Stupid Questions, December 2015

I think that the basic answer is that they were really big, and looked kind of like dinosaurs. We certainly know more than that, but most of what we know is either highly technical, or just deductions that you might not want to consider "really knowing". There is also a third category, with things like "laid eggs" and "underwent a mass extinction event" that you already know and are probably not interested in hearing about again.

It is worth noting that although they were the dominant land animal for about 135 million years, we only have about 1,000 clearly identified species (to help put this in perspective, we have two clearly defined species identified in the genus Triceratops, one of the most recent of the dinosaur genera... as opposed to, for example, about 30 species for the genus Homo {not a very prolific genera}. These two genera, Triceratops and Homo, spent approximately the same amount of time on planet Earth.) It is possible that the less than 1% of dinosaur species that we happen to have stumbled across are a good representative sample of the clade, but it is also possible that they are not.

But... We do know that many dinosaurs had feather-like structures. We do know that T. Rex could eat you, even if you were hiding in your car, and there is some evidence of them attacking live prey (prey that escaped with wounds that were able to start healing before they died). Pterodactyls could fly, although some early scientists in the 17-1800s doubted this, and for a while it was believed to be a swimmer. (But pterodactyls are not technically dinosaurs).

Studying dinosaurs is still just peeking at the very edge of a very large and mysterious world, and that is probably more useful for kids to learn about than hunting down the few facts we know for sure. But I do agree that the information out there is not presented very well; it should all be in the form "we think X because of Y", but it is generally boiled down for popular audiences to something like "MAYBE X!"

Monty Python - Theory on Brontosauruses

(I am not any kind of medical expert, so the value of this comment is very limited. But you did ask for general opinions.)

I think you are clearly correct about the likelihood of encountering a partner with an STD being higher than naive calculations would suggest. It isn't clear to me how much higher. If you are at least taking typical safe-sex precautions then the probability of transmission can be quite low even if your partner does have an STD; I fear there's no good substitute for actually doing the calculations, for someone who actually wants to make a sensible decision on this and would if possible like to have a lot of sex with a lot of people.

My impression (based on almost exactly zero information) is that antibiotic treatment for most STDs is very close to 100% successful at present, but I would be concerned about hastening the development of antibiotic resistance in STDs, on account of the implications for other people. (If you[1] can guarantee that if diagnosed with an STD and treated with antibiotics you will have absolutely no sex with anyone until you're definitely cured, maybe that's not a factor.)

Also, of course, antibiotics will do you no good at all if you get, say, genital herpes or HIV.

[1] Meaning a hypothetical person wondering about this stuff for practical reasons, not necessarily you.

https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/std-statistics/ information.

As far as sexually transmitted diseases go, a lot of it is "tragedy of commons". As far as population less goes, everybody profits from reducing the spread of sexually transmitted disease.

This is one of those times where I shear on Theranos. Having cheaper bloodtests that only take a drop of blood for those diseases will allow our society to act very differently when it comes to sexually transmitted disease.

the dangers of having a lot of sex with random people are exaggerated

This is one of those "bravery debate" things. The statement is not precise enough to be true or false. Some people definitely overestimate the risks. Are they the audience for this? Are you among them? I don't know.

Define manufactured? There isn't really any "default" culture to compare current human values to, for which you could say that "these values are manufactured because they don't manifest in the default culture".

I think many of LW values are manufactured. I think you detect which are most manufactured by looking at the ones not widely held by other humans. Values like "you should get your head frozen when you die" are probably at the most manufactured end as they are nearly unique to LW and fellow travelers. Values like polyamory are pretty manufactured by do show up in a larger minority of non-LW types than head freezing. Values like a world with 3**3 created AIs in it that are a little happy is better than a world with 1 billion humans in it who are all living quite well are manufactured. Certainly held beyond LW but plenty of people hold the opposite value, that a better world would have a sustainable biologically human population.

In my opinion, the human values that are not manufactured are the ones you are born with. They feel more like moral sentiments than coherently stated values, because, I think, you aren't born with ideas, you are born with tendencies to feel certain ways. From your moral sentiments, and discussions with other people, you build ideas that, in my opinion, you think help you explain why you have your moral sentiments. In my opinion you have your moral sentiments, and thinking your value ideas account for them is like being attracted to another person and "thinking" that means they are attracted to you: it is a form of projection, a human bias, very helpful in propagating the species but not particularly well suited to accurately explaining how the world works.

It isn't just LW values that are manufactured, in my opinion, all values expressed as ideas are manufactured. This is why they have to be taught to be propagated, no particular set of values expressed as ideas arise spontaneously in a large number of humans.

I don't think that manufactured is a useful word here. If I were to try to use it, I would say that any LessWrong value that you gained from LessWrong was "manufactured in you". I would also say that any value commonly expressed on LessWrong has been shaped beyond the form in which it was originally conceived, and 'manufactured' in this sense.

There is no real sense that you can can any value you hold is not manufactured, unless you are talking about values like eating and breathing.

P.S. As far an a universal human culture goes, we can say with some certainty that religion, for example, is part of human nature -- but no specific god, church, or belief is. So any religious/spiritual views you hold are clearly manufactured; the extent to which you hold them or do not was 'shaped' (which you may call manufactured or not).

You can't hear temperatures because if the temperatures of air were high enough to make enough noise for you to hear, you would be incinerated.

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/110540/how-loud-is-the-thermal-motion-of-air-molecules goes over this. There is a lot of error in that thread, but the parts that are right show up a few times and calculate the white noise sound level of room temperature air at about -20 dB SPL. SPL of 0 dB is the approximate threshold of human hearing. dB is a logarithmic scale such that every 10 dB increase is a 10X higher power. So -20 dB SPL is about 1/100 the average sound power level that would just barely be audible by a human. This is calculated at something close to room temperature, about 23 C which is about 300 K.

How hot would air have to get to have its thermal fluctuations audible as sound to humans? Any thermal power (at sufficiently low frequencies which situation applies here) is proportional to the temperature. So to increase the thermal sound level from -20 dB to 0 dB, the sound power needs to be increased by a factor of 100. So this would happen at an absolute air temperature of 30000 K, or about 29700 C. For us Americans, that is 53500 F. Super crazy hot, hotter than the sun.

So wait a minute, am I saying that a white noise generator generating 0 dB (barely audible) white noise is heating the air to super-solar temperatures? That doesn't pass the smell test: if it was true my ears would be burning off when exposed to any white noise loud enough for them to hear. But the answer is, we are only generating white noise over a very small frequency range in order to hear it. Even a high fidelity white noise generator will have a bandwidth covering about 50 Hz to 20,000 Hz. But the "natural" bandwidth of thermal fluctuations is found from quantum mechanical considerations: BW = T * kb/h or bandwidth is Temperature(in Kelvin) times Boltzmann's constant divided by Planck's constant. That ratio kb/h turns out to be about 20 GHz per degree K. So thermal noise loud enough to hear would have a bandwidth of 600,000 GHz or 6e14 Hz. TO an approximation, thermal power is proportional to bandwidth, so a 20 kHz white noise generator putting out 0 dB SPL is putting out only 20000/600000000000 = 1/30000000000 the power level associated with a 30000 K source. So in terms of TOTAL energy, a band-limited white noise source is delivering way less than 1 K of extra temperature to your ears, even though in terms of energy density (power per bandwidth), it sounds hotter than the sun.

Much of the thread below covers some of this, but perhaps I add a little detail with what I write. As to blackbody radiation, yes that is appropriate to use here and its upper frequency limit has nothing to do with electromagnetics, or not fundamentally. It is a quantum mechanical limit. At a high enough frequency, the quantum of energy becomes comparable to the thermal energy, and so at higher frequencies than that those frequencies can't be effectively generated by thermal sources. This is true for both photons (electromagnetic energy quantized) and phonons (sound or vibration energy quantized).

Hope this is clear enough to add more light than heat to the discussion. Or in this case, more sound than heat :)

The peak frequency of thermal noise at room temperature is far higher than 5 GHz, it's actually closer to 30 THz. I'm not exactly sure about the biology here and whether Brownian motion of air molecules excites the hair cells in your cochlea. I'm guessing that it does, but even so, the range of frequencies you can hear (20-20,000 Hz) carries only a very, very tiny fraction of the thermal energy. Someone should do the calculations; my guess is that it's far below the detection threshold.

Another thing to keep in mind is that at equilibrium, you have thermal excitation everywhere. You might as well ask why you don't hear or see or smell the thermal excitation in your own brain.

white noise is caused by air molecules moving randomly at high speed

This is wrong. What you hear is sound waves, that is, rarefaction/compression zones in the air, pressure differentials. They are a phenomenon at a different scale than molecules. In particular, the energy involved is different. "White noise" means the frequencies are uniformly distributed.

Essentially, an air molecule doesn't have enough energy to register at your hearing sensors, that is, to move your eardrum (or cochlear hairs).

To clarify what I believe is the question: Why can't solipsist hear brownian motion?

The question is pretty good; Brown Noise derives its name from brownian motion, or rather the discoverer of such, as it is the frequency (or set of frequency) that brownian motion produces.

I'd -guess- the answer is that the motion all cancels out on the average, approximately, and the remaining statistical noise isn't energetic enough to be perceived.

The way a sense organ interacts with temperature follows a different mechanism from perception of sound.

What does "hear temperature" mean?

It gets very interesting if there actually are no stocks to buy back in the market. For details on how it gets interesting google "short squeeze".

Other than that exceptional situation it's not that asymmetrical:

-Typically you have to post some collateral for shorting and there will be a well-understood maximum loss before your broker buys back the stock and seizes your collateral to cover that loss. So short (haha) of a short squeeze there actually is a maximum loss in short selling.

-You can take similar risks on the long side by buying stocks on credit ("on margin" in financial slang) with collateral, which the bank will use to close your position if the stock drops too far. So basically long risks also can be made as big as your borrowing ability.

if you buy a stock, you could come out arbitrarily well-off, but your losses are limited to the amount you put in. But if you short, your payoffs are limited to the current price, and your losses could be arbitrarily big, until you run out of money.

This is accurate.

it feels like an important asymmetry

This asymmetry comes from the fact that prices are non-negative numbers and do not dip below zero.

Effect on the market? Off the top of my head, here is a couple: long-term shorts are more risky than they seem; and shorting penny stocks (stocks with a low price, typically below $5) is also "extra" risky because your upside is small, but your downside is not.

You usually avoid unlimited liability by placing a stop order to cover your position as soon as the price goes sufficiently high. Or for instance you can bound your losses by including a term in the contract which says that instead of giving back the stock you borrowed and sold, you can pay a certain price.

Accurate, but not asymmetrical. It's perfectly symmetrical: purchase of an asset for resale has a loss floor and no gain ceiling, sale of an asset (including short sales) has a gain floor and no loss ceiling. For actual transactions in either direction, there is a practical maximum gain/loss, even when there's not a theoretical one: if a value goes too far out of modeled range, one of the parties will abrogate when not able to pay the ludicrous amount.

For smaller investors making short-term trades (which is illegal if one has inside info, and unwise if not), generally Call or Put options are used. The constraints of payout/loss can get quite complicated fairly quickly by mixing different strike and maturity options.

if you buy a stock, you could come out arbitrarily well-off, but your losses are limited to the amount you put in

You never only buy, but at the same time you have traded your dollars, euros or whatever currency for that stock.

There is nothing like "buying" and "shorting" - it's always trading. Swapping two "currencies".

Bit late but Aubrey de Grey in his latest reddit AMA estimates that Crispr/CAS9 cuts off about 20 (!) years of the SENS/immortality timeline.

Emphasis on probably -- intelligence is not a simple matter, and it is unclear that our genome, even if we clearly identify all relevant factors, would be "open ended" -- that is to say, there may be a difference between "making you as smart as you can be" and "making you smarter than any human ever". As a poor analogy, we will certainly soon be able to make humans taller, but there may be limits to how tall a human can be without important system failures; we have already had very tall people, and even if we do want to breed for tall, we might choose to top out at 7'0" for health reasons. Likewise, when you think of smart people, it may be that you are thinking of people with skills maximized for specific functions at the cost of other functions, and a balanced intelligence might top out at some level... at least until we get past mapping what we have and into the much harder task of designing new types of genomes.

I'm not a biologist, but am I right in thinking that Crispr could be the most important human innovation ever?

There are several competing techniques. People who use the other techniques think that CRISPR mostly has better PR, and is a fairly minor technical innovation. Gene editing, regardless of the technique involved, will be tremendously important for the next few decades.

When they say "a solved problem" they mean that the cost of off-target mutations is worth it for a single high-value edit. It is unlikely that most genomes have the option of a high-value edit to improve intelligence. It's probably more like 1 IQ point per edit. Of course, accuracy in 10 years will be better than accuracy now. In fact, if we truly had no off-target mutations, we could act now, without knowing the structure of intelligence, just by "spell-checking" -- correcting rare variants.

It is hard to tell in advance what is important. Quite a few innovations that were promised to change everything turned out to have much more limited value.

Within a decade we should know a lot about the genetic basis of intelligence

I don't see any reason for it. So far, all knowledge in this area is just correlation between some genes and IQ, with no understanding how it works. Judging from history of other technologies, with such theoretical base any major improvements take centuries of trial and error.

This Wired article claims that a knowledgeable scientists thinks that the "off-target mutations are already a solved problem."

Even if the Crispr protein itself doesn't cause mutations you likely will have to doublicate DNA a few time via PCR which produces additional errors.

According to Wikipedia:

This means that a human genome accumulates around 64 new mutations per generation because each full generation involves a number of cell divisions to generate gametes

I think we are very far off from reaching the exactly the same level of mutations or a lower level. The difficult question will be what level of mutations is acceptable.

Within a decade we should know a lot about the genetic basis of intelligence. Wouldn't it then probably be easy to create embryos that give birth to extremely smart people, far smarter than have ever existed?

If gene A raises IQ and gene B also raises IQ than that doesn't mean that both genes together will raise IQ even more. The might cancel each other out. A few people will grow to be extremely smart but I don't think that will be the case for every embryo in the project.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/198ld3/does_spinning_in_the_opposite_direction_really/

When you spin, your endolymph moves against hair cells in your semicircular canals. This tells your brain that you are spinning. But the hair cells respond strongly to changes in movement, and when you continue to spin, there is no change in movement -- your vestibular system is telling your body that you aren't really moving much, rather, the world is spinning, and you are still. This leads to sensory integration issues, and you start to feel dizzy and nauseous. Stopping spinning doesn't help too much -- suddenly your hair cells get a jerk from you stopping spinning, and say that you are moving when you are not, and you get more conflicting sensory information.

When you start spinning again, you get consistent sensory inputs -- your vestibular system tells you that you are spinning, and you are. This is a good thing for maybe a spin or two, but then you will start getting conflicting input again, and get dizzier. I'm not sure that it matters which direction you spin. It is possible that the continuing motion of your endolymph (in the direction you were spinning) might be enough to lessen the triggering of hair cells when you start to spin in the same direction, while spinning in the opposite direction (against the flow) gives a stronger trigger. But that is speculation on my part.

Footnote: When dancers turn their heads to focus on a single spot, this works both because they are consistently orienting themselves visually, and because the sudden movements of their head tells their vestibular system that they are spinning -- no conflict in sensory input.

My default reaction is, no way that can actually work.

can you explain this more? I am interested in what you mean and how the state of this belief feels...

In my non-RCT experience :-) yes, this does work.

Placebo effect should be enough to make it work if you believe strongly that it works.

Value things that can be gotten out of computer games:

• community
• feelings of victory
• feelings of adventure
• feelings of learning (for learning games)
• feelings of relaxation
• feelings of pain

computer games can be good for getting things like the sense of community or victory, but on the downside they occupy time and sometimes do other things i.e. become addictive.

For simulating victory-feels; yes.

Ask yourself -

1. what are you getting out of games,
2. at what cost?
3. what do you want to be getting out of games?
4. and what do you want to be getting out of those expenses?

You should weigh up the costs and the benefits. Do you need some of those benefits? Are you willing to incur some costs? And decide where the optimum game-time is. (also check again at a different time and re-evaluate regularly)

There's been some actual research into that, this talk is a good summary.

But you can pick an inertial reference frame such that any given photon has arbitrarily high frequency (and thus energy) due to blueshift.

That applies to anything, not just photons. In any event, I'm not an expert in general relativity, but I think what matters is the energy of an object in its own center-of-mass frame (a.k.a. its mass). (And a single photon, or a collection of photons traveling in the same direction, doesn't even have a center-of-mass frame.) Anyway, elementary particles (including photons) already are point-like so far as we know, so they couldn't possibly collapse any further.

Quantum mechanics and relativity are not compatible. That's one of the big problems (probably even the biggest) of modern physics. From each one's point of view the other one is nonsense, the math breaks down.

Why don't ordinary photons spontaneously collapse into black holes?

How do you know that ordinary photons aren't black holes?

Energy density is a function of mass, and photons have zero mass.

It is very hard to turn pages if your fingers are too dry (or lack oil). Most people turn pages by using the friction of their fingers against the face of the page, rather than hunting for the edge of the page. Very dry skin doesn't present much friction, and your fingers just slide along the page.

I usually blow on my fingers, on the theory that it is slightly more sanitary, and provides enough moisture to 'grip' the paper.

A dry finger slides easily on paper, a wet finger sticks to it (and moves it).

Cashiers often have a wet sponge on hand to moisten their finger when counting banknotes.

My grandfather saw me do this to a book once and told me the story of an Eastern mage who avenged himself by leaving the king who beheaded him a wondrous book with pages stuck together - but they were poisoned.

Never did this again...

I see no reason why bacteria can't survive like this.

keep the domain; start a blog. if you don't like the logo - let it go.

or get rid of the domain. up to you!

nothing bad happens if you keep them; or get rid of them. I assume you paid a year or two worth of the domain.

The best thing you could do is maybe make use of the resource now that you have it. The worst is maybe to not make use of it. (actively doing yourself harm aside...)

Why shouldn't I just publish all my identity documents on Facebook?

What for?

Probably nothing in particular will happen to you if you do that. But it is also probable that nothing will happen to you if you never wear a seat belt. But in both cases there are very bad potential consequences, even if they have a probability of less than 50%.

Identity theft does happen in the real world. There no reason to be make easier for other people.

There are literally millions of cases of personal information being published online in places where people could access it and steal it (if they were smart enough). Basically, you are just lowering the intelligence bar for identity theft -- or perhaps more accurately, the entry cost.