Open thread, Jul. 18 - Jul. 24, 2016

Yes, it's entitled "Good and Real." The shadowy cabal behind LessWrong wrote it under one of their other pseudonyms, "Gary Drescher."

no. print your own after buying the ebook. If you go to an office-supply store they should be able to print and bind it for you.

I studied at Cambridge (which, btw, is definitely better than Oxford :-)).[1] Being in the Cambridge area when I got out of academia meant that there were plenty of jobs around that suited me. (Obviously that's a good thing in itself, but perhaps if I'd been somewhere else then I'd have moved to, say, London and had a different range of job opportunities.)

Pretty much every job I've taken I've found out about because someone at my new employer knew me. In some cases those were people who studied with me. Does that count as an effect of having been at a good university? I don't know -- if I'd been somewhere else, presumably other people would have known me, and maybe they'd have been even more impressed for want of strong competition :-). But there are lots of Cambridge people in Cambridge jobs, for obvious reasons.

The point here is that lots of things useful to my career have arisen from my having gone to a good university -- but not in the obvious way (people looking at my history and saying "oooh, Cambridge PhD, must be very smart").

[1] It occurs to me that there is a slight danger of that being taken more seriously than I intend it, so let me mention that Oxford and Cambridge are traditional rivals and that of course I would say Cambridge is obviously better. My actual opinion is that Cambridge is somewhat better for maths, science, technology, engineering, while Oxford is better for classics, history, politics, etc. If you want to be prime minister, go to Oxford. If you want to start a billion-dollar tech company, go to Cambridge. I'm not sure how they compare for intermediate fields like philosophy and law.

I'm currently applying for jobs while finishing up my Master's degree, so I'm not technically in the group you are asking, but can hopefully still say something useful.

Background: I've been studying Computer Science with a natural language focus, both at a relatively unknown university in Eastern Germany and at University of Edinburgh. The latter is definitely top n in the field, although it does not have the same nimbus and does not offer as much of regular 1-on-1 teaching time with profs like Oxford and Cambridge do (you can get it if you ask, but it is not a default teaching mode). I can't compare to the US because I haven't been there yet.

Content comparison: I find that the courses at both universities is similar both according to content and quality. The focus is different of course, and workload is much higher in Edinburgh, probably because the degree program is only 1 year instead of 1.5 or 2 for roughly the same content. In both places I could get meetings with professors if I wanted to, although in Edinburgh there is additionally a lot of staff who checks up on us and reminds us about organisational things. Among students, there is a bigger share of really bright and enthusiastic people, and that is quite noticeable. The biggest difference here is that there is direct contact with the people who made major inventions and contributions to the field and are on top of things I actually care about. This is most important in a very narrow range of topics I want to go further. For the basics, it doesn't really matter who explains them. I currently also get very good dissertation supervision, but I cannot compare that to my old university because I wrote my dissertation there during an internship and largely with supervision from the company's research department.

Job applications: I feel like being in Edinburgh gives a significant boost to job applications. In Germany, profs were willing to write recommendations on request, but did not offer interesting company contacts on their own. There were partnerships between university and bigger companies, but this felt very cheesy and ineffective. Around here, I do get very cool company introductions and interviewers sometimes happen to have worked or studied here as well, which gives a good basis for conversation and might give a bonus, even if they try to avoid it consciously.

Conclusion: UK tuition fees at top-n universities (around £7k-25k/year) are low compared to US fees, so they are easier to justify and I think mine are worth it with regards to my future job. I would not say the same for knowledge gain per money, since German living costs are much lower and it does not have tuition fees. I could have done a two-year master in Germany for less money and could have had more relaxed studies with the same gain. I however wanted to have shorter, intensive studies, so the UK suited my preferences. Be aware however that Brexit causes trouble for British research, so this evaluation might totally change in 1 or 2 years.

http://siderea.livejournal.com/1261773.html?format=light

useful thoughts about colleges.

There's a lot of self-selection, and the classes and extracurricular resources are therefore allowed to be geared towards smarter students, and that's nice. You'll also get more opportunities to learn about current research in your chosen field, which improves your grad school chances.

A lot of the value is if you plan to get a job straight out of college, going to a top n school will have a name brand advantage (not without reason).

However, controlling for smartness and research experience, I think that where you did your undergrad doesn't matter all that much for grad school.

Yes, there are differences.

I talked to a person who was hiring for tech jobs in Silicon Valley, and he said that the Ivy League schools in the United States get a much better quality of training than other United States schools in the fields of engineering and computer science. For example, the Ivy League schools would have 3 hour exams where you have to show how you arrived at an answer as well as the answer. Most of the other schools had 1 hour multiple choice exams.

The situation is different in other countries. In Canada, unlike in the US, engineering is a regulated profession. That means certain types of designs have to be approved by a Professional Engineer. There are rules about how to become a professional engineer. One path to becoming one involves graduating from an accredited program at a university. So every engineering program at a university is monitored by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board. No matter which university you go to in Canada, you'll get the 3 hour non-multiple choice exams, and very good training.

For this reason, the person at the tech company liked to hire Canadians, since they have the good training, but not the entitled attitude of the Ivy League graduates. But he considered Ivy League graduates. He wouldn't even consider the non-Ivy League ones, unless they showed some other way that they actually have the skills and training, since they didn't get it at school.

Another difference between Harvard, MIT, etc. and the typical Canadian university is that Harvard and MIT have huge endowment funds and many wealthy alumni and donors, so they have access to a lot more resources than most universities. Like about 1000x more money. The MIT endowment fund reached $13.5 billion in 2015.

I also know someone who went to Harvard for a Masters degree in political science, and she said that after getting a degree from Harvard, she was taken a lot more seriously. People listened to what she said, and deferred to her, in a way that they didn't before she could say that she went to Harvard. So it seems to make a difference in public policy and government work.

Another difference between universities can be their intellectual property policy. The University of Waterloo, in Canada, has the most respectful intellectual property policy that I know of, among universities. Simply, if you do research or work there, it's yours, and you can use it in a startup company if you wish. Many students and professors do this. The University of Waterloo is well known for many technology spinoff companies. I know of one prof who doesn't even publish journal articles any more, he just documents his work with patents, and then uses them in his startup. This is seen as adding prestige to the institution, unlike in some other universities, where there's a bit more disdain for commercialization. The co-op program at the University of Waterloo also means that students get real-world experience and bring that back to the classroom, and is another reason for the more positive attitude to collaboration with industry.

The University of Waterloo's intellectual property policy is even more respectful and individualistic than the one at Stanford, which is also a university known for its spinoffs.

Oxford has more name recognition in North America than Cambridge. Within the UK, they are seen as mostly equivalent, to the point that "Oxford and/or Cambridge" is often shortened to "Oxbridge". It is easier to get work in government in the UK with an Oxbridge education.

Also, the people you meet at university are more likely to end up in powerful positions if you go to one of the big name universities. So the alumni network becomes more valuable.

It depends on what you want to study and what you want to do afterward. There are some fields where it wouldn't matter much.

Graduate education is a different matter. With some exceptions, like my friend who went to Harvard for political science that I mentioned above, it doesn't really matter much what school or department you go to for graduate school. The most important things will be 1) What did you do? and 2) Who did you work with? The rest is almost irrelevant. Finding a good supervisor who you can get along with, and who will help your career, is the priority when choosing graduate school.

I'm most familiar with Canada, and a bit with the US and the UK. I don't know the situation in other countries.

What do you actually want to do with your life? There are careers like politics where personal connection that are gathered during university years are very important.

There are other careers such as starting a startup where personal connections with high status people might not be central and a lot of the YC founders don't have them.

Either there's some sort of self-selection, or do graduates from there have better prospects than graduates of 'University of X, YZ'?

Why "either or"?

do graduates from there have better prospects than graduates of 'University of X, YZ'?

Yes, they do.

There are basically three tiers: the elite (top 10-12 schools), the middle (top 50-100 or so), and the don't-bother (the rest).

The link lacks a trailing l after "htm". Otherwise it won't work.

Well, I'd try to find a more accurate estimate of mortality and hospitalization for your age group; if you're younger than 30, I'd be very surprised to find the mortality rate that high. You could also take Acetaminophen instead, as it it is a pain reliever which is NOT an NSAID, and does not seem to cause any stomach bleeding, which should cut it down to the 4x margin. IANAD, though, so take that with a grain of salt, and speak to your GP if you have any particular questions about interactions.

I can follow your maths, but I'm also not a stat major or anything.

In direct contradiction to your request, I am not helping with your maths but providing general (not specific) advice.

Bleeding has a 30% mortality rate

This depends very much on the population you are looking at (age, source of bleeding, severity of bleeding, comorbidities at time of bleeding - both acute and chronic). I would suggest that if you are not fulfilling some of these criteria your bleeding mortality is much lower. It is certainly possible that an SSRI could have a statistically significant effect in cases of severe bleeding like major trauma, but you'd have to estimate the risk that you'll experience major bleeding.

As Cariyaga has said, acetaminophen/paracetamol is an alternative, which doesn't have the same interaction with SSRIs. Individual doses of NSAIDs may be ok, but I don't know if there's any good data to support or deny this. Part of the risk with NSAIDs is that they affect coagulation AND directly cause bleeding (gastric ulceration). Past history or family history of clotting/bleeding disorders, gastric ulcers or significant gastric reflux increase the risk of this.

Another alternative is non-serotonergic antidepressants. There are many classes of antidepressant and some may not feature the same level of evidence of this increased bleeding risk (although all feature potential side-effect profiles longer than my arms). To confuse matters, some are classified structurally (tricyclic antidepressants TCAs, tetracyclic antidepressants) and some functionally (SSRIs, SNRIs, NaSSAs, RIMAs, MAOIs). TCAs may behave functionally like SSRIs, and may confer a bleeding risk as well.

I think the solution will depend on some research by yourself and some discussions with your doctor. Certainly avoiding NSAIDs is an easy first step. It is easy to get paralysed by the ocean of studies, but doing nothing may not be the right decision for your quality of life.

No, mainly because Elon Musk's concern about AI risk added more prestige than Thiel had.

I think it's more likely to go the other way. There are FAR more people who pay attention to Trump and normal republican politics than are currently paying attention to Thiel and AI risk. A small fraction of these being interested in Thiel and looking into AI risk is probably going to outweigh any losses.

I am, and not just MIRI/AI safety, also for other topics like anti-deathism. Just today I read in a major French newspaper an article explaining how Peter Thiel is the only one from the silicon valley to support the "populist demagogue Trump" and in the same article that he also has this weird idea that death might ultimately be a curable disease...

I know that reverse stupidity isn't intelligence, and about the halo effect, and that Peter Thiel having disgusting (to me, and to most French citizen) political tastes have no bearing on him being right or wrong about death, but many people will end up associating antideathism with being a Trump-supporting lunatic :/

Not me.

In general, I think hysterics over Trump are much overdone.

Generally speaking, for this you need a meta-model, that is, a model of how your model will change (e.g. become outdated) with the arrival of new information. Plus, if you want to compare costs, you need a loss function which will tell you how costly the errors of your model are.

Unfortunately to pull this off you need to look closely to both your model and the model of the error, there's no general method AFAIK.

That's a question of psychology, not of rationality. I don't know the answer, though my prejudices say it probably isn't a great idea.

But there's another reason why you might choose not to buy another in that situation: you may think it less likely than you did before that any given other mattress will solve your sleep problems -- so now the deal you're considering isn't "$1400 for better sleep" but "$1400 for one more attempt at better sleep that may well fail like the last one did". (That was really the deal you were considering all along, but you didn't know it then.)

Also, now you're $1400 poorer. If that's a sizeable fraction of your wealth then $1400 is worth more to you now than it was before and that may very reasonably affect your willingness to spend that much on a mattress. If it's not a sizeable fraction of your wealth, it may still be a sizeable fraction of your readily accessible wealth (the rest being tied up in pension schemes, investments you can't liquidate very quickly, accounts or investments you could liquidate quickly but have a policy of not doing because otherwise you'd spend too much, future earnings[1], etc.) so you may not want to spend that much again soon.

[1] Of course, if you consider something like the estimated net present value of your future earnings as part of your wealth it's much less likely that $1400 is a sizeable fraction of your total wealth thus reckoned.

So this may be a case where letting the sunk cost fallacy do its thing produces a better decision than trying to ignore sunk costs, if you aren't very careful about it. I suspect there are quite a lot of such situations. Cognitive biases sometimes yield better approximations to optimal rationality than simple attempts at explicit unbiased reasoning...

Is it rational for someone to choose to NOT buy another mattress, not because of the sunk cost, but in order to "punish" oneself (stick and carrot style) to change their behavior and not buy non-returnable, expensive things, ever again?

The key question is: Why do you believe that this attempt at punishing will have this effect?

Is that a theory that you came up with yourself as a person who isn't an expert in psychology and who hasn't read any of the relevant research or alternatively has done enough self experiments to have empiric data about how this effect will work on them?

Or, they could simply update on the fact that it did not work when they expected it to, and rightly conclude that it was more likely than they realized that spending even more money would not be worthwhile.

my intuition is not to discount at all, i.e. my happiness in 50 years is worth exactly the same as my happiness in the present.

If you separate utility discount into uncertainty (which isn't actually a discount of a world state, it's weighting across world-states and should be separately calculated by any rational agent anyway) and time preference, it's pretty reasonable to have no utility discount rate.

It's also reasonable to discount a bit based on diffusion of identity. The thing that calls itself me next year is slightly less me than the thing that calls itself me next week. I do, in fact, care more about near-future me than about far-future me ,in the same way that I care a bit more about my brother than I do about a stranger in a faraway land. Somewhat counteracting this is that I expect further-future me to be smarter and more self aware, so his desires are probably better, in some sense. Depending on your theory of ego value, you can justify a relatively steep discount rate or a negative one.

Hyperbolic discounting is still irrational, as it's self-inconsistent.

Couple of things to throw in there.

First, you can empirically observe real-life discount functions that you can, ahem, bet money on. For example, here.

Second, with respect to "my intuition is not to discount at all", let's try this. I assume you have some income that you live on. How much money would you take at the end of three months to not receive any income at all for those three months? Adjust the time scale if you wish.

In general, you can think of discounting in terms of loans. Assuming no risk of default, what is the interest rate you would require to lend money to someone for a particular term?

Are any types of non-exponential discounting time-consistent?

No.

Why do people focus on hyperbolic and exponential? Aren't there other options?

I don't think people really mean anything very specific by "hyperbolic discounting." They are just considering a 3 period model and saying that anything other than exponential is inconsistent. The qualitative form of hyperbolic discounting---of falling rapidly at first, and then slowly---empirically matches human psychology, but I don't think people care very much about precisely what inconsistent preferences humans express.

On a personal level, my intuition is not to discount at all, i.e. my happiness in 50 years is worth exactly the same as my happiness in the present.

Do you think you actually behave that way on a system one level?

Why car safety is not advertise as its main quality?

I think there's a major selection effect when safety comes into play; that is, there is a sizable fraction of drivers who do prioritize safety, they buy the cars that are reputed to be safest, and then those cars appear even safer in the statistics. (For example, there are some engineering differences about the Subaru compared to other cars, but the differences between Subaru drivers and the drivers of other cars are probably larger.)

Because people believe that the driver's skill is significantly more important factor in determining safety. I don't know if this belief is correct but it sounds plausible. Do insurance companies offer different prices for owners of different cars?

I think part of the promise of a BMW is that it's a safe car. However rightly or wrongly 5-star safety ratings is the common measurement of safety and not fatal accidents per mile.

Lots of sleep science out this week, but this one purports that you need 6-8 hours sleep to flush the beta-amyloids out of the brain

It's worth mentioning that this doesn't mean that flushing out beta-amygloids is the only thing that sleep does. I think various processes happen during sleep.

You need at least 10 karma points to vote (you currently have 2 points, according to your profile). Once you have 10 points you should be able to see the voting buttons. Incidentally, after a troll downvoted me from 12 to 4, I lost the ability to vote, and now I can no longer see the buttons.

Depends on what you mean by infinite precisely. Consider for example that the in some sense finite (0-1) interval can be transformed into the interval (0-inf) via e.g x -> 1/(1-x)-1. Or whether the infinite in some sense size of the universe can be described by some finite process (like here writing a finite representation 'inf' for something infinite..

is it theoretically possible to transform it into something finite?

Sure. Choose a finite volume and forget everything else. If this example doesn't suit you, then I suggest there are other requirements you want such a transformation to conform.

"Infinite" is only well-defined as the precise limit of a finite process. When you say "infinite" in absolute, it's a vague notion that is very hard to manipulate without making mistakes. One of my university-level maths teacher kept saying that speaking of "infinite" without having precise limit of something finite is equivalent to dividing by zero.

Robin Hanson's "The Age of Em" is a book about this sort of thing.

Well, there already exists a version of this -- a few orders of magnitude slower -- where some groups of people decide to reproduce faster than other groups.

In real life the limiting factor is often that human children require resources, so too much reproduction may actually harm them by not leaving enough resources per child, so they are later unable to compete with those who received more resources. Another limiting factor is war, often over the resources. And yet another approach is to just let it happen and hope the problem will somehow solve itself, which actually sometimes happens (for example as groups of people get richer, they start valuing comfortable life more, which gets in the way of maximizing the number of their children). Also, sometimes the group actually wins, and then in the future its various subgroups have to compete against each other.

Also, there is the fact of human sexual reproduction, which means that the winning group does not have to exterminate the losing groups; it can also assimilate them. Here is probably the greatest difference compared with the Em scenario, which is like a return to asexual reproduction.