Covert conditioning is an interesting variant of operant conditioning where, instead of using an external stimulus to modify someone's behaviors, you just have them imagine themselves doing things and then receiving rewards or punishments. For instance, an alcoholic could imagine drinking alcohol and then immediately feeling nauseated. Or a student could imagine deciding to do his homework and then suddenly winning a million dollars.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure whether covert conditioning works. The linked Wikipedia article doesn't really give much evidence. If covert conditioning works, it seems like it could be very useful, especially in situations where ordinary reinforcement techniques are hard to use. For instance, one could easily reinforce sociability, which is hard to reinforce through ordinary methods because you don't want to look weird in public. Or one could train oneself to avoid unhealthy food by imagining that it makes one nauseated, precluding the need for actual emetics.
(Not going anywhere in particular with this, just curious what people's thoughts are.)
I attended a fire preparedness course, and the instructor told us that actual fire evacuation drills were not necessary. It was enough just to spend a couple of minutes vividly imagining what we would do in case of a fire. Our chances of surviving would greatly increase if we imagined the situation in advance. Unfortunately he gave no references to that claim.
Of the 12 most recent posts in 'Discussion', nine are 'Meetup' related and one is a meta-level discussion about producing LW courses.
Is LW imploding into some sort of self-impressed death spiral? Where is the new non-LW meta content? Am I way off, or has the quality of posts significantly diminished over time here?
I'm curious to know what others think.
I have noticed waves of insightful posts inspired by other insightful posts, followed by periods where nobody thinks of anything important to say, so we are dominated by meetup posts. I think for me, there has been a greater density of interesting in the previous 2 months, than there was in the 6 months before that.
I want to use computers without being exposed to the internet. I haven't been able to find a lot of practical information about this. I would appreciate the LessWrong hivemind's thoughts on this matter.
My current plan is something like have no internet access at home, record internet tasks on a todo list, go to a library once per week and do them (sample tasks include downloading fanfic reading material for the week, sending e-mails, downloading new versions of programs, checking my bank accounts, etc...). Lack of torrents is something I'll just have to live with. I'm also thinking of switching my phone to a Nokia 106, which has no internet access. There's a neat trick where you can get e-mails as text messages, which should be enough to deal with emergencies. I'll make sure to avoid careers which involve prolonged interaction with internet-capable machines, such as programming. Is teaching math safe?
I dread the day when wireless internet becomes omnipresent. It's a horrible, horrible supertimulus.
Inefficient altruism-- knitting sweaters for penguins-- I welcome evo psych explanations for the desire to knit.
I suggest substituting "knitting unwanted sweaters for penguins" for "raising money for rare diseases in cute puppies" because the sweater thing actually happened, research into rare diseases of cute puppies might pay off in understanding other diseases, and at least for me "rare diseases in cute puppies" has a nasty pattern match to sneering at rare diseases in people, cuteness, and puppies.
I have had a ridiculous munchkin idea. My idea is to hold a pencil in your teeth to increase productivity.
There are some reasons to believe that being happy makes you more productive, rather (just?) than the other way round. This research is quite new. This does not mean it is wrong, but it is not replicated well. If it is true, you can make yourself more productive by making yourself happier.
Forced smiling may make you feel happier. It is hard to force smile when you are not happy. It is even harder to do work and force smile at the same time. When I try this, I forget to force smile.
There are some reasons to believe that holding a pencil in your teeth makes you happier. This research is very old. This does not mean it is wrong, but it is not replicated well.
I have just had this idea. It seems to be widely known as an idea to make you happy, but not to make you productive. I have not yet time to test it for a long period. Short-term results are that I feel silly. I do not want to do this in the office. However, I am smiling because the idea is fun. In my subjective opinion this makes me more productive.
Cog sci question about how words are organized in our minds.
So, I'm a native English speaker, and for the last ~1.5 years, I've been studying Finnish as a second language. I was making very slow progress on vocabulary, though, so a couple days ago I downloaded Anki and moved all my vocab lists over to there. These vocab lists basically just contained random words I had encountered on the internet and felt like writing down; a lot of them were for abstract concepts and random things that probably won't come up in conversation, like "archipelago" (the Finnish word is "saaristo", if anyone cares). Anyway, the point is that I am not trying to learn the vocabulary in any sensible order, I'm just shoving random words into my brain.
While studying today, I noticed that I was having a lot more trouble with certain words than with others, and I started to wonder why, and what implications this has for how words are organized in our minds, and whether anyone has done studies on this.
For instance, there seemed to be a lot of "hash collisions": vocabulary words that I kept confusing with one another. Some of these were clearly phonetic: hai (shark) and kai (pro...
These are interesting questions. I think the keyword you want for "hash collisions" is interference. Here's a more helpful overview from an education perspective: Learning Vocabulary in Lexical Sets: Dangers and Guidelines (2000). It mostly talks about semantic interference, but it mentions some other work on similar-sounding and similar-looking words.
How do you use librarians? College libraries seems to pay money to employee qualified librarians. Being a student myself that means I sort of have access to them as a resource but never really used them for help.
Did anyone here used the librarians at his local university to find information that he otherwise wouldn't have found or had other good experiences with librarians?
A new paper by Lenny Susskind discusses the black hole firewall problem and suggests that the computations necessary to actually create the standard paradoxical situation are computationally intractable. Paper here, discussion by Scott Aaronson here.
I am getting married in less than a month, and I just realized that the wedding is probably the Schelling point event of my life. Therefore, if I were to make a commitment to change something about myself, now is probably the time to do it. It seems to me that If I want to make a short term resolution to change something about myself, I should start on New Years Day, so that I can have that extra push of being able to say "I have not done X this year." However, If I want to make a long term change, the best time to do it is probably the wedding, since it is probably the Schelling point of events in my life.
So what are some useful commitments I can make in this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?
One idea is to get a "Precommitment Journal", and commit to follow anything that I write down in there, but in that case, I have technically followed everything I have written in that non-existent journal, so that commitment does not really need a Schelling point start date.
I would say the big one to start is Family Traditions, and the like. Ideas:
A weekly or bi-weekly date night where you go do something different (no dinner-and-a-movie.)
If you don't usually have a "Family Dinner", make one day of the week a "Family Dinner" night.
Weekly or monthly get-together where you can hash out plans, see what's been problematic, hopefully correct things before they lead to arguments, etc
The yearly traditions such as: having a jar where you write down all the awesome things that happened on slips of paper, and read the paper on New Years, various holiday traditions, or yearly vacations, or whatnot
If having children is in the plan, I will comment that having kids has been much more Schellingy than getting married was, and any life-changes I didn't have solidly cemented before having kids damned sure weren't going to be made after having them.
One thing I'm glad I did was make a habit of trying to write fiction a few times a week before the kids came along - basically, selfishly carve out some me-time - because now I'm still able to maintain this habit with two babies.
You know, I wonder if anyone ever made a Fault Tree Analysis of Romance. Specifically, of all the things that could and did go wrong in their previous romantic history. All the causality chains. One could argue that romantic failures have as huge an impact on the economy as the most disastrous industrial accidents, and that this is a field worth researching.
Well, yeah, but I don't mean "seduction methods", I mean basic discipline, among which are ethics and forethought. Such as "Don't cheat on a partner. If you're going to cheat on a partner anyway, don't lie to the other partner about having the first partner's consent. If you're going to lie to the other partner anyway, for god's sake don't leave them drunk and alone together. " "Don't do things that you'll later feel the need to keep secret" also sounds to me like very sound general advice. "Don't put yourself into a situation in which you're likely to do something you'll later regret ." (such as getting intoxicated on whatever, without a sober party you absolutely trust to watch your back).
You know, the relationship equivalent to "never, under any circumstances, point a gun at anything you don't want dead", or "don't even try heroin, and if you're going to do so anyway, lie on your side, not your back", or "do not fuck with the IRS". Or don't piss on an electric fence. Or even "don't run with scissors" and "put your seatbelt on" and book your flights in advance and study your materials every ...
It's not a matter of getting people to like you, it's a matter of preventing people from getting hurt. Lovesickness and heartache are, in my experience, among the worst, most devastating pains the world can offer.
My general thought is that this is opposed to everything of which LW is in favor. That is, love is not a rational move, since it (by a definion I'd accept) requires self-sacrifice for the good of another.
Dedicating resources to one thing that you want means that you can't dedicate them to another thing that you want. Wanting to make someone happy isn't different from any of the other things that you want.
I just discovered libgen.org, but I don't know anything about it. Is it legal? Looks like I can download full-text copies of copyrighted books, so I don't see how it could be legal.
One area of my life I'd like to optimize is my cleaning. What I have is habits I picked up from others, what I want is knowledge of which tasks have which effects, so I can focus on what makes sense and leave out steps that are just a waste of time.
Anybody have a good source for that?
I'm aware that a good solution would be to hand everything over to a cleaning person. But if I do that, I'd still want to know what exactly I want to pay for.
In the previous Open Thread NancyLebovitz posted an article about the living-Biblically-for-one-year guy deciding to try living one year rationally. Alicorn noticed that the article was from 2008, so the project was probably cancelled.
However, I was thinking... if someone tried to do this, what would be the best way to do it. (It's easy to imagine wrong ways: Hollywood rationality, etc.) We can assume that the person trying this experiment is not among the most rational people in the world, because they would already be too busy optimizing the universe, an...
How to delete pages in the wiki? This looks like spam: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Young_Rap_God_Kills_Eminem_Remix_By_Token
Quantum Mechanics as Classical Physics, by Charles Sebens. It's described as yet another new QM interpretation, firmly many-worlds and no collapse, with no gooey "the wave function is real" and some sort of effort, if I read correctly, to put back the wave-function in its place as a description rather than a mysterious fundamental essence. Not in quite those exact words, but that does seem to be the author's attitude IMO.
Sounds interesting and very much in line with LW-style reductionist thinking, and agrees a bit too much with my own worldviews...
A new study in mice (popular article) establishes that elevated levels of fatty tissue cause cognitive deficits in mice with potential significance for humans suffering from obesity or diabetes. They hypothesize that the mechanism of action involves the inflammatory cytokine interleukin 1 beta. Interventions that restored cognitive function included exercise, liposuction, and intra-hippocampal delivery of IL1 receptor antagonist (IL1ra).
Translating the article Entropy, and Short Codes, there is a part where Eliezer writes about how words for categories are created, and (if I understand that correctly) the most frequently used categories are likely to get the shortest words.
The specific examples are: "furniture", "chair", "recliner". The shortest one is "chair", because that one is most frequently used in speech. Word "recliner" is too specific, it refers to a rare set of objects, so people will use it rarely. On the other hand, "furni...
Lately I've been wondering about telescope resolving power, and physical limits on the size of features we can see at interstellar distances.
I know about the diffraction limit, which (by my quick and dirty math) seems to imply a telescope on the order of a kilometer in size could resolve objects several meters across, but I imagine it's actually more complicated than that. Does anyone know a good source of information on the topic?
I have created an anonymous feedback form for myself, totally ripping off Luke's in both concept and style:
While I don't have the stature, karma, popularity, or cohesive base of posts that Luke (or gwern) has, what I do have is a desire to improve and a feeling that I need more forms of feedback than a metaphorical mirror.
An article just out in PlosONE could have been called "Don't Panic!", but is actually the more sober "Humans Optimize Decision-Making by Delaying Decision Onset".
The task they set their human subjects was to detect the direction of drift of random dot patterns against a background of interfering cues, asking them either to maximise speed or to maximise accuracy. I've not read their model building and model fitting, but their conclusion is in the title. Subjects got better accuracy by waiting to see what was there before deciding what to...
Would it be possible to help with keeping an AI boxed by building a goal of staying in the box into it?
Not sure where else to ask this...
What's the practical downside to setting my router's wireless security setting to WPA2 TKIP + AES instead of WPA2 AES only? I know that TKIP has a known exploit, but I have some old hardware (specifically, a PSP) that doesn't support WPA2 AES encryption. What does the exploit let someone actually do?
CCC and I were talking on another thread, and I responded to his comment, on the topic of religion. Rather than derail the original conversation, we decided to continue it here.
Here's the main point of my response, just for reference (original here):
I find your post very interesting, because I tend to respond almost exactly the same way when someone asks me why I'm an atheist. ... Anyway, I find it really curious that we can disagree so completely while employing seemingly identical lines of reasoning.
So, CCC, here are a couple things that I'm curious...
The recent events in the Ukraine seem important. Till now I haven't come across a good article that describes the background of the event in detail. Can anyone provide me a good link?
It is difficult to get good info on the English-speaking internet. I have been following the Russian-speaking Internet + I have personal contacts (I was born in the Crimea, and raised in Odessa). I am happy to answer questions.
edit: the outside view of this reminds me of the European middle ages. Much of European politics was dominated by the conflict between France (a unified autocratic state), and the Holy Roman Empire (a highly decentralized "superstate" but dominant in central Europe). France was often able to exploit the decentralization of the HRE, and the lack of effective political power of the Hapsburg emperor to get its way, even though a unified HRE would easily defeat it. In fact, one of the stated foreign policy goals of France was to keep the HRE divided, which was accomplished by siding with individual german princes against the Hapsburg emperor (and doing scandalous things like allying with the Ottoman empire, which was a muslim state).
The EU is a kind of modern, liberal HRE, and is having the same difficulties solving coordination problems.
What are the top reasons people provide when asked why they want to join the EU or the Russian Federation?
Because Ukraine is fairly large, it has complicated demographics (both ethnically and in terms of opinion).
The educated middle class in Ukraine understands that Ukraine inherited weak (in the sense of huge corruption drag on everything) Soviet institutions, feels a sense of shame because of this, and wants to modernize institutions using western Europe (and e.g. Poland) as an example to follow. I think the main push to join EU is this (obviously people also want to do well economically, but I think pride/shame has a lot to do with this as well). I think Russo-sphere is a profoundly dysfunctional and "third world" place in many respects. For example, here is a (russian-speaking, but pictures speak for themselves) url showing what some hospitals look like in Russia (w/ some comparison to how the elite live): http://lj-editors.livejournal.com/393747.html
The intelligentsia (both in Ukraine and Russia) is ashamed and deeply critical of Putin. Many Russian members of intelligentsia are ashamed to be Russian right now. There are anti-war protesters in Russia that are...
Will add to this post as I collect my thoughts:
Putin is farcically lying about 1. We can even identify specific units sent (for example the "East" battallion sent to Dzhankoy). Not even mentioning, e.g. russian license plates on military tech. Putin's claim that the troops wear uniforms "that you can buy in any store" are widely ridiculed in the Russosphere. The troops in the Crimea are Russian infantry Spetsnaz.
2: there might be some scope for Russian troop presence, but I did not read the agreement in detail. Not willing to pass judgement yet.
4: legitimacy is a matter of interpretation, so a tie.
Russian state TV is farcically lying about 5 (e.g. they are showing footage of what is supposed to be the Ukrainian/Russian border with a string of refugees, but is in reality the Ukrainian/Polish border identifiable by landmarks, with regular car traffic).
8: it is difficult to say because of the possibility of "black ops." I have heard an account from a Crimean Rabbi that there was a swastika graffiti that appeared the day after Russian troops arrived (and this sort of thing never happened before).
9: I don't know what Putin is trying to say here.
10: there is some radical influence in the Rada, but I do not think the radicals form anywhere near a dominant majority.
Two more logic puzzles on my blog:
Using the three digits, 1, 2, and 3, each at most once, and the combining them using addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, exponentiation, square root, factorial, unary negation, digit concatenation, decimal point, vinculum, and parenthesis, construct all the positive integers from 1 to 30. (Digit concatenation and decimal points only allowed on the original 3 digits. You do not need a 0 before the decimal point.) Solution
Using the numbers 5 and 7, each twice, and the combining them using addition, subtraction, ...
Now that it no longer contains Rationality Quotes February 2014, my last-30-days karma is 75% positive, which is the lowest I can recall it ever being. I take this to indicate that I'm currently too mind-killed to contribute to Less Wrong productively.
In an attempt to remedy this, I will (as a Schelling point) give up commenting or posting on Less Wrong for Lent (defined as from today to 20 April, excluding Sundays, in whatever time zone I am at each given time).
It always amazes me how much weight people give to the very lossy signal that is karma. Please do report (on Sundays) whether you think this is helping, and with which goals.
Honestly, 75% positive seems pretty good to me. In fact, it seems better than my (current) 96%. If I'm not posting at least some things that people don't like, I'm probably posting too little generally, and not taking enough risks.
In an attempt to remedy this, I will reduce my threshold for commenting or posting each week until I'm at 75% positive karma, and then re-evaluate whether I like that level.
Hi, long time lurker, new user. I was thinking about writing a post on how any potential AGI of human-level intelligence is likely to have a band of a few years before and after its creation where FOOM risks can be contained with care, and how this would be an especially fruitful period to deal with friendliness. Any posts/articles I should look at to avoid being too redundant?
Another method of immortality. Eterni.me will lifelog you, process the data with AI, and build a virtual you that will last forever. That's their advertising claim, anyway. The service has not yet launched, but they're accepting early signups.
How good would this have to be, for LWers to sign up in the hope of obtaining actual immortality, rather than merely an interactive, animated memorial to who they were? Bearing in mind whatever improvement in technology you expect between now and your deanimation.
Inspired by a reddit thread... Given that vacuum is a pretty effective dehydrator, would it make sense to vacuum-mummify a body first before freezing it for cryopreservation?
The question of "intelligent design" is subtler than theists or atheists make it.
Narrowly construed, intelligent design speaks specifically to the design of living intelligence on our planet. The intelligent design hypothesis is that intelligence existed before any of the design of living intelligence on earth took place and that the pre-existing intelligence participated in the design or creation of biological intelligence on earth. The uintelligent design hypothesis is that biological intelligence on earth arose without the participation of...
The obvious example example of a (/several) great discovery(s) in physics by someone outside of a physics department is Einstein.
Grad students count as people in physics departments.