"There are 729,500 single women my age in New York City. My picture and profile successfully filtered out 729,499 of them and left me with the one I was looking for."

I know this is sort of meant as a joke, but I feel like one of the more interesting questions that could be addressed in an analysis like this is what percentage of the women in the dating pool could you actually have had a successful relationship with. How strong is your filter and how strong does it need to be? There's a tension between trying to find/obtain the best of many possible good options, and trying to find the one of a handful of good options in a haystack of bad ones.

I'm somewhat amazed that you looked at 300 profiles, read 60 of them, and liked 20 of them enough to send them messages. Only 1 in 5 potential matches met your standards for appearance, but 1 in 3 met your standards based on what they wrote, and that's not even taking into account the difference in difficulty between reading a profile and composing a message.

You make a big deal about the number of people available online, but in your previous article on soccer players you implied that the average had a much larger effect on the tails than the average did. If you're really looking for mates in the tails of the distribution, and 1 in 729,500 is about 4.5 sigma event, then being involved in organizations whose members are much more like your ideal mate on average may be a better strategy than online dating.

[Playground] In this sub-thread you may try polls without anybody being getting angry with you (except possibly some DBA if you really overdo it).

Example: Use this as an example:

[poll]{Option 1}{Option 2}{Option n}

(note: you can see this verbatim because I escaped the "[" with "\" in the comment (another nice trick))

Don't be surprised if you edit your poll later and find this replaced by something like

[poll\:12345]

this is to ensure that your poll stays the same after you edited the other parts of the comment.

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).

It's a bit hard for RNN's to learn, but they can end up much better than humans.

After some engineering effort. Researchers didn't just throw a random RNN at the problem in 1990 and found they worked as great as transistors at arithmetic... Plus, if you want to pick extremes (the best RNNs now), are the best RNNs better at adding or multiplying extremely large numbers than human savants?

Humans are not bad at math. We are excellent at math. We can calculate the best trajectory to throw a ball into a hoop, the exact way to move our jiggly appendages to achieve it, accounting for a million little details, all in a blink of an eye. Few if any modern computers can do as well.

The problem is one of the definition: we call "math" the part of math that is HARD FOR HUMANS. Because why bother giving a special name to something that does not require special learning techniques?

How do you get the top portion of the second payoff matrix from the first? Intuitively, it should be by replacing the Agent A's payoff with the sum of the agents' payoffs, but the numbers don't match.

Most people are altruists but only to their in-group, and most people have very narrow in-groups. What you mean by an altruist is probably someone who is both altruistic and has a very inclusive in-group. But as far as I can tell, there is a hard trade-off between belonging to a close-knit, small in-group and identifying with a large, diverse but weak in-group. The time you spend helping strangers is time taken away from potentially helping friends and family.

Fiction is written from inside the head of the characters. Fiction books are books about making choices, about taking actions and seeing how they play out, and the characters don't already know the answers when they're making their decisions. Fiction books often seem to most closely resemble the problems that I face in my life.

Books that have people succeed for the wrong reasons I can put down, but watching people make good choices over and over and over again seems like a really useful thing. Books are a really cheap way to get some of the intuitive advantages of additional life experience. You have to be a little careful to pick authors that don't teach you the wrong lessons, but in general I haven't found a lot of histories or biographies that really try to tackle the problem of what it's like to make choices from the inside in an adequate way. If you've read lots of historically accurate works that do manage to give easily digested advice on how to make good decisions, I'd love to see your reading list.

On a very basic level, I am an algorithm receiving a stream of sensory data.

So, do you trust that sensory data? You mention reality, presumably you allow that objective reality which generates the stream of your sensory data exists. If you test your models by sensory data, then that sensory data is your "facts" -- something that is your criterion for whether a model is good or not.

I am also not sure how do you deal with surprises. Does sensory data always wins over models? Or sometimes you'd be willing to say that you don't believe your own eyes?

two discrete steps totalling just 5 years

At this rate of change we are not talking about climate. The ice core data essentially measures certain characteristics of dust in the atmosphere. Even in recorded history we had things like volcano eruptions causing a "year without summer". It's not like glaciers can noticeably react to weather/climate abnormalities on a scale of years, anyway.

group selection

When you said "more closely linked to genetic self-interest than to personal self-interest" did you mean the genetic self-interest of the entire species or did you mean something along the lines of Dawkins' Selfish Gene? I read you as arguing for interests of the population gene pool. If you are talking about selfish genes then I don't see any difference between "genetic self-interest" and "personal self-interest".

is a series of appeals of to authority

Kinda, but the important thing is that you can go and check. In your worldview, how do you go and check yourself? Or are "streams of sensory data" sufficiently syncronised between everyone?

If children are such a good investment, why did we need a modest proposal?

Because, like with all investements, the future is uncertain, returns are not guaranteed, there are occasional crashes, and a lot of general variability.

And why are the rich, who retirements are not in doubt, so desirous of children?

Because children are not only investments in one's old age, they are useful for many other purposes (e.g. dynastic). And, of course, the rich have the same hardwired biological urges. Besides, sometimes children are just a side-effect that the rich or the powerful don't care much about (see e.g. Ottoman sultans).

Fact just isn't an epistemological category that I have, and it's not one that I find useful. There are only models.

So how you choose between different models, then? If there are no facts, what are your criteria? Why is the model of lizard overlords ruling the Earth any worse than any other model?

You use expressions like "because it's always been true in the past", but what do you mean by "true"?

aspect of the climate system that consistently and frequently chnages between glacial and near-interglacial conditions in periods of less than a decade, and on occassion as rapidly as three years

I am not sure this interpretation of the data surivived -- see e.g. this:

Here it is shown that in general, the flickers seen in ECM records probably reflect the highly non-linear response of electrical conductivity as ice approaches acid/base neutrality, rather than significant changes in the climate system.

...

I am making the argument that it is unlikely that people choose to have children in order to obtain those advantages.

Yes, and would you like to present some evidence in favour of that argument?

I am making the argument that the decline in birthrate in unlikely to be due to people adjusting the number of children they have as part of a retirement plan.

Do you have an alternative explanation for the decline in birthrate in mind? You have previously said that people just followed the lead of the elites, but why did the elites reduce their birthrate?

my assertion that human behavior is more closely linked to genetic self-interest than to personal self-interest.

I haven't been following the subject closely, but didn't the idea of group selection ran into significant difficulties? My impression is that nowadays it's not considered to be a major evolution mechanism, though I haven't looked carefully and will accept corrections.

We don't have have intuitive equipment for making long-term predictions

Well, um, I do X-) On which basis do you decide what kind of "intuitive equipment" humans have?

If you don't consider the opinions of experts evidence, what qualifies?

Opinions are not evidence, they are opinions. Argument to authority is, notably, a fallacy. I call things which qualify "facts".