Open Thread, June 16-30, 2013

Genes take charge and diets fall by the wayside.

You need a New York Times account to read it, but setting one up only takes a couple of minutes. Here are some exerpts in any case.

Obese people almost always regain weight after weight loss:

So Dr. Hirsch and his colleagues, including Dr. Rudolph L. Leibel, who is now at Columbia University, repeated the experiment and repeated it again. Every time the result was the same. The weight, so painstakingly lost, came right back. But since this was a research study, the investigators were also measuring metabolic changes, psychiatric conditions, body temperature and pulse. And that led them to a surprising conclusion: fat people who lost large amounts of weight might look like someone who was never fat, but they were very different. In fact, by every metabolic measurement, they seemed like people who were starving.

Before the diet began, the fat subjects’ metabolism was normal — the number of calories burned per square meter of body surface was no different from that of people who had never been fat. But when they lost weight, they were burning as much as 24 percent fewer calories per square meter of their surface area than the calories consumed by those who were naturally thin.

Thin people who are forced to gain weight find it easy to lose it again:

...His subjects were prisoners at a nearby state prison who volunteered to gain weight. With great difficulty, they succeeded, increasing their weight by 20 percent to 25 percent. But it took them four to six months, eating as much as they could every day. Some consumed 10,000 calories a day, an amount so incredible that it would be hard to believe, were it not for the fact that there were attendants present at each meal who dutifully recorded everything the men ate.

Once the men were fat, their metabolisms increased by 50 percent. They needed more than 2,700 calories per square meter of their body surface to stay fat but needed just 1,800 calories per square meter to maintain their normal weight.

When the study ended, the prisoners had no trouble losing weight. Within months, they were back to normal and effortlessly stayed there.

The body's metabolism changes with weight loss and weight gain:

The implications were clear. There is a reason that fat people cannot stay thin after they diet and that thin people cannot stay fat when they force themselves to gain weight. The body’s metabolism speeds up or slows down to keep weight within a narrow range. Gain weight and the metabolism can as much as double; lose weight and it can slow to half its original speed.

Genes and weight:

.A few years later, in 1990, Dr. Stunkard published another study in The New England Journal of Medicine, using another classic method of geneticists: investigating twins. This time, he used the Swedish Twin Registry, studying its 93 pairs of identical twins who were reared apart, 154 pairs of identical twins who were reared together, 218 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared apart, and 208 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared together.

The identical twins had nearly identical body mass indexes, whether they had been reared apart or together. There was more variation in the body mass indexes of the fraternal twins, who, like any siblings, share some, but not all, genes.

The researchers concluded that 70 percent of the variation in peoples’ weights may be accounted for by inheritance, a figure that means that weight is more strongly inherited than nearly any other condition, including mental illness, breast cancer or heart disease.

There's been more recent work suggesting that planets are extremely common. Most recently, evidence for planets in unexpected orbits around red dwarfs have been found. See e.g. here. This is in addition to other work suggesting that even when restricted to sun-like stars, planets are not just common, but planets are frequently in the habitable zone. Source(pdf). It seems at this point that any aspect of the Great Filter that is from planet formation must be declared to be completely negligible. Is this analysis accurate?

To whoever fixed it so that we can see the parents of comments when looking at a user's comments, major props to you for being awesome.

I just found out that there exists an earlier term for semantic stopsigns: a thought-terminating cliché.

A thought-terminating cliché is a commonly used phrase, sometimes passing as folk wisdom, used to quell cognitive dissonance. Though the phrase in and of itself may be valid in certain contexts, its application as a means of dismissing dissent or justifying fallacious logic is what makes it thought-terminating.

The term was popularized by Robert Jay Lifton in his 1956 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. Lifton said, “The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”

Has anyone written a worthwhile utilitarian argument against transhumanism? I'm interested in criticism, but most of it is infested with metaphysical and metaethical claims I can't countenance.

I was an intern at MIRI recently and I would like to start a new LW meetup in my city but as I am still new on LW, I do not have enough karma points. Could you please upvote this comment so that I can get enough karma to post about a meetup? lukeprog suggested I do this. I only need 2 points to post in the discussion part. Thanks to you all

Thanks for bringing back the bright-colored edges for new comments.

The additional thing I'd like to see along those lines is bright color for "continue this thread" and "expand comments" if they include new comments. I'd also like to see it for "comment score below threshold", but I can understand if that isn't included for social engineering reasons.

Risks of vegetarianism and veganism

Personal account of physical and emotional problems encountered by the author which were reversed when he went back to eating animal products. Much discussion of vitamins and dietary fats, not to mention genetic variation. Leaves the possibility open that some people thrive on a vegetarian diet, and possibly on a vegan diet.

I just realized that willingness to update seems very cultish from outside. Literally.

I mean -- if someone joins a cult, what is the most obvious thing that happens to them? They update heavily; towards the group teachings. This is how you can tell that something wrong is happening.

We try to update on reasonable evidence. For example we would update on a scientific article more than on a random website. However, from outside is seems similar to willingness to update on your favorite (in-group) sources, and unwillingness to update on other (out-group) sources. Just like a Jehovah Witness would update on the Watch Tower, but would remain skeptical towards Mormon literature. As if the science itself is your cult... except that it's not really the science as we know it, because most scientist behave outside the laboratory just like everyone else; and you are trying to do something else.

Okay, I guess this is nothing new for a LW reader. I just realized now, on the emotional level, how willingness to update, considered a virtue on LW, may look horrifying to an average person. And how willingness to update on trustworthy evidence more than on untrustworthy evidence, probably seems like hypocrisy, like a rationalization for preferring your in-group ideas to out-group ideas.

How do other people use their whiteboards?

After having my old 90 x 60 whiteboard stashed down the side of my bed since I moved in, nearly two years ago, I finally got around to mounting it a couple of weeks ago. I am amazed at how well it compliments the various productivity infrastructure I've built up in the interim, to the point where I'm considering getting a second 120 x 90 whiteboard and mounting them next to each other to form an enormous FrankenBoard.

A couple of whiteboard practices I've taken to:

• Repeated derivation of maths content I'm having trouble remembering. If there's a proof or process I'm having trouble getting to stick, I'll go through it on the board at spaced intervals. There seems to be a kinaesthetic aspect to using the whiteboard that I don't have with pen and paper, so even if my brain is struggling to to remember what comes next, my fingers will probably have a good idea.

• Unlike my other to-do list mechanisms, if I have a list item with a check box on the whiteboard, and I complete the item, I can immediately draw in a "stretch goal" check box on the same line. This turns into an enormous array of multicoloured check-boxes over time, which is both gratifying to look at and helpful when deciding what to work on next.

So I'm interested in taking up meditation, but I don't know how/where to start. Is there a practical guide for beginners somewhere that you would recommend?

More grist for the hypothetical Journal of Negative Results

Scientist wants to publish replication failure. Nature won't accept the article (even as a letter). So scientist retracts previous letter written in support of the non-replicated study.

While researching a forthcoming MIRI blog post, I came across the University of York's Safety Critical Mailing List, which hosted an interesting discussion on the use of AI in safety-critical applications in 2000. The first post in the thread, from Ken Firth, reads:

...several of [Vega's] clients seek to use varying degrees of machine intelligence - from KBS to neural nets - and have come for advice on how to implement them in safety related systems... So far we have usually resorted to the stock answer "you don't — at least not for safety critical functions", but this becomes increasingly difficult to enforce, even if your legal and moral ground is sound. Customers are increasingly pleading the need for additional functionality and for utility to have precedence over safety (!!)

The thought of having to apply formal proofs to intelligent systems leaves me cold. How do you provide satisfactory assurance for something that has the ability to change itself during a continuous learning process? I can only assume that one would resort to black box testing, with all its inherent shortcomings and uncertainties - in particular, a black-box test would only apply to the version tested, and not to subsequent evolutions...

My fear is that the longer we ignore this problem, the more likely that users will simply ignore the safety community and press on regardless (precedents from US naval combat systems and commercial operating systems??). Can anyone offer pragmatic advice to customers who are likely to use IKBS anyway? Personally I think that I prefer... [to avoid] putting unvalidatable systems in the safety-critical firing line. But for how long can we continue to achieve this?

I encountered this thread via an also-interesting technical report, Harper (2000).

[I made a request for job finding suggestions. I didn't really want to leave details lying around indefinitely, to be honest, so, after a week, I edited it to this.]

I would like to get better at telling stories in conversations. Usually when I tell a story, it's very fact-based and I can tell that it's pretty boring, even if it wasn't for me. Are there any tips/tricks/heuristics I can implement that can transform a plain fact-based story into something more exciting?

Since I'm used to hearing Dutch Book arguments as the primary way of defending expected utility maximization, I was intrigued to read this passage (from here):

The Dutch book argument concerns the long-term consistency of accepting bets. If probabilities are assigned to bets in a way that goes against the principles of CP [Classical Probability] theory, then this guarantees a net loss (or gain) across time. In other words, probabilistic assignment inconsistent with CP theory leads to unfair bets (de Finetti et al. 1993). [...]

These justifications are not without problems. Avoiding a Dutch book requires expected value maximization, rather than expected utility maximization, that is, the decision maker is constrained to use objective values rather than personal utilities, when choosing between bets. However, decision theorists generally reject the assumption of objective value maximization and instead allow for subjective utility functions (Savage 1954). This is essential, for example, in order to take into account the observed risk aversion in human decisions (Kahneman & Tversky 1979). When maximizing subjective expected utility, CP reasoning can fall prey to Dutch book problems (Wakker 2010).

The Wakker 2010 reference is to a book; searching it for "dutch book" gets me the footnote

In a later chapter on expected utility we will show that a Dutch book and arbitrage are possible as soon as there is risk aversion (Assignment 3.3.6).

And looking up assignment 3.3.6 gets

Assignment 3.3.6. This assignment demonstrates that risk aversion implies arbitrage. More generally, it shows that every deviation from risk neutrality implies arbitrage.

You may assume that risk neutrality for all 50–50 prospects implies complete risk neutrality. Show that arbitrage is possible whenever there is no risk neutrality, for instance as soon as there is strict risk aversion. A difficulty in this assignment is that we have defined risk neutrality for decision under risk, and arbitrage has been defined for decision under uncertainty. You, therefore, have to understand §2.1–2.3 to be able to do this assignment.

Since I don't really have the time or energy to work my way through a textbook, I thought that I'd ask people who understood decision theory better: exactly what is the issue, and how serious of a problem is this for somebody using the Dutch Book argument to argue for EU maximization?

All students including liberal arts students at Singapore's new Yale-NUS College will take a new course in Quantitative Reasoning which John Baez had a hand in designing.

Baez writes that it will cover topics like this:

• innumeracy, use of numbers in the media.
• visualizing quantitative data.
• cognitive biases, operationalization.
• qualitative heuristics, cognitive biases, formal logic and mathematical proof.
• formal logic, mathematical proofs.
• probability, conditional probability (Bayes’ rule), gambling and odds.
• decision trees, expected utility, optimal decisions and prospect theory.
• sampling, uncertainty.
• quantifying uncertainty, hypothesis testing, p-values and their limitations.
• statistical power and significance levels, evaluating evidence.
• correlation and causation, regression analysis.

John Baez, Quantitative Reasoning at Yale-NUS College

http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/4435.html

Just after the PRISM scandal broke, Tyler Cowen offered a wonderful, wonderful tweet:

I’d heard about this for years, from “nuts,” and always assumed it was true.

There is a model of social knowledge embedded in this tweet. It implies a set of things that one believes to be true, a set of things one can admit to believing without being a “nut”, and an inconsistency between the two. Why the divergence? Oughtn’t it be true that people of integrity should simply own up to what they believe? Can a “marketplace of ideas” function without that?

It’s obvious, of course, why this divergence occurs. Will Wilkinson points to an economy of esteem, but there is also an economy of influence. There are ideas and modes of thought that are taboo in the economy of influence, assertions that discredit the asserter. Those of us who seek to matter as “thinkers” are implicitly aware of these taboos, and we navigate them mostly by avoiding or acceding to them. You can transgress a little, self-consciously and playfully, as Cowen did in his tweet. If you transgress too much, too earnestly, you are written off as a nut or worse. Conversely, there are ideas that are blessed in the economy of influence. These are markers of “seriousness”, as in Paul Krugman’s perceptive, derisive epithet “Very Serious People”. This describes “thinkers” whose positions inevitably align like iron filings to the pull of social influence, indifferent to evidence that might impinge upon their views. Most of us, with varying degrees of consciousness, are pulled this way and that, forging compromises between what we might assert in some impossible reality where we observed social facts “objectively” and the positions that our allegiances, ambitions, and taboos push us towards. Individually, there is plenty of eccentricity, plenty of noise. People go “off the reservation” all the time. But pub[l]ic intellectualizing is a collective enterprise. What matters is not what some asshole says, but the conventional wisdom we coalesce to. When the noise gets averaged out, the bias imposed by the economy of influence is hard to overcome. And the economy of influence pulls, always, in directions chosen by incumbent holders of wealth and power, by people with capacity to offer rewards and to mete out punishment.

I'm running an Ideological Turing Test at my blog, and I'm looking for players. This year's theme is sex and death, so the questions are about polyamory and euthanasia.

You can read the rules and sign up at the link, but, essentially, you answer the questions twice: once honestly, and the second time as you think an atheist or Christian (whichever you're not) plausibly would. Then we read through the true and faux atheist answers and try to spot the fakes and see what assumptions players and judges made.

Anybody with tips for beginning an evaluation for the purpose of choosing between future career and academic choices? As far as I can tell, my values are as commonly held as the next fellow:

• Felt Purpose - A frequent occurrence of situations that demonstrate, in unique ways, the positive effects of my past actions. I see this as being somewhere in the middle of a continuum, where on one end I'd have only rational reason to believe my actions were doing good (effective charity), and on the other only the feeling as if I were doing good, but less rational evidence (environmental volunteerism?).

• Utilitarian Benefit - I do need a fair bit of the left-hand-side of the above continuum. Even if no feeling might leave me depressed, too much feeling without enough rational evidence would leave me feeling hollow and wrong. I might also expect an increase in altruism through personal development that will push me further in the direction of effectiveness.

• Academic Fun - The feeling of discovery, that my work is on not-commonly-trodden path, and the realized ability to make novel contribution.

• Social Fun - Being surrounded by people with widely varying backgrounds, providing direct opportunity to partake in new social situations, a fun going beyond anthropological interest. Ability to make friends of an intelligent, kind, and uplifting sort.

• Artistic Outlet - The feeling that long-held and heavily inspected aspects of my psyche are finding expression, probably combined with the feeling that this expression is understood by like minds, and that those minds are being helped by it.

• Financial Freedom - Money for me is less about buying objects so much as the freedom to do new things. Like travelling and inviting as many people as I want. Also, income reflects my real economic output, which is valuable in itself, with the benefit that I can put the profit toward effective charities.

Of course, this listing of values is the beginning of my self-evaluation. What I'm less keen on is where to find a listing of my options. I am a 24 year old computer science graduate, currently in the video game industry as a pipeline and graphics engineer working on AAA titles (as opposed to independent games). I have saved up for myself about 80,000 USD, and increase this savings at roughly $40,000 per year at my current job. I would have only minor qualms about relocating (within the country). I view myself as having a high aptitude for learning but a very limited working set. I tend to solve hard problems very cleverly and thoroughly, but find it difficult to maintain work on multiple hard problems at the same time.

Current options I've considered:

• Switch jobs in-industry to reclaim novelty, and/or achieve a pay increase ("Got to move sideways to move upward.")
• Switch jobs out-of-industry (with retained CS focus, perhaps) to broaden interests, continue learning.
• Return to academia (What study? What university?)
• Form a startup with already-formed acquaintances. (Make an indie game? Other solvable problems with my skillset?)
• Combination of above.
• ??

Would love comments, although interestingly typing this out has itself been a great help.

I have started writing a Death Note fanfiction where the characters aren't all as dumb as a bag of bricks (or one could say a rationalist fic) and... I need betas. The first chapter is available on http://www.fanfiction.net/s/9380249/1/Rationalising-Death and the second is pretty much written, but the first is confirmedly "funky" in writing and since I'm not a native English speaker I'm not sure I can actually pinpoint what exactly is wrong with it. Also I'd love the extra help.

Anyone interested? My email for contact is pedromvilar@gmail.com (and I also have a tumblr account, http://scientiststhesis.tumblr.com )

Politicians have a lot of power in society. How much good could a politician well-acquainted with x-risk do? One way such a politician could do good is by helping direct funds to MIRI. However, this is something an individual with a lot of money (successful in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street) could do as well.

Should one who wants to make a large positive impact on society go into politics over more "conventional" methods of effective altruism (becoming rich somewhere else or working for a high-impact organization)?

I have concluded that many of the problems in my life are the result of being insufficiently impulsive. As soon as I notice a desire to do something, I more or less reflexively convince myself that it is a bad idea to do just now. How can I go about increasing my impulsivity? I want to change this as a persistent character trait, so while ethanol works in the short run it is not the solution I am looking for.

Aaron Winborn: Monday was my 46th birthday and likely my last. Anything awesome I should try after I die?

Just over two years ago, I was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. In short, that means that my mind will increasingly become trapped in my body as the motor neurons continue to die, and the muscles atrophy and waste away, until my diaphragm dies, bringing me with it.

...

But yes, there is a silver lining to this all, such as it is. Kim Suozzi made a similar plea to the Internet a year ago today, and came up with the brilliant idea of freezing her body in the hopes of a distant advanced technology being able to revive her someday. Her body now rests at liquid nitrogen temperatures.

...

What's actually known about women's biological clocks?

Pretty much the usual if someone looks closely at a commonly held belief about a medical issue. The usual dramatic belief that fertility drops off sharply at 35 is based on French birth records from 1670 to 1830. Human fertility is very hard to study. Women who are trying to have their first child at age forty may be less fertile than average. And so on.

Zach Alexander just posted a reverse engineering of the Soylent recipe. It looks pretty legit, and reasonably easy to put together.

In last year's survey, someone likened Less-Wrong rationalism to Ayn Rand's Objectivism. Rand once summed up her philosophy in the following series of soundbites: "Metaphysics, objective reality. Epistemology, reason. Ethics, self-interest. Politics, capitalism." What would the analogous summary of the LW philosophy be?

In the end, I found that the simplest way to sum it up was to cite particular thinkers: "Metaphysics, Everett. Epistemology, Bayes. Ethics, Bentham. Politics, Vinge."

A few comments:

For metaphysics... I considered "multiverse" since it suggests not only Everett, but also the broader scheme of Tegmark, which is clearly popular here. Also, "naturalism", but that is less informative.

For epistemology... maybe "Jaynes" is an alternative. Or "overcoming cognitive bias". Or just "science"; except that the Sequences contain a post saying that Bayes trumps Science.

For ethics... "Bentham" is an anodyne choice. I was trying to suggest utilitarianism. If there was a single well-known thinker who exemplifies "effective altruism", I would have gone with them instead... Originally I said "CEV" here; but CEV is really just a guess at what the ethics of a friendly AI should be.

For politics... Originally, I had "FAI" as the answer here. That may seem odd - friendly AI is not presented as a political doctrine or opinion - but the paradigm is that AGI will determine the future of the world, and FAI is the answer to the challenge of AGI. These are political concerns, even if the ideal for FAI theory would be to arrive at conclusions about what ought to happen, that become as uncontroversial and "nonpartisan" as the equations of gravity. I chose Vernor Vinge as the iconic name to use here; I suppose one could use Kurzweil. Alternatively, one could argue that LW's cardinal metapolitical framework is "existential risk", rather than FAI vs UFAI.

A nice feature on the Bitcoin-accepting pub in London.

Over the past several months, I have been practicing a new habit: whenever I have a 'good' idea, I write it down. ('Good' being used very loosely.)

This is a very simple procedure but it seems to have several benefits. First, I began noticing that I remembered having a 'good' idea but not being able to remember what it was. I now notice this behavior much more strikingly and it causes some small amount of distressing thinking about what I might have forgotten. Writing it down relieves that worry. Second, I can refer back to it later. So far nothing significant has come out of this, but I like having the option and I have gone back to note that some of my once-though 'good' ideas don't hold up on second thought. This is useful information about yourself to have. Third, it encourages me to have more good ideas. For a while I tried to write down one a day (possibly using a long-term 'cached' idea I had been floating for a while if I didn't have anything good that day). Fourthly, writings things down even just for myself helps me to really get a clear idea of it.

I'm sure there are many suggestions which are similar to this or encompass it. Obviously this is similar to having a journal and probably shares some of the benefits. This has the advantage of being extremely simple and takes hardly any time at all and is only done when it has an obvious benefit.

So with the PRISM program outed, the main thrust of discussions is about its legality and consequences. But what interests me is a rather non-political issue of general competence. One would think that the NSA and in general any security agency would take risk assessment and mitigation seriously. And having its cover blown ought to be somewhere close to the top of the list of critical risks. Yet the obvious weak point of letting the outsiders with appropriate clearance access deep inside the areas with compromising info was apparently never addressed.

Even the standard approach of having tiered access for everyone regardless of the clearance level, and automatically checking and flagging every unusual escalation was either not implemented or cleverly subverted by a low-level admin. And given the Bradley Manning security breach, one would expect even a half-decent internal security officer to be rather paranoid. And who knows what other low-ranking admins quietly did and probably are doing with what information and for what purpose and in what organizations.

I am wondering, is it reasonable to assume that the people responsible for the integrity of a spy agency are this inept? Or is what we see now is somewhere low on the list of risks and is being handled according to plan? Or, if you go deeper in the conspiracy mode, is orchestrated for some non-obvious reason?

Personally, I hope it's the last possibility, because I'd take competency over ineptitude anytime, nefarious purposes or not.

http://qz.com/96054/english-is-no-longer-the-language-of-the-web/

Plenty for LW here-- not just that English is a steadily declining fraction of online material, but the difficulties of finding out what proportion of the web is in what language, and the process by which more and more of the web is in more and more languages.

I am very interested in higher order theory of mind (ToM) tests for adults to differentiate those with high theory of mind quotient if you will. My hypothesis is that people with strong theory of mind are better at sales – I have an interest in both. Most tests I find online are meant to test children and for Asperger's Syndrome, what I want are complex questions and problems.

I recently saw a highly upvoted comment on reddit that stated "...Mifune, destroying the top black belts..." and cited this video However, I believe OP has misread the situation. Mifune is highly respected and is in a room full of spectators that fully expect him to come out on top when sparing, or at least would feel embarrassed for Mifune if he didn't. The pretense is that everyone is trying their hardest to throw Mifune but he is so good he just twirls around them and that it is not a demonstration - it's real sparing. OP and those who upvoted, failed to put themselves accurately in the role of the students in that room and think " gee I totally don't want to be that guy that throws the old man down." The students are conforming, whether they believe it or not.

Any 4 year old can pass the false belief test but the Mifune video is a lot more subtle and complex. There are intentions involved, there is also each student's knowledge of other student's intentions, conformity, and self-delusion. The huge man being thrown by Mifune might say that he really believed he was trying his hardest not the be thrown, but ToM isn't just about what others believe it's also about accurately predicting other peoples actions, why they did it, and what they think they believe they did it for.

I am trying to compile a list of such examples, and would greatly appreciate it if anyone could add to this conversation by agree/disagreeing with what I have said, and especially, provide some examples of more complex theory of mind problems.

Showing Compassion To Designated Enemies; A Punishable Offense

There's this very interesting trope being forged on TVT, and I found it very interesting from a rationalist standpoint, especially the examples involving God... What an asshole.

I just found this nice quote on The Last Conformer which is supposed to prove that betting on major events is qualitatively different from betting on coinflips:

I wouldn't even offer bets on this kind of probability because that would just invite better informed people to take my money.

It seems to me that the problem exists for coinflips as well. If I flip a coin and don't show you the result, your beliefs about the coin are probably 50/50. But if I offer you to bet at 50/50 odds that the coin came up heads, you'll probably refuse, because I know which way the coin came up and you don't.

According to the Dutch book argument for rationality, we are supposed to accept either side of any bet offered at the odds corresponding to our beliefs. In my example, that idea breaks down, because getting the offer is evidence that you shouldn't take the bet. But then how do we formulate the Dutch book argument?

Doctors say "If I'm going to die, please don't freaking try to keep me alive". Normal people and doctors agree that they want a peaceful death, but only doctors are truly aware that a peaceful death is often a willing one.

Useful chrome-plugin for learning to do fermi calculations:

http://blog.xkcd.com/2013/05/15/dictionary-of-numbers/

What is the proper font, spacing, and so forth for a LessWrong article?

<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica;">

Bayes' theorem written a certain way is surprisingly effective and easy to use in Fermi estimates of population parameters and risks. Unless you are already quite well versed in intuitive Bayes, this is likely of interest.

Hastie & Dawes (2010, p. 108) describe the "Ratio Rule", a helpful way of writing out Bayes' theorem that is useful for the quick estimation of an unknown proportion:

Pr(A|B) / Pr(B|A) = Pr(A) / Pr(B)

(Ratio of conditional probabilities equals ratio of unconditional probabilities.)

To steal their example, it's often reported that most 'hard' drug users also use (or started out with) pot, and this is often taken to support the notion that pot is a gateway to hard drugs. Hastie & Dawes point out that for the purposes of evaluating the 'gateway' claim, what we really want is not the reported value of Pr(has used pot | has used hard drugs) but rather Pr(has used hard drugs | has used pot) [*]. Suppose that Pr(pot|hard) ~ 0.9. We know that Pr(pot) ~ 0.5 (fraction of Americans who've used pot at some point), and we estimate that Pr(hard) is lower by a factor of, say 2.5 - 5, so the ratio Pr(pot) / Pr(hard) is between 2.5 and 5. By the ratio rule, Pr(pot|hard)/Pr(hard|pot) = 2.5 - 5, so Pr(hard|pot) is between about 0.2 and 0.4.

Another example: recently I found that the annual risk of dying by suicide for a young to middle-aged male is about 0.02%, as high as the annual risk of a middle-aged male dying in a car accident (!). I figured that taking into account my not having a history of mental illness should decrease this risk. Googling revealed that Pr(mental illness|suicide) = 0.9, and Pr(mental illness) is between 0.06 and 0.25 depending on the severity criteria you use. I want x = Pr(suicide|not mental illness), so I set up the ratios (assuming that the population proportions can be interpreted as annual risk):

Pr(suicide|not mental illness) / Pr(not mental illness|suicide) = Pr(suicide) / Pr(not mental illness)

x/0.1 = 0.0002/0.75 ~ 0.0002

x ~ 0.00002 (0.002%)

This seems much less worth worrying about. In the plausible range, the precise value of Pr(not mental illness) doesn't matter much.

[*] What we would really like is Pr(has used hard drugs | started out with pot) but we can assume that the two are close.

A meetup is coming up on July 4th in Tel Aviv. I want to post about it, but I've never done a meetup post before. Are there any non-obvious guidelines I should follow? A template? What about the map?

So, the technology is here to grow human pancreas in pigs and potentially improve lives of millions of diabetics. The obstacles are mostly ethical/regulatory, apparently. Does this mean that we explicitly or implicitly value non-creating a donor pig life, however short it might be, over quite a few human QALY?

Is there a general way to answer questions like this, which often occur in economics and the social sciences:

"Does institution X play a part in keeping parameter Y stable? It looks like parameter Y has been really stable for awhile now. Is institution X doing a good job, or is it completely useless?"

Does anyone want to make a small study group to read one of these books at a relatively slow pace?

• Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference
• Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (Gelman has been recommended over Jaynes here I'm flexible but I'd rather read Jaynes)
• Martin Peterson - An Introduction to Decision Theory
• Anything else similar/LW relevant

I've been meaning to read these (which I learned about from LW) for a long time and just now have the time.

Causality looks like the best option: the entire first edition is freely avaiable on Pearls site here. There is an overview of 2nd ed. chapters here

So, I just moved to Europe for two years and finally got finantial independence from my (somewhat) Catholic parents and I want to sign up for cryonics. Is there international coverage? Is there anything I should be aware of? Are there any steps I should be taking?

I was thinking about writing down everything I know. After reflecting a few seconds on that I realized what a daunting task I haveset out to do. Has anyone tried this or a suggestion how I should go about this if at all?

Christopher Gardner, a nutrition scientist at Stanford University who was not involved in the new study, said that after decades of research but little success in fighting obesity, “it has been disappointing that the message being communicated to the American public has been boiled down to ‘eat less and exercise more.’”

"An underlying assumption of the ‘eat less’ portion of that message has been ‘a calorie is a calorie,’" he said. But the new research "sheds light on the strong plausibility that it isn’t just the amount of food we are eating, but also the type"”

NYTimes blog article: How Carbs Can Trigger Food Cravings.

(If you ever have trouble accessing a NYTimes article (there was a script which doesn't work anymore), having exceeded your monthly allotment, remember you can just google the title then follow a link from e.g. Google News, which won't count against your quota.)

My overview page is missing some comments. They do show up on my comments page. This is true of the other accounts I checked too: Eliezer_Yudkowsky, JonahSinick, lukeprog, and orthonormal.

Edit: Looks like it's fixed. (26 June 2013 07:00:00AM UTC)

Richard Dawkins' New Strange Video

Now, as far as I'm concerned, he's preaching to the choir: not only does his message here sound like oversimplified, old news, but the freaky video is a mildly unremarkable instance of Seapunk which is in turn a memetic mutation of many, many things.

Nevertheless, I'm worried that many commenters seem to have decided that this clip was strong evidence that Dawkins has "gone insane". Don't they have any sense of humor?

Also, for comparison, a video done by someone who probably is "insane" (or rather, depressed).

Seriously, though, we need to look into the use of the word sane/insane and get a proper convention going, because the way it is now it sounds like "insane" is "someone who follows thought patterns I don't share", rather than, say "someone who's unsuitable for punishment by the judiciary because they can't be held responsible for their actions because... they don't have free will?".

Actually the legal definition is even more confusing...

Just had a gender-balanced LW meetup in Bratislava, 4:4. The small numbers most likely don't prove much, it could have been a coincidence. But after some discussions we had at LW, I would like to ask -- how likely is it to have a gender balance on a LW meetup?

What happened to the "How to have space correctly" article? I can't find it in either discussion or main.

Edit: Its reappeared with revisions, I must have been trying to access it while the author was editing.

I saw a video link from LW (I think it was from here) in which a man gave a TED-style talk arguing that artists should try to elevate pornography to a serious art form. Does anyone know the video I'm talking about? I'm pretty sure it wasn't an actual TED talk, but it was structured similarly.

Edit: Found it. It was a talk by Alain De Botton.

Is being fashionable optimal? When it comes to fashion, it seems apparent that the main goal is to make an impression on others, so it seems reasonable to conform ones fashion to what other people call fashionable. However, we also know that there are plenty of examples of cases where people's expressed preferences do not match their actual preferences. Is there a compelling reason to think that expressed fashion preferences are actually those that give the best impression? Does anyone know of studies on this? Does anyone have any anecdotes one way or the other?

(Here I always mean 'fashionable' with respect to the intended audience, not with respect to some 'high art' sophisticates.)

This question obviously generalizes to a wide variety of status-motivated choices. Does reading 'fashionable' books actually make a better impression on someone than reading, say, a well-loved and popular but 'childish' book that the audience is likely to have fond memories of? Does driving a nice car give a better impression than driving a car similar to the Jones's?

I just saw this:

Persistent Autonomy means going beyond what has been done before. PANDORA is creating a new class of AUVs that keep going under extreme uncertainty. AUVs that respond to system faults by doing what they can. AUVs that generate their own missions when idle. AUVs that act appropriately under unexpected environmental challenges.

Humankind needs a new class of underwater vehicle to address the new challenges that deep sea exploration and mechanization create. A PANDORA AUV constantly replans, continuously questions its assumptions, and adjusts its skills to fit its immediate environment.

AUV here means Autonomous Underwater Vehicle.

No, I'm not expecting this to FOOM, but I found the language striking, especially with that name. Machines that generate their own missions when you leave them unattended! Machines that continually question their assumptions! Machines that keep going, autonomously, no matter what! Underwater, where it's hard to find anything that wants to stay hidden!

I was reading Outlawing Anthropics and especially this subconversation has caught my attention. I got some ideas; but that thread is nearly four years old, so I am commenting here instead of there.

My version of the simplified situation: There is an intelligent rational agent (her name is Abby, she is well versed in Bayesian statistics) and there are two urns, each urn containing two marbles. Three of the marbles are green. They are macroscopic, so distinguishable, but not for Abby's senses. Anyway, Abby can number them to be marbles 1, 2 and 3, she is just unable to "read" the number even on close examination. One marble is red, she can distinguish it, and it gets number 0. One urn has marbles 0 and 2, this is the "even" urn, the second has marbles 1 and 3, and is called odd. Again, Abby cannot distinguish urns without examining marbles. Now, assistent takes both urns to another room, computes 256th binary digit of exp(-1), and gets back with just one urn of corresponding parity. Abby is allowed to draw one marble (turns out it is green) and then urn is taken away and Abby is basically asked to state her subjective probability of the urn being odd (by accepting or refusing some bets). And only then she is told that in another room there is another person (Bart) who is being presented with the same choices after drawing the other marble from the very same urn. And finally, Abby is asked (informally) what is her averaged expectation of Bart's subjective probability of the urn being odd (now that she sees her marble is green). And, if this average is different from her subjective probability, why is she not taking that value as an indirect evidence in her calculations (which clearly means that the assistent is just messing with her).

Assumptions are that neither Abby nor Bart have a clue about binary digits of exp(-1), they are not able to compute that far and so they assign prior probability of the urn being odd to 50%. Another assumption is that Abby and Bart both have chosen their marbles randomly, and in fact, they do not even know which one of them was drawing first. So there are 4 "possible" worlds, numbered by the marble Abby "would" have drawn, all of them appearing equally probable before the marble drawing.

Question is (of course) what subjective probability should Abby use when accepting/refusing bets. And to give a witty retort to assistant's "why" question, where applicable; or else, to explain why Boltzmann brains are not that big obstacle to rationality.

And here I am, way over my time budget, having finished around one third of my planned comment. So I guess I shall leave you with questions for now, and I will resume commenting later.

Edit: Note to self: Do not forget to include http:// in links. RTFM.

Edit: "possible" worlds, numbered by marble Abby has drawn -> "possible" worlds, numbered by marble Abby "would" have drawn

Somewhere I think there's a quote about Eliezer writing faster with a writing partner. Could someone point me to this quote?

Odd brain exercise I find entertaining: Using only knowledge about this universe, try to determine what kind of universe would be most likely to simulate our kind of universe.

For example, to my eye, general relativity, plus the propensity of pi to pop up in odd places, implies something like a hierarchy-relative polar coordinate system is the standard mathematical model in our host universe, as opposed to the Cartesian coordinate system we tend to default to. So, what would a universe look like such that this is the most intuitive way of considering data? Seems most likely that such a view is most likely to arise in a nonoriented universe; gravity would be unlikely, as gravity provides a natural plane of orientation, so something like universal attractive and repulsive forces probably wouldn't exist.

WHY PEOPLE REALLY HAVE DOGS

People really have dogs so they can talk to themselves
without feeling crazy. Take me, for example, cooking
scrambled eggs, ranting about this dumb fuck
who sent naked pictures of himself to strange women,
a politician from New York, I read about it in the paper,
start telling my nervous cock-a-poo, blind in one eye,
practically deaf (so I have to talk extra loud) all about it
and he’s looking at me, poor thing, like he thinks I’m
the smartest person he’s ever heard and I go on, him
tilting his head, and when he sees me pick up my dish
of eggs he starts panting and wagging his tail, I tell him,
no, they’re not for you, but then I break down and give
him some knowing full well that feeding from the table
is rule number one of what you don’t do with dogs,
but I do it anyway because he wants them so bad,
because it makes me feel good to give him what he wants,
and I expound more to make sure he’s aware of the whole
political scandal, the implications for the democrats,
the hypocrisy, tell him dogs are rarely hypocrites, except
when they pretend to be interested in you when all they want
is your food, take him, for example, right now pretending
to love me so much when all he wants are my eggs, me
talking to him when all I want is to say my opinions with no one
interrupting, feel my voice roll out on a clear Saturday morning,
listen to it echo from the kitchen to the bath, up through the ceiling,
out to the sky, the voice from within, all alone in the morning
as the light outside catches the edge of the silver mixing bowl
where the remaining, uncooked eggs sit stirred, ready to toss
into the pan, cooked, eaten by whomever pretends to want them.

Kim Dower

All right, since I was told on my very first, and abortive, discussion thread that I should post a larger summary or excerpt of the link I had on there if I wanted to comport with LW's norms, let me do that here instead (since my karma is now too low to make another discussion post).

So I've written a long article summarizing a life philosophy which asserts the significance of a certain kind of meditative self-expression for grasping human freedom and understanding the significance of pain and suffering in human life.

Any LessWrong readers interested in thinking about the meaning of life, meditation, psychology, philosophy, spirituality, art, or in better understanding and handling their own minds should be interested.

Here is the largest excerpt I could post without the comment being rejected as too long:

The next time you stub your toe or otherwise hurt yourself, take a moment to become curious about exactly what the pain is like. What exactly does it feel like? Is it stabbing? Does it radiate? Is it blunt or sharp? Does it come and go? Is it cold or hot? Does it remind you of someone, or something, or some place?

As soon as you suspend the pain in your mind, the pain immediately changes. It becomes interesting. Like Keanu Reeves might stop a bullet in the air in The Matrix, you stun the pain by paying it conscious attention and then examining it like a scientist or artist might. It becomes fascinating. And then, as you describe it, its character changes more and more. It becomes sharp, specific, and beautiful. It might still be pain, but still, even as pain, it is no longer painful in the same way. Now it is a jewel. You see within it organization, ideas, intelligence.

Through the process of reflection and then expression, we can transform pain into beauty. This is true not just of physical pain, but of all pain, and indeed, of any experience. This is the essence of human freedom and power.

The most interesting and fundamental question in the world is what we’re doing here in this life. What’s the point? I spent years thinking about this question — going through psychology and western and eastern philosophy, and asking this question over and over.

I think I have an answer, at least a certain kind of partial answer. It’s certainly not totally original. Yet it is not often seen, not often heard.

My problem is how to explain it in words. I have tried many formulations on paper and in my head and none of them seem quite right. So I’ve decided to share several of them with you here, and hope you get the point. I’m trying to indicate a sensibility about the world — a way of relating to it, of seeing it, of dealing with it. What I’m trying to say cannot be wholly communicated in words (though can anything?). I need you to get the feel of it, to have the shift in perspective without which none of this will really make sense.

There’s a zen story about the monk who points to the moon. And the disciple keeps looking at his finger. ‘No, no, up there!’ the monk tries to say, but the disciple cannot understand the concept of pointing. That’s the kind of barrier I feel I’m up against.

Let me give you another example: to someone new to wine, wine tastes like wine. Maybe red wine tastes like red wine, and white wine tastes like white wine. To someone who drinks a little more, and thinks about what they drink, perhaps they start to identify sour and bitter, dryness and acidity. But to the wine connoisseur and critic, the vocabulary and the experience expand. They start to be able to detect and name notes of musk, florality, and minerality. They distinguish the taste of the wine at the front of the palate from the taste at the back. They comprehend the history and the heritage of the wine, its lineage in the soil, the effect of the sun and the rain on the grapes that made it. They taste and appreciate the various nuances of fermentation.

For the connoisseur, the wine unfolds into a much more complex, in-depth experience. It happens not just because the person drinks a lot of wine, but because they pay attention, and because they analyze the wine, and come up with labels, and break down and express their experiences.

The same way the experience of the wine reveals layer after layer with increased attention and thought, so too can the same general idea apply to life. Any particular experience you’ve had without thinking about it you’ve barely even lived. It passed by and vanished, and you missed a lot in it, a lot like a rookie misses almost everything interesting in the wine she’s tasting. If you take an experience of yours, pay it attention, and express what it is like, you will find that the experience starts to refine itself. It becomes complex, multi-layered, rich, fascinating, interesting, beautiful. It ceases to be one big blob and starts to become a multitude.

This revelation of layers of intelligence, of pattern but also of chaos—interesting chaos—is the reward for this expression.

Expression is the key.

Mere observation is not enough. Simply remembering an experience is not enough. You just remember the same pale, shallow memory you had before. But if you remember an experience and then 1) think deeply about it, 2) try to honestly and originally express exactly what it was like for you, and 3) put this expression in some form (music, poetry, film, or even just a few sentences in your journal) then 4) that will allow you to see the experience in a new light. It will force you to choose the important aspects of the experience. Those aspects of the experience will come into focus. Like a near-sighted man putting on glasses for the first time, the experience will become dramatically sharper.

Of course, expression inevitably distorts. Even a good map is partly wrong. It is still illuminating. A map has to distort and simplify to be useful. Similarly, every expression breaks down experience in a way that is partly wrong. One kind of expression will highlight certain facets of an experience; another expression will highlight other facets. Experiences can be expressed in an endless variety of ways.

This sensibility I’m trying to communicate results in the appreciation of “subtlety.” To a casual listener of music, when someone plays a key on a piano, they hear it as a single note. To a musician or a music critic or an audiophile, though, the note has at least three parts. The first is the attack, when the key is struck and a tiny hammer literally pings against a tight string inside the piano. The second is a middle portion of the note. The third is the decay, as the note fades. Each of these is different. And in fact even within each of these parts the note changes. Expression is like an instrument that allows you to see the worlds within every world.

Observing and expressing any experience streams down beautiful ideas that allow you to see it in a new way. The experience discloses connections to other experiences, patterns within it, intelligence.

To appreciate the finer and finer details of these changes — to see distinctions and discern refinement where once there was only sameness — is the spirit of subtlety. It is to see not just a thing but the presence of the space surrounding that thing. It is the spirit of the Japanese tea ceremony.

It is the spirit of not trying to overwhelm with a simple rush of pleasure, but to see deeper and deeper and quieter and quieter parts of something. It is why John Cage created an entirely silent piece — he wanted to make a statement about this spirit of subtlety, that looks for the shyest and most reluctant details. It is the spirit of, when you’re hungry, not just gobbling up food, but making food that tastes good, and then, looks good. Taking your time to do that prolongs the hunger, but then allows you to explore that hunger in a more and more elegant, artistic way.

The Magic Equation: Desire = Pain

And if you want to see these subtleties, desire is crucial. You do not fully control your mind anymore than you fully control the weather. You are at all times in a mental landscape, and the most important feature of this landscape is desire. We always want something — or perhaps to avoid something — and this focuses and defines our attention. We can use this desire as the starting point of our attention and expression.

Desire, which unfulfilled is the same thing as pain, is what allows you to appreciate anything. So the connoisseur realizes that desire is a precious thing. It should not be used up too early. It is what allows you to be interested in something. As soon as you’ve had an orgasm, interest in sex decreases. It is the desire for sex, the ache, the hunger, that can motivate you to explore subtler and subtler realms of sexuality: to be interested in those realms. And that is why celibacy shows up so often in the world’s mystical traditions. It provides the motivation to seek sexuality not in physical bodies, but in knowledge and contemplation. The subtlest sexual objects are ideas.

The artistic mindset I am trying to communicate sees emotional or physical pain — unfulfilled desire — as a precious, specific energy that we can capture like a firefly in a jar, to follow its spirals and whirls. We can use it by investigating the desire itself. The desire is an experience. We can attend to it, note its intricacies.

Read the rest of it...

20 Signs You Studied Philosophy In College