If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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I'm in the process of reading Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". It's interesting but it is quite dated. Is there a 21st cenutry book on the history and philosophy of science that you would recommend?
Excepts from ''Explaining and inducing savant skills: privileged access to lower level, less-processed information'' by Allan Snyder, available here
...There are now several accounts of artificially induced savant-like skills, in drawing, proofreading, numerosity and false memory reduction, all by inhibiting the LATL with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS; Snyder et al. 2003, 2006; Young et al. 2004; Gallate et al. 2009).
(i) Why does becoming more literal enhance numerosity?
We argue that the estimation of number by normal people is performed on information after it has been processed into meaningful patterns. The meaning we unconsciously assign to these patterns interferes with our accuracy of estimation, whereas savants, by virtue of being literal, have less interference.
This insight has an important generalization. The healthy brain makes hypotheses in order to extract meaning from the sensory input, hypotheses derived from prior experience (Gregory 1970, 2004; Snyder & Barlow 1988; Snyder et al. 2004). So judgements in general are likely to be performed on this hypothesized content, not on the actual raw sensory input. This suggests the possibility of artifici
I just (in, say, the last couple of days) got something like 50 downvotes, presumably all on old comments since I don't see any sign of a lot of downvotes on recent comments of mine.
This is the kind of thing that has got people banned in the past; if any moderator happens to be reading this and considers it worth investigating, I'd be interested to know the result.
I made this joke site: https://flashcash.money
It's often rational to burn cash on positional goods like Rolexes and bottle service at clubs, but FlashCash.money takes that value proposition to the logical extreme.
What is a computation?
Intuitively some (say binary) states of the physical world are changed, voltage gates switched, rocks moved around (https://xkcd.com/505/), whatever.
Now, in general if these physical changes were done with some intention like in my CPU or the guy moving the rocks in the xkcd comic, then I think of this as a computation, and consequentially I would care for example about if the computation I performed simulated a conscious entity.
However, surely my or my computer's intention can't be what makes the physical state changes count as a ...
Gene editing saves girl dying from leukaemia in world first
For the first time ever, a person’s life has been saved by gene editing.
...
Layla’s doctors got permission to use an experimental form of gene therapy using genetically engineered immune cells from a donor. Within a month these cells had killed off all the cancerous cells in her bone marrow.
Acute lymphoblastic leukemia and other blood tumors in which B-cells become malignant are extremely well-suited to this approach. You can cook up a T-cell that will react against B-cell specific proteins, inject it, and it will sense all the B cells around it and grow up to large numbers and kill all the B-cells and B-cell derived tumor cells in the patient's body. You can live without B-cells (with a hit to immune system strength) and they have some very cell-specific proteins. Going after B-cell malignancies with modified immune cells has been successfully done before.
I am loving the new twist though - rather than going through the process of extracting the patient's own T-cells and modifying them, they took a T-cell line they already had and destroyed its ability to ever respond to anything but the targeted antigen, meaning that a tissue-compatibility mismatch was irrelevant because it would never go after any foreign things it encountered other than the one coded target. The cells were apparently also modded to be resistant to chemotherapy drugs. The same cell line could be used in multiple people - though I'm sure that if any of the patient's own immune system remained at all the foreign T cells would eventually be killed off rather than becoming a permanent part of the immune system as sometimes happens when the cells come from the patient themselves.
Zombie physics: 6 baffling results that just won't die
...To celebrate Halloween, Nature brings you the undead results that physicists can neither prove — nor lay to rest.
When a scientific result seems to show something genuinely new, subsequent experiments are supposed to either confirm it — triggering a textbook rewrite — or show it to be a measurement anomaly or experimental blunder. But some findings seem to remain forever stuck in the middle ground between light and shadow. Even efforts to replicate these results — normally science’s equivalent of Valyr
We outline an algorithm that solves the Graph Isomorphism (GI) problem and the related problems of String Isomorphism (SI) and Coset Intersection (CI) in quasipolynomial (exp(polylog n)) time.
The best previous bound for GI was \exp(\sqrt{n log n}), where n is the number of vertices (Luks, 1983). For SI and CI the best previous bound was similar, \exp(\sqrt{n}(log n)^c), where n is the size of the permutation domain (the speaker, 1983).
G. Ph...
An unusually clear discussion of the failings of the p-values and what you can (or can not) expect from them. The author seems to have a slight allergy to the Bayesian approach though he freely acknowledges that what he is using is, in fact, the Bayesian approach :-/
What are time-efficient ways of finding people with similar interests and skills to cooperate with?
I have a foggy memory of someone here (I think it was gwern) linking to an article about simulation interface design. It built up examples based on a bird's eye view of a car steering down a road. I haven't been able to find it, anyone know a link to the article?
Does anyone have any good recommended reading on being social? Stuff like understanding social situations and how to respond appriopriately. Understanding personality types and how to engage with them. How to make people like you can how to keep people's attention. I'd really love to learn these skills , as I feel I am deficient at them.
Posting here to avoid introducing an irrelevant aside on one of the main [ETA: Discussion-main, not Main-main] threads, regarding the "retrocausality" of Newcomb-like problems.
Causality is always bidirectional. It is information which only goes in one direction. Once you dissolve that distinction, the question is one of information, which doesn't need to involve any strange loops at all; the behavior of Newcomb-like problems isn't produced by your actions changing history, but by information about what your action will be changing the future, o...
It looks like letting math students flounder for a while before telling them how to solve a problem helps them learn.
Is Economics Research Replicable? Sixty Published Papers from Thirteen Journals Say “Usually Not” by Andrew C. Chang and Phillip Li
...We attempt to replicate 67 papers published in 13 well-regarded economics journals using author-provided replication files that include both data and code. Some journals in our sample require data and code replication files, and other journals do not require such files. Aside from 6 papers that use confidential data, we obtain data and code replication files for 29 of 35 papers (83%) that are required to provide such files as
Note that their implicit definition of "replicable" is very narrow --- under their procedure, one can fail to be "replicable" simply by failing to reply to an e-mail from the authors asking for code. This is somewhat of a word play, since typically "failure to replicate" means that one is unable to get the same results as the authors while following the same procedure. Based on their discussion at the end of section 3, it appears that (at most) 9 of the 30 "failed replications" are due to actually running the code and getting different results.
It is interesting to compare the Less Wrong and Wikipedia articles on Recursive self improvement: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Recursive_self-improvement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_self-improvement I still find the anti-foom arguments based on diminishing returns in the Wikipedia article to be compelling. Has there been any progress on modelling recursively self improving systems systems beyond what we can find in the foom-debate?
I've recently started using RSS feeds. Does anyone have LW-related feeds they'd recommend? Or for that matter, anything they'd recommend following which doesn't have an RSS feed?
Here's my short list so far, in case anyone else is interested:
Less Wrong Discussion
Less Wrong Main (ie promoted)
Slate Star Codex
Center for the Study of Existential Risk
Future of Life Institute [they have a RSS button, but it appears to be broken. They just updated their webpage, so I'll subscribe once there's something to subscribe to.]
Global Priorities Project
80,000
NASA Study: Mass Gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet Greater than Losses
...A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.
The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.
According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 b
The amount lost in the Arctic is about a factor of 3 larger than the net gain in Antarctica, and West Antarctica as a subset of antarctica is losing ice on the net in a way that is likely to accelerate in the future. Also apparently Antarctica has been gaining ice on the net for 10,000 years according to the source, and it's a case of recent loss rate increases not yet balancing this normal gain rate.
Further quote from the article:
“If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years -- I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.”
This is the most terrifying comic SMBC has made yet How much of a point does Zach have, here? Can this be the shape of the future?
If you had to select just 5 mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive variables to predict the the outcome of something you have expert knowledge (relative to say...me) about:
what are the 5 things that best determine the outcome?
Please tell us about multiple things if you are an expert at multple things. No time for humility know, it is better that you are kind teacher than a modest mute.
If you can come up with a better way I could ask this, please point it out! It sounds clumsy, but the question has a rather technical ba...
Top 4 web resources about the application of machine learning to public health:
As independent scientific movements
In one computationally intensive field of public health
Feel free to add any non significantly overlapping, high quality resources in the comments, or to comment otherwise.
This may be a silly question, if complex regional pain syndrome is 47 out of 50 on the McGill pain scale, where would 'torture' be?
Identifying cognitive distortions
Psychologists someone's hand out a worksheet with the names of cognitive distortions. Ie: mentalising. It is usually encumbrance upon psychiatric patients to pick up on trends for these distortions themselves from what their psychologists tells them.
For instance, my psychologists might intuit that something is paranoid while I don't. That certainly kills that one belief after a bit of reflection, but my mind remains generally predisposed to paranoid thinking in the next moments of conscious ideation too. They will never cat...
There are 4 computer memory designers. One is a major phone manufacturer, one is a major computer manufacturer and one is a major car manufacturer. The fourth, crucial, makes computer memory for their competitors. I reckon this is best if only example of a stable large scale unregulated efficiency monopoly.
I wish I was clever enough to understand computer memory, get in on the open hard ware movement and capitalise on Project Aras forthcoming release early next year! Imagine, an AppStore for hardware, sponsored by Google for android!
I'm looking for an academic/science/technology enthusiast to cofound my new website with me.
Website is already built and nearing launch. I am looking for someone who can serve as an adviser and contribute directly to site content (I will explain the content in more detail to serious candidates). This will require knowing a lot about science, and a lot about how scientists think. He/she needs to be interested in new technologies and current events. From international affairs, economic policy, politics and ethical issues to cryptocurrency, biotech, physics a...
I want to learn to play the Dataridoo. Is Swirl the right choice if I want to graduate into a career in machine learning, but failed at learning Python, and managed to learn Stata? Also I'm shit at concentrating, and it's the only learning platform that doesn't confuse me with all the features. I kid you not I took months to figure out how to use LessWrong. I may be stupid, but I am dedicated. Once I find the best platform for me, I'll stick to it. But good recommendations now may save me months later.
Pardon my candour, but if you are "shit at concentrating", are readily confused by things, and found Python too difficult to learn, then you might want to consider whether machine learning is a good choice of career.
(I gravely doubt that you are in fact stupid, and given sufficient dedication I expect you could do it, but it seems like a lot of pain. Are you sure it's worth it?)
Mathematicians don't give a shit about IQ.
That's because they are an exclusive high-IQ club to start with.
Take someone who scored in 300s on his SAT -- would you recommend him to try to become a mathematician?
What do you suppose Ramanujan's IQ was?
No one has any idea since he lived before IQ tests.
Do you think Hardy cared?
That's like saying a basketball coach doesn't care about the player's height, he only cares how high can he jump.
people think about mathematics in an extremely heterogeneous way
Sure, that's true.
reducing human brains to one number as some sort of "math hit points" is silly
And I agree. But consider the setup: we have a person who doesn't quite know what he wants to do and who has shown no signs of possessing any "supernatural" math abilities. Could he turn out to be another Groethendieck? Well, sure, it's possible, but we are talking about the base population rate here, the chances are, let's say, not very high.
Now, it so happens that most math professionals have high IQ. That's not a coincidence, of course -- if your brain is insufficiently weird to see math "directly", you have to rely on the same dimensions of performance (working memory, etc.) which are reflected in the IQ score.
Trying out a profession has costs, sometimes considerable. You can't try everything on the off chance that it might work out -- you want to focus on the areas where you expect to do well. And someone with an IQ of 130 has much, MUCH better chances of becoming a mathematician than someone with the IQ of 80.
So, apparently NLP is pseudoscience, and now I'm confused. Does anyone actually claim
If there are no claims to any of the above, what exactly was discredited?
Health is good. Intelligence is sometimes associated with health. Wikipedia has two articles on the relationship between intelligence and health. The other is here. So wouldn't you want to know more about your intelligence?
Clarity's index of sometimes subtle neurological conditions that impair cognitive functionl
...a rare sleep disorder characterized by persistent episodic hypersomnia and cognitive or mood changes. Many patients also experience hyperphagia, hypersexuality and other symptoms.
KLS can be diagnosed when there is confusion,
i reckon the reason i have admired and.imitated entrepreneurship, innovation and initiative above their market value, social and financial, is that it seems to signal reaponsibility, in spite of circumstanes for which their solution may not be apparent for a particular problem. But there are a whole class of.other values and hehaviours that entail.reaponsibility and I reckon the quality of those particular aforementioned signals to imply responsibility has and is decaying as I mature. Duty, and consistency, are the traits a value them on par with now, things I had neglected before.
Yes. From the inside it can be very tough to tell, but from the outside they're clearly they're wrong about them all being low probability. They don't check for potential problems with the model before trusting it without reservation, and that causes them to be wrong a lot. Even if your "might as well be 100%" is actually 97% - which is extremely generous, you'll be wrong about these things on a regular basis. It's a separate question of what - if anything - to do about it, but I'm not going to declare that I know there's nothing for me to do about it until I'm equally sure of that.
I think one of the real big things that makes the answer feel like "no" is that even if you learn you're wrong, if you can't learn how you're wrong and in which direction to update even after thinking about it, then there's no real point in thinking about it. If you can't figure it out (or figure out that you can trust that you've figured it out) even when it's pointed out to you, then there's less point in listening. I think "I don't see what I can do here that would be helpful" often gets conflated with "it can't happen", and that's a mistake. The proper way to handle those doesn't involve actively calling them "zero". It involves calling them "not worth thinking about" and the like. There is nothing to be gained by writing false confidences in mental stone and much to be lost.
Right. With the lottery, you have more than a vague intuitive "very low odds" of winning. You have a model that precisely describes the probability of winning and you have a vague intuitive but well backed "practically certain" odds of your model being correct. If I were to ask "how do you know that your odds are negligible?" you'd have an answer because you've already been there. If I were to ask you "well how do you know that your model of how the lottery works is right?" you could answer that too because you've been there too. You know how you know how the lottery works. Winning the lottery may be a very big win, but the expected value of thinking about it further is still very low because you have detailed models and metamodels that put firm bounds on things.
At the end of the day, I'm completely comfortable saying "it is possible that it would be a very costly mistake to not think harder about whether winning the lottery might be doable or how I'd go about doing it if it were AND I'm not going to think about it harder because I have better things to do".
If I were gifted a lotto ticket and traded it for a burrito, I'd feel like it was a good trade. Even if the lottery ticket ended up winning the jackpot, I could stand there and say "I was right to trade that winning lotto ticket for a burrito" and not feel bad about it. It'd be a bit of a shock and I'd have to go back and make sure that I didn't err, but ultimately I wouldn't have any regrets.
If, say, it was given to me as a "lucky ticket" with a wink and a nod by some mob boss whose life I'd recently saved... and I traded it for a freaking burrito because "it's probably 1 in 100 million, and 1 in 100 million isn't worth taking seriously"... I'd be kicking myself real hard for not taking a moment to question the "probably" when I learned that I traded a winning ticket for a burrito.
And all those times the ticket from the mob boss didn't win (or I didn't realize it won because I traded it for a burrito) would still be tremendous mistakes. Just invisible mistakes if I don't stop to think and it doesn't happen to whack me in the head. The idea of making mistakes, not realizing, and then using that lack of realization as further evidence that I'm not overconfident is a trap I don't want to fall into.
My brief attempt at "general advice" is to make sure you actually think it through and would be not just willing to but comfortable eating the loss if you're wrong. If you're not, there's your little hint that maybe you're ignoring something important.
When I point people to these considerations ("you say you're sure, so you'd be comfortable eating that loss if it turns out not to be the case, the vast majority of the times when they stop deflecting and give a firm "yes" or "no", the answer is "no" - and they rethink things. There are all sorts of caveats here, but the main point stands - when its important, most people conclude they're sure without actually checking to their own standards.
That's just not making bad decisions relative to your own best models/metamodels - you can still make bad decisions by more objective standards. This can't save you from that but what it can do is make sure your errors stand out and don't get dismissed prematurely. In the process of coming to say "yes, and I can eat the loss if I'm wrong" you end up figuring out what kinds of things you don't expect to see and committing to the fact that your model predicts they shouldn't happen. This makes it a lot easier to both notice the fact that your model is wrong and harder to let yourself get away with pretending it isn't.
I don't know about that. That clearly depends on the situation -- and while you probably have something in mind where this is true, I am not sure this is true in the general case. I am also not sure of how would you recognize this type of situation without going circular or starting to mumble about Scotsmen.
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