to climate change (even though it is acknowledged to be the most important factor in general), because people want to have their opinions heard without getting mired in political debates. But the material is there and can be revealed with a simple google search. I'm hesitant to give you links myself because I'd feel like I'm just cherry-picking the articles I want you to read.

I don't know what I or my friends can do to encourage it in a cost-effective way.

I don't either, aside from the usual cliche of 'spreading awareness' .

passive_fist on Potential Impacts of Climate Change

2013-05-25T07:33:03.237074+10:00

It doesn't cost us anything in that we don't have to give up anything we currently have (provided that we execute the right policies to maintain current levels of prosperity without expanding into nature even more). You're talking about an imagined future cost, and that gets pretty tricky. Who's to say that it doesn't cost us to keep the Milky Way running, since in a billion years we could conquer it all?

Manfred on Is a paperclipper better than nothing?

2013-05-25T07:32:03.741066+10:00

Since you doing it "on the off chance" doesn't correlate with whether or not it does anything special, any paperclipper worth its wire would make paperclips.

someonewrongonthenet on Is a paperclipper better than nothing?

2013-05-25T07:31:38.399175+10:00

For the slightly different case in which life both dies and is guaranteed not to rise naturally ever again, choice A. There's a small but finite chance of the paperclipper slipping enough bits to produce something worthwhile, like life. This is probably less likely than whatever jumpstarted life on Earth happening again.

If I were a paper-clipper and wanted to maximize paper clip output, it would make sense to have some form of self replicating paper-clip manufacture units.

CarlShulman on Is a paperclipper better than nothing?

2013-05-25T07:26:13.851576+10:00

Phrased another way: does the existence of any intelligence at all, even a paperclipper, have even the smallest amount of utility above no intelligence at all?

This is a different and cleaner question, because it avoids issues with intelligent life evolving again, and the paperclipper creating other kinds of life and intelligence for scientific or other reasons in the course of pursuing paperclip production.

I would say that if we use a weighted mixture of moral accounts (either from normative uncertainty, or trying to reflect a balance among varied impulses and intuitions), then it matters that the paperclipper could do OK on a number of theories of welfare and value:

Desire theories of welfare
Objective list theories of welfare
Hedonistic welfare theories, depending on what architecture is most conducive to producing paperclips (although this can cut both ways)
Perfectionism about scientific, technical, philosophical, and other forms of achievement