Open Thread, July 16-31, 2012

Congrats! Some topics I'd like to see, most of which you'll probably already cover (though they may be more on general "sleep" than "self-experimentation and sleep"):

1) distributions of sleep in general population and any information you can find on correlates

2) any well-powered interventions to see whether sleeping more correlates with success in any way (more working memory, decreased bias, real-world measures, etc.)

3) whether lucid dreaming really might make your memory worse because you need that REM sleep to be "random" (generally, trade-offs to lucid dreaming)

4) trade-offs in sleep: what are the upsides/downsides to more, what are the upsides/downsides to less, and how might drugs like modafinil play into this.

Edit 7/30: fixed typo in #4

Scientifically backed evidence on waking up and falling asleep?

No novel insights; you've precisely put your finger on why this example is interesting: it pits our intuitions against the conclusions of a certain flavor of utilitarianism. If we embrace that flavor of utilitarianism, we must acknowledge that our intuitions are unreliable. To accept our intuitions as definitive, we must reject that flavor of utilitarianism. If we wish to keep both, we must find a radically different way of framing the scenario.

The interesting stuff is in what comes next. If I reject that flavor of utilitarianism, what do I use instead, and how does that affect my beliefs about right action? If I reject my intuitions as a reliable source of information about good and bad outcomes, what do I use instead, and how does that affect my beliefs about right action? If I try to synthesize the apparent contradiction, how might I do that, and where does that leave me?

It's not obvious that the ‘utilities’ for different people should add as sublinearly as those for one person do. So a better comparison would be whether you prefer to receive a dust speck in the eye with probability p or 50 years of torture with probability p/3^^^3. (This is essentially the veil-of-ignorance thing, where p is 3^^^3 divided by the total population.)

Wow, it sounds terribly like Pascal's Mugging now. Had anyone noticed that before?

How do you feel about this framing? Would you rather have a 1 in 3^^^3 chance of being tortured for 50 years, or get a dust speck in your eye? (This is analogous to jaywalking vs. waiting a minute for a crosswalk.)

Thinking about it as if it's a meaningful choice may soften you up for Pascal's scams.

but with no lasting harm.

The way you phrase it, it makes me think this caveat is really the key point. Consider if Omega doesn't offer that and says this:

1. I can have a satisfying and fulfilling life for 3^^^3 days. However, I have to be tortured continuously for fifty years first.

2. I can have a satisfying and fulfilling life for 3^^^3 days, but I'll wake up with a speck in my eye everyday.

My intuitive response would be "Don't pick 50 years of torture, you'll die!" Which is generally the case. It's explicitly not the case in the first scenario, because of the "but with no lasting harm." caveat. But without that caveat, I doubt I would survive 50 years of torture, which means that what would happen afterwards is useless, since I'd be dead.

For instance, imagine if the torture disutility was something like bleeding.

I can have a satisfying and fulfilling life for 3^^^3 days. However, I have to be lose 50 gallons of blood all at once first.

I can have a satisfying and fulfilling life for 3^^^3 days, but one blood cell will be removed from my body every day.

Or alternatively, starving.

I can have a satisfying and fulfilling life for 3^^^3 days. However, I have to go without food for 50 years first.

I can have a satisfying and fulfilling life for 3^^^3 days, but one crumb will be removed from my plate every day.

My intuitive response will successfully allow me to avoid death!

But with the caveat in, your intuitive response consigns you to a greater total inconvenience because it doesn't quite get the caveat or doesn't trust the person giving the caveat.

Now, Omega is defined as generating circumstances which are 100% trustworthy. So to properly grasp the question on an intuitive level means you have to intuitively grasp caveats such as "I am certain that I know that I am talking to Omega, Omega is certainly correct at all times, and Omega said I certainly won't suffer any lasting harm, and I certainly understood Omega correctly when he said that." Because that's all stipulated as the fine print caveats in an Omega problem, in general.

If you think to yourself "Well, I'm NOT certain of any of those, I'm just really really sure of them!" and then rerun the numbers, then I think the intuitive response goes back to being correct. I mean, consider the following question where you aren't certain about that caveat, just really sure:

1. I can have a satisfying and fulfilling life for 3^^^3 days. However, I have to be tortured continuously for fifty years first, but with a 99.99% chance of no lasting harm and a .01% chance of death.

2. I can have a satisfying and fulfilling life for 3^^^3 days, but I'll wake up with a speck in my eye everyday.

Does this seem insightful, or am I missing something?

Does "no lasting harm" make sense if we're talking about human beings?

Does it matter how long recovery takes? (Probably not, so long as it's not an amount of time which requires special notation.)

Can being removed from your usual life for fifty years count as lasting harm?

Do you feel like baseline happiness makes a difference? If not, imagine starting with 3^^^3+1 people each being tortured for 50 years. You can get one of them out of torture, at the expense of a pain increase equivalent to a speck of dust in the eye for each of the others. If you do this for everyone, each one will have a 3^^^3 speck of dust equivalent, an amount of pain far surpassing 50 years of torture.

I prefer oblivion to significant amounts of negative utility for any sustained period.

Putting the torture first changes things, we discount future events, so of course the torture scenario seems worse.

Not a real answer.

Sound is measured in Bels. This is a logarithimic scale. 2 Bels is 10 times as loud as 1, 3 ten times as loud as 2, etcetera. Since sound is a wave I expect the intensity to diminish at constant*(inverse square of distance).

Arbitralily say each individual emits 1 unit of sound.

80,000/(2,000^2) = 0.02 Magnitude of arbitrary unit is 0.02 at 2km 80,000 / (1000^2) = 0.08 Magnitude of arbitrary unit is 0.08 at 1km

Basically it's an example of an inverse square law. No real understanding of physics was used in this comment.

Sounds are waves transmitted by air. Waves can reinforce or cancel each other, but cancelling can only go so far (to zero), so what is left is the sound resulting from the reinforced waves.

I'm not an expert, but here's what I'd guess:

If 100 people stood exactly the same distance from your house, and sang the same pure note in phase with each other, the resulting sound would arrive with an amplitude 100 times greater than if it was just one person.

If 100 people stood at random distances from your house, and sang the same pure note all with different phases, the resulting sound would arrive with an amplitude 10 times greater.

I don't know how popular it is, but everyone else calls it "construal level theory". I also don't know why he decided to rename their close/distant to near/far.

Psychology is extremely fragmented. I don't think there is any theory well described as "endorsed by psychology researchers."

I've never heard that argument made before, but it makes a whole lot of sense to me.
If anyone knows of a more formal treatment of it anywhere, I would love a pointer.

Yes! Both of these are massively annoying. The last solution you gave is the correct one. Mark as read precisely the comments that were read.

I agree with gwern that there's not really much variation apart from the openness domain. It's a bit dangerous to use percentile rankings on internet assessments for longitudinal studies, though – you never know if the norms have been changed, or if you have been normed against a different population when retaking the test due to differences in, e.g., IP address or age. It would be best to record the raw scores as well, if possible.

The test you linked to was created by Gosling et al. (2004) for a study on web-based Big Five tests. (I found it funny that this test was also created for the same study – ignoring the substantial differences in... decoration, they should give similar results.) The inventory in that test is the Big Five Inventory (BFI) (most recent reference: John et al., 2008); it's quite widely used.

I recommend the IPIP-NEO for anyone who wishes to do a self-assessment for the Big Five. That link provides two versions: Goldberg (1999) developed the original 300-item inventory, and Johnson (2011) shortened that to a 120-item inventory. For those who have time, the 300-item version is psychometrically superior, as expected. There are two main advantages to the IPIP-NEO, compared to alternatives like the BFI: (1) It was designed to correlate with the commercially-distributed NEO-PI-R, which remains the most popular inventory in the literature, (2) It gives percentile rankings on the 30 facet-level scales as well as the 5 domain-level scales in the NEO-PI-R (an example report).

(I recently spent ~2 weeks doing a literature review of personality psychology, with a brief focus on internet self-assessments for the Big Five. For a very brief overview of the field, I recommend Robins and Donnellan's (2009) article in The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology. For an up-to-date review of the Big Five, I recommend McCrae's (2009) article in The Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology.)

This test seems to be measuring your self-image, not your behavior.

Consider the difference between asking, "Do you see yourself as someone who starts quarrels with others?" and following the person around for a week and seeing if they start quarrels with others.

I'd like to know how well-calibrated people's self-images are. It seems to me that for some variables, many people's self-images are very poorly calibrated.

That doesn't seem to be much of a variation, except for your Openness - and without knowing more about you, I couldn't say whether that's good or bad...

http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2012/03/personality-without-genes.html

The author in the comments:

Scud: I never said it had to be wrong. I'm just saying that if you accept that there are no Big 5 SNPs, then the explanation must be either:

1) Personality is independent of genetics 2) The Big 5 is a poor measure of personality or 3) We just haven't found the personality SNPs yet because our sample sizes are too small or our stats aren't clever enough.

Or a mixture of those.

Also interesting: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/06/heritability-of-behavioral-traits

Holy shit, I just realized that looking from a TDT perspective, a Parfit's Hitchhiker, a Newcomb's Problem and ye olde one-shot PD... are more or less the same challenge, just with a few variables changed! They all can be resolved optimally and consistently only by being something, not just doing something.

Sometimes we even just lump them in as "Newcomblike" and be done.

I'd suggest not giving her a book overtly about atheism. Something more broadly about skepticism would be a better choice I think. The Demon-Haunted World gets a lot of recommendations, though I haven't actually read it myself.

I feel strongly about my atheism and want to do something in this vein. Any advice?

Get over it. Overt evangelism really isn't worth the hassle if you aren't doing it for the expectation of divine reward. If you want to have influence try to be the coolest seeming older cousin possible and hope your influence rubs off somewhat.

Have you thought about giving her something with strong rationalist themes instead? HPMoR is what I'm thinking of specifically, but other stuff could work.

If she doesn't learn how to think rationally, an atheist book may or may not work regardless. If she does know how to think rationally, it's a matter of time before she sees the inconsistencies in religion anyhow. Plus, fiction is a much more compelling read than argument books and you get to keep plausible deniability without offending her aunt.

I had much the same opinion, atheism vs theism debate raise red flags. People go talking about improbable events, morality, friends and parents in the emotional mode.

Teach how to think and some heuristics, not perfectly baked beliefs.

You don't mention what your young cousin believes. That's pretty important; if she believes what her parents do, you may offend and alienate her if you're not careful.

In general, you're going to have a hard time researching this precisely because hallucinogens are so illegal. For example, when I was researching http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD_and_schizophrenia the area was just gearing up to really deal with the various confounds and alternate explanations when LSD was outlawed and bam, now the only studies you can do are of illegal users who tend to have huge confounds like abusing all sorts of other drugs or taking extremely nasty psychiatric drugs or just being intrinsically less mentally healthy.

(Likewise, looking into modafinil and schizophrenia was complicated by the fact that no studies directly bore on the problem, which will likely be an issue for you as well once you exhausted the few studies which are looking for specific benefits.)

Your best bet is probably looking for the modern trials investigating substances like psilocybin for PTSD, fear of death, etc. I know at least a few exist.

Just made an account there: http://www.goodreads.com/friend/i?i=LTM1OTYwODg2NDI6NDAy

Does it handle foreign language literature?

I signed up for fantasy recommendations and so far it's been great. I'm much too lazy to add in every book I've ever read though, so mostly it just shows me the most popular books on the site.

http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/10321583-idante

Poll time.

If it is time for a new welcome thread upvote this comment. There will be a child comment as a karma sink.

Great support, no dissent; done. I asked orthonormal if they'd prefer to do it but they handed the torch to me :)

Poll time, this time with all the options needed. Please don't comment here; comment here.

Your thought experiment is like saying, "suppose I win the lottery, does that disprove probability theory?" You've basically said that their total population over time is infinite, but that you've decided to focus on the very beginning of their history. A randomly selected individual from that possible world should have an immeasurably long history behind them.

Small bit of anecdotal evidence: I've started using it once I got to my latest work environment as soon as I noticed that the place is basically perpetually-contaminated and, well, plain dirty. Carrying a small bottle around to use whenever you're about to unexpectedly end up putting your hands on your face is also something I was taught to do.

Turns out that it's useful in both cases for me, since it's easy with a bit of experimentation and discipline to strongly correlate to a 90% prediction accuracy times when you don't disinfect your hands before putting them on your face and getting sick within a week with some germ/virus/bacteria-related illness.

For me, the "time gained" and general utility of avoiding minor illnesses like a cold or flu far surpasses the cost of the disinfectant, and I've seen no evidence that there are health-detrimental side effects if used "reasonably" (AKA only when strictly needed before eating or some similar criteria of less-than-X-times-a-day).

Mind, though, as stated above: It's only me, so YMMV. Anecdotal evidence and all that.

I think that replying to yourself is generally acceptable (although there's no special benefit other than the ones you mentioned). Just don't do it so much that it clogs up a thread.

AFAICT, there's no hard consensus here; I've seen both patterns, and I haven't seen either pattern disproportionately criticized. As you say, separating distinct thoughts into multiple posts maximizes the potential clarity of feedback provided through voting. In the case of edits, it also causes the new thought to appear in the Recent Comments queue, which some people read; this makes the new thought more visible to those people.

Nevermind, found them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlyJuxjUm1c

Can you trace this strong emotional reaction of yours to its origins?

Within the academic literature for personality psychology, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is obsolete; the Big Five has been the dominant framework for studies on human personality since about 1990. The most-cited review of the MBTI was very critical of it (McCrae and Costa, 1989) (side-note: there is a conflict of interest in that McCrae and Costa receive royalties from their NEO-PI inventory of the Big Five). Here is the abstract:

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI; Myers & McCaulley, 1985) was evaluated from the perspectives of Jung's theory of psychological types and the five-factor model of personality as measured by self-reports and peer ratings on the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI; Costa & McCrae, 1985b). Data were provided by 267 men and 201 women ages 19 to 93. Consistent with earlier research and evaluations, there was no support for the view that the MBTI measures truly dichotomous preferences or qualitatively distinct types; instead, the instrument measures four relatively independent dimensions. The interpretation of the Judging-Perceiving index was also called into question. The data suggest that Jung's theory is either incorrect or inadequately operationalized by the MBTI and cannot provide a sound basis for interpreting it. However, correlational analyses showed that the four MBTI indices did measure aspects of four of the five major dimensions of normal personality. The five-factor model provides an alternative basis for interpreting MBTI findings within a broader, more commonly shared conceptual framework.

This was interesting (italics mine):

Most conspicuous is the lack of a Neuroticism factor in the MBTI. Its absence is understandable on two counts: first, because emotional instability versus adjustment did not enter into Jung's definitions of the types, and second, because the authors of the test were apparently philosophically committed to a position which saw each type as equally valuable and positive (Myers with Myers, 1980)—a view that is difficult to hold with regard to Neuroticism. (To a lesser extent, the same criticism applies to the TF and JP indices. Descriptions downplay the antagonistic side of Thinking types and the lazy and disorganized side of Perceiving types.) Although it makes interpretation of results palatable to most respondents, this approach also omits information that may be crucial to employers, co-workers, counselors, and the individuals themselves. For many, if not most, applications, some measure of Neuroticism would be useful.

e.g. if I'm asked if I'm extroverted what baseline am I comparing myself to?

I took an online Big Five personality test, and it explicitly said I was to compare myself to typical people of the same gender and age as me (which, since there are huge selection effects in the kinds of male twentysomethings I hang around with, meant that in lots of questions I wanted to answer “how the hell should I know?”).

What do people think of the Myer-briggs personality system?

Astrology for geeks.

You could probably do an analysis looking at the expected utility in terms of social benefits (people seeing you as well-dressed or fashionable), or performance of the clothing (sports clothing, jeans, work boots), depending on what you wear and do.

In terms of clothing minimalism, it probably depends on your friends and work environment. Many people seem to have multiple similar-looking work outfits, so that they don't have to worry too much about changing their appearance regularly, and others have room to imagine any number of identical items of clothing in the wardrobe at home. Without evidence to the contrary people tend to expect you to have a similar amount of clothing as they themselves do.

A good tactic is to keep a number of discernably unique and stylish clothing items that you do not wear often at all. These can be rotated for social occasions, so that you aren't seen to be wearing the same thing twice in recent succession. This seems to be all most people look for, although it depends on your associates.

Personally I wear whatever seems comfortable and appropriate, making sure to wash most clothing items after one day of use, and thinking about the social implications of being seen wearing whatever I am wearing. The social implication of wearing the same thing for multiple days is that you are dirty and smelly. In my experience as long as you keep clean and presentable, and are seen to have multiple different clothing items, most people don't worry about it, but this may be highly dependant on your local culture.

Regarding things wearing out at the same time - well, even if you use them as evenly as possible there should be more than enough randomness in daily usage to mean things wear out at different times. Even if you buy two identical shirts, they won't get the exact same treatment, leading to an increasing difference in the number of wears before each becomes unusable. (see "Random Walk" problems for an interesting mathematical treatment of a similar concept)

Regarding rotation making things last longer - I think it's fine to think of it as a fixed (but unknowable) number of uses before something wears out. So no matter how you rotate your clothes, each item should have the same base value as it would have otherwise. Thus individual day-to-day changes in clothing (which items are more relevant to the current day's activities) are probably much more important.

One last unmentioned point - clothes sitting at the bottom of a drawer can be easily forgotten. It can be good to upend your drawers every once in a while just to make sure you haven't forgotten any hidden gems. Or, err, moth-eaten horror stories (although it's been a while since this happened to me).

To focus on Newcomb's problem: TDT still one-boxes even if Omega is a little bit bad at predicting whether or not you will one-box. How bad Omega can be while still resulting in TDT one-boxing depends on the precise rewards for one- and two-boxing.

Shminux asked a similar question a while ago and I forgot to tell him that it's in the TDT paper. Hey, shminux: it's in the TDT paper.

When you get to the future, would you regret having to answer "Yes", given that if you weren't so rational you could just answer "No"? If so, you should answer "No" every time. What is the difference between this time and the future? From your present position, you see all future possibilities, and so you make tradeoffs between them, acting on expected utility. But at present, you could similarly take notice of the alternative possibilities that are "sideways" from where you are, things that could happen to you but didn't, and similarly act on expected utility. There doesn't seem to be any fundamental reason for discarding (ceasing to care about) possibilities on the basis of not happening to be located within them, it's just practical to do so since you normally can't do anything about them.

(See Counterfactual Mugging and UDT for more discussion.)

It seems to me that an agent that self-modified to answer "Yes" to this sort of question in the future but said "No" this time

This strategy is not reflectively consistent. From the new TDT PDF:

A decision algorithm is reflectively inconsistent whenever an agent using that algorithm wishes she possessed a different decision algorithm.

If an agent implemented your strategy, they would change decision strategies every time they come across a predictor that flipped heads.

Plenty of things that are downvoted are still worth having conversations about. I think a reasonable job is done of simply downvoting and not commenting on the really trolly ones.