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’m asking after advice. Here’s my predicament;
I will soon fall over dead from social deprivation. I’m only exaggerating somewhat. I’m living in my hometown, where for unspecified reasons all previous contacts are lost to me. I am unlikely to be able to move for months, at least. I live far from rationalist circles. I’ve decided to try out the study hall to fill the gap a little (yet to do this, time for bed). I will also probably try to forge new circles by going to town and searching for groups to join that are at least adjacent to my interests. This feels (flagging for overconfidence) unlikely to work here, it’s a smallish town. Nice, but still, not academically active in a suitable fashion, that I've noticed.
There are specifics to group-finding in meatspace I am able to work out fine, so I don’t need help there. But that is the extent of my creativity. Am I missing something glaringly obvious? Please tell me I am.
EDIT: Issue solved! Thanks! :D
I think that the psychedelic images that DeepDream produces today are just the start of what we'll see with this kind of technology. Wrote a bit about the ways in which it could be used for increasing image quality, putting artists out of work, and of course, generating porn.
http://kajsotala.fi/2015/07/deepdream-today-psychedelic-images-tomorrow-unemployed-artists/
This is one third request, one third challenge, and one third curiosity.
LW likes to discuss game theory. I'd like to see an analysis of the Greek-Troika negotiations over the last few months from the game theory perspective that looks at whether the sides used particular tactics (e.g. pre-commitment) and how well did they turn out. Note that the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has written a book on game theory.
Recently came across Valiant's A Theory of the Learnable. Basically, it covers a method of machine learning in the following way: if there's a collection of objects which either possess some property P or do not, then you can teach a machine to recognize this with arbitrarily small error simply by presenting it with randomly selected objects and saying whether they possess P. The learner may give false positives, but will not give a false negative. Perhaps the following passage best illustrates the concept:
...Consider a world containing robots and elephants
I seek a pointer to material which may help me with a problem I am having. I have noticed that certain claims make me angry and defensive. I find this troubling because while I am convinced that a subset of those claims is wrong, I am unsure regarding the complement. Nevertheless, because I become angry and defensive, I simply cannot evaluate claims which belong in the complement. (Well, rather, I "evaluate" those claims by knocking down arguments in their favor and declaring victory over my opponents which is not particularly helpful in finding the truth.)
I am about to come into possession of a house of 6 rooms for at least 6 months. The future of the property is to be knocked down and rebuilt into a larger house for sale at a profit (this is an almost definite thing for the future). My goal is to make the most amount of profit in the time it takes to submit plans for a new house and get approval from my local bodies for building works.
My requirements:
I'm probably completely confused, but is there any reason that Greg Egan's rebuttal* to Dust Theory does not also apply to any Big World scenario?
*Q5
Does anyone know what's going on with Robert Freitas's book series Nanomedicine? I've been waiting for the third and fourth volumes to come out forever.
A pretty awesome definition of the word "derp" in the context of Bayesian inference.
Followed by a suggested declension of "derp" as an irregular verb:
I can’t see this happening
You regularly restate your tight (low probability) prior
He herped a flerp of derp, the twerp
Reverse intelligence is not stupidity.
Just saw If You Buy The Stuff No One Else Likes, You Just May Be A “Harbinger Of Failure"
And wondered: If these persons consistently fail can it be that theyjust live up to their inner bruce from "Stuck In The Middle With Bruce"?
It would be great if someone used text analysis on transcripts of political debates and compiled a list of terms used as 'the worst arguments in the world', annotated with central meanings.
It would run into many problems, as people would argue about definitions and exceptions, but the very frequency of usage of specific words would more or less indicate their mindkilling potential.
I wrote a pair of essays (and a shorter summary of both) on heroic responsibility, and how it could serve as a strong counterpart to empathy as a one-two punch for making good moral decisions:
http://aarongertler.net/heroism/
Seemed Less-Wrong-ish, though my "heroic responsibility" is written for a different audience than Eliezer's, and is a bit less harsh/powerful as a result.
I don't want to start a blog yet I would like to put articles online. I don't want to worry about things like a blogs name, layout or colors. But I would like to put an article somewhere and then share it on Reddit, LW, Facebook... and the site should preferably look reasonably professional (say, black on white, magazine like fonts etc.) so if you would write someone serious, say, Bryan Caplan, a comment saying "I disagree with some points in your article, here is my article to explain" the would not feel shamed linking to it in their own answer ...
One quantitative finance fund to rule them all?
Machine learning specialists outperform prediction markets and subject matter experts Yet, the quantitative finance industry eagerly laps up former asx employees who supposedly have privellaged knowledge of exchange architecture (they don’t, it’s all published anyway and that which isn’t is privy to freedom of information requests), particularly high frequency trading firms.
I suspect this practice may have more to do with regulatory capture instead. Conspiracy theory aside and assuming there isn’t a meritious...
Whenever the conjunction fallacy is brought up, it always irks me, because it doesn't seem like a real fallacy. In the example given by Rationality A to Z, "[...] found that experimental subjects consdiered it less likely that a strong tennis player would lose the first set than he would lose the first set but win the match."
There's two valid interpretations of this statement here:
1) The fallacious interpretation: P(Lose First Set) < P(Lose First Set and Win Match)
2) P(Lose First Set) < P(Win Match | Lose First Set), which is a valid and n...
Looks like it has been addressed in Conjunction Controversy (Or, How They Nail It Down):
A further experiment is also discussed in Tversky and Kahneman (1983) in which 93 subjects rated the probability that Bjorn Borg, a strong tennis player, would in the Wimbledon finals "win the match", "lose the first set", "lose the first set but win the match", and "win the first set but lose the match". The conjunction fallacy was expressed: "lose the first set but win the match" was ranked more probable than"lose the first set". Subjects were also asked to verify whether various strings of wins and losses would count as an extensional example of each case, and indeed, subjects were interpreting the cases as conjuncts which were satisfied iff both constituents were satisfied, and not interpreting them as material implications, conditional statements, or disjunctions; also, constituent B was not interpreted to exclude constituent A. The genius of this experiment was that researchers could directly test what subjects thought was the meaning of each proposition, ruling out a very large class of misunderstandings.
I see deep dreaming as a new, big and growing thing. I am surrounded by people who not only want to try it out but have the capacity to do it. As in the programming ability to fiddle. That puts me in a uniquely exciting place to see several deep dreaming experiments popping up all over facebook. My question is - where is it going? What is it leading to?
Do you have a good prediction of what comes next out of deep dreaming RNN systems? I believe its something big, and with the confidence and ability to predict it; it might be possible to see into the...
I'm interested in increasing the chance of happening upon personally interesting content on Lesswrong - represented by my 'saved' posts.
Based on my saved pages, it is clear that the content is heavily biased towards particular high profile users
I am interested in accessing more data on the karma of Lesswrong users without going to each user profile.
To answer who are the the most reliable LW users, I intend to see if I can predict whether a particular LW user will post something of interest to me based on their karma/post or another metric beyond the aggregate karmic data available in the sidebar.
Can you help me answer the questions that I'm interested in?
How does one overcome the illusion of control over others? I feel like I think a lot about people I have crushes on because I feel like I can affect their decision to like me more than I can influence others.
Reposting from crazy ideas thread (hopefully someone will comment):
Does Dust Theory imply that every time you go to sleep, or lose mental grasp of your surroundings, your reality takes a somewhat different shape? After all, it's only your experiences that create your coherent world. I think it would be similar to the Autoverse's 'removal' of Permutation City.
EDIT: Hmm, no, there would just be a slow degradation of consciousness. Nothing that would explain my memories of dreaming last night and taking a ninety-degree turn back into reality upon waking up; that dream would have become my reality. So I'm fairly confident Dust Theory is false, because of the sheer unnecessary baggage my reality appears to have.
I recently read this post from a couple years back, and I do not understand the point being made at all.
...Isn't this, along with so many other problems, a candidate for our sometime friend the anthropic principle? That is: only in a conscious configuration field which has memories of perceptions of an orderly universe is the dust theory controversial or doubted? In the vastly more numerous conscious configuration fields with memories of perceptions of a chaotic and disorderly universe lacking a rational way to support the observer the dust theory could be
At lesswrong.com/user/Clarity/liked/ I can only see whole threads I have upvoted, not all the comments. Is there any way to find those other than bookmarking the permalinks?
It sounds like open borders are a sound idea excepting the danger of importing conflicts from around the world. Reasonable?
The other night I went to an event and found the people I was talking to really boring. A friend suggested that when he has felt the same in the past, it was because he was boring himself, ha ha. Am I boring?
Conversation is a team sport, with a minimum of two players. A "boring" person can be characterized as someone who does not contribute interesting anecdotes or facts to a conversation, or asks no interesting questions. Like most team sports, a bad player can be "carried" to victory by sufficiently good team. So while it's certainly possible that you were talking to boring people, a more actionable and probably more rewarding point of view to take is that you were being boring, and strive to learn techniques for making a conversation more engaging for you and your team.
Open question - what is going well and what could go better?
This raises an interesting question, actually. How many of those "gay men" are only being gay because that's their solely alternative to being a loser virgin? After all, that's a common scenario in male subpopulations with no access to women - consider convicts, or folks living in sexually oppressive societies.
Updated to add: I'm not suggesting that our own society is sexually oppressive, at least wrt. gays. I'm only saying that the scenario for male virgin losers is close enough that they should respond in similar ways. If anything, we should expect gay behavior to be even more common (in the affected subpopulation), compared to societies that do repress it - and where it exists nonetheless.
In a sexually oppressive society, gays are likely to have very low status. For truly non-gay men, it can't be beneficial to switch from being seen as the local singleton to being seen as the local degenerate.