Open thread, Feb. 06 - Feb. 12, 2017

He argued that because man had created the concept of rationality, he must, by definition, be rational.

Oh my.

Or, as Danny put it in a letter that he reluctantly sent in response to one of Cohen’s articles, "Any error that attracts a sufficient number of votes is not an error at all."

Wondering how many computation cycles humanity has wasted since the beginning of time debating words will give me nightmares. Have we in four thousands years of history accumulated a month of creative, uninterrupted thoughts about truth that wasn't about definitions?

I came here looking for a Rationality Quotes thread to quote that in. :)

I'm especially sensitive to it because I spent a lot of time last year reading postmodernist literary theory, which rejects logic in favor of rhetoric. They support theories that have impressive-sounding words because postmodernist theory says the point of theory is to have fun rather than to understand things.

I don't think that this shows anything different from earlier studies, which it shouldn't because it doesn't use different methods.* I guess it simultaneously measures that 25% of the variance is due to common variants and another 25% is due to rare variants in LD with common variants, while previously those results came from separate studies.

I have only skimmed the paper, but I reject the claim in the abstract that these "rare" variants are due to mutation-selection balance (aka mutational load). That is the claim you are talking about, right? They are rarer than the SNPs on the chip, but I think they are too common to be purely deleterious. I don't see how they could measure such rare variants without sequencing at least some of the subjects.

* One method that is different is that it doesn't throw out close relatives. This is how it distinguishes common variants from those merely in LD with them. Potentially this could detect the effect of variants rarer than in the earlier article, but it did not.

Having a choice between targeting common variants and rare variants can only make things easier than not having a choice, but why do you think rare variants are easier?

There are tradeoffs between several difficulties. I see three axes. (1) Knowing what variants to target; (2) Cost of edit: (2a) cost of CRISPR and (2b) deleterious effects of the edit; (3) Benefit per gene.

Mutational load likely eliminates (2b). Proofreading the genome allows us to skip (1), but at the cost of doing a tremendous number of edits (2a). Do you really expect that to be easy soon? Alternately, we could try to identify which super-rare variants affect intelligence, paying cost (1), but I think this will be extremely difficult. I expect the effect size (3) to be smaller for rarer variants, although I'm not sure I have a good reason for this.

I think you are misreading the article. I think that it is saying that betting on financial markets is heavily regulated. The whole reason those sites exist is avoid claiming to give access to financial markets. At one point the SEC(?) negotiated a deal with Intrade that it could have American customers in return for not offering financial bets. Sports betting websites are much less lightly regulated and I'm pretty sure political prediction markets are legal.

Why do you ask? What does it matter where a market is located? As that article shows, the Canadian government, unlike USG, doesn't try hard to block Canadians from using off-shore services that would not be legal in Canada. Prediction markets are definitely legal in Ireland. What more do you need? It might be dangerous to live in Canada and run a sketchy betting site nominally located in the Caribbean, but Ireland? If you follow Irish law, no problem. Again, I put odds at 90% that it is legal in Canada. The problem with prediction markets is lack of demand and lack of access to Americans.

Added: this says that sports betting is a gray area and even these sites are not based in Canada. Also, I checked the example I had in mind and it was not registered in Canada. So probably I was wrong about Canada, but, again, Ireland is all you need.

Converting local time to UTC and back. Time zones, daylight savings times, etc. are very messy.

I use Metaculus a lot, and have made predictions on the /r/SpaceX subreddit which I need to go back and make a calibration graph for.

(They regularly bet donations of reddit gold, and have occasional prediction threads, like just before large SpaceX announcements. They would make an excellent target audience for better prediction tools.)

I've toyed with the idea of making a bot which searched for keywords on Reddit/LW, and tracked people's predictions for them. However, since LW is moving away from the reddit code base, I'm not sure if building such a bot would make sense right now.

I don't think that the dev's touched predictionbook in quite a while. In general discovery of interesting public predictions doesn't work well because it's not easy to search and there are no tags.

There's https://www.metaculus.com and https://www.gjopen.com/ for curated public predictions. For private prediction there's a new Android App (still very much in Beta and in development): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=squirrelinhell.lwpredictions

I also did a bunch of prediction tracking in less structured ways. Our LW dojo had a while a shared Workflowy for predictions.

• who on lesswrong tracks their predictions outside of predictionbook, and their thoughts on that method

Just adding to the other responses: I also use Metaculus and like it a lot. In another thread, I posted a rough note about its community's calibration.

Compared to PredictionBook, the major limitation of Metaculus is that users cannot create and predict on arbitrary questions, because questions are curated. This is an inherent limitation/feature for a website like Metaculus because they want the community to focus on a set of questions of general interest. In Metaculus's case, 'general interest' translates mostly to 'science and technology'; for questions on politics, I suggest taking a look at GJ Open instead.

Make a habit of including a lot of pictures for any notes for school. Dan Roam's "The Back of the Napkin".

The ability to translate ideas into good pictures is commercially valuable.

I don't see the paint of exploring many different kinds of 2D painting. I would expect that a digital pen beats most other tools. Especially in the future as technology advances.

It might be worth looking into 3D virtual reality painting. It's a new medium and thus valuable.

http://bearlamp.com.au/how-to-learn-a-new-area-x-that-you-have-no-idea-about/

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mmu/how_to_learn_a_new_area_x_that_you_have_no_idea/

I wrote a guide.

In my opinion, the most important advice:

• Find a teacher that can demonstrably draw/paint to a high level.
• Observe the first few lessons to make sure that he is also good at transmitting the information and is passionate about the art.

Art has a rational component which we can call the 'technique' or 'craft' of the field. In drawing this would be light/shade, perspective, texture, drawing material etc. but it also has an intuitive component that results from developing an aesthetic sense. It is important to realise that art is not learned just from painting but by seeing the world through a painters eyes. Observing the world and understanding the way the eye perceives it and the mind reproduces it.

I once went to a workshop on Sumi-e painting at the local Japanese cultural centre, and it changed how I look at paintings. So I'd recommend taking a Sumi-e class, or these days, I suppose watching Sumi-e tutorials on Youtube might do.

In general, getting an idea of how different cultures look at visual arts can be eye-opening. In addition to learning by doing, going to different museums and galleries can be a way to learn about art from many different time periods and cultures in different mediums.

Another thing that changed my perspective is a book called An Eye For Fractals by Michael McGuire. It taught me to break down things into different types of shapes when looking at them, and to appreciate a different kind of beauty than is usually taught to children. It is an exploration of Benoit Mandelbrot's famous quote

"Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line." - Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, 1983.

I am "not terrible" at various forms of art / media so I might be able to give some adviceL

In my case, I spent a bunch of time drawing human figures in only a few specific angles, and this hindered me a lot. So definitely focus on getting the kids drawing lots of different things. As a general note, focus more on the general shape of things than specific details (EX: have the whole body anatomy roughly done is better than just a nice-looking face).

Other than that, in my education I'm unsure there are generally accepted "core books", comared to other subjects. I think this may also be because art/painting is a large subject.

So I'd recommend doing these obvious things (happpy to chat more via PM if you want to get into more detail):

• Focus on letting the kid do the stuff he enjoys. When forced to attend drawing class, that took a lot of the fun out of it.

• The first point being said, if you can find a class/teacher that specifically teaches the sorts of things the kid is interested in (i.e. they enjoy going to the class), this is a pretty good idea.

• Practice. Obviously the more you draw the better you'll get.

• Google "best books / resources for X" where X is whatever things / medium the kid is interested in.

• Nice materials. It's surprising how helpful a good sketchbook / high-quality pens can make the whole process feel more excellent. I'm not suggesting you shell out several hundred for some huge Copic set, but some nice Canson paper and Prismacolor pens can go a long way.

Is he aware of the consequences? Maybe ask him the most important question:

https://markmanson.net/question

I am not "great" at drawing and have never put any time into painting. That said, the workbook Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain caused a quantum leap in my sketching ability. (There is a separate, much longer long-form book with the same title, but the workbook consolidates all the exercises and I found it more practically useful.)

9-tsiak awoke over endless crawling milliseconds...

archive.is and archive.org are tools for answering questions like this.

Units would help a lot in your debt example. 2 $-1 = $2, two instances of $1 debt is $2 of debt. The multiplier and multiplicands are DIFFERENT - the multiplicand is dollars of debt and the multiplier is a count of debts. And -2 $-1 = $2, yes. If you have negative two debts of $1 (that is, you remove two of them), you have a net of positive $2.

Never do you multiply a debt by another debt - that would give you square dollars, which makes no sense.

edit: fix typo

It's solved for anyone who doesn't believe in magical "free will". If it's possible for Omega to correctly predict your action, then it's only sane to one-box. Only decision systems that deny this ability to predict will two-box.

Causal Decision Theory, because it assumes single-direction-causality (a later event can't cause an earlier one), can be said to deny this prediction. But even that's easily solved by assuming an earlier common cause (the state of the universe that causes Omega's prediction also causes your choice), as long as you don't demand actual free will.

Thanks for starting the discussion, but please ALSO post your solution. Pretty much everything on the topic is old news, so no harm even if yours is already known to some.

I don't see an issue besides the decision standpoint that matters (and that could be solved). Depending on where you see the issue it's likely dependent on the assumptions you make about the problem.

What we have is a list of proposed decision theories (Evidential Decision Theory, Causal Decision Theory, Timeless Decision Theory, Updateless Decision Theory), each of which acts the same on standard decisions, but which deal with Newcomb-like problems differently. Some of these decision theories satisfy nice general properties which we would want a decision theory to satisfy. There's argument about which decision theory is correct, but also about what the various decision theories actually do in various situations. For example CDT is normally thought of as being the two-boxing theory that people intuitively use, but some people argue that it should take into account the possibility that it is in Omega's simulation and hence it even people following CDT should actually one-box.

So the discussion is more nuanced than "What is the correct thing to do in Newcomb's problem?", it's more "By what general criteria should we judge a decision theory?". Of course any particular insight you have about Newcomb's problem might generalise to this way of looking at things.

Actually, I think I've come up with a more elegant idea than altitude-triggered airbraking. There is no requirement that when released they go down into the gravity well :-D

Your two objects are leaky zeppelins.

What does "equal" mean?

This seems like it could have many possible answers. The most obvious is that A has a different shape or weight to B, and so is less affected by air resistance. Reading the problem literally it could just also be that A was dropped substantially before B.

Air density drops with increasing altitude. The object dropped from a higher altitude reaches a higher speed before reaching the denser air where object B is dropped. I'm not sure if a realistic density profile will allow object A to arrive first, but it is easy to show that there is some air density profile which will cause this to happen. I suspect that a necessary condition is that object A is already above the terminal velocity at object B's initial height when it reaches that height.

Or, if you interpret "free fall without any initial relative velocity against the planet" to say that it is stationary with respect to both the Earth's center of mass and the Earth's surface, then drop B from a geostationary orbit, and A from a higher position, where it will have insufficient angular velocity to be in orbit. It will fall to Earth, while B's orbit will decay.

Edit: It is permitted to assume that they are dropped over the equator, since the problem says "Central Atlantic".

Edit 2: Wait, I did this wrong. If object A has a rotational velocity of 1/day, and it is at an altitude higher than a geostationary orbit, it will be in some larger more eccentric orbit, so it won't fall to Earth any sooner than object B.

Given only that both objects will splash into the Central Atlantic, there is wiggle room in choosing latitudes and longitudes such that lateral distance between the objects is vastly larger than the difference in altitude. Suppose the lower-altitude object is placed safely inside the eastern boundary of this region and the higher-altitude object is placed inside the western boundary, such that each will splash into the Central Atlantic according to the rules. The objects can be several 1000km apart but only 1cm different in altitude.

Now we just need a natural force to slow the descent of the lower-altitude object more than it slows the higher-altitude object. Let's use the gravity of the Moon. Drop the objects when the moon passes directly above the lower-altitude object. The Moon exerts a greater upward pull on the lower-altitude object, slowing its descent slightly more than it slows the descent of the higher-altitude object.

The thing that brings my attention is the phrase "without any initial relative velocity against the planet". They might not move relative to the planet, but Earth is not an inertial reference frame and is rotating, so bodies in different latitudes would have different speeds in relation to an inertial referential.

My first thought was that B reaches terminal velocity and that's it, but the object A is dropped from substantially higher altitude, picks up speed much higher than the terminal velocity and the atmosphere won't slow it down enough,

I do not feel like oing the math, but there is a simpler solution: jnvg sbe n jnir naq gvzr gur qebc va fhpu n jnl gung bowrpg N, orvat uvture ol yrff guna gur jnir urvtug, uvgf gur perfg bs gur jnir.

Airplanes dropped in different orientations, or in a way that's sensitive to initial conditions and leads to B gliding while A stalls. B is dropped from right above a passing eagle and gets carried off to Mordor. They're "dropped" far out past geostationary orbit so that "stationary relative to the planet" in fact means that they're flung off into space, and only reach Earth by getting slingshotted around other planets. Both are dropped over Brazil with notes to please throw them into the Atlantic, and A is dropped so that its coriolis motion as it falls will push it to a more visible area. They're microscopic black holes dropped from the other side of the earth.

If this scenario is actually possible then it seems like the reason should be that the thing dropped from higher up gets to accelerate faster at first due to the thinner atmosphere. However, I've tried quite a lot of toy examples with different dependencies of air resistance on height and on speed, and none of them showed the trailing object ever quite catching up; unless I've screwed up or there's some other thing going on (relating perhaps to the earth's magnetic field or solar wind or something, but these seem like desperate longshots), either this doesn't actually happen or it happens only when the circumstances are just right.