Oh. Apparently I have been playing memory wrong all these years? I thought the peeks were private. Or maybe I am just misremembering.

Actually, imagine for instance you have a set of preferences A1 < A2 < A3 < A4 ... and B1 < B2 < B3 < B4 ... such that your opinion with regards to any A compared with any B is like the above confusion

If this is meant to be a kind of introductory piece for decision theory, I don't think it'll work for most people. I'm a programmer (well, I know how to and used to do it for money but not currently), and my eyes start to roll into the back of my head when I read a sentence like the one above and I am not convinced it's important. It seems to me most of the comments are from people who have already thought about preference rankings and are using this to refine there ideas/check yours. I doubt people who don't already know this stuff (and therefor why it's important) will take the time to understand sentences like the one above. To work, it needs more qualitative generalizing statements (less A>B>C>D which is a pain to look at) and more examples (the first example of saving a kid is so obvious it makes one tend to think, "preference ranking is easy" which doesn't motivate someone not otherwise motivated to do the hard work of getting through this.)

Certainly I, as the designer, had a model of the robot and its environment when I wrote that program, and the program implements those models. But the robot itself has no model of its environment. It calculates the positions of its feet, relative to itself, by sensing its joint angles, knowing the lengths of its limb segments and calculating, so it does have a fairly limited model of itself: it knows its own dimensions. However, it does not know its own mass, or the characteristics of its sensors and actuators.

The fact that it works does not mean that it has an "implicit" model of the environment: "implicit", in a context like this, means "not". What is a model? A model is a piece of mathematics in which certain quantities correspond to certain properties of the thing modelled, and certain mathematical relationships between these correspond to certain physical relationships. Maxwell's equations model electromagnetic phenomena. The Newton-Raphson (EDIT: I meant Navier-Stokes) equation models fluid flow. "Implicit model" is what one says, when one expects to find a model and finds none. The robot's environment contains a simulated wind pushing on the robot, and a simulated hand giving it a shove. The robot knows nothing of this: there is no variable in the part of the program that deals with the robot's sensors, actuators, and control algorithms that represents the forces acting on it. The robot no more models its environment than a thermostat models the room outside it.

Since it is possible to build systems that achieve goals without models, and also possible, but in general rather more complicated, to build such systems that do use models, I do not think that the blind god of evolution is likely to have put models anywhere. It has come up with something -- us, and probably the higher animals -- that can make models, but nothing currently persuades me that models are how brains must work. I see no need of that hypothesis.

I'd rather like to build that robot. If I did, I would very likely use an onboard computer just to have flexibility in reconfiguring its control algorithms, but the controllers themselves are just PID loops. If, having got it to work robustly, I were to hard-wire it, the control circuitry would consist of a handful of analogue components for each joint, and no computer required. I still find it remarkable, how much it can do with so little.

I liked the Alien Space Bat description of a control system. The idea that our psychology is a collection of control systems, originated by a control engineer sounds like the cliche "if you're holding a hammer, everything look like a nail" and I don't know how the belief itself controls anticipation (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/07/making-beliefs-.html). So as of now, I still don't know why I need to know about control theory.

Also, when it comes to self-help, you're in luck -- the number of actually different methods that exist is fairly small, but they are infinitely repeated over and over again in different books, using different language.

My personal sorting tool of choice is looking for specificity of language: techniques that are described in as much sensory-oriented, "near" language as possible, with a minimum of abstraction. I also don't bother evaluating things that don't make claims that would offer an improvement over anything else I've tried, and I have a preference for reading authors who've offered insightful models and useful techniques in the past.

Okay. Another take. Is this really true? How long would it take for a new-commer to walk through every available option? How much would it cost? What is the chance he should expect before starting the whole endeavor that any of the available options will help? For the last question, the lottery analogy fits perfectly, no "works only for ME" excuse.

But in this case it would appear that formal studies were done and failed to back up the claims previously supported by self-experimentation

If you think that's the case, you didn't read the whole Wikipedia page on that, or the cite I gave to a 2001 paper that independently re-creates a portion of NLP's model of emotional physiology. I've seen more than one other peer-reviewed paper in the past that's recreated some portion of "NLP, Volume I", as in, a new experimental result that supports a portion of the NLP model.

Hell, hyperbolic discounting using the visual representation system was explained by NLP submodalities research two decades ago, for crying out loud. And the somatic marker hypothesis is at the very core of NLP. Affective asynchrony? See discussions of "incongruence" and "anchor collapsing" in NLP vI, which demonstrate and explain the existence of duality of affect.

IOW, none of the real research validation of NLP has the letters "N-L-P" on it .

You cannot verify anything by self-experimentation to nearly the same strength as by "properly validated rituals and papers". The control group is not there as impressive ritual. It is there because self-experimentation is genuinely unreliable.

Unreliable for what purpose? I would think that for any individual's purpose, self-experimentation is the ONLY standard that counts... it's of no value to me if a medicine is statistically proven to work 99% of the time, if it doesn't work for ME.

The thing is, it can take a long time until the deep theory to support a given practical advice is discovered and understood. Moving forward through trial and error can give faster and as effective results.

If you look at human history you will find several examples like the making of steel where practical procedures where discovered through massive experimentation centuries before the theoretical basis to understand them.

I'd wager 10 karma points against 1 that this is not the desire Eliezer has imagined for Brennan.

I'd only wager 5 against 1 that he has a specific desire imagined for Brennan.

(Thus begins the prediction market for the Bardic Conspiracy...)

Brennan asked: "Is this the only way in which Bayesian masters come to be, sensei?"

And thought: "How could Jeffreyssai possibly have known before Brennan knew himself?"

He wants to find a better way to train Bayesian masters.

Perhaps there should be a short survey and a full survey? Or every question (or most other than demographics) have a "no answer" as an already marked default? It's a pretty intensive survey unless you spend a lot of time here I think.