Open Thread, November 8 - 14, 2013

How can we spread rationality and good decision making to people who aren't inclined to it?

I recently chatted up a friendly doorman who I normally exchange brief pleasantries with. He told me that he was from a particularly rough part of town and that he works three jobs to support his family. He also told me not to worry because he has a new business that makes a lot of money, although had to borrow gas money to get to work that day. He said that he was part of a "travel club". I immediately felt bad because I had a gut feeling he was talking about some multi-level marketing scheme. I asked him if it was and he confirmed it was, but disagreed that it was a "scheme". He told me that he is trying to recruit his family, and that the business model encourages recruiting among family and friends. Skip 45 minutes of him selling it to me, I left him with a warning to be cautious because these things can be fly by night operations and that most people need to lose for a very few to win, and that he can win only if he is part of the very best promoters/sellers. I said that on purpose to gauge whether he is a true believer or a wolf in sheep's clothing but his response was a sort of genuine disbelief that his business was zero sum.

I walked away feeling sad. This guy is really trying to better his life for him and his family and what does life give him? A shitty MLM scheme that will likely harm him and he doesn't know any better. I have this special hatred for MLM schemes, right up there with religion. The deviousness lies in the difficulty to see MLM schemes for what they are prima facie when it is obfuscated with legitimate business practices, as is what most of these companies do.

I should talk to him again and maybe get him to change his mind. Back to my original question; the people who I want to help can not afford or want to attend things like a CFAR work shop, how do you help these people? And introducing people to LW is tricky. LW isn't really accessible, it doesn't find you, you find it.

Would there be interest in me writing a post, or a series of posts, summarizing Richard Feldman's Epistemology textbook? Feldman's textbook is widely used in philosophy classes, and contains some surprisingly reasonable views (given what you may have heard about mainstream philosophy).

I'm partly considering it because it might be a useful way to counteract some common myths about what all philosophers supposedly know about evidence, the problem of induction, and so on. But I seem to have given away my copy, and a replacement would be $40 for a volume that's under 200 pages. So I want to gauge interest first.

Question about EA and CFAR. I think I've heard some people express sentiments that CFAR might be a good place for EAs to donate, due to the whole "raising the sanity waterline" thing.

On its face, this seems silly to me. From the outside view, CFAR just looks like a small self-help organization, though probably better than most such organizations, and it seems unlikely that it'll affect any significant portion of the population.

I think CFAR is great; I went to minicamp, and I think it probably improved my life, although I suspect I'm not as enthusiastic about it as most people who went. But if I were to give CFAR any money, it would be because it helps me and people I know, not because I think it's actually likely to have a large impact on the world.

Are there people around here who believe CFAR is actually likely to have a large impact on the world? Could you explain your reasoning why?

Longitudinal study of men and happiness

“At a time when many people around the world are living into their tenth decade, the longest longitudinal study of human development ever undertaken offers some welcome news for the new old age: our lives continue to evolve in our later years, and often become more fulfilling than before. Begun in 1938, the Grant Study of Adult Development charted the physical and emotional health of over 200 men, starting with their undergraduate days. The now-classic ‘Adaptation to Life’ reported on the men’s lives up to age 55 and helped us understand adult maturation. Now George Vaillant follows the men into their nineties, documenting for the first time what it is like to flourish far beyond conventional retirement. Reporting on all aspects of male life, including relationships, politics and religion, coping strategies, and alcohol use (its abuse being by far the greatest disruptor of health and happiness for the study’s subjects), ‘Triumphs of Experience’ shares a number of surprising findings. For example, the people who do well in old age did not necessarily do so well in midlife, and vice versa. While the study confirms that recovery from a lousy childhood is possible, memories of a happy childhood are a lifelong source of strength. Marriages bring much more contentment after age 70, and physical aging after 80 is determined less by heredity than by habits formed prior to age 50. The credit for growing old with grace and vitality, it seems, goes more to ourselves than to our stellar genetic makeup.”

Last night I found myself thinking, "Well, suppose there's no Singularity coming any time soon. The FAI project will still have gotten a bunch of nerds working together on a project aimed at the benefit of all humanity — including formalizing a lot of ethics — who might otherwise have been working on weapons, wireheading, or something else awful. That's gotta be a good thing, right?"

Then I realized this sounds like rationalization.

Which got me to thinking about what my concerns are about this stuff.

My biggest AI risk worries right now are more immediate than paperclip optimizers. They're wealth optimizers, profit optimizers; probably extrapolations of current HFT systems. The goal of such a system isn't even to make its owners happy — just to make them rich — and it certainly doesn't care about anyone else. It may not even have beliefs about humans, just about flows of capital and information.

Even assuming that such systems believe that crashing the economy would be bad for their owners, I expect that for the vast majority of living and potential humans, world dominance by such systems would constitute a Bad Ending.

It does not seem to me that it would require self-modifying emergent AI to bring about such a Bad Ending; and no exotic technologies such as computronium — just the continuation of current trends.

Some physicists have managed to put an 810-atom molecule, weighing over 10,000 amu, in superposition. Was linked there from this blog post, which gives a good summary.

An interesting paper: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/papers/wp01-12.pdf

tl;dr -- Abstract (emphasis mine)

"We document a lower bound for the control premium: agents’ willingness to pay to control their own payoff. Participants choose between an asset that will pay only if they later answer a particular quiz question correctly and one that pays only if their partner answers a different question correctly. However, they first estimate the likelihood that each asset will pay off. Participants are 20% more likely to choose to control their payoff than a group of payoff-maximizers with accurate beliefs. While some of this deviation is explained by overconfidence, 34% of it can only be explained by the control premium. The average participant expresses a control premium equivalent to 8% to 15% of the expected asset-earnings. Our resu lts show that even agents with accurate beliefs may incur costs to avoid delegating and suggest that to correctly infer beliefs from choices, one should account for the control premium."

How to make it easier to receive constructive criticism?

Typically finding out about the flaws in something that we did feels bad because we realize that our work was worse than we thought, so receiving the criticism feels like ending up in a worse state than we were in before. One way to avoid this feeling would be to reflect on the fact that the work was already flawed before we found out about it, so the criticism was a net improvement, allowing us to fix the flaws and create a better work.

But thinking about this once we've already received the criticism rarely helps that much, at least in my experience. It's better be to consciously remind yourself that your work is always going to have room for improvement, and that it is certain to have plenty of flaws you're ignorant of, before receiving the criticism. That way, your starting mental state will be "damn, this has all of these flaws that I'm ignorant about", and ending up in the post-criticism state where some of the flaws have been pointed out, will feel like a net improvement.

Another approach would be to take the criticism as evidence of the fact that you're working in a field where success is actually worth being proud about. Consider: if anyone could produce a perfect work in your field, would it be noteworthy that you had achieved the same thing that anyone else could also achieve? Not really. And if you could easily produce a work that was perfect and had no particular flaws worth criticizing, that would also be evidence of your field not being particularly deep, and of your success not being very impressive. So if you get lots of constructive criticism, that's evidence that your field is at least somewhat deep, and that success in it is non-trivial. Which means that you should be happy, since you have plenty of room to grow and develop your talents - and you've just been given some of the tools you need in order to do so.

Some IRC discussion reminded me that LWers might enjoy a SF short story I wrote some time ago: "Men of Iron".

Orthodox statistics beware: Bayesian radicals spotted:

A group of international Bayesians was arrested today in the Rotterdam harbor. According to Dutch customs, they were attempting to smuggle over 1.5 million priors into the country, hidden between electronic equipment. The arrest represents the largest capture of priors in history.

“This is our biggest catch yet. Uniform priors, Gaussian priors, Dirichlet priors, even informative priors, it’s all here,” says customs officers Benjamin Roosken, responsible for the arrest. (…)

Sources suggest that the shipment of priors was going to be introduced into the Dutch scientific community by “white-washing” them. “They are getting very good at it. They found ghost-journals with fake articles, refer to the papers where the priors are allegedly based on empirical data, and before you know it, they’re out in the open. Of course, when you look up the reference, everything is long gone,” says Roosken.

This seems like a big deal:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/10/28/1313476110.full.pdf

Basically, dude illustrates equivalence between p-values and Bayes factors and concludes that 17-25% of studies with a p-value acceptance threshold of 0.05 will be wrong. This implies that the lack of reproducibility in science isn't necessarily due to egregious misconduct, etc., but rather insufficiently strict statistical standards.

So is this new/interesting, or do I just naively think so because it's not my field?

I'm planning to do a series of posts of myself systematically reading the Sequences and commenting on them. Anyone did this before?

Trying to find a link I saw about CFAR doing some publishing some preliminary research on rationality techniques, including a finding that a technique they expected to work didn't actually work. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? My Google fu is failing me, to the point that I'm wondering if I'm imagining it.

There is an atheist argument, "Religious people are only religious because they want to control other people or are controlled by them. Religion is a system of authoritarian control."

There is a religious argument, "Atheists are only atheists because they want to rebel against God. Atheism is an act of rebellion."

Are these extensionally equivalent?

Are there other common arguments from opposed viewpoints that pair up like this?

A scenario which occurred to me and I found strange at first glance: Consider a fair coin, and two people -- Alice who is 99.9% sure the coin is fair and who can update on evidence like a fine Bayesian, and Bob who says he's perfectly sure the coin is biased to show heads and does not update on the evidence at all.

Nonetheless the perfectly correct Alice (who effectively needs choose randomly and might as well always say 'heads') and the perfectly incorrect Bob (who always says 'heads' because he's always certain that'll be the correct answer) have the same chance (50%) to correctly predict the next coin's toss. Even when the experiment is repeated multiple times, its progress further confirming to Alice that she is right to believe the coin fair, Alice's predictive ability isn't improved over non-updating Bob's on a toss-by-toss basis.

I found that initially perplexing -- If we consider accuracy alone, Alice's more accurate beliefs can only be perceived if she's allowed to make predictions over large patterns (e.g. she'd expect a roughly equal number of heads to tails). If she's not given that ability, and if a third party is only told the number of times each of the participants were correct in their guesses, they couldn't tell who is who.

One more thing that distinguishes them: If Alice and Bob were allowed to bet on their guesses, Alice would accept only favorable odds, and Bob would soon go bankrupt...

Even less important than it was last week, but if anyone wants to come out and tell me why they went on a mass-downvoting spree on my comments again, please feel free to do so.

Not sure what to label or call this thinking error I had recently, but it seems as if it might come up more often, although I can not come up with another example for now.

I know someone who signed up for a marathon and I was to be part of the coordination of getting her to the official transportation area. After signing up online she was able to choose from a set of departure times for the bus take runners to the start line. Her wave is set to start at 10:15 a.m. She wanted to select the latest possible departure to avoid idle time standing around trying to keep warm and to her surprise the latest departure was 730 a.m. The ride to the start line is short so that would mean at least 2 hours of standing around in the cold. Why? It was rather annoying for both of us. It just seems terribly inefficient. Of course I am sure the organizers have their reasons. So I started to wonder about what those reasons might be. Take a minute to think up of some of your own.

I came up with some satisfactory reasons why 7:30 is the last bus out:

• Traffic logistic reasons – shutting down a major city is a big job, crowd control and tight timelines are good things.

• Later start – Daylight savings gave everyone an "extra" hour and this was already considered a late marathon anyway, 7:30 a.m. doesn't sound that bad.

• Security

For a few days I was happy with my reasoning but this problem, although trivial, nagged at me. On the morning of the marathon day something went wrong and the 7:30 a.m. departure had probably already left. I cursed the marathon, and we both wondered, yet again, why the hell was it so early to begin with? A two hour wait for her, would be an almost three hour wait for those in waves later than her's. This absolutely screws over the people in the last wave regardless if they caught the last bus. Why didn't they have a later option so that the poor person starting at 10:45 isn't a Popsicle before they start? That way, if she was late and there was still room she could catch a ride outside of her scheduled transportation and still make the race with plenty of time to spare. We were frustrated but what else could we do but to try anyway. There was probably a non advertised "real" last departure to catch all the people that missed the last departure, but even so, I just don't get it. The happy ending is that she was able to make her race. And I figured it all out once we got there why 7:30 a.m was the last departure.

7:30 isn't the last departure, it never was. The system that processed the runners knew their wave start times and gave them appropriate albeit early departure times. People in later waves received later choices. We both had assumed that just because we were offered 7:30 a.m. that had to mean that was the last time for everyone. It was not. And suddenly everything made sense. They wanted everyone wave to be at least 2 hours early, and restricted the the choices so that not everyone would cram into the last slot.

I was angry with myself for not catching something so simple. I was asking the wrong damn question. I made an assumption that had fundamentally set me on the wrong path since the beginning, and I was never going to solve it no matter how reasonable I was with my thinking because my original premise is false. It is especially infuriating that I had made a mental effort to think outside the box when thinking about this problem yet I missed this completely. Crap, it seems like I needed to think outside of outside of the box. What else have a missed? There are probably many times in life where I am trying to understand people's motives and completely failed. I guess we can file this under the "jumping to conclusions" thinking error?

I'm starting practice drills for stenographic typing. The software (Plover) and the theory/typing drills (I'm using http://qwertysteno.com/Home/) are available for free, and the hardware is cheap (and I already have it).

What I'm really curious about, though, is the value you can get out of roughly doubling my typing speed from 80 WPM to 160. There's the time saved, but that's offset by the time spent learning steno. Really the big benefit is time-shifting the work of typing out English words, from "in the middle of having a thought" to the stenotyping drills.

And I have no goddamn idea how to estimate the value of that, since I've only ever been able to get my thoughts down at roughly 80 WPM. I'm hoping that it'll make lower-value composition worth doing. An alternative valuation is comparing salaries of professional stenographers versus administrative assistants.

I think speed-reading practice can be subjected to a similar analysis - it moves work from time-critical contexts to non-critical ones, at the expense of the next best thing you could be doing instead (obvious candidate: reading for fun).

While having heard of AutoHotkey a long time ago I just started using it and it's extremly useful.

One example would be opening wikipedia with the clipboard content as search string. It just takes 3 lines to assign that task to 'Windows Key + W'. I can't grasp why they didn't recommend us student at computer science to get proficient with it. It"s useful for automating common tasks.

It"s much easier to get results for learning programming through automating task with autohotkey than it's through learning it with simple python programs that serve no use and are just for pratice.

 #w::
        Run, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%clipboard%
        return

I wish someone would have told me to get proficient in it years ago.

I have a constant feeling that I had a great idea or an important thought just now or just a few minutes ago. I know I have recurring thoughts - not of the bad kind, mind you - that I deem quite useful but I am never sure that this feeling of forgetting is with respect to those recurring ideas or something new. Does this kind of thing ring a bell?

So the latest patches from Microsoft on Tuesday crashes my internet browsers. I'm sure something happens to someone every time, this is a reminder to make sure you have adequate space for system restore points. I didn't for some reason.

I've announced a meetup but got the day and year wrong (it should be December 14, 2013). Can someone tell me how to fix it, please? I can't figure it out.

[insert obvious joke about meetup topic]

PSA: Sign up for Medfusion (or your region's equivalent) if your doctor offers it.

Yesterday I asked my doctor's nurse a question electronically. I had a symptom and I was unsure if it required a visit to the practice. The nurse responded the next day saying the symptom was benign and would go away. This saved me a copayment and a trip outside.

Is there a LW consensus on the merits of Bitcoin? Namely, is it the optimal place to invest money, especially in regards to mining equipment?

I think the value is liable to increase fairly dramatically over time, and that buying/mining Bitcoins will prove incredibly profitable, but I'd like the input of this community before I decide whether or not to put money forth for this venture.

Hello. I've made a model for the ultimate program, i.e. "operating system, programming language, programs, applications; and artificial intelligence.". The project is open-source. I looked especially for logical people, because there should be a better chance for understanding the model and it's importance; which would likely be very low with normal people. It's written in regular language, and anyone can read it. It also contains the two principles I found, by which anything can be made in the optimal way. Anyone who want's to read it and maybe give an opinion or help, can ask in the mail markshif at Gmail.