What are the consequences?

I guess it is a bad news for bioinformatics (comparing two very long pieces of DNA), but maybe there are sufficiently useful approximations. Or if one string is fixed and only the other string varies, maybe you can precompute some data to make the comparison faster.

Feel free to vote!

What reasons would you have for not voting?

If I remember correctly the voting system takes into account your newness, and won't let you overly downvote without sufficient karma.

See http://lesswrong.com/lw/m5l/guidelines_for_upvoting_and_downvoting/ for 'rules' about voting.

Not that it counts much, but I do believe that the ZFC is inconsistent.

One of the open problems MIRI is working on for FAI is exactly this type of logical uncertainty. It should be able to modify itself if it finds out the logic underlying it's basic programming is incorrect.

I would think it faster to search for proofs of any kind, then simplify to an elementary/constructive/machine verifiable proof.

Strange. Tenured professors get paid the same regardless of how many students they teach so it helps them if another instructor attracts lots of students thereby reducing the tenured professor's teaching burden.

Some people disagree with his version of events.

"But I do think it that it [sic] is very important that you not deviate too far from the department norms."

Yep.

Bureaucracies chew up and spit out people who deviate from norms. You apparently think that you are a better teacher. How relevant is that to your success in the bureaucracy? Is it necessarily beneficial? Do your students get a vote on whether you get tenure? Get a raise? Get a lab?

Some people at work work on the purported purpose of the bureaucracy Others work the bureaucratic reward and punishment system.

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

"Align more with department standards" sounds like shorthand for some more specific concerns. Coward doesn't spell out what those concerns are.

Schools comparable to Berkeley have one of three common organizations of math teachers. One, Berkeley's old structure, is to employ no lecturers. Another is to employ a lot of lecturers, whose job is simply to teach as well as possible.

But I think the most common organization is to employ a small number of lecturers who do a small amount of teaching, but whose real job is to handle the administrative details of teaching, such as placement of freshmen, curriculum design, and instructing graduate students in teaching. I think the complaints make most sense in the context of the department expecting him to grow into such a job.

Proof, in this case, means that using only a restricted set of rules, you are able to rewrite a set of initial assumptions to get the desired conclusion. The rules are supposed to conserve, every time they are used, the truth status of the assertions they are applied to.
In this case, if the derivation is correct and both agents believe in the same environment logic, then the mental state change should be a consequence of the strict symbols manipulation. Note that 'two agents' might mean 'the same agent in the past and in the future of the derivation'.

If you want more karma you can post as Discussion and then use that karma to propagate to Main. Also you could add comments giving a summary here.

Headhunters will rarely be honest about this. I always recommend to clients that they say "brutal feedback" instead of just feedback to make sure they're getting good responses, but it's the rare manager that will be honest about this.

Please take this as a given:

Why?

High school is hard.

Feel free to comment -- since only the user you're replying to (and anyone that has chosen to subscribe to updates for that specific post) is notified, you don't need to fear being a distraction to masses of people who might no longer care.

Necro to your heart's content. It's fine.

See http://lesswrong.com/lw/le5/welcome_to_less_wrong_7th_thread_december_2014/ it has further points.

Same with knowhow about how society actually runs. School should tell you how to use social services and a lot of basic law.

Agreed. I really wish that there was a site like webMD that actually included rates of the diseases and the symptoms. I don't think it would be a big step to go from there to something that would actually propose cost-effective tests for you based on your symptoms.

e.g. You select sore-throat and fever as symptoms and it says that out of people with those symptoms, 70% have a cold, 25% have a strep infection and 5% have something else (these numbers are completely made up). An even better system would then look at which tests you could do to better nail down the probabilities, which could be as simple as asking some questions like "Do you have any visible rashes?" or asking for test results like a quick strep test.

what the base rate is

There is a not insurmountable but a pretty large problem here. Rates for which groups? There are a LOT of relevant subgroups (sex, age, ethnicity, social group, geographic group, current medical conditions, previous medical conditions, diet, etc.).

If you just want an overall picture, CDC publishes mortality and morbidity tables, I believe, which should supply you with some sort of base rates.

Medical diagnostic expert systems exist and do reasonably well, but they are not trivial.

On a practical note, the doctors' guild is likely to take a luddite position towards this X-/

I started an IF schedule where I eat from 4pm until 8pm a few months ago. I did have acid reflux issues in the beginning, but that stopped after a couple of weeks. In my experience, the acid reflux is worse if you eat shortly before going to bed. (In the beginning I ate until 9pm and went to bed at 10pm. Now I'm eating from 5pm to about 6:30 and go to bed at 10, with no problems. (I've had a sore throat for the last 4 years or so, but other than the acid reflux thing when I started IF, this has pretty much remained unchanged, so I'm assuming the intermittent fasting isn't making it better or worse.))

So you could try taking a ≈2h break before going to bed (if you're not doing that already), eating twice a day, experimenting with different foods, talking to a doctor, and if you still feel bad after that, I would suggest going back to a regular diet. Three months seems like enough time for the body to adjust as much as it's ever going to.

Too many proton pump inhibitors may interfere with your absorption of minerals. You may want to have your blood tested for deficiencies.

Junior doctor here.

Different PPIs tend to work the same as each other. PPIs are pretty safe drugs, but having ongoing acid reflux is itself not that good for your health. You could try to reduce it by staying vertical for a while after eating, by spacing your meals into at least two per day (even two within a couple hours), and doing any other simple suggested lifestyle measures.

Adding or switching to a different class of antireflux drug seems rash if you can just fix things with a lifestyle change.

Have you tried sleeping on your left side?

Does the story actually says the Superhappies really know humanity's utility function better? As in, does an omniscient narrator tell it, or is it a Superhappy or one of the crew that says this? That changes a lot, to me. Of course the Superhappies would believe they know our utility function better than we do. Just like how the humans assumed they knew what was better for the Babyeaters.

Similarly, the Superhappies are moral, for their idea of morality. They were perfectly willing to use force (not physical, but force nonetheless) to encourage humans to see their point of view. They threatened humanity and were willing to forcibly change human children, even if the adults could continue to feel pain. While humans also employs threats and force to change behavior, in most cases we would be hard-pressed to call that "moral."

From a meta-perspective, I'd findit odd if Yudkowsky wrote it like that. He's not careless enough to make that mistake and as far as I know, he thinks humanity's utility function goes beyond mere bliss.

The only way I think you could see the Superhappies' solution as acceptable if you don't think jokes or fiction (or other sort of arts involving "deception") are something humans would value as part of their utility function. Which I personally would find very hard to understand.

they are moral and wouldn't offer a deal unless it was beneficial according to both utility functions being merged (not just according to their value of happiness).

I guess whether it is beneficial or not depends on what you compare to? They say,

he obvious starting point upon which to build further negotiations, is to combine and compromise the utility functions of the three species until we mutually satisfice, providing compensation for all changes demanded.

So they are aiming for satisficing rather than maximizing utility: according to all three before-the-change moralities, the post-change state of affairs should be acceptable, but not necessarily optimal. Consider these possibilities:

1) Baby-eaters are modified to no longer eat sentient babies; humans are unchanged; Superhappies like art.

2) Baby-eaters are modified to no longer eat sentient babies; humans are pain-free and eat babies; Superhappies like art.

3) Baby-eaters, humans, and Superhappies are all unchanged.

I think the intention of the author is that, according to pre-change human morality, (1) is the optimal choice, (2) is bad but acceptable, and (3) is unacceptable. The superhappies in the story claim that (2) is the only alternative that is acceptable to all three pre-change moralities. So the super-happy ending is beneficial in the sense that it avoids (3), but it's a "bad" ending because it fails to get (1).

But it's still a compromise. Is it part of humanity's utility function to value another species' utility function to such an extent that they would accept the tradeoff of changing humanity's utility function to preserve as much of the other species' utility function?

I don't recall any mention of humanity being total utilitarians in the story. Neither did the compromise made by the superhappies strike me as being better for all parties than their original values were, for each of them.

The only reason the compromise was supposed to be beneficial is because the three species made contact and couldn't easily coexist together from that point on. Also, because the superhappies were the stronger force and could therefore easily enforce their own solution. Cutting off the link removes those assumptions, and allows each species to preserve its utility function, which I assume they have a preference for, at least humans and baby-eaters.

My feeling is that many utility functions in the general class of utility functions that the super happy's is drawn from would lie about how advantageous it is to merge. Weren't the humans going to lie to the babyeaters?

I think what the "true" (status-quo) ending proves is that the Super-Happies did not accurately model humanity's utility function at all. If they had, they would have proposed a deal where humanity gets rid of most of its pain, but still keeps some, especially those "grim" things that humans actually like (somewhat counter-intuitively). (And perhaps the Babyeaters' thing would then be understood as one of these "grim" things by humans, as it clearly is for the Babyeaters themselves It's not clear if the Superhappies would be willing to acquire this value, though). This is a deal that humans would indeed accept, since it agrees with their values. I think the true moral of this story is that getting human wants right for something like CEV is a hard problem, and making even small mistakes can have big consequences.

That seems to be pretty worthwhile without them saying how much of the varience they can "predict".

I was saying things like, "I really doubt the garbage disposal is really broken, we just had two other major things replaced, what are the odds that another thing would break so quickly?" [...] I am probably a poster child for "doing probabilistic thinking wrong" in some obvious way that I am blind to.

You are indeed doing it very wrong. As far as proablisitic reasoning goes the fact that one item broke doesn't reduce the chances that a second item breaks at all.

"I really doubt the garbage disposal is really broken, we just had two other major things replaced, what are the odds that another thing would break so quickly?"

You have two hypotheses: the appliances breaking are not connected (independent); and the appliance breaking are connected (dependent).

In the first case you are saying the equivalent of "I tossed the coin twice and it came up heads both times, it's really unlikely it will come up heads the third time as well" which should be obviously wrong.

In the second case you should discard your model of independence alongside with your original prior and consider that the breakages are connected.

I think the moral of the story is that life is complicated and simple models are often too simple to be useful. You should discard them faster when they show signs of not working.

And, of course, if you are wondering whether your garbage disposal is really broken, you should go look at your garbage disposal unit and not engage in pondering theoretical considerations.

Some random thoughts:

As a bounded agent, you have to be aware that it's physically impossible to consider all the hypotheses. When you encounter new evidence, you might think of a new hypothesis to promote that you hadn't thought of before - in fact, this is an unavoidable part of being a good bounded agent. So don't worry about coming up with the One True Prior ahead of time and then updating it - instead, try to plan for the most likely outcomes, but leave a "something else" category and be ready to change your mind.

And given that we're biased, when we make plans we're probably going to get some probabilities wrong - in this case, future events contain information about how one was biased. Try to learn about your own biases, which often means being more influenced by evidence than an unbiased agent.

If you still want to try reasoning probabilistically, I'd look into Tetlock's good judgment project and start planning how to practice my probability estimation. Oh, and check out the calibration game.

I am probably a poster child for "doing probabilistic thinking wrong" in some obvious way that I am blind to.

One possible mistake is assuming that problems will be independent and spread out evenly over time. That's an extreme assumption. In real life there are always more reasons for problems to cluster than to anti-cluster (so to speak), so it doesn't balance out at all. Also, problems will do more harm when clustered, because your ability to cope is reduced. So it makes sense to prepare for clustered problems. When two things go wrong, get ready for the third. That's very obvious in software engineering, if you find ten bugs, chances are you haven't found them all. But it's true in real life too.

The more general problem is that you just seem to have less life experience than your wife. To fix that, go out and get experience. Fix stuff, haggle, make arrangements... It'll improve your life in other ways as well.

I think you were basically doing okay, it's just that as soon as you formulated your initial hypothesis you should have actively sought out a way to disprove it. How hard can I lean on my fence? Is scratching lazily sufficient to remove paint on the siding? Do I dare to wash the floor under the bookshelf?... After all, if you suddenly received lots of evidence to the contrary, you would a) update fast, and b) earn husband points.

In essence, you should always ask yourself, is this still the relevant question?

I really doubt the garbage disposal is really broken, we just had two other major things replaced, what are the odds that another thing would break so quickly?

If they're independent, the odds are exactly the same as if two other major things had not been recently replaced. If they're dependent, the odds are higher. For this decision, you have a lot more evidence about the specific, so your base rate (unless it's incredibly small) doesn't matter, and the specific evidence of brokenness overwhelms it.

A better application is budgeting for next month. Compare how much you're planning to set aside for repairs with how much your wife is. See who's right. Update. Repeat.

separate advice: look around at things and check if anything else is about to break and can be saved from expensive replacement via the process of repairs.

nothing scientific about having sex with machines

Sexology is not a science?

Would it be more scientific to make an interdiscipline between sexology and, uhm, computer science? Oh wait...

According to Wikipedia, in Malaysia sale and importation of sex toys is illegal, but it doesn't sound like there's any law against using a vibrator you made yourself.

Get a bunch of really smart people that are good at what they do and want to change the world, and get them to work for you,

I don't know, but if you could get a working plan by asking on public boards, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be worth billions of dollars.

1. How can you become less competitor in order that You become more successful?

Not sure what exactly you meant here. But if you want to avoid being "one of many people doing the same stuff", your options are, approximately:

• find something no one else does. Problem is, other people may follow you, so this itself is not enough.
• build a brand. No one else can produce your brand, so now you meta-compete with other brands.
• establish a monopoly. Try to put yourself in a position where other people can't compete with you because they lack some critical resource.
• make a cartel with your competitors, or bribe a government official to make competition illegal. This is technically illegal, but not unusual. Be sure you have the right friends, otherwise you may risk prison.

Thiel goes a bit deeper on 1. in his book.

You could be depressed.

consider: exploration/exploitation. Maybe some part of you has decided that it's time to stop exploring education and its time to exploit the knowledge you already have? Do you feel like you have a lot of knowledge now? Or that you know enough? Is your relationship to knowledge seeking now in the form of "disinterest", "too busy for it", "sick of it" or some other sentiment...

(also as Artaxerxes said - depression, or other brain chemical things that this could be a symptom of)

Listen to yourself. You want to know what happened to you. You're still a curious person.

Even if you don't feel like you want to learn in general, you want to want to learn. You're on the path to switching from undirected to directed, from chaotic to purposeful curiosity. You already know how to pursue a question; now you need to find what questions matter to you.

I've felt that lack of curiosity a fair amount over the past 5-10 years. I suspect the biggest change that reduced my curiosity was becoming financially secure. Or maybe some other changes which made me feel more secure.

I doubt that I ever sought knowledge for the sake of knowledge, even when it felt like I was doing that. It seems more plausible that I had hidden motives such as the desire to impress people with the breadth or sophistication of my knowledge.

LessWrong attitudes toward politics may have reduced some aspects of my curiosity by making it clear that my curiosity in many areas had been motivated by a desire to signal tribal membership. That hasn't enabled me to redirect curiosity toward more productive areas, but I'm probably better off without those aspects of curiosity.

does it imply that getting out into space is a lot harder than it sounds?

It enforces a statement along the lines of "these aliens got space travel recently or getting out into space is a lot harder than it sounds." That's weak evidence, at least, for that claim.

Anyone want to take bets on whether or not this will turn out in ten years to be natural?

How can they get a mess of objects whirling around a star without getting into space?

As much as I would like for it to be aliens, I think even a 1% belief that it's aliens is privileging the hypothesis too much. Previous 'weird' cosmological objects have all turned out to have far more plausible natural explanations.

All this said, though, it does seem kind of natural for a civilization to put most of its effort into surviving in its own solar system - where energy is plentiful and communication is rapid - rather than spreading outward into tenuous space where the chances of survival are very low. It's not obvious to me why a civilization should choose to colonize other solar systems. That said, if a civilization chose to do that and was successful in doing that, it would quickly become very populous, but it requires an initial impetus.

I've read the original paper. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.03622v1.pdf

There is no infrared excess - that is the weirdest part of the whole thing. It means that there isn't a large system-spanning amount of material heated by the star and radiating in the infrared, that we are just seeing a small fraction of as it happens to pass in front of the star from our angle. Instead, there must be only a small amount of material that we are seeing a reasonable fraction of each time it occults the star. An infrared excess does not depend on the type of material, merely its surface area.

This and the irregular deep nature of the occultation is very strange - large deep occultations mean the matter has to be diffuse rather than something like a planet, irregularity means theres probably multiple clumps, but the lack of infrared excess means we have to be seeing a pretty good fraction of it. The brightness of the star also wiggles a little bit on timecales of ~20 days for part of the dataset, in a manner they don't know how to interpret.

The leading theories are:

1 - Dust clumps generated from a giant impact between two planets, spread around the orbital range of that planet. Should be some infrared excess in that case though, and the odds of happening to see that in a system that isn't actively forming are ridiculously tiny.

2 - Exocomet storm in which large, icy dusty objects rain down practically on top of the star and poof into dust, then zoom back out into the outer system, possibly with one large ancestral object breaking up into multiple ones that share an orbit and pass next to the star at irregular intervals like our own solar system's Kreutz sungrazers. In this case large amounts of dust would be irregularly generated in close proximity to the star where we are much more likely to see them pass in front. When they went back and looked at the star with other instruments, they found a passing red dwarf star only about 1,000 AUs out which could definitely disturb the far outer system and an Oort cloud equivalent.

3 - Something new, some kind of semi-stable clumpy low mass dust belt or a new form of chaotic variable star. Or the astrometry that ruled out certain classes of explanation being wrong.

For many purposes, but especially for video, it is useful to pretend to be an iphone. Just set your user-agent to iphone and it will give you <video> rather than flash. That's not as good as actually getting the video file. If you want to do that, start here.

Added: I'm using a Mac, using Safari, which is basically the same web browser as on an iphone, so pretending to be an iphone works great for me. Also, Safari has a user-agent switcher built-in, in the Developer menu, which can be turned on in the Advanced tab of Preferences. I have not tried a user-agent switcher in Chrome, and maybe that would work. But I have failed to get the video to play directly in Chrome, so maybe this is an Apple streaming format that Safari implements and Chrome doesn't. In that case the flash player has an important role of implementing it.

Linear algebra, function optimization, probability theory.

:)

Highly speculative thoughts off the top of my head (only with what little I can remember from my high school physics):

• The main factor that determines escape velocity is the mass of the planet (there's also atmospheric drag, but it's generally manageable unless the world is a perpetual hurricane hell, in which case I doubt it has any civilization). After a certain mass threshold, the planet is likelier to be gaseous than rocky. I don't think Neptune-like or Jupiter-like worlds are suitable for life (but their moons are another story). In general, I'd say if the world is too big to jump out of, it's too gaseous for anything to have walked on it anyway. Edited to add: Inhabited moons of Jupiter-like worlds would also need to take into account the planet's escape velocity, even if it's lower where they are.

• If the planet is a big Earth (that is, quite massive but still mostly rocky), the greater gravity will result in a thicker and denser atmosphere, but I don't know enough aerodynamics to tell how much, if any, this detail will add to the problem of escape velocity. But this difference may change the rules as to which fuels will be solid, liquid or gaseous under that planet's normal conditions.

• Another, related problem is payload. For example, if the planet's intelligent species is aquatic, the spaceship will need to be filled with water instead of air; this will increase the total mass horribly and require a much more potent fuel (but all this is assuming that an aquatic species has had the opportunity to discover fire in the first place).

• In worlds too big to escape by propulsion, people may come up with the idea of the space elevator, but the extra gravity will require taking into account the structure's weight. The counterweight at the upper end will need to be heavier and/or farther. Issues related to which material is best suited for this building scenario and whether there's a limit to how big a space elevator you can build are beyond my knowledge. According to Wikipedia, nanotubes appear to be a workable choice on Earth.

• Some world out there may have a ridiculously tall mountain that extends into the upper atmosphere. Gravity at the top will be lower, and if a launch platform can be built there, takeoff will be easier. Of course, this is an "if" bigger than said mountain.

• India has a huge coastline, but for mythical/cultural reasons, Hinduism used to have a taboo against sea travel. In the worst scenario, our heavy aliens may stay on ground, not because they can't, but because they won't; maybe their atmosphere looks too scary or their planet attracts too many meteorites or it has several ominous-looking moons or something.

I don't think "harder to get off the planet" means more than "spend an additional 1000 years" developing tech.

Constant density planet: Escape velocity scales with the cube root of mass.

Real planets: Goes up faster than that since the inside crunches down as mass increases. Also the geology could start getting... interesting at large masses due to the whole square cube law thing and rapidly increasing primordial heat of formation.

Have you tried asking him why he thought these things?

I don't know either of a program that solves your problem. But writing a transcompiler from mathematical markdown (mathdown?) to Latex should not be that difficult in F#. It should be a fun excercise, if you write the formal grammar.

Would any of these be useful? That's just a list I found by Googling /MathJax editor/. I'm not familiar with any of them. MathJax is a Javascript library for rendering mathematics on web pages. The mathematics is written in MathML.

I use pen and paper, and switch to LaTeX when I have something I need to preserve. It's not very satisfactory, but since anything I might want to publish will have to go through LaTeX at some point, there's no point in using any other format, unless it had a LaTeX exporter. And pen and paper is far more instant than any method I can imagine of poking mathematics in through a keyboard.