All of KnaveOfAllTrades's Comments + Replies

Why can't the deduction be the evidence? If I start with a 50-50 prior that 4 is prime, I can then use the subsequent observation that I've found a factor to update downwards. This feels like it relies on the reasoner's embedding though, so maybe it's cheating, but it's not clear and non-confusing to me why it doesn't count.

Begin here and read up to part 5 inclusive. On the margin, getting a basic day-in, day-out wardrobe of nice well-fitting jeans/chinos (maybe chino or cargo shorts if you live in a hot place) and t-shirts is far more valuable when you start approaching fashion than hats. Hats are a flair that come after everything else in the outfit you're wearing them with. Maybe you want to just spend a few hours one-off choosing a hat and don't want to think about all the precursors. But that can actually make you backslide. If you look at their advice about hats, you'll... (read more)

Yes!! I've also independently come to the conclusion that basic real analysis seems important for these sorts of general lessons. In fact I suspect that seeing the reals constructed synthetically, or the Peano --> Integers --> Rationals --> Dedekind cuts construction, or some similar rigorous construction of an intuitively 'obvious' concept, is probably a big boost in accessing the upper echelons of philosophical ability. Until you've really seen how axioms work and broken some intuitive thing down to the level that you can see how a computer coul... (read more)

What specifically did you mean here?

What I mean is if you have the resources (time, energy, etc.) to do so, consider trying to get the data where the script returned '0' values because the source you used didn't have that bit of data. But make it clear that you've done independent research where you find the figures yourself, so that the user realises it's not from the same dataset. And failing that, e.g. if there just isn't enough info out there to put a figure, state that you looked into it but there isn't enough data. (This lets the user distinguish ... (read more)

I like the graph that shows salary progression at every age. Often career advice just gives you the average entry figure and the average and peak senior figures, which kinda seems predicated upon the 'Career for life' mentality which locks people into professions they dislike. Suggestions, to do or not do with as you see fit, no reply necessary:

Ability to compare multiple jobs simultaneously. Make a note saying the graph will appear once you pick a job, or have it pop up by default on a default job. Center the numerical figures in their cells.

Make the list... (read more)

Thanks to Luke for his exceptional stewardship during his tenure! You'll be awesome at GiveWell!

And Nate you're amazing for taking a level and stepping up to the plate in such a short period of time. It always sounded to me like Luke's shoes would be hard for a successor to fill, but seeing him hand over to you I mysteriously find that worry is distinctly absent! :)

I used to have an adage to the effect that if you walk away from an argument feeling like you've processed it before a month has passed, you're probably kidding yourself. I'm not sure I would take such a strong line nowadays, but it's a useful prompt to bear in mind. Might or might not be related to another thing I sometimes say, that it takes at least a month to even begin establishing a habit. While a perfect reasoner might consider all hypotheses in advance or be able to use past data to test new hypotheses, in practice it seems to me that being on the ... (read more)

This premise sounds interesting, but I feel like concrete examples would really help me be sure I understand

I didn't follow everything in the post, but it seems like the motivating problem is that UDT fails in an anti-Newcomb problem defined in terms of the UDT agent. But this sounds a lot like a fully general counterargument against decision algorithms; for any algorithm, we can form a decision problem that penalizes exactly that and only that agent. Take any algorithm running on a physical computer and place it in a world where we specify, as an axiom, that any physical instantiation of that algorithm is blasted by a proton beam as soon as it begins to run, be... (read more)

I wondered about this too before I tried it. I thought I had a higher-than-average risk of being very sensitive to my own perspirations/sheddings. But I haven't detected any significant problems on this front after trying it. It goes both ways: Now I know that I'm not very sensitive to my own trouser sweat, it means I can wear trousers longer after they've been washed (i.e. exposed to potentially irritant laundry products), which possibly reduces the risk of skin problems from the laundry products (another problem that I think I have a higher-than-average ... (read more)

Not sure if it's in addition to what you're thinking of or it is what you're thinking of, but Tommy Hilfiger 'never' 'washes his Levis'. I heard this and confirmed with a fashion- and clothing-conscious friend that they (the friend) had tried it. I used to wash jeans and chinos after a few consecutive days of wearing them. For the past five or six weeks I've been trying out the 'no wash' approach. I wore one pair of jeans for about thirty five days (maybe split into two periods of continuous wearing) and washed them probably once or never during that time.... (read more)

Thanks for reminding me to do a meetup report! I've added it at the end of the announcement for this Sunday's meetup. Let me know in the comments there whether you think you can still make it this weekend.

Currently expecting at fewest two others with joint probability >70%, so I'll still do the original day. But I'll bear the next week in mind; we might do two weeks in a row.

You more-or-less said, "gwern is imperfect but net-positive. So deal with it. Not everyone can be perfect.". I think such a response, in reply to someone who feels bullied by a senior members and worries the community is/will close ranks, is not the best course of action, and in fact is better off not being made. Even assuming your comment was not a deontological imperative, but rather a shorthand for a heuristic argument, I am very uncertain as to what heuristic you are suggesting and why you think it's a good heuristic.

Even if you ignored all t... (read more)

I'm not sure exactly which parts you're referring to, so can you quote the parts you find odd or by which you are confused?

Those aren't weird deontological rules and you're just throwing in those words to describe those phrases as boo lights. MOST things people say aren't meant as strict rules, but as contextual and limited responses to the conversation at hand.

There is a very particular mental process of deontological thinking that epistemic rationalists should train themselves to defuse, in which an argument is basically short-circuited by a magic, invalid step. If the mental process that actually takes place in someone's head is, 'This person criticised a net-positive fi... (read more)

Whoever downvoted this comment, please explain your downvote.

turchin's proposed action makes me uneasy, but how would you justify this comment? Generally such comments are discouraged here, and you would've been downvoted into oblivion if you'd made such a response to a proposal that weren't so one-sidedly rejected by Less Wrong. What's the relevant difference that justifies your comment in this case, or do you think such comments are generally okay here, or do you think you over-reacted?

Oops, I didn't actually read 7 and assumed it was public opinion had grown more positive. Given the two choices actually presented, I'd say 7 more likely.

Edit: Relative credences (not necessarily probabilities since I'm conditioning on there being significant effect sizes), generated naively trying not to worry too much about second-guessing how you distributed intuitive and counterintuitive results:

1:07 : 33:67
2:08 : 33:67
3:09 : 67:33
4:10 : 40:60
5:11 : 45:55
6:12 : 85:15

In another project spaced repetition project I used Anki to learn to distinguish color that he didn't distinguish beforehand.

I think I managed to do this when learning flags, with Chad and Romania. It seemed like I got to the point where I could reliably distinguish their flags on my phone, whereas when I started, I did no better than chance. I did consciously explain this to somebody else as something interesting, but now that I think about it, I failed to find it as interesting as I should have, because the idea that seeing a card a few times on Anki can increase my phenomenal granularity or decrease the amount of phenomenal data that my brain throws away, is pretty amazing.

I found typing to be a massive deterrent personally. Lots of my Anki is done in bed or on trains on my phone, and I found Memrise (on a laptop) much less compelling and harder to get myself to do than Anki because of all the typing, multiple choice, and drag-n-drop (and it would switch between those which would break my focus). I don't want to have to type 'London' when I'm asked what the capital of the UK is or click it on a multiple choice. Maybe if it were just typing on a fully-fledged computer, like you describe, it wouldn't be so bad?

I still don't th... (read more)

This post is brilliant.

(Sensations of potential are fascinating to me. I noticed a few weeks ago that after memorizing a list of names and faces, I could predict in the first half second of seeing the face whether or not I'd be able to retrieve the name in the next five seconds. Before I actually retrieved the name. What??? I don't know either.)

Right! When telling people about Anki, I often mention the importance of not self-deluding about whether one knows the answer. But sometimes I also mention how I mark a card as 'Easy' before I've retrieved or su... (read more)

First, how is average utilitarian defined in a non-circular way?

If you can quantify a proto-utility across some set of moral patients (i.e. some thing that is measurable for each thing/person we care about), then you can then call your utility the average of proto-utility over moral patients. For example, you could define your set of moral patients to be the set of humans, and each human's proto-utility to be the amount of money they have, then average by summing the money and dividing by the number of humans.

I don't necessarily endorse that approach, o... (read more)

Woah, well done everyone who donated so far. I made a small contribution. Moreover, to encourage others and increase the chance the pooled donations reach critical mass, I will top up my donation to 1% of whatever's been donated by others, up to at least $100 total from me. I encourage others to pledge similarly if you're also worrying about making a small donation or worrying the campaign won't reach critical mass.

Daniel, did you go ahead with this? Learn anything interesting?

(A): There exists a function f:R->R

and the axioms, for all r in R:

(A_r): f(r)=0

(The graph of f is just the x-axis.)

This might be expressible with a finite axiomatisation (e.g. by building functions and arithmetic in ZFC), and indeed I've given a finite schema, but I'm not sure it's 'fair' to ask for an example of a theory that cannot be compressed beyond uncountably many axioms; that would be a hypertask, right? I think that's what Joshua's getting at in the sibling to this comment.

I don't think there's stuff directly on dissolving (criminal) justice in LessWrong posts, but I think lots of LessWrongers agree or would be receptive to non-retributive/consequentialist justice and applying methods described in the Sequences to those types of policy decisions.

Some of your positions are probably a bit more fringe (though maybe would still be fairly popular) relative to LW, but I agree with a lot of them. E.g. I've also been seriously considering the possibility that pain is only instrumentally bad due to ongoing mental effects, so that you... (read more)

The prospect of being formally in a study pair/group makes me anxious in case I'm a flake and feel like I've betrayed the other participant(s) by being akratic or being unable to keep up and then I will forever after be known as That Flake Who Couldn't Hack Model Theory That Everybody Should Laugh At etc. etc. I should probably work on that anxiety, but in the interim, as a more passive option, I've just created this Facebook group. Has the benefit that anybody who stumbles across it or this comment can join and dip in at their leisure.

I don't really know ... (read more)

I'm not sure if it's because I'm Confused, but I'm struggling to understand if you are disagreeing, or if so, where your disagreement lies and how the parent comment in particular relates to that disagreement/the great-grandparent. I have a hunch that being more concrete and giving specific, minimally-abstract examples would help in this case.

I don't understand the first part of your comment. Different anthropic principles give different answers to e.g. Sleeping Beauty, and the type of dissolution that seems most promising for that problem doesn't feel like what I'd call 'using anthropic evidence'. (The post I just linked to in particular seems like a conceptual precursor to updateless thinking, which seems to me like the obviously correct perfect-logically-omniscient-reasoner solution to anthropics.)

Can you give a concrete example of what you see as an example of where anthropic reasoning wins... (read more)

Ah, that's good to know. Thanks for the suggestion!

It's not enough to say "the act of smoking". What's the causal pathway that leads from the lesion to the act of smoking?

Exactly, that's part of the problem. You have a bunch of frequencies based on various reference classes, without further information, and you have to figure out how the agent should act on that very limited information, which does not include explicit, detailed causal models. Not all possible worlds are evenly purely causal, so your point about causal pathways is at best an incomplete solution. That's the hard edge of the pro... (read more)

I don't think you're taking the thought experiment seriously enough and are prematurely considering it (dis)solved by giving a Clever solution. E.g.

If it's not the urge, what is it?

Obvious alternative that occurred to me in <5 seconds: It's not the urge, it's the actual act of smoking or knowing one has smoked. Even if these turn out not to not quite work, you don't show any sign of having even thought of them, which I would not expect if you were seriously engaging with the problem looking for a reduction that does not leave us feeling confused.

Edi... (read more)

If I took the time to write a comment laying out a decision theoretic problem and received a response like this (and saw it so upvoted), I would be pretty annoyed and suspect that maybe (though not definitely) the respondent was fighting the hypothetical, and that their flippant remark might change the tone of the conversation enough to discourage others engaging with my query.

I've been frustrated enough times by people nitpicking or derailing (even if only with not-supposed-to-be-derailing throwaway jokes) my attempts to introduce a hypothetical that by t... (read more)

Yep, I find the world a much less confusing place since I learned capitals and location on map. I had (and to some extent still do have) a mental block on geography which was ameliorated by it.

Rundown of positive and negative results:

In a similar but lesser way, I found learning English counties (and to an even lesser extent, Scottish counties) made UK geography a bit less intimidating. I used this deck because it's the only one on the Anki website I found that worked on my old-ass phone; it has a few howlers and throws some cities in there to fuck with yo... (read more)

So my mind state is more likely in a five-sibling world than a six-sibling one, but using it as anthropic evidence would just be double-counting whatever evidence left me with that mind state in the first place.

Yep; in which case the anthropic evidence isn't doing any useful explanatory work, and the thesis 'Anthropics doesn't explain X' holds.

Yes! There's a lot of ways to remove the original observer from the question.

The example I thought of (but ended up not including): If all one's credence were on simula(ta)ble (possibly to arbitrary precision/accuracy even if perfect simulation were not quite possible) models and one could specify a prior over initial conditions at the start of the Cold War, then one could simulate each set of initial conditions forward then run an analysis over the sets of initial conditions to see if any actionable causal factors showed up leading to the presence or abse... (read more)

Is this in support of or in opposition to the thesis of the post? Or am I being presumptuous to suppose that it is either?

Haha. I did seriously consider it when that example was less central to the text, but ended up just going for playing it straight when it was interleaved, since I didn't want to encourage second-guessing/paranoia.

Thanks. I've edited the post pointing to lukeprog's more recent post about the matching drive, since I'd consider this one fully obsolete now the Stellar offer is so low.

Good chance you've seen both of these before, but:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness and http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html

I am also now bereft of a term for what I thought "learned helplessness" was. Analogous ideas come up in game theory, but there's no snappy self-contained way available to me for expressing it.

Damn, if only someone had created a thread for that, ho ho ho

Strategic incompetence?

I'm not sure if maybe Schelling uses a specific name (self-sabotage?) for that kind of thing?

There will probably be holes and not quite capture exactly what I mean, but I'll take a shot. Let me know if this is not rigorous or detailed enough and I'll take another stab, or if you have any other follow-up. I have answered this immediately, without changing tab, so the only contamination is saccading my LW inbox beforing clicking through to your comment, the titles of other tabs, etc. which look (as one would expect) to be irrelevant.

Helplessness about topic X - One is not able to attain a knowably stable and confident opinion about X given the amoun... (read more)

You seem to making an assertion about me in your last paragraph, but doing so very obliquely.

Apologies for that. I don't think that that specific failure mode is particularly likely in your case, but it seems plausible to me that other people thinking in that way has shifted the terms of discourse such that that form of linguistic relativism is seen as high-status by a lot of smart people. I am more mentioning it to highlight the potential failure mode; if part of why you hold your position is that it seems like the kind of position that smart people wo... (read more)

This is really dismissive and, if I'm honest, I'm disappointed it's been upvoted so much. It's very convenient to say something like this and score points by signalling self-sacrificing stoicism and tough skin, and a lot less convenient to take the time to actually try looking for solutions or even just hold off from making dismissive comments.

I believe I remember when I hopped on #lesswrong (on which I've spent maybe between fifteen and ninety minutes' active time, so it's telling that this happened), and within a few minutes you'd complained to me (when ... (read more)

Actually, I could imagine you reading that comment and feeling it still misses your point that 0.999... is undefined or has different definitions or senses in amateur discussions. In that case, I would point to the idea that one can makes propositions about a primitive concept that turn out to be false about the mature form of it. One could make claims about evidence, causality, free will, knowledge, numbers, gravity, light, etc. that would be true under one primitive sense and false under another. Then minutes or days or month or years or centuries or mil... (read more)

It's "Here's a sequence of symbols. Should we assign this sequence of symbols the value of 1, or not?" Which is just a silly argument to have.

It's not. The "0.999... doesn't equal 1" meme is largely crackpottery, and promotes amateur overconfidence and (arguably) mathematical illiteracy.

Terms are precious real estate, and their interpretations really are valuable. Our thought processes and belief networks are sticky; if someone has a crap interpretation of a term, then it will at best cause unnecessary friction in using it (e.g. if y... (read more)

A recurring problem with these forms of civilizational inadequacy is bystander effect/first-mover disadvantage/prisoners' dilemma/etc, and the obvious solutions (there might be others) are coordination or enforcement. Seeing if there's other solutions and seeing how far people have already run with coordination and enforcement seems promising. Even if one is pessimistic about how easily the problems can be addressed and thinks we're probably screwed anyway but slightly less probably screwed if we try, then the value of information is still very high; this ... (read more)

Generalising from 'plane on a treadmill'; a lot of incorrect answers to physics problems and misconceptions of physics in general. For any given problem or phenomenon, one can guess a hundred different fake explanations, numbers, or outcomes using different combinations of passwords like 'because of Newton's Nth law', 'because of drag', 'because of air resistance', 'but this is unphysical so it must be false' etc. For the vast majority of people, the only way to narrow down which explanations could be correct is to already know the answer or perform physic... (read more)

Where does one draw the line, if at all? "1+1 does no inherently equal 2; rather, by convention, it is understood to mean 2. The debate is not about the territory, it is about what the symbols on the map mean." It seems to me like that--very 'mysteriously'--people who understand real analysis never complain "But 0.999... doesn't equal 1"; sufficient mathematical literacy seems to kill any such impulse, which seems very telling to me.

Good point!