Open thread, Nov. 16 - Nov. 22, 2015

http://mindhacks.com/2015/11/16/no-more-type-iii-error-confusion/#comments

Use "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" as a mnemonic. His first error is type 1 (claiming a wolf as present when there wasn't one). His second error is type 2 (people don't notice an existing wolf).

LW displays notifications about replies and private messages in the same place, mixed together, looking the same. Note that top-level comments on your articles are also considered replies to you (this is a default behavior, you could turn it off, but it makes sense so you will probably leave it turned on).

This has the disadvantage that when you post an article which receives about 20 comments and someone sends you a private message, it is very easy to miss the message. Because in your inbox you just see 21 entries that look almost the same.

Suggestion: The easiest fix would probably be to change the appearance of private messages in your inbox. Make the difference obvious, so you can't miss it. For example, add a big icon above each private message.

The latest New Yorker has a lengthy article about Nick Bostrom and Superintelligence. It contains a good profile of Bostrom going back to his graduate school days, his interest in existential threats in general, and how that interest became more focused on the risk of AGI specifically. Many concepts frequently discussed at LW are mentioned, e.g. the Fermi paradox and the Great Filter, the concept of an intelligence explosion, uploading, cryonics, etc. Also discussed is the progress that Bostrom and others have made in getting the word out regarding the threat posed by AGI, as well as some opposing viewpoints. Various other AI researchers, entrepreneurs and pundits are mentioned as well (although neither EY nor LW is mentioned, unfortunately).

The article is aimed at a general audience and so it doesn't contain much that will be new to the typical LWer, but it is an interesting and well-done overview, IMO.

As soon as I have two Karma points, I will post a 2000 word article on bias in most LW posts (which I would love to have your feedback on) with probably more to follow. However, I don't want to search for some more random rationality quotes to meet that requirement. Note to the administrators: Either you are doing a fabulous job at preventing multiple accounts or registration is currently not working (tried multiple devices, email addresses, and other measures).

I've been hearing about all this amazing stuff done with recurrent neural networks, convolutional neural networks, random forests, etc. The problem is that it feels like voodoo to me. "I've trained my program to generate convincing looking C code! It gets the indentation right, but the variable use is a bit off. Isn't that cool?" I'm not sure, it sounds like you don't understand what your program is doing. That's pretty much why I'm not studying machine learning right now. What do you think?

http://boingboing.net/2015/11/16/our-generation-ships-will-sink.html

Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the new scifi novel Aurora and back in the day the Mars trilogy, on how the notion of interstellar colonization and terraforming is really fantasy and we shouldnt let it color our perceptions of the actual reality we have, and the notion of diminishing returns on technology.

He doesnt condemn the genre but tries to provide a reality check for those who take their science fiction literally.

The great advantage of Robin Hanson's posts is that you can never tell when he's trolling :-D

Sample:

...maybe low status men avoiding women via male-oriented video games isn’t such a bad thing?

I found out about Omnilibrium a couple months ago, and I was thinking of joining in eventually. I was also thinking of telling some friends of mine who might want to get in on it even more than I do about it. However, I've been thinking if I told lots of people, or they themselves told lots of people, then suddenly Omnilibrium might get flooded with dozens of new users at once. I don't know how big that is compared to the whole community, but I was thinking Omnilibrium would be averse to it growing it too big, as well-kempt gardens die by pacificism and all that. But then, Slate Star Codex linked to it a few weeks ago. So, that's plausibly hundreds of new users flooding it.

I'm wondering, how do the admins of Omnilibrium feel about this? Are you happy to have many new users? Are you upset SSC linked to Omnilibrium, bringing it to the attention of so many people who may not necessarily maintain the quality of discourse current users of Omnilibrium have gotten accustomed to?

Recommended: a conversation between Tyler Cowen and Cliff Asness about financial markets. Especially recommended for people who insist that markets are fully efficient.

Samples:

A momentum investing strategy is the rather insane proposition that you can buy a portfolio of what’s been going up for the last 6 to 12 months, sell a portfolio of what’s been going down for the last 6 to 12 months, and you beat the market. Unfortunately for sanity, that seems to be true.

and

One thing I should really be careful about. I throw out the word “works.” I say “This strategy works.” I mean “in the cowardly statistician fashion.” It works two out of three years for a hundred years. We get small p-values, large t-statistics, if anyone likes those kind of numbers out there. We’re reasonably sure the average return is positive. It has horrible streaks within that of not working.

and

...what’s the actual vision of human nature? What’s the underlying human imperfection that allows it to be the case, that trading on momentum across say a 3 to 12 month time window, sorry, investing on momentum, will work? What’s with us as people? What’s the core human imperfection?

Disinformation review, a weekly publication, which collects examples of the Russian disinformation attacks.

The main aim of this product is to raise the awareness about Russian disinformation campaign. And the way to achieve this goal is by providing the experts in this field, journalists, academics, officials, politicians, and anyone interested in disinformation with some real time data about the number of disinformation attacks, the number of countries targeted, the latest disinformation trends in different countries, the daily basis of this campaign, and about the coordination of the disinformation spread among many countries.

Our global network of journalists, government officials, academics, NGOs, think tanks (and other people / initiatives dealing with this issue) provides us with the examples of current disinformation appearing in their countries. East StratCom Task Force compiles their reports and publishes a weekly review of them. The document with the data collected is public and free for further use – journalists may use it as a source for their products, decision makers and government officials may find relevant information about the latest state of events, experts may find data for their analysis, NGOs and think tanks may share the knowledge about this issue with the rest of the world.

How are you all doing today? I'm having a pretty good start of my day(it's 11:42 am) here :P

I have found Krushke's bayesian data analysis & Gelman's text to be pretty good companions to each other and I'm glad I bought both. Personally I also found that building a physical personal library was much better for my person development than probably any other choice I made throughout the last year and a half. Libraries are definitely antifragile.

Also http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0471257095/ref=dp_olp_all_mbc?ie=UTF8&condition=all Feller vol 2 paperback is 8 dollars used.

Is anybody interested in Moscow postrationality meetup?

I'm curious about how others here process study results, specifically in psychology and the social sciences.

The (p < 0.05) threshold for statistical significance is, of course, completely arbitrary. So when I get to the end of a paper and the result that came in at, for example, (p < 0.1) is described as "a non-significant trend favoring A over B," part of me wants to just go a head and update just a little bit, treating it as weak evidence, but I obviously don't want to do even that if there isn't a real effect and the evidence is unreliable.

I've found that study authors are often inconsistent with this—they'll "follow the rules" and report no "main effect" detected when walking you through the results, but turn around and argue for the presence of a real effect in the discussion/analysis based on non-individually-significant trends in the data.

The question of how to update is further compounded by (1) the general irreproducibility of these kinds of studies, which may indicate the need to apply some kind of global discount factor to the weight of any such study, and (2) the general difficulty of properly making micro-adjustments to belief models as a human.

This is exactly the situation where heuristics are useful, but I don't have a good one. What heuristics do you all use for interpreting results of studies in the social sciences? Do you have a cutoff p-value (or a method of generating one for a situation) above which you just ignore a result outright? Do you have some other way of updating your beliefs about the subject matter? If so, what is it?

I've never understood the appeal of uploading.

I've seen just once someone talk about an idea which I strongly doubt is the mainstream, that there's this question about which hardware "you" will "wake up" in. Surely not. Both would be conscious, right?

If I upload myself, there are two of me.

But this doesn't make me feel like I don't mind dying. What do I care if the world will continue with another of me? I want to live. It's not that I want someone who is me to keep existing, I want to keep living myself.

Am I confused about why people think of this as a life extension possibility?

Finally, someone with a clue about biology tells it like it is about brain uploading

http://mathbabe.org/2015/10/20/guest-post-dirty-rant-about-the-human-brain-project/

In reading this, suggest being on guard against own impulse to find excuses to dismiss the arguments presented because they call into question some beliefs that seem to be deeply held by many in this community.

What do people think of the “When should I post in Discussion, and when should I post in Main?” section in the FAQ?

I find myself looking less and less in Main because I don’t see much content in there besides the meetup posts. I have a suggestion which might improve this and that is to update the FAQ so that it encourages reposting highly voted content in discussion into Main. This would have couple of benefits:

• It would allow the potential main articles to go through a process of vetting. It would be suggested that only highly voted (15 karma or more, maybe) posts should be reposted in Main.
• The post in discussion can be improved based on the provided comments before it is reposted to main
• The comments from the draft version of the article in discussion can be discarded
• It would allow double visibility for better posts, where better is decided by their karma level.
• This would just be a suggestion in the FAQ. Anyone can still post in Main straight away if that is desired.

The problems I see with moving the post from discussion to main once it is highly voted is that:

• I think there might be a bug where the extra karma from the difference in discussion vs Main doesn’t go towards your total karma, but does go towards your monthly karma.
• If there is revision in the post, the comments are still there from the old version of the post.

Live in LA? On the autism spectrum? Got social anxiety or social phobia? You're elegible for legal MDMA therapy. Congrats. For the rest of you out there, take it from me, don't do extasy, it's unreliabe. The tests are shitty.

Live in Canada and got an addiction? Ayahuasca for you!. Live in Australia with PTSD? Soon.

A Quasipolynomial Time Algorithm for Graph Isomorphism: The Details

Laszlo Babai has claimed an astounding theorem, that the Graph Isomorphism problem can be solved in quasipolynomial time. On Tuesday I was at Babai’s talk on this topic (he has yet to release a preprint), and I’ve compiled my notes here. As in Babai’s talk, familiarity with basic group theory and graph theory is assumed, and if you’re a casual (i.e., math-phobic) reader looking to understand what the fuss is all about, this is probably not the right post for you. This post is research level theoretical computer science. We’re here for the juicy, glorious details.

Video of Laszlo Babai's talk.

Has anybody donated a car to charity before (in the US? CA in particular, but I imagine it'll generalize outside of location-specific charities).

The general advice online is useful but not very narrowly-tailored. Couple points I'm looking for information on:

1) Good charities (from an EA perspective)

2) Clarification on the tax details (when car's fair market value is between $500 and $5000)

Would appreciate any advice.

My girlfriend's cat poops on the carpet. The cat does poop in the litter boxes some of the time, and always urinates in them, but she also poops on the carpet several times a day in different places. (She also never buries her poop when she does use the boxes.) Any advice?

There are profit (and income) premiums in vice industries from non-competitive behaviour by moralists. Wouldn't be suprised if moral entrepreneurs intersect with actual entrepreneurs.

Feeling like you're an expert can make you closed-minded

Victor Ottati at Loyola University and his colleagues manipulated their participants (US residents, average age in their 30s) to feel relative experts or novices in a chosen field, through easy questions like “Who is the current President of the United States?” or tough ones like “Who was Nixon's initial Vice-President?” and through providing feedback to enforce the participants’ feelings of knowledge or ignorance. Those participants manipulated to feel more expert subsequently acted less open-minded toward the same topic, as judged by their responses to items such as “I am open to considering other political viewpoints.”

People’s perceptions of their all-round expertise – provoked in the participants via an easy rather than a hard trivia quiz – also led them to display a close-mindedness in general, even though it was the participants who took the hard quiz who failed more, and reported feeling more insecure, irritable and negative – ingredients that are normally associated with close-mindedness. This isn’t to say that these emotional states didn’t have any effect, just that any effect was swamped by perceptions of expertise.

[Stanford researchers uncover patterns in how scientists lie about their data(http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/november/fraud-science-papers-111615.html)

Even the best poker players have "tells" that give away when they're bluffing with a weak hand. Scientists who commit fraud have similar, but even more subtle, tells, and a pair of Stanford researchers have cracked the writing patterns of scientists who attempt to pass along falsified data.

The work, published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, could eventually help scientists identify falsified research before it is published.

There is a fair amount of research dedicated to understanding the ways liars lie. Studies have shown that liars generally tend to express more negative emotion terms and use fewer first-person pronouns. Fraudulent financial reports typically display higher levels of linguistic obfuscation – phrasing that is meant to distract from or conceal the fake data – than accurate reports.

To see if similar patterns exist in scientific academia, Jeff Hancock, a professor of communication at Stanford, and graduate student David Markowitz searched the archives of PubMed, a database of life sciences journals, from 1973 to 2013 for retracted papers. They identified 253, primarily from biomedical journals, that were retracted for documented fraud and compared the writing in these to unretracted papers from the same journals and publication years, and covering the same topics.

They then rated the level of fraud of each paper using a customized "obfuscation index," which rated the degree to which the authors attempted to mask their false results. This was achieved through a summary score of causal terms, abstract language, jargon, positive emotion terms and a standardized ease of reading score.

Focus on a new frame of reference, not on technique. Clients need to shift away from content—“it’s about my heart/ my debt/ the safety of the plane/ germs”—and toward the very best strategies to recover from their anxiety disorder. These strategies will always address the intentions that currently motivate their actions. Most decisions by anxious clients have two functions:

1) to only take actions that have a highly predictable, positive outcome

2) to stay comfortable

And that makes sense. Everyone seeks comfort. And everyone wants to feel confident about certain outcomes. Most people who experience traumatic events—a near drowning, a panic that resembles a heart attack, blanking out in the middle of a conference presentation—initially react by seeking comfort, safety, and reassurance. So persuading clients to change must include a convincing explanation that their solution to the problem—avoiding and resisting, and seeking comfort and certainty—perpetuates their problem. Anything that is resisted will persist; therefore, the best perspective is a paradoxical one: When facing a problem, one must purposely and voluntarily choose to go toward uncertainty and distress.

-Reid Wilson

I bought a visa prepaid debit card that's expiring in a month. I have a bank account. How do I get the money from the debit card (anonymous, not attached to my name and has no online account associated with it) into my bank account? There's no payment gate in my online bank account.

A meta-ethics reflection about the three chimps.
We know that chimps societies are in a meta-stable Molochian equilibrium of violence, but you can tip them off with more resources into a more pacific state.
There is supposedly a "universal" progress of society towards a more moral baseline, such as less slavery, less torture, more freedom, but there were also notable exception. I was thinking about the seventeen's century Venice, which was freer than contemporary Venice. But at the time Venice was one the most powerful city-state in the Mediterranean sea, and was enjoying considerable wealth.
So my thinking went: there are at least two modalities in our ethics, one more resembling the chimps societies, the other closer the bonobo way of life, and we oscillate between the two based on the wealth available. This would mean that the moral progress is actually a progress in wealth, which tips off an oscillation in the bonobo region of our ethical system.
Thoughts? Counter-examples?

After watching the show: 'locked up abroad'. I Don't want to travel and want to be culturally imperialistic and create liberal democracies in foreign corrupt lawless countries

Also makes me feel I need a contingency plan for people smuggling of wanted persons out of Australia to other countries and onwards to safety.

Research suggests either positive or negative self-talk may improve performance, suggesting the effectiveness of self-talk phrases depends on how the phrase is interpreted by the individual.

Any enterprising rationalists know a thing or two about the Tequila industry?

The defense attorney must, at a minimum, cross-examine the expert on error rates, comparison to similar groups, validity, and reliability of the research.