Open thread Jan. 5-11, 2015

Consistent with why children care so little about their future.

Shane Frederick had the idea that hyperbolic discounting might be because people identify less with their future self. He actually wrote his dissertation on this topic, using Parfit's theory of personal identity (based on psychological continuity & connectedness). He did a few empirical studies to test it, but I think the results weren't all that consistent with his predictions and he moved on to other research topics.

That smells like an actual insight to me, so please do work it up into a full theory if no-one comes up with an example of how it's been done already.

With most of the main contributors having left and no new ones emerging (except for an occasional post by Swimmer963 and So8res discussing MIRI research), this forum appears, unfortunately, to have jumped the shark. It is still an OK forum to hang out on, but don't expect great things. Unless you are the one producing them.

As a person interested in rationality and little else that this website has to offer

I'm confused why you categorize SSC as appropriate for debiasing but not LW; doesn't SSC have as much of a mix of non-rationality material as LW? Is it a mix you like better? Do you just enjoy SSC for other reasons?

In theory, the main or promoted posts should be more focused in rationality-for-its-own-sake topics while Discussion (and especially many of the more open threads therein, the literal Open Threads most of all) are going to contain a lot of memes of interest to the rationalist community without actually being about rationalism per se.

On the other hand, the rate of release of rationality material here isn't terribly high, and some of it does get mixed in with affiliated-but-unrelated topics.

This is something that I've noticed and been concerned with. I think this is worthy of a top level discussion post.

I think part of the problem is that rationalism is harder that weird and interesting ideas like transhumanism : anyone can dream about the future and fiddle with the implications, but it takes significant study and thought to produce new and worthwhile interventions for how to think better.

My feeling is that the Main is for rationality stuff and the Discussion is for whatever the members of this community find interesting, but since we don't have strong leaders who are doing the work and producing novel content on rationality, the Main rarely has a new post, so I at least gravitate to the Discussion.

I've managed to partly transmute my "I want to buy that now" impulse into sending a sample to my kindle. Then if I never get past the first few pages I've not actually spent any money, if I reach the end of the sample and still want to continue I know I'm likely to keep going .

Do you mostly buy physical or digital books?

My digital unread list is hundreds of titles long, and it doesn't bother me much. It pales in comparison to my "read later" bookmark list.

My physical unread pile already occupies half a wall of my room, and just for being there it gives me aesthetic pleasure and bragging privileges. I used to think I should be worried, but I decided to embrace the pile. I guess it still hasn't reached the point where I should really be worried.

I wish I had your problem; mine is to find books I want to read. I very often re-read ones that are already on my shelves, for lack of anything new. However, this suggests a possible approach to your issue: When buying a book, check whether you are actually and genuinely excited to read it, so that you will open it the minute it arrives from Amazon. If not - put it in a "maybe later" pile. If it's more a case of "sure, sounds good" or, even worse, "I want to signal having read that", then give it a miss.

If you need to read stuff for work or for Serious Social Purposes like a book club, then treat it like work - set aside a certain time of day or week, and during that time, read.

This was more of a side effect of deciding to pare down on my possessions than an intervention specifically aimed at buying fewer books, but I rarely buy books anymore just because I want to read them. I get books on LibGen or at the university library. In the rare event in which a book turns out to be a really valuable reference I may then buy it.

• I read really, really fast. Like, I've finished some of the largest books in print(Atlas Shrugged and A Memory of Light come to mind here) in a single day before.
• The longer my reading list is, the less likely I am to add to it, or at least the less likely I am to take my additions seriously(when I have two items it's "I should read that!" When I have 200, it's "Eh, sounds interesting, might get to it someday").
• My to-read list is about 10 Chrome bookmarks(none short), 20 Amazon wishlist items, plus most of the width of a bookshelf that I've bought and not read, so I'm not sure how well I actually do despite the above.

My library system lets you request books from anywhere in the county from your home computer. I put the book on hold, and then I get an e-mail when it arrives. Also, when a book isn't in the library system, I'll often buy an ebook edition or wait for it to enter the system.

For physical I hold myself to a "half read" rule. That still means a growing collection, mind. I prune aggressively but only from things I've already read, which unfortunately means I have a rump of books that I suspect are mediocre and therefore don't particularly want to read, but don't feel justified in getting rid of, whereas I get rid of books that are probably better than that if I've read them and don't think they're good enough to keep.

I don't have a solution but thankfully FiftyTwo's approach works now.Hopefully I can slowly shrink my physical pile to the point where it fits on my bookshelves.

Well we can for sure say that in our Universe interstellar travel is not hard. It's extremely easy, once you take humans out of the picture. With current technology we have the means to push spacecraft to 60 km/s. This isn't hypothetical tech, it's stuff that's sitting in the shed. At such velocities, craft could traverse the milky way galaxy 20 times over during the (current) lifetime of the galaxy (estimated at around 13 billion years). The galaxy is big, but it's not that big, not compared to the time scales involved here.

Unfortunately this only makes it much more likely that the second possibility is true: Evolution of AIs that spread outward and colonize the galaxy must be extremely unlikely.

In that case the vast majority of individuals (considered across all universes) would be members of those large spacefaring civilizations, no? In which case, why aren't we?

Yes, you can apply the Anthropic principle to the Fermi paradox, if you make some assumptions, but even then the case is nowhere near as clear-cut as applying it to the 'fine-tunenes' of the universe.

I think you should post this as its own thread in Discussion.

Why not a monthly post that links to all the respositories?, as a chance to add suggestions to them, and remind people that they're there.

This could in fact be combined with a focus on a "specific' repository.

By "advice in the comments", you mean new entries to the repositories, right? So you're suggesting that we fragment the repository through a number of separate comment sections, labeled by year, and that is a really awful way of organizing a global repository of timeless articles.

If you're worried about incumbents taking disproportionate precedence in the list(as more salient posts tend to get more attention; more votes; more salience), IIRC, reddits have a comment ordering that's designed to promote posts on merit rather than seniority. If that isn't sufficient to address incumbent bias then we should probably be talking about building a better one.

I suppose the best thing to do is to tell you to shut up now, right?

This (your hypothesis) appears wrong, however. Assuming the simulation is accurate, the fact that we can think about the simulation hypothesis means that whatever is being simulated would also think about it. If there's an accuracy deficiency, it's no more likely to manifest itself around the simulation-hypothesis than any other difference in accuracy.

Although that depends on how we come by the hypothesis. If we come by it like our world did, which is philosophers and other people making argument without any evidence, then there's no special reason for us to diverge from the simulated, but if we would have evidence (like the kind proposed in http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847 or similar proposals) then we would have a reason to believe that we weren't an exact simulation. In that case, we'd also have evidence of the simulation and not been shut down, so we'd know that your theory is wrong. OTOH, if you're correct we shouldn't try to test the simulation hypothesis experimentally.

PSA: Thinking a thought that might cause you to have never existed, might cause you to have never existed. You might think that you are thinking that thought, but that's just how the logically impossible hypothetical of thinking it feels like from the inside. Think twice before you hypothetically think it.

(P.S. Noticing that you are certain to be right to worry about it seems to be an example of such a thought, for our world. Like correctly believing anything else that's false in a suitable sense. As far as I know.)

How would you act differently even if we assume that your whole life merely exists inside a simulation? You still have to live the life you've been given - it's not like you can break out of the simulation and go take your real life back. Your actions in the simulation still have their usual effect on the life in the simulation. The only case where it matters is if the simulator wants you to behave certain ways and will reward you accordingly(either real-you or by moving you to a nicer simulation), but that's just a different way to talk about religion.

There's no reason to limit simulation to one level, nor to privilege "real" as any special thing. All reality is emergent from a set of (highly complex, or maybe not) rules. This is true of n=0 ("reality", or "the natural simulation"), as well as every n+1 (where a level N entity simulates something).

It's turtles all the way up.

Put another way, the simulation parent entities wonder if they're being simulated, so it's exactly proper for the simulation target entities to wonder, for exactly the same reasons. I suspect that in every universe, thinking processes that can consider simulation will consider that they might be simulated.

I don't know if they'll reach the conclusion that it doesn't matter - finding the boundaries of the simulation is exactly identical to finding the boundaries of a "natural" universe, and we're gonna try to do so.

Any being that does not at some point consider the possibility that it is inside a simulation, is not worth simulating.

If your employer responds to the number of employees who are giving by modifying the cap, then that means that whether or not you give will not change how much money your employer gives in the long term.

However, even if that is true, you still are choosing where your employer donates your portion of the gift match. Therefore, if you believe that most of the money given to charity is being used at only moderate effectiveness, but that you could choose a good givewell charity to donate to and achieve much greater results, then the impact of the employee match is still signficant.

Given that the most effective charities are at least an order of magnitude more effective, probably more than that, than average charities, any decrease you cause to other people's matches is probably insignificant compared to the match you get.

Don't know about Egan or Vinge specifically, but fanfic of literary SF not targeted at the YA market is very rare. I'd speculate this is partly due to demographics and partly due to the fact that a lot of trad SF's appeal lies in conceptual stuff that's generally more or less fully explored in its work of origin.

Buy a good textbook on visual design principles. I don't have a recommendation in this area, so you'll have to do some homework to find the right one. Start looking at the work of professional designers in the area you're interested in. I use a blogroll for this, but you can pick your own path. The design section of my RSS currently consists of abduzeedo, design milk, and grain edit. For mock-up tools, I like Inkscape a lot. It's free and mock-ups are mostly about the text, shape, and pen tools anyways. In the area of raster graphics, I haven't seen any good alternatives to Photoshop; not that I've been looking. You can also look into some user experience stuff too, but that strikes me as overrated. After that, which programming tools you pick up will depend on your needs.

I've used The bootstrap framework to make web apps that don't look horribly ugly. Learning all the things you'd need to make apps that use that (so a bit of JS, CSS, HTML, etc. as sixes_and_seven says) would probably be a good start. (It would be probably easier than trying to make good-looking CSS from scratch, which is more of a pain).

This might be a disappointing answer, but HTML, CSS and JavaScript are extremely valuable skills if you want to throw together accessible GUI applications.

You can try learning how to create mobile apps, seems like a very useful skill. For example, Android programming: https://developer.android.com/training/index.html

Depending on how much you want to invest in aesthetics vs. simply producing a user-friendly GUI, Visual Studio takes almost all of the tricky work out of producing basic GUIs (whether you're working in Visual Basic or C++) and is an easy go-to solution especially since it's now free for individuals, even for commercial use (still requires Windows though; I don't have a lot of experience writing GUI apps for other desktop OSes). The results will likely look somewhere between utilitarian and just ugly until/unless you learn some UI design aesthetics and expend the effort to apply them, but even there tools such as Blend exist to help out (especially on mobile, but some of that stuff can be applied to PC software too).

They arrive in about 4-6 days after ordering for me.

I don't think that the basilisk you linked to is the specific basilisk of LW notoriety; basalisks were creatures of legend all the way back to Pliny the Elder's time; they were mentioned in Pliny's Natural History written around 79 AD.

In case anyone is wondering what needle felting is....

I didn't have a visualization, but when I saw that, I knew the basilisk can't possibly be that cute. I've settled on shifting shapes in unpleasant colors which sometimes coalesce into something that vaguely resembles Tchernobog from Night on Bald Mountain.

As pointed out: Not the same basilisk. I wonder how people visualize Rocko's variant.

beeminder

This isn't a direct response to your request as it's not a book suggestion, but ...

I've had plenty of conversations with very thoughtful, intelligent creationists. Virtually all of my friends and family are creationists in some sense or another. So far I've never discussed it with anyone (at least anyone who's thoughtful and intelligent) who has disagreed with the following argument:

1) The world clearly looks old. For example:

• Light from the stars needs to travel much more than several thousand years before it reaches us.
• There are many more than several thousand layers of annual ice in Antarctica.
• The Colorado River is wearing away at the bottom of the Grand Canyon as we speak. The rest of the Grand Canyon is exactly the sort of thing we'd expect if we extrapolate backwards a few million years.
• In general, there are innumerable geological features all over the world that are exactly what we'd expect if we extrapolate backwards millions or billions of years based on processes that are happening right now. (Any good geology textbook should demonstrate this pretty clearly. As I tell people: "Read a basic geology textbook, go to a national park and read the signs explaining the local geology, and then come back and tell me it doesn't look old.")
• [You can also mention some of the principles of geological layering - e.g., that we consistently find the same types of fossils in the same types of layers. But I've found that this sort of thing is a little too complicated to explain quickly.]

2) One could perhaps respond with something like, "maybe God used some alternative unknown form of physics in the six days of creation" or, "maybe Noah's Flood caused geology to go haywire in unknown ways". However, the key point is that to say that it doesn't even look old is simply false. Saying that the Flood or some alternative physics caused it means that e.g. the bottom 30-40 feet of the Grand Canyon (the part that's been eroded in the past 5000-6000 years) was caused by normal everyday processes, but anything above that point - which is indistinquishable from the bottom 30-40 feet - was caused by the Flood / alternative physics which just so happened to work out in such a way that it looks exactly as if it was caused by normal erosion.

3) If so, then we have only three choices: (a) The world really is that old; (b) God created the world 6000 years ago but (for whatever reason) he intentionally made it look old; or (c) God created the world 6000 years ago and for various reasons it accidentally ended up looking old. Option (c) is unacceptable according to every religious conception of God that I've ever heard, which leaves (a) or (b). If someone is willing to accept (b) theologically then I can't really prove to them otherwise, but if for theological or philosophical reasons they're unwilling to accept (b) then that leaves only (a), that the world really is that old.

4) Moreover, if you say that it was just created looking old then you'll need to say that God created it with a real whopper of a backstory. For example, the geologic record preserves detailed records of fights between dinosaurs, as well as dinosaurs with the food from their last meal still in their stomachs. Astronomers regularly observe supernovas which are records of explosions from stars that according to young earthers never existed. [Some of these examples might be moot depending on which version of young earth creationism the other person subscribes to.]

Again, the key point here is that I don't try to prove to people that the world really is that old, just that they must agree that it certainly looks old, in which case either it is that old or God deliberately created it in such a way that it looks that old.

[It could be that some versions of flood geology might have responses to some of the above, but I personally don't know anybody who goes for flood geology so I've never had to respond to those types of arguments.]

If you drop a teacup from a height of 2m then s = 1/2 at^2 says t ~= 0.6 seconds which at 10000x becomes 6000 seconds or 1h40m. If the figure for Nick Bostrom is "several hours" then he must be, I dunno, attending tea parties on stilts or something.

(Of course this is mere pedantry. But it seems like the sort of thing it should have been easy to get right.)

I learned a few interesting memory tricks from the movie Memento. One thing you can try is to tattoo important information on yourself, so that you don't forget it.

I can think of a few security caveats for sensitive information though:

• It's probably better if you choose a location that's not easily visible (e.g. chest, part of your arm that's covered by a shirt), though you should probably choose a location that's still somewhat accessible (i.e. not your lower back)
• If you absolutely have to use a more visible location, like your forehead, make sure you get the sensitive information tattoo'd BACKWARDS, so that only you can read it (and only when you're looking in a mirror)

On a more serious note, I find it much easier to remember random alphanumeric characters "kinesthetically" (i.e. by developing muscle memory for the act of actually typing the password), as suggested by polymathwannabe. The only downside to this approach is that it's extremely difficult for me to enter such a password on a cell phone.

Despite my other comment, there are cases when we simply can't choose. My university gave me an alphanumeric sequence that I am able to remember because I'm a trained typist. So I didn't memorize the letters and numbers; I memorized the finger movements.

Just write it down. Eventually, you'll memorize it. It will be faster if you challenge yourself each time: see how many characters you can type before having to look.

It's important to keep in mind threat models. The biggest threat is that someone attacks one website you use and uses that password to take control of your account on another website. The password manager solves this problem. (It also give you strong passwords, which is overkill.) People physically close to you that might steal the piece of paper with the password aren't much of a threat and even if they were, they probably wouldn't figure out the meaning of it. But you can destroy it after memorization.

• Write the password down on paper and keep that paper somewhere safe.
• Practice typing it in. Practice writing it down. Practice singing it in your head.
• Set things up so you have to enter it periodically.

I use a passphrase, which has higher entropy than a short password and is easier to remember at the same time.

Take a dictionary of 50k words and choose a sequence of 6 words at random. (Use software for this; opening a printed dictionary "at random" won't produce really random results). This provides log2(50000^6) = 94 bits of entropy. This is a similar amount to choosing 15 characters from an 80-character set (lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers, and 18 other characters) which would produce log2(80^15) = 95 bits.

It's much easier to remember 6 random words than 15 random characters. You can generate some passphrases here to estimate how difficult they might be to remember. (Of course you wouldn't generate your real passphrase using an online tool :-)

egrep -x '[a-z]{3,9}' /usr/share/dict/words | shuf -n4 | xargs

You'll get used to it. All my passwords are long (~20) strings of random alphanumeric characters. Initially, when I started using this system, I had doubts that I would be able to memorize them all, but after a while it got easy.

If you're really in need of some outside help, write it somewhere in rot13; since it's random, nobody can guess through the pattern of the letters that the rot13 version is not the actual password; a random string of letters and its rot13'd version are much the same for all practical purposes. And if you want some extra security and you're not worried about getting tangled in all your weird personalized decoding rules, write it backwards; write every number as ten minus that number; make all capitals lowercase letters and vice versa; add known short strings of characters at the beginning and/or at the end, etc. But I really don't recommend going down that route.

Keep it written down and read it consciously every time you need to enter it(ideally, often). Whenever you have it memorized, destroy the physical copy.

For my non-phrase passwords, I make myself enter the password at least once per day, and I recite it in my head frequently.

Alphanumeric passwords are overrated.

Might I suggest you create a new discussion thread when you write up long posts like this one?