Open Thread, April 2011

I propose we make a series of exercises to go along with the articles of the sequences. These exercises could help readers know how well they understood the material as well as help them internalize it better.

I was thinking of starting a sequence of articles summarizing Heuristics and Biases by Kahneman and Tversky for people who don't want to buy or read the book.

I bought it, and it seems like something like this would help make me actually stick through reading it long enough to make me finish it. And make it more memorable.

Would people want that?

Edit: I guess the answer is Yes. I should make time for this.

I've just read "Hell is the Absence of God" by Ted Chiang, and upon finishing it I was blown away to such extent that I was making small inarticulate sounds and distressed facial expressions for about a minute. An instant 10/10 (in spite of its great ability to cause discomfort in the reader, but hey, art =/= entertainment all the time).

I'm compelled to link to a html mirror but I suppose it hasn't the author's permission. Anyone who'd like to read the story now may look at the first page brought up by googling the title. This is the book in question.

I'm curious as to the opinions of those who have read it.

There's a fresh Metafilter thread on John Baez's interview of Yudkowsky. It also mentions HP:MoR.

Noticed this comment:

I started reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality once and it drove me crazy. The book's Harry Potter doesn't practice rationality, he practices empiricism.

So people actually do start thinking of the Enlightenment era school of philosophy, like some earlier commenters feared. I also remembered a couple of philosophy blog posts from a few years ago, The Remnants of Rationalism and A Lesson Forgotten, which seem to work from the assumption that 'rationalism' will be understood to mean an abandoned school of philosophy.

Redefining established terms is a crank indicator, so stuff like this might be worth paying attention to.

I used to have a hobby of reading Christian apologetics to get a better understanding of how the other side lives. I got some useful insights from this, e.g. Donald Miler's Blue Like Jazz was eye-opening for me in that it helped me understand better the psychology of religious faith. However, most books were a slog and I eventually found more entertaining uses for my time.

Today I saw that a workmate of mine was reading Lee Strobel's The Case For Faith earlier. My policy is to not discuss politics or religion at work, so I didn't bring it up there.

I hadn't read that particular book before, so I was curious about its arguments. Reading over the summary, I remembered again why I quit reading Christian apologetics - they are really boring.

The subtitle of The Case Against Faith is A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity, and is quite untrue. I can almost dismiss each chapter in the time it takes to yawn. Even if Strobel had good answers to the Problem of Evil, or proved that religious people historically have been less violent than non-religious people, or somehow found a gap in current understanding of evolution, he would still be leagues away from providing evidence for a god, let alone his particular god.

I remember being similarly bored by a Christian-turned-Atheist's book John Loftus' Why I Became an Atheist. A common criticism of atheist writers is that they don't engage the more sophisticated arguments of theists. This book illustrates why - the sophisticated arguments are stupid. Loftus accepts Christian scholars' ideas, arguing within spaces previously occupied by dancing angels (e.g. he says on p.371 "In a well-argued chapter... Lowder has defended the idea that Jesus' body was hastily buried before the Sabbath day... but that it was relocated on the Sabbath Day to the public graveyard of the condemned...").

Most of us here would probably lose a live debate in front of an audience against someone like Lee Strobel. Even so, it's a little disappointing to me that even the most skilled theist debater's signature attack relies on bits like "This first cause must also be personal because there are only two accepted types of explanations, personal and scientific, and this can't be a scientific explanation." Because winning the debate by refuting that would be a waste of intellect.

Per talk page - I have just updated the jargon file on the wiki, making it actually a list of jargon with definitions. I've also folded in the previous acronym file, as a jargon file should be a single page. Point your n00bs here. Since it's a wiki, feel free to fix any of my quick one-line definitions you don't like.

Bayesians caught smuggling priors into Rotterdam harbor

(I'm new here and don't have enough karma to create a thread, so I am posting this question here. Apologies in advance if this is inappropriate.)

Here is a topic I haven’t seen discussed on this forum: the philosophy of “Cosmicism”. If you’re not familiar with it check Wikipedia, but the quick summary is that it’s the philosophy invented by H. P. Lovecraft which posits that humanity’s values have no cosmic significance or absolute validity in our vast cosmos; to some alien species we might encounter or AI we might build, our values would be as meaningless as the values of insects are to us. Furthermore, all our creations and efforts are ultimately futile in a universe of increasing entropy and astrophysical annihilation. Lovecraft’s conclusion is: “good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure 'Victorian fictions'. Only egotism exists."

Personally I find this point of view difficult to refute – it seems as close to the truth about “life, the universe and everything” as one can have and remain consistent with our current understanding of the universe. At the same time, such a philosophy is rather frightening in that a world of egomaniacal cosmicists who consider human values to be meaningless would be seem to be highly unstable and insane.

I don’t claim to be an exceptionally rational person, so I’m asking the rationalists of this forum: what is your response to Cosmicism?

Friendly AI: A Dangerous Delusion?

By: Hugo de Garis - Published: April 15, 2011

http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/04/15/friendly-ai-a-dangerous-delusion/

The latest XKCD was brilliant. :)

I have only just discovered that Hacker News is worth following. Since the feed of stuff I read is Twitter, that would be @newsycombinator. I started going back through the Twitter feed a few hours ago and my brain is sizzling. Note that I am not a coder at all, I'm a Unix sysadmin. Work as any sort of computer person? You should have a look.

Is it just me, or do you feel a certain respect for Harold Camping? He describes himself as "flabbergasted" that the world didn't end as he predicted. He actually noticed his confusion!

(I can't find the Open Thread for May 2011.)

Via 538: How Feynman Thought on the Freakonomics blog.

Reposting from the latest HP:MoR discussion thread, since not everyone reads recent comments and I'm not sure this warrants a full post:

Fanfiction.net user Black Logician has announced Harry's Game, a spinoff of HP:MoR which branches out around Chapter 65-67 of the original fic. From his post at the HP:MoR review board:

...Hermione has already formed SPHEW. Quirell though doesn't dismantle Harry's army, but goes for an alternative condition to make the army wars more of a challenge to Harry. ...

Please use ROT13 for spoilers when discussing Harry's Game.

I just had a startling revelation. I had been glancing now and then at my karma for the last few days and noticed that it was staying mostly constant. Only going up now and then. This is despite a lot of my comments getting a whole bunch of upvotes. So naturally I figured I had offended one or more folks and they were downvoting me steadily to keep it constant. I don't exactly tiptoe around to avoid getting anyone offside and I don't really mind that much if people use karma hits as a way to get their vengeance on. It saves them taking it out via actual comments in the slightly more real social reality.

But I just looked at the bottom of the sidebar and slapped myself. Left aligned text formatting in a limited space is roughly equivalent to taking significant figures (with a floor instead of a round). Oops. Apparently nobody hates me after all, just, well, too many people love me. :P

My nomination for Worst Use of the word "Bayesian", April 2011. This may answer my earlier question as to whether creationists, birthers, etc adopting the notion of Bayes' theorem is a good idea or not. Remember: choose your prior based on your bottom line!

To anyone who knows: How active are the fortnightly Cambridge, MA meetups? There seem to be very few RSVPs on the meetup.com page, but I suppose it's possible that if there are any regular attendees they don't always bother RSVPing.

Hypothetical situation: Let's say while studying rationality you happened across a technique that proved to give startlingly good results. It's not an effortless path to truth but the work is made systematic and straightforward. You've already achieved several novel breakthroughs in fields of interest where you've applied the technique (this has advanced your career and financial standing). However, you've told nobody and, since nobody is exploring this area, you find it unlikely anybody will independently discover the same technique. You have no reason to believe others would apply this technique to areas you value and therefore doubt the benefits of sharing it widely. There could be a significant first mover advantage to being the only person who practices the technique.

Questions: What do you do? Would you share it with the world on principle? Would you try to establish a trusted group to practice the technique? Would you keep it to yourself until you could improve your position to the point where you'd have greater control and wouldn't have to watch hopelessly as the technique was applied to immoral ends by others with greater resources than you? Or is there another option?

Screenshot from our ongoing intelligence explosion:

howtomacke arobotinstchrocshin

I used to have a hobby of reading Christian apologetics to get a better understanding of how the other side lives. I got some useful insights from this, e.g. Donald Miler's Blue Like Jazz was eye-opening for me in that it helped me understand better the psychology of religious faith. However, most books were a slog and I eventually found (more entertaining uses for my time)[http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems].

Today I saw that an workmate of mine was reading Lee Strobel's The Case For Faith earlier. My policy is to not discuss politics or religion at work, so I didn't bring it up there.

I hadn't read that particular book before, so I was curious about its arguments. Reading over the summary, I remembered again why I quit reading Christian apologetics - they are really boring.

The subtitle of The Case Against Faith is A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity, and is quite untrue. I can almost dismiss each chapter in the time it takes to yawn. Even if Strobel had good answers to the Problem of Evil, or proved that religious people historically have been less violent than non-religious people, or somehow found a gap in current understanding of evolution, he would still be leagues away from providing evidence for a god, let alone his particular god.

I remember being similarly bored by a Christian-turned-Atheist's book John Loftus' Why I Became an Atheist. A common criticism of atheist writers is that they don't engage the more sophisticated arguments of theists. This book illustrates why - the sophisticated arguments are stupid. Loftus accepts Christian scholars' ideas, arguing within spaces previously occupied by dancing angels (e.g. he says on p.371 "In a well-argued chapter... Lowder has defended the idea that Jesus' body was hastily buried before the Sabbath day... but that it was relocated on the Sabbath Day to the public graveyard of the condemned...").

Most of us here would probably lose a live debate in front of an audience against someone like Lee Strobel. Even so, it's a little disappointing to me that even the most skilled theist debater's signature attack relies on bits like "This first cause must also be personal because there are only two accepted types of explanations, personal and scientific, and this can't be a scientific explanation." Because winning the debate by refuting that would be a waste of intellect.

Today's SMBC has an amusing take on the simulation argument and attempting to guess the goals of the simulation creators.

Does anyone else have religiophobia? I get irrationally scared every time I see someone passing out pocket bibles or knocking on doors with pamphlets. I'm afraid of...well, of course there isn't much to be afraid of, or else it wouldn't be a phobia.