Open Thread, May 1-15, 2012

Related to: List of public drafts on LessWrong

Article based on this draft: Conspiracy Theories as Agency Fictions

I was recently thinking about a failure mode that classical rationality often recognizes and even reasonably competently challenges, yet nearly all the heuristics it uses to detect it, seem remarkably easy to use to misuse. Not only that they seem easily hackable to win a debate. How much has the topic been discussed on LW? Wondering about this I sketched out my thoughts in the following paragraphs.

On conspiracy theories

What does the phrase even mean? They are generally used to explain events or trends as the results of plots orchestrated by covert groups. Sometimes people use the term to talk about theories that important events are the products of secret plots that are largely unknown to the general public. Conspiracy in a somewhat more legal sense is also used to describe agreement between persons to deceive, mislead, or defraud others of their legal rights, or to gain an unfair advantage in some endeavour. And finally it is a convenient tool to clearly and in vivid colours paint something as low status, it is a boo light applied to any explanation that has people acting in anything that can be described as self-interest and is a few inferential jumps away. One could argue this is the primary meaning of calling an argument a conspiracy theory in on-line debates.

But putting aside the misuse of the label and associated cached thoughts, people do engage in constructing conspiracy theories when they just aren't needed. Note that we do have plenty of historical examples of real conspiracies with pretty high stakes, so we do know they can be the right answer. Sometimes entire on-line communities fixate on them or just don't call such bad thinking out. Why does this happen? Groups are complicated since we are social monkeys. This is something I don't feel like going into right now, since plenty of fancy phrases like tribal attire or bandwagon effect would abound not to mention the obligatory Hansonian status based explanations, packed in a even bigger wall of text. Let us then first take a look at why individuals may be biased towards such explanations.

First off we have a hard time understanding that coordination is hard. If we see a large pay off available and thinking it easily in reach if "we could just get along" seems like a classical failing. Our pro-social sentiments lead us to downplay such barriers in our future plans. Motivated cognition on behalf of assessing the threat potential of perceived enemies or strangers likely shares this problem. Even if we avoid this, we may still be lost since the second big relevant thing is our tendency for anthropomorphizing things that better not be. A paranoid brain seeing agency in every shadow or strange sound, seems like something evolution would favour over one that fails to see it every now and then. In other words the cost of false positives was reasonably low. Also our brains are just plain lazy, the general population is pretty good at modelling other human minds and considering just how hard the task is, we do a pretty remarkable job of it. So when you want rain you do a rain dance to appease the sky spirits since the weather is pretty capricious and angry sky spirits is a model that makes as much sense as any other (when you are stuck in relative ignorance) and is cheap to run on your brain. The modern world is remarkably complex. Our Dunbarian minds probably just plain can't get how a society can be that complex and unpredictable without it being "planned" by a cabal of Satan or Heterosexual White Males or the Illuminati (but I repeat myself twice) scheming to make weird things happen in the small stone age tribe. Learning about and gaining confidence in some models helps people escape anthropomorphizing human society (this might sound strange but here on LW we are wary of doing this to people, ha beat that!) or the economy or government. The latter is particularly salient since the idea that say something like the United States government can be successfully modelled as a single agent to explain most of its actions is something I dare say most people slip up on occasionally. And lastly... naughty secret conspiracy and malignant agency just plain make a good story.

Humans loooove stories.

At Reason Rally a couple of months ago, we noticed that a lot of atheists there seemed to be there for mutual support - because their own communities rejected atheists, because they felt outnumbered and threatened by their peers, and the rally was a way for them to feel part of an in-group.

There seem to be differing concentrations of people who have had this sort of experience on LessWrong. Some of us felt ostracized by our local communities while growing up, others have felt pretty much free to express atheist or utilitarian views for their whole lives. Does anyone else think this would be worth doing a poll on / have experiences they want to share?

Whatever happened to the second Quantified Health Prize?

I get a ridiculous amount of benefit by abusing store return deadlines. I've tested and returned an iPhone, $400 Cole Haan bag, multiple coats, jeans, software, video games, and much more. It's surprising how long many return periods are, and it's a fantastic way to try new stuff and make sure you like it.

Re-reading my own post on the 10,000 year explosion, a thought struck me. There's evidence that the humans populations in various regions have adapted to their local environment and diet, with e.g. lactose tolerance being more common in people of central and northern European descent. At the same time, there are studies that try to look at the diet, living habits etc. of various exceptionally long-lived populations, and occasionally people suggest that we should try to mimic the diet of such populations in order to be healthier (e.g. the Okinawa diet).

That made me wonder. How generalizable can we consider any findings from such studies? What odds should one assign to the hypothesis that any health benefits such long-lived populations get from their diet are mostly due to local adaptation for that diet, and would not benefit people with different ancestry?

I feel as though this cobbled-together essay from '03 has a lot of untapped potential.

An economics question:

Which economic school of thought most resembles "the standard picture" of cogsci rationality? In other words, which economists understand probability theory, heuristics & biases, reductionism, evolutionary psychology, etc. and properly incorporate it into their work? If these economists aren't of the neo-classical school, how closely does neo-classical economics resemble the standard picture, if at all?

Unnecessary Background Information:

Feel free to not read this. It's just an explanation of why I'm asking these questions.

I'm somewhat at a loss when it comes to economics. When I was younger (maybe 15 or so?) I began reading Austrian economics. The works of Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, etc., served as my first rigorous introduction to economics. I self-identified as an Austrian for several years, up until a few months ago.

For the past year, I have learned a lot about cognsci rationality through LW sequences and related works. I think I have a decent grasp of what cognsci rationality is, why it is correct, and how to conflicts with the method of the Austrian school. (For those who aren't aware, Austrians use an apriori method and claim absolute/infinite certainty, among other things.) The final straw came when I read Bryan Caplan's "Why I am not an Austrian Economist" and his debate with Austrian economist Walter Block. Caplan ably defended BayesCraft. I - with emotional difficulty - consciously updated my belief in Austrianism to below 0.5. I knew I could no longer be an Austrian, nor did I want to be.

Caplan is an neo-classical economist, and neo-classical seems to be the dominant school of modern economic thought. So I'm reading my way through introductory neo-classical economics textbooks. (Specifically, Principles of Macreconomics and Principles of Microeconomics by Mankiw.) I am also looking to take some economics courses when I start university in the fall. My primary major will likely be mathematics, but I am considering double majoring in economics. Maybe get a graduate degree in economics? I don't know yet.

But I'm apprehensive about reading bad economics textbooks because I don't know enough good economics to sort out the bunk. And the reason I want to read economics textbooks in the first place is to learn more good economics. So I'm in a catch 22. I think I'm safe enough reading a standard intro to micro/marco book. But when it comes to finance? Banking? Monetary theory? I haven't a clue who to trust.

So I'm looking to take what I do know (cogsci rationality) and see where it is utilized in economics. If there is a school of economic thought that uses it as their methodology, I think that serves as very strong evidence I can likely trust what they say.

In many artificial rule systems used in games there often turn out to be severe loopholes that allow an appropriate character to drastically increase their abilities and power. Examples include how in Morrowind you can use a series of intelligence potions to drastically increase your intelligence and make yourself effectively invincible or how in Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 a low level character can using the right tricks ascend to effective godhood in minutes.

So, two questions which sort of go against each other: First is this evidence that randomized rule systems that are complicated enough to be interesting are also likely to allow some sort of drastic increase in effective abilities using some sort of loopholes? (essentially going FOOM in a general sense). Second, and in the almost exact opposite direction, such aspects are common in games and one has quite a few science fiction and fantasy novels where a character (generally evil) tries to do something similar. Less Wrong does have a large cadre of people involved in nerd-literature and the like. Is this aspect of such literature and games acting as fictional evidence which is acting in our backgrounds to improperly make such scenarios seem likely or plausible?

I found this person's anecdotes and analogies helpful for thinking about self-optimization in more concrete terms than I had been previously.

A common mental model for performance is what I'll call the "error model." In the error model, a person's performance of a musical piece (or performance on a test) is a perfect performance plus some random error. You can literally think of each note, or each answer, as x + c*epsilon_i, where x is the correct note/answer, and epsilon_i is a random variable, iid Gaussian or something. Better performers have a lower error rate c. Improvement is a matter of lowering your error rate. This, or something like it, is the model that underlies school grades and test scores. Your grade is based on the percent you get correct. Your performance is defined by a single continuous parameter, your accuracy.

But we could also consider the "bug model" of errors. A person taking a test or playing a piece of music is executing a program, a deterministic procedure. If your program has a bug, then you'll get a whole class of problems wrong, consistently. Bugs, unlike error rates, can't be quantified along a single axis as less or more severe. A bug gets everything that it affects wrong. And fixing bugs doesn't improve your performance in a continuous fashion; you can fix a "little" bug and immediately go from getting everything wrong to everything right. You can't really describe the accuracy of a buggy program by the percent of questions it gets right; if you ask it to do something different, it could suddenly go from 99% right to 0% right. You can only define its behavior by isolating what the bug does.

Often, I think mistakes are more like bugs than errors. My clinkers weren't random; they were in specific places, because I had sub-optimal fingerings in those places. A kid who gets arithmetic questions wrong usually isn't getting them wrong at random; there's something missing in their understanding, like not getting the difference between multiplication and addition. Working generically "harder" doesn't fix bugs (though fixing bugs does require work).

Once you start to think of mistakes as deterministic rather than random, as caused by "bugs" (incorrect understanding or incorrect procedures) rather than random inaccuracy, a curious thing happens.

You stop thinking of people as "stupid."

Tags like "stupid," "bad at _", "sloppy," and so on, are ways of saying "You're performing badly and I don't know why." Once you move it to "you're performing badly because you have the wrong fingerings," or "you're performing badly because you don't understand what a limit is," it's no longer a vague personal failing but a causal necessity. Anyone who never understood limits will flunk calculus. It's not you, it's the bug.

This also applies to "lazy." Lazy just means "you're not meeting your obligations and I don't know why." If it turns out that you've been missing appointments because you don't keep a calendar, then you're not intrinsically "lazy," you were just executing the wrong procedure. And suddenly you stop wanting to call the person "lazy" when it makes more sense to say they need organizational tools.

"Lazy" and "stupid" and "bad at _" are terms about the map, not the territory. Once you understand what causes mistakes, those terms are far less informative than actually describing what's happening.

Error vs. Bugs and the End of Stupidity

I've just uploaded an updated version of my comment scroller. Download here. This update makes the script work correctly when hidden comments are loaded (e.g. via the "load all comments" link). Thanks to Oscar Cunningham for prompting me to finally fix it!

Note: Upgrading on Chrome is likely to cause a "Downgrading extension error" (I'd made a mistake with the version numbers previously), the fix is to uninstall and then reinstall the new version. (Uninstall via Tools > Extensions)

For others who aren't using it: I wrote a small user script that allows you to jump through the green-bordered new comments quickly. More information here.

Book recommendations from some awesome people.

Yesterday I was lying in bed thinking about the LW community and had a little epiphany, guessing the reason as to why discussions on gender relations and the traditional and new practices of inter-gender choice and manipulation (or "seduction", more narrowly) around here consistently "fail" as people say - that is, produce genuine disquiet and anger on all sides of the discussion.

The reason is that both opponents and proponents of controversial things in this sphere - be it a techincal approach to romantic relations ("PUA") or "traditional"/conservative gender relations or polyamory or other such examples - are inevitably almost completely correct in pointing out the most blatant and harmful effects of the opposing view's practices. Put simply, all known solutions in the area of sexuality and gender relations, however they compare to each other, are quite awful on an absolute scale (by the vast majority of moral outlooks). Because of the fundamentally broken and irrational nature of how our psychology interacts with the non-ansectral environment, all of our imperfect arrangements will inevitably produce much psychological and/or social suffering and "dysfunction". I use that word in quotes because, according to the view above, our society is inevitably and innately dysfunctional whatever you do with it.

Yet people, while seeing with some clarity the evils of the opposing view, are in denial about those of their own suggestions - just like most non-transhumanist atheists are in denial about many awful realities of the human condition, chiefly death. They simply refuse to allow themselves the thought that something so bad might be going on with no decent solution in sight. Thus, disquiet and misdirected anger.

Now, transhumanists are better off in this regard [1] because they know that humans can eventually be enhanced, and the vast disperancies between how we live and what evolution prepared us for, fixed. So I suggest that we don't approach this topic without keeping in mind the possibilities of transhumanism, so as to eliminate the cognitive dissonance in observing problems that can't be overcome at the level they arise on.

My idea could well be mistaken, generated by sudden intuition instead of methodical inquiry as it was; so would you please discuss it and consider it in more detail - but on a meta level at first, without getting into the usual failure mode?

[1] They might have their own issues, sure, but here's a clear advantage for them.

Just posted today: a small rant about hagiographic biographers who switch off their critical thinking in the presence of literary effect and a cool story. A case study in smart people being stupid.

Has anybody actually followed through on Louie's post about optimal employment (i.e. worked a hospitality job in Australia on a work visa)? How did you go about it? Did you just go there without a job lined up like he suggests? That seems risky. And even if you get a job, what if you get fired after a couple of weeks?

I really like the idea, but I'd also like a few more data points.

Argument for Friendly Universe:

Pleasure/pain is one of the simplest control mechanism, thus it seems probable that it would be discovered by any sufficiently-advanced evolutionary processes anywhere.

Once general intelligence arises as a result of an evolutionary process, it will apply itself to optimizing the (unnecessary) pain away.

Generally, it will succeed. (General intelligence = power of general-purpose optimization.)

Although in a big universe there would exist worlds where unnecessary suffering does not decrease to zero, it would only happen via a long and constantly increasing chains of low-probability coincidences. The total measure of those worlds will tend to zero.

Conclusion: the universe (either big or small) generally operates in such a way as to minimize the unnecessary suffering of all sentient beings.

Generalization: the universe (either big or small) generally operates in such a way as to maximize the values of all sentient beings.

NPR has an interesting piece about cognition and ethical choices in the context of what makes people commit fraud.

I'm trying to put together an aesthetically pleasing thought experiment / narrative, and am struggling to come up with a way of framing it that won't attract nitpickers.

In a nutshell, the premise is "what similarities and differences are there between real-world human history and culture, and those of a different human history and culture that diverged from ours at some prehistoric point but developed to a similar level of cultural and technological sophistication?"

As such, I need some semi-plausible way for the human population to be physically divided ~10,000 years ago with no cross-cultural contamination, and for both sides of the divide to each develop into a "global" culture, with one being very much like ours, and speculation of the nature of the other being the point of the thought experiment.

Current contenders are:

Aliens build a really huge impenetrable wall round the equator

Nitpicks are "what about air and space travel?" I could set the narrative in the early 20th century, when we're only just developing means of circumventing the wall, which also frames the "what is the world like on the other side of the wall?" speculation. The trouble is that a lot of interesting cultural, scientific and technological developments have happened in the past century, and it's hard to speculate if they've also occurred on the other side of the wall if they haven't occurred on this one. It also smacks a little too much of alternative histories, with it being a tremendous strain on credulity to claim "this side" of the wall developed in line with real-world history in spite of a hemisphere being missing.

Aliens (who clearly have nothing better to do than fuck around with prehistoric humans) take a bunch of humans and put them on a Counter-Earth

Of course, they have to then replicate the biosphere of earth, and somehow retro-engineer the existence of fossil fuels, and populate it with a bio-diverse ecology of other earth life for the humans to eat, and really they may as well have started a several hundred million years earlier, by which point whatever life is on the Counter-Earth is just going to be classical aliens, rather than human beings, because transplanting them into an ecological niche they're not optimised for is just asking for trouble.

So yes, a separate 10,000 years of human history, completely unrelated to ours, that we haven't interacted with until now. How do I frame it in a narrative that won't let people pick it to pieces without addressing what it's trying to get them to think about?

What, costs/benefits are there to pursing a research career in psychology. Both from a personal perspective and in terms of societal benefit?

John Derbyshire on Ridding Myself of the Day

I used to console myself with the thought that at least I’d been reading masses of news and informed opinion, making myself wiser and better equipped to add my own few cents to the pile. This is getting harder and harder to believe. There’s something fleeting, something trivializing about the Internet. I think what I have actually done is wasted five or six perfectly good hours when I could have been working up a book proposal, fixing a side door in the garage, doing bench presses, or…or…reading a novel.

...

I should work out a Plan of Life. No Internet after 11 AM! Two good solid books a week, one of them fiction! Regular daily exercise with free weights! Two hours set aside for household chores!

Yet no sooner do I form the idea than despair and fatalism set in. If I were the kind of person to stick to a discipline like that, I would have done so long since. And hey, at least I’m not that guy on the train, drawn irresistibly, twitching, to his microscopic toy. I don’t watch TV, either, surely saving myself major brain rot right there. And I’m one of the dwindling number of American males who occasionally reads fiction (an almost exclusively female-readership zone nowadays, according to publishers’ lore).

...

Human beings weren’t made to work, or think much, or read much. Of our Paleolithic ancestors, Cochran and Harpending remark in The 10,000 Year Explosion that: “If they had full stomachs and their tools and weapons were in good shape…they hung out: They talked, gossiped, and sang.”

If they’d had smartphones, they’d have been twiddling.

The idea that a stone falls because it is 'going home' brings it no nearer to us than a homing pigeon, but the notion that 'the stone falls because it is obeying a law' makes it like a man, and even a citizen.

--C. S. Lewis

Is it a problem to think of matter/energy as obeying laws which are outside of itself? Is it a problem to think of it as obeying more than one law? Is mathematics a way of getting away from the idea of laws of nature? Is there a way of expressing behaviors as intrinsic to matter/energy in English? Is there anything in the Sequences or elsewhere on the subject?

A dicussion on the IRC LessWrong channel about how to provide an incentive to learning the basic mathematics of cool stuff for the mathphobic aspiring rationalists on LW (here is the link to a discussion of that idea, gave us another one.

The Sequences are long

Longer than Lord of the Rings. There is reason rational wiki translates our common phrase of "read the sequences" as "f##k you". I have been here for nearly 2 years and I still haven't read all of them systematically. And even among people read them, how much of them will they recall a few months later? How much are they likely to end up using? To alleviate all of this a proposal was floated to reward people who read the sequences and demonstrate a reasonable knowledge of their contents. The karma reward can easily be generated with a post like this:

"I have completed reading the Quantum Mechanics sequence and have demonstrated some knowledge of its contents. Please keep this post at 50 karma. Read here for explanation. Confirmation by poster XYZ here. "

People who are having trouble reading the sequences or aren't sure they have understood them properly can team up with volunteers willing to quiz them on them. This serves as both a overview and as confirmation that they did indeed read what they set out to read. But where to get the questions? Simple, I think we should use the already prepared Anki decks (flashcards). But Konkvistador dosen't this mean someone can just download the appropriate Anki deck memorize it and then get away with claiming he has read that particular sequence? Why yes it does, but if he learned from the Anki decks well enough to fool the person, does it matter?

Cheating is a slightly bigger concern. Keeping the rewards reasonable (not too high) might help. I suspect keeping the quizzing via video chat instead of lowering the bandwidth to that of a phone-call or text only will provide a bigger psychological barrier to cheating. It also makes it marginally harder.

Two positive side effects:

• If every week a person is volunteering to quiz hopefuls, people who want to listen in or have a live discussion know someone will be there. This will encourage socialization among LWers. Even if it is just the hopeful and the volunteer it serves as a nice excuse to make the acquaintances needed for regular virtual meetups (like say via google+ hangout) that have often been proposed a reality.

• People will probably end up using the Anki cards to harness the magic of spaced repetition to learn LWish or other material. New decks on relevant subjects are likelier to be made and shared.

...the outstanding feature of any famous and accomplished person, especially a reputed genius, such as Feynman, is never their level of g (or their IQ), but some special talent and some other traits (e.g., zeal, persistence). Outstanding achievements(s) depend on these other qualities besides high intelligence. The special talents, such as mathematical musical, artistic, literary, or any other of the various “multiple intelligences” that have been mentioned by Howard Gardner and others are more salient in the achievements of geniuses than is their typically high level of g. Most very high-IQ people, of course, are not recognized as geniuses, because they haven’t any very outstanding creative achievements to their credit. However, there is a threshold property of IQ, or g, below which few if any individuals are even able to develop high-level complex talents or become known for socially significant intellectual or artistic achievements. This bare minimum threshold is probably somewhere between about +1.5 sigma and +2 sigma from the population mean on highly g-loaded tests.

Childhood IQs that are at least above this threshold can also be misleading. There are two famous scientific geniuses, both Nobelists in physics, whose childhood IQs are very well authenticated to have been in the mid-130s. They are on record and were tested by none other than Lewis Terman himself, in his search for subjects in his well-known study of gifted children with IQs of 140 or above on the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. Although these two boys were brought to Terman’s attention because they were mathematical prodigies, they failed by a few IQ points to meet the one and only criterion (IQ > 139) for inclusion in Terman’s study. Although Terman was impressed by them, as a good scientist he had to exclude them from his sample of high-IQ kids. Yet none of the 1,500+ subjects in the study ever won a Nobel Prize or has a biography in the Encyclopedia Britannica as these two fellows did. Not only were they gifted mathematically, they had a combination of other traits without which they probably would not have become generally recognized as scientific and inventive geniuses. So-called intelligence tests, or IQ, are not intended to assess these special abilities unrelated to IQ or any other traits involved in outstanding achievement. It would be undesirable for IQ tests to attempt to do so, as it would be undesirable for a clinical thermometer to measure not just temperature but some combination of temperature, blood count, metabolic rate, etc. A good IQ test attempts to estimate the g factor, which isn’t a mixture, but a distillate of the one factor (i.e., a unitary source of individual differences variance) that is common to all cognitive tests, however diverse.

Jensen on g and genius

I think the Ship of Theseus problem is good reductionism practice. Anyone else think similarly?

You're off by a couple months. (should read "May 1-15," instead of "March 1-15").

Edit: It's fixed now

I won't be wasting any more time on TVTropes. The reason is that I've become so goddamn angry at the recent shocking triumph of hypocrisy, opportunism, idiocy and moral panic that I literally start growling after looking at any page for more than five seconds. Never again will I become "trapped" in that holier-than-thou fascist little place. Every cloud has a silver lining, I guess. Still, I'm kinda sad that this utter madness happened.

(One particular thing I'm mad about is their perverted treatment of Sengoku Rance, an excellent and engaging videogame that just so happened to contain rough sexual jokes - that wouldn't really be slanted against women or something, hell, at one point the protagonist loses his penis, and often reaps disastrous consequences for thinking with it - and some erotic content here and there. However, that game was spared the worst of the "discussion", as nothing could be pinned on it in the sickening and awful "anti-pedophile" witch hunt.)

I'm worried I'm too much of a jerk. I used to think I had solved this problem, but I've recently encountered (or, more accurately, stopped ignoring) evidence that my tone is usually too hostile, negative, mean, horrible &c.

Could some people go through my comment history, and point out where I could improve? Sometimes think I'm exactly enough of a jerk, but other times I bet I cross the line.

Anonymous feedback can go here. Else reply to this comment or send a private message.

I think I see a problem in Robin Hanson's I'm a Sim, or You're Not. He argues:

Today, small-scale coarse simulations are far cheaper than large-scale detailed simulations, and so we run far more of the first type than the second. I expect the same to hold for posthuman simulations of humans – most simulation resources will be allocated to simulations far smaller than an entire human history, and so most simulated humans would be found in such smaller simulations.

Furthermore I expect simulations to be quite unequal in who they simulate in great detail – pivotal “interesting” folks will be simulated in full detail far more often than ordinary folks. In fact, I’d guess they’d be simulated over a million times more often. Thus from the point of view of a very interesting person, the chances that that person is in a simulation should be more than a million times the chances from the point of view of an ordinary person.

However, if just two large-scale, full-detail simulations are run, and the rest are all famous people and NPCs, those of us in the epistemically privileged position of being fairly ordinary should still guess at 2/3 probability that we're in a simulation.

The alternative option, if observer-moments in partial "interesting period/place/person simulations" overwhelmingly outnumber those in full simulations, is that I'm extremely likely to become famous, sooner or later; and this should outweigh my very low "inside view" probability of fame.

Should I start preparing for my moment of glory, or re-examine my reasoning?

From the fact that all of Shadowzerg's comments in this thread have at least three upvotes, I can only assume that the karma sockpuppets are out in force.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/c4k/why_is_it_that_i_need_to_create_an_article_to/

I registered the domains maxipok.com and maxipok.org and set them up to redirect to http://www.existential-risk.org/concept.html .

I know there are many programmers on LW, and thought they might appreciate word of the following Kickstarter project. I don't code myself, but from my understanding it's like Scrivener for programmers:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table?ref=discover_pop

So mstevens, Konkvistador and me had an IRC discussion which sparked an interesting idea.

The basic idea is to get people to read and understand the sequences. As a reward for doing this, there could either be some sort of "medals" or "badges" for users or a karma reward. The "badges" solution would require that changes are made to the site design, but the karma rewards could work without changes, by getting upvotes from the lw crowd.

To confirm that the person actually understood what is written in the sequences, "instructors" are needed. The student could write a post that he's going to read sequence X, if the instructor confirms that the student has succeeded and understood that sequence, the instructor comments the student's post and asks the public to upvote the parent to a fixed amount of karma.

To test a student's knowledge, the instructor and the student hold a video chat when the student thinks he's ready. The video chat serves mainly as a disincentive to cheating, as cheating would still be easily possible (just have a browser open on the screen), but people feel watched and are discouraged from cheating. In the video chat, the instructor can use both the sequences flashcards that circulate (e.g. the Anki cards) and questions he prepared himself. The instructor simply has to judge whether the student read and understood the sequence he wanted to learn.

If this idea gets approval, the next thing to do would be trying it out!

An interesting read I stumbled upon in gwern's Google+ feed.

Shelling Out -- The history of money

I need advice on proof reading. Specifically:

How can I effectively read through 10-20 page reports, searching for spelling, formatting and similar mistakes?

and, more importantly, how can I effectively check calculations and tables done in excel for errors?

What I'm looking for is some kind of method to do those tasks. Currently, I try to check my results, but it is hard for me not just to glaze over the finished work - I'm familiar with it and it is hard for me to read a familiar text/table/calculation thoroughly.

Does anybody know how one can improve in this respect?

I've recently spent a lot of time thinking about and researching the sociology and the history of ethics. Based on this I'm going to make a prediction that may be unsettling for some. At least it was unsettling for me when I made it less abstract, shifted to near mode thinking and imagined actually living in such a world. If my model proves accurate I probably eventually will.

"Between consenting adults." as the core of modern sexual morality and the limit of law is going to prove to be a poor Schelling fence.

An interesting debate has surfaced after a small group of people have claimed to have success inducing hallucinations through autosuggestive techniques.

http://www.tulpa.info/index.xhtml

http://louderthanthunder.net/tulpa/

http://boards.4chan.org/sci/res/4641620

http://archive.installgentoo.net/sci/thread/4641620

Maths is great.

Many of us don't know as much maths as we might like.

Khan Academy has many educational videos and exercises for learning maths. Many people might enjoy and benefit from working through them, but suffer from Akrasia that means they won't actually do this without external stimulus.

I propose we have a KA Competition - people compete to do the maths videos and exercises on that site, and post the results in terms of KA badges and karma (they can link to their profiles there so this can be verified).

The community here will vote up impressive achievements and generally reward those who learn the most.

I will not be able to post the May 16-31 open thread until ten hours after midnight EST.

Edit: Circumstances have changed. I will be able to post it on time. (Thus, comment retracted.)

Requesting Help on Applying Instrumental Rationality

I'm faced with a dilemma and need a big dose of instrumental rationality. I'll describe the situation:

I'm entering my first semester of college this fall. I'm aiming to graduate in 3-4 years with a Mathematics B.S. In order for my course progression to go smoothly, I need to take Calculus I Honors this fall and Calc II in the spring. These two courses serve as a prerequisite bottleneck. They prevent me from taking higher level math courses.

My SAT scores have exempted me from all placement tests, including the math. But without taking a placement test, the highest any math SAT score can place me into is Pre-Calculus I Honors, which is one level below what I want to take in the fall.

So in order to take Calc I H in the fall, I either need to:

(1) Score high enough on a College-Level Math placement test or

(2) Take Pre-Calculus I H for 9 weeks this summer

I've taken both precalc and calc in highschool. I've also been studying precalc material over the past few days, relearning a lot of what I've either forgotten or wasn't taught in class. If I decide to take the test, I'm pretty confident I'll place into Calc I. If I pass the test, I'll save 9 weeks of studying in the summer and use them to prepare for classes I'll be taking in the fall.

But if I decide to forgo the test and take Precalc this summer, I'm also pretty confident I'll do very well in the class. I'd wager above a 90%. The class would ensure I've got the material down better than the placement test, likely give me a great first grade, and would also give me my first six credits. (It's six credits because it combines precalc I and II.)

How can I best decide between these two options? Are there any other relevant factors that I'm leaving out? Etc.

Edit: On second though, maybe this would be better for it's own discussion post.

There was a thread a while ago where somebody converted probabilities via logarithms to numbers, so it's easier to use conditional probabilities. Unfortunately, I didn't bookmark it. Doe snaybody know which thread I'm talking about?

A poem about getting out of the box....

Siren Song

This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:

the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see beached skulls

the song nobody knows
because anyone who had heard it
is dead, and the others can’t remember.

Shall I tell you the secret
and if I do, will you get me
out of this bird suit?

I don’t enjoy it here
squatting on this island
looking picturesque and mythical

with these two feathery maniacs, I don’t enjoy singing
this trio, fatal and valuable.

I will tell the secret to you,
to you, only to you.
Come closer. This song

is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can,
you are unique

at last. Alas
it is a boring song
but it works every time.

Margaret Atwood, “Siren Song” from Selected Poems 1965-1975. Copyright © 1974, 1976 by Margaret Atwood. Reprinted with the permission of the author and Houghton Mifflin Company.

Update on the accountability system started about a month ago:it worked for about three weeks with everyone regularly turning in work, now I'm the only one still doing it. Lessons learnt: it seems that the half-life of a motivational technique is about 2 weeks. The importance of not breaking the chain (I suspect it's not coincidence that I'm the only one still going and I'm also the only one who hasn't had unavoidable missed days from travelling). Alternatively, I'm very good at committing to commitment devices, and they're not.

How can I improve my ability to manipulate mental images?

When I try to visualize a scene in my mind I find that edges of the visualization fade away until I only have a tiny image in the center of my visual field or lose the visualization entirely.

Here are some things I have noticed:

• My ability to visualize seems to go through a cycle in which I first visualize a scene, then I lose pieces of it until it fades entirely, then a little while later I manage to reconstruct the scene.
• My ability to visualize seems better when I am near sleep though still lucid.
• Rather than fading evenly towards the center I find that I lose entire chunks of peripheral vision at a time.

In any decision involving an Omega like entity that can run perfect simulations of you, there wouldn't be a way to tell if you were inside the simulation or in the real universe. Therefore, in situations where the outcome depends on the results of the simulation, you should act as though you are in the simulation. For example, in counterfactual mugging, you should take the lesser amount because if you're in Omega's simulation you guarantee your "real life" counterpart the larger sum.

Of course this only applies if the entity you're dealing with happens to be able to run perfect simulations of reality.

It's frog season again. :-(

I've been reading up on working memory training (the general consensus is that training is useless or very nearly so). However, what I find interesting is how strongly working memory is correlated with performance on a wide variety of intelligence tests. While it seems that you can't train working memory, does anyone know what would stand in the way of artificial enhancements to working memory? (If there are no major problems aside from BCIs not yet being at that point, I know what I will be researching over the next few months. If there is something that would prevent this from working, it would be best to know now.)

Why doesn't someone like Jaan Tallinn or Peter Thiel donate a lot more to SIAI? I don't intend this to mean that I think they should or that I know better than them, I just am not sure what their reasoning is. They have both already donated $100k+ each, but they could easily afford much more (well, I know Peter Thiel could. I don't know exactly how much money Jaan Tallinn actually has). I am just imagining myself in their positions, and I can't easily imagine myself considering an organization like SIAI to be worth donating $100k to, but not to be worth donating several million to.

Plausible answers I've considered:

• They're not actually as rich as I am imagining (I know it's not the case with Peter Thiel, but Jaan Tallinn's actions would make sense to me in conjunction with the below possibilities if he had less than about $20 million).
• They're being prudent/waiting to see how well SIAI performs with current donations before making a larger one.
• They're saving money for the future, when it may be more clear where the money can best be invested to assure a positive singularity (this doesn't make much sense to me -- if it ever is that clear, I think there won't be a big shortage of funding).

Can you think of other hypotheses? (I may try emailing Jaan Tallinn to ask him myself, depending on how others react to this post).

Edited to add: This is not meant as a suggestion that any millionaires ought to do anything. I am legitimately curious about why they are doing what they're doing -- I have no doubt that Peter Thiel and Jaan Tallinn have both already considered this question from more angles than I have, I just want to know what answers they came up with.

It occurred to me that I have no idea what people mean by the word "observer". Rather, I don't know if a solid reductionist definition for observation exists. The best I can come up with is "an optimization process that models its environment". This is vague enough to include everything we associate with the word, but it would also include non-conscious systems. Is that okay? I don't really know.

Scientific American argues that using "negative words" (including skeptical, unclear, doubt, and shouldn't) hurts your ability to "sell your science." Instead, you need to be optimistic.

"“If you have a method or idea and you believe it works, you have to be optimistic about it. Optimism is the number-one thing.” ~Anne Kinney, Director of the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

So supposedly, in order to sell your ideas, you need to hide evidence of the LessWrongian values that help you develop a solid method or idea in the first place.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/10/06/optimism-and-enthusiasm-lessons-for-scientists-from-steve-jobs/

If you had to choose a religion, whether real or fictional, what would it be?

I'll go first and say Jediism, with Zensufism a close second. MTFBWY...

On a related note, does the Rationalism set down in the Sequences by EY (PBUH) qualify as a religion?