Are there any newbies wandering these parts? Leave a comment here! I want to know if there's any interest in a weekly/fortnightly/monthly newbie thread?

By newbie, I mean that you've found LessWrong somewhat recently and are getting exposed to many ideas like those in the Sequences but you don't post because you wonder if the things you would talk about get discussed later or might have already been discussed somewhere.

LW has a reputation of being very harsh on newbies, so maybe a newbie thread where we can discuss things without annoying those critical people would give people a place to hang out.

I've been having digestive trouble recently and have started wondering if I've developed a new allergy/intolerance (Known: milk, cashewnuts, chocolate). Does anyone have a recommendation for tests to check for these?

Apparently, "Eight foods account for 90% of all food-allergic reactions: milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts (e.g., walnuts, almonds, cashews, pistachios, pecans), wheat, soy, fish, and shellfish." (source: http://www.foodallergy.org/file/facts-stats.pdf). However, nuts are good for you (eg. https://examine.com/faq/how-can-i-best-ensure-cardiovascular-health-and-longevity/). So what do you do?

I imagine allergies are bad for your body, even apart from the digestive issues. So, do you take any supplements for nuts? The only one I am aware of here is Omega-3, which is common to various nuts.

Sidenote: If you are willing to put a "nuts without allergies" supplement together, I might buy it from you. See https://www.reddit.com/r/Supplements/comments/3ptsz8/i_am_a_supplement_caffeineenergy_pill_company/cw9gwht for business advice.

I've been preparing for coding interviews, and I realized that the skill had gotten "rusty" from disuse. A specific example is coding a binary search, which is a little nontrivial because you have to think carefully to avoid off-by-one errors.

When people talk about old skills they talk about them in two ways: some skills you can supposedly never forget, like riding a bike, Some others can get rusty, so you need to keep brushing them up over and over again.

Neither of these seems actually true. I think it's more like the exponential forgetting curve we have for (verbal) memory. The neurons for the skill still exist but you can't access them after a while, and when you recall the skill, you get to the same level as before. If you keep reinforcing it from time to time, say according to the spaced repetition schedule, the skills become permanent. (I've made the exponential analogy because it would be cool if motor memory and verbal memory had similar mechanisms, but it's just a model that I'm familiar with)

Has anyone heard of something like this in the psych literature?

What are your experiences with skills like these that you don't use as often? Have you made a skill "permanent" through repeated practice.

There is an opinion expressed here, that I agree with: http://smerity.com/articles/2016/tayandyou.html TL;dr: No "learning" from interactions on twitter happened. The bot was parroting old training data, because it does not really generate text. The researchers didn't apply an offensiveness filter at all.

I think this chat bot was performing badly right from the start. It would not make sense to give too much importance to the users it was chatting with, and they did not change its mind. That bit of media sensationalism is BS. Natural language generation is an open problem and almost every method I have seen (not an expert in NLP, but would call myself one in Machine Learning) ends up parroting some of its training text, implying that it is overfitting.

Given this, we should learn nothing about AI from this experiment, only about people's reaction to it, mainly the media reaction to it. Users' reaction while talking to AI is well documented.

[Survey Taken Thread]

By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.

Let's make these comments a reply to this post. That way we continue the tradition, but keep the discussion a bit cleaner.

I recently attended a 10 day intensive Vipassana meditation retreat. Would a write-up of the experience be something LWers are interested in as an article for discussion?

I had minimal to moderate experience in meditation before this but now feel much more comfortable with it. I can see potential rationality relevance through,

* Discipline
* Concentration
* Emotion and habit regulation
* Seeing reality as it is

If there is interest then I would appreciate it if someone is willing to look over a draft of the article for me as I haven't written for LW before.

Hi,

I have two areas I'd like to study: deep learning, and anything on the MIRI research guide. Lots of material is available on both topics, but I'd like to pair up with someone to build a good learning strategy (for lack of a better expression).

I have some knowledge of algebra, probability theory, logic, game theory, machine learning (Master's Degree in Computer Science).

Regarding deep learning, I have a small collection of links, Udacity, and I'm positive learning materials abound now that the field is really popular.

Regarding MIRI's research guide, well, the guide itself provides a lot of links and pointers.

My timezone is CET (UTC+1).

I'm interested in setting up the dev environment. But I'm running into technical issues setting up the VM etc. I expect more such questions will come up. What is the right place to discuss these? Perhaps a channel on the slack? Or do we want something more permanent to help new contributors?

What app does less wrong recommend for to-do lists? I just started using Workflowy (recommended from a LW friend), but was wondering if anyone had strong opinions in favor of something else.

P.S. If you sign up for workflowy here, you get double space.

EDIT: The above link is my personal invite link, and I get told when someone signs up using it, and I get to see their email address. I am not going to do anything with them, but I feel obligated to give this disclaimer anyway.

Tell us about your feed reader of choice.

I've been using Feedly since Google Reader went away, and has enough faults (buggy interface, terrible bookmarking, awkward phone app that needs to be online all the time) to motivate me towards a new one. Any recommendations?