Open Thread, November 15-22, 2013

Representativeness heuristic - Most liars are politicians.

Status quo bias -- Fear of losing one's social standing.

Recency illusion -- Belief that a word is new when it was really coined by Jane Austen.

Choice-supportive bias -- Pro-abortion bias.

Risk compensation -- Making a daring attack at Kamchatka and then fortifying.

The actual procedure is you must try, you must record your thinking, you must ask.

That's...that's terrible. That it would feel worse to have a chance of resurrection than to have closure. It sounds depressingly plausible that that's people's true rejection, but I hope it's not.

Religion doesn't have the same problem, and in my experience it's because of the certainty. People believe themselves to be absolutely certain in their belief in the afterlife. So there's no closure problem, because they simply know that they'll see the person again. If you could convince people that cryonics would definitely result in them being resurrected together with their loved ones, then I'd expect this particular problem to go away.

That could be because they believe that everyone will be resurrected.

Assuming your closure hypothesis is true, I think this is it. With cryonics, not only do you have to worry about the low chance of getting resurrected, but you also have to worry about the state of the cryonics facilities that store your loved ones while you're still alive.

why the same thing doesn't happen with religions that believe in an afterlife

Because with religion you return to life in afterlife which is entirely different from "normal" life. And with cryonics you return to life still in normal life, just after some time has passed.

If this is the case, then one might ask why the same thing doesn't happen with religions that believe in an afterlife.

The religion I'm familiar with (dunno about others) explicitly says that the death of either spouse terminates the marriage.

That could be because they believe that everyone will be resurrected.

Yeah, but some people will go to heaven and other people will go to hell, so I don't think that's the answer.

What is meant by closure? Is it just about being concerned as to what happens to them while they're frozen? Or does it mean that people want their loved ones to die at some point?

A person A uses "common sense" to suggest a solution X, which seems obvious to them.

Research shows that in reality, Y is much better than X, and sometimes X is actually not even helpful.

A person B says: See? This is why you should always collect and evaluate data!

A person C says: No, the real lesson is that we should use common sense which obviously recommends Y! Why didn't anybody use their common sense?

SiteMeter in the sidebar was the cause of this. It has been removed.

Yeah, same here. Little video on the bottom-right corner starts playing randomly. Not related to any LW topic I can think of.

My usual browsers are pretty much locked down all the time, but I dug out IE and looked at some LW pages. Didn't see any ads, video or not.

I would suspect malware, but it's also possible that other browser tabs (e.g. Facebook) are playing games...

P.S. Oh, a plug-in I have says there are three "requests" on this page from SpecificMedia (http://specificmedia.com/) and it does seem to specialize in video advertising.

 <!-- Site Meter -->
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<a href="http://s18.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s18lesswrong" target="_top">
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I'm not seeing anything like that on Windows 8/Firefox, Ubuntu/Firefox, or iOS/Safari. What OS and browser are you using?

At NYU a month or so back, I saw a flier for paid participation in an experiment which assesses your negotiation skills, and vitally, offers feedback. I don't know if you're in the correct area, but if you are, it might be worth looking into whether it's still running (I don't know for a fact that it is, but I do know that other advertized studies have run for significantly longer periods than that.)

There are plenty of real world situations where you can negotiate prices. If you buy groceries at a chain such as Walmart you can't negotiate prices.

If you however buy them at a farmers market you can.

Even if you buy a hot dog at a street vendor you can negotiate for price.

Are there games that are very close to real world negotiations?

A friend of mine learned negotiating by trading world of Warcraft items. I think he brought WoW-gold for 50€ and used that as capital basis for trading the items.

When you want some form of interacting with your friends, you could bet with them frequently. Betting means that you can negotiate the odds.

In real life, do you feel high-status or low-status? High-status people feel like they deserve more, so it would be probably natural for them to extract as much value as possible, while "the bare minimum is good enough for me" would be a natural attitude of a low-status person.

You may value saving one life for $200, but maybe you're not willing to pay $400 to save two lives

This is what scope insensitivity is. The original paper calls it "purchase of moral satisfaction" -- the revealed preference in these experiments is for an internal state of moral satisfaction as opposed to the actual lives you're saving. Like hunger, the internal state is quickly satiated and so exhibits diminishing returns, but actual lives do not exhibit diminishing returns (in the relevant range, for humans, on reflection).

Eliezer's answer (I can't find it at the moment) is that there are many more lives around, and it seems unlikely that U(875,431 people die) - U(875,430 people die) is that different from U(875,430 people die) - U(875,429 people die).

(OTOH, once you've spent $200 to save a life, you have $200 less, and so the marginal utility of another $200 is larger.)

What would the decreasing marginal value be in the charity example? If we're just talking fuzzies, isn't that scope insensitivity?

That does raise the question of why you only value lives you saved. If all lives are important, marginal value won't change much over one life saved.

It seems you're confused about what scope insensitivity means.

If you also want someone to review your post, and the content is at least mildly interesting, I would be happy to do a thorough job.

The Welcome Thread is for newcomers, so it would make more sense on the front page, not the sidebar.

I also personally wish there were a "Latest Media Thread" link in Discussion, but I understand others might consider it visual pollution or clutter (even though I don't agree that it should be an issue).

I pretty rarely wrestle with people (or otherwise have such close physical contact), so if someone I have a crush on is literally sitting on top of me pinning me on my back, I have trouble staying calm. (I'm thinking of a particular time this happened to me. I felt about like Taylor does in your Worm quote.)

I've just finished Worm! At the pace of 10^5 words/week it left me little time for other activities. I hope someone makes a movie out of this web novel, it's so visual.

Anyway, the passage you quoted seems like a perfectly good description of one's physical contact with her crush. Especially if it's the first crush of a not-quite 16 year-old girl.

I've had moments like that. It's much more of a thing I think when you're extremely lonely and inexperienced. But I still get emotional thrills when sitting in very close contact to someone I find attractive regardless of the fact that I have plenty of physical fun these days.

Yes. Not even being attracted to anyone, physical contact (especially the close kind in grappling) tends to have me consciously trying not to panic over those sorts of implications. It might be a cultural thing? Possibly mixed with personality type/experience?

(Yes, it is annoying.)

My best guess is to delay the discovery/acceptance of science. Imagine a world where Descartes never made his clever arguments (the hand etc.) that made it possible to pursue natural philosophy in a way that was compatible with Christianity. Or one in which western Christianity took up a ban on idol-like representations (as Islam has - a friend tells me it very nearly got there, and changing one influential essay would be enough), so art was not pursued the same way, projective geometry didn't arise, and the axiomatic revolution never happened, or happened much later.

Or, being more subtle, what about a world with no islands - that is, no places where heretics could go into exile but continue working on their heretical things. The Netherlands was able to be such a place because of the defensibility of swamplands and its position as a pawn in wider political machinations, right? I'm trying to think of the kind of world that would give rise to a strong, unified government - which then wouldn't even need to be particularly evil, just populist and follow the typical medieval outlook. What about a world where weapons of mass destruction were easily available, where any reasonably competent person could create a city-destroying weapon from naturally available materials?

People learn best through pain. What about a world that has embraced this - where torture is an everyday fact of life, what you do to kids as part of bringing them up, what you do to subordinates who need to acquire a new skill?

Lead poisoning makes people stupid and aggressive - not enough to make society collapse, but enough to make everyone's lives a little bit worse. What about a world where, rather than gold and copper and the like, the aesthetically attractive metals are the kind that cause heavy metal poisoning.

If you can pick the physical, but not the social, makeup then you don't have sufficient precision to reliably pick out a world that is actually significantly worse of than your home timeline - if it supports humans, either it has social and technological structures conductive to a high-utility equilibrium social order, or it can be dystopian. Note that base-line earth is largely dystopian in the sense I mean here! Most of the population is living lives much poorer than our understanding would permit. , and you will not be able to reliably predict the social structures at all from the information you have. Which also means picking a world certain to have problems you can solve is impossible, and you will in fact be certain to land in a world with social and political structures you dont understand at all. Which will probably cause you difficulties.

Best bet for landing somewhere where you can do some actual good, with a skillset that will allow you to do so? Study the engineering principles of heavy EE, hydro-power, Nuclear Engineering, metallurgy, and the techniques of the modern agricultural revolution.. Pick a world with no easily available fossil fuels. With sufficient knowledge it should be possible to specify out a path to an industrial economy that goes "Muscles and animals->Hydro->Nukes" and you are likely to have some info which is useful to the locals regardless of what level they start at.

What Earth-like world would maximize the amount of good a single person could achieve?

I don't actually believe the following answer, but as we're talking about fiction, and some people might actually think it would work, why not.

A world in which a catastrophe has reduced the population to a group of a few breeding pairs, or just one -- plus yourself, who have managed to survive the catastrophe and preserve your access to the technology of the vanquished civilisation. You use your overwhelming power to take charge of the remaining tribe and direct their development, confident that you can do better than the blind chances of history. You crack some sort of good-enough immortality for yourself, so that you can perpetuate your absolute rule indefinitely, and make humans live they way the clearly ought to. Since you are, for practical purposes, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, failure would be a contradiction in terms.

Here it is as raw HTML, with markup (copied from feedly), you can paste it using the 'HTML' button in the article editor: http://pastebin.com/HuQiP3AV

(Also, use the original URL, don't create a new article: http://lesswrong.com/lw/j20 )

All the posts appear in the RSS feed immediately when they are posted, so I have a copy of it as it was posted. I can't copy the formatting, but the text is here: http://pastebin.com/eHpFVeZY

At this moment, the subreddit settings are "anyone can read, only approved members can contribute". (I hope it also means that only the approved members can vote.)

I'm pretty sure everyone can vote, and that there's not really a way to stop this. But usually for new subreddits, there aren't too many trolls, and they few that are there can be easily handled with moderation.

Why does it work? Best practices for optimizing test scores with Anki? Drawbacks or things to avoid? Success stories? Are there people with learning-styles where Anki would not be effective?

People don't have something like inherent learning styles. They have strategies for learning. Using Anki is a learning style.

One frequent error when making Anki cards is to think that the card should contain the solution to an exam question. That leads to cards that are too complicated.

http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm is a good introduction to how SRS works.

Don't overcomplicate it. Anki allows you to create many "fields" for the card, but you often need two (question, answer) or four (question, footnote for question, answer, footnote for answer). Start now.

Don't worry about creating too many cards, or getting your answers wrong. You learn even by getting wrong answers. The only failure is to stop using Anki. -- Unless the questions are badly designed, in which case don't hesitate to redesign them. For example if there are two questions you often confuse with each other, try replacing them with a question "what is the difference between X1 and X2?".

Create some schedule for using Anki. For example: "the first thing after I start my computer".

Gwern's article is a good place to start.

I've been using Anki for the past few months, and recommend it for learning things. It's also a good way of making use of a daily commute.

The Lesswrong Wiki has pointers to some of the places it's been discussed here.

As a quick summary:

• Make your cards super easy (the answers should be a single word as much as possible, and you should be able to answer it very quickly)
• Use cloze deletion; eg if you want to learn "As part of the reward pathway, dopamine is manufactured in nerve cell bodies located within the ventral tegmental area and is released in the nucleus accumbens and the prefrontal cortex.", you might make cards with:

"As part of the ???? pathway, dopamine is manufactured in nerve cell bodies located within the ventral tegmental area" reward

"As part of the reward pathway, dopamine is manufactured in ???? located within the ventral tegmental area" nerve cell bodies

"As part of the reward pathway, dopamine is manufactured in nerve cell bodies located within the ?????" ventral tegmental area

• Create Anki cards yourself, don't use pre-made decks
• Enter stuff in Anki once you have a basic understanding (i.e. after reading about it or having a lecture etc. - not directly entering facts witout processing them)
• Make cards that ask for pretty much the same information several times (definition of a concept, what's the concept of this definition, such-and such is an example of which concept, etc.)
• Review in little sessions dispersed through the day
• Delete stuff if it feels useless / too difficult. If it's too hard, best to delete it and make several easier cards.

The problem I've seen with trying to sell people on Anki in the outside world is that many places will give you printable flash cards. An easy way to get these into Anki would go a long way.

I occasionally go airsofting, which is quite similar to paintball. The organizers mainly borrow from First Person Shooters for their rules, but if you adapt the rules to something similar to Quirrell's games in Methods of Rationality and throw in ways to do easily conceal information, you might be able to make it work.

First of all, have more than two teams. Two teams don't allow for interesting scenarios such as teaming up, betraying, bluffing... Adding an extra one does.

Don't have "respawns". Failure should be meaningful and you can have "wipe out the enemy" as an objective. It also lowers the time needed to complete an objective.

Give incomplete or inaccurate information to your players about the goals or the layout of your arena. This forces them to quickly process new information they encounter on the battlefield.

There are other things you can do, but I'll have to give it some more thought.

In a way every game is a rationality game, because in almost every game you have to discover things, predict things, etc. In another way almost no game is one, because domain-specific strategies and skills win out over general ones.

One idea is based on the claim that general rationality skills matter more when it's a fresh new game that nobody has played yet, since then you have to use your general thinking skills to reason about things in the game and to invent game-speficic strategies. So what if there were "mystery game" competitions where the organizers invented a new set of games for every event and only revealed them some set time before the games started? I don't know of any that exist, but it would be interesting to see what kinds of skills would lead to consistent winning in these competitions.

There are various other ways you could think of to make it so that the game varies constantly and there's no way to accumulate game-specific skills, only general ones like quick thinking, teamwork etc. Playing in a different physical place every match like in HPMoR's battles is one.

Hi, this is P. from New Jersey, right? (don't want to give away your personal info if you don't wish). I spoke to someone at the MeetUp yesterday who brought up this exact issue.

-Ernie

Things become much easier if you drop the "physical" constraint.

A basic example would be the ability to gain power-ups by demonstrating rationality in some Quake/Unreal FPS environment.

Poker-boxing.

Are there any expats in Japan who might be willing to do me a favor and find out the answer to a technology-related question I have?

Is there a reason why you address expats in Japan instead of people living in Japan?

Standard young-Earther responses, taken from when I was a young-Earth creationist.

Round Earth: Yes. You sort of have to stretch to interpret the Bible as saying the Earth is round or flat, so it's not exactly a contradiction. Things like "the four corners of the Earth" are obvious metaphor.

Animals on the boat: The "kinds" of animals (Hebrew "baramin") don't correspond exactly to what we call species. There are fewer animals in the ark than 2*(number of modern species); this is considered to be a sufficient answer even though it probably isn't. I don't know exactly what level of generality the baramin are supposed to be; I guess it depends on how much evolution the particular creationist is willing to accept. They'll typically use the example of dogs and wolves being the same "kind," but if that's the level of similarity we're talking about then there'll still be an awful lot of kinds.

Amount of water: The Earth used to be a lot smoother. Shallower oceans, lower mountains, etc. So it could be covered with a more reasonable amount of water. We know this because in the genealogies some guy named his son after the fact that "in his day the Earth was divided." (The word for divided, Peleg, means earthquake or cataclysm or something. This verse also doubles as tectonic plates being moved around.)

I don't agree with these, but thought that to avoid strawmanning I should post the l responses that I would have used. Not that they're much better than the straw version, but this is the kind of thing that would have been said by at least one YEC.

Also, amusingly enough, it features a spherical Earth. And I have to wonder how they'll fit "one couple of every species of the Earth" in that ship, huge though it is, without involving Gallifreyan technology.

Biblically speaking, it's seven breeding couples of every "clean" species, one of every unclean.

What's much more nonsensical than fitting all those animals onto the ark in the first place though, is the idea that it would actually save them. You've got predators reduced to equal numbers with their prey species; memory check, what do they live on?

This actually looks better than I expected. I anticipate it to have good visuals and to possibly be worth watching. And there are some redeeming aspects to the storyline; isn't it fundamentally about taking heroic responsibility and doing what is necessary in the face of an existential threat? Now there's also all sorts of other luggage it's pulling around (wait, isn't the existential threat being caused by the one who's asking him to alleviate it?).

Daren Aaronofsky has done some good and rather intense films in the past (Pi, Black Swan, The Wrestler, Requiem for a Dream). He'll likely make it at least powerful if not meaningful.

pattern-match God's behaviour with that of an abusive partner

There's an interpretation of the Bible, or at least the Old Testament, that depicts its god and people as coevolving a workable set of ethics as successive attempts at top-down imposition fail.

This isn't going to fly with the omni(potent|scient|benevolent) God that's standard in modern Christianity, of course, but from my admittedly atheistic standpoint it tallies a lot better with the story as depicted.

You know I've always wondered how the world would react to Modern-Day-Noah if someone demonstrated a miracle or two. Ze has marching orders from on High, power to protect zir autonomy/safety but not compel obedience. Justification is "God Says So" and task is onerous and of no obvious benefit. (Build a big temple/ark/pyramid/whatever). Seems like that could be a pretty cool movie.

It is surprising that more cash ins of the Christian demographic aren't done given the excellent performance of previous bible movies.

in that ship, huge though it is,

It's [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah's_Ark]size[/url] is actually well defined:

it will be 300 cubits long (137.16 m, 450 ft), 50 wide (22.86 m, 75 ft), and 30 high (13.716 m, 45 ft);

There is also a TV adaptation from 1999), where the chronology is a bit mixed-up because it presents the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as some sort of "prelude" to the Flood, whereas in the Bible the Sodom story is several hundred years after Noah. The reason why I'm bringing this up is that in that film, the destruction of Sodom is presented with fireballs/meteorites, which also feature in this linked trailer, so I'm lead to think this film will also distill the two stories together in some way (there is no fire-related destruction in the Bible anywhere near the Flood story).

Also, I'm wondering if they will be incorporating popular/deuterocanonical traditions a la The Passion of the Christ - for example, Methuselah dying seven days before the Flood.

Also, amusingly enough, it features a spherical Earth. And I have to wonder how they'll fit "one couple of every species of the Earth" in that ship, huge though it is, without involving Gallifreyan technology.

I'd strongly caution against fighting a false version of your opponent. Even among biblical literalists, very nearly none believe in a -spherical- (EDIT: flat, thank you for catching the typo) Earth (often citing parts of the bible that call the world a sphere!), and that's been the case for over a millennium. And while the movie probably will have impossible space CGI shenanigans, even the Creationist idiots tend to think of things in terms of "kind" rather than "species" (and often don't understand the later's definition), and try to create some artificial dividing line between macroevolution and animal husbandry.

And about all the water on Earth not being sufficient to actually flood everything; will they have God miraculously, spontaneously and temporarily generate water for that specific purpose, and then later remove it?

The original Jewish version would probably go that way, since it was closer to a cataclysm/Ragnarok event in that belief structure. Modern Christian translations generally just turn it into rain. Given that the actions of a literal magic sky being are part of the premise...

That's not to say Biblical Literalism or Creationism is particularly coherent, nor that it's likely to be a good movie, of course.

If a fully quantum category will be found, and showed to have more than one model, then I think that the idea of reality as an infinite-dimensional configuration space inhabited by an atemporal wave-function should be abandoned.

Why?

There are already examples of quantum theories with multiple interpretations, most famously AdS/CFT. Do these affect your view of realism?

I think this is spectacularly hard to get a robust estimate of, but my wild uninformed guess is your chances of dying of it interacting with your heart condition are less than 25%, and probably less than 5%. (I try not to pull probabilities higher or lower than 5%/95% out of the air - I need a model for that.) That's for the simple case where you don't get addicted and take ever-higher doses or start taking other stimulants too or start smoking, etc.

The only hard information I can get a handle on is that the US manufacturer lists existing cardiovascular conditions as a potential contraindication. I suspect this is on general principles (stimulants are known to make them worse, modafinil is a stimulant, sort-of) rather than on hard data about problems caused.

Reporting systems for drug side effects are haphazard and leaky at best, and it's very hard to do decent analysis. Unusual combinations that aren't very deadly just aren't going to show up in the research.The fact that we haven't heard that it's deadly does, though, put something of a ceiling on just how bad it could be (my 25% above).

Most medics would reckon taking stimulants you don't have to when you have a known cardiovascular condition is unwise. (Although some of them do it themselves in early career.) Quantifying 'unwise' is tricky. There's the general issue of data I just mentioned. Then there's trying to think it through. On the plus side, modafinil is less likely to cause problems for CV patients in the way that other more general CNS stimulants are known to; but on the minus side, we don't properly understand how it does work.

Doctors are by nature very cautious: "first, do no harm" and all that. You might come to a different cost/benefit decision.

FWIW, I wouldn't take it in your shoes. But I don't take it myself, despite having no contraindications. I'm extremely risk averse, particularly about my own life, and place more emphasis on quantity than quality compared to most people (on hedonic adaptation grounds).

a year ago, for about a week, I had sinus bradycardia at 50bpm, sinus tachycardia at 169bpm, occasional wrenching feelings in my chest accompanying 3 beats salvo premature ventricular contractions and premature atrial contractions

Everyone has these, the question is why, how many and for how long. What "condition" were you diagnosed with?

Yes, modafinil elevates heart rate and blood pressure. But probably not as much as caffeine.

The FDA's analysis says (pdf warning) :

Modafinil has not been evaluated in patients with a recent history of myocardial infarction or unstable angina, and such patients should be treated with caution.

In clinical studies of PROVIGIL, signs and symptoms including chest pain, palpitations, dyspnea, and transient ischemic T-wave changes on ECG were observed in three subjects in association with mitral valve prolapse or left ventricular hypertrophy. It is recommended that PROVIGIL tablets not be used in patients with a history of left ventricular hypertrophy or in patients with mitral valve prolapse who have experienced the mitral valve prolapse syndrome when previously receiving CNS stimulants. Such signs may include but are not limited to ischemic ECG changes, chest pain, or arrhythmia. If new onset of any of these symptoms occurs, consider cardiac evaluation.

Blood pressure monitoring in short-term (<3 months) controlled trials showed no clinically significant changes in mean systolic and diastolic blood pressure in patients receiving PROVIGIL as compared to placebo. However, a retrospective analysis of the use of antihypertensive medication in these studies showed that a greater proportion of patients on PROVIGIL required new or increased use of antihypertensive medications (2.4%) compared to patients on placebo (0.7%). The differential use was slightly larger when only studies in OSAHS were included, with 3.4% of patients on PROVIGIL and 1.1% of patients on placebo requiring such alterations in the use of antihypertensive medication. Increased monitoring of blood pressure may be appropriate in patients on PROVIGIL.

I'm not sure we have large enough numbers to give meaningful analysis. I could give a 25% (+/- 22) confidence that you'd likely experience elevated blood pressure, but you'd experience far greater harm from everyday stress or lack-of-exercise. There's a nice big list of serious adverse effects, but two or four out of seven hundred people doesn't seem very useful.

Dietary and psychiatric concerns may also be relevant.

Looks like the makings of a good main post, to me. (Haven't read it all yet)

Five experiments demonstrate that people pay forward behavior in the sorts of fleeting, anonymous situations that increasingly typify people’s day-to-day interactions. These data reveal that—in contrast to the focus of media, laypeople, and prior research—true generosity is paid forward less than both greed and equality. Equality leads to equality and greed leads to greed, but true generosity results only in a return to equality—an asymmetry driven by the greater power of negative affect.

I had the same problem for ages. I've just made a bookmarklet for a google search starting with 'site:lesswrong.com' when I enter 'lw' in the url bar.

I long ago simply set up window manager keybindings for Google and other sites, so I just hit mod-g 'keyword site:lesswrong.com'. If you don't have a hotkey set up for Google... I recommend you set one up. If you do nearly as many searches as I do, you'll find it pays for itself in weeks.

For me it works well.

I have the same problem, although I don't think it's ever returned anything for me.

It works for me-- it's not very efficient in returning what I want-- if I ask for [quotes], the results won't be in chronological order, but if I ask for [quotes $month], they will be-- but it returns results quickly.

I'm using Chrome.

ostensibly

This word does not appear to be the one you want; it does not make sense in this context.

How did you choose the visa expediting company? Did you have recommendations? If a company has a very good reputation it's okay that it put the risk of failure on the client. If it doesn't have a good reputation however, there no real reason why they shouldn't take the risk.

There also the issue of why you don't name the company by it's name. In our times people search the internet to form opinions about companies.

Given the 99.9999...% chance that you are not alive at any given point in the universe's (or multiverse's) timeline...it's extremely unlikely that you would be alive right now, let alone that you would ever have existed in the first place.

There is an arrangement of pieces of clementine peels on my desk right now; it's exceedingly unlikely that that particular arrangement would happen right now at exactly this place. Therefore there must be an infinite amount of universes in which that arrangement exists or something.

I don't understand why you believe quantum mechanics is non-deterministic. Do you, perhaps, believe probability functions are non-deterministic?