Strictly speaking these are bar charts rather than histograms, aren't they?
As a first reaction (and without being read up on the details), I'm very skeptical. Assuming these three systems are actually in place, I don't see any convincing reason why any one of them should be trusted in isolation. Natural selection has only ever been able to work on their compound output, oblivious to the role played by each one individually and how they interact.
Maybe the "smart" system has been trained to assign some particular outcome a value of 5 utilons, whereas we would all agree that it's surely and under all circumstances worth mo...
At least for me, I've found that studying some machine learning has kind of broadened my perspectives on rationality in general. Even if we humans don't apply the algorithms that we find in machine learning textbooks ourselves, I still find it illuminating to study how we try make machines perform rational inference. The field also concerns itself with more general, if you will philosophical questions relating to e.g. how to properly evaluate the performance of predictive agents, the trade-off between model complexity and generality and the issue of overfitting. These kind of questions are very general in nature and should probably be of some interest to students of any kind of learning agents, be they human or machine.
I'm still not convinced that drawing has any real relevance to rationality. To me drawing seems to mostly involve unconscious motor learning that does not generalize much to other domains. For most rationality related purposes I don't see any major difference from other motor-based, practice-requiring skills such as juggling, playing golf, playing an instrument or patting-your-head-while-rubbing-your-stomach.
Sure, in some sense you will have to "see reality, as it truly is", and sure "your model of reality will be flawed, and you'll need to ...
The link for "Countdown to Zero" points to the wrong place (I presume).
You can't make a movie and say 'It was all a big accident' - no, it has to be a conspiracy, people plotting together. Because in a story, a story is about intention. A story is not about spontaneous order or complex human institutions which are the product of human action but not of human design - no, a story is about evil people plotting together.
One of the strengths of Apollo 13 is that it has only good guys in it, battling together against an unforeseen, mysterious and near-lethal twist of fate.
Apparently he hasn't seen many Cohen brothers movies...
Yeah sure, that's cool with me. We could also decide on the train for the way back (if you're going back), though SJ's site is down for maintenance at the moment. Anyhow I'll send you my contact info by PM.
I think "Get genotyped for free" would work, I don't know how many people will not fully understand what is meant but it'd be hard to come up with something else without getting non-snappy.
I will come - I'm in Uppsala currently but I'll take the train down there.
Actually, they will not sequence your genome - they will genotype you. It's actually quite a difference and I would recommend changing the title of this post. So what they do is use a so called "SNP chip" to test your genotype at a large number (hundreds of thousands) of positions known to be polymorphic in the human population (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNP_genotyping). This is the same technology currently used by personal genomics companies such as 23andMe, and it's not particularly expensive.
Sequencing a genome is done by totally differen...
Clicking the first image for full size isn't working, seems to be a link problem there.
Gothenburg, Sweden.
I've heard about people doing this for sports events they care about - e.g. betting against their national team qualifying for the soccer World Cup.
While I don't disagree that it can be valuable to say that there's something wrong with a theory, it should be noted that at least for factual matters, if you can't provide an alternative explanation then your criticism isn't actually that strong. The probability of a hypothesis being the true explanation for an observation is the fraction its probability makes up of the total probability of that observation (summing over all competing hypothesis, weighed by their respective likelihoods). If you can't move in with another hypothesis to steal some probability clay from the first hypothesis (by providing likelihood values that better predict the observations), that first hypothesis is not going to take a hit.
Has anyone read, and could comment on, Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach by philosophers Howson and Urbach? To me it appears to be the major work on Bayes from within mainstream philosophy of science, but reviews are mixed and I can't really get a feel for its quality and whether it's worth reading.
Tabloid 100% gold. Hanson slayed me.
Where on Earth have you been for the last couple of days? : ] Hiding in a Croatian cave?
That being said, we currently have no reason to believe that this interbreeding had any phenotypic effects on the human lineage.
If we're looking to find out if humans vary significantly in their psychological phenotypes, why not compare these phenotypes directly rather than appealing to highly shaky evolutionary speculations about genotypes?
(Sure, environmental variation also contributes to phenotypic variation, but we have no reason to believe that the current level of human psychological variation is masked by environmental factors - especially since right now environmental variation is probably at its peak in human history)
I'm sure the NIH would love to fund research comparing cognitive phenotypes of different races! Just remember to budget for nails and a cross in your proposal.
From Science, March 12 2010, p. 1316:
'Elsevier told Charlton [editor of a controversial Elsevier non-peer-reviewed journal that published AIDS denial articles] on 22 January that Medical Hypothesis would have to become a peer-reviewed journal. Potentially controversial papers should receive careful scrutiny, the publisher said, and some topics - including "hypotheses that could be interpreted as supporting racism" - should be off-limits.'
Does anyone know a popular science book about, how should I put it, statistical patterns and distributions in the universe. Like, what kind of things follow normal distributions and why, why do power laws emerge everywhere, why scale-free networks all over the place, etc. etc.
Sorry for ranting instead of answering your question, but "power laws emerge everywhere" is mostly bullshit. Power laws are less ubiquitous than some experts want you to believe. And when you do see them, the underlying mechanisms are much more diverse than what these experts will suggest. They have an agenda: they want you to believe that they can solve your (biology, sociology, epidemiology, computer networks etc.) problem with their statistical mechanics toolbox. Usually they can't.
For some counterbalance, see Cosma Shalizi's work. He has many...
…it is fatally easy to read a pattern into stochastically generated data.
-- John Maynard Smith (The Causes of Extinction, 1989)
He thought he knew that there was no point in heading any further in that direction, and, as Socrates never tired of pointing out, thinking that you know when you don't is the main cause of philosophical paralysis.
-- Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea
My reading of that sentence was that Kaj_Sotala focused not on the happiness part of utilitarianism, but on the expected utility calculation part. That is, that everyone needs to make an expected utility calculation to make moral decisions. I don't think any particular type of utility was meant to be implied as necessary.
The point is to imagine the event that is the least bad, but still bad. If dust specks doesn't do it for you, imagine something else. What event you choose is not supposed to be the crucial part of the dilemma.
It is better to have an approximate answer to the right question than an exact answer to the wrong question.
-- John Tukey
This isn't really true. Only organisms with mitochondria developed multicellularity. Mitochondria are the hard part.
...Multicellularity is widely viewed as a unique attribute of eukaryotes, somehow made possible by the origin of a more complex cellular architecture and, without question, with the assistance of natural selection. However, it is difficult to defend this assertion in any formal way. Complex, multicellularity has only arisen twice, once in animals and once in vascular plants. One might add fungi to the list, alth
"We have tried to do this in a hypothesis-independent manner because there is nothing more dangerous in life than a good hypothesis."
--Kári Stefánsson, deCODE Genetics
"Although the first solution is the one usually given, I prefer this second one because it reduces the need to think, replacing it by the automatic calculus. Thinking is hard, so only use it where essential."
--Dennis Lindley, Understanding Uncertainty
How does everyone feel about posts not consisting of info, advice or reflection, but only of request for help or the pointing out of problems and difficult questions? So far on LW the former kind of posts have been dominating, with the general feel, inherited from OB, that posts should be high-quality contributions from the poster to the community. But could there also be room for posts just consisting of "I have this problem (relevant to our topic) and I need help" or straight-forward questions without much complementary reflection from the post...
On several occasions I've wanted to introduce people to Eliezer's writings (and OB/LW aswell), but due to its disorganized and heavily-dependent-on-other-material-in-a-great-messy-web-like nature, I have feared that just a "hey check this guy out" would most likely just result in the person reading a few random essays, saying "yeah I guess that's pretty interesting" and then forgetting about it. Right before LW launched, I seem to recall Eliezer talking about how the LW architecture would allow better organization and that maybe he woul...
I used to play a competitive multiplayer game at a fairly high level, and in the community "play to win" was the standard dogma to throw at "scrubs" who complained about what they felt were unfair tactics or exploitation of bugs or unbalanced strategies. In this particular community, this attitude reached a somewhat unpleasant magnitude and many potentially constructive concerns or reflections upon player behaviour or game balance was met with hostility. The "play to win" doctrine to some extent hampered discussion in the comm...
Am I the only one who is isn't entirely positive towards the heavy use of language identifying the LW community as "rationalists", including terms like "rationalist training" etc.? (Though he is by far the heaviest user of this kind of language, I'm not really talking about Eliezer here, his language use is whole topic on its own - I'm restricting this particular concern to other people, to the general LW non-Eliezer jargon). Is strongly self-identifying as a "rationalist" really such a good thing? Does it really help you sol...
I find it much more tolerable when 'aspiring' is added.
Post here if you live in Sweden.
Maybe it would be nice if some people wrote a few "tutorial"-like or basic lesson-kind of posts aimed at people who are new to the whole "rationalist" thing, covering for example basic concepts in probability theory and statistics, decision theory, cognitive bias etc., thereby making LW more accessible to newcomers who want to get on the train but might have never been exposed to these topics before. These posts could be sorted under a special tag that could be linked to in the "About" section.
Causality in Statistics Education Award: http://www.amstat.org/education/causalityprize/
via http://normaldeviate.wordpress.com/2012/11/02/causality-prize/