Open Thread, April 15-30, 2013

I know this comes up from time to time, but how soon until we split into more subreddits? Discussion is a bit of firehose lately, and has changed drastically from its earlier role as a place to clean up your post and get it ready for main. We get all kinds of meetup stuff, philosophical issues, and so forth which mostly lack relevance to me. Not knocking the topics (they are valuable to the people they serve) but it isn't helpful for me.

Mostly I am interested in scientific/technological stuff, especially if it is fairly speculative and in need of advocacy. Cryonics, satellite-based computing, cryptocurrency, open source software. Assessing probability and/or optimal development paths with statistics and clean epistemology is great, but I'm not super enthused about probability theory or philosophy for its own sake.

Simply having more threads in the techno-transhumanist category could increase the level of fun for me. But there also needs to be more of a space for long-term discussions. Initial reactions often aren't as useful as considered reactions a few days later. When they get bumped off the list in only a few days, that makes it harder to come back with considered responses, and it makes for fewer considered counter-responses. Ultimately the discussion is shallower as a result.

Also, the recent comments bar on the right is less immediately useful because you have to click to the Recent Comments page and scroll back to see anything more than a few hours in the past.

MIRI's strategy for 2013 involves more strongly focusing on math research, which I think is probably the right move, even though it leaves them with less use for me. (Math isn't my weakest suit, but not my strongest, either.)

Do we know any evolutionary reason why hypnosis is a thing?

Recantation by Gregory Cochran

The Linear Interpolation Fallacy: that if a lot of something is very bad, a little of it must be a little bad.

Most common in politics, where people describe the unpleasantness of Somalia or North Korea when arguing for more or less government regulation as if it had some kind of relevance. Silliest is when people try to argue over which of the two is worse. Establishing the silliness of this is easy. Somalia beats assimilation by the borg, so government power is bad. North Korea beats the Infinite Layers of the Abyss, so government power is good. Surely no universal principle of government can be changed by which contrived example I pick.

And, with a little thought, it seems clear that there is some intermediate amount of goverment that supports the most eudaemonia. Figuring out what that amount is and which side of it any given goverment lies on are important and hard questions. But looking at the extremes doesn't tell us anything about them.

(Treating "government power" as a scalar can be another fallacy, but I'll leave that for another post.)

What is the smartest group/cluster/sect/activity/clade/clan that is mostly composed of women? Related to the other thread on how to get more women into rationality besides HPMOR.

Ashkenazi dancing groups? Veterinarian College students? Linguistics students? Lilly Allen admirers?

No seriously, name guesses of really smart groups, identity labels etc... that you are nearly certain have more women than men.

How much difference can nootropics make to one's studying performance / habits? The problems are with motivation (the impulse to learn useful stuff winning out over the impulse to waste your time) and concentration (not losing interest / closing the book as soon as the first equation appears -- or, to be more clear, as soon as I anticipate a difficult task laying ahead). There are no other factors (to my knowledge) that have a negative impact on my studying habits.

Or, to put it differently: if a defective motivational system is the only thing standing between me and success, can I turn into an uber-nerd that studies 10 h/day by popping the right pills?

EDIT: Never messed with my neurochemistry before. Not depressed, not hyperactive... not ruling out some ADD though. My sleep "schedule" is messed up beyond belief; in truth, I don't think I've even tried to sleep like a normal person since childhood. Externally imposed schedules always result in chronic sleep deprivation; I habitually push myself to stay awake till a later hour than I had gone to sleep at the previous night (/morning/afternoon) -- all of this meaning, I don't trust myself to further mess with my sleeping habits. Of what I've read so far, selegiline seems closest to the effects I'm looking for, but then again all I know about nootropics I've learned in the past 6 hours. I can't guarantee I can find most substances in my country.

I've been reading Atlas Shrugged and seem to have caught a case of Randianism. Can anyone recommend treatment?

Request for practical advice on determining/discovering/deciding 'what you want.'

More Right

Edit: We reached our deadline on May 1st. Site is live.

Some of you may recall the previous announcement of the blog. I envisioned it as a site that discusses right wing ideas. Sanity but not value checking them. Steelmanning both the ideas themselves and the counterarguments. Most of the authors should be sympathetic to them, but a competent loyal opposition should be sought out. In sum a kind of inversion of the LessWrong demographics (see Alternative Politics Question). Outreach will not be a priority, mutual aid on an epistemically tricky path of knowledge seeking is.

The current core group working on making the site a reality consists of me, ErikM, Athrelon, KarmaKaiser and MichaelAnissimov and Abudhabi. As we approach launch time I've just sent out an email update to other contributors and those who haven't yet contributed but have contacted me. If you are interested in the hard to discuss subjects or the politics and want to join as a coauthor or approved commenter (we are seeking more) send me a PM with an email adress or comment here.

Article on an attempt to explain intelligence in thermodynamic terms.

I have a super dumb question.

So, if you allow me to divide by zero, I can derive a contradiction from the basic rules of arithmetic to the effect that any two numbers are equal. But there's a rule that I cannot divide by zero. In any other case, it seems like if I can derive a contradiction from basic operations of a system of, say, logic, then the logician is not allowed to say "Well...don't do that".

So there must be some other reason for the rule, 'don't divide by zero.' What is it?

Today, I finally took a racial/sexual Implicit Association Test.

I had always more or less accepted that it was, if not perfect, at least a fairly meaningful indicator of some sort of bias in the testing population. Now, I'm rather less confident in that conclusion.

According to the test, in terms of positive associations, I rank black women above black men above white women above white men. I do not think this is accurate.

Obviously, this is an atypical result, but I believe that I received it due to confounding factors which prevented the test from being an accurate reflection of my associations are likely to affect a large proportion of the testing population.

First, the most significant factor in how successful I was in correctly associating words and faces was simply practice. I made more mistakes in the first phase than the second phase, and more in the second than the third, etc. I believe that my test could have showed significantly different results simply by re-ordering the phases.

Second, I suspect that I was trying harder in the phases where I was matching black faces than white faces. I don't want to corrupt the test, but I also don't want it to tell me I'm a racist; would I have been so enthusiastic about making the final phase my most accurate one of all, if it had been matching white male faces rather than black male faces?

Third, I felt that many of the questions on the survey that followed the matching phase were too loaded to properly answer on their own terms. They presented a series of options from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree," where I felt that my real answer would most accurately be framed as ADBOC.

If anyone here has access to university resources and would like to collaborate on an experiment which would attempt to discern subjects' associations while correcting for these faults, please let me know.

Yet another fake number of sex partners self-reported:

Men report having more partners than women (15 partners versus an average of 9 partners for women).

Unless, of course, Canadian men tap the border.

Note: it basically evens out if you remove the 20+ partners boasters.

I keep accidentally accumulating small trinkets as presents or souvenirs from well-meaning relatives! Can anyone suggest a compact unit of furniture for storing/displaying these objects? Preferably in a way that is scalable, minimizes dustiness and falling-off and has pretty good ease of packing/unpacking. Surely there's a lifehack for this!

Or maybe I would appreciate suggestions on how to deal with this social phenomenon in general! I find that I appreciate the individual objects when I receive them, but after that initial moment, they just turn into ... stuff.

The Girl Scouts currently offer a badge in the "science of happiness." I don't have a daughter, but if you do, perhaps you should look into the "science of style" badge as well.

So far, I haven't found a good way to compare organizations for the blind other than reading their wikipedia pages.

And, well, blindness organizations are frankly a political issue. Finding unbiased information on them is horribly difficult. Add to this my relatively weak Google-fu, and I haven't found much.

Conclusions:

• NFB is identity politics. They're also extremely assertive.
• AFB focuses on technology, inherited Hellen Keller's everything, etc.
• ACB... umm... exists. They did give me a scholarship, and made the case for accessible money (Good luck with that. :P), I guess.

I want to find the one with the most to offer, and take advantage of those opportunities.

The difficulty is figuring out which one is the most useful. NFB comes across as cultish and pushing their ideology on anyone who comes to them, and they seem to be ignoring medical professionals advising them against using sleep shades on people with residual sight in their training programs. Also, their specialized cane sounds like an identity symbol more than a utility maximizer; it has better reach, but is flimsy-yet-unfolding and gets in the way. I do like the implication that it optimizes arm usage, but otherwise it sounds annoying.

On the upside, they seem to be the loudest, and as we all know, America is the country where the loudest get large chunks of attention. I've read some of their legal recommendations, and they seem to be the work of someone who knows how to aim for a goal and shoot until they hit it. Also, they're intense about braille.

Meanwhile, I'm imagining AFB being a possible avenue for getting my hands on a blasted tactile display, and possibly other meaningful technology-related projects, without having to put up indoctrination shields. Eah, there doesn't seem to be as much to say on them, which tells me that they have much less to criticize, but at the same time, it makes me wonder if they're powerful enough for the vague notion of whatever nonspecific ideas spawned this investigation.

NFB's sleep shades and specialized cane are rational for their purpose: to force the trainee to strengthen blindness as an identifying quality. They have other excuses--sleep shades prepare people for the possibility of losing what sight they have, the specialized cane provides better reach and is easier on the arms--but in light of the responses to these, and their responses to those responses, it's pretty clear that the identity advertisement is their main purpose. And quite frankly, that's annoying; my vision is not an identifying quality I care much about, so much as it's an obstacle that's made its troubles much clearer to me as of late. None of the other organizations seem to be functionally equivalent to the NFB, minus that element. Their main rival, the ACB, doesn't seem to do much of anything other than have fancy meetings and occasionally talk to legal people.

Gah, I would just continue ignoring them all, as I always have, if I wasn't living in a freakin' box.

I would like to recommend Nick Winter's book, The Motivation Hacker. From an announcement posted recently to the Minicamp Graduates mailing list:

"The book takes Luke's post about the Motivation Equation and tries to answer the question, how far can you go? How much motivation can you create with these hacks? (Turns out, a lot.) Using the example of eighteen missions I pursued over three months, it goes over in more detail how to get yourself to want to do what you always wanted to want to do."

(Disclaimer: I hadn't heard of Nick Winter until a friend forwarded me the email containing that announcement, and I have no interest in promoting the book other than to help folks here attain their goals more effectively.)

Sex. I have a problem with it and would like to solve it. I get seriously anxious every time I'm about to have sex for the first time with a new partner. Further times are great and awesome. But the first time leaves me very anxious; which makes me delay it as much as I can. This is not optimal. I don't know how to fix it, if anyone can help I'd be greatly grateful

--

I notice I'm confused: I always tried to keep a healthy life: sleeping many hours, no alcohol, no smoke. I've just been living 5 days in a different country with some friends. We sleep 7 hours at most, they are smoking all the time, I've drank once. We hardly eat: My face looks better, I feel better, I just look healthier. Also feel like that. Possible confounds: I live mostly alone, now I'm also hanging out with at least 3 people, usually closer to 10. I'm going out and dancing at least 4 hours every night. I'm talking to new people every night. I don't know how I'd go about to test what caused this, but I'd like to know and keep that factor in my life. Any ideas?

A few of you may know I have a blog called Greatplay.net, located at... surprise... http://www.greatplay.net. I’ve heard some people that discovered my site much later than they otherwise would because the name of the site didn’t communicate what it was about well and sounded unprofessional.

Why Greatplay.net in the first place? I picked it when I was 12, because it was (1) short, (2) pronounceable, (3) communicable without any risk of the other person misspelling it, and (4) did not communicate any information about what the site would be about, so I could mold the site as I grew.

Now after >2 years of blogging about basically the same thing, I think my blog will always be about utilitarianism (both practical and philosophical), lifestyle design (my quest to make myself more productive and frugal, mainly so I can be a better utilitarian), political commentary (from a utilitarian perspective), and psychology (of morality and community and that which basically underlies practical utilitarianism).

I probably would want to talk about religion/atheism from time to time, which used to be my biggest interest, but I can already tell it's moderately unpopular with my current readership (yawnnn... we really have to go over why the Bible has errors again?) and I'm already personally getting increasingly bored with it, so I can do away with discussing atheism if I needed to keep to a "topic"-focused blog.

Basically, at this point, I think I stand to gain more by making my blog and domain name more descriptive than I stand to lose by risking my interests shifting away from utilitarianism (or at least the public discussion thereof). But the big question... what should I name my blog?

Option #1: Keep with Greatplay.net: There will be costs with shifting to a new domain name. The monetary cost is mostly insignificant (<$20/yr for a new domain name), but it will take a moderate amount of time to move all the archives over and make sure all the new hyperlinks on the site work. Also, there will be confusion among the readership, and everyone who was linking to my site externally would now be linking to dead stuff. So, if I've misestimated the benefits of moving, I might want to stick with the current name and not incur the costs.

Option #2: Go to PeterHurford.com: I already use this site as an online résumé of sorts, so I wouldn't need to get the domain. This also seems the most descriptive of what the site would be about (a personal blog, about me) and fits in with what the cool kids are doing. However, some of my opinions are controversial relative to the mainstream and I don't know what I'll be doing in my future. Keeping my real name hidden from my website might be an asset (so I don't lose opportunities because of association with unpopular mainstream opinions), though it might also be a drawback (I think I have gotten some recognition and opportunity from those who share my unpopular mainstream opinions).

Option #3: A new name: If Option #1 and #2 don't work, I'd want to just rename the blog to something descriptive of a blog about utilitarianism. Some ideas I've come up with:

• A Shallow Pond
• The Everyday Utilitarian
• Everyday Utilitarianism
• Commonsense Utilitarianism
• A Utilful Mind (credit to palladias)

Though feel free to suggest your own!

Is tickling a type of pain?

Does anyone have any real-world, object-level examples of degenerate cases)?

I think degeneracy has some mileage in terms of explaining certain types of category error, (eg. "atheism is a religion"), but a lot of people just switch off when they start hearing a mathematical example. So far, the only example I've come up with is a platform pass at a train station, which is a degenerate case of a train ticket. It gets you on the platform and lets you travel a certain number of stops (zero) down the train line.

Anyone want to propose any others?

There's a phenomenon I'd like more research done on. Specifically, the ability to sense solid objects nonvisually without direct physical contact.

I suspect that there might be some association with the human echolocation phenomenon. I've found evidence that there is definitely an audio component; I entirely by accident simulated it in a wav file (It was a long time before I could listen to that all the way through, for the strong sense that something was reaching for my head; system2 had little say in the matter).

I've also done my own experiments involving covering my ears, and have still been able to sense things to some extent, if more weakly. I notice that if I walk around with headphones on, I have a much harder time getting a sense of my surroundings.

The size of the object, and its proximity to my head are related to how well I can sense it (large walls and trees are easier than bike racks or benches. My college had a lot of knee-high brick walls lining its paths, which was hell on my normal navigation methods).

My selfish motivation for researching this is that, if it can be perfectly simulated in audio, then game accessibility has a potential avenue to gain much strength. I would like to understand it even without that perk, though.

If there is, in fact, decent published research on this that I don't know about, I'd be grateful if someone could provide one or more links. Otherwise, I'd like an idea of who I might contact to try and initiate such research; at the moment, I'm considering recommending it to Lighthouse International.

In chapter 1 of his book Reasoning about Rational Agents, Michael Wooldridge identifies some of the reasons for trying to build rational AI agents in logic:

There are some in the AI research community who believe that logic is (to put it crudely) the work of the devil, and that the effort devoted to such problems as logical knowledge representation and theorem proving over the years has been, at best, a waste of time. At least a brief justification for the use of logic therefore seems necessary.

First, by fixing on a structured, well-defined artificial language (as opposed to unstructured, ill-defined natural language), it is possible to investigate the question of what can be expressed in a rigorous, mathematical way (see, for example, Emerson and Halpern [50], where the expressive power of a number of temporal logics are compared formally). Another major advantage is that any ambiguity can be removed (see, e.g., proofs of the unique readability of propositional logic and first-order predicate logic [52, pp.39-43]).

Transparency is another advantage: "By expressing the properties of agents, and multiagent systems as logical axioms and theorems in a language with clear semantics, the focal points of (the theory) are explicit. The theory is transparent; properties, interrelationships, and inferences are open to examination. This contrasts with the use of computer code, which requires implementational and control aspects within which the issues to be tested can often become confused." [68, p.88]

Finally, by adopting a logic-based approach, one makes available all the results and techniques of what is arguably the oldest, richest, most fundamental, and best-established branch of mathematics.

I started following DavidM's meditation technique Is there anything that I should know? Any advice or reasons on why I should choose a different type of meditation?

Sometimes, success is the first step towards a specific kind of failure.

I heard that the most difficult moment for a company is the moment it starts making decent money. Until then, the partners shared a common dream and worked together against the rest of the world. Suddenly, the profit is getting close to one million, and each partner becomes aware that he made the most important contributions, while the others did less critical things which technically could be done by employees, so having to share the whole million with them equally is completely stupid. At this moment the company often falls apart.

When a group of people becomes very successful, fighting against other people within the group can bring higher profit than cooperating against the environment. It is like playing a variant of a Prisonner's Dilemma where the game ends at the first defection and the rewards for defection are growing each turn. It's only semi-iterated; if you cooperate, you can continue to cooperate in the next turn, but if you manage to defect successfully, there may be no revenge, because the other person will be out.

Will something like this happen to the rationalist community one day (assuming the Singularity will not happen soon)? At this moment, there are small islands of sanity in the vast oceans of irrationality. But what if some day LW-style rationality becomes popular? What are the risks of success analogical to a successful company falling apart?

I can imagine that many charismatic leaders will try to become known as the most rational individual on the planet. (If rationality becomes 1000× more popular than it is today, imagine the possible temptations: people sending you millions of dollars to support your mission, hundreds of willing attractive poly partners, millions of fans...) There will be honest competition, which is good, but there will also be backstabbing. Some groups will experiment with mixing 99% rationality and 1% applause lights (or maybe 90% rationality and 10% applause lights), where "applause lights" will be different for different groups; it could be religion, marxism, feminism, libertarianism, racism, whatever. Or perhaps just removing the controversial parts, starting with many-worlds interpretation. Groups which optimize for popularity could spread faster; the question is how quickly would they diverge from rationality.

Do you think an outcome like this is likely? Do you think it is good or bad? (Maybe it is better to have million people with 90% of rationality, than only a thousand with 99% of rationality.) When will it happen? How could we prevent it?

Does anybody on here use at-home EEG monitors? (Something like http://www.emotiv.com/store/hardware/epoc-bci-eeg/developer-neuroheadset/ although that one looks rather expensive)

If you do, do you get any utility out of them?

Cal Newport and Scott H. Young are collobarating to form a start deliberate practice course by email. Here's an excerpt from on Cal's emails to inquiring people:

The goal of the course is simple: to teach you how to apply the principles of deliberate practice to become a stand out in your job.

Why is this important? The Career Capital Theory I teach in my latest book and on Study Hacks maintains that the skills that make you remarkable are also your leverage for taking control of your working life, and transforming it into a source of passion.

The goal for Scott and I in offering a limited pilot run of the course at this point, is to get feedback from real people in real jobs. Adapting deliberate practice to knowledge work is difficult. We think experiments of this type are the only way to keep advancing our understanding.

The course lasts four weeks and is e-mail based. During each week you will receive three e-mails concluding with a concrete action step to help you solidify what you learned and start applying it to your life immediately.

Here is the curriculum: Week One: Mapping out How Success Actually Works in Your Field Week Two: Hard Facts, Driving Your Career by Metrics Week Three: Designing and Choosing Projects to Build Skills Faster Week Four: Enabling Deep Work

Does this sound like it's worth $100?

I think that the open thread belongs in Discussion, not Main.

The Care and Feeding of Your Extrovert

In a few places — possibly here! — I've recently seen people refer to governments as being agents, in an economic or optimizing sense. But when I reflect on the idea that humans are only kinda-sorta agents, it seems obvious to me that organizations generally are not. (And governments are a sort of organization.)

People often refer to governments, political parties, charities, or corporations as having goals ... and even as having specific goals which are written down here in this constitution, party platform, or mission statement. They express dismay and outrage when these organizations act in ways that contradict or ignore those stated goals.

Does this really make sense?

It seems to me that just as the art or science of acting like you have goals is "instrumental rationality", it may be that the art or science of causing organizations to act like they have goals is called "management".

[link] XKCD on saving time; http://xkcd.com/1205/ Image URL (for hotlinking/embedding): http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/is_it_wor Though it will probably be mostly unseen as the month is about to end.

I encountered this cute summary of priming findings, thought you guys might like it, too:

You are walking into a room. There is a man sitting behind a table. You sit down across from him. The man sits higher than you, which makes you feel relatively powerless. But he gives you a mug of hot coffee. The warm mug makes you like the man a little more. You warm to him so to speak. He asks you about your relationship with your significant other. You lean on the table. It is wobbly, so you say that your relationship is very stable. You take a sip from the coffee. It is bitter. Now you think the man is a jerk for having asked you about your personal life. Then the man hands you the test. It is attached to a heavy clipboard, which makes you think the test is important. You’re probably not going to do well, because the cover sheet is red. But wait—what a relief!—on the first page is a picture of Einstein! Now you are going to ace the test. If only there wasn’t that lingering smell of the cleaning fluid that was used to sanitize the room. It makes you want to clean the crumbs, which must have been left by a previous test-taker, from the tabletop. You need to focus. Fortunately, there is a ray of sunlight coming through the window. It leaves a bright spot on the floor. At last you can concentrate on the test. The final question of the test asks you to form a sentence that includes the words gray, Florida, bingo, and pension. You leave the room, walking slowly…

How do you people pronounce MIRI? To rhyme with Siri?

Amanda Knox and evolutionary psychology - two of LessWrong's favorite topics, together in one news article / opinion piece.

The author explains the anti-Knox reaction as essentially a spandrel of an ev. psych reaction. Money quote:

In our evolutionary past, small groups of hunter-gatherers needed enforcers, individuals who took it upon themselves to punish slackers and transgressors to maintain group cohesion. We evolved this way. As a result, some people are born to be punishers. They are hard-wired for it.

I'm skeptical of the ev. psych because it seems to require a fairly strong form of group selection pressure. But I thought folks might find it interesting.

I am aware that there have been several discussions over to what extent x-rationality translates to actual improved outcomes, at least outside of certain very hard problems like metaethics. It seems to me that one of the best ways to translate epistemic rationality directly into actual utility is through financial investment/speculation, and so this would be a good subject for discussion (I assume it probably has been discussed before, but I've read most of this website and cannot remember any in depth-thread about this, except for the mention of markets being at least partially anti-inductive).

Partially the reason for my writing this is that I have been reading about neuroeconomics and doing some academic research of my own (as in actually running experiments), and I am shocked by how near-universal irrational behavior displayed is (and therefore, exploitable by more rational agents). Even professional traders behavior is swayed by things like fluctuating testosterone levels. (Not that I know how to compensate for this!)

On a related note I've also been thinking about:

1) Applications for machine learning/narrow AI to finance.

2) Economic irrationality invalidating the libertarian free-market ideas, and possibly libertarianism in general, seeing as personal decisions can often be conceptualized economically. (I should point out that libertarianism used to appeal to me, and I find this line of reasoning mildly disturbing)

3) Gender relations, and the possibility that men are on average better at maths then women has been discussed here, and so discussion of the possibility that women are generally better at finance (see link above) could be beneficial, both in the context of pointing out opportunities to female rationalists, and to help dispel any appearance of misogyny that this community may have.

Again, I can't remember these being discussed here, and (1) seems very relevant to this community, although (2) is probably mind-killing and not very productive, unless any of us actually have the power to influence politics.

Apologies if this all has been already discussed in-depth somewhere.

I wonder if many people are putting off buying a bitcoin to hang onto, due more to trivial inconvenience than calculation of expected value. There's a bit of work involved in buying bitcoins, either getting your funds into mtgox or finding someone willing to accept paypal/other convenient internet money sources.

Request for a textbook (or similar) followup to The Selfish Gene and/or The Moral Animal. Preferably with some math, but it's not necessary.

I could swear Zach Weiner reads this forum.

I have noticed an inconsistency between the number of comments actually present on a post and the number declared at the beginning of its comments section, the former often being one less than the latter.

For example, of the seven discussion posts starting at "Pascal's wager" and working back, the "Pascal's wager" post at the moment has 10 comments and says there are 10, but the previous six all show a count one more than the actual number of visible comments. Two of them say there is 1 comment, yet there are no comments and the text "There doesn't seem to be anything here" appears. These are meetup announcements that I would not expect anyone to be posting banworthy comments to.

There is no sign of comments having being deleted or banned, and even if something of the sort is what has happened, I would expect the comment count displayed on a page to agree with the number of accessible comments.

On the Discussion page itself, the comment count displayed for each post agrees with the comment count displayed within the post.

This has most likely been mentioned in various places, but is it possible to make new meetup posts (via the "Add new meetup" button) to only show up under "Nearest Meetups", and not be in Discussion? Also, renaming the link to "Upcoming Meetups" to match the title on that page, and listing more than two - perhaps a rolling schedule of the next 7 days.

Is there a nice way of being notified about new comments on posts I found interesting / commented on / etc? I know there is a "comments" RSS feed, but it's hard to filter out interesting stuff from there.

... or a "number of green posts" indicator near the post titles when listing them? (I know it's a) takes someone to code it b) my gut feeling is that it would take a little more than usual resources, but maybe someone knows of an easier way of the same effect.)

Is there anyone going to the April CFAR Workshop that could pick me up from the airport? I'll be arriving at San Francisco International at 5 PM if anyone can help me get out there. (I think I have a ride back to the airport after the workshop covered, but if I don't I'll ask that seperately.)

Who is the best pro-feminist blogger still active? In the past I enjoyed reading Ozy Frantz, Clarisse Thorn, Julia Wise and Yvain, but none of them post regularly anymore. Who's left?

Is there a secret URL to display the oldest LW posts?

I wrote something on Facebook recently that may interest people, so I'll cross-post it here.

Cem Sertoglu of Earlybird Venture Capital asked me: "will traders be able to look at their algorithms, and adjust them to prevent what happened yesterday from recurring?

My reply was:

I wouldn't be surprised if traders will be able to update their algorithms so that this particular problem doesn't re-occur, but traders have very little incentive to write their algorithms such that those algorithms would be significantly more robust in general. The approaches they use now are intrinsically not as transparent as (e.g.) logic-based approaches to software agent design, but they are more immediately profitable than logic-based approaches.

Wall Street has tried before to update its systems to be more robust, but their "band-aids" approach won't be sufficient. For example: in response to the flash crash of 2010, regulators installed a kind of "circuit breaker" that halts trading when there are extreme changes in a stock's price. Unfortunately, this did not prevent high-frequency trading programs from disrupting markets again on August 1st, 2012, in part because the circuit breaker wasn't also programmed to halt trading if there were extreme changes in the number of shares being traded (see: http://is.gd/vBqf53).

We can design multi-agent ecosystems using only logic-based agents that are (in some cases) subject to "formal verification" (mathematical proof of correct operation). See, for example, http://is.gd/XgRJYn. But these approaches haven't seen nearly as much development as the approaches currently in use on Wall Street, because they are not as immediately profitable.

Only regulators could have sufficient incentive to implement a more trustworthy ecosystem of high-frequency trading programs, but they succumbed to regulatory capture long ago, and therefore won't do anything so drastic.

I'm not too worried about the next 5 years, though. Mostly it will just be momentary scares, like the flash crash and the recent fake tweet disruption. I'm more worried about the far more powerful autonomous programs of the future, and those programs are the focus of our research at MIRI.

Considering making my livejournal into something resembling the rationality diaries (I'd keep the horrible rambling/stupid posts for honesty/archival purposes). I can't tell if this is a good idea or not; the probability that it'd end like everything else I do (quietly stewing where only I bother going) seems absurdly high. On the other hand, trying to draw this kind of attention to it and adding structure would probably help spawn success spirals. Perhaps I should try posting on a schedule (Sunday/Tuesday/Thursday seems good, since weekends typically suck and probably will motivate me to post, but holding off on that until Monday could keep me in a negative mindset that could delay rebounding). I suppose I'll have an answer (to the question that no one asked) by Sunday, then, unless someone convinces me one way or the other before then.

I started browsing under Google Chrome for Android on a tablet recently. Since there's no tablet equivalent of mouse hovering, to see where a link points without opening it I have to press and hold on it. For off-site links in posts and comments, though, LW passes them through api.viglink.com, so I can't see the original URL through press-and-hold. Is there a way to turn that function off, or an Android-compatible browser plugin to reverse it?

(Edit: Posted and discussed here.)

Some folks here might want to know that the Center for Effective Altruism is recruiting for a Finance & Fundraising Manager:

Would you like to gain experience in non-profit operations by working for the Centre for Effective Altruism, a young and rapidly expanding charity based in Oxford? If so, we encourage you to apply to join our Graduate Volunteer Scheme as Finance and Fundraising Manager

I've always felt that Atlas Shrugged was mostly an annoying ad nauseum attack on the same strawman over and over, but given the recent critique of Google, Amazon and others working to minimize their tax payments, I may have underestimated human idiocy:

the Public Accounts Committee, whose general verdict was that while companies weren't doing anything legally wrong when they shifted profits around the world to lower their total tax bill, the practice was "immoral".

On the other hand, these are people wearing their MP hats, they probably sing a different tune as board members. Or maybe Britain is overdue for another Thatcher.

To quote (apparently) Arthur Godfrey,

I'm proud to pay taxes in the United States; the only thing is, I could be just as proud for half the money.

What happened to that article on cold fusion? Did the author delete it?

Is there anyway to see authors classified by h-index? Google scholar seems not to have that functionality. And online lists only exist of some topics...

Lewis Dennett and Pinker for instance have nearly the same h-index.

Ed Witten's is much larger than Stephen Hawkings..... etc........

If you know where to find listings of top h-indexes, please let me know!

Art Carden, guest blogger at Econlog, advocates Bayes theorem as a strategy for maintaining serenity here.

I remember seeing a post (or more than one?) where Yudkowsky exhorts smart people (e.g. hedge fund managers) to conquer mismanaged countries, but I can't find it by googling.

Does anyone have a link?

I heard a speaker claim that the frequency of names in the Gospels matches the list of most popular names in the time and place they are set, not the time and place they are accepted to have been written in. I hadn't heard this argument before and couldn't think of a refutation. Assuming his facts are accurate, is this a problem?

Toying around with the Kelly criterion I get that the amount I should spend on insurance increases with my income though my intuition says that the higher your income is the less you should insure. Can someone less confused about the Kelly criterion provide some kind of calculation?

For anyone asking, I wondered if, given income and savings rate how much should be invested in bonds, stocks, etc. and how much should be put into insurance, e.g. health, fire, car, etc. from a purely monetary perspective.

Jimmy Kimmel's show has no trouble finding people on the street to give a confident answer to a nonsensical question. (Happily, not all the interviewees do this.)

Here's something I think should exist, but don't know if it does: a list of interesting mental / neurological disorders, referencing the subjects they have bearing on.

Does this exist already?

So, I have a primitive system for keeping track of my weight: I weigh myself daily and put the number in a log file. Every so often I make a plot. Here is the current one. I have been diligent about writing down the numbers, but I have not made the plot for at least a year, so while I was aware that I'm heavier now than during last summer, I had no idea of the visual impact of that weight loss and regain. My immediate thought: Now what the devil was I doing in May of 2012, and can I repeat it this year and avoid whatever happened in July-August?

Hmm... come to think of it, I was taking allergy meds, and then I stopped taking them. If that's it, probably not replicable.

Further hmm, my daughter was born in early April last year. Stress? I did not consciously notice being stressed, but perhaps I wouldn't; at any rate my routine, obviously, was rather disrupted. Timing is not quite right, but there could be some lag.

North Korea is threatening to start a nuclear war. The rest of the world seems to be dismissing this threat, claiming it's being done for domestic political reasons. It's true that North Korea has in the past made what have turned out to be false threats, and the North Korean leadership would almost certainly be made much worse off if they started an all out war.

But imagine that North Korea does launch a first strike nuclear attack, and later investigations reveal that the North Korean leadership truly believed that it was about to be attacked and so made the threats in an attempt to get the U.S. to take a less aggressive posture. Wouldn't future historians (perhaps suffering from hindsight bias) judge us to be idiots for ignoring clear and repeated threats from a nuclear-armed government that appeared crazy (map doesn't match territory) and obsessed with war.

I want to change the stylesheets on a wordpress blog so the default font is Baskerville. I'm not too experienced with editing CSS files, anyone here good at that? I know how to manually make each paragraph Baskerville.

Are you a guy that wants more social interaction? Do you wish you could get complimented on your appearance?

Grow a beard! For some reason, it seems to be socially acceptable to compliment guys on a full, >1", neatly trimmed beard. I've gotten compliments on mine from both men and women, although requests to touch it come mostly from the latter (but aren't always sexual--women with no sexual attraction to men also like it). Getting the compliments pretty much invariably improves my mood; so I highly recommend it if you have the follicular support.

How feasible is it for a private individual in a western developed country to conduct or commission their own brain scan?

Howdy - comment to some person I haven't identified but will probably read this:

I appreciate the upvotes, but please only upvote my comments if you agree with them/like them/find them interesting/whatever. I'm trying to calibrate what the Less Wrong community wants/doesn't want, and straight-ticket upvoting messes with that calibration, which is already dealing with extremely noisy and conflicting data.

Now that school's out for the summer, I have an additional 40 hours per week or so of free time.

How would you use that?

Anybody on here ever sold eggs (female human gametes)? Experiences? Advice on how best to do it?

I came across this post on Quora and it strikes me as very plausible. The summary is essentially this: "Become the type of person who can achieve the things you want to achieve." What's your (considered) opinion?

Also, this seems relevant to the post I linked, but I'm not sure exactly how.

It's an old point, probably made by Robin Hanson, that if you want to donate to charity you should actually boast about it as much as possible to get your friends to do the same, rather than doing the status-preserving, humble saint act.

I think it might be worth making an app on facebook, say, that would allow people to boast anonymously. Let's say your offered the chance to see if your friends are donating. Hopefully people bite - curiousity makes them accept (no obligation to do anything after all). But now they know that their friends are giving and they aren't. "Do as you're friends have done!" we tell them "donate a little" you'll even encourage others to donate, and nobody can accuse you of boasting...

Thoughts?

I found this blog post on the commensurate wage fallacy, and am wondering if there are any glaring errors (you know, besides the lack of citations).

Help me get matrix multiplication? (Intuitively understand.) I've asked google and read through http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/31725/what-does-matrix-multiplication-actually-mean and similar pages&articles , and I get what linear functions mean. I've had it explained in terms of transformation matrices and I get how those work and I'm somewhat familiar with them from opengl. But it's always seemed like additional complexity that happens to work (and sometimes happens to work in a cute way) because it's this combination of multiplication and addition, and a lot of algorithms involve a bunch of multiplication and addition at some point.

I used to not get trigonometric functions either; I could compute them and I got certain things they did and I did see that there wasn't really other stuff that could do what they could do, but a lot of stuff like secant seemed totally arbitrary, but then I asked a prof and he was all "geometric interpretation!" and then it clicked. I think.

Are there any psychometric or aptitude tests that are worth taking as an adult?

Just got bitten again by the silent -5 karma bug that happens when a post upthread from the one you're replying to gets downvoted below the threshold while you're writing your reply. If we can spare the developer resources, which I expect we can't, it would be nice if that didn't happen.

Overheard this on the bus: “If Christians are opposed to abortion because they think fetuses are people, how comes they don't hold funerals for miscarriages?”

This article is fascinating: http://io9.com/5963263/how-nasa-will-build-its-very-first-warp-drive

A NASA physicist called Harold White suggests that if he tweaks the design of an 'Alcubierre Drive', extremely fast space travel is possible. It bends spacetime around itself, apparently. I don't know enough about physics to be able to call 'shenanigans' - what do other people think?

All (90%) of rationalist women who would not otherwise have become rationalist women became so because of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

Thus, we need 50 shades of Grey Matter.

As well as good marketing designs of things that attract women into rationality.

Which are the bestselling books if you only consider women? What about the best movies for women?

Your Strength As A Rationalist [LINK]

This site is filled with examples, but this one is particularly noteworthy because they're completely unsurprised and, indeed, claim it as confirming evidence for their beliefs.

Is anyone here skilled at avoiding strawmanning and categorizing people's views? We could do with some tricks for this, kind of like the opposite of "feminist bingo".

This is a funny video for people familiar with the r/atheism community.