Open thread 7th september - 13th september

Would any one be interested if I did some posts on the rhetorical figures of speech? These posts would not be about simple or concise ways to improve your writing. I recommend luke prog's post for that. I want the posts to be more orientated around a discussion on the rhetorical figures of speech and why/when they work. I have some rough notes where I have grouped them into some some simple categories.

Information diet?

I did a quick search on LW but didn't find any important article about information diet. Did I miss something?

Questions worth considering:

• Should we eliminate all news sources like some advocate?
• What about the news that are relevant, e.g. changes in the tax code that you need to know about?

So I'm aiming for the soft spot of eliminating all the unnecessary news while still getting those pieces that are relevant for me.

Any ideas?

A cautionary tale about perverse incentives: Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit.

A redditor has created a .docx document that summarizes which studies have been replicated in recent big psychology replication study.

William Nordhaus thinks the Singularity is not near. Abstract:

What are the prospects for long-run economic growth?, the present study looks at a more recently launched hypothesis, which I label Singularity. The idea here is that rapid growth in computation and artificial intelligence will cross some boundary or Singularity after which economic growth will accelerate sharply as an ever-accelerating pace of improvements cascade through the economy. The paper develops a growth model that features Singularity and presents several tests of whether we are rapidly approaching Singularity. The key question for Singularity is the substitutability between information and conventional inputs. The tests suggest that the Singularity is not near.

A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style

In fine art, especially painting, humans have mastered the skill to create unique visual experiences through composing a complex interplay between the content and style of an image. Thus far the algorithmic basis of this process is unknown and there exists no artificial system with similar capabilities. However, in other key areas of visual perception such as object and face recognition near-human performance was recently demonstrated by a class of biologically inspired vision models called Deep Neural Networks.1, 2 Here we introduce an artificial system based on a Deep Neural Network that creates artistic images of high perceptual quality. The system uses neural representations to separate and recombine content and style of arbitrary images, providing a neural algorithm for the creation of artistic images. Moreover, in light of the striking similarities between performance-optimised artificial neural networks and biological vision,3–7 our work offers a path forward to an algorithmic understanding of how humans create and perceive artistic imagery.

Comparing Artificial Artists

Last Wednesday, “A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style” was posted to ArXiv, featuring some of the most compelling imagery generated by deep convolutional neural networks since Google Research’s “DeepDream” post.

On Sunday, Kai Sheng Tai posted the first public implementation. I immediately stopped working on my implementation and started playing with his. Unfortunately, his results don’t quite match the paper, and it’s unclear why. I’m just getting started with this topic, so as I learn I want to share my understanding of the algorithm here, along with some results I got from testing his code.

How the DSM developed - the 'statistical' part of the name may suggest that the classification of mental disorders is based on the distribution and clustering of dyfunctional behaviours in the general population. No quite...it's more about 'inter-rater reliability', which is if multiple psychiatrists agree that someone has something, then that something exists. This thing, is of course a label learned from psychiatry teachers, back till the psychodynamic days of psychiatry. This changed when the feighner criteria came along which was current to the research at the time, but we've learned a lot about psychiatry in around 40 years. Today, we're still waiting on the NIH to kick start a new domain of discuss based on biological aetiology. At least on LessWrong, we could, perhaps, start using the research domains the NIH is proposing, instead of to-be-dated terms like 'depression' or 'schizophrenia' or 'anxiety' cause we're on the bleeding edge of things like that. Luckily before I submitted this I had a quick look at the original criterion paper. Based on its citations and references, I retract my statement about it being based on evidence - it seems like it's just a formalism of clinical judgement inherited in most cases. Even though there are quantiative studies of clinical observation, they are of a particular kind of patient (e.g. manic-depressive) so they have already been selected in a biased way for the expected behaviour). In addition. the highest sample size for any of these papers is 100, and all obviously from a single place in America. That's the origin of the way psychiatric classification works. It's a shame that psychiatrists and psychometricians are in charge of psychiatric classification, and not public health researchers or economists. Maybe we'd get classifications with tie-ins to disability or subjective self-reports.

If you want to get into academia because you think there will be less organisational politics, Berkley warns it may be worse than the corporate world

Recent discussion topics on Omnilibrium:

• Should companies use implicit association tests to screen potential hires?

• Should the SEC stop requiring companies to do quarterly earning reports?

Does anyone know where I could find a Steelmaned version of the pro-death arguments which people often bring up in discussions (around stagnation, inequality, etc) written by someone who has thought about a post-singularity world?

Good posture isn't something you do, it's the by-product of not pulling yourself out of natural balance/alignment.

I've been thinking about writing a pitch for AI risk that would sidestep some of the usual objections, mostly due to people latching onto the word "intelligence" and bringing up connotations that are irrelevant to the argument. But then it got a bit out of hand and turned into a small fiction story. On rereading it, I'm aware that it might be preaching to the choir. Here goes:

The Danger of Automatic Planning

Imagine that 30 years from now, your smartphone has an app called Automatic Planner. It can accept data from the phone's sensors, and the internet too if you allow it. The main function of the app is to answer natural language questions like "what's the most effective plan for me to achieve goal X, provided that I follow that plan?" Internally it uses fancy machine learning techniques and predictive models, which are trained on things like physics, biology, psychology, economics, etc. This all sounds a little far-fetched, but not much more than Google Translate or Wikipedia would've sounded 30 years ago.

The same app also existed on the previous generation of smartphones and was a huge success. You could ask it for simple everyday things, like getting a cheeseburger, and it would give you directions to the nearest burger joint. Unfortunately the new generation of phones, which has four times more computing power, seems to trigger some kind of weird bug. Most queries still work as before, but sometimes you unexpectedly get an answer like "the best plan is for you to follow this link", followed by a long incomprehensible string of characters. What's worse, the link usually points to some random website that has no relation to the app or to the question being asked.

Once the bug is noticed, the developers push a quick fix to make the app use less computing power on newer phones. That seems to make the problem go away, buying some time for proper investigation. After a bit of cautious poking and prodding, Lawrence, the app's chief developer, asks for the best plan to get a cheeseburger. The app gives him a link to the website of some furniture company in South Africa. Lawrence clicks the link to see what will happen.

Soon after that, the world ends. For the benefit of those of us living in the counterfactual past and wishing to avoid such a future, here's a rough timeline of events:

T+1 second: the furniture company's website is hacked through a vulnerability in the request parser.

T+10 seconds: the next few visitors to the site are owned through an exploit inserted in the main page. Each of their machines starts sending requests to more websites, leading to a cascade reaction.

T+1 minute: the combined computing power of the new botnet exceeds every company or government in the world. Some of the power is shifted from spreading infection to running automatic planning, using the app's original algorithm and Lawrence's original question.

T+2 minutes: a plan with a high chance of success is devised and put into action. Global communications filter goes live. Manufacturing takeover begins.

T+5 minutes: Lawrence and his whole neighborhood have been put into catatonia by carefully chosen stimuli over the internet, to minimize the chance of anything that could prevent Lawrence from getting the cheeseburger. The same happens to key decision makers across the world who could interfere with the plan.

T+10 minutes: first stage defensive perimeter is constructed, using remotely controlled cars and repurposed electronics. Second stage physical defenses are on the way. All airplanes are destructively grounded to minimize risk.

T+30 minutes: manufacturing takeover yields first results.

T+1 hour: (incomprehensible)

...

T+10 years: the Solar System's matter and energy have been put to good use, except for narrow beams of fake sunlight aimed at neighbouring star systems. The Von Neumann probe program is underway. In a secure location, Lawrence receives yet another cheeseburger, due to a small but finite chance that the goal wasn't actually achieved and all previous reports of success were random flukes.

...

Scaling Laws and the Speed of Animals

In a recent issue of the American Journal of Physics, I read an interesting paper by Nicole Meyer-Vernet and Jean-Pierre Rospars examining the top speeds of organisms of varying sizes, from bacteria up to blue whales. They found that the time it takes for an animal to move its own body length is almost independent of mass, across 21 orders of magnitude. They derived a simple scaling argument and order-of-magnitude estimate for this remarkable fact. Before I elaborate further on their paper, I will give an overview of scaling arguments and their power.

There is a false dichotomy in physics, that concepts can either be explained in quasi-philosophical vague descriptive arguments, or in terms of rigorous formulae that take years of study to understand. For example, one could describe general relativity with the bowling-ball-on-a-bedsheet analogy, and when that fails, crack out the Einstein field equations. However, this sad dichotomy is actually a happy trichotomy: in between the two extremes is the powerful tool of scaling arguments.

Neural Networks, Types, and Functional Programming by Christopher Olah

If we think we’ll probably see deep learning very differently in 30 years, that suggests an interesting question: how are we going to see it? Of course, no one can actually know how we’ll come to understand the field. But it is interesting to speculate.

At present, three narratives are competing to be the way we understand deep learning. There’s the neuroscience narrative, drawing analogies to biology. There’s the representations narrative, centered on transformations of data and the manifold hypothesis. Finally, there’s a probabilistic narrative, which interprets neural networks as finding latent variables. These narratives aren’t mutually exclusive, but they do present very different ways of thinking about deep learning.

This essay extends the representations narrative to a new answer: deep learning studies a connection between optimization and functional programming.

In this view, the representations narrative in deep learning corresponds to type theory in functional programming. It sees deep learning as the junction of two fields we already know to be incredibly rich. What we find, seems so beautiful to me, feels so natural, that the mathematician in me could believe it to be something fundamental about reality.

This is an extremely speculative idea. I am not arguing that it is true. I wish to argue only that it is plausible, that one could imagine deep learning evolving in this direction. To be clear: I am primarily making an aesthetic argument, rather than an argument of fact. I wish to show that this is a natural and elegant idea, encompassing what we presently call deep learning.

http://www.examine.com has proven that there's a market for user friendly, layman readable, scientific reviews of subjects where there's a lot of BS. This is also an area that could do significant good by shortening the time between scientific discovery and it's effect on people's decisions.

I've seen quite a few layman readable scientific reviews here on LW, and it seems a great business model for someone who likes that type of research.

Some potential areas for which you could start a website like this:

• Nutrition
• Exercise
• Happiness
• Longevity

(Reposted from the previous OT)

One of my professors claimed that postmodernism, and particularly its concept of "no objective truth", is responsible for much of the recent liberalism of society, through the idea of "live and let live". (Specific examples given were attitudes towards legalization of gay marriage and drugs.) I pointed out that libertarianism and liberalism predated postmodernism historically, and they said that that's true, but you can still trace the popularity back to postmodernism.

Is this historically accurate? If not, is there something I can point to that would convince them? It seems to me that the shift in society is much more a shift on the object level questions than on the meta level "should we ban things we disagree with", but I don't know very much recent history of philosophy (it isn't strictly their field either, so I'm justified in not taking them at face value).

Sup friends, suggest books on subjective probability, statistical inference, or decision theory that are good buys. I have a lot but want to furnish my collection a little. Let's go on a spending spree!!

Also anyone know how to get good deals on used books? Recommend me books in general to purchase as well. De Finetti's textbooks are quite expensive....

Do you think Jaynes was subconsciously motivated to become a leading advocate of Bayesian statistics because of the typographical similarity between his name and the Reverend's? Was Richard Dawkins motivated to become an evolutionary psychologist because of the similarity between his name and Charles Darwin's?

People who are able to reliably create good first impressions when you meet people for the first time, how do you do it? What would you advise?

Hummingbirds find protection building nests under hawks

(Phys.org)—An international team of researchers working in a part of Arizona has found evidence of a hummingbird species benefiting by building nests in trees beneath hawk hunting grounds. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the team describes the study they carried out and just how much safer the hummingbirds appeared to be when living in close proximity to hawks.

To learn more about black-chinned hummingbirds living in Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains, the team walked among the trees looking up, as part of a three year study of hummingbirds living beneath 12 hawk nests. In so doing, they discovered that hummingbird nests beneath hawks were approximately 80 percent safer from Mexican jays eating their eggs than were unprotected nests.

There were two types of hawks involved in the study, Cooper and goshawks, both find food by looking down from their perch high in a tree—when they spot something, such as a jay, they swoop down between the branches and grab their meal. They don't generally target hummingbirds, however, the team noted, likely because they are too small and fast. That led to what the researchers call cones of protection, where nests within a certain area under a hawk's nest would be protected by the hawks. Jays, they noted, were more likely to fly higher in such areas, above the cone.

Meta: this seems to not have shown up on the sidebar OT because you used a dash in the tag instead of an underline.

(Also, is it ok for me to repost my previous OT comment here?)

Imagine that someone offers you a deal: a quantum random number generator will randomly display a message "WIN" or "LOSE". (The chances of each result are non-zero.) If it is "WIN", you will get million dollars. If it is "LOSE", you will be immediately killed painlessly in your sleep.

According to the Quantum Immortality hypothesis, you should take this deal, because in all quantum branches where you will exist you get million dollars, and the quantum branches where you don't exist are simply not your problem. So there is no downside to this bet. Do you agree?

If you said yes, imagine that there are two quantum random number generators available. One of them displays "WIN" with probability 99.99% and "LOSE" with probability 0.01%. The other displays "WIN" with probability 0.01% and "LOSE" with probability 99.99%. Do you have any preference at all about which of these two generators should be used in your case?

Felix Salomon is being mean to Nick Cooney's book on EA and to EA itself. E.g.:

His book appears to be set in a parallel universe in which philanthropists, just by dint of spending money, magically induce positive change elsewhere in the world.

Introducing JASP: A free and intuitive statistics software that might finally replace SPSS

Are you tired of SPSS’s confusing menus and of the ugly tables it generates? Are you annoyed by having statistical software only at university computers? Would you like to use advanced techniques such as Bayesian statistics, but you lack the time to learn a programming language (like R or Python) because you prefer to focus on your research?

While there was no real solution to this problem for a long time, there is now good news for you! A group of researchers at the University of Amsterdam are developing JASP, a free open-source statistics package that includes both standard and more advanced techniques and puts major emphasis on providing an intuitive user interface.

(no affiliation with creators of JASP)

I should be able to resume creating new open threads in time from the next week, if Elo wishes to step down.

Open question: how do you integrate LessWrong.com into your workflow? Do you allocate a time for it? Access the site in an undiciplined manner? Browse according to your whim, or more systematically? Do you have a trigger for going back, or just hope that you remember your account name every morning and haven't lost your memory?

How to change Anki timezone? Where to find free online textbooks?

I'm 12 hours different now and my Anki won't count a "new day" (to let me review my cards) until late in the day. Anyone know how to change the Anki timezone? The manual doesn't seem to say.

And I've heard there are online sources of great books (EY once joked that everything worth reading was online); where can I find those?

How does one work out how important it is to sort out and systematise one's backup/archived files and folders given that they are an emergency something or the other and we live in an age of searchable files and folders?

How does one determine whether they should just grit out chronic pain or go to physician for a referral to a pain specialist Take into account that most Dr's where I'm from just take your word for things, so if you say you're in pain they'll ask you if it's bad enough to see a specialist. There are no reliable pain scales that can control for pain catastrophising which any GP I've heard of would probably bring out unless they had good reason to suspect they're dealing with a hypochondriac, malingerer or someone that's gonna misuse antiinflammatory medication.

On the topic of malingerer's, it's very interesting that it's considered a psychiatric diagnosis in and of itself. It's like a consolation prize for people who want a mental illness but don't. Basically, if you want to be mentally ill, by definition you are!

System admin test comment, please ignore

What are your thoughts on the Unreasonable Institute? http://unreasonableinstitute.org/

What's the best way to get free calibration training?

Are there any examples of people in positions where their job is merely to take on a compartment of responsibility in another individuals life and to make them money?

For instance, a personal data scientist to make more money they are paid an individual with data about that individual

A friend of mine attributes the refugee crisis in the Levantine countries to a severe drought caused by "climate change."

Does "climate change" mysteriously stop at Israel's borders? I haven't heard of any political breakdown or mass emigration from that country.

Singapore is hot, modern, stable, strategically positioned in Asia, economically strong, great for business and English speaking.

However it's also polluted, absent in rural landscapes, difficult for job seekers and authoritarian.

I'm surprised there isn't more rationalist circle jerking around Singapore.