Fake explanations don't feel fake. That's what makes them dangerous. -- EY

Let's look at "A Handbook of Software and Systems Engineering", which purports to examine the insights from software engineering that are solidly grounded in empirical evidence. Published by the prestigious Fraunhofer Institut, this book's subtitle is in fact "Empirical Observations, Laws and Theories".

Now "law" is a strong word to use - the highest level to which an explanation can aspire to reach, as it were. Sometimes it's used in a jokey manner, as in "Hofstadter's Law" (which certainly seems often to apply to software projects). But this definitely isn't a jokey kind of book, that much we get from the appeal to "empirical observations" and the "handbook" denomination.

Here is the very first "law" listed in the Handbook:

Requirement deficiencies are the prime source of project failures.

Previously, we observed that in the field of software engineering, a last name followed by a year, surrounded by parentheses, seems to be a magic formula for suspending critical judgment in readers.

Another such formula, it seems, is the invocation of statistical results. Brandish the word "percentage", assert that you have surveyed a largish population, and whatever it is you claim, some people will start believing. Do it often enough and some will start repeating your claim - without bothering to check it - starting a potentially viral cycle.

As a case in point, one of the most often cited pieces of "evidence" in support of the above "law" is the well-known Chaos Report, according to which the first cause of project failure is "Incomplete Requirements". (The Chaos Report isn't cited as evidence by the Handbook, but it's representative enough to serve in the following discussion. A Google Search readily attests to the wide spread of the verbatim claim in the Chaos Report; various derivatives of the claim are harder to track, but easily verified to be quite pervasive.)

Some elementary reasoning about causal inference is enough to show that the same evidence supporting the above "law" can equally well be suggested as evidence supporting this alternative conclusion:

Project failures are the primary source of requirements deficiencies.

The Less Wrong Public Goods Team has already brought you an easy-to use virtual machine for hacking Less Wrong.

But virtual boxes can cut both ways: on the one hand, you don't have to worry about setting things up yourself; on the other hand, not knowing how things were put together, having to deal with a "black box" that doesn't let you use your own source code editor or pick an OS - these can be offputting. To me at least, these were trivial inconveniences that might stand in the way of updating my copy of the source and making some useful tweaks.

Enter Vagrant - and a little work I've done today for LW hackers and would-be hackers. Vagrant is a recent tool that allows you to treat virtual machine configurations as source code.

Instead of being something that someone possessed of arcane knowledge has put together, a virtual machine under Vagrant results from executing a series of source code instructions - and this source code is available for you to read, review, understand or change. (Software development should be a process of knowledge capture, not some hermetic discipline where you rely on the intransmissible wisdom of remote elders.)

Preliminary (but tested) results are up on my Github repo - it's a fork of the offiical LW code base, not the real thing. (One this is tested by someone else, and if it works well, I intend to submit a pull request so that these improvements end up in the main codebase.) The following assumes you have a Unix or Mac system, or if you're using Windows, that you're command-line competent.

Hacking on LW is now done as follows (compared to using the VM):

• The following prerequisites are unchanged: git, Virtualbox
• Install the following prerequisites: Ruby, rubygems, Vagrant
• Download the Less Wrong source code as follows: git clone git@github.com:Morendil/lesswrong.git
• Enter the "lesswrong" directory, then build the VM with: vagrant up (may take a while)
• Log into the virtual box with: vagrant ssh
• Go to the "/vagrant/r2" directory, and copy example.ini to development.ini
• Change all instances of "password" in development.ini to "reddit"
• You can now start the LW server with: paster serve --reload development.ini port=8080
• Browse the URL http://localhost:8080/

I'm reposting this from HN's front page, because it brought up a non-cached thought on cryonics:

The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” [...] I’ve had hundreds of people brought to me in the emergency room after getting CPR. Exactly one, a healthy man who’d had no heart troubles (for those who want specifics, he had a “tension pneumothorax”), walked out of the hospital.

In short, end-of-life medical care is often pointless, painful and costly; doctors and ER personnel know this so well that they go to great lengths to ensure it doesn't happen to them.

It seems as if our systems and conventions around end of life are designed to not let people have a say in how they spend their final moments, even when letting them have their way would result in significant savings (note the dollar figures quoted above). I've already speculated on why that might be, but I keep seeing that turn up in unexpected ways.

I suspect that this is the bigger obstacle to cryonics, not so much e.g. the lack of scientific proof. "Freeze me cheaply instead of spending insane amounts of money on brutal attempts at keeping me alive" sounds like a sensible thing to tattoo on your chest, but the evidence suggests that it wouldn't be honored any more than "DNR" tattoos.

"Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction"

Have you seen something similar to explain Bayesian updating? If not, how would one go about doing that?

The rest of the site and in particular the "Kill Math Project" may also be of interest to LWers. Author Bret Victor, whose CV includes "designed the initial user interface concepts for the iPad", comes across overall as a particularly awesome fellow.

In an Open Thread comment beriukay mentioned that he's reading C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. I've been reading it too, for interesting reasons.

In my case it so happened that I started discussing faith with a long-time online friend whose spiritual views I didn't yet know, and he turned out to be a Christian with a high regard for the Bible, who also has an interest in science. As our discussion turned to our readings on spirituality, I acknowledged (I think it was me) that I probably spent more time on books that reinforce my point of view than on books that challenge it, perhaps a case of confirmation bias. (I've been exposed to many poor arguments for Christianity, and dismissed them; but possibly that was largely a function of having started out with that bottom line already written and picking arguments I wouldn't have much trouble refuting.)

In the spirit of experiment we agreed to a "trade" - he would read (thoughtfully and with an open mind) a book of my choosing on reasons to doubt faith, and I'd do the same with a book he chose on Christianity.

So the idea here is to pick a book that's the "best argument from the other side" (as in quote 3 here).

I recommended The God Delusion - I'm not sure if that's the best choice given the above intent, but it's what came to mind on the spot.

Would you make a different choice? If so, what?

At SingularityHub. Promising title; disappointing content. Author proceeds by pure perceptual analogy with the Asimovian Three Laws alluded to; argues that the mere possibility of self-modification renders AI uncontrollable - without considering the possibility of fixed points in the goal computation. ("Do you really think it can be constrained?" - i.e. argument from limited imagination.)

First part: "This Week's Finds (Week 311)".

Second part: "This Week's Finds (Week 312)"

Why is this collection of vat-brains described as "cool" when cryonics - frozen, severed heads - is described as "creepy"?