All of Marlon's Comments + Replies

Marlon10

Don't send heat underwater, it's a bad idea for everything that lives under there (and for us if we don't want these things going up).

I'm curious though, how would you "send" heat ?

0Daniel_Burfoot
Not much lives 1000m under the surface. Also, the amount of heat that we would send is actually quite small compared to the heat capacity of the oceans. Water has 4000x higher heat capacity than air by volume. Transferring heat from a hot place to a cold place is really easy. In principle you can just connect them with a highly conductive material like copper. In practice even copper might not have enough heat conductance, so it might be better to pump either water or air from one place to another.
Marlon00

I would like to read that review but can't access it (either through my Uni or sci-hub). Can you provide the pdf of this review please ?

Thanks for this small litterature review.

0[anonymous]
My internet is extremely slow at the moment so I can't get the file right now, but I can do this. I'll get back to you. If somehow I forget after a week days just remind me (but you shouldn't have to, ideally)
Marlon00

To paraphrase Wittgenstein, what you should do if someone talks metaphysics is point out that they haven't given signification to some of their words. Although he says that philosophy should only care about reality (and if it's reality, it's physics, biology, etc and not philosophy), he also says that philosophy is here to clarify our thoughts, and I can't help but agree.

The "kind of crazy" of the postmodern though aren't the minority, they kinda all lack rigor and fail to give signification to their words (but use them nonetheless) - and moreove... (read more)

Marlon00

Only few people are interested in studying placebos. However, there are a few papers (Gotzsche is one of the few).

Pain (or nausea) isn't an objective outcome anyway.

4[anonymous]
Elaborate? I'm pretty sure that's not correct, at the very least when it comes to pain, immune system things, autonomic stuff, and possibly some musculoskeletal stuff.
Marlon20

Greatly interested, and once I am free of my current activities (in a few weeks) I'll be able to delve in it.

Marlon00

The main idea of WGS is having >all< the SNPs whereas you only get the most common SNPs with the SNP tests.

I'm not really sure how you would use the data from WGS (let's say the genome is assembled too - or maybe that would cost more ?). You would probably use BLAT on your local machine to search for genes with known SNPs. I don't think you could do anything more (finding novel SNPs is out of reach here).

I would guess the main idea would be to be able to check for new SNPs as more and more are found in the literature. However, the literature is not ... (read more)

5Douglas_Knight
I agree with your general point, but here is a technical comment: 23andMe is the million most common SNPs, but that is not the same as the million most common variants, because not all variation is in the form of a SNP. SNP stands for "single nucleotide polymorphism" -- it means that one letter is changed while the context is unchanged. They are easy to detect because of that context, and that ease of detection is why they are used. Another kind of variation is an insertion or a deletion. They are harder to detect, which is why 23andMe only detects three of them, ones in the BRCA gene that are common among Ashkenazi. It does not attempt to detect even the ones that are equally common among the Dutch. They are easy to detect with whole genome sequencing and they are valuable to detect because they are fairly easy to interpret: the whole protein is ruined. What the protein does and what you can do about it are harder problems, but it's not like finding a new SNP, where it probably means nothing. A third kind of variation is copy number variation, where there is a repetitive section of the DNA and number of repeats varies from person to person. But whole genome sequencing today is bad at such regions, at least if the number of repeats is large. A lot of people think that they are important, but the fact that they are hard to measure makes that hard to assess at this time.
Marlon00

Even Kirsch's paper from 2008 results in that, and it's probably one of the most (or the most) harsh paper on antidepressants.

Marlon00

Science is not that simple, I'm not sure you can draw such conclusions.

There was/is indeed a problem in the reporting of the evidence, that diminished the effect of antidepressant in the literature. Reporting bias is an important and serious matter in science.

That does not mean however that the antidepressant effects got down to a placebo effect. It seems that Kirsch does a lot of hand-waving to put aside the treatment effect. He did the same thing in 2008.

AFAIK the literature still says antidepressants have an effect better than placebo.

0ChristianKl
Do you have specific meta analysis in mind?
Marlon00

How would you test that the FAE leads to in average better judgments ? And better than what ? Eliminating the FAE does not mean only considering external factors either, or you'd have another bias.

0OrphanWilde
I cannot imagine a formal way to test the accuracy of FAE. From a "better" perspective, I lean towards the perspective that a hypothesis about somebody's personality is almost always more useful than a hypothesis about somebody's situation. Somebody else's personality is something I have to interact with; somebody else's situation is not. I can update inaccurate profiles of personalities based on further information, so I don't see a significant cost to inaccurate profiles.
Marlon00

Does your increase in social skills made you better at discussing (without boring others) subjects you have an interest in then ?

Marlon00

I wasn't very clear, and probably misleading. Although I'm not an expert, I have "read" Pearl's book a few years ago (Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, it's available as a pdf) and it really seemed to me that some independence was hard to test, and sometimes was an assumption given the system. It's also true that I haven't read it deeper now that I have a bit more knowledge, and I lack time to do so.

If you have more hindsight about that, I would love to read it.

Marlon-10

So ... Should I understand that you're now talking about subjects you have no interest in ?

Or your final point is that you're working on talking about subjects you do have an interest in with more "sociality" (and I don't get why people would take it differently if the subjects are, as I perceive, not common) ?

1JonahS
No, socializing has become fascinating to me because I realized the degree to which social skills have been the limiting factor for me, how much room for improvement I have.
Marlon00

I agree with gurugeorge response and see Popper the same way.

That said, I do think that although Pearl's work is great, the key word is "in principle" - the methods rely on a number of assumptions that you can't test (like independance) and he also says that the experiment is the only guaranteed way to establish causation (in his talk the art and science of cause and effect). I also may be wrong, as this talk was given in 1996, he might have changed his mind.

Moreover, your "trust your intuitions sometimes" is misleading: it is still no... (read more)

2IlyaShpitser
You can test independence. There is a ton of frequentist literature on hypothesis testing, and Bayesian methods too, of course. Did you mean something else?
Marlon00

Updating priors with evidence. Standing by your beliefs seems to be praised - at least where I live.

I consider Popper as an important thinker, falsification is quite important right now for example. Why do you seem to think he's unimportant ?

-1ChristianKl
The most funny thing about Popper is that I don't get the impression that he or most of the people reading him seek to falsify his theories. Often because someone, as it's philosophy the rules of falsification don't matter. Popper didn't try to study scientists and how scientists come up with new scientific findings to try to falsify his hypothesis. From a more LW perspective Lukeprog writes: Popper isn't really a recent thinker. He wrote 50 years ago. Jaynes wrote his book in the 1990s. Kahnemans works wasn't known before that time. We have modern tools to deal with uncertainty like credence calibration. We have found that in cases with low costs of false positives trusting intuition is highly useful and that most experts make a lot of their decisions based on intuition rather than analytical reasoning.
Marlon40

More knowledge about bias, which would particularly undermine the unfortunately common and well regarded stance "I only believe what I see". People rely too much on their direct feelings/intuitions without assessing them.

The idea that in order to have an accurate representation of reality, one must have background knowledge in science. Add in a little philosophy (recent philosophy, like Popper).

Also praising the ones who admit their mistakes - that happens too little.

The final idea would be like yours, more Bayesian thinking.

I'm probably too optimistic.

0ChristianKl
What do you mean with that? Especially while you try to treat Popper as an important thinker?
Marlon20

I don't know if that has been pointed out, but it has been done only recently and with moderately bad results ...

It could become a thing if every human on the planet wouldn't go crazy at every mention of "gene editing" (or simply "gene" for that matter, as 80% of americans support the labeling of DNA containing foods ...).

This kind of development would be ... strange. The generations of semi-enhanced humans would indeed feel rather strange.

But I have to point out one thing: genes don't work like that. You don't have one (or few) gene fo... (read more)

Marlon10

For this problem, you could make the distribution of the time it takes to get to the train station - you could easily compute the average time it takes for going there, and seeing that by planning to take exactly this amount of time to get there will make you 20 minutes late 50% of the time.

The prep time will only make the "late amount of time" discontinuous, it won't change the probability of being late.

Marlon30

One problem I see is trying to see the signals that would raise the crush probability ... While you would also need to see the signals that would make that probability drop.

The sensible route seems in my opinion to be what signals would they give me if they didn't have a crush on me ?, as you seem to be going the confirmation bias route otherwise.

I'm also one of those for whom the whole "You're overthinking this, don't think, stay natural" simply does not work. I appreciate the idea of such a survey to get a prior though, it seems like a great idea.

Marlon00

The way I see it, causal decision theory simply ignores a part of the problem: that the Predictor is able to "predict".

Evidence should get inside the equation, but not the same way as evidential decision theory: the evidence is what should fuel the hypothesis "The Predictor predicts our choices".

It does not matter if we "think" that our "choice" shouldn't change what's inside the boxes - as the main thing about a prediction is that we aren't actually making any "choice", that "choice" is already ... (read more)

Marlon00

Indeed, I stand corrected.

I still find a rather big amount of self-published articles in this list. I find the idea of self-publishing articles to be a bit self-defeating :/

Marlon10

There is no dichotomy here: it is possible to both keep blogs and publish in mainstream journals.

Marlon30

This should be interesting to look at

Marlon10

Same reason why milesmathis (google it, have fun) isn't taken, and shouldn't be taken seriously by the mainstream. Because "playing by the rules" didn't work - you usually end up with an unending amount of crackpottery in what is actually not published: books, blogs, etc.

Not publishing in the mainstream while publishing books and self published articles is the crackpott's artillery, unfortunately.

Think like the mainstream: given the amount of crazy stuff that's present on the internet that couldn't be published because it was, indeed, crazy, should I care about this particular guy that doesn't publish anything but books (or self published articles) ? The unfortunate answer is no.

Marlon00

I agree, most writings are derived from academic works.

That may seem weird, but I don't think "basic clear thinking" should be excluded from academia. Philosophy problems should in my opinion not simply be something we "solve it ourselves", and should enter as formal as it can in academia. I may also simply be unaware of the possibly similar works on this problem too.

That said, I haven't been confused by this problem either, simply got more confused after reading LW and asking what people thought around me - that it was really something that bothered people.

And TDT has been self published ... Why not in mainstream academia ?

2Ishaan
Recorded compatibalist conceptions of free will are several centuries older than academia, so I don't think it was ever really a publishable insight. (You got it on your own, I got it on my own, and so have a lot of people throughout history - it's just that not everyone agrees.) I don't know about the second question...assuming the premise is true, I suppose either they did not try or it wasn't accepted, I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable about academic philosophy to speculate!
Marlon00

MIRI self publishes if I'm not wrong.

Why not publish in mainstream academia ?

1ChristianKl
You are wrong, MIRI doesn't only self publish: https://intelligence.org/all-publications/ There are multiple journal articles and conference papers in the list.
0Gram_Stone
This is old and it seems like it was a bit controversial, but lukeprog wrote a post with some reasons that publishing in mainstream academia might be suboptimal: Reasons for SIAI to not publish in mainstream journals
Marlon00

Is this simply one statement ? Is Solomonoff complexity additive with multiple statements that must be true at once ? Or is it possible that we can calculate the probability as a chain of Solomonoff complexities, something like:

s1, s2 ... etc are the statements. You need all of them to be true: magic powers, matrix, etc. Are they simply considered as one statement with one Solomonoff complexity K = 2^(x) ? Or K1K2... = 2 ^ (x1 + x2 + ...) ? Or K1^K2^... = 2^(2^(2^...)) ?

And if it's considered as one statement, does simply calculating the probability with... (read more)

Marlon20

I think you are overestimating the probabilities there: it is only Pascal's Mugging if you fail to attribute a low enough probability to the mugger's claim. The problem, in my opinion, is not how to deal with tiny probabilities of vast utilities, but how not to attribute too high probabilities to events whose probabilities defy our brain's capacity (like "magic powers from outside the Matrix").

I also feel that, as with Pascal's wager, this situation can be mirrored (and therefore have the expected utilities canceled out) if you simply think "... (read more)

1dxu
The problem here is that you're not "attributing" a probability; you're calculating a probability through Solomonoff Induction. In this case, the probability is far too low to actually calculate, but simple observation tells us this much: the Solomonoff probability is given by the expression 2^(-Kolmogorov), which is mere exponentiation. There's pretty much no way mere exponentiation can catch up to four up-arrows in Knuth's up-arrow notation; therefore, it doesn't even really matter what the Kolmogorov complexity is, because there's no way it can be nearly as low as 3^^^^3 is high. All would be well and good if we could simply assign probabilities to be whatever we want; then we could just set the probability of Pascal's-Mugging-type situations as low as we wanted. To an extent, since we're humans and thus unable to compute the actual probabilities, we still can do this. But paradoxically enough, as a mind's computational ability increases, so too does its susceptibility to these types of situations. An AI that is actually able to compute/approximate Solomonoff Induction would find that the probability is vastly outweighed by the utility gain, which is part of what makes the problem a problem. But do the two possibilities really sum to zero? These are two different situations we're talking about here: "he kills them if I don't abide" versus "he kills them if I do". If a computationally powerful enough AI calculated the probabilities of these two possibilities, will they actually miraculously cancel out? The probabilities will likely mostly cancel, true, but even the smallest remainder will still be enough to trigger the monstrous utilities carried by a number like 3^^^^3. If an AI actually carries out the calculations, without any a priori desire that the probabilities should cancel, can you guarantee that they will? If not, then the problem persists. Also, your remark on infinities in decision-making is well-taken, but I don't think it applies here. As large as
Marlon140

Hello. New to the active part of the site, I've been lurking for a while, reading much discussions (and not always agreeing, which might be the reason I'm going active). I've come to the site thanks to HPMOR and the quest towards less bias.

I'm a (soon starting a PhD) student in molecular dynamics in France, skeptic (I guess) and highly critical of many papers (especially in my field). Popper is probably the closest to how I define, although with a few contradictions, the philosophy of what I'm doing.

I'm in the country of wine, cheese and homeopathy, don't forget it :)