Open thread, Oct. 13 - Oct. 19, 2014

The absolute numbers are far far below panic-levels but the underreporting and ridiculously-exponential curve is pretty disturbing. It's showing little sign of saturation in the currently-affected populations (an apparent levelling off of infection rates in Liberia was accompanied by reports of difficulty gathering data), it could spread to other populations, and wherever it goes it brings not just ebola but economic disruption, famine, and disruption of health systems that deal with other, more common chronic diseases like malaria and childbirth complications. As of now the measured doubling time is circa 3.5 weeks (a bit longer than that which the worst-case CDC models used but not by much) with each case infecting about two new ones.

The scary possibility is it getting established in additional poor urban populations. It already might be just starting to set off famines where it already is. All exponentials eventually run into a wall and saturate, but it's unclear exactly which walls will do the job here, behavioral or medical or geographc, and exactly where they are and at what order of magnitude they lay. The possibility of thicker spread through larger populations dominates any discussion of the potential effects of the situation.

My feeling is we will know with more certainty the approximate order of magnitude of the issue by Christmas. In the mean time I somehow managed to save a bit recently... money sent. I hope that was paranoid of me.

I don't think this is meant to be iterate, or else the estimate quickly goes to infinity

It is meant to iterate, which is how we've gotten from one case to thousands already. Biology is all about exponential growth. If each person infected now infects an average of less than one new person, the outbreak dies out. If each person infects more than one, it grows until it has infected everyone within reach, which probably means a fixed proportion of the populations of the affected countries. Pushing that number below 1 is a really big deal.

$1000 for malaria bed nets supposedly gives something like 20 to 100 DALYs

Givewell's DALY numbers are based entirely on preventing deaths, and do not account for the long term effects on malaria survivors. In addition to the DALYs of chronic disease, there is also lost productivity, which could have long term consequences for the society. If the conditions are (or will be) malthusian, it is better for people to die of acute starvation than that they be subject to chronic malnutrition; it is better that they die of acute diseases like ebola, that they suffer from chronic diseases like malaria.

I have a couple of remarks

1 - Your malaria/ebola comparison must be off somewhere. Here's how I see it: Malaria - $5 to distribute a net, some small chance of preventing a person from getting malaria, some very small chance of fatality from malaria. ~$4k per life saved. Ebola - $10 to distribute a kit, some small chance of preventing a person from getting ebola, 50% fatality.

So the effectiveness of Ebola kits does not need to be anywhere near as effective at preventing infection in order to be equally effective. Ebola kits need only prevent infection ~0.2% of the time to be effective. Note - my calculation probably has some errors and omisions.

For reference, GiveWell's estimates, CDC projections

2 - CDC is modelling the no-intervention case as exponential, doubling every few weeks. Reading their paper might inform an intermediate-case growth trajectory

3 - It's worth considering how many millions are being poured into ebola reduction by national governments and thinking that if these governments are intervening effectively, then our inroads into ebola are likely to be proportionately smaller, according to the smaller size of our monetary contribution.

4 - A recent relevant link, HT Carl

ETA: CellBioGuy gave an excellent response here.

There are also black swan risks in which Ebola spreads to the entire Third World (eg India) and kills tens of millions of people there.

Not meaning to start fear mongering, but since we're talking about highly improbable events, I wonder how probable a mutation is that makes it spread much more effectively via aerosol.

A Finnish official covered this question on the news and her answer was that such a mutation has never been observed, and Ebola is already transmitted effectively enough so that there's no selection pressure for more infectivity.

The CDC estimates a best-case scenario of 20,000 cases by January and a worst-case scenario of about 1.5 million cases by January.

What kind of confidence interval lies between best case and worst case?

I'm late to the thread - just got pointed here from Slate Star Codex. I gave to Doctors Without Borders recently. Your analysis is pretty similar to mine except on two points. Douglas_Knight pretty well covered the first, about iteration. Supposing an infection prevention kit successfully averts an infection, we should not only count the expected half-a-life saved right away, but all the expected subsequent generations of infection that the averted case would have led to, until the end of the current epidemic.

Second, instead of assuming that a prevention kit goes to a random person in the entire population, I think it's more realistic to assume that it goes to the family member of a person who has either the flu, food poisoning, etc, or ebola.

I don't think its worth dealing with Ebola because its not going to get that far. I think Ebola is overhyped. I think worrying about influenza this year and the upper respiratory infection from South America is far more pressing.

I work at a small publishing house specialized in medical literature. This year we had an editor who had majored in Latin, and he urged us to bring the style of the classical humanities to our physical sciences niche. For example, he said we should follow Aristotle's rhetorical advice (announce what you'll say, then say it, then said what you just said), and insisted that the appeal to authority was valid because we always had to cite sources.

Eventually he left the company for his own reasons, but this made me think about the different assumptions about writing that people can have, depending on their background. This guy believed any attempt at communication was unavoidably ambiguous because that's the way language works. I try to make my writing efficient and clear because I believe language should be transparent.

Perhaps what you already believe about language will shape what you will strive for in your writing.

Writing is hard. I know you don’t need me to tell you that, but any discussion on writing should begin with that statement. Writing is hard and studying it needs to be treated with the same seriousness as any other “hard” question. After all, not everyone has a book in them and those who do have to make the book themselves; it’s not pre-baked inside their genes.

The best statement on the difficulty of “studying” writing that I have encountered (everyone has at least one) was by Flannery O’Connor. Paraphrased: “Studying writing by discussing point of view or sentence structure or character development is like trying to describe a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are.” Everyone writes and learns to write differently. Some people, like E.H. White or C.S. Lewis, thrive on the academic, the grammar, the scholarly themes and canon and dissection. Others, like Jack Kerouac and James Joyce, thrive off raw passion and blatant disregard for distraction.

Your comparison between Orwell and undergrad essays is a good one. An undergrad essay has set parameters that dictate what will be in it and how it will be decided whether it has succeeded in its task or not. Orwell’s books have no set parameters. No book is so lucky to have set parameters. Their success depends entirely on the society that accepts them.

For my part (and I am only one person in a massive field), the greatest tool for a learning writer is to write. And not write privately but write things for the consumption of others. I have tried writing privately to “perfect” the projects I work on. Doesn’t work. I just write for myself and make nothing. I’m not saying do like Stephen King and Dean Koontz and abandon quality for output. No, not at all! That’s the anathema of improving your writing ability. After all, I don’t think it’s a lack of talent that keeps Donna Tartt from publishing more than one book a decade. But do not sequester your writing away until it is “ready” or “skilled” or “perfect.” Get it in front of someone, because by coming in contact with other minds your writing will do what its suppose to: act as a tool to convey ideas and emotions. By hitting against other people, you can tell where your tool needs sharpening.

If you would like a critic, I would not mind working as a reader and giving you what I can. I really do enjoy editing quite a bit and currently have a bit of a bet going with some fellow writers so that we can each improve the other’s output. I would not mind doing the same here. Just message me. But, beyond doing the thing, I don’t know of any secret gate to pass through. There is no royal road to writing, so to speak.

Well, there is, but the toll is enormous. Worse than the Florida Sunpass.

Thanks for this - it's a very interesting topic. You might want to look into Pinker's Sense of Style, which has been well-received, on this topic (I just started reading it).

I've read a few introductory-level books on subjects like written composition and rhetorical technique. It's given me a broader vocabulary to describe what's going on, and a selection of tips, tricks and patterns.

It would be great if you could give us an overview of what you've learnt, as a starting-point of further discussion.

Also, I think it's important to know what sort of quality writing you're aspiring at. Good scientific writing is very different from good literary writing, for instance.

Writing is hard.

Alright, here's my list of writing resources (in no particular order):

Books:

• Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning by Eugene Gendlin
• Writing With Power by Peter Elbow
• The Psychology of Written Communication by Carl Bereiter, Marlene Scardamalia
• Vernacular Eloquence by Peter Elbow
• Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams

This is an excellent article about writing:

http://nautil.us/issue/18/genius/shakespeares-genius-is-nonsense

Some more inspiration:

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/01/11/seeking-density-in-the-gonzo-theater/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/03/rediscovering-literacy/

AI luminary Schmidhuber has written about complexity and beauty, and I've found his thoughts helpful:

http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/beauty.html

My blog is one, long, ungrammatical, rough-draft experiment, for reference, e.g.:

http://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2014/09/29/what-rationality-actually-looks-like-from-the-inside-4500-words/

http://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/

I don't have a good idea for my writing skill as I don't think I haven't written anything like an essay in the last five years, Otherwise I'm in a similar position.

How about starting a group where every week one person hand in a post and then everyone discusses what can be improved and how to improve it. Maybe the discussion process can even be live?

It's given me a broader vocabulary to describe what's going on, and a selection of tips, tricks and patterns. I can say what's good about a piece of writing I like, but I can't fit it into an overarching coherent theory.

My experience is that writing isn't a field that would have an overarching coherent theory - instead it only has an endless selection of "tips, tricks and patterns", as you put it. Becoming a better writer is just about constantly expanding your toolkit of tricks, by being explicitly told tricks, taking apart other writers' work to discover theirs, and experimenting with inventing new ones. Read a lot and write a lot.

(Stein on Writing is my own favorite collection of tricks, covering both fiction and non-fiction writing.)

The best way to improve writing will vary largely by person. Here's what worked/is working for me that I think generalizes better than average:

1. Get good enough that, when you read other people's writing, you notice things they could've done better. Notice the first step in "how to improve at writing" is "improve at writing"; going from below baseline takes a different strategy than going from baseline to above. Importantly, until you get to the point where you're able to make improvements to other's writing, writing your own stuff isn't going to help, since you're not high level enough to improve it. That is, getting to this baseline is going to require external resources. I personally used a combination of Strunk and White and a MLP fanfic blog.

Also, getting to this level doesn't need to take much. You can get absurd mileage out of "Omit needless words".

1. Find a person other than yourself who's writing something and would like a beta. Things that you should probably look for: intelligence, similarity in writing goals, divergence in writing style.

2. Act as a beta reader. Make suggestions liberally. That is, if you see a change you might make and are unsure if it will improve the writing, suggest it; your primary will either accept or reject it. The important part is you discussion points of disagreement.

You can, of course, go at this from the opposite side (as a primary who finds a beta), but my system 1 says the other way is easier. They guy I currently beta for had to put in an absolutely absurd amount of work to get to the point of taking on betas, whereas I just had to leave a review saying "this is pretty good, but you could improve x, y, and z, and you could really use a beta, and I'd be up for it because this story will be awesome if you can clean this stuff up."

I came to the open thread to add a comment saying "Everyone should read Steven Pinker's The Sense Of Style". I didn't know I'd have the perfect occasion.

There's no overarching coherent theory, but there are ideas both at the detailed level of choosing words and at the higher level of structuring your writing and taking your reader on a journey. I also enjoyed reading it immensely and found it very hard to put down. Everyone here writes, so everyone here should read it!

I would recommend writing, regularly and refine the skill. Thats the only way to improve effectively.

Have you read any of Paul Graham's essays? I'm always very impressed by the quality of his writing.

The best feedback will come from seeing how people in your target audience respond to your writing. You don't want to necessarily take on board all of their suggestions, but you do want to see how they seem to receive it in general. I mean, people are good at knowing what they like, but bad at knowing what they would like.

Is writing really as hard as people here make it out to be, or is it an endeavor that makes people set absurdly high standards for themselves?

I think I have some excellent advice for you this time.

I've noticed very recently that in my own writing I tend to optimize for the strength of individual sentences instead of for the strength of paragraphs or arguments as a whole. Because I write one sentence at a time, it's tempting to have each sentence make its point as direct and powerfully as possible. But this is a little bit like playing each note of a song as loudly as possible in an attempt at maximum musical impact. A more skilled performer would play some notes softly, others louder, and use that to emphasize certain ideas over others within the work. I think writing is the same way, and some sentences or paragraphs should be softer or louder than others. The main function of some sentences should be what they do for other sentences, rather than their own arguments. Changing my writing habits in this way will be difficult, but I think eventually highly rewarding.

I don't know whether you have a similar problem or not. But I suspect it's a common one, and hope someone will find this advice useful even if you don't.

The prediction that it would become a popular thing certainly hasn't come to pass, and at least one of his factual claims at the time was false; I live in the UK and while there were and are people who spent a year or two in Australia, they didn't spend it bartending in the outback and didn't save money.

I think many LW-cluster people, myself included a) are much better at following a plan than being creative b) undervalue themselves. The idea that dozens of LW-cluster people could be given an explicit plan for how to earn above-average discretionary income, follow it, and earn above-average discretionary income, does not surprise me. But I don't think that plan has to be optimal or even above-average for this to work.

And FWIW in my particular field of employment, I've received substantially higher offers when applying for "subfield I have 5 years' experience in" rather than "subfield closely related to the subfield I have 5 years' experience in". I don't know if this continues forever, but I do think that in my early twenties I vastly underestimated the (economic) value of experience. The straight-up career path is alive and well in at least some cases.

I read GTD about four months ago and have started using it at work. It's made an incredible difference by 1) reducing the instances I feel overwhelmed or confused about what to do 2) helping me to better track my primary projects 3) helping me not to forget about small projects or put off the steps to getting them started 4) the system reminds me of what I'm waiting for other people to do, which I never tracked efficiently before.

I read it a while ago but it reading it alone wasn't enough to have an impact for me.

Seconded. Damn paywalls.

Most of the time success isn't binary. Five years ago I think there might have been people who could fully understand me but today I think I derivative on a lot of more fundamental questions enough that communicating my full philosophy is unrealistic.

I don't need another person to understand me fully. It's perfectly fine that different people have different life philosophies. If you want to effect other people pushing something on them is usually not very effective.

Two weeks ago I basically found that I can fix a long standing health issue by moving upwards when I'm moving forward and downwards when I'm moving back. It took me roughly 2 1/2 years of on average weekly exposure to the idea to fully grasp it so I could actually use it. It fixed an issue that according to doctors I was supposed to live with the rest for my life, so it's a meaningful insight.

Then a week afterwards I go to my somatics group and there a man who has trouble with his left shoulder. It's tense. When he moves forward he moves down instead of upward. I clearly see how that's his problem.

However it's not something fixed by a few words. I do mention the issue but my somatics teacher says (I paraphrase): "Well, yes. However he's not at the point where he can integrate that knowledge."

I'm unable to communicate a single sentence of wisdom in a way that doesn't take months and I was very conscious of that fact. I know the time it took me. I have read the research on phenomenological primitives and know that you can't easily give someone a new one. The idea just takes a sentence but that doesn't help.

It's like the one time I spent hours trying to explain a first year bioinformatics student the concept of recursion. Recursion is a simple concept but explaining it to someone who doesn't have any basis for it is hard. It was before the exam so, the semester informatics A in Haskell didn't succeed in communicating the idea. I got that the course chooses Haskell to make a point of teaching recursion. The prospect of successfully teaching the primitive of recursion made using Haskell, instead of a language that's actually useful, worthwhile.

If you are communicating over a big inferential gap, trying to explain multiple primitives at once to explain your full life philosophy is an impossible undertaking. It's what you are up against if your own life philosophy is sufficiently complex and contains nonstandard ideas.

Feeling bad about that fact isn't helpful. You can't explain a non-mathematician graduate mathematics and hope that they instantly get it. If you have a complex life philosophy it's similar. If you are on LW there a good chance that you do have a complex life philosophy, even if a lot of the ideas seem trivial to yourself.

Giving up the need to have the other person understand you fully opens up a lot of freedom. You can start to listen to the other person. If you see a door that you can open to help a person make an insight you can go for it.

Most of the influential conversations I had that strongly influenced someone else where very targeted. Understanding the other person was key. Carrots don't grow faster if you pull. When doing change work on important beliefs many untargeted pushs create resistance. If a person defends a belief successfully that strengthens the belief.

If you want to start a thread for that task, a discussion post probably makes more sense than a post in the open thread that isn't as long living.

The Less Wrong Wiki is a valuable resource.

Who gets what value from the wiki?

For a time, I adopted the Special Threads page, because it looked like a valuable resource. Eventually it grew to be too much of a hassle, and after that code changes made it less useful (because now there are links to the latest open thread and rationality diary and quotes thread and so on). There have been a lot of attempts to build up various parts of the wiki as useful, but I don't think all that much of it is actively maintained, and the parts of it I use the most seem to be metaposts (sequence lists, etc.).

This thread is to be used to voice updates Less Wrong users would like to be made to the WIki, especially so it's easier to use it as a reference for introducing a new concept from Less Wrong for the first time.

Several things come to mind here.

1. Be bold. If you want the wiki to have pages on X, add pages on X, and maintain pages on X. If it's not being done, that's because the wiki is waiting for you to do it. We are likely better off encouraging people to edit the wiki than we are encouraging people to ask what they would like to be done (because who will do it?).
2. Inferential distance. If it took two thousand words to explain the concept in 2008, say, do we think it will take significantly less words to explain the concept now? Quite possibly, yes. That wiki page is a much shorter explanation than the Eliezer post that discussed the evopsych reasons for why we should expect inferential distances to be a problem, but that wiki page might also be optimized for someone in the LW-sphere who just doesn't know the jargon, rather than someone outside of the LW-sphere who would need it explained to them what evidence actually means. (The evidence wiki page is terse, and links to seven blog posts about evidence.)

Lots of good stuff happened there, but it looks like it'll have to be curated fairly actively to continue to make progress, and unfortunately that doesn't fit with my current duties.

If someone else would like to act as a leader for it, I'd be happy for that! In any case, I'm glad we tried it, and thankful that so many people jumped in.

It probably includes finding a person with expertise on the subject matter. That means it's easier if you reduce the level of abstractness and specify the issue at least a bit.

This seems to be an example of negative commentary being primarily negative, rather than primarily commentary. One specific concrete claim that stood out to me without needing to unpack:

I seem to recall that Yudkowsky first claimed he didn't need to get a degree [...] because the singularity was so near it would be a waste of time.

is, I believe, simply false.

I still believe that the spaced repetition dataset produced by memosyne is underanalysed. Gwern put effort into bringing that dataset into a good format.

In particular:

• Is there a way to calculate the brain power for an individual day? Reviews made at a high brainpower day would have a higher successful. Having such a metric would be very useful for Quantified Self (QS) purposes because it means that everybody who uses Anki or memosyne daily would get a free QS metric.

• Is there a better way to to calculate the interval for cards than the supermemo algorithm that can be proven to be better based on the data from the memosyne set? If so how much better? (If you find something that shows real improvement over the status quo, the next step would be to write an Anki addon that does AB split testing with it)

I think that especially the first task has the chance to provide a decently cited academic paper.

I don't know how much effort either of those tasks takes and whether it would go beyond a project for a college course, but both projects should be interesting and highly useful. You might also find other interesting question when you investigate the data set.

This is only an anecdote, but I've always been an extremely slow reader, but worked hard to fully comprehend everything on the first read-through (at least for subjects that weren't extremely subtle and required lots of time to chew over). An example of this is that when I took AP U.S. History, I could just read the textbook once and ace the tests. This isn't just about having a photographic memory (which I don't have), this is also about synthesizing facts into patterns and ideas as I read. I find this very helpful and do the same thing while following whiteboard talks (except I'm apparently a much faster verbal learner, or at least I don't have trouble following talks in real time at all).

I'm not sure what direction this anecdote points in, but at the very least I'd personally be afraid to do speed-reading because it would mess up a pretty good system I already have in place.

There seems to be a moderately hard speed-comprehension tradeoff curve. A few techniques might shift the curve outward, letting you have more speed and more comprehension, but mostly they give you more flexibility to choose where you want to be on the curve.

Here are two in-browser speed reading apps for anyone who wants them for testing hypotheses. My sense is that it is useful for quickly skimming simple news, re-reading books you've already read or other things of little depth that you want to get out of the way quickly, but that you wouldn't to use it on something that requires actual thinking. I have not tested this.

http://spreeder.com/

https://www.squirt.io/install.html

A thought, the people swearing by it vs the no improvement folks reminds me rather a lot of the people from generalising from one example.

It's been a few years since I investigated the issue the last time in depth but at the time the situation was that there was no convincing evidence either way.

They didn't repeat the experiment, so I don't know how you imagine that there was a way to find out what went wrong.

I would imagine that another round in which the both do the experiment together would be fun. If the participant has to be told something both Schlitz and Wiseman tell it to him. Computer equipment can be set up to require both people to click.

By "anti-Ebola preparations" do you actually mean "minimizing your chance of getting infected"?

Take a tent and go solo camping. Somewhere up North :-)

Try to encourage getting it stopped and stamped out at the center of infection, Western Africa, where it is being maintained in the population, expanding and throwing off infected travelers. Money and political pressure are the presumed ways to do this, in the absence of direct medical/epidemiological skills in the efforts against it.

Ordinary disaster-preparedness things - have some emergency canned food and maybe bottled water (get a fire extinguisher while you're at it - not for ebola, but it's more likely to save your life). Get in the habit of taking your temperature daily, in a consistent way and at a consistent point in your routine, and plug it into some quantified self thing, then you'll have an idea of what's normal and be able to spot a fever sooner. (If your toilet allows, a habit of inspecting your poop can also give you early warning of irregularities). Getting a flu shot will lower your odds of a false alarm. Wash your hands frequently, especially after shaking hands with anyone (or getting their bodily fluids on you, but that's hopefully common sense); wear gloves in public places if you can get away with it; be sure to keep any open wounds covered, even if they're small (and obv. don't have sex, especially with promiscuous people). Work from home if you can, avoid crowds, and especially avoid aeroplanes (bear in mind this is actively bad for your odds of not dying; even during an ebola scare, driving is far far far more dangerous than, well, pretty much anything).

When it comes to personal safety it's generally a bad idea to optimise your preparation against specific threads.

I haven't noticed anyone doing that, but it does sound like the sort of thing people would do. This can hardly be avoided, though, unless we were to entirely decouple status from all superficial characteristics.

Have you? If you have, would this tell us more about LW or human psychology? If the latter, then what's the news?

Sanity isn't binary and YMMV.

...a few people survived outside that Singularity...

I'm not sure what this means exactly. Are they returning space explorers who are surprised by recent developments (a la Planet of the Apes)? Luddite survivors who experienced the transition and rejected it? Members of an uncontacted tribe or some primitive culture with ethnographic boundaries respected by the machine? Each of these will interpret a post-singularity world in a very different way, I think.

'Singularity' is code for 'we don't know', so as a writer you're permitted just about anything. But the most fun I've had with post-singularity fiction is when there is a dominant singleton with running themes and strong personality quirks- The Optimalverse is the reigning champion here, in my opinion, but there's also the famous I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Gods are fun to read about when they're mad in some way, or at least when they seem mad from a human perspective. So it's worth thinking particularly about the forces (that is, the choices and personalities) that give internal structure to your post-Singularity world. Randomness is not compelling.

Aside from that, my advice would be to avoid anything that is too much a fantasy trope. Try not to get in to the habit of thoughts like "It's a dragon, except [x] is different." Make sure it's your world that's driving these things, and not your genre.

Actual examples, as requested- although these probably suffer from being 'too random' since I don't know anything about your world:

Exactly 1.4 trillion biological humans, cloned with some variations, buried underground in cryogenic stasis near the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, on a timer to wake up automatically in ten million years. One of many contingency plans in case of catastrophe. They have never been conscious, but there is a kind of dream.

A machine intelligence (or the machine intelligence) has begun to redirect comets and asteroids from the Oort Cloud to collide with Venus. Most people assume this is part of a terraforming effort, but that theory fails to explain why the collisions always occur in groups of three equidistant points along a great circle.

There is a handful of bipedal, roughly humanoid robots walking across Asia. They walk in a straight line, climbing directly over any terrain features to avoid deviating from the path. Any time they encounter a prepubescent human, they ask for her to give them directions, and will change course to whichever direction she points. Each is separated form the others, and seem incapable of acknowledging their existence.

In Antarctica, there is currently a replica of 17th century Paris carved entirely out of ice, detailed down to the level of individual ice cobblestones and ice candles with frozen flames in ice chandeliers. Last year it was 20th-century Jakarta, and the year before that Beijing. As the year progresses, the replica changes subtly as if it were lived in; furniture moves, ships-of-the-line are slowly completed, footprints appear. Nobody has yet taken responsibility.

Vinge's Marooned in Realtime comes to mind. The survivor's tech is close to what the singularity level was, but they "missed" the singularity and aren't improving their tech over the timescale of the story because of low population and other priorities.

"Missing" an intelligence explosion would be hard, if it drastically optimizes the solar system. In Vinge, this works because the exploding society simply disappears - implying that they're off in higher dimensions or femtotech or something. Other examples would be if the survivors are being simulated - there's a great story whose author I forget, about someone waking up after the singularity because he was an early brain scan and they just fixed him up now.

Non-Linnaean wildlife. Built de novo by the superintelligence; made of the same sorts of organic materials as normal species, but not related to them; possibly not nucleic-acid based/non-reproductive. Their inner workings are simpler and more efficient; no symbiotic mitochondria and chloroplasts, but rather purpose-built modules. They are edible, and the survivors know the unique taste of, e.g., their 'muscle' tissue, which is not actin/myosin based.

The whole point of the concept of singularity is that we don't know what will happen afterwards.

Honestly I doubt cryptocurrencies are any better than a random walk (unless you have some special foreknowledge of some extra attention the currency is about to get.)

If you want a solid year-long project, find a statistical model you like and figure out how to do inference in it with variational Bayes. If this has been done, change finite parts of the model into infinite ones until you reach novelty or the model is no longer recognizable/tractable. At that point, either try a new model or instead try to make the VB inference online or parallelizable. Maybe target a NIPS-style paper and a ~30-page technical report in addition to whatever your thesis will look like.

And attend a machine learning class, if offered. There's a lot of lore in that field and you'll miss out if you do the read-the-book-work-each-problem thing that is alleged to work in math.

Is my judgement correct?

Short answer: Yes.

Let's go through a Fermi estimate. According to Wikipedia there have been only a small handful of Ebola cases in the First World during this outbreak, almost exclusively among people who'd been volunteering in West Africa on missionary or health care assignments. (There has, however, been one case of local transmission in Texas.) Let's be generous and say 20 people with the disease flew in or out of the US over the last month. Now, there are about two million air passengers per day in the US, of which I'm guessing about a quarter are on international flights; that works out to 15 million international passengers over the same month.

Ebola takes close contact to be transmitted; it's not an airborne disease. Since you'll probably be sitting next to each other, that means you'll each only be coming into close contact with one other person on each flight. Let's say that, if they're infectious, that person has a 20% chance of giving you Ebola over the course of the flight (probably an overestimate), and that a case of Ebola in the First World has a 50% chance of killing you. Combined with the ratio of infected travelers we worked out earlier, that means that your chance of dying from Ebola contracted on each leg of the trip is about one in 7.5 million.

That's about as dangerous as driving 30 miles in a car, or a bit less than a mile on a motorbike. And I'm making a number of simplifications that almost certainly inflate the risk: your route for example doesn't go anywhere near West Africa, assuming you're starting near Atlanta as your profile would suggest.

What is it that your family member sees as dangerously increasing the risk of getting Ebola?

• Going to the UK (perhaps they think the UK is likely to be hit worse than wherever you are now)
• Getting on an aeroplane (perhaps they are concerned by being in close proximity to other people)
• Travelling at all (perhaps they want to minimize the number of different people they interact with)

I am far from being an expert and you shouldn't trust me, but my handwavy judgement is the same as yours.

Possibly relevant Sequence article about the availability heuristic.

1. Risk of what is negligible? 80% seems awfully low for making the decision in question.
2. Might be the availability heuristic but I'm not sure which article you're talking about. It applies to events that are easy to imagine. Dramatic events and events frequently covered by news certainly fit.
3. Aknowledge their feelings and the basis for them first, then present the facts and hope they make the right decision themselves. Aknowledge their feelings repeatedly if necessary. Feeling understood isn't usually about the facts.

You could compare ebola with other infectious disease like tuberculosis for example, which should be far more scary for the time being especially since it's airborne. Viral hepatitis isn't and you should be scared shitless of it if you're afraid of catching ebola.

Don't sweat ebola, for now anyways. There are thousands of cases, trues, but they are highly localized. There have been VERY few western cases. And even if you were on a flight with someone in the narrow window of ebola's contamination stage, you wouldn't be infected with it unless they bit you or you shared drinks or something like that.

Can someone explain/articulate why rent-seeking behavior is bad for an economy?

The point of the economy is to produce value (where "value" is defined as "something people want"). Accordingly you want to structure the economy in such a way as to incentivize people to produce value. Rent-seeking produces no value and, in fact, lessens the incentives for others to produce value.

Why an economy should be structured to use people's natural greed to motivate them to create wealth.

Nothing else works as well.

Why an economy should be structured to use people's natural greed to motivate them to create wealth.

A economy isn't structured with a purpose to use something. Economies self organize. The structure themselves and people try to provide services for prices that customer want to pay.

This means that anybody in the system who sees an inefficiency can make money by eliminating that inefficiency. In hierarchical organisations usually only people at the top can redirect resources and the people at the top often don't have all the information.

In our system we have a plurality. We solve some problems via hierarchical organisations and others via markets. In cases of big corporations that have their own hierarchies there a mix.

Since you participated in the discussion of the posts that critiqued Taubes beginning here, I don't understand why you'd bring this topic up again if you've nothing new to say.

Can someone help me understand why those who would like to lose weight can't just eat less and exercise more?

Yes. Try being less stubborn. Those threads are full of possible reasons why.

Can someone help me understand why those who would like to lose weight can't just eat less and exercise more?

They can.

If it's not working, eat less and exercise more. Physics is physics.

The usual implied questions behind, though, are "Do you have enough motivation to eat sufficiently less?" and "For how long will you be able to keep it up and what happens afterwards?".

Weight loss methods seem to be a topic that have gotten really complex on LW.

Because the two questions above are important ones and because EY tried to lose weight and it didn't work for him.

just don't get why it's so complicated

Losing weight is not complicated. Maintaining the desired body configuration is -- because it usually requires continuous effort.

I've lost 30 pounds in the last four months. I have a hard time losing weight unless I fast for a day or two at a time. Reducing portions at some meals just means I snack more later in the day when my attention has wavered. Hypothetically I could reduce portions at all meals, but realistically given the demands of my life that won't happen. Avoiding meals altogether is easier for me because I don't feel very hungry when my attention is absorbed in something other than food, so as long as I stay busy I'm fine. It also helps that I've got social anxiety and don't like to go into the cafeteria where large crowds of students are.

Can someone help me understand why those who would like to lose weight can't just eat less and exercise more?

Since I've been trying for almost, oh years and years, I possibly can point you into some directions.

On eating less: eating less what, exactly? There are people who just eat less carbohydrates, or less fats, or less sugars, etc, and they still get fatter. The point is that you can eat in quantity as much as you want, if you just eat less calories. Ah, but counting calories is no easy task: it's pretty easy when you eat something that has been industrially produced , but when it comes to food you prepare yourself, or others prepare for you? How much calories is a portion of vitel tonné? It depends on the portion size, on the ingredients, on the preparation. How much calories are in a slice of angel food cake, prepared with only 80% of the eggs? Who knows? What if you're forced to eat every day something different? On the other side, even if you manage to reduce the calories eaten, you'll get hungry, very hungry. There's basically no amount of will-power or motivational hack that will work against hunger. It's one of the primary instinct of life and will overwrite everything your conscious mind can come up with.

On excercising more: which specific excercises will you choose? Aerobic, anaerobic? Walking, running, swimming, weight lifting? You have to find the time of course to do those activities. And many of the thing you're going to choose will either require too much time to have an impact on your diet, or will increase drastically your hunger, or will lower your metabolism by killing your thermogenesis outside the excercise.

So yes, losing weight is easy if you eat less and excercise more. But coming up with a way to do those things efficiently and reliably is a very difficult task.

What people said, also metabolism.

Givewell already analyzes the effectiveness of various charities, so I'd start there.

Amnesty, UNICEF, Bill and Linda Gates Foundation, as far as mainstream charities go. I believe they all have specific Canadian divisions if you are worried about tax reasons.

Some others you might check out are Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Canada Without Poverty, Equiterre, Canadian Council For International Cooperation, Tides Canada, CoDevelopment. I had a longer list but misplaced it.

I also strongly suggest you research each charity on your own instead of depending on whether or not a ranking website tells you it is good.

Why do you want Canadian charities?

So that you can get a tax break or an employer match?
That makes your money about twice as effective, but changing charities often makes a much larger difference. So don't restrict to charities registered in Canada.

For example, I've noticed a ramping up lately of propaganda against those horrible people called "billionaires." I would call today's billionaires the early adopters of future living standards, assuming that we continue to have exponential economic growth.

I don't think this is a good example of the broader phenomenon you are describing. When people criticize the very wealthy, they're primarily making a criticism about relative, not absolute standards of living. I.e. "It is a sin to have so much when others have so little." I wouldn't say this is the only criticism, because I have seen, for example, criticisms of people owning mansions when they have small families (since it creates enormous upkeep costs and the unused rooms have basically no value except as a positional good). But that's the exception; I don't think anyone would consider owning a Maserati immoral (at least on grounds of wealth rather than environmentalism) if there weren't also people struggling to pay for basic necessities.

I would call today's billionaires the early adopters of future living standards

My impression is that what billionaires are resented and propagandized against for is mostly not lifestyle advantages like having huge houses, private jets, the option of not working for a living, etc., but two other things.

• Power over other people. For instance, consider the Koch brothers, who are frequent targets of criticism. But what they get attacked for is not being rich but using their wealth for particular political ends (and unsurprisingly the people doing the attacking are generally political partisans whose political position is opposed to the Kochs'). The complaint here isn't "boo, these people can buy yachts and mansions and planes" but "boo, these people can buy government policy". (And of course the complaints mostly come from people who think the policies they're buying are harmful.)
• Getting rich at the expense of other people. For instance, consider the financial wizards of Wall Street -- the original main targets of the "99%/1%" rhetoric, I believe. I dare say there was always some resentment of the financial elites, but there was an enormous change in how widely and openly and loudly they were resented -- when there was a big financial crash in which lots of people lost jobs and savings, which was widely perceived as the result of reckless greed by those financial elites.

What these have in common is that the anger is aimed not at the lifestyle of the super-rich -- at all the nice things they are able to have -- but at its (alleged) negative impact on others.

If indeed the economy continues to grow exponentially for a few centuries, and if scientific and engineering progress continue strongly, then indeed everyone may end up with a lot of the lifestyle elements that only the very rich have now. But it won't be possible (by definition) for everyone to have far-more-than-average influence on public policy, or for everyone to get wealthy by making people in general poor. And those, not the luxurious lifestyle, are what billionaires get attacked for.

Now, of course it's possible that what really motivates any given criticism of very rich people is good old-fashioned envy (or, in the case of the financial elites, sometimes good old-fashioned anti-Semitism) and that all the stuff about buying influence and causing economic disaster is just an excuse. But it seems at least worth considering the possibility that the people making those criticisms mean what they say.

they call [cryonicists] selfish and narcissistic

I think it's pretty safe to dismiss "narcissistic" on the grounds you do. But a case can be made for "selfish" -- not really any better a case than can be made for pretty much everyone, but I'd say that pretty much everyone is in fact selfish :-). Specifically, suppose you choose for $100k of your money to be spent on cryopreservation at the moment of (what non-cryonicists would consider to be) your death. That's money that would otherwise have been inherited by others. So you're choosing to use that money to give yourself a (probably small) chance of surviving into the far future, rather than to benefit those others.

Most of us spend most of our money to benefit ourselves (or in some cases our close family) rather than others. Most of us could do a lot more good to the world by spending a lot less on ourselves. So I think the same sort of charge of selfishness can be levelled at almost everyone as is levelled at cryonicists. But that doesn't make it wrong.

You can, indeed, characterize what cryonicists or billionaires are doing as wanting something that everyone will have in the future. But the complaint (or at least a complaint) isn't that no one should ever have it, but that for one reason or another trying to have it now imposes a substantial cost on other people.

(Note 1. The following -- highly fanciful -- analogy may help. Suppose that instead of trying to live a 24th-century lifestyle in the 21st century, you're trying to life an affluent US / Western European lifestyle in some desperately poor part of Africa. To this end you build factories and roads and things -- but only for your use, the locals get no benefit. The factories are staffed with imported minions and supply only you, no one else is allowed on your roads, etc. It doesn't seem unreasonable for your neighbours to resent you, not simply for living like an affluent Westerner, but for imposing noise and pollution and nuisance on them in order to do so, with no compensating benefit to them.)

(Note 2. The above analysis is not concerned with the question of whether the criticisms are correct. One could argue, e.g., that the billionaires' influence on public policy is actually beneficial, that every cryonics customer benefits everyone by encouraging funding for research in relevant areas, etc. I'm concerned only with what the criticisms actually are.)

I would call today's billionaires the early adopters of future living standards, assuming that we continue to have exponential economic growth.

That's one hell of an assumption.

Are you talking about the Bill Gates-rich or the Paris Hilton-rich? They are both admired and hated for totally different reasons.

I would call today's billionaires the early adopters of future living standards

That's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure it works well historically. At which point the lifestyle of hoi polloi started to resemble that of a Roman senator? Does today's middle class live like medieval feudal lords?

We find this idea in science fiction

In the sci-fi from the 50s. Contemporary sci-fi is rather more dystopian (with some exceptions, notably Iain Bank's Culture).

Having slaves two centuries ago was accepted, but having them now allegedly makes you a morally bad person. I don't think that's what you were referring to, though.

In what universe can't you do experiments about biology or psychology?

The whole point of Bayesianism is that you get as much information as possible from a small amount of data. It works perfectly well in noisy domains.

The recent post on Knightian Uncertainty may or may not be relevant to your interests - it's not the same thing but it seems like it might be related to what you were really getting at.