February 2013 Media Thread

A one hour informal lecture by Alexander Shulgin, the chemist who invented most of the modern "psychedelic" and "entheogen" drugs

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z14oZqon5NM (others linked from youtube)

He talks about how remarkable it is that a fairly simple molecule such as mescaline can be so transformative to our subjective experience. So what happens when you tweak the molecule in various ways? What do the variations do, in turn? Can we find any rules that govern this relationship?

More generally, his idea is that if we want to study this thing we call "consciousness" --- our subjective experience --- then it's useful to be able to twiddle the knobs a little, and these drugs potentially give us a way to do that. He sees himself as a tool-maker, developing experimental apparatus that other researchers ought to be able to use productively.

The Mystery of the Black Death-- evidence that the Black Death wasn't spread by rats (which weren't common in northern Europe at that time) and wasn't bubonic plague. It may have been some sort of hemorraghic fever.

This is of interest to ratioinalists because it's about taking a second look at whether what everyone believes is actually plausible.

Is there a closure bias which favors just choosing a theory so as not to leave open questions?

A previous post on LessWrong mentioned an online course on Google power searching. There is a recent Advanced course on offer as well.

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

Should we also have a rule saying,

"Please avoid upvoting recommendations just because you personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific virtue in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect."

?

Gunnerkrig Court: an entertaining, story-based webcomic. Not complete, but has a significant amount already and updates MWF. Wavers between the silly, the absurd, and the genuinely great.

I've been playing Persona 4 Golden recently. It's essentially a murder mystery, and it's sort of interesting that, at one point, the game gives you a list of literally every named character in the game and challenges you to identify the killer. If you fail, you get a bad ending. Most mysteries are content to let the detective give the reader the answer; this game makes the player do the hard work, and it's not at all obvious what the answer is. I accidentally spoiled myself on the solution, though.

I've been enjoying the game very much, and I'm pretty close to the "true" ending...

• iamamiwhoami
• Adebisi Shank
• White Sea
• The Bronzed Chorus
• Emeralds
• Dum Dum Girls

Doujin (chronological):

• "泣かない蝶々" [vocal] (by MANYO; heard on '羽ノ亡キ蝶')
• "Prologue" [inst. rock] (by Tenmon; from 'CHRONICLE' {C82})

Touhou:

• "Thought" [vocal] (by 38BEETS; from 'Cause and Effect' {C82})

Vocaloid:

• "Love It!" (Miku; by Clean Tears; heard on 'Love It!')

• Shakey Graves (two songs) - Texan folk/country singer.

• Red Fang (three more songs) - I guess you could call them stoner metal. They're like a less thinky Mastodon, but some of their more recent stuff (not linked) seems to be going down a more progressive route.

• I found a neat little live studio album of Tower of Power recently. I can't find a good version of this album online, but here's two songs for anyone who doesn't know them, and the album is called Tower of Power Direct.

• It's really clichéd for musicians to list her as an influence, but I'm currently deep in a Kate Bush phase. I must have listened to Never for Ever about five times in the last few days.

Chillstep : I've found this online collection to be quite relaxing, as the genre name suggests.

The Art Of Noise - The Seduction of Claude Debussy : I hadn't listened to any music by this super-group before this year, and now they're one of my favourite groups...I'm either fickle or these guys are awesome, and I'm not fickle. There's one song I liked in particular, Metaforce, and its remixes. It'll show you just how versatile this group is, with the rest of the album as a backdrop.

If you're like me, most media you consume is some combination of dark, violent, and/or ironic. Chihayafuru, on the other hand, is sincere, heartwarming, and beautiful. It's also about an obscure Japanese card game about memorizing poetry, but don't let that put you off. It's exciting. Really.

Click the link above to watch for free - an Adblock browser plugin will skip the video ads for you.

House of Cards, the American made-for/by-Netflix remake, is actually quite good. The original British version with Ian Richardson is probably better, if a bit dated by its post-Thatcherist setting.

In a nutshell, Kevin Spacey plays Francis Underwood, the majority Democratic whip in an alternate reality where the Democrats won 2008 with someone other than Obama. After re-election, Frank is passed over for Secretary of State, and then starts using his connections to bring down the administration. There's a lot of sex, drugs, violence, backstabbing, and political intrigue.

Some of the critics I've read are annoyed with the bluntness of the action and the occasional weakness of the writing. On the other hand, because it was written for the Netflix format, all of the first season is available at once, and each episode can be as long as it needs to be. There aren't any commercials, so what you get is a smooth, continuous plot from start to stop. The series' running gag is that Francis breaks the fourth wall on a rather frequent basis, so you'd have to like Deadpool-esque main characters, too.

My main concern (I'm only two episodes in) is how the politics of England (which were kind of necessary to fill out the plot of the UK series) are going to translate to politics in the US version.

I watched Life of Pi in 3D. I thought the visuals were very beautiful, but the message sillier than ever and the ending seemed to pull its punch compared to the novel. I made some cynical jokes about it on Google+.

Anime (descending):

• Monster
• Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita
• Thermae Romae
• Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo
• Upotte!!

I thought The Imposter) was a great illustration of various human thought patterns, such as the desire for narrative.

E.g. ng bar cbvag gur qrgrpgvir qrpvqrf Obheqva vf cebonoyl n fcl, orpnhfr jul ryfr jbhyq fbzrbar sbervta cergraq gb or n zvffvat puvyq? Yngre ur qrpvqrf gur snzvyl xvyyrq Avpubynf, orpnhfr jul ryfr jbhyq gurl unir npprcgrq Obheqva?

Descending:

• Danielewski, House of Leaves (review)
• Jordan/Sanderson, A Memory of Light (review)
• Shaw, Back to Methuselah (review)

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Less Stewart-- it's been mentioned here once, but I'm amazed it isn't extremely popular here for rationalism and famous in general as a delightful book.

It's about four orphans who are recruited for a mission against a terrifying organization full of well-dressed people who talk in bafflegab and is led by a vain man who has mind control technology. Not only does the book have appreciation for high intelligence, it has appreciation for different kinds of intelligence.

It's in the romantic tradition (Victor Hugo, not modern romance) of disguises, secret tunnels, and sudden turns of fortune. It has a lot of respect for updating and for checking on whether things make sense.

Language in Thought and Action, by S. I. Hayakawa. It goes without saying that this book is highly recommended. To those who've read the sequences, and have therefore had just a bite of the hearty meal, you should really get it. An anecdote about how I came to find this gem: My grandfather is a retired linguist, and in his library, in a house I grew up in, he keeps, and still has, a gigantic collection of books. A member of that distinguished class of "books older than me", this book is a part of his linguistics collection, and I didn't even know he had it until a few weeks ago when I was having a conversation with my uncle in said library. The title jumped out at me, and I haven't been this happy about finding a book in that room since I found my mother reading Kahneman.

Louder than Words by Benjamin K. Bergen is a new (published October 2012) book on embodied cognition that summarizes research supporting the idea that we understand language by mentally simulating the events described, using the same parts of the brain that perceive such events.

I'm in the middle of the book right now; it's a quick read. I haven't read any of the original research, so it's difficult for me to comment on the book's quality. I don't necessarily recommend the book, but it seemed like the sort of thing LW should know about if no one's mentioned it already.

• I finished Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise; I liked it. Very accessible view into the world of predicitions in very different field (earthquakes, poker, elections, stock market, ...). Nice book to introduce people into quite a few of the LW-themes. One weakness I found that while Silver got to interview Donald Rumsfeld, he succeeds in not getting anything interesting out of him.
• Also, I finally finished Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, a great book that discusses many of our cognivitive biases. A whole subgenre of irrationality-pop-psy has arisen in the last few years, but this is really the book that makes much of those superfluous. Book gets a bit tedious in the end, but I'd still consider it near-mandatory reading for people interested in LW-themes.

Strongly recommend:

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Steven Pinker

You've likely heard of this; if you haven't you absolutely must at least watch bis TED talk or find an article summary. I'll add my high recommendation.

Weakly recommend:

The ancestor's tale Richard Dawkins

I got what I wanted from this, which was better knowledge of the phylogenetic tree. Still, it wanders around quite a lot, and it makes it seem like he doesn't really understand the probability models being used for the sequence-based evidence that's challenging a lot of the old assumptions.

Micro-motives and macro-behaviour Thomas Schelling

I really only bought this because The Art of Strategy wasn't in the Kindle store. It's an okay set of game theory/group dynamics teasers to sharpen your intuition, but far from essential.

Worlds Of Their Own: A Brief History of Misguided Ideas: Creationism, Flat-Earthism, Energy Scams and the Velikovsky Affair - a collection of skeptical works from the '70s-'90s. Old-style skepticism, but he's quite kind to his subjects - interviews with Velikovsky, flat earthers, free-energy cranks. Not so kind to creationists, particularly Duane Gish. Has an excellent chapter describing the pseudoscientific method in detail, which I need to summarise.

Debunking Economics, by Steve Keen.

I've been reading parts of Pseudo-Problems: How Analytic Philosophy Gets Done.

It introduced me to this nice Boltzman quote:

If therefore philosophy were to succeed in creating a system such that... it stood out clearly when a question is not justified, so that the drive towards asking it would gradually die away, [then] philosophy would become worthy of the name of queen of the sciences.

The Problem of Political Authority, by Michael Huemer. review amazong. Best book on political philosophy I've read. Clear writting style, doesn't appeal to massive conjunctive reasoning - unlike much philosophy. Even mentions GiveWell.

Descending order:

• Takeda, The Notenki Memoirs: Studio Gainax and the Men Who Created Evangelion, (review)
• Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (review)
• Manzi, Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society (review)
• Friedman, Legal Systems Very Different From Ours

I've been reading a lot of fanfiction recently, starting with HPMoR then going recursively through Eliezer's 'favorites' list, eventually branching to various TVTropes recommended lists. It's in the latter that I found Destiny is a Hazy thing, a Naruto AU fanfic with major Lovecraftian themes and (currently, at least) minor crossover/shout out elements to Evangelion. The author page has a rather good description. Personally I like this story because it combines a lot of elements I seem to enjoy in fiction, mainly a 'large world' feel and Anehgb univat Lbt Fbgubgu nf n sngure svther (minor spoiler).

I'm currently reading another story by Calanor, Harry Potter and the Puppet of Time

Draco receives the memories of his future self and undertakes an effort to free Harry from Dumbledore's plan without turning him into another Dark Lord and make a better life for himself in the process. Naturally, things stray from their planned path very fast.

Seems to be worth reading as well.

If someone is interested, I can probably spare the time to go over the fics I've read and recommend what I liked, but right now I'll limit myself to Calanor due to his works being sufficiently obscure as to not be easily noticeable otherwise (and maybe other obscure but good authors I find).

For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of WWII

When Books Could Change Your Life.

Here's a snippet:

When we’re children, all the books we read are handed down to us, like the Ten Commandments, by grownups, who seem like, and sort of are, a different order of being from ourselves. They’re the gods of childhood, bigger and older and more experienced; they know more than we do, imparting what wisdom to us they think we can bear, empowered to tell us what to do. I’m over 40 now, no longer by even the most charitable definition a young adult, and I’m starting to realize, in something like panic, that I don’t understand anything, and that nobody else seems to know any more about it than I do. There aren’t any grownups.

I would amend this to say there are a few grownups, and that the next step after noticing one's ignorance should be to extinguish it if possible.

Another snippet:

Books that unabashedly purport to supply all the answers sell like Hula-Hoops or Viagra. This genre is called “wisdom literature” if it’s old enough to be respectable or “self-help” if it’s by someone who’s still alive and making money off it, and ranges in credibility and earnestness of intention from the Tao te Ching and Aurelius’ Meditations to shameless dogshit like The Secret.

If Free Will Doesn't Exist, Neither Does Water

How Much Tech Can One City Take?

The Weatherman is Not a Moron.

Snippet 1:

Our views about predictability are inherently flawed. Take something that is often seen as the epitome of randomness, like a coin toss. While it may at first appear that there’s no way to tell whether a coin is going to come up heads or tails, a group of mathematicians at Stanford is able to predict the outcome virtually 100 percent of the time, provided that they use a special machine to flip it. The machine does not cheat — it flips the coin the exact same way (the same height, with the same strength and torque) over and over again — and the coin is fair. Under those conditions, there is no randomness at all.

Snippet 2:

For centuries, meteorologists relied on statistical tables based on historical averages — it rains about 45 percent of the time in London in March, for instance — to predict the weather. But these statistics are useless on a day-to-day level. Jan. 12, 1888, was a relatively warm day on the Great Plains until the temperature dropped almost 30 degrees in a matter of hours and a blinding snowstorm hit. More than a hundred children died of hypothermia on their way home from school that day. Knowing the average temperature for a January day in Topeka wouldn’t have helped much in a case like that.

What will the billion dollar brain projects do?

Excerpt:

The Human Brain Project sells itself as aiming to “simulate a complete human brain in a supercomputer” but this is clearly bollocks. [,..]

It’s interesting that this claim makes the press kit and the flashy video but the actual report (pdf) has much more sober claims about ‘simulating brain dynamics’ and the like.

But it’s important to realise that while their big sell is nonsense, the project is likely to genuinely revolutionise neuroscience in a way that could push the field light years ahead.

What Markram has realised is that the single biggest barrier to progress in neuroscience is the co-ordination, sharing and integration of data.

Essentially, it’s a problem of information architecture but quite frankly, you can’t sell that to politicians and they can’t sell it to the public. Hence the ‘simulating a complete human brain’ fluff.

Posner, Thinking about Catastrophe.

Dave Hitt, Name Three (h/t Qiaochu).

Some Alternatives to Bayes' Rule.

Communication and Deception in 2-Player Games.

A General Theory of Scientific/Intellectual Movements.

Montibeller & Durbach, Behavioral Analytics: A Framework for Exploring Judgments and Choices in Large Data Sets.