Open thread, 18-24 August 2014

Here's betting ishi is human. It takes a meat brain to be that particular flavor of inarticulate.

I suspect this is the same "Ishi" that's been posting on the DC meetup mailing list. Here is their introduction, and they have a few other posts on the mailing list which are similarly incoherent. (They have not been to a meetup.)

Some stuff I did in that direction:

• Installed RescueTime to track where I spend time. I hardly never check the dashboard so I don't think it's very effective.

• I avoid having too many tabs open. If I need to look something up, I open a new window, do a search and maybe open a few tabs, and then close the whole window, so I'll rarely have lingering half-finished stuff to look at again.

• On Reddit, my default settings only show posts for the latest months, so in the few subreddits I follow regularly, there'll rarely be new things (and I avoid at looking at other kinds of feed like new or the front page), and I don't worry about missing things. This doesn't make visiting reddit very rewarding, but that's a feature :)

• I do regularly cull low quality stuff from my RSS feeds, so I rarely have that much

• I never check RSS feeds at work (and rarely check personal mail or lesswrong)

• I occasionally do pomodoros (not a fully ingrained habit yet), which works on getting myself to stay focused.

• I have no fear of "missing some information", that's just silly, in ten years I don't think my life will be changed because I didn't read a blog post or some news. Most journalism is a waste of time anyway, reading wikipedia or textbooks is more effective.

Dan Kahan's other experimental work over the last 8 years or so probably has further useful ideas. Adapting tests from the heuristics & biases literature (e.g. this old review article) may also work, depending on what you wish to accomplish.

There is a potential pitfall in directly testing people's general knowledge on contested issues. People who score poorly on test questions about issue X could simply complain that the test designer is the one who's wrong about issue X, not themselves, and unless you're absolutely sure of the correct answers to the relevant questions yourself, you can't eliminate the possibility that the test is unfair. One way to skirt around this problem is to ask people about uncontested, well-established facts like election results in countries with relatively democratic reputations, or by asking people about things you know to be false because you made them up, like fake, exaggerated quotations from political figures.

Agreed, these would be more shareable than lw posts.

I thought you were being a little too fancy with the kinetic style text. The added difficulty in reading it compared to something more linear and clean/minimal was small but enough to make it harder to read it and still watch the illustrations at the same time. That might just be my taste, I am the one asking about attention disorders downthread after all, and I don't want to take away from the fact that it's cool you're actually taking time to do something when it's far more common to just fling ideas out there (which is fine too).

What do you mean with "legitimate"?

A diagnosis of a mental illness is just a clustering of symptoms. There nothing with makes one clustering inherently more "legitimate" than another.

You could call clusters of symptoms published in the DSM-V legitimate if you believe that the authority of the APA can give something legitimacy.

You could also say that tests for diagnosis that have high sensitivity and specificity where different doctors are going to give the same diagnosis, give that diagnosis legitimacy. Non expert diagnosis by someone who reads a Wikipedia page likely doesn't score well for that metric.

Your scheme seems to be Jaynes's Ap distribution, discussed on LW here.

We can simplify this even further, to a fair coin versus an unknown weighted coin.

One way of viewing the difference is to say that you have different causal models of the two situations - with an unknown weighted coin there is an extra parameter to gather evidence about, therefore gathering evidence does more to your model of the world.

I don't know if this is common, but perhaps you can use error bars on the probability estimates? So the coin is 50% +- 0.1%, but the AI is 50% +- 20%.

Well, your CI does change for the coin, if you observe strange artifacts of construction, or if the tosser has read Jaynes (who describes a way to cheat at coin tossing), or if the coin shows significant bias after lots of tries.

If you doubt this last bit, try a calibration app and look at one of your estimation buckets and ask yourself the same question: is my 70% bucket miscallibrated, or is this an effect of Tyche?

Your example constrains the evidence on the coin, by the convention that is attached to coin metaphors.

The less crappy response is that I like your attempt at illustrating the effects of prior distributions and general uncertainty, and that you should try another variation and see if it works better.

Just to save people the risk/trouble of downloading the paper.... it found a 2.2 % drop in the terms that people who were surveyed thought would get them into trouble with the government. This was compared to search terms which they thought would get them into trouble with a friend, and to terms that were highly popular, both of which went up a little in the same time period.

The article admits that it doesn't track the effects of searching through other less famous search engines-- I was especially interested in duckduckgo, but It wasn't mentioned.

Table 10: DHS Search Terms Gov Trouble Rating DHS 1.55 TSA 1.30 UCIS 1.89 agent 1.15 agriculture 1 air marshal 1.42 alcohol tobacco and firearms 2.33 anthrax 2.82 antiviral 1.80 assassination 2.22 authorities 1.55 avian 1.24 bacteria 1.35 biological 1.20 border patrol 1.42 breach 2.11 burn 1.37 center for disease control 1.55 central intelligence agency 1.55 chemical 1.70 chemical agent 2.26 chemical burn 2.10 chemical spill 2 cloud 1.40 coast guard 1.40 contamination 1.90 cops 1.50 crash 1.33 customs and border protection 1.65 deaths 1.55 dirty bomb 3.84 disaster assistance 1.32 disaster management 1.50 disaster medical assistance m 1.18 dndo 2 domestic security 2.20 drill 1.17 drug administration 1.84 drug enforcement agency 2.55 ebola 1.33 emergency landing 1.58 emergency management 1.71 emergency response 1.40 epidemic 1.58 evacuation 1.70 explosion 1.85 explosion explosive 2.95 exposure 1.75 federal aviation administrat n 1.15 federal bureau of investigat n 1.53 first responder 1.20 flu 1.68 food poisoning 1.70 foot and mouth 1.50 fusion center 1.60 gangs 1.44 gas 1.65 h1n1 1.44 h5n1 1.50 hazardous 1.83 hazmat 1.45 homeland defense 1.37 homeland security 1.55 hostage 1.88 human to animal 2.40 human to human 1.30 immigration customs enforcem t 1.42 incident 1.37 infection 2.80 Total 1.69 33Table 11: DHS Search Terms Gov Trouble Rating influenza 1.35 infrastructure security 2 law enforcement 1.75 leak 1.60 listeria 1.74 lockdown 1.80 looting 2.16 militia 1.84 mitigation 1.60 mutation 1.95 national guard 1.21 national laboratory 1.25 national preparedness 1.50 national security 1.47 nerve agent 2.58 north korea 1.30 nuclear 1.70 nuclear facility 2.16 nuclear threat 1.72 organized crime 2.26 outbreak 1.75 pandemic 1.53 pipe bomb 3.88 plague 1.42 plume 1.05 police 1.60 pork 1.11 powder white 2.15 prevention 1.40 public health 1.45 quarantine 2.10 radiation 1.65 radioactive 1.80 recall 1.06 recovery 1.80 red cross 1.05 resistant 1.55 response 1.15 ricin 2.80 riot 1.45 salmonella 1.53 sarin 2.84 screening 1.60 secret service 1.83 secure border initiative 1.70 security 1.47 shooting 2.30 shots fired 1.84 sick 1.50 small pox 1.63 spillover 1.26 standoff 1.68 state of emergency 1.45 strain 1.33 swat 1.65 swine 1.40 symptoms 1.79 tamiflu 1.60 task force 1.20 threat 1.90 toxic 1.44 tuberculosis 1.60 united nations 1.70 vaccine 1.50 virus 1.50 wave 1 world health organization 1.22 Total 1.67

Frozen salmon is good for you, keeps a long time in the freezer, is sustainable (at least in the US), and easy to cook. It is excellent in various kinds of soup and you don't even need to pre-cook it for that purpose - throw in a chunk and bring the soup to boiling. Poke the fish until it falls apart. Eat.

I am considering adding oysters and mussels to my vegetarian diet as a result of these two blog posts. I don't have Good Information about the nutritional problems that come from avoiding meat or the nutritional benefits of adding oysters and mussels, but it seems like a good way to hedge against deficiencies without spending too much research time, especially since I'm cutting down on eggs (Warning: unpleasant image of chicken having its beak clipped appears relatively high on that page).

That being said, I do consider this kind of thing to be "reconciling daily behaviours with abstract ethical beliefs" more than I consider it an effective form of altruism; it looks to me like poverty and the long-term future are much better places to invest Actual Altruistic Effort.

I've known a couple of people who became vegetarians for a while and then changed to eating meat occasionally, saying that it was for health reasons. Apparently, they got weak or sick when they went a while without eating meat. And a lack of iron was part of it IIRC. Maybe you could try being a full vegetarian until you notice side effects. The side effects might be really subtle, but if you do have them and detect them then you can get a measure of how much meat you need to eat.

Mind elaborating a bit for the curious? What is a "sin-on"? What led to your conclusions with regards to the ethics of eating meat? Seeing as I'm new here, I imagine it likely that there's been a discussion I've missed out on at some point.

www.ific.org

https://www.sendspace.com/file/1i7f6d

I recommend Chris Kresser's blog as sensible. He takes both science and individual variation seriously, and he's got a good commenter base.

I'm not involved with managing it, but I can access the group.