Open Thread May 16 - May 22, 2016

But I think the probability (that if Alice hadn't shouted me down then this guy would still be alive) is nontrivial.

I urge you to consider why you think this is true. You say that many other people warned this couple about the risks and all were blown off. If they had listened to your (or anyone's advice), there is a non-trivial chance of a different outcome. But was there a non-trivial chance you would persuade them differently?

(I'm also skeptical that your political disagreement had any effect on your persuasiveness regarding the danger of these drugs.)

This sounds like the type of attitude I hope to encounter every time I navigate to a lesswrong page. Yes it's a basic version, but you felt you should post it, so maybe it's not obviously instantiated.

You say also "I've always tried to follow the advice that... if possible." Is it really that you're trying to do this, or is it just what you seem to do? Maybe you just do it, and when you think about it you can also come up with some reasons why it might be a good thing.

But I've always tried to follow the advice that the best way to deal with conflict is to calmly walk away, if possible.

Wow that is quite possibly the worst advice I have ever heard, without exaggeration. Walking away is a 'solution' that will literally never solve the problem. Now there are times when the best strategic move is to not engage, but that is a statement of priorities and/or timing. But never, not once do you solve a problem by ignoring it. Walking away is not a solution. I hope at least that lesson was learned from this tragic accident :(

Since Alice isn't reading this, there's no point giving her advice. Instead, you should look for lessons to modify your own behavior. How about: don't talk about politics.

This is awesome. Please write Week Two.

Liking it a lot. Have you read Return from the Stars?

I really enjoyed this, it was very well written! Lots of fun new concepts, and plenty of fun old ones being used well.

Looking forward to reading more! Even if there aren't too many new weird things in whatever follows, I really want to see where the story goes.

I enjoyed this. Please let LW know if you ever write a chapter 2.

a rationality-themed tattoo

That's not a rationality-themed tattoo, it's an Intentional-Insights-themed tattoo. So far as I can tell, the only connection between the word "intentional" and rationality is that your organization uses "intentional" to mean roughly what some other people mean by "System 2".

(It's not even as if "use System 2 rather than System 1" is itself a particularly rational, or particularly rationalist, principle. Our brains take the shortcuts they do for reasons, and often we should let them do it.)

I think magnetic finger implants for a sixth sense seems a pretty cool transhumanist body mod thing. Along the same lines, there are Programmable Subcutaneous Visible Implants where you stick a LCD screen under the skin, although I think that is more of a "maybe we'll have the tech worked out in five years" sort of thing.

To each his own. Personally, I think that unless you live in a community where most people have tattoos, the most rational decision is to have no tattoos. I believe they close more doors than they open. Maybe I am mistaken, maybe situations were tattoos help you are more common than I think. Please correct me then.

Some time ago I considered getting a useful tattoo. Useful like

• name, birthdate and maybe other information suitable to locate relatives in case of emergency
• ruler (if you stopped growing)
• Morse alphabet
• Smith Chart
• graphical rendering of an encryption algorithm (I imagine that there are pleasant renderings)

I'm curious that you know others with rationality-themed tattoos, too; do they either live in your area, or work for Intentional Insights? I hadn't been aware that people had these sorts of tattoos at all.

I signed up a few years back then left, slightly intimidated by the community (though I enjoyed reading the Sequences and discovered HPMOR through this site, which I then recommended to friends).

I also held back on posting from thinking regs would tire of rehashing old-to-them, new-to-me topics. The reason I just recently came back was from showing HPMOR to my boyfriend. I think a newbie thread would bring out some lurkers and help people better integrate into the community.

Great idea. :)

I remember seeing a study where clicking pictures of happy people improved their happiness but I can't find it now.

Normally I say get plenty of sleep, but I think you asked a bit late to get that answer.

useless, from an economic perspective

(Emphasis mine.) The article gives no reason to think that AI will make billions of humans actually useless. Only that it will make them unable to earn enough money to live on by selling their labour. These are not the same thing.

I have been thinking about this a bit along with the basic minimum wage.

It would also seem that we would need a universal "kickstarter" type clearinghouse to vote on projects that should get done. You would have to login and vote on a project say, once a week to get your basic funding, and you could volunteer of build things or do research to earn credits for travel.

Would Andrew Gelman's blog count? (Author of recommended textbook on Bayesian statistics.)

Maybe it would be useful for you to share the entire blogroll you've accumulated thus far and just ask people to recommend more blogs like the ones you already have. For example, I'm guessing you found Gelman already since he's present in Robin Hanson's blogroll--but I could think of a way you would have plausibly found lots of potential recommendations.

You could even create a "show us your blogroll" discussion post, in order to harvest OPMLs to mine through.

This is an interesting case. If people are free to place the coins as they wish, I wouldn't be surprised if P(heads)>P(tails) due to biases about which way is "right side up". When a face appears on a coin many people seem to think of this as the front of the coin, and in numismatic circles, the obverse is typically "heads" if a head appears on only one side (although no surprise that there are contentious debates about obverse/reverse in specific circumstances).

"Random", in objective Bayesianism, just means that you have no information privileging one alternative or the other.
In this case, the reasons why you don't know which outcome each single experiment will have are different, but the end result is the same.
There are possibly differences in their Ap distributions though, depending on how you model human behaviour...

"Random" doesn't mean anything but "unpredictable", and a possibly relevant question is "unpredictable by whom?".

But yes, probably. (If you ask 1000 people for a number from 1 to 10 many more than 100 of them will say "7" etc.)

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "as random."

It may well be that there are discernable patterns in a sequence of manually simulated coin-flips that would allow us to distinguish such sequences from actual coinflips. The most plausible hypothetical examples I can come up with would result in a non-1:1 ratio... e.g., humans having a bias in favor of heads or tails.

Or, if each person is laying a coin down next to the previous coin, such that they are able to see the pattern thus far, we might find any number of pattern-level biases... e.g., if told to simulate randomness, humans might be less than 50% likely to select heads if they see a series of heads-up coins, whereas if not told to do so, they might be more than 50%.

It's kind of an interesting question, actually. I know there's been some work on detecting test scores by looking for artificial-pattern markers in the distribution of numbers, but I don't know if anyone's done equivalent things for coinflips.

If none of the participants can predict or influence the 50/50 outcome, then it's random. The procedure for generating the state doesn't matter - only that the individual events cannot be predicted and the aggregate converges toward a distribution.

This SSC post is slightly related

Venice introduced an electoral college system in 1172. I believe that their earlier system was direct elections, but I've never seen a very clear claim. This seems to claim so.

Another example: France. The Second Republic had a directly elected President, while the Third Republic had the President chosen by the Senate. France returned to direct elections early in the Fifth Republic. It did not go directly from direct election to electoral college because it did not go directly from Second to Third. But I believe that the decision against direct election was motivated by the experience of the Second Republic and the memory of the prescient arguments Jules Grévy made at the drafting of its Constitution; indeed, Grévy himself was a leading figure of the Third Republic.

• Interacting with those people in limited settings. Using different systems in different settings. A system doesn't have to encompass all human interactions.

• Use rewards instead of punishments. Similar to your second point, but feels differently.

By the way, your third point is a special case of your second one.

Another one is (non-compulsive) persuasion.

Note that compulsion requires you to have governmental (or quasi-governmental) power and exclusion ("fences") requires a certain degree of autonomy and, basically, property rights.

However the question as asked is too high-level. Moral systems' responses critically depend on how acceptable the other moral belief is. Minor things are usually tolerated and major things are subject to compulsion or exclusion (given sufficient power). For example the US government doesn't care about the Mormons' conversion of deceased (indifference) but does care about polygamy (compulsion).

Are there others?

Yes, e.g.:

• submit and cooperate - this is one of the staple of Christianity in its concept of martyrdom, also hinted in the Sermon of the Mount, when Jesus talked about turning the other cheek;

• submit but do not cooperate - for example in the doctrine of non-violence.

thoughts:

• convert - try to sign them up to the system i.e. the way religions used to do it. Reason with them and tell them they want to join because it's better.
• kill them - historic wars happened.
• bind them explicitly - society today binds adults to legal responsibility to their own rights. children are not bound in the same way until we say they are capable of being responsible, in a way they are people who won't adopt the system (sometimes because it's too complicated for them). Our solution is to bind others to the responsibility and eventually bind them when they are old enough to adopt the system (18 years old is usually an adult in most countries)
• (an instance of compulsion) threaten them with being cast as an entity with less rights within your system than other entities if they do not join your system.

I think you mean ethics and not morals.

There are many ways to persuade people. You can control information flow. You can nudge people and optimize the nudging.

There are physical changes that affect moral behavior. A lot of variables from temperature to diet have effects on moral decision making in certain instances.

You can convince people through arguments.

FODMAP sensitivity is one source of digestive troubles. This causes sensitivity to garlic, onion, pears, apples, beans, among other things. If you seem sensitive to those things you can get a hydrogen breath test to test it further.

Does anyone have a recommendation for tests to check for these? if you are searching, the word "allergy" is usually reserved for life threatening instances of the condition. the words, "intolerance" or "sensitivity" are usually used for conditions that are discomforts, i.e. digestive, rashes, red eyes, itchy skin etc.

WRT allergies: Consider plants; things you are drinking; washing powders (although more relevant for skin irritations); pets (more relevant for respirator problems).

As your problem is digestive it's probably safe to look at things you are consuming.

I would suggest eliminating things; or running self-tests. i.e. eat nothing for a few hours then eat a slice of bread - if you are fine to eat that you are probably not sensitive to wheat.

This can either be done by writing out your full diet and testing each part, or by testing the top 8 as mentioned above.

Aside from allergies, also consider whether the digestive trouble could be due to anxiety or other psychological issues.

Flax and chia seeds are both very good sources of omega 3 (but flax seeds need to be ground for your body to absorb it, and once you grind them, you should store them cold), as are fish (especially salmon).

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