Open & Welcome Thread—May 2020

👋 Hey All, I'm basically new here, though I've been lurking for about two years. Although I've been interested in mathematical logic and epistemology as long as I can remember, and I had accidentally stumbled upon and bought Godel, Escher, Bach while ducking into a Barnes and Noble to use the bathroom, RAZ was what really tied everything together for me. I found that after someone recommended the HPMOR podcast to me, and then looked up all the references...

If you're reluctant to adjust your stock market exposure because selling ETFs would incur capital gains for you, there are ways to do it via options or futures instead. See https://www.cmegroup.com/education/whitepapers/hedging-with-e-mini-sp-500-future.html and https://www.optionseducation.org/strategies/all-strategies/synthetic-short-stock. (Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, accountant, or investment advisor, and the above is for general informational purposes purposes only.)

Hello! I've been a lurker for a few weeks and promised myself I'd actually make an account after my university exams finished.

I'm 22, from England, and technically still an undergraduate student of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford (though I did do an A-Level in philosophy). Since my final exams finished, I'm finding myself with much more time on my hands to learn new skills, and I was drawn to the rigour of discussion here. I took the fact that I was so intimidated by every single discussion point as a reason to jump in. Truthfully, I feel a bit of an outsider as an arts/humanities student on this forum, but also have a suspicion this feeling will prove unfounded.

I'm a newbie to almost every major topic of discussion at LW, but my main goals are: to absorb as much new knowledge as I can; to improve my writing style, which I dislike; and to define, and refine, my worldview based on hard thinking.

It's great to meet everyone!

Mini-feature announcement I didn't have anywhere else to put: Links to Metaculus forecasting questions now have hover-previews that allow you to see the state of the prediction on metaculus. See this link for an example.

Hey. For the past 2 years, I have been working on LearnObit (https://learnobit.com).

When I first started to learn coding, I used Anki and the old tried-and-tested Spaced Repetition algorithm, but it wasn't suitable for more complex, general topics like Mathematics or Physics. Because of that, Spaced Repetition has always been widely overlooked despite its proven effectiveness in learning.

I wanted to unlock this effectiveness for a wider audience by building LearnObit, a tool that combines tree-structure note-taking tools with Spaced Repetition so that you can apply it to more than just simple fact pairs.

And now it even has the feature to export data to Anki, so you can leave with your data when you decide not to use it! (Of course I don't want anyone to use it, but I couldn't help it, because people wouldn't start using it without this in the first place...)

Anyway, I'll be here anytime if you have any questions for me. Thanks for your time.

There is a study reconstructing how Coronavirus spread in Austria (link to German summary article on Spiegel Online). The researchers found not a single infection cluster in schools or Kindergarten, and not a single case where a child was the source of infection in a family. The conclusions of the study include (short version of the points listed in the article I am linking to):

• people infect others before (they realize) they have symptoms,
• infection takes place within few days after infection (3 to 5 days),
• transmission happens when several people are at the same place for a longer timespan (about 15 minutes),
• for most clusters, point expositions were found: one person is at the beginning of the chain, and there are more infections when that person has contact to other persons for a longer timespan (probably they mean the 15 minutes from the previous point)
• quarantine measures and barriers work,
• there are currently no transmission chains that would give evidence to transmission via public transport or visiting a shop.

Hi everyone! The path that lead me here started with my childhood desire to not die, Charlie Mungers talk on the the psychology of human misjudgement, then reading HPMOR, Currently reading the Sequences and as of 5/17/2020 started the process of signing up for Cryonics. Looking forward to the journey of becoming sane.

Howdy. I came across Ole Peters' "ergodicity economics" some time ago, and was interested to see what LW made of it. Apparently one set of skeptical journal club meetup notes: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gptXmhJxFiEwuPN98/meetup-notes-ole-peters-on-ergodicity [LW · GW]

I am not sure what to make of criticisms of Seattle meetups (they appear correct, but I am not sure if they are relevant; see my comment there).

Not planning to write a proper post, but here is an example blog post of Peters which I found illustrative and demonstrates why I think the "ergodicity way of thinking" might have something in it: https://ergodicityeconomics.com/2020/02/26/democratic-domestic-product/ . In summary, looking at the aggregate ensemble quantity such GDP per capita does not tell much what happens to individuals in the ensemble: the typical individual experienced growth in population in general is not related to GDP growth per capita (which may be obvious to a numerate person but not necessarily so, given the importance given to GDP in public discussion). And if one takes average of exponential growth rate, one obtains a measure (geometric mean income that they dub "DDP") known in economics literature, but originally derived otherwise.

But maybe this looks insightful to me because I am not that very well-versed in economics literature, so it would be nice to have some critical discussion about this.

I was a common south bay member in the meet ups we had a few years ago before our core members decided they would do stuff other than host meetings in the south bay. I'm back from an alternative account I used to use when #NRx was more prominent among members here. I just want to say hello again to everyone on the new website(no clue how long its been since we've had it) but i'm glad to be back and discussing stuff like Jaynes, Solomonoff induction, and how we can best prevent humanities disasters, and indeed perhaps even cause golden ages. I'm a fan of Isaac Levi's work in formal epistemoloy, and I follow the author of the Incerto quite closely. Anyways glad to be back here.

Hi, I'm new here Read a bunch of the sequences a few years ago (not sure how I got there).

Started reading Scott's and Zvi's posts on here recently after reading on their blogs for a while.

In the space of four frames, today's SMBC comic touches on unfriendly AI, fun theory, and overfitting in machine learning.

Hello! I’m more or less new hear. Been reading on and off for ~ a year, but keep getting distracted by school. I’m a CS sophomore trying to gain control of my life and my mind, and, trying to make friends who care about understanding things.

Hello, I wanted to post something but when reading the guidelines, I am a little confused. The issue of my confusion is "Aim to explain, not persuade". English is not my native language, but when I googled "persuade" I found that it means "induce (someone) to do something through reasoning or argument. ". To me, this sounds a little ridiculous on the rationality forum.

There's an interesting discussion here on Twitter about simplification and transparency of laws.

Robin Hanson reminded me of Leibniz who wanted to design a legal system made up only by a few basic principles taken from ancient roman law.

I have a doubt on Rationalization, dunno if someone can use it for a post.

Imagine you're a lawyer and someone comes to you saying he/she needs to be defended.

You don't know whether he/she is guilty or not. You can obviously "guessing" using all data you can gather.

Your duty as a lawyer, if you accept the case, is to defend them no matter what. In fact, everyone deserves a due process.

Here's my dilemma: take A Rational Argument [? · GW] and the other posts from "Against Rationalization". It is said that to present a rational argument, you have to gather up the more evidence you can and then choose the best candidate.

So there are a few paths involving laws and evidence:

A) Both law and evidence on your side

B) Law on your side

C) Evidence on your side

D) Neither law or evidence

What should you do if you have only law on your side? Would you accept the case knowing that there's a high degree of probability that your client is guilty?

Does a predictable punchline have high or low entropy?

From False Laughter [LW(p) · GW(p)]

You might say that a predictable punchline is too high-entropy to be funny

Since entropy is a measure of uncertainty a predictable punchline should be low entropy, no?

What's that SSC post where Scott talks about how he didn't think he terminally valued punishment, but then he was able to think of some sufficiently bad actions, and then he felt what seemed like a terminal value for the punishment of the bad actors?

I went through the titles of his posts over the last year and googled around a bit, but couldn't find it.

Four German medical professional associations demand an almost complete opening of schools and preschools due to supposedly low risk of coronavirus spread among children: https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/bildung/corona-krise-mediziner-fordern-komplette-schul-und-kita-oeffnung-a-4d1a0336-680d-4259-818e-7a263732f811

In a twitter thread, Muge Cevik discusses evidence on Corona virus transmission dynamics:

https://twitter.com/mugecevik/status/1257392347010215947

I recently gave up on trying to keep track of where things are in the kitchen, since my husband also cooks and puts everything where he likes, too. So I just taped the lists to the inside of the cabinets' doors. Surprisingly efficient, except for the time when we literally lost a pan in the next drawer. So after this worked, we now have a reminder on how to wash some things in the washing machine taped above the machine. And a reminder of our sizes taped in the wardrobe. I am thinking about labeling shelves in the kid's wardrobe, but this might be not enforceable anyway.

Hello, I would like to ask a straightforward question: Is there a logically valid way to call evolution science and creationism a pseudo-science? I am not creationist, I just hope I will strengthen my evolutionistic opinion. And I would like to have it in a clear form. I must admit that because of my family member I visited a specific creationistic site. And there was the extraordinary claim that there is no such logically valid way and I would like to disprove this for me and my family member by stating at least one. And I want to stop visiting that site after disproving. Thanks for answer in advance.

Maybe the answer is that creationistic hypotheses don't make any falsifiable but confirmed predictions, but I am not sure.

And I would also like to ask a broader question whether there is some rationally efective method of looking for the truth on the internet. Or more simply stated, who to believe.

which more specifically would be something like "not using logical fallacies".

In the discourse that existed 20 years ago better reasoning might mean "not using logical fallacies". In this community it never meant that. In the beginning in this community it meant "being a good Bayesian" which involves thinking in terms of probability and not in terms of logic. You could see following Tedlock's principles for Superforcasters as an ideal for that kind of reasoning.

Since then, we also have the Center for Applied Rationality that focuses on neither probability nor logic. It had a lot influence on the current discourse that happens here. On aspect of it as I see it is that understanding other people's mental models and sharing your own mental models with other people is an important part of reasoning. Part of understanding models is finding cruxes.

I think the main problem with the whole idea of trying to be more rational is that the discussion usually focuses on only two dimensions: logic and evidence, while leaving out a crucial third one.

Which discussion are you talking about? If I would ask a bunch of people who read LessWrong on which dimensions our discussion focuses I doubt a majority would answer logic and evidence.

If you like Yudkowskian fiction, Wertifloke = Eliezer Yudkowsky

The Waves Arisen https://wertifloke.wordpress.com/