Open & Welcome Thread - December 2019

Hi everyone, I have recently started reading this site again after having had a break for a couple years.

What I like most about LessWrong (apart from the name), is that it contains so much good quality information about rationality, all in one place. And the posters maintain such a high standard of reasoning. One thing I would like to see more of on the site, though, is analyses of common human behaviour.

Also, it would be great to see some humour on here.

Hi. I'm new to LessWrong and looking forward to exploring it. I've been slowly wading into the rationale spheres out there, one sea at a time, over the past couple of years. I'm LA-based, so I'll attend the LA meetups when I'm able.

About me: robotics engineer focused on mobility and surface sampling, among other areas; trying to learn more and eventually do some work in the newly emerging field of philosophy of engineering (actively exploring grad-school options in this area); enjoys volleyball and live music; not a very habitual forum-poster, so I'll probably post infrequently and mostly read/comment from a distance.

Thanks, LW Team, for the very comprehensive FAQ and About pages. That should make the experience of beginning to swim around in LW less confusing than most online spaces.

Hey all. I've recently come into this blog after the SSC-NYT-gate and I'm very intrigued by the content posted and the community. I've skimmed a number of articles and I'm felt immediately drawn by every single thing I read.

About me: I'm a robotics engineer currently living in NY. You can follow me in twitter @wannabegroncho

When thinking about information asymmetry in transactions (e.g. insurance, market for lemons), I can think of several axes for comparison:

1. whether the thing happens before or after the transaction
2. whether the buyer or seller has more information
3. whether the asymmetry is about a good or about an action

Insurance-like transactions pick "after", "buyer", and "action": the person buying the insurance can choose to act more carelessly after purchasing the insurance.

Market for lemons cases pick "before", "seller", and "good": prior to the transaction, the seller of the good knows more about the quality of the good.

So in many typical cases, the three axes "align", and the former is called a moral hazard and the latter is called adverse selection.

But there are examples like an all-you-can-eat buffet that sets a single price (which encourages high-appetite people to eat there). This case picks "before", "buyer", and "action". So in this case, 2/3 of the axes agree with the insurance-like situation, but this case is still classified as adverse selection because the official distinction is about (1).

Wikipedia states "Where adverse selection describes a situation where the type of product is hidden from one party in a transaction, moral hazard describes a situation where there is a hidden action that results from the transaction" (i.e. claims that (3) is the relevant axis) but then on the same page also states "For example, an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant that sets one price for all customers risks being adversely selected against by high appetite" (i.e. classifies this example as adverse selection, even though classifying according to (3) would result in calling this a moral hazard).

Does anyone know why (1) is the most interesting axis (which I'm inferring based on how only this axis seems to have names for the two ends)?

Sometimes it seems to me that LW is too ready to build for the ages. The best heuristics, the best textbooks, the best meetup practices. Either there should be mandatory time thresholds for re-evaluations, or we should maybe relax about this. (Except for the Boring Advice Repository, perhaps.)

Chris McKinstry was one of two AI researchers who committed suicide in early 2006. On the SL4 list, a kind of precursor to Less Wrong, we spent some time puzzling over McKinstry's final ideas.

I'm mentioning here (because I don't know where else to mention it) that there was a paper on arxiv recently, "Robot Affect: the Amygdala as Bloch Sphere", which has an odd similarity to those final ideas. Aficionados of AI theories that propose radical identities connecting brain structures, math structures, and elements of cognition, may wish to compare the two in more detail.

I've been wondering about design differences between blogs and wikis. For example:

• Most of the wikis I know use a variable width for the body text, rather than a narrow fixed width that is common on many websites (including blogs)
• Most of the wikis I know have a separate discussion page, whereas most blogs have a comments section on the same page as the content
• I think wikis tend to have smaller font size than blogs
• Wikis make a hard distinction between internal links (wikilinks) and external links, going so far as to discourage the use of external links in the body text in some cases

I find the above differences interesting because they can't be explained (or are not so easy to explain) just by saying something like "a wiki is a collaborative online reference where each page is a distinct topic while a blog is a chronological list of articles where each article tends to have a single author"; this explanation only works for things like emphasis on publication date (wikis are not chronological, so don't need to emphasize publication date), availability of full history (wikis are collaborative, so having a full history helps to see who added what and to revert vandalism), display of authorship (blogs usually have a single author per post so listing this makes sense, but wiki pages have many authors so listing all of them makes less sense), standardized section names (a blog author can just ramble about whatever, but wikis need to build consistency in how topics are covered), and tone/writing style (blogs can just be one author's opinions, whereas wikis need to agree on some consistent tone).

Has anyone thought about these differences, especially what would explain them? Searching variations of "wikis vs blogs" on the internet yields irrelevant results.

Hi! I'm Hazrina from Indonesia. I came here after reading Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality and googling about the author. I'm a total newbie in this rationality thingy and I'm looking forward to learn a lot here. Thank you so much for making this wonderful community 🌻

80.000 hours recommands a Machine Learning PhD as a high-impact career path – can help understand the most important technology, and a powerful entry ticket into many relevant jobs. And ML jobs are often well-paid, so they allow earning-to-give as a backup option.

I don't really like the Machine Learning institute at my university, but the professor who leads the institute for information security (whom I do like) has offered to combine the two fields. He said they're primarily interested in "privacy-preserving ML".

How valuable would such a mixed PhD be, compared to a pure ML one? And also, how much does the prestige of the university matter? Should I try to get into the most prestigious one in my country, even if it takes longer? I really struggle to approach these questions. I'm also unsure how much I should care about how I feel about the professor.

I liked Robin Hanson's recent post Unending Winter Is Coming (it matches my understanding of at least one scenario of how physics/computation/war is likely to work in the future), but find his lack of urgency for trying to solve the problem puzzling. To quote my comment there:

Our descendants may not have the same opportunities to solve this problem that we have. At a minimum it seems much easier (even if still very hard in an absolute sense) to solve this problem (for example by coordinating to build a Singleton / strong world government) before human or post-human civilization starts spreading into the stars. It seems like lack of urgency is only justifiable if one was very certain that space colonization is far in the future, and I don't see how that belief is justifiable.

Greetings. Retired engineering type from Central New Jersey, USA. From my quick first scan I can tell I will be spending some evenings in front of the screen learning and appreciating other opinions on a wide area of topics.

Radio Bob

I stumbled on this site randomly one day a few months back at work and the very thing that caught my attention was the name, lesswrong. I read a few posts, maybe one or two, and bookmarked the site. Today, I was in dire need to read something informative, rational, and mind training; just when I started scrolling the bookmarks, again, the title grabbed my attention. Completely forgetting what this is about, I opened the site, in the curiosity of "lessWrong", ended signing up, deciding to be a member. As much as I am excited to read more here, I am looking forward to write something. 

Hello Everyone.
I am new to lesswrong and am keen on exploring a structured approach to rationality. I am fascinated by mathematics and keep wondering if we can have similar formal methods for thinking about life. 

Hey everyone. Like others, I found this site while looking for information on Zettlekasten. Pleasantly surprised to find its connections to Slate Star Codex, which I have enjoyed reading in the past.

I'm interested in learning about xrisks and rationality, and hopefully taking ideas across disciplines and contexts. Seattle area.

Hello! I have been exploring LessWrong on a non-regular basis for a few months, and have recently been advised to create my own account.

I am a french aerospace student, who will (likely) start a PhD next year. I am particularly interested in mitigating xrisks, and would like to orient my career in such a direction. I enjoy ethics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind. A fact which I think is relevant: I am probably a bit less fond of bayesianism as most people here.

I'm looking for a comment from /u/wei_dai; it had something to do along the lines of deciding what to work on (or do, or study) week by week, and then updating/changing after the week (maybe in a post about UDT?) Does someone know what I'm talking about? Search function, wei_dai posts and google has turned up nothing. Thanks for anyone's help!

Hi there, I am new to LessWrong. I hope to find here people for interesting discussions 😊

There's a post somewhere in the rationalsphere that I can't relocate for the life of me. Can anybody help?

The point was communication. The example given was the difference between a lecture and a sermon. The distinction the author made was something like a professor talking to students in class, each of whom then goes home and does homework by themselves, versus a preacher who gives his sermon to the congregation, with the expectation that they will break off into groups and discuss the sermon among themselves.

I have a vague memory that there were graphics involved.

I have tried local search on LessWrong, site search of LessWrong, and browsing a few post histories that seemed like they might be the author based on a vague sense of aesthetic similarity. I was sure it was here, but now I fear it may have been elsewhere or it is hidden in some other kind of post.

What audiobooks should I listen to? Things I'd like to learn more about:

• economic history
• the causes of productivity of researchers and research fields
• the evolution of intelligence

Whence I come: 78 years old, Ph. D. social psych, musician, lately reading a lot of philosophy. Just wondering if the community here thought Hume was an idiot and the latest findings about emotions being a necessary part of decision-making horrifying. bill w

is there any explanation of the current Karma System? The main thing I can find is this [LW · GW]. (you need to scroll to 'The karma system', for some reason you can click on subsections to go to them, but you can't link to them).

Also why do I see a massive message that says 'habryka's commenting guidelines' when I am writing this comment, but there are no guidelines or link? Is this just a weird extra ad for your own name?

My mistake. This is the "Hello, world" place. But the default sort of this one should probably not be by "top scoring"? However, like the visible top scored comment, I, too, have been away from LW for some years. (Nice to see that I can change the sort order without losing my draft. Evidence of solid code. However the newly visible top comment is from 5 months ago? Months between comments?)

I was reminded of LW by The AI Does Not Hate You, though I'm pretty sure I've seen other references to it over the years. So far my impressions are mostly favorable, except that it seems to use 1D karma and I'm averse to reducing people (or even my opinions about people) to any single dimension.

I am somewhat interested in the mentioned books related to LW, but I have trouble finishing ebooks. Perhaps the first thing I should seek is advice on how to enjoy ebooks? I still enjoy many dead trees every year. (And I confirmed that none of my local libraries has any of them. I pretty regularly use a half dozen library systems.)

I'm (re-)reading up on absolutely continuous probability spaces right now. The defintion for the expected value I find everywhere is this:

(1): $E\left(X\right):={\int }_{-\infty }^{\infty }x\cdot f\left(x\right)\text{d}x$

The way to interpret this formula is that we're integrating over the target space of $X$ rather than the domain, and $f$ is a probability density function over the target space of $X$. But this formula seems highly confusing if that is left unsaid ($X$ doesn't even appear in it – what the heck?). If one begins with a probability density function $f$ over a probability space $\Omega =R$ and then wants to compute the expected value of a random variable $X:\Omega \to R$, I think the formula is:

(2): $E\left(X\right):={\int }_{-\infty }^{\infty }X\left(\omega \right)\cdot f\left(\omega \right)\text{d}\omega$

It seems utterly daft to me to present (1) without first presenting (2) if the idea is to teach the material in an easily understandable way. Even if one never uses (2) in practice. But this is what seems to be done everywhere – I googled a bunch, checked wikipedia, and dug out an old script, I haven't found (2) anywhere (I hope it's even correct). Worse, none of them even explicitly mention that $x$ ranges over $X\left(\Omega \right)$ rather than over $\Omega$ after presenting (1). I get each random variable does itself define a probability space where the distribution is automatically over $X\left(\Omega \right)$ but I don't think this is a good argument not to present (2). This concept is obviously not going to be trivial to understand.

Stuff like this makes me feel like almost no-one thinks for themselves unless they have to, even in math. I'm interested in whether or not fellow LW-ians share my intuition here.

There seems to be a similar thing going on in linear algebra, where everyone teaches concepts based on the determinant, even though doing it differently makes them far easier. But there it feels more understandable, since you do need to be quite good to see that. This case here just feels like people aren't even trying to optimize for readability.