Open Thread: August 2011

Trivial Inconvenience Alert: I just realized that I seldom browse the comment feeds anymore, since it now requires an extra click.

Possibly interesting article on winning: How to seem good at everything: Stop doing stupid shit

Summary, as I interpreted it: In practicing a skill, focus on increasing the minimum of the quality of the individual actions comprising performing the skill.

(Is this worth a /r/discussion link-post?)

Silly hypothesis: all reductionists are actually p-zombies. Lacking qualia, and generalizing from one example, we assume incorrectly that "qualia" must refer to something that our own brains do, and wind up constructing theories that try to explain qualia in terms of material processes.

I'm reading Mere Christianity, and boy howdy is it a hair-puller. It made me so mad that on about page 90 he was talking about donating to charity until it hurts, which reminded me of the current SIAI fundraiser. I know that donating money out of spite isn't exactly the healthiest of actions, but I've got $1000 that says fuck him.

A post in French about "You always want to be right!" presents an interesting hypothesis: People who always want to actually be right like corrections a lot (because they make them righter). So they emit a lot of them; whenever someone makes a mistake, they offer a patch. But most people dislike corrections; when presented with one, they distort it instead of updating. So they end up with two mistakes instead of one. This leads the corrector to emit another correction, making things worse. Therefore, the interlocutor sees someone who constantly tells them they're wrong, but is never right (because their words get distorted before reaching consciousness) - someone who refuses to lose debates ("who always want to be right").

This is interesting. In particular, it explains why I often get called this by people who seem, both to me and to others, to "always want to be right" (make obvious mistakes, refuse to admit them). If it were just Dunning-Kruger (people who think "Oh, I'm so good at changing my mind in response to evidence!" being worse at it, and getting called out), we shouldn't expect such a pattern.

Alternately, maybe they're accusing us of being clever arguers.

This situation is common - Alice cares about being right, verifiably changes her mind unusually often, including saying "You're right, I was wrong" during debates, likes to look at the evidence; Bob (according to several outsiders) often defends propositions like "The sky is green" in the face of contrary evidence, and gets angry when corrected; yet Bob accuses Alice of always wanting to be right.

It can't just be about status. Bob would just call Alice a jerk or something. The hypothesis I linked is the best I've seen so far. What's going on?

I really wish that someone would develop an algorithm that stitched together news, discussion and academic papers so that a debate could be tracked. I'd especially like it if, at the end, the system would spit out "RESOLVED: XYZ is true/sorta true/a total load. [Here's why.]"

I figure that you could currently train a machine to recognize a spin down in academic debates and hire someone who could then review the literature to write about the resolution.

I just feel the need to say this. I'm so tired of losing track of things and then never knowing whether I was right or wrong about some issue as a result.

So I recently came across this paper and http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.5849 which seemed relevant to us but which I really don't have time to read right now, not least due to the fact that I don't actually know anything of quantum information theory and so would need a bit more background to actually understand it.

The reason I thought it relevant was -- well, since I began to understand that QM runs on amplitudes, not probabilities, it's bothered me that we fundamentally still use probabilities rather than amplitudes to represent uncertainty. Of course there's good reasons for doing this (Savage...), it's good enough most of the time, and it's not at all clear how amplitudes could sensibly be assigned in most cases, but it still bugs me. I was wondering if this paper did anything to elucidate how such a setup might work? Because it seems to treat how you would go about conditioning on an event, and the lack of being able to do so seems a more fundamental obstacle than the ones I listed above.

If not, perhaps it's still relevant to us for other reasons anyway. :)

Does anyone know anything about cryonics in Europe? I've done some looking but I figured that there's bound to be someone that's already done the research.

I'm planning on recording myself reading at least one and possibly more sequences aloud, to be uploaded to dropbox, and posted on the comments, maybe to be collated in a post elsewhere later.

But I need a braindead simple voice recorder to do it because I'm crap with computers/ easily frustrated. MS audiorecorder does not have an immediately obvious way for me to (a) make the files it record end when I want them to, as opposed to after 60 seconds (b) always save as mp3. Audacity requires me to do magic shit with tarballs and unzipping if I want to export their .aup files as .mp3 as opposed to doing what would seem to me to be the sensible thing and make it work out of the box. I realise it's made by techies, for techies, but I want to register my frustration that they made something that is Windows compatible and didn't just package LAME painlessly with it. Beware Trivial Inconveniences and all that. I have VLC as well so if there's some way of doing it in that that just requires the right button clicks in the menu that'd be good too.

Help would be much appreciated.

Is there a way to rss subscribe to my message inbox, or to get emailed when someone replies to my posts?

Did the site layout just change, or is my browser doing funky things?