March 2013 Media Thread

Thank you for doing this. Please continue to do so in the likely event I fail to in the future. As I become busier and busier, I have less time for reading LessWrong, and hadn't even thought about this until I went looking for something recommended in it from several months ago.

Forcehimes, Download This Essay: a defence of stealing ebooks.

Jacob Taylor, Wireheading: Towards a Consumer Market?.

Moertelmaier, Newcomblike Problems and Optimal Agents.

Tonn & Stiefel - Evaluating Methods for Estimating Existential Risks

Hartmann et al, Formal epistemology meets experimental philosophy

...there has been an increasing tendency in the application of formal and experimental methods to tackle philosophical issues... which we view as part and parcel of the recent renewal of “scientific philosophy”.

Jesse Galef, What Would a Rational Gryffindor Read?

A friend and I cowrote a 6th year Hermione vs Diary!Riddle fic on ff.net A Pound of Flesh. Neither is tuned up to HMPOR levels, but we did make them smarter and a bit more inventive than canon, so I thought LWers might enjoy. Trigger warning for violence, some of which is sexualized. And here's a quote:

"I'm listening, Miss Granger. Do you have something to tell me?"
"Just that it would still be stupid and useless for you to torture me. I do know what the prophecy said, you're right, but that's a complicated, detailed piece of information, not a simple yes or no answer. You won't be able to hone in on the content just by playing evil sadist twenty questions. And even if I tell you something, it'll be very hard to tell if I've been precise enough even if I'm not lying. And push me past the true details out of desperation, and you'll get extraneous information that will end up confusing you.
It's not even np-hard – oh, you wouldn't know that phrase. What I mean is that the information is hard to get, and there's no easy way to check whether it's accurate once you've got it. It's not like looking for a puzzle piece in a mess, but having an easy way to check whether it fits. You won't know whether the information I give you is good, though I grant I'll probably say something. So you can torture me, but do me the courtesy of admitting you're doing it because you want to hurt me, not because you want to know the prophecy."

With Charity for All. Excerpts below.

On the role of the charitable sector:

The charitable sector... includes areas as diverse as education, global health services, shelter for the homeless, ...arts and culture, and some of our most important scientific research. We support this broad array of services because absent a robust charitable economy, these functions would either cease or devolve to government — an unpalatable option in a time of rising public debt and dwindling faith in the efficacy of government. In effect, we have privatized these public functions in the belief that charities can perform these tasks better and with greater efficiency than government.

[Even] in this results-obsessed country, the public rarely demands measures of how effective charities are in implementing their services and meeting their service goals. And... when the public generally and funders more specifically do not press for results-oriented organizations... charities respond accordingly...

...the market incentives in the nonprofit world push charities toward happy anecdote and inspiring narrative rather than toward careful planning, research, and evidence-based investments, to crippling effect...

...The glossy fund-raising brochures, the moving videos, and the carefully crafted inspirational anecdotes often mask problems that range from inefficiency and ineffectiveness to outright fraud and waste. There is little credible evidence that many charitable organizations produce lasting social value. Study after study tells the opposite story: of organizations that fail to achieve meaningful impact yet press on with their strategies and services despite significant, at times overwhelming, evidence that they don't work.

...This could have been a bleak book. My early research was not promising. I found story after story of organizational and service failure... But over time, another story began to emerge, of a nascent movement to rethink how the charitable sector works, to build market mechanisms to reward effective charities and discourage ineffective ones, and to create tools that will allow people to turn themselves from donors to investors. This book begins with... a narrative of systematic shortcomings, but it ends with a glimpse of those who are beginning to reshape the charitable world and show us what it can be.

The Red Cross as an example of charity ineffectiveness:

With Hurricane Katrina bearing down on New Orleans in August 2005, the American Red Cross geared up for action... In many ways, it was the largest peacetime call-up in American history, ultimately activating 250,000 employees and volunteers across a thousand miles of the southern United States.

...The human resources and material aid were tremendous, but the system of quality control was in absolute tatters. Volunteers were assigned to tasks without adequate training or any attempt to match their skills to the work. Goods poured into the Mobile warehouse, but often without regard to need... Whatever came in was shipped out to the field, regardless of its usefulness to the relief effort... goods coming into the warehouse were not registered or recorded; pilfering was common... Shelters were under- or incorrectly supplied, goods rotted in warehouses, the wrong things went to the wrong places, cash disappeared, supplies walked away... At one point, it was reported that fully half of the goods supplied to the Red Cross could not be traced to confirm that they made it to their intended destination.

The Red Cross failures during Katrina unfortunately do not stand out... they mirror, on a much larger scale, the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness displayed by hundreds of other nonprofits seeking to respond to the disaster.

These problems were magnified by the policies of the IRS, which fast-tracked more than four hundred new Katrina-related charities in the wake of the storm, in some cases granting tax-exempt status within hours of receiving an application. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of those new charities... have since failed, disappeared, or been diverted to other purposes...

The roots of the Red Cross's failures during Katrina and other crises lie in its inability—a failing shared by virtually all charities—to make the necessary internal investments that are the hallmark of all good organizations, be they for-profit businesses, charities, or government agencies...

When even the highest-revenue charity in the country is bound together by rubber bands and duct tape, it is a sign of profound misunderstanding of how to build effective charities.

On the creation of Givewell:

In the summer of 2006, eight friends working in the financial services industry decided to... research and share information on different charities... They discovered that the Charity Navigator rankings were unhelpful, as they were based largely on ratios of overhead to programmatic spending that they quickly realized had no correlation to organizational effectiveness and impact. [Moreover,] Charity Navigator depended on self-reports from the charities, which could easily, and frequently did, game the ratings... When pressed for more information... the charities often furnished their own confidential internal reports and data — the inadequacy of which led the group... to understand that the charities themselves did not know whether they were helping or hurting a given situation.

…[The group] concluded that there had to be a better way of evaluating charities... In the summer of 2007, Karnofsky and Hassenfeld left Bridgewater to set up GiveWell... Their approach was based upon the methodologies they had learned at Bridgewater: in-depth, research-driven evaluations supported by facts and data, not formulas and marketing brochures...

Over the past five years, Givewell... has produced over five hundred investment grade reports, both on entire charitable sectors and on individual charities. After all this work, it has identified only eight organizations that can fully demonstrate material and effective impact and efficiently use additional funds.

Changeology.

'An Introduction to Elementary Particles' by David Griffiths is one of the most enjoyable text books I have ever read. It covers basic particle physics, Feynman diagrams and Feynman calculus, basic experimental setups in the realm of high-energy physics and more. The author is well regarded as one of the most readable undergraduate physics textbook writer (also known for his intro quantum mechanics book), but this topic is his specialty and he really shines in presenting it. Even for those without a background in physics, the first chapter has a great exposition of the historical developments of the mid 1900's that led to the modern standard model. After that he goes into Feynman diagrams which is also quite approachable and interesting without any significant background. The later chapters then actually go into Feynman calculus and would be less readable to those without at least one course in quantum mechanics.

Rereading the Discworld... Almost every page has something for the Rationality Quotes thread.

I've been rereading Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, a formative text for me back when I was a nerdy teenager in the late Nineties, but one which I haven't touched in a decade or so.

A lot of it has already been obsoleted by real technological and social changes; its China for example transitioned directly from Maoism to neo-Confucianism without an authoritarian market economy stage, staying well behind the technological bell curve in the process, and its approach to AI is looking increasingly quaint. From a psychology/cogsci/poli-sci point of view I imagine it'd still be a deeply interesting book for many LW readers, though. The motivations behind its Primer closely approximate some of the ways we talk about rationality, for one thing

Unfortunately a lot of the interesting bits edge into politics, so I'm not sure I feel comfortable unleashing my usual rambling screed in this context.

Sasami-san@Ganbaranai doesn't have a very good score at myanimelist, but I'm currently at 8/12 episodes and it has rather impressed me at points.

It's from the same company (SHAFT) that produced Madoka Magica, and I think the element it shares with it is that both attempt to do a sort of redemption of the ludicrous, as Adam Cadre would call it. But where Madoka Magica merely redeemed magical-girls anime, Sasami-san@Ganbaranai attempts the even harder task of attempting to redeem a story about a shut-in girl and incestuous fanservice.

Very recently decent fansubs have surfaced for Mamoru Hosoda's new movie The Wolf Children Ame and Yuki. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Nick Bostrom gave an interesting talk on existential risk reduction at TEDxOxford 2012, which has recently been uploaded at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0Nf3TcMiHo and has the rather ominous title "The End of Humanity". I suppose most of the people reading this will be quite familiar with the concepts (and the talk is aimed at people who aren't), but it might be a good resource to point people to who need introducing.

Full disclosure: I am involved with TEDxOxford, though I wasn't involved with TEDxOxford 2012.

Ruby Gloom.

Available on Netflix (American, for some reason Netflix Canada pulled it?) for instant viewing, a surprisingly good children's show with a cheerful Gothic theme.

Approximately the complete works of Yellow Magic Orchestra, who started as three classically-trained musicians messing with these new "synthesizer" things in the 1970s, wanted to make music that combined Western pop with older Japanese music and proceeded to invent large slabs of synthpop and what became J-pop. They're the band Ryuchi Sakamoto came from. The studio stuff sounds slightly dated but is still pretty good, and musically important; the live stuff still sounds fresh IMO.

The only hard rock you'll ever need:

Clutch Songs: The Regulator, The Mob Goes Wild Albums: Blast Tyrant

Psychedelic trance, for studying, falling asleep, staying awake, daydreaming (unfortunately will not cause you to be able to fly):

Shpongle Songs: The Dorset Perception, Ineffable Mysteries, Around the World in a Tea Daze, Invisible Man in a Fluorescent Suit Albums: Are You Shpongled, Tales of the Inexpressable

Death Grips - Hip hop/punk/noise

Bizarre, aggressive, and ridiculously creative music. I'm fascinated by musicians that manage to be simultaneously reckless and focused, though I should expect nothing less from any project that includes the drummer from Hella.

Songs: Hunger Games, Takyon Full Albums: Exmilitary, The Money Store, No Love Deep Web

Lola y Manuel - Flamenco

A husband and wife songwriting duo from mid-70's Spain. Arab-influenced singing, technically spectacular guitar, and quite progressive compositions that expand, rather than abandon the traditional flamenco forms. PM me for a copy of their first album, it's nearly impossible to find these days and is soul splittingly beautiful.

Songs: Sangre Gitana y Mora, Nuevo Dia

I've recently spent a bunch of time listening to Canadian goth rock band The Birthday Massacre, and I think it's pretty safe to call them my current musical obsession. Warning, most of their appeal is based around atmosphere and tone, which some people can have a hard time relating to. As one reviewer put it:

So what does The Birthday Massacre actually sound like? My best way of describing it would be: imagine yourself in your childhood waking at night with a vaguely moonlit doll shaped figure standing before you, leading you to a hidden door in the corner your bedroom, where you go through a narrow tunnel and enter a mystical gothic wonderland, illuminated only by a purple mystical light and otherwise coated in shadows. It's alluring yet scary. The reason why I describe it with a lack of technical terms is that I find The Birthday Massacre's force being the atmosphere they are able to conjure.

To illustrate, consider "Leaving Tonight", the lead song from their newest album, Hide And Seek, which I like to describe as the catchiest song about dead children ever. It's not immediately obvious what the song is about, and many people listen through it several times before realizing, but the band has confirmed this interpretation in interviews. Context: the lead singer, Chibi, is noted for having an obsession with the true crime genre, and while writting the album, encountered a specific story about a vannished child from 20 years ago that stuck in her head to the point where she started having dreams about it. So, she wrote this song, which manages to perfectly convey this feeling, in that its both absolutely horrifying once you know what it's about, and also impossible to stop listening to.

'Nother heads up: their new album, while being both their darkest and subtles work to date (which is saying that they've come quite a long way, considering that they started their career with songs about bashing people's heads in), is also probably their least immediately accessible. I myself initially dismissed it as their worst album so far, until I started reading interviews from the band explaining a lot of the context.

If you're interested in checking out their music, first start by watching the music videos for "Blue, Looking Glass and In The Dark (the band initially formed out of an art school, and it shows). Then, to get a good overview of their early work, listen/watch the live album/concert video Show And Tell, which contains all the best songs from their first three albums (and can be viewed here). If you like that, consider checking out their subsequent albums, Pins And Needles and Hide And Seek. Then, you can go back and see what you missed on the first three albums: Nothing And Nowhere, Violet and Walking With Strangers.

Everyone should read Slate Star Codex by Yvain.

Fleep: a short comic with a rationalist vibe. Shigabooks also has the excellent Meanwhile... and the less relevant but still great Bookhunter.

Just a fun game I came across the other day: http://trainsportedgame.no-ip.org/

From the website: "trAInsported is a game about trains, Artificial Intelligence and lots and lots of passengers. It's the near future, and trains are controlled by AI. It's your job to write the best AI on the market. Manage your trains in short rounds and make sure you transport more passengers than any other company.

As you go through the game, your AI will improve. Once through the tutorial and challenge maps (or anytime you think your AI is ready), you can upload the AI through this site and watch it compete in live online matches against other players' AIs! The server will stage live matches multiple times an hour. AIs will be chosen at random, the less matches the AI has already competed in, the more likely it will be to compete in the next match."

The AI scripting is done in Lua, and there are a limited number of lines of code that can be executed for an AI to keep the frame rate up. The concept is infectious, and you can watch live matches on the trAInsported website.

Finally got to the end of Persona 4 Golden for the PS Vita.

This game is awesome. You should play it.

Subnormality is one of my favorite comics. A bit verbose, but your patience is well rewarded with surprisingly deep insight. No seriously, I probably get more out of Subnormality than cognitive behavioral therapy.

Medaka Box is a fun read. It looks like just Absurdly Powerful Student Council (TVTropes warning) at first, but later plays around with genre and genre-savviness in a way I found really interesting. Spoiler in rot13: Gur znva nagntbavfg va bar nep oryvrirf gung fur vf va n onggyr znatn naq gung gurersber vg'f vzcbffvoyr gb orng gur znva punenpgre, fvapr gur znva punenpgre va n onggyr znatn nyjnlf jvaf. Fb fur nggrzcgf gb jva ol punatvat gur traer gb ebznagvp pbzrql.

My advisor, Jarad Niemi, has posted a bunch of lectures on Bayesian statistics to youtube, most of them short and all pretty good IMHO. The lectures are made for Stat 544, a course at Iowa State University. They assume a decent familiarity with probability theory - most students in the course have seen most of chapters 1-5 of Casella and Berger in detail - and some knowlege of R.