Open thread, Sep. 14 - Sep. 20, 2015

Could we live forever? - hey guys. I made a film about transhumanism for BBC News. It features some people in this community and some respected figures. Let me know what you think and if i missed anything etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STsTUEOqP-g&feature=youtu.be

26 Things I Learned in the Deep Learning Summer School

In the beginning of August I got the chance to attend the Deep Learning Summer School in Montreal. It consisted of 10 days of talks from some of the most well-known neural network researchers. During this time I learned a lot, way more than I could ever fit into a blog post. Instead of trying to pass on 60 hours worth of neural network knowledge, I have made a list of small interesting nuggets of information that I was able to summarise in a paragraph.

At the moment of writing, the summer school website is still online, along with all the presentation slides. All of the information and most of the illustrations come from these slides and are the work of their original authors. The talks in the summer school were filmed as well, hopefully they will also find their way to the web.

Probably the biggest cryonics story of the year. In the print edition of The New York Times, it appeared on the front page, above the fold.

A Dying Young Woman's Hope in Cryonics and a Future, by Amy Harmon

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/us/cancer-immortality-cryogenics.html

You can also watch a short documentary about Miss Suozzi here:

http://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000003897597/kim-suozzis-last-wishes.html

How Grains Domesticated Us by James C. Scott. This may be of general interest as a history of how people took up farming (a more complex process than you might think), but the thing that I noticed was that there are only a handful (seven, I think) of grain species that people domesticated, and it all happened in the Neolithic Era. (I'm not sure about quinoa.) Civilized people either couldn't or wouldn't find another grain species to domesticate, and civilization presumably wouldn't have happened without the concentrated food and feasibility of social control that grain made possible.

Could domestcatable grain be a rather subtle filter for technological civilization? On the one hand, we do have seven species, not just one or two. On the other, I don't know how likely the biome which makes domesticable grain possible is.

AI risk going mainstream

This week on the BBC you may get the impression that the robots have taken over. Every day, under the banner Intelligent Machines, we will bring you stories on online, TV, radio about advances in artificial intelligence and robotics and what they could mean for us all.

Why now? Well at the end of last year Prof Stephen Hawking told the BBC that full artificial intelligence could spell the end for mankind. [...] That gloomy view started a public debate. Roboticists and computer scientists who specialise in the AI field rushed to reassure us that the "singularity", the moment when machines surpass humans, is so far off that it is still the stuff of science fiction.

Looks like Stephen Hawking is finally someone high enough status that he can say this sort of think and people will take him seriously.

A while back, I was having a discussion with a friend (or maybe more of a friendly acquaintance) about linguistic profiling. It was totally civil, but we disagreed. Thinking about it over lunch, I noticed that my argument felt forced, while his argument seemed very reasonable, and I decided that he was right, or at least that his position seemed better than mine. So, I changed my mind. Later that day I told him I'd changed my mind and I thought he was right. He didn't seem to know how to respond to that. I'm not sure he even thought I was being serious at first.

Have other people had similar experiences with this? Is there a way to tell someone you've changed your mind that lessens this response of incredulity?

The Fallacy of Placing Confidence in Confidence Intervals

Welcome to the web site for the upcoming paper "The Fallacy of Placing Confidence in Confidence Intervals." Here you will find a number of resources connected to the paper, including the itself, the supplement, teaching resources and in the future, links to discussion of the content.

The paper is accepted for publication in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

pdf

Interval estimates – estimates of parameters that include an allowance for sampling uncertainty – have long been touted as a key component of statistical analyses. There are several kinds of interval estimates, but the most popular are confidence intervals (CIs): intervals that contain the true parameter value in some known proportion of repeated samples, on average. The width of confidence intervals is thought to index the precision of an estimate; CIs are thought to be a guide to which parameter values are plausible or reasonable; and the confidence coefficient of the interval (e.g., 95%) is thought to index the plausibility that the true parameter is included in the interval. We show in a number of examples that CIs do not necessarily have any of these properties, and can lead to unjustified or arbitrary inferences. For this reason, we caution against relying upon confidence interval theory to justify interval estimates, and suggest that other theories of interval estimation should be used instead

How many hours of legitimate work do you get done per day?

Legitimate = uninterrupted, focused work. Regarding the time you spend working but not fully focused, use your judgement in scaling it. Ie. maybe an hour of semi-productive work = .75 hours of legitimate work.

Edit: work doesn't only include work for your employer/school. It could be self-education, side projects etc. It doesn't include chores or things like casual pleasure reading though. Per day = per day that you intend to put in a full days work.

[pollid:1029]

Recent discussion topics on Omnilibrium:

• Should people be allowed to ear-mark their taxes to specific policy areas for a price?

• Are there any arguments for wealth inequality being desirable?

Should we actually expect 'big world immortality' to be true? I know the standard LW response is that what we should care about is measure, but what I'm interested in is whether it should be true that from every situation in which we can find ourselves in, we should expect a never-ending continuity of consciousness?

Max Tegmark has put forth a couple of objections: the original one (apart from simple binary situations, a consciousness often undergoes diminishment before dying and there's no way to draw continuity from it to a world in which it survives) and a newer one in Our Mathematical Universe (he doesn't think there are "actual" infinities in nature and, therefore, a relevant world doesn't always exist). Any others?

I have a variant on linear regression. Can anyone tell me what it's called / point me to more info about it / tell me that it's (trivially reducible to / nothing like) standard linear regression?

Standard linear regression has a known matrix X = x(i,j) and a known target vector Y = y(j), and seeks to find weights W = w(i) to best approximate X * W = Y.

In my version, instead of knowing the values of the input variables (X), I know how much each contributes to the output. So I don't know x(i,j) but I kind of know x(i,j) * w(i), except that W isn't really a thing. And I know some structure on X: every value is either 0, or equal to every other value in its row. (I can tell those apart because the 0s contribute zero and the others contribute nonzero.) I want to find the best W to approximate X * W = Y, but that question will depend on what I want to do with the uncertainty in X, and I'm not sure about that.

I should probably avoid giving my specific scenario, so think widget sales. You can either sell a widget in a city or not. Sales of a widget will be well-correlated between cities: if widget sells well in New York, it will probably sell well in Detroit and in Austin and so on, with the caveat that selling well in New York means a lot more sales than selling well in Austin. I have a list of previous widgets, and how much they sold in each city. Received wisdom is that a widget will sell about twice as much in New York as in Detroit, and a third more than in Austin, but I want to improve on the received wisdom.

So I'm told that a widget will sell 10 million, and that it will be sold in (list of cities). I want to come up with the best estimate for its sales in New York, its sales in Austin, etc.

Hopefully this is clear?

data {
    int<lower=1> N;
    int<lower=1> Ncities;
    int<lower=1> Nwidgets;
    int<lower=1> city[N];
    int<lower=1> widget[N];
    real<lower=0> sales[N];
}

parameters {
    real<lower=0> alpha;
    real beta[Ncities];
    real gamma[Nwidgets];
    real<lower=0> sigma;
}

model {
    // put code here to define explicit prior distributions for parameters
    for (n in 1:N) {
        // the tilde means the left side's sampled from the right side
        sales[n] ~ normal(alpha + beta[city[n]] + theta[widget[n]], sigma);
    }
}

for (n in 1:N) {
    sales[n] ~ lognormal(log(alpha * beta[city[n]] * theta[widget[n]]), sigma);
}

I made a rationalist Tumblr, primarily to participate in rationalist conversations there. Solid posts will still be posted to LW, when I finish them.

Singer v.s. Van der Vossen:

Singer asks, if it’s obligatory to save the drowning child you happen to encounter at the expense of your shoes, why isn’t it obligatory not to buy the shoes in the first place, but instead to save a child in equally dire straits?

As a profession, we are in an odd but unfortunate situation. Our best philosophers and theorists develop accounts of global justice that are disconnected from the best empirical insights about poverty and prosperity.

Reading these theories, one might think that our best prospects for alleviating poverty around the world lie in policies of redistribution, foreign aid, reforms to the international system, new global institutions, and so on. And one might think that markets, property rights, and economic freedom are at best incidental, and more likely inimical, to the eradication of global poverty.

Such ignorance, if not denial, of the empirical findings about development and growth is irresponsible.

Bas van der Vossen

The article he is quoted in goes on to explain:

Mainstream development economics, in a nutshell, holds that the poverty is an institutional problem. More precisely, poverty is human being’s natural state. Poverty is normal and does not need to be explained, but wealth does.

The main reason some nations are rich and others poor is not because some nations have better geography, better natural resources, or better genes. Rather, rich countries are rich because they have better institutions. Rich countries have institutions that incentivize growth and development.

These institutions include strong private property rights, inclusive and honest governments, stable political regimes, a dependable and inclusive legal system characterized by the rule of law, open and competitive markets, and free international trade.

Poor countries have institutions that fail to incentive growth and development, and often instead have institutions that encourage predation. These countries have weak recognition or active disregard of property rights, exclusive and dishonest governments, instable political regimes, undependable legal systems characterized by the capricious rule of men rather than the rule of law, and closed, rent seeking, crony capitalist markets, or few markets at all, and little international trade.

Overall, we are not against charity. We accept that charity is good on the margins. We both give money to various charities.

But to focus on charity as means of fighting poverty is misguided. Mainstream development economics holds that that international aid and charity tend to do little good overall, and tend to do as much harm as good.† ...

As a profession, we are in an odd but unfortunate situation. Our best philosophers and theorists develop accounts of global justice that are disconnected from the best empirical insights about poverty and prosperity.

Reading these theories, one might think that our best prospects for alleviating poverty around the world lie in policies of redistribution, foreign aid, reforms to the international system, new global institutions, and so on. And one might think that markets, property rights, and economic freedom are at best incidental, and more likely inimical, to the eradication of global poverty.

Such ignorance, if not denial, of the empirical findings about development and growth is irresponsible.†

We share van der Vossen’s concerns.

Mainstream development economics, in a nutshell, holds that the poverty is an institutional problem. More precisely, poverty is human being’s natural state. Poverty is normal and does not need to be explained, but wealth does.

The main reason some nations are rich and others poor is not because some nations have better geography, better natural resources, or better genes. Rather, rich countries are rich because they have better institutions. Rich countries have institutions that incentivize growth and development.

These institutions include strong private property rights, inclusive and honest governments, stable political regimes, a dependable and inclusive legal system characterized by the rule of law, open and competitive markets, and free international trade.

Poor countries have institutions that fail to incentive growth and development, and often instead have institutions that encourage predation. These countries have weak recognition or active disregard of property rights, exclusive and dishonest governments, instable political regimes, undependable legal systems characterized by the capricious rule of men rather than the rule of law, and closed, rent seeking, crony capitalist markets, or few markets at all, and little international trade.†

To be inclusive, economic institutions must feature secure private property, an unbiased system of law, and a provision of public services that provides a level playing field in which people can exchange and contract; it must also permit the entry of new businesses and allow people to choose their careers.†

Now, not every development economist shares Acemoglu and Robinson’s exact views. But their general position — that private property, markets, and economic freedom — are needed for sustained growth is the mainstream view.

To be clear, we are not saying that mainstream development economics calls for libertarian politics at a domestic level. Economists have varying positions about the degree to which governments can and should correct market failures. They also have varying positions about the extent to which countries should provide social insurance to their citizens.

,,,

Our view — consistent with development economics — is that first-worlders’ willingness to buy DVD players and iPhones, not their desire to donate their income, is that thing that actually makes the bigger difference in fighting poverty.

Taiwan and South Korea grew rich and became First World countries, not because of handouts, but because they produced and sold luxury goods (on the broad definition of “luxury good”) to the First World.

But, as far as we can tell, they talk this way because they are ignorant and/or misinformed about the relevant empirical work. Philosophers disagree with economists not because they have read and discovered serious flaws in the economists’ work, but because philosophers have for the most part just ignored development economics.

Philosophers are of course free to disagree with mainstream development economics, but they bear the burden of proof of refuting it. We do not bear the burden of defending it here

...

But in the long-term, we’ll shut down the very economic system that made the First World rich. The Third World doesn’t need to eat our success — they need to emulate

...

Second, the history of food donations is fraught with peril. Donating food to the Third World sometimes alleviates a famine — it is sometimes the thing to do in an emergency.

But, more frequently, first-world food donations just put Third World farmers out of business, and make them dependent on donations in the future.†

Again, the consensus in development economics is not that the Third World needs us to give them grain, but, on the contrary, that the Third World needs our governments to stop subsidizing grain production in the first world, so that we First Worlders instead buy our grain from the Third World.

I don't understand how the karma system here works. One my posts below, about the usefulness of prostitutes for learning how to get into sexual relationships through dating regular women, dropped off for awhile with a -4 karma. Then I just checked, and it has a +4 karma. Where did the 8 karma points come from?

This has happened to some of my posts before. Do I have some fans I don't know about who just happen to show up in a short interval to upvote my controversial posts?

Many LWers, myself particularly, write awkwardly. Did you know Word can check your writing style, not just your spelling with a simple option change. I'm learning how to write with better style already.

The Importance, tractability, and neglectedness approach is the go-to hereustic for EA's.

The open philanthropy project approaches it like this:

“What is the problem?” = importance

“What are possible interventions?” = tractability

“Who else is working on it?” = neglectedness

I reckon it's a simplification of the rational planning model:

Intelligence gathering — A comprehensive organization of data, potential problems and opportunities are identified, collected and analyzed.

Identifying problems — Accounting relevant factors.

Assessing the consequences of all options — Listing possible consequences and alternatives that could resolve the problem and ranking the probability that each potential factors could materialize in-order to give a correct priority in the analysis.

Relating consequences to values — With all policies there will be a set of relevant dimensional values (for example, economic feasibility and environmental protection) and a set of criteria for appropriateness, against which performance (or consequences) of each option being responsive can be judged.

Choosing the preferred option — The policy is brought through from fully understanding the problems, opportunities, all the consequences & the criteria of the tentative options and by selecting a optimal alternative with consensus of involved actors.

What do you reckon?

If a graduate student approached you to do a section of the data analyses of your research in return for credit/authorship and to degree requirements, what would you give her? Not, she's specified just a ''section'' and is not interested in any data collection, research administration or the link, she just wants to fulfill her mini-research project requirements.

From the Foreword to Brave New World:

Nor does the sexual promiscuity of Brave New World seem so very distant. There are already certain American cities in which the number of divorces is equal to the number of marriages. In a few years, no doubt, marriage licenses will be sold like dog licenses, good for a period of twelve months, with no law against changing dogs or keeping more than one animal at a time. As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.

We can remember things we don't believe and believe things we don't remember. Which source of knowledge if a better authority for our expectations and priors?

I'm trying to wrap my mind around Stuart Armstrong's post on Doomsday argument, and to do so I've undertook the task of tabooing 'randomness' in the definitions of SIA and SSA.
My first attempt clearly doesn't work: "observers should reason giving the exact same degree of belief to any proposition of the form: 'I'm the first observer', 'I'm the second observer', etc." As it has been noted before many times, by me and by others, anthropic information changes the probability distribution, and any observer has at least a modicum of that. I suspect this conflict is what's thwarting my attempts at making sense of the topic.

http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=1239

Against akrasia

The other day I heard someone reply 'so am I' to ''I'm sorry''. Never heard that before. Polite, but not as askward to replying I'm sorry right after the counterparty.

Brave New World, Chapter 3:

"And after all," Fanny's tone was coaxing, "it's not as though there were anything painful or disagreeable about having one or two men besides Henry. And seeing that you ought to be a little more promiscuous …"

Lenina shook her head. "Somehow," she mused, "I hadn't been feeling very keen on promiscuity lately. There are times when one doesn't. Haven't you found that too, Fanny?"

Fanny nodded her sympathy and understanding. "But one's got to make the effort," she said, sententiously, "one's got to play the game. After all, every one belongs to every one else."

"Yes, every one belongs to every one else," Lenina repeated slowly and, sighing, was silent for a moment; then, taking Fanny's hand, gave it a little squeeze. "You're quite right, Fanny. As usual. I'll make the effort."

A child of four is just as intelligent as the adult they will eventually become. They just have less knowledge to work with.

So that I may get a better overview of this account I have undertaken one task and plan to undertake another.

This is the task I plan to complete in the near future: In the near future I will be reviewing what I have replied to and deciding whether to bookmark that link and the parent link for further consideration or to disregard them.

This is the task already completed: Looking back over my post history, these are the only one's for which I currently expect that looking back upon them in the future will be a worthwhile exercise

etc

Posts after [? · GW] this post was published are not included

Discussion board posts

Synthetic biology for good

Deworming a movement

Rationality (psychology, computer sci and behavioural economics)

daily checklist

internalised discounting

meta cognitive checklist

Change, help and understanding

Reducing dimensions of complexity

high performance psychology

What does correlation mean?

triaging problems with plausible psychological and physical solution spaces

Perhaps there should be trigger warning warnings

Uncertainty is okay

Critical thinking emergency department

Hunt down false memories

What does it mean when mental health conditions shift to one another?

time and expertise

towards evidence based meta-cognition and conscious thought

Extinction addiction

Public health*

Lack of community interest in extremely high payoff risky projects, AI excepted

GiveWell's irreverence for the controversial topics in developmental economic

Is there any evidence GiveWell's recommended charities make anyone feel better any more effectively than alternatives?

Could preoccupation with neglectedness is an easy way to keep the charity evaluation space free of its own analytical competitors, and who's keeping track of open problems in ea?

Precision medicine

Human genomics has been a let down so far

Some people may be more depressed because they aren't traumatised enough

health startups go with a whimper not a bang, if they take off at all

Regulators hold back precision medicine

Political economy

young people can become politicians too

Are market economies conjured evolutions that can't bridge the Lucas critique?

recent Thiel quotes

individuals might be able to bet beliefs and vote values but is there enough homogeniety in what beliefs and values mean to set up a multiagent system around it?

radio opinions

Openheimmer and his documentary on paramilitaries, similar things and the people behind them

Motivation

competition and ordinariness

yo elliot

Affective truths in motivation

Procrastination and fear of success

Unexpected behaviour

What's MIRI hiding?

Structured sexism

Not only disinterested in playing paranoid debating online, LW's dislike the idea

Nobody seems interested in making a planning tool for lay people based to construct game theoretic scenarios

An effective altruism related post in an easy-points thread with minimal texts getting downvotes

LW'ers don't seem to like poetry

LW'ers don't like don't like tangents or counterforenscs

Alcor Cryonics should rename itself to Alicorn Cryonics, because associating your brand with ponies makes marketing easier.

I'll leave it to you to determine if I meant for this comment to be taken seriously or sarcastically.

namechk

So how does getting sexual experience with prostitutes translate over to getting into sexual relationships with regular women through dating, any way?

I met a 20-something woman at the Venturist cryonics convention in Laughlin, Nevada, last year who talked to me more than she needed to as a social acknowledgment, which made me wonder if she felt attracted to me. I don't know how to interpret these situations in the handful of times they have happened in my life, so I don't know what to do, and they make me anxious.

If I had sexual learning experiences only from prostitutes, and I had nothing else to go on, should I have asked this woman how much money she wanted to come with me to my room in Laughlin's hotel for sex?

Does America's health care system have a bias against incels?

Today I went to get my first physical in years now that I have Obamacare, and during the interview with the nurse practitioner, when she got to the questions about my marital status and whether I have any children, I just went straight to the point about my adult virginity, along with providing some context about how I wasted my time “dating” earlier in life because I could never close the deal with a woman. Otherwise she might assume that I had gone to prison for 30 years or something ridiculous like that to explain what kept me away from women for so long. (A woman actually asked me one time if I had spent decades in prison to account for my lack of sexual experience.)

And this nurse then started arguing with me about not giving up on finding sexual relationships – at my age (55). She sounded like the dating advice scolds that incel bloggers like The Black Pill have written about. This pissed me off, and I may have to find a different health care provider.

People with sexual experience really, really don’t understand the situation of guys like me, even ones with medical training.