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The last Society for Neuroscience conference had 35,000 people attend. There must be at least 100 research papers coming out per week. Neuroscience is full of "known things" that most neuroscientists don't know about unless it's their particular area.
In response to
The continued misuse of the Prisoner's Dilemma
This professor, who has no doubt debated game theory with many other professors and countless students making all kinds of objections, gets three paragraphs in this article to make a point. Based on this, you figure that the very simple objection that you're making is news to him?
One thing that concerns me about LW is that it often seems to operate in a vacuum, disconnected from mainstream discourse.
In response to
Singularity Summit 2009 (quick post)
Has anyone considered extending an invitation to Raymond Smullyan, as, say, a guest of honor to the summit (if not having done so already). Living in New York State, he recently published an amusing and short literary book (at age 89). There aren't many students of A. Church (recall that Turing was one of them) still with us. With Aubrey de Grey on the roster covering issues of longevity and more, an appearance by Ray Smullyan, provided he is willing and able, may raise the level of your conference not only intellectually, but also in terms of humor, humanity and perspective. I've heard he also does magic tricks. Thoughts?
Or how about Ray Solomonoff? He doesn't live that far away (Boston I believe) and still gives talks from time to time.
In response to
Atheism = Untheism + Antitheism
One of my favourite posts here in a while. When talking with theists I find it helpful to clarify that I'm not so much against their God, rather my core problem is that I have different epistemological standards to them. Not only does this take some of the emotive heat out of the conversation, but I also think it's the point where science/rationalism/atheism etc. is at its strongest and their system is very weak.
With respect to untheistic society, I remember when a guy I knew shifted to New Zealand from the US and was disappointed to find that relatively few people were interested in talking to him about atheism. The reason, I explained, is that most people simply aren't sufficiently interested in religion to be bothered with atheism. This is a society where the leaders of both major parties in the last election publicly stated that they were not believers and... almost nobody cared.
In response to
Shane Legg on prospect theory and computational finance
This is interesting, but (as far as I know) a much better explanation as to why most people don't own stock is that they don't actually bother researching how to invest or spend much cognitive effort on investing.
Perhaps Napoleon's old statement needs a corollary: "Never attribute to a complicated model of behaviour contingent on the interconnection of numerous noisy empirical estimates that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
Sure, there will be a great many factors at work here in the real world that our model does not include. The challenge is to come up with a manageable collection of principles that can be observed and measured across a wide range of situations and that appears to explain the observed behaviour. For this purpose "can't be bothered" isn't a very useful principle. What we really want to know is why they can't be bothered.
For example, I know people who can be bothered going to a specific shop and queueing in line every week to get a lottery ticket, and then scheduling time to watch the draw on television. It would be a lot less total effort over the years if they went into their internet banking and transfered a few thousand dollars into an investment fund that their bank offers. Plus their expected return would be positive rather than negative. Even if you point this out to them, they probably still won't do it. Why is it then that they can't be bothered doing this, but they can be bothered buying lottery tickets? One potential explanation provided by prospect theory is probability weighting: the negative tail on stock returns gets over weighted, as does the chance of winning the lottery. No doubt you can come up with other hypotheses about what is going on.
I'll also add, that while this work is a bit different to things usually covered here, it is perhaps interesting for some people to see an attempt to incorporate some of these ideas of cognitive biases into a formal mathematical model of behaviour -- in this case the behaviour of investors.
In response to
Open Thread: June 2009
In case it hasn't already been posted by somebody, here's a nice talk about irrational behaviour and loss aversion in particular.
Yeah... I know :-\ There are various political forces at work within this community that I try to stay clear of.
One group within the community calls it "Algorithmic Information theory" or AIT, and another "Kolmogorov complexity". I talked to Hutter when we was writing that article for Scholarpedia that you cite. He decided to use the more neutral term "algorithmic complexity" so as not to take sides on this issue. Unfortunately, "algorithmic complexity" is more typically taken as meaning "computational complexity theory". For example, if you search for it under Wikipedia you will get redirected. I know, it's all kind of ridiculous and confusing...
In response to
Taking Occam Seriously
The title is a bit misleading. "Algorithmic complexity" is about the time and spaces resources required for computations (P != NP? etc...), whereas this web site seems to be more about "Algorithmic Information Theory", also known as "Kolmogorov Complexity Theory".
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There is nothing about being a rationalist that says that you can't believe in God. I think the key point of rationality is to believe in the world as it is rather than as you might imagine it to be, which is to say that you believe in the existence of things due to the weight of evidence.
Ask yourself: do you want to believe in things due to evidence?
If the answer is no, then you have no right calling yourself a "wannabe rationalist" because, quite simply, you don't want to hold rational beliefs.
If the answer is yes, then put this into practice. Is the moon smaller than the earth? Does Zeus exist? Does my toaster still work? In each case, what is the evidence?
If you find yourself believing something that you know most rationalists don't believe in, and you think you're basing your beliefs on solid evidence and logical reasoning, then by all means come and tell us about it! At that point we can get into the details of your evidence and the many more subtle points of rational reasoning in order to determine whether you really do have a good case. If you do, we will believe.