I've submitted a ticket to the LW bug tracker.

in sans-serif than in serif font.

FWIW, most of my pages on gwern.net seem like they'd count as 'long texts', but my just concluded font A/B test using 2 sans-serif and 2 serif fonts doesn't see any difference in reading time when you split by serif: http://www.gwern.net/a-b-testing#fonts

This might be helpful.

These are natural mathematical equivalents of the Godel "true but undecidable" sentence. They can be proved in a larger system which is generally accepted as a valid form of reasoning, but are undecidable in a more limited system such as Peano Arithmetic.

Here's one answer.

In the summer of 1922, the Paris weekly newspaper L'Intrasigeant posed as their "Man on the street" question

"An American scientist announces that the world will end, or at least that such a huge part of the continent will be destroyed, and in such a sudden way, that death will be the certain fate of hundreds of millions of people. If this prediction were confirmed, what do you think would be its effects on people between the time when they acquired the aforementioned certainty and the moment of cataclysm? Finally, as far as you're concerned, what would you do in this last hour?"

The novelist Marcel Proust responded:

"I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it -- our life -- hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.

But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! If only the cataclysm doesn't happen this time, we won't miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India.

The cataclysm doesn't happen, we don't do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn't have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening."

I suspect that without mortality salience I would have more trouble getting out of bed and doing something useful every morning. Or I would just play games forever.

Fuck cancer. Fuck mortality. We must work faster.

I'll say what I said on facebook: The most effective paths historically for the bettering of the human condition are technology and trade. The net effect of the republican party on american well-being, however crazy they are, is way smaller than cheap cellphones or widespread computers or good public transportation. You can spend 20 years getting to a position of power as a republican or you can spend 20 years inventing energy storage systems or cheap and accessible travel or healthy but palatable alternatives to snack foods that are more achievable and have the positive benefit of providing you with experience and connections that aren't based 100 percent on lies.

In practice, desire to implement reform-from-within is a strong negative to promotion to positions that could implement the change. If the organization thought your issue was a problem, they probably would address it without your intervention. Since they don't, that means they don't agree that your issue is a problem.

One could adopt a false persona for years to get the promotions to powerful positions. But you still might not get the promotion. And do you want to be a faithful cog in implementing bad policy in the meantime?

And even if you did, you still might not be in position to make the change you want. With the benefit of hindsight, we know Gorbachev could and did make major reforms. But could he have predicted that at the beginning of his career, even if he wanted to?

My soul is here defined as my supernatural non-material essence as specified by Judeo-Christian philosophers, and not my computational pattern (over which I continue to claim copyright); transfer does not cover any souls of gwerns in alternate branches of the multiverses inasmuch as they have not consented.

What? This is lame. The definition of the soul as used by 16th century Catholic theology, which is friendly to information theory, is clearly the common sense interpretation and assumed among reasonable people. Sure some moderns love the definition you use but they are mostly believers of moralistic therapeutic deism, one hardly needs more evidence of their lack of theological expertise.

Huh, reading this made me realize that there's apparently still a small bit of my brain that doesn't alieve in atheism. For a moment I considered whether I should try to get some profit out of selling my soul as well, and then felt uncomfortable over the idea, thinking "I should hold onto it, just in case..."

My soul is here defined as my supernatural non-material essence as specified by Judeo-Christian philosophers[...]

What do you intend to do with your soul(s) as defined by other schools of philosophy?
By Plato's theory of Ideal Forms, selling your soul would be tantamount to selling bits of the gods - and man has no claim to the gods. I'd advise against this lest you wish to become fate-brothers with Prometheus.

Heh, I would have bid 0.5btc if I had known I would be the only bidder...

I flashed back to Bill Wilingham's Proposition Player. Highly recommended for an amusing fantasy take on this particular deal.

you still benefit infinitely by bargaining him down to an agreement like torturing you every day via a process that converges on an indefinitely large but finite total sum of torture while still daily torturing you & fulfilling the requirements of being in Hell.

A tactic that almost definitely should be referred to as "Gabriel's Horn."

You definitely should auction it off in other places, where prospective buyers value such things much higher.

Sorry to ruin the fun but I'm afraid this sale is impossible. Gwern lacks the proprietary rights to his own soul. As the apostle St Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians (chapter 6), "Or know you not, that your members are the temple of the Holy Ghost, who is in you, whom you have from God; and you are not your own? For you are bought with a great price. Glorify and bear God in your body." It clearly states that "you are not your own" which at least applies to baptized Christians (and as a confirmed Catholic, it may even apply to a higher degree). Unless gwern provides some scriptural basis for this sale, it cannot proceed. Even when Satan tempted Christ, the only proferred exchange was worship in return for temporal power. There are no cases (even hypothetical ones) of a direct sale of one's soul in the Church's Tradition.

In exchange for ruining this sale, I'll pray for your soul for free.

My soul is here defined as my supernatural non-material essence as specified by Judeo-Christian philosophers, and not my computational pattern

What if these are in fact the same thing, in extension if not intention? Then you would be selling your computational pattern, in contradiction with

(over which I continue to claim copyright)

I laughed out loud when I read this. I'm not incredibly surprised someone would bid, but at the same time, disappointed.

Are you accepting bids in things other than currencies commonly used for exchange? I would like to offer a finely crafted narrative instead of bitcoins.

The quitclaim doesn't help here. It merely quits your claim, which is relevant if ownership is disputed, but it doesn't give any more rights to the buyer than to anyone else (just more documentation of the quit). You should have been suspicious when taterbizkit mentioned that you can sell quitclaim deeds for a single item to multiple buyers.

has never been anyone else's

Hindus and some other groups may disagree with that. ;)

conversely, if Satan insists on my soul, I can let Satan have my soul and use yours instead.

FYI, according to galactic law, transactions like this are valid only to the extent that the implicit metaphysics of the contract is correct. If you wish to guarantee the property rights of your soul's new owner, you should add a meta clause indicating valid interpretive generalizations of content and intent.

I certify that my soul is intact and has not been employed in any dark rituals such as manufacturing horcruxes; I am also a member in good standing of the Catholic Church, having received confirmation etc. Note that my soul is almost certainly damned inasmuch as I am an apostate and/or an atheist, which I understand to be mortal sins.

Not sure how much I can trust the word of a damned. After all, lying is no more of a mortal sin than apostasy. And for an atheist there is no extra divine punishment for lying.

One person who did this years ago spun the event into a book, a popular blog, and endless speaking gigs.

I am really disappointed in you, gwern. Why would you use an English auction when you can use an incentive-compatible one (a second price auction, for example)? You're making it needlessly harder for bidders to come up with valuations!

(But I guess maybe if you're just trying to drive up the price, this may be a good choice. Sneaky.)

so souls likely constitute a lemon market.

applause

Just increased my subjective probability that John Wittle is Satan.

Note that if you can get a high price from Satan on your own soul (e.g. rulership of a country), this is a no-lose arbitrage deal since souls are fungible goods.

Probably safer to do that after HPMoR is finished. Otherwise there is a chance she would forward the letter to her lawyer, the lawyer would send a cease and desist letter to CFAR, and then what?

If the same thing happens after HPMoR is finished, it can be removed from web and shared among LW members in ways that give plausible deniability to CFAR. But you can't have plausible deniability while Eliezer continues to write new chapters.

Do you (not) observe this both with males and females?

Baboons are supposed to be a good model for human social structure, though not as smart as apes. They are matrilocal, so they don't know how big the male's family was. The female's status is largely determined by alliances, which are made of family blocks. They do get some grooming work out of allies. They might be able to get work out of low status females, who love to hold high status babies, but the mothers don't trust them, perhaps out of fear for the baby, perhaps out of fear of status contagion. Anyhow, since (2) is true, it's hard to measure (1). But it is probably better to look at anthropological evidence than baboons.

Large families mean low infant mortality and low maternal mortality. Low infant mortality might be due to good genes, or good provisioning. A woman from a large family might provide genetic protection against maternal mortality, but not a man from a large family. If infant mortality is due to bad infant genes, siblings testify to this kind of gene, but it might not be different from other kinds of robustness that can be measured in adulthood. If it's paternal provisioning, then maybe it's evidence that the man inherited dad strategy genes (vs cad strategy), but hunter-gatherer couplings probably were not long term so the large family is not highly informative. The farming environment seems like it should select for the behavior you suggest, but people usually assume it didn't last very long so didn't shape much.

"Real life" doesn't even remotely resemble the ancestral environment. In the modern world, a big family is evidence about your cultural background, especially the relationship between your cultural background and contraception, and that might be a turn-off for some. This is the same kind of phenomenon that makes having extra fat evidence, in the ancestral environment, that you were good at acquiring food and other resources, but in the modern world it's evidence that you're poor or lack access to good food or lack self-control or whatever.

Why does evo. psych imply this result? The fact that you can spawn healthy children may make you more attractive to an additional potential mate, but the potential mate must also consider whether you can provide resources to support additional children.

more people will share resources to help my kids survive. (emphasis added)

This seems like the opposite of what evo. psych would predict. Your relatives might be willing to provide you more support if you have more kids, but why would strangers be more willing to support you based on your reproductive fitness? As for relatives of additional potential spouses, the considerations of I discussed above still apply.

Well, the more kids are in a family, the less resources can be allocated to each child, all other things being equal. That said, it isn't obvious to me that your premise is true. I have found that my esteem for somebody grows for some reason when I learn they have siblings.

For a reflectively consistent person (let's call her Alice), the word "ought" according to Alice means whatever Alice ought according to Alice believe that it means.

Politics is the mind killer for a variety of reasons besides ridiculously strong priors that are never swayed by evidence. Strong priors isn't even the entirety of the phenomena to be explained (though it is a big part), let alone a fundamental explanation.

Also, I really like Noah's post (and was about to post it in the current open thread before I found your post). Not only did Noah attach a word to a pretty commonly occurring phenomenon, the word seems to have a great set of connotations attached to it, given some goals about improving discourse.

PITMK?

The talk is now online, here.

Aaronson is just trying to make the point that it's possible to make a formal distinction between nondeterminism and randomness. Mathematically, a nondeterministic function is a function that returns a set of values rather than a value, and a random function is a function that returns a probability distribution over values rather than a value. The fact that we can make such a formal distinction suggests that we ought to also be able to make an informal distinction.

Well, he's saying that. I don't know which part of this is the part you're having trouble with.

Note that this isn't particularly specific to the US. The situation is pretty much the same in every country, AFAIK.

I'm currently in a weeklong design meeting. On Monday, the guy leading the meeting proposed a schedule for what we were doing when, in which my presentation was Monday, a likely followup for my presentation was Friday, and various other things were true. Some people objected, and he changed some stuff, though not those two things. Nobody objected to it, and it's the schedule we're using.

I have no idea what we're going to do this afternoon or tomorrow, and I was surprised by what we did yesterday and this morning. At no time have I ever known, I didn't bother to listen when it was announced. I don't care what we discuss when, as long as I know when my topics are so I can prep.

Still, I'm happy to say that our schedule is an aggregate of public opinion.

Would you disagree?

I approach public policy in a democracy similarly. Sure, most of us don't know anything about anything, but I'm not sure how much that really matters.

That being said, I'm also not sure how much I endorse public policy driven by public discourse. "Worst system in the world except for everything else we've ever tried" comes to mind.

Why, then, don't more people realize that many worlds is correct?

I am going to try and provide short answer, as I see it. (Fighting urge to write about different levels of "physical reality".)

Many Words is an Interpretation. An interpretation should translate from mathematical formalism towards practical algorithms, but MWI does not go all the way. Namely, it does not specify the quantum state an Agent should use for computation. One possible state agrees with "Schroedinger's experiment was definitely set up and started", another state implies "cat definitely turned out to be alive", but those certainties cannot occur simultaneously.

Bayesian inference in non-quantum physics also changes (probabilistic) state, but we can interpret it as a mere change of our beliefs, and not a change in the physical system. But in quantum mechanics, upon observation, the "objective" state fitting our knowledge changes. MWI says "fitting our knowledge" is not a good criterion of choosing quantum state to compute with (because no state can be fitting enough, as example with Shroedinger's cat shows) and we should compute with superposition of Agents. MWI may be more "objectively correct", but it does not seem to be more "practical" than Copenhagen interpretation. So physicists do like to cautiously agree with MWI, then wave hands, proclaim "Decoherence!" and at the end use Copenhagen interpretation as before.

Introductory books emphasize experiments, and experimental results do not come in form of superpositioned bits. So before student gets familiar enough with mathematical formalism to think about detectors in superposition, Copenhagen is already occupying slot for Interpretation.

Why, then, don't more people realize that many worlds is correct?

Note that you are using Eliezer!correct, not Physics!correct. The former is based on Bayesian reasoning among models with equivalent predictive power, the latter requires different predictive power to discriminate between theories. The problem with the former reasoning is that without experimental validation it is hard to agree on the priors and other assumptions going into the Bayesian calculation for MWI correctness. Additionally, proclaiming MWI "correct" is not instrumentally useful unless one can use it to advance physical knowledge.

'hey, maybe at that point half of the superposition just vanishes, at random, faster than light'

It's worse than that, actually. In some frames it means not just FTL but also back in time. But given that this is unmeasurable, it matters not in the slightest if you adopt the Physics!correct definition.

I notice that almost all of those books are about things that are considered "mental problems" (the exceptions being chronic fatigue, chronic pain, and relationship problems, which are nevertheless specific problems). So if a self-help book isn't about a particular problem (like How to Win Friends and Influence People and The Seven Habits), or the problem it talks about isn't primarily psychological (like Getting Things Done), then it won't appear on that list regardless of how good it is.

(Stating my opinions here so that you won't have to guess: My brother, who seems quite sensible and whom I admire very much, states that all three of the books mentioned here are very good. Getting Things Done taught me one extremely useful lesson, probably among the top five most useful things I have ever learned. I have little evidence, apart from this stuff, that any of these books are useful.)

Sure it's not in plasma?

The inconvenience of setting up a payment method may play some role.

Incidentally, I'm confused over the fact that so few sites or people seem to use Flattr, despite it basically solving this problem. (Well, it's microdonations rather than micropayments, so you can't really require your users to pay anything, but still.)

The interesting thing about that observation is that it's very much about how the internet get's used in the West. In China where a lot of internet use happens in internet cafés where uses pay the internet café by the hour micropayments for virtual goods are used more frequently than in the West.

Additionally transaction costs are a big deal when it comes to micropayments. Paypal's micromayment fee is 5% + $0.05 per transaction. If we would have cheap micropayment there a chance that a greater ecosystem of services that need micropayments can grow.

Bitcoin did promise being cheap but still have some substantial transaction costs. On the other hand Ripple (https://ripple.com/) provides the opportunity of a cost of $0.0001 per transaction.

You can't control whether or not the girl will hit or insult you. As a result hoping that she would do one of those things goes against stoicist ideals.

It's much better to seek out-of-comfort zone experiences where you can control that you have the experience. Instead of depending on the bully in the bus to provide an experience in which you can grow you can go and have fun dancing in the bus.

A year ago I was in a personal development seminar that's partly about improving one's charisma and finding the courage to do what one likes.

At the end of the day there's live music and most people just sit there listening and watching the musicians. I went and danced in alone in front of >200 people because I felt like dancing. I got a bunch of positive social feedback for it.

Stoicism doesn't have to be about having no fun and doing nothing. It's rather about reducing negative emotions.

If I'm counting the replies correctly, nine respondents requested them so far. I'd like my word values. Thank you!

May I have mine? Thanks.

An alternative would be to ask people for donations to Against Malaria Foundation or your preferred charity.

I'll provide these values for the first ten respondents who want them.

I'd like mine, please.

mine, please.

I'd like mine, please!

Ooh, go on then.

Can you comment on your methodology - tools, wget scripts or what?

Sure, why not? Thanks!

Cool! This (judging the relevance of words in documents in a corpus and analogous problems) is a subject I muse about sometimes. Thanks for introducing me to TF-IDF.

I'd like my top scoring words please.