Open Thread, Sept 5. - Sept 11. 2016

Something that might help is writing things down. For example, if you had a notebook where you wrote down things that you had figured out, every time you came to a conclusion, and any details that might help you remember why you came to that conclusion. Then, whenever you encounter a problem you can read over the notes in the notebook from a variety of topics, and see if any of them match. Also, if you keep it updated frequently then when you go to write something down that would be another opportunity to review the notebook and see if anything matches something else that's bothering you.

Or if physically writing things in a notebook isn't something you want to do, sending yourself an email could work in a similar way.

In general, I've found that writing things down helps with remembering things.

I'm not sure how much this would help you in particular, but spaced repetition, when done right, should jog your memory and make you work to recall something just before you would have forgotten it.

In order to learn and remember to apply useful concepts, I have an Anki deck containing the following:

• http://mcntyr.com/52-concepts-cognitive-toolkit/

• https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d#.qtvgobrvk

• The LW Wiki

• Miscellaneous, domain-specific tools and knowledge

The argument a) depends on you being a random observer and b) makes only a statistical prediction. If you are one of those early or late observers you will come to the wrong conclusions. Probability doesn't help you at that point at all.

Also: Once you start creating more and more variants of the the same pattern (double DA, other time frames) you don't really make the probability worse, you are doing p-hacking. That doesn't change reality and you can't reliably learn anything about reality.

I might be in a simulation and such checks might change my prior for it but it is quite low anyway. Like so many other strange and newfangled ways reality could be like theistic.

The problem with the doomsday argument is that it is a correct assignment of probabilities only if you have the very small amount of information specified in the argument. More information can change your predictions - the prediction you would make if you had less information gets overridden by the prediction that uses all your information.

Let's use the example of picking a random tree. Suppose you know about the existence of tree-diseases that make trees sick and more likely to die, and you know that some trees are sick and some are healthy. You pick a random tree and it is ten years old and sick. You now should update your prediction of the average tree age toward 10 years, but you cannot expect that you have picked a point near the middle of this tree's life. Because you know it is sick, you can expect it to die sooner than that.

As I commented on your blog, I thought of the argument myself before I heard it from anyone, and I am unlikely to be unique in that, which makes things slightly less bad, since there were probably lots of people (in absolute numbers) who thought of it.

The best rebuttal I know here is that the question is not asked randomly but conditionally dependent of my position. That is when I ask "why I am so early?" I know that I am "early", and I am not random person from all group. So all who are early will be more interested in DA and ask the question more frequently. But does it completely compensate DA?

For example people who was born 1 January may be more interested in question why their birthday is so early in the year. But it doesn't prevent me using my birthday date to estimate the number of days in a year. (My birthday is on 243th day so the number of days in a year is less than 500 with 50 per cent probability)

I came to the same conclusion: that DA should be applied only to the people who knows about DA. And it makes it worse. There are two ways how to apply it DA-people. Using years and using number of people (rank) who know about DA. The second way is even worse as the number of people is growing exponentially, and so we are near the end of the group of people who knows about DA.

It may not mean extinction, but strong and universally accepted DA rebuttal, or drastic fail of the number of people.

Global catastrophe in next 10-50 years unfortunately seems to be most likely explanation.

(The ideas were also known to Carter in 1983 when he presented anthropic principle and already knew about DA. At this time he was the only person on Earth who knew about DA and he understood its implication for small class of people who knows about DA and it really made him worry about extinction soon. I forget where I read about it.)

I would rather see the doomsday argument as a version of sleeping beauty.

Different people appear to have different opinions on this kind of arguments. To me, the solution appears rather obvious (in restrospect):

If you ask a decision theory about advice on decisions, then there is nothing paradoxical at all, and the answer is just an obvious computation. This tells you that "probability" is the wrong concept in such situations; rather you should ask about "expected utility" only, as this is much more stable under all kind of anthropic arguments.

I'm going to understand 'academic publishing without journals' broadly.

Has anyone else found themselves implicitly predicting how much academic research would be performed and published virtually in the future? Think things like Sci-Hub, academic blogosphere, increase in number of preprints, etc. Can you 'exit' mainstream academia?

So, will the amount of academic research published in the blogosphere increase over time? It’s hard for me to imagine a non-interesting answer to this question. If it increased, wouldn’t that be interesting? And if it stayed about the same or decreased, wouldn’t you wonder why?

Er, could the blogosphere function as a compliment or partial substitute of the traditional academic community? If not, why not?

The first intuitive objection that crosses my mind goes something like: “You cannot build the Large Hadron Collider in your backyard.” My immediate reply is, “Not yet.” But that seems fair. You probably can’t, at the moment, do experiments that currently require massive amounts of coordination and funding without going through the existing academic system.

But with that said, I think to ask, “What fraction of academic work is like that?” I’m sure it varies by field, but if a substantial amount of academic work can be done virtually, then you could still be pretty competitive from a keyboard, insofar as this is a competition. Think of all the theoretical work and lit reviews and data interpretation.

The second intuitive objection that crosses my mind goes something like: “Science is Big, blogosphere is small.”

This is often a good metaphor. Boulders beat bunnies in crushing contests. Walmart beats Mom and Pop in profit contests. Bigger is often better. But I think this is a very weird case of competition between firms. For one, academic papers aren’t really fungible. It doesn’t matter if you buy a Snickers bar from Mom and Pop or if you buy one from Walmart, and if it’s cheaper at Walmart, then you’ll buy it there. In the academic case, you could switch out one copy of my paper on high-pressure chocolate pudding dynamics with another, and everything would be fine, but you cannot in general exchange my paper on pudding dynamics with someone else’s paper on the neuropsychology of flower aesthetics and get the same work done. And beyond that, there is an ancient tradition of making scientific data public. You could conceivably obtain a monopoly on Snickers retailing, but if there were some effort to systematically starve any particular group of data, I imagine that being pretty controversial. I also don’t imagine that being very practical, at least not any more than any other historical effort to prevent people from copying digital information. It’s too easy to copy. The traditional publishers are sort of already trying this right now and miserably failing.

After I ask whether or not the idea is worth exploring, I think to ask why it hasn’t happened more, and whether or not it can be made to happen more.

Robin Hanson did an answering session on Quora recently, and he said that at times he’s had to consider whether he would publish something traditionally or blog about it. So, to think about it one way, why do academics currently prefer publishing in mainstream academia to publishing in the blogosphere?

Are the only reasons, 'an overwhelming majority of academics publish in mainstream academia', 'publishing in mainstream academia is more prestigious than publishing in the blogosphere', and 'mainstream academia is the only way to get paid for doing research'? If those were the only reasons, this might mean that the relative unpopularity of the blogosphere for academic publication is just a matter of inertia. This seems like it would be a bad thing. And that’s an honest question: “Why do academics currently prefer publishing in mainstream academia to publishing in the blogosphere?” It’s easy for me to imagine that I’ve missed something because I’ve never experienced what it’s like to be an academic.

To think about it in another way, do academics have incentives to publish in the blogosphere as opposed to mainstream academia?

I think this is already answered weakly in the affirmative. Academic criticism is published in mainstream academia, but there are also bloggers who publish criticism in the blogosphere pseudonymously/anonymously instead in order to preserve their careers and reputations, and to avoid entry costs (which can include personal effort). This is sad. Also, it may be easy to lump this sort of work in with journalism, but the criticism can get quite technical, and it would have been published in mainstream academia otherwise.

The thing I found interesting about the link in the parent comment wasn't the reputation system, but the idea of post-publication review becoming widespread. I would be so happy if scientists just blogged at each other instead of waiting for enough content to make a passable paper. I would be so happy if, instead of publishing another paper, scientists just wrote kickass comments and let the OP update what they had. There's no reason you couldn't assign status for that. That's happened historically here. The Stack Exchange Network is also kind of like this. Post-publication review makes me excited. You can get status without maximizing a number (or, publication count; maybe there's karma.)

Most generally: there are already people who prefer the Internet to academia; I wonder just how far and in what way you'd have to push things to make this preference ordering more common.

Publication mints coins/points which immediately flow to cited articles.

Is this true even if I am citing the article just to show how bad it is?

Also, this would preserve (maybe even increase) many existing problems with the scientific publishing, such as splitting your ideas into many little articles, citing your friends who cite you in return, etc.

I have some in transit to me (in Australia) will report on the OT when they get here.

I've tried Joylent Twennybars but not any other product. I found them very tasty, but I also got some stomachache. Maybe I would get used to that, though, or I may have been eating them incorrectly.

Has anyone else tried the new Soylent bars?

I have tried Joylent, but not any other stuff, so I can't compare. (I suspect they all taste like muesli.)

I like having a vegan option, but I also prefer the liquid version, so I don't care about the taste or price of the bars.

However, for introducing other people to the concept of universal food, bars are probably better than the liquid stuff. As in, people are more likely to take a food that seems less weird.

The problem is that "the laws of physics" is a phrase that means two different things:
(1) Rules like Newton's laws.
(2) What the world does.

Rules of grammar are formal rules like (1) and not about (2). You can use statistics to see whether (1) matches (2) but there's a lot that can be said with math about formal rules. You can use math to show that two kind of theories are equivalent or that they are different.

There's a lot about the rules of mathematics that you can't learn via statistics. You can't prove NP=/=P by looking at a bunch of examples and using statistics.

Chomsky invented the Chomsky hierachy and from what I remember from my classes at university there's no statistics involved in that way of thinking about grammar. It's still a model of grammar important enough to be taught in computer science classes.

The passage seems silly. It is easy to make statistical models that contradict Chomsky's claim. But I think he means something else, that whether a sentence is grammatical, while not a binary, admits sharply discrete levels. The concept of grammar cuts human understanding of language at its joint and statistical understanding is largely on the other side. At least, that is the claim; I think introspection is difficult and usually turns statistical understanding into an illusion of discreteness.

Therefore, one cannot use statistical reasoning to draw conclusions about the rules of grammar.

Is this, actually, the argument Chomsky made? Because looking at Wikipedia, it says

This was used then as a counter-example to the idea that the human speech engine was based upon statistical models

which is a very different thing.

If they actually achieved what they claim - a calculus for directly obtaining inference algorithms from input models - then it is very cool.

My gut mathematical feeling is that the full solution to that problem is intractable, but even a partial semi-solution could still be cool.

http://128.84.21.199/pdf/1609.00425v1.pdf

how do you think your first failure at this will come about? before retrying?

I did burpees for a while. Now I'm not sure what's the point. Sure, you get tired quickly, but you don't feel strong or fast while doing it. Lifting average-heavy stuff for 10-15 reps, or running 100m dashes with short breaks, is much more fun for me because I can go all out and push against my limit of power, not just my fatigue.

ie for 17, do 7, 6, 3, 2, 1),

That rounds up to 19, not 17.

I considered it seriously and spent hours working on a method, then realised that if I reduced stress I could improve my memory in a way that I didn't need it.

Using memory palaces to solve your problems might be a harder path to doing whatever it is that you want to do than other existing paths that might seem aversive. (I was hoping to remember names better. Now I just choose to remember them with more ferocity)

Brienne has, example blog post here. She'd probably recommend it.

I personally am satisfied with some much more simplistic memory techniques like trying to remember context when I remember something (e.g. try to remember the sight and feel of sitting in a certain classroom to remember content of a lecture), and using repetition more judiciously (remembering to use peoples' names right after I hear them is the biggest use, but this is also good for shopping lists etc).

I also suspect that practice using any sort of deliberate memorization at all will improve some sort of general deliberate memorization skill, so you might find that practicing mnemonics or method of loci improves your memory in a general way.

"Your Memory: How it works and how to improve it" by Higbee is an excellent book on memory. It dispels some common memory myths, clarifies concepts (e.g. short vs long term memory), teaches general principles on how to remember information (meaningfulness, organisation, association, visualization, etc.), as well as specific memory techniques (method of loci, peg mnemonic, first letter mnemonic, etc.).

[I'm one of the organizers of this years Community Weekend.]

Since the community weekend's focus is on building community, we decided to only accept speakers who are also regular participants. We offered this option to Bachir but didn't receive any further messages.

Both neoreactionaries and other people want a functional society, they just disagree on how to get it; both transhumanists and religious people want to live forever, they just disagree about whether life extension or preying to get into the best afterlife is the best way to go about it. Perhaps they have the same terminal goals?

OTOH if religious people have 'faith' as a terminal value and atheists do not, then yes, this may be more of a problem. If people have 'other people follow my values' as a terminal value, this could be a very large problem.

I think that one of the problem with CEV is that we still have to say who's values we want to extrapolate, and it almost defines the outcome.

For example CEV of values of C. elegance is not equal to human values.

The main problem here is how we defined to be human. Here are most value groups differ. Will we include unborn children? Neanderthals?

I mean that different value system have different definition of human beings, and "human CEV" is different for green party member who include all animals in "humans", and to neo-something who may exclude some people from definition of humans. So AI could correctly calculate CEV but to the wrong group.

This is a very weak argument, since it might simply show that coherent epistemology leads to everyone becoming religious, or neo-reactionary.

In other words, your arguments just says "very intelligent people disagree with me, so that must be because of perverse values."

It could also just be that you are wrong.

It's really silly.

If we lived in the kind of universe where learning didn't help, where drawing more-correct conclusions and fitting your behavior better to the environment didn't help, then evolution and indeed biological life wouldn't work either. The kind of world where maps don't have anything to do with territories is a dead world, one in which there are no maps because becoming a mapper is worthless.

"Every communication is inaccurate" is inaccurate, but more-or-less true. "Every communication is equally inaccurate" is very much less accurate, to the point of being a flat lie.

After all, if communication didn't work (better than non-communication), then there wouldn't be any. The existence of falsehoods implies the existence of (relatively accurate) truths, because if there wasn't such a thing as a truth, then why would we bother making up lies? A lie only fools anyone because they believe it to be a truth.

Under what circumstances would you say "someone was able to refute my arguments"? Evidently when you are convinced by them. So the "fact" that no one can refute your arguments is not something impressive, but merely shows that you are stubborn.