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Tumblr user su3su2u1 (probably most known to LWers for his critiques of HPMOR's scientific claims, and subsequent fallout with Eliezer) has an interesting post about MIRI's research strategy. I think it has some really good ideas. What do other folks think?
It seems like a lot of focus on MIRI giving good signals to outsiders. The "publish or perish" treadmill of academia is exactly why privately funded organizations like MIRI are needed.
The things that su3su2u1 wants MIRI to be already exist in academia. The whole point of MIRI is to create an organization of a type that doesn't currently exist, focused on much longer term goals. If you measure organizations on the basis of how many publications they make, you're going to get a lot of low-quality publications. Citations are only slightly better, especially if you're focused on ignored areas of research.
If you have outside-view criticisms of an organization and you're suddenly put in charge of them, the first thing you have to do is check the new inside-view information available and see what's really going on.
Ever since I started hanging out on LW and working on UDT-ish math, I've been telling SIAI/MIRI folks that they should focus on public research output above all else. (Eliezer's attitude back then was the complete opposite.) Eventually Luke came around to that point of view, and things started to change. But that took, like, five years of persuasion from me and other folks.
After reading su3su2u1's post, I feel that growing closer to academia is another obviously good step. It'll happen eventually, if MIRI is to have an impact. Why wait another five years to start? Why not start now?
The whole point of MIRI is to create an organization of a type that doesn't currently exist, focused on much longer term goals. If you measure organizations on the basis of how many publications they make, you're going to get a lot of low-quality publications. Citations are only slightly better, especially if you're focused on ignored areas of research.
Just because MIRI researchers' incentives aren't distorted by "publish or perish" culture, it doesn't mean they aren't distorted by other things, especially those that are associated with lack of feedback and accountability.
If MIRI doesn't publish reasonably frequently (via peer review), how do you know they aren't wasting donor money? Donors can't evaluate their stuff themselves, and MIRI doesn't seem to submit a lot of stuff to peer review.
How do you know they aren't just living it up in a very expensive part of the country doing the equivalent of freshman philosophizing in front of the white board. The way you usually know is via peer review -- e.g. other people previously declared to have produced good things declare that MIRI produces good things.
If MIRI doesn't publish reasonably frequently (via peer review), how do you know they aren't wasting donor money?
How did science get done for the centuries before peer review? Why do you place such weight on such a recently invented construct like peer review (you may remember Einstein being so enraged by the first and only time he tried out this new thing called 'peer review' that he vowed to never again submit anything to a 'peer reviewed' journal), a construct which routinely fails anytime it's evaluated and has been shown to be extremely unreliable where the same paper can be accepted and rejected based on chance? If peer-review is so good, why do so many terrible papers get published and great Nobel-prize-winning work rejected repeatedly? If peer review is such an effective method of divining quality, why do many communities seem to get along fine with desultory use of peer review where it's barely used or left as the final step long after the results have been disseminated and evaluated and people don't even bother to read the final peer-reviewed version (particularly in economics, I get the impression that everyone reads the preprints & working papers and the final pu...
Is this an "arguments as soldiers" thing? Compare an isomorphic argument: "how did medicine get done for the centuries before antibiotics."
That's not isomorphic. To put it bluntly, medicine didn't. It only started becoming net beneficial extremely recently (and even now tons of medicine is harmful or a pure waste), based on copying a tremendous amount of basic science like biology and bacteriology and benefitting from others' discoveries, and importing methodology like randomized trials (which it still chafes at) and not by importing peer review. Up until the very late 1800s or so, you would have been better off often ignoring doctors if you were, say, an expecting mother wondering whether to give birth in a hospital pre-Semmelweiss. You can't expect too much too much help from a field which published its first RCT in 1948 (on, incidentally, an antibiotic).
Leaving aside that this an argument from authority,
I include it as a piquant anecdote since you seem to have no interest in looking up any of the statistical evidence on the unreliability and biases (in the statistical senses) of peer review, or the absence of any especial evidence that it works.
...But:
Julian Savulescu: The Philosopher Who Says We Should Play God
Australian bioethicist Julian Savulescu has a knack for provocation. Take human cloning. He says most of us would readily accept it if it benefited us. As for eugenics—creating smarter, stronger, more beautiful babies—he believes we have an ethical obligation to use advanced technology to select the best possible children.
A protégé of the philosopher Peter Singer, Savulescu is a prominent moral philosopher at the University of Oxford, where he directs the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. He also edits the Journal of Medical Ethics. Savulescu isn’t shy about stepping onto ethical minefields. He sees nothing wrong with doping to help cyclists climb those steep mountains in the Tour de France. Some elite athletes will always cheat to boost their performance, so instead of trying to enforce rules that will be broken, he claims we’d be better off with a system that allows low-dose doping.
So does Savulescu just get off being outrageous? “I actually think of myself as the voice of common sense,” he says, though he admits to receiving his share of hate mail. He’s frustrated by how hard it is to have reasoned arguments about loaded issues without getting flamed on the Internet. Savulescu thinks we need to become far more adept at sorting out difficult moral issues. Otherwise, he says, the human species will face dire consequences in the coming decades.
An interesting paper by the name of Fuck nuance.
Abstract:
Seriously, fuck it.
No, I'm not kidding, this is the actual abstract at the beginning of the paper.
Technically, it's about sociological theories, but I feel the general principle applies much more widely.
(Normally I would quote a teaser chunk of the paper here, but this PDF file seems unusually resistant to copy-and-paste-as-text and I don't feel like manually inserting back all the spaces between the words...)
Nancy Leibowitz was quoting this. Having spent the weekend reading 20th century French philosophers, this was refreshing. From the paper:
To make a loose statistical analogy, [asking for more nuance] is a little like continuing to add variables to a regression on the grounds that the explained variance keeps going up.
It's not a loose analogy. It's a literal description of an example of the sort of thing that should happen in the reality underlying the theory.
There is another aspect to nuance that I don't yet see mentioned in the paper. In French philosophy, the nuance is nuance of interpretation, not an attempt to handle more cases. Many theories are presented without having any cases at all that they handle! Jacques Lacan, for instance, only described one case history during his entire career; he presented detailed theories of personality development with no citations or data.
This happens with many who descend academically from Hegel: Marx, Lacan, Derrida. The model is not "nuanced" in the sense of handling many cases; it is never demonstrated to handle any data at all, or at best one over-simplified case (a general claim, or a particular sentence which the philosophe...
Gwern rubbishes longevity research.
I think he's taking about the dream of achieving indefinite numbers of healthy years.
However, there are some people who live into their 90s in pretty good health, and they're far from the majority. What's the likelihood of just making good health into one's 90s much more likely? I'm not talking about lifestyle improvement-- I'm talking about some technological fix.
So, he's specifically talking about the failures of previous longevity research. It seems to me that modern longevity research has portions that are considerably better (among other things, the reductionistic view appears to be the dominant view among the top researchers). Consider this section in particular:
I could wish Stambler made more of an effort to evaluate researchers on scientific grounds and give a better idea of where ideas have been vindicated or refuted by subsequent work.
That Stambler spent too little time on whether or not they actually got the science right / pushed in the right or wrong direction, and spent too much time focusing on their political persuasion, strikes me as highly relevant and interesting when it comes to scientific history (and the modern versions--namely, choosing who to fund or not, and what experiments to pursue or not).
Someone changed the password on the Username public throwaway account. It's a shame a troll finally got to it after several years.
Solving a Non-Existent Unsolved Problem: The Critical Brachistochrone
During my research I came across an obscure mathematical physics problem whose established answer was wrong. I attempted to solve this unsolved problem, and eventually found out that I was the one who was wrong.
As part of my paper on falling through the centre of the Earth, I studied something called the brachistochrone curve....
"Do Artificial Reinforcement-Learning Agents Matter Morally?" Yes, says Brian Tomasik, even present-day ones (by a very small but nonzero amount). He foresees their ethical significance increasing in the near future, and he isn't talking about strong AI, but an increase in the ordinary applications of reinforcement learning to our technology.
The argument is, briefly: for various claims about what consciousness physically is, RL programs display these features to some extent as well. Therefore they have a nonzero degree of consciousness, and so a...
I'm looking for for a high quality parenting blog, one with relatively frequent well written content and which might accept guest contribution - or one with a discussion forum that's not just gossiping. Can be English speaking or German. I'd like to try my hand on some posts before opening my own blog. Any ideas?
What hypothesis are you testing, or is gnawing at the back of your mind, in relation to LessWrong, as you surf LessWrong right now? Or perhaps you're just surfing idly.
For me its: Has anyone experimented with replacing their socialising with friends time with LessWrong exclusively? I wonder if the benefits associated with socialising such as increased well-being can be substituted for interaction in online communities.
Though, I suspect the nature of the community would be a strong determinant of the outcome. For instance, facebook would probably be unhealt...
In digital markets with extremely quick liquidity like the stock exchange, Is investing based on macroeconomic factors and megatrends foolhardy? Is it only sensible to invest when one has privellaged information including via analysis of public data at a level no one else has done?
Famous neurologist and science popularizer Oliver Sacks has died. Which of his books are your favorites?
The macro/micro validity tradeoff
...Many economists insist that the realism of their assumptions is not important - the only important thing is that at the end of the day, the model fits the data of whatever phenomenon it's supposed to be modeling. This is called an "as if" model. For example, maybe individuals don't have rational expectations, but if the economy behaves as if they do, then it's OK to use a rational expectations model.
So I realized that there's a fundamental tradeoff here. The more you insist on fitting the micro data (plausibilit
Inability and Obligation in Moral Judgment
...It is often thought that judgments about what we ought to do are limited by judgments about what we can do, or that “ought implies can.” We conducted eight experiments to test the link between a range of moral requirements and abilities in ordinary moral evaluations. Moral obligations were repeatedly attributed in tandem with inability, regardless of the type (Experiments 1–3), temporal duration (Experiment 5), or scope (Experiment 6) of inability. This pattern was consistently observed using a variety of moral v
One of my professors claimed that postmodernism, and particularly its concept of "no objective truth", is responsible for much of the recent liberalism of society, through the idea of "live and let live". (Specific examples given were attitudes towards legalization of gay marriage and drugs.) I pointed out that libertarianism and liberalism predated postmodernism historically, and they said that that's true, but you can still trace the popularity back to postmodernism.
Is this historically accurate? If not, is there something I can point...
Here's one for the "life pro tips" category since Less Wrong users are mostly male. It seems as though the best way to deal with balding is to catch it as early as possible, because that's the time drug treatments (well Finasteride at least) are most effective. Of the "big 3" baldness treatments, ketoconazole shampoo is available over the counter and has few side effects reported online. (It's also used as an anti-dandruff shampoo.) (EDIT: Looks like it is not recommended to take orally, although I don't see anyone saying that topic...
How to perform surgery on yourself with Clarity
I do irrational things. The other day I bought a flight interstate, somewhat impulsively, to a conference I knew next to nothing about for complicated reasons. Instantregret, but the cancellation fee is about half the price of the ticket. I also got some art professionally designed for a few hundred dollars, that I didn't need or want. I've also lost thousands gambling and on the stock exchange. I'm stupid in many ways, but I'm also capable enough to be able to share insights from the other side of sanity with...
Is anyone willing to share an Anki deck with me? I'm trying to start using it. I'm running into a problem likely derived from having never, uh, learned how to learn. I look through a book or a paper or an article, and I find it informative, and I have no idea what parts of it I want to turn into cards. It just strikes me as generically informative. I think that learning this by example is going to be by far the easiest method.
Meta: in posting the open thread at this time I note that it is Monday where I am in Sydney Australia; even if this is roughly 6-12 hours earlier than usual to start the open thread. (hope you all have a good week ahead)
Update on the Slack: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mpq/lesswrong_real_time_chat/
A list of our topics:
These are expected to grow and change as we need them. I count 58 people who have joined so far today. Feel free to PM me as well.
It's worth noting that parenting just...
A Defense of the Rights of Artificial Intelligences by Eric Schwitzgebel and Mara [official surname still be decided]
...There are possible artificially intelligent beings who do not differ in any morally relevant respect from human beings. Such possible beings would deserve moral consideration similar to that of human beings. Our duties to them would not be appreciably reduced by the fact that they are non-human, nor by the fact that they owe their existence to us. Indeed, if they owe their existence to us, we would likely have additional moral obligations
Does anyone know of a good life expectancy calculator? Preferably one which has good justification behind the model, and also has been tested.
I tried this calculator, but I noticed a few issues. First, it sells me I should start doing conditioning exercise... when I did check that off. I think that part of the calculator is broken. It also seems to think that taller people live longer, when from what I understand it's well accepted that the opposite is true. Some of its other features seem unjustified to me, for example, it seems to think you get a life ex...
My conscience is as hypertrophied as the next person, but how is a balance struck between avoiding cognitive biases, logical fallacies, etc., and enjoying life?
Dilbert creator Scott Adams, who has a fantastic rationalist-compatible blog, is giving Donald Trump a 98% of becoming president because Trump is using advanced persuasion techniques. We probably shouldn't get into whether Trump should be president, but do you think Adams is correct, especially about what he writes here. See also this, this, and this.
I wouldn't put it at 98%, but I definitely wouldn't put it at Nate Silver's 2%, which I think comes from an analysis that is just way too simplistic.
I would take Silver's analysis over Adams' any day. Look at their respective prediction track records.
Scott, if you read this, how about a wager?
Despite his frequent comments that he's "betting" on Trump and that Silver is "betting" against Trump, Adams's position is that gambling is illegal when pressed to actually bet. This means one of the big feedback mechanisms preventing outlandish probabilities is not there, so don't take his stated probabilities as the stated numbers.
(In general, remember how terrible people are at calibration: a 98% chance probably corresponds to about a 70% chance in actuality, if Adams is an expert in the relevant field.)
A summary of rather counterintuitive results of the effect of priming on raising people's performance on various tests of cognitive abilities, and the ability to negate (or enhance) the effects of stereotype threat through priming:
"Picture yourself as a stereotypical male"
(It's not all about gender, either. Some of it is about race! How exciting!)
In view of this http://essay.utwente.nl/66307/1/Bolle%20Colin%20-s%201246933%20scriptie.pdf did the smartphone makers anticipate addiction, as did the tobacco companies in the U.S.?
Certainly both are profiting from it.
For me it seems like some version of The Tulip Mania.
I've never heard of this book or author before, anyone read it? How does it compare to eg "Smarter Than Us" or "Our Final Invention"?
Do western civilizations owe something to those civilizations that were disadvantaged as a result of imperialism? A common reaction of national conservatives to this idea is that what happened during imperialism is time-barred and each country is responsible for their citizens.
Something which may prove interesting to somebody here:
A tentative list of internal states (certainly incomplete), divided into emotions and mental states. I distinguish between emotions and mental states on the basis of something I can't quite put my finger on, but I'm reasonably certain there -is- a difference, something like the difference between color photographs and black-and-white photographs. (It's quite fuzzy in some places, though, so not everything neatly fits in one or the other. Suspicious/paranoid, for example, I quibble about the placemen...
I'm looking for a good demonstration of Aumann's Agreement Theorem that I could actually conduct between two people competent in Bayesian probability. Presumably this would have a structure where each player performs some randomizing action, then they exchange information in some formal way in rounds, and eventually reach agreement.
A trivial example: each player flips a coin in secret, then they repeatedly exchange their probability estimates for a statement like "both coin flips came up heads". Unfortunately, for that case they both agree from r...
Bridge, the card game. Bidding is the process of two players exchanging information about the cards they hold via the very limited communications channel (bids). The play itself is also used to transfer more information about which cards remain in the hand.
I don't know if that will work as a demonstration of the Aumann's Theorem, though, bridge gets very complicated very fast :-/
Are there any advocacy groups with sex buyers or 'johns'? They're an affluent bunch, and their interests include easily influenced poor settings, and they're not neccersarily constrained by the scrupolosity that advocates for say sex worker's rights may have. It suprises me that they don't exist, when advocacy groups for smokers and other vices exist, when only advocacy groups for the suppliers and workers in the sex trade seem to exist.
I hypothesise that there are several topics for which you can reliably expect upvotes or downvotes depending your position, regardless of your content.
Anyone ever try modeling internal monologue as political parties? I suppose it's not so different from the House voices in HPMOR, but I'm curious if there's RL experience.
Regarding prediction markets and regulation, does anyone know whether a betting market wherein the payout for the betting contract goes to the winner's choice in charities (as opposed to going to the winner) would avoid most or all of the legal issues involved?
I bought a $200 prepaid debit card to precommit to getting a beeminder account that won't fuck up my bank balance. I plan to use it to give up pornography and excessive masturbation (<or=1 a week is my goal). However, $200 doesn't have a lot of marginal value to me. I'm thinking of exploiting my irrationality and warm fuzzies by precommiting to donate it to a warm fuzzies charity, or maybe I'll put the money towards potential dates so I can get a girlfriend as substitute if I'm successful in nofapping or watching porn. Ideally there would be a system wh...
I have yet to see a treatise, for strategic managers or from academics of any domain, on the game theoretic implications of data science and data-driven firm behaviour in general.
I for one would expect data driven organisations to be act more rationally and therefore predictable, meaning that game-theoretic optimal strategic behaviour, or rather an approximation of it because many data driven organisations will be stupid like many poker players forming a nash equilbirum would maximise expected utility. However, I don't see how machine learning provides an ...
Does anyone else have trouble with people who openly display their intelligence or attempt to be smart about something? High-school and media have somehow ingrained a hostility towards that and I find it surprisingly hard to overcome. I think it is some sort of empathy response, similar to vicarious embarrassment.
It's worth distinguishing a number of things.
Actually and visibly being really smart, and pretty much always right in their domain of expertise.
Trying to look really smart and right, over and above merely being so.
Arrogance in dealing with people who are wrong.
Arrogance in dealing with people disagreeing with oneself.
(1) is a great virtue, (2) and (4) are mortal sins of rationality, and (3) merely a venial one. I will overlook a lot of arrogance in someone who is actually pretty much always right, especially if it isn't me they're being arrogant at.
People who are insecure around smart people often read actually being right and knowing it (1 and 3) as pretending to be right and intimidating others (2 and 4).
Cause prioritization looks at the Importance, tractability, and neglectedness of causes.
“What is the problem?” = importance
“What are possible interventions?” = tractability
“Who else is working on it?” = neglectedness
Where are neglected causes found?
Recently a friend told me that values are important to relationship success. I met a business person the same day who claimed knowing his values got him to where he is as a social entrepreneur. Long ago, my psychiatrist asked me about my values, and I didn't know. Psychologist have tried to help me know my values on several occasions but I forget.
Just now I looked up how to find my values and found this article
Since their technique isn't any good for me since my memory is shoddy, I just selected from the list of values. Hope I haven't unconsciously chose ...
Are there any good reasons to use hotmail (outlook.com online) instead of gmail apart from switching costs if you already use outlook? Outlook is associated with business and therefore carries higher status and formality, perhaps?
Why aren't more LW's public intellectuals in the conventional sense - making appearances on radio or television news bulletins? The benefits seem obvious, if you're okay with fame. And, It's a position of influence and seems relatively easy to contact news organisations to say you have original research for a reputable organisation. Many of us are academics so that's probably true. Perhaps there is even an easier way to contact many news distributes at once to get your name out there and get offers coming to you. Something easier than say manually sending ...
CBT is becoming less effective and (by the article author' insinuation) is creating disability
For SSC fans, here's an article that's probably about the same thing, but I can't bring myself to read the inane story at the start.
According the the first article's author, the declining efficacy effect is seen in psychiatry in particularly, but also in medicine more generally. Interesting.
How does one deliver Interpersonal psychotherapy? It's just as effective as CBT without the psychobabble. I can't find information on what is actually done, however.
What's in the way of large scaleprospective placebocontrolled trial of preexposure HIV prophelaxis?
Talos Principle has an AI singularity plot. In the the final test to pass is an anti-friendliness test. However upon experiencing the story this doesn't seem especially repugnant. Is friendliness in conflict with moral autonomy?
SNP's are not independent - tag SNP's 'represent a region fo hiily correlated SNP's.
So, can the correlations be used to correct the reported risks in promethease to identify overall risk for a particular thing?
Does 23andme test for highly correlated SNP's, or does it exclude them cause unnecersary???
NZ is a libertarian paradise. Additional points missed are that there are no agricultural subsidies, and there are some other things mentioned in the comments.
Disabled people can benefit from sex. Presumably, some disabled people cannot access sex without paying for it (including neurodevelopmentally disabled, mentally ill, etc). There are barriers to sex workers providing for disabled clients. Unfortunately, there are compelling misconceptions that criminalizing the buying of sex is helpful to society when the evidence appears overwhelmingly on the other side, not to mention the stigma and access to the information about the rewards of sexual experience for sex worker's clients. Further, existing advocacy for s...
Famous neurologist and science popularizer Oliver Sacks has died. Which of his books are your favorites?
Awakenings is a perennial favorite, a cohort of people with severe Parkinsonism given levodopa all at once (and going through the several month long process of becoming nearly completely functional with the quirks that come from excess dopamine, then their brains slowly losing homeostasis in the face of the exogenous uncontrolled neurotransmitters).
Seeing Voices, a look into the perceptions of the deaf and the nuances of signed languages, was fascinating to me.