Open Thread, Jul. 27 - Aug 02, 2015

I didn't read the letter but did it have a subsection saying something like "and if this creates a future shortage of military manpower we would welcome our children being drafted to fight against the common enemies of mankind such as ISIS"?

I like the spirit of the proposal but I fear it will be very hard to draw a reasonable line between military AI and non-military AI. Do computer vision algorithms have military applications? Do planning algorithms? Well, they do if you hook them up to a robot with a gun.

Outlaw it, and only outlaws will have it.

I wonder if we'll follow up by seeing politicians propose changes to C++ standards.

Even assuming these guys are experts on how dangerous the weapons are, they have no expertise in politics that the man on the street doesn't, and the man on the street doesn't put out press releases. This is no better than all those announcements by various celebrities concerning some matter they have no expertise on, except they're tech celebrities and are intentionally confusing technical knowledge and political knowledge to make themselves sound like experts because they are experts about the wrong link in the chain.

Sometimes I will be talking to a student, and be perfectly happy to talk with her until a minute before my next class starts, but I'm uncertain of the time. If I make any visible effort to look at the time, however, she will take it as a sign that I want to immediately end our conversation, so I could use your described device.

Do you know about this thing? It actually gets introduced at 11:00. It's originally intended to let deaf people hear again, but later on he shows that you can use any data as input. It's (a) probably overkill and (b) not commercially available, but depending on how much time and resources you want to invest I imagine it shouldn't be all too hard to make one with just 3 pads or so.

Instead of real-time directional data, could you improve your sense of direction with training? Something like: estimate North, pull out phone and check, score your estimate, iterate. I imagine this could rapidly be mastered for your typical locations, such that you no longer need to pull out your phone at all.

How very interesting - I would find north to be unhelpful as it's not intrinsically relevant to me. compared to say - which direction my house is from here.

Can you use sun or shadow based heuristics? (the sun rises in the east and sets in the west - give or take a correction factor for how far towards the poles you are). And maybe note the direction of a few star signs for night-time. cloudy-time is a bit harder to manage.

There are probably compass devices you can probably get as a bracelet. as an example http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/NEW-Tactical-WRIST-COMPASS-Military-Outdoor-Survival-Watch-Strap-Band-Bracelet-/121644526398?hash=item1c52942b3e Try camping stores also for similar devices? There is probably a watch with a built in compass.

To my knowledge there are no internal-magnet systems that impart a north-knowledge by having them inside your body.

I have a natural sense of direction (I assume nearly everyone does) can you train yours?

Question - was a different request to . I took it to read, "current real-time information about north-facing"

If it is a separate request most wearable fitness devices have a vibrating alarm.

but pulling out a phone to learn them is too inconvrnient

There is ancient device called a "watch", believe it or not...

If it breaks conservation of momentum and also produces a constant thrust, it breaks conservation of energy since kinetic energy goes up quadratically with time while input energy goes up linearly.

If it doesn't break conservation of energy there will be a priviliged reference frame in which it produces maximum thrust per joule, breaking the relativity of reference frames.

Adjust probability estimates accordingly.

Conservation laws occasionally turn out to be false. That said, momentum is pretty big, since it corresponds to translation and rotation invariance, and those intuitively seem pretty likely to be true. But then there was

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation

I would give at least .00001 probability to the following: momentum per se is not conserved, but instead some related quantity, call it zomentum, is conserved, and momentum is almost exactly equal to zomentum under the vast majority of normal conditions.

In general, since we can only do experiments in the vicinity of Earth, we should always be wondering if our laws of physics are just good linearized approximations, highly accurate in our zone of spacetime, of real physics.

This seems much more like a "We know he broke some part of the Federal Aviation Act, and as soon as we decide which part it is, some type of charge will be filed" situation. The person who invented it doesn't think it's reactionless, if thrust is generated it's almost certainly not reactionless, but what's going on is unclear.

Shawyer has said he thinks it doesn't violate conservation of momentum because interacts with "quantum vacuum virtual plasma." I don't really find that reassuring. The current effect size is very small with no sign yet of scaling.

Obligatory links to John Baez on the topic: 1, 2.

See http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2015/05/26/warp-drives-and-scientific-reasoning/ for a thorough analysis.

LW's strongest, most dedicated writers all seem to have moved on to other projects or venues, as has the better part of its commentariat.

In some ways, this is a good thing. There is now, for example, a wider rationalist blogosphere, including interesting people who were previously put off by idiosyncrasies of Less Wrong. In other ways, it's less good; LW is no longer a focal point for this sort of material. I'm not sure if such a focal point exists any more.

About that survey... Suppose I ask you to guess the result of a biased coin which comes up heads 80% of the time. I ask you to guess 100 times, of which ~80 times the right answer is "heads" (these are the "easy" or "obvious" questions) and ~20 times the right answer is "tails" (these are the "hard" or "surprising" questions). Then the correct guess, if you aren't told whether a given question is "easy" or "hard", is to guess heads with 80% confidence, for every question. Then you're underconfident on the "easy" questions, because you guessed heads with 80% confidence but heads came up 100% of the time. And you're overconfident on the "hard" questions, because you guessed heads with 80% confidence but got heads 0% of the time.

So you can get apparent under/overconfidence on easy/hard questions respectively, even if you're perfectly calibrated, if you aren't told in advance whether a question is easy or hard. Maybe the effect Yvain is describing does exist, but his post does not demonstrate it.

I re-analyzed the calibration data, looking at all 10 question averaged together (which I think is a better approach than going question-by-question, for roughly the reasons that D_Malik gives), and found that veterans did better than newbies (and even newbies were pretty well calibrated). I also found similar results for other biases on the 2012 LW survey.

A lot of this has moved to blogs. See malcolmocean.com, mindingourway.com, themindsui,com, agentyduck.blogspot.com, and slatestarcodex.com for more of this discussion.

That being said, I think writing/reading about rationality is very different than becoming good at it. I think someone who did a weekend at CFAR, or the Hubbard Research AIE level 2 workshop would rank much higher on rationality than someone who spent months reading through all the sequences.

1) There are diminishing returns on talking about improving rationality.

2) Becoming more rational could make you spend less time online, including on LessWrong. (The time you would have spent in the past writing beautiful and highly upvoted blog articles is now spent making money or doing science.) Note: This argument is not true if building a stronger rationalist community would generate more good than whatever you are doing alone instead. However, there may be a problem with capturing the generated value. (Eliezer indirectly gets paid for having published on LessWrong. But most of the others don't.)

Some of the discussion has moved to CFAR, although that involves more focus on how to get better cooperation between System 1 and System 2, and less on avoiding specific biases.

Maybe the most rational people don't find time to take surveys?

I can take a look, send me a PM if you like.

I can take a look; you know my email.

All of my calculations are in an excel spreadsheet, so I'll email you the text of the post, as well as the excel file, if you're interested in looking over my work.

One of the trends I've seen happening that I'm a fan of is writing posts/papers/etc. in R, so that the analysis can be trivially reproduced or altered. In general, spreadsheets are notoriously prone to calculation errors because the underlying code is hidden and decentralized; it's much easier to look at a python or R script and check its consistency than an Excel table.

(It's better to finish this project as is than to delay this project until you know enough Python or R to reproduce the analysis, but something to think about for future projects / something to do if you already know enough Python or R.)

I received feedback from some friends to suggest that this is not applicable to large datasets - i.e. big data. I play with my own quantified self data sets of 100,000+ lines from time to time. (think minutised data at 1440 minutes a day for a year and counting). Can you discuss this more (maybe in the next open thread?)

Really useful!

Very interesting, and readily Bayesianizable!

The Rationality eBook is out now, which is an improvement over where things stood four years ago.

The nice thing about summarizing the Sequences / separating the useful concepts from blog posts / writing new explanations for those concepts is that it's a thing that you can do, and partial completion is useful. The wiki is the natural place to host this.

Paul Christiano has written about this subject:

http://rationalaltruist.com/2013/03/12/giving-now-vs-later/

http://rationalaltruist.com/2013/06/10/the-best-reason-to-give-later/

http://rationalaltruist.com/2014/05/14/machine-intelligence-and-capital-accumulation/

There's a very recent paper on PeerJ (hooray, open access), perhaps not what one would call "scientific backing" in the strongest sense, but more a study aiming to establish the scope of the phenomenon, and relate it to other aspects of perceptual experience - through survey of self-reported ASMR experiencers: Barratt & Davis, 2015

While ASMR appears to be a genuine, relatively prevalent perceptual experience, the exact nature of the phenomenon is still unknown....

Full survey data is also provided as supplemental information (see the link above) in case anyone wants to do some deeper digging.

Could be related to skin orgasms. Some people have brought it in relation with foreplay, cuddling and delousing. Perhaps the closeness of the sounds evoke strong associations with being actually touched resulting in something like a laughter response to being tickled (which could be thought of as a signaling that there is no danger from a spider crawling down your neck). Perhaps the high spectra in whispering make it even related to chills we receive from high-pitched noises, which is possibly related to teeth maintenance. I'm not aware of any research.

I was under the impression that "brain space" was unlimited for all practical intents and purposes, and that having more stuff in your brain might actually even make extra learning easier - e.g. I've often heard it said that a person loses fluid intelligence when they age, but this is compensated by them having more knowledge that they can connect new things with. Do you know of studies to the contrary?

What do you outsource that is common and uncommon among people that you know?

A lot of little facts (of the kind that people on LW use Anki decks to memorize). I outsource them to Google.

I barely remember any phone numbers nowadays and that seems to be common.

What should you be avoiding keeping in your brain that you currently are?

Schedules / to-do lists. I really should outsource them to some GTD app, but can't bring myself to use one consistently.

Dunno about that; in my case information is either worth knowing (like 'what poplar tree marks the turn left to Epipactis palustris' - ideally outsourced to a map, but I would just get confused, or 'what kind of porridge to cook tonight given the kid rejected x, y and z' - ideally outsourced to a notebook, but there are too many details to bother with it) or worth losing.

When I am ill, though, I outsource my meds list to the fridge door. (Recipes and shopping lists, too, occasionally.)

I'm not sure whether it makes me a more satisfied/happy person if I out-source lots of things to devices. I agree that it is likely more efficient to delegate lots of memory work and planning habits to devices. But it also takes some of your autonomy away. It of course depends on the specific interaction and probably also on the person (some people may feel it quite natural to delegate tasks to (virtual) persons they trust). But as long as the out-sourced task affects you later in a non-adaptive way (and I judge this to be mostly the case) then this might not feel as natural as one might like.

See also my post about when augmentations feel/are natural.

Brienne's actually written a pretty great article on this, here: http://agentyduck.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-to-train-noticing.html I can't seem to find the article, but she has another one where she talks about using an old style ticker for positive habits. She clicks it every time she notices, and it's not only immediate feedback, but it gives you a running tally of how many you've done for the day, which is a bit gameified.

If it's a negative habit you're noticing, an old NLP standby is to snap a rubber band on your wrist, just enough that it stings.. A more modern version of this is the Pavlock wristband - it shocks you when you do the negative thing.

Another good one is to wear a bracelet, which you switch from wrist to wrist when you notice the habit. I believe this originated with Will Bowen and his no complaint experiment. These remind you throughout the day by having the wrist band, and every time you switch it, you'll be paying more attention because you haven't habituated to the wristband yet.

Finally, there's apps like tagtime/moodrecorder/etc. These are installed on your phone and pop up variably throughout the day, asking you to be present to internal state and record it. This gives you a more holistic view of what's going on internally throughout the day.

Do you have suggestions for either: a. dealing with it b. getting people to answer the right question

(a) Recognise that getting upset over it does not achieve your purpose.

(b) Have you tried asking for what you want? For example:

Elo: (question)

A.N.Other: (answer not addressing what you wanted)

Elo: That's all very well, but what I really want to know is (restatement of the question)

etc., many variations possible depending on context.

Having answered your question, I shall now say something which is not an answer to your question. What is your experience of the other side of that situation, when someone asks you a question?

As a software developer, I spend a lot of time on both sides of this. When a user reports a problem, I need to elicit information about exactly what they were doing and what happened, information that they may not be well able to give me. There's no point in getting resentful that they aren't telling me exactly what I need to know off the bat. It's my job to steer them towards what I need. And when users ask me questions, I often have to ask myself, what is the real question here? Questions cannot always be answered in the terms in which they were put.

Assuming there isn't something wrong with the question I originally ask and how I present it.

I wouldn't assume this. Most of the time when I notice this in my conversations, it turns out I've made false assumptions about my conversational partner's state (of knowledge, receptiveness, or shared priors). Identifying those mistakes in my communication choices then lets me rephrase or ask different questions more suited to our shared purposes in the discussion.

Sometimes what happens is that people don't know the answer to the question you're asking but still want to contribute to the discussion, so they answer a different question which they know the answer to. In this case the solution is to find someone who knows the answer before you start asking.

It's a perennial problem. My method which kinda-sorta works is to get very, very specific up to and including describing which varieties you do NOT want. It works only kinda-sorta because it tends to focus people on edge cases and definition gaming.

If you can extend the question into a whole conversation where you can progressively iterate closer to that you want, that can help, too.

Yeah, this happens.

I just want to yell at people; "answer the question I asked! not the one you felt like answering that was similar to the one I asked because you thought that was what I wanted to hear about or ask about!".

Try this, except instead of yelling, say it nicely.

One thing you could do as an example is some variation of "oh sorry, I must have phrased the question poorly, I meant (the question again, perhaps phrased differently or with more detail or with example answers or whatever)".

Assuming there isn't something wrong with the question I originally ask and how I present it.

Aren't you blocking, with this assumption, all the parameters you can intervene on to improve your communication?

As for dealing with it, you can try to see it this way: every time you ask a precise question with very stringent constraints, you are basically asking people to solve a difficult problem for you. You are, in a sense, freeloading on others' brainpower.
As with everything, this is a scarce resource, one that you cannot really expect people to give to you freely.
Learn to accept that we are animals constantly doing cost-analysis, and so if you notice a question not being answered the way you want to, it's probably because of this, and you need to supply a more adequate reward.

Yeah, I get that a lot. Some random suggestions:

• Ask in a more friendly and open-ended way
• Tailor your question to the crowd's interests and biases
• Accept the tangents and try to spin them into other interesting conversations
• Find a different crowd to ask

Could you give two examples of questions you asked and the answers you got? Context matters a lot here.

Nope, but it seems interesting.

I think no; but also ask in the next OT because this one is no longer the most recent. Maybe make a poll?

I saw this dataset at a conference in December. There's a bunch of interesting statistics coming out of it.

I did not find the project so laughable. It's hopelessly outdated in the sense that logical calculus does not deal with incomplete information, and I suspect that they simply conflate "moral" with "utilitarian" or even just "decision theoretic".

Well, both can be cast as convex optimization problems, right? So if you're interested in the similarities, maybe look into that.

Break down the problem, and identify your goals in dealing with it/them. Is your problem one or more of: 1) fear is unpleasant and you'd rather not experience it, regardless of any other experienced or behavioral differences? 2) there are consequences to not using an account? 3) there are consequences to trying to use an account when it's not necessary?

You might address the fear via therapy, medication, meditation, and/or introspection - though not in that order, please. Introspection should include trying to separate out the components of the fear, in order to decide how much to focus on your perception, and how much to focus on the second thing, behavior.

You might address the actual problems of too many accounts by having fewer - just don't sign up for things that aren't going to be a net positive value. Or consolidating into a PasswordSafe or other place to list the accounts, so you can see when you've last used something. Or simply a checklist of daily and weekly information to look at.

Write everything down in a single place?

There is no such thing as a uniform probability distribution over a countably infinite event space (see Toggle's comment). The distribution you're assuming in your example doesn't exist.

Maybe a better example for your purposes would be picking a random real number between 0 and 1 (this does correspond to a possible distribution, assuming the axiom of choice is true). The probability of the number being rational is 0, the probability of it being greater than 2 is also 0, yet the latter seems "more impossible" than the former.

Of course, this assumes that "probability 0" entails "impossible". I don't think it does. The probability of picking a rational number may be 0, but it doesn't seem impossible. And then there's the issue of whether the experiment itself is possible. You certainly couldn't construct an algorithm to perform it.

Your math has some problems. Note that, if p(X=x) = 0 for all x, then the sum over X is also zero. But if you're in a room, then by definition you have sampled from the set of rooms- the probability of selecting a room is one. Since the probability of selecting 'any room from the set of rooms' is both zero and one, we have established a contradiction, so the problem is ill-posed.

As others have pointed out, there is no uniform probability distribution on a countable set. There are various generalisations of probability that drop or weaken the axiom of countable additivity, which have their uses, but one statistician's conclusion is that you lose too many useful properties. On the other hand, writing a blog post to describe something as a lost cause suggests that it still has adherents. Googling /"finite additivity" probability/ turns up various attempts to drop countable additivity.

Another way of avoiding the axiom is to reject all infinities. There are then no countable sets to be countably additive over. This throws out almost all of current mathematics, and has attracted few believers.

In some computations involving probabilities, the axiom that the measure over the whole space is 1 plays no role. A notable example is the calculation of posterior probabilities from priors and data by Bayes' Theorem:

Posterior(H|D) = P(D|H) Prior(H) / Sum_H' ( P(D|H') Prior(H') )

(H, H' = hypothesis, D = data.)

The total measure of the prior cancels out of the numerator and denominator. This allows the use of "improper" priors that can have an infinite total measure, such as the one that assigns measure 1 to every integer and infinite measure to the set of all integers.

There can be a uniform probability distribution over an uncountable set, because there is no requirement for a probability distribution to be uncountably additive. Every sample drawn from the uniform distribution over the unit interval has a probability 0 of being drawn. This is just one of those things that one comes to understand by getting used to it, like square roots of -1, 0.999...=1, non-euclidean geometry, and so on.

I opine that you are equivocating between "tends to zero as N tends to infinity" and "is zero". This is usually a very bad idea.

Measure theory) is a tricky subject. Also consider https://twitter.com/ZachWeiner/status/625711339520954368 .

This is an old problem in probability theory, and there are different solutions.

PT is developed first in finite model, so it's natural that its extension to infinite models can be done in a few different ways.

I belong to the "data science is just the new cool name for statistics" camp :-) I think the blog post linked in the parent confuses what statistics is with how statistics is typically taught. As a consequence it sets up a very narrow idea of statistics and then easily shows that "data science" is wider than narrow and limited "statistics".

Ridiculously terrible article - lots of unsupportable assertions without any evidence. He doesn't seem to have any knowledge of the actual constraint space on circuit design - thermodynamic, area, latency, etc.

See my longer reply comment here.

He uses a 200hz firing rate, when neurons actually fire at < 1hz on average. He claims the cerebellum has more compute power than the cortex, which is pretty ridiculous - given that the cortex has far more synapses and more volume, and the fact that the brain is reasonably efficient. He doesn't understand that most of the energy usage is in wire dissipation, not switching. His estimates are thus off by many orders of magnitude. The article is not worth reading.

Acknowledges that in a group context, actions have a utility in of themselves (signalling) separate from the utility of the resulting scenarios.

Why do people even signal anything? To get something for themselves from others. Why would signaling be outside the scope of consequentialism.

Unpack #1 a bit.

Are you looking for information about situations where an individual's decisions should include predicted decisions by others (which will in turn take into account the individual's decisions)? The (Game Theory Sequence)[http://lesswrong.com/lw/dbe/introduction_to_game_theory_sequence_guide/] is a good starting point.

Or are you looking for cases where "individual" is literally not the decision-making unit? I don't have any good less-wrong links, but both (Public Choice Theory)[http://lesswrong.com/lw/2hv/public_choice_and_the_altruists_burden/] and the idea of sub-personal decision modules come up occasionally.

Both topics fit into the overall framework of classical decision theory (naive or not, you decide) and expected value.

Items 2-4 don't contradict classical decision theory, but fall somewhat outside of it. decision theory generally looks at instrumental rationality - how to best get what one wants, rather than questions of what to want.

Alexa says that the ranking has been dropping in the last couple of months, so not very likely.

Is it good or is it bad?

It only works in comments as far as I know. Don't know why.

Policy briefs don't acually influence anyone involved in policy cause they have opinions already

Not everybody involved in policy has his opinions already formed. When a new issue comes up, politicians have to form an opinion about it and don't have to have a premade opinion.

The point of lobbying often isn't to convince a politician but to provide the politician with arguments to back up a position that he already holds. It's also to help with written the actual law. As far as I know the Global Priorities Project succeeded into getting an amendment that they wrote in actual law.

It's interesting to try to square the reality of very slow growth in developed economies with the widespread notion that we are living in a time of rapid technological change.

Also interesting is that there's some precedent for this: British GDP growth (table 21 of this) was similarly anaemic during the (first) Industrial Revolution. The average growth rate didn't even hit 2% until around the 1830s!

Hacker News has higher concentration of entrepreneurs than Reddit.

Twitter X-D

But no, the currency of internet is attention and attention of people with the resources to actually implement something is expensive. You need to pay for it with credibility (or appropriate networking).