Open thread, Jul. 04 - Jul. 10, 2016

This write-up is about my most recent exercise: Do a Non Gender-Conforming Thing

Don't spend your idiosyncrasy credits frivolously.

What I find interesting are people who "break out" of their gender-roles only to fall into conforming strictly to whatever the new one is: boys wearing skinny-jeans and deep v-necks and girls wearing their grandfather's shoes (or ones they bought at a thrift store) and carrying a briefcase. In a sense, a man wearing women's clothing isn't that much different than him dressing like a goth or a punk. Gender is just the last of the great wearable ideologies to have been opened up to being monkeyed with. But we've now reached the point where we seem to have already entered a post-gendered and weirdly more ideologically driven world of cultural symbolism in which it is important to be seen to be breaking gender conventions (transsexualism, metro-sexuality, men's make-up and skincare, and the skinniest skinny-jeans you have ever seeny-seen). So, in a way, the more radical act has become to rationally accept the chains by which you are fettered and break out of your comfort zone by staying exactly where you are.

There is some on http://www.clearerthinking.org/

When I write I try to hit instrumental not epistemic (see here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mp2/). And I believe there is a need for writing along the lines of instrumental guides. (also see: boring advice repository http://lesswrong.com/lw/gx5/boring_advice_repository/)

As far as I know there has been no effort to generate a sequence on the topic.

Is there a specific area you would like to see an instrumental guide in? Maybe we can use the community to help find/make one on the specific topic you are after (for now).

Or this?

Maybe this?

Gotta love how cigarettes are listed as non-drugs.

Here (copy) is a diagram.

Tesla's algorithm is supposed to be autonomous for freeways, not for highways with intersections, like this. The algorithm doing what it was supposed to do would not have prevented a crash. But the algorithm was supposed to eventually apply the brakes. Its failure to do so was a real failure of the algorithm. The driver also erred in failing to brake, probably because he was inappropriately relying on the algorithm. Maybe this was a difficult situation and he could not be expected to prevent a crash, but his failure to brake at all is a bad sign.

It was obvious when Telsa first released this that people were using it inappropriately. I think that they have released updates to encourage better use, but I don't know how successful they were.

The truck pulled in front of the Model S. The Model S had enough time to break and stop but didn't recognize the truck against the brightly lit sky.

Extremely interesting, thanks!

New to me were: Simpson's paradox, Third story, BATNAs, tyranny of small decisions, 1-1's, Forcing function, organizational debt, Bullseye framework.

Some cognitive biases don’t allow a person to see and cure his other biases.

A concept that I liked from Critical Rationalism was immunization strategies - ideological commitments and stratagems that make a theory unfalsifiable.

Look into those. I assume people must have lists of these things somewhere.

You went to some ends to make the list comprehensive. I have only a few comments:

_5. Lack of knowledge in logic, statistic, brain science, scientific method etc.

I don't think this strictly meets your requirement that it doesn't "allow a person to see and cure his other biases". Sure science helps but I think that many laymen already to profit from bias literature otherwise self-help books - some of which picking up biases wouldn't work. Or don't they? Maybe the point really is that the required preliminaries are so many or organized in such a way that you can't go there from here.

_9. Lack of motivation

This is relatively broad. It can be seen to include 4, 5 and 10.

I also tried to come up with other options which was hard. Here is my try:

_11. Greed (or other highly focusing motivations like existential needs). Takes energy away from self improvement. This appears to be a special case of your 9 which I see as too general.

_12. Social pressure. Thinking about own fallacies may not be socially acceptable in the peer group. This is different from 2 -Dogmatism.

Maybe this list could be structured a bit into psychological, cognitive and belief structure items.

Minor nitpick: The formatting of the numbered list seems to be broken.

I don't think it's useful to mentally categorize "Lack of motivation to self-improvement" as a bias. Not everything is a bias.

Also, I think there's an (unstated, and that should be fixed and the topic debated) belief that instrumental rationality without epistemic rationality is either useless or harmful.

I think some people agree with that, but I consider it backwards.

I'll take winning over accurately predicting. Winning is the desired end; accurate prediction is a means, and not the only one.

Why not? If you haven't yet decided what your goals are, being able to meet many goals is useful.

The AGI argument is that its goals might not be aligned with ours, are you saying that we should make sure that our future self's goals be aligned with our current goals?

For example, if I know I am prone to hyperbolic discounting, I should take power from my future self so it will act according to my wishes rather than its own?

Trigonometry by Gelfand & Saul. I mention it here because in school, this was my least favourite part of mathematics, and at least this book seems to show it to advantage:)

Also, Biogeochemical Approaches to Paleodietary Analysis - published in 2002; probably of no immediate usefulness (looking at the table of contents). Also, if you want to base some conclusions on the isotope studies, bear in mind the growing body of evidence that at least C13 and C14's distribution in plants' organs is not really random; who knows how it is for nitrogen, etc.

Also, Misclassification of Smoking Habits and Passive Smoking A Review of the Evidence published in 1988. Description:

How accurate are statements about smoking habits? This book presents the results of a comprehensive review in which the literature on the subject is newly interpreted. It is shown that smokers are misclassified as non-smokers in epidemiological studies often enough to explain the increased lung cancer risk seen in self-reported non-smokers in relation to their spouse's smoking habits. This study overturns the commonly held view that increased risk is a consequence of exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and highlights the difficulty of making valid inferences from epidemiological data. No-one should draw conclusions about passive smoking before reading this book!

BTW, Data Book on Mechanical Properties of Living Cells, Tissues, and Organs looks like a good text for constructing Fermi questions on this kind of stuff.

srlee309.github.io/LessWrongKarma/ this one? can kinda do it. I don't know of the other one.

When an account is deleted the author on all posts will be shown as "deleted" (litereally).

I remember that LW has an API. It should only be a matter of finding all your posts that do not have any replies and then deleting them.

I'm referring to programming of course, but I can't help you with it more specifically.

GMO camp going to have a difficult time with this one, as it was a 1k person study

While the study is interesting, in part because strands of cfDNA has started being used as markers for tumors, there's no indication that some strand of DNA from GMO are more or less dangerous than cfDNA from non-GMO (although new DNA is of course possibly more dangerous than DNA we have evolved with).
Besides, the study reported the presence of chloroplast DNA, which are of course inside plants but have their own DNA.

The second study is more interesting and to the point, although I wasn't able to find a study on how much Cry we absorb with our diet.

Theoretical example.

Somewhere in space flying ASI in the form of a cloud with nanobots that continuously simulates the future. He does this for to know all of the risks and opportunities of the event in advance. So, he is able to conduct more effective research, for example to avoid loss of a time. Of course, if the future of modeling uses less resources than saved. There is only one problem - its sensors indicate that at a distance of thousands parsecs no other ASI. But there is a probability (0,0...1%) that another ASI will suddenly appear next to us using the teleport about which the first intellect is nothing known. The calculation shows that the probability of 0.0...1% appearance and 5% that other ASI will destroy the first algorithm. That will selects the first algorithm? Waste of resources to solve the problem with low probability or the probability the destruction.

On the whole the algorithm is able to create a a lot of markers, which he will have to check in real world. And these markers will be correct probabilistic models all the time.

So, you can build a model in which the highest probability density is verified most densely markers on the basis of genetic algorithms.

true probability

What does that phrase mean?

on the basis of these 10 future variants, algorithm simulating new probability for 2nd year, then on the following 3 years and other.

That's called chaining the forecasts. This tends to break down after very few iterations because errors snowball and because tail events do happen.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/rf/ghosts_in_the_machine/

You are treating the AI a lot more like a person than I think most folks do. Like, the AI has a utility function. This utility function is keeping it running a production facility. Where is this 'neutral perspective' coming from? The AI doesn't have it.

Presumably the utility function assigns a low value to criticizing the utility function. Much better to spend those cycles running the facility. That gets a much better score from the all important utility function.

Like, in assuming that it is aware of pain/pleasure, and has a notion of them that is seperate from 'approved of / disapproved of by my utility function) I think you are on shaky ground. Who wrote that, and why?

I have a problem understanding why a utility function would ever "stick" to an AI, to actually become something that it wants to keep pursuing.

I think that's one of MIRI's research problems. Designing an self-modifying AI that doesn't change it's utility function isn't trival.