Open thread, 25-31 August 2014

Yep, I find the world a much less confusing place since I learned capitals and location on map. I had (and to some extent still do have) a mental block on geography which was ameliorated by it.

Rundown of positive and negative results:

In a similar but lesser way, I found learning English counties (and to an even lesser extent, Scottish counties) made UK geography a bit less intimidating. I used this deck because it's the only one on the Anki website I found that worked on my old-ass phone; it has a few howlers and throws some cities in there to fuck with you, but I learned to love it.

I suspect that learning the dates of monarchs and Prime Ministers (e.g. of England/UK) would have a similar benefit in contextualising and de-intimidating historical facts, but I never finished those decks and haven't touched them in a while, so never reached the critical mass of knowledge that allowed me to have a good handle on periods of British history. I found it pretty difficult to (for example) keep track of six different Georges and map each to dates, so slow progress put me off. Let me know if you're interested and want to set up a pact, e.g. 'We'll both do at least ten cards from each deck a day and report back to the other regularly' or something. In fact that offer probably stands for any readers.

I installed some decks for learning definitions in areas of math that I didn't know, but found memorising decontextualised definitions hard enough that I wasn't motivated to do it, given everything else I was doing and Anki-ing at the time. I still think repeat exposure to definitions might be a useful developmental strategy for math that nobody seems to be using deliberately and systematically, but I'm not sure Anki is a right way to do it. Or if it is, that shooting so far ahead of my current knowledge was the best way to do it. Similarly a LaTeX deck I got having pretty much never used LaTeX and not practising it while learning the deck.

Canadian provinces/territories I have not yet found useful beyond feeling good for ticking off learning the deck, which was enough for me since I did them in a session or two.

Languages Spoken in Each Country of the World (I was trying to do not just country-->languages but country-->languages with proportions of population speaking the languages) was so difficult and unrewarding in the short term that I lost motivation extremely quickly (this was months ago). The mental association between 'Berber' and 'North Africa' has come up a surprising number of times, though. Most recently yesterday night.

Periodic table (symbol<--->name, name<-->number) took lots of time and hasn't been very useful for me personally (I pretty much just learned it in preparation for a quiz). Learning just which elements are in which groups/sections of the Periodic table might be more useful and a lot quicker (since by far the main difficulty was name<--->number).

I am relatively often wanting for demographic and economic data, e.g. population of countries, population of major world cities, population of UK places, GDP's. Ideally I'd not just do this for major places since I want to get a good intuitive sense of these figures for very large or major places on down to tiny places.

Similarly if one has a hobby horse it could be useful. Examples off the top of my head (not necessarily my hobby horse): Memorising the results from the LessWrong surveys. Memorising the results from the PhilPapers survey. Memorising data about resource costs of meat production vs. other food production. Memorising failed AGI timeline predictions. Etc.

I found starting to learn Booker Prize winners on Memrise has let me have a few 'Ah, I recognise that name and literature seems less opaque to me, yay!' moments, but there's probably higher-priority decks for you to learn unless that's more your area.

Great effort. If may suggest a topic without providing a deck, I'd say learn about the vocabulary of personal finance. Or more generally, learn the vocabulary of stuff relevant to most lifes from time to time, like medicine, law and, well, finance. This helps to search for the correct things when needed and helps communicating with the relevant professionals.

KnaveOfAllTrades's idea of learning demographic & economic (GDP and its component parts) statistics of various places has occurred to me as a candidate for a useful Anki deck, so I second that.

Knowing some mathematical constants to a few significant figures can be useful. Memorizing √10 = 3.16 lets you interpret midpoints between ticks on a logarithmic scale, and √2 & √3 are the lengths of diagonals of unit squares & cubes. And knowing all three roots makes it easier to guesstimate square roots in general, using the √(ab) = (√a)(√b) result for non-negative a & b. Likewise for e.g. exp(2), exp(3), ln 2 & ln 3. The 68-95-99.7 rule should go on the list as well.

If anyone hasn't read Blindsight yet you really should

Godspeed!

Most people want the explanations (models) to make intuitive sense, though a few are satisfied with the underlying math only. And intuition is based on what we already know and feel.

The Pauli exclusion (or inclusion, if you take bosons) principle feels to me like rubbery wave-functions pushing against each other (or sticking together), even though I understand that antisymmetrization is not actually a microscopic force, and interacting electrons are not actually separate entities.

I do not think that one should lump free will and identity in the same category as basic QM, however, as we do not have nearly the degree of understanding of the cognitive processes in System 1 which produce the feeling of either.

What the goal of having an explanation?

Do you want the explanation to change your model of the world in a way that allows you to have the right intuition about a subject matter? Do you want the explanation to allow you to make better predictions about the subject matter?

Beliefs are supposed to pay rent.

If someone without a physics background hear about quantum mechanics they are supposed to be confused. If they aren't they would simply project their old ideas into the new theory and not really update anything on a deeper level.

emotions from biology

I'm not aware of a published theory of emotions as an extension of biology that describes all aspects of emotions that I observe on a day-to-day basis.

computers from solid state physics

Understanding hardware does need solid state physics but you also need to understand software to understand computers.

The one thing missing from that video (at least up to 4:23 when I got frustrated - and he had explicitly disclaimed talking about the Pauli Exclusion Principle before this point) which gets really to the heart of it is that the Pauli Exclusion Principle kicks in when one thing literally runs into the other - when parts of two things were trying to occupy exactly the same state. If 'couldn't go any further or you'd be inside the other thing, but you can't do that' isn't 'contact' then the word has no meaning.

The interviewer is exactly right at 4:17 - he did the demonstration wrong. He should have brought them into contact. Only when he was pushing inwards and the balls were pushing back hard enough to balance -- that's when he'd say they're in contact.

So this isn't a great example because the proper explanation does include a smaller version of what's being explained.

What people complaining about this usually do is link to this video (or better), but I'm not sure it's actually helpful for people who don't get it.

The stories are great!

These make me sad, but not in an objectionable way. Liked and Follow'd. Good Night seems specifically optimised to chill EY, was it your goal?

I am a bit puzzled by one aspect of Good Night, but that may be because I don't understand the tech level that the characters are operating at. In Twilight's place, it seems that the obvious thing to do would be to znxr n pbcl bs urefrys jvgu gur nccebcevngr oberqbz-erqhpgvba arhebzbqvsvpngvba, naq yrnir vg gb xrrc Pryrfgvn pbzcnal. Vs guvf vf cbffvoyr va gur frggvat, V qba'g frr jul guvf vfa'g n pyrne jva; fvapr Gjvyvtug rkcyvpvgyl qbrf abg jnag gung shgher sbe urefrys, fur gurerol fubhyq abg vqragvsl jvgu n ure-jub-qbrf-jnag-gung-shgher, be srne fhowrpgvir pbagvahngvba nf gung pbcl. Lbhe Gjvyvtug vf bs pbhefr serr gb abg-jnag guvf fbyhgvba, ohg vg ohtf zr gung fur qvqa'g guvax bs vg gb erwrpg vg.

Good Night was really great.

Enjoyed that, thanks. Have you read Diaspora by Egan?

(decided to move everything to Main)

My first suggestion would be to look at the incentives of people who write for the media. Their motivations are NOT to "get the best message out". That's not what they're paid for. Nowadays their principal goal is to attract eyeballs and hopefully monetize them by shoving ads into your face. The critical thing to recognize is that their goals and criteria of what constitutes a successful piece do not match your goals and your criteria of what constitutes a successful piece.

The second suggestion would be to consider that writers write for a particular audience and, I think, most of the time you will not be a member of that particular audience. Mass media doesn't write for people like you.

All of these examples upset me to various degrees since I feel like it is evidence that people -- even writers and the scientists they are quoting -- are unable to think critically and message coherently about issues.

That's a funny sentence. You yourself blame scientists with whom you didn't interact at all based on the way they got quoted without critically asking yourself whether your behavior makes sense.

If a journalist quotes a scientist the process might be: Journalists picks up the phone and calls the scientists. They talk 15 minutes about the issue. Then the journalist who thinks that it's his job to quote an authority picks one sentence of that interview that fits into the narrative the journalist wants to tell. It's quite possible that the scientists even didn't say that sentence "word for word".

It's also quite possible that you spend more time investigating the issue in detail then some of the journalists you read.

Who needs a WYSIWYG editor when you have readable source code which can be easily converted to an html document?

Many people. Text editors and word processors are different tools serving different needs.

Try auto-generating a table of contents in your Markdown document or inserting a table with live formulas (you can, of course, use external tools to achieve any functionality...).

On a similar note, if the documents you are writing will end up printed, or in PDF format, I recommend TeX. It's significantly more complex than Markdown, but also far more powerful. And absolutely irreplaceable if you are writing something Math/Formula heavy.

I also make a point of editing all my documents in a text editor, and then compiling them. Seconding Jaime's recommendation.

Vast majority are CS/Math specifically IME.

A story of Yet Another Real Estate Swindle..?

That's a very very uncharitable interpretation of that sentence in the body of the bill.

Here is the newest version of the rationalist masterlist I know of, thought it's still a few months out of date. Also people who follow you (looks like we are following each other now, yay!). Also it can be fun to follow blogs for fandoms or things you think are cute, or whatever random things you are interested in.

The one blog I can really recommend is scientiststhesis. Otherwise I'd suggest going over the Masterlist and see what strikes your interest. The one thing about tumblr is that good, interesting content is often on the same blogs as Doctor Who gifs and "OMG THAT'S SO CUTE!" The signal-to-noise ratio is rather low.

I think there was a masterpost of tumblr rationalists at some point- ask ozy about it, maybe? Besides that, it depends on your other interests.

The policy in the Finnish meetups has been "Finnish if everyone is Finnish, English if there are foreigners present". I would expect the meetups in the other countries to be similar.

In France it's French if everybody speaks French, English otherwise (or sometimes a little bit of German, there are sometimes more German speakers than French speakers).

The Brussels meetup is typically in English.

The Hamburg Meetup is mostly in English (at least if is asked for). And we would be happy to have new participants. Couchsurfing at my home is also an option.

Most of Patrick's arguments against Bitcoin are actually against offering Bitcoin exclusively rather than against offering Bitcoin as an option, probably with an added fee.

Patrick McKenzie explains a bit more why he hates bitcoin:

I think "hate" is too strong a word. There are a lot of things for which I find no use but that I don't hate.

Many bigshot social scientists during the last century or so were anything but rational (Foucault and Freud are two of many examples), but were able to convince other (equally biased people) that they were.

I understand that bashing Freud is a popular way to signal "rationality" -- more precisely, to signal loyalty to the STEM tribe which is so much higher status than the social sciences tribe -- but it really irritates me because I would bet that most people doing this are merely repeating what they heard from others, building their model completely on other people's strawmans.

Mostly, it feels to me horribly unfair towards Freud as a person, to use him as a textbook example of irrationality. Compared with the science we have today, of course his models (based on armchair reasoning after observing some fuzzy psychological phenomena) are horribly outdated and often plainly wrong. So throw those models away and replace them by better models whenever possible; just like we do in any science! I mostly object to the connotation that Freud was less rational compared with other people living in the same era, working in the same field. Because it seems to me he was actually highly above the average; it's just that the whole field was completely diseased, and he wasn't rational enough to overcome all of that single-handedly. I repeat, this is not a defense of factual correctness of Freud's theories, but a defense of Freud's rationality as a person.

To put things in context, to show how diseased psychology was in Freud's era, let me just say that the most famous Freud's student and then competitor, Carl Gustav Jung, rejected much of Freud's teachings and replaced them with astrology / religion / magic, and this was considered by many people an improvement compared with the horribly offensive ideas that people could be predictably irrational, motivated by sexual desires, and generally frustrated with the modern society based on farmers' values. (Then there was also the completely different school of Vulcan psychologists who said: Thoughts and emotions cannot be measured, therefore they don't exist, and anyone who says otherwise is unscientific.) This was the environment which started the "Freud is stupid" meme, which keeps replicating on LW today.

I think the bad PR comes from combination of two facts: 1) some of Freud's ideas were wrong, and 2) all of his ideas were controversial, including those which were correct. So, first we have this "Freud is stupid" meme most people agree with, however, mostly for wrong reasons. Then, the society gradually changes, and those Freud's ideas which happened to be correct become common sense and are no longer attributed to him; they are further developed by other people whom we remember as their authors. Only the wrong ideas are remembered as his legacy. (By the way, I am not saying that Freud invented all those correct ideas. Just that popularizing them in his era was a part of what made him controversial; what made the "Freud is stupid" meme so popular. Which is why I consider that meme very unfair.) So today we associate human irrationality with Dan Ariely, human sexuality with Matt Ridley, and Sigmund Freud only reminds us of lying on a couch debating which object in a dream represented a penis, and underestimating an importance of clitoris in female sexuality.

As someone who has actually read a few Freud's books long ago (before reading books by Ariely, Ridley, etc.), here are a few things that impressed me. Things that someone got right hundred years ago, when "it's obviously magic" and "no, thoughts and emotions actually don't exist" were the alternative famous models of human psychology.

(continued in next comment...)

Stanovich draws an interesting distinction between intelligence and rationality, where intelligence, as measured by IQ test, is so to say the strength of an individual's analytical abilities, whereas rationality is this individual's tendency to use these analytical abilities (as opposed to fast and unreliable Systems 1 processes); i.e., his or her tendency to "overcome his or her biases".

There is a bigger problem. People's system 2 can be even more unreliable that their system 1. System 2 uses whatever one consciously believes, which can very well include large amounts of falsehoods and anti-epistemology, e.g., believing the theories of Foucault and Freud. In fact, system 1 frequently saves people from their system 2's irrational beliefs.

and since my brain makes a rational estimate of the probability of my getting lung cancer when deciding how much anxiety to dump on me

Generally, this is false.

I would guess that the common factor causes her to have an urge to smoke, and if she wants to find out whether she has cancer, it is irrelevant whether she actually smokes, she only has to see whether she has the urge. She has it, dang. Time to smoke.

But that would depend on other factors not just the probability of lung cancer. That depends on what her motivation is to smoke (relaxation, social partnerships, reducing her anxiety, stress management). In that case the temporary benefit gained from smoking may outweigh the Bayesian probability of her getting lung cancer which will take 20-30 to take hold (most likely) rather than using other means to mitigate her very present problems. If she is deciding to smoke or not based solely on the probability of getting lung cancer and her anxiety level about that the rational brain usually chooses to do things that reduce risk rather than increase it and if she is looking to reduce the anxiety level she should choose not to smoke because the chances of lung cancer derived from smoking go down. However, she could also use nicotine as a way to cope with her stress or anxiety which may provide a much better present relief and mitigate any anxiety she has about developing lung cancer in the future.

How to paint your house. Basic plumbing and electrical. How to check your car's oil, radiator fluid. How to open an investing account rather than a savings account (very practical). Knife skills for the kitchen.

I think all the needle crafts are handy:

Needlepoint Crochet Knitting Embroidery

I think that sewing and learning to make a dress, blouse, pants or how to hem your own pants is useful and most people don't know how to sew anymore.

I would also consider reaching out to organizations to see who you can bring in and then just serve as a point of contact and outreach to the community.

I'm not sure that coming up with the skills yourself is the best idea. You could simply announce that you provide space for anyone to hold a class to teach whatever they want to teach.

Introductory programming perhaps? (Presumably you have some public computers in your library.)

Accurately judging the confidence that other people have in their own judgements isn't easy. It can be that the other person just doesn't care whether they are wrong.

In political discussions people often argue their positions quite strongly even if they don't have good evidence for them. You might mistake that strong arguing as confidence when it's rather the opposite.

Fight, flight and freeze responses are all instances of fear but look quite different. Especially shy people often confuse a fight response with confidence when it isn't.

Would you care to post some predictions?

I compiled the Wikipedia book on atheism, and it appears to work fine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Atheism

Have you tried using Calibre combined with the Wiki Reader plug-in?

Interesting.

From...

30/ You can strip away rituals up to the limit of your mindfulness, staying on the edge of manic-depression. This is being a sociopath.

37/ A culture cannot be both compassionate and beautiful at once without ceasing to grow. To be a sociopath is to recognize this.

39/ A culture that chooses to grow is one that systematically devalues beauty and resists the allure and comfort of pricelessness.

42/ Those who choose growth tell another kind of story, about an expanding zone of mindfulness that defines the superhuman.

...it seems to follow that the future (whatever kind of AGI, singularity, technological advance) will be ugly and sociopath. No wonder many fear this.

No one in their right mind would fix their health issues without consulting a physician, an expert in physical health.

Quite a lot people do start diets without consulting a physician.

I see a lot of consulting in the following areas:

• sports - esp. if happening in a fitness center

• parental and relationship advice (at least it is offered quite a lot in Germany and we used it)

• job and career advice - there is a whole profession for placing prospective youth into jobs and later on qutie some effort is made to help you find a job (though quality has declined a lot in Germany in the last years)

If reading scientific books counts as 'consulting experts' then quite a lot of topics (including diet above) count, or?

Yet we are very willing to do most of our lifes without consulting any other experts

That just isn't true. Every time you call a plumber or hand your car to an auto mechanic or go to a class, etc. etc. you consult an "other expert".

Reliance on on other people has its own built-in problems -- e.g. the agency issue or deciding which expert to pick (say, you want to lose weight -- there is a large variety of experts all disagreeing with each other...).

your physician assess your physical health

Physicians are rarely interested in or trained to assess physical health. What they do instead is assess lack of disease which is a different thing.

A&B gains more evidence than A from the experiment. It doesn't (and can't) become more probable.

Let's have an example. Someone is flipping a coin repeatedly. The coin is either a fair one or a weighted one that comes up heads 3x as often as tails. (A = "coin is weighted in this way".) The person doing the flipping might be honest, or might be reporting half the tails she flips (i.e., each one randomly with p=1/2) as heads. (B = "person is cheating in this way".)

Let's say that ahead of time you think A and B independently have probability 1/10.

Your experiment consists of getting the (alleged) results of a single coin flip, which you're told was heads.

So. Beforehand the probability of A was 1/10 and that of B was 1/100.

The probability of your observed results is: 1/2 under (not-A,not-B); 3/4 under (not-A,B); 3/4 under (A.not-B); and 7/8 under (A,B).

So the posterior probabilities for the four possibilities are proportional to (81:9:9:1) times (4:6:6:7); that is, to (324:54:54:7). Which means the probability of A has gone up from 10% to about 14%, and the probability of A&B from 1% to about 1.6%.

So you've got more evidence for A&B than for A, which translates (more or less) to a larger relative gain in probability for A&B than for A. But A&B is still less likely.

If you repeat the experiment and keep getting heads, then A&B will always improve more than A alone. But the way this works is that after a long time almost all the probability of A comes from the case where A&B, so that A&B's advantage in increase-in-probability gradually goes away.

A&B cannot be more probable than A, but evidence may support A&B more than it supports A.

For example, suppose you have independent prior probabilities of 1/2 for A and for B. The prior probability of A&B is 1/4. If you are then told "A iff B," the probability for A does not change but the probability of A&B goes up to 1/2.

The reason specific theories are better is not that they are more plausible, but that they contain more useful information.

A more specific explanation is better than a general explanation in the scientific sense exactly because it is more easily falsifiable. Your sentence

If I know a complex differentiable function has roots on all multiples of pi, Saying the function is satisfied by Sin is more plausible then saying it's satisfied by some analytic function.

is completely wrong, as the set containing the sine function is most certainly contained in the set of all analytic functions, making it more plausible that "some analytic function has roots at all multiples of pi" than to say the same of sine, assuming we do not already know a great deal of information about sine.

However, If I do an experiment, and measure something which is implied by A&B, then I would think "A&B becomes more plausible then A", Because A is more vague then A&B.

Plain and simply no. If evidence E implies A and B, formally E -> A&B, then seperately E -> A and E -> B are true, increasing the probability of both seperately, making your conclusion invalid.

If A,B,C are binary, values of A and B are drawn from independent fair coins, and C = A XOR B, then measuring C = 1 constrains A,B to be either { 1, 1 } or { 0, 0 }, but does not constrain A alone at all.

Before we conditioned on C=1, all values of the joint variable A,B had probabilities 0.25, and all values of a single variable A had probabilities 0.5. After we conditioned on C=1, values { 0, 0 } and { 1, 1 } of A,B assume probabilities 0.5, and values { 0, 1 } and { 1, 0 } of A,B assume probabilities 0, values of a single variable A remain at probability 0.5.

By conditioning on C=1, you learn more about the joint variable A,B than about a single variable A (because your posterior for A,B changed, but your posterior for A did not), but that is not the same thing as the joint variable A,B being more plausible than the single variable A. In fact, it is still the case that p(A & B | C) <= p(A | C) for all values of A,B.

edit: others below said the same, and often better.

I think we tend to intuitively "normalize" the likelihood of a complex statement. Our prior is probably Kolmogorov complexity, so if A is a 2-bit statement and B is a 3-bit statement, we would "expect" the probabilities to be P(A)=1/4, P(B)=1/8, P(A&B)=1/32. If our evidence leads us to adjust to say P(A)=1/3, P(A&B)=1/4, then while A&B is still less likely than A, there is some sense in which A&B is "higher above baseline".

Coming from the other end, predictions, this sort of makes sense. Theories that are more specific are more useful. If we have a theory that this sequence consists of odd numbers, that lets us make some prediction about the next number. If our theory is that the numbers are all primes, we can make a more specific, and therefore more useful, prediction about the next number. So even though the theory that the sequence is odd is more likely than the theory that the sequence is prime, the latter is more useful. I think that's where the idea that specific theories are better than vague theories comes from.

P(A & B) <= P(A)

I'm guessing that the rule P(A & B) < P(A) is for independent variables (though it's actually more accurate to say P(A & B) <= P(A) ). If you have dependent variables, then you use Bayes Theorem to update. P(A & B) is different from P(A | B). P(A & B) <= P(A) is always true, but not so for P(A | B) viz. P(A).

This is probably an incomplete or inadequate explanation, though. I think there was a thread about this a long time ago, but I can't find it. My Google-fu is not that strong.

We know P(A & B) < P(A). So if you add details to a story, it becomes less plausible.

Not so. Stories usually are considerably more complicated than can be represented as ANDing of probabilities.

A simple example: Someone tells me that she read my email to Alice, let's say I think that's X% plausible. But then she adds details: she says that the email mentioned a particular cafe. This additional detail makes the plausibility of this story skyrocket (since I do know that the email did mention that cafe).

What draws her to environmental charities? Concern for animals? Concern for humans? Fighting global warming with its likely negative effects on both?

Before GiveWell/whoever can make a recommendation they need to know what the person wants. The best environmental charity for preventing species extinction is going to be very different than the best one for preventing animal suffering.

This comment is the first time I've ever heard the term "post-neoliberal".

What exactly is post-neoliberalism?

From Googling the term it seems to be a word for South American politics. South American issues are generally not strongly debated in the English speaking internet. You probably find a better reception in some Spanish speaking venues.

I've never heard Milton Friedman, or anyone else prior to this, refer to Milton Friedman as a post neoliberal or neoliberal. And I've read a fair bit of Friedman, and watched many interviews of him.