Open thread, July 23-29, 2013

Really interesting looking stuff here. Thanks for this.

I don't know about Flynn, but this is in large part not new news: that the early 1920s US iodization led to measurable gains in enlistees for WWII has been in papers floating around for a while now; for example, "The Economic Effects of Micronutrient Deficiency: Evidence from Salt Iodization in the United States", Feyrer et al 2008. "The Impact of Iodine Deficiency Eradication on Schooling: Evidence from the Introduction of Iodized Salt in Switzerland", Politi 2010, is also cool. Also maybe even voting patterns.

(Citations borrowed from my iodine page.)

I've only read the abstract as the full PDF seems to be paywalled, but the 15 points of gain seem to be limited to "the one quarter of the population most deficient in iodine". The abstract says the estimated gain for the population as a whole was "roughly one decade's worth of the upwardtrend [sic] in IQ in the US", which is 3 points (from memory).

I once made a white board out of one of those transparent office chair mats. I just stapled it to my white wall. I never ended up using it extensively, but it worked pretty well. If you want them professional-looking at more cost and slightly more work, consider just painting the back of a piece of plexi glass white, or just the wall behind it. That's how this institution solved the same problem

(Edit: I researched some more and, due to ghosting issues, acrylic glass (or plexiglass) is not an ideal whiteboard material.) You could make 10 giant white boards for ~1000dollars, according to this website. A cheaper, if less stylish option, buy these 4'x4' panels for ~50 each.

If you want to go even more DIY, here's a list of whiteboard materials:

1. Melamine

2. Painted steel

3. Ceramic (glass) fired onto a steel surface in a kiln. The only material which does not ghost if the ink is left on for long periods of time.

4. PET, Polyethylene terephthalate-on-steel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteboard#Surface_materials.

Melamine seems like the best bet. Look for melamine-laminated plywood, as it will likely be as high-quality as most store-bought boards. Here's the type of thing you'd want, and it's very cheap. But you'd have to find someone willing to sell it in small quantities.

Note, chalk is an option - and a cheap one. This chalkboard contact paper is very cheap and has excellent reviews:http://goo.gl/samVWk What's that you say? You're too cool for chalkboards? I assure you, you're not. If you do decide to buy the chalk paper, remember it must be applied to a smooth surface - one reviewer recommends masonite board. You cannot stick it directly to a wall, unless the wall is abnormally smooth. Same goes for spray-on chalkboard coating - which works very well, too.

If you have dry-erase surfaces, I recommend the policy of having only dry-erase markers around - i.e. no permanent markers. That way you make finding a marker to write much easier (you can just grab the nearest marker), and you also drastically reduce the problem of accidental permanent marker on the dry-erase surfaces.

I purchased some of these, which you get at about $0.16/sqft:

http://www.amazon.com/National-Brand-Write-On-Static/dp/B0000E2RGH/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1374840990&sr=8-8&keywords=white+board+paper

Unfortunately they also suffer from the problems with not erasing things after a while, although you can still clean them with water after that and it works. Also, they're very thin and tear easily.

EDIT: Also, this thread is making me think that perhaps searching for "clear plastic" on Amazon and buying one of the things that come up to put it on a white surface could also work. Like this. People replace glass with this material to make greenhouses; maybe it would be a good glass replacement for whiteboards, too...

For 6: if sunlight positively affects workplace productivity, drop down white backgrounds on windows would have adverse consequences.

Balancing suggestion: install a window on a wall.

You can build a sexy glass whiteboard from IKEA tabletops. We used these $25.99 table tops at the last startup I was at, mounted on the wall with standard tools:

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60221471/

I was reading my old posts and I saw these old comments to you. This got me curious: what was your eventual solution?

Replying to this late, but: strongly consider spending the cash on lots of real whiteboards. I have never found an alternative that is anything close to as good.

Another useful link: This guy did a comprehensive review of whiteboard materials which you might find helpful.

At my company we use 'expo neon' dry erase markers on windows and mirrors, and they show up extremely clearly, unlike normal dry erase. Something we have also done is used glass-top conference tables as a writing surface during design meetings, which works very well.

This was your message to his list?

Sites with votes always have a tiny proportion of people who engage in really really weird voting behavior IME.

Seems likely that it could be someone who had a bad experience at one of these meetups, and is trying to punish you for it.

Perhaps they long-ago stated that they though meetup threads were a bad idea, and they've been downvoting since?

Upvoted the original comment. Is your goal to do a self-hack to eliminate the (now) troublesome feelings towards the SO or to simply 'move on' while maintaining some of those feelings?

My Granddad died today at the tragically young age of 72. This is basically what I was thinking but I couldn't articulate it to anyone.

Thanks.

Technically it's not unfair. It's equally horrible for everyone.

Although the fact that we last different amounts of time is unfair.

Shouldn't this go on Rationalist Quotes?

The song "I Hate You" by Kendrick Lamar is really good and has a similar message. (The title refers to Death). I was surprised to hear such a Yudkowskian view on death coming from a rapper who has Christian themes in his work.

"Let me start off this letter saying I don't like you, scared of you but I will fight you."

Well based on your track record there, it seems like a prudent move to avoid making bets with you ;)

(Though I agree with you and should be shaming them rather than defending them.)

If you assume regression to the mean will occur in replication, you should only pay attention to fairly large effect sizes. This has a way of washing out a lot of the noise in areas where previously it seemed hard to draw a conclusion.

tDCS has come up on LW several times before, and previous comments may help: http://google.com/search?num=100&q=tDCS+site:lesswrong.com

Once a month, set specific goals for that month. Make sure that it's very easy to verify that you achieved the goal ("improve at programming" is not a good goal, "solve every practice problem in the first chapter of SICP" is a good goal. "solve every practice problem in the first chapter of SICP, or spend at least 2 hours thinking about each problem before giving up and looking up a solution" is even better).

After you've decided on your goals for a given month, don't second-guess whether they're actually the best thing you could be doing or whether you're wasting your time -- it's only one month. If it turns out it wasn't the best goal to try, just take note of it and use that knowledge to pick better goals next month. It's more important that you actually follow through than that you follow the optimal path, and if you keep switching goals every week, you're not gonna follow through.

Also, start using either anki or mnemosyne.

One of the things I most often wish I'd done when I was 15 is study programming. I didn't do that, though, because I hadn't known that programming would be my main breadwinning skill. (I wouldn't have done it even if I had known it would be an important skill for me because I hadn't known that I should ask what my future self would want and be strategic, but you're probably well ahead of 15 year old me in that respect if you're here posting this.) So I think one of your first priorities should be to find out what goals to work toward.

What purposes do you instrumentally value wealth and skill for? It matters mainly because that indicates whether they're time-sensitive, how much risk you should accept, and whether the marginal value of more money tapers off once you have "enough" or not. Also think about what other forms of power you might want - would becoming a famous person be useful to you? (It's good that you're focusing on becoming powerful first - that's usually worthwhile even if you aren't quite sure what you want.)

I guess one thing you could do is research what methods you could use to become wealthy, and then what skills you would need and how you would be spending your time if you followed each of those paths. Look at which options you would enjoy or at least tolerate, and would earn enough money at ("enough" might be "as much as possible", depending on what you want money for), and start learning the skills you would need to pursue those. Prefer skills that are useful for many paths, so you'll be more likely to benefit from them even if you change your mind later.

Social skills and rationality are probably also good things to learn young. You can start using them right away, and you're not likely to be taught them later. (If you learn programming and then major in computer science, you'll probably waste some time being taught programming that you already know. I had to do that for HTML/CSS, and it was pretty unpleasant. I'm still glad that I'd learned it early, but not sitting bored in class for four hours a week is preferable when all else is equal.)

For social skills, it might be worth getting a tutor, especially if you're not above the water line. One of the things that I most appreciate having done early is seeing a speech therapist who also helped me with understanding others' nonverbal signals. (I started that during elementary school, though - it may be harder to learn at 15.) That's probably expensive if you can't have it done through your school or have health insurance pay for it, though. The other way to improve social skills is to spend a lot of time around other people, so that you have to practice a lot.

You'll want to target anything that compounds over time.

Something I believe you should add to the list is to develop the habit of exercise. You will live longer, have more energy day-to-day, and being attractive is one of life's great cheat codes. The reddit fitness community has a great faq on how to get started.

Once you've picked some goals, use this technique to improve your chance of achieving them (taken from "59 Seconds"):

Other researchers have developed “super-strength” visualization tools that aim to combine the motivational effects of imagining yourself doing well with the practical benefits associated with thinking about whatever is required to achieve your aim. Much of this research has been conducted by Gabriele Oettingen at the University of Pennsylvania and involves a little bit of Orwellian doublethink.

In 1984, George Orwell introduced the concept of “doublethink,” describing it as simultaneously holding two opposing beliefs in your mind and yet accepting both. In Orwell’s novel, this technique was used by a totalitarian government to continuously rewrite history and thus control the populace. However, recent research has shown that the same type of idea can be used in a more productive way, helping people to achieve their goals and ambitions. Oettingen speculated that one of the most effective states of mind involves people being optimistic about achieving their goal but also realistic about some of the problems that they may encounter. To investigate, she developed a novel procedure that encouraged people to hold both types of thought in mind, and she then carried out a series of studies to assess its effectiveness. The procedure is simple. People are asked to think about something they want to achieve, such as losing weight, learning a new skill, or changing their drinking habits. Next, they are told to spend a few moments fantasizing about reaching the goal and to note the top two benefits that would flow from such an achievement. After this, they are asked to spend another few moments reflecting on the kinds of barriers and problems that they are likely to encounter if they attempt to fulfill their ambition, and again, make a note of the top two issues. Now comes the doublethink. People are asked to reflect on their first benefit, elaborating on how it would make their life more enjoyable. Immediately afterward, they are asked to think about the biggest hurdle to such success, focusing on what they would do if they encountered the difficulty. Then they repeat the same process for the second positive aspect of achieving their aim and the second potential problem.

In several experiments, Oettingen discovered that this procedure provides the best of both worlds. When people focused on an existing relationship that they wanted to improve, those engaging in doublethink were more successful than those who just fantasized or focused on the negatives. Returning to the theme of romance, she applied the doublethink procedure to students harboring a secret crush. Those who employed the fantasy-reality technique were more successful than those who merely dreamed about their perfect date or dwelled solely on the difficulties of revealing their true feelings. Additional work has used the doublethink procedure to encourage employees to become more involved in training courses; nurses to build better relationships with patients’ family members and show greater commitment to best practice; and middle managers to make better decisions, delegate more effectively, and improve their time-management skills.

Keep records, so that you can later evaluate what you achieved (and write about it on LW).

What format of records? Well, if you know what you are going to do, the best would be just writing numbers (for example if your goal is to make money, then how much money you made when), because that's no-nonsense, and you can do monthly statistics and reports. But you are probably going to try many new things, so you don't know yet which variables will seem important. Something like bullet-point diary could be a good compromise. For each day write very short messages, with some numbers if possible. For example: "Read a book XY, pages 150 to 190." "Met a friend Z; discussed business plans." These data can later be processed to graphs.

Once in a week or in a month try writing predictions about what will you achieve during the week or month. At the end make notes what you did and what you didn't do. Also, why is the outcome different from prediction: was there some unexpected situation, did you change your mind, were you just too optimistic, or did your plan lack something?

Should all time be devoted to the quickest increases in utility, or should energy be set aside for starting some long term goals early? Does it make more sense to improve yourself, so you can make more money? Or to make some money, and use it to improve yourself?

This is complicated, and it depends on your specific situation: what skills do you have, how is your family financially, what are your hobbies? Some things require preparation before they pay off. Learning the first lesson of a foreign language or the first lesson of programming does not bring any benefits, so if you focus on short-term maximizing, you will never learn anything like this. On the other hand, long-term plans have less feedback, so you are more likely to delude yourself. For example, you could spend a few months learning a foreign language, only to realize that you actually have no good plan where to use it.

When you are a beginner, getting more skills is better than getting more money, because you will probably not make a lot of money anyway; but until you try using your skills in real-life situations, you may have a bad idea about how good you are, or which parts are important to master. If your parents are okay with paying all the expenses you need, you can ignore the money, but you should have some way to measure your progress. For example you could try to win a competition in what you learn. You should compete even if you don't have a chance to win, because you will get the feedback, and if you try it again later, you will see how much did you actually improve.

what would you recommend that I do over the next year, to give me the biggest utility bonus the fastest, both in skill and wealth?

Really depends on where you are now. If you were my clone, which obviously you are not, I would recommend programming and social skills. For programming, start with Python, and when you can write algorithms (participate in a competition to verify that), learn something that allow you writing mobile applications; that gives you useful skills and allows you to make money in your free time. For social skills, watch The Blueprint Decoded, learn dancing, go to places where you can meet interesting people and talk with them (for example LW meetups). Don't procrastinate online.

I think this is actually enough work for one year; programming will take a lot of time. You also need some free time to meet with friends, read good books, and relax. (Seriously, relaxation is an important skill some people lack; actually it is a part of social skills. Also, try meditation.) Read the Sequences, but don't read all the comments.

Alcor UK exists. Also, do you count Moscow, Russia as Europe? Then consider KrioRus.

It looks like there are no non-US-based providers. Alcor has some information, but the situation doesn't look good. You won't get treated by a perfusion team or anything. Instead they'll try to convince local coroners to literally just freeze you with dry ice and ship you to Arizona for storage, which is incredibly destructive for the obvious reasons, and that's if the locals even cooperate. Not worth the money, IMO. (I say that as a current Alcor member living in the US.) I haven't checked CI's practices, but they're unlikely to be better.

Steps you can take:

—Sign up with a US-based provider

—If you become terminally ill, move to the US

—Don't die suddenly

My immediate reaction to this proposal was a feeling of being personally attacked. "Fine, meat's expensive and a pain to cook anyway, but I'll be damned if you take away my French fries too." It also seems that every fad diet, including crazy stuff like juice cleansing, promises increased "energy" and the like; in this context, the anecdotal claims are not persuasive.

Conclusion: could work on people who don't get much pleasure out of food to begin with, but associating with animal rights activism seems likely to be counterproductive. It might also be less irritating if these foods were promoted as, well, foods, rather than the only thing you will ever eat again. I could definitely see a version of Soylent replacing my standard breakfast of instant ramen if the cost were anywhere near competitive.

I second your question. I have no particular inclination to make myself a wiki page and so mine is blank too. I'd like it to be able to remove it entirely.

I in general find it a minor nuisance that I have an extra page load to do to reach the desired user page. I want to see the comments and posts not a profile. When I want to see interesting profile pages I'll go to OkCupid. (I wonder how long it would take to write a firebug script that took me to the appropriate page by default.)

You can still get to your overview page by going to your user page and clicking "OVERVIEW". The user pages of people who don't have same-named wiki accounts default to their overview pages but I don't think there's a way to make yours do this, with the possible exception of deleting your wiki account. You can of course edit your wiki page to have whatever links you want on it.

(By the way, the mapping between LW accounts and LW wiki accounts is not updated in real time. It's maintained by a job that runs once a day or so.)

I think they recommended you join the London meet-up listserv and ask there for a greater quantity of responses.

For reference, it's this thread.

This BuzzFeed article is accurate in every detail. (I'm currently the cat in #8.)

Yes. Playing spot the fallacy with mainstream media stuff should be generalizable.

Personally, I find pull-ups, push-ups and squats working fine for me so far. OK, you do need a bar for pull-ups.

I've found that preference to be common in Parkour communities, which might be another place to look.

You're going to want Building the Gymnastic Body, by the former gymnastics coach of the US national team IIRC. Keep in mind that to advance past a certain stage you will need to start weighting your dips and chin ups. But this can be accomplished in a variety of ways at home. A chin up bar and rings can be had for under $100, assuming you have a good spot for them.

Have you checked out r/bodyweightfitness?

the writing down of thoughts is or can be part of the 5-minute rule. Part of the 5 minutes of thinking of something is writing down your various ideas of how to solve it. The proposing solutions part is when you're actually talking to other people.

I sometimes have this problem when sleep deprived. Are you getting enough sleep?

This usually indicates a badly-initialised pointer - either it's zero and shouldn't be, or it is fooling a test-for-zero check through being filled with random garbage, and thus preventing program flow from correctly returning to the calling function. Suggest running the debugger to see if the problem goes away - this indicates the second issue, as the debugger will initialise all pointers not given an explicit value to zero; if it persists, you should at least be able to get a stack trace.

This happens to me fairly often while public speaking and (much less often) low-stress social settings. Not a complete mind blank, I do not lose awareness of my surroundings and so on, just completely lose my train of thought.

It was enough of a concern that I started keeping a diary of the circumstances. It nearly always boiled down to mind-wandering and its relatives: either focusing on a point I wanted to make down the line and not paying close enough attention to what I was saying at the moment (especially in public speaking), or thinking about something else during a social conversation. Sort of, operating on conversational auto-pilot, which seems to break down as soon as anything goes amiss (I make a spontaneous speech error & need to correct it but then suddenly am unsure of what I was saying; or someone makes an unexpected point and I wasn't paying close enough attention).

In public speaking I reduced this by switching from a highly rehearsed literal approach (writing up a script and then close-to-memorizing it), to something more based on a narrative arc, as in this post on public speaking ... I still get tongue-tied occasionally but not nearly as often, since I am only trying to get to each important point in the narrative but not trying to keep to a specific script.

In social conversation, my diary notes suggested this happened mostly during conversations that I wasn't so engaged with - not really such a concern except for social reasons it's not a great thing to zone out when someone else is talking to you.

So my feeling from an n=1 diary study (confounded with practice effects in public speaking), is that this is not a working memory problem for me, but more about distraction and focus.

The evidence so far suggests that practicing dual n-back will have few effects other than making you better at dual n-back. I wish I had better advice to offer, but right now all I can think of is "be mindful of the problem during conversation in general".

I also have this problem and would like to know how to fix it / if dual n-back might help.

We'll see who remembers first ;-)

If you look at history - events, trends, culture - what are the biggest things of which one can say, that only happened because the idea "utilitarianism" existed, it wouldn't have happened otherwise?

If Jeremy Bentham had not come up with utilitarianism, I don't think classical liberalism as we know it would exist today. He came up with a remarkable number of what we now consider "right" answers in the social sciences. And he obviously influenced plenty of important folks, including e.g. John Stuart Mill.

If that hadn't happened, I think other ideas would be more important instead, e.g. natural law and perhaps some vague appeals to egalitarianism.

Utilitarianism as distinct from consequentialism in general? (Can you narrow down exactly what idea you're asking about?)

As a starting point, let's try: "None. Ideas such as 'utilitarianism' only serve to justify actions after the fact, and the actual reasons for these actions are more along the lines of personal gain. People in positions of power who espouse utlitarianism as an ethical theory do so to demonstrate their chosen political affiliation."

Are there reasons to believe anything different?

Well, it's complicated. But let me point out three big differences which should be enough to start you thinking about things.

First, goals. Financial management at the personal level has the goal of having (at some point in the future) more money. Sovereign governments generally don't have a goal of more money in the future. Their goals are multiple and varied ranging from "stay in power for another year" to "help the economy produce the most it can".

Second, money. Countries usually can print their own money (a big exception: the eurozone) and a household cannot. The personal equivalent would be the ability to write "$10" on a piece of paper and have the store accept that piece of paper and give you $10 worth of goods in exchange.

Third, income. Countries can, within reason, decide what their income (aka taxes) would be. The household equivalent would be for you to tell your job "This year I want to be paid $X" and have it happen, just so.

Given all this, I am not at all sure that there is no limit to the debt/GDP ratio. I rather suspect that as that ratio grows, bad things become more likely (this has mostly to do with public expectations). Of course, even if household finances are the wrong metaphor, that claim is not in any way an argument for large debt/GDP ratios.

Steven Landsberg often writes about this very topic

Summary: Either the debt is paid for by taxes in the future or now; because we can save money, it doesn't make any difference. The problem is the level of spending (which affects how much must be paid) not the debt (which merely affects when it must be paid).

Was this an existing or proposed thing? If proposed, it was a city still being built in UAE IIRC - not sure that's much help!

EDIT: This, perhaps?

Not sure what Scramblers are exactly, but in 2001 I came up with some ideas about how AIs could do something like anthropic reasoning, without being sentient (which eventually incorporated into UDT). Here's the original post I wrote, which was titled no need for anthropic reasoning .

To the extent that anthropic reasoning works at all, it doesn't seem like sentience should be needed.

To use an analogy, it seems to me that this non-sentient site is sort of using anthropic reasoning.

Even as a researcher of practical implementations of quantum computers, I'm having difficulty answering this.

I'm tempted to go 50/50 with 1. We have AGI before large scale (more than 40 entangled computational qubit) quantum computers, or 2. Quantum computers will only marginally accelerate AGI timelines.

Large scale quantum computers would greatly accelerate research of a lot of sub-problems in chemistry and physics, but it's hard frame those gains in terms of what we need to do to actually build an AGI. From a fundamental algorithmic-gains perspective, I think quantum computers will remain niche for quite a while even after we can build large ones.

Then again, I think similar pessimism was expressed about digital computers shortly before they permeated just about every part of our culture. I'd be overjoyed if everyone had a quantum computer in their home.

Perhaps you would like to post this in the latest (July 2013) media thread? When I wonder what book to read next, I might look through the media threads, but not the open threads...

I get the description of Permutation City as shocking (I remember when a friend I lent the book to called me up in the middle of the day when he got to one of the wham sentences) but what in Diaspora was shocking?

I might have missed something in Neuropath. What I got from it was mostly a technotriller plot using near-future brain surgery to give people creepier versions of the sorts of Oliver Sacks delusions people already get when they get brain damage. The possibility of doing this doesn't seem like a very radical thesis if you already take it as given that the brain runs on physics.

I'd agree with the description of Permutation City as philosophically shocking, it had a very strange core idea in it that still wasn't obviously wrong.

Not exactly what you're looking for, but possibly helpful if you're not already aware of it: Bostrom's Singleton paper lists some advantages and disadvantages of having a single governing agent.

Programmer-defined if you're asking about what CEV focuses on to extrapolate at start.

No one knows. First one needs to find a coherent and extrapolatable definition of "human".

His "no evidence for Bayes, and therefore trusting Bayes is unskeptical" argument seems weak. Don't all ideas of evidence require philosophical underpinnings?

Also discussed here.

http://lesswrong.com/saved/
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/saved/

These look different but they apparently show the same things (as opposed to one showing main stuff and the other discussion stuff).

There isn't a link at the top of the main page but there are ones at the tops of recentposts and r/discussion.

The problem is that your current self probably objects to being modified in such a way.

Consider you were worried about an upcoming exam, and someone offered you a lobotomy, after which you wouldn't give a hoot about the exam anymore.

Your rejection to that probably translates to a rejection of the SMBC solution.

It's wireheading, that's what's wrong.

I wouldn't remove my dislike of dying because then I'd be more likely to die. (It's tautological that I judge the outcome based on my current preferences rather than those I'd hypothetically have when the outcome happens, because my preferences are my current preferences.)

Barring people from using their chosen fonts inhibits me from using a quick crank heuristic to save my time by ignoring them, so I would be against it. We should let them select themselves out of the memepool.

I suspect that there are times when it's appropriate to "use nonstandard fonts to good affect". Would it be just as easy to issue a warning with the option to "convert to standard font"? Then everyone wins.

Is there a benefit from doing that server-side rather than client-side? I've long since configured my web browser to always use my favorite font rather than whatever is suggested by any website.

How's that a fallacy? The utility function is not up for grabs. If I care more about people I know than about people I don't know, I may be evil/selfish/whatever, but I'm not (epistemically) wrong just because of that.

Why is that a fallacy? You SHOULD weight deaths that happen to people closer to and more like you more heavily. They're more likely to be indicative of risk of death to yourself, they are more likely to affect you in other ways, and they're more likely to be affect able BY you.

For a) you might partly be thinking of scope insensitivity (wikipedia calls it scope neglect).

(a) sounds a bit like the Availability Heuristic

A boring rant, it just takes some factoids nobody cares about and claims they are myths, without evidence. Like:

Which brings us to the next well guarded myth, with the opposite flavor. That if all insect suddenly died, we would also follow them soon thereafter.