All of duwease's Comments + Replies

duwease10

Perhaps you can crib some gameplay ideas from the Phoenix Wright series, like was done with Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher? Those games make pointing out fairly mundane logical or argumentation mis-steps pretty entertaining, and I can see how it might complement the idea of updating probabilities in a story-based scenario.

duwease00

Agreed.. I'd love to see this or read an article on this topic. I have the Pearl book, but it's a bit dense for someone who doesn't have an in-depth background in statistics.

duwease40

It's still a field where demand outstrips the supply in places, so it may be possible to just land one by knowing enough to answer questions in the interview. I know currently certain bustling communities such as Drupal are dying to land people.

However, it's certainly better to have experience, and what you can do on that front is contribute to an open source project. It's incredibly easy to do nowadays, and valid as resume-worthy experience.

duwease20

I've put a lot of thought into trying to improve the aggregation of science data in order to quickly determine the legitimacy of any particular paper based on current knowledge. Ultimately, it seems to me, aggregation isn't viable because so much of the data is simply inaccessible (as you mentioned, accessibility is more a function of being new and exciting, whereas 'vanilla' building blocks such as replications may not be publicly accessible at all).

Ultimately, I think, the incentive structure has to change, and that's difficult because when only positiv... (read more)

duwease90

The doctor recommending medicine one threw me. Why not offer more than one, explain that one gives the best bang for the buck, but also let them decide whether the $350 for 30 headaches is still worth it despite being an increased cost per headache prevented. I can easily imagine a rational scenario where 20 less headaches is still worth increased payment per headache prevented, especially if it costs you wages at your theoretical low-income job..

0ChristianKl
Via rot13.com: Crbcyr jub engvbanyyl pnyphyngr gur inyhr bs na ubhe bs rkcrevrapvat rkgrafvir cnva fubhyq gnxr bcgvba 1. Ubjrire bcgvba 2 vf pyrneyl orggre guna bcgvba 3. Gurer n ovnf gung zvtug znxr fbzr crbcyr gnxr bcgvba 2.
3Vaniver
I suspect there are two points to that exercise, and am obscuring my guess with rot13: Gur svefg vf gb znxr fher gung lbh ernyvmr gur qbzvangrq nygreangvir vf qbzvangrq, naq gura frpbaq vf gb grfg vs lbh npghnyyl eha gur ahzoref, be vs lbh ersyrpgviryl fnl "cbbe=varkcrafvir bcgvba." Jura V ena gurz (ivrjvat gur varkcrafvir gerngzrag nf gur onfryvar, abg ab gerngzrag, juvpu znxrf gur rkcrafvir gerngzrag yrff nggenpgvir) vg pnzr bhg gb sbhe qbyynef gb nibvq na ubhe bs univat n zvtenvar. Gung frrzf yvxr n irel purnc jnl gb ohl unccvarff sbe nalbar jub yvirf va gur qrirybcrq jbeyq, rira ba n ybj vapbzr. Juvyr vg'f fvk gvzrf nf rkcrafvir cre ubhe nf gur purnc bcgvba, vg fgvyy vf purnc rabhtu gb fgebatyl erpbzzraq. (Pbafvqre gur erirefny: jbhyq lbh gnxr ba n zvtenvar gb rnea sbhe qbyynef na ubhe?)
duwease40

Also excepting the ones whose consciousness wasn't uploaded into homicidal testing machines, of course.

duwease140

I'm curious as to hear an example or two of what sort of experiments you had in mind (and the models they'd be testing) when writing this article. A brief, none-too-thorough attempt on my own part kept hitting a couple of walls. I agree with your sentiment that simple surveys may fall prey to sampling biases, and I wonder how we would acquire the resources to conduct experiments methodologically sound enough that their results would be significant, the way CFAR is doing them, with randomized controlled trials and the like.

5[anonymous]
Luminosity is an example of a sequence that I liked but thought of as something that has many predictions that need testing . Methods of teaching rationality also seem like an obvious area for gain anyone who is interesting in that may be interested in a project I started to tackle this. I implicitly argue that CFAR would be better of doing this kind of thing too. We are at the dawn of an era of computational social science, transitioning to a more data driven model seems promising. If that is the course they pick I see no reason to make a strong distinction between CFAR and the wider LessWrong community. We can raise funds via kickstarter or just regular donations to cover expenses, as was done in the example of Citizen Genetics. Competitions like the quantified health prize could be used by CFAR to pick which of the community proposed projects it would like to happen and perhaps fund it. For things like processing time and bandwith you already have LWers willing to give it away for free. We wouldn't need that many resources. A website of the yourmorals.org kind (that is used for academic research) is something well within our reach (YourBrain, YourReasoning, RURational?). As to the cognitive resources, don't we have enough Bayesians and people with basic programming knowledge that given resources like common crawl we could come up with interesting research? That we have many AI experts on the site only means we also have the know how to tackle big data.
duwease00

Ah, so what we're really talking about here is situations where the world state keeps changing as the memory builds its model.. or even just a situation where the memory has an incomplete subset of the world information. Reading the second article's example, which makes the limitations of the memory explicit, I understand. I'd say the chess example is a bit misleading in this case, as the discrepancies between the memory and world are a big part of the discussion -- and as you said, chess is a perfect-information game.

duwease00

I'm having a hard time understanding what the arrows from W-node to W-node and M-node to M-node represent in the chess example, given the premise that the world and memory states take turns changing.

If I understand correctly, W is the board state at the start of the player's turn, and M is the state of the memory containing the model of the board and possible moves/outcomes. W(t) is the state that precedes M(t), and likewise the action resulting from the completion of remodelling the memory at M(t), plus the opposing player's action, results in new world s... (read more)

1Johnicholas
The arrows all mean the same thing, which is roughly 'causes'. Chess is a perfect-information game, so you could build the board entirely from the player's memory of the board, but in general, the state of the world at time t-1, together with the player, causes the state of the world at time t.
duwease20

Good article, but as always a concrete example would be beneficial to comprehension.

0orthonormal
I'm sorry, duwease, but I'm afraid I couldn't do that. More seriously, decision theories deserve a more intuitive writeup as well, but first someone needs to show that the content is actually there. So I'm focusing on that with this sequence.
duwease20

Worked great for me. I like to browse the articles during coffee breaks, and anything that helps me to easily grab on to an idea through example in "reality" rather than slow down and parse out the abstract concepts in my head makes the read go altogether easier :)