All of virtualAdept's Comments + Replies

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)

I suppose this would be a good point to say I'm interested in advice from anyone who has successfully converted a friend or family member's opinion of the site from knee-jerk negative to neutral or positive, given that I spent most of yesterday fuming about something absolutely ridiculous and insulting that was said in response to me bringing up the topic of cryonics.

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!

Fair. That's how I took it at first, and why I liked it more then.

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.

Do you really think saying less than necessary is good advice? That one seemed intuitively good to me at first glance, but then I thought about it a bit more. If I seek to communicate clearly, I should definitely say as much as necessary.

Otherwise, I heartily agree with you.

1rwallace
Well not literally of course, but I consider the useful meaning to be: beware of the intuitive tendency to assume it is necessary to say much, when saying a little would actually suffice. It's a guideline rather than a rule, not always applicable, but often enough to be of value.

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.

9Bongo
Here's a similar story.

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... (read more)

3wedrifid
To me it seems sufficiently relevant for a front page post. Just not a promoted front page post. :)

Yes! Thank you for linking that thread; I hadn't seen it.

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.

0endoself
Thanks for the reply.

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.

I can't really argue with that. I've been going back and forth with myself over whether I should call it something different. Suggestions?

0Emile
How about "LW Biology 101 Introduction: Bases of Biochemistry"? I guess it depends of what you're going to talk about in the rest of the sequence.
1wedrifid
I'm afraid I'm not sure what you like to call stuff within your field. But if I was going with the university subject metaphor and pulling something out of thin air it'd be: BIO253: Modelling Cellular Systems A second year Bio subject with a prereq of BIO101 and two semesters of maths and stats. :) (Note: If I was actually within the field I expect at I would cringe at the inaccuracy.)

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... (read more)

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 ... (read more)

0endoself
I have updated based on this evidence. One follow up question: Is this sort of thing not changing?

Ahh, that makes sense. Thank you.

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.

3gwern
What is meant is n tickets are sold, and then you do something like 'each ticket bought a particular plutonium atom out of n atoms; whichever atom decays first is a winning ticket'. Many Worlds says that each atom decays first in some world-line. The idea is to, like the least convenient possible world, to avoid a cheap rhetorical escape like 'I deny the trilemma because in my world the possibility of winning has already been foreclosed by my buying a predetermined losing ticket! Hah!'

What constitutes 'more?' I ask because it seems to be a fairly frequent topic on the site (people trying to do less of it), and I don't want to write a primer post that ends up being rehash for 90% of readers.

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!

Oh, your suggestion makes me grin. Systems biology is essentially the theme of my academic career. I will definitely write about those things; the hard part will probably be shutting up about them.

4Normal_Anomaly
Definitely focus more on the topics you're most passionate about, after you've given the necessary background. It will make your writing better.

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... (read more)

1[anonymous]
Point 1 is only sensationalist if not true. The fact is, there has been little research conducted in the area. This is mostly because, as far as I can tell, there were some supposedly 'definitive' studies in the 1980s which 'proved' there was no effect. Those studies, however, had serious flaws. More research has been conducted recently, some of it very promising, but still mostly of the 'kills cancer cells in a test tube' type rather than the 'large scale double-blind placebo controlled test' type. Meanwhile, several individual doctors have used the techniques described and report great success. As for point two, the authors are both retired former academics, not clinicians, and conducting clinical trials is not their area of expertise.

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... (read more)

2[anonymous]
The books in question are popularisations of many earlier studies, and certainly not 'announcing boldly that it has The Answer'. To quote from the material at http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/cancer-nutrition-and-survival/243487 "Clinical trials are needed to test such non-toxic therapies. Biological research suggests that cancer is a treatable condition. Although current data is not sufficient to indicate the degree of life extension achievable, many terminal patients might die of other causes, before the cancer kills them. Cancer patients deserve to be offered this opportunity."

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... (read more)

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

... (read more)
0Hul-Gil
Why programming or other computer science? It is important to be able to know how to use a computer, but beyond that, what's the benefit (unless the student is going to be a professional programmer)? Perhaps it trains the mind in a useful way?

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... (read more)

What has led you to anticipate (for brevity, some of) these things? Including some benefits for you and the predicted detriments for your fraternity brothers.

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.

To what extent do you agree with the official precepts and practices of the religion - i.e., what do you actually believe? (I'm interested in both the abstract affirmation-of-faith-you-say-in-a-service beliefs and how they apply in a social and day-to-day context.)

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... (read more)

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 ... (read more)

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.

Like how I quoted you?

Wow. Yeah. My brain remembers looking for something like that, but I think it's only attempting to justify its embarrassment. Thanks!

3jwhendy
Don't worry about it -- there have been many requests about changing that, making it more intuitive (like "markup formatting" vs. "help") -- I think the upcoming redesign will probably handle this and make it easier for folks.

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... (read more)

[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?

2jwhendy
Like how I quoted you? If so, click the "Help" link to the bottom right of the text entry box after you clilck "Reply" and you'll see that it's the greater-than symbol.

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... (read more)

1malthrin
Primarily as a case study, though input is certainly welcome. There's division in the moderation staff about the site should develop. Some feel that we should work on being more approachable to people who want to learn what to do without learning why - concise and easily-found guides, user-friendly models, etc. Others prefer the status quo and would rather improve information sharing across different models to reduce wasted effort in mechanics testing. The first group is hoping to encourage discussion of subjective topics by attracting new posters while the second group is fine with finding those discussions on other sites.

Fair enough - I tend to look for excuses to play with fire, so it seemed like the perfect solution to me. I think the oven probably does a better job of it, though.

Upshot of this: I now desire marshmallows.

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 ... (read more)

4MinibearRex
My experience with roasting marshmallows using candles is that the compounds in the wax tend to give the marshmallows a bad flavor. This may just be because of the candles I tried, but in general I had success with pushing down the toaster and roasting the marshmallow on a stick over the slots.
1Alicorn
I was actually aware that candles were an acceptable facsimile, but I don't like playing with fire if I can avoid it.

I'm definitely interested; similar to others, late evenings (EST) work on weekdays for me, or afternoon+ on weekends.

I'd be interested in discussing the sequences and people's day-to-day experiences with applying the more nonintuitive aspects of rationality.

0jwhendy
You are in Group B; please post HERE to coordinate with the others in your "virtual meetup."
0jwhendy
Planning discussion thread on g-groups is now HERE

I'm sure these have already come up, but I'll add my voice in enthusiastically recommending the following -

  • The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
  • Accelerando by Charles Stross
  • City at the End of Time by Greg Bear
  • Neuromancer by William Gibson

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... (read more)

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... (read more)

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... (read more)

2Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
Thank you. That's quite helpful.

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 ... (read more)

0taryneast
actually yeah - this is a great idea. We could probably start by coding up a simplified version of this - just to get something done... then add more fo the complex features after that. For example a good starting point would be for phase 1 predictions to just ask a (randomised) set of multi-choice or simple write-in questions for predictions: eg "how many red squares will there be at the end? in which part of the screen will the blue circle end up?" etc. I reckon that in the first "level" they could start by estimating a probability, rather than jumping straight into weightings of evidence? We could then introduce evidence weighting as a "level 2"? What do you think? Would that totally change the nature of what it's teaching too much? 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. :)

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... (read more)

2Emile
That sounds vaguely similar to the game of Eleusis, which I'm surprised wasn't mentioned yet. And of course, Zendo.
0taryneast
I'm not sure I follow how to turn this into a computer game. Can you give me an in-game example of the "set of rules for making some kind of decision/prediction"? Also the set of scenarios and how to "apply those rules"? Remember that we have to spell this stuff out for a computer to be able to understand.

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... (read more)

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... (read more)

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