All of dspeyer's Comments + Replies
New York City
Solstice: December 14 [fb]
Megameetup: December 13-16 [fb]
Both: Sheraton Brooklyn New York Hotel
Signup: https://rationalistmegameetup.com/
Law of Extremity does some weirder stuff...
Consider a gaussian trait with high levels stigmatized. From a careless observer's perspective, +1s will be rare (somewhat hiding), +2s extremely rare (thoroughly hiding), +3s nonexistant (very hiding *and* rare to begin with) but +4s unable to hide and in fact talked about incessantly on the news / clickbait / juicy rumor mill. Which looks like there are two populations, a large left-skewed one and an entirely distinct but much smaller one. The trait at [-3,+1] and at +4 may not even look that qualitatively simil...
1San Francisco Bay
Dec 16
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bay-area-winter-solstice-2023-tickets-721678057497
FB Event: https://fb.me/1QOVAoRFRHROxgK
New York City
Dec 9 with Megameetup Dec 8-11
Combined Registration: https://rationalistmegameetup.com/
Solstice FB Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/759149316041783
Megameetup FB Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/333410062694327
I object to the term "non-magical". Bribes and intimidation are not magic.
The most obvious conspiracy, what I would consider the null hypothesis, involves one rich influential person who was worried about getting ratted on, one professional hitman, and one or two jailers who were willing to take bribes. And from the perspective of a jailer being offered a bribe, with vague threats if he refuses, someone who has gone yachting with a bunch of highly placed politicians is scary even if the jailer can't fill in the details of the threat.
None of tha...
1.5 The officer within the CIA who investigated Epstein knew, but he got promoted based on how many agents he had and how useful they were, so he kept quiet. Had he turned Epstein in, he'd have gotten some kudos for that, but it wouldn't have been as good a career move. Had he reported up the chain, his commanding officer might have decided to sacrifice the original officer's career for greater justice, so he didn't do that either. Whoever set up this incentive system didn't anticipate this particular scenario.
This is the thing about conspiracy theories: they usually don't require very much actual conspiring.
I suspect this is a lack of flexibility in Stockfish. It was designed (trained?) for normal equal-forces chess and can't step back to think "How do I best work around this disadvantage I've been given?" I suspect something like AlphaZero, given time to play itself at a disadvantage, would do better. As would a true AGI.
That is literally true. The old HPMOR site was just there to host the book as cleanly as possible. Lesswrong is a discussion forum with a lot of functionality. You can host a book on a discussion forum, but it'll never be as smooth.
I propose that "I don't know" between fully co-operative rationalists is shorthand for "my knowledge is so weak that I expect you would find negative value in listening to it." Note that this means whether I say "I don't know" depends in part on my model of you.
For example, if someone who rarely dabbles in medicine asks me if I think a cure works, and I've only skimmed the paper that proposes it, I might well explain how low the prior is and how shaky this sort of research tends to be. If an expert asked me the same question, I'd say "I don't k...
New York / East Coast
Solstice:
December 10th, 6:15pm
Bruno Walter Auditorium, 111 Amsterdam Ave (between 64th and 65th streets, near the Lincoln Center stop on the 1 train)
Registration: https://forms.gle/fAFLWFCLm1pS1Hra7
Facebook Event: https://facebook.com/events/557544469714744
MegaMeetup:
December 9-12
Hoboken
Registration: https://rationalistmegameetup.com/
Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1468622393619899
How big of a subunit were you able to get? Last I looked at mail-order dna, the affordable stuff was only a few hundred bases.
It is not clear to me what point you're making with your examples. Have you written an object-level analysis of a failed LW conversation? I realize that doing that in the straightforward way would antagonize a lot of people, and I recognize that might not be worth it, but maybe there's some clever workaround? Perhaps you could create a role account for your dark side, post the sort of things you think are welcomed here but shouldn't be, confirm empirically that they are, then write a condemnation of those?
Less of a constraint if matters are arranged such that living in NYC is practical. Expensive, of course, but no worse than the Bay. It's a long-ish commute, but not too terrible by mostly-empty train (the full trains will be running the opposite direction). Easier still if WFH a few days a week is supported.
This seems like a very confused way of thinking about earthquakes.
In the past month, there were 4 earthquakes associated with the Juan del Fuca subduction. All were around Richter 2.5 and no one cared.
While I suppose it's possible for a fault to produce small and large earthquakes both more often than in between, this strikes me as rather unlikely. Generally an analysis of earthquake risk should begin be deciding what magnitude earthquakes to care about, and then calculate probabilities.
(When we say that the Seattle area is particularly ...
I can more easily imagine worlds where some MIRI staff lived and worked in NYC itself, though I think MIRI's first-pass goal would be to have as many staff as possible working in the Peekskill area.
You may be underestimating the mental health benefits of being immersed in a larger community. If you apply the “Comfort In. Dump Out” model of emotional support to the stress of MIRI, having strong relationships with people with less stressful lives is really important. If MIRIans are living in a little bubble with no one to dump on but each other, stress just builds.
Seeing as MIRIans will be working outside the city and having fun inside it (regardless of where they live), they won't be traveling with the rush.
Conflict of interest disclaimer: I live in NYC and think bringing MIRI here would be good for our local community
I would point out that being an hour by train from the city is significantly closer than an hour by car. An hour by train is an hour of relaxation or productive work (your choice), whereas an hour by car is an hour lost. An hour by train is also reliably an hour, whereas an hour by car puts your schedule at the mercy of traffic. Finally, an hour by train is accessible to everyone, whereas an hour by car requires possessing a ca...
Apart from transit, I'd urge you to take weather seriously. I lived near Seattle for two years, and going without sunlight for months at a time drained me.
This is a big problem for me. I think that if we move near Seattle, there's something like a 40% chance I'll just completely bail after the first or second year and be like "well, I guess this life plan isn't for me after all". But I've sort of been keeping quiet about it 'cause as far as I know I'm the only one who's part of the move and has severe SAD. Didn't want to make considerations even more complicated just for my sake. But if people regularly move to Seattle and then develop significant SAD symptoms, that seems really important to know.
'Below 1%' is a very small number!
Burns, sunburns, repeated impact, scrapes, abrasion from overuse...
I generally only put a dressing on damaged skin if it's actually bleeding. And even then if the dressing falls off after it clots, I don't worry about it.
I'm worried about damaged skin. If I have a patch of surface where the keratin layer is abnormally thin, does that skin mutate, metastasize, and threaten my entire body? I suspect such patches are present in over 1% of individuals under normal circumstances.
What were the 38 trends you studied? How did you select them? How confident are you that the other 28 don't have discontinuities that you missed?
https://yucata.de/en is another website with a variety of games
http://brass.orderofthehammer.com/ has Brass
http://boardgaming-online.com/ has Through the Ages, both original and updated deck. (Despite the generic name, it's just that one game.)
Words With Friends is imitation Scrabble available as a Facebook app.
So *that's* where that UI lives! I did look for it.
Might go back and convert this into a proper sequence when I get back from Mystery Hunt.
In addition to modifying the perceived beauty or distastefulness of a given concept, there are knobs you can turn related to the concepts themselves: nudging, splitting, merging, or even destroying (and assigning all remaining aesthetic value to other, related concepts.
This is a public key I wanted to document exists in a rationalist-associated place:
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAAAgQDSU/aJmWPV/lHsh5TiePzWimK0/Bj4VlsykTYucHv5PG+b3ogUe8zjcBqzW1Dl0pIJj+KYaEdxk5KYhEEImyaP6umMPnlKvL4VqR3lXebvTAnGxcWN27ZJDqcfgGI/Ilcf1JVEjA6g6DyvEOx3xeqBUH+oPvo8Z/VmyZjAFuuWwQ== dspeyer@dspeyerheim
Seattle
December 21st
St Patrick Catholic Church
Bay Area
December 15th
Chabot Space & Science Center, Skyline Boulevard, Oakland
https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Fpaa7hNb8RhdLS9Jj/bay-area-winter-solstice-2019
With attached West Coast Megameetup?
New York City
December 21st
Hunter College
Solstice registration link:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nyc-secular-solstice-2019-tickets-75612475951
East Coast Megameetup registration link: https://rationalistmegameetup.com
And FB events, for those who like those:
Solstice: https://www.facebook.com/events/628964180975129/
Megameetup: https://www.facebook.com/events/719410405253904/
Dealing with uncertainty about our own logic. It's a circular sort of problem: any logic I use to deal with my potentially flawed reasoning is itself potentially flawed. It gets worse when you deal with potential rationalization.
The idea of rationalist seder is to -- carefully! -- use the effect described in "beware fictional evidence" to promote ideas to our awareness.
We know that "the obviously better thing wouldn't be a Nash equilibrium" traps exist, but we have trouble seeing them, and keep seeing malice and power where there is only desperation. We know that stories can give structure to societies (or, at least, we do if we've read Haidt), but we have trouble seeing it, instead seeing madness and gullibility. We know social structures have both costs and...
Two small notes for those who aren't immersed in Judaism:
The "almost has been said" refers to the saying:
Keep two truths in your pocket and take them out according to the need of the moment. Let one be “For my sake the world was created.” And the other: “I am dust and ashes.”
credited to Rabbi Simcha Bunam, a leader of the chassidic movement in the early 19th century. He said, rather than wrote, this, so the exact phrasing may have gotten cleaned up by successive quoters (of which there have been many).
As for the rhythm of dayenu and lo dayen...
There's a sort of Gresham's Law of conversations. If a conversation reaches a certain level of incivility, the more thoughtful people start to leave.
Reverse causation is not ruled out because diagnosis can be delayed.
It seems entirely plausible to me that it takes several months of worsening depression symptoms (during which time sex drive is effected) before a patient sees a psychiatrist.
I suppose it's ruled out if we separate "depression" and "diagnosed with depression" into separate nodes, but that doesn't rule out anything interesting.
I think the common thread in a lot of these [horrible] relationships is people who have managed to go through their entire lives without realizing that “Person did Thing, which caused me to be upset” is not the same thing as “Person did something wrong”, much less “I have a right to forbid Person from ever doing Thing again”.
--Ozymandias (most of the post is unrelated)
I agree.
The model I use to derive that involves looking at lots of dying people who don't want to die. If we had lots of people lying around saying "I wish I could die; why can't I die?" that same model would conclude the lifespan is too long.
Chronology is evidence of causality, but it's weak evidence. In this case, there are (at least) two problems. First, there could be some other factor (disruption of social network? increase in pro-inflamatory microbiota?) which causes both, but the sex is caused faster. Alternatively, it could be that depression causes low sex drive, but that kicks in immediately whereas it takes months to get a depression diagnosis.
There are good ways to determine causality from observational data, but timing isn't one of them.
Don't trust any model that implies X is too low unless it's also capable of detecting when X would be too high
The smug mask of virtue triumphant could be almost as horrible as the face of wickedness revealed. Almost as horrible, but not quite.
-- Granny Weatherwax. Carpe Jugulum, Terry Pratchett
[T]he kind of mirage that came from modern data-dredging capabilities: if you watch trillions of things, you will often see one-in-a-million coincidences.
-- Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End
Then the most important question for any model would be what domains it's good at.
For example: one model approximates the population as infinite, so it gets decent predictions when the number of agents in each category exceeds five (this is rare).
These requirements to apply the model should be the first thing taught about the model.
I consider that I understand an equation when I can predict the properties of its solutions, without actually solving it.
-- Paul Dirac
There is the world that should be, and the world that is. We live in one.
And must create the other, if it is ever to be.
-- Jim Butcher, Turn Coat
Don’t waste time trying to make him think that [your philosophy] is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous — that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about. The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy’s own ground. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?
-- Archfiend Screwtape, The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis
There is another proverb, "As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it"; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.
-- G. K. Chesterton
The population of sub-Saharan Africa is around 950 million people, and growing. They have been a prime target of aid for generations, but it remains the poorest region of the world.
In absolute terms, conditions in sub-Saharan Africa have improved a lot. Saying "poorest" only states that it hasn't caught up with the rest of the world, which is also improving.
That's true. But conditions in sub-Saharan Africa have improved by a lot less than in other regions that were extremely poor 50 years ago, such as China and South-East Asia. For most of that period, growth in Africa was slower than growth in the West, despite the fact that catch-up growth is much easier. Indeed, sub-Saharan Africa continues to fall further behind China (growth rate of 4.24% versus 7.7%, both for 2013) despite the fact that catch-up growth should favour Africa.
This is not a success story.
As a general rule, 90% of the execution time of your program will be spent in 10% of its code. Profilers are tools that help you identify the 10% of hot spots that constrain the speed of your program. This is a good thing for making it faster.
But in the Unix tradition, profilers have a far more important function. They enable you not to optimize the other 90%! This is good, and not just because it saves you work. The really valuable effect is that not optimizing that 90% holds down global complexity and reduces bugs.
-- Eric Raymond, The Art of Unix Programming
(Applies to optimization in general)
You are probably not cynical enough if you think you could beat seven billion people at cynicism.
--Alicorn? (I'm not sure exactly how authorship of these pages works)
Has a LessWrong Event too
(TIL LessWrong Events are a thing)