All of TylerJay's Comments + Replies

Thank you! This is exactly what I was looking for. Thinking in terms of bits of information is still not quite intuitive to me, but it seems the right way to go. I've been away from LW for quite a while and I forgot how nice it is to get answers like this to questions.

I'm curious about how others here process study results, specifically in psychology and the social sciences.

The (p < 0.05) threshold for statistical significance is, of course, completely arbitrary. So when I get to the end of a paper and the result that came in at, for example, (p < 0.1) is described as "a non-significant trend favoring A over B," part of me wants to just go a head and update just a little bit, treating it as weak evidence, but I obviously don't want to do even that if there isn't a real effect and the evidence is unrelia... (read more)

This is a good one. More generally, it's sometimes called the "Why" Regress. Not just about how you know something, but about how something happened or came to be. It applies equally to science and religion.

Edit: "...know you know" => "...how you know"

I like this idea, and I'd like to see it developed further. I don't see any reason why FGCAs shouldn't be catalogued and learned alongside logical fallacies for the same reasons.

I guess the important distinction would be that certain FGCAs can be used non-fallaciously, and some of these seem to have valid use-cases, like pointing out confirmation bias and mind-projection fallacy. Others are fallacious in their fully-general form, but have valid uses in their non-fully-general forms, so it is important to distinguish these. (e.g. pointing out vagueness or ... (read more)

I used to drink coffee every day, but I don't anymore. I just drink green tea in the mornings if I want something hot. I definitely don't think it's worth risking the benefits of your fast by using sugar or milk in your coffee. If I recall correctly, Berkhan's assertion that half a teaspoon (or whatever it was) of milk wouldn't cause a problem wasn't really supported by any science, so I would avoid it if possible. I think his reasoning was that your body would metabolize it super quickly and then return to a fasted state, but it's not clear if you'll reta... (read more)

What would you imagine the criteria would be?

I had never heard of any of these except people putting magnets in their fingertips. Thanks for the post!

Minor typo I noticed:

"...and it is unique in that it is not implanted but instead." (instead what?)

I'll second the recommendation to relax this rule. I think the ability to gauge the quality of a popular book is a lot more cross-domain than with textbooks. I've read good books and I've read bad books. I can tell pretty quickly if a book is bad, even if I'm relatively new to the subject area.

Also, I feel like a lot of people would tend to only read one or two pop books in a particular area. Any more knowledge beyond that often comes from the internet or a textbook or elsewhere. I mean, I can count on one hand the number of specific subjects about which ... (read more)

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Very informative. Thanks. I've heard reversible computing mentioned a few times, but have never looked into it. Any recommendations for a quick primer, or is wikipedia going to be good enough?

There's no way to give a broad estimate on that. It's going to vary widely based on source, geographic location, and form (pressed pills vs powder/crystals/rocks).

Pressed pills or "Ecstasy" pills are more likely to have Amphetamine and/or other stimulants like caffeine and piperazines in addition to the MDMA, as they are intended as "rave drugs" for clubbing and dance parties. (Many users actually prefer amphetamine/caffeine in their pills because MDMA alone is more of a psychedelic than an "upper" and can make people want to... (read more)

Part 2

Macro-Level Physiological Effects

The increase in Dopamine, Norepinephrine, and Serotonin caused by MDMA causes Central Nervous System (CNS) stimulation that can raise body temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure. It can also cause increased sweating and perspiration, insomnia, nausea, and diarrhea, all of which contribute to dehydration. These comprise Normal Risk #2 family. The fact that MDMA use is often associated with excessive dancing, hot environments, and limited access to water and electrolytes (such as at raves, music festivals, concerts... (read more)

The risks of one-time MDMA use can be roughly sorted into two categories: "Normal Risks" which apply to everyone and "Edge-Case Risks" which only apply to certain people (though it may not always be clear, as we will see, if you are at risk for one of the edge-cases). I will give a very brief and oversimplified description of how MDMA is processed by the body and the effects it has, and then I will describe some of these risks. I didn't have time to put together sources and citations (especially as this was written from memory + fact ch... (read more)

...or Tim Feriss is seen as low status because he's not an academic (or for some other reason), so nobody tried. Could be a hidden alternative.

How insane would it be to just not have a control group?

Pretty insane in my opinion. I can't imagine anything I would grade more harshly than not having a control except ethics violations.

Besides, don't most university psychology experiments with volunteers keep the protocol secret throughout the whole experiment and then debrief at the end? (Or sometimes even lie about the protocol to avoid skewing the results?)

Alternatively, have you thought about doing a crossover-style design?

Take group A and group B. Group A plays your game, and then takes the te... (read more)

I thoroughly enjoyed it and think it was really well done. I can't perfectly judge how accessible it would be to those unfamiliar with x-risk mitigation and AI, but I think it was pretty good in that respect and did a good job of justifying the value alignment problem without seeming threatening.

I like how he made sure to position the people working on the value alignment problem as separate from those actually developing the potentially-awesome-but-potentially-world-ending AI so that the audience won't have any reason to not support what he's doing. I ju... (read more)

That's a really interesting point. Personally, I never even taste the things that people make analogies to when drinking wine. An ex-girlfriend of mine would always ask me things like "don't you taste blackberries? or "Isn't this buttery?" and would be really disappointed when I said no. I don't think it's because I have a bad sense of taste though. In fact, I'll often be able to tell if I've had a specific wine before (if it's the same vintage) because I recognize the taste signature, and I can sometimes say which other wines I've had that it tastes similar to. I just don't know how to describe the flavors.

I went to a party school for college (a top school in the US though) and was a pretty big partier, so hopefully I can offer the "general population perspective" as I think my early alcohol experiences are closer to that of an average person than to a typical LessWronger.

If you average all my years in college, I probably drank 3.5 or 4 days a week with about a quarter of those sessions to nearly blackout-level intoxication. In my experience, college-aged kids who are relatively new to drinking only care about the intoxicating effects. Since they'... (read more)

Just a notice for anyone wondering: They stack.

Haha, thanks. Was just curious. You're right about it being significantly cheaper. 5 days in the hospital, surgery, and all the drugs that go along with that: ~$400 USD.

And just a few lines before your last quote:

Quirrell:

"I did not have any friends like that when I was young." Still the same emotionless voice. "What would have become of you, I wonder, if you had been alone?"

What I love about this twist is how it changes the interpretation of so many other things that were said throughout the story. For example:

"Purposeless?" said Professor Quirrell. "Oh, but the madness of Dumbledore is not that he is purposeless, but that he has too many purposes.

It turns out PQ was right in that the madness of Dumbledore was not purposeless, however much his going around and "snipping all the threads of destiny" to constrain future events would, to anyone without all the knowledge of prophecy, look like many div... (read more)

I couldn't be happier with the ending. So perfect.

"I think that you always were, from the day I met you, my mysterious old wizard."

Thank you so much Eliezer. It's been an amazing journey.

I derived Bayes' Theorem and the basic rule for conditional probabilities today while trying to find the answer to a question.

I had seen Bayes' Theorem before, but never really understood it and certainly had never memorized it. The only relevant knowledge I had was:

• That the syntax for "probability of A given B" is p(A|B)
• That you can multiply independent probabilities to do AND, but aren't allowed to do that if they are dependent

I was surprised at how it followed directly from intuition and the last bullet point above. I put together a toy ... (read more)

Congratulations!

Out of curiosity: What do you think of Czech healthcare? I got appendicitis while visiting the Czech Republic and had to have my appendix out while there in a hospital that was built in the 1300s.

Haha, yup, I gotcha. Thanks for the info.

Just remember that this isn't a boxing setup. This is just a way of seeing what an AI will do under a false belief. From what I can tell, the concerns you brought up about it trying to get out isn't any different between the scenario when we simulate C3PO* and when we simulate C3PO. The problem of making a simulation indistinguishable from reality is a separate issue.

Here's my explanation of it. Let me know if this helps with your concerns at all:

Imagine we have an AI design we want to test. Call this AI C3PO, and let its utility function be U(A) where A is a world-state from the set of all possible world-states. And let the super-unlikely-event-happening-at-the-specified-time described in the post be w such that w = true if it happens and w = false if it doesn't happen. Then let A be a world state in the subset of all world-states A in which w = true. Basically, A is A given that w happened (this is how we simulate a ... (read more)

Thanks. I understand now. Just needed to sleep on it, and today, your explanation makes sense.

Basically, the AI's actions don't matter if the unlikely event doesn't happen, so it will take whatever actions would maximize its utility if the event did happen. This maximizes expected utility

Maximizing [P(no TM) C + P(TM) u(TM, A))] is the same as maximizing u(A) under assumption TM.

Nope, you're right. It's not definitive. In my original comment, I just said I thought I remembered reading somewhere that you couldn't fit >30 hrs into a day, and the passage I quoted is where I got that impression. If /r/hpmor thinks it's possible that TTs let you fit up to 48 hrs in a day, then I have high confidence there wasn't anything explicitly forbidding it in the story.

Ch 17:

Harry:

"...Sorry to ask but I was wondering, is it possible to get more than six hours if you use more than one Time-Turner? Because it's pretty impressive if you're doing all that on just thirty hours a day."

Dumbledore:

"I'm afraid Time doesn't like being stretched out too much," said Dumbledore after the slight pause, "and yet we ourselves seem to be a little too large for it, and so it's a constant struggle to fit our lives into Time."

Anyone interested in a Central/Southern California wrap-party? Even if it's pretty informal?

Just wanted to say that I almost missed this because I only check Main every other month or so. There are a lot of people who only really browse Discussion, and that's where pretty much all of the HPMOR discussion goes on anyway on LW. Can you x-post? I'm going to make a discussion post linking this Main post just for visibility. If you x-post it, I can delete it, just let me know.

Thanks for organizing this!

This is really interesting. I thought I understood it and I wanted to verify that by trying to summarize it (and maybe help others too) but now I'm not so sure...

Edit: Just to save anybody the reading time, my reasoning is false below. After sleeping on it, I see my mistake. Nothing below the "False Thermodynamic Miracles" subheading made sense to me yesterday because I thought the purpose of the setup was to have an "off switch" on the simulated AI under the false belief (letting it see the result of the signal after some time period)... (read more)

Thought so. Seems like a pretty close call to me. Thanks.

Although, really, it seems a bit contrived. If QQ was identified to the wards as the defense professor, wouldn't that be what the Hogwarts security system sees?

I don't know much about copyright law, but I still don't understand whether it's okay to use this in a classroom setting. If it's a free course or nonprofit, it seems it's allowed, but what about:

• A paid course offered by a for-profit institution where the reading material is linked to or provided for no additional (explicit) fee?
• A course where excerpts are part of a reader that costs money?

I've been wondering this in general, not just related to this particular e-book, so if you know the answers, I'd appreciate it. Thanks!

And Monroe was in Slytherin. That was a piece of intentionally leaked information so that the "smart" people could deduce that he was Monroe.

I've been wondering about this for a while, but never had a chance to do the required detective work. Were Harry and the Defense Professor in the castle at the time? If so, when Dumbles said "Find Tom Riddle..." he most definitely learned that HP and QQ were both Tom Riddles.

So... were they in the castle at the time? Or was QQ at St. Mungo's or the DMLE?

I see lots of people doing that on /r/hpmor and I've never been confused by it, strangely enough. It's not just you. You probably absorbed it unconsciously.

Yup. Part of my justifications to Harry setting the stage in 115 were (from right before this):

If the most terrible Dark Lord in history, confronts an innocent [girl] - why, how could he not be vanquished?

Unclear. Either midnight or as soon as last 24 hours contain less than 6 hours of looped time. I've been wondering this as well. I think I remember something being said like "No combination of time-turners could let you fit more than 30 hours into a day" but I don't know if that really helps...

Nice. I like it.

I expanded my previous post in a full solution (very long) with a pretty thorough line of reasoning. In the end, I convinced myself that Voldemort is not acting in his self-interest by killing Harry and that he's dangerously overconfident in his understanding of the Prophecy and his ability to avert it. Here are the relevant excerpts from my solution:

Tell Voldie that original prophecy ("born as the seventh month dies...") has not yet been fulfilled, and argue that this calls for rethinking killing Harry because attempting to ki

I submitted it. Here's the link to my whole solution (It's long, with backup plans and a few unique mechanics) if you're interested. I'm pretty proud of it, given the time constraints.

How would you distinguish you popping into existence with different qualia (and different memories/personality/etc.) from someone else popping into existence with different qualia (+memories/personality/etc.)? As others have argued, I think the flaw in the reasoning is that there is a privileged "I" that you are that is separate from the body/mind you wear.

Here's another object-level tactic I haven't seen mentioned yet. (Assume LV will not just kill Harry for speaking of non-magical powers. I have a way of increasing the likelihood of this assumption being true)

Harry could explain the Power of Expected Utility Calculations and subtly attempt a Pascal's Mugging on LV, convincing him that LV can't possibly assign a probability of less than one in twenty that killing Harry will indeed avert the prophecy, or for that matter cause it, and that the rational action to take is to not kill Harry. He can present it as... (read more)

I agree. This is a good line of reasoning. I was just saying that Harry has to make that argument and it's not guaranteed LV will accept it.

Eliezer himself has a 24.5 hr sleep cycle. I think it was just that and a way to get a time turner

Voldemort will probably tell him

I don't think that's a foregone conclusion, and not one Harry would be willing to bet his life and the fate of the universe on. Voldemort specifically said that he doesn't want to tell Harry because telling him could make it come true. Harry has to convince Voldie that it's not just okay to tell him, but beneficial to his goals to tell him. That's the kind of argument you'd have to craft here.

Last line of the article explains the motivation:

I wouldn’t mention it at all, but the inventor is not a human being and it’s a very good example of a “pure mechanical invention”.

"Stuporfy" would probably be the better option here. Yes, it's visible, but LV doesn't know about swerving stunners, since Flitwick never demonstrated it in public. It's probably the best chance Harry has of triggering a resonance by casting a spell, assuming he can fire one off.