All of sixes_and_sevens's Comments + Replies

Phase I clinical trials exist for this purpose. The objective of Phase I trials is to establish safety, dosage, and side-effects of drugs in human subjects, and to observe their proposed mechanism of action if relevant.

It's rare for Phase II and III trials (which have clinically-relevant endpoints ) to be carried out on healthy subjects. Part of this is ethical considerations, but also clinical trials are extremely expensive to carry out, and there's not much payoff in learning whether your drug has some specific effect on healthy subjects.

Here is some colourful language for you: Dominic Cummings makes my memetic immune system want to vomit.

Part of it is because he sets off my Malcolm-Gladwell-o-Meter, but mostly it’s because he’s trying so hard to appear more knowledgeable and well-educated than he actually is. He surrounds himself with the trappings of expertise he obviously doesn’t have. Case in point: this “paper” is clearly a blog post which he converted to PDF via MS Word because he thinks that makes it look more credible.

The effect for me is a bit like receiving an email from a Nigerian prince, asking for your help in getting millions of dollars out of the country. My response is approximately the same.

0Viliam
The pattern-matching part of my brain sees the author as a modern analogy of Chesterton -- a highly intelligent and educated person who decided to put their skills in defense of a political bottom line, by trying to repaint it as hidden rationality. He almost makes you believe that a victory of his political side would mean a victory of rationality, just because he can convincingly connect these two things in his head, and put that on paper. Problem is, his position is absolutely not representative of the political side he defends, and 99% of people on his political side have completely different priorities. This said, his description of NASA in its best days is really cool. I just don't share his implied belief that Brexit is somehow related to that. My prediction is that 5 or 10 years later, Britain will not be any more NASA-like than it is now. And neither will be USA under Trump, France under Le Pen, Hungary under Orbán, etc. This is all just wishful thinking for contrarians.
4gjm
It doesn't seem like he's trying to make it not look like a blog post. (If he were, he'd have removed the bits that explicitly say it is one.)

How do you select (or deselect) the root set?

2Paul Crowley
The site has to have a clear owner, and they decide on the root set. Technically, it's part of the site configuration, and you need admin access to the site to configure it.

I've had some luck in open threads on SSC for stuff I would previously have directed to LW, but it's much noisier, and is a far cry from a fully-featured discussion forum.

The links are a new feature since I was last here, and I can't say I'm overwhelmed by them, tbh.

I haven’t posted in LW in over a year, because the ratio of interesting-discussion to parochial-weirdness had skewed way too far in the parochial-weirdness direction. There still isn’t a good substitute for LW out there, though. Now it seems there’s some renewed interest in using LW for its original purpose, so I thought I’d wander back, sheepishly raise my hand and see if anyone else is in a similar position.

I’m presumably not the only one to visit the site for the first time in ages because of new, interesting content, so it’s reasonable to assume a bunch of other former LW-users are reading this. What would it take for you to come back and start using the site again?

2Tenoke
More quality content (either in terms of discussions or actual posts). P.S. I do see how that might not be especially helpful.
0TheAncientGeek
Have you tried Slate Star Codex?
4plethora
I have a very low bar for 'interesting discussion', since the alternative for what to do with my spare time when there's nothing going on IRL is playing video games that I don't particularly like. But it's been months since I've seen anything that meets it. It seems like internet people think insight demands originality. This isn't true. If you look at popular long-form 'insight' writers, even Yudkowsky (especially Yudkowsky), most of what they do is find earlier books and file the serial numbers off. It could be a lot easier for us to generate interesting discussion if we read more books and wrote about them, like this.
7NatashaRostova
I'm not new to this internet sphere, but new to LW. One thing I suggest is users spend less time wondering what would get people back, and more time posting interesting links. Interesting links are somewhat rare, there is lots of lame blogs and annoying quasi-philosophy discussions. Lots of the philosophy posted here is very cringeworthy.

Similarly, I've read Austin's How to Do Things With Words. He's not winning any awards for his prose style, but he has a comprehensible project which he goes about in a rigorous, methodical way.

Subject: Written style and composition

Recommendation: Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects, by Martha Kolln and Loretta Gray

Reason: After reading Pinker's The Sense of Style, I wanted a meatier syllabus in the mechanics of writing well. My follow-up reading was Rhetorical Grammar and Joseph Williams' Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace.

I would actually recommend reading all three. Rhetorical Grammar is the most textbook-y of the recommendations, and The Sense of Style is more like a weighty, popular book on the subject, with Ten ... (read more)

Or a host for a beautiful parasitic wasp?

3Lumifer
Toxoplasmosis is a better metaphor if you want to go that way :-D

LW's strongest, most dedicated writers all seem to have moved on to other projects or venues, as has the better part of its commentariat.

In some ways, this is a good thing. There is now, for example, a wider rationalist blogosphere, including interesting people who were previously put off by idiosyncrasies of Less Wrong. In other ways, it's less good; LW is no longer a focal point for this sort of material. I'm not sure if such a focal point exists any more.

5Baughn
Where, exactly? All I've noticed is that there's less interesting material to read, and I don't know where to go for more. Okay, SSC. That's about it.
2Lumifer
LW as an incubator?

Not that much of a rags-to-riches story, I'm afraid. My parents both have working class backgrounds, and neither went to university, but my upbringing would probably get coded as lower-middle class. I had one attempt at university already, fifteen years ago, but dropped out after one year of an Astrophysics degree. Also my jobs for those six years were mid-range software dev/tech professional tybe jobs. It's not like I've been shovelling coal or anything.

Some of the things I was thinking about class in relation to that comment were on this sort of topic. I... (read more)

8Viliam
I believe having a lot of money is useful in many ways; far beyond merely being able to buy a larger car or spending your holidays in a more exotic location. Imagine that your would be born in a family rich enough that your parents could and would simply give you as much money as you make at your job today. And there would be no worry that you will run out of resources in a year, or even in twenty years. Essentially, you could have a private "basic income" in a country where other people don't... and they would all have to compete with you. How large advantage would it be? Instead of having to spend 8 hours every day at work, most likely spending your mental energy on fulfilling someone else's dreams, you could spend all this time and energy on your own dreams. You could freely do your own project at your own pace; and if the project fails, no problem, you can learn from your mistakes and start another project; and again, and again, as many times as necessary. No worry about paying your bills. If you want to learn something, you have as much time as you need to learn it; nothing will interrupt you. If you want to travel to conferences and meet people, you are free to go for as long as you need. You don't have to carefully count your remaining vacation days. Even if you would decide that having a job is the best way to learn and practice your skills, unlike the less rich people you would be completely free to optimize for this goal. Your could choose your job regardless of the salary. If you would find out that the job is not exactly what you have imagined, or if your boss later told you to do something that you don't wish to learn and practice, or if you would simply feel that you have already learned enough and want to try something new, you would be free to leave without any worry that maybe you won't find an equally paying job soon enough. (Read more here: "Yes, rich kids already won the career game. Here’s why.".) If you were in such situation, the largest r

I finished the part-time Bachelor's degree in Economics and Maths I've been working on in my spare time for the past six years, alongside a full-time job. I got the result of my (particularly brutal, touch-and-go) final exam this afternoon, and have landed first-class honours. I'll be quitting my job in September and starting a full-time Masters in Computational Statistics and Machine Learning.

6Gram_Stone
I've only interacted with you briefly, and I always feel quite condescending when I use the phrase 'proud of you,' but I'm super proud of you! You're a badass! In fact, since you speak of working while attending university, I am now curious about your socioeconomic class, if that is not too forward. I'm viscerally interested in people who rise above the limitations of class. Now that I'm reminded, I'm also curious about those class-related things about which you had been thinking that were related to the things that I said in that comment. PM me anytime if that's something you care to discuss.

For the country data example, every instance of a country name is prepended with a small icon (for development purposes this is currently an obnoxious red X, but I plan to replace this with a neutral-coloured globe or something), and the name itself is wrapped in some custom style (currently boldface, but could be anything). Clicking on the icon places a container with the relevant data on the page, offset to the same location as the icon, (giving the illusion of the icon "expanding" to show the data). Clicking on the icon again, or away from the... (read more)

0eeuuah
Yeah that seems like it would work pretty well for the case of country data. Let us know how development goes!

I'm playing around with writing a Chrome extension that identifies countries of the world in the browser and marks them up with expandable, at-a-glance summary data for that country, like GDP per capita, composite index scores (HDI, MPI, etc.), literacy rate, principal exports and so on. I find myself regularly looking this up on Wikipedia anyway, and figured I'd remove the inconvenience of doing so.

This example probably isn't that useful for everyone, but it got me wondering what other sets of things could be marked up in the browser in this way. Another ... (read more)

0eeuuah
This kind of thing sounds very useful especially if easily extensible. How are you planning to make the ui for this work? I think it would be fairly challenging to make it both easily available without being obnoxiously overpresent and am interested to hear your approach to the problem.
3ChristianKl
Names/EmailAddresses/Phone numbers of people can be useful. Both by drawing information from my contact book but also in the way https://rapportive.com/ works. Unit conversion would be interesting. If someone writes the price of 5£ however over that price to see the conversion to Euro and dollar would be useful. Whenever I read temperature noted in °F, I would appreciate being able to hover over it to see a conversion into the sensible format of °C. The same goes for units like inches. When I read a time noted in EST I would like automatic conversion into GMT+1 with happens to be where I live.
1Silver_Swift
I'm still sad that there isn't a dictionary of numbers for Firefox, it sounds amazing but it isn't enough to make me switch to Chrome just for that.
2[anonymous]
There was a chrome extension advertised on LW a while ago that did this for "alternate points of view" - but it was crowdsourced, and didn't have enough links to be useful. But an automated version of that (that say, detected keywords, and posted up links) would be great.

Much of what we teach teenagers about human biology is very recently-acquired knowledge, historically speaking. Modern knowledge about the circulatory system, aerobic and anaerobic respiration, vitamin deficiencies, etc. is very far away from the 13th Century, but has practical implications that can still be implemented, like "train your troops at altitude and give your sailors citrus fruit".

A lot of contemporary ideas about workflows and division of labour are fairly recent developments as well, (there were no assembly lines in the 13th Century), but have been internalised by citizens of the 21st Century.

Who should I talk to in a group? I have a bunch of existing "social senses" for navigating this, but they're not very reliable. If a clear You-Should-Talk-To-This-Person sense went off whenever I encountered someone appropriate, that would be nice.

1lululu
I've always wanted this, but in a magical genie kind of way! OK cupid tries to do something like this by matching people pre-meeting. At an IRL interaction I can't imagine how a computer would figure this out before I did unless it had a very accurate idea of every personality in the group. So every person would have to have personality tests on file. Which I guess isn't implausible in the future! I also wonder if this would silo people even more among others similar to them. If anti-vaxers only talk to other anti-vaxers, and none of them have ever been friends or talked to a proponent of vaccination, they have no reason to ever change their mind. People who grew up poor only talk to other people who grew up poor, and the same for those who grew up rich, so fewer unexpected opportunities for social mobility/job offers/connections.
0TylerJay
What would you imagine the criteria would be?

I've read The Design of Everyday Things. You don't need to read The Psychology of..., as it's the same book, renamed for marketing reasons.

Completely off-topic, but do you have a policy for when you emphasise with italics and when you emphasise with bold?

2Lumifer
A very vague one. Bold is a bit stronger than italics, plus italics are overloaded, they are used to signify other things than emphasis, too. In the grandparent post there are both italics and bold because the emphasis is somewhat different so I wanted two different ways to emphasize.

I don't know how common this is, but with a dual-monitor setup I tend to have one in landscape and one in portrait. The portrait monitor is good for things like documents, or other "long" windows like log files and barfy terminal output. The landscape monitor is good for everything that's designed to operate in that aspect ratio (like web stuff).

More generally, there's usually something I'm reading and something I'm working on, and I'll read from one monitor, while working on whatever is in the other.

At work I make use of four Gnome workspaces: o... (read more)

This is all kinds of useful. Thanks!

You can learn an astonishing amount about web development without ever having to think about how it'll look to another human being. In a professional context, I know enough to realise when I should hand it over to a specialist, but I won't always have that luxury.

4MSwaffer
You are definitely right in that we need to think about how it will look to another human being. If you are interested in pursuing this idea further, Don Norman has written a number of books about design in general. These are not about graphic design but just design thinking. The Psychology of Everyday Things is a classic and Emotional Design builds on the work of people like Antonio Damasio with regard to the role of emotion in cognition. Norman has another book called The Design of Everyday Things which I have not read but I imagine is a great read as well. All of these works emphasize the role of design in helping humans accomplish their goals. Some practitioners of data analytics view the output of prose, charts, tables and graphs as the final product. In most cases however the final product of a data analytics effort is a decision. That decision might be to do more research, to buy one company versus another or propose a new policy to Congress. Regardless of the nature of the decision, how well you design the output will have an impact on the quality of the decision made.

How are we operationalising "best" here? The purpose of textbooks is to efficiently impart material. Popular books have a wide variety of purposes (to inform, inspire, entertain, polemicise, etc.), so by what standard are we holding one popular book to be superior to another?

Do you love it to the tune of $20?

4palladias
Yeah, I'd say so.

I've dabbled with ggplot, but I've put it on hold for the immediate future in lieu of getting to grips with D3. I'll be getting all the R I can handle next year.

I did not know about the book, but it's available to view from various sources. If I get time I'll give it a look-in and report back.

A lot of online communities pay lip service to the idea that their experiences aren't universal, but Less Wrong seems to be one of the few places that takes that idea seriously.

4[anonymous]
This is actually one of the things I am both positive and negative about. I think people are far more similar than sometimes assumed here. The evidence is pop culture. How could something be as popular as Star Wars or Metallica if not for calling out to a very similar underlying emotional hardware in people? In a No Mind Is Typical universe there would no universal mind product - there would be no hugely successful bands or movies just thousands of mini subcultures with mini stars. One of my most surreal moments of How We All Are Really Alike was reading a documentary novel from an Afghanistani woman writer. I don't really remember the title or her name but I can find the book later if interested. Anyway she wrote Titanic was a huge underground success there. Underground because banned like most Western stuff, it was the early Taliban era if I remember right but still pretty much ever woman or young man saw it. It is a romantic movie that has just about NO reference whatsoever to how love or marriage is done in their culture, and yet it "clicked" because it talks to the same, universal human hardware. (Nm the book I found another source anyway.)

I'm looking for some "next book" recommendations on typography and graphically displaying quantitative data.

I want to present quantitative arguments and technical concepts in an attractive manner via the web. I'm an experienced web developer about to embark on a Masters in computational statistics, so the "technical" side is covered. I'm solid enough on this to be able to direct my own development and pick what to study next.

I'm less hot on the graphical/design side. As part of my stats-heavy undergrad degree, I've had what I presume to... (read more)

0Adam Zerner
You may be interested in some of Bret Victor's stuff. I too am a web developer looking to learn more about design. And I too have read Butterick's Practical Typography, Don't Make Me Think, Visual Display of Quantitative Information as well as a few other classics. But I don't think it's made me much better at design. I sense that there are a few "roadblocks". Ie. things I don't know that are preventing me from actually applying the things I learned in reading those books. Any thoughts on this?
6MSwaffer
With your background in web development have you read things like Krug's Don't Make Me Think and William's The Non-Designer's Design Book? These are focused more on the design aspect of web however they contain some good underlying principles for data visualization as well. Tufte's book are all great for underlying principles even though, as you noted, they aren't focused on modern technologies. Beautiful Evidence from 2006 has some updated thoughts but he still borrows heavily from his earlier books. For general multimedia concepts, Mayer's Multimedia Learning is good from a human learning perspective (my background). I found Data Points: Visualization That Means Something to be a good modern guide. From my perspective, I am glad you are looking down the road and recognizing that after the data are analyzed the analysis must be communicated.
5palladias
My job (not at the WSJ!) gave me The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics: The Dos and Don'ts of Presenting Data, Facts, and Figures in my new hire bundle, and I love it!
5Douglas_Knight
Learn the library ggplot2. It is worth learning the language R just to use this library (though there is a port in progress for python/pandas). Even if you cannot incorporate the library into your workflow, its very good defaults show you what you should be doing with more work in other libraries. It is named after a book, the Grammar of Graphics, that I have not read.

Please post here if you learn a good answer elsewhere.

I'm pretty sure flirting works more or less the same in most of the Western world. As a general strategy for gauging interest with plausible deniability, I imagine it's universal.

Why?

1) It's largely pointless in terms of one's behaviour and psychological well-being. If you have an all-consuming infatuation and you're not acting on it, the reason for not acting probably isn't because some test statistic hasn't crossed a predesignated threshold.

2) The whole sentiment of "I will calculate your love for me" is attached to a cluster of non-attractive features that probably get binned as "creepy". No, this isn't right. No, this isn't fair. But it is the case.

3) The notion of a "prior" on other people bein... (read more)

0[anonymous]
Quite sure HughRistik went over this, but the creepiness factor is pretty much the research of the whole routine flirting stuff that happens. Courting is the right word, I think. But it's specifically that, though. Interestingly I think it's not uncommon for people to take a few actions, add them up and say "this person likes me". The opposite is quite true, too. The problem with those is that they're rather imprecise, so we can't know for sure. Unlike the research method which will recursively build upon itself until it has a good model. Precise vs imprecise, that's pretty damn creepy.
0[anonymous]
Since not everyone thinks my approach is totally wrong like it seemed in the beginning I will re-enter this discussion although I said that I would abandon the approach. I did plan to abandon it, not because I understood why it was completely wrong but because I saw the massive dislike of it as enough evidence to believe it is wrong. Concerning 1) As I mentioned my point was not to do nothing, try to analyse and then come to some kind of result whether another person likes you. It is to assign probabilities on whether that person has a crush on you in order to decide how to act. Concerning 2) If you decide to do certain things in the process of flirting you always assign probabilities to whether to person has a crush on you or not. If this would not be the case than there would be no development in the flirting process. You would give exactly the same signals at the beginning and at the end. You only progress to more obvious signals because based on what you have seen before you think it is more probable that that person likes you. The only question is do you let your subconscious assign the probabilities or do you make a conscious effort to do that. Most people will let their subconscious assign the probabilities. I agree that a lot of people will find it creepy if I decide to make conscious decisions here, but A) I do not have to let them know that I make a conscious decision and B) those people would probably also have problems with me making conscious decisions on other issues where they do not and if a person is not willing to accept that that is how I make my decisions it is probably the wrong person anyway. Concerning 3) yes my attractiveness something specific to me. But my attractiveness is not the only factor deciding how likely it is for someone to have a crush on me. I am not sure how to explain this properly, but in a world where every person would only have a crush on someone once in his/her entire life the chance of someone having a crush on me wo
0ChristianKl
Maybe it's even right. It's behavior that makes people uncomfortable. I don't see a reason why people shouldn't shun you for making them uncomfortable.

My claim is that your model is far too simple to model the complexities of human attraction.

Let's use your example of pulling red and blue balls from an urn. Consider an urn with ten blue balls and five red balls. In a "classical" universe, you would expect to draw a red ball from this urn one time in three. A simple probabilistic model works here.

In a "romantic" universe, the individual balls don't have colours yet. They're in an indeterminate state. They may have tendencies towards being red or blue, but if you go to the urn and say &... (read more)

0Gunnar_Zarncke
Probably. But that doesn't mean that it can't be modelled. Or are you instead claiming that it shouldn't be modelled? The first can be remedied by better models - and starting with a simple approximate model surely isn't a bad first step. The latter can't be fixed by modelling obviously.

There are various things wrong with this reasoning, but I don't think you're getting my general point: this entire approach is misguided and it will not lead you to good outcomes.

2[anonymous]
I accept that you and most people here think this aproach is not helpfull. I will therefor abandon it. However you said that there are various other things wrong with my reasoning even if the aproach was not generally bad. Is my general process of asigning probabilities to believes wrong? Would the thing I did in the following paragraph also be wrong in an abstract scenario, where I would for example want to differentiate between blue and red balls instead of someone having a crush on me or not? " If however this person gives the response with 100% Chance to a Person he/she has a crush on, but also with 50% chance to a person he/she just likes as a friend, then this signal will only help me differentiate between the states "friend" and "love intrest" with 50% probability. And now it becomes relevant on how many of his/her friends this person has a crush. Let us say the person has 10 friends and has a crush on 5 of them. Than on average he/she would give 5 correct positive signals 2.5 false positive signals and 2.5 correct negative signals. So if I get a positive signal, than that means that with a probability of 2/3 that person would have a crush on me and with a probability of 1/3 he/she would not."

A twelve-year-old sixes_and_sevens had the 1988 print of Psychology: The Essential Science and The Definitive Book of Body Language. He was not a hit with the ladies.

Epictetus110

Jeremy tried to be an interesting person. The trouble was that he was the kind of person who, having decided to be an interesting person, would first of all try to find a book called How to be an Interesting Person and then see whether there were any courses available.

--The Thief of Time

It's important to note that the base rate of people finding other people attractive is different from the base rate of other people finding you attractive. You're way more interested in the second question than you are the first question, but no amount of polling people on the internet can answer that question for you.

It's a bit like learning to juggle. You can't learn to juggle just by reading books and imagining how balls get thrown and how fast they fall. To learn how to do it, you've got to throw some balls up in the air. You've got to figure out how y... (read more)

3[anonymous]
That is indeed another problem I did not consider. It definitely decreases the value of knowing how many people others have a crush on in general. But still, the fact how many people have a crush on me in particular should be somewhat correlated to how many people they have a crush on in general. Since, as you pointed out, it is impossible for me to get the specific percentage for myself I’ll have to go with the general one. Concerning your juggling comparison. Maybe I did not express myself clearly. If you want to find out if someone likes you, then of course the most important thing is interacting with him/her. It is way more important than knowing the prior. I do not expect that after finding out the prior and reading about flirting signals I will be able to skip Interacting with people. I believe it will help me interpreting the interaction with people the right way. The only way I can see the prior being irrelevant is when flirting signals are 100% perfect filters. Let us say I am flirting with someone and giving a signal and getting a response. If that person gives that response 100% to a person she has a crush on and 0% to a person she does not have a crush on than the prior would indeed be irrelevant. If however this person gives the response with 100% Chance to a Person he/she has a crush on, but also with 50% chance to a person he/she just likes as a friend, then this signal will only help me differentiate between the states "friend" and "love intrest" with 50% probability. And now it becomes relevant on how many of his/her friends this person has a crush. Let us say the person has 10 friends and has a crush on 5 of them. Than on average he/she would give 5 correct positive signals 2.5 false positive signals and 2.5 correct negative signals. So if I get a positive signal, than that means that with a probability of 2/3 that person would have a crush on me and with a probability of 1/3 he/she would not. If that same person would only have a crush on one

This post may get downvoted, as I suspect it's of low value and low interest to a lot of readers. You shouldn't take this personally.

For what it's worth, I admire your approach, though it's based on incorrect assumptions. Trying to calculate whether someone is attracted to you will not end well. Researching psychology for romantic reasons will probably also not end well.

People solve this problem by making bigger and bigger signals at each other, until either one side stops making the bigger signals or until the signals are so big you can't ignore them, (al... (read more)

0bogus
Signals are one part of the solution of course, but one thing that's really important in practice is showing off: doing things and acting out behaviors that will give the other side a good impression of yourself. The nice thing about doing this is that you're sending all sorts of positive signals at the same time. Good qualities of course, but also saying that you know what sorts of showoffs are appreciated. It's also a good signal that (a) you're attracted to them yourself, and would feel good about it if the attraction was mutual, but (b) you also value your autonomy and know that mutual attraction cannot be counted on. You most likely are not going to get clingy and dependent - a prospect many are worried about. All in all, I'm not sure what other things could successfully send this kind of valued, targeted info. Of course there's a big amount of subtlety in showing off as in anything else, but if there's one thing you want to keep in mind about the rational and game-theoretic side of relationships, maybe this should be it.
0Gunnar_Zarncke
Is that so? If yes I'd like to really highlight that because at least for me that would be new and valuable information (introvert speaking here). Or is this a culture-specific 'protocol'?
0Gunnar_Zarncke
Why? Because it is 'too rational' (in the straw-vulcan sense of not emotional enough)? Some time ago there was a post about the Law of Gendlin being problematic on emotional topics but I don't think that is settled. Also if the base-rate for crushes and infatuations were known you could calibrate yourself against that which would help to better deal with rejection and lack of crushes.
1Gunnar_Zarncke
For what it's worth I don't think it is of low value and it is of interest to me. If only because I tried to answer this same question too.
-3[anonymous]
Sounds like an rather fun thing to solve although I have a feeling you could probably find the answer in a certain book. I'll twist your quote around and say the readers are low value. Don't let the haters get you, OP. At least you have a girlfriend.
2skeptical_lurker
This prob should be in the open thread.
2[anonymous]
I have no problem with getting downvoted, If my aproach seems stupid to other people it is good for me to know that. I am also aware that you cannot find exact percentages when it comes to what other peole think about you. Hovever as far as I know in general it is important to know the prior of an event if you want to get a feeling about how probable it is. Or am I wrong here? I see that this does not fully apply to flirting because there you have signals that are very obvious and cant be misinterpreted. Hovever you also have ambigious signals. It happens that people flirt and one person gets the wrong impression about what the other meant. If lets say every second person had a crush on you and you flirt with them, then you would not need to do much to be reasonably sure that you understood them right. However if lets say only one in a million people had a crush on you it would be much more likely that signals you got where actually caused by something else. And if this is true the prior would be relevant. The second part of my post about how signals raise the probability might be a stupid, but I still don't see why knowing a rough figure for the prior chance of someone having a crush on you would not be helpfull. Can anyone please explain to me where the error in my thinking is?
-1Salemicus
Unfortunately there is the common failure mode where Alex keeps making bigger and bigger signals, while Billy makes no signals at all, but A interprets everything B does as maybe some kind of signal. So this method still relies on being able to tell, at least to some extent. If you aren't good at reading other people's signals, then the following heuristic is a pretty good one: * If you like A, and you are wondering whether A likes you, the answer is no. * If you don't like A, and you are wondering whether A likes you, the answer is yes.

I found this response very insightful. It ties in with a variety of other things I've been thinking about recently, and has given me a great deal of food for thought. Thank you for sharing it, and you have my sympathies regarding your sister.

Thank you as well; I didn't mention it because the decision rather than the ultimate outcome was the relevant part of this discussion, but she ended up with a deal in which she would receive six months in jail and live at a dual-diagnosis (she has generalized anxiety disorder) halfway house for some time after that, so the outcome has been quite positive compared to alternatives.

Interesting post!

I really don't know what we're actually disagreeing about here, so I'm going to tap out. Have a nice evening.

(If it's not evening where you are yet, then have a tolerable rest of the day, and then have a nice evening)

Well if we're talking about that version of "me", why not talk about the version of "me" who's a member of the International Dog-Kicking Association? For any given virtue you can posit some social context were that virtue is or is not desirable. I'm not sure what that accomplishes.

0Jiro
The International Dog-Kicking Association is something you just made up, so the fact that a rule fails when applied to it doesn't mean the rule will cause any problems in real life. Religion actually exists.

I think we're talking past each other here. I'm not talking about how to cooperate with anybody, or how to cooperate in a value-hostile social environment. I'm talking about how I can cooperate with people I want to cooperate with.

0Jiro
I'm talking about that too. For slightly different values of "you", where "you" want to cooperate with fellow religious believers because you think they are more likely to share your desires and values.

I don't claim that not kicking dogs is a universal moral imperative. I claim that having some internal feature that dissuades you from kicking dogs means I will like and trust you more, and be more inclined to cooperate with you in a variety of social circumstances. This is not because I like dogs, but because that feature probably has some bearing on how you treat humans, and I am a human, and so are all the people I like.

I obviously can't directly inspect the landscape of your internal features to see if "don't needlessly hurt things" is in there, but if I see you kicking a dog, I'm going to infer that it's not.

0Jiro
Again, that can be said of violent video games or atheism. Or to generalize it a bit, it applies to putting conformity above individualism. If I have some internal feature that leads me to do exactly the things you like, you will like and trust me more and be more inclined to cooperate with me. This is true whether those things are "don't kick dogs", "don't play violent video games", "believe in God", "be heterosexual", or "go and kill members of the outgroup". It doesn't matter whether God actually exists for this to be true.

Also, on the broader subject of fundamental attribution error, in some cases there are fundamental attributes. If I see someone exhibiting sadistic tendencies (outside of a controlled consensual environment), I don't care how bad a day they're having. Unless I can at all avoid it, I don't want them on my team.

I think it's a case of a lot of things, but fundamental attribution error isn't one of them.

It's funny you should mention kicking dogs, as I think animal cruelty (and cruelty in general) is an example of one of the strongest rationales for virtue ethics. I don't attach a lot of moral weight to dogs, but if I witnessed someone kicking a dog, especially if they thought they weren't being witnessed, that gives me insight into what sort of person they are. They are displaying characteristics I do not favour.

People would be more inclined to trust and deal with ... (read more)

0Jiro
This argument works equally well when you replace "kicking dogs" with "playing violent video games" or "being an atheist in a place where you are expected to be a religious believer". But I would guess that most people here do not see it as a valid reason to stop those things.
2[anonymous]
If a dog runs to your kid, teeth bared, you probably kick it away without having a dilemma; but if pushing a fat man to die saves a bunch of kids, you have to decide to do it? I mostly have (maybe) dilemmas of the kind 'if I spend another hour at work, I will finish the task, but not make dinner' which does have implications for me as a housewife; or (in the past) 'if I fine this obviously poor flower seller, she might not earn her dinner, but others here will be less inclined to sell Cyclamen kuznetzovii'. (This latter is based on several assumptions, of course.)

I was envisioning some sort of context-system, in part for the reason you describe and in part because people probably have specific learning needs, and at any given time they'd probably be focusing on a specific context.

Also I reiterate what I've said to other commenters: likening it to Anki flashcards was probably misguided on my part. I'm not talking about generating a bunch of static flashcards, but about presenting a user with a dynamically-generated statement for them to parse. The interface would be reminiscent of something like Anki, but it would probably never show you the same statement twice.

I agree that auto-generated exercises would be a superior utility, but that seems like a much trickier proposition.

Also, for clarification, this wouldn't be used for memorising notation, but for training fluency in it. My use of Anki as a comparison might have been misguided.

I may not have presented this well in the original comment. This wouldn't be generating random static cards to put into an Anki deck, but a separate system which dynamically presents expressions made up of known components, and tracks those components instead of specific cards. It seems plausible to restrict these expressions to those composed of notation you've already encountered.

In fact, this could work to its advantage. It also seems plausible to determine which components are bottlenecks, and therefore which concepts are the most effective point of in... (read more)

An idea: auto-generated anki-style flashcards for mathematical notation.

Let's say you struggle reading set builder notation. This system would prompt you with progressively more complicated set builder expressions to parse, keeping track of what you find easy or difficult, and providing tooltips/highlighting for each individual term in the expression. If it were an anki card, the B-side would be how you'd read the expression out in natural language. This wouldn't be a substitute for learning how to use set builder notation, but it would give you a lot of p... (read more)

0Strangeattractor
I like the idea of making it easier to understand mathematical notation, and get more practice at it. However, using flash cards to implement it could be problematic. As I learned more and more mathematical notation while studying engineering, it became clear that a lot of the interpretation of the notation depends upon context. For example, if you see vertical lines to either side of an expression, does that mean absolute value or the determinant of a matrix? Is i representing the imaginary number, or current, or the vectors in the same direction as the x-axis? (As an example, electrical engineers use j for the imaginary number, since I represents current.) For a sufficiently narrow topic, the flashcards might be useful, but it might set up false expectations that the meaning of the symbols will apply outside that narrow topic. There is not a one-to-one correspondence between symbols and meaning.
1Richard_Kennaway
Auto-generated exercises might be better. Compared with e.g. learning a language, there aren't many elementary components to mathematical notation to be memorised. The exercises might be auto-rated for complexity, and a generalised Anki for this sort of material would generate random examples of various degrees of complexity, and make the distribution of complexity depend in some way on the distribution of your errors with respect to complexity. Language learning materials might be similarly generalised from the simple vocabulary lists that flashcards are usually used for.
0ChristianKl
It's important to understand the notation before you put it into Anki. Automatically generated cards with mathematical notation that the person doesn't yet understand is asking for trouble.

Not that I particularly care about this, but my original point was that concern over AI is topical right now, and the film in question seemed to make small but deliberate effort to tap into that topicality, beyond simply having an AI as the villain. I wasn't claiming that Avengers: Age of Ultron had invented an amazing new fictional concept of antagonistic intelligent machines.

I get that you can do this in principle, but in the specific case of the Allais Paradox (and going off the Wikipedia setup and terminology), if someone prefers options 1B and 2A, what specific sequence of trades do you offer them? It seems like you'd give them 1A, then go 1A -> 1B -> (some transformation of 1B formally equivalent to 2B) -> 2A -> (some transformation of 2A formally equivalent to 1A') -> 1B' ->... in perpetuity, but what are the "(some transformation of [X] formally equivalent to [Y])" in this case?

2one_forward
You can stagger the bets and offer either a 1A -> 1B -> 1A circle or a 2B -> 2A -> 2B circle. Suppose the bets are implemented in two stages. In stage 1 you have an 89% chance of the independent payoff ($1 million for bets 1A and 1B, nothing for bets 2A and 2B) and an 11% chance of moving to stage 2. In stage 2 you either get $1 million (for bets 1A and 2A) or a 10/11 chance of getting $5 million. Then suppose someone prefers a 10/11 chance of 5 million (bet 3B) to a sure $1 million (bet 3A), prefers 2A to 2B, and currently has 2B in this staggered form. You do the following: 1. Trade them 2A for 2B+$1. 2. Play stage 1. If they don't move on to stage 2, they're down $1 from where they started. If they do move on to stage 2, they now have bet 3A. 3. Trade them 3B for 3A+$1. 4. Play stage 2. The net effect of those trades is that they still played gamble 2B but gave you a dollar or two. If they prefer 3A to 3B and 1B to 1A, you can do the same thing to get them to circle from 1A back to 1A. It's not the infinite cycle of losses you mention, but it is a guaranteed loss.

If someone reports inconsistent preferences in the Allais paradox, they're violating the axiom of independence and are vulnerable to a Dutch Book. How would you actually do that? What combination of bets should they accept that would yield a guaranteed loss for them?

8gjm
There is a demonstration of exactly this in Eliezer's post from 2008 about the Allais paradox. (Eliezer modified the numbers a bit, compared with other statements of the Allais paradox that I've seen. I don't think this makes a substantial difference to what's going on.)
3Xachariah
The point of the Allais paradox is less about how humans violate the axiom of independence and more about how our utility functions are nonlinear, especially with respect to infinitesimal risk. There is an existing Dutch Book for eliminating infinitesimal risk, and it's called insurance.
0Manfred
You get them to pay you for one, in terms of the other. People will pay you for a small chance of a big payoff in units of a medium chance of medium payoff. People will pay you for the certainty of a moderate reward by giving up a higher reward with a small chance of failure. All of the good examples of this I can think of are already well-populated business models, but I didn't try very hard so you can probably find some unexploited ones.

There is repeated and explicit dialogue reference in the film to the scary and unknown nature of AI. It is put forward as something novel that shouldn't be meddled with. This is not necessary given the setting, which could easily support sentient robots without having to draw attention to the fact that they're a case of artificial intelligence, and artificial intelligence is scary and new. Hence bandwagon jumpage.

4Epictetus
This all goes back to the old principle of "don't conjure up what you can't put down", which featured prominently in stories about magic. Whether you're summoning demons or building an AI, the main idea is essentially the same. If you bring about a power greater than your own, you're at its mercy. Age of Ultron at the very least gave us the positive example of Vision.
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