Open Thread, March 1-15, 2013

Why am I not signed up for cryonics?

Here's my model.

In most futures, everyone is simply dead.

There's a tiny sliver of futures that are better than that, and a tiny sliver of futures that are worse than that.

What are the relative sizes of those slivers, and how much more likely am I to be revived in the "better" futures than in the "worse" futures? I really can't tell.

I don't seem to be as terrified of death as many people are. A while back I read the Stoics to reduce my fear of death, and it worked. I am, however, very averse to being revived into a worse-than-death future and not being able to escape.

I bet the hassle and cost of cryonics disincentivizes me, too, but when I boot up my internal simulator and simulate a world where cryonics is free, and obtained via a 10-question Google form, I still don't sign up. I ask to be cremated instead.

Cryonics may be reasonable for someone who is more averse to death and less averse to worse-than-death outcomes than I am. Cryonics may also be reasonable for someone who has strong reasons to believe they are more likely to be revived in better-than-death futures than in worse-than-death futures. Finally, there may be a fundamental error in my model.

This does, however, put me into disagreement with both Robin Hanson ("More likely than not, most folks who die today didn't have to die!") and Eliezer Yudkowsky ("Not signing up for cryonics [says that] you've stopped believing that human life, and your own life, is something of value").

A new comet from the oort cloud, >10 km wide, has been discovered that is doing a flyby of Mars in October of 2014. The current orbit is rather uncertain, but it is probably passing within 100,000 km and the max likelihood is ~35,000 km. There is a tiny but non-negligable chance this thing could actually hit the red planet, in which case we would get to witness an event on the same order of magnitude as the K-T event that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs! (and lose everything we have on the surface of the planet and in orbit.)

I, for one, hope it hits. That would not be a once in a lifetime opportunity. That would be a ONCE IN THE HISTORY OF HOMINID LIFE opportunity! We would get to observe a large impact on a terrestrial body as it happened and watch the aftermath as it played out for decades!

As is, the most likely situation though is one in which we get to closely sample and observe the comet with everything we have in orbit around Mars. The orbit will be nailed down better in a few months when the comet comes out from the other side of the sun.

And to quote myself towards the end of the last open thread:

I don't know if this has been brought up around here before, but the B612 foundation is planning to launch an infrared space telescope into a venus-like orbit around 2017. It will be able to detect nearly every earth-crossing rock larger than 150 meters wide, and a significant fraction down to a few at 30ish meters. The infrared optics looking outwards makes it much easier to see the warm rocks against the black of space without interference from the sun and would quickly increase the number of known near earth objects by two orders of magnitude. This is exactly the mission I've been wishing / occasionally agitating for NASA to get off their behinds and do for five years. They've got the contract with Ball Aerospace to build the spacecraft and plan to launch on a Falcon 9 rocket. And they accept donations.

Zeo Inc is almost certainly shutting down.

Zeo users should assume the worst and take action accordingly:

1. Update your sleep data and then export all your sleep data from the Zeo website as a CSV (the bar on the right hand side, in tiny grey text)
2. Upgrade your Zeo with the new firmware if you have not already done so, so it will store unencrypted data which can be accessed without the Zeo website.
3. Depending on how long you plan to use your Zeo, you may want to buy replacement headbands (~$15 each, I think you can get a year's use out of them). Amazon still stocks the original bedside unit's replacement headbands and the cellphone/mobile unit replacement headbands but who knows how many they still have?

I'm sad that they're closing down. I've run so many experiments with my Zeo, and there doesn't seem to be any successor devices on the horizon: all the other sleep devices I've read of are lame accelerometer-based gizmos.

Google Reader is being killed 1 July 2013. Export your OPML and start searching for a new RSS reader...

I wanted to apologize for the post I made on Discussion yesterday. I hope one of the mods deletes it. I should have thought more carefully before posting something controversial like that. I made multiple errors in the process of writing the post. One of the biggest mistakes I made was mentioning the name of a certain organization in particular, in a way that might harm that organization.

In the future, before I post anything, I will ask myself, "Will this post raise or lower the sanity waterline?" The post I made clearly didn't really do much for the former, and could easily have contributed to the latter. For that I am filled with regret.

I have a part-time job, and I will be donating at least $150 of my income to the organization I mentioned and possibly harmed in the previous post I made.

I'm not making this comment for the purpose of gaining back karma; I'm making it because I still want to be taken seriously in this community as a rationalist. I know that this may never happen, now, but if that's the case, I can always just make another account. Less Wrong is amazing, and I like it here.

I posted this in the waning days of the last open thread, but I hope no one will mind the slight repeat here.

The last Dungeons and Discourse campaign was very well-received here on Less Wrong, so I am formally announcing that another one is starting in a little while. Comment on this thread if you want to sign up.

A call for advice: I'm looking into cognitive behavioral therapy—specifically, I'm planning to use an online resource or a book to learn CBT methods in hopes of preventing my depression from recurring. It looks like these methods have a good chance of working, although the evidence isn't as strong as for in-person CBT. At this point, I'm trying to decide which resources to learn from. Any recommendations or anecdotes would be appreciated.

For various reasons, I cannot make open threads anymore, ever again.

I have been reading up on religious studies (yes, I ignored that generally sound advice never to study anything with the word 'studies' in the name) in order to better understand Chinese religion.

Unexpectedly, I have found the native concepts are useful (perhaps even more useful) outside the realm of religion. That is to say, distinctions like universalist/particularist, conversion/heritage, and concepts like orthodoxy, orthopraxy, reification, etc... are useful for thinking about apparently "non-religious" ideologies (including, to some extent, my own).

My first instinct when hearing a claim is to try and figure out if it is true, but I fear I have been missing the point (since much of the time, the truth of the claim is irrelevant to the speaker) and instead should focus more on the function a given (stated) belief plays in the life (especially the social life) of the person making the assertion (at least, on the margin).

Over the past month, I have started taking melatonin supplements, instigated a new productivity system, implemented significant changes in diet and begun a new fitness routine. February is also a month where I anticipate changes in my mood. I find myself moderately depressed and highly irritable with no situational cause, and I have no idea which of these things, if any, are responsible.

This is not ideal.

I'd been considering breaking my calendar down into two-week blocks, and staging interventions in accordance with this. Then the restless spirit of Paul Graham sat on my shoulder and told me to turn it into an amazing web service that would let people assign themselves into self-experimental cohorts, where they're algorithmically assigned to balanced blocks so that effects of overlapping interventions can be teased apart.

I've never really gotten that into the whole Quantified Self thing, but I'd be keen to see if something like this existed already. If not, I'd consider putting such a thing together.

Any discussion/observations on this general subject?

It seems plausible to me that traditional financial advice assumes that you have traditional goals (e.g. eventually marrying, eventually owning a house, eventually raising a family, and eventually retiring). Suppose you are an aspiring effective altruist and willing to forgo one or more of these. How does that affect how closely your approach to finances should adhere to traditional financial advice?

This comment discusses information hazards, but not in much detail.

"Don't link to possible information hazards on Less Wrong without clear warning signs."
— Eliezer, in the previous open thread.

"Information hazard" is a Nick Bostrom coinage. The previous discussion of this seems to have focused on what Bostrom calls "psychological reaction hazard" — information that will make (at least some) people unhappy by thinking about it. Going through Bostrom's paper on the subject, I wonder if these other sorts of information hazards should also be avoided here:

• Distraction hazards — addictive products, games, etc.; especially those that have been optimized to be so. Examples: Links to video games; musical earworms; discussions of addictive drug use; porn.
• Role model hazards — discussions of people doing harmful things; bad examples that readers might imitate. Examples: Talking about suicide and thoughts leading to it; fatalistic discussion of bad habits.
• Biasing hazards — information that amplifies existing biased beliefs. Examples skipped to avoid a distracting political discussion here.
• Embarrassment hazard — discussions of embarrassing things happening to people in the community. Examples: Links to scandalous or distorted stories about members of the community; gossip in general.

I finished Coursera "Data Analysis" last night. (It started back in January.)

It's basically "applied statistics/some machine learning in R": we get a quick tour of data clean up and munging, basic stats, material on working with linear & logistic models, use of common visualization and clustering approaches, prediction with linear regression and trees and random forests, then uses of simulation such as bootstrapping.

There's a lot of material to cover, and while there's plenty of worked out examples in the lectures, I don't see anyone learning R or statistics just from this course - you should definitely have used R to some degree before (at least running some t-tests or graphs), and you will definitely benefit from already knowing what a p-value is and how you would calculate it by hand (because eg. you'll be flummoxed when the lecturer Leek works out a confidence interval 'by hand' while coding - "where does this magic value 1.96 come from?!").

On the plus side, I liked all the examples and the curriculum seems useful and well-chosen. It's a reasonable introduction to 'data science'. I think my time wasn't wasted doing this Coursera: I'm more comfortable with some of the more advanced/exotic techniques, and picked up many R tips, some of which have come in handy already (eg. some of the data munging tips were useful in working with Touhou music data, and I've been able to replace all my homebrew Haskell multiple-correction code in various nootropics & Zeo experiments with a standard R library function p.adjust, which I had no idea existed until the lecture on multiple comparison introduced it to me) - although as of yet I have not used bootstraps or random forests* or splines in anger. (But if any is thinking about doing it in the future, see my comment about the prerequisites.)

On the negative side: like most of the other students, I think this should've been a longer course than 8 weeks and that the estimate of 5hrs/wk is misleading. The pace was very unforgiving. I was relatively well-prepared for this course, but I still wound up submitting for the second data analysis assignment a paper I think was very substandard. Why? Well, though we had two weeks or so to do it, I deliberately didn't do much work on it in the first week because in the first assignment you couldn't do a good job without the lectures from the week before the assignment was due, and I didn't want to get bushwhacked again; but in the actual week before, I got completely distracted by my Touhou music project, and so I wound up just not having the time or energy to do it. Similar things happened to a lot of other students: there was no slack or recovery time.

(There were also the usual teething problems of any new course: wrong or misleading quizzes, errors in lectures, that sort of thing. The peer review grading seems particularly poor, with the required grades being based on pretty superficial aspects of the submitted analyses.)

* EDIT: I have since employed random forests or bootstrapping in http://www.gwern.net/Weather , http://www.gwern.net/hpmor , & http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns

So you guys remember soylent? I was thinking I could get similar benefits blending simple foods and adding a good multivitamin to fill in any gaps.

So I've worked on it on and off for a couple of days, and here is a shot at what a whole food soylent might contain:

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/recipe/2786310/2

So um if anybody wants to confirm or critique this, that would be cool

Does anyone know which of the books on the academic side of CFAR's recommended reading list are likely to be instrumentally useful to someone who's been around here a couple years and has read most of the Sequences? It seems likely that there's some useful material in there, but I'd rather avoid reviewing a bunch of stuff.

Gamification of productivity:https://habitrpg.com/splash.html

I haven't signed up yet because I'm still assessing whether the overhead of filling it out is going to be too much of a trivial inconvenience, but thought some others might be interested. From poking around, it looks like it has a lot of potential but is still a little raw. It has the core game elements firmly in place but lacks the public status/accountability elements of good games (through acheivements/badges) and Fitocracy (through community/public accountability).

UPDATE: signed up, will report back next month

So apparently I should be somewhat concerned about dying by poisoning. Any simple tips for avoiding this? It looks like the biggest killers are painkillers and heavy recreational drugs, neither of which I take, so I might be safe.

Math and reading gaps between boys and girls

However, even in countries with high gender equality, sex differences in math and reading scores persisted in the 75 nations examined by a University of Missouri and University of Leeds study. Girls consistently scored higher in reading, while boys got higher scores in math, but these gaps are linked and vary with overall social and economic conditions of the nation.

I've just noticed that hovering the mouse pointer over a post's or comment's score now displays a balloon pop-up with information how large percentage of votes was positive. New feature or am I just really bad at noticing black stuff appearing suddenly on my screen?

Anyway, it's pretty nice. You can, for example, upvote a comment from 0 to 1, notice that the positive vote ratio changes only by a few percent and suddenly realize that there's a war going on in there.

Saving the world though ECONOMICS

In a world of magic and fantasy, there exist two worlds: the Human World and the Demon World of fantasy creatures. Fifteen years ago, the "War of the Southern Kingdoms” broke out between both sides, each intending to conquer the other. Both sides were locked in a stalemate, until a young male human decides to do something about it. Known as the Hero, he is a skilled and powerful warrior who has traveled to the Demon World to end their evil by killing their leader, the Demon Queen.

But what surprised the Hero when he storms the Demon Queen's castle is that the latter doesn't want a fight. She just wanted to reveal to him a sordid truth: the war has never always been about good versus evil — it's a far more complicated affair, with each side being equally good and evil all the same.

On one hand, the war helped unite erstwhile feuding kingdoms against a common enemy. On the other hand, it allowed opportunists to take advantage of their own races and get rich off the war — powerful, corrupt humans control the poor and weak, while warmongering demon clans harass pacifistic ones. Then there's the prospects should one side win: the losers gets oppressed, while the winners break down into infighting over the spoils. Prematurely ending the war is an even worse idea, because so much money, time and resources have been spent for the war effort soldiers could never get any compensation should a ceasefire be signed immediately, causing each side to break down into civil war against their former employers.

Fortunately, the Demon Queen has a better idea, and she wants the Hero's help: forge a peaceful end to the war with the least repercussions by playing behind the scenes and at the same time introduce sweeping reforms on all levels of society. Convinced, the Hero agrees to join her as they try to forge a peaceful way out, gaining allies and companions in the process.

Is anyone else watching Maoyuu Maou Yuusha, or reading the relevant novels? It's about as close to rationalist fiction as I've ever seen a commercial work be. It goes way further than the premise; a strong spirit of secular humanism is embedded into the story and its characters, and it's got some of the finest examples examples of a Patrick Stewart Speech I've seen this side of fantasy.

Link: This Story Stinks: article on a study showing that reader's perception of a blog post is changed when they read comments. In particular, any comments involving ad hominens or being generally rude polarize people's views. Full paper link.

So, I notice some of the top contributors have the "Overview" page that appears when you click on their name display their LW wiki user page instead of the standard recent comments/posts summary (gwern, for example). Is that only for super-awesome people or is there some way to enable it that I failed to find?

[edit:] Okay, apparently patience is the key. It started working for me somewhere between 24 and 48 hours after I made the wiki page for my username.

Does anyone know if there any negative effects of drinking red bull or similar energy drinks regularly?

I typically use tea (caffeine) as my stimulant of choice on a day to day basis, but the effects aren't that large. During large Magic: the Gathering tournaments, I typically drink a red bull or two (depending on how deep into the tournament I go) in order stay energetic and focused - usually pretty important/helpful since working on around 4 hours of sleep is the norm for these things.

Red bull works so well that I'm considering promoting it to semi-daily use, but I'd like to know exactly what I'm buying if I do this.

Edit: After saying it out loud, I just realized that if I use red bull regularly, it might lose its effects due to caffeine/whatever dependency. TNSTAAFL strikes again :-/ Still interested in any evidence though.

What is the purpose of the monthly quotes thread? (To post quotes, obviously.) But it seems to me that a lot of the time, it's just an excuse for applause lights.

I've been trying out the brain-training software from Posit science. I've definitely gotten better at some of their training material (tracking objects in a crowd of identical objects and seeing briefly shown motion), but I'm not sure whether it's improving my life.

Have any of you tried Posit's BrainHQ? If so, how has it worked out for you?

The training exercises look like they're only available as expensive software, but if you do their free exercises, they'll offer a $10/month option.

I found out about Posit from this video-- Merzenich clearly has something to sell, but nothing he said seemed like obvious nonsense.

I'm having a motivation block that I'm not sure how to get around. Basically whenever I think about performing an intellectual activity, I have a sudden negative reaction that I'm incapable of succeeding. This heavily lowers my expectation that doing these activities will pay off, most destructively so the intellectual activity of figuring out why I have these negative reactions.

In particular, I worry about my memory. I feel like it's slipping from what it used to be, and I'm only 24. It's like, if only I could keep the details of the memory tricks in my head long enough I might be able to improve it. :) Only partially kidding.

In short, it takes a lot of effort for me to feel like I'm succeeding at succeeding. And I don't know why.

Apparently conscientiousness correlates strongly with a lot of positive outcomes. But unfortunately I seem to be very low on it.* Is there anything I can do to train it?

*Standard disclaimers about self assessment apply.

It occurs to me that there is a roadblock for an AI to go foom; namely that it first has to solve the same "keep my goals constant while rewriting myself" problem that MIRI is trying to solve.

Otherwise the situation would be analogous to Gandhi being offered a pill that has a chance of making him into anti-Gandhi, and declining it.

If the superhuman - but not yet foomed! - AI is not yet orders of magnitude smarter than a hoo-mon, it may be a while before it is willing to power-up / go foom, since it would not want to jeapardize its utility function along the way.

Just because it can foom does not imply it'll want to foom (because of the above).

I've just moved to the Bay Area, and, as I'm unsubscribing from all my DC-area theatre/lecture/fun event listservs, I am sad I don't yet know what to replace them with!

What mailing lists will tell me about theatre, lectures, book clubs, social dance, costuming, etc in Berkeley and environs?

I think it'd be nice to have a (probably monthly) "Ideas Feedback Thread", where one would be able to post even silly and dubious ideas for critique without fear of karma loss. Rules could be that you upvote top level idea comments if they sound interesting (even if wrong), and downvote only if you're really sure that it's very easy to find out they're bad (e.g. covered in core sequences). Could also be used for getting feedback on draft posts and whatnot.

The plan being that questionable ideas are put into their own thread for feedback, instead of being potentially turned into questionable posts. At the same time, it would give people a place to be wrong and get feedback without fear of repercussions and hopefully without forming negative associations with doing stuff on Less Wrong.

(Potential downsides include that it could steal from of other, more filtered, content locations if people feel it's a less risky place to post things, that posting in the thread may potentially be seen as low-status, and that someone reading recent comments may vote in not the intended way or feel burdened with reading less filtered content. I feel that these are probably outweighed by upsides.)

I have a small site feature question! What are those save buttons and what do they do, if anything? (They seem to not do what I think they should do.)

I've been working on a little project compiling Touhou music statistics. One major database may be unavailable to me from anywhere but Toranoana, and the total cost of reshipping will be ~$25 and take several weeks to get to me. This would be annoying, expensive, and slow.

In case my other strategies fail, are there any LWers in Japan who either owe me a favor or are willing to do me a favor in buying a CD off Tora and sending me the spreadsheets etc on it? (I'd be happy to cover the purchase cost with Paypal or a donation somewhere or something.)

How to instantly know, which articles I have already read on LW (or elsewhere)?

Well, if I have a camera on my computer, it could trace my eyes and displayed article and do some time based guesses what had actually has been read by me. Then it should be displayed with a yellowish background next time.

Just a suggestion.

P.S.

Or at least, it should be a I HAVE READ IT! button somewhere. With an personal marks how good it was. Independent of the up/down vote thumbs.

Can anyone tell me the name of this subject or direct me to information on it:

Basically, I'm wondering if anyone has studied recent human evolution - the influence of our own civilized lifestyle on human traits. For example: For birth control pills to be effective, you have to take one every day. Responsible people succeed at this. Irresponsible people may not. Therefore, if the types of contraceptives that one can forget to use are popular enough methods of birth control, the irresponsible people might outnumber responsible people in a very short period of time. (Currently about half the pregnancies in the USA are unintended, and probably 40% of those pregnancies go full term and result in a child being born. As you can imagine, it really wouldn't take very long for the people with genes that can cause irresponsibility to outnumber the others this way...)

Any search terms? Anyone know the name of this topic or recall book titles or other sources about it?

Recent experiences have suggested to me that there is a positive correlation between rationality and prosopagnosia. One hypothesis is that dealing with prosopagnosia requires using Bayes to recognize people, so it naturally provides a training ground for Bayesian reasoning. But I'm curious about other possible hypotheses as well as additional anecdotal evidence for or against this conclusion.

Has anyone indexed the set of Five-Second Skill posts on Less Wrong? E.g. Get Curious, the Algorithm for Beating Procrastination, Value of Information etc.

Does anyone have sources on active steps that can be taken to improve gender diversity in organisations?

There is a lot of writing on the subject, but I'm finding it difficult to find sources that compare the effectiveness of different measures, with figures showing change, controlling for variables etc.

Quick clarification of Eliezer's Mixed Reference, intended for me from twelve hours ago:

'External reality' is assumed to mean the stuff that doesn't change when you change your mind about it. This is a pretty good fit to what people mean when they say something like "exists" and didn't preface it with "cogito ergo." It's what can be meaningfully talked about if the minds talking are close enough that "change your mind" is close to "change which mind."

External reality can be logical, because the trillionth digit of pi doesn't change even if you change your mind about it. Or it can be physical, because dogs don't disappear if you decide there are no dogs nearby. ("why do dogs / suddenly disappear / every time / you are near.")

If we look inside of peoples' heads, logical external reality seems to be universal and specific - minds are computation, and so if you can do some fairly general stuff like labeling the output of an algorithm you haven't evaluated yet, you can have logical "external reality," which now appears to be somewhat of a misnomer, but oh well. "Stuff that doesn't change when you change your mind about it" is still too long.

Physical reality, on the other hand, is much more general and contingent - it's just a catch-all term for "hey, I know we're a mind and have logical reality and that good stuff, but there happens to be a world out here!" In fact, it's tempting to just say "if it doesn't change when you change your mind and it's not a logical thing, it's a physical thing." The label external reality might make more sense being applied to this stuff, since "physical" carries some connotation that isn't necessarily accurate.

I remember seeing something about Islamic law and the ability to will money to charities meant to exist in perpetua and now I can't find it. Does anyone know what I'm talking about.

From the wikipedia page, it seems that coffee has a lot of good long term medical benefits, with only a few long term side effects if consumed in moderation, meaning less than 4 cups a day.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_caffeine#Long-term_effects)

This includes possible reduced risk of prostate cancer, Alzheimers, dementia, Parkinson's disease, heart disease, diabetes, liver disease, cirrhosis, and gout.

It has also been taken off the list for a risk factor in heart disease, and acts as an antidepressant.

Caffeine is not the cause of all of these positive effects, because there are some that decaffeinated coffee also helps.

Risks include increased heart disease from non-paper brewed coffee, iron deficiency, and anxiety.

Because of this, I'm considering deliberately drinking coffee, despite not needing it in order to stay awake. Are there reasons not to that LWers know about? Or are there other substances that have similar effects?

I am in Berkeley for a few days, primarily Thursday march 28th. Please text me at 203-710-5337 if you'd like to catch up or have any ideas for a thing I shouldn't miss.

If computer hardware improvement slows down, will this hasten or delay AGI?

My naive hypothesis is that if hardware improvement slows, more work will be put into software improvement. Since AGI is a software problem, this will hasten AGI. But this is not an informed opinion.

ignore me; testing retraction

I've just learned that if it is July or a later month, it is more probable that the current year has begun with Friday, Sunday, Tuesday or Wednesday. If it is June or an earlier month, it is more probable that the current year has begun with Monday, Saturday or Thursday.

For the Gregorian calendar, of course.

One day Clippy will sit in a re-cohered bar with its fellow superintelligences from around the MWI-block, each sipping on their own reality-fluid, but what a stale, static beverage it will have become for everyone. Except the superintelligence making everything bubbly. Also, at that point, Clippy's architecture will be implemented using paperclips as a substrate.

I'm a piece of wire and my ambition is to become a paperclip.