Open thread, Sept. 29 - Oct.5, 2014

It seems like the rate of friendly-fire casualties might be less when fighting a real enemy. (Super-crude toy model: soldier fire randomly at whoever they see. If no one is on the island apart from the attackers, then those are all going to turn into friendly fire cases. If most of the people on the island are the ones you're trying to attack, then they're going to sustain most of those casualties.)

We can know that other amphibious assaults probably had lower or neglible friendly fire rates, because some other landings (some opposed) had absolutely lower rates of casulaties- e.g here, here, and here.

If the landing had been peaceful & uneventful, perhaps we wouldn't have heard about it. So there might be a selection effect.

What did you cut?

Tim Ferriss talks about this in the Four Hour Work Week, he calls it the "information diet". Since I read it, I pretty much stopped listening to all news.

I've tried a similar tack, and I was also worried about "narrowing".

It may be helpful to explicity note that "informative" is meaningful relative to your current set of beliefs. There are high-quality sources that I love and would recommend, but that I try not to spend much time on because the content is so close to my viewpoints that I get very little "information" out of it, even if it information-dense in an quasi-objective sense.

Society as a whole benefits from an informed public. Some news isn't really informative, but some is. The levels of wealth across countries strongly associate with their political systems and the level of really terrible stuff that happens correlates with how knowledgeable / active people are. Now correlation isn't causation, but consider that there could be a link.

If so, then you as an individual could benefit from being less informed. You could also privately benefit from not voting. Or you could benefit from cheating on taxes in a difficult to detect way, or littering instead of carrying garbage and looking for a trash can. Someone can always privately benefit from defecting in a prisoners dilemma or participating in a tragedy of the commons. An informed public is a public good.

The take away isn't don't cut news reading. A lot of news is of no value to you or anyone else, but at least some news is probably of negative value to you personally but socially positive. So when cutting a subject, at least briefly consider what would happen to the commons if all informed people didn't read it.

Depends if you are reading for usefulness or the experience. I don't necessarily learn much from tumblr/twitter/facebook but I tend to enjoy it, especially when I lack the mental energy for other stuff.

Here is what Bostrom himself says about this analogy:

Perhaps the closest existing analog to a rule set that could govern the actions of a superintelligence operating in the world at large is a legal system. But legal systems have developed through a long process of trial and error, and they regulate relaltively slow-changing human societies. Laws can be revised when necessary. Most importantly, legal systems are administered by judges and juries who generally apply a measure of common sense and human decency to ignore logically possible legal interpretations that are suffciently obviously unwanted and unintended by the lawgivers. It is probably humanly impossible to explicitly formulate a highly complex set of detailed rules, have them apply across a highly diverse set of circumstances, and get it right on the first implemntation.

Superintelligence, p. 139.

This is great, thanks! I always always said that if you are worried about FAI, you should look into what people do with unfriendly non-human agents running around today. I am glad constitutional law people have looked into this.

Here's a salient MOOC that's just started on political and legal philosophy, which I'm dipping in and out of for non-FAI reasons.

Might it benefit AI theorists to learn political science?

Political science, the art of manipulating humans for power and profit..?

Also, where would we send them? I think that if we're going to do any kind of outreach we should set up a good subsidiary forum, to try and minimize Eternal September effects.

(As a model, the HPMoR subreddit seems to be something like this (albeit with a narrower focus) for a lot of people. The Less Wrong Lounge or something, maybe?)

At the moment I don't think we have good answers for the core questions. Good reasoning is hard. Pretending that it's possible by following a few quick fixes might make it easier to reach more people but it brings in people who don't belong.

Well, firstly, I'd start handing out copies of Good and Real, because the kinds of people who join LW largely have the same big-picture questions in our heads as everyone else.

This reporter (Ross Andersen) also wrote a piece on Bostrom. So I'm gonna guess that it's not about Elon Musk getting things through Ross, but rather Ross writing what he wanted to write. In short, yay Ross Andersen.

Some clusters that seem related but not much discussed on LW:

• The "aspiring Mentat" cluster, which includes the entire mnemonics subculture, various brain-training groups, the mental math subculture, and some parts of the magic tricks / mentalism subculture and professional gambling subculture. Some weirder parts are the lucid dreaming groups, the hypnosis groups, and the tulpamancy groups. Slightly overlapping subcultures are those around various games, e.g. chess and speed-solving of Rubik's cubes. For an example, see the book Mind Performance Hacks, or the Mentat Wiki. This overlaps with some very obscure Russian inventions, such as the TRIZ system of innovation, the theory of "psychonetics", and the Trachtenberg system of speed mathematics. There's also some overlaps with conlang subculture, such as Ithkuil and Lojban.

• The "aspiring Ubermenschen" cluster. Some names that come to mind as prototypical: Tim Ferriss, Jason Shen, Sebastian Marshall. This is a part of the larger productivity culture, which includes e.g. Cal Newport, the GTD people, etc. They tend to monetize their writings, for obvious reasons. There's a spectrum here from the saner groups to the more woo-ful, e.g. Steve Pavlina. This overlaps with a "drugs for self-improvement" subculture, which includes various nootropics groups, and parts of the steroid subculture. Also overlaps with the self-tracking / quantified self subculture.

• The "outlandish schemes to improve the world" cluster, which includes e.g. Esperanto, veg*anism, the writings of Buckminster Fuller, various anti-nationalism movements, etc. (Veg*anism definitely correlates with Esperanto, for instance. Of course, a lot of veg*ans don't engage in the rest of this cluster.) Overlaps with more woo-ish things like various forms of non-theistic spirituality.

Some others:

• The psychoactive drug subculture.

• The cypherpunk subculture. "Hacker" culture in general is very close to LW memespace.

• The manosphere.

Also groups associated with various professions, such as tech people, econ people, and math people.

It may be worth clarifying that "cluster" here is (I take it) intended to have roughly the same meaning as in the old OB post The correct contrarian cluster, meaning something like "set of somewhat-related ideas". So mushroom is, I think, asking whether there are ways of looking at the world, or (so to speak) toolboxes for thinking, that aren't already familiar to most of the LW readership but might be useful.

(mushroom, please correct me if I've got it wrong.)

I seem to be missing some context for this. Taboo cluster?

What do you mean? Topics of interest to this community that have not been talked about yet?

Please use a backslash like so: \* for the asterisks; as it is your comment is very irritating to read. Edit: Much appreciated :)

Well, to a large extent it is indeed true that you shouldn't trust people who disagree with things you think obvious. So there's a sort of "conservation of smartness" going on, whereby you need to be smart already in order to collect a few "obvious" beliefs that you can then use as your litmus test. So for that person, if they really do think veg*nism is obvious, they might be "doing the best they can" in rejecting LW for that.

FWIW, I'm not a vegan anymore, but I'd agree that any attempt to "minimize total suffering" would have to include not eating meat, ceteris paribus. So anyone who claims to have that goal but still eats meat is either a liar, or suffering from some sort of "intra-self disagreement", or they believe ceteris is not paribus (e.g. "eating meat somehow lets me work harder on saving the world"), or they're uninformed. (Or something else.)

Protip: type '\*' to make a '*' symbol without LW thinking you want italics.

this reminds me a lot of people who read about utilitarianism and conclude that they are evil monsters if they ever buy a starbucks latte instead of spending that 3 dollars on mosquito nets.

It’s amazing how quickly you spot the flaws in a community once you stop thinking of yourself as a part of it.

Yeah, that's the amazing thing called Confirmation Bias.

Hmmm... that is, more or less, how I've always thought about anticapitalism.

What's the probability you put on cryonics actually working well enough to resurrect the deceased under scenarios of: medicine of 10 years from now, medicine of 20 years from now, just go ahead and assume a Friendly superintelligence?

Thanks-- I hadn't heard of exemplar theory.

I don't have an answer, but I would like to second this request.

Not being able to form certain kinds of habits sounds plausible to me. When I stopped wearing retainers it was as though I had never had them. I never even thought about putting them in again.

Not having habits sounds a bit impossible to me. A habit is just a way of doing things consistently and without thinking about it. For example, you probably button your shirt up the same way every time. You probably have some quirks in how you walk or sit that you couldn't get rid of easily. If you play an instrument, you almost certainly have habits in how you play notes and phrases that would take time to relearn. Have you done any public speaking training? If not, when you talk in front of an audience you probably use filler words like "and, so, um, like" and it usually takes time to get rid of those. Do you not do any of these things?

It seems to me that a habit must be a bit more complex than Anki reviews or fixing Soylent to notice the difference in reduced cognitive load. Habits dying easily sounds pretty normal to me unless they're intrinsically fun or there's a strong immediate incentive.

I've had a slightly different kind of problem with habits. Since I started working full time it seems I can't form or maintain habits outside of work. My free time has become quite chaotic. I still get some things done but it seems never the same way or the same order. My work has become quite habitual and I don't have to put effort into thinking about what to do next most of the time. The difference in cognitive load is huge, I used to be exhausted every day after work and now my energy levels are just fine.

Do you have any habits? How did you form them? Do you think you could deliberately form a bad habit?

I think the success rate for most attempts at self-initiated personal change is poor, (think New Years resolutions, quitting smoking), although the expected value from trying is often still good. Despite this, the habit model seems to describe most people quite well: The levers you can pull are less powerful than the levers you can't (or won't).

I've had good luck with the very behaviorist "habit formation is learning a cue-behavior-outcome relationship" model of thinking about habits. Is there a cue (to deploy the learned response)? Is there an outcome that reinforces the behavior?

I've had some habits stick and not stick, and the ones that stuck had "more going for them" than just being repeated every day.

Anki is structured in a way that it doesn't ask you the same questions today that it asks you yesterday. That makes habit building harder.

When it comes to habit building, the structure also matters. If you do 20 minutes Anki every day after waking up that's more likely to become a stable habit than when you do it at random times each day.

To add a random data point I have a similar experience. I've found setting dailies on habitrpg helps a bit.

Assume there's a threshold at which sending the ship for repairs is morally obligatory (if we're utilitarians, that is the point at which the cost of the repairs is less than the probability*expected cost of the ship sinking, taking into account the lives aboard, but the threshold needn't be utilitarian for this to work.)

Let's say that the threshold is 5% - if there's more than a 5% chance the ship will go down, you should get it repaired.

Mr. Grumpy's thought process seems to be 'I alieve that my ship will sink, but this alief is harmful and I should avoid it'. He is morally justified in quelling his nightmares, but he'd be morally unjustified if in doing so he rationalized away his belief 'there's a 10% chance my ship will sink' to arrive at 'there's a 3% chance my ship will sink' and thereby did not do the repairs.

Likewise, it's great that Mr. Happy doesn't want to worry, but if you asked him to bet on the ship going down, what odds would he demand? If he thinks that the probability of his ship going down is greater than 5%, then he should have gotten it refitted. If he knows he has a bias toward neglecting negative events, and he knows that his estimate of 1% is probably the result of rationalization rather than reasoning, he should get someone else to estimate or he should correct his estimate for this known bias of his.

Mr. Doc looks at this probability and deems it acceptable (so, presumably, below our action threshold). He is not guilty of anything.

Wow, I wasn't expecting such varied responses haha. I've always just read it as an acronym. A.I.X.I, or "ay-eye-eks-eye"

The literal reading would be A-I-ksi or A-I-zai, said aye-eye-ksee or aye-eye-zai, because AI is standing for Artificial Intelligence and XI is the greek letter. But yeah, I just avoid mentioning it by name :)

Axe-ee.

(But I habitually drop syllables, unless I think about it actively, hence thinking arby-shop for archbishop for a really long time)

Wikipedia gives /'ai̯k͡siː/, which would be like Ike-See.

A-I-eksai is how it reads in my head, although I don't think I have said it out loud before while in conversation.

Aye-kzee.

ache-sigh

Ay-eye-zai, although I don't think I've ever said the word aloud.

I would naturally say ikes-hee, but I believe it's supposed to be ay-eye-zy (or maybe ay-eye-kzy)?

I think the anagram-of-your-name thing works better if you're called Scott Alexander than if you're called Viliam Bur.

If I'm interpreting the Perseus output correctly, "librum" is OK as genitive plural of "liber" whose main meaning is "book" -- though the usual form would be "librorum". A blog title that means "the way of books" sounds workable.

I suspect most of your readers will be more familiar with another meaning for "vim". Someone whose interests are just the right combination of geeky and literary might like "Vim Burial" as a title, but I'm thinking that if that were you you'd have said so already.

There are some other interesting words containing in your name's letters -- brumal, Malibu, lumbar, album -- but none of them seems to lead to a coherent phrase.

"Viliam Bur's Blog" opens up a lot of options, including Bug Limbo Rivals, Bogus Viral Limb, and Orb's Vigil Album. If you're a fan of Virgil you could work his name in there.

I think Via Librum is the best, and the phrase seems to occur in actual Latin. However, it is already in use which may or may not be a problem for you.

I think I got it. First I tried some combinations in Esperanto, and was very close to a nice result of "vibrating light," but the available vowels didn't help me get the suffixes right.

So I tried something different. Taking the letters I and V to stand for the Roman numeral four, I arrived at this:

aim4blur

Meaning, "point your attention towards things unclear," the unstated next action being, "shoot."

Burial Vim

In unix-ish circles "vim" is the name of a text editor. If you want to bury vim, you're probably a fan of emacs X-)

Virial Bum?

R.V. Bulimia?

I, Viral Bum?

Rum Alibi V? (This is my favourite one.)

Bim Vu, Liar (and then you'd use Bim Vu as your pen name)?

(Brought to you by an.)

So far I've only been able to get VR Bulimia, I am I.V. blur, Lumbar VII, and Evil rumba (changing one letter but keeping the same sound).

Have you checked whether it gives a viable anagram in your native language?

You could try to add "I am" or "The" to your name and look what the anagram generator spits out then.

Mail Rub IV :-)

I recommend asking on http://ozymandias271.tumblr.com/ you can ask anonymously without having a tumblr account, and Ozy knows everything,

The forum emptyclosets.com could be helpful for you.

Robin Hanson claims aside, some people want to make the world a better place. If someone is always cynical they will often be wrong about things like this (though to be fair they'd probably do well on average)

Anger is an evolved adaptation for pre-commitment. Protesters may not be performing a cost-benefit.

I think you're overestimating the risks they face.

Something like "safety in numbers" effect, as, I would guess, (after some threshold that provokes government's action (maybe not before)) the greater the number of protesters, the lesser average danger an individual faces (as the perimeter (i.e. the most dangerous place) of the geometric shape of the crowd probably grows slower than the area (the number of them)). Furthermore, the bigger the crowd, the harder it is to track their identities, and they might also expect that the government might be unwilling to punish all of them (rather than just the leaders and a small number of others). In addition to that, the greater proportion of population joins these protests, the greater peer pressure for others to join as well. I would guess that once the most risking taking individuals start everything, it becomes easier for others, who support them, but wouldn't start the protest themselves.

Protesting can be an end in itself; political action can be self-actualizing.

There's a whole mythologized tradition of protest. It's also an intense social activity.

Also you are likely to treat differently negative consequences that you expect, but consider to be unjustly imposed by others. Again, defying these consequences and those who impose them is a powerful end.

Perhaps they don't overcome them very well; maybe the optimal number of protesters is much higher than the actual number, but a lot of would-be protesters stay home.

Is this a case of irrationality giving the protesters an advantage, or are there private gains for the protesters?

I think it's mostly the former ("fuck it" is an awesome superpower), but some protesters probably have gains in terms of status and reputation. Plus the leaders might be making a bet that if mainland China decides to throw some carrots at them, they'll be in a good position to grab them.

Why do people join the military?

This sounds like presenting an argument for a thing from shared premises - the most ordinary form of trying to convince someone.

Reminds me of tricks used by a great many advertisements, if you replace premises/beliefs with desires.

(E.g. "You desire status/security/sex/pleasure etc., don't you? Then you should desire our product.")

Interestingly enough, a similar distinction has been made in Nichiren Buddhism: they talk about shakubuku and shoju, which share similiarities with the Socratic method (the aggressive way) and what you call Socratic Judo (the persuasive way).

Reminds me of Geek Fu. I wonder whether Socratic Judo is a special school of Geek Fu.

See also Roles are Martial Arts for Agency.

That might be interesting, but it is unlikely to get much support here because it smacks of Dark Arts.

Post 1 (http://habitua.net/how-to-use-rewards-to-defeat-procrastination/) : What's the goal of this post? I don't think it's wrong but I can't see the intention behind it.

The post about advertising also seems to lack a clear goal.

I liked this short story on that topic, which I believe was written by Yvain: http://raikoth.net/Stuff/story1.html

"They exist but we don't have the tech to detect them"?

Theories other than "Deliberately Hiding";

Colonizing the galaxy is a crazy thing to do take one: Informational / economic network effects and the absolute lightspeed limit make advanced civilizations quite extremely reluctant to spread out - Civilizations of billions that have collapsed into single hive-cities / computational structures. This is, strictly speaking a variation on hiding, except that the stealth isn't the point, it is a side effect. Colonizing other star systems means dooming yourself to abject cultural, social and material poverty because it means leaving reach of the technological and social engines of home. So it doesn't happen, and when it does, the decendants of the original fanatics back-migrate back to the origin system because fuck that noise.

Take 2: "There are expansionist outlets much easier and faster than interstellar space travel. Brane hopping, timeline gates, dyson swarming..

Weird : Advanced civilizations employ the anthropic principle in engineering - which winnows their very existence out of most timelines. So all civilizations encounter empty universes in the bulk of their world-lines.

I know someone who works in the library (and am checking to see if she'd be willing to chat with you!) Having some familiarity with Duke, though, my general impression is that the library system is huge and who/what is relevant would be dependent on what you're applying for.

I also know a librarian who's recently moved from NCSU to UNC, if you find any jobs to apply for there and want intel :)

Editor of what? Fiction, technical writing, college essays, ...?

When will this occur by? Without a date it isn't a proper prediction (unless you are merely saying this will occur sometime before the heat death of the universe). Also, "take the place of" is vague. This could mean anything from curated knowledge bases going completely extinct to merely making up less of the market than their NLP counterparts. In addition, what of hybrids that rely on both?

It doesn't say so on their website, but Evi reads wikipedia (with mixed results)

To give an example of what I mean here, imagine you are a computer learning agent hooked up to the Google NGram API. You come across an unknown word "Montana". You guess from syntactic context that "Montana" is a geographic region. Now you search for the trigrams "governor of Montana" and "mayor of Montana". The latter gets zero hits, while the former gets many, so you conclude "Montana" is a state.

Doesn't Cyc alread do that?

While this is by no means an unconventional suggestion, I would consider putting it in an index fund. The fees are very low and barring societal collapse, your money will grow in the long-term without you having to do much of anything about it.

At a more meta level, the boring, conventional choice is generally the best one unless you have a compelling reason to believe otherwise.

Give it to a trusted creative acquaintance and ask for a surprise gift every few months, no expectations or judgment, until the money runs out. If this is an imposition, tell her she can keep some of it.

If 3000 dollars is significant portion of your net worth I'd personally just keep it in cash (ie in a bank account) for the liquidity.

Fund a kickstarter project you find interesting and promising.

“I spent some on liquor, some on women and the rest I spent foolishly.” -- Unknown

Peer-to-peer lending?

We don't really know enough about you to give direct recommendations, but a significant portion of lesswrong is dedicated to better decision making.

Make a quick 2-4 item list of your goals, what actually matters to you right now. Now use the six hat method goal by goal to find out if that lump sum will significantly help you achieve any of those goals. Should nothing past muster, offload some decision fatigue and drop it in a fire and forget savings account/RRSP.

4+ years? Bitcoin.

Donate it to Make A Wish Foundation for warm fuzzies. Make it public or start a chain spam on your FB page for extra points. Optimized for local unorthodoxy. I don't know your values.

Personally, I'd spend the money the same way as if I had earned it gradually.

As far as learning goes, you can't learn two things at the same time. The hour you spent learning Russian can't be spent learning mathematics. Don't put background Russian radio on while you learn mathematics. It will distract you from learning math.

You can learn a language in small intervals while you are on the go. Completing a Duolingo Session while you ride the bus is easy. Doing math while you ride the bus isn't.

The second thing that takes time is memory interference. If you do Anki don't learn 6 new Russian animal names at the same time. Duolingo get's this very wrong...

Learning 6 animal names at once is much harder than learning 1 at a week at a time. I think outside of SRS books are written the way that the introduce multiple items of the same class because while the makes learning harder, hard learning decreases long term forgetting a bit.

I don't think there meaningful interference between learning Russian and math.

There are several native Russian speakers frequenting this forum who would probably summarize a link for you better than google translate. In case it makes your life easier.

As for the language vs math pools, my experience is that they are unconnected, except for the obvious bottleneck of having to divide your finite learning time between them. However, if you are learning, say, 3rd language, then your 2nd language will temporarily suffer unless you keep practicing it. This only applies to spoken, not written language skills, which are unaffected or may even benefit.

Machine learning. More speculatively, approximations to solomonoff induction.

To implement Bayes' Theorem, the prior of something must be known

Not quite the way I'd put it. If you know the exact prior for the unique event you're predicting, you already know the posterior. All you need is a non-pathologically-terrible prior, although better ones will get you to a good prediction with fewer observations.

but for real-life cases, how could accurate estimates of P(A|X) be obtained?

In order of (decreasing) reliability: through science, through expert consensus, through crowd-sourcing, through personal estimates.

but what exactly IS a world-model?

Simply the set of sentences or events declared true. For a world-model to be useful those sentences are better to be relevant, that is, can be used to derive probabilities of the questions at hand.

Machine learning can sorta do this, with human guidance. For instance, if we want to predict whether an animal is a dog or an elephant given its weight and its height, we could find a training set (containing a bunch of dogs and a bunch of elephants) and then fit 2 2-variate lognormal distributions to this training set - one for the dogs, and one for the elephants. (Using some sort of gradient descent, say). Then P(weight=w, height=h | species=s) is just the probability density at the point (w, h) on the distribution for species s. Search term: "generative model".

And in this context a world-model might be a joint distribution over, say, all triples (weight, height, label). Though IRL there's too much stuff in the world for us to just hold a joint distribution over everything in our heads, we have to make do with something between a Bayes net and a big ball of adhockery.

Hmm.

ROT13: V unir ab vqrn ubj zhpu jngre'f va gur nirentr qebcyrg, ohg gurl ybbx nobhg unys n pz npebff, fb yrg'f onyycnex vg nf n gragu bs n pp. Gubhfnaq PPf gb n yvgre, fb gra gubhfnaq qebcyrgf va bar. 86400 frpbaqf va n qnl, fb n snhprg qevccvat ng n qebc n frpbaq (cerggl snfg) vf jnfgvat nebhaq 10 yvgref n qnl, naq bar qevccvat ng n qebc rirel 10 frpbaqf (zber glcvpny sebz jung V erzrzore) vf jnfgvat nobhg n yvgre n qnl. Cerggl ybj rvgure jnl, pbzcnerq gb jung lbh'er fcraqvat ba fubjref, qvfujnfuvat, rgp.

That about what you came up with?

I had this meme roaming around my mind ever since I was a child that a dripping faucet is a major waste of water

Fun fact: when I was a child, instead of being afraid of the dark, I was afraid of the light.
I thought that the lamp that my mother left switched on would just consume too much and the electric bill would send us under a bridge. I could only sleep by pretending that I was asleep, so my mother would leave and I could swiftly switch off the light bulb.

Mindhacks was good.

Alternately, get used to reading textbooks - it really is pretty great.

I would recommend http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/. I find the community interaction conductive to learning.

In all the substantial programming projects I've undertaken, what I think of the language itself has never been a consideration.

One of these projects needed to run (client-side) in any web browser, so (at that time) it had to be written in Java.

Another project had to run an a library embedded in software developed by other people and also standalone at the command line. I wrote it in C++ (after an ill-considered first attempt to write it in Perl), mainly because it was a language I knew and performance was an essential requirement, ruling out Java (at that time).

My current employment is developing a tool for biologists to use; they all use Matlab, so it's written in Matlab, a language for which I even have a file somewhere called "Reasons I hate Matlab".

If I want to write an app to run on OSX or iOS, the choices are limited to what Apple supports, which as far as I know is Objective C, C++, or (very recently) Swift.

For quick pieces of text processing I use Perl, because that happens to be the language I know that's most suited to doing that. I'm sure Python would do just as well, but knowing Perl, I don't need Python, and I don't care about the Perl/Python wars.

A curious thing is that while I've been familiar with functional languages and their mathematical basis for at least 35 years, I've never had occasion to write anything but toy programs in any of them.

The question I always ask myself about a whizzy new language is, "Can this be used to write an interactive app for [pick your intended platform] and have it be indistinguishable in look and feel from any app written in whatever the usual language is for that platform?" Unless the answer is yes, I won't take much interest.

A programming language, properly considered, is a medium for thinking about computation. I might be a better programmer for knowing the functional or the object-oriented ways of thinking about computation, but in the end I have to express my thoughts in a language that is available in the practical context.

I don't know that I have a "favorite" programming language.

What I use for getting everyday things done: Python, with a bit of shellscript for the really quick things. Why? Because I know it well. I learned Python years ago because it had libraries I needed, kept using it because it got the job done, and then worked for many years at an employer where it was one of the Officially Approved Languages.

What I mess around with, when I'm messing around with code recreationally: currently Elm. Why? Because functional reactive programming is a freaking awesome idea, and Elm makes it actually make sense. Also, whereas Python supports antigravity out of the box, Elm supports time travel.

What I would use if I needed to write code that would run fast and handle user traffic: Go. Why? Because it is efficient, safe (from buffer overflows and the like), and makes concurrency really easy. There's not really any such thing as high-performance code without concurrency these days. Safety matters a lot, too — the last project I wrote in Go was an SSH honeypot to log the usernames and passwords that attackers try. It helps that Go code is clear enough that I could actually read enough of the crypto libraries to have confidence that I wasn't going to regret it.

Other languages I like for one reason or another: Haskell and Lisp, for expressing two deeply contrary ideals on what programming is.

I fear this post is kind of too open-ended and prone to language wars. I suggest a poll instead or a somewhat more focussed question.

Python for casual stuff -- it's powerful, the code doesn't become incomprehensible 6 months (or 6 hours) after writing it, and the design is coherent enough that returning to it after a short period of disuse doesn't involve too much painful swapping everything back into memory. Main downside: the usual Python implementation is really slow. (For some categories of calculation-intensive task, Numpy mitigates this. It's not too hard to extend Python in C or C++. There's an implementation of Python called PyPy that runs some code much faster, but is much more memory-hungry.)

I tend to say that Common Lisp is my overall favourite programming language, but I've written hardly any in the last decade or so. Admittedly that's mostly because in the last decade or so most of my programming has been done at work where language choice is usually determined by factors other than my general preferences. CL's pretty nice, though: it has roughly the usual set of useful datatypes found in modern languages, is highly extensible both syntactically and semantically (via "reader macros" and ordinary macros; C users should note that CL's macros are not at all like C's), has a reasonably capable standard library, and can be made to run pretty fast despite being dynamically typed. Downsides: the syntax is a bit clunky in some respects (e.g., there are hash-tables but no literal syntax for making them), some kinds of genericity we're used to nowadays -- e.g., being able to use the same code to do standard things to anything that "behaves like a sequence" -- aren't there, and because it's not a popular language nowadays there's much less chance that someone's already solved 90% of your problem than there is in, say, Python or Ruby or even C++.

I retain a soft spot for good ol' C, but reluctantly concede that these days you generally want to be using C++ rather than C for really performance-critical work. But C++ is a very unlovable language. (Recent versions have made a lot of things nicer, if you do things the "modern" way -- but most of the C++ code I deal with day to day has to run on very resource-limited embedded processors, which means we generally avoid a lot of the standard library, and has to be able to build with old compilers, which means a lot of those nicer friendlier features might as well not be there.) I have hopes that Rust may turn out to be a "better C++" but it's early days yet.

On the thankfully rare occasions when I need to write something Windows-GUI-ish, C# is actually a pretty good tool these days. In particular, LINQ is pretty cool (comparable to Python's comprehensions but uglier and more capable).

I still use Perl for exactly one purpose: one-liners in the shell for tasks just one notch up from what a single grep invocation will do.

For numeric stuff I regrettably tend to use MATLAB (which was well established at my current employer well before I got here). Python/Numpy would be a pretty good alternative -- as a programming language MATLAB is maybe one step above INTERCAL -- but isn't so convenient for interactive use, which is quite a big deal.

Things I have a constant sense of nagging guilt for not having looked at properly yet: Julia (might make a really good replacement for MATLAB/Python+Numpy), Haskell (clearly very powerful and elegant, and lots of language-theoretical stuff happens there), Go (clearly not in any way an interesting language, but for its niche -- pretty much anything you could call a "server" -- it seems well designed), Racket (seems like they've grown Scheme into something really capable, and maybe it should be taking CL's place in my heart).

I got tired of the lot of them, and set out to build my own. That was a rabbit hole.

I prefer to use Ruby when possible, though I switch to Python (with numpy) for more math-heavy applications. Ruby's ability to chain methods, syntactic sugar, and larger amount of built-in methods makes programming much more fun and efficient than Python, where I'm constantly going back a word to write a new method and enclose what I just wrote in parentheses, or counting parentheses/brackets, which I don't really seem to need to do in Ruby. Python is still much more enjoyable to program in than most other languages, but compared to Ruby, it feels like programming backwards. I also prefer to use Ruby/Rails for prototyping and web development.

Prefer:

• Scala (for large server-side programs). Static types and functional programming, with access to the Java ecosystem/libraries. Some of the more advanced type system features are too complex/abstract for my taste and the most popular build system, SBT, is horrific.
• Ruby (for quick scripts) . I have a slight aesthetic preference for it over Python but Python would probably be just as good.

Tolerate:

• Java. Kind of a lesser Scala but with very solid tool and framework support. Java 8 adds some decent functional features but it can still be pretty clunky and verbose.
• C#. Similar to Java (though I have little experience with it).

Dislike (based on little experience):

• C++. Too many arcane rules, too easy to screw up.
• Perl. Like Ruby or Python but with syntax that is much more complex and idiosyncratic for seemingly no benefit.

Mixed:

• Clojure. Some great features but I dislike dynamic typing for large projects and also dislike the Lisp syntax.
• Javascript. Appreciate the simplicity of the core "good parts" but is dynamically typed and I don't like the prototype-based object system.

Interested in:

• Rust. Seems like it could be a nicer language for the cases where C++ is warranted. Waiting for 1.0 to come out before trying.

My general rule of thumb is

if customer.dictates('specific language')
        use('specific language') # usually Java / PLSQL / .Net
else
        use('Python')
except error('too slow')
        use('C')

I love the simplicity and power of Python and will use it to prototype proof of concepts (not so much GUI work - would use HTML or .NET for that). For me, Python really makes programming a lot of fun again and though it is slower, I haven't yet had the need to shell out to C code though I expect I will soon.

I'm currently developing Autocad extensions, so I work routinely in AutoLisp, but pure Lisp implementations are at best outdated. So I was very interested when Clojure came out. Now that I'm tackling video-games with HTML5/CSS/JavaScript, ClojureScript might become a very interesting alternative.

I was also very fascinated by Scheme's call-with-current-continuations, so I'm hoping they will implement in Clojure.

Java; for web applications; because I have most experience in it and I also like statical typing.

successful attempt to establish a colony will most likely create society that blames Earth for their misery

That reveals a lot about where you stand on politics.

Sometimes, people mature and stop blaming others for their own shortsightedness. I don't recall the US ever blaming the UK for 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, or Jersey Shore.

On a more serious note, the Spanish colonies did fight a war against the Spanish Empire, but it was fought this side of the Atlantic, and it ended when the Spanish left. No Mexican warship has ever bombed the Iberian coastline, nor do they have a reason to do it.

Besides, there is more than one way to settle and run a colony. You can become a neglected corner of the Third World, like Spanish America, or a world superpower able to threaten and bully the rest of the world combined, like English America, or an ascending exemplar of soft power, like Portuguese America, or more or less good friends with the mother country, like French America, or never even become independent, like Dutch America. So motives for resentment are not easily predictable.

They will have both motive and means to nuke Earth for good

Having nuclear capability for self-sustenance does not equal having capability to build nuclear bombs. Also, you don't know whether the conditions on the planet will be favorable to a nuclear infrastructure: it's very different to settle a territory abundant in hydrothermal energy that doesn't even need nuclear plants (like Iceland), a territory prone to earthquakes where it should be obvious it's stupid to build a nuclear plant (like Japan), or a stable territory where nothing geologically notable ever happens (like Dubai).

The risk of pushing our colonies to nuke us out of spite vs. the risk of destroying ourselves at home before we've even reached the stars weighs strongly in favor of launching as many rockets as we physically can.

If history is any indication, separate cultures tend to end up fighting each other if they want the same resource. Whether space colonies end up in such a situation is unclear, but seems unlikely. There are also religious reasons one culture would try to convert or remove another, and that's a bigger worry. Hopefully establishing hundreds or thousands of colonies would mitigate this risk, since diversity tends to help to stave off extinction.

One character, a stereotypical math nerd and calculating prodigy named Sylvester, seems plausible to me because the high-end mathematicians tend to do their best work by their early 20's.

Do you have a citation for that claim?

I read the Wikipedia description (four male supertalented geniuses plus one female nerd plus one average waitress) and it sounded like a sequel to The Big Bang Theory.