All of Cthulhoo's Comments + Replies

I see people are highly upvoting the post, even correcting for the Bostrom's halo effect, so I'm updating a bit in the direction of you being right. I also see that you've followed Lachouette suggestion, and I like it.

I would be genuinely curious to see if it worked as intended in the end, might change the way in which I conduct job interviews a bit (I obviously realize that this is an irrelevant request that will probably not be met).

Best of luck with the recruiting.

I agree. This job offering doesn't sound very appealing to me. It basically reads: "Would you like to be Nick Bostrom's slave? He is much more important than you! It will be a honour to be his slave!"

Note that I'm not saying that the job isn't worthwile or that the world couldn't be a better place if Bostrom had more free time to do his research, just that the ad could be framed a bit better.

B-S endures, but is generally patched with insights like these.

I think I can see what you mean, and in fact I partially agree, so I'll try to restate the argument. Correct me if you think I got it wrong. In my experience it's true that B-S is still used for quick and dirty bulk calculations or by organizations that don't have the means to implement more complex models. But the model's shortcomings are very well understood by the industry, and risk managers absolutely don't rely on this model when e.g. calculating the capital requirement for Basel or Sol... (read more)

I doesn't endure, not in Risk Management, anyways. Some alternatives for equities are e.g. the Heston Model or other stochastic volatilities approaches. Then, there is the whole filed of systemic risk which studies correlated crashes: events when a bunch of equities all crash at the same time are way more common than they should be and people are aware of this. See e.g. this anaysis that uses a Hawk model to capture the clustering of the crashes.

Ha, rereading my comment I see that it may sound pretentious, but this wasn't my intention. Reading your comment just triggered this random factoid stored in my mind :)

I remember that it used to be 100 Karma, although this was when the community was much smaller. Also, it was mostly used as a rule of thumb/heuristic for the personal accountability of one's posts (e.g. some people would withold a downvote the person posting it was new to the community).

Survey done, awesome as usual, Yvain. Can't wait for the results.

Let's try to translate it using human characters.

Albert is finishing high school and wants to be a programmer. He is very smart, and under the guidance of his father he has studied coding, with the aim of entering a good college, and get the best formal education. One day, he comes across an excellent job offer: he is requested to join a startup with many brilliant programmers. He will have to skip going to college, but he knows that he will learn way more in this way than by doing academic studies. He also knows that his father loves him and wants him to... (read more)

I joined the group in good faith, even though I'm not 100% convinced of the usefulness of having yet another LW online community (and apparently not using it?). Maybe it could be dedicated to the occasional work topic that pops up here sometimes, since it's often not an issue directly related to rationality. Anyways, I will be glad to give whatever work-related-Linkedin-mediated help I can to any Lesswronger, feel free to pm me here to ask me for my name if you like.

1) Some truths can hurt society Topics like unfriendly artificial intelligence make me question the assumption that I always want intellectual progress in all areas. If we as modern society were to choose any topic which restricting thought about might be very useful, UFAI seems like a good choice. Maybe the freedom of thought in this issue might be a necessary casualty to avoid a much worse conclusion.

I'm not sure why freedom of thought is in principle a bad thing in this case. I can think about whatever horrible thing I want, but unless I act upon my ... (read more)

This definitely needs to be stressed. I went through the same path as the OP: got my PhD in Theoretical Physics, then moved to quantitative finance. I definitely wasn't stunningly above average in my old filed, but now, modesty aside, I am significantly smarter than the people I do consulting work for. And still, quantitative finance attracts people who in general are above the average population. There is probably a bit of availability/selection bias going on here, so be careful to correct for it.

Now, to the OP. As for the original question, its quite po... (read more)

I suspect the persuasiveness in oral communication is related to our susceptibility to favorable impressions of people who mimic our tone, posture, etc.

The non-verbal communication component should probably also be taken into acccount. Face to face discussions can be more dense of information, since tone and posture can also communicate nuances of beliefs and confidence in them that can make one's position more clear (and often more acceptable). Written communication is very often pretty dry in this respect, resulting sometimes in flame wars and people becoming only more stubborn.

You are right, I should eat less chocolate

In this particular case, I think the use of "should" is more an implicit dismissal than a semantic stopsign (but there may be an overlap between the two concepts). What I mean is that it's usually clear to both the participants of the conversation that you have acknowledged the problem but do not intend to implement a solution yet. More explicitely, the meaning of the phrase sounds like: "I know that I should eat less chocolate, but this is not a priority for me now.". It stops the conversati... (read more)

Amazing series, probably my all-time favorite. Walter's character is brilliantly developed, and what I found amazing is the credible portayal of a smart man who has to deal with unexpected problems. He doesn't have a magic staff, but he is usually able to use his intelligence to find a solution to the problems he has to face. What's brilliant is that you can see or at least reconstruct his thought process (no "magical deductions" à la Sherlock Holmes) and very often things go wrong beacause of something he didn't know or couldn't predict, pretty much as it happens in the real world. Despite that, he never gives up and looks for a better fixing (with all the most catastrophic consequences).

I don't think there's an easy way to be specifically notified about such a general category of events, except maybe a Facebook account following some very selected sources . For music specifically, though, I can suggest LastFm, which catalogues the music you listen to, and offers a selection of nearby gigs based on your preferences, among other things. It's also quite good for discovering new music that might fit your tastes.

Survey taken, all of it!

Thanks Yvain, for all the time and work you put every year into this. Can't wait to see the results!

Make it two data points. I am really enjoiying your (Chris) posts. Besides the content (which I do think belongs to LW) I like the writing style a lot: the entries are long, but engaging.

I solved the problem long ago by not buying junk food at all. This way, I have to ask myself whether I am really hungry, and therefore need a proper meal, or if it's only boredom. In the second case, cooking a full meal isn't worth it, so I spare myself the extra calories. I lost 8kg in three months with this simple trick.

However, similar to what lukeprog and shminux pointed out, this is quite the long essay, and it would be nice if it was tightened up a bit, at least in the form of providing a summary at the beginning.

To be honest, I didn't mind the length. It's nicely witten and it builds up a narrative of some sort, making it worth the read. A summary won't hurt, of course, but otherwise I see no need to shorten the essay.

Be careful about how much you invest in a relationship. Whatever you might think at any moment, the probability that it will end in the future are relevant. I happened to make several life-changing choices in order to optimize the relationship with my former girlfirend, since we had been together for a long time and thing were sitll looking awesome. She dumped me abruptely, and I found myself navigating into a huge void of lost friends, lost hobbies, and a job that I like, but it's not the one I had always wanted to have (and had, before changing for the sake of the relationship).

I second this. Friends selection usually involves having some mutual interests: math, music, movies, parties, whatever. The focus of the activity you do together will mostly invole those interests, therefore you will put more effort into getting "better" at them, if only because you're spending more time practicing.

I don't think the opposite can be true: of you hate physics, you can't just hang out with a phisicist to get better at it. I regularly hang out with my oldest group of firends, and none of them has ever expressed interest in knowing m... (read more)

In some species of Anglerfish, the male is much smaller than the female and incapable of feeding independently. To survive he must smell out a female as soon as he hatches. He bites into her releasing an enzime which fuses him to her permanently. He lives off her blood for the rest of his life, providing her with sperm whenever she needs it. Females can have multiple males attached. The morale is simple: males are parasites, women are sluts. Ha! Just kidding! The moral is don't treat actual animal behavior like a fable. Generally speaking, animals have no interest in teaching you anything.

Oglaf (Original comic NSFW)

I often find that the hardest part is finding the answer to:

Do you know what your long-term and medium-term goals are?

I honestly have no idea. I can easily focus on short term goals, when I am rather confident that Me(now) will be very similar to Me(goal reached). Things get harder and blurrier when I have to take into account my most likely self modification. Concrete example. Since I was 10, I've always wanted to be a physicist. Roughly near the end of my Ph.D. I started to evolve into someone who doesn't want to be a phisicist. I tried a short post... (read more)

A lot of investment sites also have these kinds of rough tests to get an idea of your risk tolerance so they can suggest advice accordingly, although they aren't necessarily perfect. This link seems to explain some of the issues that come up: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_32/b4142059711173.htm

As a side note, if you go to your bank and ask them about investing your money, they will probably make you take one of these tests, and then suggest investments that match your profile (not necessary the best choices, but it could give you an idea of what you can expect).

This is the idea that one must assume risk (uncertainty) to obtain excess expected returns. It is by no means ubiquitous: assuming risk may reduce expected returns. For example, people assume risk to gain exposure to negative expected returns in a casino (roulette, blackjack, &c). No doubt there are plenty of examples in financial markets where risk does not automatically yield excess expected returns.

In theory, all financial institution optimize around something like the efficient frontier. This should ensure that higher risk corresponds to higher ... (read more)

I would agree that this is true, but I'd caution against thinking of even government bonds as a textbook "risk-free" investment.

Correct consideration, I personally know a greek guy who bought decennial bonds from his own country five years before the collapse and got heavily screwed. This should be a more remote possibilitie for e.g US bonds, and it's kind of a "second order consideration" for someone who is just approaching the idea of investing money. I'm not sure of the taxing policies in the US, so I can't really help, but the p... (read more)

Should I even bother with this "investment" stuff right now, or just move the whole 13k sum to a simple savings account and worry about reinvesting it in a year?

It depends on when you think you will need the money, and how much dependant you are on that amount. If you plan on using it at some point (e.g. for buying a car) then try something with low risk. Usually insurance companies have good low risk funds, which guarantee a minimum return of 2-3% a year, and average round 4-5% (they mainly invest in bond: you could do it directly on your own... (read more)

Just be careful that markets /= economy. The developing economies might still grow steadily, while their markets can fluctuate a lot. One of the most widely used Indexes for emerging markets is the Morgan Stanley BRIC. You can easily google and find some funds that invest in it and look at their performance to get an idea. The first one that I found (here) has a decent summary of its most important features. You can see that it is actually losing money . A very important number you should look at is the standard deviation, which is written to be 23% over t... (read more)

Markets are essentially random walks with an upward trend?

Yes, but with a relatively high variance.

“Index funds” are magic boxes that you put money in and your money will grow at the same rate of the market that the fund “indexes”?

This is more or less true (minus some potential entry/manteinance costs)

“Developing world” economies generally grow a lot quicker than those in the “developed world”?

In general this is true, but the variance here is even higher. Lately, though, they are not performing particularly well (see here for example).

And the

A Nobel prize is awarded?

Whatever alleged "truth" is proven by results to be but an empty fiction, let it be unceremoniously flung into the outer darkness, among the dead gods, dead empires, dead philosophies, and other useless lumber and wreckage!

Anton Lavey, The Satanic Bible, The Book of Satan II

I usually proceed by asking a different question (the question if you want). Where am I not winning? Which areas of my life am I unsatisfied with? Then I go on asking the question you mentioned (or very similar ones):

• Why am I not winning?
• How much important is this area to me? It should be at least a bit since the issue came to my mind, minor problems are usually automatically filtered out (not always, of course, a problem I see could be the symptom of a bigger one, but I should at least be aware of something)
• Can I identify a solution?
• Would it be easy

I use my "rationalnoodles" nickname almost everywhere, however still can't decide if it's appropriate on LW. Would like to read what others think.

Considering that infanticide is a generally accepted discussion topic here, I don't think people will question a nickname ;)

Welcome!

It should also be noted that if one doesn't start wishing for a horse, the probability of obtaining one decreases furtherly.

I know this is meant to be a call to action instead of contemplation, but sometimes I've heard it quoted intending : "Be and adult, stop whishing for very-difficoult-to-obtain things", and this is a statement I don't agree with.

Well, it's somewhat hidden in steps 2 and 3. You have to be able to correctly state your hypothesis and to indentify all the possible variables. Consider chocolate water: your hipothesis is "There exist some brands of water that tastes like chocolate candy". Let's say for whatever reson you start with a prior probability p for this hypothesis. You then try some brands, find that none tastes like chocolate candy, and should therefore apply bayes and emerge with a lower posterior. What's much more effective, though, is evaluating the evidence you ... (read more)

The thing is, some of the steps are very vague You're right of course, this was meant to be fully general. Details should be tuned on each specific instance.

If you have a bad case of insufficient clue, what's the cure?

I'm not sure I understood what you mean, but I guess you're thinking about cases where you can't have a "perfect experimental setup" to collect information. Well, in this case one should do the best with the information one has (though information can also be collected from other external sources of course). Sometimes there's sim... (read more)

This can be easily generalized as an algorithm.

• Something repeatedly goes wrong
• Identify correctly your prior hypothesis
• Identify the variables involved
• Check/change the variables
• Observe the result (apply bayes when needed)
• Repeat if necessary

Scientific method applied to everiday life, if you want :)

-Thank you, thank you Lord, for preserving my virginity!

• You bloody idiot! Do you think God, to keep you a virgin, will drown the whole city of Florence?

(Architect Melandri to Noemi, the girl he is in love with, who thinks the flood of 1966 was sent as an answer to her prayers)

All my Friend, Act II [roughly translated by me]

passionately

Answering to diegocaleiro, I think this is the key. Be passionate about the topics that spark your interest, try to transmit how awesome they are. Often people are more lazy and scared by unknown and possibily complicated topics, but if you manage to make things accessible to them, they will be genuinely interested. Then it's also up to your ars oratoria, of course. I have a weird sense of humor and tend to interject the more serious discussion with jokingly remarks, this helps releasing the pressure if the topic gets too complicated.

First, many EU citizen tend to assume $1 is 1€ at first approximation, while currently it's more like $1.3 for 1€. Cthulhoo may have made this approximation. Second, lower salaries may be compensated by a stronger welfare system (public unemployment insurance, public health insurance, public retirement plan…). This one is pretty big: in France, these cost over 40% of what your employer has to pay. Third, major cost centres such as housing may be cheaper (I wouldn't count on that one, though). To take an example, I live in France, and here, entry-level pro

I've also been told multiple times by multiple sources that women values confidence, competence and leadership. I understand the confidence part in being able to express without embarassment your interest (but still in a socially graceful manner), but I would really like pointers about what area of my life I could engage to become more competent or a leader. In what domains women like competence/leadership?

It would be useful to know what's your job. I've gained a lot of confidence with people in general since I left the Unversity (used to be a physicist... (read more)

make your dabbling in "logic/math/AI" a "learning how to program" at least doubling your income.

A minor point: this coul probably work in the US, but it doesn't in Italy. Average salary for a good programmer (not outstanding, but at least experienced) is around $25k. It should also be noted that the cost of living in Italy is slightly lower, so $20K per year, while not impressive, it's still a decent salary.

6) Though topics in which the highest information flow could be achieved are usually abandoned, they are brought back in the beggining of new interactions if the people keep seeing each other for a few days, still as usual they slowly fade away.

7) When the button of friendship is really surely deep down pushed, they talk almost always about what doesn't matter, such as niche gossip, daily events, what they did since last interaction - I mean, how likely is it that in those 26 years, the best I've done happened in the last 2 days? - This obviously is a bad

From the experience derived in many years of competitive Magic: the Gathering, I think I have a diferent map.

• Superior opponent: Nervous - Very Focused
• Approximately my skill opponent / Unknown opponent (no precise rating available): Confident - Very Focused
• Inferior opponent: Confident - Not Focused

As can be inferred, I usually play my best game with opponents that are roughly my equal. Some of the difficoulties can be overcome by means of intense practice, i.e. making most of the decisions automatic, lessening the risk to punt them. It's also interes... (read more)

Be gur ynjazbjre zna.

I modified the post after less than five minutes... are you spying on me? ;)
Thank you, preserving the feeling, alongside the literal meaning, while translating in a foreign language can be surprisingly difficult (for me, at least).

Luck, when it's regular, it's called skill. (Il culo, quando è sistematico, si chiama classe)

Nereo Rocco

(I tried a rough tranlsation, but it sounds way better in Italian)

Also

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

Elbert Hubbard

you should give all your donation to the charity that most aids the global diversification program. Splitting your donations implies being risk-averse in what you personally achieve, which is perverse.

Well, you have to have a very bizarre utility function, for sure. ;)

even if you were risk-averse in lives saved, which I do not think you should be

I'm not sure about this point. I can imagine having a preference for saving at least X lives, versus an outcome with equal mean, but a more broadly distributed probability function.

I'm not sure if this is really relevant, but there's the possibility of some diversification effect playing a role. It could be relevant if the spendings of the different charities are somewhat correlated. This is pure speculation from my part, of course, since I have no idea about how to effectively compute such a quantity.