Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 March 2012 10:22:55PM 12 points [-]

Anna says we're still looking at locations but it's looking at around $115/person/night just for lodging + meals, and that the 3-day camps actually include 4 nights the way everyone counts things and we have to purchase it. Anna also notes that she and Julia and Michael get $3k/month and this takes way more of their time than just the actual days. So definitely not a Singinst fundraiser. That data is available very easily so I'm posting it right now.

A specific example of an exercise from last year's minicamp that a lot of people liked was "Value of Information" which included the technical details of how to calculate VoI and exercises in being sensitive to particular forms of scope (how much does it cost, how long does it last, how often does it happen).

We're still working out the program which is why it's not posted even tentatively (we were just in the middle of some agonizing about priorities).

Comment author: lessdazed 29 March 2012 10:29:39PM 5 points [-]

I have friends and relatives who live in the area. How central to the camp is the communal living aspect? What would you charge to commute to it, if that is possible?

Comment author: [deleted] 29 March 2012 10:18:41PM *  20 points [-]

Applied. Looks good. Might decide it's not worth it, but you make a good case.

One thing. 0 to 10 ratings are utterly useless. The median is almost always around 7, for almost anything. Please give us calibrated statistics, not subjective pseudo-quantities where most of the contribution is from noise and offset.

Reminds me of business planning types ranking alternatives 1..n and then treating the indexes as utilities. ick. TYPE ERROR.

Comment author: lessdazed 29 March 2012 10:23:36PM 3 points [-]

The median is almost always around 7, for almost anything.

I tried to take that into account when reading.

treating the indexes as utilities

Please explain.

Comment author: orthonormal 29 March 2012 09:43:21PM 3 points [-]

Replace "glad I went" with a better criterion- that question deserves a good response.

Comment author: lessdazed 29 March 2012 10:18:40PM 3 points [-]

"Is there evidence this will be worthwhile according to my values now, independently of how it might change my values?"

"Is there evidence that this is instrumentally useful for more than warm fuzzies?"

"Is there evidence that for the probable benefit of this event the costs are substantially optimized for it? I.e., if the benefit is substantially social, even if this would be worth flying around the world for, a program could actually be optimized for social benefits, and/or I could attend a closer/cheaper/shorter program with similar benefits to me."

"Regardless of anyone's intent, what is this program optimized for?"

"How's the food?"

Comment author: SilasBarta 29 March 2012 08:16:09PM *  8 points [-]

7b) Is there any evidence I'll be glad I went that a Christian retreat could not produce just as easily?

Edit: Okay, 15 seconds to this being downvoted was a little hasty.

Comment author: lessdazed 29 March 2012 09:38:20PM 1 point [-]

7b) Is there any evidence I'll be glad I went that a Christian brainwashing retreat could not produce just as easily?

If you went to a Jehovah's Witness retreat, and were in an accident, and you were conscious enough to refuse a blood transfusion, you'd be glad for having learned what you did at the retreat, even if you knew the refusal would be fatal.

In general, anything that is compelling and affects your decisions will make you glad for it, and its being compelling is probably not inversely related to its being true. So I'm not too concerned that my tentative answer to this question is "no."

Comment author: lessdazed 20 March 2012 07:57:36PM 3 points [-]

you'll find that people are searching for "less wrong cult" and "singularity institute cult" with some frequency.

Maybe a substantial number of people are searching for the posts about cultishness.

Comment author: wedrifid 16 March 2012 03:04:48AM *  3 points [-]

*cough* Mine is 'delete the sentence entirely'. I never really liked that virtues page anyway!

Comment author: lessdazed 20 March 2012 07:50:08PM 1 point [-]

I entirely agree with this.

Comment author: lessdazed 19 March 2012 11:03:03PM *  1 point [-]

Can someone provide the full text of this?

Slippery slope arguments (SSAs) have a bad philosophical reputation. They seem, however, to be widely used and frequently accepted in many legal, political, and ethical contexts. Hahn and Oaksford (2007) argued that distinguishing strong and weak SSAs may have a rational basis in Bayesian decision theory. In this paper three experiments investigated the mechanism of the slippery slope showing that they may have an objective basis in category boundary re-appraisal.

Also this:

...he argued that the very reasons that can make SSAs strong arguments mean that we should be poor at abiding by the distinction between good and bad SSAs, making SSAs inherently undesirable. We argue that Enoch’s meta-level SSA fails on both conceptual and empirical grounds.

Comment author: lessdazed 09 March 2012 10:51:02PM 1 point [-]
Comment author: satt 08 March 2012 12:45:17AM 0 points [-]

I think my reply to gwern's comment (sibling of yours) all but answers your two questions already. But to be explicit:

Does "two Bayesian inferences" imply it is two different people making those inferences, with two people not possibly having identical prior beliefs?

Not necessarily, no. It could be two people who have identical prior beliefs but just construct likelihoods differently. It could be the same person calculating two inferences that rely on the same prior but use different likelihoods.

Could a person performing axiom-obeying Bayesian inference reach different conclusions than that same person hypothetically would have had they performed a different axiom-obeying Bayesian inference?

I think so. If I do a Bayesian analysis with some prior and likelihood-generating model, I might get one posterior distribution. But as far as I know there's nothing in Cox's theorem or the axioms of probability theory or anything like those that says I had to use that particular prior and that particular likelihood-generating model. I could just as easily have used a different prior and/or a different likelihood model, and gotten a totally different posterior that's nonetheless legitimate.

In response to comment by satt on How to Fix Science
Comment author: lessdazed 08 March 2012 04:12:00AM *  0 points [-]

depending on how those techniques are applied,

But as far as I know there's nothing in Cox's theorem or the axioms of probability theory or anything like those that says I had to use that particular prior

The way I interpret hypotheticals in which one person is said to be able to do something other than what they will do, such as "depending on how those techniques are applied," all of the person's priors are to be held constant in the hypothetical. This is the most charitable interpretation of the OP because the claim is that, under Bayesian reasoning, results do not depend on how the same data is applied. This seems obviously wrong if the OP is interpreted as discussing results reached after decision processes with identical data but differing priors, so it's more interesting to talk about agents with other things differing, such as perhaps likelihood-generating models, than it is to talk about agents with different priors.

I could just as easily have used a different...likelihood model, and gotten a totally different posterior that's nonetheless legitimate.

Can you give an example?

In response to How to Fix Science
Comment author: lessdazed 07 March 2012 09:07:50PM *  3 points [-]

Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training

In summary, existing literature supports the use of cigarettes to enhance endurance performance through weight loss and increased serum hemoglobin levels and lung volumes.

musical contrast and chronological rejuvenation

...people were nearly a year-and-a-half younger after listening to “When I’m Sixty-Four” (adjusted M = 20.1 years) rather than to “Kalimba” (adjusted M = 21.5 years), F(1, 17) = 4.92, p = .040.

Effects of remote, retroactive intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients with bloodstream infection: randomised controlled trial

Length of stay in hospital and duration of fever were significantly shorter in the intervention group than in the control group (P=0.01 and P=0.04, respectively)...Remote, retroactive [emphasis added] intercessory prayer said for a group is associated with a shorter stay in hospital and shorter duration of fever in patients with a bloodstream infection and should be considered for use in clinical practice.

View more: Prev | Next