I can be, though I'll want to be heading to Seattle around that time. No restrictions on travel really except I'd like to be in LA within two weeks of New Year.
I'll be in Vancouver for New Year and shortly afterwards - any meetups planned for that time?
No problem. Sent him a message, hopefully he has time!
I actually know one of the guys working on it - I could ask him to come over here if you like.
Note for following meetups - I'll be in Seattle in early January, would be good to meet some of you!
Not sure for this trip; I'm mostly going West from Detroit, and I'll be back in the States (to NYC) next year but probably not heading to DC. All plans can change however!
Nice! I'm actually doing something similar in December, bussing though various cities in the States (thread at http://lesswrong.com/lw/e9t/the_wandering_rationalist/) before going, mildly ironically, to Australia. I actually think I'm going to be in Austin around the same time as you, though not for as long. I'll be reposting my message with dates shortly.
It's not necessary to have them completely performed and controlled by a third party - but the idea is if you want to do a drug trial, you sign up with an independent register saying which drug you're testing and what your methodology is. Then when the trial is done, you must report your results publicly.
That stops companies hiding negative trials and only publishing positive ones. It doesn't stop the data being manipulated, but that's another problem.
Nice article. Much of psychology suffers from the failure to replicate experiments, for various reasons like funding, time pressure, and difficulties in obtaining the population required. I've worked in sensorimotor control for several years and recently some researchers have come up with the idea of putting together a database of studies on perturbations during reaching (which is a very widely used paradigm) because they can so often be divergent due to tiny changes in the experiments.
I'd love to see more of this kind of thing in psychology in general, ju...
I will hopefully be in New Zealand in January, just passing through. Keep me informed!
Good catch. Just chatting to the editor to try to get this fixed - apparently there's a problem with the edit feature on issuu.
ETA: unfortunately it can't be changed. It can be re-uploaded but then they'd lose the view stats.
I guess it does a little - the piece was edited slightly from my original submission. I don't think it sounds all that strange, though I'm almost certainly biased on that front...
That's actually a really interesting thought. I am white and male and straight and am very aware of my privilege, and also am very interested in heuristics and biases and how they are part of our thought patterns. I consider myself very much a feminist, and also a realist in terms of how people actually work compared with how people would like each other to work. I might brood on this for a bit and write about it.
That's not a bad idea - except I have a friend in Lansing, MI I said I'd look up on the way. If I do too many zig-zags it will raise hell with my schedule, and I've spent a lot of time on the East Coast fairly recently. Still... I'll think about it.
Hello,
Not sure if any SLCers have seen this thread:
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/e9t/the_wandering_rationalist/
...but I'll be travelling through SLC sometime in December and it would be great to meet some of you if you're planning another meetup around that time. Offers of hanging out and accommodation gratefully received!
As I recall from my readings on amnesia, having no conscious recollection of events but nevertheless having an unconscious preference (or lack of preference) is fairly common. Essentially patients have impaired declarative (explicit) memory but some spared implicit perceptual and motor memory. So the fictional example of Sammy Jenkis is actually quite reality-based.
What needs to be distinguished in this scenario is whether Omega is only wiping your declarative memory or if he's also going in and getting rid of your implicit memory as well, which takes care of lower-level responses to stimuli that might otherwise cause problems after the event.
I've done Amtrak before and I quite liked it. What I'm wavering on is whether to buy the $450 30-day bus pass which allows me unlimited travel for that period or be a bit riskier and hope I'll find enough rides to get me across for cheaper. I need to sit down and do the research and the maths really.
I can rent a car for sure (I'm 31) but I haven't driven in ten years and considering it'll be December I'm not confident in my driving ability in bad weather conditions...
Don't see why I wouldn't be able to stop a night! It's going in the right direction at least.
No worries. I'm definitely interested in seeing nice things as opposed to just going places as quickly as possible, depending of course on how my travel time is going. I need to figure out what I'm actually going to do for Christmas - hopefully some friends of mine on the West Coast will take me in and feed me...
Great, thanks!
Well, it seems fairly close to Des Moines, and I don't know anyone there... it's just on my way to OK at this point. I'll bear it in mind!
I'll definitely look into that.
I know very little about what the most optimal way to get from place to place is in the US. Since I don't have a car, I figured big highways would be the way to do it, either by bus or by grabbing rides. But of course I'm happy to take advice.
I've also heard Austin is fun. I wasn't really planning on doing Texas and Austin's pretty far out of my way, but I'll think on it.
I was thinking of doing that anyway, but I wanted to have a general post up early to prime people that I'll be travelling through. It would also be fun to see if I could pop from meetup to meetup and maybe post a cross-country review of them. Got a few months to plan it more carefully anyway.
Thanks - it's a possibility. I'd love to see China. I do want to try to make Korea and Japan this trip as well.
Awesome, thanks! Madison's actually somewhere I need a place to stay; I have friends in Chicago and Minneapolis already, for example. Good to know you're there, I've heard Madison's a lot of fun.
Fixed - thanks for that!
Very useful information and incredibly relevant for, among other things, rationality testing. I have some experience with these kinds of effects from my research on motor control, but it's good to keep them in the forefront of one's mind when designing studies.
I'm not sure growth is necessarily a thing LW needs per se, as some of the other commenters have pointed out. But I do think there is scope for improving the landing page and decreasing the bounce rate of people we want to be here. That last is crucial.
In my case, I still only have a handful of comments due to not having much time to post at the moment, but I got here through HPMOR and read the Sequences... and still had problems sticking around to post anything as I was somewhat underwhelmed by the design and ease of navigation. I think things can definitely be made a little more user-friendly without ruining the community.
So I'm here a couple more days - still up for grabbing a pint?
I'm interested in this - my PhD and postdoc work has all been in motor control, which is of course very much tied up with perception and action. I'm less interested in motor control now and more interested in beliefs, but this analysis demonstrates that the two systems are very much intertwined. You need to have beliefs about the world, which come from perception, before you can generate a useful motor command, for example.
Only thing I'd take issue with is that linking this process solely to reinforcement learning is a little simplistic. Motor learning is ...
This already happens in some cases. PLoS One, for example, publishes open-access entirely online and invites community criticism:
http://www.plosone.org/static/information.action
(Sorry, I've yet to figure out how to link things and suchlike; can HTML be used here?)
One issue with just allowing anyone to comment on a paper though is a high proportion of misinformed or ignorant people who can hijack the discussion. LW gets round this very well with its judicious gardening, and other sites do this too, so perhaps it's not as big an issue as I'm making it out to be. Unmoderated comment forums tend to turn into slimepits though.
I generally agree. I have an aversion to just reading abstracts because it doesn't let you get at the nitty-gritty of how exactly the studies were performed, but it's way better than just reading the news reports - and not everyone has full-text access to studies anyway.
It's definitely a good idea to be skeptical. There is definitely some badly-designed research out there, and some that shows less than it claims to. The best way to deal with that is to read the original papers and make sure the studies were adequately performed, although this doesn't entirely solve the issue (see: publication bias).
Hello everyone,
Thought it was about time to do one of these since I've made a couple of comments!
My name's Carl. I've been interested in science and why people believe the strange things they believe for many years. I was raised Catholic but came to the conclusion around the age of ten that it was all a bit silly really, and as yet I have found no evidence that would cause me to update away from that.
I studied physics as an undergrad and switched to experimental psychology for my PhD, being more interested at that point in how people work than how the univ...
Great stuff - I just attended the June minicamp. I'm pretty sure you'll love it. I look forward to meeting and picking your brains about it!
Fashion update: many people have complimented me on how good I'm looking!
This last couple of weeks I've started using RememberTheMilk to manage my tasks a bit better. It's coming along. I'm probably not using it to its full potential yet but I'm actually GTD so that's a start.
I've also experimented with Pomodoro to increase productivity; the couple of times I used it it seems to work. More data required.
I'll be in town August 5th-11th for the Fringe - any chance of a meetup during that time?
That's a beautiful site! And looks like all the links work.
I have very few criticisms. First there is a tiny use of jargon words like 'win' in a context they're not normally used in, but I think it's probably ok, the context is fairly self-explanatory. Though I might be getting used to the jargon words by now, so I'll inevitably be biased.
Second I think the causal model graphic on the front page can be improved: I think you need to change 'perfect reasoning' and 'perfect decisionmaking' to 'improved reasoning' and 'improved decision-making'. No reasoning o...
Good point and good call. My plan is to arrange some clothes shopping time with friends when I get back to Kingston. I rather suspect they will be shocked when I ask them to accompany me. :)
I realised last night that I spent about 3 hours clothes shopping yesterday, without getting anxious once. It's much easier when you think of it as simply a problem to be solved...
Having just attended the June minicamp and having some time to kill in the Bay Area, I'm spending this afternoon on Haight hacking my fashion. So far my clothes choices have elicited a compliment on the fit from the clothing store staff at least, so I think that's a positive step.
I'm glad you're focusing on improving your appearance, but be careful. If they think you're going to be a one-time customer (Which is likely, since you don't live here. Yes, people can tell.), the staff have a massive incentive to say you look good. Bring a friend if you want an honest evaluation.
Great post - I definitely agree with some of your points. I'm very new to LW and haven't even written an introductory post yet, but I'm very impressed with what I've seen overall. I am even flying out to San Francisco tomorrow to discuss joining the newly-renamed CFAR. My background is entirely academic, as I have a PhD in experimental psychology and I'm interested in formalising some of the rationality measures CFAR is looking at. I even had a brief email exchange with Anna Salamon about the usefulness and validity of academic publications.
Here's my take ...
There's a spelling error on the first section of the Research page:
"If you’re new to the entire topic, see the 5-page Reducing Long-Term Catastrohpic Risks from Artificial Intelligence."
It should be Catastrophic.
Yes indeed. I thought people here, especially those connected to CFAR, might find it interesting. Critical thinking is only one part of rationality training of course, but its is a very useful one.