The unprecedented gap in Methods of Rationality updates prompts musing about whether readership is increasing enough & what statistics one would use; I write code to download FF.net reviews, clean it, parse it, load into R, summarize the data & depict it graphically, run linear regression on a subset & all reviews, note the poor fit, develop a quadratic fit instead, and use it to predict future review quantities.

Then, I run a similar analysis on a competing fanfiction to find out when they will have equal total review-counts. A try at logarithmic fits fails; fitting a linear model to the previous 100 days of _MoR_ and the competitor works much better, and they predict a convergence in <5 years.

Master version: http://www.gwern.net/hpmor#analysis

A time dilation tool from an anime is discussed for its practical use on Earth; there seem surprisingly few uses and none that will change the world, due to the severe penalties humans would incur while using it, and basic constraints like Amdahl's law limit the scientific uses. A comparison with the position of an Artificial Intelligence such as an emulated human brain seems fair, except most of the time dilation disadvantages do not apply or can be ameliorated and hence any speedups could be quite effectively exploited. I suggest that skeptics of the idea that speedups give advantages are implicitly working off the crippled time dilation tool and not making allowance for the disanalogies.

Master version on gwern.net

Luke/SI asked me to look into what the academic literature might have to say about people in positions of power. This is a summary of some of the recent psychology results.

The powerful or elite are: fast-planning abstract thinkers who take action (1) in order to pursue single/minimal objectives, are in favor of strict rules for their stereotyped out-group underlings (2) but are rationalizing (3) & hypocritical when it serves their interests (4), especially when they feel secure in their power. They break social norms (5, 6) or ignore context (1) which turns out to be worsened by disclosure of conflicts of interest (7), and lie fluently without mental or physiological stress (6).

What are powerful members good for? They can help in shifting among equilibria: solving coordination problems or inducing contributions towards public goods (8), and their abstracted Far perspective can be better than the concrete Near of the weak (9).

1. Galinsky et al 2003; Guinote, 2007; Lammers et al 2008; Smith & Bargh, 2008
2. Eyal & Liberman
3. Rustichini & Villeval 2012
4. Lammers et al 2010
5. Kleef et al 2011
6. Carney et al 2010
7. Cain et al 2005; Cain et al 2011
8. Eckel et al 2010
9. Slabu et al; Smith & Trope 2006; Smith et al 2008

A while ago I wrote briefly on why the Singularity might not be near and my estimates badly off. I saw it linked the other day, and realized that pessimism seemed to be trendy lately, which meant I ought to work on why one might be optimistic instead: http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#counter-point

(Summary: long-sought AI goals have been recently achieved, global economic growth & political stability continues, and some resource crunches have turned into surpluses - all contrary to long-standing pessimistic forecasts.)

Critical thinking courses may increase students’ rationality, especially if they do argument mapping.

The following excerpts are from “Does philosophy improve critical thinking skills?”, Ortiz 2007.

1 Excerpts

This thesis makes a first attempt to subject the assumption that studying [Anglo-American analytic] philosophy improves critical thinking skills to rigorous investigation.

…Thus the second task, in Chapter 3, is to articulate and critically examine the standard arguments that are raised in support of the assumption (or rather, would be raised if philosophers were in the habit of providing support for the assumption). These arguments are found to be too weak to establish the truth of the assumption. The failure of the standard arguments leaves open the question of whether the assumption is in fact true. The thesis argues at this point that, since the assumption is making an empirical assertion, it should be investigated using standard empirical techniques as developed in the social sciences. In Chapter 4, I conduct an informal review of the empirical literature. The review finds that evidence from the existing empirical literature is inconclusive. Chapter 5 presents the empirical core of the thesis. I use the technique of meta-analysis to integrate data from a large number of empirical studies. This meta-analysis gives us the best yet fix on the extent to which critical thinking skills improve over a semester of studying philosophy, general university study, and studying critical thinking. The meta-analysis results indicate that students do improve while studying philosophy, and apparently more so than general university students, though we cannot be very confident that this difference is not just the result of random variation. More importantly, studying philosophy is less effective than studying critical thinking, regardless of whether one is being taught in a philosophy department or in some other department. Finally, studying philosophy is much less effective than studying critical thinking using techniques known to be particularly effective such as LAMP.

Yesterday I finished transcribing "The Ups and Downs of the Hope Function In a Fruitless Search". This is a statistics & psychology paper describing a simple probabilistic search problem and the sheer difficulty subjects have in producing the correct Bayesian answer. Besides providing a great but simple illustration of the mind projection fallacy in action, the simple search problem maps onto a number of forecasting problems: the problem may be looking in a desk for a letter that may not be there, but we could also look at a problem in which we check every year for the creation of AI and ask how our beliefs change over time - which turns out to defuse a common scoffing criticism of past technological forecasting. (This last problem was why I went back and used it, after I first read of it.)

The math is all simple - arithmetic and one application of Bayes's law - so I think all LWers can enjoy it, and it has amusing examples to analyze. I have also taken the trouble to annotate it with Wikipedia links, relevant materials, and many PDF links (some jailbroken just for this transcript). I hope everyone finds it as interesting as I did.

I thank John Salvatier for doing the ILL request which got me a scan of this book chapter.

ciphergoth just asked what the actual value of Quantified Self/self-experimentation is. This finally tempted me into running value of information calculations on my own experiments. It took me all afternoon because it turned out I didn’t actually understand how to do it and I had a hard time figuring out the right values for specific experiments. (I may not have not gotten it right, still. Feel free to check my work!)  Then it turned out to be too long for a comment, and as usual the master versions will be on my website at some point. But without further ado!

Master copy lives on gwern.net

See previously “A good volunteer is hard to find”

Back in February 2012, lukeprog announced that SIAI was hiring more part-time remote researchers, and you could apply just by demonstrating your chops on a simple test: review the psychology literature on habit formation with an eye towards practical application. What factors strengthen new habits? How long do they take to harden? And so on. I was assigned to read through and rate the submissions and Luke could then look at them individually to decide who to hire. We didn’t get as many submissions as we were hoping for, so in April Luke posted again, this time with a quicker easier application form. (I don’t know how that has been working out.)

But in February, I remembered the linked post above from GiveWell where they mentioned many would-be volunteers did not even finish the test task. I did, and I didn’t find it that bad, and actually a kind of interesting exercise in critical thinking & being careful. People suggested that perhaps the attrition was due not to low volunteer quality, but to the feeling that they were not appreciated and were doing useless makework. (The same reason so many kids hate school…) But how to test this?

Previous: http://lesswrong.com/lw/6ya/link_get_paid_to_train_your_rationality/

The IARPA-run forecasting contest remains ongoing. Season 1 has largely finished up, and groups are preparing for season 2. Season 1 participants like myself get first dibs, but http://goodjudgmentproject.com/ has announced in emails they have spots open for first-time participants! I assume the other groups may have openings as well.

I personally found the tournament a source of predictions to stick on PB.com and I even did pretty well in GJP. (When I checked a few weeks ago, I was ranked 28 of 203 in my experimental group.) I haven't been paid my honorarium yet, though.