Open thread, August 4 - 10, 2014

Great idea and nicely done! It also had the additional benefit of constituting my very first interaction with javascript because I needed to modify somethings. (Specifically, avoid the use of localStorage.)

This looks excellent.

I tried downloading it by clicking on "install the extension", but it doesn't seem to get to my browser (Chrome). Am I missing something?.

Thanks a million!

"To the very best of my abilities" seems excessive to me, or at least I seem to do reasonably well with "according to the amount of work I'm willing to put in, and based on pretty good habits".

I'm not even sure what I could do to improve my posting much. I could be more careful to not post when I'm tired or angry, and that probably makes sense to institute as a habit. On the other hand, that's getting rid of some of the dubious posting, which is not the same thing as improving the average or the best posts.

Given the recent discussion about how rituals can give the appearance of cultishness, it's probably not good time to bring that up at the moment ;)

Testing this...

Have other people had similar, disorganized correspondences with MIRI?

Yes.

Apparently, in the days leading up to the Effective Altruism Summit, there was a conference on Artificial Intelligence keeping the research associates out of town. The source is my friend interning at the MIRI right now. So, anyway they might have been even busier than you thought. I hope this has cleared up now.

Mathematical arguments happen all the time over whether 0.99999...=1 but I'm not sure if that's interesting enough to count for what you want.

I thought about this on & off over the last couple of days and came up with more candidates than you can shake a shitty stick at. Some of these are somewhat political or controversial, but I don't think any are reliable flame-war magnets. I expect some'll ring your cherries more than others, but since I can't tell which, I'll post 'em all and let you decide.

1. The answer to the Sleeping Beauty puzzle is obviously 1/2.

2. Rational behaviour, being rational, entails Pareto optimal results.

3. Food availability sets a hard limit on the number of kids people can have, so when people have more food they have more kids.

4. Truth is an absolute defence against a libel accusation.

5. If a statistical effect is so small that a sample of several thousand is insufficient to reliably observe it, the effect's too small to matter.

6. Controlling for an auxiliary variable, or matching on that variable, never worsens the bias of an estimate of a causal effect.

7. Human nature being as brutish as it is, most people are quite willing to be violent, and their attempts at violence are usually competent.

8. In the increasingly fast-paced and tightly connected United States, residential mobility is higher than ever.

9. The immediate cause of death from cancer is most often organ failure, due to infiltration or obstruction by spreading tumours.

10. Aumann's agreement theorem means rationalists may never agree to disagree.

11. Friction, being a form of dissipation, plays no role in explaining how wings generate lift.

12. Seasons occur because Earth's distance from the Sun changes during Earth's annual orbit.

13. Beneficial mutations always evolve to fixation.

14. Multiple discovery is rare & anomalous.

15. The words "male" & "female" are cognates.

16. Given the rise of online piracy, the ridiculous cost of tickets, and the ever-growing convenience of other forms of entertainment, cinema box office receipts must be going down & down.

17. Looking at voting in an election from the perspective of timeless decision theory, my voting decision is probably correlated and indeed logically linked with that of thousands of people relatively likely to agree with my politics. This could raise the chance of my influencing an election above negligibility, and I should vote accordingly.

18. The countries with the highest female life expectancies are approaching a physiologically fixed hard limit of 65 — sorry, 70 — sorry, 80 — sorry, 85 years.

19. The answer to the Sleeping Beauty puzzle is obviously 1/3.

Language in general might be a rich source of these, between false etymologies, false cognates, false friends, and eggcorns.

That's a tall order. I'll try:

Noticing that people who are the best in any sport practice the most and concluding that being good at a sport is simply a matter of practice and determination. Tabula Rasa in general.

The supply-demand model of minimum wage? Is this political? I'm not saying minimum wage is good or bad, just that the supply-demand model can't settle the question yet people learning about economics tend to be easily convinced by the simple explanation.

That thermodynamics proves that weight loss + maintenance is simply a matter of diet and exercise (this is more Yudkowsky's fight than mine).

I doubt it is possible to find non-controversial examples of anything, and especially of things plausible enough to be believed by intelligent non-experts, outside of the hard sciences.

If this is true, the only plausible examples would be such as "an infinity cannot be larger than another infinity", "time flows uniformly regardless of the observer", "biological species have unchanging essences", and other intuitively plausible statements unquestionably contradicted by modern hard sciences.

Most drug new drugs fail clinical trials.

Intelligent people make theories about how a drug is supposed to work and think it would help to cure some illness. Then when the drug is brought into clinical trials more than 90% of new drugs still fail to live up to the theoretical promise that the drug held.

If a plane is on a conveyor belt going at the same speed in the opposite direction, will it take off?

I remember reading this in other places I don't remember, and it seems to inspire furious arguments despite being non-political and not very controversial.

If your twin's going away for 20 years to fly around space at close to the speed of light, they'll be 20 years older when they come back.

A spinning gyroscope, when pushed, will react in a way that makes sense.

If another nation can't do anything as well as your nation, there is no self-serving reason to trade with them.

You shouldn't bother switching in the Monty Hall problem

The sun moves across the sky because it's moving.

EDIT Corrected all statements to be false

beliefs that are incontrovertibly incorrect, but which intelligent people will nonetheless arrive at quite reasonably through armchair-theorising?

Would wrong scientific theories qualify? E.g. phlogiston or aether.

Downwind faster than the wind. See seven pages of posts here for examples of people getting it wrong.

Kant was famously wrong when he claimed that space had to be flat.

This isn't very interesting, but I used to believe that the rules about checkmate didn't really change the nature of chess. Some of the forbidden moves - moving into check, or failing to move out if possible - are always a mistake, so if you just played until someone captured the king, the game would only be different in cases where someone made an obvious mistake.

But if you can't move, the game ends in stalemate. So forbidding you to move into check means that some games end in draws, where capture-the-king would have a victor.

(This is still armchair theorising on my part.)

Does it have to be something from the modern day? Because there are tons of historical examples.

Bell's spaceship paradox.

According to Bell, he surveyed his colleagues at CERN (clearly a group of intelligent, qualified people) about this question, and most of them got it wrong. Although, to be fair, the conflict here is not between expert reasoning and domain knowledge, since the physicists at CERN presumably possessed all the knowledge you need (basic special relativity, really) to get the right answer.

When I was ~16, I came up with group selection to explain traits like altruism.

Generalising from 'plane on a treadmill'; a lot of incorrect answers to physics problems and misconceptions of physics in general. For any given problem or phenomenon, one can guess a hundred different fake explanations, numbers, or outcomes using different combinations of passwords like 'because of Newton's Nth law', 'because of drag', 'because of air resistance', 'but this is unphysical so it must be false' etc. For the vast majority of people, the only way to narrow down which explanations could be correct is to already know the answer or perform physical experiments, since most people don't have a good enough physical intuition to know in advance what types of physical arguments go through, so should be in a state of epistemic learned helplessness with respect to physics.

The sun revolves around the earth.

How about "human beings only use 10% of their brains"? Not political, not flamebait, but possibly also "a lot of people say it and sounds plausible" rather than armchair theorizing. "Everyone should drink eight glasses of water a day" is probably in the same category.

Perhaps "The person who came out of the teleporter isn't me, because he's not made of the same atoms"?

Why not also spend an equally amount of time searching for examples that prove the opposite of the point you're trying to make? Or are you speaking to an audience that doesn't agree this is possible in principle?

Edit: Might Newtonian physics be an example?

Given that most of the important scientific papers are in English there already a gap between people who can speak English and people who don't. I don't think that you can get a good position in a Western business these days if you can't speak any English.

things like time, motivation, and availability of learning material are now more important.

And ability to learn.

Could this spark a significant education gap between English speakers and non-speakers?

The greater the gap, the greater the incentive for non-speakers to narrow the gap by becoming speakers.

Caffeine's a strong drug for me, except I have a huge tolerance now because I consume so much coffee. One night a few years ago, after I had quit caffeine for about a month, I was picking away at a bag of chocolate almonds while doing homework, and after a few hours I noticed that I felt pretty much euphoric. So yeah, this is good info to have if you're trying to get off caffeine.

Besides caffeine, there's also theobromine.

a cup of black tea

FWIW, I did some reading of studies and it seems that kinds of tea vary too much in caffeine content for classifying by preparation method to be a meaningful indication of caffeine content, and there's some question about how l-theanine plays a role. It's probably better to say 'a cup of tea'.

100g of pure chocolate is a lot. I normally eat 25g of 85% chocolate. That's probably an upper bound on a typical serving, diluted by other ingredients. For people who do not otherwise consume caffeine, it's a powerful dose, but for people who drink coffee every morning, it's probably not much.

Added: 25g of pure chocolate has about 10mg of caffeine, about the same as 25g of liquid coffee.

For you to rule out a belief (e.g. geocentrism) as totally unbelievable, not only does it have to be less likely than insanity, it has to be less likely than insanity that looks like rational evidence for geocentrism.

You can test yourself for other symptoms of delusions - and one might think "but I can be deluded about those too," but you can think of it like requiring your insanity to be more and more specific and complicated, and therefore less likely.

The relevant number is probably not D (the fraction of people who suffer from delusions) but a smaller number D0 (the fraction of people who suffer from this particular kind of delusion). In fact, not D0 but the probably-larger-in-this-context number D1 (the fraction of people in situations like yours before this happened who suffer from the particular delusion in question).

On the other hand, something like the original D is also relevant: the fraction of people-like-you whose reasoning processes are disturbed in a way that would make you unable to evaluate the available evidence (including, e.g., your knowledge of D1) correctly.

Aside from those quibbles, some other things you can do (mostly already mentioned by others here):

• Talk to other people whom you consider sane and sensible and intelligent.
• Check your reasoning carefully. Pay particular attention to points about which you feel strong emotions.
• Look for other signs of delusions.
• Apply something resembling scientific method: look for explicitly checkable things that should be true if B and false if not-B, and check them.
• Be aware that in the end one really can't reliably distinguish delusions from not-delusions from the inside.

The simple answer is to ask someone else, or better yet a group; if D is small, then D^2 or D^4 will be infinitesimal. However, delusions are "infectious" (see Mass hysteria), so this is not really a good method unless you're mostly isolated from the main population.

The more complicated answer is to track your beliefs and the evidence for each belief, and then when you get new evidence for a belief, add it to the old evidence and re-evaluate. For example, replacing an old wives' tale with a peer-reviewed study is (usually) a no-brainer. On the other hand, if you have conflicting peer-reviewed studies, then your confidence in both should decrease and you should go back to the old wives' tale (which, being old, is probably useful as a belief, regardless of truth value).

Finally, the defeatist answer is that you can't actually distinguish that you are delusional. With the film Shutter Island in mind, I hope you can see that almost nothing is going to shake delusions; you'll just rationalize them away regardless. If you keep notes on your beliefs, you'll dismiss them as being written by someone else. People will either pander to your fantasy or be dismissed as crooks. Every day will be a new one, starting over from your deluded beliefs. In such a situation there's not much hope for change.

For the record, I disagree with "delusional disorders being quite rare"; I believe D is somewhere between 0.5 and 0.8. Certainly, only 3% of these are "serious", but I could fill a book with all of the ways people believe something that isn't true.

If I believe that a belief B has a < D chance of being true, and then I receive what I think is strong evidence supporting B, how can I distinguish the cases "B is true, despite my previous belief that it is quite unlikely" and "I have developed a delusional disorder, despite delusional disorders being quite rare"?

The basic idea is to talk about your belief in detail with a trusted friend that you consider sane.

Writing your own thought processes down in a diary also helps to be better able to evaluate it.

Why is this so?

Because the case where you are entirely wedded to a particular conclusion and want to just ignore the contrary evidence would look awfully similar...

This idea seems like a manifestation of epistemic learned helplessness.

I say things like this a lot in contexts where I know there are experts, but I have put no effort into learning which are the reliable ones. So when someone asserts something about (a) nutritional science (b) Biblical translation nuances (c) assorted other things in this category, I tend to say, "I really don't have the relevant background to evaluate your argument, and it's not a field I'm planning to do the legwork to understand very well."

Yet it is extremely rare to see LW folk or other rationalists say things like this. Why is this so?

In my experience there are LW people who would in such cases simply declare that they won't be convinced of the topic at hand and suggest to change the subject.

I particularly remember a conversation at the LW community camp about geopolitics where a person simply declared that they aren't able to evaluate arguments on the matter and therefore won't be convinced.

Because that ends the discussion. I think a lot of people around here just enjoy debating arguments (certainly I do).

I actually do say things like this pretty frequently, though I haven't had the opportunity to do so on LW yet.

A similar situation that used to happen frequently to me in real life, was when the argument was too long, too complex, used information that I couldn't verify... or ever could, but the verification would take a lot of time... something like: "There is this 1000 pages long book containing complex philosophical arguments and information from non-mainstream but cited sources, which totally proves that my religion is correct." And there is nothing obviously incorrect within the first five pages. But I am certainly not going to read it all. And the other person tries to use my self-image of an intelligent person against me, insisting that I should promise that I will read the whole book and then debate about it (which is supposedly the rational thing to do in such situation: hey, here is the evidence, you just refuse to look at it), or else I am not really intelligent.

And in such situations I just waved my hands and said -- well, I guess you just have to consider me unintelligent -- and went away.

I didn't think about how to formalize this properly. It was just this: I recognize the trap, and refuse to walk inside. If it happened to me these days, I could probably try explaining my reaction in Bayesian terms, but it would be still socially awkward. I mean, in the case of religion, the true answer would show that I believe my opponent is either dishonest or stupid (which is why I expect him to give me false arguments); which is not a nice thing to say to people. And yeah, it seems similar to ignoring evidence for irrational reasons.

Related link: Peter van Inwagen's article Is it wrong everywhere, always, and for everyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence?. van Inwagen suggests not, on the grounds that if it were then no philosopher could ever continue believing something firmly when there are other smarter equally well informed philosophers who strongly disagree. I find this argument less compelling than van Inwagen does.

I see the broad point Waytz is making, but the ranty delivery is pretty silly. Why is the doctor's act not selfless? It certainly appears to be motivated by altruism (even if that altruism is misguided, from a utilitarian perspective). Having a non-utilitarian moral code is not the same thing as selfishness.

Second, the anger in that comment seems to have more to do with a distaste for deontological altruistic gestures than anything else. I really doubt Waytz would be as mad if the doctor had simply decided that he had had enough of working in the medical profession and decided to open a bistro instead.

You might be interested in reading Gwern's page on Archiving URLs and Link Rot

Pages here are disappearing - someone's been going through the archive deleting posts they don't like. (c.f. [1] versus [2].) (The post is still slightly available, but the 152 comments are no longer associated with it.) So get archiving sooner rather than later.

I believe I had the opposite problem most of my life. I was taught to be humble, to never believe I am better than anyone else, et cetera. Nice political slogans, and probably I should publicly pretend to believe it. But there is a problem that I have a lot of data of people doing stupid things, and I need some explanation. And of course, if I forbid myself to use the potentially correct explanation, then I am pushing myself towards the incorrect ones.

Sometimes the problem is that I didn't understand something, so the seemingly stupid behavior wasn't actually stupid, it was me not understanding something. Yes, sometimes this happens, so it is reasonable to consider this hypothesis seriously. But oftentimes, even after careful exploration, the stupid behavior is stupid. When people keep saying that 2+2=5, it could mean they have secret mathematical knowledge unknown to you; but it is more likely that they are simply wrong.

But the worse problem is that refusing to believe in other people's stupidity deprives you of wisdom of "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Not believing in stupidity can make you paranoid, because if those people don't do stupid things because of stupidity, then they must have some purpose doing it. And if it's a stupid thing that happens to harm you, it means they hate you, or at least don't mind when you are harmed. Ignorance starts to seem like strategical plausible deniability.

I had to overcome my upbringing and say to myself: "Viliam, your IQ is at least four sigma over the average, so when many people seem retarded to you, even many university-educated people, that's because they really are retarded, compared with you. They are usually not passively aggressive; they are trying to do their best, their best is just often very unimpressive to you (but probably impressive in their own eyes, and in eyes of their peers). You are expecting from them more than they can realistically provide; and they often even don't understand what you are saying. And they live in their world, where they are the norm; you are the exception. And it will never change, so you better get used to it, otherwise you prepare yourself for a lifetime of disappointment."

From that moment, when I see someone doing something stupid, I consider a hypothesis "maybe that's the best their intelligence allows them to do". And suddenly, I am not angry at most people around me. They are nice people, they are just not my equals, and it's not their fault. Often they have a knowledge that I don't have, and I can learn from them. (Intelligence does not equal knowledge.) But also, they often do something completely stupid that likely doesn't seem stupid in their eyes. I should not assume that everything they do makes sense. I should not expect them to able to understand everything I am trying to explain; I can try, but I shouldn't become too involved in it; sometimes I have to give up and accept some stupidity as a part of my environment.

The proper way to work with stupid people is to realize their limitations and don't blame them for not being what you want them to be. (Of course you should always check whether your estimates are correct. But they are not always wrong.)

That blog post assumes that actual stupidity is never the "real" problem. I beg to disagree.

I put writing online for free and siphoned off spare HPMoR fans until I had enough fanbase to maintain my own stable of beta readers, set of tumblr tags, and modestly populated forum. This is more how I cultivated a fandom than a set of colleagues, but some of the people I collected this way also cowrite with me and most of them are available to spur me along.

I was once part of an online community on sffworld writing forum. There were regular posters like on any forum and there was also a small workshop (6-8 people) and each week two people would submit something for the rest of the group to read and provide feedback on. It was motivating and fun.

I frequent a sci-fi fan club in my city and from that group emerged a tiny writing workshop (6 members currently). The couple of guys who came up with the idea had heard that I wrote some small stuff and won a local contest, and thus I got invited. Every two Sundays we meet via Skype to comment on the stories that we've posted to our FB group since the last meeting. It has been helpful for me; we've agreed to be brutally honest with one another.

(Not in any way an expert; just going by what I've heard elsewhere.) I think the answer probably depends substantially on how much you care about the welfare of West Africans. It is very unlikely to have any impact to speak of in the US or Western Europe, for instance.

No, You're Not Going To Get Ebola

TL;DR: Ebola is very hard to transmit person to person. Don't think flu, think STDs.

Ebola isn't airborne, so breathing the same air, being on the same plane as an Ebola case will not give you Ebola. It doesn't spread quite like STDs, but it does require getting an infected person's bodily fluids (urine, semen, blood, and vomit) mixed up in your bodily fluids or in contact with a mucous membrane.

So, don't sex up your recently returned Peace Corps friend who's been feeling a little fluish, and you should be a-ok.

There are over 100 strains of the common cold. If you gain immunity to one, this will not significantly decrease your chance of catching a cold in the far future. On the other hand, good hygiene will significantly decrease your chance of being infected by most contagious diseases.

But is there room to optimize?

Maybe, but I don't think you can find out -- the data is too noisy and the variance is too big.

Besides, of course, the better your immune system gets, the more rarely will you get sick with infectious diseases...

The catch I'd expect here is for the marginal immunological benefit from an extra cold to be less than the marginal cost of suffering an extra cold, although a priori I'm not sure which way a cost-benefit analysis would go.

It'd depend on how well colds help your immune system fight other diseases; the expected marginal number of colds prevented per extra cold suffered; the risk of longer-term side effects of colds; how the cost of getting sick changes with age (which you mentioned); the chance that you'll mistakenly catch something else (like influenza) if you try to catch someone else's cold; and the doloric cost of suffering through a cold. One might have to trawl through epidemiology papers to put usable numbers on these.

Consuming probiotics (or even specks of dirt picked up from the ground) might be easier & safer.

Your immune system is already being subjected to constant demands by the simple fact that you don't live in a quarantine bunker. Let it do its job. Intentional germ-seeking is reckless.

I don't find these results to be of much value. There's a long history of various sleep-duration correlations turning out to be confounds from various diseases and conditions (as your quote discusses), so there's more than usual reason to minimize the possibility of causation, and if you do that, why would anyone care about the results? I don't think a predictive relationship is much good for say retirement planning or diagnosing your health from your measured sleep. And on the other hand, there's plenty of experimental studies on sleep deprivation, chronic or acute, affecting mental and physical health, which overrides these extremely dubious correlates. It's not a fair fight.

Based on that data, I think a blanket suggestion that everybody should sleep 8 hours isn't warranted. It seems that some people with illnesses or who are exposed to other stressors need 8 hours.

I would advocate that everybody sleeps enough to be fully rested instead of trying to sleep a specific number of hours that some authority considers to be right for the average person.

I think the same goes for daily water consumption. Optimize values like that in a way that makes you feel good on a daily basis instead of targeting a value that seems to be optimal for the average person.

Once upon a time I tried using what I could coin "quicklists". I took a receipt, turned it over to the back (clear side), and jotted down 5-10 things that I wanted to believe. Then I set a timer for 24 hours and, before that time elapsed, acted as if I believed those things. My experiment was too successful; by the time 24 hours were up I had ended up in a different county, with little recollection of what I'd been doing, and some policemen asking me pointed questions. (I don't believe any drugs were involved, just sleep deprivation, but I can't say for certain).

More recently, I rented and saw the film Memento, which explores these techniques in a fictional setting. The concept of short-term forgetting seemed reasonable and the techniques the character uses to work around it are easily adapted in real life. My initial test involved printing out a pamphlet with some dentistry stuff in tiny type (7 12-pt pages shrunk to fit on front-back of 1 page, folded in quarters), and carrying it with me to my dentist appointment. I was able to discuss most of the things from my pamphlet, and it did seem that the level of conversation was raised, but there were many other variables as well so it's hard to quantify the exact effect.

I'm not certain these techniques actually count as "doublethink", since the contradiction is between my "internal" beliefs and the beliefs I wrote down, but it does allow some exploration of the possibilities beyond rationality. I can override my system 2 with a piece of paper, and then system 1 follows.

NB: Retrieving your original beliefs after you've been going off of the ones from the paper is left as an exercise to the student

I don't have experience with those, but I'll recommend Graphviz as a free (and useful) alternative. See e.g. http://k0s.org/mozilla/workflow.svg

And UnBBayes does computational analyses, similar to Flying Logic, except it uses Bayesian probability.

Would 'Google Scholar' be too glib an answer here?

Your downvotes are limited by your karma (I think it's four downvotes to a karma point). I don't think you will meaningfully bias anything if you continue to upvote things you like while accumulating enough karma to downvote again.

I had those too. It stopped rather quickly.

That's a pretty cool histogram in figure 2.

correct link.pdf)

I have done a lot of neurofeedback. It's more of an art than a science right now. I think there have been many studies that have shown some benefit, although I don't know if any are long-term. But the studies might not be of much value since there is so much variation in treatment since it is supposed to be customized for your brain. The first step is going to a neurofeedback provider and having him or her look at your qEEG to see how your brain differs from a typical persons' brain. Ideally for treatment, you would say I have this problem, and the provider would say, yes this is due to your having ... and with 20 sessions we can probably improve you. Although I am not a medical doctor, I would strongly advise anyone who can afford it to try neurufeedback before they try drugs such as anti-depressants.

Some LW discussions of his books: A summary and broad points of agreement and disagreement with Cal Newport's book on high school extracurriculars, Book Review: So Good They Can’t Ignore You, by Cal Newport, The failed simulation effect and its implications for the optimization of extracurricular activities.

Cognito Mentoring refer to him a fair bit, and often in mild agreement. Check their blog and wiki.

Yes, though ignoring the effects of evaporation is ignoring a major factor.

Yes, it's how hair dryers work.

Yes. Your body would try to cool your face exposed to hot air by circulating more blood through it, creating a temperature gradient through the surface layer. Consequently, the air nearest your face would be colder than ambient. A wind would blow away the cooler air, resulting in the air with ambient temperature touching your skin. Of course, in reality humidity and sweating are major factors, negating the above analysis.

Yes. This happens sometimes in a really wet Sauna.

But conditions in which you actually feel this also kill you in less than a day. You need to lose about 100 W of heat in order to keep a stable body temperature, and moving air only feels hotter than still air if you are gaining heat from the air.