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Open Thread April 25 - May 1, 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.)
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4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
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Comments (127)
Regarding the EugeneNier fiasco, what if we were to require new users to submit a link to a Facebook/LinkedIn account or have a current active user vouch that the new account is real?
I don't like this idea, but people, please do not downvote Daniel just because you disagree. Downvote thumb is not for disagreements, it's for comments that don't add anything to the discussion.
Who says?
I assume at least some of the downvotes are from Eugene sockpuppets (he tends to downvote any suggestions that would make it harder to do his trolling).
I think the plan to only allow senior members to vote is better.
As long as the definition of "senior member" includes about 90% of active members (as opposed to about 10%).
Reducing the number of voting people would be harmful, because already too few people bother to vote. (The more people would vote, the smaller impact would have one spiteful downvote. Imagine that every comment would have tens of votes, the more popular ones would have hundreds. Who would notice a single downvote?) We merely need to prevent the "hit and run" downvoting strategy.
At this moment, LW is ridiculously fragile. I mean, look at all that debate about problems caused by one mindkilled person. Imagine that tomorrow, a group of ten equally mindkilled people would discover LW and try the same strategy. (Ten people is different from ten sockpuppets; they have more brainpower and more total time.)
You won't have many new users.
Why is it hard to create multiple facebook/linkedin accounts?
it's not; but it would slightly increase the effort required to do it. Eventually the effort will be high enough as a deterrent. In this case I don't think it will deter Eugene more than new users.
Suprising academia
Music from my housemates!
Birdy - Words as weapons
John Legend - Tonight (Best You Ever Had) ft. Ludacris
Some Japanese/Chinese song
テレサテン・時の流れに身をまかせ
天空之城 木吉他演奏曲
Dirty Dike - Hold my hands - Not from my housemates, but from the loudspeaker of a teenage looking patient at a mental health outpatient unit.
Lil wayne Office theme
Dream journal
about a week ago I dreamed I had sex with my mom and last night I dreamed my mom had a dick (non-sexual) and my alcoholic narcissistic uncle was making fun of her (almost said him)/me. Wtf.
Notes from today's appointment with my social worker Jenna
Insight: personality
Depressive Narcissist
The Sadistic Narcissist
Narcissist's Sadistic Inner Judge
Everyday people's quotes
you can have a dream, but don't expect it to come true - my housemate 'A'
'Get out of my way or I will literally kill you with the knife in the breast pocket of the shirt im wearing' the writing on my sister's custom ordered shirt
personal development
What It’s Like To Not Love Your Body
Feeling Lonely?. >If you're single, doesn't mean you're not in a relationship - you're just focussing on your most important relationship, the relationship with yourself....being lonely is a mindset, not a situation.
Next time you're in transit, walking, whatever, you might like to try not to look at people to see if it will drain your will-power.
Reframe log
browsing Reddit is dumb .
You cannot create happiness; you can only reveal the happiness that is already inside of you. Your very nature is unconditional happiness.
Things I learned from a men's fitness magazine (jan 2016): (1) first 3 bites of food taste get then it's all over. So, when you give into temptation proportion appropriately (2) wearing suits at work improves your career prospects (3) hungry women pick up on less romantic cues
Despite how great hiring sex is, I would probably have more fun spending the equivelant amount going to a concert like this. Now I don't feel like I'm supressing my desire, just choosing the most pleasant options in life.
The whole universe culminates in my subjective personal experience. What a unifying thought.
I'm tired of all these fucgurls
Magneto, I love that quote!
So I finally overcame my habit of checking out people,compulsively thanks to the wisdom of realising relationships are about compromise, hard work, and growth, rather than love at first site, and dramatic vulnerability.
When I feeling like looking up dumb stuff on youtube, instead I'll look up this
Fun and silliness
HYDRAULIC PRESS CRUSHING HIPPO CRUSHING WATERMELON. Bear emoticon: ʕ·͡ᴥ·ʔ YESSSS hippo eats a watermelon THIS IS SO SATISFYING
Rapongi!
housework
I tried using wheat vinegar apple flavour from a Korean store to get rid of the lint in my wash, but it didn't work.
That seems sane to me. You do indeed have a power differential.
Meh, not really. To me it's backward thinking. Being so strong that it doesn't matter if you're vulnerable to other is the real strength.
How can that not be sexual?
Possibly meaning non-arousing? I do too sometimes have dreams related to sex, even about performing sex, where no excitement happens.
When I'm honest with myself about the three aspects of April 2016 LW that interest me most, the list that emerges is this (in no particular order):
Just be grateful I'm not using ponies :-)
You took that criticism quite well.
This comment was quite funny, because of the mental picture it evoked; using ponies can sometimes be a high variance strategy (which is sometimes a reason to not use ponies, sadly). ;)
Thanks! BTW, do you know that there's a Less Wronger who actually uses ponies to promote rationality? And that's no joke.
Now, now, I'm entirely down with the use of ponies to make points about rationality.
Fair enough :-) There's a Less Wronger who actually does so.
You're very good at using ponies for that purpose, and have a strong track record to prove it. <3
It's ironic that 'Eugine' comes from the greek 'good spirit'.
Whoa, can we put together the two, one against the other? A post-apocalyptic fight between sock puppets and meat puppets for the destiny of rationality on Earth?
Stitchpunk at it's best!
EDIT: it's already happening!
It is possible that Gleb and Eugine are the same person.
Doubtful. Gleb has demonstrated an ability to learn from his mistakes.
Well, to be fair the Eugine Tsipursky Theory™, Gleb is using Eugine's super rude sock puppet army, which he invented and maintains using high level trolling techniques, to manufacture an enemy to LW... An enemy that he will later destroy using his own super polite meat puppet army. Then, he will use the goodwill he has earned to take over the universe. Or at least get a good amount of karma here on LW.
At any rate, Gleb and Eugine appearing to be very different is essential to the ruse. If the ETT is correct, you're falling right into his trap.
We need a comic.
Some. It only took him what, four or five debacles to learn to shut up? X-)
Eugine also learns -- he recently has been using several accounts simultaneously (to post, not just to sockpuppet upvote). And you probably don't want him to start learning rapidly :-/
With moderator drones circling above the battlefield, relaying footage and sending an occasional salvo into the midst...
I like to imagine there is a team of mods working 24/7 in some underground war room following up on leads for potential new Eugine sock puppets. IIRC, LW 2.0's development has been severely hampered by all the resources devoted to finding and eliminating new Eugines.
:-D That's a pretty classic case of "you will be replaced by a short script", traditionally shell but nowadays probably Python. And they'll stand there yelling that it's only a flesh wound...
It's the Little Eugine That Could! X-D
But he embraced the Dark Side and became Noir...
Like a number of people I browse LW by using the "recentposts" URL to avoid missing anything new. However in the sidebar it appears that "recent comments" and "recent posts" only seem to show those in Main/Promoted. With the move away from the use of Main, does this need to be fixed? Or is it not worth the effort given dwindling comment levels here and the eventual shift to a LW2.0?
Made a github issue.
If you start from the Discussion page, you'll get the recent posts and recent comments for Discussion.
Thank you! However, this appears to miss anything that is "Promoted". The only recent example is Free CFAR summer programs, and before that the LW survey. If other posts get promoted they may also get overlooked by browing from Discussion.
Main is still a separate section, even there isn't much happening there.
You can get new posts in Main from http://lesswrong.com/new/
There may not be a convenient way of tracking new comments on non-promoted posts in Main.
A professor insists that our maps are quite unlike the territory and that evolution is to blame.
Seems to be right up LW's alley :-)
Is that yet another exercise in the "motte and bailey fallacy"? If there is any value in reading the article, please be specific about what it is.
I wasted some of my time to learn that... uhm... we pay more attention to things that can be relevant for our survival... and that agents are composed from smaller parts.
The value lies in exposing your mind to possibly new ways of considering things. If these ways are old news to you, congratulate yourself and carry on.
Just a random thought:
I realized that Twitter hashtags may be the next step in evolution of the thought-terminating clichés. You no longer have to even spell out the cliché; you merely include a reference.
Even outside of Twitter: I think the clichés used to be full sentences; now people simply use a keyword, or an abbreviation. What does this "shortening of thought-terminating clichés" mean? Are people becoming more mindkilled? Or is the world simply more tightly connected, so it is easier to synchronize globally on a meaning of a keyword?
To explain what I mean, the oldest form of the thought-terminating clichés is proverbs. They are usually full sentences, and sometimes you are able to deduce the meaning of the sentence from the sentence itself. Imagine someone who never heard that "an apple a day keeps the doctor away". I believe that person, upon hearing the proverb, would still be likely to deduce that apples are believed to be beneficial for the health. (Or maybe this is an illusion of transparency, and they could equally well deduce that apples magically repel doctors the same way garlic repels vampires.)
On the other hand, when you think about modern clichés such as "nice guy" -- at the beginning there were a few internet articles explaining what is the supposed new meaning of these words, but now it is assumed that everyone knows, so it is used without an explanation, and the person who sees this usage for the first time could become quite confused. Similarly without context it is difficult to explain why "all lives matter" is supposed to be racist, etc.
So maybe the difference is that the old thought-terminating clichés were supposed to sound like an explanation, but the new ones are used as signals of being internet-savvy; it's precisely the lack of explanatory power that makes them costly signals.
It's difficult to explain without context why the sounds that make up the word "matter" refer to the concept we commonly understand as "matter". Terms always get their meaning from the context in which they are used.
I don't see how knowing a lot of different concepts means that you are mind-killed. Language isn't the enemy of rationality.
mindkilled
Edit: Hashtags turned my comment big and bold. Neat. I'm leaving it.
So Eugine Neir has been downvoting my posts heavily, preventing me from getting useful feedback on the posts. So I'd like some thoughts from others on whether would better go on the Outreach thread, or on Discussion. The Outreach thread is for stuff that does not have potential for good discussion, but is just about successful outreach. I posted that in Discussion because it seems like it had potential for an interesting discussion. Indeed, it did have a number of non-Eugine comments, where people seemed interested in talking about the topic at hand.
Please leave comments, as downvotes are not good indications due to Eugine's potential intervention.
Comment retracted due to downvoting and thus not being able to get useful information due to potential Eugine interference - I posted the comment in another thread.
A week or two ago I linked to a new orbital dynamics paper indicating that there is strong evidence that the inner moons and rings of Saturn are only ~100 megayears old rather than being primordial to the solar system.
Here is a talk at the SETI institute by the scientist who did the research. Fascinating stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHZZK8smWFo
What non-english content do you consume?
I want to try out a new system I came up with: a 'trickle' system, with some kind of interesting, but short text landing in my email box(/or comparable) each day, the words the text uses automatically compared to the list of words I already know, and the disjunction automatically queried from wiktionary and made into one sided flashcards. (reason being: I realized I cared for receptive abilities, but not so much for being able to express my thoughts in a different language. If it was a free action, great, but I feel like it usually is not.) And these words learned BEFORE reading the text. (as to avoid having too many breaks in the flow)
I watch the Quebec French version of The Voice, called La Voix https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=la+voix
I also listen to some french language podcasts, such as those from the CBC (SRC in French), and sometimes I'll watch documentaries in other languages, such as NHK documentaries in Japanese.
What does your working-stack look like? In what order do you do tasks, what lists, notifications, alerts etc - do you check?
I am currently unhappy with my stack's order of operations, I am quite sure I can just re-order it but I before I try I thought I would see what everyone else is doing.
Please answer before checking my stack so that I don't influence your response.
Mine looks like this (in ROT13 d3coder ):
Thanks for obscuring yours to avoid biasing the rest of us.
not simply ordered
According to this guy, there are no Kardeshev Type 3 civs out there.
He doesn't seem to address the galactic quenching question, just uses a complete collection scenario
Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist
http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.07844
Oh, and don't use the "more than the atoms than in the universe" analogy lightly
http://norvig.com/atoms.html
The first legal ruling for an AI or robot may be in the pipe, and it was filed by the DoJ. this may set a precedent for an AI to have legal standing, as the ruling is filed against an electronic device.
United States of America v. Apple MacPro Computer, et al
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160428/07395434297/so-much-fifth-amendment-man-jailed-seven-months-not-turning-over-password.shtml
The 1916 case United States v. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola did not recognize Coca-Cola as containing an incipient intelligence, nor did 2013's United States v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton contemplate dinosaur necromancy.
Titles like this just represent the legal fiction for in rem cases, in which a case is brought against a piece of property — originally e.g. unclaimed property or contraband.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_rem_jurisdiction
What are some non-flashcard-style memorization techniques? I'm learning a menu as part of my job as a waiter and it feels more like trial and error. My main problem is that I can't remember the stuff at all.
I've come up with a "open answers" system that I don't really know if it can work. Let's say we have x number of things on the system, like item1, item2, item3...item(x). We also have y number of meals (which vary on the number of ingredients) and so you need to fill in the blanks, like this:
Meal 1: (underscores should be here but the "you'll never get what you see" comment system hates them)
This has the advantage of being visible which I personally like. It's also pretty simple and doesn't really require reading much beyond "fill in the blanks". It removes the disorder of "x number of things" and instead moves the question to "where should item(x) belong to?".
My only significant issue with this is that it's a trial and error thing - which I personally dislike because that's how I play chess, and most of my games end up in a loss which disappoints me and makes me think trial and error is meh, but hey I'm just one person, let's not get into typical mind fallacy here.
How's your visual memory? If it happens to be good, consider reframing from "learn what items are on the menu" to "learn what the (actual physical) menu looks like", which might help by giving extra structure (this dish is above that dish, these dishes are grouped together because they're similar, etc.) and by providing an extra exercise you can inflict on yourself (attempt to reproduce a copy of the menu).
Is there any consistent structure you can get a grip on? E.g., maybe there are three things X each of which comes with a "Super X" that includes a large soft drink and a complimentary shoulder massage from the chef, or something.
What does your memory actually need to be able to do for you? I mean, is this about retrieving specific items ("Excuse me, can you tell me what's in the Maximum Fun-Fun Ultra Super Happy Meal[1]?") or is it about fluently generating complete lists from a fixed list ("Excuse me, can you tell me all the soft drinks you offer?") or about doing nontrivial queries over the whole thing ("Excuse me, can you tell me what I can eat from your menu if I'm allergic to nuts, don't eat meat, and want to spend at least $6 and at most $25?")? These seem like quite different sorts of task and you might want your training to match what you're going to have to be able to do.
Have you eaten their food yourself? If there's some particular item you have difficulty remembering, would it help to buy one yourself and pay particular attention to what it's like?
Disclaimer: I have never been a waiter, never tried to memorize a menu, and have a very poor visual memory.
[1] You don't want to know about the other meal they offer.
[EDITED a couple of times to fix typos, once to add another, probably bad, suggestion, and once to provide a better TWC link.]
There no reason not to use flashcards for the purpose of learning a menu. Likely cards that go in both directions. You could use cloze deletion on the list of ingridients.
Then there's mnemonics. Get pegs for the numbers from 1 to 100 and then use them to make pictures.
Another spammer here.
Thanks, Banned.
I watched "Eye in the Sky" this past week, and ended up having a large argument with a friend after.
Story follows the UK Army following most-wanted terrorists in Kenya using a drone in the sky. They follow them into a house where they start preparing suicide vests. Plan turns into a remote drone strike, but the pilot keeps delaying as there is a young girl outside the house.
Essentially, a story line similar to the trolley problem - do you (potentially) save 1 innocent girl's life, or potentially watch terrorists attack a crowded place (film estimated 80 deaths).
I found it really hard to sympathise with the "wait and save girl" argument - the moral conflict here is fairly small, and could have been made worse in the film. Friend disagreed saying what they did was wrong.
Am I missing something?
"Wrong" means not only different things but different kinds of things to different people.
I am guessing (from what you say, and from the fact that most people here are more or less consequentialists) that you are a consequentialist; from that perspective, indeed, blowing up the building (or whatever exactly the drone would have done) seems like a clear win.
But perhaps your friend is a deontologist: s/he has a rule "you're not allowed to kill civilians" and wants it followed in all cases. That will give suboptimal results sometimes, and maybe this case is an example. But it may still be a better policy than "think it out from first principles in every case". For instance, suppose -- as seems pretty plausible, though I don't know -- that drone operators quite often face the possibility of collateral damage, and that in most cases they could avoid killing civilians (without much compromise to military objectives) by taking some extra trouble: waiting a bit, observing for longer, etc. Then if "you're not allowed to kill civilians" they will take that extra trouble, but in the absence of such a clear-cut rule they may be strongly motivated to find excuses for why, in each individual case, it's better just to go ahead and accept the civilian deaths. (And there's a feedback loop here; do that often enough and you're likely to find yourself caring less about civilian deaths, perhaps even finding rationalizations for why they're a good thing.)
Or perhaps your friend is a virtue ethicist: good people find it really hard to kill innocent bystanders, so a really good person wouldn't carry out the strike and kill the girl (even if they agreed that in principle it would be for the best; they just psychologically couldn't do it); therefore a drone operator who just goes ahead and does it is thereby shown not to be a good person, and that's why they shouldn't do it. The consequences of being a Good Person in this particular case may be bad -- but a world of Good People would probably have a lot fewer situations in which that kind of decision had to be made in the first place.
Me, I'm pretty much a consequentialist, but I'm consequentialist about policies as well as about individual actions, and I'd at least want to consider a fairly strict no-killing-civilians policy of the sort that would forbid this action. (But I think what I would actually prefer is a policy that almost forbids such things and allows exceptions in really clear-cut cases. I haven't seen "Eye in the Sky" and therefore have no idea whether this was one.)
One other remark: this sort of drama always makes me uncomfortable, because it enables the people making it to manipulate viewers' moral intuitions. Case 1: they show lots of cases where this kind of dilemma arises, and in every case it becomes clear that the drone operator should have taken the "tough" line and accepted civilian casualties For The Greater Good. Case 2: they show lots of cases where this kind of dilemma arises, and in every case it becomes clear that the drone operator should have taken the "nice" line because they could have accomplished their objectives without killing civilians. -- Politicians are highly susceptible to public opinion. Do we really want the makers of movies and TV dramas determining (indirectly) national policy on this kind of thing?
(I am not suggesting that they should be forbidden to do it, or anything like that. That would probably be much worse. It just makes me uncomfortable that this happens.)
Great response, thanks.
Finding the hardest to argue against are the deontologists. Morality is a hard one to pin down and define, but my original thought process still holds up here.
Unless moral objectives are black and white, we can assign a badness to each. Killing and allowing death are subtly different to most people, but not to the chime of 80 people. In both cases, you will kill civilians - and in that light, the problem becomes a minimisation one. I still would then say that inaction is less moral than action in the above situation.
Civilian death is acceptably bad (to everyone) and to be minimised - if waiting doesn't jeopardise the mission, then minimise away. This was a big part of the film, but it got to a point where they could no longer wait. There is a call to be made - will waiting actually bring us anywhere, or are we delaying the inevitable at a risk to the mission. (The civilian in the film was a young girl selling bread. She had a load of loafs to sell.)
This opens up a whole other can of worms. Is it worth waiting to minimise civilian deaths at the chance to fail the mission?
The danger of thinking in such a clear cut way (as a person or as an organisation) is ignoring the cases where inaction is worse. Nobody likes to "kill civilians" and making up a silly rule that frees you the responsibility of doing so does not make the situation better. Your rule should not be "never kill civilians" or "kill target no matter what, ignoring civilian deaths" but "minimise civilian casualties in any possible manner".
I think I'd have many arguments (ehrm - discussions) with a friends like that.
From the drone drivers perspective - Not sure an organisation would hire a virtue ethicist drone pilot. Somewhat defeats the purpose. "Spying on people is always bad"?
I thought something similar, actually. I think overall, films that properly convey the issue at hand are a good thing. The film talked about the conflict above, as well as some intra-country disputes (USA vs UK vs Kenya) and media issues (what would the public think).
Sure, this might change the view of many people. But the media is already filled with opinionated content on air strikes and foreign warfare. You're not going to remove opinion, but perhaps forcing 90 minutes of debate on to someone is the next best thing.
Depends on your computing power.
For example, choosing "minimise civilian casualties in any possible manner" may encourage your opponent to take hostages they wouldn't take if you would precommit to "kill target no matter what, ignoring civilian deaths". If taking hostages makes crime relatively safe and profitable, this may encourage more wannabe criminals to take action. Thus, minimising the casualties in short term may increase the casualties in long term.
Also, it's important how much your actions are legible by your opponent, and how credible are your precommitments.
For example, if you choose the strategy "kill target no matter what, ignoring civilian deaths", but your opponent believes that you would follow the strategy if there are 10 hostages, but that you would probably change your mind if there are 10 000 hostages, well, you just motivated them to take 10 000 hostages.
(Then there are strategies to ruin your opponent's precommitment. Essentially, if your opponent precommits to "if X, then I do Y", your strategy is to do things that are very similar to X, but not completely X. You keep doing this, and while you technically didn't do X, only "X minus epsilon", so your opponent was not required to do Y, psychologically you weaken the credibility of their precommitment, because for most people it is difficult to believe that "X minus epsilon" doesn't bring the strong reaction Y, but X would.)