All of nyralech's Comments + Replies

Having a list where people can sign up to be notified when spots are running low would be very useful.

I agree that it is some support, but I do not have any knowledge of the statistical distribution of differences between twins deaths. I would assume that there are enough twins that such a large difference is not terribly unlikely to happen just by chance alone.

However, it's quite clear to me that you are more informed about this than I am, so it would be nice if you could point me toward some resources with stats on this.

The example of Rita Montalchni is incredibly interesting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Levi-Montalcini). She administered a nerve growth factor (NGF) as eye drops and lived for 101 years while her twin sister died when she was 91. (Bearing in mind the average life duration difference of twins is six years, we can conclude that she gained about four years.)

Actually, all we can conclude is that you have managed to find a single anecdote to support your point. (Sidenote: according to the link she died at 103 years of age.)

0turchin
Also the statistical difference in 12 years is still strong in this case as Hompertz curve is much steeper in 90th that in 70th. For example, after 100 a person has the probability to die 50 per cent a year. In this case gaining several years is very unprobable event. For example for 91 years old person to survive until 103 has probability around 1 in 1000. The statistic for twins is also probably distorted by earlier deaths of most twins (like 65 and 71) - because most people die earlier than Hompertz curve is not so steep.
7Dustin
After reading turchin's post on my phone last night, I was going to make this same point when I got to my PC this morning. While turchin calls this "incredibly interesting", it seems pretty uninteresting to me. The very least of reasons being that the average life duration difference between twins being six years can easily mean vast swaths of twins die at the same age difference Rita Montalchni did.
2turchin
Basically my idea was not to support any points, but to write short introduction to the map, which include many different things. I think that idea of preventing brain decline as focal point in personal life extension is important, but its best supports comes not from anecdotes, which I used just for illustration, but from logical reasons. To consciously put efforts into life extension someone need clear and rational mind. It is necessary condition. That is why it is rational to invest most in preventing age related brain decline. Such investment for now should mostly be in the form in research as very small amount of actual interventions is known to work. (Apart from pure NGF, good studies are about green tea in Japan, and also about lithum and taurin). I think, I should improve the map by concentrating them in one box (with links). But basically it is the same logic as for AI that invest most resources in self-improvement. We also need best mind condition to be able to fight aging. If my IQ fell below certain threshold, I will be unable to rise it back as well as implement new life extension technics. Here is discussion about IQ and aging: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4gi/age_fluid_intelligence_and_intelligent_posts/

Is there any way to do these things without paying a large pricetag? Could you just lurk around campus or something? Only half-joking here.

Moving to europe, and (maybe) not exactly GB, should for the most part allow you to do that.

But those outcomes which have a limited initial effect yet have a very large overall effect are very sparsely distributed among all possible outcomes with a limited initial effect.

I still do not see why the pump would magnify the chance of those outcomes terribly. The space of possible actions which have a very large negative utility grows by a huge amount, but so does the space of actions which have trivial consequences beside doing what you want.

I'm afraid I don't know what you mean by Kolmogorov distance.

I consider this not to be a fair situation, and I'd rather my tax-dollars went to helping this person live a bit longer, than go to the next unnecessary-war (drummed up to keep the current pollies in power).

I think this shows the underlying problem. You would also rather have all your tax money go to give a cute little puppy more food than it will ever need, simply because war is a terrible alternative.

But that doesn't mean it's the best thing you can do with your money, or even anywhere near that standard. And neither is, one could argue, giving money to an obsolete person in a country where the cost of living is very high comparative to other countries in the world.

0taryneast
If I were magically put in charge of distributing the next year's federal budget - I would still allocate resources to domestic welfare (supporting others that, through no fault of their own, have fallen on times of hardship), even though a larger portion went to foreign aid.

Most consequences are limited in scope. You have a slim chance of killing many others through everyday accident but a pump would magnify that terribly.

That depends entirely on how the pump works. If it picks uniformly among bad outcomes, your point might be correct. However, it might still be biased towards narrow local effects for sheer sake of computability. If this is the case, I don't see why it would necessarily shift towards bigger bad outcomes rather than more limited ones.

0HungryHobo
In the example I gave the nuke exploding would be a narrow local effect which bleeds over into a large area. I agree that a pump which needed to monitor everything might very well choose only quite local direct effects but that could still have a lot of long range bad side effects. Bursting the damn a few hundred meters upriver might have the effect of carrying your mother, possibly even alive, far from the center of the building and it may also involve extinguishing the fire if you've thought to add that in as a desirable element of the outcome yet lead to wiping out a whole town ten miles downstream. The sort of the point is that the pump wouldn't care about those side effects.

Yes, that's definitely a problem. But then I'd say you're trying to use it on the wrong group of people.

Many people here (I hope) would very much prefer it if you told them "hey you're dull" to you making up excuses every time you come across them and they try to talk to you, whether it be to reflect on why you think they're dull, or to stop wasting both of your time by trying to interact with you if you aren't even interested.

Thank you, that was certainly insightful. I see now that it is some kind of natural extension of relevant concepts.

I have been told however that from a formal point of view a lot of QM (maybe they were talking only about QED) makes no sense whatsoever and the only reason why the theory works is because many of the objects coming up have been redefined so as to make the theory work. I don't really know to what extent this is true, but if so I would still consider it a somewhat unnatural theory.

natural result of the theory

To my very limited understanding, most of QM in general is completely unnatural as a theory from a purely mathematical point of view. If that is actually so, what precisely do you mean by "natural result of the theory"?

7TheMajor
Actually most of it is quite natural, QM is the most obvious extension that you get when you try to extend the concept of 'probability' to complex numbers, and there are some suggestions why you would want to do this (I think the most famous/commonly found explanation is that we want 'smooth' operators, for example if turning around is an operator there should also be an operator describing 'half of turning around', and another for '1/3 of turning around' etc., which for mathematical reasons immediately gives you complex numbers (try flipping a sign in two identical steps, this is the same as multiplying by i)). To my best knowledge the question of why we use wavefunctions is a chicken-and-the-egg type question - we want square integrable wavefunctions because those are the solution of Schrodingers equation, we want Schrodingers equation because it is (almost) the most general Hermitian time-evolution operator, time-evolution operators should be Hermitian because that is the only way to preserve unitarity and unitarity should be preserved because then the two-norm of the wavefunction can be interpreted as a probability. We've made a full circle. As for your second question: I think a 'natural part of the theory' is something that Occam doesn't frown upon - i.e. if the theory with the extra part takes a far shorter description than the description of the initial theory plus the description of the extra part. Informally, something is 'a natural result of the theory' if somehow the description for the added result is somehow already partly specified by the theory. Again my apologies for writing such long answers to short questions.

I think that another problem in the context of a debate is with people in often throwing down a lot of arguments. If the weak arguments all come from a single source within a short period of time I tend to discount their arguments (perhaps too much).

Unless I am misunderstanding you, yes, that's precisely the point.

I don't understand why you are confused, though. None of these are, after all, numbers in (0,1), which would not contain any information as to how you would go about doing your updates given more evidence.

How is that information by itself useful?

0Martin-2
Good question. I didn't have an answer right away. I think it's useful because it gives structure to the act of updating beliefs. When I encounter evidence for some H I immediately know to estimate P(E|H) and P(E|~H) and I know that this ratio alone determines the direction and degree of the update. Even if the numbers are vague and ad hoc this structure precludes a lot of clever arguing I could be doing, leads to productive lines of inquiry, and is immensely helpful for modeling my disagreement with others. Before reading LW I could have told you, if asked, that P(H), P(E|H), and P(E|~H) were worth considering; but becoming acutely aware that these are THE three quantities I need, no more and no less, has made a huge difference in my thinking for the better (not to sound dogmatic; I'll use different paradigms when I think they're more appropriate e.g. when doing math).

Non-standard analysis is perfectly fine. Most mathematicians just don't deal with that kind of analysis.

If being reasonable is necessary to your goals, then it is already instrumentally rational to be reasonable.

Isn't this just cognitive bias on part of the researcher?

3ChristianKl
No, the term cognitive bias suggests that someone is picking actions that are not correct according to his utility function. If a person is corrupt and acts in his interests that's no cognitive bias in the sense I understand the term to be used in psychology.

Weak bayesian evidence E is something which you can reasonable expect to find given either hypothesis (e.g. "math is useful" vs "math is useless"), but nevertheless results in P(H|E)/P(~H|E) > P(H)/P(~H).

Strong bayesian evidence would pretty much kill the alternative hypothesis, i.e. P(~H|E) ~ 0.

0ChristianKl
The world has more than just two categories. It's useful to know whether we talk about updating by 1% or 0.001%.

I don't think this list tells you much.

The most obvious reason why the list might look this way is that there are simply more people getting MBAs or engineering degrees. So of course there would be more of those becoming millionaires than there are math students etc.

I'm also not sure if the study actually measured how many people with a given degree actually got this level of wealth by themselves or if they also asked those who had wealthy parents. I don't have statistics on this but it does sound reasonable (not to say that it necessarily is) that wealth... (read more)

You could also do a row-wise XOR on every feature and get 2. Which for me seemed like a pretty obvious solution to me so I went with it.