Open Thread, September 15-30, 2012

The tagging system in general is underused which is a shame,

I strongly recommend the whole blog - that guy should post on LessWrong or something!

Those posts are followed by:

• The Sixth Meditation on Superweapons
• Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz - The Seventh Meditation on The War On Applause Lights

I don't think the example with the beggars in India provided the same insight to me that it did to Yvain. Mainly because tourists -- consistently, articulably -- don't want anyone to ask them for money, while women (I think?) do want (some) men to approach them with romantic overtures, and ostensibly filter them by certain characteristics.

Tourist: don't ever ask me for money. So don't do things that make it harder for me to turn you down for money and then ask for money.

Women[1]: don't ask me for romantic interaction unless I like you (or will like you), and if you get a false positive you're a f\**ing terrorist who did a thousand things wrong that I would have found charming if I liked you*.

In other words, once you accept that some approaches of a certain type are desired, you have to accept that some will make that type of approach without it being desired, and therefore not regard such instances as atrocities.

The tourist doesn't have this problem: s/he doesn't want begging at all. If there were a tourist that actually wanted to be panhandled but only from "awesome enough" people, and gave such people money I would expect that they'd have the insight to recognize that, "Well, some people will panhandle me without being awesome enough, and that doesn't mean they violated any rules. Here's a clear list of things that I regard as awesome, and here's what I do to mean that you should really stop revealing awesomeness and go away."

[1] of the type who are most vocal in the creepiness threads

Edit: I spoke too soon. Yvain addresses the above in the second meditation, but in the (more insightful) comparison to how "some tourists want their fortunes told". And indeed, some people want to be telemarketed to, and some want to be spammed. So what exactly makes some advances wanted and others not? I tried to address that issue here a while back, but all I got was resentment at the comparison to salesmen and telemarketers (oh, and a "you don't have the right to respond to my arguments here"). Go fig.

I found them very interesting, though some of his statements and implications are naive or disingenuous. (As for Hanlon's razor, I assign a higher prior for the former and I'm not sure which way the evidence points overall. EDIT: after reading the ninth post of the series, it was definitely the former -- or that guy deserves an Academy Award.)

Awesome. Yvain should post these here. Or if he doesn't, he should at least appear here so we can upvote him for these...

Graham speculates there's a ranking of the languages in which programmers too comfortable in one of the languages "don't get" the usefulness of the features in languages above it. So BASIC-addicts might not appreciate what they can do with recursion or structured programming (i.e. by abolishing go-to statements); C-addicts might not appreciate what they can do with functions as first class objects, and Python-addicts might not appreciate what they can do with Lisp macros.

If "enlightening people about better programming languages" ever becomes a higher priority than "enlightening people about superior status of X language users", I think a good strategy would be to explain those possible insights in a simplest possible form, without asking people to learn the guru's favorite programming language first.

For example, to show people the benefits of the recursion, I would have to find a nice example where recursion is the best way to solve the given problem; but also the problem should not feel like an artificial problem created merely for the sake of demonstrating usefulness of recursion.

I can use recursion to calculate the factorial of N... but I can use a for-cycle to achieve the same effect (without risking stack overflow). Actually, if my math happens to be limited to 64-bit integers, I could just use a precomputed table of the first few results, because the factorials of greater numbers would overflow anyway. This is why using factorial as an example of usefulness of recursion is not very convincing. A good example would be e.g. recursively parsing and then evaluating a mathematical expression. -- The idea is that even if some concept is powerful, your demonstration of it may be wrong. But providing no demonstration, or very esoteric demonstration, is also wrong.

Alternatively, we could hold annual competitions between proponents of different programming languages. For example they would have to program a Minesweeper game, and would be rated by (a) the speed of finishing the product, and (b) the elegance of their code.

At this point, proponents of the X language may object that coding Minesweeper is not the fair way of comparing languages, because their language is better for some other tasks. But this argument cuts both ways. If my goal is to write a Minesweeper game, then perhaps Paul Graham's (or anyone else's) opinion about the best programming language is not relevant to me, here and now. Perhaps call me again when my ambitions change. Or tell me in advance what kinds of projects should I do in the X language, and what kinds of projects will rather easily work in any language.

Have you dug around the publications of Alan Kay's Viewpoints Research Institute? They're trying to really push the envelope with the expressive power of highly customized programming languages.

ETA: A LtU discussion thread about a recent VPRI progress report.

I haven't heard of any studies in that direction, although a few people try to do find something, like "how long are the programs comparatively" etc., similar to this quickly googled IEEE paper.

I assume that because

• programming languages are used by humans, and
• most of a programming language's quality is based upon its actual effects on humans in the target group, and
• for real work we value long-term effects

such a study is unfeasible, i.e. too much effort, too expensive. And probably not that much related to programming language features (as most popular languages converge to some degree, especially on the most important axises). Also, "fewer symbols/lexemes/special-purpose-constructs" is an advantage only under certain conditions, meaning: the question asked may very well already determine the answer.

Do you mean only programming languages or programming languages plus the commonly available standard libraries? Some programming languages are very simple and powerful (LISP, Haskell), and some provide a large standard library and other tools to make it easy and straightforward to get things done in specific problem spaces (MATLAB, VB).

The most powerful and concise language I can imagine would be in the language of set theory with a magic automated solver: Define the domain of a problem space and a predicate for solutions and the result is the set of solutions. A standard library built on such a language would consist mostly of useful definitions for converting real world problems into mathematics and back again.

I think most programming languages try to approximate this to some degree, but the programmer is necessary to fill in the algorithmic steps between the problem space and the solution space. The fewer explicit steps the programmer has to specify to write a function, the more concise and powerful the language. The fewer definitions and functions necessary to convert real world input into a mathematical model and back to real world output, the more concise and powerful the standard library is.

I don't have any answers, but I'm also interested.

This idea has been covered on Less Wrong before. I'll spend the next minute looking up some links.

EDIT: Years saved: Cryonics vs VillageReach
Against Cryonics & For Cost-Effective Charity
There's already discussion about cryonics and charitable giving in the Reddit, help me find some peace I'm dying young thread.
There is a discussion thread in Normal Cryonics about charity vs. cryonics. See in particular this comment.

For me the argument is the same as for why I don't live a pauper and give all my wealth to charity: Selfishness. I know that I can feed someone for a long time on the money I spend on a trip somewhere, and I still prefer to take the trip. I will spend a lot more money on myself than I will on a friend, and a lot more on a friend than on a stranger.

Note: I am not signed up for Cryonics.

If cryonics works, then money spent on cryonics is much more of an investment than money spent on conventional charity. Several million people die every month. Malaria nets can only stop a small fraction of that, no matter how many are made, but cryonics can stop almost all of it - if it works. Anything done in support of cryonics in its fledgling form will help it to scale up.

The future won't revive you because it needs you to solve the Y3K problem, but we also don't save children from dying in order that they can go back to work the next day. Cryonics is a way to stop a life from being cut off, with the side effect that the cryonaut wakes up as a mere human in a transhuman world. If it's a friendly place, they'll have a chance to grow into their new world as an equal and a participant.

Grats, you are catching on :)

So, Cochran and Harpending have been posting to their blog about genetic noise and parental age. Given modern data, this is actually a rather important result with a lot of wide-ranging implications. Turns out, people thought it was significant 50 years ago, and it's mostly lain dormant since then.

How about 'deliberate practice'? I'm fairly sure that it implies that you're working on a problem that challenges you and pushes your limits.

I wonder if something analogous is true for mental training. E.g., will you improve mathematical ability faster by grinding through a bunch of relatively easy problems, or by spending a shorter amount of time mentally exhausting yourself on problems that push your limits? Anyone know of any solid evidence?

What's the basis behind HIIT? If I remember correctly, it's that the high intensity activity kicks your metabolism up a notch, continuing to burn calories / seem active for a significant period after the training is officially complete. Is there a similar mechanism for learning and memory?

There's solid evidence that spaced repetition- like in the Saxon method- is demonstrably better than doing something once and moving on with little review. In general, it seems like practice is a very important part of mathematics ability.

There are also time-based effects for learning things before going to sleep- but I'm not sure how practical using those would be.

Off-Topic Nit-Picking:

Evidence is building that High intensity interval training, e.g. Tabata sprints, is more effective at physical conditioning than low intensity endurance techniques.

"physical conditioning" is a very general term. For instance: Is evidence building that Tabata sprints are more effective for preparing for a 100k ultra-marathon?

Of course competitive runners do some sort of interval training, and -- if information on The Internet (reddit) is to be believed -- runners do not train the full distance. And if basic health and looks is your goal, running is probably not the most time-efficient (of even effective) way for doing it. But this "endurance is all wrong" meme is overshooting it a bit...

I'm responsible for Akinator knowing who he is, having a picture of him, and in part for believing he's famous. I don't know where the energy's from.

Edit: Akinator still asks about green energy but now expects a "no".

I tried and didn't get Eliezer. This is possibly because Akinator doesn't believe that any actual famous people are personally known to the people playing the game? I guess it would have had an even harder time if I'd played back when I would've had to say "yes" to "does your character live with you?".

Edit: Told it it was wrong and hit continue; still got it wrong. When I told it it was wrong again it wanted me to pick off a list, and admittedly Eliezer was on the list!

I got Eliezer (the page's second guess) despite saying "no" to the green energy question.

A year ago, it specifically got Harry James Potter Evans Verres from Methods of Rationality.

I tried for Luke and he wasn't a result. After the last question, Eliezer was its second guess.

(Edit: this is not directed at Multihead in particular.)

It's a truism in the efficient charity community that when giving to charity, we should find the most efficient group and give it our entire charity budget; the common practice of spreading donations among groups is suboptimal. However, in investing it's considered a good idea to diversify. But it seems that giving to charity and investing are essentially the same activity: we are trying to get the highest return possible, the only difference is who gets it. So why is diversification a good idea for one and not the other?

If you are attempting to maximise expected returns from your personal investment you would not diversify (except within resources that have identical expected returns). However with personal investments you have some degree of risk aversion. That is, you don't value money linearly all the way from 0 to $10,000,000 and so splitting the investment between multiple stocks gives higher expected utility even though the expected returns in $ will be slightly lower.

This differs when it comes to charitable giving because it is assumed that your personal donations aren't sufficient to change the marginal utility significantly. Personally owning $10,000 rather than $0 is much more useful than owning $20,000 instead of $10,000 but after you give $10,000 to The Society For Cute Puppies And Mosquito Nets the value of giving another $10,000 to TSFCPaMN has probably barely changed at all. Diversifying becomes important again when you have enough financial power to change the margin all on your own.

You've pinpointed it: the only difference is who gets it. When investing, diversification as the receiver of the return is useful because you'd rather gain slightly less than often lose everything. When ... living, diversification as the receiver of the return is useful for the same reason.

When investing, you'd like your buyers to diversify... but there's only one buyer, so that buyer needs to diversify. But when giving charitably, the world would like its buyers to diversify, and there are lots of buyers. Assuming its buyers are sufficiently independent, the world gets enough diversification just because its buyers make different decisions. So as long as sufficiently many people make different charitable giving decisions than you, feel free to buy only what you think are the most efficient charities.

The world doesn't care how much you help it, the world only cares how much it gets helped overall.

The difference is very simple.

Is it better to have $100,00, or a 30% chance of $1,000,000 and a 70% chance of being homeless. Obviously the former

Is it better to save 1 life, or have a 30% chance of saving 10 lives and 70% chance of doing nothing. Obviously the latter.

It seems true that when investing, you're trying to get the highest return possible, in terms of a single value measured in currency.

I've never understood why it should also necessarily be true with charity. It seems often to be an unexamined assumption, and may be reinforced by using terminology like "utilons" that appears to be begging the question.

Someone who donates both to the mosquito nets effort in Africa, and to the society which helps stray dogs and cats in Michigan, is not necessarily being irrational. They just may be perceiving the two benefits to lie on incomparable axes. They may be caring about helping Africans and helping stray dogs simultaneously, in different ways that are not exchangable to each other. The familiar objection is: "Sure they are exchangable; everything is exchangable into utilons; if you don't see a clear rate of exchange for your own preferences, that just means you still ought to estimate one given your imperfect knowledge, and act on it". But I don't see why that should be true.

Certainly most of our spending is done on axes that are incomparable to one another. We have needs along those axes that we do not normally consolidate to one "most efficient" axis, even after the minimal requirements are met. Investing is the activity that's the odd one out, here - and one of the reasons it is is precisely that we don't care much which of the companies we invest in brings us profit. It seems odd that charity should so unequivocally stand along with investing as an exception.

If charitable giving is not an exceptional way for us to spend money, the idea of a single currency becomes difficult to support, because if charity must be so streamlined, why not all other activity? In other words, sure, you can criticize someone for helping stray dogs by saying their money could be saving lives in Africa instead; but is that very different from criticizing them for buying a large color TV, when their money could be saving lives in Africa instead?

You might be an extreme centrist. Or an extreme pragmatic. Not all extremists are the "take some idea to its (il)logical conclusion and start blowing things up" type.

Impact of charitable donations is, at least within the domains that most people can give, directly proportional to the size of the donations. It's not at all clear, however, that extremist participation in politics produces a greater impact in the desired direction than casual participation.

I think that in some cases, it probably does, whereas in others it does not.

It probably depends of the decision process you're trying to influence:

• If you're voting for a candidate, you don't have any incentive to vote in a way more extreme than your preferences - with more than two candidates, you can have strategic voting which is often the opposite incentive, i.e. voting for a candidate you like less that has more chances of making it.

• If a bureaucrat is trying to maximize utility by examining people's stated preferences, then you can have an incentive to claim extreme preferences for the reasons Yvain gives.

Informal discussions of what social norms should be look more like the second case.

Elected politicians have to deal with the two systems, on one side they want to take a moderate position to get the maximum number of voters (median voter etc.), on the other hand once elected they have an incentive to claim to be more extreme when negotiating in their constituents' interest.

Could you spell out what you mean by extremist, and how the analogous argument goes?

If there are three candidates, then yes, you should give all your support to one candidate, even if you hate one and don't distinguish between the other two.

But that hardly makes you an extremist. I don't see any reason that this kind of argument says you should support the same party in every election, or for every seat in a particular election, or that you should support that party's position on every issue. Even if you are an extremist and, say, want to pull the country leftward on all issues, it's not obvious whether equal amounts of support (say, money) to a small far-left party will be more effective than to a center-left party. Similarly, if your participation in politics is conversation with people, it's not obvious that always arguing left-wing positions is the most effective way to draw people to the left. It may be that demonstrating a willingness to compromise and consider details may make you more convincing. In fact, I do think the answer is that the main power individuals have in arguing about politics is to shift the Overton window; but I think that is a completely different reason than the charity argument.

and then I looked up your comment on LJ and the comment it replies to and I strongly disagree with your comment. This has nothing to do with the charity argument. Whether this argument is correct is different matter. I think the Overton window is a different phenomenon. I think the argument to take extreme positions to negotiate compromises better applies to politicians than to ordinary people. But their actions are not marginal and so this is clearly different from the charity argument.

Value of information about which political side is more marginally valuable makes unbiased discussion a cause that's potentially more valuable than advocacy for any of the political sides, and charities are similarly on the same scene. So the rule is not "focus on a single element out of each class of activities", the choice isn't limited to any given class of activities. Applied to politics, the rule can be stated only as, "If advocacy of political positions is the most marginally valuable thing you can do, focus on a single side."

There's a standard argument about "efficient charity" that says you should concentrate all your donations on one charity

If this argument was universal, it would be rational to invest in a single stock and the saying about all eggs in one basket would not exist.

I'm surprised no-one's thrown together an online course aggregator yet.

I too am interested in books on feminism that might appeal to a LWer.

I tried researching this, but I found one easy failure mode is to find books based on the assumption that everyone knows what feminism is about and agrees 100%, and what the reader wants is a list of people who were feminists at various times in history.

The angle I was more interested in was "feminists believe X because Y", or "you, foolish person who is not a feminist, should be a feminist because Z".

On signalling:

• Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction by William Flesch attempts to explain what makes certain plots, or fiction at all, enjoyable through a signalling lens.
• The Mating Mind and Spent by Geoffrey Miller delve into how signalling concerns pushed us evolutionarily into who we are and then how our evolved tendencies are disconnected with modern consumer culture.
• Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate by Diego Gambetta

...going back to school to study computer science (if my start-up succeeds before then).

That's amusing. Usually I would say the value of the founder being present is much higher for a successful company than one that has failed. I would actually expect my freedom to pursue other avenues diminish as my success in my current avenue grows.

Do you mean that your start-up, if successful, will pretty much run itself? Or that if it hasn't succeeded /yet/, then you will feel obligated to stay and keep working on it?

I'm thinking of doing all three, though I might skip 2 since I'm already doing things along those lines.

I'm doing mathematical thinking as well. I have a two-person local study group; how large is the LW study group looking so far?

I've been taking their Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computation course that is about to end. I would recommend it to anyone interested. The course doesn't do a good job emphasizing the linear algebra prereqs (basically the only prereqs of importance) and it sounded like a lot of people got frustrated with that early on. A college course in linear algebra definitely suffices and one could even learn this sufficiently for the course on your own if you were ready to dedicate some time to it.

This does not seem coherent. The responsible choices people make are always the result of unchosen circumstances. The genes you are born with, the circumstances of the development of your brain, your upbringing, the decisions of your past and perhaps very different self, which information you don't know you don't have, all of these are unchosen and there is no decision making beyond the laws of physics.

Well, we already know that (even in a deterministic world) there's a meaningful way to say that someone could have done something, despite being made of mindless parts obeying only the laws of physics. I think the notion of responsible choice is probably similar.

I've been doing this since November last year and recommend it.

My list of fully listened books has 109 entries now. I've found that an important thing in determining whether a book works well in text-to-speech form is how much of it you can miss and still understand what's going on, or, how dense it is. Genre-wise, narrative or journalistic nonfiction and memoirs make especially good listening; most popular nonfiction works decently; history and fiction are pretty hard; and scholarly and technical writing are pretty much impossible.

A lot of writing on the internet, like blog posts, works well too. I have some scripts for scraping websites, converting them into an intermediate ebook form and then into text-to-speech audiobooks. If I encounter an interesting blog with large archives this is usually how I consume it nowadays.

There's also obviously the issue of comprehension, which I'd say definitely is lower when listening than when reading. But, 1) literally at least 95% of the stuff that I've listened to I never would have read, it would either have sat on my to-read list forever* or I wouldn't have thought it was worth the time and effort in the first place 2) you can view this as a way to discover stuff that's worth deeper study, like skimming, 3) it takes less mental effort than reading, and 4) there are a lot of times when you couldn't read but can still listen, so it's not a tradeoff. There are also some interesting ways in which texts are more memorable when listening, because parts of the text get associated to the place you were in and/or the activity you were doing when you were listening to that part.

Compared to traditional audiobooks, there's the disadvantage that fiction seems to be harder to make sense of in text-to-speech form, but other than that, you get all the benefits of traditional audiobooks plus it's faster** and you can listen to anything.

* Whereas during the last year I've been getting to experience the new and pleasant phenomenon of actually getting to strike off entries from my to-read list pretty often.

** You can speed up the text-to-speech, and while you can also speed up traditional audiobooks, you can speed up the text-to-speech more because it's always the same voice instead of a different one for every book so you can get used to listening to it at higher and higher speeds - I currently do 344, 472 and 612 WPM for normal, fast, and extra-fast-but-still-comprehensible respectively (these numbers have been stable for about the past six months).

But on what? Question choice is hard. (My own suggestion would be something like hold a contest on finding and summarizing all existing criticism of Baumeister's Is There Anything Good About Men? and if there is no good criticism, come up with one's own; but that's just because I regard it as one of the more evidence-backed paradigms.)

Intrinsic motivation, pplz :D. Better than a prize might be paying someone to convince and help other people to want to write the article. Or simply doing that yourself, if you want to make it happen.

Primary takeaway: simple, visible theories are rarely completely correct, especially when they're formulated in response to primitive data.

Commentary: "Species" is a wrong idea, and much of the start is uninteresting discussion of whether or not neanderthals were a "separate species." Taboo species, and everything becomes clear: they had a separate evolutionary history than the strain of homo sapiens that originated in Africa, but they could and did interbreed with that strain, and so current humans have genes from at least one of the African, Neanderthal, and Denisovan varieties.

Write-in: I believed it was among the more reliable forms of forensic evidence, but didn't believe the bombastic claims of absolute certainty.

The article doesn't actually contain any data saying that fingerprints are reliable. If I had to guess, I'd say that a (non-partial) fingerprint match had an odds ratio of around 10^7, a hefty 22 bits of info. Is there any data to contradict that? Or is this just the "but there's still a chance, right?" fallacy?

The article is very limited as a history of the Great Depression - it says very little about why the economy got worse and better and does not include key words like "deflation", "gold standard", "Federal Reserve", or "monetary".

One of the first things that Roosevelt did as President was to take the US off the gold standard (to put a stop to the deflation), and that was probably the most important thing that a country could do to deal with the Depression. See, for example, this graph, this section of a Wikipedia article, or this (much longer) Economic History Association article.

Woah, woah, woah!

Polls! And even with graphs! Tricycle is awesome!

A relative of mine is a huge Operations Research fanboy, but I don't get it - I just see graph theory and calculus, and some clever but brittle planning algorithms. If you can explain what the big deal is, please do.

My impression is that holy wars about software and hardware aren't as common as they used to be. Is this correct?

How so? In a local nonreductionist universe, wouldn't a fundamentally complicated thing just have to have zero width?

Mixed Nash equilibrium is going on here :P If you made this into a little game, with the students paying a cost to cram but getting a benefit if they crammed the night before the test, and the teacher wanting the minimum number of students to cram, you could figure out what the actual ideal strategies would be, and the teacher would indeed have a mixed strategy.

What the non-probabilistic (that is, deductive) reasoning really shows is that there is no way to always surprise a student. If you make things probabilistic, that means you're only claiming to surprise your students the most you can. This problem is weird because it demonstrates how in order to be surprising overall, sometimes you actually do have to choose bad options (at least when you're playing against perfect reasoners :D )! It's only by sometimes actually choosing Friday that the teacher can ever get students to not cram before class Thursday - the times the quiz is on Friday are sacrificed in order to be surprising the other times.

It's an amusing paradox and I don't know what the standard solution to it is, but I resolve it easily in my mind by tabooing the word 'surprise', and replacing with "suddenly obtaining certain knowledge of its date". Then it becomes more of a silly game of words.

Assuming the test is certain to take place (it's the law!), the students can't be suprised on Friday, but on Thursday they will either be "surprised" to locate the test on Thursday or "surprised" to locate the test on Friday. The Thursday (or Wednesday or Tuesday or Monday) surprise will therefore be genuine, though no student can be suprised on Friday. They can be "surprised" on Thursday about either a Thursday or a Friday test, though.

The day-by-day progression is a distraction btw. The paradox can be replaced by having five cups, a ball under one of them, lifting them one by one in whatever order. If you've lifted three empty cups, you'll then either be "surprised" to locate the ball under the cup you lift next, or "surprised" to locate it definitively under the cup you haven't lifted. Both of these will be a surprise, a surprise occurring at the next-to-last cup.

I'm a hobbyist computer programmer considering a career in it.

When I was 6, I met a friend who was into star-trek and science and such. We used to talk about science stuff and dig up "dinosaurs" and attempt to build spaceships. I think a lot of my intellectual personality came from being socialized by him. The rest came from my dad, who used to teach me things about electricity and physics and microeconomics (expected value and whatnot).

I learned to program when someone introduced it to me and I realized I could make video games. (I was 18) I absorbed a lot of knowledge quickly, and didn't get much done. I would find some little problem, and then go and absorb all the relevant knowledge I could to get it exactly right. Even tho I didn't accomplish much, now I know a lot about computer science, which is helpful. Having some thing I was trying to do put a powerful drive behind my learning, even if I didn't actually act in a strategic or effective way.

My dad occasonally told me the importance of finishing the last project before beginning the next, but I don't think it properly transferred. I still have lots of trouble shipping.

One thing that bit me a lot was regressing into the deep wizardry tech instead of focusing on the end product. Architecture and tech are a lot more interesting than the mere surface of the product, but what matters is getting the thing done. The tech side is the dark side. Lots of interesting insight on this on prog21.dadgum.com (a blog)

I wish I'd encountered Paul Graham's essays a lot earlier. They have a lot of good advice about programming and growing up in general. I caught a lot of my ambition from there. The wider hacker news community is great too. Really inspiring and helpful community.

Overall (TL;DR:) Teach him to ship. This is important. Start with trivially small things if you have to, but make sure stuff gets to version 0.1 (releasable) at least. Do what you can to encourage friendships with other smart kids who are into science. Find something he's interested in and wants to build, or the rest of it will be directionless. Focus on the creative output, not on the tech. Get him reading interesting and inspiring battle-wisdom like paul graham and prog21. Don't make him hate it.

I am a software developer, and have glimpsed over many similar questions. To summarize: There are enormous individual differences in how one can become a better programmer, and even more so on the opinions on it. It is not even easy to agree on what basic skills should be there at the "end" (i.e., the beginning, after your first two years real experience), much less on how to get those skills.

That said, most commonplace advice is valid here:

• there is with high probability no really significant innate aptitude for programming (intelligence has a carry-over into many domains, however) (edit: seems I am wrong about that: See "Has “Not everyone can be a programmer” been studied?" at Programmers.StackExchange
• don't expect too much skill carry-over: mathematical thinking and programming are related, but different activities
• being able to concentrate for some time is good (a.k.a.: conscientiousness helps)
• as a kid, liking the task probably also helps
• playing the trumpet - not that much (though it can be fun)

On skill-set:

• The practical coding skills are always important. (Except if you want to earn more than a dev.)
• Algorithmic knowledge is rarely helpful, but you will stumble at least once if you don't have it (but nobody will notice).
• Mathematics is necessary only in very small areas.

What should I have done? Training self-discipline would have helped (if something like that is possible). Knowing/Having somebody who is actually significantly better than me, and pushing me, would have helped (fuckarounditis on "learning" is too easy to do).

My Opinion: In professional software development there is very little time to broaden your knowledge -- it goes into obscure platform and domain knowledge quite quickly, and Jobs where you do what is actually interesting are in very short supply. However, exactly this broader knowledge is what can keep you afloat even if you happen to be neurotic, unreliable, slow worker*. So: Let him do what is most interesting, but gently guide him to do it just a bit better, and a little bit more diverse than he would otherwise. About interest: Many people say kids usually like somewhat quick results, and things that crawl. Maybe?

Preparatory learning exercises: Sorry, no opinion and idea here. I always liked to take things apart, and sometimes also to put them together (as in Lego Technik models, or -- almost always unsuccessful -- attempts to construct my own). Actually, I think constructing Lego models (or of course anything that is "more real") is great. But then there is the initial caveat of individual differences.

*: I might exaggerate a bit, but not too much.

One thing I have observed about people who are better programmers than me is that many play musical instruments. (I don't.) I have no idea what sort of causal structure is involved here.

Learn off-sequence math: logic puzzles, geometric constructions, number theory (primes, modular arithmetic) that are not represented in the standard school math sequence.

Learn something of electronics, digital logic, etc.

Use different languages: maybe Python and Pygame for animations and games, and HTML and JavaScript for web pages. Don't allow the idea to develop that there is one "normal" way for code to look, e.g. "normal languages have curly braces; ones that don't are gratuitously weird."

I'm an adult professional programmer. The gaming machine of choice when I was a kid was C-64, not NES, so I knew programming your own stuff was a thing at elementary school age. The obvious interesting thing with the computer was game programming. The (generally correct back then) received wisdom also was that any serious game programming effort with the 8-bit home computers involved assembly languages, but I wasn't able to find any manuals or software I could understand to teach myself assembly, so I never ended up learning it.

A few years later the PC was the top gaming box, and assembly had given way to C (and Turbo Pascal, which was a big thing on DOS back then for some reason), I managed to learn C after a false start or two, and went off happily coding many stupid things I did not finish with it. So not much of a lesson here, not learning assembly at age 10 didn't seem to slow me down much later, and it also turned out that I never did need to learn to program 8-bit microcomputers right down to metal to make games. Still, I'm sure it would've been interesting to learn that.

The big thing that made me learn programming was the intrinsic drive to want to program computer games. Any sort of achievement-endorsing authority figures were generally entirely indifferent to this.

The hard things in programming for me are also ones which I suspect are inherently boring. Working with legacy codebases, working on uninteresting features that are needed for business reasons, finishing the countless little things like documentation, ports and packaging so that something can be released, and in general going from the 80 % solution to the 100 % one. I guess I could echo nyan_sandwich's admonition to teach shipping here.

I did waste some time writing unnecessarily bad C++ before I read Stroustrup's book on the language, so I guess hitting the books early could help. I also crashed, burned and never recovered enough to have any degree of academic success with university level maths after basically coasting all the way through high school, but as far as I can tell, this hasn't had much any impact with my programming skill. It did keep me from ending up in any kind of grad school, which I thought I would end up in when going to university.

So I guess my first choice of an experiment for 10-year-old me would be to hook him up to the present-day internet and teach him to download lots of textbooks on programming. I might worry a bit about a parental authority figure pushing the stuff extremely hard, since that might kill off the intrinsic drive which has been pretty important for me, but having some sort of mentor who knows the stuff and who you can bounce things off might also have sped things up a lot back then.

I do miss never learning how to make tracker music and not getting into the demoscene as a a teenager, so there are those. Tracker music is kinda programmy and could exercise the hypothetical music and programming skill connection. The demoscene thing is a general programmatic art competitive thing that will teach someone a lot about how to make a computer do tricky things if they get into it. The demoscene seems to be pretty much an European phenomenon, for some reason, and also a dying one, since fewer people who know about computers nowadays consider making them do intricate moving colors and sounds to be an impressive achievement.

Should I focus on him doing lots of coding or, for example, would he be better served by learning additional math?

IMO, definitely lots of coding. Lots and lots of coding. There's a big aspect of craftsmanship in being a good programmer, and at least for now, solid craftsmanship and weak theory seems to beat solid theory and weak craftsmanship most of the time.

I'm a computer programmer who started at age 12. At that time, by far the coolest thing about programming for me was being able to write my own game. I was also motivated by math and algorithms, but more weakly, at least initially.

I would recommend balancing two things. First, settle on a simple framework that lets you do simple graphics in a simple language with minimum boilerplate. Maybe pygame (never tried it), or processing.js (good because it works right there in your browser), or some learning-oriented language (when I was a kid, Logo was popular, though I quickly moved on to BASIC; is there an analog of Logo for the 2010s?). Show him how he can draw something with three lines of code, get him fascinated, move the goalposts, iterate.

Second, more math but I would especially advise math puzzles of all kinds. Tricks with numbers, geometric constructions, logical puzzles. It's great if you can find material of this kind for your son that he'll want to consume on his own and not just because of the time-sharing scheme. Martin Gardner's books may be useful, though probably a bit later on; and other material of such kind.

Note that I haven't answered your last question because while the things I listed were helpful to me, I did them, and I don't know what other, different things would've caused me to be a better programmer. I don't even know if starting at age 7 would've caused that; I suspect it's true, but don't have a solid argument.

You might try getting him a shell account and have him learn to use tmux (or screen) and vim (or emacs).

I think gauging interest for meetups is usually presented as a discussion post so that it's more likely to be noticed, but I'm not sure I'm right about that. Anyone else notice a pattern?

The problem is that the agent doesn't know what Myself() evaluates to, so it's not capable of finding an explicitly specified function whose domain is a one-point set with single element Myself() and whose value on that element is Universe(). This function exists, but the agent can't construct it in an explicit enough form to use in decision-making. Let's work with the graph of this function, which can be seen as a subset of NxN and includes a single point (Myself(), Universe()).

Instead, the agent works with an extension of that function to the domain that includes all possible actions, and not just the actual one. The graph of this extension includes a point (A, U) for each statement of the form [Myself()=C => Universe()=U] that the agent managed to prove, where A and U are explicit constants. This graph, if collected for all possible actions, is guaranteed to contain the impossible-to-locate point (Myself(), Universe()), but also contains other points. The bigger graph can then be used as a tool for the study of the elusive (Myself(), Universe()), as the graph is in a known relationship with that point, and unlike that point it's available in a sufficiently explicit form (so you can take its argmax and actually act on it).

(Finding other methods of studying (Myself(), Universe()) seems to be an important problem.)

I do not think there is a "general stance" on drug usage. Further, tobacco is not a general drug (there's no such thing) but a specific well-known drug with a specific history. I would not expect reactions to tobacco smoking in fiction to be reflections of general stances on drug use.

What I read in the reaction to Hanna's smoking is specifically that, today and to some readers, smoking seems ① self-destructive and ② odious; and furthermore ③ signals unsympathetic or disfavored character tropes.

First, because we know so well today that tobacco smoking causes such a wide range of deadly diseases, an educated character in present-day or near-future fiction can be assumed to know this, too. She has willingly taken up a habit which causes cancer, emphysema, heart disease, etc. Many readers will have had relatives who died due to smoking-related diseases. So smoking may be seen as a symbol of a character's self-destructiveness. (An example that comes to mind is John Constantine in the Swamp Thing and Hellblazer comics.)

Second, smoking in public is often seen as odious — or, at least, insensitive to others' well-being. People from social backgrounds where smoking is uncommon may, due purely to a selection effect, associate smoking with people who do not care that they are being unpleasant to others. So smoking may be a symbol of a character's rudeness, hostility, or willful repulsiveness — a choice to "gross out" others to assert personal space, for instance.

(Also, many readers may have sensitivity to smoke, asthma, allergies, or simply a strong dislike for being around smoking or people who smell of smoke. So they may read a character smoking and think, "I would not want to be around her," and through mind projection fallacy conclude "she is unpleasant to be around.")

Third, smoking may be culturally associated with various sorts of characters (or real-world people) whom the readers disfavor — beatnik-type hipsters; rednecks; French philosophers; street criminals; anxious New York literary types; good ol' boys; the self-consciously retro sort of conservative; or for that matter the characters of Ayn Rand. Writers often intend a character to fit particular tropes, and the tropes that smoking brings to mind may be ones the reader finds unsympathetic.

I would not expect most of the above to apply to most other sorts of drug use.

Sounds like a good idea to me. Cryonics could definitely use more female-audience-targeted arguments.

What's the point?

I haven't read Strategy of Conflict, but I have read Robert Cialdini's book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, which Harry name-drops a couple of times and uses several techniques from. I'd guess that that's some of what you're seeing.

For future reference, though, it's considered polite to confine free-floating HPMoR discussion to the Methods threads, the most recent of which appears to be here. There have been a few Methods-related threads since, but all with narrower scope.