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Martial arts training camp. Average sleep time was around 4 hours per day, also, guard shifts round the day, so sometimes it ended up being 2. So towards the end of the week I was quite... sleepy. And this seems to have an interesting effect on visual pattern recognition.
One day, me and another guy were standing guard, around 4 in the morning, the sun was just about to come up. Making circles around the countryside weekend house we were staying in, I noticed that some people appeared with a truck and started to pick grapes from the nearby field. I promptly...
k2pdfopt. It slices up pdfs so that you can read them without zooming on a much narrower screen, and since its output pdfs are essentially images, it eats everything up to (and including )very math-heavy papers, regardless of the number of columns they have. Also, it works with scanned stuff too.
(And even though the output is a bit bigger than the originals, I didn't encounter any problems with 600 page books... the result was about 50 megs tops.)
All of this is true in a world where people do research because it's fun and they want to do so. Which is a good assumption if you're sitting on a few million dollars. Unfortunately, that's not the case for most of the people doing research.
That is, research topics are polygamous, but research funds aren't.
Also, for the same reason, choosing to write mediocre papers is a better choice to look productive than attempting to have really cool insights and results and failing doing so: it's hard to tell apart people who failed at stuff from people who did nothing if you are the one to pay them.
Possibly relevant: Sudbury schools, with the curriculum of "do whatever you want, as long as you're in school, surrounded by interesting stuff". Also, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn. It really seems that we are doing quite bad by default...
As it turns out, for example, kids are quite good at learning stuff from each other (including things like reading... "I can't always get the big kids to read me stories, so I'd better go and learn this <> thing from them"...)
Now, find a way to prevent that from happening. Sorting kids by age and separating the groups? Perfect.
Your "running different code" approach is nice... especially paired up with the notion of "how the algorithm feels from the inside", seems to explain lots of things. You can read books about what that code does, but the best you can get is some low quality software emulation... meanwhile, if you're running it, you don't even pay attention to that stuff as this is what you are.
Aren't utility functions kind of... invariant to scaling and addition of a constant value?
That is, you can say that "I would like A more than B" but not "having A makes me happier than you would be having it". Neither "I'm neither happy or unhappy, so me not existing wouldn't change anything". It's just not defined.
Actually, the only place different people's utility functions can be added up is in a single person's mind, that is, "I value seeing X and Y both feeling well twice as much as just X being in such a state"...
You won. Aren't rationalists supposed to be doing that?
As far as you know, your probability estimate for "you will win the lottery" (in your mind) was wrong. It is another question how that updates the probability of "you would win the lottery if you played next week", but whatever made you buy that ticket (even though the "rational" estimates voted against it... "trying random things", whatever it was) should be applied more in the future.
Of course, the result is quite likely to be "learning lots of nonsense fr...
... this is the thing I've been looking for! (I think I had some strange cached thought from who knows where that posts do not have comments feeds, so I didn't even check... thanks for the update!)
Didn't they do the same with set theory? You can derive a contradiction from the existence of "the set of sets that don't contain themselves"... therefore, build a system where you just can't do that.
(of course, coming from the axioms, it's more like "it wasn't ever allowed", like in Kindly's comment, but the "new and updated" axioms were invented specifically so that wouldn't happen.)
Is there a nice way of being notified about new comments on posts I found interesting / commented on / etc? I know there is a "comments" RSS feed, but it's hard to filter out interesting stuff from there.
... or a "number of green posts" indicator near the post titles when listing them? (I know it's a) takes someone to code it b) my gut feeling is that it would take a little more than usual resources, but maybe someone knows of an easier way of the same effect.)
P(Luminosity fan | reads this comment) is probably not a good estimate... (count me in with a "no" data point though :)) Also, what is the ratio of "Luminosity fan because of Twilight" and "read it even though... Twilight, and liked it" populations?
(with "read Twilight because of Luminosity" also a valid case.)
Also, who is the target audience and what are the plans for reaching it? I don't think there are many people who are willing to invest time AND money into a book like this while still not having read the sequences (available freely on the web, and also in all kinds of e-book formats).
For the two use cases I imagine at the moment:
giving it as a gift as an introduction to rationalist stuff feels better with a physical book indeed. Yes, there is a difference between buying an e-book for yourself and downloading the same stuff for free, especially in terms o
The point is that it's not, but making it so is a design goal of the paper.
Example: Mario immediately jumping into a pit at level 2. According to the learned utility function of the system, it's a good idea. According to ours, it's not.
Just as with optimizing smiling faces. But while that one was purely a thought experiment, this paper presents a practical, experimentally testable benchmark for utility function learning, and, by the way, shows a not-yet-perfect but working solution for it. (After all, Mario's Flying Goomba Kick of High Munchkinry definitely satisfies our utility functions.)
I heard the opposite too: don't try to push your own research too hard, especially in the beginning, but try to find something the others in the lab group are working on, learn stuff from them, and after a while you'll end up with your own ideas anyway.
Pros and cons for both of the approaches exist, but "picking a thesis early on" might be hard as you don't necessarily know what the good problems are in your field. But that might depend on your field / advisor too.
You see that you won't get stuck: that you'll finish relatively fast.
Do you know of a way for estimating this? Every research problem (and the entire PhD itself) might look much easier before you start working on it (you don't have an outside view perspective before starting).
This thing looks more and more relevant as I think about it. What it does is not just optimizing an objective function in a weird and unexpected way, but actually learning it in all its complicatedness from observed human behavior.
Would it be an overestimation to call this a FAI research paper?
Wow. First thought: who is this guy who submits a really cool scientific result to a thing like SIGBOVIK? He could have sent this thing to a real conference! It's a thing no one has ever tried!
Then I checked out his website. The academic one. And the others.
Well, short description: "Superhero of Productivity". The list of stuff he created doesn't fit on his site. Sites. Also, see this remark of his,
One of the best things about grad school was that if you get your work done then you get to do other stuff too.
(I'm also at CS grad school, am happy if I have time to sleep, and my only productive output is... LW comments... does that count?)
In the class I TA for, the students can go to the professor's office hours after the midterm / final, and if they can solve the problem there, they still get... half of the points? I wonder how that one affects test-taking performance.
Also, this whole thing seems to be annoyingly resistant to Bayesian updates... "Every time I'm anxious I perform bad, and now I'm worried about being too worried for this exam", and, since performing bad is a very valid prediction in this state of mind, worry is there to stay.
Maybe if the tests are called "quizzes" the students end up in the other stable state of "not being worried"?
... I did my fair share too, Santa vs. thin threads spun across the way between where the presents were supposed to emerge and the door... "stand back, I'm going to try Science" for the first time I remember.
Actually, it was a really nice experience not only about Science but also about how compartmentalization feels from the inside. I definitely remember thinking both that it's my parents and that it's some kind of mystical thingy, the only new thing that year was that these two aren't supposed to coexist in the same world. Not surprisingly, it's the very same feeling that I felt after being exposed to a semester of catholic middle school. Didn't have a name for it then though...