Open thread, Sep. 26 - Oct. 02, 2016

Happy Petrov day!

Today is September 26th, Petrov Day, celebrated to honor the deed of Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov on September 26th, 1983. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, take a minute to not destroy the world.

• 2007 - We started celebrating with the declaration above, followed by a brief description of incident. In short, one man decided to ignore procedure and report an early warning system trigger as a false alarm rather than a nuclear attack.

• 2011 - Discussion

• 2012 - Eneasz put together an image

• 2013 - Discussion

• 2014 - jimrandomh shared a program guide describing how their rationalist group celebrates the occasion. "The purpose of the ritual is to make catastrophic and existential risk emotionally salient, by putting it into historical context and providing positive and negative examples of how it has been handled."

• 2015 - Discussion

• I had an idea to connect bunker owners all over Switzerland (it’s law that everyone must have one but no-one lives there day to day) with interns and others looking for accommodation in Switzerland (many people come to work for the UN there and housing prices are astronomical)
• Looks like locals beat me to it:
• Turns out the pilot model is profitable: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1077791/Pictured-The-worlds-star-hotel-guests-sleep-disused-nuclear-shelter.html
• Turns out it’s already planned to be scaled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Stern_Hotel
  I do like the Spartan premise - perhaps I could host boot camps there for extreme personal development!

I don't know if this is lesswrong material, but I found it interesting. Cities of Tomorrow: Refugee Camps Require Longer-Term Thinking

“the average stay today in a camp is 17 years. That’s a generation.” These places need to be recognized as what they are: “cities of tomorrow,” not the temporary spaces we like to imagine. “In the Middle East, we were building camps: storage facilities for people. But the refugees were building a city,” Kleinschmidt said in an interview. Short-term thinking on camp infrastructure leads to perpetually poor conditions, all based on myopic optimism regarding the intended lifespan of these places.

Many refugees may never be able return home, and that reality needs to be realized and incorporated into solutions. Treating their situation as temporary or reversible puts people into a kind of existential limbo; inhabitants of these interstitial places can neither return to their normal routines nor move forward with their lives..

From City of Thorns:

The UN had spent a lot of time developing a new product: Interlocking Stabilized Soil Blocks (ISSBs), bricks made of mud, that could be used to build cheap houses in refugee camps. It had planned to build 15,000 such houses in Ifo 2 but only managed to construct 116 before the Kenyan government visited in December 2010 and ordered the building stopped. The houses looked too much like houses, better even than houses that Kenyans lived in, said the Department for Refugee Affairs, not the temporary structures and tents that refugees were supposed to inhabit.

From reddit:

Peru had an uprising in the 1980s in which the brutality of the insurgents, the Sendero Luminoso, caused mass migration from the Andes down to the coast. Lima's population grew from perhaps a million to its current 8.5 million in a decade. This occurred through settlements in pure desert, where people lived in shacks made of cardboard and reed matting. These were called "young villages", Pueblos Jóvenes.

Today, these are radically different. Los Olivos is now a lower-middle-class suburb, boasting one of the largest shopping malls in South America, gated neighborhoods, mammoth casinos and plastic surgery clinics. All now have schools, clinics, paved roads, electricity and water; and there is not a cardboard house in sight. (New arrivals can now buy prefab wooden houses to set up on more managed spaces, and the state runs in power and water.)

Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, opened 4 years ago seems to be well on it's way to becomming a permanent city. It has businesses, permanent structures, and it's own economy.

Anybody have recommendations of a site with good summaries of the best/most actionable parts from self-help books? I've found Derek Sivers' book summaries useful recently and am looking for similar resources. I find that most self-help books are 10 times as long as they really need to be, so these summaries are really nice, and let me know whether it may be worth it to read the whole book.

Music to be resurrected to?

Assume that you are going to die, and some years later, be brought back to life. You have the opportunity to request, ahead of time, some of the details of the environment you will wake up in. What criteria would you use to select those details; and which particular details would meet those criteria?

For example, you might wish a piece of music to be played that is highly unlikely to be played in your hearing in any other circumstances, and is extremely recognizable, allowing you the opportunity to start psychologically dealing with your new circumstances before you even open your eyes. Or you may just want a favourite playlist going, to help reassure you. Or you may want to try to increase the odds that a particular piece survives until then. Or you may wish to lay the foundation for a practical joke, or a really irresistible one-liner.

Make your choice!

I was at the vet a while back; one of my dogs wasn't well (she's better now). The vet took her back, and after waiting for a few minutes, the vet came back with her.

Apparently there were two possible diagnosis: let's call them x and y, as the specifics aren't important for this anecdote.

The vet specifies that, based on the tests she's run, she cannot tell which diagnosis is accurate.

So I ask the vet: which diagnosis has the higher base rate among dogs of my dog's age and breed?

The vet gives me a funny look.

I rephrase: about how many dogs of my dog's breed and age get diagnosis x versus diagnosis y, without running the tests you did?

The vet gives me another funny look, and eventually replies: that doesn't matter.

My question for Lesswrong: Is there a better way to put this? Because I was kind of speechless after that.

Has Sam Harris stated his opinion on the orthogonality thesis anywhere?

Who are the current moderators?

Continuing my catnip research, I'm preparing to run a survey on gwern.net & Mechanical Turk about catnip responses. I have a draft survey done and would appreciate any feedback about brokenness or confusing questions: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeT3GIg-pSwzDFAfNaqE-MzfJEtD0HghN_Vma68OZJtz1Pztg/viewform

I feel the onset of hypomania. Please bear with me if I post dumb stuff in the near future.

In the last year, someone mentioned a workout book on the #lesswrong irc channel.I want to start exercising in my room and that book seemed, at the time, the best place to start for me so I am looking for it.

Help with finding the book or alternatives appreciated. Here's what I remember about it:

• the author is someone who server time in jail or is currently serving at the moment
• the person that talked about the book said that the book empathizes on the idea of keeping the body strong and healthy without the need of weights
• the exercises use limited space

I can't remember more right now but I will edit the post if I do.

I've been meditating lately on a possibility of an advanced artificial intelligence modifying its value function, even writing some excrepts about this topic.

Is it theoretically possible? Has anyone of note written anything about this -- or anyone at all? This question is so, so interesting for me.

My thoughts led me to believe that it is theoretically possible to modify it for sure, but I could not come to any conclusion about whether it would want to do it. I seriously lack a good definition of value function and understanding about how it is enforced on the agent. I really want to tackle this problem from human-centric point, but i don't really know if anthropomorphization will work here.

Game theory research reveals fragility of common resources

"In many applications, people decide how much of a resource to use, and they know that if they use a certain amount and if others use a certain amount they are going to get some return, but at the risk that the resource is going to fail,"

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160929143603.htm

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825616300458

I just thought of this 'cute' question and not sure how to answer it.

The sample space of an empirical statement is True or False. Then, given an empirical statement, one would then assign a certain prior probability 0<p<1 to TRUE and one minus that to FALSE. One would not assign a p=1 or p=0 because it wouldn't allow believe updating.

For example: Santa Claus is real.

I suppose most people in LW will assign a very small p to that statement, but not zero. Now my question is, what is the prior probability value for the following statement:

Prior probability cannot be set to 1.

Trait Entitlement: A Cognitive-Personality Source of Vulnerability to Psychological Distress.

"First, exaggerated expectations, notions of the self as special, and inflated deservingness associated with trait entitlement present the individual with a continual vulnerability to unmet expectations. Second, entitled individuals are likely to interpret these unmet expectations in ways that foster disappointment, ego threat, and a sense of perceived injustice, all of which may lead to psychological distress indicators such as dissatisfaction across multiple life domains, anger, and generally volatile emotional responses"

http://psycnet.apa.org/?&fa=main.doiLanding&doi=10.1037/bul0000063

but of course..... Psychiatry as Bullshit

"By even the most charitable interpretation of the concept, the institution of modern psychiatry is replete with bullshit. "

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/springer/ehpp/2016/00000018/00000001/

story http://www.rawstory.com/2016/09/proven-wrong-about-many-of-its-assertions-is-psychiatry-bullsht/

'Tis a shame that an event like tonight's debate won't, and ostensibly never would have, received any direct coverage/discussion on LW, or any other rationality sites of which I am aware.

I know (I know, I know...) politics is the mind killer, but tonight—and the U.S. POTUS election writ large—is shaping up to be a very consequential world event, and LW is busy discussing base rates at the vet and LPTs for getting fit given limited square footage.

A thing already known to computer scientists, but still useful to remember: as per Kleene's normal form theorem, a universal Turing machine is a primitive recursive function.
Meaning that if an angel gives you the encoding of a program you only need recursion, and not unbounded search, to run it.