Open thread, July 28 - August 3, 2014

Sightings:

• Arguments that aren't actually arguments: argument by tribal affiliation was certainly in full force, as well as a certain general condescension bordering on insult.
• Statistical illiteracy: in an only minor variant of your hypothetical exchange, I said that very few people are doing too much exercise (tacitly, relative to the number of people who are doing too little), to which someone replied that they had once overtrained to their detriment, as if this disproved my point.

I was also struck by how weird it was that people were nitpicking totally incidental parts of my post, which, even if granted, didn't actually deduct from the essence of what I was saying. This seemed like a sort of "argument by attrition", or even just a way of saying "go away; we can tell you're not one of us."

A general pattern I've noticed: when processing an argument to which they are hostile, people often parse generalizations as unsympathetically as they can. General statements which would ordinarily pass without a second thought are taken as absolutes and then "disproved" by citations of noncentral examples and weird edge cases. I think this is pretty bad faith, and it seems common enough. Do we have a name for it? (I have to stop myself doing it sometimes.)

Your symbolic arguments made me laugh.

It's a first contact situation. You need to establish basic things first, e.g. "do you recognize this is a sequence of primes," "is there such a thing as 'good' and 'bad'," "how do you treat your enemies," etc.

Simplicio: "Well I know someone who is X but isn't Y, so there goes that theory"

“Aren't you afraid of flying after that plane was shot down?” “No; flying is still much safer than driving, even taking terrorist attacks into account.” “But that plane was shot down!!!”

f) Logical illiteracy:

Example 1:

Salviati: " If A then B"

Simplicio: "But A isn't true therefore your argument is invalid"

Sorry for being nit-picky, but that is partly linguistic illiteracy on Salviati's part. Natural language conditionals are not assertible if their antecedent is false. Thus, by asserting "If A then B", he implies that A is possible, with which Simiplicio might reasonably disagree.

I've actually seen an argument online in which some social justicers (with the same bad habits as in the story above) were convinced that it is acceptable to care about male circumcision on the grounds that it made SRS (sexual reassignment surgery) more difficult for trans women. Typically (in this community), if you thought male circumcision was an issue - you were quickly shouted down as a dreaded MRA (men's rights activist).

Don't think that'd work. Traditional practices and attitudes are a sacred category in this sort of discourse, but that doesn't mean they're unassailable -- it just means that any sufficiently inconvenient ones get dismissed as outliers or distortions or fabrications rather than being attacked directly. It helps, of course, that in this case they'd actually be fabrications.

Focusing on feelings is the right way to go, though. This probably needs more refinement, but I think you should do something along the lines of saying that exercise makes you feel happier and more capable (which happens to be true, at least for me), and that bringing tangible consequences into the picture helps people escape middle-class patriarchal white Western consumer culture's relentless focus on immediate short-term gratification (true from a certain point of view, although not a framing I'd normally use). After that you can talk about how traditional cultures are less sedentary, but don't make membership claims and do not mention outcomes. You're not torturing yourself to meet racist, sexist expectations of health and fitness; you're meeting spiritual, mental, and incidentally physical needs that the establishment's conditioned you to neglect. The shock is a reminder of what they've stolen from you.

You'll probably still get accusations of internalized kyriarchy that way, but it ought to at least be controversial, and it won't get you accused of mansplaining.

You're right.

I was glad to at least disrupt the de facto consensus. I agree that it's worth bearing in mind the silent majority of the audience as well as those who actually comment. The former probably outnumber the latter by an order of magnitude (or more?).

I suppose the meta-level point was also worth conveying. Ultimately, I don't care a great deal about the object-level point (how one should feel about a silly motivational bracelet) but the tacit, meta-level point was perhaps: "There are other ways, perhaps more useful, to evaluate things than the amount of moral indignation one can generate in response."

I don't think it's a good idea to get into a discussion on any forum where the term "mansplaining" is used to stifle dissent

True for a serious discussion, but such forums make for interesting ethnographic expeditions :-) And if you're not above occasional trolling for teh lulz... :-D

Only because I had a clear, concise, self-contained point to make and I figured I'd be able to walk away once I was done. I'll know better next time.

Sidetrack: I'm imagining a shock bracelet to discourage involvement in pointless internet arguments. How would it identify them?

That's probably a FAI-complete problem. See also: http://xkcd.com/810/

Would people use it?

A thing I would like is this. I would totally enable this on LW if it was an option. (And if someone volunteered to write a Firefox plugin to achieve the same client-side, they'd have all my gratefulness.)

It's called the Pavlok. It seems to be able to monitor a variety of criteria, some fairly smart.

I imagine it could be interfaced to an app that could give shocks under all manner of chosen conditions.

Classic bash.org :-D

#4281 +(27833)- [X]

<Zybl0re> get up
<Zybl0re> get on up
<Zybl0re> get up
<Zybl0re> get on up
<phxl|paper> and DANCE
* nmp3bot dances :D-<
* nmp3bot dances :D|-<
* nmp3bot dances :D/-<
<[SA]HatfulOfHollow> i'm going to become rich and famous after i invent a device
that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet

I mentioned beeminder and that I use it. Don't think anyone picked up on that part, cash evidently being less triggering than electricity.

Skip to section VIII.

Though note that an insurance may regardless be useful if you have self-control problems with regard to money. If you've paid your yearly insurance payment, the money is spent and will protect you for the rest of the year. If you instead put the money in a rainy day fund, there may be a constant temptation to dip into that fund even for things that aren't actual emergencies.

Of course, that money being permanently spent and not being available for other purposes does have its downsides, too.

I appreciate the extention on my thought process. It is very clear to me that since you have to pay an insurance premium buying insurance is necessarily a net loss. Buying insurance is very meaningful before a rainy day fund is filled up, if emergency financing methods are not available through a credit card or very trustworthy person and if the insurance contracts include other services, e.g. getting liabilities of the other party paid in case of their unwillingness to pay.

This is implicit in my phrasing

rare events with disastrous consequences

but made explicit by your post and will be included in the end report. Generally I come to the conclusion that buying insurance is a necessity unless you are perversely rich and even then there is some meaning found in insurance as even insurance companies themselves are insured. Just go for contracts with high co-pay to lower the exposition to the insurance premium which is basically just unnecessary bureucracy in case of small claims, as in the example of the $1000 dollar computer. For things in that price class I read an interesting sentence "if you can not afford to buy it twice, you can't afford it in the first place" alluding to self-insurance.

I'll admit that the basis for my statement is from the seemingly lack of much negative user reports or studies that reported high negative reactions regarding safety, rather than experiments specifically demonstrating safety.

a review behind a firewall.

Here you go: https://pdf.yt/d/I3KvgDrqP-uVjm0e / https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85192141/2014-priori.pdf

Thank you! These changes both make sense; I will adjust the tournament structure as you described and enter your bot when the tournament is open.

Can you explain the rationale behind the elimination setup a little more? An elimination tournament seems less fair than pure round-robin. Moreover, I ran some tests with various combinations of the example bots from the tutorial, and what generally happens is the bots with strategies along the lines of "I'll cooperate if you do" (i.e. tit-for-tat, justiceBot, mirrorBot) rise to the top and then just cooperate with each other, resulting in a multi-way tie. If the actual pool of submissions contain enough bots with that kind of strategy, a large tie seems inevitable. This result doesn't sound very exciting for a competition, but is there is some sense in which it is theoretically "better" than round-robin?

Edit: This outcome doesn't always happen, but it happens most of the time.

Well I don't like the dragon parable either. It's overlong, a bit condescending and ignores the core problem that anti-aging research has done a pretty poor job of showing concrete achievements, even if it's right that it's under-prioritized. I was not a fan of yours exactly because I think the parable elides the most important parts of the actual topic. Even if a direct discussion would be flamey, it's not better to discuss a poor proxy. I'm not trying to pick on you, I just think you tried to define the problem with some premises that were well worth dispute.

There are all sorts of other bad analogies out there though: "If canada launched missiles at the US, how would it respond?", even though the US hasn't turned Canada into a prison-state over the course of 50 years, is one on the news a lot right now.

Parables about the danger of nuclear weapons that ignore the fact that this danger was successfully handled (there was something on here using it as an analogy for AI).

Also, when parables are kind-of-but-not-really trying to be coy about what they're actually about is a bit annoying, leading to stilted writing (but that's the least of my issues).

EY also has a lot of dubious parables, but tackling those is a subject for a bigger post.

And of course there's the whole genre of parables where two fictional interlocutors are arguing, the strawman 'loses' the argument, and that's supposed to convince us of something. I think LW manages to avoid overt versions of this.

In the realm of politics (both Red/Blue and further-from-mainstream) people often apply "argument by utopia", which suffers similar issues in that it attempts to prematurely define convenient facts and use a narrative to elide gritty, worthwhile details of an issue.

What would you think of the following solution?

Announce 'I would like to have conversations about the controversial topic Pick-up Artistry. Because talking about it publicly can result in problems, If you want to talk with me about that topic, please send me a message stating your position on the topic.'

By keeping it open like that and not stating your own position, it seems to be about as not prone to mindkill as you could get.

The downside is, private conversations don't have as much bounce effects. For instance in the prior mentioned thread, Viliam_Bur essentially created a post which I don't think would ever get paralleled in a series of private conversations.

(Viliam_Bur's post for reference: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/klx/ethics_in_a_feedback_loop_a_parable/b5oz

I get this. And I think many parables profoundly fail in this. They create a simplistic narrative and conclusion, then make it harder to argue about by transferring the logic over to an analogue.

Then it's hard to get the discussion back onto important details.

De-biasing and removing words that trigger an immediate emotional response is one major use of analogies too though.

It is an attempt to extract one or two key ideas

Given how it portrays women as an undifferentiated passive object with no preferences or any input into the process, I'd say this attempt failed.

Yup. The simplest formulation I have is this one.

There is this paper, http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Hintze-Problem-class-dominance-in-predictive-dilemmas.pdf which was an honors thesis.

More discussion relevant to the state of UDT and TDT in this comment: http://lesswrong.com/lw/k3m/open_thread_2127_april_2014/au6e

I've suspected that food might have more affect on people in general than general opinion says it does. But I act really differently on my diet vs. when eating what most Americans eat (I haven't tried eating normally since childhood because the effects are too unpleasant, but I've made enough mistakes in a row to come close on one occasion - see my comment to James_Miller), and most other people act more like me on a good diet than me on a bad diet.

I've considered generalizing from one example when it comes to people who do act similar to me with a bad diet. I tend to keep quiet about it because it comes off as really insensitive to tell someone that their depression might be caused by the candy they eat, when I don't have any evidence for that besides generalizing from my own experience.

Good hypothesis. I still don't think I'm completely normal, because when I eat a typical American diet I can't function in society, which most people seem to be able to do. (Mainly thinking of a family trip where I ate out a lot and wasn't as careful as usual, and after a couple days I was breaking down crying about once a day, at things that would normally just annoy me.) But then, I could see the more subtle symptoms being things that people assume are chronic problems they can't change. Alternately, my normal is near some kind of borderline for a mental problem and that's why my diet can push it over so easily.

I've also wondered how much of mental illness could be caused by this sort of thing. I was told that as a child, a doctor thought I had ADHD and was about to have me tested, and then my mom forgot to buy bananas at the store one week and my behavior suddenly improve. It seems likely that other children with the same problems I have exist, and most of their parents weren't already alert to diet influences.

Thanks for the app link. I don't have iphone, but I bet I can find something similar for android.

I guess what I should do first is hit up a library database and find out if anyone has already researched this. (I've made a few efforts to look it up before, but mostly just google searches - though I did find that mental symptoms for corn and milk allergies aren't unheard of.) If nutritionists don't think food works this way, but also haven't studied this specifically and found it false, I'm not sure if I should try to do my own experiment or not.

Yes, you're right. I didn't like the change that's all, and was hoping for a majority to back me. But if anyone wants to do that, that would certainly be a good idea

Oops. Did I mess something up?

I have us being different by a factor of 10^40, but yeah, that's a bit surprising. Maybe we're far enough out in the tails that the normal approximation is breaking down?

When I know I'm to be visited by one of my parents and I see someone who looks like my mother, should my first thought be "that person looks so unlike my father that maybe it is him and I'm having a stroke"? Should I damage my eyes to the point where this phenomenon doesn't occur to spare myself the confusion?

This comment rubbed me the wrong way and I couldn't figure out why at first, which is why I went for a pithy response.

I think what's going on is I was reacting to the pragmatics of your exchange with Coscott. Coscott informally specified a model and then asked what we could conclude about a parameter of interest, which coin was chosen, given a sufficient statistic of all the coin toss data, the number of heads observed.

This is implicitly a statement that model checking isn't important in solving the problem, because everything that could be used for model checking, e.g., statistics on runs to verify independence, the number of tails observed to check against a type of miscounting where the number of tosses don't add to 1,000,000, mental status inventories to detect hallucination, etc., is left out of the statistic communicated.

Maybe Coscott (the fictional version who flipped all those coins) did model checking or maybe not, but if it was done and the data suggested miscounting or hallucination, then Coscott wouldn't have stated the problem like this.

So, yeah, the points you raise are valid object-level ones, but bringing them up this way in a problem poser / problem solver context was really unexpected and seemed to violate the norms for this sort of exchange.

Seems Michael Jackson is back from the dead and commenting on Louie's blog. The salubrious powers of vitamin D know no bounds!

if you don't already have the gene for it.

Well, I definitely agree that we should make non-super intelligent AIs for study, and also for a great many other reasons. But it's perhaps less clear what 'too stupid to foom' actually means for an AGI. There was a moment when a hominid brain crossed an invisible line and civilization became possible; but the mutation precipitating that change may not have obviously been a major event from the perspective of an outside observer. It may just have looked like another in a sequence of iterative steps. Is the foom line in about the same place as the agriculture line? Is it simpler? Harder?

On the other hand, it's possible to imagine an experimental AGI with values like "Fulfill [utility function X] in the strictly defined spatial domain of Neptune, using only materials that were contained in the gravity well of Neptune in the year 2000, including the construction of your own brain, and otherwise avoid >epsilon changes to probable outcomes for the universe outside the domain of Neptune." Then fill in whatever utility function you'd like to test; you could try this with each new iteration of AGI methodology, once you are actionably worried about the possibility of fooming.

The internships I have found so far through resources like the State department and usajobs.gov are all specifically for students. I've also emailed the person in charge of State department internships, asking if she knows of any non-student internships, and she has not heard of any.

Of course, this does not mean there is no cache of non-student internships out there. I simply have not found any through the resources I know of.

I have yet to find out. Currently I am in talks with an IT company for a paid internship where I could acquire some IT-related experience such as setting up and understanding IT infrastructure and working in a larger coding project. There is some appeal to that. On the other hand I love mathematical models which this kind of field would be lacking. A major problem of mine is that I am absolutely not willing to work long hours as I value my time very highly and want to use it to learn about the world around us for the time I am without a family or spend it with my family for the time I am with a family.

Oh nice! I was planning to match my purchase price in a Miri donation so they got a piece anyway. Thanks for speedy reply.

It's the "Saving the World - Progress Report" I mentioned elsewhere.

Nabokov: "[reality is] one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes".

All of these violate this proposed rule.

After reading some of these comments, there are more exceptions than that, and I wrote it confusingly. So how about this: you cannot have more than one consonant at the same side of a syllable without extenuating circumstances. Having two of them have the same place of articulation (like the s and t in backstop), is a common one. s and z seem to only be possible to place after consonants that are voiced and unvoiced respectively. Neither can be placed after a ʒ (the second half of a j sound).

That should be "consistently pronounced." However the native speakers consistently pronounce something is right.

The pronounce it in a way that violates the theory of what can and cannot be pronounced in Japanese. As far as I can understand, the Japanese alphabet has one character for each syllable. Each syllable has one consonant, then one or more vowels, then possibly an n. There is no syllable "sem".

I don't know if they always pronounce it "sempai". I know it is at least sometimes written "senpai". I just meant that it's very common to pronounce that way, even though it shouldn't be possible at all. If they have gratuitous English that has a syllable ending in a consonant, they stick a vowel after it. For example, "red" becomes "redo" (and the d is particularly t-like, and the r is something that has no English equivalent).

1) The clusters in "upthrust" and "backstop" actually have three consonantal sounds, even if some of those sounds are written as digraphs. This debate is going to be very difficult if we're stuck to English or any language whose spelling makes little sense, if at all. Ghoti and all that.

2) Those clusters aren't in a single syllable. Up-thrust. Back-stop. Black-strap. Schatz-kam-mer. Op-schrij-ven. Apart from the exotic example you cite (and that time a Muppet tried to pronounce the entire alphabet as a single word), I haven't seen more than three consonants in a single syllable.

How do you tell if it's a consonant or just part of a diphthong? For example, is the y in may a consonant? If so, how about the y sound in mate?

Also, by that reasoning, even the r in beard, which has another vowel in it, would have to be a vowel since it's immediately followed by a consonant.

It says that it's the middle part of a vowel. That's not clear at all, considering that you can have more than one vowel in the middle and you don't need consonants at the ends.

You don't put a w or a y in the middle of a syllable, but it's frequent to put the corresponding sound there. You just don't spell it with a w or y. r is frequently put in the middle of a vowel with consonants at both ends. There is often no other vowel there. There's always another vowel written there, but the only sound made is an r sound. For example, bird, herd, and turd just have the r sound. Beard has a y sound before the r sound, but since it has a consonant after the r, the r clearly can't be a consonant.