Digging behind the bet, I think you were betting that Louie had been spoofed. If the screenshot Louie sent was really sourced in zagat and not spoofed, then zagat did indeed have the opinion lukeprog thought it didn't.

If the purpose of bets is measure your model against the world, it seems to me that the more valuable lesson is how often you are surprised in the process of evaluating the bet than how often you are correct. If you put 40 or 65% on the hypothesis that the restaurant falls in a particular bin, you aren't surprised either way by the answer, but you both erred in believing that there were just two bins.

I don't know about documentation, but you can start looking here.

On Facebook one time, there was some discussion or other about gender, and a link to the post was made. EY said something to the effect of 'I no longer endorse that post sufficiently enough to keep it up', and took it down.

Here is a working link.

You don't want to make being praised unpleasant for the recipient -- that leads to perverse incentives. And you don't want to give an award a stupid name or an embarrassing shape -- part of the point of this sort of thing is that it looks good on your resume or perched over your desk. You want to mark their achievement in a way they'll genuinely appreciate, but simultaneously add symbolism to make their coworkers feel that their status hasn't been diminished.

I think what you're looking for is a little temporary public humiliation, not intrinsic to the award but coming along with more standard recognition. You could do this in several different ways. If it's a fairly small group and the awards are a fairly big deal, for example, you could run a roast) as part of the party following the award. You could probably contrive ways to add this kind of symbolism to physical awards, too.

Isn't being praised already unpleasant enough?

Find a way to make it non-zero-sum. Only 1 person can be employee of the year, so others lose out and may resent their colleague. Maybe a gold/silver/bronze border around your portrait on the intranet, with a tooltip that explains what you got it for?

Money. Give the person a token bonus and let it be known that if you get a bonus you are not supposed to tell other people about it.

I build a robot that hibernates until the last person presently alive dies, then exterminates all people who are poor, unhappy, or don't like my robot. Good thing?

If future generations average the welfare of lives after their "present moments", they will make decisions we disapprove of.

Can you give an example? It seems to me that if they decide at t_1 to maximise average welfare from t_1 to ∞, then given that welfare from t_0 to t_1 is held fixed, that decision will also maximise average welfare from t_0 to ∞.

Edit: oh, I was thinking of an average over time, not people.

it's important to ensure that the future will contain many people who have better lives than us

Are you swiping the complexity of value under the terms "better" and "veridical"? Does following your axiology prevent humanity from evolving into a race of happy-go-lucky clones?

on whether the person's experiences are veridical.

Is this different from whether their perception of their experiences is correct, or is it jargon?

There are LessWrong meetups in many countries, in particular there are 4 in Germany.

See http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Less_Wrong_meetup_groups

I'm pretty sure that due to the free rider problem, active and lively communities are much more likely to grow via word of mouth than via public advertising or easily googled websites.

Maybe try Mensa? I don't know if they're any good, but they're in Germany and they're big enough to know an LWish community if one is available.

In Berlin we found that having Quantified Self events in English makes more sense then holding them in German. All the interested people speak English. Our local Berlin LW meetups are also in English. There no good reason to use German if you want to discuss intellectual topics on a deep level. English is the language of science. English is the language of programming.

That said, see whether there a LW meetup, QS meetup, Chaos Computer Club Erfa or Hackerspace at your city. That's were the kind of people who are here hang out. Meetup.com in general is good to find interesting groups.

When the Chaos Computer Congress was still in Berlin I went there multiple years in a row. Now I don't travel to Hamburg but if you are free on 27-30 December going there, is a very worthwhile experience to be in the company of very smart people.

As far as general strategies for finding communities, talk to people. Ask them to which communities they belong.

I have been using Amazon Smile and Smile Always for MIRI for about a year.

IIRC, Amazon Smile used to be listed on MIRI's Donate for free page, but has since been replaced by "Good Shop". Good Shop appears to give a higher percentage, but I was unable to get the browser extension working so that it happened automatically, so I still use Smile. If anyone knows of a way to get it working, I'd be happy to hear it. But I tried to do it manually for a while, and I just don't remember often enough.

Is this for the EU too? 0.5% seems a bit low, for every $200 you'd spend the charity receives $1. Then again, it is about the aggregate effect.

Edit: Browsing through the charities, they are all located in the US, so it seems specific to there.

In cases like this, a large portion of the "money" paid is actually in the form of shares, which can vary wildly on a day-to-day basis (especially during a takeover!). It doesn't make sense to specify the value of it too precisely because nobody knows what the shares are going to be worth tomorrow.

What makes you think that these numbers are determined by some kind of rational cost-benefit analysis rather than those with the money rattling off numbers until those with the property give in?

Why not all of the above? We can see some rounding already; http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=835447 says

Facebook today announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Oculus VR, Inc., the leader in immersive virtual reality technology, for a total of approximately $2 billion. This includes $400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares of Facebook common stock (valued at $1.6 billion based on the average closing price of the 20 trading days preceding March 21, 2014 of $69.35 per share). The agreement also provides for an additional $300 million earn-out in cash and stock based on the achievement of certain milestones.

There's rounding right there (23.1m * 69.35 is not a round number). And there's plenty of uncertainty about how much they will actually pay: how can anyone know how much of that earn-out will ultimately be paid?

Google's IPO was e * 10^9$#In_computer_culture) :)

Fixed, I hope entering the tag post hoc fixes the issue.

Edit: For some reason the one before doesn't have the tag either..

People have been posting in both recently.

Lol.

no matter how much is discovered about mathematics and the measurable regularities of reality, it seems to me that stoners will always be able to ask each other, “dude, what if like, two plus two isn't four?”

Seriously though, that's a really bad argument, why have you added it here?

What is UDT?

1.1. Epistemic truth is to be determined solely by the scientific method / Occam's razor.

Is this an epistemic truth?

1.1- Disagree, but I may not understand the claim (what's 'epistemic truth'?). 1.2- Agree. 1.3- Agree. 2.1- Agree that consciousness is the result of computing processes in the brain, disagree that a machine implementing the same computations would necessarily be conscious. (i.e. agree with physicalism, don't agree with functionalism). 2.2- I don't understand the claim. But I think I disagree. 3.1- Agnostic. 3.2- Disagree. 3.3- Disagree, especially with the claim that this is the only meaningful interpretation of 'should'. 4.1- Agnostic. 5.1- Agnostic. 5.2- I don't understand this at all. 5.3- I don't understand your use of the word 'real'.

Sociology: A Very Short Introduction (published Oxfrod University Press)

You can try Everything Is Obvious by Duncan Watts. He's a multi-disciplinary type, but he is at least partially a sociologist. He also discusses a lot in there about sociology as a discipline.

Erving Goffman is said to be accessible and said to be a sociologist. One issue is that "sociology" has several meanings. His version shades into psychology.

The sociologist Charles Murray) says interesting things. I don't usually agree with them, but they make me think.

I'm currently learning about hypothesis testing in my statistics class. The idea is that you perform some test and you use the results of that test to calculate:

P(data at least as extreme as your data | Null hypothesis)

This is the p-value. If the p-value is below a certain threshold then you can reject the null hypothesis.

This is correct.

Put another way:

P(data | hypothesis) = 1 - p-value

and if 1 - p-value is high enough then you accept the hypothesis. (My use of "data" is handwaving and not quite correct but it doesn't matter.)

This is not correct. You seem to be under the impression that

P(data | null hypothesis) + P(data | complement(null hypothesis)) = 1,

but this is not true because

1. complement(null hypothesis) may not have a well-defined distribution (frequentists might especially object to defining a prior here), and
2. even if complement(null hypothesis) were well defined, the sum could fall anywhere in the closed interval [0, 2].

More generally, most people (both frequentists and bayesians) would object to "accepting the hypothesis" based on rejecting the null, because rejecting the null means exactly what it says, and no more. You cannot conclude that an alternative hypothesis (such as the complement of the null) has higher likelihood or probability.

But it seems more useful to me to calculate P(hypothesis | data).

That may be true if you have little influence over what data is available.

Frequentists are mainly interested in situations where they can create experiments that cause P(hypothesis) to approach 0 or 1. The p-value is intended to be good at deciding whether the hypothesis has been adequately tested, not at deciding whether to believe the hypothesis given crappy data.

Your conclusion

So what I'm wondering is whether under frequentism P(hypothesis | data) is actually meaningless. The hypothesis is either true or false and depending on whether its true or not the data has a certain propensity of turning out one way or the other. Its meaningless to ask what the probability of the hypothesis is, you can only ask what the probability of obtaining your data is under certain assumptions.

is correct. Frequentists do indeed claim that P(hypothesis | data) is meaningless for exactly the reasons you gave. However there are some little details in the rest of your post that are incorrect.

null hypothesis (which is the complement of the hypothesis that you are trying to test).

The hypothesis you are trying to test is typically not the complement of the null hypothesis. For example we could have:

H0: theta=0

H1:theta>0

where theta is some variable that we care about. Note that the region theta<0 isn't in either hypothesis. If we were instead testing

H1':theta isn't equal to 0

then frequentists would suggest a different test. They would use a one-tailed test to test H1 and a two-tailed test to test H1'. See here.

P(data | hypothesis) = 1 - p-value

No. This is just mathematically wrong. P(A|B) is not necessarily equal to 1-P(A|¬B). Just think about it for a bit and you'll see why. If that doesn't work, take A="sky is blue" and B="my car is red" and note that P(A|B)=P(A|¬B)~1.

So what I'm wondering is whether under frequentism P(hypothesis | data) is actually meaningless.

It's not meaningless, but people who follow R. A. Fisher's ideas for rejecting the null do not use p(hypothesis | data). "Meaningless" would be if frequentists literally did not have p(hypothesis | data) in their language, which is not true because they use probability theory just like everybody else.

Don't ask lesswrong about what frequentists claim, ask frequentists. Very few people on lesswrong are statisticians.

But it seems more useful to me to calculate P(hypothesis | data). And that's not quite the same thing.

It is not the same thing and knowing P(hypothesis | data) would be very useful. Unfortunately, it is also very hard to estimate because usually the best you can do is calculate the probability, given the data, of a hypothesis out of a fixed set of hypotheses which you know about and for which you can estimate probabilities. If your understanding of the true data-generation process is not so good (which is very common in real life) your P(hypothesis | data) is going to be pretty bad and what's worse, you have no idea how bad it is.

As far as I can tell, you're correct.

I don't think that's really the fallacy of grey, if I have to map it to a piece of LessWrong-speak, I'd call it privileging the hypothesis; it's not saying you can't be sure of anything, if you're a good Bayesian it's not really telling you anything new there, it's just bringing one particular super-implausible hypothesis to your attention so it occupies much more of your mind than it has any right to.

Here's a sampling of the best in my RSS reader:

• Scott Aaronson, theoretical computer science/physics
• Tyler Cowen, economics, Cowen is good about sharing surprising info
• Lambda the Ultimate, programming language theory
• John Baez, "from math to physics to earth science and biology, computer science and the technologies of today and tomorrow," plus stuff on catastrophic risk w.r.t. climate change.
• Jeremy Kun, computer science mostly
• The n-Category Cafe, "A group blog on math, physics and philosophy"
• Andrew Gelman, pointing out bad statistics in social science. More than once, I've revised my beliefs about some study months later when he points out a failure to replicate or other problem.
• Timothy Gowers, math, analysis I stuff recently, mostly over my head
• Terry Tao, math, number theory, mostly over my head
• matthen, math visualizations
• Gödel’s Lost Letter, theoretical computer science, complexity theory, often funny
• MIRI blog, interviews, research recaps, computer sciencey
• Overcoming Bias, X isn't about Y
• Dart Throwing Chimp, global politics
• Carl Shulman, effective altruism, thoughtful analysis
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, webcomic
• So Your Life is Meaningless, webcomic
• XKCD, webcomic
• hbd* chick, population genetics, star wars, emoticons
• Unqualified Reservations, neoreactionary, questioning everything since the enlightenment
• Yvain, psychology, rationality, relationships
• Ben Kuhn, effective altruism
• Katja Grace, rationality
• Brienne Strohl, rationality
• And finally my blog, I try to share surprising information, cogsci/relationships/computer science/math

gwern posts on google+ and Kaj Sotala posts interesting stuff on Facebook. I also subscribe to a number of journal's table of contents via this site to keep up with research and some stuff on arxiv.

After discussing diffusion of interesting news at the most recent London meetup, I was planning on asking something like this myself.

Futility Closet is nothing but "interesting stuff". It describes itself as "a collection of entertaining curiosities in history, literature, language, art, philosophy, and mathematics, designed to help you waste time as enjoyably as possible". It has more chess than I personally care for, but is updated with what I find to be novel content three times a day.

Conscious Entities is a blog on Philosophy of Mind. It takes an open position on a lot of questions we would consider to be settled on LessWrong, but I think it has value in a steel-manning / why-do-people-believe-this capacity.

(The categories on my feed reader are "Blogs", "CS", "Dance", "Econ", "Esoterica", "Maths/Stats", "Philosophy", "Science" and "Webcomics". I'd be interested in finding out how other people classify theirs.)

There are some blogs mentioned on the wiki.

Mr.Money Mustache on personal finance.

In the Pipeline is a very good blog to keep up with what's happen in big pharma and chemistry in general. It written by someone employed inside a pharma company, and not someone who criticizes pharma policy from a outsider standpoint. There are some posts about specific chemical reactions that I skip but if you want to understand how the healthcare industry works, I can recommend the blog very much. It also provides good coverage if a new relevant biomedical finding comes in the news. The comment section is usually full of people with domain experience.

I used to read Matt Talibies Rolling Stones blog column for Finanical news. Stories about Libor are explained in detail on that blog.

Matt now left the Rolling Stones and will lead his own magazine under the heading of First Look Media which is funded by the tech billionaire of ebay cofounder Pierre Morad Omidyar. At the moment First Look Media already publishes Glenn Greenwald & company which the primary job of still processing the pile of Snowden documents.

I used to read Glenn Greenwald for a long time but reading every other day about the NSA, used to become boring so I won't read everything that comes out in the Intercept but I subscribe to the feed.

As a German speaking independent news sources I read hintergrund, fefe and the indepth podcast Alternativlos.

Alternativlos is an interesting project. Two members of the Chaos Computer Club basically concluded that speaking to the public and explaining them how things work politically is "without alternative" and started to explain topics in 2 hours. It explains a topic like stuxnet in detail in a detail that explains what exploits cost on the black market.

Today some public radio stations rebroadcast the podcast.

I don't really read many blogs frequently. The one sort-of-bloggish site I visit daily is 3 Quarks Daily. They link to a number of interesting articles every day, and their taste in topics coincides quite nicely with mine.

Urban sprawl is said to be an unintended consequence of the development of the US interstate highway system.

Passive voice / finding causes is hard / compare LA and SF.

This is not really a haiku.

Some factors pointing towards an increase: decreased emotional, health, and financial cost of commutes.

Some factors pointing towards a decrease: decreased cost and increased flexibility and convenience of car-sharing services, which work better in higher density locations.

I think the primary driver of urban sprawl is schooling (and thus home prices), not commuting. The growing acceptance of online schooling will likely decrease urban sprawl significantly.

Here's an economics analysis: self-driving cars reduce the effective cost of a commute, by allowing the passenger to focus on other things than driving during the commute (reading, watching TV, playing games, etc). Since a significant limit to sprawl is the cost, broadly construed, of long commutes, self-driving cars will increase sprawl.

Based on the idea that you get what you incentivize, and irrespective of other factors, I'd expect a marginal to mild increase. Self-driving cars can make commutes a bit more pleasant and substantially less dangerous, but they can't reduce commute times (until they reach saturation or close to it), and time's the main limitation.

If she's on medicine to contain her anorexia she knows she has an issue. You could start with simple asking her what she eats and listen empathically.

I would also suggest that you think about your relationship with her. What does she want? Does she want your approval? Does she want that you tell her what to do, to not have to take the responsibility for herself? Does she care about looking beautiful to you? Does she want a relationship with you? Do you want a relationship with her?

Knowing answers to questions like that is important when you deal with deep psychological issues. It shapes how the words you say will be understood.

Do you have any thoughts about whether she's at risk for an exercise disorder?

You may directly ask her in what terms she prefers to discuss those matters. That way you'll get across your message, i.e. that proper diet is worth talking about, with little risk of involving the wrong message in the mix.

If she wants to get bigger, then I'd get her started with Greyskull LP. It's a fairly basic beginner weight lifting program that, when combined with a caloric surplus, will get good results for size and strength. There isn't much work involved (just three sets on 2-3 exercises; doing more is counterproductive for beginners) so it won't use as much energy as a cardio or circuit intensive routine.

A couple of protein shakes with milk/almond milk are enough to get a caloric surplus going. You only need 250-500 extra calories to make good gains, and you can easily get that with a shake or two.

A friend of mine has mild anorexia (she's on psych meds to keep it contained)

I don't have good ideas about dealing with anorexia, but I think you should suggest to your friend that she is being used as a pawn by the psycho-pharmaceutical industry to extract dollars from her health insurance provider.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagonal_lemma

Or read Godel, Escher, Bach. Actually, read GEB anyway.

I suggest reading a translation.

I disagree that Bob's expected value drops to -0.5$ during the experiment. If Bob is aware that he will be "super-duper quantum memory erased", then he should appropriately expect to receive 1$.

There may be more existential dread during the experiment, but the expectations about the outcome should stay the same throughout.

Bob cannot become entangled with the outside world while in the middle of a quantum erasure experiment, or else it doesn't work. So he doesn't really get to do anything :P

If Bob knows that the particle becomes entangled with him, then he still makes the same predictions.

FYI, it is possible to do a part-time masters program and some employers will pay for you to get a graduate degree (usually as part of an agreement to keep working for the company several years afterwards).

IMO the real problem is that academia teaches computer science whereas what programmers need to know to be valuable is software engineering. Those seem to be rather different disciplines.

Disclaimer: I didn't study CS myself and this opinion is based on indirect evidence.

You want options (as in, the financial market instruments called "options").

A sufficiently deep and wide options market basically provides most of the market-expected distribution of the future value of the underlying.

My comments earlier. Wolfram is a beautiful language with well designed libraries. If you are new to programming, you will learn a lot mucking about with it. It's probably not going to take the world by storm.

Seems like a product placement.

Homotopy type theory differs from ZFC in two ways. One way is that it, like ordinary type theory, is constructive and ZFC is not. The other is that it is based in homotopy theory. It is that latter property which makes it well suited for proofs in homotopy theory (and category theory). Most of the examples in slides you link to are about homotopy theory.

Tegmark is quite explicit that he has no measure and thus no prior. Switching foundations doesn't help.

the implied prior

Which implied prior? My understanding is that the problem with Multiverse theories is that we don't have a way to assign probability measures to the different possible universes, and therefore we cannot formulate an unambiguous prior distribution.

futurismic.com and maybe io9.com