If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Would any one be interested if I did some posts on the rhetorical figures of speech? These posts would not be about simple or concise ways to improve your writing. I recommend luke prog's post for that. I want the posts to be more orientated around a discussion on the rhetorical figures of speech and why/when they work. I have some rough notes where I have grouped them into some some simple categories.
Information diet?
I did a quick search on LW but didn't find any important article about information diet. Did I miss something?
Questions worth considering:
So I'm aiming for the soft spot of eliminating all the unnecessary news while still getting those pieces that are relevant for me.
Any ideas?
I stopped reading political news 2.5 years ago, and haven't looked back since. I now view news as an addiction, similar to fast food, alcohol or gambling. I occasionally consume a bit of political news here and there, and it always leaves a bad taste in my "mental mouth", almost physically, as if I've eaten something too big and sugary to be healthy.
(This is despite the fact that I live in Russia, a country in which news seemingly have higher survival value than in developed countries. Plus, I live in a region bordering eastern Ukraine, which now flickers between a failed gangster state and an active war zone -- and I have relatives living there, right on the front line between the Ukrainian army and the rebels! Instead of reading the news, I just call them and check up on them directly.)
My strategy for getting important news is:
Or, if you are not a social person:
If there's a high-impact event happe...
It seems to me that news streams fall into a few broad categories:
News your friends / coworkers / social contacts want to talk with you about.
News about production opportunities (business, financial, scientific, etc.).
News about consumption opportunities.
General news about the state of the world.
The first group, I find, is adequately served by Facebook. The sort of thing that a friend will bring up in conversation is also the sort of thing that that friend (or a similar friend) will share. (Facebook will also work for the next two, if you have the right friends, but it's still probably worthwhile to do your homework and go deeper than the viral hits.)
The second group is probably best served by a specialized business press, and won't be comparable across industries. For scientists, this is journals that have papers you should be aware of, and it's obvious that scientists should be reading different journals.
The third group is again probably best served by specialized business press, but on the other side--this is subscribing to the marketing newsletters of companies you like, fan blogs of things you like, and so on.
The fourth group is probably worthless, if you view it as the exclusion of the other three. (I don't need to read the New Yorker to find the best of the New Yorker; I can trust my friends will share that, and serve as a filter for me.)
A cautionary tale about perverse incentives: Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit.
A redditor has created a .docx document that summarizes which studies have been replicated in recent big psychology replication study.
William Nordhaus thinks the Singularity is not near. Abstract:
...What are the prospects for long-run economic growth?, the present study looks at a more recently launched hypothesis, which I label Singularity. The idea here is that rapid growth in computation and artificial intelligence will cross some boundary or Singularity after which economic growth will accelerate sharply as an ever-accelerating pace of improvements cascade through the economy. The paper develops a growth model that features Singularity and presents several tests of whether we are rapi
A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style
...In fine art, especially painting, humans have mastered the skill to create unique visual experiences through composing a complex interplay between the content and style of an image. Thus far the algorithmic basis of this process is unknown and there exists no artificial system with similar capabilities. However, in other key areas of visual perception such as object and face recognition near-human performance was recently demonstrated by a class of biologically inspired vision models called Deep Neural Networks.1, 2 He
How the DSM developed - the 'statistical' part of the name may suggest that the classification of mental disorders is based on the distribution and clustering of dyfunctional behaviours in the general population. No quite...it's more about 'inter-rater reliability', which is if multiple psychiatrists agree that someone has something, then that something exists. This thing, is of course a label learned from psychiatry teachers, back till the psychodynamic days of psychiatry. This changed when the feighner criteria came along which was current to the researc...
If you want to get into academia because you think there will be less organisational politics, Berkley warns it may be worse than the corporate world
Recent discussion topics on Omnilibrium:
Does anyone know where I could find a Steelmaned version of the pro-death arguments which people often bring up in discussions (around stagnation, inequality, etc) written by someone who has thought about a post-singularity world?
I've been thinking about writing a pitch for AI risk that would sidestep some of the usual objections, mostly due to people latching onto the word "intelligence" and bringing up connotations that are irrelevant to the argument. But then it got a bit out of hand and turned into a small fiction story. On rereading it, I'm aware that it might be preaching to the choir. Here goes:
The Danger of Automatic Planning
Imagine that 30 years from now, your smartphone has an app called Automatic Planner. It can accept data from the phone's sensors, and the int...
Scaling Laws and the Speed of Animals
...In a recent issue of the American Journal of Physics, I read an interesting paper by Nicole Meyer-Vernet and Jean-Pierre Rospars examining the top speeds of organisms of varying sizes, from bacteria up to blue whales. They found that the time it takes for an animal to move its own body length is almost independent of mass, across 21 orders of magnitude. They derived a simple scaling argument and order-of-magnitude estimate for this remarkable fact. Before I elaborate further on their paper, I will give an overview of
Neural Networks, Types, and Functional Programming by Christopher Olah
...If we think we’ll probably see deep learning very differently in 30 years, that suggests an interesting question: how are we going to see it? Of course, no one can actually know how we’ll come to understand the field. But it is interesting to speculate.
At present, three narratives are competing to be the way we understand deep learning. There’s the neuroscience narrative, drawing analogies to biology. There’s the representations narrative, centered on transformations of data and the ma
http://www.examine.com has proven that there's a market for user friendly, layman readable, scientific reviews of subjects where there's a lot of BS. This is also an area that could do significant good by shortening the time between scientific discovery and it's effect on people's decisions.
I've seen quite a few layman readable scientific reviews here on LW, and it seems a great business model for someone who likes that type of research.
Some potential areas for which you could start a website like this:
(Reposted from the previous OT)
...One of my professors claimed that postmodernism, and particularly its concept of "no objective truth", is responsible for much of the recent liberalism of society, through the idea of "live and let live". (Specific examples given were attitudes towards legalization of gay marriage and drugs.) I pointed out that libertarianism and liberalism predated postmodernism historically, and they said that that's true, but you can still trace the popularity back to postmodernism.
Is this historically accurate? If no
Sup friends, suggest books on subjective probability, statistical inference, or decision theory that are good buys. I have a lot but want to furnish my collection a little. Let's go on a spending spree!!
Also anyone know how to get good deals on used books? Recommend me books in general to purchase as well. De Finetti's textbooks are quite expensive....
Do you think Jaynes was subconsciously motivated to become a leading advocate of Bayesian statistics because of the typographical similarity between his name and the Reverend's? Was Richard Dawkins motivated to become an evolutionary psychologist because of the similarity between his name and Charles Darwin's?
People who are able to reliably create good first impressions when you meet people for the first time, how do you do it? What would you advise?
Hummingbirds find protection building nests under hawks
...(Phys.org)—An international team of researchers working in a part of Arizona has found evidence of a hummingbird species benefiting by building nests in trees beneath hawk hunting grounds. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the team describes the study they carried out and just how much safer the hummingbirds appeared to be when living in close proximity to hawks.
To learn more about black-chinned hummingbirds living in Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains, the team walked among the t
Meta: this seems to not have shown up on the sidebar OT because you used a dash in the tag instead of an underline.
(Also, is it ok for me to repost my previous OT comment here?)
Imagine that someone offers you a deal: a quantum random number generator will randomly display a message "WIN" or "LOSE". (The chances of each result are non-zero.) If it is "WIN", you will get million dollars. If it is "LOSE", you will be immediately killed painlessly in your sleep.
According to the Quantum Immortality hypothesis, you should take this deal, because in all quantum branches where you will exist you get million dollars, and the quantum branches where you don't exist are simply not your problem. So ther...
Felix Salomon is being mean to Nick Cooney's book on EA and to EA itself. E.g.:
His book appears to be set in a parallel universe in which philanthropists, just by dint of spending money, magically induce positive change elsewhere in the world.
Introducing JASP: A free and intuitive statistics software that might finally replace SPSS
...Are you tired of SPSS’s confusing menus and of the ugly tables it generates? Are you annoyed by having statistical software only at university computers? Would you like to use advanced techniques such as Bayesian statistics, but you lack the time to learn a programming language (like R or Python) because you prefer to focus on your research?
While there was no real solution to this problem for a long time, there is now good news for you! A group of researchers at the
I should be able to resume creating new open threads in time from the next week, if Elo wishes to step down.
Open question: how do you integrate LessWrong.com into your workflow? Do you allocate a time for it? Access the site in an undiciplined manner? Browse according to your whim, or more systematically? Do you have a trigger for going back, or just hope that you remember your account name every morning and haven't lost your memory?
How to change Anki timezone? Where to find free online textbooks?
I'm 12 hours different now and my Anki won't count a "new day" (to let me review my cards) until late in the day. Anyone know how to change the Anki timezone? The manual doesn't seem to say.
And I've heard there are online sources of great books (EY once joked that everything worth reading was online); where can I find those?
How does one work out how important it is to sort out and systematise one's backup/archived files and folders given that they are an emergency something or the other and we live in an age of searchable files and folders?
How does one determine whether they should just grit out chronic pain or go to physician for a referral to a pain specialist Take into account that most Dr's where I'm from just take your word for things, so if you say you're in pain they'll ask you if it's bad enough to see a specialist. There are no reliable pain scales that can control for pain catastrophising which any GP I've heard of would probably bring out unless they had good reason to suspect they're dealing with a hypochondriac, malingerer or someone that's gonna misuse antiinflammatory medicat...
What are your thoughts on the Unreasonable Institute? http://unreasonableinstitute.org/
Are there any examples of people in positions where their job is merely to take on a compartment of responsibility in another individuals life and to make them money?
For instance, a personal data scientist to make more money they are paid an individual with data about that individual
A friend of mine attributes the refugee crisis in the Levantine countries to a severe drought caused by "climate change."
Does "climate change" mysteriously stop at Israel's borders? I haven't heard of any political breakdown or mass emigration from that country.
I do not know if emigration can be attributed to climate change or not, but I do that that Israel produces very large quanties of fresh water by desalination:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Israel
Neighboring countries may not be able to afford this.
Households hardly matter at all in terms of water use compared to agriculture. (It's worth noting that those that link recent events in the middle east to climate point towards a combination of an influx of people abandoning dried up farms into cities accelerating unrest, and increased food prices.)
But clearly the "refugee crisis" is not a result of drought, it's a result of European countries being unwilling to enforce their borders and immigration laws. Israel is not experiencing the refugee crisis Europe is because they don't let the refugees in and consistently enforce their restrictive immigration laws.
Truly, there would be no refugee crisis in Europe if the refugees were unable to enter Europe. Instead, there would be a refugee crisis elsewhere. There would be no refugee crisis at all if the refugees were unable to leave Syria. Instead, there would be some other crisis. Perhaps a slaughter crisis. Or a starvation crisis. Or a breakdown of all government crisis. Or a victory by a jubilantly expansionist and for the first time correctly so called Islamic State crisis.
There may be an argument that we, the states of Europe, should build strong walls and cultivate our own gardens within them, but observing that strong walls would allow us to cultivate our own gardens is not that argument. And in the longer run, strong walls may not be enough.
Truly, there would be no refugee crisis in Europe if the refugees were unable to enter Europe. Instead, there would be a refugee crisis elsewhere.
Well using the term "refugee" here is misleading. Note that 75% of the refugees are men. So either they feel that the places they're leaving are safe for women and children, or their main motivation isn't escaping danger.
There may be an argument that we, the states of Europe, should build strong walls and cultivate our own gardens within them, but observing that strong walls would allow us to cultivate our own gardens is not that argument. And in the longer run, strong walls may not be enough.
Well the strong walls are doing a remarkably good job of keeping them out of the gulf states.
The main difference between going to Turkey and going to Greece is that going to Greece requires paying people smugglers a few thousand dollars. A lot of families can't afford sending all family members to Europe, therefore they send only one, possibly as an anchor, later to be joined by other family members through family reunification programs.
"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
It's a well known saying, but is it true? My non-academia friends complain about office politics and cliques much more than those who stayed in academia.