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 will be most interested to find out what it is that requires a sockpuppet but doesn't require it to be secret that it's a sockpuppet or even whose sockpuppet.
I think the point is that when googling his name, the post does not show up, but if LWers know it's the same person, there's no harm.
Lessons from teaching a neural network...
Grandma teaches our baby that a pink toy cat is "meow".
Baby calls the pink cat "meow".
Parents celebrate. (It's her first word!)
Later Barbara notices that the baby also calls another pink toy non-cat "meow".
The celebration stops; the parents are concerned.
Viliam: "We need to teach her that this other pink toy is... uhm... actually, what is this thing? Is that a pig or a pink bear or what? I have no idea. Why do people create such horribly unrealistic toys for the innocent little children?"
Barbara shrugs.
Viliam: "I guess if we don't know, it's okay if the baby doesn't know either. The toys are kinda similar. Let's ignore this, so we neither correct her nor reward her for calling this toy 'meow'."
Barbara: "I noticed that the baby also calls the pink fish 'meow'."
Viliam: "Okay... I think now the problem is obvious... and so is the solution."
Viliam brings a white toy cat and teaches the baby that this toy is also "meow".
Baby initially seems incredulous, but gradually accepts.
A week later, the baby calls every toy and grandma "meow".
So the child was generalizing along the wrong dimension, so you decided the solution was to train an increase in generalization of the word meow which is what you got. You need to teach discrimination; not generalization. A method for doing so is to present the pink cat and pink fish sequentially. Reward the meow response in the presence of the cat, and reward fish responses to the fish. Eventually meow responses to the fish should extinguish.
I've gotten around to doing a cost-benefit analysis for vitamin D: http://www.gwern.net/Longevity#vitamin-d
Why too much evidence can be a bad thing
...(Phys.org)—Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all judges, then the suspect was acquitted. This reasoning sounds counterintuitive, but the legislators of the time had noticed that unanimous agreement often indicates the presence of systemic error in the judicial process, even if the exact nature of the error is yet to be discovered. They intuitively reasoned that when something seems too good to be true, most likely a mistake was made.
In a new paper to be published in The Proceedings of The Royal Society A, a team of researchers, Lachlan J. Gunn, et al., from Australia and France has further investigated this idea, which they call the "paradox of unanimity."
"If many independent witnesses unanimously testify to the identity of a suspect of a crime, we assume they cannot all be wrong," coauthor Derek Abbott, a physicist and electronic engineer at The University of Adelaide, Australia, told Phys.org. "Unanimity is often assumed to be reliable. However, it turns out that the probability of a large number of people all agreeing is small, so our confidence in unanimity is ill-fo
A side note.
My mother is a psychologist, father - an applied physicist, aunt 1 - a former morgue cytologist, aunt 2 - a practicing ultrasound specialist, father-in-law - a general practitioner, husband - a biochemist, my friends (c. 5) are biologists, and most of my immediate coworkers teach either chemistry or biology. (Occasionally I talk to other people, too.) I'm mentioning this to describe the scope of my experience with how they come to terms with the 'animal part' of the human being; when I started reading LW I felt immediately that people here come from different backgrounds. It felt implied that 'rationality' was a culture of either hacking humanity, or patching together the best practices accumulated in the past (or even just adopting the past), because clearly, we are held back by social constraints - if we weren't, we'd be able to fully realize our winning potential. (I'm strawmanning a bit, yes.) For a while I ignored the voice in the back of my mind that kept mumbling 'inferential distances between the dreams of these people and the underlying wetware are too great for you to estimate', or some such, but I don't want to anymore.
To put it simply, there is a marked diff...
Would anyone actually be interested if I prepared a post about the recent "correlation explanation" approach to latent-model learning, the "multivariate mutual information"/"total correlation" metric it's all based on, supervenience in analytical philosophy, and implications for cognitive science and AI, including FAI?
Because I promise I didn't write that last sentence by picking buzzwords out of a bag.
Link: Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain
How useful do you think this actually is?
Why does E. Yudkowsky voice such strong priors e.g. wrt. the laws of physics (many worlds interpretation), when much weaker priors seem sufficient for most of his beliefs (e.g. weak computationalism/computational monism) and wouldn't make him so vulnerable? (With vulnerable I mean that his work often gets ripped apart as cultish pseudoscience.)
You seem to assume that MWI makes the Sequences more vulnerable; i.e. that there are people who feel okay with the rest of the Sequences, but MWI makes them dismiss it as pseudoscience.
I think there are other things that rub people the wrong way (that EY in general talks about some topics more than appropriate for his status, whether it's about science, philosophy, politics, or religion) and MWI is merely the most convenient point of attack (at least among those people who don't care about religion). Without MWI, something else would be "the most controversial topic which EY should not have added because it antagonizes people for no good reason", and people would speculate about the dark reasons that made EY write about that.
For context, I will quote the part that Yvain quoted from the Sequences:
...Everyone should be aware that, even though I’m not going to discuss the issue at first, there is a sizable community of scientists who dispute the realist perspective on QM. Myself, I don’t think it’s worth figuring both ways; I’m a pure realist, for reasons that will become apparent. But if you read my introduction, you are getting my view. It is not only my view. It is probabl
Because he was building a tribe. (He's done now).
edit: This should actually worry people a lot more than it seems to.
My model of him has him having an attitude of "if I think that there's a reason to be highly confident of X, then I'm not going to hide what's true just for the sake of playing social games".
So I think I've genuinely finished http://gwern.net/Mail%20delivery now. It should be an interesting read for LWers: it's a fully Bayesian decision-theoretic analysis of when it is optimal to check my mail for deliveries. I learned a tremendous amount working my way through it, from how to much better use JAGS to how to do Bayesian model comparison & averaging to loss functions and EVSI and EVPI for decision theory purposes to even dabbling in reinforcement learning with Thompson sampling/probability-matching.
I thought it was done earlier, but then I r...
Recently my working definition of 'political opinion' became "which parts of reality did the person choose to ignore". At least this is my usual experience when debating with people who have strong political opinions. There usually exists a standard argument that an opposing side would use against them, and the typical responses to this argument are "that's not the most important thing; now let's talk about a completely different topic where my side has the argumentational advantage". (LW calls it an 'ugh field'.) Sometimes the argument...
I'd say that his critics are annoyed that he's ignoring their motte [ETA: Well, not ignoring, but not treating as the bailey], from which they're basing their assault on Income Inequality. "Come over here and fight, you coward!"
There's not much concession in agreeing that fraud is bad. Look: Fraud is bad. And income inequality is not. Income inequality that promotes or is caused by fraud is bad, but it's bad because fraud is bad, not because income inequality is bad.
It's possible to be ignorant of the portion of the intellectual landscape that includes that motte; to be unaware of fraud. It's possible to be ignorant of the portion of the intellectual landscape that doesn't include the bailey; to be unaware of wealth inequality that isn't hopelessly entangled in fraud. But once you realize that the landscape includes both, you have two conversations you can have: One about income inequality, and one about fraud.
Which is to say, you can address the motte, or you can address the bailey. You don't get to continue to pretend they're the same thing in full intellectual honesty.
While browsing the Intelligence Squared upcoming debates, I noticed two things that may be of interest to LW readers.
The first is a debate titled "Lifespans are long enough", with Aubrey De Grey and Brian Kennedy of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging arguing against Paul Root Wolpe from the Emory Centre for Ethics and another panelist TBA. The debate is taking place in early February.
The second, and of potentially more interest to the LW community, is taking place on March 9th and is titled "Artificial Intelligence: The risks outweigh...
PSA: I had a hard drive die on me. Recovered all my data with about 25 hours of work all up for two people working together.
Looking back on it I doubt many things could have convinced me to improve my backup systems; short of working in the cloud; my best possible backups would have probably lost the last two weeks of work at least.
I am taking suggestions for best practice; but also a shout out to backups, and given it's now a new year, you might want to back up everything before 2016 right now. Then work on a solid backing up system.
(Either that or al...
Maybe it's just the particular links I have been following (acausal trade and blackmail, AI boxes you, the Magnum Innominandum) but I keep coming across the idea that the self should care about the well-being (it seems to always come back to torture) of one or of a googleplex of simulated selves. I can't find a single argument or proof of why this should be so. I accept that perfectly simulated sentient beings can be seen as morally equal in value to meat sentient beings (or, if we accept Bostrom's reasoning, that beings in a simulation other than our ow...
Dealing with shame by embracing a vulnerability, fear of vulnerability and letting that shame be
I feel full of shame which I can’t explain. I feel that it is linked to my gender identity, sexuality and/or body.
why
When I asked Google why I feel this shame with search terms linked to the above suspicions, I landed on a page suggesting that shame in adult males is linked to child abuse. The point that really hit home was the comment: ‘’Males are not supposed to feel vulnerable or fearful about sex.’’ Was I sexually abused as a child? I didn’t think so. Thou...
Is there a formal theory of how a rational actor should bet on prediction markets? If the prediction market says the probability is 70% and the actor thinks it's 60% is there a formal way to think about to what extend the agent thinks he knows better and should therefore bet against the market?
I'd guess that that falls under the usual paradigms like Savage or Von Neumann-Morgenstern. For example, the Kelly criterion.
Sapir-Whorf-related question:
Although I've been an informal reader of philosophy for most of my life, only today did I connect some dots and notice that Chinese philosophers never occupied themselves with the question of Being, which has so obsessed Western philosophers. When I noticed this, my next thought was, "But of course; the Chinese language has no word for 'be.'" Wikipedia didn't provide any confirmation or disconfirmation of this hypothesis, but it does narrate how Muslim philosophers struggled when adapting Greek questions of Being into...
Iran's blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web
Hossein Derakhshan was imprisoned by the regime for his blogging. On his release, he found the internet stripped of its power to change the world and instead serving up a stream of pointless social trivia
How profitable are student club party and ballroom events? I am suprised external companies haven't sprung up to handle the organising of those events on students club's behalves for tidy profits in exchange for access to an attendee base and marketing channels. In return, the student club members get value and their leadership gets extra funds.
Can anyone help think of a clever name for a quantitative consulting company? LW in-jokes allowed.
The Lion started posting "abruptly" with no signs of being a newbie, not very long after VoiceOfRa was banned (much like VoiceOfRa did after Azathoth123 was banned and Azathoth123 did after Eugine Nier was). Also, the first comments of The Lion have been on points that the previous EN incarnations also often made, and their writing styles sound very similar to me.
Discussion of the Bayes' Theorem as expounded by EY 8-/
Fairly active follow-up discussion on HN.
sorry, not sure if this should be posted here, but I hadn't yet found more rational strategy for my problem. If any of you guys know someone who can speak and write Japanese please contact me, I would very appreciate any help
Some political predictions (Edited for formatting):
Who buys government bonds at sub-zero rates? Why can't those instiutions simply put the money into a bank tresor?
How does one call a philosophical position that images have intrinsic meanining, rather than assigned one by the external observer?
What can be said about a person giving voice to such position? (with the purpose of understanding their position and how to best one could converse with them, if at all)
I am asking because I encountered such a person in a social network discussion about computer vision. They are saying that pattern recognition is not yet a knowledge of their meaning and yes, meaning is intrinsic to image.
All that comes to my mind is: I am not versed in philosophy, but it looks to me that science is based on the opposite premise and further discussion is meaningless.
Can I edit events that I created on Less Wrong?
It seems I can't. (I ask because I created this event, but when I pasted the details, I neglected to add the city (Melbourne). And now the map is wrong by about 3600km.
Polls seem to indicate that Trump has a massive lead in the Republican primary, far ahead of Cruz who is far ahead of Rubio. UK Bookmakers put him slightly behind Rubio, and slightly ahead of Cruz. Why the discrepancy?
For that matter - that's the odds of him being the Republican candidate. For the primaries, they put him ahead of Rubio for both the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire Primary. Does winning the primaries not make him the Republican party candidate? Are there other primaries that aren't being bet on? Do they think his performance in NH and IA is so...
I've created a sock puppet named deprimita_patro with which I intend to create one and only one post (possibly with responses in the comments). I will respond to this comment using that account and would appreciate if you would upvote that response so that I can make the post. Afterwords, I will delete this comment. Thank you.
edited: this post used to be dumber
gamification for flow experiences.
Academic and anti-transhumanist, anti-libertarian, democratic socialist Dale Carrico is in full flow against Eliezer's essay, Competent Elites. The comments have the new (to me) tidbit that the aforementioned essay and this one on IQ are not present in Rationality: From AI to Zombies (a base motive is, of course, attributed).
musings
What does an example super-healthy lifestyle look like? Are there any prescription one could model their behaviour changes towards? I imagine it would include like: x amount of exercise, y diet, not smoking, yada yada. The elements that are suprising for a given person would likely be the really important parts. Ideally, if the prescription is sophisticated enough, some kind of prioritisation of different elements would be helpful.
*
Is there a hedonistic counterpart to effective altruism? I'd sure like to get involved with that :) Imagine that, a com...
Two people were lamenting the state of affairs of the world.
A bystander said, "When I become 'King of the World' I will fix things."
One of the two said, "Can I trust you?"
The bystander said, "Of course not."
The retort was, "In that case, I trust you."
Is this a
par·a·dox/ˈperəˌdäks/ noun
1. a statement or proposition that, despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory.
?
Goals for January
Game Theory (Nalebuff, Avinash) says carrying a gun is a dominant strategy. Does it favor concealed, or open carry? TIA.
How often do they actually execute those arrested for buying drugs, as opposed to other punishments? Is the chance of "success" even bigger than that of suicide by hanging, for example? Because ending up imprisoned is not necessarily better than ending up mutilated. On the other hand, if someone is going to purchase illegal drugs for an overdose, is there any reason not to do it in a country with capital punishment as opposed to one in which they'd definitely face years in prison? (OK, those aren't the only two options...)
Singapore was used as the specific example because execution is mandatory for certain quantities and they have a track record of staying true to that. The main issue is rather that in countries like Singapore, there is minimal demand for drugs relative to countries with worse law enforcement, lowering the criminal profitability.