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Wow, too big an inferential distance Phil. No idea what you are tallking about here "what we think of today as individuality, will correspond to information in the future."
Would you mind giving a few more details? Curiosity striking...
Still waiting for OP to deliver...
It's probably just something stupid like he thinks humans will upload on computers and he thinks he knows how future society-analogues will function.
In response to
Open Thread, Jul. 20 - Jul. 26, 2015
One of our cats (really, my cat) escaped a few days ago after a cat carrier accident. In between working to find her and having emotional breakdowns, I find myself wanting to know what the actual odds of recovering her are. I can find statistics for "the percentage of pets at a shelter for whom original owners were found", but not "the percentage of lost pets that eventually make it back to their owners by any means." Can anyone do better? I don't like fighting unknown odds.
Additionally, if anyone has experienced advice for locating lost pets -- specifically an overly anxious indoor cat escaped outdoors -- it would be helpful. We have fliers up around the neighborhood, cat traps in the woods where we believe she's hiding, and trail cameras set up to try and confirm her location. Foot searches are difficult because of the heat and terrain (I came back with heat exhaustion the first day). I guess what I'm specifically looking for from LW is "here is something you should do that you're overlooking because bias X/trying to try/similar."
In my one experience with such a situation, we found our cat (also female, but an outdoor cat) a few days later in a nearby tree. I've seen evidence that other cats also may stay in a single tree for days when scared, notably when a neighbor's indoor cat escaped and was found days later stuck up a tree. Climbing down is more difficult than climbing up, so inexperienced cats getting stuck in trees is somewhat common. My best advice is to check all the nearby trees very thoroughly.
Also, food related sound may encourage her to approach, if there are any she is accustomed to such as food rattling in a dish or taping on a can of cat food with a fork.
In response to
comment
by
on
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102
I've suspected Baba Yaga would be dramatically revealed since the sentence I read her name. Since then there's been no shortage of evidence which can be somehow contorted to confirm my theory.
In response to
comment
by
on
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102
I have some evidence opposing your theory.
EY has made a habit of throwing references to other fanfics in HPMOR. For example, David Monroe is a character in A Black Comedy. Baba Yaga appears in many fanfics, most famously in Turn Me Loose: A Harry Potter Adventure, where she is an immortal Dark Lady.
In response to
Find a study partner - May 2014 Thread
I'll be reading through some math, physics, and engineering textbooks. I'm fine with going through them in any order, so if there's something you are interested in, I can start that any time you want. I expect to be doing only 2 simultaneously.
I like to read through chapters sequentially, and do practice problems. My expectations regarding a study parter are that we agree on which problems to do, both do them and compare answers, and discuss any difficulties.
If you are only interested in one or some of these books, thats fine. I'm going to be reading these anyway and this is simply an invitation to join me, so there's no commitment.
I just started Griffiths' Introduction to Electrodynamics a couple days ago, which is currently the only thing I'm reading. I'll be going at a pace of one chapter per week.
List of book's I'm planning on reading, if anything interests you let me know and I'll do that one next:
- Principles of Applied Statistics by Cox and Donnelly
- Principles of General Thermodynamics by Hatsopoulos
- Transport Phenomena by Bird, Stewart, and Lightfoot
- Introductory Nuclear Physics by Krane
- Control Systems Engineering by Nise
- Nuclear Reactor Engineering by Glasstone and Sesonske
- Advanced Calculus of Several Variables by Edwards Jr.
Lastly, although I know the material well, there are a couple of books I'd enjoy working through again. In the incredibly unlikely event that anyone here wants to read Nuclear Reactor Analysis by Duderstadt and Hamilton or Nuclear Reactor Theory by Lamarsh, I'd be happy to work through the practice problems with you, and help out with any problems you have.
In response to
Self-Study Questions Thread
People vary quite a bit, so this may only apply to a subset of readers. It definitely applies to me. I learn by working backwards much better than by finding a path from basics to an end result.
Also, for a whole lot of topics, "learn X" or even "study X" is not a well-formed intent. There are often an incredibly wide range of activities you could undertake that seem to be leading to your goal(s), but are actually part of a completely different result that happens to share the same name "know X".
Don't attempt to study machine learning. Pick an outcome you want (perhaps building a LessWrong comment classifier), and study enough to get that done. Then pick another outcome, and do that.
Don't attempt to study quantum mechanics. Instead, try to figure out why you should care about the many-worlds interpretation.
Instead, try to figure out why you should care about the many-worlds interpretation.
This strikes me as terrible advice. You're advising people to exclusively read filtered evidence on a topic they know nothing about.
Summary: Trying to use new ideas is more productive than trying to evaluate them.
If you drop the qualifier "new", then you may find something else holds; trying to use evaluated ideas is more productive than trying to use new ones. From personal experience, I've gotten a lot of utility from less wrong threads. Because they are evaluated by the community, I find them more useful.
I rarely post unless I have something constructive to add. One such reason would be if I noticed an error or oversight and think that some reader might benefit from my remark. If I found a post useful however, I just upvote it and don't comment about its usefulness.
Hypothesis: The lack of people using your posts is more perceived than real.
Proposed Test: At the end of a post, ask that if the reader found the post helpful they leave a comment saying something to that effect, instead of just upvoting. Make sure to give a reason for the request to increase participation. i.e. "If you found this post useful, please comment saying so, because I am testing a hypothesis."
In response to
January 2014 Media Thread
Fanfiction Thread
I have an author recommendation: Rathanel. His stories are noteworthy in that all his characters feel like they have agency. While not explicitly rationalist, many of his characters do a good job at weighing evidence and updating their beliefs throughout the stories. Also, (and I'm not quite sure how to phrase this) his worlds feel like they operate on a rational rule set, as opposed to the plot driven rules which many stories seem to follow. He has two series, both in the Naruto-verse.
In The Empty Cage the main character is a demon (the 9 tail fox) who is posing as a human (Naruto). The character is interesting in that he has his own set of non-human morals. There is a spin off story, Swapping the Cage, in which this character is inserted into the canon universe.
Naruto: Ramen Days is a VideoGame!Naruto story. It's written in first person, in the perspective of Canon!Naruto, as he goes through the time travel-like loops of a video game. It has an interesting juxtaposition between a world where rational behavior is optimal (and there are many intelligent characters), and a main character who is really not smart.
There seems to be a definite relation between active recall, the testing effect, spaced repetition, generation, learning in different environments, changing the parameters of learning. They seem to all work with long term memory by either filling short term memory up with different material or waiting until short term memory forgets the material in question. At least, that's my reading of the research.
I found out about these learning effects while researching the interaction between spaced repetition and deliberate practice. I'm starting to think that certain parts of deliberate practice are wrong. Namely conflating measured improvement in a task directly after training with actual learning (ie how much skill you retain after a couple of days).
I would love to know what long term application of these techniques look like. Are you cumulatively improving faster than if you took a more traditional approach(massing many practice problems in one time frame)?
I would love to know what long term application of these techniques look like.
I've only been using SRS for around 6 months, and only starting doing textbooks this way in June, so I have no direct evidence for long term effectiveness. Also, the first five textbooks I Ankified were from classes I had already taken.
Are you cumulatively improving faster than if you took a more traditional approach(massing many practice problems in one time frame)?
Of the texts of previously unlearned material I done this for, most (all but one) have been for classes I am currently taking. In these I have been adding chapters to Anki prior to the material being covered in class and waiting until it's taught in class to do any practice exercises.
Because of this pacing, I haven't been progressing any faster, but I am doing significantly better in those courses than before...
...which might only be because I'm using SRS now when I didn't before.
It actually sounds like you're getting a third effect out of your setup. Namely interleaving.
http://learninglab.uchicago.edu/Publications_files/5-CogsciIddeas2005.pdf
You could probably improve it slightly further by trying to generate your own theories before reading chapters and learning the material in different locations.
Thanks for the link, that was a very interesting read!
The generation technique reminds me a lot of active recall. In both cases doing some sort of work yourself improves retention.
I imagine it works best with theoretical material, and for many topics it would be near impossible to use. For example, recently I've been studying some nuclear physics, which it is very empirically based. The equations are made to fit the experimental data, and so are difficult to generate.
Seemingly a better way to use the technique would be for the material to be presented with key parts missing, and the learner would have to generate just those parts. This, of course, requires specifically prepared material, and not just the conventional textbooks I am using.
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Runaway global warming - small probability event with extinction level consequences. http://arctic-news.blogspot.ru/
Maybe someone better at statistics than me (I'll withhold my own suspicions of the answer) can answer a question:
Given that life has been around for billions of years without very many huge extinction events, it seems likely that the environment is a very stable system and runaway global warming is false.
However, if the environment is an extremely unstable system, such that runaway global warming always results in total extinction of all life, then the anthropic principle comes info effect.
So my question is: Can we actually then say that runaway global warming is a small probability event?