Open thread, August 26 - September 1, 2013

(as we both work at Google, and our peers are working on AI.)

Speaking of False Consensus Effect, when you say this, are you mentioning something which is already public knowledge, like self-driving cars or Google now, or are you talking about some other project that perhaps people outside of Google haven't even heard of and you can't talk about in detail? There are a lot of things that someone might call to mind when they hear someone else say "our peers are working on AI." But I wouldn't be surprised if I was getting the entirely wrong impression from this sentence and I should try to avoid that.

I don't understand. What's wrong with 80%?

A few weeks ago I started assessing my own calibration, using tools such as the CFAR calibration game. I got fairly good and concluded that I am relatively well calibrated.

TIL this app exists. Thank you.

After using it for half an hour it turns out that I am well calibrated at probabilities except 80% and 90%. Weird.

Anyhow, could this be combined with a program such as Anki? Meaning, that you place the answer in your head and indicate how certain you are in percent. If correct, the card will be placed accordingly into the future. This should work splendidly with learning vocab for linguistically close languages.

Hey, thanks for mentioning this. I hadn't heard about it.

I've tried my hand at this app (50 questions or so), and it seems like the correct strategy, for me, is to go 50% for anything I have a little doubt on, and 99% for that I'm sure about. Maybe 5% of the questions fall into the 60%-90% range.

I'm still working to understand the tutorial and how to interpret my results.

That seems like a great norm... under assumption that the goal of the debate is to speak meaningfully, as opposed to trying to get more power to one's group. Because, if the true goal is more power to the tribe, then declaring all opponents stupid or evil and repeating the party line in a situation where it cannot be opposed is obviously the winning strategy.

But this could be a funny game -- be the first person to declare that some applause light of the given group is "obvious", and then support it with a wrong argument. The goal is to calibrate the level of wrongness precisely so that someone within the group will recognize the wrongness, but they will be a very small minority and afraid to speak loudly against the applause lights. (And if they speak, then attack them and let them feel the wrath of the group.)

Uhm, to excuse this evil game, I should probably find some positive purpose. So... let's say that it teaches people to examine the arguments critically even if they already agree with the conclusion.

Here is an (imaginary) example:

At a meeting of Amnesty International: "Everyone knows that racism is evil and unscientific. I don't want to hear any more of this bullshit of innate racial differences in IQ. Cognitive science has proved that intelligence is not a function of brain, but of kidneys, and all races have exactly the same kidneys. So I ask all racists to please shut up." A wave of applause. Then, a silent trembling voice: "Are you sure intelligence is in the kidneys? I never heard about such research and I am a cognitive scientists..." Acting offended: "Shut up, you nazi, how dare you!"

If X is obvious, you should say "X" and everyone will know you are right.

Clearly you have not spent much time on teh interwebs... :-D

This sounds exceedingly interesting. Please clarify on the "few days on ice," does that mean they were cryogenically frozen, or...

Hopefully someone will create a new discussion thread for it.

It's a hard decision, I feel for you.

Having observed several people in a similar situation, I saw them go through the reasoning you describe. If you discard the virtue-ethics non-consequentialist reasons, like "One should love one's relatives" (regardless of how bad they are), or "You owe them, for their past good deeds " (despite all the poisonous and mean stuff they inflicted on you), you are left with enumerating options and calculating utilities.

At least one person I know had decided that the emotional damage of maintaining contact outweighs any potential financial benefits and severed her connections with one part of the family entirely, instead relying on her friends for socializing and emotional support. When her parents passed away some years later, they left their millions to some church charity and nothing to her, but that was already factored in her decision and so was not a big upset.

Another managed to learn to detach himself emotionally from whatever is going on at the meetings, by treating his family as low-level NPCs who simply follow their faulty programming and are no more worthy of being upset at than a wordprocessor program with a bug in it. I think nurses go through this kind of training.

If you are not sure that you can implement the second option (and you clearly have trouble ignoring at least one overly critical LW regular, who is not even your relative), then maybe finding some convenient excuses to avoid family gatherings is a better approach.

Oh, another approach I have seen was to build an alliance/support network out of the less bigoted part of the family. YMMV.

There is also a number of decent self-help books on the subject, like Toxic Parents.

Good luck!

They keep you well calibrated about the level of insanity in the society. They allow you to not only have a good model of the society, but to also feel it on a gut level.

Advice that you probably don't need to hear, but might be useful to someone in a similar situation:

If you do cut family ties, try to do so without hurting anyone or burning any bridges. The outside view says you're likely to reconcile in 5-10 years, and that's a lot easier if you drifted apart than if you had a big cathartic fight.

meet potential allies who are by default more loyal to you than other people. if you can act nice to family they will like you way more than strangers will and a network of people you can rely on and who can rely on you is a useful and awesome thing to have. meeting the few members of your family that agree with you can also be positive and fun.

Don't forget to add status quo bias. Most people think its important to care about horrible family members, and not doing so because you obviously shouldn't just seems weird.

Deciding that you don't really care about continuing your relationship with those family members can be freeing because it means that you can do anything in their presence.

It can be fun when you talk with a religious person to just argue a more fundamentalist position then them for one meeting and see how they will deal with it.

If you are going to memorize any logs, you should only bother memorizing logs of primes, since you can add those together to get other numbers.

Pharmacy stuff Brand & generic name pairs for prescription drugs. Classes & mechanisms of action for prescription drugs. 1st line therapies for various diseases. Etc.

Mandarin Chinese *Mostly just doing vocab at the moment, but have used it for listening (MP3 clips), writing, & grammar.

Misc work stuff Names of new employees (they're Chinese names, so difficult to remember) Who is the contact person for what (eg if you want a new email account, you need to contact Mrs. Wu YiJun for approval)

I don't really see much use for Anki for everyday life, honestly, because I don't have too many things I need to memorize right now.

However, some people at the LessWrong DC group have started learning Lojban, and Anki is just the biggest possible stick to hit the "learn words in a new language" problem with. I've learned a lot of words just doing that for a week. I still have to learn grammar concepts, but having a bigger vocabulary at my fingertips is pretty great.

If you live in London, the tube map can become suffiiciently memorised to serve for pegs in itself.

Mnemonics

Using anki to memorize a complete 3 digit peg list allows you to do some pretty impressive memory feats, including recalling long lists in order, and memorizing really long numbers.

Background: I've been using Anki for about 2.5 years. I have done the following:

• (+3) assorted unusual English vocabulary (English is my first language)
• (+1) the NATO phonetic alphabet
• (+2) hiragana and katakana
• (0) phone numbers of family and friends
• (+2) the streets of San Francisco
• (+1) assorted technical concepts, some LW-related

The numbers in parentheses are my rough impression of usefulness and/or enjoyment on a possibly familiar scale of -10 to +10. When I was first getting used to Anki and only using it for English, the usefulness was around (-1), for reasons I can get into if anyone's interested.

My biggest problems with Anki are first that it's a pain to input cards in a useful way, and second that for some things (e.g. hiragana and katakana) a more structured format would be strictly better.

The street grid layout for the city you live in, if relevant. Not very hard and allows you to understand locations much more easily if you live in a city where people speak in terms of cross streets. Don't go overboard trying to remember places you'll never go and other exceptional situations.

Some stuff I used Anki for:

• Japanese (I have decks for kana, vocabulary, grammar rules...), that's the one I've used the most consistently for the past six months or so.
• Paris subway map (which color is line 8? Which is the green subway line? What lines pass at Montparnasse-Bienvenue? What is the east terminus of line 1?); not particularly useful but should help consolidate my mental map of Paris; I haven't been reviewing that very consistenly but know it pretty well by now.
• A few misc. facts in AI and robotics; I made the mistake of putting too much stuff I don't really care about, and despite a few cleanups haven't been reviewing this consistently

A couple years ago I had used Anki with some pre-made decks (German, Lesswrong sequences), but reviewing it started feeling like a chore, and I stopped. It's easier to stay focused with cards I made myself.

When I'm in Japan I jot down all the phrases I learn on a piece of paper, and then later on enter them into Anki (I also have a running list of "things I would like to be able to say").

A related question: What sort of time per card have long-term Anki users experienced?

As a first "project" with Anki, I've been learning english vocabulary. Half are new words, and half are words I recognized but understood only vaguely. I have 2300 cards, and spent around 18 hours reviewing and 8 hours collating cards, which is around 40 seconds per card. Three months out, I'm reviewing ~30 cards a day in ~2 minutes.

I feel like a fool when I think that I've spent 26 hours studying vocabulary this summer, but I'm pretty pleased with the equivalent "40 seconds to learn a new word". More generally, the cumulative time spent on any habit will sound pyschotic when quoted over long time periods: 4 minutes a day is 24 hours over a year.

CFA exam: There are many dry facts to be learnt.

Driving Theory Test: What different roadsigns mean and so on.

Sports teams: I don't care about sports but it's handy to be able to understand colleagues' conversations.

Genocides: Because it is sad nobody even remembers most of them.

Latin phrases: A part of my education I missed.

The Lord's Prayer: Because going to hell is a bad idea.

Facts from books I have read: Because otherwise I'd just forget them in a year.

Small exponents: e.g. 6^3.

I do 1-3 on a regular basis, though path 2) is ridiculously prone to bias. Part 4 is probably where I'm stuck right now...

The NERSC suoercomputing facility, which I believe is adjunct to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, would be worth looking into. Or the Computational Research Division also at LBNL. I know other California national labs are heavily into supercomputing as well. It's a government job so the risk is pretty low.

I've seen a few similar positions recently. Haven't been paying that much attention to them, since they're usually looking for deeper graphics experience than I have, but I expect you ought to be able to find something.

This Monster posting seems representative.

D. E. Shaw Research hires algorithm and software developers:

Candidates should have a demonstrated track record of academic, industrial, and/or open-source accomplishments. Relevant areas of expertise might include parallel computing on high performance computing systems employing multi-core, GPU, or special-purpose architectures, numerical analysis, C/C++, or Python programming, data-intensive computing, compilers, operating systems, or distributed systems, but specific knowledge of and level of experience in any of these areas is less critical than exceptional intellectual ability.

They are in NYC. I've heard that they offer outstanding salaries (considering the wealth of the founder, they are unlikely to run out of funds).

A doctor friend's sister-in-law suffers similar pain. My friend and I discussed her condition, and he told me in private "yeah, she's screwed". From what I recall of the conversation, doctors have just no idea what do to with a patient like this.

I'm not sure how to go about this but it feels like it should be possible for some price.

That, in a nutshell, is the reason we spend so much on healthcare for remarkably little effect.

MetaMed? (See also.) (And also.)

My wife has similar-sounding pain. She was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia (which, as far as I can tell so far, appears to be in many cases a diagnosis of exclusion - we don't know what causes this, so we'll put it in the Fibromyalgia bucket) and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which makes her connective tissues weaker than normal.

We have tried quite a few things with varying degrees of success.

• Trigger Point Therapy - A type of massage therapy that focuses on treating a muscular phenomenon named (poorly, in my opinion) "trigger points". In brief, these are small regions of muscle that become constantly contracted and unable to relax. I'm not aware of the specific mechanism that causes this. Trigger points can have strange effects, including pain appearing in different parts of the body than where the muscular problem exists. The best resource we have found on this is this work by Travell and Simons. Here is the volume for the lower extremeties. We have had good success with this sort of treatment, but we have to keep treating. It's worth investigating, even if the problems seem like joint or nerve pain. Many of the referred pain patterns appear in joints, for example. I don't know how well-researched this phenomenon is - many doctors seem to be unaware of it's existence.
• Other forms of massage therapy give her some temporary relief.
• Aquatic physical therapy - This involved exercises and stretching in a pool kept at about 80F, and it seemed to have a large positive effect. I'm not certain of the exact exercises done, but if you're interested I can find out.
• We have explored possible dietary factors, and have found that removing wheat has some effects on other conditions, but we can't correlate it strongly to pain.
• Stress reduction - Stressful events cause her pain levels to rise quite a lot, and it takes quite some effort to bring the pain back down after an event. It appears that the pain and stress work in a positive-feedback loop to make things worse.
• Alcohol - We've discovered that she hurts much less when mildly inebriated. Obviously this isn't a good solution, but it does offer some temporary escape from the pain.

Have they checked for rheumatoid arthritis (and not just with a blood test, it doesn't always show)? It took many doctors vists for them to get the correct diagnosis for my wife (despite a history of it in her family).

Is the joint pain constant or on movement? Does it react to heat/cold?

IANAD (I Am Not A Doctor) but I'd check a variety of inflammation markers (the more the better) with special attention paid to possible autoimmune issues. I assume the usual suspects (arthritis, gout) were ruled out?

If I were you I'd try more doctors (third, fourth, fifth, etc.) hoping to hit one of three: (1) someone highly competent; (2) someone lucky to order the right test; (3) someone with determination to figure it out.

See also Scott Sonnon -- he's got a system of joint mobility exercises that seems to be gentle and effective. I find that the series that starts here is the easiest to follow.

A friend of mine suffered from undiagnosable pain in her joints for about a decade as well. About a year ago she discovered it was lime disease. Have any doctors you've talked to already eliminated that possibility?

I would try some form of bodywork.

The Taoist standing meditation that NancyLebovitz suggest would be one way. If you don't want to do something that comes from a religion Feldenkrais would be a good choice.

I'm not sure if you have already tested for this. Please have the test for hyperthyroidism done. My wife had a problem with a finger ache and after many tests, we eventualy zero-ed in on hyperthyroidism.

As we don't know the content of the logs it's difficult to assess the value that conceiling the logs has to Eliezer. Without a person who would plausible pay real money to him for revealing the logs I don't think it makes sense for Eliezer to give you a $ number.

are your expectations for more structure useful for your purposes in keeping a journal?

I write paragraphs beneath headings, to prevent rambling.

My journal is primarily is revision record for my life, something Future Me can look up and cross reference against memory to refresh on why certain choices were made or how landmark events made me feel. The second purpose is to brainstorm on and explore upcoming choices and current events, to be honest with myself on how I feel. As a result my journal is a shameless full-disclosure letter to Future Me, and that works for me.

Ask yourself why you keep a journal? What is the goal? Then write to achieve your goal.

If that doesn't work, split your existing entries into similar groups.

• Notes to future self.
• Messages to an audience.
• essays.

Now work backwards from those groups to assess your motivations. Perhaps you want to split your journal into three sections, one to address your future self, one to vent into and get stuff off your chest, and one to explore and summarize ideas.

Please provide feedback.

I haven' t seen anything about human evolution and lullabies, and I'd really like to.

When I was a student I spent a lot of time in class writing down what was being said, and reading my notes later on, there's a lot of stuff I don't remember learning. When I look stuff up on Wikipedia because I'm curious, I don't think I remember less than when I was writing everything down.

Now I tend to only write down a very short summary of the most interesting/surprising bits, ideally with a diagram or silly drawing, but then I haven't been reading much textbooks recently. If I was back in "I nead to learn all this new information" mode, I'd probably do a mix of exercises, and Anki.

Depends how well you retain it. Note-taking is a highly effective mnemonic technique for some people; not so much for others.

If you're going to be doing the work of transcribing it anyway, it might be a good idea to put it into an Anki deck or other spaced repetition framework, so as to make later reinforcement easier if you need it.

I would generally value a million lives over cultural information. We're always producing more culture, anyway; it's kind of what we do, as a species. Any particular set of in-jokes, songs, and stories is, I think, less valuable than a million people who will make more.

Is it better for the last million people of a certain population to die, or for two million people all around the world, randomly selected and evenly distributed, to die?

I would kill the million, every time. (I can imagine populations of size 1,000,000 which I would value more than 2,000,000 random humans, but I don't think any have yet existed.)

What about 1,000,000 versus 1,000,001? I'm not sure. I think that could depend on the population in question.

I'd like to preserve the culture, but not at the cost of a million lives.

Depends on whether that culture was going to disappear anyway (quite a few cultures seem doomed today), and how valuable and unique it is. It's sad that we lost a lot of information about the ancient greeks, but information about say the various central asian seems less regretted.

That depends on how you define the population. Killing the worst 1 million people (people who have caused the most harm to other people, and would continue to cause significant harm) instead of 2 million random people would be a very large net benefit. There have probably been few or no traditional populations (nations, cultures, political movements, etc.) that would be worth completely eradicating, and probably never an entire 1 million people in such a population worth killing out of hand, but if I was forced to choose, I think I could find examples in the 20th century.

That depends. Is knowledge of a culture worth a million people's lives?

What do you mean with "certain population"? Any selection of one million people describes a population.

people are mostly interchangeable. i'd save the million.

Fortunately, it's not the kind of choice we're generally offered in the real world.

You might find the last couple of paragraphs of this quote useful.

In order:

1:This kind of thing does not come up.

2:If it did, the moral obligation is to find a third option.

3: The million would be the lesser evil, but is exceedingly unlikely to to actually die, as an identifiable group faced with the prospect of a loosing that high a number of its membership is going to exert a lot more leverage than the world at large is going to exert over a one in 3.500 chance of death.

One option is to have clients enter their source, destination, bid, and the range of times when they'd be willing to travel, and to have an algorithm for selecting the highest revenue path (which won't always mean accepting the highest bid, if slightly lower bids can chain together destinations and sources). (There could also be a secondary market to fill any otherwise-empty legs in this path.) The operations problem of creating this algorithm seems related to the traveling salesman problem (it's a different problem, but may involve similar math).

But I expect that, to maximize revenue, satisfying the highest-paying clients will be more important than efficiency in maximizing the number of paying clients per hour. Prices of trips are likely to vary by more than an order of magnitude, and trips with a fixed source, destination, and time would tend to get lower bids. He might even want to give some of these otherwise-empty trips away for free, (e.g., as "upgrades" to airline passengers who were scheduled on that route, in order to build goodwill with airlines who are now sharing the airport with him, and who may be able to do him favors like transporting passengers who he has to cancel on).

There are complications in terms of the timing of booking (regardless of whether there are secondary auctions), because some high-paying clients will want to book at the last minute and get a trip ASAP, while others will want to book in advance and have a guarantee that the trip will go as scheduled. So the revenue-maximizing strategy would probably involve a mix of trips booked in advance and trips booked closer to the departure time, with some preference for clients who are more flexible about timing or cancellations.

I think the correct solution probably involves hiring secretaries to manage the whole affair instead of bidding on a website.

Also, it feels, bizarrely, like cheating.

But that's a good thing, isn't it? I mean, that's what rational Harry Potter would do.

Try finding a tutor that will let you make short videos of them doing the signs, and then you can put those videos into Anki. (At least I hope it is possible to put videos in Anki, never tried. Or maybe photos.) Could be more efficient than usual learning.

how to negotiate schedules and rates

Decide in advance how much is acceptable for you. Find out the minimum hourly wage in your area. Those are your limits. You can start by offering something in the middle of this interval.

I paid $25/hr for an ASL tutor in Washington DC. I found it to be a lot worse than taking a community college class. My tutor was Deaf, but didn't have a lot of teaching experience. She wasn't very good at steering the convos into new vocabulary ("Tell me about what you did last week" involved a lot of repetition). And she was much better at helping me pick up vocab (which I was decent at on my own) than grammar/expression. I ended up stopping the lessons and looking for a better option.

The inverse of the Ackermann function grows very slowly but is not primitive recursive. That is, the function f where f(n) is the smallest m such that A(m) exceeds n. Of course, this is hardly a different method of proof.

Let me see if I can unpack this idea a bit more.

CEV is based on the idea that there is an algorithm that can look at the state of my brain, filter out various kinds of noise, and extrapolate what sort of desires and values I'd want to have if I lived in a kinder more benevolent society, wasn't subject to nearly as many serious cognitive biases, etc.

The problem I'm seeing is that the origin and meaning of terms like 'desire' and 'value' are in prescientific culture - folk psychology. they were created by people in absolute ignorance about how brains work, and it seems increasingly plausible that these concepts will be totally inadequate for any accurate scientific explanation of how brains produce human behaviour.

It seems to be common sense that desires and values and the like are indispensable theoretical posits simply because they are all we have. Our brains' extremely limited metacogntive abilities prevent us from modelling ourselves as brains, so our brains invent a kind of mythology to explain their behaviour, which is pure confabulation.

If these ideas are right, by asking CEV to consider folk psychological ideas like desires and values, we would be committing it to the existence of things that just aren't really present in our brain states in any objective sense.

In the worst case, running CEV might be somewhat analogous to asking the AI to use Aristotelian physics to build a better airplane.

What we perceive as the fragility and complexity of human based values might not map onto brain states at all - 'values' as we wish to conceive of them may not exist outside of narrative fiction and philosophy papers.

My recent thinking on these topics has been heavily influenced by the writings of Scott Bakker , Daniel Hutto and Peter Watts' Blindsight

I hope I'm wrong about this stuff, but I don't have the training to fully analyze and debunk these ideas by myself - if it's even possible. I hope LW and MIRI have some insights about these issues, because I am seriously troubled by the apparent implications for the future of humanity.

I think it's in chapter 3 of Jaynes' *Probability theory". Also (google is your friend), check here or here.

Open subcomment thread: If you think it's worth saying, but not worth its own top-level reply in the open comment thread, you're too much of a nitpicker and seriously need to recalibrate your expectations of either what's worth saying or how much a comment costs.