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.
I've just started a job as a news writer at FiveThirtyEight (author archive here), I'm really looking forward to this, and I'd love for folks to think of me as a possibly-summonable research person. If you have a question/dataset/etc related to American news, send me an email (leahDOTlibrescoATgmailDOTcom) and I may wind up researching it and covering it.
I have no idea what possibly-summonable research person means, but now I imagined a Lvl 3 wizard spell "Summon Researcher" where a demon in lab coat appears and answers every question with "I will reply in 2 weeks, if I find statistically significant studies" and it sounds mildly amusing. I know you meant news research but it is funnier this way :) BTW congrats!
Baidu CEO Robin Li interviews Bill Gates and Elon Musk.
Key takeaway: Bill Gates has read Superintelligence, and liked it enough to recommend it.
The segment where they talk about AI starts at ~17 mins.
There a nice segment where Bill Gates get's asked how I wants to be remembered in 100 years. He answers that he still wants to be alive in 100 years.
In the spirit of asking personally important questions, what jobs are there where high intelligence is useful but that also provide structure? Structure is fairly successful at circumventing my akrasia.
Of course, I'd also like the work not to be boring, the pay to be good, there to be independence (this may be in conflict with the structure, in which case my desires may just be incoherent), etc.
Some paleo diets and blogs claim that people should avoid plants from the nightshade family (tomatoes, eggplants etc). Some inflammation and auto immune blogs claim the same thing. Does anyone know if these claims have a scientific basis and, if so, what mechanism is purportedly driving the effect?
I figure there has been enough interest on paleo here, that before I invest hours into digging through Google scholar it makes more sense to ask if anyone already knows the answer. Thanks in advance
I have a small problem. My girlfriend (that I've been with for almost a year, and hope to be with for more years to come) has something of a New Age/unscientific worldview, which I find slightly disturbing, but I don't know how to attempt to "convert" her to something, well, less wrong, without upsetting her or making her feel stupid or something like that, or even how to react to her talking about her more "unusual" experiences.
A trivial example: She once mentioned that a certain kind of stone (it may have been hematite) had "healing powers". I expressed vague skepticism but didn't press the issue any further.
More seriously, my girlfriend has told me stories about seeing and interacting with "spirits", although she's asked me not to repeat any of them, and I've had to reassure her that no, I don't think she's crazy. For example, she said that whenever she goes to a particular railroad crossing, she always sees a woman riding a bicycle along the tracks that nobody else sees, and that one side of the woman's head looks horribly injured. There's another spirit, which she says reminds her of me, that usually hangs out on the roof outside her se...
When I was in college in small-town New England in the late '90s, one year a group of freshmen became convinced that the woods near campus were haunted by a malicious evil spirit — a wraith. This upset them greatly; they reported feeling the wraith as an oppressive and disturbing presence. Practical advice such as "there's no such thing as wraiths; you are all just working each other up into a tizzy over nothing" was ineffective to relieve their upset.
Eventually, a friend of the group got a friend of his, who was an initiated practitioner of ritual magick, to send them a spell to banish the wraith. The spell was cast, and the people who had felt the wraith's presence reported that it was no longer bothering them.
Now, one self-consistent description of these events is that wraiths literally exist, and banishing-spells literally work. Another is that when people become caught up in playing out an upsetting story, bringing that story to a close within its own rules can work to end their upset.
Other possibly relevant tales:
Changing someone's world view that's backed up by experiences isn't easy, so it's likely not the best target. Even if you could destroying the fantasy world in which an emotionally fragile person withdraws is no good idea.
I would rather focus on making her feel safe and helping her to be emotionally stable.
But what do you do when she tells you about "unusual" experiences? I would recommend to listen and ask her questions like: "How does it make you feel that the spirit stands guard?", "How does it make you feel to tell me this story?" and "Is there something new in this experience that you didn't experience in the past?"
That can help her order her thoughts. Not focusing on the content but how she feels about the content is likely to help you to listen in a nonjudgemental way because you can be genuinely care about her emotional experience.
If she doesn't do any sports I would encourage her to do some physical activity to get more in touch with her body.
More seriously, my girlfriend has told me stories about seeing and interacting with "spirits", although she's asked me not to repeat any of them
Then repeating them in this way in a public forum is quite a breach of trust.
The sort of desirability which can be evaluated quickly becomes less important as people get to know each other-- a study of 350 college students.
On the assumption that there's some overlap between LW and readers of Mencius Moldbug, this report on how to improve the monetary system, commissioned by the government of Iceland, might be interesting. It seems the author has been reading some Moldbug; his favoured suggestion, the "Sovereign Money Proposal", is closely related to Moldbug's suggestion that fractional-reserve banking with a lender of last resort might just as well be replaced with a sovereign lender of first resort, and banks that do not issue demand deposits.
My dentist causes me pain, so why don't I hate him? The rational part of my brain certainly has no reason to hate him, but the emotional, caveman part does. My model of myself would predict that my emotional brain would generate feelings of dislike for my dentist that my rational part would suppress, yet there is nothing to suppress. Do other people respond this way as well? If so, what's the cause?
You should give more credit to the emotional part of your brain :) It's not that stupid. There's a little extra something in-between the pain and the person causing it, that triggers the reaction of hatred against the person -- probably the expectation of hostile intentions. It's likely not a simple two-item person+pain=hatred association arc; even our emotional selves know this.
LW and related blogs are basically spoiling fantasy fiction to me. DAE have an experience like this? How to overcome it?
My formerly existing but weakly skeptical atheism and generic anti-supernaturalism got really strengthened here. I bought into the idea that the supernatural means the propositon that some mental things are are not reducible to nonmental things and from that it is only a small jump to say that mental things are entirely in the map, not in the terrain, it is a useful shorthand model to think of some things as mental but they are never irre...
In a world where magic exists, magic exists. We can imagine a plan for making one, given uploading or better brain-perception interfaces and much better computing hardware. So it can exist both in principle and in practice. It might be that there is not much evidence for magic to shift expectation away from matter-is-dumb-stuff, as in our world, but even that doesn't necessarily rule it out.
Before evolution was figured out, unobserved living and perhaps thinking causes of life might have seemed a possibility, a reasonable expectation of nonvanishing probability. Future capability for making simulations with magic increase probability that a given medieval-like society is inhabiting one, although that argument probably wouldn't occur to its inhabitants, and capability isn't sufficient without motive, which seems tenuous. In any case, for practical purposes of building a technological civilization it shouldn't have mattered for our world, as not all probability went there and even in a magical world a technological civilization might be possible if there is no systematic/purposeful supernatural interference against that very outcome.
Our present certainty in the absence of magic is ba...
Then don't define magic as 'that which disturbs the map-territory distinction', but rather 'awfully (in)convenient physics'. The map-territory distinction still works. Just, fundamental physics is much, much harder to work out there.
On putting all one's charitable eggs in one basket:
I note that GiveWell recommend splitting one's charitable giving between their top charities in a certain ratio. But it seems that this would reduce the expected value of one's giving. Is this considered by others to be the best way to donate, or is it better to give all of one's donation to that single charity estimated to be most effective? I imagine this is the sort of thing that has already been discussed, so pointers to any previous discussion would be of use.
There's a fairly specific subset of coding theory that I feel should exist, but I don't know what it's called or how to find it. It's best characterised by needing to obliquely embed subchannels of communication in human-readable text.
Here are some examples of problems that exist in this area:
1a) How do I pass arbitrary concealed data in a body of English text? Let's say I have a message of length n bits. What would be the most efficient way of obliquely encoding that message so that it passes for plain English text? For example, if I had the message 11001...
What do folks here think about blood donation? Is the consensus that it's not an efficient way to help people?
I recently encountered this very disturbing blog post arguing that there's an "energy trap" in using energy sources like wind, solar and nuclear because even as they may have high enough energy return on energy investment, since the energy return is spread out over many years, switching to them results in an energy investment that doesn't pay back quickly enough if one is trying to switch to a non-fossil fuel based economy. I'm not completely sure I buy into it: it seems like it assumes a very narrow range of EROEIs and even small improvements in...
Does anyone know how long will it take for uploading to be possible? We don't have the computing power to simulate the uploaded brain but if you have the patterns you can be restore sooner or later. What about other ways to restore the upload such as altering an existing brain?
I'm considering to make a poll post for value judgements. Questions would include the trolly one, comparison of saving a human life vs. 10, 1000, a million animals (of differnent kinds) and others. has this been done? Where? Do you have recommendations for such?
I googled for empirical ethics but didn't turn up anything that asking for value judgements online. Do you know anything about this?
My interest was spurred by a discussion that left this part out. My motivation is mainly to get some (non-representative) sample of such value judgements. Could be inte...
[META]
MrMind, I'm just letting you know that I'd be happy to take over posting the majority of OTs in case you ever want a break. To be honest, I'm interested in the karma, but I can get karma elsewhere, and I definitely don't want to feel like I'm taking yours. (Also, it was rude of me before to post OTs without checking with you.) If you think our preferences are approximately equal, perhaps we could try posting on alternate weeks or something like that?
On the quality and enjoyability of elementary school:
"Money in the future should not obscure well-being in the present."
I don't think it's efficient. If you work for the amount of time you'd be spending giving blood and donate the money, you'd do much more good.
Possible, conditional on your income. Assuming we need blood, unless your work creates an efficient blood replacement alternative, someone must donate blood. Less Wrong's readership skews young with a lot of college students, who presumably have low income. If you're reading this, you are probably someone who has a comparative advantage in donating blood rather than money.