Open Thread, December 16-31, 2012

The deadliest school massacre in US history was in 1927. Why its aftermath matters now

In the end there were 38 children dead at the school, two teachers and four other adults.

I’m not talking about the horrific shooting in Connecticut today. I’m talking about the worst school murder in American history. It took place in Michigan, in 1927. A school board official, enraged at a tax increase to fund school construction, quietly planted explosives in Bath Township Elementary. Then, the day he was finally ready, he set off an inferno. When crowds rushed in to rescue the children, he drove up his shrapnel-filled car and detonated it, too, killing more people, including himself. And then, something we’d find very strange happened.

Nothing.

No cameras were placed at the front of schools. No school guards started making visitors show identification. No Zero Tolerance laws were passed, nor were background checks required of PTA volunteers—all precautions that many American schools instituted in the wake of the Columbine shootings, in 1999. Americans in 1928—and for the next several generations —continued to send their kids to school without any of these measures. They didn’t even drive them there. How did they maintain the kind of confidence my own knees and heart don’t feel as I write this?

They had a distance that has disappeared. A distance that helped them keep the rarity and unpredictability of the tragedy in perspective, granting them parental peace.

“In 1928, the odds are that if people in this country read about this tragedy, they read it several days later, in place that was hard to get to,” explains Art Markman, author of “Smart Thinking” (Perigee Books, 2012). “You couldn’t hop on a plane and be there in an hour. Michigan? If you were living in South Carolina, it would be a three-day drive. It’s almost another country. You’d think, ‘Those crazy people in Michigan,’ same as if a school blows up in one of the breakaway Republics.”

Time and space create distance. But today, those have compressed to zero. The Connecticut shooting comes into our homes–even our hands–instantly, no matter where we live. We see the shattered parents in real time. The President can barely maintain composure. This sorrow isn’t far away, it’s local for every single one of us.

And of course it brings up Columbine. Two horrors, separated by years and miles, are now fused into one. It feels like terrible things are happening to our children all the time, everywhere. Nowhere is safe.

As a result, I expect we will now demand precautions on top of precautions. More guards. More security cameras. More supervision. We will fear more for our kids and let go of them even more reluctantly. Every time we wonder if they can be safe beyond our arms, these shootings will swim into focus.

Will this new layer of fear and security make our children any safer? Probably not, but for a reassuring reason: A tragedy like this is so rare, our kids are already safe. Not perfectly safe. No one ever is. But safe.

That’s a truth the folks in 1928 America understood. We just don’t feel that way now.

Not when there’s no distance between us and the parents in Newtown.

This weekend I staged a Les Mis "One Day More" flashmob in our train station with about 20 people. (I'm Javert).

I realized I had been wishing that a flashmob would happen, and finally wised up and realized I should just do it myself. I think most of us underestimate how willing people are to go along with wacky plans, as long as they don't have to have any logistical responsibilities. It also helped to set point people for a couple different social circles to recruit (alums, work colleagues, an improv group, church friends). This has definitely lowered my reticence to stage other public spectacles.

I'd like to take a moment to boast about my site traffic: gwern.net recently passed 1.5m pageviews with 1m unique pageviews by 973.4k readers.

I began gwern.net on ~3 October 2010, so it took a little over 2 years to reach this point. (I have fewer pageviews and visitors than Overcoming Bias did when it broke 1m visits, but Eliezer and Hanson and co. is some pretty stiff competition!)

LW traffic has been indispensable all the while, both in building up numbers and in criticizing many of my pages and hopefully improving them, so thanks to everyone.

I've finished my potassium sleep experiment: http://www.gwern.net/Zeo#potassium It made my sleep much worse, and I didn't notice any daytime benefit.

EDIT: ditto for the followup

Kurzweil has joined Google as Director of Engineering. (Discussion on Hacker News.)

Why is there a Boing Boing article in Featured Articles on the front page? Who has edit access to the front page and why are they spamming?

I've changed my mind on a few big things recently, or at least clarified my doubts. Somewhere along the way, I noticed that the correct side (as I judge) on controversial issues tends to use evidence and careful logical argument, and the incorrect side tends to use indignation, invocation of taboos, straw-manning, and scoffing.

I find logical arguments more convincing than social authority, so a lot of the fact that the "correct" arguments use logos (logical argument) instead of ethos (social argument) could be selection. This explains the above, but fails to explain the extreme polarization on some issues where one side uses mostly logos and the other uses mostly ethos.

So if logos has a reliable correlation with the truth (either because logos-tending people more reliably produce truth, or because only truth can be armed with logos), that has some interesting implications. For one, you can get a quick estimate of correct side in a controversy just by surface-level syntactical analysis.

That idea has disagreed with previous beliefs in interesting ways that have not yet been resolved:

• I ran into some holocaust deniers, who tended to cite "facts" (that may or may not have been true or representative) and attempt to make arguments, while the defense couldn't say anything better than "I can't understand how people can deny the holocaust" and "that's just not OK". This is probably because a random holocaust denier is intelligent and well-researched (holocaust denial is their hobby), while an average "defense attorney" on this one is the average person (who is nearly illiterate). On this one, I'd still bet on the conventional account, but the level of repression that holocaust denial gets, and the use of logos vs ethos makes me want to examine this one a bit more closely. (Also, the holocaust deniers mix in all sorts of global jewish conspiracy shit that would be stupid to bring up even if it were true.)

• I've noticed that feminism tends to be argued with ethos ("that's totally not OK, etc"). On this one, I think pathos is more appropriate ("here's how that makes me feel"). I was going to say that the median antifeminist argument was just a bunch of idiotic misogyny, but then I duckduckgo'd for "feminism FAQ", and got this, which I have a negative reaction to, but uses logos. I can't in 30 seconds find a better representative of feminism than jezebel, which I find idiotic at times.

The case of feminism is interesting because it's the only one where ethos is being used by the prosecution.

I'm getting bored of writing this, but...

So I'll either be slipping even further into the dark side, or I'll revise some of my latest updates. If the latter, it will be because the prosecution tends to be the small outside group, which tends to be intelligent and well-researched, which I find too convincing.

So, does anyone else have thoughts on this logos/ethos x truth/lies corellation?

How much should I care about online privacy?

As far as I can tell most people's fear s in relation to privacy are motivated by an intuitive 'ick' feeling not by any projection of future harms. But as we know reversed stupidity isn't intelligence, so the question of how much one should care about privacy, especially online, is still open.

What do you do in terms of preserving privacy and why? E.g. Do you keep your real world and online (or different online) personalities distinct, if so why?

Edited for typos and clarity

New MoR: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/86/

Reddit discussion

Is Kessler syndrome relevant to existential risk? Kessler syndrome is the danger that if low-earth orbit becomes sufficiently crowded, a bad collision could result in a cascade effect. This would in a few hours or days destroy all satellites in LEO and would possibly render LEO unusable for decades. While this isn't an existential risk by itself, it may be relevant. Many existential risks can be dealt with in part by simply not having all are eggs in one basket- nuclear war, nanotech, and many others fall into this category. Meanwhile some existential risks such as large asteroids can only be detected and stopped by having well-developed space capabilities.

So is Kessler syndrome relevant to existential risk? Does this not substantially matter because there's already a fair bit of resources going in to preventing it?

This is a sockpuppet I have created. It is a ROT13ed version of my username, for comments that I would prefer to have not associated with a simple google search of my real name. Generally personal things that I don't mind random strangers on the internet knowing. I have only ever thought of two or three things that I would want to use this account for, and the alternative is simply not making those comments. As long as I never use this account for voting purposes, do you as a LW member feel this is an acceptable use of sockpuppetry?

Is this acceptable? [pollid:373]

Some scientists think they have a method to test the Simulation Argument.

Some perspectives from Prudentius

A delightful and short new post by Moldbug on Christianity and the Fall of Rome. The link to Peter Frost's take is very much worth reading as well. The post is also related to Frost's Genetic Pacification paper.

Did Christianity and evolution leave Late Antiquity Romans particularly vulnerable to bad consequences of the typical mind fallacy when dealing with non-pacified populations?

I often find myself rooting for the villain in pop-culture stuff, especially if he's the sort of villain that has been putting together a massive plan that obviously took time, dedication, and quite a lot of hard work and ambition. The hero is often, by contrast, a slacking power-of-friendship layabout who has power/talent due to an intrinsic property: "the Chosen One".

Villains are sympathetic to me even when they really shouldn't be; in Avatar: The Last Airbender (spoilers follow) Sver Ybeq Bmnv'f tbny jnf yvgrenyyl gb ohea gur jbeyq, erohvyq sebz gur nfurf, naq ehyr jungrire jnf yrsg, ohg gur furre qrqvpngvba naq uvf cresrpgvba ng sveroraqvat guebhtu lrnef bs pbafgnag cenpgvpr znqr zr ernyyl srry onq ng frrvat uvz fb cbjreyrff ng gur raq. Ol pbagenfg, Nnat (juvyr hadhrfgvbanoyl zbenyyl 'orggre'), bayl fhpprrqrq qhr gb yhpx naq gur Qrhf Rk Znpuvan bs gur Ningne Fgngr xvpxvat va. Vs Bmnv unq orra fznegre, zber cngvrag, be whfg n yvggyr yhpxvre, gur svtug jbhyq unir tbar uvf jnl.

What is wrong with me? Does anyone else root for the villain or feel that they're generally more sympathetic of a character archetype? Maybe I'm just too heavily influenced by the book "Soon I Will Be Invincible" or the webseries Dr. Horrible such that I'm more familiar with the subversion of the superhero trope than just playing it straight.

There's an old Google tech talk by Geoff Hinton about restricted Boltzmann machines that was my introduction to a bunch of topics in machine learning, and it still strongly informs a lot of my thinking about cognition. The main example is about labeling image from the MNIST handwritten digit database. Then, starting around 23:20, he shows that his RBMs are also generative; he can fix the state of a high level unit in the network (that normally discriminated images of 2s), crank forward his inference algorithm, and get out images of handwritten numbers "2". He says that the patterns of activation on the high level units are brain states, and the generated images are mental states, i.e. what the model is thinking about, because those are the sorts of inputs the environment would have to supply to the model for the model to be perceiving an image of a number two.

Is that perspective really obvious to everyone? That mental imagery is like counterfactual simulation with top down biased activations? And patterns of neural oscillations are like Gibbs sampling at work? And, at least in the case of single modality visual perception, you can point to a model and say what it's thinking, by squeezing the perception out back through the feature detectors till it becomes sensory data once more?

I'd been thinking about writing this up for a while, but wanted to learn some more about how RBM inference and learning map onto bayesian networks or HMMs, whether we can generate more interesting data like photorealistic images or videos, what's left to be done in machine vision, how adequate our models of the primate visual cortex are, et cetera. Now that Eliezer has posted Causal Reference, I think a post like that might be redundant, in regard to demystifying.

The Sherlock Game

For those of you who watch the Sherlock BBC serial, here's a rationalist's game: try to extrapolate other hypotheses to explain the found evidence than those the protagonist came up with, and compare them in terms or relative likeliness. To give you an example of how it's done, from Pratchett;

[Vimes] distrusted the kind of person who'd take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, "Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fell on hard times," and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man's boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he'd been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!

I was reading the comic "Heavenly Nostrils" yesterday, and it was a pretty good illustration of the idea of Mundane Magic.

On luminosity

With extensive observation of myself, I finally understood that familial dynamics were reinforcing maladaptive thoughts in myself that I was actively trying to remove. Thinking very carefully about what my situation would look like from someone else's perspective bolstered my suspicions that my situation was likely emotionally abusive. As such, I (with extensive assistance from my own social circles) have managed to remove myself from my childhood home.

While not necessarily useful in a carve-reality-at-the-joints sense (1), I have found the concepts of PTSD and C-PTSD to be useful, both in literature search and in understanding that many of my impairments stem from adaptation to the situation I was in (i.e. rather than from any inherent genetic/neural wiring (2) or personal failings). Furthermore, I seem to have been practicing a form of CBT on myself for years as a direct result of my luminosity practice, which has kept me far more sane and functioning than would be expected given my situation.

Incidentally: rationalist practice of believing that which is true, regardless of how comfortable you are with it (3), turns out to be very good practice for the processing and manipulation of traumatic memories. The fact that I already know I can stare into the void and not claw my eyes out makes it easier to withstand the kind of associations my own brain is generating.

While my life thus far is not full Winning as the community (4) would likely use the word, I am doing extremely well given my background and I have every reason to believe these mental habits will facilitate further recovery.

(1) But neither are most other psychiatric diagnoses.

(2) Thank the blind idiot god for adult neuroplasticity, I am in desperate need of it.

(3) I was going to talk about compartmentalization and dissociation here, but could not think of a coherent way to phrase the perceived similarity/difference.

(4) I have noted before that most of the reason that I consider myself a LW-type is because I was already practicing a form of luminosity on my own, and was extremely pleased to find that I was not alone.

Could anyone comment on the market for biomedical engineers? I'm specifically interested in regenerative medicine, so the common advice of "get a degree in MechE or EE and apply to biomedical companies" doesn't seem like it would apply.

I know Zvi has thought about this, as well as Scott Adams and probably some Berkeley Lesswrongers: I am wondering if there is a name for the "field" which may or may not exist that encompasses optimal modern housing and architecture, especially in the sense of communal/group living. If there's not an actual field, is there some sort of consensus or document similar to the NYLW Paleo document? I've found that I really enjoy living with other people and hanging out at houses that consist of a bunch of room-mates so I want to look into doing this in the best possible way.

Commencement speech by Ira Glass-- specifically about reporting, but it's also rather a lot about how to be agenty-- find ways to do your work better, fight the pull of mediocrity, do enough things so that luck has a chance to work.

What one book could give me a new, useful superpower?

Hacker News discussion

Does somebody happen to have an overview of the current consensus on Dual N-Back? My understanding is that the impact on IQ is not solidly established. What about working memory? Is there solid evidence for transfer? Is it wort a) learning more about it b) actually spend time on training if you have a cognitively demanding job (analysis/programming)? Thank you!

Canadatheism Gentle whimsy or mind-killing challenge?

An untitled Christmas poem, in the style of Dr. Seuss, by Yvain.

I'm looking for two things I think I found on this website.

One is a philosophy paper that argued that deontology was merely the rationalization of unconscious moral heuristics (or something like that...). Meaning that people have unconscious moral instincts that they arrive at unconsciously, then they try to justify them, therefore deontology. I think I remember getting access to it through LessWrong, though I don't remember, nor do I remember who it's by (maybe Joshua Greene)? Anyway it was really interesting and I'd be grateful if someone pointed me to it!

Also, the second thing. There's a LW comment somewhere that I'm trying to find. It was talking about personal identity, and how the concept needs to be dissolved. It was kinda long-ish, it had about forty karma, and I think it was made by someone whose username started with 'k'. I searched for 'personal identity' in the search box and I wasn't able to find it. If someone can help me find either of these, I'll give them love.

Found this gem in a singularity thread on 4chan/b/:

If the first ultraintelligent machine is based in any way on human thought then it will just be retarded really really fast.

Quick thought experiment for you all: A machine has been invented that can view the past (type in place/time/date and you can see what happened then with perfect accuracy). Would you allow the police to use it to investigate crimes?

Why is it fun to be bad? I've heard actors say its more fun playing the bad guy. Also, I find the thought of stealing millions of dollars and getting away with it, thrilling, but not very nice.

I hope that deathism remains a powerful ideology, such that if radical life extension becomes possible, I can opt out with minimal social consequence. I may be generalizing from one example, but strongly suspect that LW overestimates the number of people who would genuinely prefer to live forever relative to those who could be socially coerced into it. I also suspect this is already true in the case of ordinary life extension, for which no deathist safeguards are in place.

Sometime in January I will create "Best of Rationality quotes, 2012 Edition". Should I put it in Main or Discussion? The first two editions (2009-10, 2011) were in Main.

What are people's thoughts on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (nature of language affects how people think).

If it is true are there lessons for teaching rationality in different linguistic communities or modifying language to increase rationality?

There are a few short stories/essays that I'm pretty sure I came across on lesswrong but have been unable to find with my brief, lazy googling. If you know any of these off the top of your head it would be much appreciated.

1. Story about a kingdom tormented by a dragon that demanded villagers be regularly sacrificed to it. People attempted to rationalize the situation and make excuses for the state of affairs. Eventually something is done about the dragon and the people lament that it took them so long. The dragon symbolized death.

2. Essay about a brain in a vat. Initially can remote control a body and finds it interesting that it feels like he exists "in" the body even though he knows he's back in a vat. The body breaks down and all of a sudden it's very obvious that he exists in the vat and not the body. Then the brain is copied onto two separate computers running in parallel. While they are in sync it is as if they are the same person but they eventually fall out of sync with disastrous results for the copy not in control on the body.

3. Essay about children's rights. I don't remember much of this one but I know it referenced the tng episode where Picard and some others revert to children in a transporter malfunction.

Culture-toxic fundamentalism and the love for austerity

Where does that come from? The anti-hedonistic love of scarcity, spareness, composure, measure, rigour, effort, sacrifice, strain, toughness, drought, and grim-faced resolution? The hatred for art, for music, for wine and other drugs, for sex, for food? The notion that sloth, lust, gluttony, and pride are not just sins, but mortal sins? It's not exclusive to one culture, and it comes and goes with the ages, and it pops up all over the planet, all over the ages. Entire cultural movements surge with the intent to stop decadence and clean society and bring back the true, pure values. I think there's something there, but I don't know what. Anyone here have a clue?

Some cool new videos by Aurini a fellow LessWrong user and reader:

Transhumanism, Mind Replication, Right Wing Attitudes, & Left Wing Opulence

An interesting take on Em World Scenario and Forager vs. Farmer distinction by Robin Hanson. It is obviously a political take however.

I have a bunch of cards in an Anki 2.0 deck. How do I generate their reverses and add them to my deck? That is, if I have a card 'bestehen' -> 'to exist', I would expect to see a new card, 'to exist' -> 'bestehen'. There's a FAQ about it for 1.2, but I can't find anything on 2.0.

University of Southampton decided to stop teaching social work due to lack of credible research in the discipline. (May 2012) http://www.examiner.com/article/university-of-southampton-decides-to-stop-teaching-social-work

Is there a way to "sticky" a post on Google Groups? For example, if I want to (privately, for now) track local meetup attendees and topics for X period of time, and I want to sticky a post for the entire duration just in case anyone wants to retain anonymity or plausible deniability or whatever.

About Newcomb's problem + something non-deterministic:

If the contents of box B are increased so that B > A, it seems like by basing the choice of one-boxing or two-boxing off of a quantum coin toss, one could limit Omega's predicting powers from 100% accuracy to a mere coin toss with 50% accuracy.

Where A has $1000 and B has $2000, the average payoff would be $1500 the coin toss ($0 or $3000) versus $1000 by one-boxing and $0 by two-boxing in a way Omega can predict.

Has something like this been considered as a possible resolution?

Call supernatural metanatural then recycle old Catholic/Hindu/Taoist arguments in LW jargon. #WinningAtLessWrong #lifehacks

On 15 December 2012 06:01:26PM, I received an unsolicited and badly-spelled PM from a "ZakaulRehman" (who does not appear to have sent any non private messages) on ... subatomic physics, I think. Has anyone else received similar messages?