Post Request Thread

Neato. Will do by the end of April.

I've coached competitive debating which is a bit more specialist but probably overlaps in the important parts.

It's probably best if I wait until you've written your article so we aren't duplicating effort, but if you want assistance/collaberation PM me.

I think that's partly because the usual computational complexity results aren't terribly relevant here. Many NP-complete problems, while very difficult to solve exactly, are quite computationally tractable for any constant allowable error. (For example, finding a route in the traveling salesman problem that is within 1% of the best route, or any other error bound, provided you hold the error bound fixed with respect to the problem size.)

So, the fact that a proper Bayesian update on a complex network is intractable is not necessarily relevant, if you can guarantee that your approximate update has bounded error.

Also, my general sense is that bounded-error complexity proofs are much less common, and impossibility proofs for bounded error results even less so. (But it's not something I've studied at all, so my confidence here is low.)

For the record, this comment has motivated me to find some random introduction paper to computational complexity and slowly read and rewrite in my simplified own words as I go along.

Don't expect an actual LW post out of this, but (anyone can) feel free to bug/PM me in a few days to inquire on how it went. My hopes are that the mental muddiness around the subject will finally clear away if I try to explain it myself as I read it, even if I'm not explaining it to anyone in particular.

Related, it would be interesting to have more about information theory in general.

concerning exercise

concerning supplements

concerning the Paleo diet

Concerning alcohol.

The state of exercise science is absolutely deplorable. You're stuck with what coaches who train athletes say after having trained lots of people.

Here are two previous posts on exercise:

• Minimum viable workout routine
• Weight training

But I agree that this is an area that deserves more study from LW members.

Reddit's r/fitness is a good source of mostly fact based information (or at least they have a culture of aggressively attacking "broscience").

The FAQ is a good place to start. Examine.com is a very good website made by one of the mods, which focuses mainly on the science of nutrition.

While by no means a replacement for such a post, here's some easily-followed advice for reducing the motivation threshold to initiating exercise.

Exercise makes you warmer - if keen, don't go out of your way to prevent yourself from becoming cold.

Purchase a removable doorway pull-up bar. Place it outside and next to the door to your most frequently used loo.

Warm yourself up (pull-ups〔anywhere〕, push-ups using the bar〔or any surface whatsoever〕, high knees, running from parked car to destination, etcetera〕. Pep yourself up (when in a negative mood). If not already present, hacking in some vanity, then exercising and looking at yourself might also help with motivation. Try to have fun with it (id est try not to reluctantly force yourself to exercise or guilt yourself for abstaining).

I'd be interested in writing this one. I don't your divide is a real one; it's basically the same skill. But it's still worth talking about in that context.

Given the seemingly high interest I'm considering researching a full post on this. However, going just off what I remember from psyc classes the short answer is we don't know and suspect that you can't alter them much, at least not without doing something drastic. That said, putting yourself in social groups were the desired trait is common/expected looks relatively promising. Additionally, it may be possible to change your behavior in ways that emulate the effects of a big five change without technically changing your personality. In particular the Getting Things Done I learned from CfAR is supposed to boost your effective conscientiousness, and I have observed that to kinda be the case since I adopted it.

Related: Should I alter my Big 5 personality traits?

I realize it's not the ones you were explicitly asking about, but single dose psilocybin can increase openness long term. Relevant Google search.

In part, so I can understand UDT-consequentialism.

Seconded, and are there any currently existing LW posts on CBT? (I would like one, if not.)

Slight caution, trying to "think your way out of depression" is a common failure mode among high intelligence people who are used to being able to solve problems with their own research. Most mental health problems by their nature require external intervention.

Thirded.

I've found knowing indicators useful for managing stress, too. I'm sometimes terrible at knowing when I'm stressed, so I also pay attention to whether I'm getting headaches when other people aren't (meaning it's not just the weather), and whether I'm checking for bugs in the house more than usual.

The symptoms known in the medical community but not outside it is something I hadn't thought about before, but it sounds very interesting.

Stress management might also tie in with akrasia, to some extent - some people procrastinate because thinking about the work is stressful.

I'm amazed that I'm smack dab in the middle of the consensus.

Could your rant about geeks add bad user interfaces to the list of problems?

Regarding Good and Real, I didn't manage to work out the EPR experiment. It would be nice to see someone else make sense of it.

If these gaps are small enough that they can be filled using relatively short sentences, have you tried the Open Thread instead? I have in mind requests for longer posts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc

And you made it happen!

Two that apply to everyone:

Every bit of your work that can go in a computer should go in a version control system repository.

Everything you do that can be generated on your computer should be stored in a format such that regenerating it from original human-editable sources is as easy as typing "make".

One that applies to everyone who has to write some form of software:

Everything that you write should be accompanied by tests, which should be run regularly, preferably by some "buildbot" system as well as yourself. Otherwise, if you're writing reusable code it's all to easy to break use case A while improving use case B or adding use case C. Even when you're writing use case A, it's easy to trick yourself into thinking the result is more correct than it is unless you've tested it.

There is a world of psychological health in between "This isn't working!?! It was working fine six months ago! I'm screwed!" and "Oops, time to write another test for git bisect to play with. I should probably increase the line thickness in all my thesis' graphs by a smidge while waiting for that to finish."

I don't have time to flesh this out into a full post. Plus, the more material I add the more narrowly focused on applied-mathematics-on-Linux it would get. I hope the abridged version is still helpful.

This post may turn into a decent resource.

I would like to see such an article iff failure to follow the advice in it has a moderate probability of leading to long-term damage, not just discomfort that goes away when the problematic activities are halted. Especially so if the damage can occur without a warning more obvious than mild discomfort. My general impression is that most of the activities listed may be uncomfortable, but do not cause lasting damage.

Unsure what "technological employment is true" means.

Unemployment primarily caused by technological change is a major problem

Currently disagree (although it's most likely a minor source of unemployment right now) but expect it to become a major problem in the future.

Disagree, but I think the position is subtle:

I agree that technology renders jobs obsolete, so in a sense I agree.

However, I think that thus far the "Demand is unlimited" axiom held in some branches of economics has held true in the long term (short term disruptions aside), so I disagree with the implication that technology will result in unemployment in the foreseeable future. (I am open to the possibility of paradigm shifts which render historical evidence irrelevant, I simply do not see at reasonable to assume the future will look the way we currently expect it to look; "Nothing ages faster than yesterday's tomorrow," quote source not immediately determinate to me.)

On a related note, a common piece of advice for sleeping better is to avoid screen time before bed. I often have trouble finding things I want to or should do before bed that don't involve a computer (anything involving cleaning is too stressful for me to do before bed). I'd like to see something on reasonable ways to accomplish this.

This seems vague / general. Can you be more specific about what you're looking for?

I realise this is not quite the point of this thread, but it is relevant:

I would like not to have any more posts on PUA or feminism. They are political, unproductive timesinks. The mutual disarmament we had after the flamewar of Summer 2009, where neither side posted, was excellent.

I have a few objections against the way PUA and feminism are present at LW, but I think that could be fixed by presenting them in a different way.

My problem with PUA is that its discussion does not happen at a separate article, but rather as huge threads within articles about something else. So I am annoyed with the discussion being off-topic, long, repeating the same points over dozen different articles, never reaching any conclusion, threatening to happen again and again forever. Also, even the basic terms are never defined, so people just talk past each other, each one having a completely different understanding what "PUA" means.

This could be solved by having one article, written by someone who understands the topic, but is not mindkilled by it. Someone who could shortly describe the history and evolution of the movement, its most important schools, and what is considered the state of the art today: specific techniques and beliefs, with some evidence that this is what many PUA's really believe today. So the critics can focus on the core, instead on what some guy said 20 years ago and almost nobody agrees with him today. Having different beliefs properly attributed to different schools, we could perhaps reach a conclusion that some aspect X is unethical, and that X is part of the A's teachings, but is not present or even is explicitly opposed by B's teaching. -- This would be much saner than a discussion where "PUA" is de facto defined by its critics as "whatever any man said on internet about getting women, especially if it sounds ofensive", and the defenders object that "not all PUAs are like that" without being any more specific.

My problem with feminism is... actually, pretty similar. There is never a definition. (Yeah, we are kind of supposed to find it elsewhere. Guess what: most sources about feminism do not provide a definition nor a pointer to a definition. You are supposed to already know it, otherwise you are a bad person.) And I guess if someone finds a definition, it would not be up to the LW rationality standards. Actually, I consider it pretty unlikely that if you have a huge movement, all of its beliefs, without exception, happen to be true and rational. So it would be nice if someone could present a subset of feminism which is rationally defensible, along with the rational defense.

The current sequence of "LW women"... I don't exactly understand the point of it. There are some opinions and experiences of some women, LW members. I get that. But I guess there is supposed to be some connotation, some conclusion that a sensitive reader is supposed to get after reading them -- and I am not sure what it is, and I would prefer it to be more explicit. Because it is difficult to agree or disagree or just analyze something that wasn't actually said. I mean, the last piece is about horrible things that happened to some women. Okay, but what is the lesson we should take from this? -- "Horrible things happen to people." "Horrible things happen only to women." "Horrible things happen to women more frequently than to men." "LessWrong somehow contributes to these horrible things happening." "Preventing these horrible things should be given higher priority on LW than raising the sanity waterline, constructing our new AI overlords, etc." -- Note that the data is filtered; if something similar happened to a man, it wouldn't be included as the part of the series. In absence of a clear message, of course the discussion is chaotic.

So here are some recommendations for people who want to discuss these topics:

• Make it a separate article, instead of hijacking discussions in dozen other articles.
• Start with a reasonable definition of what are you talking about, just to make sure we use the same words to mean approximately the same things.
• Make your point obvious, e.g. by writing a summary at the end of the article.
• Don't announce that you are going to write a series of articles on a topic. Choose one thing, write a standalone article about it. Later, choose another topic, write another article, linking the previous one when necessary.

If this happens, any discussion should immediately taboo feminism. It's an extremely loaded term that means different things to different people, and I think it would lead to a lot of arguing over definitions.