Open Thread, April 1-15, 2013

I propose "Confusion Awareness Day".

Oh, Wikipedia gave me a feel today

Did you know... ...that Walter Baxter wrote about the gay Batman–Kent relationship?

(snicker)
(click)

The officer and the batman are captured after a Japanese attack. Kent initially divulges nothing more than his name, rank and serial number, but after being shown how his fellow soldiers had been tortured, and he is threatened with the same, he reveals to his Japanese interrogator all of the information he knows. After an air raid, Anson is able to escape, also saving Kent. Their relationship resumes, and Kent kills a soldier who has figured this out and tried to blackmail him. After the company has arrived in India, Kent attempts suicide, but when unsuccessful, finds himself happy to be alive, and to be with Anson.

...

LATER LIFE: The trials were disheartening for Baxter, and he would not write another book. Christopher Isherwood wrote in 1961 that Baxter "... has become a rather tragic self-pitying drunken figure with a philosophy of failure."

Poignant.

I'm glad to report that I am one of those who make this achievement possible by occupying the other 98%. Indeed I believe I am supporting the high ranking of a good 50% of the forecasters.

More seriously, congratulations. :)

Congratulations! I also received it (thanks not the least to your posts). I wonder how many other LWers participate and who else (if anybody) got their invitations.

Can't help but get the impression that even people here aren't very good at Googling. Maybe they should be taking Google's little search class; knowing how to search seems like the sort of skill that would payoff constantly over a lifetime.

It appears to me that in half of these examples people hadn't tried to google at all. It doesn't seem particularly likely to me that the class would develop such a habit. Not that I have a better idea.

Since April 2013:

• http://lesswrong.com/lw/hbp/using_evolution_for_marriage_or_sex/8xn2
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/hb6/links_passing_through_apiviglinkcom/8v0g
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/4n8/rationality_quotes_march_2011/8uoo
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/h7r/open_thread_april_1530_2013/8tca
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/jb9/some_notes_on_existential_risk_from_nuclear_war/a6k2
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/j24/to_like_or_not_to_like/a1pj
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/ing/open_thread_september_1622_2013/9ren
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/ikg/yet_more_stupid_questions/9qgc
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/i7t/rationality_quotes_august_2013/9ocd
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/ic0/where_ive_changed_my_mind_on_my_approach_to/9m2o
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/hva/open_thread_july_115_2013/9by7
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/hsd/start_under_the_streetlight_then_push_into_the/98ur
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/hgm/open_thread_may_1731_2013/932n
• http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jc8/harry_potter_and_the_methods_of_rationality/a7fo

This is epic.

Since December 2013:

• http://lesswrong.com/lw/kid/this_is_why_we_cant_have_social_science/b40h
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/kge/question_lesswrong_web_traffic_data/b2wq
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/kfb/open_thread_30_june_2014_6_july_2014/b1xd
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/k6r/open_thread_may_5_11_2014/avtl
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/jys/what_colleges_look_for_in_extracurricular/aqn6
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/jr8/open_thread_february_25_march_3/an4q

Great point I saw in the discussion:

Look at it like a cryptographer: Is putting a brain in liquid nitrogen a secure erasure method against all future attacks from a determined opponent with lots of resources? Would you trust your financial data to such a method of data erasure?

It's really, really saddening that he of all people has been an outspoken deathist and now it's depriving him of any chance whatsoever. (Well, except for hypothetical ultra-remote reconstruction by FAI or something.)

Hopefully he'll get around to doing some sort of "where I wanted to take the Culture series; ideas which I may have spun into novels" brain dump, before he dies.

I realise it's a constructed example, but a videogame that would be even remotely accurate in modelling the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire strikes me as unrealistically ambitious. I would at any rate start out with Easter Island, which at least is a relatively small and closed system.

Another point is that, if you gave the player the same levers that the actual emperors had, it's not completely clear that the fall could be prevented; but I suppose you could give points on doing better than historically.

A big part of education today is memorization. Perhaps it is wrong, but it is going to stay here for a while anyway. And at least partially it is necessary; how else would one learn e.g. a vocabulary of a foreign language?

So while it is great to invent games that teach principles instead of memorization, let's not forget that there is a ton of low-hanging fruit in making the memorization more pleasant. If we could just take all the memorization of elementary and high school, and turn it into one big cool game, it would probably make the world a much better place. How much resources (especially human resources) do we spend today on forcing the kids to learn things they try to avoid learning? Instead we could just give them a computer game, and leave teachers only with the task of explaining things. Everyone could get today's high school level education without most of the frustration.

Recently I started using Anki for memorization, and it seems to work great. But I still need some minimum willpower to start it every day. For me that is easy, because with my small amounts of data, I get usually 10-20 questions a day. But if I tried to use it in real time for high-school knowledge, that would be much more. Also, today I know exactly why I am learning, but for a small child it is an externally imposed duty, with uncertain rewards in a very far future. So some additional rewards would be nice.

It could be interesting to make a school where in the morning the students would play some gamified Anki system, and in the afternoon they would work in groups or discuss topics with teachers.

These games already exist for many things, good enough that watching Letsplays of them are probably more efficient than most deliberately educational videos. It's just finding them and realizing it's that tricky.

Games relevant to this discussion include Rome: Total War and Kerbal Space Program. Look them up.

Have you played the Portal games? They include lots of things you mention... they introduce how to use the portal gun, for example, not by explaining stuff but giving you a simplified version first... then the full feature set... and then there are all the other things with different physical properties. I can definitely imagine some Portal Advanced game when you'll actually have to use equations to calculate trajectories.

Nevertheless... I'd really like to be persuaded otherwise, but the ability to read Very Confusing Stuff, without any working model, and make sense of it can't really be avoided after a while. We can't really build a game out of every scientific paper, due to the amount of time required to write a game vs. a page of text... (even though I'd love to play games instead of reading papers. And it sounds definitely doable with CS papers. What about a conference accepting games as submissions?)

One point is that while memorizing specific causes of the fall of the roman empire may not be especially useful, acquiring the self-discipline necessary to do this without a game to motivate you might be very useful.

There are many people having thoughts along these lines, I think. Before forging ahead too much on your own it would be worth poking around to see what's already being done (e.g. Valve started some kind of initiative to get Portal played in schools as part of physics classes or something).

It sounds to me like it has a lot in common with the noncentral fallacy. There's a general tendency to think of groups in terms of their central members and not their noncentral ones. This both makes sneaking in connotations by noncentral labels possible, and makes "all central foos are bar" feel like the same thing as "all foos are bar".

Why can't people say "some foos are bar" or "foos tend to be bar"? My default interpretation of "foos are bar" is "all foos are bar". I tend to classify confident assertions that "foos are bar" with clear counterexamples as blustering. We already know from Philip Tetlock's work that hedgehogs who make predictions based on simple models tend to be more confident, more widely quoted in the media, and more wrong than foxes who make equivocal, better-calibrated predictions based on more complicated models.

I think there may actually be a bit of a group coordination problem here--hedgehogs gain status from appearing confident and getting quoted in the media, but they're spreading low-quality info. So it's a case of personal gain at the expense of group loss. I'm inclined to call people out for hedgehog-style behavior as a way of dealing with this coordination problem. (In case it's not obvious, I frequently see hedgehog-style predictions from LW-affiliated people and find them annoying and unconvincing.)

[Aside] I'm not sure how I feel about Scott Adams in general. I enjoyed his work a lot when I was younger, but he seems very prone to being contrarian for its own sake and over-estimating his competence in unrelated domains.

I'm a little surprised he didn't try Alexander Technique, an efficient movement method which was developed by F.M. Alexander to cure his serious problems with speaking-- problems which sound a good bit like vocal dystonia.

The problem may be that F.M. Alexander was an actor, and his technique has remained best known in the theater arts community.

In other news, Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight is about people whose range of sensory comfort is mismatched to what's generally expected. It's a problem that doesn't just happen to people on the autistic spectrum.

There's some help for it-- what was in the book was putting people in a non-stressful environment and gradually introducing difficult stimuli-- but working with this problem is cleverly concealed under occupational therapy, where no one is likely to find it.

Do you have registered user numbers for those services where this is meaningful?

Also, I assume you've see this and this, but just in case you hadn't . . .

To address your (a) comment, some countries have implemented close approximations to NGDP level targeting after the 2008 crisis, and have done well. They include most obviously Iceland (despite a severe financial crisis), and some less obvious instances like Australia, Poland and Isreal. One could point to the UK as the clearest counterexample, but just about everyone agrees that they have severe structural problems, which NGDPLT is not intended to address. And even then, monetary easing has allowed the conservative government to implement fiscal austerity without crashing the economy - this was widely expected to happen and there was a lot of public concern (compare the situation in the US wrt the "fiscal cliff" and "sequestration" scares. Here too, the Fed offset the negative fiscal effect by printing money).

As for (b), nobody argues that money hoarding is a bad thing per se. But it needs to be offset, because practically all prices in the economy are expressed in terms of money, and the price system cannot take the impact without severe side effects and misallocations. Inflation targeting is a very rough way of doing this, but it's just not good enough (see George Selgin's book Less than Zero for an argument to this effect). ISTM that this is not well understood in the mainstream ("NK") macro literature, where supply shocks are confusingly modeled as "markup shocks". I have seen cutting-edge papers pointing out that these make inflation targeting unsound (sorry for not having a ref here).

Yes!

The comment is from hacker news thread about Bitcoin hitting $100. It would be cool to have him also expand more on bitcoin itself which he seems to regard as destructive but not necessarily doomed to fail? Here he entertains the idea about combining NGDP level targeting (which I don't understand) with the best parts of Bitcoin. This all sounds very interesting.

Can someone suggest the best reference available that I could link to?

The free will (solution)) page?

From this day forward all speculation and armchair theorizing on LessWrong should be written in Comic Sans.

Shouldn't it? Isn't epistemic hygiene correlated with font choice in known cases? I mean, if someone posts something in Comic Sans ...

Eyeballing this, the effect size is tiny. Looking at their own measurements, it is statistically significant, but barely.

ADDED: Hmm... I missed the second page. Over there is more explanation of the analysis. In particular:

But this analysis gives us a way to quantify the advantage to Baskerville. It’s small, but it’s about a 1% to 2% difference — 1.5% to be exact, which may seem small but to me is rather large... Many online marketers would kill for a 2% advantage either in more clicks or more clicks leading to sales.

Point taken. This is large enough that it might be useful. However, I don't think it is a large enough bias to be important for rationalist.

I’m doing a research project on attraction and various romantic strategies.

Excellent! An area in which there has been far less formal research than the usefulness of the knowledge calls for. I'll be interested in seeing your results once you publish them.

Are you also going to try to gauge how friendly to women each technique is?

Your sign up form doesn't say anything about the amount of time/effort that you expect students to invest into the course.

Good to know that someone's keeping the ol' Illuminati flame burning. Pope Bob would be proud.

The thing I find most curious about the Illuminati conspiracy theory is that if you look at the doctrines of the historical Bavarian Illuminati, they are pretty unremarkable to any educated person today. The Illuminati were basically secular humanists — they wanted secular government, morality and charity founded on "the brotherhood of man" rather than on religious obedience, education for women, and so on. They were secret because these ideas were illegal in the conservative Catholic dictatorship of 18th-century Bavaria — which suppressed the group promptly when their security failed.

If CFAR becomes at all successful, conspiracists will start referring to it as an Illuminati group. They will not be entirely wrong.

or is it just that people who are attracted to LW are very unlikely to have chemical addictions?

To busy with the internet addictions?

Caffeine addiction is pretty popular, and I bet we have quite a few on adderall. Is that not what you mean?

Have you had a chemical addiction? [pollid:422]

Unfortunately, the poll options don't seem to include ticky-boxes, so I don't see an elegant way to ask about which chemicals.

Surely I'm missing something?

Perhaps more practice?

Your writing isn't very clear.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/ou/if_you_demand_magic_magic_wont_help/8o31 is a good example. To me it isn't clear what point you want to make with that post.

I get the impression that you try to list a few facts that you consider to be true instead of trying to make a point. It might help you to edit your writing to remove words that don't help you to make the point that you want to make.

When it comes to real life conversations, lack of interest overlap is rarely the main problem. Even if you know nothing about a topic you can have a conversation where the other person explains you something about the topic.

The problem is more emotional. If you are anxious than it's hard for a conversation to flow.

*For disclosure, my own writing isn't the clearest either. It's still a lot better than it was in the past.

If you supply a sample or two of your writing in context from other forums, perhaps it will be easier for someone here to see a pattern of what you're doing.

A very common phenomenon is that people are inhibited from doing work because they don't like the quality of what they produce. If they are a little sleep-deprived or drunk, they can avoid this inhibition. I think you're talking about something else, though.

~5 hours after I usually go to bed is an incredibly productive period of time for me. So the timing doesn't correspond, but the "part of my brain that usually wants to shift attention" does.

Alas, no such protocol exists. So just go for it.

Start a new Group Rationality Diary post.

you probably need fundamental mathematical insights, and it's damn hard to predict those.

We can still try. As it happens, a perfectly relevant paper was just released: "On the distribution of time-to-proof of mathematical conjectures"

What is the productivity of Science? Can we measure an evolution of the production of mathematicians over history? Can we predict the waiting time till the proof of a challenging conjecture such as the P-versus-NP problem? Motivated by these questions, we revisit a suggestion published recently and debated in the "New Scientist" that the historical distribution of time-to-proof's, i.e., of waiting times between formulation of a mathematical conjecture and its proof, can be quantified and gives meaningful insights in the future development of still open conjectures. We find however evidence that the mathematical process of creation is too much non-stationary, with too little data and constraints, to allow for a meaningful conclusion. In particular, the approximate unsteady exponential growth of human population, and arguably that of mathematicians, essentially hides the true distribution. Another issue is the incompleteness of the dataset available. In conclusion we cannot really reject the simplest model of an exponential rate of conjecture proof with a rate of 0.01/year for the dataset that we have studied, translating into an average waiting time to proof of 100 years. We hope that the presented methodology, combining the mathematics of recurrent processes, linking proved and still open conjectures, with different empirical constraints, will be useful for other similar investigations probing the productivity associated with mankind growth and creativity.

They took the 144 from the Wikipedia list of conjectures; their population covariate is just an exponential equation they borrowed from somewhere. Regardless, they turn in the result one would basically expect: a constant chance of solving a problem in each time period. (In turn, this and the correlation with population suggests to me that solving conjectures is more parallel than serial: delays are related more to how much mathematical effort is being devoted to each problem.)

Why so narrow as to exclude good computer science, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, etc...programs from consideration?

No advice from me, sorry. But I am interested in what you'd be doing. To be succinct, do you want to write for a philosophy audience, or an AI researcher audience?

Consider contacting the NYC LW email list.

I think using Pomodoros is more fun because you can do things like record how many assignments you grade per Pomodoro. Now you can keep track of your "high score" and try to break it. Competition is fun and worth leveraging for motivation, even if it's with your past selves.

I should do this for more people than Quirrel

CFAR's notion of agency is roughly "the opposite of sphexishness," a concept named after the behavior of a particular kind of wasp:

Some Sphex wasps drop a paralyzed insect near the opening of the nest. Before taking provisions into the nest, the Sphex first inspects the nest, leaving the prey outside. During the inspection, an experimenter can move the prey a few inches away from the opening. When the Sphex emerges from the nest ready to drag in the prey, it finds the prey missing. The Sphex quickly locates the moved prey, but now its behavioral "program" has been reset. After dragging the prey back to the opening of the nest, once again the Sphex is compelled to inspect the nest, so the prey is again dropped and left outside during another stereotypical inspection of the nest. This iteration can be repeated again and again, with the Sphex never seeming to notice what is going on, never able to escape from its programmed sequence of behaviors. Dennett's argument quotes an account of Sphex behavior from Dean Wooldridge's Machinery of the Brain (1963). Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett have used this mechanistic behavior as an example of how seemingly thoughtful behavior can actually be quite mindless, the opposite of free will (or, as Hofstadter described it, sphexishness).

So ants don't have agency. The difference between intelligence and agency seems to me to vanish for sufficiently intelligent minds but is relevant to humans. Like ArisKatsaris I think that for humans, intelligence is the ability to solve problems but agency is the ability to prioritize which problems to solve. It seems to me to be much easier to test for intelligence than for agency; I thought for a little bit awhile ago about how to test my own agency (and in particular to see how it varies with time of day, hunger level, etc.) but didn't come up with any good ideas.

One sign of sphexishness in humans is chasing after lost purposes.

How about "agency" as the extent by which people are moved to action by deliberate thought and by preferences they're aware of -- as opposed to by habit, instinct, social expectations or various unconscious drives.

That's pretty much similar to Luke's definition I guess.

Is this different from, say, intelligence as an "ability to reason, plan, solve problems"?

It's different in that it also chooses which problems to seek to solve, in accordance to one's own self-aware preferences .

Are there examples of intelligent non-agents or non-intelligent agents?

Lots of intelligent non-agents -- a pocket calculator for example.

Do you mind pointing out exactly where he says that?

As far as I know, it's because breaking conservation of energy means that relativity is borked.

Let me explain. Conservation of energy is a logical consequence of the fact that experiments performed in different places or at different speeds turn out the same way. In other words, "how fast you are going doesn't matter" -> "conservation of energy". Equivalently, "no conservation of energy" -> "how fast you are going can change things".

We believe relativity is true in large because of how speed and position are invariant in physics (iirc, this is the insight used to generate the theory of relativity in the first place). Once the reasons to believe in relativity go out the window, so does its baggage - specifically, the injunction against FTL.

so I think this is a real thing

Is this meant to imply that you didn't previously think this is a real thing or that you hadn't heard of it until now? It's apparently a well-studied phenomenon, I think I know people who experience it, and it's completely consistent with my current model of human psychology.

I think this has to do with the difference between work and curiosity mode. In curiosity mode solving problems is much easier, but stress reliably kills it. Once the stress is gone, the answers come pouring out.

It's extremely common with certain learning disabilities, like dyslexia and to a lesser extent dyscalculia. For many people, it's the time limit, rather than the seriousness of the task itself, and eliminating the time limit to take the test permits them to finish it without issue (frequently within the time limit!).

In the class I TA for, the students can go to the professor's office hours after the midterm / final, and if they can solve the problem there, they still get... half of the points? I wonder how that one affects test-taking performance.

Also, this whole thing seems to be annoyingly resistant to Bayesian updates... "Every time I'm anxious I perform bad, and now I'm worried about being too worried for this exam", and, since performing bad is a very valid prediction in this state of mind, worry is there to stay.

Maybe if the tests are called "quizzes" the students end up in the other stable state of "not being worried"?

Based on the description at the LW wiki, it sounds like far mode is a good time to evaluate how risk-averse you've been and whether there are risky opportunities you should be taking that you previously weren't taking because of risk-aversion.

You may be interested in the literature on "concept learning", a topic in computational cognitive science. Researchers in this field have sought to formalize the notion of a concept, and to develop methods for learning these concepts from data. (The concepts learned will depend on which specific data the agent encounters, and so this captures the some of the subjectivity you are looking for.)

In this literature, concepts are usually treated as probability distributions over objects in the world. If you google "concept learning" you should find some stuff.

"Subjective" seems uselessly broad. Can you give a more specific example?

So given that I could spread this meme on how you can get paid to decrease Bitcoin's volatility, should I do it?

Why wouldn't you?

First, Eliezer seems to imply here that brains only work (to the extent that they can have beliefs capable of being acted on) when they work digitally, with at least some neurons having definite on or off states.

I assume you mean this section:

Your world does not split into exactly two new subprocesses on the exact occasion when you see "ABSORBED" or "TRANSMITTED" on the LCD screen of a photon sensor. We are constantly being superposed and decohered, all the time, sometimes along continuous dimensions—though brains are digital and involve whole neurons firing, and fire/not-fire would be an extremely decoherent state even of a single neuron... There would seem to be room for something unexpected to account for the Born statistics—a better understanding of the anthropic weight of observers, or a better understanding of the brain's superpositions—without new fundamentals.

He's not exactly saying that brains only work digitally -- they don't; neuron activation isn't only about electrical impulses -- he's just talking about one particular process that happens in the brain. At least, as far as I can tell.

Are you familiar with the Quantum Bomb Tester?

Are you aware that David Deutsch is (1) the loudest proponent of MWI and (2) the inventor* of the quantum computer? Moreover, he claimed that MWI lead him there. He also predicted that quantum computers would convince everyone else of MWI. So far, that claim doesn't look very plausible.

I am skeptical of the possibility of many worlds contributing to imagination. I prefer the phrase "no collapse" to the phrase "many worlds" because there are a lot of straw men associated with the latter phrase. But phrasing it as a negative shows that's it's really a subset of Copenhagen QM, and thus shouldn't require more or different imagination. You might say that the first incarnation of many worlds is Schrödinger's Cat, which everyone talks about, regardless of interpretation.

There is some discussion of the fruitfulness here; in particular Scott Aaronson says "I think Many-Worlds does a better job than its competitors...at emphasizing the aspect of QM—the exponentiality of Hilbert space—that most deserves emphasizing."

* Manin, Feynman, and maybe other people could claim that title, too, but I think they were all independent. Moreover, I think Deutsch was the first person to produce a quantum algorithm that he could prove was better than a classical algorithm; he exploited QM rather than saying it was hard. It is this exploitation that he attributes to MWI.

Deutsch discusses his predecessors, but he didn't know about Manin. I think Manin's contribution is all in the 3 paragraph Appendix (p25).

There have been various threads in the past about whether corporations can be considered AIs. The general consensus seems to be "not in the sense of 'AI' that this community is concerned with."

ignore this experiment

ignore this experiment

So far the best I can come up with is running Folding@home.

Remember the power consumption entailed: http://www.gwern.net/Charity%20is%20not%20about%20helping

This suggestions conflicts with the advice of the Welcome Thread, which says:

However, it can feel really irritating to get downvoted, especially if one doesn't know why. It happens to all of us sometimes, and it's perfectly acceptable to ask for an explanation. (Sometimes it's the unwritten LW etiquette; we have different norms than other forums.)

In my opinion, downvoting is necessary for forum moderation, and people don't downvote enough. It is rather easy to get a lot of karma by simply writing a lot, because the average karma of a comment (this is just my estimate) is around 1. I would prefer if the average was closer to 0.

Asking about downvoting is ok, per se (assuming that the person does not do it with every single damned comment which fell to -1 temporarily). But sometimes it seems to contain a connotation that "you should not downvote my comments unless you explain why". Which I completely disagree with and consider it actively harmful, so I automatically downvote any comment that feels like this. (Yes, there is a chance that I misunderstood the author's intentions. Well, I am not omniscient, and I don't want to get paralyzed by my lack of omniscience.)

This and other variants of it have been tried on other forums before, with no real change in new user behavior.

I just downvote people complaining about downvotes