Why might not whole communities and public bodies be seized with fits of insanity, as well as individuals? Nothing but this principle, that they are liable to insanity, equally at least with private persons, can account for the major part of those transactions of which we read in history.
Bishop Joseph Butler
Because the mechanisms for encoding goals, planning, and updating on new information are completely different. They may malfuction in both cases, but you'll be better off looking at how it's supposed to work and how it fails than making a surface anaology with humans. Otherwise either you've just said "Both of these things break sometimes" or you're going to run off and predict economic fluctuations by analogy to mood swings or something.
Friedman continues, but I shortened the quote to make it punchier. Essentially he says that, (1) given a large number of individuals irrationality will average out in the aggregate, (2) In most cases that an economist would be interested in (eg. investors, CEOs) the individuals have been selected to be good at the task they are performing, i.e. not irrational in that domain.
In some contexts it makes sense to talk about errors in opposite directions canceling out but in others it does not as errors only accumulate. Suppose one person overestimates how much they'll enjoy having an iPad and buys one when they'd be better off without one, and another person underestimates how much they'll enjoy having an iPad and doesn't buy one when they'd be better off with one. Looking at the total number of iPads sold, these errors cancel out. But looking at total human welfare, the errors just add up - two people are each less happy than ...
Friedman continues, but I shortened the quote to make it punchier. Essentially he says that, (1) given a large number of individuals irrationality will average out in the aggregate,
This is the part that sounds (and is) wrong. It would perhaps be correct if it was "given a large number of individuals selected from mind space via a carefully crafted distribution of deviations about some mind the irrationality will average out in the aggregate". The irrationality of a large number of human individuals will not average out.
A writer on structuralism in the Times Literary Supplement has suggested that thoughts which are confused and tortuous by reason of their profundity are most appropriately expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear. What a preposterously silly idea! I am reminded of an air-raid warden in wartime Oxford who, when bright moonlight seemed to be defeating the spirit of the blackout, exhorted us to wear dark glasses. He, however, was being funny on purpose.
Peter Medawar
Daniel Oppenheimer's Ig Nobel Prize acceptance speech:
My research shows that conciseness is interpreted as intelligence. So, thank you.
I think Mencken was using it in the sense of, "A peasant; a rustic; a farm servant.", (see also). It's an unusual usage.
...Suppose we know someone's objective and also know that half the time that person correctly figures out how to achieve it and half the time he acts at random. Since there is generally only one right way of doing things (or perhaps a few) but very many wrong ways, the "rational" behavior can be predicted but the "irrational" behavior cannot. If we predict the person's behavior on the assumption that he is rational, we will be right half the time. If we assume he is irrational, we will almost never be right, since we still have to guess w
Even when errors are only random noise, modeling people as rational is different from modeling people as rational on average with random errors. If people are rational, that implies that someone with a dangerous job has properly taken the risks into account when choosing the job. But if people are rational on average with random errors, then the person who ends up with a dangerous job is probably someone who underestimated/underweighted the risks (which is a case of the winner's curse).
Upvoted because it provoked interesting thoughts, even though I disagree with it.
I can actually say in advance which irrational things I am likely to do on a given day. (For example, be up at 1 AM posting on Less Wrong instead of sleeping). If I know enough about a person to know their goals and approximate level of education as relates to those goals, I usually also know enough to have a sense of what types of irrational things they tend to do.
This sounds wrong. Biases have predictable direction, that's why they're called biases and not variance (ahem).
...The inferior man's reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex - because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meagre capacity to take in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. So on what seem to be higher levels. No man who has not had a long and arduous education can understand even the most elementary concepts of modern pathology. But even a hind at the plough can grasp the theory of chiropractic in t
Alternate hypothesis: the inferior man hates knowledge because "Yay knowledge!" is associated with people like Mencken, who go around calling people things like "inferior man" because they're poor and uneducated.
The day we allow biochauvinism to overtake Less Wrong is the day I leave for good.
Thank you, I stand corrected.
As far as I know, there are none. I mention it because I find I tend to be fresher and more motivated in the morning, so if I wanted to take up a new habit such as practicing dual n-back, I would schedule it in the morning. I'm really just throwing out ideas for the wiki.
I recommend O'Reilly's Mind Performance Hacks and the accompanying Mentat Wiki. I was particularly interested in the exoself which is really just a combination of the Hipster PDA and a Motivaider.
Also, touchtyping is the closest thing to a Direct Neural Interface you can get today. If you don't know how to do it, learn!
Does Clippy maximise number-of-paperclips-in-universe (given all available information) or some proxy variable like number-of-paperclips-counted-so-far? If the former, Clippy does not want to move to a simulation. If the latter, Clippy does want to move to a simulation.
The same analysis applies to humankind.
I'll have a go. I'm in Oxford.
A pickup line: "I want to update on your posterior."
Recommended accompaniment: the "buddy" gesture
A pickup line: "I'll maximise your utility if you utilise my virility."
Awww... Don't downvote YYUUUU, It's rationalist anti-humour! What a great idea!
How do you prevent a rapidly self-replicating em from driving wages down to subsistence level?
HIT IT WITH AN AXE
A p-zombie walks into a bar but is fundamentally incapable of perceiving its situation and so to derive humour would be exploitative.
A guy walks into an AI conference and says he thinks he can create Friendly AI using complex emergent chaotic simulated paradigms.
So I stabbed him.
The obscurity of that rationalist pun is abayesing.
I was genuinely trying to be helpful. I apologise for lack of context/social skills. The fact that you said it was orange made me think of street lighting, and the v-shape of migrating birds.
Anyway, I googled and this explains what I meant:
"Birds
Individually and in flocks, birds can catch out the unwary. Many fuzzy, elliptical UFOs captured by chance on photographs have been attributed to birds flying unnoticed through the field of view just as the shutter was pressed.
Migrating flocks of birds can create UFO ‘formations’, particularly if lit up by str...
On second thoughts the sun would provide too much light, street lights maybe?
Was the sun setting? It could have been illuminating the underbellies of a flock of geese.
"If the tool you have is a hammer, make the problem look like a nail."
Steven W. Smith, The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing
I think book discussions are an excellent idea, particularly for technical topics.
Oxford is good for me, but London is fine. Anywhere with a whiteboard is going to cost money to book, so take that into account.
As far as I could tell, the multiplicity of AIs thing came from people objecting to hard takeoff scenarios, so that confusion should be soluble, given more time to explain the subject (Roko was packing a massive number of ideas into that talk.)
And they transpose the conditional! If a sample is likely given the hypothesis, it does not necessarily follow that the the hypothesis is likely given the sample. This always struck me as the most egregious failure of naive significance testing.
The conversion techniques page is fascinating. I'll put this to use good in further spreading the word of Bayes.
This is an excellent list, and would serve well as an introduction to Less Wrong.
Squeak/Etoys takes a constructivist approach to teaching children. Is this the kind of thing you're thinking of?
Besides porking (really) hot babes, flipping out, wailing on guitars, and cutting off heads, a ninja has to train. They have to meditate ALL THE TIME. But most importantly, each morning a ninja should think about going a little crazier than the day before. Beyond thinking about going berserk, a ninja must, by definition, actually go berserk.
Robert Hamburger, REAL Ultimate Power, The Official Ninja Book
I won’t teach a man who is not eager to learn, nor will I explain to one incapable of forming his own ideas. Nor have I anything more to say to those who, after I have made clear one corner of the subject, cannot deduce the other three.
Confucius
...The unwillingness to tolerate or respect any social forces which are not recognizable as the product of intelligent design, which is so important a cause of the present desire for comprehensive economic planning, is indeed only one aspect of a more general movement. We meet the same tendency in the field of morals and conventions, in the desire to substitute an artificial for the existing languages, and in the whole modern attitude toward processes which govern the growth of knowledge. The belief that only a synthetic system of morals, an artificial langu
We could all just mark ourselves on a map like Frappr, that way we'd know where it was worth organising meets.
Sounds fun! Easy to implement on a computer too. I wonder if players would discover the best strategy simply by practicing (and not by reasoning about the game).
This is what I thought everyone was going to say. I don't see why you'd be concerned about the paycheck though, a strong mathematics background could land you a job as a banker or trader or something. But looking at your upvotes it seems like plenty of people agree with you.
My next question would be what you'd like to have a basic introduction to. Plenty of LW posts tend to assume a grounding in subjects like maths, economics or philosophy - which is fine, this is a community for informed people - but it probably shrinks LW's audience somewhat, and certain...
I read this and at first I was like, "Damn! Not only did my anti-sexism plan fail, it made me even more sexist!" but then I was all, "No way! I'm going to find a bunch of evidence that genies can't be neuter! That'll show 'em! Show all of them." but then I read the Wikipedia article and it goes, "The pre-Islamic Zoroastrian culture of ancient Persia believed in jaini/jahi, evil female spirits thought to spread diseases to people." and I was totally like, "God fucking damnit! That's like... sexism squared!"
Well you might have won this round, Yudkowsky. But you haven't seen the last of me!
I've been thinking about educational games as well. The main problem, it seems to me, is that trying to make learning fun for someone who isn't already interested and motivated is a waste of time because you're just trying to hide the teaching under a sugarcoating of computer game, and that never works. On the other hand trying to make learning fun for someone who is already interested and motivated is pointless, because they already want to learn and the game just adds needless hassle like completing levels in order to reach the next piece of knowledge, o...
OK, I see where you're coming from. Learning to play the violin is frustrating, but it's probably fun once you can do it.
So if we could find a way to make learning easier, hypothetically speaking, you would use that opportunity to be a better generalist rather than further specialising in your chosen area? That's interesting because specialists are usually better paid. I wonder if that's a common point of view.
LWers are generalists, in general. Most of us know some psychology, some economics, some philosophy, some programming and so on. But I wonder what...
So you wouldn't pick instant expertise in philosophy because that would take the fun out of it. Do you think that if studying philosophy was easier, it would be less fun? I'm not convinced because no matter how much of an expert you are, there's still more to learn. The genie is offering you the chance to be at the cutting edge of your field.
So you pick the area with the highest expected monetary payoff? I'm not sure that skills in singing or creative writing serve that end, since the competition is so intense and the selection process for successful singers and writers seems somewhat arbitrary and random.
I see what you mean about the amount of effort required changing which area you would pick, and that was part of what I was getting at. I wonder how many of us choose to study a particular subject because it's easier than the alternatives, then rationalise it later as what we really wanted. If effort wasn't a factor and you could have chosen to study anything, what would it have been? If we on Less Wrong find ways to make learning easier, what will you do?
This comment doesn't really go anywhere, just some vague thoughts on fun. I've been reading A Theory of Fun For Game Design. It's not very good, but it has some interesting bits (have you noticed that when you jump in different videogames, you stay in there air for the same length of time? Apparently game developers all converged on an air time that feels natural, by trial and error). At one point the author asserts that having to think things through consciously is boring, but learning and using unconscious skills is fun. So a novice chess player gets bor...
I checked with the genie and he said fine. Not very rationalist-y of you, though.
Imagine you find a magic lamp. You polish it and, as expected, a genie pops out. However, it's a special kind of genie and instead of offering you three wishes it offers to make you an expert in anything, equal to the greatest mind working in that field today, instantly and with no effort on your part. You only get to choose one subject area, with "subject area" defined as anything offered as a degree by a respectable university. Also if you try to trick the genie he'll kick you in the nads*.
So if you could learn anything, what would you learn?
*T...
On the subject of advice to novices, I wanted to share a bit I got out of Understanding Uncertainty. This is going to seem painfully simple to a seasoned bayesian, but it's not meant for you. Rather, it's intended for someone who has never made a probability estimate before. Say a person has just learned about the bayesian view of probability and understands what a probability estimate is, actually translating beliefs into numerical estimates can still seem weird and difficult.
The book's advice is to use the standard balls-in-an-urn model to get an intuit...
Have you ever learned a useful fact from the PUA discussions here?
Basically, assigning certain attributes to either sex effectively prohibits those attributes in the other sex. That is not useful or rational, that is just limiting the potential.
Upvoted for this but... in a way this reminds me of the Tversky and Edwards experiment mentioned in the Technical Explanation where participants are shown a sequence of red and blue cards and asked to guess the next in the sequence. Since 70% of the cards are blue the best strategy is to always guess blue, but participants irrationally guess a mixture of blue and red as if they...
Brother Ty's seventh law