Open thread, September 22-28, 2014

Most people do not consume enough potassium.

I find this claim a bit weird considering that only a very small minority of my patients (geriatric, often poor nutrition) are hypokalemic while not receiving any supplements.

Who's RDA is that and how was it determined? How strong is the evidence for it?

There is a serious inconsistency in the literature on potassium. The original RDA was set to be the average consumption about 30 years ago. But people trying to reach it today find it very difficult. This might be because diets have changed, but is probably because people reassessed how much potassium food contains and failed to update numbers like the RDA that are based on the erroneous measurement.

Most people consume too much sodium

average intake in the US: 3.4g/day optimal intake for health according to the Cochrane review on sodium consumption: 3g/day

not excessively bad. Negative health effects start cropping up above the 4g and below the 2g range.

Anecdotally, some people seem a lot more able to taste the difference than others. So-called "lite salt" (50/50 sodium chloride and potassium chloride) tastes almost identical to commodity table salt to me, although it doesn't have the complexity of unrefined sea salt; but that isn't true for everyone.

An option for those who don't want to replace table salt in their diets might be to supplement with potassium chloride in pill form. Capsules and capsule fillers are fairly cheap on Amazon. Oddly, this doesn't seem well covered by the existing supplement market; potassium supplements do exist but the doses they provide are ridiculously small (single-digit percentages of FDA allowances, if you're lucky).

they taste pretty different.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18710605 seems to be published article in support of your claim. It's from a Chinese source so results can be interpreted with a grain of salt ;)

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/22/4/464.abstract is a Western source that also comes to the conlusion that potassium salt is good. Both sources recommend substitution with a miss of both salts. Given that nutrition is always about being in balance the idea of mixing seems good. That especially true as from what I can see potassium consumptions leads to increased sodium secretion so if you supplement potassium you might need more sodium than the average person.

However some people with renal failure to get problems through increased potassium consumption http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1124926/. Potassium also does seem to interfere with some blood pressure medications so someone who's on medication for high blood pressure shouldn't do this without speaking with his doctor.

I'm not 100% sure but I remember faintly that someone on LW got into problems by taking potassium as a nootropic.

I almost ordered the potassium salt (kalium chloride) from amazon.com but then I discovered Raab LowNat on the local Amazon (DE) which I think provides a better balance of potassium and sodium salt and other sea mineral salts too.

Everything in balance.

I think it's related to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_problem Once you can categorize a theory into a certain reference class you use your priors for that reference class rather than for similarly improbably problems of a more generic nature

First of all, in the absence of any real evidence, conspiracy theories and religion can mostly be rejected simply on the basis of priors. However, as a general rule, many people believing something, especially if it's a vast majority, is decent evidence for a claim, and so the fact that many people believe something should cause you to update your subjective probability upward, to some extent.

The important point here is that the strength of that evidence has a very significant dependence on how people attained those beliefs. If you were to find that those beliefs were attained via some generally reliable method, e.g. scientific experimentation and dissemination via broad scientific consensus, this would cause you to further update your subjective probability upward, because it would be a strong sign that their beliefs correlate with reality.

On the other hand, if you were to find that their beliefs were obtained by, for example, using a ouija board, you would update your subjective probability back down because the evidential value of the other person's beliefs would fall to pretty much zero.

Basically, finding out the process by which people obtained their beliefs partly or wholly screens off the evidential weight of the fact that they have those beliefs.

In a Bayesian framework, you are simply assigning a higher prior probability to x believes that A because of cognitive bias B than x believes that A because A is true and through causal mechanism C, is determining x's belief in A, or some similar set of hypothesis. As long as these priors approximately reflect base rates (in addition to object level arguments you have examined for yourself), it seems like a decent way to go about things to me.

People are more likely to believe true things, so someone believing something is evidence that it's true. If you find out that they're especially likely to believe this even if it's not true, but not proportionately more likely to believe it if it is, then the fact that they believe it is not as strong evidence. Thus, if it's a given that they believe it, finding out that they'd believe it either way is evidence against it.

People tend not to believe things because they're true, but for some other reason.

Pr(People Believe | True) < Pr(People Believe | Some other explanation)? I would hazard to guess that the number of untrue things people have believed all throughout human history overshadows the number of things they (we) have believed that were actually true.

It's a bit of an ad hominem, but logical fallacies can be viewed as weak Bayesian evidence.

If you reject theories based on humans believing in them you can't believe in any theories.

I don't think it's spamming. Promotion of life extension research and knowledge exchange is in all our interest. Utilitarian analysis suggests that you post is a net win.

However if you do the work to organise a conference telling people to request information via email is no good medium. Get a proper website to promote your event.

Cult like adherence to the words of a relatively uneducated man, frequent babbling in pseudo-scientific nonsensical terms. 'reinventing the wheel' and trying to claim their knowledge is completely unique and undiscovered (despite the complete opposite). A seeming opposition to mainstream science, and belief in an incredibly dangerous practice (cryonics) that they believe will lead them to a perfect afterlife (replace heaven with singularity and god with AI), and a leader that makes money from sitting around all day taking donations from his 'followers'.

Oh and both Hubbard and Yudkowsky post long rambling author tracts that pretend to be a story....

Sounds like dual-coding hypothesis. TL;DR: more imaginable things are easier to remember because you're working two distinct memory subsystems (verbal, visual).

As far as I understand the world championships in mnemonics all get won via memory places that use spatial memory. At my present project of making phonemes learnable I specifically show the charts of phonemes along with my minimal pairs to give the user an orientation.

Venn diagrams are a nifty tool for giving knowledge a structure. I use them in Anki to distinguish essential, semiessential and nonessential amino acids. I however haven't yet programmed automatic Venn diagram creation.

The supermemo principles by Wozniak suggest against learning multiple similar items at the same time. If you have a deck about British monarch there nothing wrong with spreading it out at 1 card per day.

As far as automatic remembering of detail about people goes, it often works via narratives. Narratives are difficult to display via Anki.

I personally had a heard times following along the who's who of Game of Thrones on the other hand someone on LW has used the example of remembering facts about Game of Throne as a way to illustrate how easy it is to remember facts about certain subjects. .

I've posted this before, but I think it's relevant here:

See: How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think [pdf]

An excerpt from the introduction (tldr: beware of eating yourself):

This book is about how to make a complete map of everything you think for as long as you like.

Whether that's good or not, I don't know- keeping a map of all your thoughts has a freezing effect on the mind. It takes a lot of (albeit pleasurable) work, but produces nothing but sight.

If you do the things described in this book, you will be immobilized for the duration of your commitment.The immobilization will come on gradually, but steadily. In the end, you will be incapable of going somewhere without your cache of notes, and will always want a pen and paper w/ you. When you do not have pen and paper, you will rely on complex memory pegging devices, described in "The Memory Book". You will never be without record, and you will always record.

You may also articulate. Your thoughts will be clearer to you than they have ever been before. You will see things you have never seen before. When someone shows you one corner, you'll have the other 3 in mind. This is both good and bad. It means you will have the right information at the right time in the right place. It also means you may have trouble shutting up. Your mileage may vary.

I've previously observed that it's easier to process and retain facts about places if you know where those places are on a map. Knowing the map gives you an intuitive schema to hang the information on.

Weirdly enough, since that comment a month ago, I've been sucked into learning about the fission of Yugoslavia, after years of knowing only the barest outlines of it — and I have noticed that knowing facts about the geography has helped me remember facts about the conflicts. I think it goes both ways, as well; knowledge of events helps cement knowledge of geography.

I'm considering making an anki deck of people. Historical scientists, mathematicians and philosophers,

Potentially useful.

As a kinetic learner I'm all about activities and doing things. I think reading over one card a day every day and reading over multiple ones would really help me learn something like that. There is also something to be said for life-long education including workshops, master classes, and such. That is much easier to do online now than ever before.

If you like visuals, Crash Course has an entertaining and informative Biology playlist which includes a subset on human biology. I would imagine any undergrad (or possibly even high school) introductory text would also revise major organ systems to the level you describe.

Do you have any specific purpose or goal in mind?

Gray's anatomy.

If you want to learn how the organ systems work, that's physiology. I liked Boron in med school, if you want a basic understanding just read the subtitles and figures.

The basic stuff doesn't change drastically with time, and you can get older versions of the books cheaply.

Not exactly an overview but apparently good for learning location and name: Speed Anatomy App https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.speedAnatomy.speedAnatomyLite&hl=en

DK Publishing has lots of books on this subject, all with the classic DK gorgeous visuals. They're geared to a public (not student / academic) audience, which may or may not be what you're looking for. The one I have is The Human Body Book. It also has sections on pathologies for each part of the body.

You should send a message to Viliam Bur.

I'm amused that your comment is sitting at -1; seems like someone made an awkward move. Reverting to zero under policy of not punishing these requests, though. :P

I both disagree and agree with your high-school self.

Learning to recognize common failure modes, and developing a common language for talking about them with each other, is a relatively cost-effective way to improve the average validity of my arguments, in much the same way that reducing infant mortality is a relatively cost-effective way to increase average lifespan.

It doesn't do anything to improve the validity of my most valid arguments, though. Depending on how reliably I reach that maximum and how high that maximum is, that might be OK. Or it might not, and an entirely different approach (like teaching what valid arguments are) might work better.

And the relationship between learning-to-X and teaching-X-in-high-school is of course a whole different problem.

All of that said, I'm curious: how would you go about teaching what a valid argument is, to a degree that "don't trust anything else" is actually good advice to follow?

On the other hand, some fallacies recur much, much more often.

Ad hominem and appeal to authority are de facto THE way humans argue with each other, with strawmanning as a very strong third. So at least learning how to spot and correct those can alone improve someone rationality.

There are though much funnier ways to learn about fallacies, Biased Pandemic being one of my favourite.

Is it worthwhile to teach about "Logical Fallacies?"

It's worth learning about logical fallacies and internalizing them. It might not be worthwhile to teach people about them in school because people often don't remember & internalize what they're taught there.

My reasoning was that there were many more ways to give arguments incorrectly than to give arguments correctly, and that we should instead be teaching people what valid arguments are, and not to trust anything else.

While it's important to be able to recognize & build a valid argument, it's still been useful for me to use knowledge of fallacies to set mental triggers which activate when I mentally reach for a fallacy. Instead of unreflectively using an appeal to authority (for example) as a cognitive short-cut without checking whether it actually works, the not-quite-conscious sensation of making the appeal gets flagged for conscious attention, and I realize, "Oh! I'm making an appeal to authority. Does that appeal actually have much evidential weight?"

Edit: this isn't directly responsive to you, but I can also imagine LWers who've moved on to noticing newer fallacies finding it harder to understand why it's worth studying more well-known & canonical fallacies, even if the latter are as important.

There are "valley of bad rationality" effects here. Most so-called fallacies are in fact valuable heuristics. For instance, appeal to authority and slippery slope are both generally correct.

Knowing about fallacies creates in people the illusion that they can tell good arguments from bad. It lets them refute, in a superficially intelligent way, whatever position they don't want to believe.

Though I do think it's worth learning them anyway, for some people, at least so you know what people mean when they say "ad hominem".

I don't think that there evidence that it's very useful. Knowing the label "appeal to authority" doesn't tell you anything about when you want to believe in an authority when when you don't.

The whole idea of teaching logical fallacies without providing the student any evidence that it's useful to teach logical fallacies also very ironic. In the real world scholarship is important for understanding a topic on a higher level.

Any professional educators able to comment on this?

I had the opposite experience, I never learnt about logical fallacies in school and was shocked it was never taught when I found the formal definitions later in life.

It used to be at blog.muflax.com, but he appears to have taken it down. It wasn't on the Internet Archive last time I checked.

Gwern still links to some of muflax's writings, using his own backups. Googling something like "site:gwern.net muflax" turns up some results (though not many).

I'm not aware of any complete compilations of his fiction in one place; that said, you can presumably find most of it by going through the "fiction" tag on SSC, the fiction section of his website and the fiction tag on his old LiveJournal.

this is slow but simple, while this requires a login

Google only gives two:

https://www.axelarnbak.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Liebert-2010-Collingridge%E2%80%99s-dilemma-and-technoscience.pdf

http://www.philosophie.tu-darmstadt.de/media/institut_fuer_philosophie/diesunddas/nordmann/forensics.pdf

No time to explain, but logged in to list

Distress
Axiomatic (story collection)
Luminous (story collection)
Permutation City
Quarantine
Diaspora
Zendegi
Teranesia
Orthogonal trilogy
Schild's Ladder
Incandescence

I haven't read many. I fully recommend Diaspora and Luminous (short story collection), I was less sold on Permutation City.

This should be fun!

Distress - it's like the kitchen sink of hard/near-future SF

Quarantine - very enjoyable, but a bit simple-minded

Incandescence - seems like a return to early Egan's minimalism

Permutation City - cool, but rather off for me

Schild's Ladder - doesn't feel innovative, the ending has the same vibe as that of Permutation

Zendegi - was expecting more LW mockery after the discussions, unfortunately it was very limited

Diaspora - although brilliant in some respects, very confusingly written

Teranesia - just boring, I understand why it's not so known

Haven't read yet An Unusual Angle; the Orthogonal trilogy I'll read when I get it whole.

Haven't read them all. Of the ones I've read:

Axiomatic (best, collection of short stories)

Permutation City

Distress (contains 'sufficiently advanced' biotechnology that amazingly did not piss me off)

Diaspora

<Edge of what I'd wholeheartedly recommend>

Schild's Ladder

Incandescence

Quarantine (I found it nearly unreadable)

I suspect he's one of those authors that everyone agrees one of his books is great but nobody can agree on which one...

EDIT: I find myself seriously considering the possibility that Diaspora is in the future of Permutation City...

Diaspora
Distress
Quarantine

I haven't read the short story collections close enough together to rank them, but I'd generally recommend them

Permutation City
Zendegi
Schild's Ladder
Teranesia

Didn't finish (more physics than I could appreciate)

The Clockwork Rocket
Incandescence

If you liked Diaspora, you'll like Schild's Ladder. Zendegi is more psychological and a different kind of fiction, thus not much of my favourite.

Incandescence and Orthogonal should be grouped together; not bad, but different, and IMHO Orthogonal suffers from being a trilogy. They are also much more maths-heavy.

Biological immortality is cancer-cure-complete. And cancer is very tough, it's a breakdown of multicellularity coordination. Conspiracy theory bug in brain seeing agency everywhere is much more likely.

Why do plants not get cancer btw?

He's joking. Look at his previous post on longevity.

This might take a lot of work. If so, don’t count on seeing effective immortality any time soon, because society doesn't put much effort into it. In part, this is because the powers that be don’t know understand the points I just made. Sometimes I wonder what they do understand.

Cochrane's model of the "powers that be" seems to be that they are kind of dumb.

He is joking or crazy, right?

Dunno, but he's not very consistent in whatever it is. He says at the end of that paragraph:

[Faking your death and returning] wouldn’t mean losing power – real power is already invisible.

If the real powers that be are invisible, i.e. so powerful you'll never hear of them, they don't need to pretend to die.

Presumably, the visible powers that be that he begins by talking about are taking their orders from the invisible PTB, who discovered the secret of immortality in their own secret laboratories. But this is Weekly World News territory.

Yes, time to clean up your RSS feed ;)

Remindes me of Lazarus Long resp. the Howard Families.

See, if people trying to bring in a new age where people can be brought in line to the legitimate views can just stop posting nonsense like this maybe we can get somewhere. Great, now one of the few legitimate blogs we had now look crazy and we would be delegitimized if we link to it.

This could explain the recent popularity of the vampire romance novels, and the new model of the vampires.

In the past, the most reliable way to longevity was calorie restriction, mostly practiced by hermits. This was the old model of the vampire: an old person, fragile to weather changes (holy water, even daylight), wise and evil, but nonetheless easily defeated by a determined human attack.

These days, I am not sure what exactly the longevity treatment is, but it seems to allow the person to remain young and attractive and strong and quick etc. Maybe not exactly as attractive and as strong as the Twilight novels describe, though; part of that impression is probably just a halo effect around a very-high-status person. Thus, the new kind of vampires. Ones who are obviously superior to average humans, and the only danger for them is their vampire competitors. Unless that is also a metaphor for the world oligarchy.

The average person should get a blood panel if they want to know what's going on with their body, and that goes double for a person with a chronic illness. With a bit of effort you can probably figure out a combination of cheap foods and supplementation that you feel good about.

WRT multivitamins specifically, the effect on your stress level dominates the negative impact on your health in all likelihood.

A basic blood panel is unlikely to tell you much about your micronutritional status if your diet is even remotely normal and you don't have problems with absorption i.e. gastrointestinal disease. The only vitamins they might sample would be vitamins D, B5 and perhaps B12 and folate. I don't think these are even part of any basic health check at least for younger people.

However if there are gross deviations in a basic blood panel then nutrition is probably the least of your problems.

Just thoughts of an MD from Finland, I'm not much of an expert on nutrition. I don't eat extremely healthily myself and based on this literature review I don't bother supplementing anything else than vitamin D, which I consume 50 ug a day. I wouldn't be scared of multivitamins either, while relative risks might look scary, the absolute risks involved are miniscule.

As far as understand the situation is as follows:

If you are a vegetarian, then you have to supplement B12.

There inconclusive evidence on whether supplementing Vitamin D3 is helpful. Human's don't have Vitamin D2 naturally, so taking it instead of D3 is a bad idea. I personally think that supplementing it helps for people who are mostly indoors and don't get their needs meet by synthesizing it while being outdoors. At the moment there a randomized control trial underway that will gives us more information in a few years.

There no evidence that the average person benefits on an average day from taking multivitamins. Any decision to take them should be made on an individual basis. If you don't have a well trained sense of listening to your body that means going to the doctor and getting blood test.

If you do have a chronic illness you should discuss questions like this with the doctor responsible for treating you for that chronic illness. He might know specific things that apply to you based on your illness.

What you can do for your health is getting 3 times per week 30 minutes of exercise that get's your pulse up.

There are also various things with can be experimented with to see whether they reduce the symptoms of your chronic illness.

LW regular James Miller has written a book on Game Theory: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0071400206?sa-no-redirect=1&pldnSite=1

What is your programming background?

Unless you have a specific reason that you want to use Facebook, I would recommend not using Facebook to build your app. If you use Facebook, you will be locked in to their platform, subject to their whims, and part of a system that does not respect the privacy of the users, or respect users in general.

Contributing to an open source project, or building your own open source application, would be a better way to improve and showcase your skills, in my opinion. It would also have a more positive impact on the world.

That said, Facebook's Developer page's Quickstart Guide says that Facebook's Graph API is based on HTTP. So, I would recommend learning about how HTTP works, getting a better understanding of it, then downloading Facebook's Graph API Explorer tool, and fooling around with that, as a place to begin.

There are probably many ways to learn about HTTP, but one way you might consider is the O'Reilly book on the subject: HTTP: The Definitive Guide by David Gourley and Brian Totty. I haven't read it, but I have found other O'Reilly books to be helpful with more clarity in the writing than in many other technical books.

The facebook API is probably the friendliest and best-documented "web API" out there (which is not to say it's good, and they're terrible about changing it all the time - but compared to their competitors...). Their docs have examples, and also the interactive "graph explorer" is a very good place to play around to start with. You edit code the way you normally do, and your code makes web requests to their APIs. If you're not comfortable with that, maybe some tutorials on e.g. web scraping (that's a popular thing to do in Python) would help you get more comfortable with doing HTTP in Python? Or from the other edge, try making the necessary HTTP ("REST") requests to facebook "by hand" using something like Postman, and then writing code to do that.

As others have said, start with a "hello world" and then add features to it.

I think the easiest way to implement this is to replace Open Thread with a third subreddit.

Is there any way to promote open thread comments and the comments in answer to them to Discussion? If there isn't any way, should there be?

modelling subjective value judgements as a function.

Like a utility function?

Wouldn't this be more or less the same thing as decision theory, just applied to one particular sort of set of preferences?

Darcey Riley (lucidian) has written the introductory post to a planned series of "what is postrationality?" posts.

Edit (2017-01-22): Metarationality Repository

Something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercer_Quality_of_Living_Survey ? (though if you're like me then filtered by local language). Of course that assumes you want to live in a city.

What are your criteria? And what places meet them so far?

I also have an objective. My objective is this: At least somewhere on the internet, there should exist a community where people can have real discussion, ie, a dispassionate exchange of priors, likelihood ratios and arguments. It will not be possible for me to achieve my objective if participants turn discussions into wars. It will also not work if people with certain views feel unwelcome, or scared to vocalize their views.

Yes, he may have been acting rationally, in the same way that somebody who defects in Prisoner's Dilemma acts rationally. In fact, it would be rational for anyone to use unacceptable tactics in order for their side to "win" the discussion. However, the continued existence of Less Wrong as a rationalist community depends on people cooperating in this game. Moloch will certainly kill the rationalist spirit if we don't punish defectors.

Sometimes it is rational to punish defectors even if the defectors themselves are acting rationally. I do however understand that this is a difficult trade-off, as we have seen strong evidence that there are people who are willing to participate and have high-quality insights that are not easily obtained elsewhere, but who refuse to play by the rules.

It is not at all clear that Eugine achieved his objective. One thing he certainly achieved was to get kicked ignominiously out of the Less Wrong community, which I'm guessing wasn't an objective. (though I have seen speculation that he has returned under a different name).

Rationality is about going down winning road and accurately predicting the consequences of your actions. Punishment creates deterrence for rational actors.

Eugine very likely made wrong predictions over the results of his actions.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/

Well no, because I doubt he'd share the downvoter's objective. (I assume. I wasn't following the kerfuffle.) To conclude that he would, you have to transplant his methods onto a forum setting but not his goals. Which is a weird level to model at.

orthogonality?

If HPJEV were a forum-dweller instead of a wizard, he would do the very same.

Given the strong ethical view that HPJEV takes of lying, that would be grossly against his character. He might also say, as would I, that it's a short step from mass downvoting to what Yvain reports here.

Like an amoral capitalist, he revealed flaws in our moderation system that really ought to be addressed in a less ad-hoc way.