Open thread, Nov. 23 - Nov. 29, 2015

I'm not the right person at all, but if you ever want an amateur data enthusiast to help clean and present research results, I'd be willing to donate my time. The project is interesting and I would like to start stretching my skill set. I am pretty good at graphing in R, have a solid understanding of probability theory (undergrad level). I also have a good intuition for cleaning data sets.

All of that evaluation is based on what other math nerds have told me, so I understand if you're not interested!

Do you have any plans for international shipping? (Say, the UK)

you'll help us earn money for effective giving

I realize you are in the startup phase now, and so it probably makes sense for you to put any surplus funds into growth rather than donating now. However, 2 questions:

1. Once you finish with your growth phase, about what percent of your net proceeds do you expect to donate?

2. What sorts of EA charities are you interested in?

I've been using MealSquares regularly, without realizing that that you guys were LWers or EAs. As such, I've been using mostly s/Soylent because of the cost difference. (A 400 Calorie MealSquare is ~$3, a 400 Calorie jug of Soylent 2.0 is ~$2.83, 400 Calories worth of unmixed Soylent powder is ~$1.83, and the ingredients for 400 Calories worth of DIY People Chow are ~$0.70. All these are slightly cheaper with a subscription/large purchase.)

I ask, because if you happen to be interested in similar EA causes to me, and expect to eventually donate X% of proceeds, then I should be budgeting my expenses to factor that in. If (100%-X%) * MealSquares_Cost < soylent_Cost, then I would buy much less soylent and much (/many?) more MealSquares. I'd be paying a premium to Soylent in order to add a bit more culinary variety. (Also, I realize this X isn't equal to the expected altruistic return on investment, but that would be even harder to estimate.)

How does your product compare to widely-available meal replacement foods, like, say: http://www.cookietime.co.nz/osm.html ?

The first association I have with your username is "spams Open Threads with not really interesting questions".

Note that there are two parts in that objection. Posting a boring question in an Open Thread is not a problem per se -- I don't really want to discourage people from doing that. It's just that when I open any Open Thread, and there are at least five boring top-level comments by the same user, instead of simply ignoring them I feel annoyed.

Many of your comments are very general debate-openers, where you expect others to entertain you, but don't provide anything in return. Choosing your recent downvoted question as an example:

How do you estimate threats and your ability to cope; what advice can you share with others based on your experiences?

First, how do you estimate "threats and your ability to cope"? If you ask other people to provide their data, it would be polite to provide your own.

Second, what is your goal here? Are you just bored and want to start a debate that could entertain you? Or are you thinking about a specific problem you are trying to solve? Then maybe being more specific in the question could help to give you more relevant answer. But the thing is, your not being specific seems like an evidence for the "I am just bored and want you to entertain me" variant.

You use LW as a dumping ground for whatever crosses your mind at the moment, and that is usually random and transient noise.

As I said before, I think it would be good if you get in the habit of trying to predict the votes that your posts get beforehand and then not post when you think that a post would produce negative karma.

One way to do this might be, whenever you write a post keep it in a textfile and wait a day. The next day you ask yourself whether there anything you can do to improve it. If you feel you can improve it, do it. Then you estimate a confidence interval for the karma you expect your post to get and take a note of it in a spreadsheet. If you think it will be positive post your comment.

If you train that skill I would expect you to raise your karma and learn a generally valuable skill.

If at the end of writing a post you think "I’m not sure where I was going with this anymore." as in http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mzx/some_thoughts_on_decentralised_prediction_markets/ , don't publish the post. If you yourself don't see the point in your writing it's unlikely that others will consider it valuable.

Thank you for asking. I've been trying to figure out what to say to you, but couldn't figure out quite what the issue is. One possibility in terms of karma is to bundle a number of comments into a single comment, but this doesn't address how the comments could be better.

A possible angle is to work on is being more specific. It might be like the difference between a new computer user and a more sophisticated computer user. The new user says "My computer doesn't work!", and there is no way to help that person from a distance until they say what sort of computer it is, what they were trying to do, and some detail about what happened.

Being specific doesn't come naturally to all people on all subjects, but it's a learnable skill, and highly valued here.

I think it's that you post a lot of questions and not a lot of content. Less Wrong is predisposed to upvoting high-content responses. I haven't had an account for very long, but I have lurked for ages. That's my impression, anyways. I recognize that since I haven't actually pulled comment karma data from the site and analyzed it, I could be totally off-base.

Maybe when you ask questions, use this form:

[This is a general response to the post] and [This is what is confusing me] but [I thought about it and I think I have the answer, is this correct?] or [I thought about it, came up with these conclusions, but rejected them for reasons listed here, I'm still confused]

EDIT: I just looked at your submitted history. You do post content in Main, apparently, but your posts seem to run counter to the popular ideas here. There is bias, and LessWrong has a lot of ideas deemed "settled." Effective Altruism appears to be one, and you have posted arguments against it. I've also seen some of your posts jump to conclusions without explaining your explicit reasons. LWers seem to appreciate having concepts reduced as much as possible to make reasoning more explicit.

A large proportion of your comments seem very distracting and sort of off-topic for Less Wrong.

In addition to what everyone else has said, here's a useful article on how to ask smart questions. It's talking about asking technical questions on support forums, but the matter generalises, especially the advice to make your best effort to answer it yourself, before asking it publicly, and when you do, to provide the context and where you have got to already.

while it isn't necessary to already be technically competent to get attention from us, it is necessary to demonstrate the kind of attitude that leads to competence — alert, thoughtful, observant, willing to be an active partner in developing a solution.

Usually, your questions feel more suited for a general-purpose forum than the narrowly specialized set of interests commonly discussed here. (We do have "Stupid Questions" and "Instrumental Rationality" threads, but even those follow the same standards for comment quality as the rest of LW.)

Also, posting a dozen questions in succession may give users the impression that you're trying to monopolize the discussion. Even if that's not your intention, I would understand it if some users ended up thinking it is.

I would suggest looking for specialized forums on some of the topics that interest you, and using LW only for topics likely to be of interest to rationalists.

Many of your comment get downvoted, sometimes heavily. In every open thread you post a lot of questions, some of them completely off topic.
A single good question in the open thread can give you 2-3 karma, but a single bad one can go down as -7 or less. So stop asking so much irrelevant questions and start contributing.

as a hard rule; when posting in open; the ratio of your posts to posts by others should always be below 1:3 (other's might want to comment and suggest 1:4). You should post less then 1 in 4 of the posts in the open thread. They often read like a stream of consciousness (I think you know this already), and you might be better off taking on board some of the ideas of sitting on thoughts over a day or so and re-evaluating them for yourself before posting.

As a side note: presentation of an idea can help the reception. We are still human; and do care for delicate wording on some topics.

Don't buy these comments too much. i'm glancing through them, they're much too critical. Listen to Nancy if anyone.

Some things to think about:

Are there actual political threats to you in your own polity (nation, state, etc.)? Do you belong to groups that there's a history of official repression or large-scale political violence against? Are there notable political voices or movements explicitly calling for the government to round you up, kill you, take away your citizenship or your children, etc.? (To be clear: An entertainer tweeting "kill all the lawyers" is not what I mean here.)

Are you engaged in fields of business or hobbies that are novel, scary, dangerous, or offensive to a lot of people in your polity, and that therefore might be subject to new regulation? This includes both things that you acknowledge as possibly harmful (say, working with poisonous chemicals that you take precautions against, but which the public might be exposed to) as well as things that you don't think are harmful, but which other people might disagree. (Examples: Internet; fossil fuels; drones; guns; gambling; recreational drugs; pornography)

Internationally — In the past two hundred years, how often has your country been invaded or conquered? How many civil wars, coups d'état, or failed wars of independence have there been; especially ones sponsored by foreign powers? How much of your country's border is disputed with neighboring nations?

For the extreme stuff, I think you'll get clues from things like how people like you are treated on the street.-- if it's your country. If you're at risk of being conquered by a government that hates you, the estimate is more complicated.

For the more likely things to keep track of, think about what's likely to affect you (like changes in laws) and use specialist sources.

This is harder than it seems. For example, to find out when you need to withdraw your money ahead of a banking crisis, like what happened in Cyprus and Greece, you need to figure this out ahead of everybody else. Furthermore, the authorities are going to be doing their best to cover up the impending crisis.

What is the optimal amount of attention to pay to political news?

To electioneering, zero would be about right (unless you appreciate the entertainement value). To particular laws and/or regulations which might affect you personally, enough to know the landscape.

If you live in the US I would guess that if you read LW you will see comments about really important political events.

how I do it -

Things that I care about: local events (likelyhood of terrorism; or safety threats nearby)

Things I don't care about: any politics that is further away than that. (and not likely to affect my life)

global, country-wide, natural disasters that are far away.

Get weekly updates from light, happy sources (The Daily Show, The News Quiz, Mock the Week), and then specific searches for things that sound important.

Short version: try something like Vanguard's online recommendation, or check out Wealthfront or Betterment. Probably you'll just end up buying VTSMX.

Long version: The basic argument for index funds over individual stocks is that you think that a is going to outperform a because of general economic growth and reduced risk through pooling. So if you apply the same logic to index funds, what that argues is that you should find the index fund that covers the largest possible pool.

But it also becomes obvious that this logic only stretches so far--one might think that meta-indexing requires having a stock index fund and a bond index fund that are both held in proportion to the total value of stocks and bonds. So let's start looking at the factors that push in the opposite direction.

First, historically stocks have returned more than bonds long-term, with higher variability. It makes sense to balance your holdings based on your time and risk preferences, rather than the total market's time and risk preferences. (If you're young, preferentially own stocks.)

As well, you might live in the US, for example, and find it more legally convenient to own US stocks than international stocks. The corresponding fund is VTSMX, for the total US stock market. If you want the global fund, it's VTWSX.

You might have beliefs about small caps and large caps, or sectors, and so on and so on. One mistake to avoid here is saying "well, I have three options, so clearly I should put a third of my money into each option," especially because many of these options contain each other--the global fund mentioned earlier is also a US fund, because the US is part of the globe.

I have a secondary question to that. These things seem to all operate online only, without bricks and mortar. How do I assure myself that a website that I have never seen before is trustworthy enough to invest, say, 6-figure sums of money in? Are there official ratings or registers, for probity rather than performance?

The best argument for getting an index fund is the expense ratio; not broad versus narrow. Managed mutual funds have higher expense ratios because of the broker's salary. Private trading instead of buy and hold will similarly cost you more because of the transaction cost. To justify their transactions, a broker doesn't just have to beat the market, but to beat the market by a large enough swing to justify those extra costs. Because of the number of brokers out there, even if one has consistently beaten the market, it is impossible to determine whether that is due to skill or luck for any given broker. Large domestic index funds will generally have the lowest expense ratios.

So, I think the correct answer to the question "I have a 5-figure sum of money to invest" is to just go with Betterment/Wealthfront rather than Vanguard, so that you get diversification between asset classes (whereas a specific index fund will get you diversification within an asset class). If I'd known this when I'd asked the question, I would have picked a better mix of Vanguard index funds, and not hesitated as much with figuring out where to put the money. To be fair, Vaniver basically said this, I just think the links below explain it better, so I could feel certain enough to make a decision rather than let the money burn away through inflation.

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/02/17/book-review-the-intelligent-asset-allocator/

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2014/11/04/why-i-put-my-last-100000-into-betterment/

You need to figure out things like your own risk tolerance, your own time horizons for investments, and your own ideas about what might happen (or not) in the econo-financial world within your time horizons.

I have a secondary question to that. These things seem to all operate online only, without bricks and mortar. How do I assure myself that an online website that I have never seen before is trustworthy enough to invest, say, 6-figure sums of money in? Are there official ratings or registers, for probity rather than performance?

Hope this kind of work gets decent funding...

I asked about this recently. I think that the sports bookie Betfair is the best existing option, in terms of liquidity and diversity of topics. The only prediction markets that I know to be open to Americans are the Iowa Electronic Markets and PredictIt, both with smaller limits than iPredict.

you should post this on the next OT

I don't think we learn a lot through the number. It might be that multiple genes are regulated by the same mechanism and turning that mechanism down brings us forward.

Here is a study finding that "high levels of passionate love of individuals in the early stage of a romantic relationship are associated with reduced cognitive control": free copy%20Reduced%20cognitive%20control%20in%20passionate%20lovers.pdf) / springer link

Also, while I was searching for studies, I found a news article saying this about a study by Robin Dunbar:

"The research, led by Robin Dunbar, head of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, showed that men and women were equally likely to lose their closest friends when they started a new relationship."

More specifically, the study found the average number of lost friends per new relationship was two.

Except there is no publicly published paper anywhere online, despite what the news article says, there are only quotes by Dunbar at the 2010 British Science Festival, which seems a bit suspicious to me, maybe suggesting that the study was retracted later.

A study that relies only on self-reported claims of 'being in love' might be interesting to read, but such a study would be of higher quality if there was an objective way to take a group of people and sort them into one of two groups: "in love" or "not in love." Based on my own experience and experiences reported by others, I wouldn't reject the notion that such a sorting is possible in principle, although it may be beyond our current technological capability. The pain associated with being suddenly separated from someone that you have 'fallen in love with' can rival physical pain in intensity. What type of instrumentation would we need to detect when a person is primed for such a response? I have no idea.

Present day mathematics is a human construct, where computers are used more and more but do not play a creative role.

It always seemed very strange to me how, despite the obvious similarities and overlaps between mathematics and computer science, the use of computers for mathematics has largely been a fringe movement and mathematicians mostly still do mathematics the way it was done in the 19th century. This even though precision and accuracy is highly valued in mathematics and decades of experience in computer science has shown us just how prone humans are to making mistakes in programs, proofs, etc. and just how stubbornly these mistakes can evade the eyes of proof-checkers.

public class HelloWorld { public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println("Hello World"); } }

The levels of uncertainty make this really hard to work with.

On the one hand perhaps it works and the person gets to live for billions of deeply fulfilling years, till the heat death of the universe experiencing 10x subjective time giving trillions of QALYs.

Or perhaps they get awoken into a world where life extension is possible but legally limited to a couple hundred years.

Or perhaps they get awoken into a world where they're considered on the same moral level as lab rats and millions of copies of their mind get to suffer in countless interesting ways.

so you end up with a very very wide range of values, negative to trillions of QALYs with no way to assign reasonable probabilities to anything in the range which makes cost effectiveness calculations a little less convincing.

I also ask myself these questions and I'm unable to answer them. In the end, I exercise and modify my diet as much as my will allows without causing me too much stress.

As for valuing years of life, if I considered that the very best outcome of cryonics (as HungryHobo described) is certain, then, well, even for very small values that will result in cryonics giving me far more utility than exercice. I don't value later years of my life that low.

Yudkowsky believes that cryonics has a greater than 50% chance of working, and that we will be able to have fun for any amount of time, so for him, the expected value of cryonics is ginormous.

I get quite a bit of disutility from forcing myself to eat a bit more healthily. My food diversity is very power; if I try to ingest one of many foods I don't like, I will throw up. Attempting to eat those foods anyway causes me great discomfort. So that's not a great way for me to increase overall utility.

On the last paragraph, it appears to me that the two basics - avoiding obesity and not smoking - are the best thing you can pester them about. But the other lifestyle choices have the expected benefit of a few years total, if you don't expect any new medical technology to be developed.

I'm going to guess that English language proficiency is far higher in Europe than it is in China. But Asian Americans seem underrepresented on LW relative to the fields that LW draws heavily from, so that seems unlikely to be a complete explanation.

I'm going to guess it's based on some of the East-West thinking differences outlined by Richard Nisbett in The Geography of Thought (I very highly recommend that book, BTW). I don't remember everything in the book, but I remember he had some stuff in there about why easterners are often less interested in, and have a harder time with, the sort of logical/scientific thinking that LW advocates.

I don't understand why facebook messes up the language issue so strongly. It seems like the American's at facebook quarters just don't care about bilinguals.

The way Facebook works, you decide what's available, but each of your friends has to individually decide how much they want to see of you.

I think this is not quite right, and it's not-quite-right in an important way. It really isn't true in any sense that "it's more likely that you'll alternate between heads and tails". This is a Simpson's-paradox-y thing where "the average of the averages doesn't equal the average".

Suppose you flip a coin four times, and you do this 16 times, and happen to get each possible outcome once: TTTT TTTH TTHT TTHH THTT THTH THHT THHH HTTT HTTH HTHT HTHH HHTT HHTH HHHT HHHH.

• Question 1: in this whole sequence of events, what fraction of the time was the flip after a head another head? Answer: there were 24 flips after heads, and of these 12 were heads. So: exactly half the time, as it should be. (Clarification: we don't count the first flip of a group of 4 as "after a head" even if the previous group ended with a head.)
• Question 2: if you answer that same question for each group of four, and ignore cases where the answer is indeterminate because it involves dividing by zero, what's the average of the results: Answer: it goes 0/0 0/0 0/1 1/1 0/1 0/1 1/2 2/2 0/1 0/1 0/2 1/2 1/2 1/2 2/3 3/3. We have to ignore the first two. The average of the rest is 17/42, or just over 0.4.

What's going on here isn't any kind of tendency for heads and tails to alternate. It's that an individual head or tail "counts for more" when the denominator is smaller, i.e., when there are fewer heads in the sample.

However, if you're predicting the next flip in a finite series of flips that has already occurred, it's actually more likely that you'll alternate between heads and tails.

...because heads occurring separately are on average balanced by heads occurring in long sequences; but limiting the length of the series puts a limit on the long sequences.

In other words, in infinite sequences, "heads preceeded by heads" and "heads preceeded by tails" would be in balance, but if you cut out a finite subsequence, if the first one was "head preceeded by head", by cutting out the subsequence you have reclassified it.

Am I correct, or is there more?

extroverts are more likely to cheat unless they're likely to get caught

That's not what your link says. First, there is no cheating involved, we are talking about degrees of cooperation without any deceit. And second, it's not about "getting caught", it's about being exposed to the light of the public opinion which, of course, extroverts are more sensitive to.

The "legendary old writings from Eliezer Yudkowsky" are probably easy to find, but I am not going to help you.

I do not like the idea of people (generally, not just EY) being judged for what they wrote dozens of years ago. (The "sense for the true nature" seems like the judgement is being prepared.)

Okay, I would make an exception in some situations; the rule of thumb being "more extreme things take longer time to forget". For example if someone would advocate genocide, or organize a murder of a specific person, then I would be suspicious of them even ten years later. But "embarrassing in their hubris"? Come on.

These are so much fun to read!

(snapshot times chosen more or less at random, and specific pages are what I consider the highlights)

https://web.archive.org/web/20010204095400/http://sysopmind.com/beyond.html
(contains links to everything below and much more)

https://web.archive.org/web/20010213215810/http://sysopmind.com/sing/plan.html (his original founding plans for the singularity institute, extremely amusing)

https://web.archive.org/web/20010606183250/http://sysopmind.com/singularity.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20101227203946/http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/wiki/So_You_Want_To_Be_A_Seed_AI_Programmer (some... exceptional quotes in here and you can follow links)

https://web.archive.org/web/20010309014808/http://sysopmind.com/eliezer.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20010202171200/http://sysopmind.com/algernon.html

More can be found poking around on web archive and youtube and vimeo. Even more via PM.

I don't think Eliezer's changes in hubris level are what's interesting-- he's had some influence, and no on seems to think his earliest work is his best. It might make sense to find out what how his writing has changed over time.

Here.

Are you offering help to people, or just curious about support networks? I'm mainly trying to motivate myself to write up a paper on relatively old data: dealing with my usual problem that I am more excited about newer projects, even though the older ones are not completed. Help would be nice but it's essentially my sole responsibility to prepare a first draft, after which my coauthors will contribute.

What are you working on, and do you need help?

When Nassim Taleb's predictions fail and someone points that out, he calls that person fucking idiot.

The main complaint seems to be that Taleb violates an orthodoxy and not that he's factually wrong. On the issues of costs the cited paper says:

This cost-saving potential has been supported by several studies that compared homeopathy with conventional medicine. However, our own health economic evaluations did not show a consistent picture. We observed no differences in costs [15] or additional costs [16,17] in the homeopathic group compared to conventional care depending on the setting or diagnosis. [...] A recent systematic review by Viksveen on the cost-effectiveness of homeopathy showed that in eight out of fourteen studies, the homeopathic treatment was less cost-intensive than the conventional treatment; in four studies, the treatment costs were similar; and in two studies, the homeopathic treatment was more costly than conventional treatment

There are observed cases where homeopathy did lead to cost savings as Taleb suggests.

Interestingly the cited PLoS paper puts people who don't take homeopathy into the homeopathy group based on the fact that they could get it for free:

For this analysis, patients belonged to the homeopathy group if they subscribed to the integrated care contract in 2011 and if they were continuously insured through the TK for the observational period (12 months before and 18 months after subscription to the integrated care contract), regardless of whether they used homeopathy during the study period."

Depends on what you mean by "deterministic" (and "universe").

1) Do you assume each interaction has only one outcome, or are multiple outcomes (in different Everett branches) possible?

2) Do you assume all universes started in the same state? Molecular interactions in an existing universe are a different topic than the "creation of the universe".

In a universe where molecular interactions are deterministic, I don't see any additional universes emerging.

If by deterministic you mean informationally, that is with complete information we have the possibility to predict any future states (barred complexity), then we most definitely know that molecular interactions are not deterministic.
However, even hypothesizing a deterministic universe, you could have different starting conditions that would evolve to different universes, and while you are at it, why not postulates different deterministic laws?

There's a very extensive medical literature - although mostly focusing upon persistent (>48 hours) or intractable (>1 month) hiccups. One possible remedy jumped out at me from Google Scholar results: title alone gives the game away (albeit N=1):

Odeh, M., Bassan, H., & Oliven, A. (1990). Termination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage. Journal of internal medicine, 227(2), 145-146.

A very recent review by Steger et al (2015) gives good coverage of "state of the art" in acute hiccups:

In acute hiccups, physical manoeuvres are often effective (Table 2). Many of these ‘remedies’ have not been tested and some appear to have been invented ‘purely for the amusement of the patient's friends’.[23] The principle that links these manoeuvres is the attempt to interrupt or suppress the reflex arc (Figure 1) thought to maintain repetitive diaphragmatic contractions.[8, 12] This is most often attempted by breath holding, the Valsalva manoeuvre or rebreathing into a paper bag. Physiological studies have demonstrated a mechanism by which these manoeuvres improve hiccups, with the frequency of hiccups decreasing as arterial pCO2 rises.[9] This experimental evidence, backed up by personal experience of the senior author, suggests that an effective method to interrupt hiccups is to hold ones breath in expiration (diaphragm relaxed, pCO2 high). Other techniques that can lead to cessation of hiccups involve stimulation of the nose, ear or throat (e.g. ice cold drinks), eyeball pressure, carotid massage or self-induced vomiting. Techniques that ‘push against’ the diaphragm by drawing up the legs to the chest (i.e. ‘rolling into a ball’) may also be helpful. Rectal massage and sexual stimulation have also been reported to help[24, 25]; however, we recommend that this kind of recommendation is reserved for carefully selected patients!

before concluding in case of persistent/intractable hiccups:

This systematic review revealed no high quality data on which to base treatment recommendations.

Steger, M., Schneemann, M., & Fox, M. (2015). Systemic review: the pathogenesis and pharmacological treatment of hiccups. Alimentary pharmacology & therapeutics, 42(9), 1037-1050.

Further note: reference [23] above in Steger et al (2015) is "Watterson B. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2005."

Well, I know of some remedies, but they're also anecdotal :)

All the good ones I know are essentially breathing exercises, where you have to pay close attention to your breathing for a while (i.e. take control of your diaphragm). Like the classic "drink a glass of water from the far side of the glass" is actually a breathing exercise, which works just as well if you just do the breathing without the glass of water.

agree with others; the diaphragm is the muscle underneath the lungs that controls your breathing. Hiccups are caused by irritation of the diaphragm. knowing this; you are looking for methods of relaxing the diaphragm. that includes generally trying to work out the control for the automatic muscle; and figuring out how to calm it down.

as for trustworthy, or better-than-anecdotes - you can get surgery if it's a long-term (over several months) problem. how do you relax the diaphragm? for your human-hardware? likely different to other humans' hardware - so not much luck finding non-anecdote solutions.

This works for me: Pour yourself a glass of water and hold it in one hand. Lift your arms up, reaching for the ceiling - this movement has the consequence of lifting your ribcage. Drink a few swallows from the glass of water without dropping your ribcage from its elevated orientation. Do this a few times.

As a first protective measure, don't publish her name on the internet.

She has already contacted the police, and they have already given her the best advice available.

The rest is up to her.

What kind of threats?

See https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en

the gates usually only give tickets to large metal objects (like cars) because they have sensors in the road underneath the ticket machine. There was a Mr. Bean sketch about this event. He used a large metal rubbish bin to get a ticket.

What, other than an interest in the commercial success of the car lot business, normative social influence and scrupulosity (all tenuous)

These are what holds society together. These are what society is -- including the bit about commercial success.

But have you tried? The entry barriers only issue a ticket when there's a car in front of them. That's how it works at the car parks I'm familiar with that use that system.

And, to continue the discussion of why your karma is so persistently low, this is something you might have thought of before posting. See also.

Why don't people steal from other people if nobody is looking? General ethics.

A "person that you are not likely to see again" is not a complete description of a lawyer's client; it's missing the part where "this person pays me for my services so I need many of this person in order to make a living."

How exactly could users of something anonymous precommit to not do something?

It wouldn't be much different than the status quo. No one of the direct forks of bitcoin currently compete with bitcoin for the core purpose of being a currency and not just speculation.

Yes, someone could.