Open Thread, May 18 - May 24, 2015

Please post here if you learn a good answer elsewhere.

With your background in web development have you read things like Krug's Don't Make Me Think and William's The Non-Designer's Design Book? These are focused more on the design aspect of web however they contain some good underlying principles for data visualization as well.

Tufte's book are all great for underlying principles even though, as you noted, they aren't focused on modern technologies. Beautiful Evidence from 2006 has some updated thoughts but he still borrows heavily from his earlier books.

For general multimedia concepts, Mayer's Multimedia Learning is good from a human learning perspective (my background).

I found Data Points: Visualization That Means Something to be a good modern guide.

From my perspective, I am glad you are looking down the road and recognizing that after the data are analyzed the analysis must be communicated.

My job (not at the WSJ!) gave me The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics: The Dos and Don'ts of Presenting Data, Facts, and Figures in my new hire bundle, and I love it!

Learn the library ggplot2. It is worth learning the language R just to use this library (though there is a port in progress for python/pandas). Even if you cannot incorporate the library into your workflow, its very good defaults show you what you should be doing with more work in other libraries.

It is named after a book, the Grammar of Graphics, that I have not read.

You may be interested in some of Bret Victor's stuff.

I too am a web developer looking to learn more about design. And I too have read Butterick's Practical Typography, Don't Make Me Think, Visual Display of Quantitative Information as well as a few other classics. But I don't think it's made me much better at design. I sense that there are a few "roadblocks". Ie. things I don't know that are preventing me from actually applying the things I learned in reading those books. Any thoughts on this?

On the topic of popularization, I think the ratio of idealistic people interested in alleviating global poverty to people who are aware of the concept of meta-charities that determine the optimal way to do so is shockingly low.

That seems like one of those "low hanging fruits" - dropping it into casual conversations, mentioning it in high visibility comment threads, and on. There's really no excuse for Kony to be more well known than Givewell.

I agree that adding content to Wikipedia is worthwhile.

In addition to Wikipedia I think that StackExchange pages can often be very worthwhile.

Often when I come across an interesting claim on the internet where I don't know whether it's true, I post it on Skeptics.StackExchange or a subject specific site in the StackExchange network.

As I often say, I haven't been here long, but I notice a sort of political-esque conflict between empirical clusters of people that I privately refer to as the Nice People and the Forthright People. The Nice People think that being nice is pragmatic. The Forthright People think that too much niceness decreases the signal-to-noise ratio and also that there's a slippery slope towards vacuous niceness that no longer serves its former pragmatic functions. A lot of it has to do with personality. Not everyone fits neatly, and there are Moderate People, but many fit pretty well.

I also notice policy preferences among these groups. The Nice don't mind discussion of object-level things that people have been drawn towards as the result of purportedly rational thinking and deciding. The Forthright often prefer technical topics and more meta-level discussion of how to be rational, and many harken back to the Golden Age when LW was, as far as I can tell, basically a way to crowdsource hyperintelligent nerds (in the non-disparaging sense) to work past inadequate mainstream decision theories, and also to do cognitive-scientific philosophizing as opposed to the ceiling-gazing sort. The Nice think that new LW members should be welcomed with open arms and that this helps advance the Cause. The Forthright often profess that the Eternal September is long past and that new members that cannot tolerate their Forthrightness are only reducing the discussion quality further.

The current LW is a not-so-useful (certainly not useless, as far as I'm concerned) compromise between the two extremes. The Nice think that the Forthright are often rude and pedantic (often being from academia, as the Forthright are), and prefer not to post here. The Forthright think that the discussion quality has fallen too far, such that the content stream is too difficult to follow time-efficiently, and that to do so would have little value, and prefer not to post here.

I know that you specifically spoke out against subreddits, but I think subreddits would help. Last time I checked, the post was called Hold Off On Proposing Solutions, not Hold Off On Implementing Solutions Indefinitely. (Excuse my Forthrightness!) Tags are good for getting fed the right content, but subreddits encourage subcultures, and subcultures already exist on LW. If you posted in a more technical subreddit, you could expect more Forthright behavior, but also super-high discussion quality. Forthrightness really isn't so bad in a semi-academic context; it's the outside-LW norm. If you posted in a sub-reddit for object-level lifestyle stuff, or miscellaneous stuff, you could expect more Nice behavior; that's also the outside-LW norm. This might actually be a case of LW collectively overestimating how atypical it is, which is, so ironically, very typical.

In my view, you're asking the wrong question. The major contributors are doing great; they have attracted their own audiences. A better question might be: how can LW grow promising new posters in to future major contributors (who may later migrate off the platform)?

I had some ideas that don't require changing the LW source that I'll now create polls for:

Should Less Wrong encourage readers to write appreciative private messages for posts that they like?

[pollid:976]

Should we add something to the FAQ about how having people tear your ideas apart is normal and expected behavior and not necessarily a sign that you're doing anything wrong?

[pollid:977]

Should we add something to the FAQ encouraging people to use smiley faces when they write critical comments? (Smiley faces take up very little space, so don't affect the signal-to-noise-ratio much, and help reinforce the idea that criticism is normal and expected. The FAQ could explain this.)

[pollid:978]

We could start testing these ideas informally ASAP, make a FAQ change if polls are bullish on the ideas, and then announce them more broadly in a Discussion post if they seem to be working well. To keep track of how the ideas seem to be working out, people could post their experiences with them in this subthread.

I recently wrote this, which would probably have been of interest to LW. But when I considered submitting it, my brain objected that someone would make a comment like "you shouldn't have picked a name that already redirects to something else on wikipedia", and... I just didn't feel like bothering with that kind of trivia. (I know I'm allowed to ignore comments like that, but I still didn't feel like bothering.)

I don't know if that was fair or accurate of my brain, but Scott has also said that the comments on LW discourage him from posting, so it seems relevant to bring up.

The HN comments, and the comments on the post itself, weren't all interesting, but they weren't that particular kind of boring.

I doubt there's much to be done. I wouldn't be surprised if MIRI shut down LessWrong soon. It's something of a status drain because of the whole Roko thing and no one seems to use it anymore. Even the open threads seem to be losing steam.

We still get most of the former value from the SlateStarCodex, Gwern.net, and the tumblr scene. Even for rationality, I'm not sure LessWrong is needed now that we have CFAR.

Do you mean whether it should be posted to Discussion or Main?

You can post it to Discussion. It might get promoted to Main. I'm not sure who makes those decisions.

You can post it to Main, and take your chances on it being downvoted.

You can post a link to it, and see if you get advice on where you should post it.

Another data point: someone would downvote every comment I made up until April 1st. Not sure if I successfully signalled my 'rationality' or if I successfully signalled that I'm not going away.

Same here, in fact I've been keeping an eye on that account for a while, and noticed when you expressed your complaints about downvoting in a discussion with him recently. There's no apparent sign of the sheer downvote rampages of old so far, if we're right he's been a little more careful this time around about obvious giveaways (or maybe it's just the limited karma)... Alas, old habits die hard.

I'm not even sure anyone can do anything about it; LessWrong is among those communities that are vulnerable to such abuses. Without forum rules relating to member conduct, without a large number of active moderators, without a culture of holding new members under close scrutiny until they prove themselves to bring value to the forum, but with a built-in mechanism for anyone to disrupt the forum activity of anyone else...

I think Azarthoth is back too, and I think I know which account, but I don't get the impression that the mass upvote sockpuppets that were suspected to be helping his previous incarnations are active.

I think there should be simple ways to combat this sort of problem anyway, for a start people's accounts could list the percentage of upvotes you give in the same way it currently lists the percentage of upvotes you receive. Limits could be put on the amount of downvotes you can issue by saying that they cannot exceed your karma (or a multiple thereof).

This problem has been encountered before in places like reddit - how did they deal with it there?

I actually have a suspicion which account, too

Me too. Should you I PM you to tell which one?

If I remember correctly, NancyLebovitz is the forum moderator; she might have the means and willingness to look into this kind of thing, and take action if needed.

All things you could easily get without being rational, and that rationality doesn't seem too correlated with (there's probably even a weak-moderate negative correlation).

• I sense that a common rationalist perspective is to pay a lot more attention to the bad things, and not to be satisfied with the good. More generally, this seems to be the perspective of ambitious people.
• Rationalists don't seem to be able to derive as much joy from interaction with normal people, and thus probably struggle to find strong relationships.
• Normal people seem to derive a sense of fulfillment from things that they probably shouldn't. For example, my Uber driver was telling me how much fulfillment she gets from her job, and how she loves being able to help people get to where they're going. She didn't seem to be aware of how replaceable she is. She wasn't asking the question of "what would happen if I wasn't available as an Uber driver". Or "what if there was one less Uber drive available".

I should note that none of this is desirable, and that someone who's a perfect rationalist would probably do quite well in all of these areas. But I think that Reason as a memetic immune disorder applies here. It seems that the amount of rationality that is commonly attained often acts as an immune disorder in these situations.

This sorta seems like an obvious thing to say, but I get the sense that making it explicit is useful.

It might not be. Any further explanation is costly, and would be welcomed only if the subject is really interested in the topic. If not, you would come across as pedantic and boring.

The problem is that I feel pressure to be consistent with what I said, even though I know it's a simplification.

I think that you should learn to resist the pressure. It's very rare that someone will call you out for some inconsistency, even blatant. It's quite amazing, actually. In the rare cases where someone does call you out, you can just offer further explanation, if you care to.

At work:

Software development: text editors (or IDE) on one screen, terminal/command-prompt window(s) for building, running tests, etc., on another.

Exploratory work in MATLAB: editor(s) and MATLAB figure windows (plots, images, ...) on one screen, MATLAB command window on another.

I use virtual desktops as well as multiple monitors, so things like email and web browser are over in another universe and less distracting. (This does have the downside that when I'm, say, replying to something on Less Wrong, my work is over in another universe and less distracting.) So are other things (e.g., documents being written, to-do lists, etc.).

Of course things may get moved around; e.g., if I'm writing a document based on some technical exploration then I may want a word processor coexisting with MATLAB and a web browser.

At home: email on one monitor, web browser on another. (And all kinds of other things on other virtual desktops.)

I have 2 desks in my office, both with multiple screen layouts. Your question made me think about how I use them and it comes down to the task I am performing.

Like others, when I am programming I typically have an IDE where I am doing work on one and a reference open on another. When doing web development my third monitor usually has a browser where I can immediately refresh my work to see results, for other development it may be a virtual machine or remote desktop that I am logged into.

When I am doing academic work, I often have EndNote (reference manager) on one monitor, the document I am writing on another and the documents I am finding / reading on the third.

Since both my desks are next to each other, I often "borrow" a monitor from the other setup to keep communication windows open (Skype, Lync, Hangouts, #Slack etc.) This allows me to keep in touch with coworkers and colleagues without having to flip windows every time I get a message.

So I would say there are three purposes identified:

• Active Work
• Reference Material
• Communication

I put source code/IDE/logging output in one, and the program I'm running in the other, particularly when debugging a program; running in debug mode or watching logs is simpler.

I also put remote desktops in a separate screen, often copying the contents of configuration files over as text, as I don't generally get the ability to drag files directly into environments (people who prevent direct copying of files or dragging and dropping, your security is getting in the way without providing any security - Base64 encoding exists).

Otherwise I will have social applications open in one (e-mail application, chats with clients, etc), and my actual work in the other.

I of course do much of the "work on A, reference on B" that others have talked about--the IDE open on one screen and the documentation open on the other--but it's also worth pointing out the cases where there are multiple pieces of reference material that I'm trying to collide somehow, and having both of them open simultaneously is obviously incredible useful.

The typical theme is reference material on one screen, and working material on the other screen. The equivalent of having all your reference material open on your desk so you are not flipping back an forth through notes.

Edit: Read The Intelligent Use of Space by David Kirsh as recommended by this LessWrong post.

I work with multiple screens and I estimate that I save between 20 minutes and one hour per day in comparison to using only one. I do financial work and examples would be: Quickbooks open on one screen and an internet bank account open on the other; or the account open on one page and some financial pdf open on the other; or similar things.

3 monitors, 1 for a browser, 1 for IDE, 1 for misc stuff, like watching syslog messages, file manager, etc.

One screen (small square monitor I found for free) is often filled up with my matlab data files and matlab command window. The other (large) contains some combination of figures generated by my matlab scripts from my yeast data (constantly popping in and out), analysis I am writing, and scripts I am editing.

(I should really map out the dependencies of all my scripts sometime...)

When things are slower the small monitor often contains the live feed from the space station.

I don't know how common this is, but with a dual-monitor setup I tend to have one in landscape and one in portrait. The portrait monitor is good for things like documents, or other "long" windows like log files and barfy terminal output. The landscape monitor is good for everything that's designed to operate in that aspect ratio (like web stuff).

More generally, there's usually something I'm reading and something I'm working on, and I'll read from one monitor, while working on whatever is in the other.

At work I make use of four Gnome workspaces: one which has distracting things like email and project management gubbins; one active work-dev workspace; one self-development-dev workspace; and one where I stick all the applications and terminals that I don't actively need to look at, but won't run minimised/headlessly for one reason or another.

I believe that both making notes and making flashcards are suboptimal; the best (read: fastest) method I know is to read and understand what you want to learn, then close your eyes and recall everything in full detail (that is hard, and somewhat painful; you should try to remember something for at least few minutes before giving up). Re-read whatever you haven't remembered. Repeat until convergence.

In math, it helps to solve problems and find counterexamples to theorem conditions, because it leads to deeper understanding, which makes remembering significantly easier. Also try to make as much connections to already known facts and possible applications as possible: our memory is associative.

If possible, I like to allocate full attention to listening to the lecturer instead of dividing it between such and taking notes. However, this isnt always feasible. It helps if there is a slidepack or something similar that will be avaliable afterwards. Most of the time, I'm trying to build a mental construct for how all of the things that I'm learning fit together. Depending on the difficulty of the material, I may need to begin creating this construct pretty soon so I can understand the material, or it may be able to wait until pretty close to the exam. (If I'm not having to take notes, I can start doing it in class, which is more efficient and effective.)

I try to fill in the gaps in my mental model with a list of questions to ask in office hours. In the process, the structure of the material becomes a bit more evident. Is it very interconnected, either in a logical or physical sense? Is it something that seems to be made of arbitrary facts? If the latter, and the material is neither interesting nor useful nor required, I will be tempted to drop the class. If it is interesting or useful, facts stick much better, as I can think about how I can use them, how they help me understand things in such a manner that I can more easily affect them. Not sure that I personally have found many classes interesting but not useful if they lack a structure. If neither, but required, I prefer creating a structure that helps me link things together in a way that will help me remember them. A memorable example was committing a picture of the amino acid table to memory and then stepping through it vertically, horizontally, diagonally to make it stick. A structure that can be useful here is to repeat all past memorized items when memorizing a list. So A, then AB, then ABC, and so on.

I like pictures, lists, and cheat sheets (often worth making for me to help memtal organization even if I can't take them into a test) for the facts that don't fit in my mental model, or just as redundancy. Otherwise, I tend to mainly do things by trying to get an understanding of the relationships between and use cases of the concepts and methods. (Sometimes involving outlining the class on paper), and then using practice tests to highlight gaps.

Focus on grokking, on understanding, rather than remembering.

Define Pakistan.

According to the official story Pakistan didn't know about Osama Bin Ladin's location at the time of his death.

Isn't the official story that the US didn't know that Pakistan knew? As in, it's both possible that Pakistan knew/ didn't know, but the US didn't know one way or another.

I'm assuming you're talking about the US's official story.

Pakistan didn't know about Osama Bin Ladin's location at the time of his death.

Given the location where OBL was eventually found, this "official story" is not plausible in the least, and everyone knows that. The only reason for its existence is nobody wants to 'officially' admit that Pakistan was running a _scam_ on the U.S. by asking for $$$ "to help search for Bin Ladin", and the U.S. government fell for it for quite a while.

They're not exactly patrolling Reddit for critics, but I'll bite.

From what I understand, Bostrom's only premise is that intelligent machines can in principle perform any intellectual task that a human can, and this includes the design of intelligent machines. Juliano says that Bostrom takes hard-takeoff as a premise:

The premise of Bostrom's book is based on the assumption that the moment an advanced AI is created that it will overcome the human race within minutes to hours.

He doesn't do that. Chapter 4 of Superintelligence addresses both hard- and soft-takeoff scenarios. However, Bostrom does consider medium- to hard-takeoff scenarios more likely than soft-takeoff scenarios.

Another thing, when he says:

This extraordinary claim is neither explained nor substantiated with any evidence. It is just expected that the reader will take it at face value that this will happen. It's an incoherent premise from a scientific standpoint, but the idea is so sensational that people who don't understand the technical issues behind why that is not going to happen don't care.

There can't be evidence of an intelligence explosion because one hasn't happened yet. But we predict an intelligence explosion because it's based on an extrapolation of our current scientific generalizations. This sort of criticism can be made against anything that is possible in principle but that has not yet happened. If he wanted to argue against the possibility of an intelligence explosion, he would need to explain how it isn't in line with our current generalizations. You have to have a more complex algorithm for evaluating claims than "evidence = good & no-evidence = bad" to get around mistakes like this. He actually sort-of seems to imply that he doesn't think it's in line with our generalizations, when he says "people [...] don't understand the technical issues behind why that is not going to happen", which would be a step in the right direction, but he doesn't actually say anything about where he disagrees.

Also, Bostrom has a whole section in Chapter 14 on whether or not AGI should be a collaborative effort, and he's strongly in favor of collaboration. Race dynamics penalize safety-conscious AGI projects, and collaboration mitigates the risk of a race dynamic. Also, most people's preferences are resource-satiable; in other words, there's not much more that someone could do with a billion galaxies' worth of resources as opposed to one galaxy's worth, so it's better for everyone to collaborate and maximize their chances of getting something (which in this scenario is necessarily a lot) as opposed to taking on a large risk of getting nothing and a small chance of getting a lot more than they would ever probably want.

But this is a very different conception from Juliano's, because I guess Juliano doesn't think that machines could become far more intelligent than any human. His recommendations make sense if you think that strong AI is sort of like really smart computer viruses, and all we need to do is have an open community that collaborates to enact countermeasures like we do with modern computer viruses. But if you think that superintelligent machines are in line with our current generalizations, then his suggestions are wholly inadequate.

No-one would agree on what models to use.

I think this is an interesting idea in theory. And if you connect it to prediction markets, then this could be some sort of computational collaborative futarchy.

This sounds like a larger implementation of the models pathologists use to try and predict the infection rate of a disease. Considering the amount of computing power needed for that, such a service might be prohibitively expensive- at least in the near future.

I'm wondering if there would be a way for participants to place some skin in the game, besides a connection to prediction markets.

So what happens when 4chan discovers it?

I think learn better if I stop to eat whenever I feel like eating, and not get distracted by thoughts of food (I also lack 10 kg to normal weight, so I can afford it.)

Killer robots with no pain or fear of death would be much easier to fight off than ones who have pain and fear of death. It doesn't mean they won't get distracted and lose focus on fighting when they're injured or in danger. It means that they won't avoid getting injured or killed. It's a lot easier to kill someone if they don't mind it if you succeed.

If the dispensing device is "locked" against the user and you want to enforce dosing you don't need any crypto keys. Just make the device have an internal clock and dispense a dose every X hours.

In the general case, the device is externally controlled and then people who have control can do whatever they want with it. I'm still not seeing a particular need for a crypto key.

There are already dispensing machines that dispense doses on a timer. They are mostly targeted at people who need reminding (e.g. Alzheimers), though, rather than people who may want to take too much. I don't think the cryptographic security would be the problem in that scenario, but the physical security of the device. You would need some trusted way to reload it and it would have to be very difficult to open even though it would presumably just be sitting on your table at home, which is a very high bar. It could possibly be combined with always-on tampering reporting and legal threats to make the idea of tampering with it less appealing though.