Open Thread, Apr. 27 - May 3, 2015

This is a neat question, but I think programs being successful is not really about gracefully going down a hierarchy. For example, Tit-for-Tat does not take the correct strategy against always-cooperate (If your opponent is always cooperating, you say thank you and always defect). Tit-for-Tat succeeds for much more ecological reasons. I'd say bigger-memory versions of Tit-for-Tat are going to be something like the class of "peaceful, non-exploitable" strategies. Such strategies are not going to be the first to defect, which means they actually don't get that much information about their opponent. I think the lesson of iterated prisoners dilemmas is that you don't need that information anyhow, as long as your strategy occupies a good ecological niche.

There's still some subtlety here. A Memory-0 strategy picks C with probability p and D with probability q, independent of any past results. If you know p and q, you can devise a strategy to optimize your score. The result in the paper is that this new strategy is Memory-0 and that you can't do better by increasing your memory.

The advantage of a longer memory is that, given enough iterations, you can get a good approximation for p and q and so deduce the appropriate Memory-0 strategy. Something like Tit-for-Tat is devised to basically get the same score as its opponent (the opponent can get an advantage of one defection). It's not going to do worse than any individual opponent, but neither is it going to do better. A strategy that remembers the entire game can recognize, say, All-C and exploit it by defecting, which Tit-for-Tat can't do.

A Memory-1 strategy is one where p and q are functions of the previous round. In general, they'll depend both on what it did last round and what the opponent did last round. There are four possible results (C-C, C-D, D-C, D-D), which means that the strategy will have up to four distinct probabilities for cooperation next round. If you can learn those, you can come up with the optimal strategy for playing against it. This strategy can be modeled as a Memory-1 strategy.

The big difference, I think, is that having a longer memory is helpful if you're in a diverse environment. In any individual game, there's always a strategy with a shorter memory that will do as well as yours. However, the same short-memory strategy will not be optimal against every opponent, while you can use your longer memory to devise the best short-memory strategy for a given match.

[Tit for Tat is] one of the few Memory-1 strategies that gracefully falls back to the appropriate Memory-0 strategy when faced with All-C or All-D.

I am not clear on how this is the case. It seems to me that the appropriate strategy when faced with any Memory-0 strategy is to go All-D, since your defections would optimize your own score while having no influence on the future behavior of your opponent. Tit for Tat does not default to All-D unless the opponent is All-D.

Typical analysis of the basic design you described is often something like a mixed 2×2 factorial design: which test (pre- / post-test, within subjects) × intervention (yes/no, between subjects) - the interaction term being evidence for effects of intervention (greater increase between pre- and post- test in intervention condition). Often analysed using ANOVA (participants as random effect), nonparametric equivalents may be more appropriate.

More complex models are also very appropriate, e.g., adding question type as a factor/predictor rather than treating the different questions as separate dependent variables: this would provide indications of whether improvement after intervention differs for the question types, as you've predicted. This doesn't give you clues about bimodality but at least allows you to more directly test your predictions about relative degree of improvement (if the intervention works).

Correlations between your different dependent measures: feel free by all means - but make sure you examine the characteristics of the distributions rather than just zooming ahead with a matrix of correlation coefficients. And be aware of the multiple comparisons problem, Type I error is very likely.

Excluding participants on the basis of overly high performance in pretest is appropriate. If possible I suggest setting this criterion before formal testing (even an educated guess is appropriate as this doesn't harm the conclusions you can draw: it can be justified as leaving room for improvement if the intervention works) - or at the very least do this before analysing anything else of the participant's performance to avoid biasing your decision about setting the threshold.

... don't want to elaborate too much on what tasks we'll give to the subjects, in case I'll recruit someone reading this to be one of my test subjects.

I'm afraid you've said too much already - and if you're looking for people who are naive about the principles involved, LW is probably not a great place for recruiting anyway.

please feel free to private message me if you'd like clarification of what I've posted - this sort of thing is very much part of my day job.

what kinds of statistical tests would be most appropriate for measuring the results?

What question about your game and learning math/probability are you trying to answer?

If you want "an effect" you want a comparison of two arms. But you can only have one arm have an intervention, and the other just be the baseline arm with no treatment at all (or just the 'background treatment' of being a college undergraduate). For example, you can take a set of undergrads, and advertise that you are testing probability aptitude or something, and then the control arm just gets the test, while the test arm gets your game and the test afterwards.

I don't know about your advisor, but I would accept a study like that.

I always found it slightly puzzling that LW folks who get into practical data analysis start with F methods, and not B. Isn't B kind of a LW "thing?"

Starting to think about measuring results via ANOVA et al is, to me, starting at the wrong level of abstraction (I realize I may differ on this from a lot of statisticians). For example, ANOVA can test for the null. What does that null mean? Well, you are interested in some causal effect. Maybe this: E[test result | assigned to game] - E[test result | baseline undergrad].

Or maybe you give them a questionaire first, and learn how much math they have had (or even what particular classes). Maybe you want to actually look at an effect conditional on math preparation level. Does your game possibly have an 'interaction' with background math sophistication level? Then you need to model that. Then maybe if you decide on the model, you decide for how to test for the null. Or maybe you don't want the null, but the size of the effect itself. etc. etc.

You think about what you want first, the stats technique afterwards.

Additionally, I'm a little worried about the control group part. I expect it's relatively easy to recruit people to play a game and have them be motivated to play it, but if I tell people that "oh, but you may be randomly assigned to the control condition where you're given more traditional math instruction instead", I expect that that will drop participation. And even the people who do show up regardless may not be particularly motivated to actually work on the problems if they do get assigned to the control condition, especially given that I'm hoping to also educate people who'd usually avoid maths. How insane would it be to just not have a control group?

Sounds like you should take more l-theanine to mitigate that effect

As someone who is published, I can tell you that it depends entirely on the field. One possibility is obtaining data from other people and analyzing it in new ways. There are many free public sources of data, and a lot of researchers will share old data sitting on their hard drives if they think it could result in publications. Off the top of my head, genomics, bioinformatics, microscopy, medical imaging/radiology, and biometrics are all fields where there is a glut of data and people would gladly welcome new, more powerful analysis tools and procedures.

What kind of research do you want to do?

The risks of one-time MDMA use can be roughly sorted into two categories: "Normal Risks" which apply to everyone and "Edge-Case Risks" which only apply to certain people (though it may not always be clear, as we will see, if you are at risk for one of the edge-cases). I will give a very brief and oversimplified description of how MDMA is processed by the body and the effects it has, and then I will describe some of these risks. I didn't have time to put together sources and citations (especially as this was written from memory + fact checking), but my hope is that this will help people understand what the risks are and some of the mechanisms of action so that they can do more informed research into the topic.

Basic Neuroscience Background Information

In the human brain, where two neurons meet is called the Synapse. In reality, there is actually a small gap at the synapse between neurons called the synaptic cleft. When a signal traveling down a neuron reaches the end, it causes a release of neurotransmitters into the synaptic cleft. These neurotransmitters fit like keys into keyholes called receptors on the second neuron. Depending on which keyholes/receptors are activated/filled, the second neuron takes some action like firing or not.

You can visualize this by holding your right fist up and then making a "C" shape around it with your left hand (they should be close, but not touching. While maintaining this, hold your elbows out to the sides. Each of your arms is a neuron. Your forearms are the "Axon" which is the path the signals travel down and the space between your hands is the synaptic cleft. A signal travels from your left elbow to your left fingers which causes them to release neurotransmitters into the space between your left hand and your right fist. All over your right fist are small keyholes called receptors that are shaped to specifically fit certain neurotransmitters. The neurotransmitters float around in the gap for a while, some of them fitting into the keyholes, and some of them being reabsorbed by your left hand to be used later. (This reabsorption process is called "reuptake" by the way) If enough of the keyholes on your right fist are filled, then a signal travels from your right fist down to your right elbow, at which there is another synapse and the same thing happens.

Now, on your fist (or the "receiving" end of a synapse) you have a lot of receptors, but not all of these receptors are "on" or "active" at any given time. Your body maintains homeostasis by regulating the amount of active receptors for a certain neurotransmitter in response to the amount of that neurotransmitter that is typically produced. For example, I might produce (or rather, release) slightly less serotonin than you on average, but my body will deal with that by activating more serotonin receptors. In that case, our expected number of serotonin receptors that are filled with serotonin molecules at any given time would be roughly the same, so there would be no difference between us in that respect.

The last piece of background information we'll need is to explain "free radicals". You learned in high-school chemistry how atoms have electron shells/orbitals that "want" to have a specific number of electrons in them. This applies to molecules as well. When a molecule is missing an electron, it goes crazy and tries to steal one from its neighbors. A molecule in this state is called a "free radical". If it's pull is stronger than a neighbor's, then it takes one of the neighbor's electrons and calms down while the neighbor then goes crazy and becomes a free radical itself, looking to steal an electron from another molecule. This causes a chain reaction and can be very damaging to sensitive structures in your body like DNA or receptors in the brain.

The definition of an "antioxidant" is a molecule that can give up at least one of its electrons to a free radical without becoming a free radical itself, thereby ending the chain reaction. Free radicals are produced by pretty much all metabolic functions, so they are unavoidable to a certain extent. Your body uses antioxidants from your diet and endogenous antioxidants to counter this process every second of every day. Typically, it does a pretty good job and your body maintains homeostasis.

MDMA Mechanism of Action and Pharmacokinetics

MDMA causes excess release of Serotonin, Dopamine, and Norepinephrine into the synaptic cleft, though its action is primarily on Serotonin, so that's what I'll mostly focus on here.

So when you take MDMA, your neurons release excess serotonin into the synaptic cleft. This causes more binding to serotonin receptors which causes more firing of those neurons. This leads to the euphoria associated with MDMA use. However, your body wants to maintain homeostasis, so it starts turning off serotonin receptors. That way, even though there's more Serotonin, there are less places for it to bind, which reduces activity. Then your MDMA wears off and your neurons are actually releasing less serotonin than before. This, coupled with less active serotonin receptors leads to considerably lower serotonin activity. This is associated with the anhedonia, anxiety, and depression that sometimes follow MDMA usage for a few days. However, nothing I've just described is permanent, so your body will eventually up-regulate your serotonin receptors again, your serotonin stores will replenish, and you'll be back to normal.

However, this excess activity at the Serotonin receptors also creates excess free radicals. These free radicals can actually damage serotonin receptors (break them permanently) so that they can never be reactivated. In a single, modest dose, this is likely negligible, though with a single super-dose, it is significant. This highlights the important of having antioxidants available to your brain throughout the MDMA trip. A study was done on monkeys where they gave them super-does of MDMA, some with a Vitamin C injection and some without, and found significant brain-damage reduction (as in, blocked the vast majority of brain damage) in the Vitamin C group. (sorry, I can't find the study right now.)

So, with chronic use or higher doses, this kind of damage becomes more and more of a problem and leads to brain lesions in the serotonergic neural pathways, and is Normal Risk #1

When your neurons absorb MDMA, it has effects on the Monoamine Oxidase system. Therefore, taking MDMA with Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors (MAOIs) is extremely dangerous and can be life-threatening. Do not take MDMA if you are on MAOIs (and make damn sure you check if any meds you are on or recreation drugs you take are MAOIs). This is Edge-Case Risk #1

Your body breaks down MDMA largely through the CYP450 family of liver enzymes—primarily CYP2D6, but also CYP3A4 and possibly some others to minor extents. Therefore, if these enzymes are inhibited or otherwise not fully functional, your body will not be able to eliminate MDMA (or will do so much more slowly) which can lead to overdose and amplification of the detrimental effects on your brain, cardiovascular system, and more. Inhibition of CYP450 enzymes can be caused by certain medications (like Tagamet/Cimetidine or Ritonavir) or foods like grapefruit and grapefruit juice. This is Edge-Case Risk #2a. Certain people may also have genetically-impaired CYP2D6 activity which can lead to similar complications. This is Edge-Case Risk #2b

"An algorithm is developed and used to relate vitamin D production to the widely used UV index, to help the public to optimize their exposure to UV radiation."

I've been doing the same thing for ~40 minutes of daily peak sunlight, because of heuristics ("make your environment more like the EEA") and because there's evidence it improves mood and cognitive functioning (e.g.). The effect isn't large enough to be noticeable. Sunlight increases risk of skin cancer, but decreases risks of other, less-survivable cancers more; I'm not sure how much of the cancer reduction you could get from taking D3 and not getting sunlight. I guess none of that actually answers your question.

Because when a debt is paid or you get paid for your work, you don't feel grateful, this is yours by right.

That sounds like a deeply unsatisfying way to live; it seems like you will mostly be disappointed by the things that are "yours by right" that you don't get.

The point of gratitude journaling is to focus on how your life has many good things in it. "I got my paycheck for the hours I worked this week; I'm thankful that my employer is honest and prompt, I'm thankful that I have a job, I'm thankful that past-me put in the effort to develop skills relevant to this job, I'm thankful that I live within my means..." and so on. This might involve lowering your expectations so that actually being paid is remarkable enough to write down.

If yes, it means, you are glad because you got stuff you did not really earn

If you read a bit of the happiness literature you find that people feel more happy when buying experiences than when buying "stuff". When doing gratitude journaling, don't focus on stuff but on experience.

was not yours by right, was not owed to you, right?

Thinking about rights isn't very fun.

Let's say that on your way to work a beautiful woman smiles at you. A appropriate reaction is to simple feel good and be grateful. Thinking about whether or not you deserve that she smiles at you on the other hand is stressful and not fun.

Focusing on gratitude shifts attention away from the question whether or not you deserve something.

On LW Elo wrote that they are much more happy than most other smart people that they know. If you look through her post a good portion of them express gratitude like http://lesswrong.com/lw/m3o/lesswrong_experience_of_flavours/canb. That's the kind of post most people on LW wouldn't write. It's reflective of a happier mindset.

I understood it as focusing on everything good that happened... whether it was your work, luck, or a mix of both.

The goal is to cultivate the feeling "my life is good". Which will help reduce anxiety, or something like that.

This is (I think) an extension of mindfulness practice. So the ultimate point of the exercise is to help you conscientiously notice and assign weight to a certain class of experience. Your feeling of entitlement is opposed to that in the sense that humans tend not to notice a well-functioning machine. So if we put a dollar in a vending machine and candy comes out, we might enjoy the candy, or be sad about not having a dollar any more, but we rarely take any time to be excited about how great it is to have a machine that performs the swap. Same with getting a paycheck.

Ideally, gratitude journaling expands the class of things you have to be happy about. It adds the vending machine as an object of joy, rather than an 'inert' object that catches our attention only when it fails.

Humans are adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers, so this explanation is useful for evolutionary psychology, but it's not what goes on in people's minds.

Gratitude deals with friendship, not contracts. They are more vaguely defined. With a contract, you both agree beforehand on the exact way each of you will help the other. With friendship, you just generally help each other when one of you needs help and the other is in a position to offer it. You may have earned the help with earlier friendship. Or maybe someone helped you to start a friendship, on the basis that you are likely to pay for it later.

I'm not familiar with gratitude journaling. I guess it would make you feel like you have lots of friends.

To add a bit of empirical analysis to this comment, I analyzed the YCombinator Winter 2015 batch. I categorized the startups into one of three buckets: Tech-Dependent Business Model (TDBM), RePackaging and Polishing existing tech (RPP), and Novel Tech (NT). The list can be found here.

• CampusJob - TDBM
• Seed - TDBM
• NextTravel - TDBM
• TheMidGame - TDBM
• eBrandValue - TDBM
• Standard Cyborg - RPP, maybe NT
• Rescue Forensics - TDBM (social entrepreneurship)
• Lumi - TDBM/RPP
• Undeground Cellar - TDBM
• Transcriptic - NT?? but not easily evaluated
• Atomwise - maybe NT but probably RPP/TDBM of machine learning (I doubt they created new ML algos)
• Spark Gift - TDBM
• Gradberry - TDBM
• Industrial Microbes - NT?? but probably TDBM/RPP of existing chemical engineering tech
• TechList - TDBM
• Meadow - TDBM
• ReSchedule - TDBM
• Diassess - RPP, synthesis of biotech and infotech
• RazorPay - TDBM
• DirectMatch - TDBM
• BuildScience - TDBM/RPP
• ShiftLabs - RPP, making medical devices cheaper.
• Valor Water Analytics - TDBM
• Instavest - TDBM
• Open Listings - TDBM
• CloudMedx - TDBM/RPP
• BankJoy - TDBM
• TransitMix - TDBM
• ZenFlow - NT, in biotech space.
• Final - TDBM
• Lully - maybe NT but probably RPP
• Spire - TDBM/RPP
• AnalyticsMD - TDBM
• Smarking - TDBM
• 20N - NT
• GrubMarket - TDBM
• CribSpot - TDBM
• KickPay - TDBM
• Notable Labs - uncategorizable but brilliant, some kind of legal/biotech/infotech combination play
• Pretty Instant - TDBM
• VetPronto - TDBM
• Akido - TDBM
• DroneBase - TDBM
• MashGin - maybe NT in computer vision space but probably RPP/TDBM
• LabDoor - RPP/TDBM
• Bonfire - TDBM
• EquipmentShare - TDBM

The following pattern emerged from this exercise: YC is not funding startups that are developing new computer science technology, with the possible exception of MashGin and AtomWise. The YC startups that are attempting to develop new technology are in the biotech/medtech space - Transcriptic, Standard Cyborg, Industrial Microbes, Zenflow, Lully, and 20N.

Edit I noticed after writing that the list is from Demo Day 2, representing the second half of the Winter 2015 batch. However, it doesn't appear to me that analyzing only half the batch causes a serious bias in the conclusion. The Demo Day 1 batch is available here.

"New technology" is ill-defined. Is a more practical version of something which already exists considered new technology or old technology?

Contra gurus like Paul Graham and Peter Thiel, successful tech startup companies do not actually create new technology. Good tech startups do one of two things: 1) invent a new technology-dependent business model, or 2) repackage and polish existing technology in such a way as to bring it above the threshold for widespread use.

I think this is coming from both the way you're defining technology (which looks like it's excluding various forms of cultural or social technology) and the set of startups you're considering. I think both Graham or Thiel would agree with you that entrepreneurs create businesses, which seems like the short version of your claim. Yes, both of them think that new technology is a fruitful place to look for new businesses, but it isn't the only one.

Consider biotech startups, specifically Genentech. The company wasn't founded until a few years after the underlying tech had been invented in a university lab, and while now it has extensive research labs that do basic as well as applied research, most of the startups I'm familiar with (and early Genentech) are very much in the 'applied research' category.

One of the most sensible books I've read about how technology works, from an economic perspective, is The Nature of Technology, by Brian Arthur. It talks about how different technologies interact with each other, and with the economy, and how what he calls standard engineering, which mostly involves assembling off-the-shelf parts, contributes to the advancement of technology as a whole.

A lot of the concepts he talks about can be experienced by using an open source operating system with package management, such as Ubuntu. At least, as I was reading the book, a lot of open source software examples came to mind.

Brian Arthur was involved in the founding of the Santa Fe institute that studies complexity.

I am not sure I'm willing to agree with that.

First, absolutely everyone depends on technologies invented by others and it's turtles all the way down -- a start-up depends on personal computers which depend microprocessors which depend on transistors... etc.

Second, Google and Apple would probably be the canonical examples of startups which actually created new technology. Not coincidentally they belong to the biggest and richest companies in the world. I think Facebook also created new technology, albeit intangible, and also joined that club.

Third, look beyond bits. Biotech startups, for example, attempt to create technology much more often that the code-driven ventures.

I agree with your first premise (that startups don't create new technology), but not the second premise (that large, established companies do).

Read 'The Sources of Innovation' by Eric von Hippel. It reaffirms what your first point, and shows that real technological progress usually comes from users of technology rather than producers (or, to put it in a better way, from cooperation between users and producers). More precisely, innovation happens when there is a feedback loop where users use technology in creative ways (according to needs not foreseen by the original producers) and producers incorporate those ideas back into their products. The contribution of the producer is to identify creative uses of their products and formulate business models around them. Amazon's cloud computing initiative is definitely consistent with this point of view.

Another major source of innovation is academic institutions, where risk-taking is encouraged when it comes to new ideas. Of course, it's also true that established companies also fund research.

I have the exact opposite feeling about Uber. I think that their main business model is: a taxi dispatch service that actually comes when you call it. There is no technology in that at all. The problem is that it is very difficult to enter a business where everyone else is frauds. You can't just advertise that you aren't a fraud, because who would believe you? Uber differentiated itself by being techy, to get people to try it. Maybe the technology was necessary to allow people to monitor cabs and allow people to trust it, but if the industry hadn't dug itself into a hole, a similar business could have been built 50 years ago.

TDBM, I would argue is the most important step. A single discovery could have hundreds of different ways to coordinate with existing technologies. As for RPP, often the people who are best at creating and the ones who are best at distributing are very different. It's a shame the distributor gets the lion's share, but such is life. There are also levels below technology creation. Before the technology can be applied, it's principles must be experimentally tested. Before an experimental test can be conducted, a theory must be developed to explain what you are testing for although some technologies skip this step. The experimenter and the theorist often receive even less than the applier who receives less than the distributor.

I don't think that it's fair to say that software isn't technology. Facebook didn't create new hardware but the idea of the timeline was new.

But even if we look at hardware I don't think it's true. Bre's MakerBot industries did manage to sell MakerBots while it was a startup.

Arduino is created by a startup.

Pebble is a YCombinator startup. Technology like Arduino allowed Pebble to do their prototyping easier than was possible before. There are also a bunch of other Kickstarter projects that produce technology.

I do consider the Hackerspace ecosystem capable of creating new hardware.

A lot of new technology get's developed by repurposing existing technology. Arduino couldn't have been developed without the ability to buy cheap chips but Arduino is still new technology.

You decide on which fund you want, open an account with the appropriate mutual fund company (e.g. Vanguard) or a brokerage, transfer to them the money from your checking account, and put that money into the fund.

Lumifer's answered this already in a sibling comment, but note that this general class of question is answered in the Procedural Knowledge Gaps thread (or its repeat). (I wrote a longer answer to this particular question there.)

https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0040&FundIntExt=INT

or

https://www.fidelity.com/mutual-funds/index-funds/overview

I'm assuming you already have some absolutely basic knowledge of the major physical theories, at the level of Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos (which was recommended in another comment). The books I'll recommend take you deeper into the theories (emphasizing philosophical implications) without excessive mathematics. If you don't have knowledge at this level, read Greene's book first. Some of the books I'm suggesting aren't entirely up to date, but none of them are obsolete. I'm not aware of any more recent books that cover the same material with the same quality. I teach philosophy of physics to non-physics majors, and these are usually among the books I assign (supplemented with recent papers, lecture notes, etc.).

Space-Time: Geroch, General Relativity from A to B

Quantum Mechanics: Albert, Quantum Mechanics and Experience

Statistical Mechanics: Ben-Naim, Entropy and the Second Law: Interpretation and Misss-Interpretations (Supplement with Albert's Time and Chance if you want to go deeper into the "Arrow of Time" issue)

Quantum Field Theory and the Standard Model: Oerter, The Theory of Almost Everything (A pretty superficial book compared to the others on this list, I admit, but I'm not aware of any philosophically deep treatment of QFT that doesn't presume considerable math knowledge. You could also try Feynman's QED, which is excellent but very out-dated.)

Cosmology: Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe (Good basic overview of cosmology, but the philosophical speculation doesn't meet your third requirement. Try Unger and Smolin's The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time for a counterpoint.)

Are your requirements sorted by order of importance?

Quantum Computing Since Democritus might be a good choice. If I think of the first item as the goal and the others qualifications, it is a poor choice, but if I rearrange them, maybe a good choice.

How about The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene? It is a clearly written account of cosmology, though with more emphasis on string theory than on other topics.

As for comparing and explaining the different interpretations of quantum mechanics, I am not aware of any book that does what you ask for. The clearest explanation of some of the interpretations of quantum mechanics that I've read so far is actually right here on Less Wrong, in the Sequences. However, that focuses on a few of the interpretations, without context of the others, and I had to read a bunch of scientific papers to start to get some of the missing context, though I still feel like there are gaps in my knowledge. I too would be interested in reading a book that properly explains and compares the different interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, so I'll be checking back at this thread to see if someone recommends one.

Penrose

Have you taken any sort of notes when reading the Sequences/RAZ?

[pollid:905]

Can anything be done to take advantage of this other than "sit and wait for years while Medical Science does more research"?

This mostly depends on your attribute to risk and responsibility when things go wrong. No doctor is going to tell you "yeah, sure, try it out now" because that would open them up to significant risk and responsibility; if you tell your mom to try this and it doesn't work out, then you're taking on some risk and responsibility. She may not be interested in doing anything riskier than what's been verified by medical science, and talking it over with her is the first step.

The next step is to ask her doctor about trials for this. It may be possible to be involved in human trials, though there is probably waiting involved.

Self-medication is possible. It seems unlikely that a doctor will help you figure out a correct dose, but it's worth asking. In either event, you only have to do it once, and so it may be worth doing the paper-dive and finding the relevant textbooks to borrow (you'll probably only need to read a few sections). If internal application is necessary, you'll probably need to purchase the active ingredient directly. If you do decide to self-medicate, talk to your doctor about it. That'll help prevent doing anything dangerous or any potentially foreseeable interactions between medications.

I think this is the kind of question MetaMed was created to answer. MetaMed's website seems to be offline. Has the company shut down?

I think the consensus was not so much that phrasing anthropic problems in terms of decision problems is necessary, or that there is a "dissolution" taking place, but merely that it works, which is a very important property to have.

One has to be careful when identifying implied beliefs as SSA or SIA, because the comparison is usually made by plugging SSA and SIA probabilities into a naive causal decision theory that assumes 'the' bet is what counts (or reverse-engineering such a decision theory). Anything outside that domain and the labels start to lose usefulness.

In the course of answering Stuart Armstrong I put up two posts on this general subject, except that in both cases the main bodies of the posts were incomplete and there's important content in comments I made replying to my own posts. Which is to say, they're absolutely not reader-friendly, sorry. But if you do work out their content, I think you should find the probabilities in the case of Sleeping Beauty somewhat less mysterious. First post on how we assign probabilities given causal information. Second post on what this looks like when applied.

I'm trying and failing to extract your main point out of your post. Is it that you believe that people don't, or shouldn't, have emotional motivations for political beliefs? Or that a good way to check whether a political belief is right or not is to perform utilitarian calculation on the truth or falsity of the belief, and disregard the emotional implications?

there is a substantial probability that tolerance of homosexuality will destroy civilisation.

I think you should distinguish between

• Destroy civilization -- like the Roman civilization was destroyed -- which delays advancement for a while
• Destroy civilization forever so that post-humans have to re-evolve from some low stage

Not to mention that you sound Pascal-mugged.

I just want to point out this is more or less what was called conservatism for a long time, before it got more radical. If you look up e.g. Edmund Burke's works, you find precisely the attitude that civilization is worth preserving, yet it is something so fragile, so brittle, radical changes could easily break it. So the basic idea was to argue with the progressivist idea that history has a built-in course, going from less civilized to more civilized, and we will never become less civilized than today, so the only choice is how fast we progress for more, Burke and other early conservatives proposed more of an open-ended view of history where civilization can be easily broken. Or, a cyclical view, like empires raise and fall. Part of the reason why they considered civilization so brittle was that they believed in original sin making it difficult for human minds to resists temptations towards destructive actions, like destructive competition. An atheist version of the same belief would be that human minds did not evolve for the modern environment, the same destructive competitive instincts that worked right back then could ruin stuff today. To quote Burke: "Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."

This moderate view characterized conservatism for a long time, for example, National Review's 1957 takedown of Ayn Rand was in this Burkean spirit.

However throughout the 20th century, conservatism has all but disappeared from Europe and and it turned into something quite radical in America. Far more than a civilization-preserving school of ideas, it became something more radical - just look at National Review now and compare it with this 1957 article. I don't really know the details what happened (I guess the religious right awakened, amongst others), but it seems conservatism in its original form have pretty much disappeared from both continents.

Today, this view would be more characterized as moderate e.g. David Brooks seems to be one of the folks who still stick to this civilization-preserval philosophy.

My point is, you probably need to find people who self-identify as moderates and test it on them. e.g. moderatepolitics.reddit.com

When I worried that the correlation between testosterone and politics means that political opinions are hopelessly biased by emotions, it was pointed out to me that it could be valid for emotions to affect values if not probability estimates.

It just so happens that deficits in emotional processing are usually linked to gambling disorders and in the lab are linked to difficulty in distinguishing good bets from bad bets. I suspect that most decisions are less "probability estimates" and more based on approach/avoid emotions. (And incidentally, political orientation is also linked to differences in approach/avoidance behaviors and differences corresponding brain regions. If you thought the testosterone link were bad wait till you read about the amygdala links).

In short, as far as humanity goes emotion basically is totally inextricable from accurate probability estimates, and differences in emotional processing are probably responsible for the variation in viewpoints that cannot be explained by variations in life experience.

P(tolerance of homosexuality will save civiliseation)

Given the attitude of nearly every previous civilization towards homosexuality (including our own until ~30 years ago) I don't see how you can justify assigning this a value anywhere close to P(tolerance of homosexuality will destroy civiliseation).

For one thing, I think that a general principal of not defecting against people who do not defect against you could arguably help save civilisation.

So does this count as defecting? What about this?

P(tolerance of homosexuality will destroy civiliseation)-P(tolerance of homosexuality will save civiliseation)>10^-30

Do you have a reason to consider this, and not the inverse [i.e. P(intolerance of homosexuality will destroy civilization)-P(intolerance of homosexuality will save civilization)>10^-30]?

I don't think this is even a Pascal's mugging as such, just a framing issue.

So far, this is probably fairly obvious. Its also fairly clear that, unless everyone believes you to be a perfect Bayesian reasoner, it is certainly possible that by holding certain beliefs you are signalling moral stances even though this should be independent.

When I worried that the correlation between testosterone and politics means that political opinions are hopelessly biased by emotions

So what should I conclude about your attitude towards men from your use of "testosterone" in that sentence?

P(women are better at maths than men on average) should be independent of whether one wants it to be true,

Why shouldn't one want the statement: 'women are better at maths than men on average' to be true? Note, don't confuse the above statement with the statement: 'men are worse then [this fixed level] at maths on average'.

I've done some rather extensive investigations into the physical limits of computation and the future of Moore's Law style progress. Here's the general lowdown/predictions:

Moore's law for conventional computers is just running into some key new asymptotic limits. The big constraint is energy, which is entirely dominated now by interconnect (and to a lesser degree, passive leakage). For example, on a modern GPU it costs only about 10pJ for a flop, but it costs 30pJ just to read a float from a register, and it gows up orders of magnitude to read a float from local cache, remote cache, off-chip RAM, etc. The second constraint is the economics of shrinkage. We may already be hitting a wall around 20nm to 28nm. We can continue to make transistors smaller, but the cost per transistor is not going down so much (this effects logic transistors more than memory).

3D is the next big thing that can reduce interconnect distances, and using that plus optics for longer distances we can probably squeeze out another 10x to 30x improvement in ops/J. Nvidia and Intel are both going to use 3D RAM and optics in their next HPC parts. At that point we are getting close to the brain in terms of a limit of around 10^12 flops/J, which is a sort of natural limit for conventional computing. Low precision ops don't actually help much unless we are willing to run at much lower clockrates, because the energy cost comes from moving data (lower clock rates reduce latency pressure which reduces register/interconnect pressure). Alternate materials (graphene etc) are a red herring and not anywhere near as important as the interconnect issue, which is completely dominate at this point.

The next big improvement would be transitioning to a superconducting circuit basis which in theory allows for moving bits across the interconnect fabric for zero energy cost. That appears to be decades away, and it would probably only make sense for cloud/supercomputer deployment where large scale cryocooling is feasible. That could get us up to 10^14 flops/J, and up to 10^18 ops/J for low precision analog ops. This tech could beat the brain in terms of energy efficiency by a factor of about 100x to 1000x or so. At that point you are at the Landauer limit.

The next steps past that will probably involve reversible computing and quantum computing. Reversible computing can reduce the energy of some types of operations arbitrarily close to zero. Quantum computing can allow for huge speedups for some specific algorithms and computations. Both of these techs appear to also require cryocooling (as reversible computing without a superconducting interconnect just doesn't make much sense, and QC coherence works best near absolute zero). It is difficult to translate those concepts into a hard speedup figure, but it could eventually be very large - on the order of 10^6 or more.

For information storage density, DNA is close to the molecular packing limit of around ~1 bit / nm^3. A typical hard drive has a volume of around 30 cm^3, so using DNA level tech would result in roughly 10^21 bytes for an ultimate hard drive - so say 10^20 bytes to give room for the non-storage elements.

You might be interested in Kryder's Law.

Probably gotten most of the responses it was going to get, so here's a scatter plot:

People seem to think it's worse the more they know about it (except those who know nothing seem slightly more pessimistic than those who know only a little).

Made by running this in IPython (after "import pandas as pd" and "from numpy.random import randn" in .pythonstartup):

!sed "/^#/d" poll.csv >poll-clean.csv
pd.read_csv("poll-clean.csv", names=["user", "pollid", "response", "date"])
_.pivot_table("response", ["user"], ["pollid"])
_ + 0.1*randn(*_.shape) # jitter
_.plot(kind="scatter", x=906, y=907)
plt.xlabel("Net loss.....Net benefit")
plt.ylabel("Nothing.....Expert")

Ooh, having the raw poll data is neat.

Specifically, it is a person recently kicked out for similar behavior from Wikipedia. It will be interesting to see how other people on RationalWiki will deal with this.

They welcome him because he writes at the usual RationalWiki quality standard?

and now you have neither

I don't see any indication that lack of niceness deprived him of any of his Jeopardy! winnings.

how much money could I get from random people on internet if I just openly ask them to contribute to my glory

You say that as if he was simply planning to collect people's money, put it in a big pile, and sit on it while cackling evilly, but the ostensible plan was actually to make a documentary. The most obvious explanation for the Kickstarter failure seems to me to be "no one was very interested in a documentary about some guy who won a bit of money on Jeopardy!" rather than "no one wanted to contribute to making this documentary because its subject wasn't a nice enough person".

kicked out for similar behavior from Wikipedia

Similar to what? Writing a long article? Splitting an article into two shorter ones? (Neither of those seems like something anyone should or would be kicked off Wikipedia for. A bit of googling suggests it was for edit-warring and behaving generally obsessively and disagreeably, but I don't know how accurate that is because the people saying so are apparently on the other side of the "Gamergate" culture war. from Ryulong and that seems to be a thing that brings out the worst in people.)

Can you recommend a good summary of RationaWiki as such from an external and fairly unbiased point of view? To me it looks like a place that very easily hands out insulting, degrading evaluations of other people's work/thoughts and the part I find kind of weird is that while they clearly have a kind of an agenda or ideology it is not really clear what that is. Who are the main people behind it and what are their convictions etc.

Well, since I'm on LW the first article to come to mind was Outside the Laboratory, although that's not really arguing for the proposition per se.

As for the stooping thing, I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but the first thing that came to mind was that maybe you have a rule out rather than rule in criteria for judging intelligence? As in: someone can say a bunch of smart things, but at best that just earns them provisional smart status. On the other hand if they say one sufficiently dumb thing that's enough to rule them out as being truly intelligent.

It seems to me that a lot of "smart" people are capable of applying their intelligence in some spheres, but not others.

What is your exact claim? That people don't have the ability to apply their intelligence if they chose to do so or that they simple don't choose to apply their intelligence?

What to you mean with intelligence? If it's something like rational thinking, many people use different standards in different domains. A person who on the one hand believes that placebo-blind trials are necessary to establish causation can still believe that it's possible to analyse causation of single events in history and learn from that history.

Hansons Don't be a rationalist might be interesting.

That really sounds like just fighting the hypothetical. I mean, in practice, if something approximating the experiment was attempted in the real world, your reasoning is right, but that's not at all what the thought experiment is about. Do you at least acknowledge that, given that the people involved don't know about it (and also won't find out about the torture later), torture is the correct option?

Create a market for frozen humans

That sounds like an excellent plot for a dystopian horror movie.

What about revival attempts that fail such that they kill the patient? e.g. destructive scan for an upload that turns out not to be accurate enough to run? How can we discourage people from taking unnaceptable risks with our frozen bodies just to exploit us for a quick buck, without also discouraging them from trying to revise us at all?

If you click on the insert/edit image button you get a window with image options. Within that window, to the right of the "Image URL" textbox, there is a button with mouseover text "Browse." Clicking that will open up a new window that lets you upload files (Choose File) and use files you've already uploaded.

GiveWell already has donors that might influence priorities. I don't think having donors means losing credibility.

Since you seem to be sincere in asking for reasons:

"Whore" is considered an unpleasant word by many people. That combined with the overall tone may have made people think your intention was trollish

You seem to deeply misunderstand the dynamics that lead to ssex eduation being the way it is. There is no plausible transition from the way the world exists at present to one where retired sex workers were employed in the school system to teach sex education.

• a) Because the majority still have moral objections to sex work and it is illegal in many places.

• b) there is no common agreement that children should be taught about sex full stop, much less about sexual techniques aimed at pleasure. The only way the very minimal sex education that does exist has been allowed has come to exist is because it framed in terms of health

There are no better experts

In general almost no school classes are taught by domain experts.

But are the even the best experts? Prostitutes are in interactions that are focused on giving their client pleasure in the least amount of time instead of focused on the enjoyment of both parties .

On of the most important lessons that a school could teach on the subject might be: "Talk with your partner about what they enjoy and communicate your own desires." That's much different in a non-money based interaction.

I suspect part of the downvoting is not just due to the content but the use of the loaded word "whores" which has very negative connotations.

Edit: Nevermind. I see that Fiftytwo made the same point. Sorry for wrecking signal/noise.

Hire retired whores to teach sex ed classes. There are no better experts

There are no better experts at impersonal sex carefully walled off from the real "you". They are probably pretty good at separating johns from their money, too...

Eh, I have a problem with the current "sex ed" model because of the trend towards exclusion of more and more boys from the possibility of having sex lives, a trend thoroughly analyzed and discussed in Manosphere blogs dealing with love-shyness, involuntary celibacy and PUA. Also refer to my downvoted and currently hidden post above about some idiot sex expert's ideas about the future of sexbots and orgasmatrons in an essay she published on the website of the Wall Street Journal, of all places.

Basically I find it, well, cruel, to teach these boys about sexual experiences that girls could quite possibly withhold from them indefinitely because the boys don't meet young women's emotionally immature criteria for sex appeal. I would like to make sure that the sexually laggard boys get their sexual debut at an appropriate age, and that means setting aside our inherited religious superstitions about fornication and the like out of practical necessity. if these boys need to see prostitutes, with the approval of their parents, and with the permission of legal and medical authority figures, to overcome this hurdle - well, at one time that idea would have bothered me. But I have come around to seeing it as highly preferable to leaving the sexual debut to the haphazard in the current environment where more and more boys will likely wind up alienated from society through sexual eviction. Sex as a rite of passage signals to the young man, "Welcome to the tribe."

The only talk I've seen about "the sexual advantages of becoming an atheist" other than specifically christian women dropping celibacy commitments has been people taking stuff Christians say about atheist sexual freedom and saying "oh, yeah, look at all this sex we're having just all over the place" in a really sarcastic voice, so I really doubt anyone's ideologically commited to its existence.

No, what people are getting mad at is, that talking about men with "low sexual market value" is steeped in an ideology that most atheists consider disgusting and abominable, because especially the "Newish Atheists" tend to be very feminist compared to the general population. Even if you don't actually mean to push that whole memeplex to them, it's like complaining that someone's opinion is influenced by their privilege in the comments of a right-wing or anti-SJ blog.

Christian sexual repression is about the "sex is bad" and you should only have it to reproduce ideology. That's no fun ideology and it's worthwhile to get rid of it.

I haven't seen any atheist who argues that when men switch to being atheists women won't reject him any more. That seems to me like a strawman.

I'm also not aware of any studies that suggest that atheists men are more or less likely to get rejected.

How about spending some time without relying on the "sexual market" hypothesis?

I see so much wrong with this that I don't know where to start:

Then why bring it up on LW?