Velocity Raptor: a simple physics Flash game where the physics simulates special relativity. Lorenz contraction, time dilation, red shifts, visual distortions ... people seem to get stuck on level 30, though Gwern made it to level 31. It's one thing to look at equations, it's another to get a feel for it. I strongly recommend this to everyone.
Technically, we don't have incontrovertible proof that Gwern isn't a mostly-friendly AI that consumes a lot of anime.
Hi all, I'm Andy, the guy who made the game. I stumbled across this posting and am glad people are both enjoying the game and thoroughly infuriated by it :)
I had that scene in Cosmos vividly in mind as I created VR. It's amazing how well that series stands up to the test of time.
Another neat resource for that 'seen' view is http://www.spacetimetravel.org
They have a bunch of videos and explanations, too. In fact, the big inspiration for this game came from an exhibit that group built. It was in a museum years ago, and you'd physically ride a stationary bike around their simulation. A giant screen in front of you showed what you'd see as you rode through the streets of Bern (supposing light was traveling at 5 mph). It was completely interactive, and completely rad.
I've got other links posted if you're interested in more, but that's the one that sticks out to me.
Well you managed to entertain a lab full of astrophysicists and me for longer than I care to admit, so that was awesome ty.
It would be neat in a game to have objects/stuff that emits light outside of visible light that can only be seen by humans when they're doppler shifted into visible range.
Robot cars may already be better drivers than humans. And if not, they're clearly on their way to become so.
Driving is an area of life where millions of "ordinary" humans (non-specialists) make life-critical and therefore morally-significant judgments every day. When we drive, we are taking our lives and those of others in our hands. Many of us would wish to be better drivers than we are: not only more skilled, but better in ways that could be described as "virtue": less prone to road rage, negligence, driving while impaired, and other faults. Robots don't get angry, they don't get distracted, and they don't get drunk or tired. Since bad driving kills people, we can reasonably say that robot driving is (or can become) morally superior to human driving — in a plain consequentialist sense.
This seems like a natural analogy for CEV in superhuman systems. We do not want a robot driver to drive just like a human. We want a robot driver to drive as a human would drive if that human were faster-thinking, calmer, clearer-minded, more focused; had sharper eyes, better knowledge of the roads and hazards, better ability to cooperate with other drivers. We want a robot to op...
Suspended Animation the first blog post in a series on Urban Future that I am currently reading. Stagnation in our time:
What seems pretty clear from most of this (and already in Cowen's account) is that nothing much has been moving forward in the world's 'developed' economies for four decades except for the information technology revolution and its Moore's Law dynamics. Abstract out the microprocessor, and even the most determinedly optimistic vision of recent trends is gutted to the point of expiration. Without computers, there's nothing happening, or at least nothing good.
PSA: If you want there to be a new Stupid Questions Open Thread, make it yourself! There is not and never has been a rule against this. I consider the "how often to make them" question unanswered, but a good interim answer is, "whenever someone feels like making one".
(Also, my computer broke, and so I posted this from a Wii, which is incapable of using the article editor. If someone could kindly edit "the sentence" into the post.)
Something is hinky with the upvote and downvote buttons (for me at least). When I press one nothing happens. Repeated pressing doesn't seem to do anything, but then sometimes the button colours-in after a delay. Sometimes it doesn't look like I pressed the button and then when I refresh the page I see that the button is coloured and the vote did register. Anyone else have the same problem?
Previously, the interface responded immediately, but the vote wasn't immediately applied (if you reopened the same post/comment, you wouldn't see your vote for a while). Sometimes, a vote would be lost, never applied, even though it was reflected in the interface. It looks like now the interface waits for the vote to actually get received, and only updates once it has been. As before, it takes a while for that to happen, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all, but the difference is that now this effect is apparent.
If this delay can't be easily fixed, an animation indicating that the operation is in progress (like one appearing when sending a comment) might help with the interface responsiveness issue.
LSD-Enhanced Creativity (HT: Isegoria)
...Over the course of the preceding year, IFAS researchers had dosed a total of 22 other men for the creativity study, including a theoretical mathematician, an electronics engineer, a furniture designer, and a commercial artist. By including only those whose jobs involved the hard sciences (the lack of a single female participant says much about mid-century career options for women), they sought to examine the effects of LSD on both visionary and analytical thinking. Such a group offered an additional bonus: Anything they produced during the study would be subsequently scrutinized by departmental chairs, zoning boards, review panels, corporate clients, and the like, thus providing a real-world, unbiased yardstick for their results.
In surveys administered shortly after their LSD-enhanced creativity sessions, the study volunteers, some of the best and brightest in their fields, sounded like tripped-out neopagans at a backwoods gathering. Their minds, they said, had blossomed and contracted with the universe. They’d beheld irregular but clean geometrical patterns glistening into infinity, felt a rightness before solutions manifested, and even sha
Thinking about Eliezer's post about Doublethink Speaking of deliberate, conscious self-deception he opines: "Leaving the morality aside, I doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen."
This seems odd for a site devoted to the principle that most of the time, most human minds are very biased. Don't we have the brains of one species of apes that has evolved to be particularly sensitive to politics? Why wouldn't doublethink be the evolutionarily adaptive norm?
My intuition, based on my own private experience, is the opposite of Eliezer's -- I'd assume that most industrialized people practice some degree of doublethink routinely. I'd further suspect that this talent can be cultivated, and I'd think that (say) most North Koreans might be extremely skilled at deliberate self-deception, in a manner that would have been very familiar to George Orwell himself.
This seems like an empirical question. What's the evidence out there?
Review of “America’s Retreat from Victory” by Joseph R. McCarthy
This excellent review makes me think this will be an interesting book to add to my reading list. Has anyone else read it? I probably should add this statement as a sort of disclaimer:
...A rationalist has a hard time not reviewing history from that period and concluding that for all intents and purposes McCarthy was right about the extent of communist infiltration and may have indeed grossly underestimated and misunderstood the nature of intellectual sympathies for communism and how deeply roote
Right. It hits their sacrednss/profanity boxes in such minds but they can't articulate a rational argument against it based on harm or fairness. Remember they think they don't have the former box. The typical universalist mind faced with something that fits sacredness/profanity latches on to the nearest rationalization expressed in the allowed stated values to resolve the cognitive dissonance. Such rationalizations then live a dangerous life of their own sometimes resulting in disturbing policies.
To analyse the example you've provided, if I'm right we should be seeing in the moderately educated mind a search for a rationalization that fits this shape:
a company with quiet aid of government promoting this might cause harm or unfairness
I think the following does so nicely:
having babies is bad because it hurts the environment and the world is overpopulated anyway
This is ironically part of the environmentalist memeplex that is elsewhere propped up mostly by purity concerns. As evidence of this I submit the most liked youtube comment to the video.
...Heh, clever and well-written song. Catchy too! :D
But, it's just the government and capitalism being on a flawed infinite-grow
Simple explanation of meta-analysis; below is a copy of my attempt to explain basic meta-analysis on the DNB ML. I thought I might reuse it elsewhere, and I'd like to know whether it really is a good explanation or needs fixing.
Hm, I don't really know of any such explanation; there's Wikipedia, of course: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-analysis
A useful concept is the hierarchy of evidence: we all know anecdote are close to worthless, correlations or surveys fairly weak, experiments good, randomized experiments better, controlled randomized experiments...
A decade after Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, why is human nature still taboo? by Ed West
...As Pinker recalls: “Research on human nature would be controversial in any era, but the new science picked a particularly bad decade in which to attract the spotlight. In the 1970s many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that ‘the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class’. The traditional misgivings about human nature were folded into a hard-left ideology,
Commentary on LessWrong and its norms
That I would like to share. I recently found it on the blog Writings by James_G. I am going to add some emphasis and commentary of my own, but I'm mostly interested how other LWers see this. The main topic of the post itself is about politics and cooperation but I want to emphasise that isn't the topic I'd like to open.
......
So, neurological egalitarians like (I should imagine) Zachary and neurological racist-authoritarians like myself need to be able to cooperate. Unfortunately, politics is the mind-killer.
No wait—t
Another example of how reading LW ruined the pleasure from reading the most of the internet:
Robot learns to recognise itself in mirror
Recognizing oneself in a mirror is considered a sign of self-awareness. Therefore, if we program a robot to say the words "this is me" when it sees an image of itself in a mirror, the robot becomes self-aware, right?
Or it could be just a cheap hack that does not prove anything. For example if we sprayed the robot with a different color, it would not recognize itself in a mirror even after billion years of contemplation.
Questions about Eliezer's Metaethics
According to Eliezer’s metaethics, morality incorporates the concept of reflective equilibrium. Given that presumably every part of my mind gets entangled with my output if I reflect long enough on some topic, isn’t Eliezer’s metaethics equivalent to saying that “right” refers to the output of X, where X is a detailed object-level specification of my entire mind as a computation?
In principle, X could decide to search for some sort of inscribed-in-stone morality out in the physical universe (and adopt whatever it finds o...
Related to: List of public drafts on LessWrong
Public Draft On Moral progress -- Text dump
For now this is just a text dump for relating to a conversation I had, that I retracted, not because I found them so lacking but because that particular irrationality game thread turned out to have been made by a likely troll. Expect changes in the next few days. Here is a link to the original conversation.
We have not been experiencing moral progress in the past 250 years. Moral change? Sure. I'd also be ok with calling it value drift. I talked about this previously i...
I don't know what a 'model' is. Someone play taboo with me, and tell me about how theories work. Literally speaking, a model, like, airplane is isomorphic to some degree or another to the real airplane of which it is a model. Is that how a scientific theory works? Is there some isomorphism between the parts of the theory and things in the world?
X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features.
I don't always judge X. But when I do, I judge X as if it also had those features. Stay thirsty, my friends.
Miniatures company aims for 30K, is over 1M with 5 days to go. Possibly of interest here because it's a fine example of understanding what motivates people.
Suppose you are pretty sure the society you are living in is evil, beyond your power to destroy and unlikely to ever reform.
How would you deal with the psychological toll of such a life? What strategies and approaches would you recommend?
Why hate loan givers?
I find myself asking is why was the practice of making loans with interest rates so unpopular in antiquity? I always assumed this was about excessive interest rates (whatever those are), however it now seems to me that usury was about charging any interest on loans.
...Some of the earliest known condemnations of usury come from the Vedic texts of India. Similar condemnations are found in religious texts from Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. At times many nations from ancient China to ancient Greece to ancient Rome have outlawe
Lure of the Void (Part 1) a recent blog post on Urban Future on the culture of space travel in the West.
Every now and then, I want to use the expression "the map is not the territory" when writing something aimed at a non-LW audience. Naturally, in addition to briefly explaining what I mean by that in the text itself, I'd prefer to make the sentence a link to an illustrative LW post. However, I'm not sure of what would be a good page to link - the wiki has three (1 2 3) pages about the subject, but I'm not sure if any one of them is very good for this purpose. Suggestions?
Is there any sort of prevailing opinion in LW about diet? For instance, paleo, IF, CR, etc. The only posts I could find are inconclusive and from years back.
A very simple and easy first step is cutting out all liquids except for water (if that is too difficult, start with the soda). This helps a lot.
Congratulations to Vladimir Nesov for passing Anna Salamon in karma and making it to the top contributors, all time list.
Karma for the last 30 days appears to be displaying 0 for all users.
Relatedly, is there a bug report link somewhere permanent on LW? Could there be? (Should there be?)
Tomorrow, I begin an Intro to Ethics class at university. (I need it for a General Education requirement.) I found out that the professor is a Continental philosopher, possibly with Marxist influences. My cursory reading of Continental philosophy doesn't give me a good impression of the field.
I'm trying to reserve judgment until I experience the class, but I'm worried it will be a miserable exercise in guessing the teacher's password... I'll still (likely) get an 'A', but it might be a very trying experience.
I think my fear is illustrated by the oft-quote...
William Thurston: On proof and progress in mathematics. Good stuff on the more unformal core bits of mathematics here.
...Mathematicians have developed habits of communication that are often dysfunctional. Organizers of colloquium talks everywhere exhort speakers to explain things in elementary terms. Nonetheless, most of the audience at an average colloquium talk gets little of value from it. Perhaps they are lost within the first 5 minutes, yet sit silently through the remaining 55 minutes. Or perhaps they quickly lose interest because the speaker plunges i
Any LWers with recommendations for ways to improve social skills? Right now, I can more-or-less hold a conversation, but I tend to overthink what to say and end up not saying anything, and I just generally lack confidence. How much benefit would I get from, say, joining an improv class or doing (more) rejection therapy?
The FHI just released a technical report, Indefinite Survival through Backup Copies whose result is:
it is possible to have a finite chance to survive an infinite time even if there is a finite chance of getting destroyed per unit of time, if you make backup copies (that are also destroyable) at a high enough rate. The number of backup copies needed only grows logarithmically with time, a surprisingly slow growth.
I'd previously been assuming that exponentially many copies were needed (in order to "cancel out" the fact that if you only have one...
Why I am a deathist, for those who can't understand the mentality:
Because the thought that someday I will die is a -liberating- thought for me. First you must understand who I was, however - in my youth I was absolutely terrified of a permanent injury of any sort. (When I realized, truly realized, I'd been circumcised, it was mildly traumatizing.) This extends to the mental as well as the physical.
The realization, later, that I would die - wasn't a horrifying thought. It was a realization that permanence was a faulty assumption about anything except de...
Does anyone have experience with speed dating? Specifically did they find that it improved social skills? It seems like it would be very effective.
I'm looking for strategies/techniques to manage/improve poor working memory, I currently find myself in situations where I forget to do something I thought about doing just a minute past or so. If anyone have any worth trying out, I'd love to here about them.
Strategies that I already use are:
- Visual ques, putting things in positions that make me notice them hence remember.
- Domino-ques, i.e. focusing on remember one thing that will remind me of a number of things.
- Outsourcing, pen and paper mostly.
I've found the self-help stuff on here useful, and I was wondering if anyone could recommend any useful online study skills guides? I'm particularly interested in learning to read/take notes and retain information more effectively. At the moment, I can spend hours reading and take very little in!
I've been reading Robert Lindsay's blog - he's a total badass of a contrarian, stark raving mad in a good way, and a self-identified Stalinist, mentioned favorably by TGGP). He is a feminist-hating feminist, a liberal humanist who supports far-left totalitarian repression, and an anti-racist/anti-fascist White Supremacist - among other things. Literally a mad genius.
Anyway, what I want to mention is that, from the remarks of a guest poster there, I extrapolated what looks like a succint, plausible and non-mind-killed explanation of why, paradoxically, Afri...
Why doesn't this apply to every minority? For example, when anti-Semitism broke down, why didn't it leave behind little Jewish ghettos of swirling social dysfunction and failure as the best Jews escaped into goyish society? Why not any Asian group? etc.
Good try anyway.
I like the Rationality Quotes, but it seems it is dominated by fairly long entries, rather than the small gems that I prefer. Now, obviously some people like those longer entries, but it'd be great if I those could be filtered out in some way. Is there a way to do that?
Here you are: Best of short rationality quotes 2009-2012. I created it with a one-line modification of the script I used here: Best of Rationality Quotes, 2011 Edition. The threshold is 400 characters including XML markup. The user-names for the newer quotes are missing, I'll fix this for the 2012 Edition.
2 separate related comments:
1) I'm moving to Vienna on the 25th. If there exist lesswrongers there I'd be most happy to meet them.
2) Moving strikes me as a great opportunity to develop positive, life-enchancing habits. If anyone has any literature or tips on this i'd greatly appreciate it
Note; The story I originally posted here was true and complete. However the details detract from the main point of the post, which was to indicate material support for life extension causes. Hence the edit.
Owing to a recent financial windfall, I now intend to travel the world working towards life extension. Im starting by pledging donations to the Brain Preservation Fund and the Kim Suozzi fund. Readers will also shortly see my name appearing on the donar list of the aforementioned funds.
I have a blog (link below) where I will soon be writing about ...
Of interest to probably no one but me: I seem to have lost 20 karma overnight. My views are not exactly mainstream in this community, but I am vague curious what triggered someone to go through some of my recent comments to downvote them.
Also, it doesn't appear to be related to this new feature.
An attempt to apply causal reasoning a la Pearl, to the interpretation of quantum correlations. Their framework is totally not ready to analyze the full range of possible interpretations of QM, but they make a start on formally depicting a number of informal arguments that you see in the interpretation debate.
What the hell? Did you catch Konkvistador disease or something? What is up with high-quality contributors deciding to up and leave?
I, for one, think that your posts are valuable to the community.
(I'm assuming you mean that you suspect your comments cause harm to others, obviously if you think you're spending to much time procrastinating on LessWrong then leaving is fine.)
I've recently read a lot of strong claims and mind-killing argumentation made against E.Y.'s assertion that MWI is the winning/leading interpretation in QM. The SEP seems to agree with this, which means I've got a bottom-line here to erase since both of my favorite authorities agree on that particular conclusion.
I know very little actual, factual QM, as relates to the math, experiments, hard data, evidence and physics beyond what's constantly being regurgitated in popular-science-news articles - AKA loads of BS.
How should I go about being epistemically r...
I think being epistemically rational entails learning the mathematical part of QM first and reading through the QM sequence afterwards. Before you can seriously attack the problem of interpretation of QM, you needn't necessarily know the experiments and hard data and evidence for QM, but you must know the mathematical structure of the theory, because that's the thing what you are going to interpret!
Be sure you operationally understand QM under the collapse interpretation, that is, you should know how to calculate probability distribution of observed results in series of subsequent measurements of different observables and you should understand the standard jargon. You will probably have to learn Hamiltonian mechanics in the course (if you don't know it already); it is not strictly necessary for the collapse-related questions, but most textbooks assume familiarity with it from the beginning, and besides, broader and more general understanding of QM is probably a better goal than understanding only the aspects which EY had decided to write about. I suggest starting with the collapse interpretation because it is the easiest one to understand for a person accustomed only to classical m...
A politically incorrect example of a mathematical theorem:
When someone (a white person) is accused of racism, and they say -- "I'm not racist, some of my best friends are black," -- they often get a response like -- "This is exactly what a racist would say."
Translated to mathematics, the fact that a white person has black friends, is considered an evidence for hypothesis that the person is a racist. Now if this line of reasoning is correct, then according to the law of conservation of expected evidence, not having black friends should b...
It is not the fact that the person has black friends that is supposed to count as evidence of their racism. It is the fact that they say that they have black friends in response to an accusation of racism. The response is the evidence, not the fact (if it is a fact) that the response is reporting. So what would be evidence against the racism hypothesis is not saying things like "I'm not racist; some of my best friends are black."
I'm not saying this is great evidence either, but it is not as obviously ridiculous as thinking that not having black friends is evidence against racism. I wouldn't be at all surprised if saying "Some of my best friends are black" is anticorrelated with actually having black best friends.
Oh, I agree. However, folks often take the claim "Hey, that thing you just said was kinda racist" as meaning "YOU ARE AN AWFUL RACIST SCUMBAG GO DIE IN A FIRE" and respond accordingly.
That's not too surprising given that ① people generally don't like receiving criticism of their views or actions, and get defensive; and ② many people seem to believe that only "racists" (a kind of person, usually found in Nazi or Klan uniforms) do, say, or believe racist things — and therefore that if someone says you did something racist, they are calling you "a racist" and thereby predicting that you're going to go commit hate crimes.
It's unfortunate though.
It probably doesn't help that people use "racism" to mean several different things, including:
- Racial prejudice — having false negative beliefs about people according to their race
- Racial privilege — the situation where some people receive social, political, or economic advantages and others receive disadvantages on the basis of their race (see also: invisible knapsack)
- Racial hatred — having malicious intentions towards people on the basis of their race
Notably, people can do racist₂ things — perpetuating racial privilege — without being racist₁ or racist₃.
Sadly, yes. And the best way to signal that you are trying, is to accuse other people.
And because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, it is best to start accusing others even before you are accused.
(To prevent possible misunderstanding: I believe that there is real racism and real racists; and I also believe that there is a status game played about this topic. And precisely because the racism is harmful, it would be good to distinguish between real racists and people who are simply not good enough at playing this status game; and also between people who genuinely help and people who are simply good at playing this status game.)
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.