All of VincentYu's Comments + Replies

Thanks for writing such a comprehensive explanation!

Why is downvoting disabled, for how long has it been like this, and when will it be back?

In support of your point, MIRI itself changed (in the opposite direction) from its former stance on AI research.

You've been around long enough to know this, but for others: The former ambition of MIRI in the early 2000s—back when it was called the SIAI—was to create artificial superintelligence, but that ambition changed to ensuring AI friendliness after considering the "terrible consequences [now] feared by the likes of MIRI".

In the words of Zack_M_Davis 6 years ago:

(Disclaimer: I don't speak for SingInst, nor am I presently affiliated with th

• who on lesswrong tracks their predictions outside of predictionbook, and their thoughts on that method

Just adding to the other responses: I also use Metaculus and like it a lot. In another thread, I posted a rough note about its community's calibration.

Compared to PredictionBook, the major limitation of Metaculus is that users cannot create and predict on arbitrary questions, because questions are curated. This is an inherent limitation/feature for a website like Metaculus because they want the community to focus on a set of questions of general inter... (read more)

Here is the full text article that was actually published by Kahneman et al. (2011) in Harvard Business Review, and here is the figure that was in HBR:

Is there any information on how well-calibrated the community predictions are on Metaculus?

Great question! Yes. There was a post on the official Metaculus blog that addressed this, though this was back in Oct 2016. In the past, they've also sent to subscribed users a few emails that looked at community calibration.

I've actually done my own analysis on this around two months ago, in private communication. Let me just copy two of the plots I created and what I said there. You might want to ignore the plots and details, and just skip to the "brief sum... (read more)

That's some neat data and observation! Could there be other substantial moderating differences between the days when you generate ~900 kJ and the days when you don't? (E.g., does your mental state before you ride affect how much energy you generate? This could suggest a different causal relationship.) If there are, maybe some of these effects can be removed if you independently randomize the energy you generate each time you ride, so that you don't get to choose how much you ride.

To make this a single-blinded experiment, just wear a blindfold; to double blind, add a high-beam lamp to your bike; and to triple blind, equip and direct high beams both front and rear.

… okay, there will be no blinding.

Polled.

1. I generally do only a quick skim of post titles and open threads (edit: maybe twice a month on average; I'll try visiting more often). I used to check LW compulsively prior to 2013, but now I think both LW and I have changed a lot and diverged from each other. No hard feelings, though.

2. I rarely click link posts on LW. I seldom find them interesting, but I don't mind them as long as other LWers like them.

3. I mostly check LW through a desktop browser. Back in 2011–2012, I used Wei Dai's "Power Reader" script to read all comments. I also u

I haven't been around for a while, but I expect to start fulfilling the backlog of requests after Christmas. Sorry for the long wait.

Do we know which country Wright was living in during 2010?

Here.

Requested.

1. Dutton.
2. Lynn.

The article is available on various websites by exact phrase searching, but there are some minor transcription errors in these copies. I've transcribed it below using Google's copy of the scanned article to correct these errors. There seems to be a relevant captioned figure (maybe a photo of Fuller?) on p. 63 of the magazine that is missing from the scan.

Dymaxion Sleep

Sleep is just a bad habit. So said Socrates and Samuel Johnson, and so for years has thought grey-haired Richard Buckminster Fuller, futurific [sic] inventor of the Dymaxion* house (Time, A... (read more)

Here. Figures 4 and 5 are missing from the scan that I received. Dope ads.

Requested.

From the linked Wired article:

The PGP key associated with Nakamoto’s email address and references to an upcoming “cryptocurrency paper” and “triple entry accounting” were added sometime after 2013.

Gwern's comment in the Reddit thread:

[...] this is why we put our effort into nailing down the creation and modification dates of the blog post in third-party archives like the IA and Google Reader.

These comments seem to partly refer to the 2013 mass archive of Google Reader just before it was discontinued. For others who want to examine the data: the rel... (read more)

3. Here.

Huh. I never knew there were so many other plants that had similar effects on cats.

Anyway, best of luck getting Todd's work… and getting cats high.

1. Hatch.

Why the interest in catnip?

1. Requested.
2. Sadly, I can't request entire dissertations. I'm sure there are Harvard students on LW; maybe try asking for help in the open thread?
3. Requested.

Still can't get it. I should be able to access it through an institutional subscription to the EBSCO database once the paper is assigned to an issue, replacing its current "online first" designation.

Nice paper.

p. 558 (Study 4):

Participants also completed a ten item personality scale (Gosling, Rentfrow & Swann, 2003) [the TIPI; an alternative is Rammstedt and John's BFI-10] that indexes individual differences in the Big Five personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness). These data will not be considered further.

It's strange not to say why the data will not be considered further. The data are available, the reduction is clean, but the keys look a bit too skeletal given that copies of the ... (read more)

Here.

Requested.

See also Patton's (1988) "Can bad men make good brains do bad things?" (AKA "Brain in a vat on a trolley"), published in APA Proceedings.

Here.

it blew up to 14M

The object streams for indirect objects have been unpacked and stripped away, leaving their contents uncompressed. Use qpdf to regenerate compressed object streams:

qpdf --object-streams=generate in.pdf out.pdf

(The --stream-data=compress option is already set by default.)

While you are at it, might as well re-linearize the PDF for online readers with low bandwidth:

qpdf --object-streams=generate --linearize in.pdf out.pdf

Got the whole PDF from HathiTrust. I think Chart I is missing from the scan.

Downvoted. I'm sorry to be so critical, but this is the prototypical LW mischaracterization of utility functions. I'm not sure where this comes from, when the VNM theorem gets so many mentions on LW.

A utility function is, by definition, that which the corresponding rational agent maximizes the expectation of, by choosing among its possible actions. It is not "optimal as the number of bets you take approaches infinity": first, it is not 'optimal' in any reasonable sense of the word, as it is simply an encoding of the actions which a rational agent... (read more)

I see. Looking into this, it seems that the (mis)use of the phrase "confidence interval" to mean "credible interval" is endemic on LW. A Google search for "confidence interval" on LW yields more than 200 results, of which many—perhaps most—should say "credible interval" instead. The corresponding search for "credible interval" yields less than 20 results.

I briefly skimmed the paper and don't see how you are getting this impression. Confidence intervals are—if we force the dichotomy—considered a frequentist rather than Bayesian tool. They point out that others are trying to squish a Bayesian interpretation on a frequentist tool by treating confidence intervals as though they are credible intervals, and they state this quite explicitly (p.17–18, emphasis mine):

Finally, we believe that in science, the meaning of our inferences are important. Bayesian credible intervals support an interpretation of probabili

Here. Sorry about the horrible format; I didn't see a better way to download the content or print the page. In addition, I couldn't access the figures.

Page-by-page .djvu scans are available here (found via this search; edit: it seems to appear sporadically in the search results). Full sequence of download links is http://202.116.13.3/ebook%5C24/24000522/ptiff/00000{001..744}.djvu

I wrote the following just before finding the scan of the book. I'll post it anyway.

I've used 1DollarScan for about 50 books, including math/stat textbooks, and the quality is consistently good (unless you need accurate color reproduction) even with the cheapest option (i.e., $1 per 100 pages), but you'll need to do your own po... (read more)

You take the probability of A not happening and multiply by the probability of B not happening. That gives you P(not A and not B).

Only if A and B are independent.

No. "Expected value" refers to the expectation of a variable under a probability distribution, whereas "expected utility" refers specifically to the expectation of a utility function under a probability distribution. That is, expected utility is a specific instantiation of an expected value; expected value is more general than expected utility and can refer to things other than utility.

The importance of this distinction often arises when considering the utility of large sums of money: a person may well decline a deal or gamble with posi... (read more)

See also this highly-upvoted question on the Physics Stack Exchange, which deals with your question.

Interesting. Thanks for posting this!

I received exactly the same number of SNPs from BGI, so it looks like our data were processed under the same pipeline. I've found three people who have publicly posted their BGI data: two at the Personal Genome Project (hu2FEC01 and hu41F03B, each with 5,095,048 SNPs), and one on a personal website (with 18,217,058 SNPs).

Then there are a few thousand SNPs that one or other analysis (in 26 cases, both) list in their output but don't report anything for. What causes this?

The double dashes are no calls. 23andme reports... (read more)

ILL couldn't get Schretlen et al. Can try again once the paper is included in the print journal, but I'd recommend just asking the authors for a copy.

• Lyons and French.
• Vo et al.
• Kantner.
• Mowsesian and Heyer.

I'm still waiting for Schretlen et al.

Dale and Krueger's paper was revised and published in the Journal of Human Resources under the new title "Estimating the effects of college characteristics over the career using administrative earnings data".

I see. In GAZP vs. GLUT, Eliezer argues that the only way to feasibly create a perfect imitation of a specific human brain is to do computations that correspond in some way to the functional roles behind mental states, which will produce identical conscious experiences according to functionalism.

For uploading, that means whole brain emulation. In my underinformed opinion, whole brain emulation is not the Way to AGI if you just want AGI. At some point, then, AGI will be available while WBE systems will be way behind; and so, uploaders will at least temporarily face a deeply serious choice on this issue.

Are you suggesting that mind uploading to a non-WBE platform will be available before WBE? I don't think this is a common belief; uploading almost exclusively refers to WBE. See, for instance, Sandberg and Bostrom (2008), who don't distinguish bet... (read more)

The relevant paragraph is in Section 2.2.5:

OCD is ranked by the WHO in the top ten of the most disabling illnesses by lost income and decreased quality of life (Bobes et al., 2001). The severity of OCD differs markedly from one person to another. While some people may be able to hide their OCD from their own family, the disorder may have a major negative impact on social relationships leading to frequent family and marital discord or dissatisfaction, separation or divorce (Koran, 2000). It also interferes with leisure activities (Antony et al., 1998) and

The last one.

I don't think I can get the two dissertations. I'll put in ILL requests for the other papers over the next week.

Chapter 3 is available from the publisher as a sample.

(BTW, this is an old help desk thread; the newest one is here.)

Is there any chance your sequencing had greater than 4x coverage?

I don't know. How do I find out?

There is the References & Resources for LessWrong (last updated in 2011), which has a good selection of older posts and other resources by subject.

Are you sure you've downloaded your entire genome file? My uncompressed file is about 500 MB, and I got about 26000 annotations on Promethease. It seems like your file might have gotten truncated during the download.

Short step-by-step guide for those who want to get their genome annotated by Promethease:

1. Use the 'Download All Files' link on the SpiderOak page to download your genome file.*
2. Unzip then gunzip to get the raw text file genome.txt.
3. Open the file in a text editor. Remove all the commented lines at beginning of the file except the last one (i.e.

Here.

Not directly answering your conundrum on wrist computers, but—I go trail running frequently (in Hong Kong), so I've thought a bit about wearable devices and safety. Here are some of my solutions and thoughts:

• I use a forearm armband (example) to hold my phone in a position that allows me to use and see the touchscreen while running. I find this incredibly useful for checking a GPS map on the run while keeping both hands free for falls. I worry that the current generation of watches are nowhere near as capable as my phone.

• I rely a lot on Strava's online