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People with pet rats notice personality differences.
Rats do have personality differences and I would expect people to 'notice' differences in personality even if they didn't exist.
Rats even seem to have IQ of sorts. Truly, our fuzzy little friends are often underestimated.
In response to
Rationality Quotes September 2012
Qhorin Halfhand: The Watch has given you a great gift. And you only have one thing to give in return: your life.
Jon Snow: I'd gladly give my life.
Qhorin Halfhand: I don’t want you to be glad about it! I want you to curse and fight until your heart’s done pumping.
--Game of Thrones, Season 2.
Reminds me of Patton:
No man ever won a war by dying for his country. Wars were won by making the other poor bastard die for his. You don't win a war by dying for your country.
In response to
Open Thread, September 1-15, 2012
This discussion thread is insane.
Essentially, Eliezer gets negative karma for some of his comments (-13, -4, -12, -7) explaining why he thinks the new changes of karma rules are a good thing. To compare, even the obvious trolls usually don't get -13 comment karma.
What exactly is the problem? I don't think that for a regular commenter, having to pay 5 karma points for replying to a negatively voted comment is such a problem. Because you will do it only once in a while, right? Most of your comments will still be reactions to articles or to non-negatively voted comments, right? So what exactly is this problem, and why this overreaction? Certainly, there are situations where replying to a negatively voted comment is the right thing to do. But are they the exception, or the rule? Because the new algorithm does not prevent you from doing this; it only provides a trivial disincentive to do so.
What is happening here?
A few months ago LW needed an article to defend that some people here really have read the Sequences, and that recommending Sequences to someone is not an offense. What? How can this happen on a website which originally more or less was the Sequences? That seemed absurd to me, and so does this; as if both suggest that LW is becoming less what it was, and more a general discussion forum.
I suggest everyone to think for a moment about the fact that Eliezer somehow created this site, wrote a lot of content people consider useful, and made some decisions about the voting system, which together resulted in a website we like. So perhaps this is some Bayesian evidence that he knows what he is doing. And even in the case this would turn out to be a mistake, it would be easy to revert. Also, everyone here is completely free to create a competing x-rationalist website, if your worst nightmares about LW come true. (And then I want to see how you solve the problem of trolling there, when it suddenly becomes your responsibility.)
Recently we had also a few articles about how to make LW more popular; how to attract more readers and participants. Well, if that happens, we will need more strict moderation than we have now; otherwise we will drown in the noise. For instance, within this week we have a full screen of "Discussion" articles, some of them containing 86, 103, 191 comments. How many of those comments contain really useful information? What is your estimate, how many of that information will you remember after one week? Do you think that visiting LW once in a week is enough to deal with that amount of information? Or do you just ignore most of that? How big part of a week can you spend online reading LW, and still pretending you are being rational instead of procrastinating?
Perhaps LW needs more users, but it probably needs less text per week (certainly not more); both articles and comments. Less chatting, more thinking, better expressing ourselves. More moderation is needed. And most of you are not going to pay for human moderators, so I think you should just accept the existing rules, and their changes. Or you can always make a competing website, you know; but you won't do it, and you also know why.
I suggest everyone to think for a moment about the fact that Eliezer somehow created this site, wrote a lot of content people consider useful, and made some decisions about the voting system, which together resulted in a website we like. So perhaps this is some Bayesian evidence that he knows what he is doing.
There's also plenty of Bayesian evidence he's not that great at moderation. SL4 was enough of an eventual failure to prompt the creation of OB; OB prompted the creation of LW; he failed to predict that opening up posting would lead to floods of posts like it did for LW; he signally failed to understand that his reaction to Roko's basilisk was pretty much the worst possible reaction he could engage in, such that even now it's still coming up in print publications about LWers; and this recent karma stuff isn't looking much better.
I am reminded strongly of Jimbo Wales. He too helped create a successful community but seemed to do so accidentally as he later supported initiatives that directly undermined what made that community function.
Thanks for this suggestion.
I also suggested to look for such a phenomenon in vampire bats, and other reciprocating species. Do bats stop co-operating after a certain age? (Or do other bats stop co-operating with them?)
In my experience, old people are LESS likely to defect in Prisoner's dilemma, as judged by real-life instances. And other people are less likely to defect when interacting with them. This fact is worthy of some explanation, as it's not what the basic theory of reciprocal altruism would predict.
The best explanation I've heard so far on the thread is that it is because of reputation post-mortem affecting relatives. This requires a social context where the "sins of the father are visited on the son" (to quote Randaly's example).
One potential confound is that the rewards may not scale right: the older you are, often the wealthier you are. A kindergartner might be thrilled to defect for $1, while an old person can barely be troubled to stoop for a $1 bill.
It took you this long to understand why people have issues with evolutionary psychology? -1 respect points, Eliezer.
Note that, on gender issues at least, it also pattern-matches very strongly to the "scientific racism" of the 19th and early 20th century.
It is not as if we have no half-baked evopsych theorizing here; and there's Hanson, who is particularly guilty. Who can read some of his wilder posts and not regard it was a wee bit discrediting of evopsych?
A larger head makes death during childbirth easier, so I'd expect evolution to be optimizing processing power per unit volume even today.
Unfortunately, neurons are about as efficient in most species - they're already as optimized as you get. For that and other interesting facts, see http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/06/19/1201895109.abstract
In response to
Where to Intervene in a Human?
What the argument that neurofeedback has a relatively low utility?
Perhaps it's the expense? I looked into it very briefly, and apparently professional neurofeedback costs thousands of dollars!
I read it long ago, in a Spanish translation from French. It seems the book has not been published in English. The original title is Dossiers secrets de l'histoire, by Alain Decaux.
That reduces the value of the example, IMO. Political conspiracy stuff relies on so much contextual material and government records that it's hard for a foreigner to make a good appraisal of what went on. It would be like a monolingual American trying to make heads or tails of that incident decades ago (whose name escapes me at the moment) where a high-level Communist Party official died in a airplane crash with his family; was it a normal accident, or was he fleeing a failed coup attempt to Russia, as the conspiracy/coverup interpretations went? If you can't even read Chinese, I have no idea how one could make a even half-decent attempt to judge the incident.
I'm considering sanitizing the personal parts (comments I've made, on the data, any data I wouldn't want public, etc.) and posting it when I make my post on it. I'm still not sure how I feel about that. But long story short, I don't mind giving that to you at all.
This is a screenshot of the graphing worksheet I made for reporting (categorical) statistics. (By the way, I was misremembering when I wrote that, the significance is only there for clear days, not cloudy. And there's really not enough data on rainy and drizzle days to say anything.) The p-value column displays the p-value of a one tailed T test with unequal variances between the first variable set (in this case stormy weather) and the indicated variable set. So I eat as much or less food (the null hypothesis) on a clear day as I do on a stormy day with probability 0.012164. I'm sure you can extrapolate the rest. What's cool about this is all I have to do is change the variables in the red boxes and it'll automatically report anything. The excel formulas are... long.
It should be noted though, that in my second iteration of my journal, I'm changing both the way I record food and the way I record weather. First of all, when I started this the first time, it somehow didn't occur to me to record the weather. Which is kind of dumb of me, given all of the scientific literature. So I went back and looked it up retroactively for the first 3-ish months of data. Secondly, I only gave one description for the entire day, which was generally the most severe weather we had that day. So if it stormed for an hour, I recorded it as stormy, even though it may have been cloudy or clear most of the day. Now I record a morning weather and an evening weather, which hopefully should be much more precise. I still look at the same website to help myself, but it's tempered with my own observations too. I also use that website to grab the average temperature for the day though.
Also, I'm now recording an average hunger level instead of "food eaten". The "food eaten" label made me want to add, not average. If I ate a huge meal right before bed, and starved the entire day, my moods were primarily affected by the starvation, not the meal - that's my primary motivation.
Edit: I forgot to explain the scale. For most of my quantitative measurements, 50 is supposed to be how I feel on an average day. So 50 should be eating a "normal" amount of food for me.
Also, I took this screenshot just to show how the red boxes work. You change them and the rest automatically updates. Ironically, exercise is the only qualitative variable that I don't keep track of using the 50 = average system, most notably because average for me is not really doing anything.
I'd like to hear more about what results you've derived from analyzing the data, FWIW.
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Speculative: the Singularity Summit Australia 2011 was held in late August that year during the National Science Week. Then again, could be a case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Could be no cause other than the variance chiming in, which is to be expected from time to time.
What about Methods of Rationality? September 2011 is mid-way through its upswing. I see no easy way to quantify reviews, though, short of manually going through the thousands on FF.net...