What topics would you like to see more of on LessWrong?

In the near future, I plan to write a somewhat detailed discussion of the JAMA paper on vitamins that Phil Goetz and Robin Hanson have written about.

At some point I also plan to write an essay on what statistical models are actually models of and the implications for actually doing statistics, just to make sure I thoroughly work out the ideas. When I do, I'll probably post it here for anyone who's interested.

(Posting this to make it more likely that I actually do these things)

I've been thinking about this. I know a fair amount about Bayesian statistics (less about classical statistics), but I'm not sure where introduction to topics like this would fit in. For example, the topic that springs to my mind is an introduction to least-squares estimation: why it makes sense from a bayesian perspective, what it's assumptions and limitations are, and how to do it. However, this topic seems too parochial to do make a post (and also covered in the statistics book I recommended). Would it fit in in the discussion section?

For reference, on the main page right now, here are my classifications:

2 naval gazing 3 reduction attempts 2 self help 2 meetup 1 charity (not sure how to classify)

Agree, agree, but ...

fewer gimmicks

... what do you mean by gimmicks, here?

Also, post college people. I graduated from a university a year ago, and just found myself with a lot of free time to try something. It would be nice to have some help, advice, ideas, etc. This would probably need a separate venue though, aside from lesswrong posts or discussions.

I've studied game theory and rationality, and I don't use game theory even when applying rationality to game design! I've used some of the nontechnical results (threats, from Shelling's book) to negotiate and precommit but that's about it. Has someone else used game theory in real life?

Unless someone else responds to this comment, my guess is that this topic is of greater interest to readers than it is of any use.

It is indeed quite surprising that there wasn't systematic posting on this, given the amount of interest in prisoner's dilemmas and such things. It is maybe because the traditional game theory is bound to traditional causal decision theory which is not much popular here, but nevertheless I would be interested to learn more about it.

I want LW to have a good shot at advancing humanity's understanding. For that it's not enough to be rational, you also have to be at the frontier of an area.

I disagree on two counts. For one, I doubt that LW is the best place to develop original research (i.e. to publish ideas and rough drafts and get feedback). For that, you want a different kind of forum or 'subscription list' or wiki or RSS feed. Something with fewer people, most of whom are likely to read what you write. Something more focused. And, more important than a subscription list, you also need a peer-reviewed journal, so that your finished research actually gets academically published. SIAI should create a journal. JFAI or IJFAI.

Second, I disagree that the only way to advance humanity's understanding is by doing original research. We can also advance mankind's intellectual heritage indirectly, by doing original pedagogy - by publicizing ideas and problems in an interesting way for a broader audience, and thus attracting more sharp people to working with you at the cutting edge.

I'd like to see more discussion of n-back too, but I'm not sure there is anything to discuss. There's only so much research on it and I think I've covered most of the anecdotal material as well in my DNB FAQ.

I just came across this article which exemplifies my above comment.

Absolutely. I'm particularly interested in ways of measuring group rationality, since a lot of the more important dysfunctions of thought show up only through group dynamics and since it's hard to get anything really important done as a lone hacker or researcher.

I can think of some useful ways of measuring subvalues contributing to this value (even something as simple as paying attention at poker night goes a long way), but coming up with a workable general metric has eluded me so far.

I don't know if it can be reliably measured - my impression is that it's pretty damn hard, and that once you heard about most tests (the kind that are used to show irrationality in the first place, i.e. those already discussed on less wrong), you won't fall for them but that doesn't say much about how less likely you are for thinking right in "real life" situations where your brain isn't primed by "this is a test of rationality".

Some sub-components can be reliably measured - such as calibration. Any others?

I would love to see how other LW members invest their money. Some questions would be: Do you do your own investing? Do you pick stocks? If yes, what's your method?

Does K-complexity == Kolmogorov complexity?

I am interested what you want to know about these for. Like many things, I think a partial understanding of these topics can be counterproductive. (In other words, to be productive I think such posts should be as technical as necessary to get to the level of actually using the concept to solve problems.)

ETA: I just realized that my reply sounded rather negative. I do think such topics would be very interesting and a good addition to LW!

MATLAB is pretty good at this. Are you interested in a tutorial on [data visualization in] MATLAB, or something else?

If people prefer free software, Octave is, I am told, a good free substitute for MATLAB, although I have no experience with it myself and would be unable to write a post on it.

Do you have the link to the actual study and data for "The Truth Wears Off"? I have read a few summary article sprinkled around the web but it has always come off as pseudoscience to me. This is a hug claim and I have seen no evidence to back it up.

It is a very interesting article. Do they have an idea about the cause? It is, do they believe that the diminishing observable effects are result of earlier bias in experiments, or reflection of some real change, like viruses evolving immunity against the drugs?

By "via rationality" I assume you mean "via logical argument or sound science", which is an absurd substitution. Rationalists should win. The Dark Arts therefore are a type of instrumental rationality. That said, I still disagree, at least for some irrational people (let's roughly say anyone I could convince to eating a food that gives them a stomachache).

They can be convinced they should study [instrumental] rationality, it just requires you present unreasonably large amounts of evidence and don't use logical inference or experiments. (And when I say unreasonably large, that's for people in college studying science. For merely average twenty-somethings, you may need to beat them over the head with solid bricks of evidence.) Caveat: I do not often interact with allegedly common people who don't meet the minimum bar of adjusting expectations based on (sufficient) observation, so this comment does not apply to such persons. It is still a useful comment.

I.e. look, I used this thingy called rationality and I made/saved thousands of dollars, got a boyfriend, and fixed significant mental problems. Seemed to work for me okay. You need to go REALLY overkill on the evidence for non-science folks though. Again, beat them over the head with it. Make it something that will help them personally, too. I've found it useful to get people to agree (not verbally and aloud, though that's an interesting experiment) that whatever mysterious method I used to I do that, it would be a good thing to learn, BEFORE I revealed that the answer is something weird or "educational" sounding. This second half is only slightly dark-artsy (consistency bias).

As an entrepreneur, this strikes me as an incredible waste of our community's intellectual ability.

Being an entrepreneur is like being a rapper. You need to deal in the narrow band of ideas that are just good enough that you can make them look ridiculously popular, but also terribly flawed enough that customers need to pay you for a new version of your stuff next quarter. And these great looking, deeply flawed ideas have to be something that you can use to destroy markets with near monopoly powers.

I'd rather see Less Wrong explore actually good ideas... not business ideas.

Also, good entrepreneurship is the ultimate combo of every "dark art" that people repudiate on this site. Just for starters, it requires TONS of self-deception + other deception if you expect to have the motivation to work on it or the investment needed to succeed.

However, I could be wrong here. The alternative of working for others is even worse. It gives you terrible incentives to improve yourself (or even maintain yourself) since you get no improved earnings for better performance... merit pay raises are a joke.

This has been done by others who are entirely better informed on the subject than us.

I would like to know your reasoning could you elaborate? Why would you like to see more Entrepreneurship on LessWrong?

I like the idea but would perhaps go with a couple of posts on the most significant themes rather than chapter-by-chapter reviews. Or, in the case of chapter-by-chapter reviews not not make it post-per-chapter!

(Chapter by chapter reviews have flopped in the past but perhaps wouldn't have if they were not each presented as top level posts.)

I want to do an applied Bayesian analysis of what credence I should give to the Sierpinski conjecture being true.

I've been thinking that perhaps the small covering set sizes for known Sierpinski numbers, and the projections on where we expect to find primes (see A61) is enough to be "effectively certain" of the conjecture's truth even without actually having the prime counter-examples in hand. For instance, I feel like I should be able to quantify the value of Bayesian evidence that each primality test contributes to the overall project goal of proving the Sierpinski conjecture. And if I can show that I expect to update in favour of the conjecture's truth after hearing of the results of X more primality tests, then I should also be able to update on that now, right?

Working this out for a problem I'm familiar with might help us get better at analysing the truth of other scientific conjectures in general. But the reason I haven't done this so far is that despite understanding Bayesian reasoning abstractly and the rules about conserving probability, I don't know how to formally select a prior for the analysis. I realise this is probably not a big problem as long as it's not pathologically bad -- can I just say 50% true or maybe 90% since someone smart who I respect went to the trouble to publish a paper saying he believed it? Guess that's not hard, but how do I calculate the value of incremental evidence in favour of the conjecture's truth that has accumulated over the years as more and more possible ways for it to be false have been eliminated?

I picked this because I've been running the distributed computing system trying to solve this problem through brute-force computational means the past 8 years without actually knowing how sure I should be about the actual thing I'm trying to prove. It might be good to know what I'm doing, huh?

Let me mention that Nate Silver at 538 did something quite similar to your Knox post, just today:

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/15/a-bayesian-take-on-julian-assange/

By the way, I downvoted the parent. It is nothing personal, but debates like those induced by the Knox post are not what I'd like to see more of here.

I keep wanting to offer this as a test case, but I'm worried that if it holds up it will make LW look stupid.

Along these lines I still maintain the most useful exercise I ever engaged in here was the the Amanda Knox survey. We came at an issue which we had no better knowledge of than the general public. Nor was there any reason to expect us to agree- the issue bore no connection to the beliefs we share mostly as a result of self-selection (materialism, atheism). We independently looked at the evidence and mostly came up with similar results and then kept talking until nearly all disagreements were resolved. It still strikes me as a stunning example of how successful our methods can be. I'm desperate to do more of these. Of course, the issue is a lack of cases. We might try scientific controversies instead of legal ones. Unfortunately, few options will have the excitement of a murder trial involving pretty upper-middle class white girls. But using this stuff is so empowering and informative, I have to think we don't do this enough. (Though I have found the Diplomacy game helpful in this regard).

EY has commented that his MetaEthics sequence is one of his least successful. Can anyone else do better? The 'official' ethical position here seems to be a kind of utilitarianism, but we ought (for some values of 'ought') to also know something about competing approaches to ethics, including deontological ethics, virtue ethics, and naturalistic ethics (Nozick, Gauthier, and Binmore, for example).

We have deontological ethics covered. At least one post by Alicorn and the actual direct moral assertions around here are usually significantly deontological in nature.

EY has commented that his MetaEthics sequence is one of his least successful. Can anyone else do better?

I started a post and fizzled about 2/3rds of the way through. I may approach it again with a fresh mind, and another topic I'm thinking about touches on it by the fringes, and so may be a good introduction.

So, even if postmodernism is madness, is there a method in it? I doubt, but am curious. The RationalWiki article is not much convincing, it just asserts that postmodernism is somehow valuable, but does not say how.

This is rather vague actually. Postmodernism lumps together hundreds of ideas and concepts. These ideas vary greatly in their usefulness and their bullshit content. Any statement broad enough to cover all of postmodernism is trivial and unhelpful- I'm not sure there is a "Postmodernism for rationalists" waiting to be written. For a general overview the wikipedia article is really, really good.

Also, attention RationalWiki writers: Derrida was not the founder of postmodernism.

Postmodernism - I've been intrigued since David mentioned it :

I'm interested in the general category of social science ideas that were big and important 50 or 100 years ago, but have since fallen out of favor. I'm sure guys like Freud, Jung, Weber, Marx, and Durkheim had some interesting ideas. I'd like to know what those ideas were, and why people at the time took them so seriously.

This one is important because Rawls's device of "the original position" is one clever way to make utilitarianism mathematically respectable, in that it permits interpersonal comparison of utilities.

What !?

I have an interest in regular AI but as far as I can tell it's mostly distinct from rationality. AI seems much more about task completion and decision-making in narrow regions with strongly identified problems; AGIs and humans are much more about task selection and decision-making in broad regions with weakly identified problems.

People here don't like discussing politics because it's a very charged topic, it's very easy to become defensive/offensive, and it doesn't yield very much utility. Article