http://www.ledger-cli.org/ is minimalist in some dimensions, I think less so in others.

Fiction Books Thread

Sometimes I will be talking to a student, and be perfectly happy to talk with her until a minute before my next class starts, but I'm uncertain of the time. If I make any visible effort to look at the time, however, she will take it as a sign that I want to immediately end our conversation, so I could use your described device.

thanks for the info!

are there any list (wikipedia list like) of all programs that calculates Bayesian probability's?

Actually, I think that LessWrong used to be worse when the "impressive people" were posting about cryonics, FAI, many-world interpretation of quantum mechanics, and so on.

I prefer public discussions. First, I'm a computer science student who took courses in machine learning, AI, wrote theses in these areas (nothing exceptional), I enjoy books like Thinking Fast and Slow, Black Swan, Pinker, Dawkins, Dennett, Ramachandran etc. So the topics discussed here are also interesting to me. But the atmosphere seems quite closed and turning inwards.

I feel similarities to reddit's Red Pill community. Previously "ignorant" people feel the community has opened a new world to them, they lived in darkness before, but now they found the "Way" ("Bayescraft") and all this stuff is becoming an identity for them.

Sorry if it's offensive, but I feel as if many people had no success in the "real world" matters and invented a fiction where they are the heroes by having joined some great organization much higher above the general public, who are just irrational automata still living in the dark.

I dislike the heavy use of insider terminology that make communication with "outsiders" about these ideas quite hard because you get used to referring to these things by the in-group terms, so you get kind of isolated from your real-life friends as you feel "they won't understand, they'd have to read so much". When actually many of the concepts are not all that new and could be phrased in a way that the "uninitiated" can also get it.

There are too many cross references in posts and it keeps you busy with the site longer than necessary. It seems that people try to prove they know some concept by using the jargon and including links to them. Instead, I'd prefer authors who actively try to minimize the need for links and jargon.

I also find the posts quite redundant. They seem to be reiterations of the same patterns in very long prose with people's stories intertwined with the ideas, instead of striving for clarity and conciseness. Much of it feels a lot like self-help for people with derailed lives who try to engineer their life (back) to success. I may be wrong but I get a depressed vibe from reading the site too long. It may also be because there is no lighthearted humor or in-jokes or "fun" or self-irony at all. Maybe because the members are just like that in general (perhaps due to mental differences, like being on the autism spectrum, I'm not a psychiatrist).

I can see that people here are really smart and the comments are often very reasonable. And it makes me wonder why they'd regard a single person such as Yudkowsky in such high esteem as compared to established book authors or academics or industry people in these areas. I know there has been much discussion about cultishness, and I think it goes a lot deeper than surface issues. LessWrong seems to be quite isolated and distrusting towards the mainstream. Many people seem to have read stuff first from Yudkowsky, who often does not reference earlier works that basically state the same stuff, so people get the impression that all or most of the ideas in "The Sequences" come from him. I was quite disappointed several times when I found the same ideas in mainstream books. The Sequences often depict the whole outside world as dumber than it is (straw man tactics, etc).

Another thing is that discussion is often too meta (or meta-meta). There is discussion on Bayes theorem and math principles but no actual detailed, worked out stuff. Very little actual programming for example. I'd expect people to create github projects, IPython notebooks to show some examples of what they are talking about. Much of the meta-meta-discussion is very opinion-based because there is no immediate feedback about whether someone is wrong or right. It's hard to test such hypotheses. For example, in this post I would have expected an example dataset and showing how PCA can uncover something surprising. Otherwise it's just floating out there although it matches nicely with the pattern that "some math concept gave me insight that refined my rationality". I'm not sure, maybe these "rationality improvements" are sometimes illusions.

I also don't get why the rationality stuff is intermixed with friendly AI and cryonics and transhumanism. I just don't see why these belong that much together. I find them too speculative and detached from the "real world" to be the central ideas. I realize they are important, but their prevalence could also be explained as "escapism" and it promotes the discussion of untestable meta things that I mentioned above, never having to face reality. There is much talk about what evidence is but not much talk that actually presents evidence.

I needed to develop a sort of immunity against topics like acausal trade that I can't fully specify how they are wrong, but they feel wrong and are hard to translate to practical testable statements, and it just messes with my head in the wrong way.

And of course there is also that secrecy around and hiding of "certain things".

That's it. This place may just not be for me, which is fine. People can have their communities in the way they want. You just asked for elaboration.

empirically we are massively losing out by limiting the audience of LW to TOUGH GUYS who can HANDLE CRITICISM

First, not audience but content creators, but second, is this so? Did any of the really valuable contributors to LW go away because they were driven away by incessant criticism? You think Scott Alexander moved to SSC because he couldn't handle the downvotes?

The general cry here seems to be "We want more content!". Well, I don't want more content. I have a whole internet full of content. What I want is more high-quality content that I do not need to search through piles of manure to find. The great advantage of LW is that here pearls are frequent but bullshit is rare -- and I attribute this in not a small degree to the fact that you'll be punished (by downvotes and comments) for posting bullshit.

A system without downvotes encourages posting, true, but it encourages posting of everything including cat pictures and ruminations on a breakfast sandwich in three volumes. Someone has to do pruning and if you take this power away from the users, it'll fall to the moderators. I don't see why this would be better -- and people whose cat got disrespected will still be unhappy.

Mathematicians have come up with formal languages that can, in principle, be used to write proofs in a way that they can be checked by a simple algorithm. However, they're utterly impractical. Most proofs leave some amount of detail to the reader. A proof might skip straightforward algebraic manipulations. It might state an implication and leave the reader to figure out just what happened. Actually writing out all the details (in English) would at least double the length of most proofs. Put in a formal language, and you're looking at an order-of-magnitude increase in length.

That's a lot of painstaking labor for even a simple proof. If the problem is the least bit interesting, you'll spend a lot more time writing out the details for a computer than you did solving it.

Just how bad of an idea is it for someone who knows programming and wants to learn math to try to work through a mathematics textbook with proof exercises, say Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis, by learning a formal proof system like Coq and using that to try to do the proof exercises?

I'm figuring, hey, no need to guess whether whatever I come up with is valid or not. Once I get it right, the proof assistant will confirm it's good. However, I have no idea how much work it'll be to get even much simpler proofs that what are expected of the textbook reader right, how much work it'll be to formalize the textbook proofs even if you do know what you're doing and whether there are areas of mathematics where you need an inordinate amount of extra work to get machine-checkable formal proofs going to begin with.