[LINK] Interfluidity on "Rational Astrologies"

8 Zvi 11 September 2012 01:00PM

The article can be found here. While it is not, for many of us, new ground, it is an excellent treatment, and it requires no rationalist background in order to be understood. The subject is the pernicious pull of doing the standard thing, regardless of whether or not the standard thing makes any sense, and it does us the service of giving that phenomenon a descriptive link we can share as well as an excellent name.

I hope to, after more discussion and thought, write a main post on the subject.

Quantified Health Prize results announced

44 Zvi 19 February 2012 08:10AM

 

Follow-up to: Announcing the Quantified Health Prize

I am happy to announce that Scott Siskind, better known on Less Wrong as Yvain, has won the first Quantified Health Prize, and Kevin Fischer has been awarded second place. There were exactly five entries, so the remaining prizes will go to Steven Kaas, Kevin Keith and Michael Buck Shlegeris.

The full announcement can be found here until the second contest is announced, and is reproduced below the fold. 

While we had hoped to receive more than five entries, I feel strongly that we still got our money’s worth and more. Scott Siskind and Kevin Fischer in particular put in a lot of work, and provided largely distinct sets of insight into the question. In general, it is clear that much time was usefully spent, and all five entries had something unique to contribute to the problem.

We consider the first contest a success, and intend to announce a second contest in the next few weeks that will feature multiple questions and a much larger prize pool.

Discussion of all five entries follows:Place ($500):

5th Place ($500): Full report

Steven Kaas makes a well-reasoned argument for selenium supplementation. That obviously wasn't a complete entry. It's very possible this was a strategic decision in the hopes there would be less than five other entries, and if so it was a smart gamble that paid off. I sympathize with his statements on the difficulty of making good decisions in this space.

4th Place ($500):

4th Place ($500): Full report

Kevin Keeth’s Recommendation List is as follows: “No quantified recommendations were developed. See ‘Report Body’ for excruciating confession of abject failure.” A failure that is admitted to and analyzed with such honesty is valuable, and I’m glad that Kevin submitted an entry rather than giving up, even though he considered his entry invalid and failure is still failure. Many of the concerns raised in his explanation are no doubt valid concerns. I do think it is worth noting that a Bayesian approach is not at a loss when the data is threadbare, and the probabilistic consequences of actions are highly uncertain. Indeed, this is where a Bayesian approach is most vital, as other methods are forced to throw up their hands. Despite the protests, Kevin does provide strong cases against supplementation of a number of trace minerals that were left unconsidered by other entries, which is good confirmation to have.

3rd Place ($500):

3rd Place ($500): Full report

Michael Buck Shlegeris chose to consider only five minerals, but made reasonable choices of which five to include. None of the recommendations made on those five seem unreasonable, but the reasoning leading to them is unsound. This starts with the decision to exclude studies with less than a thousand participants. While larger sample sizes are obviously better (all else being equal), larger studies also tend to be retrospective, longitudinal monitoring studies and meta-analyses. The conclusions in each section are not justified by the sources cited, and the RDI (while a fine starting point) is leaned on too heavily. There is no cost/benefit analysis, nor are the recommendations quantified. This is a serious entry, but one that falls short.

2nd Place ($1000):

2nd Place ($1000): Full report

Kevin Fischer provides a treasure trove of information, teasing out many fine details that the other entries missed, and presented advocacy of an alternate approach that treats supplementation as a last resort far inferior to dietary modifications. Many concerns were raised about method of intake, ratios of minerals, absorption, and the various forms of each mineral. This is impressive work. There is much here that we will need to address seriously in the future, and we’re proud to have added Kevin Fischer to our research team; he has already been of great help, and we will no doubt revisit these questions.

Unfortunately, this entry falls short in several important ways. An important quote from the paper:

"“Eat food high in nutrients” represents something like the null hypothesis on nutrition - human beings were eating food for millions of years before extracting individual constituents was even possible. “Take supplements” is the alternative hypothesis.

This is an explicitly frequentist, and also Romantic, approach to the issue. Supplementation can go wrong, but so can whole foods, and there’s no reason to presume that what we did, or are currently doing with them, is ideal. Supplementation is considered only as a last resort, after radical dietary interventions have “failed,” and no numbers or targets for it are given. No cost-benefit analysis is done on either supplementation or on the main recommendations.

Winner ($5000): Scott Siskind (Yvain)

Winner: Scott Siskind / Yvain ($5000): Full report

Scott Siskind’s entry was not perfect, but it did a lot of things right. An explicit cost/benefit analysis was given, which was very important. The explanations of the origins of the RDAs were excellent, and overall the analysis of various minerals was strong, although some factors found by Kevin were missed. Two of the analyses raised concerns worth noting: potassium and sodium.

On sodium, the concern was that the analysis treated the case as clear cut when it was not; there have been challenges to salt being bad, as referenced last year by Robin Hanson, and the anti-salt studies are making the two-stage argument that blood pressure causes risks and salt raises blood pressure, rather than looking at mortality. However, the conclusions here are still reasonable, especially for ordinary Americans regularly eating super-stimulus foods loaded with the stuff.

 

Announcing the Quantified Health Prize

50 Zvi 02 December 2011 06:01AM
We are giving away a $5000 prize for well-researched, well-reasoned presentations that answer the following question:
What are the best recommendations for what quantities adults (ages 20-60) should take the important dietary minerals in, and what are the costs and benefits of various amounts
Part of the question is figuring out which ones are important. You may exclude any minerals for which an otherwise reasonable diet will always fall into the right range, or any minerals whose effects are relatively trivial. 
If you have an excellent entry, even if you don’t win the grand prize, you can still win one of four additional cash prizes, you’ll be under consideration for a job as a researcher with our company Personalized Medicine, and you’ll get a leg up in the larger contest we plan to run after this one. You also get to help people get better nutrition and stay healthier. 
Proposal:
Most of us spend a good portion of our time and money trying to figure out what would be best for our health, and then trying to implement those findings. We ask ourselves how to eat, how to exercise, what drugs and supplements to take and what treatments to seek, but everywhere we turn we find different opinions. Even if one reads the primary research, one finds studies riddled with problems. Most studies have an agenda to sell a product or prove a pet theory. They are then filtered by publication bias.  When results are presented, many authors use framing to steer us to the conclusions they want us to draw.
We can and must do better.
We hereby challenge this community to do better.  We're always saying how great and effective rationality is. This is our chance to prove it, and  put those skills to the test. These problems badly need proper application of Less Wrong's favorite techniques, from Bayes' Theorem itself to the correction of a whole host of cognitive biases.
This contest is also a pilot for a larger contest; before we go and put a lot more money on the line and ask more questions, we want a chance to work the kinks out. 
Entries are due by the end of day on January 15, 2012. This is a change of the original deadline, but it will not change again and it will be strictly enforced.
Final judgment will be made by Personalized Medicine’s Chief Science Officer, based on finalists chosen by our expert reviewers. If necessary, Peer Review will first be used to reduce the number of entries to a manageable size. 
The contest page can be found  here, and the FAQ can be found  here.

How I Lost 100 Pounds Using TDT

70 Zvi 14 March 2011 03:50PM

Background Information: Ingredients of Timeless Decision Theory

Alternate Approaches Include: Self-empathy as a source of “willpower”, Applied Picoeconomics, Akrasia, hyperbolic discounting, and picoeconomics, Akrasia Tactics Review

Standard Disclaimer: Beware of Other-Optimizing

Timeless Decision Theory (or TDT) allowed me to succeed in gaining control over when and how much I ate in a way that previous attempts at precommitment had repeatedly failed to do. I did so well before I was formally exposed to the concept of TDT, but once I clicked on TDT I understood that I had effectively been using it. That click came from reading Eliezer’s shortest summary of TDT, which was:

The one-sentence version is:  Choose as though controlling the logical output of the abstract computation you implement, including the output of all other instantiations and simulations of that computation

You can find more here but my recommendation at least at first is to stick with the one sentence version. It is as simple as it can be, but no simpler. 

Utilizing TDT gave me several key abilities that I previously lacked. The most important was realizing that what I chose now would be the same choice I would make at other times under the same circumstances. This allowed me to compare having the benefits now to paying the costs now, as opposed to paying costs now for future benefits later. This ability allowed me to overcome hyperbolic discounting. The other key ability was that it freed me from the need to explicitly stop in advance to make precommitements each time I wanted to alter my instinctive behavior. Instead, it became automatic to make decisions in terms of which rules would be best to follow.

continue reading »

How best to show dying is bad

14 Zvi 08 March 2011 03:18PM
I've been trying to convince my father to support the cause, and ran into resistance on a front that I didn't expect. It's hard to tell how much he's looking for an argument and how much he actually believes what he's advocating, but he doesn't display any behavior that would contradict him believing it and several of us (LauraABJ, SarahC and Andrew) were on hand and unable to shake him.
Today he emailed me these "Thoughts on Immortality"
  1. Our not wanting to die is a bit of irrational behavior selected for by evolution.  The universe doesn’t care if you’re there or not.  The contrasting idea that you are the universe is mystical, not rational.
  2. The idea that you are alive “now” but will be dead “later” is irrational.  Time is just a persistent illusion according to relativistic physics.  You are alive and dead, period.
  3. A cyber-replica is not you.  If one were made and stood next to you, you would still not consent to be shot.
  4. Ditto a meat replica
  5. If you believe the many worlds model of quantum physics is true (Eliezer does), then there already are a vitually infinite number of replicas of you already, so why bother making another one?
Given we'd already been over this several times I decided to try a different approach this tme, so this was my completely off-the-cuff reply:
"Are you here to have an argument? I'm sorry, this is abuse.

Terminal values and preferences are not rational or irrational. They simply are your preferences. I want a pizza. If I get a pizza, that won't make me consent to get shot. I still want a pizza. There are a virtually infinite number of me that DO have a pizza. I still want a pizza. The pizza from a certain point of view won't exist, and neither will I, by the time I get to eat some of it. I still want a pizza, damn it.

Of course, if you think all of that is irrational, then by all means don't order the pizza. More for me."
He's effectively an atheist so no need to worry about that angle. He would be a potentially strong asset were he to come around, and I hate to see him sit around without hope effectively waiting to die; when he tries to do good he doesn't exactly give to the Society for Cute Kittens and Rare Diseases but he's accomplishing far less than he could. I also would feel better knowing he fully supported my signing up for Alcor. More generally, I'd like to figure out how to pierce this sort of argument in a way that makes the person in question actually change his mind.
What else would you try?

NYC Rationalist Diplomacy Post-Game Discussion

8 Zvi 12 January 2011 07:40PM

In addition to the two games currently being played on Less Wrong directly, the NYC group formed a third game; we filled five of the seven slots, with two being taken from an open call on LW when it was clear we would not reach seven players otherwise. While there were some technical problems for a few players, I feel the game was quite interesting. The game can be found here: http://webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameID=42765. Commentary was posted to the discussion group LW-Diplomacy@googlegroups.com which you can access here: http://groups.google.com/group/lw-diplomacy/browse_thread/thread/e8141331abf8a114, which all are free to join and review. These were neutral point of view overviews of the situation, to help bring everyone up to speed, and were done without private knowledge. While some figured out who I was right away, we didn't reveal it explicitly until much later. In terms of the software, a lack of good notifications makes it problematic for games that aren't either very long deadlines or very short, but it is a strong system otherwise.

Also available there are all my communications and my journal, which I updated as the game progressed. I will give an overview here of what happened, as I understand it, and am happy to discuss anything and everything related to the game or Diplomacy in general.

Early on, Italy and Russia quickly realized I was Turkey from my messages, and given my experience in the game and in games in general decided to try and take me out, agreeing on a triple with Austria, while in the west England and Germany formed an alliance against France. In the fall, both Austria and England had technical issues that cost them a center, which served to help keep France viable in the west and position Austria's units in awkward fashion. The first key movement in the game was that Austria decided that he felt that taking me out for who I was wasn't sporting, and so he backstabbed Italy but without making a deal with Turkey because he'd read (correctly) that Austria/Turkey is not a good deal for Austria in general. However, by lying to all and refusing to make a deal with Russia or with Turkey until too late he put us all in a position where it was easier to take him out. France jumped on Italy while he was weak and took advantage of England's struggles and Germany's fleets to realign the west. With Austria out of the way, Russia jumped on Germany and Turkey continued west safe from a Russian stab due to the tactical situation. I spent a lot of the midgame trying to get Russia to stall as much as possible in the north while I made progress in the south, with mixed results as England joined the alliance in exchange for assistance growing and once again becoming relevant. France asked for too much in deals with me and with Italy, forcing him to agree to be a Turkish puppet and me to stick with Russia until I could go for the win outright.

In the Fall of 1906, Russia repeated even louder than usual his request that I leave Black Sea, which of course I had no intention of doing, and it was the natural time for him to try and build a southern fleet. He however had been following orders for some time, although they were strong orders, so he was out of position for a war. I guessed he might move to Romania so I went for Sevastopol, which is harmless if it fails, and I got it, preventing a Russian build. He then backed off since he wanted no war, but I couldn't let him pick up more centers and build a defense, so I pretended to agree to peace and went straight for him; he bought that the first turn's move was defensive so I got two free turns. Meanwhile, Russia pulled off a stab of France to get into Burgundy, so France agreed to let me into the Mid-Atlantic in order to help him survive since I didn't need him dead, but giving me Mid-Atlantic sealed the board's fate unless everyone could perfectly co-ordinate at a minimum, which did not happen (and rarely does in my experience) because Russia broke ranks. I believe that starting in Spring 1908 Turkey probably does have an eventual forced win because he can hold Portugal for years via support cuts but it took me a long time to see it.

The biggest thing that I think is worth noting is that I made painstaking efforts to be friendly and helpful to all players in-game and not to break my word unless absolutely necessary. Early on I couldn't have kept my word to both Austria and Russia if they had both played along, but it never became an issue, then I lied once to Austria, arguably once to France and then once to Russia, and in two of the three cases presumed total war would be the result. I'm curious what other things that came up are considered by others to be worthy of discussion/exploration, and to see the after action reports from the other survivors.