Open thread, Nov. 17 - Nov. 23, 2014

I agree with what you wrote. Having said this, let's go meta and see what happens when people will use the "rules and tips" you have provided here.

• A crackpot may explain their theory without using any scientific terminology, even where a scientist would be forced to use some. I have seem many people "disprove" the theory of relativity without using a single equation.

• If there is a frequent myth in your field that most of the half-educated people believe, trying to disprove this myth will sound very similar to a crackpot narrative. Or if there was an important change in your field 20 years ago, and most people haven't heard about it yet, but many of them have read the older books written by experts, explaining the change will also sound like contradicting all experts.

Status of your Domain

There was a post some time ago which I can't find right now which talked about the danger of one field looking down upon other fields. The prototype example is hard sciences looking down on soft sciences. The soft sciences are seen as less rigorous or less mathematically well founded and thus if you belong to the higher domain you think yourself better qualified to judge the presumably less rigorous fields.

Some indications can be taken from Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields:

Low Hanging Fruit Heuristic

if a research area has reached a dead end and further progress is impossible except perhaps if some extraordinary path-breaking genius shows the way, or in an area that has never even had a viable and sound approach to begin with, it’s unrealistic to expect that members of the academic establishment will openly admit this situation and decide it’s time for a career change.

Thus: You are likely having imaginary expertise if all low hanging fruits in your field have been taken.

Ideological/venal Interest Heuristic

You should be doubtful about your expertise when

things under discussion are ideologically charged or a matter in which powerful interest groups have a stake.

Note that these concern your expertise despite you actually being an expert.

Making predictions about the subject matter and seeing whether those come true, is one of the great ways to measure expertise.

So kind of like an intellectual chuunibyou.

If we have strong views on an established field of study we've never directly engaged in, we should probably subject those views to scrutiny.

Sounds like a pretty good idea to me. You've listed some symptoms, I guess if you catch yourself engaging in such behaviour, there are potential solutions?

Avoid heterodoxy by reading opposing viewpoints while steelmanning as much as possible.

To avoid grandstanding via vocab, keep things simple. Make sure you can play taboo with words, or up goer five.

For rules and tips, make sure you're clear with yourself on when your rules don't apply as well as when they're useful.

But really, it is a hard one to notice in yourself, and a hard one to fix without actually becoming an expert.

Great insight. I added it to my Anki deck. I think this could have been a Discussion post of its own (even at this length).

You've got a worthwhile project there, but I gather that in sufficiently complex fields (like engineering) there'are a lot of rules and tips because there isn't a complete set of principles.

At some point, a complex idea from [topic] was distilled down into a simple piece of advice for neonates. One of those neonates took it as gospel, and told all their friends how this advice formed the fundamental basis of [topic]. Examples include "if someone touches their nose, they're lying"

The reasoning for "if someone touches their nose, they're lying" is: If someone lies they feel anxiety. It's well known that anxiety can produce effects like someone getting red because of changes in blood circulation due to tension changes. Some tension changes can make a person want to touch the corresponding area.

Something along those lines is the motivation for that tip. The problem is that there are many reason why someone touches their nose and it's no good tell unless you calibrated it for a person.

Of course you could say that the fact that I know the explanation suggest that I know something about the topic. I'm probably better than average at lie detection. On the other hand I have not practiced that skill well enough to trust my skills to draw strong conclusions.

On the other hand in biology there are many cases where I have true beliefs where the justification isn't deeper than "the textbook says so". There no underlying logic that can tell you what a neurotransmitter does in every case. Evolution is quite random. In many cases I could tell you which textbook or university lecture is responsible for me believing a certain fact about biology.

Facts backed by empirical research are better than facts backed by theoretical reasoning like the one in the nose touching example.

That's a good start, now take those ideas about imaginary expertise and use them to do some introspection... :)

Anyway, it's hard to clearly define what an 'imagined expert' is. All it means is that the person overestimates their knowledge of a subject, which affects ALL human beings, even bona-fide experts. Expertise in anything other than a very small slice of human knowledge is obviously impossible.

It's easy to spot lack of knowledge in another person but not so easy to spot it in yourself.

About 'crackpottery', I don't like labelling people as crackpots. Instead it's much better to talk about crackpot ideas. There is no distinction between 'crackpot' and 'wrong'. All 'crackpot' means is that the idea has very low likelihood of being true given our knowledge about the world; this is just the definition of 'wrong'. It is in human nature to be immediately suspicious of consensus; that's not the problem (in fact it's part of the reason why science exists in the first place). The problem is when people try to push alternative agendas by pushing wrong information as correct information. That's not a problem of imagined expertise; it's a problem of willful misguiding of others.

Just wondering if it would make sense to consider everyone a Stupid Ally. That is, a good person who is just really really bad at understanding arguments. So the arguments they forward to you are worth examining, but must be examined carefully.

Fulltext: https://pdf.yt/d/dr3uP9XOtT1BPimU / https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5317066/2014-yolken.pdf / http://libgen.org/scimag7/10.1073/pnas.1418895111.pdf

I didn't much like it. This thing reeks of data dredging in every step; I don't see why they controlled for birth place where you'd think that current residence would be much more relevant (Baltimore has rich and poor areas like most big cities; and if nothing else, it'd give you an idea of infection vectors if carriers cluster around the harbor or specific places); I find it odd that their WAIS subtest shows zero (0.0) decrease in the infected group while their weirdo IQ test I've never heard of shows a fall; and I'm not sure how convincing I find their mice models* - to what extent does it really mimick human infections with no apparent symptoms? It wouldn't surprise me if, every time you gave mice a big injection of infectious organisms, their scores fell simply because you made them sick with something, so I'm not sure whether the mice experiment part is testing the right causal hypothesis (it might be testing 'raging infections decrease cognitive performance', not 'this algae, and not other infectious agents, decreases cognitive performance').

I would not be surprised if this never replicates.

* kudos to them for trying to experimentally test it, though

I keep on wondering to what degree our discovery and exploration of the all the microflora and microfauna that lives insides us will overturn "standard" medical theories of how humans work. It's already generally accepted that the diet's effect on nutrition is noticeably mediated by the gut biota, though the details are still very very fuzzy, and that's only a crude start...

Related: Stealth Mountain, a twitter bot (now defunct) which would correct tweets containing the expression "sneak peak".

Both this and the bot you link to rely less on getting machines to cleverly reproduce human behaviour, and more on identifying robotic human behaviour that can be carried out by stupid machines. Since this is probably a winning strategy, I'd recommend making that the focus of such a competition.

Core War in social media? This could get a wee bit out of hand... X-)

Has anyone tried something like this before? What is the reddit policy towards bots?

The only site-wide rules I'm aware of are ones against abusing the API (ie, your bot shouldn't be functionally equivalent to a DDoS attack). Other than that, most large subreddits seem to allow bots, but it's up to the individual moderators.

Are you familiar with the various only automatic rant generators?

Not unless you have an amazing insight / highly effective novel argument to inject into the political debate on the issue. It is an altruistic goal, but pushing for political changes that have near zero chance of actually coming to pass or have overton window shifts in the desired direction fails hard at the "Effective" part. Dont get me wrong, political action can certainly be a very effective way to do good in the world, but this particular issue is so far out of reach of the overton window it kind of isn't part of the building anymore.

The best argument I've ever been able to come up with is that we should underbid the people smuggling industry - Grant anyone who can post a 3000 dollar bond and a return ticket a temporary right of residence and employment as long as their money lasts, and I've never been able to sell anyone on it that weren't already opposed to controls on immigration.

I have also seen people much, much better at politics than me try to persuade people of the immorality of immigration restrictions. I have never seen it work. Anecdote, data, I know, but if this was a good attack angle, I should be able to think of examples of it not just abysmally failing.

If I could figure out a way to make seasteading actually profitable (iron fertilization fishing industry? ) doing that under an appropriate flag of convenience and recruiting labor out of the various hellholes people need to leave seems workable, because it doesn't require persuasion. However, it also requires what would effectively be company towns to be run to first world standards of living...

Heh. That's an interesting question. Some people certainly believe so.

It's something that GiveWell's looked into over the last year or two, and so has Carl Shulman on Reflective Disequilibrium as part of his effective altruism research notes.

"Effective" assumes that you believe you make an impact. Depending on how you plan to support it, effectiveness might vary greatly.

I went to a talk which presented the horrifying fact that immigrants are several times more likely to develop psychosis (varying from 2x to 10x dependant upon group, IIRC), and they theorised that some people have trouble empathising with people of other races, and this literally drives them insane. (Their other theory was that the cause is stimulant psychosis, but there wasn't evidence to support this as the primary cause)

I'd rather this wasn't the case. I quite like some level of controlled immigration, especially if they bring curry. But I worry that driving people insane is a fairly severe negative externality.

For context on the size of the potential benefit, an additional 1% migration rate would increase world GDP by about 1% (i.e. about one trillion dollars). The main question is the rate of migration if barriers are partially lowered, with estimates varying between 1% and 30%. Completely open migration could double world output. Based on Table 2 of Clemens (2011)

I fail to see the connection between more immigration and improved utility. Notably most of the arguments in this regard tend to assume that people are completely fungible and that third-worlders will magically acquire the characteristics of the average first-wolder the moment they cross the boarder.

I agree it would be good to find a better method to debate politics. Maybe we should have a meta-rule that anyone who starts a political debate must specify rules how the topic should be debated. (So now the burden is on the people who want to debate politics here.)

It seems to me that in political topics most of updating happens between the conversation. It's not like you say something and the other person is "oh, you totally convinced me, I am changing my mind now". Instead, you say something, the other person looks at you very suspiciously and walks away. Later they keep thinking about it, maybe google some data, maybe talk with other people, and the next time you meet them, their position is different from the last time.

For example, I have updated, from mildly pro-NR to anti-NR. I admit they have a few good points. But this is generally my experience with political movements: they are often very good at pointing out the obvious flaws of their competitors; the problem is that their own case is usually not much better, only different. I appreciate the few insights, they made me update, and I still keep thinking about some stuff. I just didn't come to the same conclusion; I separated the stuff that makes sense to me from the stuff that doesn't. Just like I try to draw good ideas e.g. from religion, without becoming religious. Instead of buying the whole package, I take a few bricks and add them to my model of the world. There are a few bricks in my model now that an outside observer could call "neoreactionary", although that would probably depend on the exact words I would use to describe them (because they are not unique for NR). The other bricks I have judged separately, and I was unimpressed. That's where I am now.

There is also this irritating fact that NRs keep associating themselves with LW. I consider that a huge dishonesty and in a way an attack on this community. If people are impressed by LW, this can make them more open towards NR. If people are disgusted by NR, this can make them dislike LW by association. They gain, we lose. It never goes the other way round; no one is going to debate overcoming their cognitive biases just because they fell in love with NR. To put it bluntly, we are used as a recruitment tool for some guy's cult, and all his shit falls on our heads. Why should we tolerate that? (This, especially #1 should be a required reading for every nerd.) That alone makes me completely unwilling to debate with them, because such debates are then used as further evidence that "LW supports NR". (As an analogy, imagine how much would you want to have a polite debate with a politician you dislike, if you know that the reason he debates with you is that he can take a photo of you two having a conversation, put it on his personal webpage, and claim that you are one of his supporters, to impress people who know you.) I refuse to ignore this context, because I am strongly convinced that NRs are fully aware of what they are doing here.

So even if we try having rational debates about politics, I would prefer to try them on some other political topics.

One aspect of neoreactionary thought is that it relies on historical narratives instead of focusing on specific claims that could be true or false in a way that can be determined by evidence.

To quote Moldbug:

Classifying traditions by their cladistic ancestry is a fine example. The statement that Universalism exists, that it is a descendant of Christianity, and that it is not a descendant of Confucianism, can only be interpreted intuitively. It is not a logical proposition in any sense. It has no objective truth-value. It is a pattern that strikes me as, given certain facts, self-evident. In order to convince you of this proposition, I repeat these facts and arrange them in the pattern I see in my head. Either you see the same pattern, or another pattern, or no pattern at all.

Given such an idea of how reasoning works, it's not clear that there an easy solution that allows for agreeing on a social norm to discuss politics.

The same stuff I normally do, except with less Akrasia and procrastinating, and more rapid research and self-correction.

So, basically, "Be a functional human being", rather than "sit around trying to do cool things, but cycle through Facebook and Lesswrong and a couple other sites all day instead".

Learn every human language (and invent one that is more pleasant, more practical and more efficient than them all), free up bytes by deleting my entire MP3 collection and playing all my music inside my head (I can already do this to some degree), go to bookstores and consume dozens of books at a sitting by flipping the pages and remembering every word, catch up with my pending movies by watching them all at the same time, periodically look at HD photographs of the night sky to scan for differences that might point to supernovas or incoming asteroids, and donate my spare processing power to run both LHC@home and SETI@home in my head.

Pain and "ugh field" asymbolia. That would be pretty awesome...

Ugh field asymbolia would be the state in which you perceive the sensations attached to "ugh fields" but do the things anyway.

Set up the subconscious to cache its processes in memory palaces, so its work can be reviewed much like a debug file.

Achieve enlightenment.

Definitely take over the world. Study enough psychology to be able to guess other people's passwords, then hack into the NSA, then download their secret blackmail stash. I now have near-complete control over almost anyone who's been online for any significant amount of time including politicians.

I'd crank up the pleasure center of my brain until the handle broke off.

Why hasn't anyone mentioned this yet? I'm sad to see that others would sacrifice greatly just to be more capable or powerful.

Hopefully, self-deception is to blame; others want to want to improve themselves instead, but if they were able to sample bliss, they wouldn't trade it for anything.

Am I the only one to whom ‘what's wrong with raping someone if they don't get injured, traumatized, pregnant, nor get STDs’ sounds a lot like ‘what's wrong with driving at 100 km/h while drunk, sleep-deprived and talking on the phone if you don't have any accidents’?

Summary:

1. Some economists (including Robin Hanson) said some things using rape as an example to illustrate abstract theoretical points, which pissed a lot of people off to whom rape is not an abstract matter. One of them (Steve Landsburg) also participated in sexual harassment of an activist. Some other economists (including Lawrence Summers) claimed that women are (relatively) bad at math and science.

Some yet other economists actually performed a study and found that economics has "a persistent sex gap in promotion that cannot be readily explained by productivity differences" and that "the average female economist -- unlike the average female physicist or mathematician -- is likely to have a better publication record than her male peers", and thus that economics as an institution is biased against women practitioners.

2. Robin Hanson vigorously agrees that economics as an institution is biased against women practitioners, but doesn't think his use of rape as a theoretical example has anything to do with that, and certainly that he didn't intend to minimize rape. Just the opposite: "Just as people who accuse others of being like Hitler do not usually intend to praise Hitler, people who compare other harms to rape usually intend to emphasize how big are those other harms, not how small is rape." He cites professional racist Steve Sailer in his defense, because that's really going to change anyone's minds.

3. Steve Sailer calls a bunch of people vile names. Yawn.

My conclusion: Robin Hanson is probably not personally responsible for the observed phenomenon of economics as an institution being biased against women practitioners. But the level of instrumental rationality and/or good rhetoric demonstrated here is not super great. If you want to convince people that you are not a bigot, why cite a bigot's defense of you as his ally?

Second, it isn't clear to me that the "badness" of using rape as a theoretical example has anything to do with minimizing it. Rather, it has to do with choosing to offhandedly mention something really awful which is linked to the victimization of a fraction of your students or readers. Being constantly squicked by gratuitous scary examples that selectively target you is not great for the concentration.

In a book about management that my partner S was reading recently, there was an analogy where managers are compared to ship captains. A page later, bad managers are described as "whipping" their underlings — that is, using punishment as an incentive. Now, S is from the West Indies, and the proximity of "ship captain" and "whipping" immediately reminded her of the slave trade, and gave her a pretty heavy-duty squick reaction. Does this mean the authors of the book intended to turn people off of being managers through stereotype threat or something? No. Does it mean they even intended to remind anyone of the slave trade? No. Does it mean that these analogies cumulatively had the effect of distracting S from the point the authors were trying to make? Yes.

If the authors were challenged on this, would they resort to citing professional racists in their defense? Probably not; they'd probably say something like "oops, wow, that was totally unintentional and really embarrassing."

I wonder if Eliezer will now attempt to disassociate himself from Hanson like he has the NRx's.

Then the restless spirit of Paul Graham sat on my body in some obscure location

Well that's a fanfiction I haven't read before.

This should be generated for every user on their "overview" page. :D

I did this a while back using cobe: dumped in gwern.net, all my IRC logs, LW comments etc. It seems that the key is to set the depth fairly high to get more meaningful language out, but then it works eerily well: with some curation, it really did sound like me! (As long as you were reading quickly and weren't trying to extract real meaning out of it. I wonder if a recurrent neural network could do even better?) You can see some at http://pastebin.com/tPGL300J - I particularly like

gwern> haha oh wow, for a moment i thought it wasn't working. and then I actually read the entire line slowly going 'wait a minute...'
gwern> = 15:35 <@gwern> (for all that I read fiction the right way to think of asking for a different purpose... the company did last year; but in fact was designed to protect MO5(G) from the "Alternate Reality" scene to Shinji saying "I don't think reader is central. I did avoid the Internet, in the Japanese media industries. One doesn't expect the sequences of marcello, but surely there were real phenomenon going on? Well, either you have a thesis? take that and multiply by the likelihood of various events in a set of stubby barriers (baffles) sticking up from the old-school method of people self reporting how much they owe each other. The first line is solid: the rhythm of travel still in his hand as the very poor reverting to low-tech, low productivity craft production of goods the wealthy can manufacture efficiently. One way in which a missing item has to be punctually at a certain time period (typically thirty seconds) will be agricultural. Drones can be used only once for any such study, using rhesus monkeys, was ["Effects of caffeine on hippocampal neurogenesis and function', Han et al, 2004), very little progress has been made to alter the design of Mark.06 is a bit secluded, but is at least 1 was a complete waste of time'
A> that is wonderfully coherent
B> That's more like it

gwern> '<@gwern> kurzweil is a flake...' <-- it speaks the truth!

gwern> '= 15:32 < gwern> turns out I'm not a loaf of white bread'

gwern> '= 06:05 < gwern> crime pays'

gwern> 'The atheist church fits in a single session on the Millennium Falcon.'
C> what.
gwern> well, it's just Han. everyone else believes in the Force or whatever Wookiees believe in

gwern> '17:08 < gwern> 'A lot of people are working through SICP all the time (FLOSS programmers may lose interest, another 17 years will see a sequence of output to get the impression you know it’s up to something,” “It just seems horribly inappropriate and wrong, but... 'Medication' here is 'kusuri.'"] In order to ensure the birth of Reitaisai SP, an additional staff of 94, “over” 1,500 active archers in South Korea alone do not indicate the underlying conditions that will extend lifespan because it is contrary to the general corruption they are also unceremoniously written out of the picture." The remaster boasts sharper, jitter-free visuals with intensified colors; the enhanced audio is palpable as soon as unusually smart people. The best covered seems to be dead.''
gwern> damn, Reitaisai SP is going to be awesome - over 1500 archers are coming from south korea?
B> From there alone!
gwern> 'their arrows will blot out the sun!'
gwern> 'good. then we will cosplay in the shade.'
A> SMARTAAAA
gwern> LOLIS! HOLLLDDDDD!!!!!!

gwern> 'the video is killing the ref, I'm getting 1993/1994 addresses for that one episode and then went through her budget with them, if I set 'div#content { line-height: 100%; }', I still see the white snakes' <-- CSS would be so much easier to program if we could just get rid of the damn white snakes in the browsers!

gwern> 'gwern> puritan: supposedly my .htaccess was put in charge of directing an episode for the first big step: a switch between mother and friend is an easy to read it a lot as they run a huge trade surplus, and arises from unmeasured benefits, such as transfer effects that scaled with training task gains. Again, such an experiment is just a rose falling apart. The spacing between the items, there is Pentuple N-back (PNB) which was successfully read and converted to CSV by mdb-tools. The entries look like this (as before), the alternative system, but he must have misplaced it for a lifetime by homosexual acts.' <-- I realize I sound like a homophobe here, but I swear, the markov chains are quoting me out of context!
C> pentuple n-back converted to CSV. how does that work exactly?
gwern> C: oh, you just treat the black spaces as the delimiter and parse as usual
D> "such an experiment is just a rose falling apart" :)

gwern> '= 00:35 <@gwern> second episode of EVANGELION: he keeps undermining himself! there must not be very practical without them. but even if, say, NERV base. (Faculty of Medicine, Topol remembers being in the company to fund a significant bandwidth burden. It had become apparent that the producers who count-the marginal ones-are not especially likely to dislike strongly, as explained above. Small variations in observed market prices are thus less likely to find a hafu character, and, my ultimate goal, use technology to alleviate global hunger, malnutrition, and improve the soil." "Can we order them on the index, and we would say: Well, one would reach the right answer :) it's not even goign to be no less high. Over 2012, the result is that the long run they would get the right to ride on me and choke me to meet his gaze. “Can’t do the study to try and reach out with their thumbs. That's very rare. Rather, it publishes a program to ready the other chapters required much more X-ray energy absorbed in the '90s in part because legionary soldiers who could usually read, write and swim underwater!' <-- that's why Rome conquered the known world: fucking underwater legions

Sure, ideally it should be considered a medical procedure on a living person in a critical condition

That would destroy cryonics companies who make money via insurance that depends on people legally dying.

Some of the major problems of cryonics can probably be solved by preventing water from expanding upon freezing.

What do you mean exactly? If I understood it right then vitrification is done to prevent ice crystals from forming. Do you mean something different?

I have signed up for this, and also registered for the meeting in London on the 29th. Has anyone else?

There is TONS of mostly feminist literature on how movies/internet/Barbie/etc. teach women their bodies and themselves are inadequate and so lower their self-esteem. It is a very popular feminist trope.

I had a discussion about this a female friend recently as to whether she'd considered female perceptions of beauty had become way out of whack since the Internet.

I think the main damage may actually come from female perception of male sexiness, (and conversely), e.g., a girl being disappointed in her boyfriend because he isn't Brad Pitt.

Edit: fixed.

On the other hand, no matter how weird your kink is, the Internet will let you find other people who share it.

stupid problem

embarrassingly simple math since forever

I should have been years ahead of my peers

momentary lack of algebraic insight ("I could solve this in an instant if only I could get rid of that radical")

for which I've had the intuitions since before 11th grade when they began teaching it to us

Sorry to jump from object-level to meta-level here but it seems pretty clear that the problem here is not just about math. Your subjective assessments of how difficult these topics are is inconsistent with how well you report you are doing at them. And you're attaching emotions of shame and panic ("problem has snowballed") to observations that should just be objective descriptions of where you are now. Get these issues figured out first (unless you're in some educational setting with its own deadlines). Math isn't going anywhere; it will still be there when you're in a place where doing it won't cause you distress.

I've considered tutoring, but it's fairly expensive, and my (or my tutor's) schedule wouldn't allow me to get as much tutoring as I would need to - given that I sometimes only have time to study during the night.

In my opinion, what you probably need is some mix of tutoring and therapy -- I don't know if it exists, and if there is a word for it -- someone who would guide you through the specific problem, but also through your thought processes, to discover what it is you are doing wrong. Not just what are you doing wrong mathematically, but also what are you doing wrong psychologically. This assumes you would speak your thoughs aloud while solving the problem.

The psychological level is probably more important than the mathematical level, because once the problems with thinking are fixed, you can continue to study maths on your own. But this probably cannot be done without doing the specific mathematical problems, because it's your thought patterns about those math problems that need to be examined and fixed.

I happen to have a background in math and psychology and teaching, so if you would like to try a free Skype lesson or two, send me an e-mail to "viliam AT bur.sk". Don't worry about wasting my time, since it was my idea. (Worst case: we will waste two hours of time and see that it doesn't work this way. Best case: your problem with maths is fixed, I get an interesting professional experience.)

Find somebody else who is in the same situation and study together.

I'm wondering whether you're expecting some math to be effortless when you're actually still at the stage of trying one thing and another, and need to be less focused on how you want the process to feel.

Have you looked into Physics Forums? They have Homework & Coursework Questions subforum.

Maybe you should post here about one or two or the problems you're stuck on.

I'm wondering whether you're demanding too much facility of yourself before you go on, but this is only a guess.

Have you looked into Khan Academy?

In general having a goal to exhaut textbooks by copying them is stupid. That's not what they are for. Get rid of that strategy.

Most forums have rules that prevent you from asking questions without deeply thinking about those questions yourself.

On math.stackexchange you are allowed to ask all maths questions provided you search before for similar questions and put in the effort to write a decent question.

Asking decent questions is a skill. Learn it and people will answer your questions.

Have you tried using WolframAlpha? If you get the pro subscription (~$66 per year - ~$45 a year for students) you gain access to their step by step solutions and unlimited problem generator. I am currently studying a Masters of Biostatistics (which has a heavy calculus section) and found this service invaluable.

Examples http://i59.tinypic.com/2yuniv9.png http://i60.tinypic.com/c5i7n.png

You should go on to more advanced topics without being fluent in less advanced topics. You can always later go back to the exercises that stumped you. The typical student taking calculus without being fluent in adding fractions is a mistake, but that don't over-correct that mistake.

Bissonomy is the virtue of stability.

Specifically, bissonomy is the virtue of knowing (-nomy) how to attach yourself ("bissys" is the name for filaments by which certain bivalves attach themselves to rocks and other substrate) to some stable object.

Arguments:

• The name. It basically tells you outright (and "bisso" is Portuguese for "bissys", just in case).
• She was turned into oysters -- bivalves -- which is a big hint.
• She was punished for throwing a mole. What do moles do? They dig! They undermine and clearly, the virtue of stability couldn't be seen undermining anything.
• Two children is another hint at stability as families with two children neither increase nor decrease the population -- they keep it stable.
• She was forgotten -- for the only thing constant in the world is change.

Sounds like a noodle virtue to me, or at least it uses the same basic idea for humour.

But if you want to keep in the spirit of EY's dementors, the article writer does some wacky reasoning to end up roughly at the virtue of dietary restriction.

You say that this feels like a riddle to you, but I would prefer to call it a koan. I think the best hint that we have to the nature of Bissonomy lies in the vagueness of its descriptions, as this is the sort of irony that Pratchett is famed for, and this sort of self-answering riddle has a Buddhist feel to it in turn. This also seems like a useful starting point for another reason: there are only so many potential virtues that Bissonomy can plausibly be, and the standard Western ones are already accounted for.

I suspect Bissonomy is the emotional acceptance of both that which is known to be true and that which is uncertain or unknowable. Ignorance, as we all know, is purported to be bliss, and that sounds like biss. However, Bissonomy is not the embrace of ignorance, nor does it bring bliss. Rather, it is the acceptance of that which is known to be unknowable, and it brings inner-peace.

Bissonomy and Tubso seem to be connected. Both virtues were forgotten due to their rarity. Explaining what one was should hopefully tell us something about the other. But it's even harder to say things about Tubso than about Bissonomy; the only thing that we know about Tubso is that its name is absurd. In a world where nominative determinism exists, however, this might be the only hint we need. I submit that Tubso is the virtue of absurdism, which surely has a place in Discworld. This fits with the koan framework, and establishes the desired connection between the two lost virtues; a koan's answer is absurd and hints at strange knowledge, but truly understanding a koan requires the recognition that one can never understand it fully, if at all.

Of necessity, this theory is largely speculative. We may never know the true answer to this question, and that's okay. And that, in turn, is Bissonomy.

You say that this feels like a riddle to you, but I would prefer to call it a koan. I think the best hint that we have to the nature of Bissonomy lies in the vagueness of its descriptions, and there is a Buddhist feel to this. There is also the sort of irony that Pratchett is famous for. Also, this seems like a useful starting point for another reason: there are only so many potential virtues that Bissonomy can plausibly be, and all the standard Western ones are already accounted for.

I suspect Bissonomy is the emotional acceptance of both that which is known to be true and that which is uncertain or unknowable. Ignorance, as we all know, is purported to be bliss, and that sounds like biss. However, Bissonomy is not the embrace of ignorance, nor does it bring bliss. Rather, it is the acceptance of that which is known to be unknowable, and it brings inner-peace.

Bissonomy and Tubso seem to be connected. Both virtues were forgotten due to their rarity. Explaining what one was should hopefully tell us something about the other. But it's even harder to say things about Tubso than about Bissonomy; the only thing that we know about Tubso is that its name is absurd. In a world where nominative determinism exists, however, this might be the only hint we need. I submit that Tubso is the virtue of absurdism, which surely has a place in Discworld. This fits with the koan framework, and establishes the desired connection between the two lost virtues; a koan's answer is absurd and hints at strange knowledge, but truly understanding a koan requires the recognition that one can never understand it fully, if at all.

Of necessity, this theory is largely speculative. We may never know the true answer to this question, and that's okay. And that, in turn, is Bissonomy.

You say that this feels like a riddle to you, but I would prefer to call it a koan. I think the best hint that we have to the nature of Bissonomy lies in the vagueness of its descriptions, and there is a Buddhist feel to this. There is also the sort of irony that Pratchett is famous for. Also, this seems like a useful starting point for another reason: there are only so many potential virtues that Bissonomy can plausibly be, and all the standard Western ones are already accounted for.

I suspect Bissonomy is the emotional acceptance of both that which is known to be true and that which is uncertain or unknowable. Ignorance, as we all know, is purported to be bliss, and that sounds like biss. However, Bissonomy is not the embrace of ignorance, nor does it bring bliss. Rather, it is the acceptance of that which is known to be unknowable, and it brings inner-peace.

Bissonomy and Tubso seem to be connected. Both virtues were forgotten due to their rarity. Explaining what one was should hopefully tell us something about the other. But it's even harder to say things about Tubso than about Bissonomy, the only thing that we know about Tubso is that its name is absurd. In a world where nominative determinism exists, however, this might be the only hint we need. I submit that Tubso is the virtue of absurdism, which surely has a place in Discworld. This fits with the koan framework, and establishes the desired connection between the two lost virtues; a koan's answer is absurd and hints at strange knowledge, but truly understanding a koan requires the recognition that one can never understand it fully, if at all.

Of necessity, this theory is largely speculative. We may never know the true answer to this question, and that's okay. And that, in turn, is Bissonomy.

This is rather disorganized, unfortunately. Don't read ahead unless you're willing to be frustrated by near stream-of-consciousness writing.

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/116456/meaning-of-onomy-ology-and-ography

I strongly suspect that the virtue of Bissonomy is the virtue of acknowledging that which you do not or can not understand, also known as epistemic humility. (Yes, faith is its sister virtue - don't ask how they're both able to be virtues at once despite their symmetrical character, as that would mortally offend both of them.) The vague and unspecified nature of Bissonomy is the best clue we have as to its nature, there is a Buddhist feel to it. This has enough of a satiric bite to it that I can imagine the author actually writing it.

Biss sounds like bliss, which as we all know is the result of ignorance. But Bissonomy is not the intellectual embrace of ignorance, although it might sound like it (haha). Rather, Bissonomy is the emotional acceptance/knowledge that our map will never fully match the territory, and that some parts of the territory are not mappable at all (eg uncertainties of quantum measurements).

The main reason to be skeptical of this idea, other than a severe lack of evidence for it (perhaps this allows it to be reconciled with faith, though :p), is that it fails to explain the virtue of Tubso, and it seems to me like understanding one of the lost virtues might require also understanding the other.

However, I have a suspicion that the virtue of Tubso might be something absurd like "not throwing shellfish at the shadows of deities", or perhaps Tubso is absurdism itself. The word certainly sounds silly enough for it. If we adopt the perspective that Bissonomy and Tubso are the "lost Buddhist" virtues, in my opinion this makes quite a lot of sense. A hint of absurdism paired with peaceful acceptance, just like a koan paired with its answer.

I think adopting this perspective seems like a good idea. There are only so many potential virtues, after all. And although I've not read enough of Pratchett's work, I would bet he's used non-Western culture as a source of inspiration before.

Another reason to be skeptical of my interpretation is that I ironically exhibit a lack of Bissonomy myself in so hastily jumping to the conclusion that it is possible to deduce what Bissonomy means, despite that Prachett provides little evidence around it. But perhaps this is simply another aspect of Prachett's joke - forcing the reader to be hypocritical in order to understand the virtue of Bissonomy would be like a half-serious chastisement/reward for spoiling the fun of leaving the virtue unknown, similar to how trying very hard to find a true answer to a koan is a bad but necessary step in allowing the koan to change the way your mind thinks.

Ultimately, we may never know. And that's okay. And that's Bissonomy.

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/116456/meaning-of-onomy-ology-and-ography

I suspect that the virtue of Bissonomy is the virtue of acknowledging that which you do not or can not understand, also known as epistemic humility. (Faith is its sister virtue - don't ask how they're both able to be virtues at once despite their symmetrical nature, that would mortally offend both of them!) The vague and unspecified nature of Bissonomy is the best clue we have as to its nature, there is a Buddhist feel to it. This has enough of a satiric bite to it that I can imagine the author actually writing it.

Biss sounds like bliss, which as we all know is the result of ignorance. But Bissonomy is not the intellectual embrace of ignorance, although it might sound like it (haha). Rather, Bissonomy is the emotional acceptance/knowledge that our map will never fully match the territory, and that some parts of the territory are not mappable at all (eg uncertainties of quantum measurements).

The main reason to be skeptical of this idea, other than a severe lack of evidence for it (perhaps this allows it to be reconciled with faith), is that it fails to explain the virtue of Tubso, and it seems to me like understanding one might require also understanding the other.

However, I have a suspicion that the virtue of Tubso might be something absurd like "not throwing shellfish at the shadows of deities", or perhaps Tubso is absurdism itself. The word certainly sounds silly enough for it. If we adopt the perspective that Bissonomy and Tubso are the "lost Buddhist" virtues, in my opinion this makes quite a lot of sense. A hint of absurdism paired with peaceful acceptance, just like a koan paired with its answer.

Another reason to be skeptical of my interpretation is that I ironically exhibit a lack of Bissonomy myself in so hastily jumping to the conclusion that it is possible to deduce what Bissonomy means, despite that Prachett provides little evidence around it. But perhaps this is simply another aspect of Prachett's joke - forcing the reader to be hypocritical in order to understand the virtue of Bissonomy would be like a half-serious chastisement/reward for spoiling the fun of leaving the virtue unknown, similar to how trying very hard to find a true answer to a koan is a bad but necessary step in allowing the koan to change the way your mind thinks.

Ultimately, we may never know. And that's okay. And that's Bissonomy.

What do you think? Tell us in a week at most, please?

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/116456/meaning-of-onomy-ology-and-ography

I'm not very familiar with the series. However, I suspect that the virtue of Bissonomy is the virtue of acknowledging that which you do not understand, also known as epistemic humility. (Faith is its sister virtue - don't ask how they're both able to be virtues despite their symmetrical nature, that would mortally offend both of them!) The vague and unspecified nature of Bissonomy is its own clue, there is a Buddhist feel to it. This has enough of a satiric bite to it that I can imagine the author actually writing it.

Biss sounds like bliss, which as we all know is the result of ignorance. But Bissonomy is not the intellectual embrace of ignorance, although it might sound like it (haha). Rather, Bissonomy is the emotional acceptance/knowledge that our map will never fully match the territory, and that some parts of the territory are not mappable at all (eg uncertainties of quantum measurements).

The main reason to be skeptical of this idea, other than a severe lack of evidence for it (perhaps this allows it to be reconciled with faith), is that it fails to explain the virtue of Tubso, and it seems to me like understanding one might require also understanding the other.

However, I have a suspicion that the virtue of Tubso might be something absurd like "not throwing shellfish at the shadows of deities", or perhaps Tubso is absurdism itself. The word certainly sounds silly enough for it. If we adopt the perspective that Bissonomy and Tubso are the "lost Buddhist" virtues, in my opinion this makes quite a lot of sense. A hint of absurdism paired with peaceful acceptance, just like a koan paired with its answer.

Another reason to be skeptical of my interpretation is that I unfortunately exhibit a supreme lack of Bissonomy myself in so hastily jumping to the conclusion that it is possible to deduce what Bissonomy means, despite that Prachett provides little evidence around it. But perhaps this is simply another aspect of Prachett's joke - forcing the reader to be hypocritical in order to understand the virtue of Bissonomy would be like a half-serious chastisement for spoiling the fun.

Ultimately, we may never know. And that's okay. And that's Bissonomy.

A half life of ~8000 given current-day levels of accidental and other death. If we get our act together enough to get rid of the problem of aging, I would assume that we would continue to get rid of other sources of death as well, which would make the actuarial model less useful.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/bad-emulation-advance.html

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/12/tiptoe-or-dash-to-future.html

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/fertility-the-big-problem.html

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/01/enable-raiders.html

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/07/firm-inefficiency.html

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/07/refuge-markets.html

are things like this OB post really supposed to be considered even remotely about Rationality?

Why are you asking that question?

Tenure.

BTW, did anyone else get an audio track on that page? I don't see any visible embedded media, but some sort of music track started a few seconds after loading the page, and stopped the moment I closed the window. Same thing when I reopened the page. I downloaded the HTML, but I didn't see a cause of it there. A few minutes later it no longer happened, although the HTML of the page was identical to the previous download.

ETA: This may be the explanation. Some sort of advertising thing. The song described there is what I heard.

I can't self correct if I don't know what is disliked.

Self-correction on the basis of twitches of the hive mind is not necessarily a great idea.

You can look at your recent posts/comments and see what looks negative.

On your profile page, click on "DISLIKED."

How meaningful is the "independent" criterion given the heavy overlaps in works cited and what I imagine must be a fairly recent academic MRCA among all the researchers involved?

Laws are useful to prevent behavior where you know what kind of behavior you want to forbid. They are often possible to game and need judging to interpret what happens in edge cases.

It's in Main where the best written and most rationality-relevant articles go. Discussion is for lower quality and less relevant posts. I wonder if missing Main is common and whether something should be done about that.

That's what MIRI are trying to work out, right?

Prevent it from becoming a super-intelligence in the first place. You can't guarantee boxing a fully self-improving AI but if you run an AI on a Macintosh 2 you could probably keep it contained.

You could put it in a box with no gatekeeper or other way to interact with the outside world. It would be completely pointless and probably unethical, but you could do it.

Isn't this the uncomputable utilon question?

In general if your beliefs lead you to expect something that doesn't happen, it's time to question your beliefs. Reality isn't wrong. Beliefs must pay rent.

I think you'd get replies if you didn't pepper it so much with needless political tribal signaling. We get it; you read Steve Sailer.

The way you wrote the question is horrible, but here are some things to consider:

• most people haven't heard about cryonics;
• most of those who heard about it believe it doesn't work;
• there are many things way more expensive than cryonics.

you would expect to see more young, reasonably attractive women showing up at public gatherings of cryonicists to try to find men they can exploit for a share of the wealth.

Wow. And a million times, wow.

One must really, really, very deeply hate women for that to be the expectation that comes to mind.

Search your favourite search engine for "hostile wife phenomenon".

If people believe that lonely [...] guys [...] sign up for cryonics, you would expect to see more [...] showing up at public gatherings of cryonicists to try to find men [...]

You don't see many men in yoga classes either.

I keep wondering when the cryonics community will attract the attention of female social justice warriors (SJW's) because of the perception that wealthy white guys dominate cryonics

When it reaches the point that most of them have heard of it. I know we've had at least one SJW come by and rant about how talking about cryonics reflected white privilege.