My sympathies to you.

This is a pretty common situation in medicine - you have a problem and you have little idea what the numbers are and insight is very hard to come by. It is incredibly frustrating. There may be studies but they only report the risks for a small number of factors or even just one (eg risk of stillbirth by age of mother or given a prior stillbirth). The raw numbers from studies are usually not available to "lay people" to allow them to do their own analysis for their own circumstances which would provide a much better insight.

When you go and look at the studies you see results that differ by a factor of 5 or worse. Does low Testosterone halve (one study), or triple (another study) your chance of getting prostate cancer? Is the risk of death within 15 years from prostate cancer at stage T1C with Gleason score 6 without surgery or radiotherapy 3% (one study) or 20% (another)? What is the incidence of impotence after prostate removal (pick a number, any number between 20% and 80%)?

You are asking "what is the likely cause?" however it is fairly likely you will never know this. Most stillbirths are never explained. There are probably thousands of things it could have been. Human reproduction is a fallible process with many points of failure. I suggest you may have to move past this question at some point.

I guess what you really need to know is "what is the risk of another stillbirth given you have had one already?".

The base rate is about 1/160 to 1/200 births. I see nothing in your report that indicates an elevated risk. I assume you have looked at the risk factors including possible family history, and found nothing.

Acording to this meta-analysis http://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h3080 the chance of a second stillbirth given a history of stilbirth is about 2.5% or 1/40. This is a lot higher than the base of ~1/200 but it is still pretty unlikely.

Sorry that's the best I can offer.

I have no medical qualifications but due to various health issues I have been reading medical books and papers and learning statistics for several decades.

Welcome back!

Thank you.

In the last few days, a few people have newly joined LW, posting only in a welcome thread and in articles about Gleb_Tsipursky's "Intentional Insights" work. Their comments have been very enthusiastic about II.

Now here's the thing. Intentional Insights is based in the US. Everyone on its leadership team (I think) and advisory board is in the US. Most of its activity, so far as I can see, is focused on promoting ... whatever exactly II promotes ... in US-based media like the Huffington Post. But it just happens that two of these people are a brother and sister (I think) from Nigeria, and a chap from the Philippines. The last person I recall turning up on LW and gushing about how great II is and how wonderful GT's articles are was also from the Philippines. Isn't that odd?

(For the avoidance of doubt, of course there's nothing in any way wrong about being from Nigeria or the Philippines. I'm just asking: isn't this a rather improbable sequence of events?)

Now, Gleb has an answer, sort of:

In fact, many of the people who engage with Intentional Insights content are from developing countries, as we collaborate with international skeptic and reason-oriented organizations such as Atheist Alliance International.

It's not clear what range of organizations Gleb is referring to, but the specific one he names (AAI) is indeed an international organization -- but I don't see any sign that it's more active in (say) Nigeria than in the US. And none of these II fans who have turned up on Less Wrong has said anything about hearing of either LW or II through any other organization.

I think there is another obvious explanation, which is that these people are being paid to publicize II, and that the reason why the II-fans we see on LW come disproportionately from developing countries is that it's much cheaper to buy publicity from people in developing countries than from people in, say, the US or Western Europe.

Am I too paranoid?

... Oh, look. Twitter feed of LW user Sarginlove. The description on the Twitter account says "works for Intentional Insight". Take a look at Sarginlove's comments and tell me this isn't a deliberate attempt to look like someone not affiliated with II who's just seen their material and been impressed by it.

I don't know quite what Gleb is actually trying to do with II, but I think this goes beyond "weird and creepy" (the usual complaint on LW hitherto, I think) to "actively deceptive".

http://mindhacks.com/2015/11/16/no-more-type-iii-error-confusion/#comments

Use "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" as a mnemonic. His first error is type 1 (claiming a wolf as present when there wasn't one). His second error is type 2 (people don't notice an existing wolf).

Well, first, I'll admit up front that I logged off and metaphorically hid for a day after posting this, so I would not be tempted to engage in a pointless argument in the comments.

That's your problem right there. If you want people to respect you, don't hide, fight. Attempting to apologize or beg does not earn you respect from women or SJ-goons like gjm or Comrade ChristianKl, it earns you mockery and signals that you're someone it's safe to beat up on.

The boy's mistake in the story was begging rather than being assertive. And your problem here is that your immediate reaction to extremely unfair criticism by people who can be extremely charitably described as mind-killed is to apologize and attempt to say "no really I didn't mean it".

She's already abused her power at least once to ban someone for expressing opinions she doesn't like.

As a high school teacher, I use this tactic all the time. I have to, or I would be overwhelmed by the many requests from parents that seem perfectly reasonable from their perspective but which become mathematically impossible in the aggregate.

"I think each teacher should check my son's agenda every day and sign off on whether they did their classwork and whether they have homework."

"Of course. Not a problem. As long as he brings it to me at the end of every class period filled out and ready for my signature, this should not be an issue."

Three days later -- often less -- the practice discontinues with no word from anyone.

Another example, by email: "I would like to meet with you this week about my daughter's grade."

I deliberately wait between 4 and 24 hours. And then:

"Of course. I'm available every day after school until..."

9 times out of 10 I'll never hear from the parent again. Ever. It's easy to rattle off an email to a teacher when you're mad at your kid, and it's easy to let a teacher make an appointment for you, but the trivial inconvenience of deciding on and committing to your own appointment time, combined with the cool-off period I created before responding, almost always leaves the ball dead in their court. And I think they feel too silly about it all afterwards to even talk to me again.

Oh well. Guess it wasn't that important to you.

Yeah, this is a dark art. Selective application is key. I really am there to help. But I use judicious social engineering to filter many of the demands I could end up committed to. Hopefully, I'm letting the ones through where I can actually do some good.

It's clearly about credit card debt

Nice.

To fight back against terrible terminology from the other side (i.e., producing rather than consuming) I suggest a commitment to refuse to say "Type I error" or "Type II error" and always say "false positive" or "false negative" instead.

I think you have grossly underestimated the importance of HBD and policy implications. If HBD is true, then all the existing correlational and longitudinal evidence immediately implies that group differences are the major reason why per capita income in the USA are 3-190x per capita income in Africa, that group differences are a major driver of history and the future, that intelligence has enormous spillovers totally ignored in all current analyses. This has huge implications for historical research, immigration policy (regression to the mean), dysgenics discussions (minor to irrelevant from just the individual differences perspective but long-term existential threat from HBD), development aid, welfare programs, education, and pretty much every single topic in the culture wars touching on 'sexism' or 'racism' where the supposedly iron-clad evidence is confounded or based on rational priors. (In terms of research, it also means that you can aggregate GWAS results across populations without worrying that population stratification or different linkage disequilibrium patterns are driving your results, which will make it easier to study complex traits like intelligence or violence.)

HBD is a lightning rod because it has so many implications and leads to a radical restructuring of so many premises like the environmental assumption built into society. It's like going from miasmas to germ theory: if the diseases damaging or killing most of your population is just environmental and due to vapors from swamps, then all you can do is try to slowly expensively drain the swamps, and when this fails, oh well - there's always bloodletting of patients. (It didn't cure the patient? Better try some more.) But if diseases are caused by tiny organisms which are communicated from patient to patient where there are carriers and some very poor regions have much higher disease burdens than others, some populations are more inherently more susceptible than others to some diseases, and there are potentially cutting-edge medical treatments which can prevent or ameliorate disease, then you are going to do a lot of things differently. You're going to send fewer white employees to India and Africa to die, you're going to strictly quarantine carriers, you're going to roll out mass population prevention schemes like vaccination, you're going to improve entire regions by spraying the mosquitoes & introducing netting & air conditioning, you're going to invest in sanitation and garbage collection to cut off transmission routes (water and rats don't carry miasmas, but they do carry feces and fleas). And so on.

Unless you're willing to commit to eugenics of some kind (be it restricting reproduction or genetic alteration), not much of anything.

'Aside from that, Ms Lincoln, how was the play?'

I found this paper which is interesting. But at the start he tells an interesting anecdote about existential risk:

The first occurred at Los Alamos during WWII when we were designing atomic bombs. Shortly before the first field test (you realize that no small scale experiment can be done -- either you have the critical mass or you do not), a man asked me to check some arithmetic he had done, and I agreed, thinking to fob it off on some subordinate. When I asked what it was, he said, "it is the probability that the test bomb will ignite the whole atmosphere," I decided I would check it myself! The next day when he came for the answers I remarked to him, "The arithmetic was apparently correct but I do not know about the formulas for the capture cross sections for oxygen and nitrogen -- after all, there could be no experiments at the needed energy levels." He replied, like a physicist talking to a mathematician, that he wanted me to check the arithmetic not the physics, and left. I said to myself, "what have you done, Hamming, you are involved in risking all life that is known in the Universe, and you do not know much of an essential part?" I was pacing up and down the corridor when a friend asked me what was bothering me. I told him. His reply was, "Never mind, Hamming, no one will ever blame you." Yes, we risked all the life we knew of in the known universe on some mathematics. Mathematics is not merely an idle art form, it is an essential part of our society.

Probably not. If you look at the comments on posts about the Prize, you can see how clearly people have already set up their fallback arguments once the soldier of 'possible bad vitrification when scaled up to human brain size' has been knocked down. For example, on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11070528

• 'you may have preserved all the ultrastructure but despite the mechanism of crosslinking, I'm going to argue that all the real important information has been lost'
• 'we already knew that glutaraldehyde does a good job of fixating, this isn't news, it's just a con job looking for some free money'
• 'it irreversibly kills cells by fixing them in place so this is irrelevant'
• 'regardless of how good the scans look, this is just a con job'
• 'what's the big deal, we already know frogs can do this, but what does it have to do with humans; anyway, it's a quack science which we know will never work'

Even if a human brain is stored, successfully scanned, and emulated, the continued existence - nay, majority - of body-identity theorists ensures that there will always be many people who have a bulletproof argument against: 'yeah, maybe there's a perfect copy, but it'll never really be you, it's only a copy waking up'.

More broadly, we can see that there is probably never going to be any 'Sputnik moment' for cryonics, because the adoption curve of paid-up members or cryopreservations is almost eerily linear over the past 50 years and entirely independent of the evidence. Refutation of 'exploding lysosomes' didn't produce any uptick. Long-term viability of ALCOR has not produced any uptick. Discoveries always pointing towards memory being a durable feature of neuronal connections rather than, as so often postulated, an evanescent dynamic property of electrical patterns, have never produced an uptick. Continued pushbacks of 'death' have not produced upticks. No improvement in scanning technology has produced an uptick. Moore's law proceeding for decades has produced no uptick. Revival of rabbit kidney, demonstration of long-term memory continuity in revived C. elegans, improvements in plastination and vitrification - all have not or are not producing any uptick. Adoption is not about evidence.

Even more broadly, if you could convince anyone, how many do you expect to take action? To make such long-term plans on abstract bases for the sake of the future? We live in a world where most people cannot save for retirement and cannot stop becoming obese and diabetic despite knowing full well the highly negative consequences, and where people who have survived near-fatal heart attacks are generally unable to take their medicines and exercise consistently as their doctors keep begging them. And for what? Life sucks, but at least then you get to die. Even after a revival, I would predict that maybe 5% of the USA population (~16m people) would be meaningfully interested in cryonics, and of that only a fraction would go through with it, so 'millions' is an upper bound.

Well, first, I'll admit up front that I logged off and metaphorically hid for a day after posting this, so I would not be tempted to engage in a pointless argument in the comments. And yet, I was somehow still too optimistic about what I'd find when I looked.

First point of order, this isn't about me. I've been on this site a while, it should be obvious by now that I have no qualms sharing gooey personal details about myself. So. Stop making it about me. If it was about me, you'd know.

Second point of order, the pronouns assigned to the characters do not matter and I think it says more about you than me that you fixated on that. So. Stop making it about sexism. Perhaps I could have chosen some other combination of genders, but I had hoped that commenters here of all places would be egalitarian enough to see those genders as the placeholders they are.

Third point of order, the parable was never meant to reflect reality. If it seems one-sided, that's because it is. It is meant to reflect a generalized emotional journey that I think is valid for a lot of people, of all sexes and orientations, who are too scared to speak up because they, rightly, expect to get nothing but vitriol for doing so.

Fourthly, if the parable even has a moral, it is about prostitution and modern attitudes towards prostitution and not really anything else. If you think the parable is advocating anything else you don't like, that, again, says more about you than me. I am astounded that I have to explicitly point this out, but there is a difference between not actively helping a person and actively interfering with help reaching a person. So. Stop putting words in my mouth. We should be above that, here.

His reply was, "Never mind, Hamming, no one will ever blame you."

This is a good example of optimizing for the wrong goal.

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".

At 26, I got my first girlfriend, and lost my virginity to her.

I'm sorry about your pain, but I don't think LessWrong is the right place for this post, as it cuts too closely to identity politics to be productively discussed.

Per some recent discussions with Elo and others, I'm working on a mockup of some new Home page designs. The current one has the following issues:

1. "About" is hard to find.
2. The question "Why should I care?" isn't answered until several links in.
3. There are potential good contributors who are probably being driven away from posting because the first link to the materials is a huge, intimidating list with idiosyncratic or academic titles.
4. Who's going to look at the "Sequences" if they don't know what the "Sequences" are, already?
5. There needs to be a "New User" section that is EASY to find from the landing page. Most of this content is already in the about page, so the about page also needs to be easy to find.
6. The rationalist blogroll needs to be easier to find, to loop in the diaspora'd community.

I had my spouse and some friends look at it, because they fulfill a few conditions: They have never seen the site before, and they are the type of person I'd like to encourage to contribute (smart, good writers, thoughtful). Their feedback was discouraging. They all indicated confusion or intimidation. Several rationalist-adjacent people on communities like Tumblr avoid the site because it's confusing, intimidating, or both. I don't mind filtering for thoughtful, nerdy people. Less Wrong will do that by default. I do mind filtering people away just because they have a bad case of impostor syndrome.

Anecdotal: I avoided posting for YEARS because of all the reasons listed above. There are whole online communities who were interested in learning more because of EY's writing (mainly HPMOR), but felt that there wasn't room for them here. I'm not particularly unusual, and I'm not a bad member to have in the community.

Overall, the home page is full of Trivial Inconveniences: http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/

In the "Less Wrong 2.0" post on Main, I saw a suggestion that LW might have just been a "booster rocket" designed to get people where they needed to go. And that's fine, but I think it's a mistake to think that's all that was needed. It may have been a booster, but it only grabbed the people who were active during a period of a few years. It would be a shame to lose good community members on the assumption that a period of ~six years was "enough."

I would prefer LW not to be spammed by HuffPo-quality advertisement pieces for charity donations, even if it's for a charity many people here like.

Thanks for taking action on this.

Once you start trying to appeal to "emotionally-oriented" thinkers (what a euphemism), you start bringing them into your group. Once you bring them into your group, they start participating in creating your group policy. Once they start participating in creating your group policy - you stop being effective, because they don't care about effective, and they outnumber you.

Don't court the Iron Law of Oligarchy so directly. Keep your focus on your organization's purpose, rather than your organization. It will last slightly longer that way.

Sorry to complain, but I opened the site to see what was going on, and Main has gone to utter crap.

"Is spirituality irrational?" and "3 reasons it's irrational to demand 'rationalism' in social-justice activism" are now heavily-commented recent posts in Main. Meanwhile, "Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People" was published a short while ago, and nothing about it appears on this site.

Looks like this site has slid into the River of Low Domain-Knowledge, Easy-to-Discuss General Stuff, rather than staying up in the nice Forest of Stuff LW Purports to be About.

Would doing so Make Less Wrong Great Again?

It's one thing to argue that non-consensual celibacy is painful; that's a fact that's often neglected when talking about sexual dynamics. It's another to frame the issue as a situation entirely perpetuated by women who are resisting for trivial reasons. That casts women as malicious, when that's not a universal or common case.

Like NancyLebowitz said, why is it acceptable to leave out the costs that women face in this dynamic?

If your point is that some sexual assaults are the product of desperation and tragedy, I agree. That doesn't make them acceptable, and you seem like you're implying that.

I'm not really sure what you're hoping to accomplish here. The fable isn't framed in a way that accurately represents reality. The sympathetic arguments you're making could be made without euphemism. The story falsely equivocates refusing sex as maliciously refusing to save someone's life.

If you're hurting, I'm sorry. I have sympathy for people who are unable to be sexually active and have few or no solutions. This, however, is bad framing at best, and harmful at worst.

His argument proves too much.

You could easily transpose it for the time when Checkers or Chess programs beat professional players: back then the "keystone, foundational aspect" of intelligence was thought to be the ability to do combinatorial search in large solution spaces, and scaling up to AGI was "just" a matter of engineering better heuristics. Sure, it didn't work on Go yet, but Go players were not using a different cortical algorithm than Chess players, were they?

Or you could transpose it for the time when MCTS Go programs reached "dan" (advanced amateur) level. They still couldn't beat professional players, but professional players were not using a different cortical algorithm than advanced amateur players, were they?

AlphaGo succeded at the current achievement by using artificial neural networks in a regime where they are know to do well. But this regime, and the type of games like Go, Chess, Checkers, Othello, etc. represent a small part of the range of human cognitive tasks. In fact, we probably find this kind of board games fascinating precisely because they are very different than the usual cognitive stimuli we deal with in everyday life.

It's tempting to assume that the "keystone, foundational aspect" of intelligence is learning essentially the same way that artificial neural networks learn. But humans can do things like "one-shot" learning, learning from weak supervision, learning in non-stationary environments, etc. which no current neural network can do, and not just because a matter of scale or architectural "details". Researchers generally don't know how to make neural networks, or really any other kind of machine learning algorithm, do these things, except with massive task-specific engineering. Thus I think it's fair to say that we still don't know what the foundational aspects of intelligence are.

I've gotten around to doing a cost-benefit analysis for vitamin D: http://www.gwern.net/Longevity#vitamin-d

Voting for a new CEO is dramatically more effective than the board trying to micromanage the current CEO with rules. Find a reasonable person and let them be flexibly reasonable.

Saved someone's life by calling the police when she attempted suicide.

(I don't think this is always the right thing to do, but I think it was the right thing to do in this case.)

I've written an essay criticizing the claim that computational complexity means a Singularity is impossible because of bad asymptotics: http://www.gwern.net/Complexity%20vs%20AI

Cryonics, supporting free market policies, and the value of the social justice movement.

Compare these two lines:

If it was about me, you'd know.

Stop putting words in my mouth.

Either you want your audience to use their ability to infer (which includes imputing motives), or you don't. (And it doesn't matter if you don't, because readers will.) Watch for the illusion of transparency, and make it obvious by highlighting the part that you want people to focus on. If this is a policy argument about the legality of prostitution and not a commentary on anything else, 1) post it to Omnilibrium instead of here because policy arguments about the legality of prostitution are off topic and 2) make that explicit (and even then, consider whether or not the example will distract or focus your audience).

When you get a reaction this bad, doubling down is ill-advised. It's typically best to just cut your losses.

I had hoped that commenters here of all places would be egalitarian enough to see those genders as the placeholders they are.

If you had a modicum of sense in you as you were considering this, you would have flipped the genders. I assume you have a modicum of sense, so I must conclude you just didn't think about it; you defaulted as much as the people you're complaining about, because you were, in fact, thinking of a specific situation.

Your comment about the real point of the story being the immorality of the opposition to prostitution is fair, and well-supported by your story.

Your complaint about people putting words in your mouth is not. You bludgeon the reader with the metaphor, you stretch it to insane and untenable places, and then complain when readers observe that the plaintext reading of the metaphor suggests attempted rape? I'm perfectly willing to ascribe that to bad writing, but it isn't -unfair- for somebody to ascribe it to your intent, when your intent is so heavily dumped all over the rest of the story.

I was asked if I wanted to be moderator. There is no policy requiring me to only ban for formal reasons. The idea that people shouldn't be banned for content is somewhat popular and I tried following it, but it has since occurred to me that the places I've seen with no banning for content end up being a flavor of right-wing hostile that I don't like. We'll see how that plays out here.

I was patient with advancedatheist for a while, but he really doesn't like women, and shows it. Before I banned him, I decided that it was worth my ceasing to be moderator.

I hope I can notice it if any poster is that contemptuous of any demographic-- and if I fail to notice it, I have no doubt that I will be seeing complaints to draw it to my attention. While I'm here, I will not tolerate a pattern of such behavior, though I'm planning to be better about warnings.

I've seen concerns about LW turning into an echo chamber, but there's a tremendous amount to disagree about even if complaining about demographic groups is taken off the table. Also, an echo chamber in the sense of everyone agreeing with each other isn't the only way things can go wrong. You can also get very low information density because people are attacking each other repetitively..

Nancy, I support Scott's (Yvain's) approach. Just say you are a dictator and ban at a whim (or perhaps ban "virtue-ethically" rather than "deontologically" -- "we don't want your type around here.") Publishing rules just invites people to bend them.

It is odd, isn't it? The effect sizes seem ridiculous*, but there's nothing obviously wrong with that study (aside from the sample size). Cochran has blogged about oxygen before as well. To compile some of the relevant papers:

• Winter et al 1975, "The anesthetic effect of air at atmospheric pressure"
• Scholey et al 1999, "Cognitive performance, hyperoxia, and heart rate following oxygen administration in healthy young adults"
• Kajtar L, Herczeg L, Lang E. 2003. "Examination of influence of CO2 concentration by scientific methods in the laboratory" In: Proceedings of Healthy Buildings 2003, 7–11 December 2003. Singapore:Stallion Press, 176–181.
• Kajtar L, Herczeg L, Lang E, Hrustinszky T, Banhidi L. 2006. "Influence of carbon-dioxide pollutant on human well-being and work intensity" In: Proceedings of Healthy Buildings 2006, 4–8 June 2006, Lisbon, Portugal:Universidade do Porto, 85–90. (requested these two)
• Chung et al 2008, "A study on the effects of 40% oxygen on addition task performance in three levels of difficulty and physiological signals"
• Satish et al 2012, "Is CO2 an Indoor Pollutant? Direct Effects of Low-to-Moderate CO2 Concentrations on Human Decision-Making Performance"
• Law et al 2014, "Relationship Between Carbon Dioxide Levels and Reported Headaches on the International Space Station" (I wonder if the ISS has the same kinds of 'sick building syndrome' that terrestrial buildings do and so the relationship may be confounded? On the other hand, the 'chits' mentioned sound like quasi-experiments.)
• Stafford 2015, "Indoor air quality and academic performance" (Texas natural experiment)

The problem for me is that while it makes sense that since we run on oxygen and the brain uses a lot of oxygen (the whole 'BOLD' thing etc), more oxygen might be better, it has the same issue as Kurzban's blood-glucose/willpower criticism: if the brain needs more oxygen than it's getting, why doesn't one simply breath a little more? While sedentary during these sorts of tasks, you have far more breathing capacity than you should need - you are able to sprint all-out without falling over of asphyxiation, after all. So there's no obvious reason there should be any lack, even more so than for glucose. And shouldn't CO2 levels closely track various aspects of weather? But as far as I know, various attempts to correlate weather and cognitive performance or mood have turned up only tiny effects. In addition, too much oxygen can be bad. So is it too little oxygen or too much nitrogen or too much carbon dioxide...?

Jessica Taylor for lending me a CO2 monitor so that I could see variability in indoor CO2 levels.

What monitor is that? You could try recording CO2 long-term, especially if it's a data logger. Opening windows is something that's easily randomized.

I did some looking and compiling of consumer-oriented devices a while ago: https://forum.quantifiedself.com/t/indoor-air-quality-monitoring-health/799/40 I was not too impressed since nothing hit the sweet spot of accurate CO2 and PPM measurement under $100. The Netatmo looked decent but there are a lot of complaints about accuracy & reliability (checking the most recent Amazon reviews, still a lot of complaints).

I've been thinking maybe I should settle for the Netatmo. I've been working on a structural equation model (SEM) integrating ~100 personal data variables to try to model my productivity (some current sample output), and it would be nice to have even noisy daily C02 variables (as long as I know how noisy and can use it as a latent variable to deal with the measurement error). Correlation-wise, I think backwards causation can be mostly ruled out, and the most obvious confound is weather, which is already in my SEM.

* taken at face value, with reasonable estimates of how much rooms differ from day to day or week to week, CO2 levels would explain a lot or maybe most of variability in IQ tests or cognitive performance!

controversial topics, such as (...) interpretations of quantum physics.

I love that this is a thing here.

When one person doesn't understand economics, we call it ignorance. When millions don't, we call it a political movement.

Scott Adams

OP Upvoted.

It's been stated elsewhere that a long standing member of the LW community was leaving because of this post. Well, to counterbalance that, I'm also strongly considering leaving LW, but it's not because of the OP. It's because of these comment threads.

In particular, the comments have shown me just how far the LW community has fallen. I'd really rather not be around people who both get offended so easily and are so willing to mindkill themselves should the slightest opportunity present itself. FYI, the OP isn't about you. It's not about your pet projects. It's not insulting everything you stand for. You're just not that important.

Five years ago, this post would likely have died a simple, unglorious death by being too vague or poorly written to be upvoted. Today it causes a political shitstorm as the community decides to interpret it in a way directly contrary to the stated goal of author. Five years ago, it would have been discussed rationally, the writer would have received tips and suggestions, and quite likely some good would have been drawn out of it. Today, it causes mass mindkilling because people feel that their identity is being attacked.

Those are the kinds of people I don't wish to be around.

to the extend that it's not explictely made clear that LW denounces it.

If only there was a way to quantify the LW community's approval or disapproval of a post submitted to it.

Just say you are a dictator and ban at a whim

There is a slight problem in that LW is not Nancy's personal blog to be shaped by her whims.

Making voting public would go a long way

...towards LOTS of drama, enemy lists, political intrigue, etc.

Edit: It continues to look like they don't know what they're doing.

Please don't use "they don't know what they're doing" as a synonym for "I don't agree with their approach".

Your parents have probably been helping you resist superstimuli (drugs, alcohol, video games) and fight procrastination. If you will be living away from home for the first time, you will need to be especially diligent against letting these forces harm you.

Political correctness is an unfortunately fact of most college campuses, but it's still a fact. You can hurt yourself with your teachers and fellow students if you say or write something politically incorrect even if your statement is true.

Figure out if you will need a high GPA to accomplish your post-college plans since the type of courses you take can greatly influence your GPA.

Not showing up for class because you overslept (especially your first year) is a sign of failure.

If you like LessWrong you will probably enjoy microeconomics.

You can often negotiate your financial aid offer, especially if you have a better offer from a college of equal or greater prestige.

You can take classes over the summer at a local community college to graduate early and hence save tuition.

Be very clear in your writing. Your professor will likely count any confusion he experiences in reading your paper against you.

If you need an extension ask your instructor as early as possible else he will think you are making up an excuse because you procrastinated rather than doing your work.

Doing poorly on an exam will not cause your professor to dislike you.

Before asking your professor a class organization question, check the class syllabus.

I'm an associate professor of economics at Smith College.

In November, I donated $3000 to Against Malaria Foundation and $500 to Give Directly. I also found the answer to a question I've been researching for ~3 years.

I have not a clue whether this sort of marketing is a good idea. Let me be clear what I mean: I think there's maybe a 30-40% chance that Gleb is having a net positive impact through these outreach efforts. I also think there's maybe a 10-20% chance that he's having a horrific long-term negative impact through these outreach efforts. Thus the whole thing makes me uncomfortable.

So here's some of the concerns I see; I've gone to some effort to be fair to Gleb, and not assume anything about his thoughts or motivations:

• By presenting these ideas in weakened forms (either by giving short or invalid argumentation, or putting it in venues or contexts with negative associations), he may be memetically immunizing people against the stronger forms of the ideas.
• By teaching people using arguments from authority, he may be worsening the primary "sanity waterline" issues rather than improving them. The articles, materials, and comments I've seen make heavy use of language like "science-based", "research-based" and "expert". The people reading these articles in general have little or no skill at evaluating such claims, so that they effectively become arguments from authority. By rhetorically convincing them to adopt the techniques or thoughts, he's spreading quite possibly helpful ideas, but reinforcing bad habits around accepting ideas.
• Gleb's writing style strikes me as very unauthentic feeling. Let me be clear I don't mean to accuse him of anything negative; but I intuitively feel a very negative reaction to his writing. It triggers emotional signals in me of attempted deception and rhetorical tricks (whether or not this is his intent!) His writing risks associating "rationality" with such signals (should other people share my reactions) and again causing immunization, or even catalyzing opposition.

An illustration of the nightmare scenario from such an outreach effort would be that, 3 years from now when I attempt to talk to someone about biases, they respond by saying "Oh god don't give me that '6 weird tips' bullshit about 'rational thinking', and spare me your godawful rhetoric, gtfo."

Like I said at the start, I don't know which way it swings, but those are my thoughts and concerns. I imagine they're not new concerns to Gleb. I still have these concerns after reading all of the mitigating argumentation he has offered so far, and I'm not sure of a good way to collect evidence about this besides running absurdly large long-term "consumer" studies.

I do imagine he plans to continue his efforts, and thus we'll find out eventually how this turns out.

One time, Yvain mentioned on SlateStarCodex that it was surprising that he didn't have more conservative acquaintances. The reason for that was that people who are similar along certain axes tend to cluster together. So, when I say that you're a beautiful person, you can be sure that that's true, because everyone with a connection to this site holds a resilient spark within themselves that sings of hope for the future of humankind.

Awesomeness clusters here.

You are deserving of friendship and love. Do you know how uncaring the world is? The world has not praised you for being good at changing your mind. It has valued neither your intelligence, nor your ability to have an impact, to the degree to which these things ought to be valued. You are valuable. Remember this.

Whatever your solution ends up looking like, a key feature has to be "I can post a link on Facebook or whatever that people can click on and read in their web browser." If you can't be linked to it's no good.

The expected monetary value of insurance is negative (or rather, negative in real dollars. It can be positive in nominal dollars but underperform inflation.)

But the utility is not linear in money. Losing e.g. $10,000 might be 20 times as bad as losing $1,000. If so, you should pay $1,000 100% of the time to avoid paying $10,000 8% of the time.

The insurance company averages out over many buyers, so their utility is roughly linear.

Insurance is just trading against different utility scales.

Sarginlove, that is, Sargin Rukevwe, works as a "virtual assistant". Basically you hire him to do whatever and in this case he seems to have been hired to promote InIn.

It's interesting that his page says he graduated from the Polytechnic in 2013, but his introductory post here says he is a student at that school.

Let me repeat the observation I've made before -- Gleb_Tsipursky is a very clear case of cargo-cult behaviour. He has no clue about marketing, but he's been told which motions to make so that the planes will come and he's making them very earnestly. One of these motions is "native" (or covert) promotion which is designed to look like spontaneous endorsement -- and so he hires a lad from Lagos to post cringeworthy stuff here and everywhere...

P.S. Hey, look, Sarginlove has a Google+ account and his entire post history consists of -- drumroll, please! -- InIn reposts.

I guess he was hired on Dec 3, 2015, amiright?

That wasn't the reason she gave for banning him.

How many women would it take to carry a human baby from conception to viable birth in 1 month?

I downvoted the post even though some of it made me laugh: I thought it was funny but not the kind of funny I want to see more of on LW.

(There are lots of things I enjoy but would not want to see more of on LW.)

Misunderstandings and ignorance of GCTA seem to be quite pervasive, so I've tried to write a Wikipedia article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCTA

Big news for visibility: Sam Harris is preparing a book co-written with Eliezer (starting at minute 51 of podcast).

Scary Mark Zuckerberg interview on AI risks where the Facebook founder says:

"I think that along the way, we will also figure out how to make it safe. The dialogue today kind of reminds me of someone in the 1800s sitting around and saying: one day we might have planes and they may crash. Nonetheless, people developed planes first and then took care of flight safety. If people were focused on safety first, no one would ever have built a plane."

Yes, but if the crash of a single airplane would cause the extermination of mankind we would all be dead. A better analogy is scientists in 1940 considering whether detonating an atomic bomb would ignite the atmosphere.

Clarity's bitching and moaning containment comment

No other top level comment by Clarity will be made in this Open Thread will be made because a considerable portion of LW voters don't give a shit

1. Windows 7 phones are problematic

There is currently no way to remove the auto-fill terms you have accumulated over time asides from hard reseting the phone.

-Windows 7 phone search history can't be deleted...

Seriously, Microsoft? People could find I eschew porn to instead listen to songs that remix in or mashup sounds from porn while going about my daily activities.

2. Can your genes exempt you from an altruistic imperative to donate your organs?

Do our SNP's indicate any exceptions to the duty to donate one's organs? rs17319721(A)'s and Rs429... are associated with kidney related issues. It doesn't appear any others are known to. The implications are unclear.

3. El Chapo's getting desperate.

What would you do in his situation? How does me manage to get to cartel to do his bidding when he's on the run when they could usurp him instead? I assume that other high up Sinoloa cartel people just appreciate his intelligence in planning their operations. And, that incidental helpers opportunistically solicit his favour, bribes and fear his influence without actively making them because of his reputation. Maybe there are some interesting mechanisms in there too, like people he's earmarked as having to die if he is ever caught, or doesn't escape by a certain time, or dies*, like a kind of prediction market. I would imagine such criminals have sophisticated prediction market-esque trustless systems to protect them. I mean, I wouldn't otherwise count on the loyalty or trustworthiness of other criminals...I mean, it would be a lot harder to replicate his actions in more Western countries because of greater structural integrity of social institutions and norms, but I can't help but be in awe of the guy's intelligence and ruthless pursuit of his ends and means.

4. Interesting takeaways from Tim Ferriss’s productivity interview of a former four star US special forces and joint coalition forces general

• High peer ratings have the highest predictive validity for top-level military leadership appointments and advancement

• After ww2 they asked combat organisations what was most useful from their training and people said: distance running and pack marches (explained as: because it pushed them) and live fire exercises (he adds, dealing with uncertainty too but that wasn't found from the ww2 survey). I noted that this was said around 48 mins 40 seconds in.

• watch 3 people - someone senior who you admire, a peer who is doing what you are doing better than you and someone junior who is doing the job you were doing better than you did

5. My sister is such c-word

I wish there were psychologist/therapist gift vouchers for frenemies or people you have to stay in contact with for a long time due to work or familial obligation...

6. Karma pattern analysis

a graph of my karma: Increasingly volatility and controversiality (high scores and low scores). Seems to be alternating clusters of high and low karma. Is that attributable to global variation in sentiment of lesswrong voters or to temporal variation in the karma attractiveness of my posts?

7. Why is psychiatry so weird?

• What accounts for the discrepancy between reports of suffering by the mentally and neurologically ill, and the sympathy afforded to them? Do estimates for disability or quality of life by mental health patients systematically deviate from observer or physiologically revealed estimates? How about addicts or pain patients?

• Smoking and schizphrenia confounded by weight control beliefs? If so sz without antipsychotic would smoke less

8. How am I supposed to follow the law if I don't know what the law is?

The AI control problem is a principal-agent problem, just like theattorney problem. Thoughts on radically simplifying the law to re-emphasise personal responsibility, promote leadership against paralysis and law anxiety?

9. How’s democratic information asymmetry working out?

Not too bad.

Ballot papers present a handful of names, a handful of labels and voting process ensues. Why aren’t there more random incompetents elected to public office? This is not to say that they aren’t there, but this system of appearingly intense information asymmetry seems to work out okay.

To be an independent candidate requires lots of voters to nominate you and therefore substantive mass (even if minority(appeal), to be a party candidate requires winning an internal preselection election (by people who tend to vote for people they have existing, long standing elections with) and to win council generally requires a racially appropriate name for the area’s demographic who are like to know you.

This screening process may separate the wheat from the chaff early-on.

10. A movie about an internet drug dealer from da hood gives a lesson in enthusiastic consent

"I'm bored as fuck, how about we play? Lets play mother may I. Do you remember how to play that?... May I take off my clothes?... May I walk over to you?... May I touch you?"

-Female character from Dope (2016 the movie)

I've omitted the guys response since they were more or less 'yes'.

What great, playful elicitation of enthusiastic consent without an awkward, forward question!

11. Fallacy charlatans

Brendan Moynihan, who the author of the Black Swan said wasn't a charlattan unlike most finance book authors, summarises market participation fallacies as internalising what should be external events here onwards. His thesis perplexis me. It's doesn't seem wrong, it seems wronger than wronger, but his case seems very compelling. I smell some darks arts. I wonder if the Black Swan author spoke too soon...

12. 80K for LMIC's

I wrote a haiku:

Teaching to earn

To earn to give

80,000 Hours 2020

Bridging 80,000 Hours with developing world education will kill 3 birds with one stone: earning to give, developing world education and the problem of bridging between schooling and economic opportunity.

13. EA unicode symbol?

How about 'æ'?

14. Is pedo advocacy an undervalued, neglected social cause?

My heart continues to bleed for virtuous pedophiles and the ostracisation that probably encourages surrepticious, unhealthy sexual and romantic relationships between adults and children. I hope more people will pledge public support for groups trying to fight to treat pedos like people. There seem to be advocacy organisations that are above board and I wouldn't be suprised if an increasingly sex positive future society crowns pedo advocates of today with the glory affored to early LGBTI campaigners. Maybe they'll call them LGBTIP one day. I feel ashamed that I should have to disclaim that I am not at all attracted to children (and barely have a sex drive nowadays in general) in order to give extra credibility to this post. I'm also ashamed that when I'm in IRL company I'm given to joining in the group emotion and condemning pedos when the topic comes up, but at least I'm willing to talk about it more uh 'rationally' here.

15. Siblings of low-functioning autistics can have a lot of carer responsibilities. Do they deserve the baggage of carrier stigma too?

Based on the Wikipedia article on the heritability of autism I have concluded that if you're dating someone who has a sibling that is autistic, other than caring for their sibling you should consider having kids early if you intend to, not having kids if the mother has a psychiatric illness but otherwise no worrying too much about passing on the autism. The rate of autism in the general population is 1.47 percent. Prevalence of autism in siblings of autistic children was found to be 1.76% in 2005 Danish study looked at "data from the Danish Psychiatric Central Register and the Danish Civil Registration System.

The risk was twice as high if the mother had been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder. The study also found that "the risk of autism was associated with increasing degree of urbanisation of the child's place of birth and with increasing paternal, but not maternal, age.

However, less authoritative (yahoo answers) sources suggests that the specific etyiology of the autism may affect the chance of inheritence. Allegedly if the autistic family carries fragile X then the chance of inheritence is like 10 percent plus or something. They recommended talking to a genetic counsellor so I reckon the best steps are to do that, or do more thorough research than I've done here about where autism has occured in your mate's family!

Pearl has a new book out: Causal Inference in Statistics: A Primer (with Glymour and Jewell also as authors), already available on Kindle and paperback coming out the 26th. You can find the Table of Contents and chapter previews here.

At 150 pages, 4 chapters, and with homework exercises, this looks like the introductory causality work that I've wanted to exist for a few years.

It's a big deal for Go, but I don't think it's a very big deal for AGI.

Conceptually Go is like Chess or Checkers: fully deterministic, perfect information two-player games.

Go is more challenging for computers because the search space (and in particular the average branching factor) is larger and known position evaluation heuristics are not as good, so traditional alpha-beta minimax search becomes infeasible.

The first big innovation, already put into use by most Go programs for a decade (although the idea is older) was Monte Carlo tree search, which addresses the high branching factor issue: while traditional search either does not expand a node or expands it and recursively evaluates all its children, MCTS stochastically evaluates nodes with a probability that depends on how promising they look, according to some heuristic.

DeepMind's innovation consists in using a NN to learn a good position evaluation heuristic in a supervised fashion from a large database of professional games, refining it with reinforcement learning in "greedy" self-play mode and then using both the refined heuristic and the supervised heuristic in a MCTS engine.

Their approach essentially relies on big data and big hardware. From an engineering point of view, it is a major advancement of neural network technology because of the sheer scale and in particular the speed of the thing, which required significant non-trivial parallelization, but the core techniques aren't particularly new and I doubt that they can scale well to more general domains with non-determinism and partial observability. However, neural networks may be more robust to noise and certain kinds of disturbances than hand-coded heuristics, so take this with a grain of salt.

So, to the extent that AGI will rely on large and fast neural networks, this work is a significant step towards practical AGI engineering, but to the extent that AGI will rely on some "master algorithm" this work is probably not a very big step towards the discovery of such algorithm, at least compared to previously known techniques.

Eliezer thinks it's a big deal.

I don't think it's "abuse of power" to obstruct the dissemination of such abhorrent views, especially at a website that has world-improvement as one of its central goals.

The truth of a view is more important than whether or not it's abhorrent. I agree with entirelyuseless in that I endorse banning advancedatheist because he had a long string of low-quality posting but do not endorse banning him because of the content of that comment by itself.

The variance of outcomes over the next few decades just went way up.

Went to the gym for the first time in my life.

It has been two months since I started (sorry, I missed the previous month's bragging thread, so I'm posting in this one), and I'm already seeing results.

Background: I'm a returning LW old hat and CFAR alum and worked briefly on the LW codebase a long time ago, but am not a moderator or authority of any kind; this is my summary based on publicly-accessible data.

The edit history is not inaccessible. What happens is that whenever an article gets deleted, all of its history entries move to https://wiki.lesswrong.com/index.php?title=Delete&action=history.

Gleb Tsipursky co-founded an organization called Intentional Insights, and is doing rationality training/outreach through it. He's been posting rationality materials on Less Wrong. He created an LW Wiki page for the org in March and made occasional updates, and on November 19 it had this text. That looks pretty reasonable, although I'd remove the language suggesting a possible CFAR collaboration unless it progresses past the "has talked with" stage. On November 29 and 30 VoiceOfRa deletes it and Gleb Tsipursky restores it, then Gjm wrote an alternative article which is intensely critical and based mostly on this thread.

That thread is too involved for me to do more than lightly skim it right now, but I will highlight this comment by jsteinhart:

My main update from this discussion has been a strong positive update about Gleb Tsipursky's character. I've been generally impressed by his ability to stay positive even in the face of criticism, and to continue seeking feedback for improving his approaches.

The content of the Less Wrong Wiki is pretty inconsequential; if not for this post it wouldn't be seen. But fights like this can be very destructive to motivation, and if I were in Gleb's shoes I'd be feeling unjustly attacked. I'd prefer to see that stopped, and replaced with something more constructive.

I request the attention of a moderator to the wiki editing war that began a week ago between Gleb_Tsipursky and VoiceofRa, regarding the article on Intentional Insights. So far. VoiceofRa has deleted it twice, and Gleb_Tsipursky has restored it twice.

Due to the way the editing to remove the page was done, to see the full editing history it is necessary to look also at the pseudo-article titled Delete.

I do not care whether there is an article on Intentional Insights or not, but I do care about standards for editing the wiki.

I got https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/4vhqoc/should_we_wipe_mosquitoes_off_the_face_of_the/ to the front page of Reddit, which probably got somewhere on the order of magnitude of 50,000 people to read it or at least think about the idea, which can only help in terms of moving it into the Overton Window.

I know at one point it was number 6 for logged out users.

Thanks for helping me out in some tough times, LessWrong crew. Please keep supporting one another and being positive rather than negative.

The reason parties are oversupplied with food is because the incentives are asymmetrical. Specifically, the loss from having too much food is considerably smaller than the loss from having too little food.

Having insufficient food is a significant loss of status since you failed as a host to provide proper hospitality. There are a bunch of obvious historical and cultural reasons why not being able to feed your guests is a bad thing, status-wise.

Having too much food is just a matter of some wasted money and/or having to eat leftovers for few days. Not a big deal at all nowadays.

The "conceivability" of zombies is accepted by a substantial fraction, possibly a majority, of academic philosophers of consciousness.

This can be made precise. According to the 2009 PhilPapers Survey (sent to all faculty at the top 89 Ph.D-granting philosophy departments in the English-speaking world as ranked by the Philosophical Gourmet Report, plus 10 high-prestige non-Anglophone departments), about 2/3 of professional philosophers of mind think zombies are conceivable, though most of these think physicalism is true anyway. Specifically, 91 of the 191 respondents (47.6%) said zombies are conceivable but not metaphysically possible; 47 (24.6%) said they were inconceivable; 35 (18.3%) said they're (conceivable and) metaphysically possible; and the other 9.4% were agnostic/undecided or rejected all three options.

Looking at professional philosophers as a whole in the relevant departments, including non-philosophers-of-mind, 35.6% say zombies are conceivable, 16% say they're inconceivable, 23.3% say they're metaphysically possible, 17% say they're undecided or insufficiently familiar with the issue (or they skipped the question), and 8.2% rejected all three options. So the average top-tier Anglophone philosopher of mind is more likely to reject zombies than is the average top-tier Anglophone philosopher. (Relatedly, 22% of philosophers of mind accept or lean toward 'non-physicalism', vs. 27% of philosophers in general.)

There is a stuff of consciousness which is not yet understood, an extraordinary super-physical stuff that visibly affects our world; and this stuff is what makes us talk about consciousness.

Chalmers' core objection to interactionism, I think, is that any particular third-person story you can tell about the causal effects of consciousness could also be told without appealing to consciousness. E.g., if you think consciousness intervenes on the physical world by sometimes spontaneously causing wavefunctions to collapse (setting aside that Chalmers and most LWers reject collapse...), you could just as easily tell a story in which wavefunctions just spontaneously collapse without any mysterious redness getting involved; or a story in which they mysteriously collapse when mysterious greenness occurs rather than redness, or when an alien color occurs.

Chalmers thinks any argument for thinking that the mysterious redness of red is causally indispensable for dualist interactionism should also allow that the mysterious redness of red is an ordinary physical property that's indispensable for physical interactions. Quoting "Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness":

The real "epiphenomenalism" problem, I think, does not arise from the causal closure of the physical world. Rather, it arises from the causal closure of the world! Even on an interactionist picture, there will be some broader causally closed story that explains behavior, and such a story can always be told in a way that neither includes nor implies experience. Even on the interactionist picture, we can view minds as just further nodes in the causal network, like the physical nodes, and the fact that these nodes are experiential is inessential to the causal dynamics. The basic worry arises not because experience is logically independent of physics, but because it is logically independent of causal dynamics more generally.

The interactionist has a reasonable solution to this problem, I think. Presumably, the interactionist will respond that some nodes in the causal network are experiential through and through. Even though one can tell the causal story about psychons without mentioning experience, for example, psychons are intrinsically experiential all the same. Subtract experience, and there is nothing left of the psychon but an empty place-marker in a causal network, which is arguably to say there is nothing left at all. To have real causation, one needs something to do the causing; and here, what is doing the causing is experience.

I think this solution is perfectly reasonable; but once the problem is pointed out this way, it becomes clear that the same solution will work in a causally closed physical world. Just as the interactionist postulates that some nodes in the causal network are intrinsically experiential, the "epiphenomenalist" can do the same.

This brings up a terminology-ish point:

The technical term for the belief that consciousness is there, but has no effect on the physical world, is epiphenomenalism.

Chalmers denies that he's an epiphenomenalist. Rather he says (in "Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism"):

I think that substance dualism (in its epiphenomenalist and interactionist forms) and Russellian monism (in its panpsychist and panprotopsychist forms) are the two serious contenders in the metaphysics of consciousness, at least once one has given up on standard physicalism. (I divide my own credence fairly equally between them.)

Quoting "Moving Forward" again:

Here we can exploit an idea that was set out by Bertrand Russell (1926), and which has been developed in recent years by Grover Maxwell (1978) and Michael Lockwood (1989). This is the idea that physics characterizes its basic entities only extrinsically, in terms of their causes and effects, and leaves their intrinsic nature unspecified. For everything that physics tells us about a particle, for example, it might as well just be a bundle of causal dispositions; we know nothing of the entity that carries those dispositions. The same goes for fundamental properties, such as mass and charge: ultimately, these are complex dispositional properties (to have mass is to resist acceleration in a certain way, and so on). But whenever one has a causal disposition, one can ask about the categorical basis of that disposition: that is, what is the entity that is doing the causing?

One might try to resist this question by saying that the world contains only dispositions. But this leads to a very odd view of the world indeed, with a vast amount of causation and no entities for all this causation to relate! It seems to make the fundamental properties and particles into empty placeholders, in the same way as the psychon above, and thus seems to free the world of any substance at all. It is easy to overlook this problem in the way we think about physics from day to day, given all the rich details of the mathematical structure that physical theory provides; but as Stephen Hawking (1988) has noted, physical theory says nothing about what puts the "fire" into the equations and grounds the reality that these structures describe. The idea of a world of "pure structure" or of "pure causation" has a certain attraction, but it is not at all clear that it is coherent.

So we have two questions: (1) what are the intrinsic properties underlying physical reality?; and (2) where do the intrinsic properties of experience fit into the natural order? Russell's insight, developed by Maxwell and Lockwood, is that these two questions fit with each other remarkably well. Perhaps the intrinsic properties underlying physical dispositions are themselves experiential properties, or perhaps they are some sort of proto-experiential properties that together constitute conscious experience. This way, we locate experience inside the causal network that physics describes, rather than outside it as a dangler; and we locate it in a role that one might argue urgently needed to be filled. And importantly, we do this without violating the causal closure of the physical. The causal network itself has the same shape as ever; we have just colored in its nodes.

This ideas smacks of the grandest metaphysics, of course, and I do not know that it has to be true. But if the idea is true, it lets us hold on to irreducibility and causal closure and nevertheless deny epiphenomenalism. By placing experience inside the causal network, it now carries a causal role. Indeed, fundamental experiences or proto-experiences will be the basis of causation at the lowest levels, and high-level experiences such as ours will presumably inherit causal relevance from the (proto)-experiences from which they are constituted. So we will have a much more integrated picture of the place of consciousness in the natural order.

This is also (a more honest name for) the non-physicalist view that sometimes gets called "Strawsonian physicalism." But this view seems to be exactly as vulnerable to your criticisms as traditional epiphenomenalism, because the "causal role" in question doesn't seem to be a difference-making role -- it's maybe "causal" in some metaphysical sense, but it's not causal in a Bayesian or information-theoretic sense, a sense that would allow a brain to nonrandomly update in the direction of Strawsonian physicalism / Russellian monism by computing evidence.

I'm not sure what Chalmers would say to your argument in detail, though he's responded to the terminological point about epiphenomenalism. If he thinks Russellian monism is a good response, then either I'm misunderstanding how weird Russellian monism is (in particular, how well it can do interactionism-like things), or Chalmers is misunderstanding how general your argument is. The latter is suggested by the fact that Chalmers thinks your argument weighs against epiphenomenalism but not against Russellian monism in this old LessWrong comment.

It might be worth e-mailing him this updated "Zombies" post, with this comment highlighted so that we don't get into the weeds of debating whose definition of "epiphenomenalism" is better.

My 11-year-old son had homework on how to be more compassionate. Rather than doing the homework he decided to donate (and tell the teacher that he was donating) $25 to the against Malaria foundation.

Just musing on how LW has had a profound impact on my life. It was a strong influence in my deconversion from theism, it's helped me make significant medical decisions, and I'm in love with someone I met at a LessWrong meetup, as well as another person whose first interaction with me was a Bayes theorem joke.

I actually did the thing with Anki, three languages at the same time, and it failed just like you described.

I suspect that it was an instance of a more general harmful pattern in my life, how I unconsciously turn my successes into future punishments. A pattern that I learned at childhood, and it's difficult to overcome, because at the moment it feels like a virtue.

Here is the pattern: I notice myself doing something right, and instead of just enjoying the situation and rewarding myself mentally, I feel the impulse to increase the burden until I break, which then provides me an opportunity to punish myself mentally (feel disappointed with myself). Which means that in long term, I am punishing myself for doing things right.

At the moment it feels like the right thing to do: I have finally found something that "works" for me; why not use it more? Just think about all the opportunities!

But the problem is that things don't scale linearly. I have a limited amount of time / energy / attention / whatever, and maybe the method already consumes as much of some resource as is sustainable. Another problem is that there is a difference between approaching a "#1 problem" and "yet another thing that should be done"; the former motivates to creatively expore solutions, the latter just creates an ugh-field around anything you use to push yourself.

Sometimes it is necessary to accept that there are many things I would want to do, but maybe at the moment I only have enough resources to do one of them properly. And I should look at the bright side and be happy that it is one thing instead of zero.

With the examples from article, in (1) I would recommend staying with French, and perhaps when the Anki workload is smaller, do something else in the remaining time, such as read a book or watch a movie in French. Switch from learning to using, without increasing time. Until it becomes a part of life (e.g. Bob would start regularly reading some French web pages) so it doesn't require conscious maintenance. If he isn't equally passionate about German, maybe he shouldn't learn it at all; maybe he just doesn't have enough time and energy for all that. In (2), Sally could use a weekend or take a day of vacation to look for the new job.

If you paint a Chinese flag on a wolverine, and poke it with a stick, it will bite you.

This does not mean that the primary danger of aggravating the Chinese army is that they will bite you.

It certainly does not mean that nations who fear Chinese aggression should prepare by banning sticks or investing in muzzles for wolverines.

If evolution is untrue, it changes everything.

Just by reading this phrase, I can conclude that everything else is probably useless.

• "Bayes vs Science": Can you consistently beat the experts in (allegedly) evidence-based fields by applying "rationality"? AI risk and cryonics are specific instances of this issue.

• Can rationality be learned, or is it an essentially innate trait? If it can be learned, can it be taught? If it can be taught, do the "Sequences" and/or CFAR teach it effectively?

are about how Rossy is pro-rape

First, it's Roissy, not Rossy. Second, it's not Roissy at all, it's Roosh.

Not denouncing writing like that has a high cost for a community

What are we, in Maoist China? You feel the need to reaffirm your loyalty by denouncing (!) writings which deviate from the Party line?

Humans are not bad at math. We are excellent at math. We can calculate the best trajectory to throw a ball into a hoop, the exact way to move our jiggly appendages to achieve it, accounting for a million little details, all in a blink of an eye. Few if any modern computers can do as well.

The problem is one of the definition: we call "math" the part of math that is HARD FOR HUMANS. Because why bother giving a special name to something that does not require special learning techniques?

A physics research team has members who can (and occasionally do) in secret insert false signals into the experiment the team is running. The goal is practice resistance to false positives. A very interesting approach, first time I've heard about physicists using it.

Bias combat in action :-)

The LIGO is almost unique among physics experiments in practising ‘blind injection’. A team of three collaboration members has the ability to simulate a detection by using actuators to move the mirrors. “Only they know if, and when, a certain type of signal has been injected,”...

Two such exercises took place during earlier science runs of LIGO, one in 2007 and one in 2010. ... The original blind-injection exercises took 18 months and 6 months respectively. The first one was discarded, but in the second case, the collaboration wrote a paper and held a vote to decide whether they would make an announcement. Only then did the blind-injection team ‘open the envelope’ and reveal that the events had been staged.

Source

let us assume, that the top leadership of ISIS is composed of completely rational and very intelligent individuals

Of the sort that casebash assures us cannot exist? The imaginary competence of fictional rational heroes? Top human genius level?

No. These all amount to assuming a falsehood.

1. The premise of this article is wrong. The ISIS are really just a bunch of idiots, and their apparent successes are only caused by the powers in the region being much more incompetent than ISIS

Another straw falsehood to set beside the first one. All of this rules out from the start any consideration of ISIS as they actually are. They are real people with a mission, no more and no less intelligent than anyone else who succeeds in doing what they have done so far.

There is no mystery about what ISIS wants. They tell the world in their glossy magazine, available in many languages, including English (see the link at the foot of that page). They tell the world in every announcement and proclamation.

"Rationalist", however, seem incapable of believing that anyone ever means what they say. Nothing is what it is, but a signal of something else.

I have not seen any reason to suppose that they do not intend exactly what they say, just as Hitler did in "Mein Kampf". They are fighting to establish a new Caliphate which will spread Islam by the sword to the whole world, Allahu akbar. All else is strategy and tactics. If their current funding model is unsustainable, they will change it as circumstances require. If their recruitment methods falter, they will search for other ways.

More useful questions would be: given their supreme goal (to establish a new Caliphate which will spread Islam by the sword to the whole world), what should they do to accomplish that? And how should we (by which I mean, everyone who wants Islamic universalism to fail) act to prevent them?

I recommend a reading of Max Frisch's play "The Fire Raisers".