Welcome to Less Wrong! (8th thread, July 2015)

13 Sarunas 22 July 2015 04:49PM
If you've recently joined the Less Wrong community, please leave a comment here and introduce yourself. We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing, what you value, how you came to identify as an aspiring rationalist or how you found us. You can skip right to that if you like; the rest of this post consists of a few things you might find helpful. More can be found at the FAQ.

 

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EXTRA FEATURES:
There's actually more than meets the eye here: look near the top of the page for the "WIKI", "DISCUSSION" and "SEQUENCES" links.
LW WIKI: This is our attempt to make searching by topic feasible, as well as to store information like common abbreviations and idioms. It's a good place to look if someone's speaking Greek to you.
LW DISCUSSION: This is a forum just like the top-level one, with two key differences: in the top-level forum, posts require the author to have 20 karma in order to publish, and any upvotes or downvotes on the post are multiplied by 10. Thus there's a lot more informal dialogue in the Discussion section, including some of the more fun conversations here.
SEQUENCES: A huge corpus of material mostly written by Eliezer Yudkowsky in his days of blogging at Overcoming Bias, before Less Wrong was started. Much of the discussion here will casually depend on or refer to ideas brought up in those posts, so reading them can really help with present discussions. Besides which, they're pretty engrossing in my opinion. They are also available in a book form.

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A note for theists: you will find the Less Wrong community to be predominantly atheist, though not completely so, and most of us are genuinely respectful of religious people who keep the usual community norms. It's worth saying that we might think religion is off-topic in some places where you think it's on-topic, so be thoughtful about where and how you start explicitly talking about it; some of us are happy to talk about religion, some of us aren't interested. Bear in mind that many of us really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false, so starting with the most common arguments is pretty likely just to annoy people. Anyhow, it's absolutely OK to mention that you're religious in your welcome post and to invite a discussion there.

A list of some posts that are pretty awesome

I recommend the major sequences to everybody, but I realize how daunting they look at first. So for purposes of immediate gratification, the following posts are particularly interesting/illuminating/provocative and don't require any previous reading:

More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.

Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site!

 

Once a post gets over 500 comments, the site stops showing them all by default. If this post has 500 comments and you have 20 karma, please do start the next welcome post; a new post is a good perennial way to encourage newcomers and lurkers to introduce themselves. (Step-by-step, foolproof instructions here; takes <180seconds.)

If there's anything I should add or update on this post (especially broken links), please send me a private message—I may not notice a comment on the post.

Finally, a big thank you to everyone that helped write this post via its predecessors!

What does being x% on board with the program of a movement mean?

3 Sarunas 05 January 2015 09:20PM
(Disclaimer: this is an exploration of possibilities of one simple model. Scott Aaronson's story is merely a starting point, merely a motivating example. This post does not claim to somehow reveal some kind of "true motivation" behind people's actions)

Recently Scott Aaronson stated that he is "97% on board with the program of feminism". This post is neither about Scott Aaronson, nor about feminism. It is a post about what does being 97 percent on board even mean. In this particular case it was probably just a figure of speech, I don't think there was anything more than that. But I think the question itself is still interesting. What does "x% agreeing" with another person or movement (let's use the word "movement" quite loosely even for things that wouldn't be called "movements" using everyday language) mean? What does "mostly agreeing" mean? This post presents one (not necessarily the only) possible model of what might be behind statements like these. The model is very simple and, if correct, could shed some light onto one particular aspect of how movements might work.

For the sake of simplicity, in this post I will assume that given a specific concrete question, person1 either agrees, or disagrees with a person2, and, similarly, person1 either agrees or disagrees with a specific point in a movement's program. Then "person1 agreeing with someone about something" is a function that outputs either 0 or 1. The arguments of this function are (person1, person2, question/statement) or (person1, movement, question/statement). Now, given person1 and person2 (or person1 and movement) one can take a list of questions/statements, and calculate the percentage of agreement for this questionnaire. If a movement has a list of statements (in other words, a list of yes/no questions) "what this movement is all about", then we can similarly calculate person1's percentage of agreement with this movement.

For the sake of simplicity, I am talking specifically about concrete and specific yes/no questions and statements. In this case, very broad statements should be understood as being shorthands for long lists of specific statements (i.e. "X should always do Y" should be understood as a shorthand for the list "X should do Y in a situation1", "X should do Y in a situation2", etc.).

The point I am trying to make is this. The length of these lists of questions/statements is usually not very well defined and you can increase the percentage of agreements by stuffing the list with questions and statements with near universal agreement (common sense statements) or you can decrease the percentage of agreement by cutting uncontroversial questions out from the list ("this is common sense, you don't need a movement for that"). And when you lengthen or shorten the list of question, various things happen.

It is my impression that if a person identifies with a movement, then they are likely to see common sense as a part of the program of the movement. The unwritten list of questions and statements is long and it is very easy to get high percentage of agreement. If a person doesn't identify with a movement, they are unlikely to see common sense as a part of "what this movement is all about" (they don't think they need movement1 where common sense is enough). To them, the things movement1 is all about are the things where the movement1 differs from common sense or tries to go beyond common sense. In this case, the list of questions is much shorter since uncontroversial common sense questions aren't included in the list.

For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that you cannot easily drop controversial questions out of the list, as it is beyond the scope of this model.

If, for some reason, a person wants to see himself/herself as agreeing with a movement, but, at the same time, does not want to change their yes/no answers to specific questions, they may try to lengthen the list by including many "easy questions" which are hardly unique to the movement. If a person's views about a movement are unfavourable, then in their minds it is the controversial questions that the movement is all about, in their minds the list is much shorter.

On the other side of the coin, movements often try to attract new people by lengthening their lists by stuffing them with various slogans and platitutes and claiming that they are very important part to their identity.

Suppose person A says that he/she 90% agrees with movement1, and person B says that he/she 40% percent agrees with it. As you can see, it does not necessarily mean that they must disagree about any given concrete question. It is possible that their respective lists of questions are simply different in length, that is, their opinions whether certain common sense statements belong to the discussion about movement1 are different.

However, if you are designing a list for a movement, you cannot add just any question you want to any given list. It is my impression that there must be at least some (real or perceived) disagreement with someone (who is again, real or perceived) about it, otherwise people will not think about that question as a part of your movement. For example, you cannot add support for the law of gravity to the list of things your movement supports and expect that people will actually include this question calculating their percentage of agreements.

Threats, both real and imaginary, are often helpful for movements, because they enable them to add uncontroversial questions and portray them as controversial, thus making it easier to reach high percentages of agreement with people.

If a question stops being controversial over the time, it becomes rarely included into the people's lists of questions, which might lead to decreases in their respective percentages of agreement with movement1, even if it was movement1's supported position that prevailed and became common sense. In this case, movement1 may try to talk a lot about the past and emphasize the small remnants (again, both real or imaginary) of dissent. If a movement no longer has positions that haven't dropped out of the list, it probably stops being considered a movement. At the same time, movements (theoretically) try to win and making your position common sense is a victory in some sense.

It is interesting to think what dynamics this might lead to. It seems that if most movement's positions are becoming common sense, perhaps it has to introduce controversial statements in order to stay a movement. If a movement is too much disagreed with, it may either have to try to distance themselves from controversial questions somehow, or try to stuff their list with a lot of statements that aren't very controversial by trying to emphasize that common sense is part of their identity. Another interesting dynamics might be introduced by geography, where different questions belong to common sense or are controversial in different parts of the world, yet those different parts know about each other.

To sum up, the lists of questions/statements are not strictly defined. People who identify with a movement (but not necessarily agree with every statement) seem to be likely to think of the list as much longer and contain a lot of common sense statements. People who perceive themselves as outsiders are likely to think that uncontroversial common sense statements do not belong to the list.

(feel free to correct mistakes, both grammatical and those related to the content of the post itself, advice on the presentation itself, comments about what was unclear are also appreciated)

[LINK] 2014 Fields Medals and Nevanlinna Prize anounced

2 Sarunas 13 August 2014 10:58AM

http://www.mathunion.org/general/prizes/2014

On August 13, 2014, at the opening ceremony of the [International Congress of Mathematicians](http://www.icm2014.org)) the Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize and several other prizes were announced.
A full list of awardees with short citations:

Fields medals:
Artur Avila

is awarded a Fields Medal for his profound contributions to dynamical systems theory, which have changed the face of the field, using the powerful idea of renormalization as a unifying principle.

Quanta Magazine on Artur Avila

Manjul Bhargava

is awarded a Fields Medal for developing powerful new methods in the geometry of numbers, which he applied to count rings of small rank and to bound the average rank of elliptic curves.

Quanta Magazine on Manjul Bhargava

Martin Hairer

is awarded a Fields Medal for his outstanding contributions to the theory of stochastic partial differential equations, and in particular for the creation of a theory of regularity structures for such equations.

Quanta Magazine on Martin Hairer

Maryam  Mirzakhani

is awarded the Fields Medal for her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces.

Quanta Magazine on Maryam  Mirzakhani

Nevalinna prize:
Subhash Khot

is awarded the Nevanlinna Prize for his prescient definition of the “Unique Games” problem, and leading the effort to understand its complexity and its pivotal role in the study of efficient approximation of optimization problems; his work has led to breakthroughs in algorithmic design and approximation hardness, and to new exciting interactions between computational complexity, analysis and geometry.

Quanta Magazine on Subhash Khot

Gauss Prize:
Stanley Osher

is awarded the Gauss Prize for his influential contributions to several fields in applied mathematics, and for his far-ranging inventions that have changed our conception of physical, perceptual, and mathematical concepts, giving us new tools to apprehend the world.

Chern Medal Award:
Phillip Griffiths

is awarded the 2014 Chern Medal for his groundbreaking and transformative development of transcendental methods in complex geometry, particularly his seminal work in Hodge theory and periods of algebraic varieties.

Leelavati Prize:
Adrián Paenza

is awarded the Leelavati Prize for his decisive contributions to changing the mind of a whole country about the way it perceives mathematics in daily life, and in particular for his books, his TV programs, and his unique gift of enthusiasm and passion in communicating the beauty and joy of mathematics.

In addition to that, Georgia Benkart was announced as the  2014 ICM Emmy Noether lecturer.
It might be interesting to note a curious fact about the new group of Fields medalists:

each of them [is] a notable first for the Fields Medal: the first woman and the first Iranian, Maryam Mirzakhani; the first Canadian, Manjul Bhargava; Artur Avila, the first Brazilian; and Martin Hairer, the first Austrian to win a Fields Medal.

However, this unusual diversity of nationalities does not necessarily translate into a corresponding diversity of institutions, since (according to wikipedia) three out of four winners work in (or at least are affiliated with) universities that have already had awardees in the past.

Some notes on the works by Fields medalists can be found on Terence Tao's blog.

A related discussion on Hacker News.