All of anonym's Comments + Replies

the structure of the universe is isomorphic to the ideal math that we could use to explain and predict it. I would not be at all surprised to find out that somehow, "they are the same thing," whatever that might mean.

Tegmark's Mathematical universe hypothesis is one answer to what that might mean.

I think it's more useful to keep the meaning of "skill" as something like "the ability to do something well", which is what everybody expects you mean when you use the word, and talk instead about better and worse applications of skills. It's not the skill that's context dependent, but how useful or beneficial the application of the skill is in a particular scenario.

Survey completed. I cooperated without thinking about it much. I believed that TDT-like reasoning would probably lead a significant number of others to cooperate too, and I felt I should support the group.

When a concept is inherently approximate, it is a waste of time to try to give it a precise definition.

-- John McCarthy

8Eliezer Yudkowsky
Thus, whenever you look in a computer science textbook for an algorithm which only gives approximate results, you will find that the algorithm itself is very vaguely specified, since the result is just an approximation anyway. (I would have said: "When a concept is inherently fuzzy, it is a waste of time to give it a definition with a sharp membership boundary.")

The opposite intellectual sin to wanting to derive everything from fundamental physics is holism which makes too much of the fact that everything is ultimately connected to everything else. Sure, but scientific progress is made by finding where the connections are weak enough to allow separate theories.

-- John McCarthy

I'm the same. Great one-on-one, and extremely awkward when there are two or more other people, which I find to be very exhausting due to the extra conversation dynamics you note. It's also very difficult too when you're the sort of person who likes to periodically be silent for a period in order to think more deeply about what you're talking about -- with more than one other person there, somebody else will just start a new conversation on a new topic to avoid the "dreaded silence".

It's much better now. The only issue remaining is that the 'Frequently Asked Questions" is just a tiny bit too wide to fit on one line inside the containing box, so the 'ns' of 'Questions' sticks outside of the gray box it is supposed to be inside.

On the topic of how the site looks in different browsers, and finding out whether the layout is borked on some browsers, you could use http://browsershots.org/.

At the moment though, it fails due to an internal server error when it tries to fetch http://friendly-ai.com/robots.txt. If you fix that, you should be able to easily see how the site looks in a bunch of different browsers on different operating systems.

I also see the FAQ page as broken with 'Questions' in the header appearing overlayed on the #2 and #3 items in the 'contents' list. With Firefox 8 on Linux at default zoom, and zooming down to make the fonts smaller than normal does fix it.

I agree with nyan_sandwich that things would be much improved if the CSS used ems instead of pixels, which are guaranteed to break if users have non-standard fonts or font sizes or their browser happens to have different enough default CSS rules.

0Lightwave
How is it for you now? If you have any problems, can you please make a screenshot (and upload to http://imgur.com or somewhere else) to help us diagnose the problem?

He did say "all exact science", a phrasing I think he probably chose carefully, so I'd charitably interpret the remark as being about people uttering purported scientific truths.

Please elaborate. In what ways have you found it to be mind-altering?

9Kevin
About 15 minutes after consumption, it manifests as a kind of pressure in the head or temples or eyes, a clearing up of brain fog, increased focus, and the kind of energy that is not jittery but the kind that makes you feel like exercising would be the reasonable and prudent thing to do. I have done no tests, but "feel" smarter from this in a way that seems much stronger than piracetam or any of the conventional weak nootropics. It is not just me -- I have been introducing this around my inner social circle and I'm at 7/10 people felt immediately noticeable effects. The 3 that didn't notice much were vegetarians and less likely to have been deficient. Now that I'm not deficient, it is of course not noticeable as mind altering, but still serves to be energizing, particularly for sustained mental energy as the night goes on.

It would be an error to suppose that the great discoverer seizes at once upon the truth, or has any unerring method of divining it. In all probability the errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one. Fertility of imagination and abundance of guesses at truth are among the first requisites of discovery; but the erroneous guesses must be many times as numerous as those that prove well founded. The weakest analogies, the most whimsical notions, the most apparently absurd theories, may pass through the teeming brain, and no record remain of more than the hundredth part….

W. Stanley Jevons

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.

Bertrand Russell

0MixedNuts
Hydrogen atoms have exactly one proton.

Or a mathematician.

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

William Lawrence Bragg

The most valuable acquisitions in a scientific or technical education are the general-purpose mental tools which remain serviceable for a lifetime. I rate natural language and mathematics as the most important of these tools, and computer science as a third.

George E. Forsythe

Thanks for the explanation. Your explanation accords with what I've heard from my coach and what I've read. What surprised me in your original comment was this sentence in particular:

The first goal was to memorize a massive amount of opening theory and what is known as 'book' knowledge.

That sounded to me like much more than "studying the Ruy Lopez and Queen's Gambit to illustrate basic ideas about central control". It sounded more like "try to memorize every line of every variation of the Ruy Lopez that is in MCO".

2[anonymous]
Yes, I see your point. It was strongly worded, I think I was just typing quickly and over-emphasized that. In my mind, I was lumping a lot of things together as 'book theory' but it is good to point out that for developing players, it's not good to devote too much time to memorizing anything, whether it's openings or solutions to chess puzzles. What I mean about "intuitive play" being stifled early on is that one of the first things I was taught was that playing moves that "look good" or "seem right" is not the right way to learn. Very few people can be successful playing with this sort of intuition. Ironically, though, this is why many chess players list Mikhail Tal as their favorite world champion.. he frequently played by intuition and would specifically choose technically unsound positions just because they had much more complication, which just personally interested him more.

In my experience, the main goal of chess coaching and training was to teach you how to act like you were a computer. Any kind of "intuitive" play or even creative play was harshly criticized from a young age. The first goal was to memorize a massive amount of opening theory and what is known as 'book' knowledge. Once a student has a reasonable amount of book knowledge, then you move on to techniques to focus you on calculating quickly.

This hasn't been my experience at all. At what level do you believe that memorization of opening theory is the... (read more)

2[anonymous]
Every chess player has to memorize opening theory or they can't make progress. I agree that this is often over-emphasized, generally because it's the easiest thing for a coach to assign. I do think opening theory is pretty fundamental because it is a constructive way to teach someone about controlling the center of the board and developing pieces, which need to be learned concurrently with tactics. The same errors that people fall into with over-emphasizing openings are also prone to occur when people over-emphasize solving chess puzzles or replaying GM games. If you spend too much time on any one aspect in the developmental stage, it's not good. But still, 1200 level players must really study a few basic openings just to even get a handle on engaging in a game of chess. My preferred approach is to teach one or two main variations for a couple of openings for both black and white. Then, after these are reasonably understood, I like to spend time focusing on the goals of the opening, like controlling the center of the board and developing minor pieces to good posts. That's usually the point where tactics and combinations start to become relevant, so its natural to work on that. This is just my opinion, of course. I'm sure many chess instructors have their own opinions. Playing slow chess is by far the most problematic issue. Chess requires so much patience, and thinking like a computer when your opponent is thinking about their own move is really hard, especially for children. Most kids don't have many options to practice other than internet chess, which is generally blitz dominated. At any rate, I never believe that memorizing opening theory is an important goal unto itself, not even at the highest level. It goes in spurts. Maybe study the Ruy Lopez and Queen's Gambit to illustrate basic ideas about central control, then take a break from openings and play dozens of Ruy Lopez or Queen's Gambit games to build up the ability to systematically study positions and co

A good way of getting cheap textbooks is to use a price alert service that notifies you when the price of a new or used book drops below a certain price. When you don't need the text in a hurry, and would rather save money and buy used, that works well, because students often want to get rid of a textbook in a hurry and offer it for sale at far below the typical used price for that book. Those deals tend to go pretty quickly though.

Another good idea is to buy the previous edition, especially for texts that have many editions. When the 8th edition of a text... (read more)

I think the positive reactions are probably mostly a case of guessing the teacher's password. Perhaps the teacher conveyed a positive impression beforehand, but the default password guessing behavior would probably be to guess "teacher wants us to write about this appreciatively" regardless of whether he said anything additional about the site -- that would be expected for a community blog devoted to refining the art of {rationality, wisdom, justice, aesthetics, ...}.

After having read the comments, I can definitely sympathize with the students. It brought back memories of when I was in the same position in history or English class when we had to read something and write our reaction to it but with little clear direction about what was expected of us or how the teacher would grade, and not really caring about the subject matter. I know the process that produced the comments, and I would probably write the same things in their position, but not out of deficient intelligence or writing skill -- rather, because I don't s... (read more)

7Solvent
Most of the rationality minded people I know, especially including myself, have a strong tendency to dispute the status quo, and disagree with authority just for the fun of it. So I imagine that if I came across LW in that setting, I would have criticized it in my blog comment just because it was non-conformist and required more original thinking. So the ones saying the most positive things about it are either the smartest ones, who realize how great we are, or the conformist ones, who just want the professor to like them.

Do you wear a retainer or any other kind of orthodontic device? I still wear a retainer now and then, and I often get a very severe headache the first night I wear it (I only wear it at night sometimes) if I've forgotten to wear it for a longer period than usual.

Don't know if that's at all relevant to your case, but am throwing it out there just in case.

0Alicorn
I've never had any orthodontia done and wear no dental appliances.

As a frequent sufferer of headaches, the only over-the-counter medication that works really well for my headaches are the Excedrin formulations that include acetaminophen, aspirin and caffeine. Each of those ingredients alone is nowhere near as effective in my experience as the combination.

0orthonormal
Ditto, and caffeine by itself often makes a headache worse for me.
2jimmy
I meant it more as a diagnostic test than a solution. I'm not sure of the mechanism of action of acetaminophen and aspirin, but I think they would reduce the information you could get from this test.

For anybody else who is as puzzled by "NoVa: NVC" as I was, NVC is, judging from this and a few other references, Non-Violent Communication.

Please spell out an acronym the first time you use it in every article. It takes you 20 seconds to do that, and it took me a couple of frustrating minutes of searching, just as it will take others minutes of searching unless they see my comment.

ETA: thank you for the edits.

Why would it be more likely that you're speaking to a deity than that you are in a simulation speaking to the principal investigator of an experiment or some other non-theistic scenario?

The difficulty I have with this thought experiment is that I can't decide how to distinguish between the hypothesis that there is a deity with whom I'm now conversing, and the many hypotheses that preserve a purely naturalistic universe in which my brain (or a simulation of my brain) is receiving coherent sensory inputs that make it seem like I'm interacting with a deity w... (read more)

0JoshuaZ
One of the primary ways to distinguish between a simulator and a deity is simply what they claim to be. It seems unlikely to me that a deity would claim to be a simulator. I can more see reason why a simulator would claim to be a deity but it still seems not like a likely course of action. Assume for a minute that Simulator and Deity are the only two hypotheses with substantial probability mass. Then P(Simulator|says it is a simulator)> P(simulator). So by conservation of evidence, P(~ Simulator|says ~ simulator) > P(~Simulator) so, P(Deity|says is a deity)> P(deity). The question becomes then by how much?

We know he doesn't provide false evidence, but the person in the scenario doesn't know that. How could they distinguish between that scenario and the scenario where the gentleman lies when says he will always tell the truth.

I always thought Edge.org was basically Brockman's way of getting cheap publicity for the intellectuals his literary agency represents and the books they are currently selling.

Thanks for the interesting investigation, which largely confirms my suspicion.

I'm reading Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain at the moment, and it seems a good textbook for people like me who don't have a hardcore background in biology.

A popular non-textbook on the topic of memory in particular is Kandel's In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, which I really liked. The following, by the same author, looks very interesting, and has just gone on my future purchase list: Memory: From Mind to Molecules.

I'm curious to hear opinions from more knowledgeable people than me though.

I agree. I was hoping somebody could make a coherent and plausible sounding argument for their position, which seems ridiculous to me. The paper you referenced shows that if you present an extremely simple problem of probability and ask for the answer in terms of a frequency (and not as a single event), AND you present the data in terms of frequencies, AND you also help subjects to construct concrete, visual representations of the frequencies involved by essentially spoon-feeding them the answers with leading questions, THEN most of them will get the corre... (read more)

0JonathanLivengood
I'm not sure I'm up to the challenge, but here goes anyway ... I think you are being ungenerous to the position Tooby and Cosmides mean to defend. As I read them (see especially Section 22 of their paper), they are trying to do two things. First, they want to open up the question of how exactly people reason about probabilities -- i.e., what mechanisms are at work, not just what answers people give. Second, they want to argue that humans are slightly more rational than Kahneman and Tversky give them credit for being. First point. Tooby and Cosmides do not actually commit to the position that humans use a probability calculus in their probabilistic reasoning. What they do argue is that Kahneman and Tversky were too quick to dismiss the possibility that humans do use a probability calculus -- not just heuristics -- in their probabilistic reasoning. If humans never gave the output demanded by Bayes' theorem, then K&T would have to be right. But T&C show that in more ecologically valid cases, (most) humans do give the output demanded by Bayes. So, the question is re-opened as to what brain mechanism takes frequency inputs and gives frequency outputs in accordance with Bayes' theorem. That mechanism might or might not instantiate a rule in a calculus. Second point. If you are tempted (by K&T's research) to say that humans are just dreadfully bad at statistical reasoning, then maybe you should hold off for a second. The question is a little bit under-specified. Do you mean "bad at statistical reasoning in general, in an abstract setting" or do you mean "bad at statistical reasoning in whatever form it might take"? If the former, then T&C are going to agree. If you frame a statistics problem with percentages, you get all kinds of errors. But if you mean the latter, then T&C are going to say that humans do pretty well on problems that have a particular form, and not surprisingly, that form is more ecologically valid. General rule of charity: If someone appears to be def

This definitely seems like main material to me. Thanks for putting it together and for the very nice summary of results.

0prase
OK, since it seems that nobody is objecting, I have removed the initial disclaimer.

I don't recall any discussion on LW -- and couldn't find any with a quick search -- about the "Great Rationality Debate", which Stanovich summarizes as:

An important research tradition in the cognitive psychology of reasoning--called the heuristics and biases approach--has firmly established that people’s responses often deviate from the performance considered normative on many reasoning tasks. For example, people assess probabilities incorrectly, they display confirmation bias, they test hypotheses inefficiently, they violate the axioms of util

... (read more)
4Vaniver
Typically, the "optimal thinking" argument gets brought up here in the context of evolutionary psychology. Loss aversion makes sound reproductive sense when you're a hunter-gatherer, and performing a Bayesian update carefully doesn't help all that much. But times have changed, and humans have not changed as much.
6rehoot
I don't understand the basis for the Cosmides and Tooby claim. In their first study, Cosmides and Tooby (1996) solved the difficult part of a Bayesian problem so that the solution could be found by a "cut and paste" approach. The second study was about the same with some unnecessary percentages deleted (they were not needed for the cut and paste solution--yet the authors were surprised when performance improved). Study 3 = Study 2. Study 4 has the respondents literally fill in the blanks of a diagram based on the numbers written in the question. 92% of the students answered that one correctly. Studies 5 & 6 returned the percentages and the students made many errors. Instead of showing innate, perfect reasoning, the study tells me that students at Yale have trouble with Bayesian reasoning when the question is framed in terms of percentages. The easy versions do not seem to demonstrate the type of complex reasoning that is needed to see the problem and frame it without somebody framing it for you. Perhaps Cosmides and Tooby are correct when they show that there is some evidence that people use a "calculus of probability" but their study showed that people cannot frame the problems without overwhelming amounts of help from somebody who knows the correct answer. Reference Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (1996). Are humans good intuitive statisticians after all? Rethinking some conclusions from the literature on judgment under uncertainty. Cognition 58, 1–73, DOI: 10.1016/0010-0277(95)00664-8

I interpret the first part as saying that there are no laws of matter other than ones our minds are forced to posit (forced over many generations of constantly improving our models). And the second part is something like "minds are subject [only] to physics", as you said. The second part explains how and why the first part works.

Together, I interpret them as suggesting a reductive physicalist interpretation of mind (in the 19th century!) according to which our law-making is not only about the universe but is itself the universe (or a small piece thereof) operating according to those same laws (or other, deeper laws we have yet to discover).

Much of the heavy lifting is also done by the assignment of numbers and colors to indicate the impact of the experiment on a hypothesis. That's much easier to grok as a whole than plain text. I can also easily make quick judgments from the chart that are much more difficult to do from a review paper, such as "later experiments generally oppose this hypothesis, and only early experiments strongly support it" (among those in the chart, of course).

Nice link. Chess and piano performance were the two examples that came to mind for me before clicking the link.

However, increasing the quality that yields the greatest marginal benefit is not necessarily the same as increasing the minimum of the individual actions (assuming you don't define "minimum quality" in terms of marginal benefit). For example, if the lowest quality action only has a small impact on outcome, there is probably something else it would be more beneficial to improve. Of course, some composite skills probably do have performance proportional to min(indvidual_skill), in which case increasing the minimum would always be most beneficial, but most don't.

Every truth is a path traced through reality: but among these paths there are some to which we could have given an entirely different turn if our attention had been orientated in a different direction or if we had aimed at another kind of utility; there are some, on the contrary, whose direction is marked out by reality itself: there are some, one might say, which correspond to currents of reality. Doubtless these also depend upon us to a certain extent, for we are free to go against the current or to follow it, and even if we follow it, we can variously

... (read more)
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0PhilGoetz
What?

Very often in mathematics the crucial problem is to recognize and discover what are the relevant concepts; once this is accomplished the job may be more than half done.

Yitz Herstein

[anonymous]100

Good mathematicians see analogies between theorems. Great mathematicians see analogies between analogies.

Banach, in a 1957 letter to Ulam.

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Richard P. Feynman

The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.

James Clerk Maxwell

3Normal_Anomaly
I am having difficulty parsing this. The easiest interpretation to make of the first part seems to be "There are no laws of matter except the ones we make up," and the second part is saying either "minds are subject to physics" or something I don't follow at all.

Rat lover here. They're adorable little creatures, and have distinct personalities and quirks. The only shortcoming of rats is that they don't live that long, so you're having to deal with the death of your cherished little friends every 2 or 3 years or so.

For anybody who likes rats or is just curious to learn more about them, I highly recommend the most awesome ratbehavior.org

I actually do use the 'save' feature in reddit. I find it a handy way to distinguish articles that I found especially useful or high-quality, or that I know I'll want to look at again in the future. Maybe I'm an exception though, because I don't use browser bookmarks or any other bookmarking-type service very much.

That functionality still works in lesswrong just as it does in reddit, but there just isn't a link to get to the page that shows all the stuff you've saved, as I noted elsewhere in this thread.

You can 'save' an article by clicking the disk icon above the 'Tags' section below an article.

There's no link anywhere to see articles that you've previously saved, but you can manually go to the following URL to see them: http://lesswrong.com/saved/

It seems like an oversight on the part of the developers that the 'saved' functionality they got for free from the reddit codebase still works correctly, and the saved pages are accessible, but there's nothing in the UI that indicates how to access the page of previously saved articles.

0falenas108
Ah, thanks.

One can't get that from "who looks better to you?", except through a lucky guess. It could just as easily have been many other things.

I couldn't answer for this reason. It's asking "whom do you rate higher [according to criterion X]?" without specifying criterion X.

6[anonymous]
Criterion X is warm fuzzies.

The example "Go is a much better game than chess" is much more likely to confuse, and that was the original phrase I objected to. Sure, if somebody thinks about it carefully, they'll realize it hides a value judgment, but as maybe you're aware, people don't consciously analyze everything they read and hear -- and things that are seen or thought about in passing often influence us in ways we are unaware of. I'm not trying to say there was a crime or anything or that one should never say a statement like "Go is a much better game than chess&qu... (read more)

-2handoflixue
I suppose I'm not sure how I failed to engage with your last comment on the thread of "I" statements. I personally don't consider "I" statements that obfuscated, and that was my response - at least where I'm from, they're a normal communication route, and not terribly misleading. It's just a conversational shorthand, because "I think you probably meant to convey..." is a bulky, awkward phrase. "you're downvoted because I think you're pushing obfuscation and then it feels to me like you're neglecting to even engage"... you see? It's a bloody awkward linguistic standard, and you're not even using it yourself. Upvoted because I appreciate that you are engaging me, and don't want it to come off like I have hard feelings here.

Yes, I should have said that. Thanks.

On the question of "I" statements though, there is a big difference between "Go is a much better game than chess", and "Go has a much larger state space than chess" (or even "Go is a more complex game than chess"). The former is in the same class of statement as "Chocolate ice cream is much better than vanilla ice cream".

What is the benefit of communicating "I prefer Go to Chess" as "Go is a better game than Chess"? It's less clear, less accurate, and it is likely to confuse many people into accepting that it's a statement about the games in general rather than a statement about one person's taste.

-5handoflixue

Go is a much better game than chess.

You mean, "I like go much more than chess", or "I think chess is a much better game than chess".

Oh, and it's not true that Go lends itself much better to measure progress. Chess has rating systems like the ELO rating system, which measure progress very well.

-2handoflixue
I think you meant to say "I think you probably meant to convey..." ;) (Down-voted for pushing the use of "I" statements)

whois ai-class.com shows Thrun (with his stanford.edu email address) as the registrant and administrative contact, so it seems legit.

What's wrong with coming up with an interesting theoretical construct that has almost zero hope of being implemented? Can't that be a vehicle for improving understanding? I don't see any failing in that. It's not like PhilGoetz was recommending we all start lobbying congress and spreading the word in the media about his idea.

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