Open Thread, December 1-15, 2012

A couple of days ago, GiveWell updated their top charity picks. AMF is still on top, but GiveDirectly bumped SCI from #2 to #3.

They also (very) tentatively recommend splitting your donation among the three: 70% to AMF, 20% to GiveDirectly, and 10% to SCI. The arguments about this in the blog post and comments are pretty interesting. (But I wouldn't stress too much about it: harder choices matter less).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues: The future will not be cool

http://www.salon.com/2012/12/01/nassim_nicholas_taleb_the_future_will_not_be_cool/

Taleb's characterization of "technothinkers" as cultural ignoramuses doesn't sound quite right to me, because they tend to read and assimilate the writings of learned (in the liberal arts sense) fantasy and science fiction writers. In this way they at least get some exposure to humane culture once removed, if they don't immerse themselves in it directly. J.R.R. Tolkien taught Anglo-Saxon language and literature at Oxford, for example.

And many of my cryonicist friends have studies of history, literature and other cultures under their belts, or in some cases the experience of actually living in non-Western cultures. Thomas Donaldson spent some time living with indigenous people in New Guinea, for example. Despite what Taleb thinks, in my experience, a passion for the past can exist comfortably with a desire to build, and live in, a better future.

On this site there is a lot of talk about x-risk like unfriendly AI, grey goo or meteorite strikes. Now x-risk is not a concept completely confined to humanity as a whole but is also applicable to any individual that is affected not only by global risks but also by local and individual events. Has anyone here researched ways to effectively reduce individual catastrophic risk and mitigate the effects of local and global catastrophic events? I am thinking of things like financial, juristic and political risk, natural disasters and pandemics. So far I have found the emergency kit as designed by www.ready.gov, but I am positive that there is much much more out there.

A black hole of light only, has its name - Kugelblitz. When you have enough dense light, a black hole is normally formed and has this cool name - Kugelblitz!

The black hole of almost exclusively neutrinos, what is its name? I googled a little but haven't found anything yet.

People in the very theoretical end of programming language research seem to be making noise about something called homotopy type theory, that's supposed to make programming awesome and machine-provable once someone gets around to implementing it.

Like the lambda calculus before it (which is actually embedded in it), MLTT may be a fruit of mathematics that has a very real and practical impact on how programmers think about programming. It could be the unifying paradigm that eventually, finally puts an end to all the “programming language wars” of our time. Already it has begun to transform the mathematical community.

It's apparently related to intuitionistic type theory, which one researcher is also very enthused about:

Intuitionistic type theory can be described, somewhat boldly, as a fulfillment of the dream of a universal language for science. In particular, intuitionistic type theory is a foundation for mathematics and a programming language.

Does anyone who has some actual idea what's going on here have an opinion on this?

My father told me about someone he knew when he was working as a nurse at a mental hospital, who tried killing himself three times with a gun in the mouth. The first two times he used a pistol of some sort - both times, the bullet passed between the hemispheres of his brain (causing moderate but not fatal brain damage), exited through the back of his head, and all the hot gases from the gun cauterised the wounds.

The third time he used a shotgun, and that did the job. For firearm based suicide, I think above the ear is a safer bet.

So assuming you have good evidence of eldritch abominations what is the best suicide method? I'm guessing anything that really scrambles your information right. Please keep in mind practicality. Really powerful explosives seem hard to obtain. Having someone dispose of your body after suicide seems an ok but risky option.

Fire?

Rationality, winning, and munchkinry

I can't help but notice that, in reviews and comments to what we like to call "rationalist fiction", detractors often call characters whose approach to problems is to seek the winning approach. rather than, say, the "reasonable" approach (like one-boxing on Newcomb's rather than two-boxing) "munchkins", as if it were some sort of insult.

A work of fiction that Yudkwosky recently recommended, "Harry Potter and the Natural 20", features a protagonist, Milo, who is a wizard from a D&D setting, and who shows great ingenuity and predictive power through completely "insane" thought rituals that nevertheless tend to result in the right answers and the right successions of actions. The author explicitly qualifies him as a munchkin, and says that he only plays the way the character does when he hates the DM.

I notice that I am confused by this. Why is it that using your ingenuity to the very limit, creatively finding combinations of actions and rules that were not intended by the rule makers, following paths not usually trod by society, is seen as a bad thing? What's wrong, in the non-rationalist mind, with having a clear utility function, and optimizing one's actions to achieve the maximum result? Why is it practically treated as a form of defection? Does this have something to do, on some level, with ethical injunctions?

Another paper on the low quality of much scientific evidence, here in the field of diet-related cancer risk. Just out in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition: Is everything we eat associated with cancer? A systematic cookbook review.

New study on rationalization and the sophistication effect curtesy of marginal revolution.

It's cute when it's just a lamp.....

Is anyone doing self-scoring on everyday predictions? I've been considering doing this for a while - writing down probability estimates for things like 'will have finished work by 7PM' and 'will have arrived on time' and even 'will rain' or 'friend will arrive on time', so I can detect systemic errors and try to correct for them. (In particular, if you are consistently over- or under-confident, you can improve your score by correcting for this without actually needing to be any more accurate.) This seems like a pretty straightforward way of getting `better' at predicting things, potentially very quickly, so I'm curious about other's experiences.

There's been some talk recently of the need for programmers and how people that are unsatisfied with their current employment can find work in that area while making a decent living. Does there exist some sort of virtual meet-up for people that are working towards becoming programmers? I'd like to form, or be part of, a support group of LW-ers that are beginning programming. There may be something like this around that I've just missed because I mostly lurk and not even that regularly anymore. (Hoping to change that, though.)

Why do LWers believe in global warming? The community's belief has changed my posterior odds significantly, but it's the only argument I have for global warming at the moment. I saw the CO2 vs temperature graphs, and that seemed to sell it for me... Then I heard that the temperature increases preceded the CO2 emissions by about 800 years...

So why does the community at large believe in it?

Thanks!

From wikipedia.

Principles of cosmicism

The philosophy of cosmicism states that there is no recognizable divine presence, such as a god, in the universe, and that humans are particularly insignificant in the larger scheme of intergalactic existence, and perhaps are just a small species projecting their own mental idolatries onto the vast cosmos, ever susceptible to being wiped from existence at any moment. This also suggested that the majority of undiscerning humanity are creatures with the same significance as insects and plants in a much greater struggle between greater forces which, due to humanity's small, visionless and unimportant nature, it does not recognize.

Perhaps the most prominent theme in cosmicism is the utter insignificance of humanity. Lovecraft believed that "the human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure 'Victorian fictions'. Only egotism exists."[2] Cosmicism shares many characteristics with nihilism, though one important difference is that cosmicism tends to emphasize the inconsequentiality of humanity and its doings, rather than summarily rejecting the possible existence of some higher purpose (or purposes). For example, in Lovecraft's Cthulhu stories, it is not so much the absence of meaning that causes terror for the protagonists as it is their discovery that they have absolutely no power to effect any change in the vast, indifferent, and ultimately incomprehensible universe that surrounds them. Whatever meaning or purpose may or may not be invested in the actions of the cosmic beings in Lovecraft's stories is completely inaccessible to the human characters, in the way an amoeba (for example) is completely unequipped to grasp the concepts that drive human behavior.

Lovecraft's cosmicism was a result of his complete disdain for all things religious, his feeling of humanity's existential helplessness in the face of what he called the "infinite spaces" opened up by scientific thought, and his belief that humanity was fundamentally at the mercy of the vastness and emptiness of the cosmos.[3] In his fictional works, these ideas are often explored humorously ("Herbert West–Reanimator," 1922), through fantastic dreamlike narratives ("The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath," 1927), or through his well-known Cthulhu Mythos ("The Call of Cthulhu," 1928, and others). Common themes related to cosmicism in Lovecraft's fiction are the insignificance of humanity in the universe[4] and the search for knowledge ending in disaster.[5]

"Cosmic indifference"

Though cosmicism appears deeply pessimistic, H.P. Lovecraft thought of himself as neither a pessimist nor an optimist but rather an "indifferentist,"[citation needed] a theme expressed in his fiction. In Lovecraft's work, human beings are often subject to powerful beings and other cosmic forces, but these forces are not so much malevolent as they are indifferent toward humanity.[6] This indifference is an important theme in cosmicism. The noted Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi points out that "Lovecraft constantly engaged in (more or less) genial debates on religion with several colleagues, notably the pious writer and teacher Maurice W. Moe. Lovecraft made no bones about being a strong and antireligious atheist; he considered religion not merely false but dangerous to social and political progress."[7] As such, Lovecraft's cosmicism is not religious at all, but rather a version of his mechanistic materialism." Lovecraft thus embraced a philosophy of cosmic indifferentism. He believed in a meaningless, mechanical, and uncaring universe that human beings, with their naturally limited faculties, could never fully understand. His viewpoint made no allowance for religious beliefs which could not be supported scientifically. The incomprehensible, cosmic forces of his tales have as little regard for humanity as humans have for insects.[8]

Though hostile to religion, Lovecraft used various "gods" in his stories, particularly the Cthulhu related tales, to expound cosmicism. However, Lovecraft never conceived of them as supernatural; they are merely extraterrestrials who understand and obey a set of natural laws, which to the limited human understanding seem magical. These beings (the Great Old Ones, Outer Gods and others)—though dangerous to humankind—are neither good nor evil, and human notions of morality have no meaning for these beings. Indeed, they exist in cosmic realms beyond human understanding. As a symbol, they represent the kind of universe that Lovecraft believed in, a universe in which humanity is an insignificant blot, fated to come and go, its appearance unnoticed and its passing unmourned.[9]

Yeah.

Would a current or former Carnegie Mellon student be interested in talking to me, a high school senior, about the school? I intend on majoring in physics. Please private message me if you are.

Reddit comment about transhumanism, explained for laymen..

Someone is planning to do (and documenting on video) 100 days of rejection therapy. He's currently up to day 26.

My friend just asked me how many people typically attend our meet ups. I don't know the answer. How do I find out?

Single gene controls whether a horse has additional gaits

I've recently become aware of the existence of the Lending Club which appears to be a peer-to-peer framework for borrowers and lenders. I find myself intrigued by the interest rates claimed, but most of what I've found in my own research indicates that these interest rate computations involve a lot of convenient assumptions. Also, apparently if the Lending Club itself goes bankrupt, there is no expectation that you will get your investment back.

It seems at least conceivable that the interest rates are actually that high, since it is a new, weird type of investment, and thus underexposed relative to the market at large.

I was wondering if anyone more monetarily savvy than me could look into this, or warn me to stop wasting my time, if called for.

Someone smart recently argued that there's no empirical evidence young earth creationists are wrong because all the evidence we have of the Earth's age is consistent either hypothesis that God created the earth 4000 years ago but designed it to look like it was much older. Is there a good one-page explanation of the core LessWrong idea that your beliefs need to be shifted by evidence even when the evidence isn't dispositive as versus the standard scientific notion of devastating proof? Right now the idea seems smeared across the Sequences.

Could someone please break down the exact difference between a 'preference' and a 'bias' for me?

Has anyone used one of those pay for a doctor's opinion websites? How do you know if it's a scam?

Do we have a lesswrong steam group?

Can anyone give me a source/citation for the idea that more intellignet people are better at rationalisaiton? I've seen it mentioned several time but without link to experimental evidence.

Book Recommendation; Fiction; AI; While this might be the kind of scifi book to merely annoy experts, I found it enjoyable. It surrounds military use of potentially FOOM AI's which are wiped periodically to prevent the foom. Soiler: vg snvyf. It is also part of a series, in which some overlapping events are told from different perspectives, which I also found enjoyable. http://www.amazon.com/Insidious-Michael-McCloskey/dp/1440192529

Can anyone think of any good sci-fi written about a world in which time travel is a commonplace (like something everyone has access to and uses in accomplishing everyday tasks)? It occurs to me that 1) this might be interesting to try to sort out, and 2) I can't even imagine how it would work.

How should one distinguish disgreement on empirical grounds vs disagreement about values? I'm increasingly convinced I'm miscalibrated on this.

FOR THE EMPEROR! HE IS THE ONLY VIABLE SCHELLING POINT!

Beware the anthropic implications of aliens, the selection pressure behind mutants, the institutional damage of heresy.

-- Sanctus Muflax of Holy Terra

In the grim dark future of our hostile multi-verse, past the dark age of technology when the men of iron were crushed by those who would be less wrong as the Emperor sits a hundred centuries undying on the golden throne there is only war.

Coming soon.

Appropriate context. Fanfiction, you know you want it.

overview of boredom

The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S.

An very interesting autopsy of institutional dysfunction related to government and non-profits. I recommend reading the whole thing.

Minus the alleged harassment, city government is filled with Yomi Agunbiades — and they're hardly ever disciplined, let alone fired. When asked, former Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin couldn't remember the last time a higher-up in city government was removed for incompetence. "There must have been somebody," he said at last, vainly searching for a name.

Accordingly, millions of taxpayer dollars are wasted on good ideas that fail for stupid reasons, and stupid ideas that fail for good reasons, and hardly anyone is taken to task.

The intrusion of politics into government pushes the city to enter long-term labor contracts it obviously can't afford, and no one is held accountable. A belief that good intentions matter more than results leads to inordinate amounts of government responsibility being shunted to nonprofits whose only documented achievement is to lobby the city for money. Meanwhile, piles of reports on how to remedy these problems go unread. There's no outrage, and nobody is disciplined, so things don't get fixed.

You don't say?

In 2007, the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) held a seminar for the nonprofits vying for a piece of $78 million in funding. Grant seekers were told that in the next funding cycle, they would be required — for the first time — to provide quantifiable proof their programs were accomplishing something.

The room exploded with outrage. This wasn't fair. "What if we can bring in a family we've helped?" one nonprofit asked. Another offered: "We can tell you stories about the good work we do!" Not every organization is capable of demonstrating results, a nonprofit CEO complained. He suggested the city's funding process should actually penalize nonprofits able to measure results, so as to put everyone on an even footing. Heads nodded: This was a popular idea.

Reading this I had to bite my hand in frustration.

There are two lessons here. First, many San Francisco nonprofits believe they're entitled to money without having to prove that their programs work. Second, until 2007, the city agreed. Actually, most of the city still agrees. DCYF is the only city department that even attempts to track results. It's the model other departments are told to aspire to.

But Maria Su, DCYF's director, admitted that accountability is something her department still struggles with. It can track "output" — what a nonprofit does, how often, and with how many people — but it can't track "outcomes." It can't demonstrate that these outputs — the very things it pays nonprofits to do — are actually helping anyone.

"Believe me, there is still hostility to the idea that outcomes should be tracked," Su says. "I think we absolutely need to be able to provide that level of information. But it's still a work in progress." In the meantime, the city is spending about $500 million a year on programs that might or might not work.

What the efficient charity movement has done so far looks much more impressive in light of this.

San Francisco historian Charles Fracchia recalls Mayor George Christopher's ploy after his plan to lure the New York Giants to San Francisco hit a snag in the late 1950s. It all hinged on building Candlestick Park, and doing that hinged on buying land in Hunters Point from real estate magnate Charlie Harney for $65,000 an acre. The trouble was, the city had sold that same land to Harney only five years previously for a fraction of the price.

"There was opposition to this from high-minded people in San Francisco," Fracchia says. "So Christopher got his opponents as well as his proponents together, and had 10 cases of scotch delivered up to this meeting at the Pacific Union Club. The scotch was drunk, and everyone came to the conclusion — yes, keep Candlestick Park."

When it comes to mismanaging a city, San Francisco has pulled a 180 — in half a century, we've gone from "city fathers" (if you liked them) or "oligarchs" (if you didn't) operating with limited input from the people to a hyperdemocracy. Overpaying for a Candlesticklike bad land deal today wouldn't be settled during a drunken soirée, but via years of high-decibel public meetings, developers being made to bleed funds to nonprofits of city supervisors' choosing, and any number of bond measures or other trips to the ballot box — all of which, when put together, could conceivably cost as much as the bad land deal itself. Maybe more.

For all its scotch-soaked flaws, the city of yore did not suffer from these problems. While archaic and stridently antidemocratic by today's standards, the system of government cobbled together by a citizens' commission in 1931 largely did what our forebears wanted it to do — mind the store and eliminate rampant corruption.

From 1932 until 1996, much of city government was handled by a powerful chief administrative officer (CAO), appointed to a 10-year term and tasked with overseeing the city's largest departments. The job was to take politics out of city management. (Today's San Francisco is so intensely saturated with politics down to the minutiae that the supervisors' recent appointment of a transit expert to a transit board — and not a union plumber — was seen as a deeply political move and an affront to organized labor.) The CAO was charged with making the city's largest decisions in an apolitical manner; the major portion of the job was keeping the books on the most vital departments and making sure they were running smoothly. In a manner of speaking, the CAO was a living, breathing accountability measure. The city certainly made its share of lousy calls, but the sloth, waste, and dysfunction emblematic of today's city government would have been shocking.

Over time, however, the CAO's purview was replaced by that hyperdemocracy. The reasonable notion that the people of San Francisco should have input into how things are run has turned into the democratic equivalent of death by a thousand cuts; as everybody gets a voice, democracy votes accountability down. When everyone's in charge, no one is. "In the old days, they ran roughshod over opposing views," Fracchia says. "Today, all ya got is opposing views. Pick your poison."

Wait maybe he has been reading Moldbug?

San Franciscans' appetite for voting is voracious; ours may be the only city that has had to ponder what to name ballot propositions after all the letters of the alphabet have been used up. "It is extraordinary, the number of things we ask our voters to vote on," Harrington confirms. "And somebody must like it, because we keep doing it."

Voters have demonstrated a jarring mixture of selflessness and selfishness. We greenlight billions of dollars in bonds, even when the city's inability to deliver projects on time or within budget has been rendered painfully clear. Yet we also repeatedly enshrine the wishes of single-issue activists and labor unions into law, and that carries ominous long-term consequences. There's a reason in times like the present that organizations such as the Department of Public Health are always targeted for deep cuts, while the notion of downsizing librarians, cops, or firefighters is inconceivable. The latter have gone to the voters to enshrine their standing in the city charter. No one has done so for the DPH — yet.

Special interests "go to the voters and say, 'Do you like libraries? Do you like children?' Well, of course they do," Harrington says. And if voters don't care to think through the fiscal ramifications — well, neither do their elected representatives. "The board likes children, too — so does the mayor. Next year in the budget they'll say, 'Oh, shit! Children get $30 million more — what doesn't?'" If the city ran its finances this way 30 years ago, the former controller notes, the money to respond to the AIDS crisis would have been locked up and unavailable. If such a need arises in the future — well, what then? Today's city can't even pay for the things it wants to pay for.

I agree with EY that collapse interpretations of QM are ridiculous but are there any arguments against the Bohm interpretation better than the ones canvassed in the SEP article?

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/#o

Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) is favored by EY as having a shorter message than others.

However, the short-message version of MWI does not include a theory as to how my particular stream of consciousness winds up in one branch or another. So Copenhagen (wave function collapse) is a theory of what I will experience, MWI is not.

Further, I have always thought MWI motivated by the ideas behind Einstein's "God does not play dice with the universe." That is, a non-deterministic theory is no theory at all. And then, MWI, would be a theory without wave function collapse, so a theory with no randomness. But of course, it is NOT a theory of what a particular observer will experience. To go from MWI to a theory of what I will experience, it seems I still need to have a random function. I suspect some will answer, "no, there is one of you in every branch so MWI predicts you will experience it all, but in separate non-interacting branches. No randomness." To which I would reply, we still need a theory that accounts for my subjective experiences, how did this me, the one I actually wound up as, "choose" between the various branches. To me it would seem essentially theological to say that because some me I can't see, hear or interact with in any way experience all the other possibilities that there is no randomness in the universe. It sure seems random that I wound up experiencing this particular version, in the absence of a non-random theory of that.

Please take this as an invitation to educate me or discuss the conclusions I reach. I am interested in sorting out just what MWI really gains you when leaving Copenhagen, and as competing theories of my own personal experience, they both seem to have, essentially, a random choosing event at their core: one calls it wave function collapse, the other one tries not to talk about it.

You guys suck