Open thread, July 21-27, 2014

Regarding your first point: if your immediate next-of-kin is unable to take care of things, do you trust whoever is next-nearest to respect your wishes? How confident are you that this will still be the case after time (t) has passed?

My experience with a few friends and relatives: often such informal estate planning is done as a one-off, in a moment of forward thinking, and then left as is, sometimes for years. Unexpected changes in the views of the next of kin (in my family's case, various religious conversions) led to all kinds of family disputes related to different opinions about what the desires and intentions of the deceased might have been - and whether they are even relevant if none were formally expressed.

1) Your local jurisdiction will have some manner of default will - a piece of legislation somewhere that says who gets what in the event that you die intestate. Look up a summary online. If its provisions bug you, you should probably get a will. If you're cool with it, then you don't necessarily need one. However, if you have an estate big enough that your relatives will sue each other for a piece of it(>$100k USD net worth, say), an estate that is somehow complex(trust funds, assets you want to go somewhere in particular, scumbag relatives you want to cut out, etc.), or children, I would advise getting one regardless. I know some estate lawyers, and the stories they tell are hair-curling. I know that's a biased source, because they don't see much of the simple cases, but it's an insurance policy I plan to get as soon as I have enough assets to be worth paying for it.

Also, when you're getting one, get a power of attorney set up. Most people don't do that even when they do get a will done, and it's a pretty ugly oversight if something goes wrong.

What would happen if the document gets stolen?

I notice that the smallest denomination of the ethereum currency is the "Wei". Is that named in honor of Wei Dai for his foundational work in the same vein as the "Satoshi"?

It's a pre-pre-mine. Ethereum will never succeed if they go through with this.

Curious observation about the incentives for buying ethereum during the pre-sale:

The issuance model will be as follows:

Ether will be sold in a Mastercoin-style fundraiser at the price of 1 ether for 0.0001 BTC. Suppose that X ether gets collected in this way.

0.25X ether will be given to the founders.
0.25X ether will be given to the Ethereum organization as a reserve pool to pay expenses in ETH such as ETH salaries or bounties for those developers who want part or all of their compensation to be in this form
0.5X ether will be mined per year forever after that point (ie. permanent linear inflation)

This is similar to a tragedy of the commons problem. The value given to the investors is their relative contribution and the total contribution of bitcoins makes no direct difference (except for positive PR). Of course, apart from the participants in the sale being human (rather than ideal UDT agents) the ideal solution (of token purchases in proportion to what the players "would have" bought if they could not cooperate) is modified somewhat because the Etherium founders have an incentive to inflate the price away from a cooperative solution.

Regarding the value transfer represented (the Etherium organisation + the founders thereof) end up with:

• All of the bitcoin spent.
• 1/3 of the Etherium currency.

That probably could be worse, given how such currencies tend to be launched.

It is worth taking into consideration that the currency has permanent linear inflation. That means the inflation will be trivial in the future but relatively huge to begin with. The currency purchased in the initial sale will represent 25% of the currency after 5 years.

The code in the github repo doesn't actually give bots access to each other's source, just the ability to run each other.

It's also lacking handling for bots that run forever.

IIRC last time the winners were programs that had some random element in their code and "got lucky" (in the sense that if the tournament had been run multiple times and the results averaged, they would not have won). So maybe you should guard against this by performing sufficiently many copies of the tournament.

If someone from MIRI is reading this: Having the upper-limit of the donation progress-bar truncate in the middle of the blue box is confusing. It makes one feel that you've reached $200K, and that you have to go the rest of the distance of the blue box to actually reach your goal.

I suggest moving <# of Donors> to below the progress-bar (as opposed to where it currently is, which is to the right of the progress bar) and scaling the progress-bar to fit the width of box.

I think the answer B makes more sense. There's no reason this portal configuration should conserve momentum since it breaks space translation symmetry. On the other hand, if you're looking at the object from the exit portal then you expect its trajectory to be smooth. More formally, the portal can be implemented by making space into an appropriate Riemannian manifold (with singularity at portal edges) and mechanics with the usual Lagrangian leads to B.

(It's A, right?)

investigate people's different intuitions of physics.

To some extent, 'folk physics' has already been studied a fair bit. For example, see the links at the end of http://lesswrong.com/lw/khd/confound_it_correlation_is_usually_not_causation/ about a quiz designed to measure how well people understand Newtonian mechanics and to what extent they succumb to incorrect folk physics beliefs.

My intuition agrees with Squark's, but I've never played the game either.

I think there little cost to starting such a thread. Afterwards you can see whether the thread produces useful discussion.

I would put such things in the bragging thread - why the separation?

I still stand by what I wrote in the answer to the Skeptic Stack Exchange question that you linked to. I don't think there good reason to assume that polyphasic sleep is very useful.

At the same time it's an interesting topic for research. If I understand right puredoxyk wants to do some group research at the moment. I would also be interested in the current conclusions of those Leverage Research folks who started polyphasic sleep a while ago.

I while ago I did meet a girl via PlentyOfFish who claimed to have been for a year on 1 hour of sleep per day without doing any kind of polyphasic schedule or other personal development tricks and that's without her knowing about my interests in the subject. It didn't kill her but it probably wasn't healthy either.

Some folks (e.g., puredoxyk) have suggested that you have to deny that some people seem to work okay on short polyphasic schedules

Phrases like "work okay" have a fairly broad meaning. There are plenty of people who think they are highly functioning but who could function a lot better. If I remember right puredoxyk was depressed when she wrote the post. She was depressed before she even started polyphasic sleep, but that doesn't set the bar for "being okay" very high.

Quickly going into REM when asleep is a sign of either narcolepsy

But only people with excessive daytime sleepiness are tested for quickly going into REM, so the fact that they do doesn't tell so much. Anecdotally, I find that people with narcolepsy went quickly into REM before they developed the excessive daytime sleepiness. They seem to function quite well, until they develop full-blown narcolepsy. So I don't think it is reasonable to associate quick REM with narcolepsy. Sleep deprivation is another matter.

This blog provides a cynical view on the workplace: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/

I like the cynicism, but I don't know how realistic it is.

Also, there is Stack Exchange: http://workplace.stackexchange.com/

I'm a fan of The Gervais Principle series - http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ is the first entry. I've largely avoided political jobs, so I can't speak to how well it works in practice, however.

The URL contains "commentisfree". Doesn't that mean that it's a user blog rather than an article?

According to your percentages, out of every 10,000 women, 5% = 500 have cancer and 95% = 9,500 do not.

Of those 500 women with cancer, 80% = 400 will get a positive test and 20% = 100 will get a negative one.

Out of those 9,500 women without cancer, 9% = 855 will get a positive test and 91% = 8,645 will get a negative one.

After taking the first test, Jane belongs to the group of 1,255 women out of every 10,000 who have a positive test.

Of those 1,255 women, 400 have cancer. Jane's likelihood of having cancer is 400/1,255 = 31.87%.

If we take those 1,255 women to a second test, 80% = 320 of the 400 women with cancer will get a positive test and 20% = 80 will get a negative test.

Of those same 1,255 women with a first positive test, 9% = 77 of the 855 women without cancer will get a positive test and 91% = 778 will get a negative test.

After taking the second test, Jane belongs to the group of 858 women out of every 10,000 with one positive and one negative test.

Of those 858 women, 80 have cancer. Now Jane's likelihood of having cancer is 80/858 = 9.32%.

Are we assuming the two tests are independent?

If so, the original cancer rate was 5:95. Multiply that by 80:9 for the likelihood ratio of getting a positive to get 400:855, which is ~30% as you said. Then, you multiply by the likelihood ratio of getting the second negative 20:91, to get 8000:77805, which as a probability is 8000/(8000+77805)~9.3%.

(Assuming that two tests are independent, which is a rather unrealistic assumption in this case) If you know how to calculate the ~30% answer to the first part of the question, then this problem is pretty straightforward to solve. Just use Bayes' rule again, treating the posterior from your first calculation (~30%) as your prior for the next calculation.

If Kim came from a population that had a ~30% prior of having cancer and took one test which came out negative, then her probability after that one test would be the same as Jane's probability after both tests.

Doing this with probabilities is a bit more complicated than what Coscott did, but to illustrate it anyhow...

where A is cancer and and C are the two test results, P(A|BC)=P(A) P(BC|A) / P(BC). P(A) is our prior of 5%. Because B and C are independent, P(BC|A) is just 0.8 * 0.2.

P(BC) is where using probabilities is more complicated than using odds, because it's not the probability of false positives, it's the total prior probability of seeing B and then C. Using the product rule, P(BC) = P(B)*P(C|B). Then splitting the possibilities up into cancer and not-cancer, this becomes (P(AB)+P(¬A B))*(P(AC|B)+P(¬A C|B)). Because B and C are independent, the second part becomes (product rule) P(A|B)*P(C|A)+P(¬A|B)*P(C|¬A) - note that even when we added both pieces of evidence at once, we still have to calculate the intermediate probability P(A|B)! Stupid non-time-saving grumble grumble.

Anyhow, if you plug in the numbers, it's ~0.094.

What does "success rate" mean?

The "Mayan apocalypse" isn't an ancient prophecy.

From Wikipedia:

Misinterpretation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar was the basis for a popular belief that a cataclysm would take place on December 21, 2012. December 21, 2012 was simply the day that the calendar went to the next b'ak'tun, at Long Count 13.0.0.0.0. The date on which the calendar will go to the next piktun (a complete series of 20 b'ak'tuns), at Long Count 1.0.0.0.0.0, will be on October 13, 4772.

Sandra Noble, executive director of the Mesoamerican research organization Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. (FAMSI), notes that "for the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle". She considers the portrayal of December 2012 as a doomsday or cosmic-shift event to be "a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in."

While Bridge still relies somewhat on luck it is my opinion mainly skill-based.

The first thing that popped into my mind: equal complexity branches would have equal probability. We know that's totally not how it works: take quantum bits, for example. You can have arbitrary superpositions of both states, and it's very hard to argue that one suddenly acquires a higher complexity than the other.

This seems to me like learned helplessness, which is probably a "farmer" adaptation. In my opinion, hapiness is always good for the individual, but sometimes my unhappiness may benefit the rest of the tribe, so there can be a cultural norm against happiness. And if other people punish you for happiness, you will learn that happiness is actually bad for you, and rationalize some wise reasons for it, or the culture will already provide you with ready rationalizations.

How is individual happiness bad for society? While people are enjoying sex at their homes, churches and supermarkets are empty.

Arguably, many consequentialists already fall in to this category. If you are unsettled by the image of a universe composed entirely of undifferentiated orgasmium, then it's a fair bet that happiness is not your (only) terminal value. To return to a common sentiment, "I don't want to maximize my happiness, I want to maximize my awesomeness."

That said, happiness is usually of some value to students of ethics. A system in which it had zero value could conceivably still be pretty happy for instrumental reasons, since happiness makes humans more efficient in the pursuit of most things that we can expect to be valued. Once you start creating non-human entities from the ground up, you would expect happiness to become rare, although not necessarily to be replaced with misery. (The paperclipper is such a force.)

Happiness can mean quite a lot of different things to different people. Even in the a single culture like the US the average 25 year old means something different with the term than the average 50 year old.

The article makes it even more worse by conflating joy and happiness. Furthermore translation of words over cultural boundaries is going to add additional challenges.

That people do not value as the sole terminal goal is obvious by the high number of people unwilling to wirebrain themselves, that is to place their brain into a mechanical and chemical device that provides with the maximum pleasure biochemistry allows.

As members of this site like to forget: Homo Sapiens is not a rational species but a product of evolution and thus only a program that runs its course.

It doesn't matter whether they say they want to be happy, happiness is an objectively preferable state. If this article is accurate, then their beliefs about why happiness isn't preferable is based on incorrect beliefs, anyway.

The ones I will probably take next are:

Game Theory - good course according to reviews

Introduction to Logic - I have done a similar course on this but need more practice in this area.

and Exploring Neural Data - no idea what this one is like, but seems interesting. You get to play with some data in Python

Introduction to Linux. I've been using Linux as my daily driver for almost two years now, but I often feel that I'm not leveraging every tool it comes with, and Linux comes with some really awesome tools.

My guess is that the over 200 points you have received recently for writing the article have not yet been added to the "total karma" and an older cached value is displayed instead. If I am correct, then this problem should fix itself in a few days.

(My first suspicion was "someone was mass-downvoting your old comments", but the numbers don't allow this interpretation. At this moment, your total karma is 101, 92% positive, which means you lost at most a dozen points by downvoting, which couldn't explain a drop from 245 to 101.)

See "Organizations" in this list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Life_extension

I like the site. Although I suspect that the goal of the site (saving precious time by not consuming anything but the best) is contradictory to building a community around it.

Look at all the "social networks", they are procrastination maximizers. Rationally people want to save time, but emotionally your heart is where you spend a lot of time. So if someone is saving your time, you will thank them, and then you'll forget them. If someone takes all your free time in a way that is not completely repulsive, they will become your tribe.

Something similar is visible on LW. On one hand, we are complaining that LW is just another shiny toy for procrastination. On the other hand, if there is a week without too many articles (the best time to stop procrastinating and actually do something), we complain that LW is dying because of too much censorship or negativity or whatever. Maybe the best thing for most LWers would be if Eliezer would simply turn off the whole website for a month, and only display a text "stop procrastinating, go out and win; the website will be back on September 1st when all of you are expected to report your progress in a special Thread". But would they hate it? Absolutely. Also, they would simply spend the whole August watching kitten videos on YouTube and refreshing HP:MoR homepage.

The only way to build an online community is to create a site where people can procrastinate.

This comes across as off-puttingly pretentious to me. How are you going to prove that people should care what you recommend?

Also, I find the combination of a tiny default font and off-black text to be hard to read.

It looks interesting, I saved it to my evernote for future reading. Good luck with that project.

I've read a few articles on your site, and I figured it might be interesting to you: Privacy is Dead (YouTube)

I like the quote on the main page, but it might be worth adding your explanation from the top of the LIbrary page to better explain what the site is about. For example, LW has its slogan/description on the main page that clearly explains what its purpose is. Also, if you intend to try to create a community around it, it might be a better idea to shift away from the first person personal in your writing.

I saw a potentially off-putting typo on the books page. "Pick" -> "Pique".

If you look at the number 2045 you will find that it comes from a roadmap of a Russian billionaire. Making roadmaps can be useful because the can guide action. Especially if a billionaire wants to use his funds in a way that keeps him alive.

Two, you can't tell if a longevity breakthrough has occurred any faster than the rate at which humans happen to live.

That's false. The number 2045 comes from a plan to be able to upload humans completely by that point and not be subject to biological concerns anymore.

And three, why all the focus on this century for people who aspire to live a lot longer than normal?

If we don't get things right in this century we won't live in the next. We do have to focus on this century if we want to experience the next.

It doesn't make much sense to ask why questions in cases like this without seeing the context in which people make their statements.

extra credit for finding the math error in the second article.

Well, near the start it refers to "an exponential growth of 3 per cent per year, or multiplying by about 10 every 100 years" when in fact 1.03^100 is about 19. At which point I have little confidence that that's the mathematical error; it suggests a level of sloppiness likely to produce others.

Two, you can't tell if a longevity breakthrough has occurred any faster than the rate at which humans happen to live. You would need institutions with the resources to collect data on the experimental groups and conduct longitudinal studies over many decades to see if they live a lot longer than the untreated control group of natural human populations. I don't know of anyone who has proposed doing that.

That's not likely to be true. If people are aging a lot more slowly, you should be able to see the effects in ten years, maybe less. It's hard for me to imagine a method which would lead to much better markers for aging that left people with the same lifespans.

Why do transhumanists keep setting arbitrary (and frankly nonsensical) "immortality" dates in this century, like 2045?

I'd say it's that people like numbers. As a result, a lot of people pull out arbitrary numbers of much higher precision than is reasonable.

And three, why all the focus on this century for people who aspire to live a lot longer than normal?

I don't think there's much point in focusing on that stuff other than entertainment. I guess people think it's more fun to think about how things will improve in a century or so than to try to work out what completely alien world will exist in the distant future.

If you do think it will be useful, then you know more about the near future, so you can think about it more productively, you have more time to think about the distant future and you can procrastinate, and thinking about the near future will pay off sooner, so it will better compete with investing.

Two, you can't tell if a longevity breakthrough has occurred any faster than the rate at which humans happen to live.

What do you think of the recent aging clock work by Horvath?

One, these dates fall within the life expectancies of people alive in 2014.

That is why. On January 1, 2045, I'll be 90 years old, if I make it that far. So if a cure for mortality has been invented and made widely available by then, I could just get to use it. If it's invented in 2060, who cares? I'll be dead.