= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Open Thread, January 4-10, 2016
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (430)
Thank you.
You're welcome.
I will be most interested to find out what it is that requires a sockpuppet but doesn't require it to be secret that it's a sockpuppet or even whose sockpuppet.
I think the point is that when googling his name, the post does not show up, but if LWers know it's the same person, there's no harm.
Yup, he has confirmed essentially this by PM.
What is your credence that the google of five years in the future won't find things written under pseudonyms when you search for the author's real name? 10 years?
I agree that will likely be available as a subscription service in 5 years or so, but I think it would be somewhat uncharacteristic for Google to launch that for everyone. (As I recall, they had rather good face recognition software ~5 years ago but decided to kill potential features built on that instead of rolling them out, because of privacy and PR concerns.)
By replying you eliminated his ability to delete the post and thus maybe the point of the effort.
Lessons from teaching a neural network...
Grandma teaches our baby that a pink toy cat is "meow".
Baby calls the pink cat "meow".
Parents celebrate. (It's her first word!)
Later Barbara notices that the baby also calls another pink toy non-cat "meow".
The celebration stops; the parents are concerned.
Viliam: "We need to teach her that this other pink toy is... uhm... actually, what is this thing? Is that a pig or a pink bear or what? I have no idea. Why do people create such horribly unrealistic toys for the innocent little children?"
Barbara shrugs.
Viliam: "I guess if we don't know, it's okay if the baby doesn't know either. The toys are kinda similar. Let's ignore this, so we neither correct her nor reward her for calling this toy 'meow'."
Barbara: "I noticed that the baby also calls the pink fish 'meow'."
Viliam: "Okay... I think now the problem is obvious... and so is the solution."
Viliam brings a white toy cat and teaches the baby that this toy is also "meow".
Baby initially seems incredulous, but gradually accepts.
A week later, the baby calls every toy and grandma "meow".
So the child was generalizing along the wrong dimension, so you decided the solution was to train an increase in generalization of the word meow which is what you got. You need to teach discrimination; not generalization. A method for doing so is to present the pink cat and pink fish sequentially. Reward the meow response in the presence of the cat, and reward fish responses to the fish. Eventually meow responses to the fish should extinguish.
The necessity of negative examples is well-known when training classifiers.
In theory I agree. Experimentally, trying to teach her that other toys are connected to different sounds, e.g. that the black-and-white cow is "moo", didn't produce any reaction so far. And I believe she doesn't understand the meaning of the word "not" yet, so I can't explain that some things are "not meow".
I guess this problem will fix itself later... that some day she will start also repeating the sounds for other animals. (But I am not sure what is the official sound for turtle.)
I am sure this isn't necessary, but, you do realize that she's going to learn language flawlessly without you actively doing anything?
Instead of saying "my <object>" my daughter used to exclusively say "the <object> that I use." My son used to append a "t" sound to the end of almost every word. These quirks sorted themselves out without us mentioning them. =)
The phrase "actively doing anything" is too slippery. What one person does passively another may do actively. People who post on Less Wrong tend to do things consciously more often than the general public. The theories which say that children acquire language without anyone doing anything special are no doubt studying the behavior of normal people.
The conclusion is that Viliam is probably simply thinking out loud about things that most people consider only subconsciously and implement in some way but don't know how to articulate. If you try to acquire a foreign language by merely listening to native speakers converse, you will learn very little. Children learn language when adults adapt their speech to their level and attempt to bridge the inferential distance. Most people do this by accident of having the impulses of a human parent.
Not actively but maybe subconsciously.
As I already mentioned child directed speech is different.
And also yes: Most children probably can get by without that either.
And also: I'm sure gwern will chime in an cite that parents have no impact on language and concept acquisition at all.
There's overwhelming data that parenting can prevent language acquisition. But that requires extreme degenerate cases - essentially child abuse on the level of locking the child in the closet and not talking to them at all.
For typical parenting, I agree that it is unlikely that variance in parenting style has measurable effect on language acquisition.
Hard to come by in normal language acquisition, though. So it probably doesn't quite work like that.
Teaching subtraction:
'See, you had five apples, and you ate three. How many apples do you have?' 'Five.' 'No, look here, you only have two left. Okay, you had six apples, and ate four, how many apples do you have now?' 'Five.' 'No, dear, look here... Okay...' Sigh. 'Mom?' 'Yes, dear?' 'And if I have many apples, and I eat many, how many do I have left?..'
Piagets problem: The child tries to guess what the teacher/parent/questioner wants.
I never teach math. At least not in the school way of offering problems and asking questions about them. For example I 'tought' subtraction the following way:
(in the kitchen)
Me: "Please give me six potatoes." Him: "1, 2, 3" Me (putting them in the pot): "How many do we still need?" Him: "4, 5, 6" (thinking) "3 more."
A specific situation avoids guessing the password.
I've gotten around to doing a cost-benefit analysis for vitamin D: http://www.gwern.net/Longevity#vitamin-d
People in the studies presumably don't take it all in the morning. Do you have an estimate of how that affects the total effect? How much bigger would you estimate the effect to be when people take it in the morning?
I take it in the morning just because I found that taking it late at night harmed my sleep. I have no idea how much people taking it later in the day might reduce benefits by damaging sleep; I would guess that the elderly people usually enrolled in these trials would be taking it as part of their breakfast regimen of pills/prescriptions and so the underestimate of benefits is not that serious.
Is it 5000IU per day?
We don't know. Since you asked, here's the comment from one of the more recent meta-analyses to discuss dose in connection with all-cause mortality, Autier 2014:
1μg=40IU, so 10μg=400IU, 20μg=800IU, and 1250μg=5000IU.
Personally, I'm not sure I agree. The mechanistic theory and correlations do not predict that 400IU is ideal, it doesn't seem enough to get blood serum levels of 25(OH)D to what seems optimal, and I don't even read Rejnmark the same way: look at the Figure 3 forest plot. To me, this looks like after correcting for Smith's use of D2 rather than D3 (D2 usually performs worse), that there are too few studies using higher doses to make any kind of claim (Table 1; almost all the daily studies use <=20μg), and the studies which we do have tend to point to higher being better within this restricted range of dosages.
That said, I cannot prove that 5k IU is equally or more effective, so if anyone is feeling risk-averse or dubious on that score, they should stick with 800IU doses.
Why too much evidence can be a bad thing
This isn't "more evidence can be bad", but "seemingly-stronger evidence can be weaker". If you do the math right, more evidence will make you more likely to get the right answer. If more evidence lowers your conviction rate, then your conviction rate was too high.
Briefly, I think what's going on is that a 'yes' presents N bits of evidence for 'guilty', and M bits of evidence for 'the process is biased', where M>N. The probability of bias is initially low, but lots of yeses make it shoot up. So you have four hypotheses (bias yes/no cross guilty yes/no), the two bias ones dominate, and their relative odds are the same as when you started.
See:
Looks like the paper is now out: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.00900v1.pdf
So, why not stab someone in front of everyone to ensure that they all rule you guilty?
I believe I read somewhere on LW about an investment company that had three directors, and when they decided whether to invest in some company, they voted, and invested only if 2 of 3 have agreed. The reasoning behind this policy was that if 3 of 3 agreed, then probably it was just a fad.
Unfortunately, I am unable to find the link.
If you are more confident that the method is inaccurate when it is operating then it being low spread is indication that it is not operating. A TV that shows a static image that flickers when you kick it more likely is recieving actual feed than one that doesn't flicker when punched.
If you have multiple TVs that all flicker at the same time it is likely that the cause was the weather rather than the broadcast
A side note.
My mother is a psychologist, father - an applied physicist, aunt 1 - a former morgue cytologist, aunt 2 - a practicing ultrasound specialist, father-in-law - a general practitioner, husband - a biochemist, my friends (c. 5) are biologists, and most of my immediate coworkers teach either chemistry or biology. (Occasionally I talk to other people, too.) I'm mentioning this to describe the scope of my experience with how they come to terms with the 'animal part' of the human being; when I started reading LW I felt immediately that people here come from different backgrounds. It felt implied that 'rationality' was a culture of either hacking humanity, or patching together the best practices accumulated in the past (or even just adopting the past), because clearly, we are held back by social constraints - if we weren't, we'd be able to fully realize our winning potential. (I'm strawmanning a bit, yes.) For a while I ignored the voice in the back of my mind that kept mumbling 'inferential distances between the dreams of these people and the underlying wetware are too great for you to estimate', or some such, but I don't want to anymore.
To put it simply, there is a marked difference within biologists in how reverently they view the gross (and fine) human anatomy, in how easily they accept that a body is just a thing, composed of matter, with charges and insulation and stuff -just a system of tubes, but still not a car in which you can individually tweak the axles and the windshield (probably). (This is why I think Peter Watts is so popular on LW - the idea that you can just tinker with circuitry and upgrade people.
Psychologists are the most 'gentle', they and the doctors have too much 'social responsibilities' baked in to comfortably discuss people as walking meat. Botanists (like me) don't have enough knowledge to do it, but we at least are aware of this. Biochemists are narrow-minded by necessity (too many pathways). Vertebrate zoologists are best (Steinbeck, I think, described it in his book about the Sea of Cortes), in that you can count on them to be brutally consistent. Physicists - at least the one I know - like to talk about 'open systems' and such, but they (he) could just as plausibly speak about some totally contrived aliens.
I know it is dishonest to ask LW-ers to spend time on studying exactly human anatomy, but even a thorough look at some skeleton should give you a vibe of how defined human bodies are. There are ridges on the bones. There are seams. Try to draw them, to internalize the feeling.
I'm sorry for the cavalier assuming of ignorance, but I think at least some of you can benefit from my words.
I am not sure what exactly you wanted to say. All I got from reading it is: "human anatomy is complicated, non-biologists hugely underestimate this, modifying the anatomy of human brain would be incredibly difficult".
I am not what is the relation to the following part (which doesn't speak about modifying the anatomy of human brain):
Are you suggesting that for increasing rationality, using "best practices" will be not enough, changes in anatomy of human brain will be required (and we underestimate how difficult it will be)? Or something else?
I read Romashka as saying that the clean separation between the hardware and the software does not work for humans. Humans are wetware which is both.
That, and that those changes in the brain might lead to other changes not associated with intelligence at all. Like sleep requirements, haemorrages or fluctuations in blood pressure in the skull, food cravings, etc. Things that belong to physiology and are freely discussed by a much narrower circle of people, in part because even among biologists many people don't like the organismal level of discussion, and doctors are too concerned with not doing harm to consider radical transformations.
Currently, 'rationality' is seen (by me) as a mix of nurturing one's ability to act given the current limitations AND counting on vastly lessened limitations in the future, with some vague hopes of adapting the brain to perform better, but the basis of the hopes seems (to me) unestablished.
I see three lines of addressing this concern:
1) Anatomy was over a long time under strong evolutionary pressure. Human intelligence is a fairly recent phenomena of the last 100,000 years. It's a mess that's not as well ordered as anatomy.
2) Individual humans deviate more from the textbook anatomy than you would guess by reading the textbook.
3) The brain seems to be build out of basic modules that easily allow it to add an additional color if you edit the DNA in the eye via gene therapy. People with implented magnets can feel magnetic fields. It's modules allow us to learn complex mental tasks like reading texts which is very far from what we evolved to do.
Also, human intelligence has been evolving exactly as long as human anatomy, it simply leaped forward recently in ways we can notice. That doesn't mean it hasn't been under strong evolutionary pressure before. I would say that until humans learned to use tools, the pressure on an individual human had had to be stronger.
I don't think that reflects reality. Our anatomy isn't as different from chimpanzee's as our minds. Most people hear voices in their head that say stuff to them. Chimpanzee's don't have language to do something similar.
I'm not saying otherwise! I'm saying that the formulation has little sense either way. Compare: 'there is little observed variation in anatomy between apes in broad sense because the evolutionary pressure constraining anatomical changes is too great to allow much viable variation', 'there is little observed variation in anatomy ..., but not in intelligence, because further evolution of intelligence allows for greater success and so younger branches are more intelligent and better at survival', 'only change in anatomy drives change in intelligence, so apparently there was some great hack which translated small changes in anatomy to lead to great changes in intelligence', 'chimpanzees never tell us about the voices they hear'...
And yet textbook anatomy is my best guess about a body when I haven't seen it, and all deviations are describable compared to it. What I object to is the norm of treating phenomenology, such as the observations about magnets and eye color, as more-or-less solid background for predictions about the future. If we discuss, say, artificial new brain modules, that's fine by me as long as I keep in mind the potential problems with cranial pressure fluctuations, the need to establish interconnections with other neurons - in some very ordered fashion, building blood vessels to feed it, changes in glucose consumption, even the possibility of your children cgoosing to have completely different artificial modules than you, to the point that heritability becomes obsolete, etc. I am not a specialist to talk about it. I have low priors on anybody here pointing me to The Literature were I to ask.
I think seeing at least the bones and then trying to gauge the distance to what experimental interference one considers possible would be a good thing to happen.
The XKCD for it: DNA (or "Biology is largely solved"): https://xkcd.com/1605/
Would anyone actually be interested if I prepared a post about the recent "correlation explanation" approach to latent-model learning, the "multivariate mutual information"/"total correlation" metric it's all based on, supervenience in analytical philosophy, and implications for cognitive science and AI, including FAI?
Because I promise I didn't write that last sentence by picking buzzwords out of a bag.
I might be super mean about this!
Is "super mean" still a bad thing, or now a good thing?
In the words of Calvin's dad, it builds character.
Ah. You mean you'll act as Reviewer 2. Excellent.
There is a relevant quote from Faust by Mephistopheles.
That being, for those of us too gauche to have read Faust in the original?
Ein Teil von jener Kraft,
Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft.
Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint!
Part of that power which would
Do evil constantly and constantly does good.
I am the spirit of perpetual negation
Anyway, could you PM me your email address? I figure that for a start at being Reviewer 2, I might as well send you the last thing I wrote along these lines, and then start writing the one I've actually just promised.
I really don't think that Reviewer 2 has anything to do with Lucifer, or with the Catholic view of Lucifer/Satan as self-thwarting.
I think you are overestimating how literally and seriously Ilya intended his reference to be taken.
I don't think the intended parallel goes beyond this: the devil (allegedly) tries to do evil and ends up doing good in spite of that; a highly critical reviewer feels (to the reviewee) like he's doing evil but ends up doing good in spite of that.
I will be very interested to read both your account of correlation explanation and Ilya's super-meanness about it.
I'd be interested! I hereby promise to read and comment, unless you've gone totally off the bland end.
Ok, then, it'll definitely happen Real Soon Now.
Any LessWrongers in Taipei? I am there for a while, PM me and I will buy you a beer.
So I think I've genuinely finished http://gwern.net/Mail%20delivery now. It should be an interesting read for LWers: it's a fully Bayesian decision-theoretic analysis of when it is optimal to check my mail for deliveries. I learned a tremendous amount working my way through it, from how to much better use JAGS to how to do Bayesian model comparison & averaging to loss functions and EVSI and EVPI for decision theory purposes to even dabbling in reinforcement learning with Thompson sampling/probability-matching.
I thought it was done earlier, but then I realized I had messed up my Thompson sampling implementation and also vectorspace alien pointed out that my algorithm for deciding what datapoint to sample for maximizing information gain was incorrect & how to fix it, and I have made a lot of other small improvements like more images.
Related to this, I am trying to get a subreddit going for statistical decision theory links and papers to discuss: https://www.reddit.com/r/DecisionTheory/
Right now it's just me dumping in decision-theory related material like cost-benefit analyses, textbooks, relevant blog posts, etc, but hopefully other people will join in. We have flair and a sidebar now! If anyone wants to be a mod, just ask. (Workload should be negligibly small, this is more so the subreddit doesn't get locked by absence.)
If anyone with graphics skills would like to help me make a header for the subreddit, I have some ideas and suggested images in https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/ZfEtb54aN4Q for visualizing the steps in decision analysis.
Link: Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain
How useful do you think this actually is?
Moderately.
On the plus side it's forcing people to acknowledge the uncertainty involved in many numbers they use.
On the minus side it's treating everything as a normal (Gaussian) distribution. That's a common default assumption, but it's not necessarily a good assumption. To start with an obvious problem, a lot of real-world values are bounded, but the normal distribution is not.
This is awesome. Awesome awesome awesome. I have been trying to code something like this for a long time but I've never got the hang of UI design.
Why does E. Yudkowsky voice such strong priors e.g. wrt. the laws of physics (many worlds interpretation), when much weaker priors seem sufficient for most of his beliefs (e.g. weak computationalism/computational monism) and wouldn't make him so vulnerable? (With vulnerable I mean that his work often gets ripped apart as cultish pseudoscience.)
You seem to assume that MWI makes the Sequences more vulnerable; i.e. that there are people who feel okay with the rest of the Sequences, but MWI makes them dismiss it as pseudoscience.
I think there are other things that rub people the wrong way (that EY in general talks about some topics more than appropriate for his status, whether it's about science, philosophy, politics, or religion) and MWI is merely the most convenient point of attack (at least among those people who don't care about religion). Without MWI, something else would be "the most controversial topic which EY should not have added because it antagonizes people for no good reason", and people would speculate about the dark reasons that made EY write about that.
For context, I will quote the part that Yvain quoted from the Sequences:
Everyone please make your own opinion about whether this is how cult leaders usually speak (because that seems to be the undertone of some comments in this thread).
Because he was building a tribe. (He's done now).
edit: This should actually worry people a lot more than it seems to.
I think LW is skewed toward believing in MWI because they've all read Yudkowsky. It really doesn't seem likely Yudkowsky just gleaned MWI was already popular and wrote about it to pander to the tribe. In any case I don't really see why MWI would be a salient point for group identity.
That's not what I am saying. People didn't write the Nicene Creed to pander to Christians. (Sorry about the affect side effects of that comparison, that wasn't my intention, just the first example that came to mind).
MWI is perfect for group identity -- it's safely beyond falsification, and QM interpretations are a sufficiently obscure topic where folks typically haven't thought a lot about it. So you don't get a lot of noise in the marker.
But I am not trying to make MWI into more than it is. I don't think MWI is a centrally important idea, it's mostly an illustration of what I think is going on (also with some other ideas).
Why?
Consider that if stuff someone says resonates with you, that someone is optimizing for that.
There are two quite different scenarios here.
In scenario 1 that someone knows me beforehand and optimizes what he says to influence me.
In scenario 2 that someone doesn't know who will respond, but is optimizing his message to attract specific kinds of people.
The former scenario is a bit worrisome -- it's manipulation. But the latter one looks fairly benign to me -- how else would you attract people with a particular set of features? Of course the message is, in some sense, bait but unless it's poisoned that shouldn't be a big problem.
I don't know why scenario 2 should be any less worrisome. The distinction between "optimized for some perception/subset of you" and "optimized for someone like you" is completely meaningless.
Because of degree of focus. It's like the distinction between a black-hat scanning the entire 'net for vulnerabilities and a black-hat scanning specifically your system for vulnerabilities. Are the two equally worrisome?
equally worrisome, conditional on me having the vulnerability the blackhat is trying to use. This is equivalent to the original warning being conditional on something resonating with you.
My model of him has him having an attitude of "if I think that there's a reason to be highly confident of X, then I'm not going to hide what's true just for the sake of playing social games".
Given the way the internet works bloggers who don't take strong stances don't get traffic. If Yudkowsky wouldn't have took positions confidently, it's likely that he wouldn't have founded LW as we know it.
Shying away from strong positions for the sake of not wanting to be vulnerable is no good strategy.
Maybe it's just the particular links I have been following (acausal trade and blackmail, AI boxes you, the Magnum Innominandum) but I keep coming across the idea that the self should care about the well-being (it seems to always come back to torture) of one or of a googleplex of simulated selves. I can't find a single argument or proof of why this should be so. I accept that perfectly simulated sentient beings can be seen as morally equal in value to meat sentient beings (or, if we accept Bostrom's reasoning, that beings in a simulation other than our own can be seen as morally equal to us). But why value the simulated self over the simulated other? I accept that I can care in a blackmail situation where I might unknowingly be one of the simulations (ala Dr Evil or the AI boxes me), but that's not the same as inherently caring about (or having nightmares about) what may happen to a simulated version of me in the past, present, or future.
Any thoughts on why thou shalt love thy simulation as thyself?
There is Bostrom's argument - but there's also another take on these types of scenario, which you may be confusing with the Bostrom argument. In those takes, you're not sure whether you're the simulation or the original - and since there's billions of simulations, there's a billion to one chance you'll be the one tortured.
Just make sure you're not pattern matching to the first type of argument when it's actually the second.
I appreciate the reply. I recognize both of those arguments but I am asking something different. If Omega tells me to give him a dollar or he tortures a simulation, a separate being to me, no threat that I might be that simulation (also thinking of the Basilisk here), why should I care if that simulation is one of me as opposed to any other sentient being?
I see them as equally valuable. Both are not-me. Identical-to-me is still not-me. If I am a simulation and I meet another simulation of me in Thunderdome (Omega is an evil bastard) I'm going to kill that other guy just the same as if he were someone else. I don't get why sim-self is of greater value than sim-other. Everything I've read here (admittedly not too much) seems to assume this as self-evident but I can't find a basis for it. Is the "it could be you who is tortured" just implied in all of these examples and I'm not up on the convention? I don't see it specified, and in "The AI boxes you" the "It could be you" is a tacked-on threat in addition to the "I will torture simulations of you", implying that the starting threat is enough to give pause.
If love your simulation as you love yourself, they will love you as they love themselves (and if you don't, they won't). You can choose to have enemies or allies with your own actions.
You and a thousand simulations of you play a game where pressing a button gives the presser $500 but takes $1 from each of the other players. Do you press the button?
My take on ethics is that it breaks into two parts: Individual ethics and population ethics.
Population ethics in the general sense of action toward the greater good for the population under consideration (however large). Action here consequently meaning action by the population, i.e. among the available actions for a population - which much take into account that not all beings of the population are equal or willing to contribute equally.
Individual ethics on the other hand are ethics individual beings can potentially be convinced of (by others or themselves).
These two interplay. More altruistically minded individuals might (try to) adopt sensible population ethics as their maxim, some individuals might just adopt the ethics of their peers and and others might adopt ego-centrical or tribal ethics.
I do not see either of these as wrong or some better then others (OK, I admit I do; personally, but not abstractly). People are different and I accept that. Populations have to deal with that. Also note that people err. You might for example (try to) follow a specific population ethics because you don't see a difference between population and individual ethics.
This can feel quite natural because many people have a tendency to contribute toward the greater good of their population. This is an important aspect because it allows population ethics to even have a chance to work. It couples population ethics to individual ethics (my math mind kicks in and wonders about a connection coefficient between these two and if and how this could be measured and how it depends on the level of altruism present in a population and how to measure that...).
What about my ethics? I admit that some people are more important to me than others. I invest more energy in the well-being of my children, myself and my family. And in an emergency I'd take greater risks to rescue them (and me) than unrelated strangers. I believe there is such a thing as an emotional distance to other people. I also believe that this is partly hard-wired and partly socialized. I'm convinced that whom and what one feels empathy with depends to a large degree on socialization. For example if you were often part of large crowds of totally different people you might learn to feel empathy toward strangers - and resent the idea of different treatment of e.g. foreigners. So populations could presumable shape this. And you could presumably hack yourself (or your next person) too.
But assume a given individual with a given willingness to do some for the greater good of their population and a capability to do so (including to reason about this). What should they do? I think a 'should' always involves a tension between what one wants and what the population demands (or in general forces of the environment). Therefore I split this in two again: What is the most sensible thing to do given what the individual wants. That might be a fusion of population ethics (to satisfy the desire for the greater good) and individual ethics (those parts that make differences between people). And what is the most sensible thing to do given what the population demands? That depends on many factors and probably involves trade-offs. It seems to me that it shifts behavior toward conforming more with some population ethics.
And what about your question: I in my framework there can't be a proof that you individually 'should' care for the other selves. You may care with them to some degree and society might tell you that you should, but that doesn't mean that you have to rewire yourself to do so (though my may decide that you want to (and risk to err in that)).
Totally tangential point: Do you sometimes have the feeling that you could continue the though of a sentence along different paths and you want to convey both? But the best way to convey the idea is to pick up the thought at the given sentence (or at least conveying both thoughs requires some redundancy to reestablish the context later on). Is there a literary device to deal with this? Or should I just embrace more repetition?
Thanks for the reply. I'm not sure if your reasoning (sound) is behind the tendency I think I've identified for LW'ers to overvalue simulated selves in the examples I've cited, though. I suppose by population ethics you should value the more altruistic simulation, whomever that should be. But then, in a simulated universe devoted to nothing but endless torture, I'm not sure how much individual altruism counts.
"Totally tangential point" I believe footnotes do the job best. The fiction of David Foster Wallace is a masterwork of portraying OCD through this technique. I am an idiot at formatting on all media, though, and could offer no specifics as to how to do so.
What you're calling population ethics is very similar to what most people call politics; indeed, I see politics as the logical extension of ethics when generalized to groups of people. I'm curious about whether there is some item in your description that would invalidate this comparison.
While browsing the Intelligence Squared upcoming debates, I noticed two things that may be of interest to LW readers.
The first is a debate titled "Lifespans are long enough", with Aubrey De Grey and Brian Kennedy of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging arguing against Paul Root Wolpe from the Emory Centre for Ethics and another panelist TBA. The debate is taking place in early February.
The second, and of potentially more interest to the LW community, is taking place on March 9th and is titled "Artificial Intelligence: The risks outweigh the rewards". All 4 speakers for and against the motion are presently unannounced.
I am a long time watcher of Intelligence Squared debates and recommend them highly. I believe others in the LW community have referred to specific debates in the past. The moderator is quite talented and encourages interesting discourse, and is often successful in steering parties away from stringing series of applause lights together.
Both the moderator and founder of the debates have indicated previously that they have been influenced in the questions asked and experts brought on to argue by commentary and suggestions from the public. I have also had a positive response from previous suggestions made to IQ in the past in relation to other debates. I have emailed them already with some suggestions about who I think would provide interesting commentary and perspectives on the debate, and links to some useful 'background briefing' documents that they may wish to add to the resources attached to the debate. I suggest that others choosing to do the same might increase the quality of discourse in a debate that is likely to come up highly in people's Google and YouTube searches into the future.
Generally speaking, the videos from Intelligence Squared are uploaded to their YouTube account fairly soon after the live stream.
Brian Kennedy. Note that he's on the "Against" side with Aubrey, as makes sense given the Buck Institute's goal to "extend help towards the problems of the aged."
PSA: I had a hard drive die on me. Recovered all my data with about 25 hours of work all up for two people working together.
Looking back on it I doubt many things could have convinced me to improve my backup systems; short of working in the cloud; my best possible backups would have probably lost the last two weeks of work at least.
I am taking suggestions for best practice; but also a shout out to backups, and given it's now a new year, you might want to back up everything before 2016 right now. Then work on a solid backing up system.
(Either that or always keep 25 hours on hand to manually perform a ddrescue process on separate sectors of a drive; unplugging and replugging it in between each read till you get as much data as possible out, up until 5am for a few nights trying to scrape back the entropy from the bits...) I firmly believe with the right automated system it would take less than 25 hours of effort to maintain.
bonus question: what would convince you to make a backup of your data?
Use a backup system that automatically backs up your data, and then nags at you if the backup fails. Test to make sure that it works.
For people who don't want / can't run their own, I've found that Crashplan is a decent one. It's free, if you only back up to other computers you own (or other peoples' computers); in my case I've got one server in Norway and one in Ireland. There have, however, been some doubts about Crashplan's correctness in the past.
There are also about half a dozen other good ones.
Links? I use Crashplan and would be interested in learning about its bugs.
Google for 'crashplan data loss', and you'll find a few anecdotes. The plural of which isn't "data", but it's enough to ensure that I wouldn't use it for my own important data if I wasn't running two backup servers of my own for it. Even then, I'm also replicating with Unison to a ZFS filesystem that has auto-snapshots enabled. In fact, my Crashplan backups are on the same ZFS setup (two machines, two different countries), so I should be covered against corruption there as well.
Suffice to say, I've been burnt in the past. That seems to be the only way that anyone ever starts spending this much (that is, 'sufficient') effort on backups.
E.g. http://jeffreydonenfeld.com/blog/2011/12/crashplan-online-backup-lost-my-entire-backup-archive/
All of that said?
I'm paranoid. I wouldn't trust a single backup service, even if it had never had any problems; I'd be wondering what they were covering up, or if they were so small, they'd likely go away.
Crashplan is probably fine. Probably.
I'm using Crashplan as the offsite backup, I have another backup in-house. The few anecdotes seem to be from Crashplan's early days.
But yeah, maybe I should do a complete dump to an external hard drive once in a while and just keep it offline somewhere...
Use RAID on ZFS. RAID is not a backup solution, but with the proper RAIDZ6 configuration will protect you against common hard drive failure scenarios. Put all your files on ZFS. I use a dedicated FreeNAS file server for my home storage. Once everything you have is on ZFS, turn on snapshotting. I have my NAS configured to take a snapshot every hour during the day (set to expire in a week), and one snapshot on Monday which lasts 18 months. The short lived snapshots lets me quickly recover from brain snafus like overwriting a file.
Long lived snapshotting is amazing. Once you have filesystem snapshots, incremental backups become trivial. I have two portable hard drives, one onsite and one offsite. I plug in the hard drive, issue one command, and a few minutes later, I've copied the incremental snapshot to my offline drive. My backup hard drives become append only logs of my state. ZFS also lets you configure a drive so that it stores copies of data twice, so I have that turned on just to protect against the remote chance of random bitflips on the drive.
I do this monthly, and it only burns about 10 minutes a month. However, this isn't automated. If you're willing to trust the cloud, you could improve this and make it entirely automated with something like rsync.net's ZFS snapshot support. I think other cloud providers also offer snapshotting now, too.
I feel that this is too complicated a solution for most people to follow. And it's not a very secure backup system anyway.
You can just get an external hard drive and use any of the commonly-available full-drive backup software. Duplicity is a free one and it has GUI frontends that are basically just click-to-backup. You can also set them up to give you weekly reminders, etc.
Generally speaking, the best practice is to have two separate backups, one of them offsite.
First, you might want to run some kind of a RAID setup so that a single disk failure doesn't affect much. RAID is not backup, but it's useful.
Second, you might want to set up some automated backup/copy of your data to a different machine or to a cloud. The advantage is that it's setup-and-forget. The disadvantage is that if you have data corruption or malware, etc. the corrupted data could overwrite your clean backup before you notice something is wrong. Because of that it would not be a bad idea to occasionally make known-clean copies of data (say, after a disk check and a malware check) on some offline media like a flash drive or an external hard drive.
Disk space is really REALLY cheap. It's not rational :-/ to skimp on it.
Recently my working definition of 'political opinion' became "which parts of reality did the person choose to ignore". At least this is my usual experience when debating with people who have strong political opinions. There usually exists a standard argument that an opposing side would use against them, and the typical responses to this argument are "that's not the most important thing; now let's talk about a completely different topic where my side has the argumentational advantage". (LW calls it an 'ugh field'.) Sometimes the argument is 'disproved' in a way that would seem completely unsatisfactory to people who actually spent some time thinking about it, but the point is that the person has displayed the virtue of "engaging with the opponent's argument" which should finally make you stop talking about it.
Note that this is a general complaint about human behavior, not any specific political side, because this mechanism applies to many of them. Generally, 'true belief' sustains itself by filtering evidence; which is a process painfully obvious to people who filter evidence by different criteria.
More specifically, after reading the essay Economic Inequality by Paul Graham, I would say that the really simplified version is that there are essentially two different ways how people get rich. (1) By creating value; and today individuals are able to create incredible amounts of value thanks to technology. (2) By taking value from other people, using force or fraud in a wider meaning of the word; sometimes perfectly legally; often using the wealth they already have as a weapon.
It should be obvious how focusing on one of these groups and downplaying the significance of the other creates two different political opinions. Paul Graham complains about his critics that they are doing this (and he is right about this), but he does the same thing too, only less blindly... he acknowledges that the other group exists and that something should be done, but that feels merely like a disclaimer so he can display the required virtue, but his focus is somewhere else.
I am not blaming him for not solving all problems of the world in a single article, but other articles on his website also go in the similar direction. On the other hand, maybe that is merely picking one's battles; he wants his website focused on one topic, the topic where he makes money. So I'm not sure what exactly is the lesson here... maybe that picking one's battles and being mindkilled often seem similar from outside? (If I would know Paul Graham in real life, I could try to tell the difference by mentioning the other aspect in private and seeing whether he has an 'ugh field' about it or not.)
I'd say that his critics are annoyed that he's ignoring their motte [ETA: Well, not ignoring, but not treating as the bailey], from which they're basing their assault on Income Inequality. "Come over here and fight, you coward!"
There's not much concession in agreeing that fraud is bad. Look: Fraud is bad. And income inequality is not. Income inequality that promotes or is caused by fraud is bad, but it's bad because fraud is bad, not because income inequality is bad.
It's possible to be ignorant of the portion of the intellectual landscape that includes that motte; to be unaware of fraud. It's possible to be ignorant of the portion of the intellectual landscape that doesn't include the bailey; to be unaware of wealth inequality that isn't hopelessly entangled in fraud. But once you realize that the landscape includes both, you have two conversations you can have: One about income inequality, and one about fraud.
Which is to say, you can address the motte, or you can address the bailey. You don't get to continue to pretend they're the same thing in full intellectual honesty.
Well, but he's writing an essay and has a position to put forward. Not being blind to counter-arguments does not require you to never come to a conclusion.
At a crude level, the pro arguments show the benefits, the contra arguments show the costs, but if you do the cost-benefit analysis and decide that it's worth it, you can have an express definite position without necessarily ignoring chunks of reality.
"More specifically, after reading the essay Economic Inequality by Paul Graham, I would say that the really simplified version is that there are essentially two different ways how people get rich. (1) By creating value; and today individuals are able to create incredible amounts of value thanks to technology. (2) By taking value from other people, using force or fraud in a wider meaning of the word; sometimes perfectly legally; often using the wealth they already have as a weapon."
Which one is inheritance?
I think it would be counted as whichever way was used by whoever you got the inheritance from.
Inheritance is how some people randomly get the weapon they can choose to use for (2).
I don't have a problem with inheritance per se; I see it as a subset of donation, and I believe people should be free to donate their money.
It's just that in a bad system, it will be a multiplier of the badness. If you have a system where evil people can get their money by force/fraud, and where they can use the money to do illegal stuff or to buy lobbists and change laws in ways that allow them to use more force/fraud legally... in such system inheritance gives you people who benefit from crimes of their ancestors, who in their childhood get extreme power over other people without having to do anything productive ever, etc.
Can't an inheritance be used as seed money for some wonderful world-enhacing entrepeneurship?
Bill Gates argues that it's bad to inherent children so much money that they don't have to work: https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_and_melinda_gates_why_giving_away_our_wealth_has_been_the_most_satisfying_thing_we_ve_done
I think the world is a better place for Bill Gates thinking that way.
I never thought I'd find myself saying this: I don't want to be Bill Gates's kid.
Does that not-want take into consideration your changed capacity to influence him if you became his child?
Yeah, the idea of "I could have been a part of the legendary 1%, but my parents decided to throw me back among the muggles" could make one rather angry.
/snort
In such a case I would probably think that you failed at your child's upbringing, much earlier than deciding to dispossess her.
Imagine that your parents were uneducated and homeless as teenagers. They lived many years on the streets, starving and abused. But they never gave up hope, and never stopped trying, so when they were 30, they already had an equivalent of high-school education, were able to get a job, and actually were able to buy a small house.
Then you were born. You had a chance to start your life in much better circumstances than your parents had. You could have attended a normal school. You could have a roof above your head every night. You could have the life they only dreamed about when they were your age.
But your parents thought like this: "A roof above one's head, and a warm meal every day, that would spoil a child. We didn't have that when we were kids -- and look how far we got! All the misery only made our spirits stronger. What we desire for our children is to have the same opportunity for spiritual growth in life that we had." So they donated all the property to charity, and kicked you out of the house. You can't afford a school anymore. You are lucky to find some work that allows you to eat.
Hey, why the sad face? If such life was good enough for them, how dare you complain that it is not good anough for you? Clearly they failed somewhere at your upbringing, if you believe that you deserve something better than they had.
(Explanation: To avoid the status quo bias of being in my social class -- to avoid the feeling that the classes below me have it so bad that it breaks them, but the classes above me have it so good that it weakens their spirits; and therefore my social class, or perhaps the one only slighly above me, just coincidentally happens to be the optimal place in the society -- I sometimes take stories about people, and try to translate them higher or lower in the social ladder and look if they still feel the same.)
It's not a social class thing. It's a human motivation thing. Humans are motivated by needs and if you start with a few $B in the bank, many of your needs are met by lazily waving your hand. That's not a good thing as the rich say they have discovered empirically.
That, of course, is not a new idea. A quote attributed to Genghis Khan says
and there is an interesting post discussing the historical context. The consequences, by the way, are very real -- when you grow soft, the next batch of tough, lean, and hungry outsiders comes in and kills you.
The no-fortune-for-you rich do not aim for their children to suffer (because it ennobles the spirit or any other such crap). They want their children to go out into the world and make their own mark on the world. And I bet that these children still have a LOT of advantages. For one thing, they have a safety net -- I'm pretty sure the parents will pay for medevac from a trek in Nepal, if need be. For another, they have an excellent network and a sympathetic investor close by.
I bet Bill Gates's children will still be comfortably in the 1%.
(I found one source saying he plans to leave them $10M each. It didn't look like a super-reliable source.)
Sure, it can be used for whatever purpose. So now we have an empirical question of what is the average usage of inheritance in real life. Or even better, the average usage of inheritance, as a function of how much was inherited, because patterns at different parts of the scale may be dramatically different.
I would like to read a data-based answer to this question.
(My assumption is that the second generation usually tries to copy what their parents did in the later period of life, only less skillfully because regression to the mean; and the third generation usually just wastes the money. If this is true, then it's the second generation, especially if they are "criminals, sons of criminals", that I worry about most.)
I don't think it's a question of more research being needed, I think it's a an issue ofthe original two categories being two few and too sharply delineated.
So why are you focusing your complaining on Paul Graham's essay rather than on the essays complaining about "economic inequality" without even bothering to make the distinction? What does that say about your "ugh fields"?
In fact a remarkable number of the people perusing strategy (1) are the same people railing against economic inequality. One would almost suspect they're intentionally conflating (1) and (2) to provide a smokescreen for their actions. Also since strategy (1) requires more social manipulation skills then strategy (2), the people pursuing strategy (1) can usually arrange for anti-inequality policies to mostly target the people in group (2).
Sure, but does rent-seeking really explain the increase in inequality since, say, the 1950s or so, which is what most folks tend to be worried about and what's discussed in Paul Graham's essay? I don't think it does, except as a minor factor (that is, it could certainly explain increased wealth among congress-critters and other members of the 'Cathedral'); the main factor was technical change favoring skilled people and sometimes conferring exceptional amounts of wealth to random "superstars".
I don't know. Seems to me possible that people like Paul Graham (or Eliezer Yudkowsky) may overestimate the impact of technical change on wealth distribution because of the selection bias -- they associate with people who mostly make wealth using the "fair" methods.
If instead they would be spending most of their time among African warlords, or Russian oligarchs, or whatever is their more civilized equivalent in USA, maybe they would have very different models of how wealth works.
The technological progress explains why the pie is growing, not how the larger pie is divided.
There are probably more people who got rich selling homeopathics, than who got rich founding startups. Yet in our social sphere it is a custom to pretend that the former option does not exist, and focus on the latter.
If you look at the Forbes list there aren't many African warlords on it.
Which people do you think became billionaire's mainly by selling homeopathics? Homeopathics is a competive market where there no protection from competitors that allows to charge high sums of money in the way startups like Google produce a Thielean monopoly.
It seems possible that African warlords' wealth is greatly underestimated by comparing notional wealth in dollars. E.g., if you want to own a lot of land and houses, that's much cheaper (in dollars) in most of Africa than in most of the US. If you want a lot of people doing your bidding, that's much cheaper (in dollars) in most of Africa than in most of the US.
On the other hand the African warlord has to invest resources into avoiding getting murdered.
Yup. It's certainly not clear-cut, and there are after all reasons why the more expensive parts of the world are more expensive.
Money has more or less logarithmic utility. So selling homeopathics could still bring higher average utility (although less average money) than startups. For every successful Google there are thousands of homeopaths.
That depends on your goals. If you want to create social or political impact with money it's not true. Large fortunes get largely made in tech, resources and finance.
I think the generalized concept is 'politicians'. And yeah, that sounds likely. But I would say that it is a problem that the ones who make the rules and the ones who explain to everyone else what's what all live in an environment where earning something honestly is weird is a problem. That there are some who are not in such a bubble is not the problem.
Oligarchs are the level above politicians. You can think about them as the true employers of most politicians. (If I can make an analogy, for a politician the voters are merely a problem to be solved; the oligarch is the person who gave them the job to solve the problem.) Imagine someone who has incredible wealth, owns a lot of press in the country, and is friendly with many important people in police, secret service, et cetera. The person who, if they like you as a wannabe politician, can give you a lot of money and media power to boost your career, in return for some important decisions when you get into the government.
So, can you tell us who employs Frau Merkel? M. Hollande? Mr. Cameron? Mr. Obama? Please be specific.
This requires a good investigative journalist with good understanding of economics. Which I am not. I could tell you some names for Slovakia (J&T, Penta, Brhel, Výboh), which probably you would have no way to verify. (Note that the last one doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. These people in general prefer privacy, they own most of the media, and they have a lot of money to sue you if you write something negative about them, and they also own the judges which means they will win each lawsuit.)
I am not even sure if countries other than ex-communist use this specific model. (This doesn't mean I believe that the West is completely fair. More likely the methods of "power above politicians" in the West are more sophisticated, while in the East sophistication was never necessary if you had the power -- you usually don't have to go far beyond "the former secret service bosses" and check if any of them owns a huge economical empire.)
Ah, well, that's a rather important detail.
I'm not saying that your model is entirely wrong -- just that it's not universally applicable. By the way, another place where you are likely to find it is in Central and South America. However I think it's way too crude to be applied to the West. The interaction between money and power is more... nuanced there and recently the state power seem to be ascending.
Except that, well, you know, in Soviet Russia the politician is above the oligarchs :-D
Is there a formal theory of how a rational actor should bet on prediction markets? If the prediction market says the probability is 70% and the actor thinks it's 60% is there a formal way to think about to what extend the agent thinks he knows better and should therefore bet against the market?
I'd guess that that falls under the usual paradigms like Savage or Von Neumann-Morgenstern. For example, the Kelly criterion.
Sure. Just stop thinking in terms of discrete probabilities and start thinking in terms of full distributions.
Dealing with shame by embracing a vulnerability, fear of vulnerability and letting that shame be
I feel full of shame which I can’t explain. I feel that it is linked to my gender identity, sexuality and/or body.
why
When I asked Google why I feel this shame with search terms linked to the above suspicions, I landed on a page suggesting that shame in adult males is linked to child abuse. The point that really hit home was the comment: ‘’Males are not supposed to feel vulnerable or fearful about sex.’’ Was I sexually abused as a child? I didn’t think so. Though, one link on the page, hyperlinked as ‘sorting it out for yourself’appealed to my confusion. I clicked on it and reconsidered. There are some circumstances from my childhood that I had not considered child abuse that I can reframe as child abuse. The article disclaims that fussng over labelling is not particularly helpful. But is thist a healthy reframe or experience to identify with? That remains unclear to me. Those articles were not so helpful other than to indicate a dead end.
how
Rather than ask why, I reckoned it may be more prudent to ask how. How can I overcome these feelings. My line of questioning was influence by the memory of a friend who once mused that she is grateful for all the relationships that didn’t work out, because there was something good in all of them, something to learn from, and something which helped her grow...or something like that. I supposed that my feelings of inadequacy may relate to my past relationship experiences...and lack thereof. Another Google search yielded neat articles about learning from relationships that didn’t work and healing past relationships. I particularly like the way the latter article summarised it’s key points visually at the start. So, I looked for other articles in the same category on that website and found two articles that I reckon will be useful guides. The first is about survivng bad dates and healing childhood scars that create bad adultrelationships. I feel good about what I have seen here. So, I hope it will be useful to ya’ll.
The key points for me in this research experience are the points given for what not to do in one (but not the other) expert beacon articles. The what todos are fairly available knowledge. I reckon people are less likely to condemn poor ways of doing things in real life. So, the article was relatively valuable, and invoked a stopping rule by cutting off the reason I was searching for an answer in the first place - the drive to* *suppress these feeling of vulnerability, that I feel, while focussing on the negative**
DON’T
"Abuse" is not a binary thing; it's a scale. Just because you were not at one extreme, does not mean that you were necessarily at the other extreme or near it.
Depends on how you are going to react to the label. The healthy aspect is that it may allow you to see causalities in your life that you have previously censored from yourself; and then you can take specific actions to untangle the problems.
The unhealthy aspect is if you take it with a "fixed mindset", and start crying about your past ("I am tainted, forever tainted"), or in extreme case if you start building some ideology of revenge against the whole evil society (or parts of the society) responsible for not preventing the bad things from happening to you.
Seems like you are choosing generally the good direction.
Okay, I wouldn't go that far. ("What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger", Just World Hypothesis, etc.) It is good to react to bad things by deriving useful lessons. However, in a parallel universe you could have good things happen to you, and still derive useful lessons from them. (Or you could derive useful lessons from bad things that happened to other people.) Bad things are simply bad things, no need to excuse them, no cosmic balance that needed to happen to make you a better person. That would mean denying that those things were actually bad.
Being able to turn a bad experience into a good lesson, is a good message about you and your abilities. Not about the bad experience per se. A different person could remain broken by the same experience.
I'd say: Use the past to extract useful information and move on, not to build a narrative for your life.
I'd say: Admit that some people have fucked up, but don't waste your time planning revenge (it is usually not the optimal thing to do with your life). Maybe don't even analyze too much who or how precisely have fucked up, if such analysis would take too much energy.
I agree.
Depends on context. Feelling vulnerable (in situations where you feel safe) is okay. In public, we all wear masks, so it would be inappropriate to e.g. start thinking about your childhood when you are at a job interview.
Keep focused on where you want to get.
That really depends. Authenticity is often more useful than wearing a mask.
In present politics Trump is successful while being relatively authentic. There's a lot of power in it.
Respectfully, Trump is very skilled at sounding authentic. I'm not sure that he is authentic, but some other politician could easily be more authentic while lacking Trump's skills at sounding authentic.
Overcoming fear is always healthy, but you should not let social expectations dictate how you have to feel. There's no single way how men are supposed to behave. Trying to force masculinity to fit inside a rigid box of allowed behaviors is a recipe for frustration and self-hatred. If you have feelings of vulnerability and fear, rather than denying or repressing them, you can observe and understand them.
In cases like this I always recommend the Empty Closets forum. Members are knowledgeable and compassionate.
Just a sidenote: there are multiple "boxes" for masculinity, and when someone tells you to get out of the box, they often have an alternative box ready for you. (For example, instead of constant checking whether something you want to do is not "girly" or not "gay", they may offer you to constantly check your "privilege".) Remember that you can avoid those new boxes too.
That's dangerous territory. Quite a lot of people got talked by their therapist has having false memories of abuse.
There are many psychological techniques to overcome feelings. There's CBT with includes workbooks like The Feeling Good handbook and there Focusing.
Sapir-Whorf-related question:
Although I've been an informal reader of philosophy for most of my life, only today did I connect some dots and notice that Chinese philosophers never occupied themselves with the question of Being, which has so obsessed Western philosophers. When I noticed this, my next thought was, "But of course; the Chinese language has no word for 'be.'" Wikipedia didn't provide any confirmation or disconfirmation of this hypothesis, but it does narrate how Muslim philosophers struggled when adapting Greek questions of Being into their own words.
Then I asked myself: Wait, did the Chinese never really address this subject? Let's see: Confucianism focused on practical philosophy, Taoism is rather poetry instead of proper ontology, and Buddhism did acknowledge questions about Being, but saw them as the wrong questions. I'm not sure about the pre-Confucian schools.
If it turns out to be the case that the main reason why Chinese philosophers never discussed Being is that Chinese has no word for "be," that would seem to me to be a very strong indication that Western philosophers have spent centuries asking the wrong questions, specifically by falling into the confusion mode of mistaking words for things, a confusion mode that I'm tempted to blame Aristotle for, but I need to reread some Aristotle before I can be sure of such an accusation.
Am I missing something here?
Or that Eastern philosophers have spent centuries failing to ask the right questions. If language A makes it easy to ask a certain question and language B makes it hard, it doesn't follow that it's a bad question arising only from quirks of language A; instead it could be a good question hidden by quirks of language B (or revealed by in-this-case-beneficial quirks of language A).
It seems a stretch to put Buddhism in the category of don't-really-care-about-Being. Rather, it's an important point that there is no being and realizing so brings countless bliss and enlightenment.
A particularity of English is that
to bemeans a lot of different things. It covers three distrinct categories in natural semantic metalanguageNow I am curious whether most of the philosophy of "Being" are merely confusions caused by conflating some of those different meanings.
I was under the impression that 是 was Chinese for "to be". The nuance isn't quite the same--you can say 是 in response to "are or aren't you American?", but that's more or less subject-omission--but it seems close enough?
But my experience with Chinese includes only two years of Mandarin classes and a few podcasts; I haven't studied the linguistics in so much detail, and that studying ended 5 years ago, so if you're basing this on something I don't know, I'd be glad for the correction.
I know much less Chinese than you do. Having said that:
The Chinese version of "be" lets you apply a noun predicate to your subject, but not an adjectival predicate: you can use it to say "I am a student" or "I am an American" but not "I am tired" or "I am tall;" that is, it doesn't state the attributes of a noun but an equivalence between two nouns. To say "I am tall," you just say "I tall." All of the other meanings of "be" (the ones relevant to this problem are those related to the essence/existence question) are expressed with various other words in Chinese.
If that is the case I consider it pretty unlikely that this has any relevance to Chinese or Western philosophy. Especially since in Greek saying "I am tall" is basically saying "I am [something tall]" which according to your description you could also say in Chinese if you had a word for "something tall."
Ah, yeah, that's true. Adjectives exhibit verb-like behavior in several East Asian languages; that they also do this in Chinese kinda slipped my mind.
Iran's blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web
"The street finds its own uses for things." -- William Gibson
Game Theory (Open Access textbook with 165 solved exercises) by Giacomo Bonanno.
Discussion of the Bayes' Theorem as expounded by EY 8-/
Fairly active follow-up discussion on HN.
Reading that HN discussion... well, I understand that it doesn't necessarily tell me anything, but socially I can't help but notice how idiotic anti-LWers sound in that thread. Fnords upon strawmen upon fnords upon cherry-picking upon fnords upon claims that if anyone on LW ever said that the probability of something is greater than zero that means every single LWers is certain that thing is guaranteed upon mood affiliation upon misspellings of EY's name upon claims that if you don't condemn poster's political enemy you must be supporting it et cetera et cetera.
Your comment made me read the debate, but it seems rather boring to me. Okay, there are a few gems there, such as (rephrased and added a link):
Also, a list of our cult leader crimes includes "a clear violation of copyright law" -- wanting to monetize HPMoR fanfic. Which by the way is "an introductory religious text".
(Today I learned a new argumentational technique: Describe what someone is doing, and keep inserting the word "religious" in random places. Use the scare quotes to prevent possible criticism; yes, you know that the word does not apply literally. However, when you are finished, use the frequency of the "religious" adjective as a proof that yes, the group you described is de facto religious. Case closed.)
But generally, the discussion seems okay to me. I mean, I expect that most internet discussions contain this kind of argumentation. I take it for granted that someone will link the "RationalWiki".
When I imagine how that HN discussion would probably have looked like five years ago, I am quite satisfied with the outcome. Seeing that the pro and con voices are approximately balanced, that is much more than I have expected.
That's just a fnord.
I feel like I found a prokaryotic version of fnord, which is almost a different species. Only one word, repeated with no skills or subtlety, and then directly used as a punchline. I think modern-day fnords are supposed to have a larger vocabulary, so they can better merge with the text.
Can anyone help think of a clever name for a quantitative consulting company? LW in-jokes allowed.
Bay Esteem (halfway sounds like Bayes Team, har har).
Conquan.
Or AskClippy :-)
Replying to clarify my point assigned was entirely for AskClippy :-)
As boring as it might sound, something with the term quantitative or similar might be prudent in the long run.
quanto costa
I am 85% sure The Lion is Eugine Nier.
How profitable are student club party and ballroom events? I am suprised external companies haven't sprung up to handle the organising of those events on students club's behalves for tidy profits in exchange for access to an attendee base and marketing channels. In return, the student club members get value and their leadership gets extra funds.
Your average disco is such a company. They make parties that people can enter by paying money.
not profitable. companies try, venues for example - regularly email clubs and try to get business from them.
source: personal experience.
I concur, having advised many student organisations over the years in the US and UK. Often such events are supported by organisation funds raised in other ways, rather than as generating income. And many universities have a body of some kind that serves to advise and support student organisations (including administrative and events advice).
Finally, in many cases, students actually want to gain experience organising events, sometimes for personal development and other times just for CV fodder. Farming events out to an external company eliminates this possibility.
I had a friend who organized these kinds of events. She made okay money for the amount of time invested in the organization of the event itself, but events were sporadic, and once you considered the time investiture in getting the event, a retail job paid rather better. If you can achieve the kind of success where people seek you out, it would pay pretty well, but that requires considerable social capital and skill, and there are other opportunities where similar social capital and skill would pay better.
Who buys government bonds at sub-zero rates? Why can't those instiutions simply put the money into a bank tresor?
If I understand correctly, FDIC insurance costs more that way, so whatever you save in negative interest, you'd lose and then some on FDIC insurance.
Verdict on Wim Hof and his method?
I've also seen a milder claim from his that exposure to moderate temperature extremes (cold/hot showers, I think) makes one's blood vessels more flexible.
Being able to withstand extreme colds isn't a pretty useful skill?
I probably should have provided more detail in the post. He claims not only to be be able to withstand cold, but to be able to almost fully regulate his immune and other autonomic systems. He furthermore claims that anyone can learn to do this via his method.
For example, he claims to be able to control his inflammation response. This would be very useful to me, at least. There seems to be some science backing up his claims - he was injected with toxins and demonstrated an ability to control his body's cytokine, cortisol, etc. reaction to the toxins. So when I'm asking for a verdict, I'm sort of asking what people think of the quality of this science.
Nothing in the Wikipedia article sounds surprising to me. The Wikipedia article says nothing about him achieving therapeutically useful effects with it or claiming to do so.
I have two friends who successfully cured allergies via hypnosis. One of them found that it takes motivation on the part of the subject and doesn't work well when the subject doesn't pay for the procedure so an attempt of doing a formal scientific trial failed due to the recruited subjects who got the treatment for free being not motivated in the right way.
sorry, not sure if this should be posted here, but I hadn't yet found more rational strategy for my problem. If any of you guys know someone who can speak and write Japanese please contact me, I would very appreciate any help
Some political predictions (Edited for formatting):
That suggest zero chance for Marco Rubio. Why so low? Especially with 10% left open for a non-Hilary, non-Sanders candidate.
So probability of either Trump or Cruz is 100%?
What are "Cor:" and "Rel:"? Are those conditional predictions?
What is the meaning of the global temperature predictions? Are you going to compare the average temperature of 2025 to the average temperature of 2015? The average of one decade to another?
Are you going to bet on this? Your stock predictions and 2016 political predictions are pretty far from consensus and easy to bet on.
Yes. ETA: Decade.
No. Two reasons: First, my internal ethics system puts no value on things I do not feel I have earned by merit of production, so I can literally only lose in the proposition. Second, I'm putting this here so I remember my predictions to calibrate my confidence levels, which is why I didn't put it in the latest Open Thread, where it would be more widely exposed.
My last set of predictions, made around eight-ten years ago, are also online, but because I do not want to associate the username under which I made them with this one, I cannot share them; short summary, however, is that they shared the same political nature as these, and they were accurate to a degree which has even surprised me. I didn't attach probabilities at the time; that's a thing I'm borrowing from this community. I suspect my guesses will be correct on average, while my probabilities incorrect on average, but that's what this process is for.
What's a major military conflict?
Couple of questions. What's your definition of a "market slump" and/or an "economic crisis"? Also, what's Health Index and what is the US National Health Database?
Let's say for simplicity a nationally recognized economic downturn amounting to at least a recession.
I guess an unofficial name for WHO's ranking system for national healthcare systems, last performed in 2000. http://www.who.int/whr/2000/media_centre/press_release/en/
The US National Health Database is a theoretical thing that is in the works to provide patient information nationally to any hospital or medical provider which requires it, and funding was set aside in the PPACA (Obamacare); it's being implemented at a state level by federal grant, and I believe is intended to eventually operate as a set of interacting state databases rather than a single database stored somewhere.
You have a 90% probability that this "downturn" will lead to the US stock market losing two thirds of its value which is worse than 2008. That implies a bit more, um, severe event.
Ah, I know an expression that fits the situation well...
Could you please shortly explain why you give Sander twice the chance as Hillary?
I am not watching politics too closely, but my impression was that Hillary is "part of the system", and she will also play the gender card; while Sanders is a "cool weirdo" (less than Ron Paul in 2012, but in the similar direction) which makes him very popular on internet, but the votes in real life will not follow the internet polls.
I would guess the answer is in the prediction in between the Clinton and Sanders nomination predictions: "Hillary to be indicted on criminal charges: 50%". Presumably that would hurt her chances of nomination.
Some of these figures seem implausible to me. The US presidential predictions are fairly strange, but others are worse. 63% probability of a 60%-80% decline in stock prices within two years? Really? (And, given that, why so little probability attached to a smaller decline? What's the underlying model here?) And what exactly is OrphanWilde's mental model of the WHO's attitude to US healthcare, that predicts such a huge influence of the existence of a US national health database on how the WHO assesses countries' health?
This isn't the whole of it, but it contributes, along with personal issues Clinton is struggling with. The bigger issue is that the coalition is fractured. If Sanders weren't playing softball against Hillary, it wouldn't even be a question, but I think he believes playing hard politics against her would damage his chances against Trump by fracturing the Democratic coalition along gendered lines. The Democratic coalition is at its weakest leaving a Democratic presidency, since anything they have achieved results in a less interested coalition member group whose goals are already at least partially achieved, and anything they haven't achieved results in a frustrated coalition member group whose goals were perceived to be passed over.
United, the Democrats win; their coalition is larger than the Republican base. Unfortunately, they're at their least united right now, and Sanders can't afford to fracture them any further. Hillary, on the other hand, seems perfectly happy to weaken the coalition in order to win the nomination.
Seems fairly plausible, but why put this specifically in terms of the Democrats? The same will apply to the Republicans, or any other party anywhere whose support comes from anything other than a perfectly homogeneous group.
On the face of it, that should make her more likely to get nominated. Are you suggesting that the Democratic Party's electorate is sufficiently calculating to reason: "She's doing these things to get nominated, they seem likely to piss off Sanders supporters, that will hurt us in the general election, so I won't vote for her in the primary"? Colour me unconvinced.
The Republicans are less of a coalition than the Democrats, and more an alliance of two groups; social conservatives, and economic liberals.
This isn't why Sanders will win, this is why he's still behind. It's a short-term strategy, however, which she started too soon; the primary voters aren't going to vote against Hillary because they don't think they'll win in the general election, they're going to vote against Hillary because she's alienated them to pander to her base.
So what? If your argument is "if they achieve group G's goals, group G will be unmotivated because they've already got what they need; if they don't, group G will be unmotivated because they'll think they've been neglected", surely this applies whether group G is 10% of the party's support or 50%.
Which is easier: Ordering food that ten people need to agree upon, or ordering food that two people need to agree upon?
I don't see the relevance of the question. The argument wasn't "It's difficult for the Democrats to do things that will please all their supporters, because their supporters are a motley coalition of groups that want different things". It was "Support for the Democrats will be weak in this situation, because each group will be demotivated for one reason if they've got what they want and demotivated for a different reason if they haven't got what they want".
It's relevant. A given Democrat is likely a Democrat for their one issue; on all other issues, they tend to revert to the mean (which is why, historically, Democrats tend to rate their party lower on listening to the base than the Republicans do). The Democratic platform is a collection of concessions and compromises between the different coalitions, and is attractive only because of a given coalition's particular interests; the rest of what it offers isn't particularly attractive to its constituents.
Republican objectives tend to be more in-line with what its constituents want, since it is only catering to a couple of different factions. It isn't invulnerable, of course, as we see right now with the fight between the conservatives and the pragmatists in the party, but is more resilient to this.
The outcome is a Republican base that generally-consistently turns out, and a Democratic base that turns out only when they feel they are losing.
The moderates, meanwhile, swing back and forth based on whoever has annoyed them the most recently. Since the party that isn't in power can't do much to annoy them, and things that have happened are more salient than things that might happen, you get elections that swing from party to party each election cycle. With increasing media exposure (both through the traditional media since Watergate, and the Internet more recently), they're increasingly aware of the smallest annoyances, which is accelerating the process.
Systemic overvaluation of stocks relative to risk as a result of tax benefits combined with overdue bills from the last three economic shocks. The full extent of the drop will require including inflation in consideration.
It's not the WHO's attitude towards US healthcare, it's a difference in attitudes towards national pride between the US and... everybody else. In the US, outward patriotism is combined with criticism of our institutions; representatives of the US are all-too-happy to say what we should do better, but still insist we're great anyways. Elsewhere, it's dangerous and right-wing (in the European rather than US sense) to be outwardly patriotic (unless the government is dangerously right-wing already, which is to say, requires patriotism of this form), but that gets combined with a resentment of any implication that there's anything wrong with their country or culture.
So ranking systems tend to accentuate the things Europe (which is powerful enough to get its say) does well (such as national health databases, repeatedly, for every category of health) while making sure the US ranks below them so they can say they're doing better than the central modern superpower (because Asia doesn't count and nobody wants to annoy China).
What I don't understand is that you can attach a 63% probability to a decline of at least 60%, but at most a 7% probability to a decline of, let's say, 20%-60% (can we agree that a 20% decline would count as a "market slump"?).
So, in fact, it is the WHO's attitude towards US healthcare that's relevant here. Anyway, your cynicism is noted but I can't say I find your argument in any way convincing. (In fact, my own cynicism makes me wonder what your motive is for looking for explanations for the US's poor ranking other than the obvious one, namely that the US actually doesn't do healthcare terribly well despite spending so much.)
The Wikipedia page on this stuff says that the WHO hasn't been publishing rankings since 2000 (which I think actually makes your prediction pretty meaningless), and that the factors it purports to weigh up are health as measured by disability-adjusted life expectancy, responsiveness as measured by "speed of service, protection of privacy, and quality of amenities", and what people have to pay. I don't see anything in there that cares about national health databases (except in so far as they advance those other very reasonable-sounding goals).
They're separate predictions.
I went through its ranking criteria about a decade ago, and the database thing came up in every single ranking, dropping even our top-caliber cancer treatment to merely average.
So what? If you hold that
then you necessarily think there's at least a ~63% probability of at least 60% decline and at most a ~7% probability of a decline between 20% and 60%.
(And the real weirdness here, actually, comes from the second prediction more or less on its own.)
Interesting. Do you have more information?
It's not that weird. Think about predicting the size of the explosion of a factory filled with open barrels of gasoline and oxygen tanks. I think the global economy is filled with the economic equivalent of open barrels of gasoline.
Not at the moment. It's been literally years since I've done any serious research on global healthcare. (Working in the health industry tends to make you stop wanting to study it as a hobby.)
So (if I'm understanding your analogy right) you expect that any drop in the market will almost certainly lead to a huge crash?
From the 17th to the 25th of August last year, the S&P 500 dropped by about 11%. This led to ... about a month of generally depressed prices, followed by a month-long rise up to their previous levels. That doesn't sound to me like an economy filled with open barrels of gasoline.
Any given spark -could- set it off, which is not the same as any given spark definitely setting it off.
If the stock market were responding appropriately to the conditions, then there wouldn't be the equivalent of open barrels of gasoline all over the place. The issue is more structural than that: Interest rates and limited investment opportunities have driven money into the markets, driving prices up, and then keeping them artificially high. Some of this pressure has been relieved by amassing inventory, but that's reached its stopping point, which is starting to cause international trade to falter.
Since approximately when?