Open thread, Dec. 05 - Dec. 11, 2016

I haven’t posted in LW in over a year, because the ratio of interesting-discussion to parochial-weirdness had skewed way too far in the parochial-weirdness direction. There still isn’t a good substitute for LW out there, though. Now it seems there’s some renewed interest in using LW for its original purpose, so I thought I’d wander back, sheepishly raise my hand and see if anyone else is in a similar position.

I’m presumably not the only one to visit the site for the first time in ages because of new, interesting content, so it’s reasonable to assume a bunch of other former LW-users are reading this. What would it take for you to come back and start using the site again?

Keith Stanovich got a $999,376 grant to develop a test of rationality. The grant was supposed to end in December 2015. Does anybody know about the result?

I wonder if there's any way to measure rationality in animals.

Bear with me for a second. The Cognitive Reflection Test is a measure of how well you can avoid the intuitive-but-wrong answer and instead make the more mentally laborious calculation. The Stroop test is also a measure of how well you can avoid making impulsive mistakes and instead force yourself to focus only on what matters. As I recall, the "restrain your impulses and focus your thinking" skill is a fairly "biological" one -- it's consistently associated with activity in particular parts of the brain, influenced by drugs, and impaired in conditions like ADHD.

Could we -- or have we already -- design a variant of this made out of mazes that rats could run through?

I might look into this more carefully myself, but does anyone know off the top of their heads?

I recently had a tech-support problem on lw and wanted to post the solution here. Anyone with write permissions on the faq is invited to copy-paste the following there:

Q: I appear to be unable to comment. Once I log in, the comment button vanishes. WTF?

A: Have you verified your email address? Due to spammers, we had to make email verification mandatory before commenting.

Unfortunately, the lesswrong code is currently unable to indicate if your account is still pending email verification. The easiest way to trigger a new attempt at email verification is to go to your account settings and change your email address; then your new email address will immediately receive a new verification mail.

1) I'm fairly intelligent, completely unskilled (aside from writing, which I have some experience in, but not the sort that I could realistically put on a resume, especially where I live), and I don't like programming. What skills should I develop for a rewarding career?

2) On a related note, the best hypothetical sales pitch for EA would be that it can provide enough career help (presumably via some combination of statistically-informed directional advice and networking, mostly the latter) to more than make up for the 10% pledge. I don't know how or whether this could be demonstrated, but do EA people think this is worth pursuing, or is their strategy still to use 99% of their members for publicity to attract the odd multi-millionaire?

I have made a lot of progress in the last two years by developing a suite of simple productivity/life-logging tools for myself. The tools are technologically simple, but because they are customized specifically to me, they are quite useful and useable. Unlike a lot of similar one-size-fits-all tools, my tools have all and only the features I want. The suite includes:

• TODO list (with a priority calculator that increases the priority of older tasks, so I don't get bogged down)
• Chore logging (remind me when it's time to get a haircut, clean my bathtub, etc)
• Finance analysis (download CSV files from my bank account, categorize them semi-automatically, aggregate them)
• Pomodoro system
• Activity Log (keep track of what I did each day)
• Junk Food/Alcohol consumption tracker

I recommend programming-savvy people try out building their own productivity tools. But I wanted also to poll people about whether they would pay me to develop some of these tools for them:

[pollid:1172]

[link] https://universe.openai.com/

there is some interesting new papers showing RNA splicing and gene replication errors causing lots of age and degenerative disease, and the Tufts study shows a newly isolated protein that affects aging if in high enough concentration.

Uncovering a 'smoking gun' in age-related disease

"called splicing factor 1 (SFA-1) -- a factor also present in humans. In a series of experiments, the researchers demonstrate that this factor plays a key role in pathways related to aging. Remarkably, when SFA-1 is present at abnormally high levels, it is sufficient on its own to extend lifespan."

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-12/htcs-ua120116.php

and

"The error occurs as copies of three-letter sequences of DNA--known as CAG and CTG triplets--expand and repeat themselves hundreds or even thousands of times, disrupting normal gene sequences." Genetic analyses in baker's yeast now reveal that these large-scale expansions are controlled by genes that have been implicated in a process for repairing DNA breaks, leading the researchers to surmise that the expansions occur while breaks are being healed."

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-12/tu-tru120216.php

I was re-reading the meditations of moloch the other day, and it dawned on me that our situation is kind of relevant when it comes to information spreading on the internet.

The current state of competition on the internet seems to be quite clearly in disalignment with what we deem as good, like truth or insight. It feels like we are mid-way towards an equilibrium that is far worse. Unless something is done, we should expect the volume of fake narratives, fake news and lies of all sorts to grow going forward. On the positive side, we should expect to see far more information that confirms with our group's opinions and rattles our emotions, especially anger or awe.

And this seem to me to be serious. Beliefs matter. People act on what they think they know about the world. To bring the incentives a bit more back in alignment, we likely need some new institutions. It's unclear to me if we currently have any internet- institutions that is working on verification. Wikipedia might count, but it is quite weak and easily subverted. The factchecker-websites have been helpful, but they seem to be overrun, and mostly used when it confirms a group's beliefs, ironically.

On a website like Quora it feels like total entropy. Like the entire internet is suffering a sort of eternal september, and in some way it is, with 2 out of the 3 billion coming online since 2009. And everywhere you turn, people despair about lies and not knowing who to trust. There is a civilizational need (and perhaps also a market) for truth.

So, I wanted to ask you, how do we fundamentally confirm that something is true? And if we had that method, how would an institution strong enough to actual alter the incentives of online publisers look like?

I can thing a few candidate themes

1. Source-reputation: how would we go about analyzing and ranking websites for their reputation for truth?
2. The science method: conjecture, criticism and testing seems viable. Can this be applied universally?
3. The bayesian method: every time a claim was made, we updated the probability of its truth, weighted for source or strength of information. Unclear if it is viable to boil down texts to essence of the belief or claim, even less clear if comparing is even possible.

(PS: I find myself thinking that I personally, somehow, am a great evaluator of truth. If I really am, or you are. There should be some very simple habit to discover from that, that maybe can be applied widely.

Yet what I do seem mundane. I curate my information sources: SSC, Marginalrevolution, WBW, Overcoming Bias, LW. (But also Reddit, Twitter, Quora.) And I even observe myselfupvoting things I agree with and emotionally engage with on Reddit, without any source-checking. I sort of rely on previous knowledge, I think, critique what I just read using existing knowledge and making a snap judgement.

Do you have personal habits of truth-seeking or evaluation information?)

Uh, help? On pages 26-31 of this issue of The American journal of science published in 1881 there's an article on changes in the length of a 4 m zinc bar. Basically, they measured it, heated it, let it return to its starting temperature and measured it again. And there was a 29 mkm difference between the two measurements. I didn't quite understand what they did, and the Fahrenheit degrees didn't help any, but - what's the catch?..

MrMind I am still curious what results you had from contacting clickers months ago on the reddit, aka if the click has stayed.

By the way, anyone who has criticism about the 'cult' (crying wolf) and logic nation you're free to debate it on stream with athene/bachir and your argument: https://www.twitch.tv/athenelive you simply go to the discord and ask there with your argument. https://discordapp.com/invite/NYX25Ab

I hope some people with rationality and some rhetorical knowledge will speak up.

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