apophenia

People want to tell everything instead of telling the best 15 words. They want to learn everything instead of the best 15 words. In this thread, instead post the best 15-words from a book you've read recently (or anything else). It has to stand on its own. It's not a...

I have several rough drafts of things I'd like to post to Less Wrong. The one I'm currently working on is about Solomonoff Induction. I seem to be best-motivated by active feedback while writing; this thread is mainly to request feedback while writing in the future. If you'd be interesting...

This is a discussion thread about applied rationality. In the comments, please explain an actual problem you have in your life you want to solve. Using their combined powers of rationality, the community can discuss the problem with the poster and eventually propose solutions. My hope is that this will...

I recently wanted to keep track of my income and expenses, in a cost-sensitive way. I am not very good at treating money as a real object, and very few people are good at valuing an expense appropriately. I'd been having some financial difficulties as a result, so I wanted...

Nick Bostrom recently posted the article "Information Hazards", which is about the myriad of ways in which information can harm us. You can read it at his website: Direct PDF Link

I am writing a program to estimate someone's utility function in various common situations. My primary application is to find out how average humans actually devalue utility over time--is it hyperbolic as claimed? However, the same program could be used to make a proxy for yourself in various situations. Someone...

While pondering the AI box problem, I tend to mentally "play" both sides, checking if there are any arguments that could convince me to let an AI out. Several I was nearly convinced by, but others have pointed out the flaws with these arguments. In this post, I will mention...