Open thread, 16-22 June 2014

I am an active github R contributor and stackoverflow R contributor and I would be willing to coordinate. Send me an email: rkrzyz at gmail

I'd be interested. More in awesome stuff than R itself. I'm currently at #22 out of 99 in a Kaggle contest and am doing it in R, but don't really know what I'm doing. I do find that participating there is not a bad way to practice.

I'd be interested.

I would be interested

I'd be interested in interesting R projects.

As MathiasZaman said, there is a big push right now to move OT content back into Discussion, and from the increased volume I'm seeing in Discussion lately, I think it's succeeding.

There has recently been a push towards having more discussion in Discussion as opposed to the Open Thread, so your problem might already be solved.

There is an RSS feed, I don't know if you consider that easier.

If you find something excellent in OT, you could mention it in a Good Stuff from OT post.

Is there an easier way to follow Open Threads?

Unless I wan't to post something myself, I just read open threads when they are already closed. Very convenient.

I think discussion would be more useful if the threads were sorted by something like reddit's 'hot' algorythm, rather than being just displayed in order of posting, which causes good threads to be buried by duller new ones.

Open threads are sort of like this as they are essentially "top posts this week"

These considerations would seem to make rooting for any other team immoral from a strict utilitarian perspective.

Only if rooting for a team makes it more likely for it to win. ;-)

I dislike football and I realized a few days ago that a win for the US would bring me the most utility - the largest number of soccer fans will [probably] be upset this way, which should decrease the global popularity of the sport slightly.

At any rate, if you are purely maximazing global utility, then the conclusion looks sounds.

I think I know how to escape this problem partially. The same method works for courts of justice.

It might be pragmatical to give sentences to people to make them examples so new criminals wouldn't do those crimes. Exaggerated sentences. Everytime a court would dish out a verdict, they would double the numbers for jailtime, surely there will be less new criminals when this pattern is maintained. I think it is the approach the US Goverment has tragically taken on whistleblowers too by the way.

Though this logic works in the single event, it's bad policy. What is lost on the general level, from the bigger picture, is fair trials. People lose their ability to believe in a fair court. They can't trust the law, they can't trust society.

The football world cup is similar. You're giving up the fun of football competitions on largescale so that you would preserve some fun on the smallerscale. It's a pyrrhic victory.

Do you think this reasoning is sufficient to deal with the dilemma?

Surely the greatest joy will come to a team that hasn't one for a long time.

Brazilians gain utility from fair victory, not a win at all costs. Not trying to win would increase the chance that Brazil wins at the cost of reducing the fairness of the victory.

Of course, that doesn't apply to just rooting for the other team.

Anecdotally I have observed this. Whomever is more invested in an argument that's at a more-or-less casual level (say, on the internet) can muster more facts and win. Even when the evidence is radically one-sided, it doesn't matter if the person on the right side of the facts doesn't know the evidence well. Anyone of us could lose an argument with people over whether the Earth is flat, if the difference in preparedness was great enough.

Perhaps something like the representativeness heuristic? While more details make something sound more believable, each detail is another thing that could be incorrect.

Looks to be a subtype of the general observation that whoever can establish her authority in an argument wins.

Nice find! Thanks for this.

I guess you should give the same reward, to the most convincing argument, regardless of whether it really convined you or not. It motivates the other people to do their best, and does not influence you in making the decision.

I don't like the idea of overcompensating for biases. I understand the reason behind it, but I am afraid that this approach creates its own specific problems. For example, how much should you overcompensate? I mean, if overcompensating is good, then the more you overcompensate, the more virtuous you are...

Make notes. Otherwise you risk spending a large part of the 1 hour repeating the stuff you learned during the 1 hour yesterday.

If you have little time for learning, only learn one thing, not two in parallel, because that would make it even worse.

Anki works pretty well in short sessions, and distractions don't cause much problems, though you won't get 8 hours out of it.

If not, are there other ways to effectively spend this time towards incremental self-improvement?

Reading textbooks in little pieces might work anyway; it does for me.

I can read textbooks nearly as well during a 20- or 30-minute train ride as I can in more stable situations. (Obviously I read less during a half-hour ride than in an hour spent reading at home, but my rate & retention seem similar in both situations.) There are textbooks I can't just read straight through on a bus, like maths & physics textbooks, but I can't just read straight through them anywhere else, either, because I need a pen & paper for the exercises. But a textbook I can read at home, like an oncology or sociology textbook, is usually a textbook I can read almost anywhere else.

If you've tried this already and found it not to work, ignore this comment! But if you haven't tried it, it's worth a go.

This isn't particularly deep analysis, more just aggregation. Here's my take on the results, though, after some totally biased and ad-hoc tallying:

A total of seventy-five users responded. Convenience, scheduling conflicts, and other personal issues were by far the most common reasons not to attend, as a factor in almost half of the responses. Unfortunately there's not much we can do about this, except possibly giving more thought to location when scheduling, and that seems unlikely to happen given the issues I've seen with finding space and time. Two people felt uncomfortable with an otherwise convenient meetup's location, with a third having no personal complaints but describing complaints from others.

After that, a perception of the participants as too nerdy, weird, or socially awkward seems to be the most common complaint, with ten people citing one or more. A couple of these respondents attended no meetups and were presumably working from perceptions of the LW community at large, but most had. This seems to be a pivotal issue with our community's perception, but I'm not sure what to do about it. I imagine many feel it's a feature rather than a bug.

A lack of structure is a close third, at nine responses. Often this involved uncertainty over time and location, or scheduling difficulties thanks to inadequate information. Games and unstructured discussion seem to be seen as adding little value, with the latter in particular cited as allowing unproductive debate between a couple of participants to dominate meetups. Bad discussion norms were specifically mentioned as a factor in four responses. These are probably the most serious issues we can immediately do anything about: I've personally participated in both structured and unstructured meetups, and the difference is night and day. Establishing some best practices here would go a very long way.

Seven people felt that their meetups were unproductive, adding little value in terms of practical rationality or other useful skills; six complained of boredom. This is likely related to the complaints about structure; several people mentioned both.

Another six people felt intimidated by meetup participants or the LW community, most citing perceived intelligence or technical knowledge. Conversely, five felt that meetup participants were generally unimpressive (my notes say "not awesome enough"); most of these describe a hope for more accomplished peers, perhaps along the lines of Eliezer's mandatory secret identities. I suspect this might be an oblique way of saying they're too nerdy, as above.

Two complained of political differences, and two felt their meetup wasn't diverse enough.

Finally, two respondents described harassing behavior from a participant or organizer.

"Well-being" is a know-it-when-we-see-it sort of thing. Sure it's vague, but I don't begrudge its use.

Let's break down the phrase you just objected to (I have not read SH's book, if that matters): "Increasing the well-being" - roughly correlates with increase utility, diminishing suffering, increasing freedom, increasing mindfulness, etc. Good things! And if defining it further gets into hairsplitting over competing utilitarianisms, then you might as well avoid that route. "Of all conscious creatures" - well, you obviously can't do anything immoral to a rock. Maybe you kick a rock and upset the nest of another creature, but you haven't hurt the rock. But you can do immoral things to conscious creatures, which can be argued to be pretty broad; certainly broader than just humans.

So I think this is as concrete as many one-sentence summaries of morality.

Closely related is the "horns effect," named by analogy to the "halo effect."

Pre-empt other people's jokes.

High frequency stock trading.

Can you chain these wormholes and send information 10 + 10 + 10 + ... seconds back in time?

Attempt Harry's trick to solve NP problems.

Have a program use its own output as input, effectively letting you run programs for infinite amounts of time, which depending on how time travel is resolved may or may not give you a halting oracle.

Also you can now brute force most of mathematics:

one way to do this is using first order logic which is expressive enough to state most problems. First order logic is semi-decidable which means that there are algorithms which will eventually return a proof for correct statements. Since your computer will take at most ten seconds to do this, you will have a proof after ten seconds or know that the statement was incorrect if your computer remains silent.

Given that you obviously broke both General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory (see Hawking's Chronology Protection Conjecture) on a macroscopic scale, I recommend using an array of those as a source of free unlimited energy. Please disregard the small side effect of vacuum decay leading to the Universe destruction bubble expanding at the speed of light.

Set up a website where people can send messages to themselves in the past in multiples of ten seconds, for a cost. Program it to automatically increase the cost as you start running out of bandwidth. Let other people figure out what to do with it.

There are a few experiments that you should try to see what you could do. For example, it seems like a good idea to have it send a message about a car accident far enough back to prevent it. But if you get the message that your car will crash, you'd have to not drive and send the message to prevent a time paradox, which means that you might get the message even if the car didn't crash. You could experiment by using things like coin flips to determine car crashes. My guess is that if you send a very specific signal in the case of something bad, then you're very unlikely to get that signal unless it would happen. Otherwise, every signal would be self-consistent, and thus equally likely.

If you already know how to touch type, how do you know if you should train some more so you can type faster?

With skimming the article it seems like another anecdotal report of speaking for people learning to type better. Does it provide any systematic evidence for the claim?

My Skeptics stackexchange question about the issue of programmer productivity due to typing is open for a long time without anyone providing real evidence for the claim.

As far as I understand the big tech companies don't believe that it's predictive of programmer quality to the extend that the test typing speed at interviews either.

I don't know how to reply on your blog, so I write my thoughts on a couple of points here.

An event like “a hurricane appears before the end of the year” may harm an insurance company that offers flood insurance, without there being some firm that benefits by the same amount who wants to take the other side of the risk.

The bet on the event itself is already the insurance. Or viewed differently, the insurance itself is a bet in some kind of prediction market on the event. Which goes to show that it does not need two economic actors with opposite exposition to some event, as in your example of the baker and the farmer w.r.t wheat prices, but it is enough that two actors have different exposition to some event. Though of course in the case of non-opposite exposition there will have to be some kind of premium for one of the sides, meaning that the market price can not be interpreted simply as a probability of the event happening.

Edit: The more I think about it, the more I have to disagree with the basic point about liquidity. For a proper market there needs to be unbiased participant and the person being affected by the event. And there always is the second person or the outcome of the event is without any meaningful economic consequence. Weather affects groth of plants, avenues visited by customers and traffic for transport of goods. Sports outcomes affect a populations happiness and their choices of activity afterwards. Scientific results make specific products plausible or impossible. And so on.

If I am affected by a specific outcome of an event in a positive way, I can reduce my exposition by betting on the opposite outcome and increase my exposition by betting on the exact outcome. If there is a person being affected in opposite ways than I am, we can take the opposite sides of the bet. Else I need someone willing to merely take on some more risk than he is already exposed to, though the person will want to be compensated for that additional risk in some way. I wonder, is this distortion measurable so to recover the "underlying" probabilites?

Here you go: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ydmn7l1mfhufgj8/SolsticeEve_2012.pdf

How should people facing colonization act to avoid cultural and economic subjugation?

They ought to subjugate themselves, obviously!

Or, to be a little less flip; if you are facing such a fate, it is because your society is overwhelmingly weaker than its rivals. Yes, as Lumifer, below, suggests, the Native Americans needed weaponry, but it's hardly an accident that they lacked it - they weren't capable of manufacturing such things for themselves, or of producing anything of value to offer in exchange for the weaponry. As a result, they were forced to rely on the goodwill and charity of their neighbours, which is just as disastrous for nations as is it for individuals. Even if the USA had left the natives well alone, the Mexicans, or the French, or some other predatory nation would have wiped them out.

What the Native Americans needed to do was to reorganise their society, to give up their traditional way of life, to live in cities, to adopt the settlers' customs, laws, methods of production, and so on. See, for example, the example of Japan 60 years later.

America circa 1800 is a hard problem, even by the standards of cultures facing colonization. The colonial aspect usually gets emphasized when people talk about that part of history, and not without reason -- the US and the Spanish at the time did behave appallingly badly. But it wasn't the only issue that Native Americans then were facing, not by a long shot. Disease and its social fallout had mangled the American interior's existing social organization quite effectively before any of the people involved had met a European other than the occasional explorer or scout (see for example the Mississippian culture), and the asymmetrical spread of technology (especially the horse, which I think we can file under "technology" if you turn your head and squint) arrived to stir things up just about when the whole exotic disease thing started getting under control.

If we took Europeans off the continent in 1800, those issues would probably have sorted themselves out after a few decades of confusion. But they're more than enough to make mounting any kind of concerted response much, much harder.

How should people facing colonization act to avoid cultural and economic subjugation?

Think hard and seriously about which of the two is worse.

Do you want to lose (most of) your culture, adapt the newcomers' way of doing things and have a chance of competing with them economically?

Or do you want to keep your culture, but be completely outclassed economically, and live at the whims of a more numerous and powerful neighbour?

Both ways include a risk of losing both anyway, but the first path looks the safest to me.

A bit as an aside, I don't think distinctive cultural identities is something that's inherently valuable to preserve. Some cultures are backwards, disfunctional or parasitic, and their loss is not worth mourning.

How should people facing colonization act to avoid cultural and economic subjugation?

You need either guns or money, preferably both, preferably as much as possible.

suppose you were transported back to America circa 1800 as a respected chieftain

I don't think a single chieftain could change much. But my best bet would be on trying to create a viable country -- probably on lands that the white colonists don't want. Likely outcome -- you die defending it.

How should people facing colonization act to avoid cultural and economic subjugation?

Join a different culture.

I've always admired the immigrants to the US who were emigrants from relatively oppressed countries. Some of them were pretty happy to join US culture, others thought they could preserve their former cultures while here, but their children drifted over anyway.

Maybe it is environmental, or maybe I am missing some common gene, but I have never had any interest in preserving the culture of my forefather's in any sense in which it was not a winning culture.

In a situation of chaotic change and lack of knowledge, flexibility and quick responses to new information are key. A group or organization (not just a pre-industrial tribe) lacks precisely that, and has formal and informal group cohesion mechanisms that impede adaptation.

Therefore, I believe a good strategy would be to motivate and assist other Native Americans to leave their tribes, attempt to fare for their own (or for their familiy, warrior band or other small group) in a thousand different ways, and teach others their own solution(s) if it happens to work.

Merely knowing about the confirmation bias helps to avoid it.

I think this is true of many (if not all) biases.

So part of what I'm looking for is how do I form a relationship with an expert I've never met?

Put yourself in their shoes. Why should they spend their time on answering "a lot of questions" from a random person? You will need to provide them with reasons to talk to you. What can you offer that they value?

For questions that don't merit an email, you might find places where people with the expertise you want gather online. Often, there will be a questions thread, and if there isn't you can start your own.

Prompted by this interview (which is interesting, but there should be a trigger warning for pompousness attached to Unger, even if I agree with most of his points about the virtues of the concrete), I looked up David Lewis. "Possible worlds" reminds me of the talk about Everett branches here. Neither is particularly useful.

Essentially unchanged. Implementations of these things are usually done so that if quantum mechanics works, it will work.