Open thread, Oct. 6 - Oct. 12, 2014

On the suggestion of Gunnar_Zarncke, this comment has been transformed into a Discussion post.

At the rationality meetup today, there was a great newcomer. He's read up most of Eliezer's Yudkowsky's original Sequences up to 2010, and he's also read a handful of posts promoted on the front page. As a landing pad for the rationalist community, to me, Less Wrong seems to be about updating beyond the abstract reasoning principles of philosophy past, toward realizing that through a combination of microeconomics, probability theory, decision theory, cognitive science, social psychology, and information theory, that humans can each hack their own minds, and notice how they use heuristics, to increase their success rate at which they form functional beliefs, and achieve their goals.

Then, I think about how if someone has only been following the rationalist community of Less Wrong for the last few years, and then they come to a meetup for the first time in 2014, everyone else who's been around for a few years will be talking about things that don't seem to fit with the above model of what the rationalist community is about. Putting myself back into a newcomer/outsider perspective, here are some memes that don't seem to immediately, obviously follow from 'cultivating rationality habits':

• Citing Moloch, an ancient demon, as a metaphorical source of all the problems humanity currently faces.

• How a long series of essays yearning for the days of yore has led to intensely insular discussion of polarized contrarian social movements, This doesn't square with how Less Wrong has historically avoided political debates because of how they often drift to ideological bickering, name-calling, and signaling allegiance to a coalition. Such debates aren't usually conducive to everyone reaching more accurate conclusions together, but we're having them anyway.

• Some of us reversing our previous opinions on what's fundamentally true, or false.

Less Wrong is also welcomes discussion of contrarian, and controversial, ideas, such as cryopreservation, and transhumanism. If this is the first thing somebody learns about Less Wrong through the grapevine, the first independent sources they may come across may be rather unflattering of the community as a whole, and disproportionately cynical about what most of us actually believe. Furthermore, controversy attracts media coverage like moths to a flame, which hasn't gone to well for Less Wrong, and which falsely paints divergent opinions as our majority beliefs.

I'm not calling for Less Wrong to write a press coverage package, or protocol. However, I want to foster a local community at which I can discuss cognitive science, and the applications of microeconomics of everyday life, without new friends getting hung up on the weird beliefs they associate me with.

Additionally, in growing the local meetup, my friends, and I, in Vancouver, have gone to other meetups, and seeded the idea that it's worth our friend's time to check out Less Wrong. We've made waves to the point that a local student newspaper may want to publish an article about what Less Wrong is about, and profile some of my friends in particular. However, this has backfired to the point where I meet new people, or talk to old friends, and they're associating me with creepy beliefs I don't follow. It sucks that I feel I might have to do damage control for my personal standing in a close-knit community. So, I'm going to try writing another post detailing all the boring, useful ideas on Less Wrong nobody else notices, such as Luke's posts about scientific self-help, or Scott's great arguments in favor or niceness, community, and having better debates by interpreting your opponent's arguments charitably, or the repositories of useful resources.

If you have links/resources about the most boring useful ideas on Less Wrong, or an introduction that highlights, e.g., all the discourse of Less Wrong which is merely the practical applications of scientific insight for everyday life, please share them below. I'll try including them in whatever guide I generate.

I started keeping a diary about a month ago. The two initial reasons I had for adopting this habit were that, first of all, I thought that I would enjoy writing, and second of all, I wanted to have something relaxing to do for half an hour before my bedtime every evening, because I often have trouble getting to sleep at night.

I have found that I generally end up writing about my day-to-day social interactions in my journals. One really nice benefit of keeping a journal that I hadn't expected to reap was that writing has helped me weakly precommit to performing certain actions that help me improve at being sociable. For example, a few weeks back, there were a couple nights where I wrote about how I felt bad about how a new transfer student to my school didn't seem to know anyone in the class which we had together. A couple days after writing about this, I ended up asking him to hang out with me, which was something that I normally would have been too shy to do.

Another thing that I learned is that writing about your problems can help you digest them in ways which are helpful to you. On a meta- level, I think that writing about my social interactions with others has helped me realize that I want to spend more time with my friends, at the expense of spending less time reading through e.g. posts on Reddit. Looking back on things, it is painfully obvious to me that spending time with my friends is much better than spending time on random internet sites, though I hadn't explicitly realized that I had been failing to spend time with my friends until I ended up writing about the fact that this was the case.

Actually, before I had even started journaling, I had known that thinking about problems by writing about them or making diagrams was, in general, a helpful thing to do-- after all, plenty of people benefit from drawing pictures when stuck on, say, math problems. However, it wasn't previously obvious to me that problems other than math and science problems could be analyzed by writing about them or drawing diagrams that represented the problem. Basically, I found a way (which was previously unknown to me) to identify and solve problems in my life.

Here's a fun game: concepts, ideas, institutions and features of the world we (let's say 21st Century Westerners) think of as obvious, but aren't necessarily so. Extra points for particularly visceral or captivating cases.

For example: at some point in human history, the idea of a false identity or alias wouldn't have even made sense, because everyone you met would be either known to you or a novel outsider. These days, anyone familiar with, say, Batman, understands the concept of an assumed identity, it's that endemic in our culture. But there presumably must have been a time when you would have had to go to great lengths to explain to someone what an assumed identity was.

Here's a proposal: popular books for statistically literate people.

I've read several books from the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series. I like the general idea of these books: roughly 140 A6 pages concisely introducing a subject, and a list of further reading if you want it.

In practice, the ones on quantitative/scientific disciplines seem to put a lot of time and effort into writing around public ignorance of statistics. Those 140 pages would go a lot further if the author could just assume familiarity with statistical research methods.

This seems like a consistent enough body of knowledge to "factor out" of a lot of material, as much educational material with prerequisites does.

Here's an offer for anyone who writes blog posts or LW articles: I'm willing to proofread as well as provide feedback on your drafts. I would probably give the most useful feedback on material concerning computer science, personal productivity and ethics, as that's where most of my experience is allocated. However, I'd be glad to read just about anything.

Excellent news.

A promising idea in macroeconomics is that of NGDP level targetting. Instead of targetting the inflation rate, the central bank would try to maintain a trend rate of total spending in the economy. Here's Scott Sumner's excelent paper making the case for NGDP level targetting. As economic policy suggestions go, it's extremely popular among rationalists - I recall Eliezer endorsing it a while back.

At the moment we have real-time market-implied forecasts for a variety of things; commodity prices, interest rates and inflation. These inflation expectations acted as an early warning sign of the great recession. Unfortunately, at present there does not exist a market in NGDP futures, so it's hard to get real-time information on how the economy as a whole is doing.

Fortunately, Scott Sumner is setting up a prediction market for NGDP targetting in New Zealand. A variety of work, including some by Robin Hanson, suggests that even quite small prediction markets can create much more accurate predictions than teams of experts. The market is in the early stages of creation, but if anyone was interested in supply technical skills or financial assistance*, this could potentially have a huge payoff. Even if you don't want to contribute to the project, you could participate in the market when it launches, which would help improve liquidity and aid the quality of predictions.

• A few EA types have already donated, and Scott quickly raised his initial target of $30k within a day or so, but it's plausible that costs might be higher than expected.

Optimization as Hobby

This may belong more in the Rational Diary; however, as it is not an account of any physical efforts, but rather a train of thought, I’ll put it here.

As of late (over the last three months), I’ve been suffering from ennui and listlessness. Several objectives (begin an independent study habit on Spanish and economics, write a novel, contribute to the online efforts of a library or archive) have proved either unfeasible or have had no success. Some of my other objectives (establish a daily exercise habit, begin writing again, obtain a tutoring job) have been slow in coming to fruition. Difficulties happen and I’m not here to complain about them. Indeed, I’m quite happy with the successes I’ve had. In the past four months, I have obtained a director job at a library, started an exercise routine that is noticeably beneficial, increased my writing output, and learned the history of the American Civil War.

What’s important to me is that these failures have generated a listlessness that I do not like and that seems to specifically rise out of my desire to avoid such listlessness. Many of the objectives I listed are not terminal objectives; most of what I have attempted to do or start in these past few months have been instrumental towards other goals (mostly: obtain a better, more permanent job and leave home for a more engaging location). However, this focus on optimization, combined with the setbacks of several optimizing habits, has made the very idea of optimizing wearisome. When I begin to think or feel “I should try to improve myself,” whatever causes the thought, the result is a lingering angst of, “But I’m not a machine. My goal in life isn’t to optimize. Can’t I just be happy?”

Anytime I argue about making myself happy, I doubt my intentions. “Happy,” of a certain manner, could easily be obtained through vegetation in front of a screen or monitor, absorbing the works of others without applying the content of that work to my own life. Just receiving a constant input of satisfaction, outputting nothing. Indeed, a problem I face is that my family believes this is what I do now. Since many of the resources I use for job hunting or skill learning are online, I spend much of my free time in front of a screen. From without, it appears I am doing just that. Receiving constant satisfaction, producing nothing. This has led to my being accused of laziness, despite now having two jobs. A simple misunderstanding that I don’t take personally, but it can make the ennui worse as a general obstacle in my environment, providing one more factor that needs optimizing.

I know that my terminal values are not to simply absorb constant input because I do not find that existentially satisfying. It does not make me content imagining myself not learning or producing something new. However, with most of the low hanging fruit plucked, I’ve come to a point of conflict. Thoughts of further optimization disrupt happiness (especially because now a lot of my personal optimization has reached very effecting levels: for instance, despite the excess of conflict it causes in my family, I have been slowly discarding a large portion of the material goods I accumulated during childhood. Excess books, movies, and video games, with the intent to one day discard all video games. This conflicts with my family’s image of me and insults them as they spent money on those items for me when I was a child, making it seem as if I were throwing away a gift. But now I’m off topic as this is only tangentially related to the ennui). But I understand that “happiness” in this use is not terminal value. It’s momentary satisfaction. It’s that desire to say, “Let me take a second to breathe,” but secretly wanting to stretch that second out to a minute, to an hour, to a day.

So, I am trying to create a change in thought regarding optimization. So far, I think of optimization in terms of values. This is my terminal value, this is an instrumental value to reach such an end. It is an economical way of thinking that lets me way cost and benefit. This is useful thinking, but because I have begun to associate optimization with ennui and strife, it is no longer effective. Instead, I am now trying to think of optimization as a hobby.

First, I’ll admit this is a stop gap method against ennui, and probably (though I have nothing to prove it) less effective than thinking in a more economical way. Thinking of optimization as a hobby encourages not considering solid costs and benefits. It makes optimization a “can” rather than a “should” and I lose that pressing desire to really make something work that I have when I have sat down and determined if a way is the right way. But that’s just what I’m looking for. I’m creating associations between that pressing need and defeat, which I do not want. Such an association will cut the legs from under my efforts if I let it build.

Instead, I try to think of optimization as a hobby. This reminds me that it is something I engage in freely, that I have control over (so the successes and failures are mine alone), and is only a single aspect of my life. It disposes of that continuous thought that being “better” is everything, instrumental and terminal alike, which clouds my ability to think about what I want, why I want it, how I want it.

I apologize for this lengthy post that is more personal than intended for others. These have simply been my recent thoughts on optimization and my current manner of approaching the topic. Expressing them here prevents me from changing my mind later and then thinking, “I’ve always really thought like this.”

I'm trying to post an article on discussion about a personally important topic, but it's not going through. Any thoughts? It won't even save the material in drafts. I haven't posted much before, but this is a question that I think Less Wrong could be a great help on. It says I have enough karma, so that shouldn't be the problem.

I have started reading Qualia the Purple, a manga strongly recommended by a few LWers, such as Eliezer and Gwern. In his recommendation, Eliezer wrote: "The manga Qualia the Purple has updated with Ch. 14-15. This is what it looks like to “actually try” at something."

Does anyone else know good examples of "actually trying" in other media? Over the LW IRC channel, Gwern linked to this page (Warning, TV Tropes), and specifically recommended Monster. Any other suggestions?

[tangential] The price of Bitcoin has been dropping significantly in the past few weeks, and dropped below $300 yesterday. I've read many theories as to how this can't happen, but it is. What's going on?

For the last few weeks, I've been using an alarm app that forces me to take a picture of my front door before it turns off. Previously, I had been using one that forced me to do two difficult arithmetic problems. This meant that I woke up mentally, but was still unwilling to leave my bed, and instead spend half an hour checking fb and browsing the net on my phone. Now, the design of the clock forces me to leave my room, which makes it much easier for me to start my day more quickly. The photo recognition is not great, so normally I need to take 2 or 3 photos before it recognises the door, but this helps me wake up even more. I would highly reccommend the app, or something with the same functionality, for people who have difficulty leaving bed in the morning.

Long time lurker here, I just recently got accepted to App Academy (A big part of my inspiration for applying came from this post) And I'm really excited to attend some meetups in the area.

I have a few questions for Less Wrong people in the area, and this seemed like a good place to post them:

1. I'll be going in December, any chance I'll have Less Wrong company?

2. I understand that at least a few folks from here have been to app academy. Any advice? I've got an Associates in CS, and none of the prep work they've given me is too difficult, but is there anything else I should do to prepare?

3. They allow students to stay there, but I'm hoping to bring my fiancee with me. Unfortunately, rent seems to be ridiculous and I have no idea where to look (I've never moved to a city that wasn't driving distance from me). What's the best way to find apartments in SF?

4. Related to the above, is anyone in the SF area looking for a roommate(or two) starting December? We are clean, quiet, and can be very unobtrusive if need be. The main issue I see is that we would prefer to also bring our cat along.

I'm looking for research (for instance from psychology) showing that detailed feedback and criticism improves performance greatly and would be very grateful if I could get any tips in this regard. (I think I've heard that this is the case but can't find any papers on this.) I'm especially interested in how criticisms of texts can improve authors' writings but am also interested in examples from other fields.

I'm thinking that such feedback could improve performance via (at least) two mechanisms:

a) It teaches you exactly what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong; i.e. gives you knowledge b) It may incentivize you to do things rightly, if you want to get praise and avoid criticism. The strength of this incentive obviously depends on the context; for instance, public feedback should generally provide you with stronger incentives than private feedback.

This seems intuitively clear, but still it would be nice to have some research saying that the effect of feedback is very strong (if it is, as I suspect). Any help is greatly appreciated.

Are there any existing libraries for generating Anki decks?

It feels like generating Anki decks from data sources with defined object-relational schemas should be easy and fruitful. Alternatively, generating them from something like an R data frame seems like it could be worth doing.

ETA: I have Googled this before asking, by the way, but there are so many Anki decks about programming languages that it seems resistant to the obvious search terms.

I'm having trouble posting an article, so any help would be appreciated. I've tried to make a discussion post, and whenever I click "submit," it says, "submitting..." for a few seconds. However, the thread never appears in the discussion section. Also, when I try to close out of the submit article page, it says, "you've made changes to the article, but haven't submitted it." Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this? My only idea is that the target and class of hyperlinks aren't set, or that the article's too long; it's 27 pages.

Happy to see Elon Musk continuing to speak out about AI risk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze0_1vczikA

The first NGDP futures market is getting started based on the ideas of economist Scott Sumner. The idea is that the expected U.S. NGDP (nominal gross domestic product) is the single most important macroeconomic variable, and that having a futures (prediction) market will provide valuable information into this variable (Scott estimates that if it works, it will be worth hundreds of billions of dollars).

Unfortunately, due to US gambling laws (I think), the market will be based in New Zealand and U.S. citizens will not be allowed to participate.

Formatting stories - any good evidence?

I've started toying around with setting up my story at its permanent website, and have put a test page of the first chapter at this page (NSFW due to image of tasteful female nudity). I find myself faced with all sorts of options - font? line width? dark on light or light on dark? inline style or CSS? spot colors? hyphens or em-dashes? straight or curly quotes? etc, etc? - and I don't have a lot of evidence to base any answers on.

As a preliminary set of answers, I've drawn on Butterick's Practical Typography, even though I don't have any particular reasons to favour that set of advice over any other, other than that it's a concentrated dose of a /lot/ of advice. I don't know how to set up formatting for multiple viewing devices, I've never touched CSS, and my budget for fonts or professional advice is pretty much zero.

Does anyone reading this know where I can find evidence that any changes I could make to my preliminary formatting would do any better than what I already have?

This seems like an obvious enough thought experiment there is probably a literature on it, but I have not found any: how much vacation would it be ethical for a superhero to take? The kneejerk reaction seems to be first none. Assuming even one life saved per hour, he'd be "killing" a handful of people even going on a date (beyond or assuming away a bare psychological minimum for sanity or cetera). The next kneejerk reaction is that the first one is nuts. Thoughts/references?

And despite involving superheroes, I am seriously interested.

I've been reading studies on interventions to improve mood.

It seems worth taking seriously the possibility that we live in a world in which all single interventions have small to tiny effect sizes, and that, once we've removed factors known to have large negative impact, the mutable difference between people with mostly good mood and people with poorer mood comes down to a huge number of these small differences.

Some forms of therapy resemble this (examining a bunch of different thought patterns in CBT). Some studies claim to examine "lifestyle changes", but they often do it in a really lackluster and low-compliance way, such as "we gave this group of depressed people a pamphlet with 50 things they should change about their lives, and compared them to the group we aggressively tracked and encourage to exercise daily".

Since we have good evidence for small positive effect sizes for a bunch of different things, I'd love to see good evidence on how those effect sizes combine. But I can't find this research.

Any thoughts? Pointers?

A question regarding polls: I have used the polls feature quite a bit now and I got the feeling that many more people vote on the poll options than on the poll comment. Given that there mostly is an option "just show me" which could be taken to interpreted as "I don't care about this poll but want to satisfy my curiosity" we could estimate the number of people who like the poll. Shouldn't these also up-vote the poll-comment as a whole? Is it just lazyness to not up-vote or is there same higher standard for LW comments than I think?

Has the activity on LessWrong changed since Spring (see this post])?

[pollid:779]

Where 'before' refers to the time in spring when this was on topic. And the middle option refers to the state at that time.

Random thought.

So, minor changes in designs of things sometimes result in better versions of things. You then build those things, and make minor design changes there. Repeat. Eventually you often get a version of a thing that no longer sees improvement from minor change.

"Global maximum!" declares a PhD biologist at a good university.

How common is this defect?

Criticize the following idea at will: let's see if there's a nugget of truth in it or if it busts under its own weight.

Moral progress can be modeled as the strengthening of a society memetic immune system.

Two extreme cases to illustrate this: a society where the power is held by an elite with very strict and very uniform moral code. In that case, any stray meme will likely be in conflict with the elite's memeplex, and so it poses a threat to the society itself. The immune system is very weak, the society is very oppressive. Another case: a society where power is distributed or the elite derives its command from other means than a very tight set of ideas: in this case, not many memes will undermine society stability, its immune system is much stronger, the society is more tolerant and progressive.

Anyone have general thoughts on distributed computing/grid computing projects? Any in the following list interest you? Any in the following list appear to be a waste of resources?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects

I'm Giving Away Money!

I recently posted about a writing wager I have developed for myself and a group of friends. The wager is simple: everyone chooses a charity and writes a novel. Finish the novel: donate to your charity. Give up or go a month without progress: donate to another charity (we have yet to decide whether it should be one charity or all three other charities).

I plan to choose an effective charity, however I am still in the decision process. So, here's you're chance to influence who gets money: tell me who I should donate to.

I'd like to hear any suggestions for the most effective charity you know. Support your choice as much or as little as you wish, I'll still be making the final decision. Interpret the word "effective" as you wish. The point is, tell me who you think I should give money to.

Why is Quixey associated with rationalism? From its website it doesn't seem different from any of many other startups.

Question: Say someone dramatically increased the rate at which humans can learn mathematics (over, say, the Internet). Assume also that an intelligence explosion is likely to occur in the next century, it will be a singleton, and the way it is constructed determines the future for earth-originating life. Does the increase in math learning ability make that intelligence explosion more or less likely to be friendly?

Responses I've heard to questions of the form, "Does solving problem X help or hinder safe AGI vs. unsafe AGI?":

1. Improvements in rationality help safe AI, because sufficiently rational humans usually become unlikely to create unsafe AI. Most other improvements are a wash, because they help safe AI and unsafe AI equally.

2. Almost any improvement in productivity will slightly help safe AI, because more productive humans have more unconstrained time (i.e. time not spent paying the bills). Humans tend to do more good things and move towards rationality in their less constrained time, so increasing that time is a net win.

Not sure how I feel about these responses. But neither of them directly answers the question about math.

One answer would be that improving higher math education would be a net win because safe AI will definitely require hard math, whereas improving all math education would be a net loss because, like Moore's Law, it would increase cognitive resources across the board, pushing the timeline further up. Note that if we ignore network effects (researchers talking to researchers, convincing them to not work on unsafe AI), the question becomes: Is the effect of improving X more like shifting the timeline forward by Y years, as in increasing computing power, or is it more like stretching the timeline by some linear factor, as in increasing human productivity? Thoughts?

Umm, would anybody here have invites for torrent trackers for textbooks (e.g. BitMe, The Geeks, Bibliotik)? PM me.

Cryonics and transhumanism are laughably irrational. Guess that's what happens with a cult based on a Harry Potter fanfiction by a dropout