[META] Alternatives to rot13 and karma sinks

18 HonoreDB 17 April 2012 08:01PM

rot13 is... (Results)
A quaint internet tradition that I quite enjoy
So annoying
Easy to use because I have Leet Key
Vapbzcerurafvoyr

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A call for solutions and a tease of mine

-3 HonoreDB 19 January 2012 02:40PM

So here's the problem: Given a well-defined group charter, how should groups make decisions? You have an issue, you've talked it over, and now it's time for the group to take action. Different members have different opinions, because they're not perfect reasoners and because their interests don't reliably align with those of the group. What do you do? Historical solutions include direct democracy, representative democracy, various hierarchies, dictatorships, oligarchies, consensus...But what's the shoes-with-toes solution? How do they do it in Weirdtopia? What is the universally correct method that could be implemented by organizations, corporations, and governments alike?

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Histocracy: Open, Effective Group Decision-Making With Weighted Voting

14 HonoreDB 17 January 2012 10:35PM

The following is slightly edited from a pitch I wrote for a general audience. I've added blog-specific content afterwards.


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Mapping Fun Theory onto the challenges of ethical foie gras

34 HonoreDB 07 December 2011 08:47PM

Foie gras, the delicacy made from the liver of a very fat goose (or sometimes duck), is believed to be unethical and is therefore frequently banned.  For a long time, it was believed that the only way to properly fatten a goose is to continually force-feed it through a tube over several weeks, which is probably a highly unpleasant experience, although it's difficult to tell.  Recently, Spanish farmer Eduardo Sousa revealed that under highly specific conditions, you can get geese to fatten themselves voluntarily.

Geese will instinctively gorge themselves when winter is coming on.  Eat a goose right after it's fattened itself up for the winter, and you get a delicious treat that died happy.  The problem is that geese will only do this if they believe food may become scarce during the winter (or their instinct to gorge only kicks in when the environment is such that that would be a reasonable inference; it's not clear whether it's the goose or evolution doing the analysis).  If they realize that food will remain available during the winter, they eat normally.  And there are quite a few possible clues--farmers trying to replicate Sousa's setup have discovered that cheating on any part leads to unfatted livers.

  • Even as chicks, geese cannot be handled by a human, or encounter other geese who have been.
  • There can be no visible fences.
  • Geese cannot be "fed," rather a variety of food must be distributed randomly throughout a large space, with the placement constantly changing, so that the geese happen to come across it.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, these constraints are similar to those we imagine a superior intelligence would operate under, if trying to get us to voluntarily gorge ourselves on utility.  A central challenge is to satisfy drives that were designed for scarcity, while actually maintaining an environment of abundance.

 

[Link] Using the conjunction fallacy to reveal implicit associations

4 HonoreDB 06 December 2011 05:29PM

Via Pharyngula.

A recent set of studies by Gervais, Shariff, and Norenzayan tested whether public dislike of atheists was based more on distrust or revulsion.  The first study simply asked directly, and found that American adults report a strong distrust of atheists.  However, they worried that explicit answers might be more about signaling, so they did a second study with a more unusual methodology. Questions they asked included (paraphrased) "Is a person who steals money out of a lost wallet more likely to be 1) a teacher or 2) a teacher and an atheist?" and "Is a person who goes all day without noticing he has phlegm on his tie more likely to be 1) a teacher or 2) a teacher and an atheist?"  Students, especially religious ones, often answered 2) to the first and 1) to the second, suggesting that it's more about mistrust.

I suspect this isn't actually a more effective way of eliciting stereotypes than asking directly.  I think signaling concerns will be just as active in the second study, and there will be a skewing of results in that anyone familiar with the conjunction fallacy (or even the importance of base rates) will answer 1) even if they distrust or are disgusted by atheists.  The result will inevitably underestimate dislike of atheists and evince a spurious or exaggerated correlation between such dislike and statistical innumeracy.  I think a better way to look for implicit, rather than explicit, stereotyping would be to create an Implicit Association Test.  That said, I think the study is still meaningful and I'm intrigued by the methodology.

Thanks to lukeprog, here's the full paper.  Relevant excerpt:

Study 1 demonstrated explicit distrust of atheists, but it is possible that, instead of being representative of personal feelings, participants’ explicit responses may have instead reflected cultural norms determining which groups are fair game for criticism and which should be insulated. The varied permissibility of such criticism is itself an interesting indicator of prejudice, but it does not specifically map on to the questions of distrust at the heart of this project. As a result, in Study 2, we adapted a classic conjunction fallacy paradigm (e.g., Tversky & Kahnemann, 1983) to create an indirect measure of distrust for various groups of people.

Probability puzzle: Coins in envelopes

8 HonoreDB 02 December 2011 05:58AM

This went over well in the xkcd logic puzzle forum (my hand was not removed), so I thought I'd try it here.  It came to me in a dream, so by solving it you may be helping to summon an elder god or something.

 

You're spying on Alice and Bob, both of whom are perfect mathematicians. Alice shows Bob a set of m envelopes. "Each of these envelopes contains either a dollar coin or nothing," she says. "I chose how many envelopes to fill randomly. What is the expected monetary value of the contents of a random envelope?" 

Bob replies, "That depends on what random function you used to choose how many envelopes to fill. If you, say, flipped m coins and put each one that came up heads in an envelope, the expected value is $.50."

Alice explains what her random function was, and Bob calculates the expected value. For kicks, he pays her that amount, and she lets him pick a random envelope. It has a coin in it! Bob pockets the coin. Alice then takes the now-empty envelope back, and shuffles it into the others. "Congratulations," she says. "So, what's the expected value of playing the game again, now that there's one fewer coin?"

"Same as before," Bob replies.

Problem 1: Give a value for m and a random function for which this makes sense (there are many).
Problem 2: Suppose Alice chose the number of envelopes to fill by selecting an integer from 0 to m uniformly at random, and distributing that many coins among the envelopes. What is m?

Poker with Lennier

15 HonoreDB 15 November 2011 10:21PM

In J. Michael Straczynski's science fiction TV show Babylon 5, there's a character named Lennier. He's pretty Spock-like: he's a long-lived alien who avoids displaying emotion and feels superior to humans in intellect and wisdom. He's sworn to always speak the truth. In one episode, he and another character, the corrupt and rakish Ambassador Mollari, are chatting. Mollari is bored. But then Lennier mentions that he's spent decades studying probability. Mollari perks up, and offers to introduce him to this game the humans call poker.

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[Draft] Poker With Lennier

22 HonoreDB 10 November 2011 05:14PM

In J. Michael Straczynski's science fiction TV show Babylon 5, there's a character named Lennier. He's pretty Spock-like: he's a long-lived alien who avoids displaying emotion and feels superior to humans in intellect and wisdom. He's sworn to always speak the truth. In one episode, he and another character, the corrupt and rakish Ambassador Mollari, are chatting. Mollari is bored. But then Lennier mentions that he's spent decades studying probability. Mollari perks up, and offers to introduce him to this game the humans call poker.

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What does your accuracy tell you about your confidence interval?

5 HonoreDB 02 November 2011 07:21PM

Yvain's 2011 Less Wrong Census/Survey is still ongoing throughout November, 2011.  If you haven't taken it, please do before reading on, or at least write down your answers to the calibration questions so they won't get skewed by the following discussion.

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[FICTION] Hamlet and the Philosopher's Stone

27 HonoreDB 25 October 2011 10:31PM

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