All of Miller's Comments + Replies

Prediction is intelligence. Why is there not more discussion about stock picks here? Is it low status? Does everyone believe in strong forms of efficient market ?

(edited -- curious where it goes without leading the witness)

0Lumifer
Prediction is not intelligence. Good predictions are one of the signs of intelligence. Apply intelligence :-) If you want to extract money out of financial markets, is picking stocks the right place to be?
0ChristianKl
Even if you don't believe in the efficient market, picking publically traded stocks yourself means that you believe you can win in zero-sum games against professional investors who are supported by huge computer models and research analysts. If you have inside information about a company that's not known to the professional investors you might make good trades but you are also violating the law and it would be stupid to publically talk about your trades and their justification on a forum like this. Another way to make money is to bet on effects that are illiquid enough that professional investors aren't interested. If you have found a trade from which $10,000 can be extracted you are also not benefiting from being public about your predictions. A friend for example used to do arbitrage between different bitcoin markets. While that happened to be profitable, it was stupid to talk about it in a public venue like this.
3Dagon
1) Prediction is not intelligence. Intelligence is goal-driven action, which makes use of conditional prediction (if I do X, Y is more likely). 2) stocks are a game where the vast majority of us are at an information disadvantage. It only takes a very weak efficient market to make it unbeatable by the layperson. 3) stock picks are useless for reason #2. 4) calling something low-status is low-status around here. You're better off decomposing the reasons something might affect peer perceptions of the poster.
1MrMind
My interpretation of the general sentiment is that market prediction, for it to be remarkably fruitful, has long escaped the possibility for a single individual who is not already blessed by a crapload of money.

Reviews online that are trustworthy. I've been travelling a lot and hotel reviews require some intelligence to determine trust. e.g. someone who says 'the lady at the front desk was rude to me, and they had bed bugs'.. well that basically means they felt insulted by the person at the front desk and the bed bug thing is probably just the worst thing they can imagine saying.

I want a better way to eliminate any of the hindrances to having productive relationships with people I would respect if I could find them.

I'm glad that this article makes efforts to assure us that lawyers continue to have job safety. It would be horrible to lose those high paying jobs to a superior and near-free alternative.

I wouldn't have been able to guess the date this speech was given. The major outline seems 10 years old.

1Ben Pace
Is that a problem? Reiterating the basics is always a useful thing, and he didn't have much more time after doing so.

Theft? Inferior Service?

I'm having a hard time guessing what this could be that you couldn't just look for someone with better references (or spend a bit more).

1Paul Crowley
Our cleaner just does the kitchen and bathroom, so we don't really have to tell them anything!

Other people have Wrong intuitions about Where Things Go.

5James_Miller
They would ask questions and move things and we had to be home when they where here.

My wireless mouse is driving me fucking nuts with it's stuttering randomly across the screen.

0Dr_Manhattan
You might need a mousepad, your table surface might not be ideal.

I'm surprised posts like this are not more commonly discussed around here.

Arguing against god(s) circa 9 years of age or so.

You could probably mad words any two buzz words together though. How about quantum rationality?

I wonder if he let his teammates know this at the time. They are unlikely to approve and then what would he do. I'd wager this was more about creating drama around him and his team than studying the opponent. I've done this kind of thing in online multiplayer contexts, and the feedback you receive from this is substantially more weighted to your own team than the opponents.

That's on my list of things I didn't expect to see today.

a set of tools for morphological disambiguation, shallow parsing, named entity recognition, sentence alignment and such

Is that made easier by the fact that in Hungarian they prefix each word with it's type? .

I'm going with this commenter being Will. What do I win?

-1CommanderShepard
I've had enough of your snide insinuations. Gains Renegade Points

recaptures a (badly obfuscated and possibly overfit) variant of it.

How do you overfit Kepler's law?

edit: Retracted. I see now looking at the actual link the result wasn't just obfuscated but wrong, and so the manner in which it's wrong can overfit of course (and that matches the results).

3othercriteria
To the extent that Kepler's laws are exact only for two-body systems of point masses (so I guess calling Kepler's third law the ground truth is a bit problematic) and to the extent that the data are imperfectly observed, there are residuals that over-eager models can try to match. Edit: More generally, you don't overfit the underlying law, you overfit noisy data generated by the underlying law.

Using a high-powered black-box technique to regress a one-dimensional continuous outcome against a one-dimensional continuous predictor seems misguided.

I don't get this. You could have a rather complicated generator for this data set. A simple regression would imply the data points were independent, but the value at time T may have [likely has] a relation to value at T-3. So it seems a good problem to me.

I had an 80$ logitech keyboard (the illuminating short-stroke like a notebook variety), and when it began to deteriorate I swapped it with a 10$ Walmart special that was a slightly curved Microsoft one. I had been playing around on this typing speed site and was surprised to find that on the 5th attempt I had beaten my previous record with this new keyboard.

If I had a variety of keyboards at my disposable I think it would be an interesting exercise to test them in this fashion.

I frequently find Will's contributions obscurantist.

The same word came to mind, and it's common to his history of interactions, so seeing it here means I ascribe it to him rather than the logic of whatever underlying purpose he may have on this occasion.

If your goal is to lower your credibility, why do that in the context of talking about credibility?

I believe I have a few results of this nature in my 23andme profile but, like most results there, they indicate e.g. that I might gain an extra .5 pounds compared to average on a high fat diet.

I got a kick when I logged in there and it said something to the effect of 'see how your genes affect your weight' and after entering height, age, and weight it told me that my genes were responsible for 2lb (whatever that meant).

It does also note lactose tolerance, alcohol and caffeine enzymes, coeliac disease risk, etc.

4Jayson_Virissimo
Yeah, I have the GG genotype of rs1801282 (also known as the Pro12Ala variant in the PPARG gene) too, so 23andme tells me that "a diet high in monounsaturated fat is not likely to have beneficial effects on BMI or waist circumference." On the other hand, shortly after adopting a high-fat diet my weight dropped dramatically.

you periodically take neuroimaging scans of your brain and save them to multiple backup locations (1010 bits is only about 1 gigabyte)

I think I understand but I'm lost as to why that 10^10 is showing up here. Wouldn't it be whatever the scan happens to be rather than a reference to the compressed size of a human's unique experiences? We might plausibly have a 10^18 scan that is detailed in the wrong ways (like it carries 1024 bits per voxel of color channel info :p).

eta: In case it's not clear, I can't actually help you answer the question of just how useful a scan is.

2Wei Dai
Yes, that makes sense. Thanks.

Ok so I'm presuming that an extremely fine grained scan stored with some naive compression is massively more than 10^14 synapse-bits. In order to store all that now in the information theoretic minimum, don't we need some kind of incredibly awesome compression algorithm NOW that we simply don't have?

6Wei Dai
No, I think the idea is to do coarse-grained scans, which the superintelligence will have to heavily process in order to infer the original brain structure. (Yeah, it's not clear this is possible even with a whole universe worth of computing power and whatever algorithmic breakthroughs a superintelligence might come up with.)

Whether the AI loves -- or hates, you cannot fathom, but plans it has indeed for your atoms.

this one:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gv/statistical_prediction_rules_outperform_expert/

When based on the same evidence, the predictions of SPRs are at least as reliable as, and are typically more reliable than, the predictions of human experts for problems of social prediction.

Hmm yes, 'same evidence'.

I'm reminded of one of your early naively breathless articles here on the value of mid-80s and prior expert systems.

Why don't you write a post on how it is naive? Do you actually know something about practical application of these methods?

Yes, if experts say that they use quantifiable data X, Y, and Z to predict outcomes, that simple algorithms beat them on only that data might not be important if the experts really use other data. But there is lots of evidence saying that experts are terrible at non-quantifiable data, such as thinking interviews are useful in hiring. Tetlock finds that ecologically valid use of these trivial models beats experts in politics.

5Miller
this one: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gv/statistical_prediction_rules_outperform_expert/ Hmm yes, 'same evidence'.

All of your pretensions aside that's a pretty slick link.

I read it. Luke's article here was more or less a transcription of the more interesting parts. The author essentially agreed. So you need 30 minutes. Set your pomodoro.

3[anonymous]
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/

Because "signing" comments is not customary here, doing so signals a certain aloofness or distance from the community

No. I am very confident the intention was to signal that Luke was not being emotionally affected by the intense criticism for the purpose of appearing to be leader type material, which is substantially not aloofness from the community.

It's not a convincing signal primarily because it's idiosyncracy highlights it for analysis, but I still think the above holds.

8komponisto
Or, in another words, signaling high status -- just like I said. It may not be aloofness, but it certainly is distance (I used two words for a reason); a leader is, necessarily, separated in some way from those who are led.

Can we be forgiving and assume that multiple anecdotes fail because they have a consistent bias related to how they are obtained?

2shokwave
Sure, and I regularly do ("Well, if situation X seems like it would produce anecdote Y, then all anecdote Y shows us is that situation X happened, not that contention Z is necessarily true - only if situation X shows us that contention Z is true"). I would surmise that not all commentors are willing to be that forgiving.

So you give me a firm denial, and then you edit out the first sentence which made it clear you were referencing contemporary politics, and clean up other sloppiness. I'll just move on.

I take it you just felt like ranting.

-2PhilGoetz
No. What did you base that inference on?

Sadness apparently leaked on the floor.

Oh yeah it's full of them. They are the kinds of things you say 'sure that makes sense', 'oh I've seen that used before', and 'man that's douche-y'. But I suspect they are all generally true and effective.

The book is: "Roger Dawson's Secrets of Power Negotiating".

I had a friend recently tell me that their company bought a license for a platform operating system for 75k$, whereas the initial asking price was 750k$. So somewhere in between those prices is a lot of value to be made by negotiating. It makes the engineer salaries a relative trifle.

0Benquo
Thanks! I just placed a hold on it at the library.

Strikes me as a behaviorist -> cognitivist paradigm shift. Scientists just got tired of the old way (or more specifically, it simply stopped being new). That'd be my armchair guess.

edit :Someone better qualified should answer that. I'm not even sure that's behaviorism.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

I am going to take the unflattering guess that your expectations for yourself are generally unrealistic, and that you are unwilling to face this fact. This is not a conscious thing but an emotional and subconscious expectation trained into you during childhood (possibly). Quite simply, hard work and small incremental gains are beneath you. Failures on inconsequential steps are unacceptable. If only a simple solution were found, the key would turn, and an uber-awesome-individual emerge.

Many of the subjects addressed on this very website are grandiose in nat... (read more)

4[anonymous]
I was in this "narcissist mini-cycle" for many years. Many google searches and no luck. I can't believe that I finally found someone who recognizes it. Thank you so much. fwiw, what got me out of it was to attend a Zen temple for 3 months or so. This didn't make me less narcissistic, but somehow gave me the stamina to actually achieve something that befit my inflated expectations, and now I just refer back to those achievements to quell my need for greatness. At least while I work on lowering my expectations.
5[anonymous]
Appreciated. I follow Crocker's Rules, so don't hesitate to call out my bullshit. That rings very true. Intellectually, I've learned over the last few years how wrong this attitude is and how crucial hard work is. Also, there were things I did work hard on, say programming or writing, but this ability has essentially disappeared by now and I'm unsure why, though it very well might be because I'm getting less attention nowadays. I'll look into that. Same goes for the link. The description is quite fitting. This in particular gets an "Ouch! Yeah, I might be doing that, I guess... ". However, I notice my pattern of "Oh, that's a cool idea, that must be it!", but it doesn't entail any actual improvement. Thing is, I'm totally willing to accept that I'm fairly narcissistic and a "special snowflake", but I realize that this is causing me suffering and is not a good self-image to have. Consciously, I see the value of small improvements and how disastrous and crappy my past approach is, so I'm interested in changing that. Whatever is causing the problem, I wanna get rid of it, not "merely" understand it. I suspected (because of MoL) that I was only changing my personality on a very superficial level, but the unconscious need for specialness and attention was unaffected and just undid my changes every time. But trying to mentally access these unconscious needs or modifying them hasn't worked out at all so far. I have already given up hope of a silver bullet that will fix everything at once, but maybe I wasn't nearly as thorough about giving up this fantasy as I should've been. I'll try working on that. Because I'm not very social. I don't find other people particularly interesting or helpful to be around, so I'm not. (This doesn't include appreciating all their useful outputs, but only the people themselves.) I can enjoy spending time with friends (introvert style), but actually talking to people is very boring most of the time. (And I'm no exception here. I'm nowher

Was thumbing through a negotiating book and it made the rather stunning and clearly true observation that the few minutes\hours it takes to talk someone down a few extra bucks is probably substantially higher than any wage rate you'll ever make. Many orders of magnitude on occasion. This is particularly true if you are leveraging the buying\selling power of a corporation, rather than just buying a trinket in Jamaica.

0Benquo
Were there other observations of similar value in this book? If so, what book was it?

Yeah Hastings was fond of saying 'That's why we called it NETflix not DVDs-by-mail'.. although I think even in the late 90s there were some weak attempts at video on demand over the web so the vision wasn't nearly as advanced as I think it would be in Zipcar's case. One of the major problems in the analogy is that the capital investment to replace cars is so ridiculously enormous it's difficult to imagine one company capturing a large chunk of it.

The precise details of how driverless cars come to be used will be fascinating. Urban or rural first? taxi rep... (read more)

Interesting. How does the program determine hard questions (and their answers) without qualifying as generating them itself? That is, the part about enumerating other programs seems superfluous.

[Edit added seconds later] Ok, I see perhaps it could ask something like 'predict what's gonna happen 10 seconds from now', and then wait to see if the prediction is correct after the universe runs for that long. In that case, the parent program isn't computing the answer itself.

1cousin_it
You don't need to be able to generate the answer to your hard problem yourself, only to check that the superintelligence's offered answer is correct. These two abilities are equivalent if computing resources are unlimited, but you could run the superintelligence for a limited time... This line of thought seems to lead into the jungle of complexity theory and you should probably take my comments with a grain of salt :-)

Well at least they aren't practicing screaming until exhaustion yet..

I think driverless cars should be one of the most fantastic changes in the next 20 years. The benefits are just too many. My crazy prediction is that Zipcar will end up being a leader in deployment, making a transition akin to Netflix's DVD to online one, the principle advantage being the possession of the right kind of customer relationship.

3j_andrew_rogers
Your mention of Zipcar in the context of Netflix is an astute point. Zipcar has a very nice and well-developed infrastructure that would be nearly ideal for the transition. The question is whether or not Zipcar is thinking that far ahead, and I do not know the answer. Many people do not know that even though Netflix has only been streaming video for a few years, they were very actively building their business around that transition over a decade ago, pretty much from their inception. They built out all of the elements required to take advantage of that transition long before it was technologically viable. Even though their DVD by mail business was highly successful, it was in many ways seen merely as a strategic waypoint. I think Zipcar might be well-advised to take a similar view of their business model, being prepared to strategically cannibalize it when the market is ready for driverless cars.

I'd wager most people wonder wtf .org is all about and why it's not a .com like all the others. But then again those people are not the ones that are gonna wind up at the site. So I find it most likely you two are just imagining two different sets of 'most people'.

] What is 1-2pm?

It is the middle of the afternoon. You are likely to be eaten by a Graehl.

Hmm Sex Pistols vis a vis Anarchy in the UK: "I am an instrumental rationalist! I don't know what I want, but I know how to get it!'

8magfrump
"I am an instrumentalist rationalist. I know I'm a terrible singer, so I get better results with just the guitar."

Sure, then all we need is good regulators to ensure everyone hobbles their extremely useful AI in this manner.

Unfortunately this topic is impossible to get traction on. We are probably better off debating which political party sucks more (Hint: it starts with a consonant).

Sounds like a decent methodology to me.

This sounds to me like a word game. It depends on what the initial intention for 'pleasure' is. If you say the device gives 'maximal pleasure' meaning to point to a cloud of good-stuffs and then you later use a more precise meaning for pleasure that is an incomplete model of the good-stuffs, you are then talking of different things.

The meaningful thought experiment for me is whether I would use a box that maximized pleasure\wanting\desire\happiness\whatever-is-going-on-at-the-best-moments-of-life while completely separating me as an actor or participant fr... (read more)

0wedrifid
Thanks, excellent link! I will (not) tell you about the experiences I (don't) have when making use of the resource.

The megalomania of the genes does not mean that benevolence and cooperation cannot evolve, any more than the law of gravity proves that flight cannot evolve. It means only that benevolence, like flight, is a special state of affairs in need of an explanation, not something that just happens.

  • Pinker, The Blank Slate
1Antisuji
The great thing about this quote for me is that when I read it I can hear Pinker's voice saying it in my mind.
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