All of syllogism's Comments + Replies

My hypothesis has been that he's suffered cognitive decline (there's various speculations about possible causes), and if you take his general 'cognitive strategy' and just power it with worse thinking, you get really bad results.

Musk's general approach is this trust-no-wisdom, first-principles thinking, combined with a propensity to lie or exaggerate to 'will results into being'. This approach can lead to results nobody else would have gotten if you're actually onto something when you charge off thinking that everyone else is wrong.

But if you're just not t... (read more)

Does COVID-19 have a long "incubation period" because we don't have any immunity to it?

This is a "makes sense to me" idea I merely thought of, and I have 0 medical expertise. So this is probably dumb, but now that I've thought of it I keep wondering whether it's true.

My thinking is that the early symptom onset we feel when we get a cold or flu is partly down to our immune system responding, which causes inflammation etc. With the novel coronavirus, the immune system isn't responding early on, and the infection itself will be in the slow ramp stage of its exponential growth, so the infection is already well established by the time you start to feel it.

I mean...The same way we always do? It depends on whether the risks are reasonably forseeable. We know that if you go about your business as normal while infectious with the coronavirus, you might infect 4 people on average. If we take a lowish infection fatality rate and say that 0.1% of infected people die, then you have a something like a 0.4% chance of directly causing someone's death.

How bad is a 0.4% chance? Should the law tolerate people putting others in danger, at about that level? If you could load up a 200-barrel revolver, would it be okay ... (read more)

But quarantine isn't a punishment, nobody's saying the person being quarantined has done anything wrong. It's just that you've suddenly become extremely dangerous, and that means you have to change your behaviour quite extremely to avoid harming other people. That's very inconvenient, sure, but nobody's convenience gives them the right to put others in harms way.

I'm not a lawyer but criminal negligence is definitely a thing:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_negligence
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recklessness_(law

You can extend the same negligence standard further, though. You can tell people: check your temperature in the morning, and if you have a fever you are lethally dangerous. That facts of the situation we're in are such that, going outside with a fever really does burden other people with unconscionable risk. But we've left it for individual people to deduce that, which means we can't enforce that as a standard.

A law could be passed that said, if prosecution can show beyond a reasonable doubt that you either knew or did not care to know wheth... (read more)

(Not a lawyer so potentially this isn't correct, but:) Legally negligence is a bit weird in that it doesn't really work probabilistically. If you actually cause the harm you suffer the culpability, but otherwise, maybe not. I do find it a bit unsatisfying, but I suppose the advantage is it's robust to the state being completely wrong about whether something is risky. In practice most people do adjust their behaviour to the potential downside for themselves, preventing the potential downside for others. But it does depend on the individual to... (read more)

I agree that actually eradicating influenza feels far-fetched. But on the other hand, it's quite a lot easier to work with than COVID-19. Influenza isn't nearly as infectious, most people have immunity, and it's barely transmissible at all when the carrier is asymptomatic.

Imagine you actually did have the "hazmat curtain" situation. Everyone is asked to take their temperature on the way in, and significant fines (and potential visa cancellations) are imposed if you lie. At first nearly everyone is checked to verify, but this is re... (read more)

Most tests you carry out on anyone else will be negative, so even if you think there's an 80-90% chance the patient is COVID-19 positive, you still get more information from running those tests than the lower symptomatic people.

Also, it does change all sorts of decisions. It probably changes what precautions the healthcare workers need to take, and it lets you tell the person's family to self-isolate. Otherwise the husband is in critical condition, and the wife might be a week behind, so she's in the waiting room making everyone sick.

But why can't we eradicate the virus? Let's say China shuts down international travel, keeps doing what they're doing, and then slowly eases back up in some area, letting the people in that city comingle and go back to work, but still restricting travel in and out. Let's say they get that city back running, with no coronavirus cases after a month.

At the same time...Won't they also have basically eradicated other influenza there? Even if not entirely, there should be much less cold and flu, right? So as soon as coronavirus creeps ba... (read more)

I don't think I meant to imply that -- could you point out where I seem to be making that assumption?

Obviously there are more exploits for a computer running Windows 95 than a carefully firewalled Linux server.

Thanks!

Okay, I'll paste the content in. I think you're right -- a link post is pretty much strictly worse.

First post on LW2, so apologies if I've not kept norms properly -- let me know if I should edit.

I considered doing this as a cross-post but it felt weird without rewriting, as the knowledge assumptions were all wrong --- so I decided to just link.

I don't think the Hamming advice is so great. It's akin to asking, "What are the highest salary professions? Why aren't you entering them?".

Academia is a market-place. Everyone wants high research impact, for a given expenditure of time. Some opportunities are higher-value than others, but as those opportunities appear, other researchers are going to identify them too.

So in academia, as in the economy, it's better to identify your comparative advantage --- both short-term, and long-term. You usually need to publish something quickly, so you need to know what you can do right away. But you also want to plan for the medium and long-term, too. It's a difficult trade-off.

I'm interested in developing better language learning software.

For the movie case, do you think these would be helpful? Any other ideas?

• Read in the subtitles file before viewing, so that vocab can be checked and learned via spaced repetition
• Option to slow down the dialogue, with pitch-shifting to keep it from sounding weird and bassy

You'd go pretty far just telling the audience the character was unintelligent, by giving them unintelligent status markers. Give them a blue-collar career, and very low academic achievement, while also coming from a stable family and average opportunity.

It's been a while since I watched it, but do you think Ben Affleck's character in Good Will Hunting was rational, but of limited intelligence?

There are scattered examples of this sort of "humble working man, who lives honest and true" throughout fiction.

Can't say I'm impressed with his reasoning there.

Interesting.

It doesn't seem to me that he has that any more than ther Jeopardy! contenders.

In ML, everyone is engaging with the academics, and the academics are doing a great job of making that accessible, e.g. through MOOCs. ML is one of the most popular targets of "ongoing education", because it's popped up and it's a useful feather to have in your cap. It extends the range of programs you can write greatly. Many people realise that, and are doing what it takes to learn. So even if there are some rough spots in the curriculum, the learners are motivated, and the job gets done.

The cousin of language processing is computer vision. The ... (read more)

I'm currently a post-doc doing language technology/NLP type stuff. I'm considering quitting soon to work full time on a start-up. I'm working on three things at the moment.

• The start-up is a language learning web app: http://www.cloze.it . What sets it apart from other language-learning software is my knowledge of linguistics, proficiency with text processing, and willingness to code detailed language-specific features. Most tools want to be as language neutral as possible, which limits their scope a lot. So they tend to all have the same set of features,

Yeah, I came across that idea in the Jaynes book, and was very impressed.

Denying that 100% confidence is ever rational seems to be equivalent to denying that logic ever applies to anything.

It's just saying that logic is a model that can't describe anything in the real world fully literally. That doesn't mean it's not useful. Abstracting away irrelevant details is bread and butter reductionism.

I have a fairly wide variety of friends. Here's some advice I find myself giving often, because it seems to cover a lot of what I think are the most common problems. The wording here isn't how I'd say it to them.

Health and lifestyle

• Don't engage the services of any non-evidence based medical practitioner.
• If you have a health problem, you're receiving treatment/advice, and not obviously improving, get a second opinion. And probably also a third. (I am not in the US)
• Don't smoke cigarettes. If you already smoke cigarettes, buy an e-cigarette (like, right n

Recent trends in my field of research, syntactic parsing

We've been trying for a long time to make computers speak and listen. Here is what has been happening with the part I work on for the last few years, or at least the part I'm excited about.

What makes understanding hard is that what you are trying to understand can mean so many different things. SO many different things. More than you think!! In fact the number grows way out of line with the number of words.

Until a few years ago, the number one idea we had was to figure out how to put together just a f... (read more)

Why is the IQ 70 kid not able to do laundry as so many others once did earlier, if the economy is so productive - shouldn't someone be able to hire him in his area of Ricardian comparative advantage?

In addition to gwern's objections, what if his RCA price-point turns out to be, say, 50c an hour? The utility curve is not smooth. Past a point, a starvation wage is still a starvation wage. Even in a hypothetical world where there were zero welfare and no opportunities for crime, he'd be better off spending the time looking for low-probability alternatives than settling on spending 40 hours a week working for sure starvation.

If you want to poke at this a bit, one way could be to test what sort of interferences disrupt different activities for you, compared to a friend.

I'm thinking of the bit in "Surely you're joking" where Feynman finds that he can't talk and maintain a mental counter at the same time, while a friend of his can -- because his friend's mental counter is visual.

Well, for me, believing myself to be a type of person I don't like causes me great cognitive dissonance. The more I know about how I might be fooling myself, the more I have to actually adjust to achieve that belief.

For instance, it used to be enough for me that I treat my in-group well. But once I understood that that was what I was doing, I wasn't satisfied with it. I now follow a utilitarian ethics that's much more materially expensive.

That could be because rationality decreases the effectiveness of distress minimisation techniques other than altruism.

I've been doing this wrong, and this advice will likely save me a few thousand dollars. Thanks.

Do you really think 1/3rd of users named gothgirl* would be male? I'd guess something like 1-10%, compared with 1-3% transsexualism on LW: http://lesswrong.com/lw/fp5/2012_survey_results/

I needed fewer than 13 bits of evidence: http://lesswrong.com/lw/fp5/2012_survey_results/

I likely committed some level of base-rate fallacy though (regardless of what the truth turns out to be). Trans* is more available to me because I hang out in queer communities, and know multiple transgender people.

Well with the username I really thought it more likely he was trans. Shrug.

am a 19 yo male (as of tomorrow)

So, are you trans?

If so, the queer clubs are a slam dunk, if you get along okay with that "type". One thing to bear in mind is, a lot of the opening chatter will be about gender and sexuality issues, which gets a little tiresome. Just accept that this is the new smalltalk for these spaces --- instead of talking about sports or what your major is, young queer kids often ask each other about coming out stories, etc. People are also trying on the role --- it's all new and unfamiliar to them, too. Many are unused ... (read more)

Here's a piece of advice I haven't seen mentioned on this topic: people are typically irrational about sex, and you can make yourself an appealing partner to a minority of people who aren't being "well served" by the general population simply by being extra open-minded. In short, I'm going to advocate exploring kink spaces.

First, cultivate the aliefs that there is zero shame associated with consensual sexual activity of any kind, and that there is no space for sex-specific morality in your code of ethics. The slogan "everyone owns exactly on... (read more)

These things wash back and forth depending on associations. Hanging out on feminist parts of the internet, I see a lot of ladies rolling their eyes at the term "females" -- mostly based on the types of guys who seem to be using it.

Some say they find the term "othering", because it's a bit sterile and biological, but I think it's a mistake to say it's anything intrinsic in the word itself.

Do you have an easy way to ensure housework is maintained to an acceptable level?

People sometimes use the term despotism to refer to a system of government where there is no expectation that the ruling group (often of one) will obey a rule of law. I think that's a better way to demarcate the systems.

Related thought: is a conversation bot crudely optimised to game the Turing test smarter than a labrador or a dolphin?

That's not unreasonable, but I think that a lot of the problems people have come from not even really trying to be careful.

I think selection effects explain almost all of this phenomenon. My nerdy friends don't really have trouble holding to their pre-commitments. The reckless 20 year olds I meet in bars don't even really understand the idea of pre-commitments, and the whole thing is just sort of...uncool, to them.

People don't regularly pre-commit to how much TV they'll watch, how much internet they'll surf, or how much chocolate they'll eat --- and when they do, I expect they fail often. When it comes to alcohol, two drinks becoming many is a total cliche.

Objectivism comes with a bunch of baggage about e.g. economics and psychology that's simply untrue, empirically. For instance an objectivist would say that status seeking inhibits self-actualisation. The objectivist plan is to learn to care less about status. As I understand the evidence, this is bad advice for almost all humans, as almost nobody can self-modify to just not care about their place on the totem pole.

In a nutshell, I think objectivists live in the "should universe", and this leads to a bunch of whacky nonsense.

For a first time user, I recommend 60-80mg as a good dose, and I always advise people to pre-commit to not re-dosing, no matter whether the first hit feels weak or strong. I usually take 80-150mg, and I don't always follow my own advice about re-dosing. Sometimes it depends what my friends are doing.

After a camping trip where I over-indulged quite alarmingly, I noticed that I was more "pleasure seeking": I spent more time seeking sex, more time on buzzfeed and YouTube, etc. This faded after a week or two.

I found that regular marijuana use causes worse anhedonia in me. If I smoke two or three times a week for a few weeks in a row, my affect is fairly flat, and I'm quite unmotivated.

Definitely agree that changing your name is a good option to have on the table.

I'd note though that in some industries having a Google-unique name is king. It really depends what your "personal brand strategy" is. I remember reading an interview with a marketer who recommended people consider name changes. Her name was "Faith Popcorn". I read that single interview probably 5-10 years ago. It wasn't even a particularly interesting interview. I still remember her name, though.

(The below is stated with no modulation for my level of confidence, which actually isn't very high.)

MDMA is a useful way to improve social skills permanently, or help make you more emotionally available.

While under the influence of it, you're very empathic, and very socially fearless. The experiences you have talking to people in this state can then transfer to when you're sober. For instance, you might notice that your openness is well-received, which lets you see that you've been under-confident.

Many people do something similar with alcohol: they learn t... (read more)

Ze Frank is amazing. Mostly they're funny and interesting, slightly poetic, takes on life and normality.

"Make Believe" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bta00Hp4gho

"Cholesterol" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBih2DYpno8

"Hack to power, Brian" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnG4dJT3itM

Anyone who has been through high-school knows a lot of unattractive or socially undesirable men get tremendous backlash for behaviors that a desirable men get away with.

I didn't go to a coed highschool, but I imagine a lot of that backlash was status signalling, and the target of the advance wasn't genuinely aggrieved. So, that isn't just.

But factoring that out, I think it's quite right to view a guy making a bunch of unwanted advances as rather a jerk, depending on how much he makes rejecting him suck for the targets. He's generating a bunch of negativ... (read more)

I don't think making a move in an elevator is an expression of confidence. I haven't read a specific analysis of the situation from a PUA guy but I would expect them to advice against that behavior.

I think tabooing "confidence" would end up being revealing here. I suspect yours, confidence-1, would read something like "not signalling anxiety or nervousness", whereas I'm talking about confidence-2, the anticipated probability of success, which informs the expected value of an approach.

I accept responsibility for the miscommunication. ... (read more)

I've always thought of this incident in terms of the calibration idea above.

The chance of his advance succeeding, given that in that context she was a celebrity and that they hadn't established any rapport, were incredibly slim. It was a total hail mary. And it was made in a context that made rejection more uncomfortable (confined space), and it was pretty directly sexual.

In short, the advance was wildly miscalibrated: it was such a stunningly bad bet, she concluded that he just didn't have her interests on the ledger at all. And that pissed her off, and I think that's thoroughly reasonable.

There no way to develop a well-calibrated model without making some mistakes along the way.

Would you say you were a proficient driver before you had your first car accident? We learn skills in fault intolerant contexts all the time. There's a bunch of learning theory work about Bayesian models not needing negative examples too, although I don't really think it's relevant here.

I don't think the potential downside of having to reject someone is much bigger than getting rejected.

There's two things here. First, even if that's true, the person who's doin... (read more)

I don't see that as much different than doing a little "come here" sign with your finger. That's not a question, and you didn't receive verbal consent in reply. You can accomplish the same effect just by doing - approach, but don't continue without a positive response in answer.

In that specific case the verbal aspect isn't so important, no. And the big difference from the context in the advice thread is that I don't have trouble communicating my intent with the body language anyway. But it has felt once or twice that saying something, even som... (read more)

That seems a comment based in ideology, and not reality. I guess there must be some women for whom that would work, but I believe most women would find that a massive cold shower - perhaps permanently. The offer and consent should be nonverbal. Going slowly and incrementally allows you to minimize any delta between act and consent.

I think this is really an imagination failure for how "verbal consent" would work. An example that includes a minor verbal component: I often smile and say something like "come here" while shifting myself a... (read more)