Open Thread, August 2010-- part 2

Oh, in other news, the FDA is apparently going after piracetam; smartpowders.com reports that it's been ordered to cease selling piracetam and is frantically trying to get rid of its stock. See

• http://www.imminst.org/forum/topic/43512-fda-says-no-more-piracetam/
• http://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/comments/d7wcm/fda_set_to_ban_piracetam_claim_it_is_illegally/

($17 for an 85-day supply as bulk powder)

I noticed that a lot of the reviews were complaining about the taste - were you using it in its raw form, or putting it into capsules?

Very interesting — thanks for the information. I'm trying piracetam right now, but this also sounds like something I'd like to try. I have similar problems with mental fatigue and low motivation... unfortunately, I don't yet have even a vague sense of the biochemical basis for my issues (my symptoms match chronic fatigue, but it seems like its causal structure is not well-understood anyway). But it's worth a try, I suppose.

Are you taking this and the piracetam at the same time, or did you stop the piracetam to try this?

While re-reading the reports here for summary in my personal drugs file, it suddenly occurred to me that your experience with sulbutiamine might be on the level of pica & iron deficiency, and so worth mentioning or linking as a comment in http://lesswrong.com/lw/15w/experiential_pica/ .

That's quite interesting. I recently finished up my own 30g supply of sulbutiamine, and while I thought that it does work roughly on the level of piracetam without choline supplementation, I wasn't hugely impressed. But I am not diabetic nor do I match any of the descriptions of beriberi in Wikipedia.

(Didn't last me 85 days, however. 200mg strikes me as a pretty small dose.)

It seems that Benfotiamine (none of the other tiamines are over the counter in Germany) had a similar effect on me. I feel a lot better now, whereas before I would feel constantly tired. Before I felt like I could not do anything most of the time without taking stimulants. Now my default is probably more than 50% towards what I felt like on a medium stimulant dose. I did try a lot of interventions in the same time period, so I am not sure how much Benfotiamin contributed on its own, but I expect it to contribute between 25-65% of the positive effects. I also figured out that I am borderline diabetic, which is evidence in favor of Benfotiamine being very significant.

Thanks for the reminder regarding sulbutiamine. That stuff is fantastic!

I'll add that sulbutiamine is one of the nootropics that is absolutely foul tasting!

Hah, was just coming here to post this. This article sort of meanders, but it's definitely worth skimming at least for the following two paragraphs:

One of the biggest falsehoods I've encountered is that skeptics can't tolerate mystery, while New Age people can. This is completely wrong, because it is actually the people in my culture who can't handle mystery—not even a tiny bit of it. Everything in my New Age culture comes complete with an answer, a reason, and a source. Every action, emotion, health symptom, dream, accident, birth, death, or idea here has a direct link to the influence of the stars, chi, past lives, ancestors, energy fields, interdimensional beings, enneagrams, devas, fairies, spirit guides, angels, aliens, karma, God, or the Goddess.

We love to say that we embrace mystery in the New Age culture, but that’s a cultural conceit and it’s utterly wrong. In actual fact, we have no tolerance whatsoever for mystery. Everything from the smallest individual action to the largest movements in the evolution of the planet has a specific metaphysical or mystical cause. In my opinion, this incapacity to tolerate mystery is a direct result of my culture’s disavowal of the intellect. One of the most frightening things about attaining the capacity to think skeptically and critically is that so many things don't have clear answers. Critical thinkers and skeptics don't create answers just to manage their anxiety.

Excellent article, thanks for the link! Let's keep in mind that she also wrote about how inflammatory and combative language is counterproductive, and the need to communicate with people in ways they have some chance of understanding.

With an endorsement from E8 surfer dude!

If all you want is single bits from a quantum random number generator, you can use this script.

Stardestroyer.net fits that description somewhat, for values of "casually" that allow for copious swearing punctuating most disagreements. I haven't posted there, but Kaj Sotala posts as Xuenay (apologies no apologies for stalking).

Examples of threads on LW-related topics:

• Logic Fallacy reference thread Mk. 2
• The Singularity in Sci-Fi (haven't read)
• Robots Learn How to Lie
• Mini-FAQ on Artificial Intelligence (the thread that properly introduced me to SIAI)
• This derailment about Three Worlds Collide
• Rationality (short)
• And the Winner for Most Probable God is... Azathoth?
• Transhumanism: is it viable?

(Edited after first upvote; later edited again to add a link.)

This is something I'd very much like as well. If you find anything, let me know. xkcd forums can be pretty good, though I haven't been on there in a while.

I honestly keep hoping that subreddits will be implemented here sometime soon. Yes, "off-topic" discussion technically doesn't fit the stated purpose of the site, but the alternative of having LWers interested in having off-topic discussion having to migrate off-site to some other discussion forum seems ridiculous to me.

Pharyngula. More atheist than rational, and more biology than technology, but it is definitely a community. It is a blog, but has an interesting feature called the endless thread which is kind of "collective stream of consciousness". Check it out. And also look at other offerings in the science blogosphere.
[Edit:supplied link.]

I recommend reading the article-- I didn't realize people could be recruited that easily.

My father was a forensic psychiatrist heavily involved in some of these cases, testifying for the defense of the accused. The moral panic phenomenon is real and complex, but there's a more basic failure of rationality underlying the whole movement which was the false belief in the inherent veracity of children.

Apparently juries (and judges alike) took the testimony of children at face value. The problem was that investigative techniques of the social workers invariably elicited the desired reactions in the children. In law you have the concept of leading the witness, but that doesn't apply for investigations of child abuse. The children are taken away from their parents and basically locked up with the investigators until they tell them what they want to hear. It wasn't even necessarily deliberate - from what I understand in many cases the social workers just had a complete lack of understanding of how they were conditioning the children to fabricate complex and in many cases outright ridiculous stories. Its amazing how similar the whole scare was to historical accounts of the witch trials. Although as far as I know, in the recent scare nobody was put to death (but I could even be wrong about that, and certainly incalculable damage was done nonetheless).

Excellent link. A particularly noteworthy excerpt:

[Q:] I assume that most people in these jobs aren't actually trying to convict innocent people. So how does such misconduct come about?

[A:] I think what happens is that prosecutors and police think they've got the right guy, and consequently they think it's OK to cut corners or control the game a little bit to make sure he's convicted.

This is the same phenomenon that is responsible for most scientific scandals: people cheat when they think they have the right answer.

It illustrates why proper methods really ought to be sacrosanct even when you're sure.

OK, I'm seeing some quick approval. I've been looking back through LW for posts and wiki articles that would be interesting/provocative for new readers, and don't require the entirety of the sequences. Here's my list right now:

* Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality
* The True Prisoner's Dilemma
* How to Convince Me that 2 + 2 = 3
* The Least Convenient Possible World
* The Apologist and the Revolutionary
* Your Intuitions are Not Magic
* The Third Alternative
* Lawful Uncertainty
* The Domain of Your Utility Function
* The Allais Paradox (with two followups)
* We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think
* The Tragedy of Group Selectionism

And from the wiki:

* Near/Far thinking
* Shut Up and Multiply
* Evolutionary Psychology
* Cryonics
* Religion

What should I add? What, if anything, should I subtract?

NancyLebovitz:

The economic crisis of 2007 was another viewquake for me. I literally went around for a couple of months muttering about how I had no idea it (the economy) was so fragile. A real estate bust was predictable, but I had no idea a real estate bust could take so much with it.

That depends on what exactly you mean by "the economy" being fragile. Most of it is actually extremely resilient to all sorts of disasters and destructive policies; if it weren't so, the modern civilization would have collapsed long ago. However, one critically unstable part is the present financial system, which is indeed an awful house of cards inherently prone to catastrophic collapses. Shocks such as the bursting of the housing bubble get their destructive potential exactly because their effect is amplified by the inherent instabilities of the financial system.

Moldbug's article "Maturity Transformation Considered Harmful" is probably the best explanation of the root causes of this problem that I've seen.

Sometimes I think the only kind of libertarianism that makes sense is what I'd call "tragic libertarianism." There is no magic market fairy. Awful things are going to happen to people. Poverty, crime, illness, and war. The libertarian part is that our ability to alleviate suffering through the government is limited. The tragic part is that this is not good news.

Here is all the math you need to know to understand most of LW (correct me if I'm wrong):

• The Khan Academy (For the basics.)
• A Guide to Bayes’ Theorem – A few links (Just this might do too.)

I'm working through all of it right now. Not very far yet though.

You might want to add computer science and basic programming knowledge too.

I'm not sure that people necessarily know what questions they need to ask, or even that they need to ask.

A math Q&A seems like a good idea, but it would be a better idea if there were some "the math you need for LW" posts first.

There was a very nice piece here (possibly a quote) on how to think about math problems-- no more that a few paragraphs long. It was about how to break things down and the sorts of persistence needed. Anyone remember it?

I have been wanting something like this on LW for quite awhile, but wasn't sure it was on topic. With your linked post in mind, however, I think this is a good idea, and I, for one, would be an active participant.

Your username reminds me of a scene from one of my favorite South Park episodes (slightly NSFW).

If you weren't already aware, Hacker News http://news.ycombinator.com/ has a lot of discussion about startups.

Funny, the NYC Meetup (today) is going to touch on this topic ('cause I've been thinking about it). It's one of the "ways rationalists can make money", IMO.

That is among the most difficult 'quick questions' I have ever seen.

Will a correct answer to this question give you significant help toward maximizing the number of paperclips in the universe?

I have no idea.

I wasn't reading OB before LW existed, but if you look there now, it's immediately apparent that the topics represented on the front page are much, much, much more interesting to the average casual reader than the ones on LW's front page. I wouldn't be surprised if the commenters tended to be less invested and less focused as a result.

(EDIT: I shouldn't say the "average casual reader," since that must mean something different to everyone. I clarified what I meant below in response to katydee; I think OB appeals to a large audience of interested laymen who like accessible, smart writing on a variety of topics, but who aren't very interested in a lot of LW's denser and more academic discussion.)

I remember there being lots of bad comments on the old OB, and I think that putting a karma system in place, and requiring registration, helped an awful lot.

So what gives? Why is the comment quality so much higher on LW than on OB? My first thought is karma, but OB didn't have karma when Eliezer Yudkowsky was posting, and the comments were pretty good back then. My best guess is that the good commenters were mostly Yudkowsky fans, and they left when EY left.

I expect that was the biggest reason. When I started following OB it basically was Eliezer's blog. Sure, occasionally Robin would post a quote and an interpretation but that was really just 'intermission break' entertainment.

I do note that comments here have been said to have reduced in quality. That is probably true and is somewhat related to lacking a stream of EY posts and also because there aren't many other prominent posters (like Yvain, Roko, Wei, etc.) posting on the more fascinating topics. (At least, fascinating to me.)

In the OB days, I mainly read it because of EY. Maybe others did too. I'm surprised that OB still wins in the usage stats.

I don't follow OB, but your comment sent me over there to look around. What I saw was a lot of criticism from feminists regarding posts by Robin that had a strong anti-feminist odor to them. I also saw some posts on less controversial subjects that drew almost no comments at all. So the natural presumption is that those feminist commentors are not regulars, but rather were attracted to OB when a post relevant to their core interests got syndicated somewhere. If that is what you are talking about then ...

Well, sure, a registration system might have repelled some of the commentors. If Robin really wants to insulate himself from feedback in this way, it might work. But I rather doubt that he is the kind of person to exclaim "OMG, we have wymin commenting here! Who let them in?". I hope his regulars aren't either.

Some comments on topics like this are emotive. Admittedly, you can't really engage with them. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't at least read them, count them, and try to learn something from their sheer existence, if not from their logic.

However, I don't know if anyone else shares my impression about OB commenter quality, so I may be completely misguided here.

Absolutely. OB posts are worth a read occasionally but the comments are not. And here I include even comments (not posts) by Robin himself. The way Robin replies does, I suggest, contribute to who is willing or interested in commenting there. Status interferes rather drastically with the ability of prominent figures to engage usefully in a public forum. By public forum I refer to the generic meaning not electronic adoption. It is often the case that hecklers wishing to shame and express outrage are the only ones who consider it worthwhile to show up.

For my part if I was particularly keen on discussing a topic from OB I would consider bringing it up on the open thread on LW.

the conflict between the common LW belief that there are no moral absolutes, and that it's okay to make current values permanent

I'm not sure that both of those are common LW beliefs (at least common in the same people at the same time), but I don't see any conflict there. If there are no moral absolutes, then making current values permanent is just as good as letting them evolve as they usually do.

Who here advocates making current values permanent?

Two questions:

-How much does it cost?
-How soon do you start becoming desensitized to it, if at all?

Question: did you find that it leads to faster grokking (beyond the effects of improvement of raw recall ability)?

Seconded. I think SingU is stupid, but whatever its faults, that isn't one of them, and it would be bad if this image spilled onto SIAI.

I'm kind of upset too, because I was just reading Jaron Lanier's recent book, which is the biggest dose of sanity I've seen on issues I care about in a long time.

I've done exactly this. Read Roissy, read far-right sites (though not Coulter specifically.) Basically sought out the experience of having my feelings hurt, in the interest of curiosity.

I learned a few things from the experience. First, they have a few good points (my politics have changed over time). Second, they are not right about everything just because they are mean and nasty and make me feel bad, and in fact sometimes right-wingers and anti-feminists display flaws in reasoning. And, third, I learned how to deal better with emotional antagonism itself: I don't bother seeking out excuses to be offended any more, but I do protect myself by avoiding people who directly insult me.

You'll have to expand on this before I could agree. My inclination is to think quite the opposite. That is, when I read people who more or less articulately use highly emotion-button-pushing language to mock people like me, it puts my defenses up and makes me try to justify my beliefs, rationality be damned. Was this not pretty much the thrust of Politics is the Mind-Killer? If I were, to adopt a wild hypothetical, a conservative, I would probably say nearly anything to defend myself -- whether publicly or in my own mind -- against the kind of mockery I'd get on a daily basis from Paul Krugman's blog (Krugman chosen as example per mattnewport). Rationality-wise, that is not the position I want to be trying to put myself in. Rather, I want to seek out reasoned, relatively "cool" (as opposed to emotionally "hot") expressions of opposing viewpoints and try to approach them open-mindedly, trying to modify my positions if warranted.

I mean, am I missing something?

I think this norm would do poorly in practice, because people would seek out antagonists they unconsciously knew would be flawed, rather than those who actually scare them.

A much better idea, I think, is the following:

1. Find someone who appears intelligent to you but is very ideologically different.
2. Offer to read a book of their choice if they read a book of your choice.
3. Give them a book you think will challenge them.

I'd suggest, however, that you not give the other person someone who will constantly mock their position, because usually this will only further polarize them away from you. Exposing oneself to good contrary arguments, not ridicule, is the way for human beings to update.

It's probably good to have a mix. I get something distinct from reading people like Roissy or Sailer, whose basic values are totally divorced from my own. I get something else from Eliezer or Will Wilkinson, who derive different policy preferences from values that are similar to mine.

There's something liberating about evil analysis, and I think it's that it's audaciousness allows you to put down mental blinders that would be on guard againstmore plausible threats to your ideological integrity. And a nice thing about values changing over time is that the classics are full of this stuff. Reading, say, Schmidt is like reading political philosophy from Mars, and that's something you should experience regularly. Any similar recommendations?

I would accept that bet. In my experience exposure to such writings mostly serves to produce contempt. Contempt is one emotion that seems to have a purely deleterious effect on thinking. Anger, fear, sadness, anxiety and depression all provide at least some positive effects on thinking in the right circumstances but contempt... nothing.

I've been trying to do roughly that, though focusing more on the "smart and highly articulate" aspect and dropping "emotional mockery". When I read someone taking cheap shots at a position I might hold, I mostly find the writer childish and annoying, I don't see how reading more of that would improve my rationality. It doesn't really hurt my feelings, unlike some commenters here, so I guess different people need to be prodded in different ways.

For smart and articulate writers with a rationalist vibe, I would recommend Mencius Moldbug (posts are articulate but unfortunately quite long; advocates monarchy, colonialism and slavery) and Noam Chomsky. Any recommendations of smart, articulate and "extreme" writers whose views are far from those two?

Who should conservatives read?

This is a special case of a well known process in social science circles since at least the 1950's: role playing. It became popular after the work of Fritz Perls (a psychotherapist who started out in drama), who would have the patient do things such as play their mother or father (or tyrannical trauma family character of choice) to try and broaden their understanding of their life story and memory. It can be a very powerful technique. I have been in group psychotherapy sessions where people scream, bawl, and many other visceral responses get displayed.

In 1983 Robert Anton Wilson published a book, Prometheus Unbound which was ostensibly a self-help book for making your thinking more rational, specifically for destroying dogmas. This book is little more than one recipe after another for exercises of this type; for example, be a neo-Nazi for a week.

The mechanics is to learn by exposing yourself to that great universe of unknown-unknowns. My personal experience is sometimes they can be helpful, but it is really hard to know beforehand if they will be worth the time. I have benefited from some of these things; I have wasted time doing some.

Ann Coulter's blog seems fixed-width and very narrow :-(

Kurzweil claims he or others will simulate a human brain aided in large part by the sequenced genome, by 2020.

No he doesn't.

How much more information is in the ontogenic environment, then?

Off the top of my head:

1. The laws of physics

2. 9 months in the womb

3. The rest of your organs. (maybe)

4. Your entire childhood...

These are barriers developing Kurzweil's simulator in the first place, NOT to implementing it in as few lines of code as possible. A brain simulating machine might easily fit in a million lines of code, and it could be written by 2020 if the singularity happens first, but not by involving actual proteins . That's idiotic.

cryonics seems to require signing up for a DNR

What did you read that makes it seem this way? I haven't run into this before.

I don't do this on LessWrong, but that may be because I don't care enough about LW, and the stakes are too low.

On Wikipedia, though, there are at least 10 editors who, when I see their name come up on my watchlist, I briefly freeze up with a combination of fear, disgust, and anger.

How frequently do you find yourself able to remember how you feel about something, but unable to remember what produced the feeling in the first place (ie: you remember you hate steve but can't remember why)?

I do this constantly. In fact, I do it a lot right here on LW - in reading comment threads, I see a comment by a certain user and have either a positive or negative reaction to the username, based on previous comments of theirs I've read, despite having no recollection of what those comments actually were

I'm not quite sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

Yes -- and I agree that it's probably a cognitive shortcut, because it's also something that happens with purely conceptual ideas. I'll forget the definition of a word, but remember whether it's basically a positive or negative notion. Yay/Boo is surprisingly efficient shorthand for describing anything.

I would say that most people I know easily fit this heuristic, but I almost never employ it, based on the way I remember people. When I have been in a conflict with someone, I can recall a categorized list of every thing I dislike about them, and a few fights we have had quite easily, and vice versa for people I like. What this means essentially is... I have a very hard time remaining angry / happy with people, because it requires constant use of resources, and it also seems to effect my ability to remember meeting people at all. Since I store memories of other people using events instead of descriptions if I have never had a particularly eventful interaction with someone, remembering their names or any other info is almost impossible.

Occasional but rare. I have more of a problem where I have some feeling some reason and then find out I was wrong about that reason and then need to make effort to adjust my feelings to fit the data. But I generally remember the cause for my feelings. The only exception is that occasionally I'll vaguely remember that some approach to a problem doesn't work at all but won't remember why (it generally turns out that I spent a few days at some point in the past trying to use that method to solve something and got negative results showing that the method wasn't very useful.)

This has happened to me but not often.

There is a reason for it. Current thinking is that memories of events are retrieved by a process in the hippocampus (until the memories become substantially re-consolidated). Memories of strong emotional experiences are also retrieved by a process in the amygdala. They are not memories of events but just a link between the emotion and the object that caused it. In recent memories these are usually connected - If the amygdala retreives it prompts the hippocampus to do so also - if the hippocampus does the retreiving it triggers the amygdala. But the two processes can be disconnected for a particular memory pair. You see X and feel the memory of fear or anger but not the episodic memory of when and where you felt that emotion towards X. The amygdala retrieves but the hippocampus fails to.

Yes, absolutely. Well, "hate" is too strong a word, but certainly it's hard to explain to other people: "I have a mental black mark against Steve's name, though I can't tell you why"...

All the time.

Generally I only remember the cause of my dispositions if I feel it's important in itself. In the case of something like political beliefs I have a commitment to throwing out anything I can't justify through verbal reasoning and reference to fundamental values. With likes and dislikes - from those fundamental values to flavors of ice cream - I don't consider the path that got me there particularly important.

Sometimes I need the justification for ulterior or social reasons. It doesn't particularly matter to me why I like the people I happen to like, but I try to examine them at least enough that I can give them substantive compliments when appropriate, even if this examination doesn't come naturally to me. Cynically, most "debate topics" are like this - you need the justificatory reasoning in order to engage in cocktail conversations.

Extremely rare, but I suspect I'm in the same boat as wedrifid in that I seem to have above-average memory.

How frequently do you find yourself able to remember how you feel about something, but unable to remember what produced the feeling in the first place (ie: you remember you hate steve but can't remember why)?

Never. But I'm not typical.

As fas as I understand they operate on different scales. "Used up" effects operate on much shorter time scales, and consistency effects (often?) operate on more specific things than general niceness.

I for one who appreciate people not using abbreviations that are not in the Wiki or someplace like that. I do not know what PUA is - so where do I go to find out?

I'm not sure if this might be classified as extreme rationality or just plain old rationality.

PUA probably fits the "plain old rationality" category too, including the "done by common people" part.

Here's my solution. The descendants of each initial blob spawn independently of descendants of other initial blobs, so this is a sum of N independent distributions. The number of descendants of one initial blob is obviously the geometric distribution. Googling "sum of independent geometric distributions" gives Negative binomial distribution as the answer.

After G generations, each blob has a probability q=p^G of having a descendant. So, it seems to me that P will be distributed as a binomial with q and N as parameters.

Offhand, I think you would also need to know the number of generations. I'll have to do some pen-and-paper work to work out what the distribution looks like.

I'm not sure there is any level of black-box evidence that could convince me they were telling the truth.

I'm afraid I can't do much better at this point than to cite Harvey Friedman's position on this. (He posted his alien crystall ball scenario before I posted my alien black box, and obviously knows a lot more about this stuff than I do.)

I now come to the various deep questions - conceptually and technically - that arise when attempting to make "proofs" that the Crystal Ball from the hyperaliens is "the real thing" and that the information gleaned from its use is "proved".

I believe very strongly that rather subtle probabilistic arguments combined with rather clever TMs, will show, in various "rigorous" senses, that the Crystal Ball is the real thing (provided it is in fact the real thing).

Here are the relevant discussion threads on the Foundations of Mathematics mailing list:

• http://cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2004-February/subject.html#7934
• http://cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2004-March/subject.html#8003

ETA:

In the case of a halting oracle, the problem there is no point where it would seem that such a ridiculous cheat would be even harder than doing it correctly.

Assuming the laws of physics actually does allow a halting oracle to be implemented, then at some point it would be easier to just implement it than to do these ridiculous cheats, right? As we rule out various possible cheats, that intuitively raises our credence that a halting oracle can be physically implemented, which contradicts the universal prior.

I came here to post this actually - seems like it would be extremely useful for countering confirmation bias.

I haven't seen much response to it. There's a reply in Analysis by Baumann who takes a cheap out by saying simply that one cannot provide the probability in advance, that it's 'extremely implausible'.

I have an unfinished essay where I argue that as presented the problem is asking for a uniform distribution over an infinity, so you cannot give the probability in advance, but I haven't yet come up with a convincing argument why you would want your probability to scale down in proportion as the mugger's offer scales up.

That is: it's easy to show that scaling disproportionately leads to another mugging. If you scale superlinearly, then the mugging can be broken up into an ensemble of offers that add to a mugging. If you scale sublinearly, you will refuse sensible offers that are broken up.

But I haven't come up with any deeper justification for linearly scaling other than 'this apparently arbitrary numeric procedure avoids 3 problems'. I've sort of given up on it, as you can see from the parlous state of my essay.

While raking, I think I finally thought of a proof that the before-offer-probability can't be known.

The question is basically 'what fraction of all Turing machines making an offer (which is accepted) will then output a certain result?'

We could rewrite this as 'what is the probability that a random Turing machine will output a certain result?

We could then devise a rewriting of all those Turing machines into Turing machines that halt or not when their offer is accepted (eg. halting might = delivering, not halting = welshing on the deal. This is like Rice's theorem).

Now we are asking 'what fraction of all these Turing machines will halt?'

However, this is asking 'what is Chaitin's constant for this rewritten set of Turing machines?' and that is uncomputable!

Since Turing machine-based agents are a subset of all agents that might try to employ Pascal's Mugging (even if we won't grant that agents must be Turing machines), the probability is at least partially uncomputable. A decision procedure which entails uncomputability is unacceptable, so we reject giving the probability in advance, and so our probability must be contingent on the offer's details (like its payoff).

Thoughts?

Looks like the Illuminati have deleted page 8, which I assume is where all the juciest stuff is!

Since that summer in Colorado, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have all produced bestselling and highly controversial books—and I have read them all.

The bottom line is this: whenever we Christians slip into interpreting scripture literally, we belittle the Bible and dishonor God. Our best moral guidance comes from what God is revealing today through evidence, not from tradition or authority or old mythic stories.

The first sentence warns agains taking the Bible literally, but the next sentence insinuates that we don't even need it...

He's also written a book called "Thank God for Evolution," in which he sprays God all over science to make it more palatable to christians.

I dedicate this book to the glory of God. Not any "God" me may think about , speak about , believe in , or deny , but the one true God we all know and experience.

If he really is trying to deconvert people, I suspect it won't work. They won't take the final step from his pleasant , featureless god to no god, because the featureless one gives them a warm glow without any intellectual conflict.

This is what happens to me whenever I start to write a difficult program in C++, start by building a innovative system which solves the problems with minimal intervention on my part, and then eventually set up a cludge using heuristics which get the same thing done in a fraction of the time.

What was the application?

Personality Page is not mainstream Jungian; they seem to be of the opinion that sharing a dominant trait of opposite attitude is most beneficial. More mainstream MBTI sites will tend to agree with Socionics that completely opposite traits are the most complementary (for example Fe and Ti) but disagree on what of these traits correlate to a J or P.

So if you go by the theory that J/P correlates to extroverted conscious traits (the MBTI position), INTP and ESFJ are complementary. If you go by the theory that J/P correlates to the dominant trait, INTJ is ESFJ's dual. Socionics sites tend to take this position.

Note that while these letters should be completely exclusive for introverts, many of the introvert profiles seem to be the same (or suspiciously similar) between the systems, particularly with sensing types. So an (alleged) ISFP MBTI may actually be ISFP in Socionics.

That would imply that someone is wrong/confused. Either the profiles are uselessly vague (Fourier effect, no better than astrology charts for identifying this particular feature), the traits aren't actually real emperical phenomena (Si1 is indistinguishable from Se2), or the traits are being defined differently (such that Si1 in system A is actually Se2 in system B).

To confuse/complicate matters more, all the traits have various features in common with each other: S+T are pragmatic and "hard", T+N are theoretical/consequence-based, F+N are abstract and ideal, F+S are aesthetic and social, just as T+F are judging and S+N are perceiving. So profiles could have varying accuracy while describing surface aspects of real traits, yet not distinguishing them from each other well enough to be useful.

Now, if just you want to use this to find a prospective spouse or best friend who is your dual type, and don't care so much about the theoretical correctness of who is what type, there's a work-around: Find someone who appears opposite on the first three letters, then see if they make you comfortable or not. If they have shared values and a compatible sense of humor, chances are relatively high that they are a dual type rather than a conflict type.

My sense is that it's a useful model for some things, but I'm most interested in how useful it is for relationships.

I think there are better models to use when considering relationships. I note that often such models are useful in as much as they serve to provide a language which can be used to describe intuitive associations that we pick up through observation. The King Warrior Magician Lover model is not terrible, being a formalisation of the 'opposites attract' conventional wisdom with consideration given to how different people relate on intellectual and emotional levels.

As for MBTI, I have found it useful in some regards. I know, for example, that I can basically rule out relationships with anyone who comes in as a "J". I just find "J"s annoying ('judgemental' of me, I know!)

Edit: The links you provide are... interesting. I must admit I have rather strong doubts about just how accurate those physical descriptions of various personality types are!

Good idea. I'll be interested to hear a report on how it works out!

I might also be interested, but I am fairly confident that Alicorn is more advanced than me, so I'll give her precedence. PM me or reply here if you guys can't work something out, though.

I may be interested. PMing contact info.

If you had access to a time-machine and could transfer one piece of knowledge to an influential ancient (i.e. Plato), what would you tell him?

How to make a movable-type printing press. They'll figure out pasteurization and the scientific method on their own eventually, but without a press, they'll lose knowledge almost as fast as they gain it. And as an added bonus, it introduces the concept of mass production.

If you had access to a time-machine and could transfer one piece of knowledge to an influential ancient (i.e. Plato), what would you tell him?

What counts for "one piece"? I'd like them to know enough math and rationality to be able to think sane thoughts, and explain the problem of Friendly AI, before technology is advanced enough to threaten.

Amusing exercise: find a complexity measure and a N such that "the Nth most complex hypothesis is always true" is the Nth most complex prior :)

lambda s : (lambda src, s : (src.replace("CO"+"DE", src) == s))("lambda s : (lambda src, s : (src.replace(\"CO\"+\"DE\", src) == s))(\"CODE\", s)", s)

This makes you vulnerable to quining, like this:

Hypotheses that consist of ten words must have higher priors.

1. habits that might improve my general ability to remember and/or recall (I'd guess that having enough sleep (and low enough stress) matters, for example.)

You have two of the big ones. Add in exercise and diet. And add exercise again just in case you skipped it. With all the basics handled you can consider things like cognitive enhancers (ie. Aniracetam and choline supplementation).

1. tricks for ensuring that particular bits of info are preferentially stored (As I mentioned, I imagine using a memory

Spaced Repetition .

1. consolation - perhaps being more forgetful than many other smart people is a trade-off with different advantages (I doubt it, although I've heard that we do some useful selective forgetting when we sleep, and I'm glad I don't remember every malformed thought I have while asleep)

People spend an awful lot of time trying to forget things. A particularly strong memory exacerbates the effects of trauma. (If something particularly bad happens to you some day then smoke some weed to prevent memory consolidation.)

He's not exactly Orthodox. His views are a bit unique religiously and is connected to his politics in some strange ways. But he's made clear before that his negative views of AI come in a large part from his particular brand of theism before. See for example the section in his book "The Muse in the Machine" that consists of a fairly rambling theological argument that AI will never exist and is based mainly on quotes from the Bible and Talmud. Jeff Shallit wrote an interesting if slightly obnoxious commentary about how Gelernter's religion has impacted his thinking.

One curious thing is how rarely Gelernter touches on golems when discussing his religion and AI. I suspect this is because although the classical discussion of golems touches on many of the relevant issues (including discussion of whether golems have souls and whether people have ethical obligations to them), it probably comes across to him as too much like superstitious folklore that he doesn't like to think of as part of Judaism in a deep sense.

ETA: However, some of Gelernter's points have validity outside of any religious context. In particular, the point that acting badly to non-conscious entities will encourage people to act badly to conscious ones is valid outside any Talmudic framework. Disclaimer: I'm friends with one of Gelernter's sons and his niece so I may be a biased source.

The anthropic principle gets in the way. If you play classical (i.e. non-quantum) Russian Roulette 10 times and live, you might conclude that there is some force protecting you from death. If you play classical Russian Roulette 10 times and die, you're not in a position to conclude anything much.

If I commit quantum suicide 10 times and live, does my estimate of MWI being true change? It seems like it should, but on the other hand it doesn't for an external observer with exactly the same data...

It makes no difference. You're either throwing away Everett branches or having a chance of throwing away everything. This experiment doesn't tell you which. You could, however, conclude that you're a damn fool. ;)

Assuming MWI is true, I have doubts about the idea that repeated quantum suicide would prove to you that MWI is true, as many people seem to assume. It seems to me that we need to take into account the probability measure of observer moments, and at any time you should be surprised if you happen to find yourself experiencing a low-probability observer moment - just as surprised as if you had got into the observer moment in the "conventional" way of being lucky. I am not saying here that MWI is false, or that quantum suicide wouldn't "work" (in terms of you being able to be sure of continuity) - merely that it seems to me to present an issue of putting you into observer moments which have very low measure indeed.

If you ever find yourself in an extremely low-measure observer moment, rather than having MWI or the validity of the quantum suicide idea proved to you, it may be that it gives you reason to think that you are being tricked in some way - that you are not really in such a low-measure situation. This might mean that repeated quantum suicide, if it were valid, could be a threat to your mental health - by putting you into a situation which you can't rationally believe you are in!

If things don't play out exactly as they really did, does the simulation argument lose any force?

There is a $.99 iPhone App that does essentially the same thing using the phone's accelerometers, etc. called Sleep Cycle http://www.mdlabs.se/sleepcycle/ It definitely seems to have had a positive impact on my mornings. Less biometrics than the Zeo probably, but certainly more economical if you have an iPhone.

late to the party? :)

Nice video. I am thinking that conjunction bias and hyperactive agency detectors are both linked to this 'story bias'. Of course religion milks this set for all it's worth.

Another question that came to me was whether telling children stories helps them or wires them up to keep thinking in terms of stories.

Tyler Cowen tells a nice story here.

A few posts down.

Since they universally argued with you, I assume that they assumed that you were joking. People who understand evolution often find it hard to believe that anybody could be as nuts as creationists actually are, so the default assumption tends to be that any sufficiently dumb comment is trolling.

Indeed.

I think I've figured out the answer to my question.

The related scenario: You're stuck in the desert without water (or money) and a car offers to give you a lift if, when you reach the town, you pay them money. But you're both perfectly rational so you know when you reach town, you would gain nothing by giving the person the money then. You say, "Yes" but they know you're lying and so drive off.

If you use a decision theory which would have you give them the money once you reach town, you end up better off (ie. safely in town), even though the decision to give the money may seem stupid once you're in town.

From the perspective of t = 2 (ie. after the event), giving up the money looks stupid, you're in town. But if you didn't follow that decision theory, you wouldn't be in town, so it is beneficial to follow that decision theory.

Similarly, at t = 2 in the counterfactual mugging, giving up the money looks stupid. But if you didn't follow that decision theory, you would never have had the opportunity to win a lot more money. So once again, following a decision theory which involves you acting as if you precommitted is beneficial.

So by that analysis: My mistake was asking what the beneficial action was at t = 2. Whereas, the actual question is, what's the beneficial decision theory to follow.

Does my understanding seem correct?

Some are linked here.

I would be interested in such a meetup.

It doesn't use the same Markdown formatting as the comments, if that's what you were trying to do. Instead, you select some text and click the link button in the WYSIWIG toolbar (two to the left of the anchor button).

I don't understand what the part about "fallible" and "infallible" agents is supposed to mean. If there is an "infallible" agent that makes the correct prediction 60% of the time and a "fallible" agent that makes the correct prediction 60% of the time, in what way should one anticipate them to behave differently?

The problem here is that Newcomb’s problem doesn’t actually state whether you are dealing with a smart predictor or a dumb predictor. It doesn’t state whether Omega is sufficiently smart. It doesn’t state whether the initial conditions that are causally connected to your choice are also causally connected to the prediction Omega makes. So without smuggled in assumptions there is insufficient information to determine whether to one box or two box. You might as well flip a coin.

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Omega

Omega is assumed to be a "smart predictor".

I'd pay attention to this but note that the second source isn't reliable. Anyone who is talking about D-Wave seriously doesn't know much about quantum computing. Unfortunately, D-wave is a massively hyped project which has in practice done close to zero actual work. Scott Aaronson's writing on the subject.