All of ChrisHibbert's Comments + Replies

Weight lifters feeling "pumped" is similarly literal. I get this from rock climbing more often than lifting, but after a particularly strenuous climb, your arm muscles feel inflated--they're engorged with blood. It can take a minute for it to subside.

Vader is clearly homicidal and irrational. Leia's superior rationality won't slow him down. Leia recognizes that immediately, but she should also have realized that revealing the base's location wouldn't prevent him from destroying the planet.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-happens-in-a-mind-that-cant-see-mental-images-20240801/

I think there's a lot of research that shows we're fairly bad at predicting how other people see the world, and how much detail there is in their heads. I've read quite a few books that talk about how some people presume that other people are speaking metaphorically when they talk about imagining scenes in color or in 3-d, or how they can "hear" a musical piece in their mind. Those who can assume that others just aren't trying. Face-blindness wasn't recognized for quite a while.

Some people are much better at doing mental rotations of 3-d objects than other... (read more)

The Iowa Election Markets were roughly contemporaneous with Hanson's work. They are often co-credited.

Proofreading comment: 

Please change "folks" to "focus"

I don't see a place for listing book orders, so does this use an automated Market Maker? What's the algorithm? (e.g. Hanson's LMSR?)  Where can we find the code?

Cooking tainted meat doesn't denature prions.  (They aren't "alive", so they can't be "killed".)  Neither do most biological processes, as you might expect in the normal case of digestion. As the article above mentions, they can persist in the environment for years. 

It can take temperatures of several hundred degrees to denature them. 

Prion diseases are slow to develop (up to decades), incurable, and always fatal.

I think the "always fatal" part of this sentence is vacuous. Unless the meaning is something akin to "kills within X years of contracting the disease", it can only mean "kills the victim if they don't die of something else first." (In fact, the article later says "Humans infected with BSE, meanwhile, can harbor it for up to decades post-exposure, and live an average of over a year after showing symptoms.")

There are two known infectious prion diseases in people. ... Kuru ... vCJ

I think a thing that most people neglect is that dishwashers are designed for approximately a family of four preparing and eating two meals a day together, which leads to a certain accumulation of dishes, and the dishwasher needing to be run at least every other day. That means a certain amount of time for the detritus to dry on the dishes. If you have a smaller dishwasher, or more people eating, the dishwasher will be run more often, and it'll be more effective at cleaning dirtier dishes. If you run the dishwasher daily, #4 or #5 might work well for you. ... (read more)

Silly hats are commonly associated with some cults and secret societies, so that's not particularly a mark in your favor. "not taking yourselves too seriously" is a plus, but neither dress code nor anti-dress code will get you there.

It's helpful to the community to file a report with the BBB. And next time check the references there rather than trusting the super's recommendations.

With only two questions about what people believe, I expected to see a matrix showing number of people in each 2-d category. The most interesting result is how do answers to the two questions correlate.

Please correct "her parents had took her to Third Hand Book Emporium" to "her parents had taken her to Third Hand Book Emporium".

The focus on categorizing negative outcomes seems to obscure a lot of relevant detail. If you broaden the view to include things from non-takeover to peaceful cooperation, it would probably be evident that the boundaries are soft and scenarios near the edge aren't as definitely bad as this makes them appear. I think we might learn more about possible coexistence and how thing might turn out well if we spend less time focused on imagined disasters.

First I'd point out that scenarios like Drexler's "Reframing Superintelligence" aren't that far from the *Flash... (read more)

typo: serious => series in the second sentence

I think the crux is right-of-way. Boats and ships have elaborate rules that always establish a right-of-way that can be clearly established after the fact, so all pilots and captains adhere their behavior to their expectations about the rules. The other thing about navigation on water is that in a close encounter the boat with the right-of-way is required to follow through so the other parties can predict what they can do. This is also not true on the road, leading to the phenomenon of drivers "politely" waving you to go out of turn.

The rules of the ... (read more)

This puts things in a substantially different light than popular explanations of bubbles caused by “greed” or popping from “fear”. There is something to those too: the subprime mortgages of ‘08 were in fact greedy, bad decisions; the private wealth-hoarding after recessions can in fact delay recovery. But we can have the understanding that the economy will have some cyclical nature from these feedback loops no matter what, and ask the question: how stable could it be aside from this?

Treating greed as something that grows and shrinks over time and has a cau... (read more)

This is orthogonal to your point, but you're conflating two different descriptions of the mechanisms of aging when you attribute "7 hallmarks of aging" to Aubrey de Grey.  Aubrey talks about seven distinct forms of damage that result from metabolic activity. There's a separate discussion that addresses 9 hallmarks, though that is less attributable to any single researcher. The framework has been adopted by the NIH, AFAR, and extensively discussed in Sinclair's book Lifespan.  

There's a fair amount of overlap between the two, but they're distinct ... (read more)

Typo watch:

Collectivization is so safe that days people with epilepsy often cure themselves by joining a collective.

should be 

Collectivization is so safe that these days people with epilepsy often cure themselves by joining a collective.

"two" should be "to".

I don't believe in chiropractic either, but I go occasionally when I have pains that conventional treatments don't help. It has probably been 20 years since my last visit, but I'd guess there have been 5-10 occasions when I went for 1 or a few sessions. Sometimes things got better faster than I expected, other times it took as long as I expected doing nothing would. 

*The placebo effect is an effect.* There's no reason to refuse to take advantage of it when other things don't seem to be working. The big benefit of the placebo effect is that it has few deleterious side effects, so it doesn't hurt to make use of it, while some drugs aren't nearly as safe.

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I'm all about epistemology. (my blog is at pancrit.org) But in order to engage in or start a conversation, it's important to take one of the things you place credence in and advocate for it. If you're wishy-washy, in many circumstances, people won't actually engage with your hypothesis, so you won't learn anything about it. Take a stand, even if you're on slippery ground.

To begin with, there are significant risks of medical complications—including infections, electrode displacement, hemorrhage, and cognitive decline—when implanting electrodes in the brain.

This is all going to change over time. (I don't know how quickly, but there is already work on trans-cranial methods that is showing promise.) If we can't get the bandwidth quickly enough, we can control infections, electrodes will get smaller and more adaptive.

enhancement is likely to be far more difficult than therapy.

Admittedly, therapy will come first. That ... (read more)

I'm confused by the framing of the Anvil problem. For humans, a lot of learning is learning from observing others, seeing their mistakes and their consequences. We can predict various events that will result in other's deaths based on previous observation of what happened to yet other people. If we're above a certain level of solipsism, we can extrapolate to ourselves.

Does the AIXI not have the ability to observe other agents? Is it correct to be a solipsist? Seems like a tough learning environment if you have to discover all consequences yourself.

It's s... (read more)

I don't answer survey questions that ask about race, but if you met me you'd think of me as white male.

I'm more strongly libertarian (but less party affiliated) than the survey allowed me to express.

I have reasonably strong views about morality, but had to look up the terms "Deontology", "Consequentialism", and "Value Ethics" in order to decide that of these "consequentialism" probably matches my views better than the others.

Probabilities: 50,30,20,5,0,0,0,10,2,1,20,95.

On "What is the probability that significan... (read more)

In my group at work, it's relatively common to chat "interruptible?" to someone who's sitting right next to you. You can keep working until they're free to take the interrupt, and they don't need to take the interrupt utill they're ready.

In f2f conversations, it's mostly an interrupt culture, but with some conventions about not breaking in in groups larger than 4 or so.

I believe that emotions play a big part in thinking clearly, and understanding our emotions would be a helpful step. Would you mind saying more about the time you spend focused on emotions? Are you paying attention to your concrete current or past emotions (i.e. "this is how I'm feeling now", or "this is how I felt when he said X"), or more theoretical discussions "when someone is in fight-or-flight mode, they're more likely to Y than when they're feeling curiosity"?

You also mentioned exercises about exploiting emotional states; would you say more about what CFAR has learned about mindfully getting oneself in particular emotional states?

When I've argued with people who called themselves utilitarian, they seemed to want to make trade-offs among immediately visible options. I'm not going to try to argue that I have population statistics, or know what the "proper" definition of a utilitarian is. Do you believe that some other terminology or behavior better characterizes those called "utilitarians"?

Did Munroe add that? It's incorrect. There are lots of situations in which it's reasonable to calculate while throwing away an occasional factor of 2.2.

downvoted. You're saying you don't know anything about the context provided by a story that is apparently of interest to (at least) several readers here, and you're proud of not sharing the context. Doesn't seem like something to crow about without first finding out if the content is frivolous.

Atul Gawande has a new article on how the medical industry can learn from other businesses that use production methods to achieve consistent results. He mentions a couple of national start-ups that are trying to use consistent evidence-based practices, and continuous review of outcomes to make health care more reliable and consistent and do it at a profit.

My significant other keeps a garden, and we have several productive fruit trees that we enjoy getting fruit from. Squirrels take a significant amount of fruit, and cats leave unwelcome surprises in the garden.

We trap squirrels and remove them to county parks. (We don't do anything about the cats.)

Marginally increasing the frequency of squirrels and cats is a negative externality for us. I'm glad you aren't feeding squirrels (or cats) near us.

"and the wisdom to know the difference"

For many more exercises exploring status behavior (both high and low), see Keith Johnstone's Impro. (Here's my review.) Johnstone's theory of improvisation (and acting in general) is that most of the weight of convincing the audience is carried by relative status distinctions among the actors. He provides a detailed set of exercises for exploring and understanding subtle and extreme differences so actors can be comfortable on stage projecting whatever distinction is called for.

Without the follow-up report, this is hardly evidence that the theory works. I guess it counts as evidence that the theory is convincing.

My point wasn't just that I wouldn't make a good torturer. It seems to me that ordinary circumstances don't provide many opportunities for anyone to learn much about torture, (other than from fictional sources). I have little reason to believe that inexperienced torturers would be effective in the time-critical circumstances that seem necessary for any convincing justification of torture. You may believe it, but it's not convincing to me. So it would be hard to ethically produce trained torturers, and there's a dearth of evidence on the effectiveness o... (read more)

Maybe my previous answer would have been cleaner if I had said "I don't think I can procure useful information by torturing someone when time is short." It's a relatively easy choice for me, since I doubt that even with proper tools, that I could appropriately gauge the level of pain to the necessary calibration in order to get detailed information in a few minutes or hours.

When I think about other people who might have more experience, it's hard to imagine someone who had repeatedly fallen into the situation where they were the right person to ... (read more)

I'm not completely convinced that all the people who were punished believed they were not doing what their superiors wanted. I understand that that's the way the adjudication came out, but that's what I would expect from a system that knows how to protect itself. But I'll admit I haven't paid close attention to any of the proceedings.

Is there any good, short, material laying out the evidence that none of the perpetrators heard anything to reinforce the mayhem from their superiors--non-coms etc. included? Your sentence "the people who went to jail... (read more)

I've been investing in stocks (occasionally) and mutual funds (consistently) for about thirty years, and I endorse Vaniver's advice heartily. I think overall, I'm up on stocks, due to doing most of my stock investing in cyclical stocks that I can buy and sell repeatedly over the course of many years. This has worked for me with both SGI and Cypress, which I repeatedly bought at low prices and sold at high prices. If you try this and find that you're not buying low and selling high, then you should stick to mutual funds and a buy-and-hold strategy. I've... (read more)

For instance: you can keep getting new data on economics, but there's no way anyone's going to let you do an experiment.

This is somewhat true of macroeconomics, but manifestly untrue of microeconomics. Economists are constantly doing experiments to learn more about how incentives and settings affect behavior. And the results are being applied in the real world, sometimes in environments where alternative hypotheses can be compared.

And even in macroeconomics, work like that explained in Freakonomics shows how people can compare historical data from ... (read more)

Over the course of your natural lifetime, your past light-cone will extend by about 100 years. Since it already envelopes almost 14 billion years, you won't get much new information relative to what you already know.

You are forgetting the impact of improving science. In fact, most of what we know about the 14 billion year light cone has been added to our knowledge in the last few hundred years due to improved instruments and improved theories. As theories improve, we build better instruments and reinterpret data we collected earlier. As I explained... (read more)

The game of Science vs. Nature is more complicated than that, and it's the interesting structure that allows scientists to make predictions that are better than "what we've seen so far is everything there is." In particular, the interesting things in both Chemistry and particle Physics is that scientists were able to find regularities in the data (the Periodic Table is one example) that led them to predict missing particles. Once they knew what properties to look for, they usually were able to find them. When a theory predicts particles that a... (read more)

I don't believe much in penance. (The dictionary I checked said "self punishment as a sign of repentance". I don't think either aspect is valuable.) It's not related to the question of how we should treat people when they have conditions that are often under voluntary control.

We should convince them that (assuming they agree that it would be better to not have the condition) their best approach is to accept that the condition is at least partially under voluntary control, that control always appears hard, and therefore to change their lifesty... (read more)

Was it Yoda who said "There is no try, there is only do"? The point is Alicorn's point about making it a top priority. You may have meant to be this positive, but you didn't sound this positive.

I love "Codd help you". Brilliant!

"The Cult of Statistical Significance" suggests that we're looking for tests that display power rather than significance.