All of minusdash's Comments + Replies

I'm not talking about back and forth between true and false, but between two explanations. You can have a multimodal probability distribution and two distant modes are about equally probable, and when you update, sometimes one is larger and sometimes the other. Of course one doesn't need to choose a point estimate (maximum a posteriori), the distribution itself should ideally be believed in its entirety. But just as you can't see the rabbit-duck as simultaneously 50% rabbit and 50% duck, one sometimes switches between different explanations, similarly to a... (read more)

I don't really understand what you mean about math academia. Those references would be appreciated.

Those are indeed impressive things you did. I agree very much with your post from 2010. But the fact that many people have this initial impression shows that something is wrong. What makes it look like a "twilight zone"? Why don't I feel the same symptoms for example on Scott Alexander's Slate Star Codex blog?

Another thing I could pinpoint is that I don't want to identify as a "rationalist", I don't want to be any -ist. It seems like a tactic to make people identify with a group and swallow "the whole package". (I also don't think people should identify as atheist either.)

I prefer public discussions. First, I'm a computer science student who took courses in machine learning, AI, wrote theses in these areas (nothing exceptional), I enjoy books like Thinking Fast and Slow, Black Swan, Pinker, Dawkins, Dennett, Ramachandran etc. So the topics discussed here are also interesting to me. But the atmosphere seems quite closed and turning inwards.

I feel similarities to reddit's Red Pill community. Previously "ignorant" people feel the community has opened a new world to them, they lived in darkness before, but now they fo... (read more)

PCA doesn't tell much about causality though. It just gives you a "natural" coordinate system where the variables are not linearly correlated.

What do you mean by getting surprised by PCAs? Say you have some data, you compute the principal components (eigenvectors of the covariance matrix) and the corresponding eigenvalues. Were you surprised that a few principal components were enough to explain a large percentage of the variance of the data? Or were you surprised about what those vectors were?

I think this is not really PCA or even dimensionality reduction specific. It's simply the idea of latent variables. You could gain the same intuition from studying probabilistic graphical models, for example generative models.

You asked about emotional stuff so here is my perspective. I have extremely weird feelings about this whole forum that may affect my writing style. My view is constantly popping back and forth between different views, like in the rabbit-duck gestalt image. On one hand I often see interesting and very good arguments, but on the other hand I see tons of red flags popping up. I feel that I need to maintain extreme mental efforts to stay "sane" here. Maybe I should refrain from commenting. It's a pity because I'm generally very interested in the topi... (read more)

Qualitative day-to-day dimensionality reduction sounds like woo to me. Not a bit more convincing than quantum woo (Deepak Chopra et al.). Whatever you're doing, it's surely not like doing SVD on a data matrix or eigen-decomposition on the covariance matrix of your observations.

Of course, you can often identify motivations behind people's actions. A lot of psychology is basically trying to uncover these motivations. Basically an intentional interpretation and a theory of mind are examples of dimensionality reduction in some sense. Instead of explaining beha... (read more)

"impression that more advanced statistics is technical elaboration that doesn't offer major additional insights"

Why did you have this impression?

Sorry for the off-topic, but I see this a lot in LessWrong (as a casual reader). People seem to focus on textual, deep-sounding, wow-inducing expositions, but often dislike the technicalities, getting hands dirty with actually understanding calculations, equations, formulas, details of algorithms etc (calculations that don't tickle those wow-receptors that we all have). As if these were merely some minor... (read more)

It can still be evidence-based, just on a larger budget. I mean, you can get higher quality examinations, like MRI and CT even if the public insurance couldn't afford it. Just because they wouldn't do it by default and only do it for your money doesn't mean it's not evidence based. Evidence-based medicine doesn't say that this person needs/doesn't need this treatment/examination, it gives a risk/benefit/cost analysis. The final decision also depends on the budget.

This may be a case of ignoring people who are bad in both intellectual and physical things. Those people are just not salient, the same way as people think smart people are ugly and beautiful people are dumb. It may simply be that the ugly and dumb people go unnoticed. This is Berkson's paradox: Even if A and B are independent, they are dependent conditioned on (A or B).

I'd say an expert in any field has better intuitions (hidden, unverbalized knowledge) than what they can express in words or numbers. Therefore, I'd assume that the decision that it's not worth doing the examination should take priority over the numerical estimate that he made up after you asked.

It may be better to ask the odds in such cases, like 1 to 10,000 or 1 to a million. Anyway, it's really hard to express our intuitive, expert-knowledge in such numbers. They all just look like "big numbers".

Another problem is that nobody is willing to put... (read more)

Saying 99.9999% seems a mouthful. Would you have preferred an answer like this instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sWpSvQ_hwo :)

Yes I'm familiar with his most famous paper and what he says about medical research findings. Has he ever endorsed MetaMed in particular? If peer reviewed research finding are often false, how can MetaMed tell the difference without trying to replicate them? Different research papers use different assumptions, differently calibrated measurements, different subjects, it seems very hard to aggregate this in practice, although I'm not a medical researcher. Why should I believe that a company started by futurists and entrepreneurs would be up to this task? Where is the evidence for the actual efficacy of their particular methodology, as evaluated by independent third-parties?

Upon more reflection, I'm not able to defend my point and my thoughts are confused and therefore I'm gravitating towards the established and mainstream viewpoint that only licensed and authorized doctos should do doctor stuff. On uncertain territory it's better to stick to well-known landmarks. Since I'm not confident in my capability of a deep enough analysis of the pros and cons, I feel that the way to convince me would be to first convince people who are experts of the medical field and of the regulations, towards whom I already have an established chain of trust.

Life, sin, disease, redness, maleness and indeed dogness "may" also be like electromagnetism. The English language may also be a fundamental part of the universe and maybe you could tell if "irregardless" or "wanna" are real English words by looking into a microscope or turning your telescope to certain parts of the sky, or maybe by looking at chicken intestines, who knows. I know some people think like this. Stuart Hameroff says that morality may be encoded into the universe at the Planck scale. So maybe that's where you shou... (read more)

I don't like the expression "carve reality at the joints", I think it's very vague and hard to verify if a concept carves it there or not. The best way I can imagine this is that you have lots of events or 'things' in some description space and you can notice some clusterings, and you pick those clusters as concepts. But a lot depends on which subspace you choose and on what scale you're working... 'Good' may form a cluster or may not, I just don't even know how you could give evidence either way. It's unclear how you could formalize this in prac... (read more)

Well, you need to decide if it's worth discussing further. Anonymous internet comment sections are often very low quality (tribalism, astroturfing, trolling etc.). If you think they are just trolling you, then ignore them. If you think they want to have a discussion, then you should defend your point or concede that you just stated a layman's opinion.

Comments don't have the space to put your own academic paper there defending what you claim.

They are right, I think. People don't have endless time to discuss things with everyone. You put a statement on the table. Now I look at it and superficially see that it's some sort of economics statement. Now should I waste my time examining your standpoint further? Can I expect to get well founded opinions from you? Will I profit from this exchange? If I can verify that you indeed have spent a long time thinking about economics and other people have considered your economy related thinking processes good enough to give you a diploma, then I can expect to... (read more)

Yes, exactly. Hallucinations and altered consciousness periods don't simply mean that your sane and usual rational mind is still there and it simply receives strange visual inputs as if you were enjoying a movie. Sometimes your very own thought processes are disturbed, it's not like a little rational homunculus can always remain skeptical. So if you then try to think about journals and science, it won't feel like a better alternative hypothesis. You will be genuinely confused and maybe imagine reading something in a journal that you didn't, or imagine that... (read more)

Good is a complex concept, not an irreducible basic constituent of the universe. It's deeply rooted in our human stuff like metabolism (food is good), reproduction (sex is good), social environment (having allies is good) etc. We can generalize from this and say that the general pattern of "good" things is that they tend to reinforce themselves. If you feel good, you'll strive to achive the same later. If you feel bad, you'll strive to avoid feeling that in the future. So if an experience makes more of it then it's good, otherwise it's bad.

Note t... (read more)

I don't know how limited plasticity is. Speculation: maybe if we put on some color filter glasses that changes red with green or somehow mixes up the colors, then maybe even after a long time we'd still have the experience of the original red, even when looking at outside green material. Okay, let's say it's not plastic enough, we'd still feel an internal red qualia. But in what sense?

What if the brain would truly rewire to recognize plants and moldy fruit etc. in the presence of "red" perception and the original "green" pattern would f... (read more)

"what are the characteristic mathematics of (i.e., found disproportionally in) self-identified pleasurable brain states?"

Certain areas of the brain get more active and certain hormones get into the bloodstream. How does this help you out?

This all seems to be about the "qualia" problem. Take another example. How would you know if an alien was having the experience of seeing the color red? Well, you could show it red and see what changes. You could infer it from its behavior (for example if you trained it that red means food - if indeed the alien eats food).

Similarly you could tell that it's suffering when it does something to avoid an ongoing situation, and if later on it would very much prefer not to go under the same conditions ever again.

I don't think there is anything special... (read more)

There's also a linguistic issue here. The English "and" doesn't simply mean mathematical set theoretical conjunction in everyday speech. Indeed, without using words like "given" or "suppose" or a long phrase such as "if we already know that", we can't easily linguistically differentiate between P(Y | X) and P(Y, X).

"How likely is it that X happens and then Y happens?", "How likely is it that Y happens after X happened?", "How likely is it that event Y would follow event X?". All these are ambiguous in everyday speech. We aren't sure whether X has hypothetically already been observed or it's a free variable, too.

Or maybe it's just outrageous to ask for $40 when it's clearly possible to sell it for $20. So you kind of punish the shop that asks for $40 because you see them as dishonest and morally repulsive. Sometimes you also have to pay attention to what behavior you encourage with your actions. Not only the immediate dollar value.

Why don't Christmas tree sellers sell the last, leftover Christmas trees for much cheaper, right before Christmas? Because then lots of people would just wait until that time and then buy it cheap. If buyers know that the seller will rat... (read more)

Propositional knowledge and introspection may be analogous to running a virtual machine in user-space, in which you can instantiate the redness object. But that's not a redness object in the real (non-virtual) program. The "real" running program only has user-space objects that are required for the execution of the virtual machine (virtual registers, command objects, etc).

Desiring a mysterious explantion is like wanting to be in a room with no people inside. Once you explain it it's not mysterious any more. The property depends on your actions: emptyness is destroyed by you entering, mysticism is destroyed by you explaining it. Just an alternative to the map-territory way of putting it

Control theory is an actual, real engineering subject. Not only this self-help, psychology, wow, mind-blown, feel-good BS.

I guess you can't want to want stuff. When you genuinely want something (not prestige but an actual goal) you'll easily be in the "flow experience" and lose track of time and actually progress toward the goal without having to force yourself. Actually you have to force yourself to stop in order to sleep and eat because you'd just do this thing all day if you could! Find the thing where you slip into flow easily and do the most efficient thing that's at the same time quite similar to this activity.

Somewhat related: I think we do have a 3D map of the environment even for things that we aren't looking at at the moment. For example I feel as if I had a device in my brain that keeps track of which people are in which parts of the house right now (or where some emotionally-loaded objects are). I don't have to exert conscious effort specifically for this.

Another thing: it's interesting to think about why we can see dots and lines and shapes at all. By this I mean, why do these low-level things reach our conscious awareness? You aren't consciously aware of... (read more)

I remember not really "getting" these illusions when I was a kid. I just didn't find them interesting, it looked too straightforward.

The idea of a "2D screen inside our head" is not our natural intuition. Before learning about these things, I just felt that I simply percieve the environment around me. I don't see a flat pixel grid in front of me when I walk around, I rather have a model of the environment that I continuously update and I percieve the objects "from where they are", just like I feel leg pain as if it were "... (read more)

That's a triad too: naive instinctive signaling / signaling-aware people disliking signaling / signaling is actually a useful and necessary thing.