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I do not consume caffeine except for in chocolate. Can anyone think of a not-coffee, not-tea, not-carbonated, not-a-long-list-of-mysterious-chemical-ingredients caffeine source for me to try? (I think there is caffeine powder in the house somewhere, so if the answer is "mix X milligrams caffeine powder in with Y compatible liquid" I can possibly do that.)
As a frequent sufferer of headaches, the only over-the-counter medication that works really well for my headaches are the Excedrin formulations that include acetaminophen, aspirin and caffeine. Each of those ingredients alone is nowhere near as effective in my experience as the combination.
In response to
Meetup : Northern Virginia: Nonviolent Communication
For anybody else who is as puzzled by "NoVa: NVC" as I was, NVC is, judging from this and a few other references, Non-Violent Communication.
Please spell out an acronym the first time you use it in every article. It takes you 20 seconds to do that, and it took me a couple of frustrating minutes of searching, just as it will take others minutes of searching unless they see my comment.
ETA: thank you for the edits.
In response to
What does it take?
Extensive knowledge of my private thoughts, revulsions and desires, in particular the ones embarrassing enough that I've never cared to share them with anyone.
Why would it be more likely that you're speaking to a deity than that you are in a simulation speaking to the principal investigator of an experiment or some other non-theistic scenario?
The difficulty I have with this thought experiment is that I can't decide how to distinguish between the hypothesis that there is a deity with whom I'm now conversing, and the many hypotheses that preserve a purely naturalistic universe in which my brain (or a simulation of my brain) is receiving coherent sensory inputs that make it seem like I'm interacting with a deity who can read my mind and show me absolutely anything I ask for -- he could even give me the memories of having proven the Riemann hypothesis to my satisfaction, of having taken me to my funeral...
My gut feeling is that the simulation hypothesis and some other non-theistic hypotheses have higher prior probability for me, and any evidence for the theistic alternative is also consistent with the simulation and some other hypotheses -- which I guess indicates with a problem with simulation hypothesis in this case, since it's not falsifiable.
In response to
What does it take?
Pascal's wager is about belief in God, not about belief in the afterlife, so that phrase is a bit clumsily inserted there; unless he's telling us that we're going to hell as soon as we believe we're dead, which is a rather strong disincentive to pursue the truth of the matter...
Anyway, I'm not certain I understand the scenario. If we assume he provides no false evidence, then the mere statement "You are dead" should be already considered sufficient evidence, no? (For the sake of simplicity I'm currently ignoring minor scenarios where he's himself mistaken or deluded)
Now, if we don't assume perfect truthfulness, the question becomes more difficult. But at the point where we can be allowed to witness our funeral, converse with the souls of other dead (and ask them in regards to several historical mysteries as well), etc and see that the whole thing fits together as well and as badly as history should, then certainly we'd have increased reason to believe in the existence of afterlife.
We know he doesn't provide false evidence, but the person in the scenario doesn't know that. How could they distinguish between that scenario and the scenario where the gentleman lies when says he will always tell the truth.
LessWrong and Rationality ebooks via Amazon
After just spending some time browsing free nonficton kindle ebooks on Amazon, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea for SIAI/LW to publish for free download through Amazon some introductory LW essays and other useful introductory works like Twelve Virtues of Rationality and The Simple Truth.
People who search for 'rationality' on Google will see Eliezer's Twelve Virtues of Rationality and LW. It would nice if searching for rationality on Amazon also led people to similar resources that could be read on the Kindle with just one click. It would considerably expand the audience of potential readers (and LW contributors and SIAI donors).
In response to
Case Study: Reading Edge's financial filings
I always thought Edge.org was basically Brockman's way of getting cheap publicity for the intellectuals his literary agency represents and the books they are currently selling.
Thanks for the interesting investigation, which largely confirms my suspicion.
In response to
How memory works - video lecture from Stanford
Does anyone have textbooks to recommend on this same topic?
I'm reading Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain at the moment, and it seems a good textbook for people like me who don't have a hardcore background in biology.
A popular non-textbook on the topic of memory in particular is Kandel's In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, which I really liked. The following, by the same author, looks very interesting, and has just gone on my future purchase list: Memory: From Mind to Molecules.
I'm curious to hear opinions from more knowledgeable people than me though.
I don't understand the basis for the Cosmides and Tooby claim. In their first study, Cosmides and Tooby (1996) solved the difficult part of a Bayesian problem so that the solution could be found by a "cut and paste" approach. The second study was about the same with some unnecessary percentages deleted (they were not needed for the cut and paste solution--yet the authors were surprised when performance improved). Study 3 = Study 2. Study 4 has the respondents literally fill in the blanks of a diagram based on the numbers written in the question. 92% of the students answered that one correctly. Studies 5 & 6 returned the percentages and the students made many errors.
Instead of showing innate, perfect reasoning, the study tells me that students at Yale have trouble with Bayesian reasoning when the question is framed in terms of percentages. The easy versions do not seem to demonstrate the type of complex reasoning that is needed to see the problem and frame it without somebody framing it for you. Perhaps Cosmides and Tooby are correct when they show that there is some evidence that people use a "calculus of probability" but their study showed that people cannot frame the problems without overwhelming amounts of help from somebody who knows the correct answer.
Reference
Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (1996). Are humans good intuitive statisticians after all? Rethinking some conclusions from the literature on judgment under uncertainty. Cognition 58, 1–73, DOI: 10.1016/0010-0277(95)00664-8
I agree. I was hoping somebody could make a coherent and plausible sounding argument for their position, which seems ridiculous to me. The paper you referenced shows that if you present an extremely simple problem of probability and ask for the answer in terms of a frequency (and not as a single event), AND you present the data in terms of frequencies, AND you also help subjects to construct concrete, visual representations of the frequencies involved by essentially spoon-feeding them the answers with leading questions, THEN most of them will get the correct answer. From this they conclude that people are good intuitive statisticians after all, and they cast doubt on the entire heuristics and biases literature because experimenters like Kahneman and Tversky don't go to equally absurd lengths to present every experimental problem in ways that would be most intuitive to our paleolithic ancestors. The implication seems to be that rationality cannot (or should not) mean anything other than what the human brain actually does, and the only valid questions and problems for testing rationality are those that would make sense to our ancestors in the EEA.
In response to
Prisoner's Dilemma Tournament Results
This definitely seems like main material to me. Thanks for putting it together and for the very nice summary of results.
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Do you wear a retainer or any other kind of orthodontic device? I still wear a retainer now and then, and I often get a very severe headache the first night I wear it (I only wear it at night sometimes) if I've forgotten to wear it for a longer period than usual.
Don't know if that's at all relevant to your case, but am throwing it out there just in case.