The injunction to measure aversion strength by effect on behavior is one I think I will find particularly useful - in particular because I already consider myself good at dealing with strong feeling aversions. If an aversion feels strong, it tends to make me question myself rather pointedly about why I feel that way, whereas those that feel only like a mild preference or a case of 'have better things to do' have not, in the past, set off those alarm bells. I quite enjoyed this post.
Very few of my friends will read anything from LW that I link to them, and I suspect that they would find this link absolutely hilarious. I have never managed to get any of them to give a generalized account of exactly what they think is so systematically annoying about LW, though - they call the whole site 'pompous' and stop there.
I have noticed that I become more tense when reading effective arguments for Christianity and more relaxed when reading good arguments against it
What do you consider an effective argument for Christianity, and what sorts of thoughts do you find yourself thinking when you encounter such an argument? It might be useful to write them down.
I agree. I didn't actually expect it to get promoted, since it doesn't fit the pattern of things I've seen on the very front. I'll show how new I am here and ask, though - Eliezer's comment read like he had been presented with some expectation that this be promoted. Is that because posts that get upvoted this far typically (or always) are?
Since I didn't ask, or state that I thought it should be, it seemed a bit out-of-the-blue, which did then and is still causing me to try to figure out whether his objection was only to the idea of promotion, or if he objected to promotion because he thought it shouldn't be here at all.
On the title - the idea was, for this post specifically, to sketch the general principles that define both the space of reasonable approaches and likely outcomes in biological problems. I do think I did an underwhelming job demonstrating that link, and if that is what you mean or close to it, then I agree with you and will take it as a reminder to work on cohesion/full clarity of purpose in future posts. (If it's not, I invite further clarification.)
As for whether it's appropriate for LW... well, since I have a fairly good idea of what I'm going to wri...
To the best of my knowledge - and that deserves a disclaimer, since I'm a grad student in science and not yet completely versed in the legal gymnastics - it is changing, but any loosening of policy restrictions only comes with exceptional evidence that current norms are grossly unnecessary. In a general sense, bioengineering and tech started out immersed in a climate of fear and overblown, Crighton-esque 'what-if' scenarios with little or no basis in fact, and that climate is slowly receding to more informed levels of caution.
Policy also assuredly changes in the other direction as new frontiers are reached, to account for increased abilities of researchers to manipulate these systems.
Hah, no, that does sound like a real course title, although usually they call it "cellular engineering" to sucker in more people who would be turned off by an explicit mention of math in the title.
(I kid. Mostly.)
It is only a small subset of what I want to cover, though. I shall continue to think on it.
It's a foundation - it's easiest to illustrate the patterns I'm describing on a molecular/cellular level, but they apply across the board. My current intent for the actual series is to start with a group of posts on molecular/cellular systems, both because a basic understanding of genetics and metabolism is extremely useful to understanding everything else, and because it's the area I'm most familiar with.
However, recognizing that about half the interest expressed in the suggestions thread was for topics above the molecular level, I'm trying to figure o...
I'm hoping that I'll be able to keep the posts within the realm of reasonable understanding for most people on this site by focusing on principles, patterns, and analogies to other fields; however, if at any point I'm failing to do so, I will ardently welcome that being pointed out.
The assumptions I made when constructing my tentative post outline were that readers here were likely to have some general scientific background, and at least a high school level of chemistry. I recognize that the latter might not be a good assumption.
(If you, or anyone else has suggestions at any point on how to improve the usefulness of these posts for those without a background in related fields, please let me know!)
If you mean my opinion on whether it's worth being afraid of - I don't think it is. Any powerful new technology/capability should be implemented with caution and an eye to anticipating risk, but I don't view bioengineering in a different capacity than any other scientific frontier in terms of risk.
On a practical level, the oversight on manipulation of organisms beyond your run-of-the-mill, single-celled lab workhorses (bacteria, yeast) is massive. In the not-too-distant past, it was an uphill climb just to be able to do genetic engineering research at ...
I think I'm hung up on the lottery example in Eliezer's original post - what is meant by a quantum lottery? He said 'every ticket wins somewhere' - does that mean that every ticket wins in some future timeline (such that if you could split yourself and populate multiple future timelines, you could increase your probability of winning)? If not, what does it mean? Lacking some special provision for the ticket, the outcome is determined by the ticket you bought before you queued up the split, rather than the individual probability of winning.
If anyone could clarify this, I'd be grateful.
Are there a handful of broad principles that constrain anticipation about biological systems or processes that you could highlight?
There are. My thought about the current event idea for the topics would be simply to use those as a jumping-off point to talk about the foundational aspects, since otherwise I'd feel somewhat aimless as to where to start. But the way you phrased that made me think about more about how to structure a foundations only-type post, and I think I could pull at least some of that off in a way that would be useful.... I shall continue to think on this. Thanks for the suggestion!
I'm trying to think how to frame my response to this. I will essentially never say that something shouldn't be studied (unless the act of studying would cause more harm than good to intelligent test subjects), and I don't know with certainty that vitamin C megadoses would not be helpful. I know a lot of reasons why they probably wouldn't be, but that's all I have.
My major problems with the book itself (from what I can see of it online, and what I've read of the studies on the subject) are:
1) It suggests ('Cancer patients deserve to be offered this op...
I'm a graduate student studying metabolomics, and my lab mate is actually doing her thesis research on cancer metabolism. My knowledge base is strong in the biology involved, and weak in the politics of medical studies and treatment preferences, as I have no direct interface with MDs.
Cancer has no 'silver bullet;' as is generally recognized in medicine nowadays, it is actually a collection of diseases with differing causes, that respond in different ways to various treatments because the mechanisms which promote cancer development, growth, and metastasi...
Genetic engineering is simply a tool. A particularly malicious individual with an absurd amount of independent resources, ingenuity, and time on eir hands could use it to make something dangerous - but such a comic book supervillain aspirant could be far more effectively evil simply by making a lot of bombs and using them on densely-populated areas.
In the non-comic book world where we live, genetic engineering is done in a veritable regulatory straightjacket. Development of products for human consumption and/or those that will have contact with non-mod...
Food allergies tend to be a response to one compound, or a very small set of compounds. With respect to using genes from one organism to confer hardiness on another, the chances of conferring the production of a deadly allergen are diminishingly slim, but you'd better believe that if such a thing was to be done, the FDA (or analogous organizations outside the US) would have warnings plastered all over the derivative organism.
The level of justification and background research showing how you're NOT going to destroy the world that is required to even get funding for this sort of thing is.... large.
Exactly that. Being able to think in explicit algorithms is extremely useful for decoding your own thoughts and being able to actually change your mind.
Since we're taking students from varied and heterogeneous backgrounds and it's an advanced degree, I'd have a list of required topics, with the students being able to place out of the area of their undergraduate study (if their undergrad major covered one of the topics).
Core areas would include:
Probability/statistics
Mathematics (at least through basic calc and linear algebra)
Computer science (at least basic programming, algorithms, and software architecture)
Natural science (chemistry OR biology OR physics)
Research experience in a natural scien
I've read your conversion story on your blog, and the answers you've posted here so far. The most salient question, to me, has become 'what led you to alter your belief about the existence of a deity,' specifically. Everything I have seen thus far has apparently relied on good feelings when you have participated in services and been around Mormons (and how nice they were/are).
I don't think you could give a less convincing account of why you should believe a god exists than that. The Mormon student I know in the lab is a kind, helpful, delightful perso...
Small electronic appliances often have some sort of safety warning tag that includes, in large text, "DO NOT REMOVE." I remember being a bit horrified the first time I saw my mother cut one off a power cord, and only later actually thought through the logic that the hairdryer or whatever it was would be staying in our house, and none of us were going to try to use the thing underwater or something similarly unhealthy.
I don't think that examples of people with fundamental, irrational beliefs being good at other things are relevant - calcsam has invited questions specifically about the belief whose rationality is being examined. If he was starting a discussion about mathematics and his points were dismissed due to his Mormon affiliation, your comment wold make more sense to me.
This common use of "I know I'm biased, but..." and its equivalent phrases is definitely a good thing to point out and work to avoid.
The proposed catch-and-analyze method for when you say such things yourself would also be useful from the other side of the conversation, as a more explicit exercise: Your conversational companion says 'I know I'm biased...' and that's a signal right there for you to ask 'how/why?' and get them thinking and talking about it. I actually think that done right, it could be turned from an unproductive 'please ignore m...
I have the same general proclivities that you describe. I've got some flexibility in my schedule (grad school is kinda awesome), but realistically speaking it's not reasonable to go with a full schedule inversion - while sleeping during the day is not difficult for me, my lab and occasional classes make it necessary to be up in the morning sometimes.
I have tried two extremes in how I handle sleep, and liked neither of them: forcing myself to a slightly abbreviated 'normal' schedule of 7 continuous hours of sleep from ~12-1 to 7 or 8 AM, and burning the ...
Microbial interaction is only responsible for some instances/types of rancidification. Oxidation and hydrolysis reactions can occur without microbes, although again the question becomes one of how quickly these reactions would occur at cryogenic temperatures (very slowly, but we are looking at potentially very long timespans here) and availability of species.
For whatever reason, I've always had a very strong memory for sounds - it's a relatively common occurrence for me to express knowledge of what a friend or family member had done on a particular day and time, based on hearing them bang about from another room. This tends to surprise them since I was not physically there to observe. The only other person I know who does this often is, fittingly, my mother.
More humorously, my office mates and I have jokingly accused our PI of teleportation; while it's usually extremely easy to hear someone coming down th...
[The solution is to approach new situations critically.]
This is a skill that can be honed in reading rather easily - I became explicitly aware of doing exactly as you've described when I began to have to offer up explanations and critiques of scholarly papers whose topics I wasn't innately familiar with on short notice. And it was just as surprising to my peers when I could come up with quick, cogent answers to complex questions about them on the spot.
Edit: Damnit, I fail at quote tags - is there a list somewhere of the tags the site uses?
Are you posting about this here looking for input/ideas, or simply as a case study of what Eliezer described?
What kind of answers are being given to "is this the community we meant to create"?
I'm a retired (feels funny to say that in regard to anything at 23...) mod of a large-scale, cross-guild raiding community, and that kind of question comes up in relation to policy issues, but seldom in concern about a lack of liveliness on our boards. But then, our boards serve more of a social and organizational function than anything else - the players w...
I'd be willing to bet that if you had at some point found yourself with an active (and at least moderately strong) desire to have a toasted marshmallow, you would have sought and found a way (oven, toaster, etc) to toast one in the kitchen... mostly because once upon a time, I found myself with a bag of marshmallows and some chocolate, and wanted s'mores, and decided since "toasting" to me at that time mostly meant "torching," a candle would suffice. And it did.
Toasting a marshmallow without a campfire wasn't a difficult problem; it ...
I'm sure these have already come up, but I'll add my voice in enthusiastically recommending the following -
Accelerando will have rather familiar themes and ideas to anyone who's spent significant time on LW, in particular, although that goes for the others to a slightly lesser extent. City at the End of Time was probably the most "work" for me to read out of the four - I enjoyed it greatly, but it's a book best s...
after we've got that working, we could then figure out how to get the user to describe the ruleset to the computer in a flexible way. That's actually a Tough Problem, BTW. It's basically forming a mini-language... so definitely on the books, but probably not the first iteration. :)
Yeah, I realized that as I was writing the longer example, and also that it wasn't strictly necessary. Interesting, but not necessary. =)
Your description of phase 1 prediction coding is very close to what I was picturing, and having a randomized set of questions rather than ju...
First, something not-particularly-useful-now but hopefully comforting: group projects in school, even ones that mimic real world problems, very often are not comparable to Real World projects in the sense of group composition and motivation. In school, you just can't get away from the fact that your ultimate goal is a grade, which is intangible and at least partially arbitrary. Because of that fact, you will nearly always have less total group motivation and more total disagreement on how much work is required for an "acceptable result" on a pr...
This is the simplest sort of example that I was picturing as I wrote the suggestion - it might not be sophisticated enough as described below to be sufficiently challenging.
I also changed my mind a bit about how phase 1 should be structured, so I'll work that in.
A "scenario" is a box on the screen that is populated by colored shapes that move around like paramecia on a microscope slide, and interact with each other according to the rules for the current round of the game. The scenario ends after a short time period (20-40 seconds) and freezes ...
Here's an idea for a game to train awareness of/resistance to confirmation bias:
The game would consist of three phases, that could then be repeated for however many iterations (levels!) were desired.
1) Presenting and habituating the "theory." Basically, give a set of rules for making some kind of decision/prediction, and then have the player apply those rules to a series of scenarios that clearly illustrate the supposed predictive (or score-increasing, if you will) properties of the Theory.
2) "In the wild" - Now present a series of sce...
I've read through the comments thus far, but relatively quickly, so please point out and forgive if any of this is exact rehash.
First, and directly concerning text in the post: one of the listed Ways to Objectify is denial of autonomy, and that is discussed briefly after the list. In later examples, lukeprog describes how we...
"...all use each other as means to an end, or as objects of one kind or another, all the time. And we can do so while respecting their autonomy."
The post implicitly casts denial of autonomy as the defining Bad Thing a...
This jives with my experience. Also, the grading I've done for various professors (and specifically the interaction that goes along with the grading) has exposed me to a lot of variations on the attitude of "officially, there are no stupid questions... but there are definitely stupid questions, and I'm tired of them." It's not ubiquitous, but it's common enough to make worrying about the prof's opinion pretty reasonable if you expect them to have any say in your future success beyond the grade you get in their class.
The problem with "does this make sense?" is that one to whom a topic/explanation makes sense cannot necessarily reproduce the principle. You're more likely to get an honest answer asking if it makes sense, but I think that's probably because "making sense" requires a less rigorous facility than "understanding."
Several of my graduate professors have a habit of pulling intuitive leaps into problems that make perfect "sense" when presented, but they aren't the sort of thing that many, if any, of the students are going to be able to make on their own due to lack of such intimate familiarity with the material. It really shows on the problem sets.
PZ's his own special brand of abrasive and dismissive, but I went and read most of the paper, and while he's not exactly rigorous with explaining his criticisms, I think they're based in good ones.
While the design of the JoC website shouldn't affect assessment of the article, the fact that a paper on such a potentially high-impact subject isn't in a mainstream journal at all does and should send up some red flags that there might be issues with the paper that would keep it from getting past peer review.
My biggest issue with the paper is that the study...
Yup, sounds about right. The phrases 'snide intellectualism' and 'ivory tower' are things I've heard more than once. From my significant other, no less. I know his response is an aversion to the site and not to intellectualism in general, or else, well, he wouldn't be my significant other, but it's incredibly frustrating. I try to bring up topics in a general sense instead of 'I read this really great article on Less Wrong...' but it's always difficult to avoid using references from people here if it's a topic that LW deals with often.
I suppose this ... (read more)
Forget about what they think of a website. Who cares? The task is to train them out of thinking it is ok to say ridiculously insulting things to you at all! You're worth more than that!