Open Thread, Jun. 1 - Jun. 7, 2015

Names/EmailAddresses/Phone numbers of people can be useful. Both by drawing information from my contact book but also in the way https://rapportive.com/ works.

Unit conversion would be interesting. If someone writes the price of 5£ however over that price to see the conversion to Euro and dollar would be useful.

Whenever I read temperature noted in °F, I would appreciate being able to hover over it to see a conversion into the sensible format of °C. The same goes for units like inches. When I read a time noted in EST I would like automatic conversion into GMT+1 with happens to be where I live.

There was a chrome extension advertised on LW a while ago that did this for "alternate points of view" - but it was crowdsourced, and didn't have enough links to be useful. But an automated version of that (that say, detected keywords, and posted up links) would be great.

I'm still sad that there isn't a dictionary of numbers for Firefox, it sounds amazing but it isn't enough to make me switch to Chrome just for that.

This kind of thing sounds very useful especially if easily extensible. How are you planning to make the ui for this work? I think it would be fairly challenging to make it both easily available without being obnoxiously overpresent and am interested to hear your approach to the problem.

And it isn't that he has no empathy, he just has more empathy for mankind as a whole than for the guy standing in front of him, and he's drawing logical conclusions from that difference.

That's a risky game. It makes the company culture less enjoyable. That makes hiring harder and can motivate people to quit. Musk can afford this because of the strength of the vision of his company, that makes people to work there but it's still not clear that it's optimal.

The general problem with it is that it can be used too easily as an excuse. Hm, I think we should try to find the meta of this, this looks useful. Basically imagine a graph where various human situations are on the X and the usefulness of a given thing in that situation is the Y. And another graph, where the usefulness of that thing as an excuse is on Y. And if the second tends to be higher, that is not a good thing.

Another meta: there is a difference between thinking I figure X is good and thinking I am entitled to decide whether X is good.

For example the good old trolley problem. Pushing the fat man is the almost obviously right choice looking at that situation only ("shut up and multiply", feelings like OMG I am a murderer now do not matter as much as lives), but it is highly dangerous if people feel like they are entitled to take such choices, they are entitled to sacrifice someone without their consent for the greater good. This is a very different thing. It generates an excuse for others in far different situations.

A truly saintly person would push the fat man then demand to be punished, because the choice was right but he was not entitled to make such a choice and others should not feel entitled to either.

I admire that

For the record, I don't. The "I'm too important to pay attention to little people. They are nothing but tools" attitude leads to bad places.

Being a pure consequentialist will not give off the signals that a socially acceptable person, who leans towards consequentialism, will. To predict someone's ethical behaviour, some stronger signals could be checked e.g. did the guy ask himself how to create the greatest good for humanity and then go and do that in about five different industries? If so, probably high on ethics.

The question about people skills is a good question to ask when you want to predict someone's social behaviour, but that is not the same as ethics, which empathy is often a proxy for.

Consequentialist thinking has a general tendency to get one labeled an asshole.

e.g.

"Hey man, can you spare a dollar?" "If I did have a dollar to spare, I strongly doubt that giving it to you would be the most effective use of it." "Asshole."

Although I think that it's dangerous to think that you can accurately estimate the cost/benefit of tact; I think most people underestimate how much effect it has.

Interesting. Thanks for posting this!

I received exactly the same number of SNPs from BGI, so it looks like our data were processed under the same pipeline. I've found three people who have publicly posted their BGI data: two at the Personal Genome Project (hu2FEC01 and hu41F03B, each with 5,095,048 SNPs), and one on a personal website (with 18,217,058 SNPs).

Then there are a few thousand SNPs that one or other analysis (in 26 cases, both) list in their output but don't report anything for. What causes this?

The double dashes are no calls. 23andme reports on a set list of SNPs, and instead of omitting an SNP when they can't confidently determine the genotype, they indicate this with a double dash.

Is this amount of mismatch typical for such analyses?

This seems normal considering the error rates from 23andme that others have been reporting (example). I don't know about BGI's error rates.

I think it might be possible to accurately guess the actual genotypes for some of the mismatches by imputing the genotypes with something like Impute2 (for each mismatched SNP, leave it out and impute it using the nearby SNPs). This will take many hours of work, though, and you might as well phase and impute across the whole genome if you have the time, interest, and processing power to do so (I've been meaning to try this out to learn more about how these things work).

I suspect that when people frame the question as whether A or B is more important to you, they are trying to take one of them from you. No, it does not follow technically; but why else would they ask such question?

When you agree to play the game and say that you e.g. prefer A to B, in the next step someone will offer to take B away in exchange for a promise to make A really safe.

I recommend this essay, entitled appropriately Confessions of an ex Commie.

Liberty means a rich man may want to build a really glorious skyscraper but if the poor man's shack is in the way and he is unwilling to sell it, then he cannot.

Curiously, that sounds like a description of equality to me.

If you find an idea to be ideologically offensive

...then you should consider disengaging the concepts of "idea" and "offensive".

the best way to fight it is to not engage it in argument but to starve it of attention

That depends. Some ideas will wither and die, but some will spread like weeds without opposition. I don't know how to decide ex ante what will happen to an idea ignored.

Great video!

But I agree with Lumifer that ignoring bad ideas is not always the answer. Many bad ideas are kind of marginal and if you ignore them they'll wither. Others will catch on. Even if they die off eventually, they can cause a lot of damage before they do (the 20th century provides ample evidence of this, and the 21 is providing addition evidence).

I estimate it will be well accepted in the sense that nobody objects to your posts. At the same time I wouldn't expect much engagement. I think your posts likely will receive a bit of upvotes and nearly no downvotes.

Poll:

[pollid:987]

I'd be interested to read another take on it if there's some novel aspect to the explanation. Do you have a particular approach to explaining it that you think the world doesn't have enough of?

Suggestion: We should ask futurists to predict what will happen 5 years in the future. Then publish the results. Then publish it again 5 years later.

With shorter time period (but probably still long enough to trigger wild imagination in some) we could get more iterations, so we could filter out the worst ones, and still get a few useful predictions from the remaining ones.

Ray Kurzweil: Humans will be hybrids by 2030

http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/03/technology/ray-kurzweil-predictions/

It's unfair to criticize someone making claims in that area that are based on the summary of a CNN journalist. To me the most likely explanation is that the CNN journalist doesn't provide a good summary of what Kurzweil said.

It's under the standards we should have on LW.

Agreed on all counts. It amazes me that anyone listens to that man.

It's interesting that Google seems to be following up on several of Kurzweil's predictions, Google Glass/Magic Leap, Project Jacquard, and the self-driving car are all predictions Kurzweil made in The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near.

That's something I've never understood about myself: I'm terrified to ask a passerby for the time of day, or ask a prospective love interest out on a date, or even call to order a pizza, but I have absolutely no problem standing in front of a room of strangers and speak for hours and hours. My suspicion is that it's a power dynamic issue: when I need to ask something of someone, I'm at a disadvantage, but when a group of people have already been convinced to gather in a room with little choice but to listen to me, I don't need to be afraid.

Mild fear here, I can talk in groups of people just fine, but I get nervous before and during a presentation (something for which I have taken deliberate steps to get better at).

For me at least, the primary thing that helps is being comfortable with the subject matter. If I feel like I know what I'm talking about and I practiced what I am going to say it usually goes fine (it took some effort to get to this level, btw), but if I feel like I have to bluff my way through everything falls apart real fast. The number of people in the audience and how well I know them both have noticeable effect as well, but what the audience is doing has almost no influence at all.

The one exception to this is asking questions, if I have a good answer to a question my mind switches from presentation mode to conversation mode, which I am, for some reason, much more at ease with. (Note: This doesn't work on everyone, some people instead get way more nervous, so don't take this as an encouragement to start asking questions when the presenter seems nervous.)

I had a paralyzing fear of public speaking which I have now mostly overcome. However this was almost entirely anticipatory fear that would go away once I actually started to speak, for example I would lose sleep about teaching a small group, excessively rehearse even for small and relatively unimportant public speaking occasions. My worries were mainly related to performance failure, e.g. that I would lose track of my plan, that I would stammer too badly, that I would suffer momentary anomia and be unable to get past it, or that I would freeze in some other way.

Audience engagement: entirely orthogonal to fear of public speaking at least for me. I may be self-critical later on if the audience isn't engaged, and may try to adapt on the fly if I notice signs of reduced engagement, but for me the fear is gone as soon as I start talking.

I don't have much fear of public speaking myself, but I'll guess that the answer to your question about audience attention depends heavily on whether they're paying / not paying attention (1) from the outset for reasons that have nothing to do with you, (2) from the outset because of your reputation or appearance or something, or (3) as a result of what you've said and done so far. I would expect a public appearance to be maximally traumatic when everyone is initially paying rapt attention, but as you proceed they visibly get bored and stop listening.

I don't think I have a particularly extreme fear of public speaking, but it certainly makes me feel very nervous. People are investing their time and attention into what you have to say and if you disappoint them, you have a whole room full of people that are immediately allied against you in their distaste for what you provided them in return for that attention.

Disappointing a few people in a crowd of many is nothing. Disappointing the crowd is fucking terrifying.

It's primarily fear of embarrassment taking the form of something very similar to, if not exactly similar to, anxiety.

Anxiety, judging by the couple of times I've experienced it, originates from over-and-behind, is tinted reddish-orange and tastes sharp, and feels somewhat like you've consumed too much caffeine (these descriptions may or may not make any sense to you, and may not translate correctly even if they did make sense owing to the subjective nature of emotion) - there's a need to act, to do -something-, which I think is supposed to express as a feeling to get away from the current location, but may get expressed instead as, for example, a need to pace.

Fear of public speaking is similar, with tinges of yellow and sour - embarrassment, I think. There's a bit of a leftish direction to it? It expresses more as a need to do nothing, to prevent anything from being done wrong. It provokes a curious mixture of a need to run away and a feeling of being pinned in place and being unable to. When you start talking, the need to "run" pushes into your voice, and you talk too quickly, while the need to do nothing may cause you to stand completely still, doing nothing but speaking.

Fear of public speaking seems only weakly influenced by the audience - it's an internal experience. Everything will get interpreted according to the internal narrative - people looking at their cell phones are rude if you're feeling okay, and bored with you and your terrible presentation if you're still feeling anxious.

People studying you with a blank expression will intensify the feeling of being studied for any mistakes, but how you interpret their expression in the first place will, again, be largely determined by the internal narrative.

It's much, much easier. Thinking clearly for most people ranges from hard to impossible. Worse, you might come to unpleasant or even dangerous conclusions. Much better to just go with the flow.

Being rational, intelligent, and able to make good decisions sounds great. If you could wave a magic wand and grant these things, I'm sure many people would like to take advantage. In the absence of a magic wand, the journey can be unpleasant and fraught with peril. Making progress involves seriously examining your own life and dealing with all those problems you'd rather not confront. It can ruin your present social life and require you to find a new circle (as with recovering alcoholics recognizing the difference between friends and drinking buddies).

And there are plenty of failure modes. There's a stereotype that the youth who first discovers atheism becomes arrogant and quarrelsome. A little learning is a dangerous thing. There's an initial decline in effectiveness of reason before it catches up to (and eventually surpasses) good old common sense. No one likes a straw Vulcan.

I would heartily recommend Erasmus of Rotterdam's In Praise of Folly for a satiric look at the benefits of not-thinking and irrationality. Here's an excerpt which I think is fitting for the present discussion:

To these, as bearing great resemblance to them, may be added logicians and sophisters, fellows that talk as much by rote as a parrot; who shall run down a whole gossiping of old women, nay, silence the very noise of a belfry, with louder clappers than those of the steeple; and if their unappeasable clamorousness were their only fault it would admit of some excuse; but they are at the same time so fierce and quarrelsome, that they will wrangle bloodily for the least trifle, and be so over intent and eager, that they many times lose their game in the chase and fright away that truth they are hunting for. Yet self-conceit makes these nimble disputants such doughty champions, that armed with three or four close-linked syllogisms, they shall enter the lists with the greatest masters of reason, and not question the foiling of them in an irresistible way, nay, their obstinacy makes them so confident of their being in the right, that all the arguments in the world shall never convince them to the contrary.

It's quite ironic, but people don't engage in not-thinking because they think not-thinking makes them happier. Pretty per definition, those people don't make there decision based by thinking.

Why k log n? I imagine n would be largely independent of k, so f(S) would become arbitrarily large just by using bigger and bigger sets.

Sorry, this was an useless post so now it's gone

"Trying to control your thoughts" sounds like a recipe for failure. If you exert force on trying to change a thought pattern you often strength it.

On the other hand there are a variety of ways to influence your thinking. Meditation is useful.

I use a variety of techniques to interact with my emotions. Most of them not easily describable.

Goal setting is a good way to prime thinking.

Ops, I answered there.

Congrats on your new Kindle. :-) I keep my Paperwhite 2 with me always and have started buying jackets based on whether or not they have pockets into which my Kindle fits.

2) Don't know how easy they break, since I haven't dropped one. I mean, when was the last time you dropped a book to the floor, or your phone? You'll probably be equally careful with your Kindle.

I had an accident with my Kindle Keyboard, however, where I put it in my backpack without cover and pressure from a corner one of my hardcover books made an indentation in the screen. It slightly discolored the background of the Kindle, but the text is still readable.

The reason I don't use a case is that I carry it with me, and the case makes it slightly thicker and heavier. I would use a case if I had it in my backpack.

1) I don't.

3, 4) Check out Caliber for library management and book-tagging. I much prefer it to organizing books into collections on my Kindle. It will also convert between formats, but if your pdf is a scanned book it won't improve.

Also check out the Kindle add on for Chrome/Mozilla. It sends web pages directly to your Kindle.

How easily is a Kindle damaged by falling to the ground? Is it important to use a case to prevent damage?

I have accidentally dropped Kindle in a case a couple of times; there was no perceptible damage.

Do you have tips for good PDF conversion. Especially for textbooks?

K2pdfopt is God's gift to Kindle readers. Compare a processed version of the latest paper I read with its original version.

What do you mean with "private domain whois"? That website can show you what's written in the Whois entry. What's written there depends on what the Register wrote into the entry. If you register with a host like GoDaddy you can choose against putting your name in the Whois entry.

I think this is true and I don't really understand the downvotes. Before the Sexual Revolution it was simple, not necessasarily satisfying but the rules were easy to grasp.

The early stages of the Sexual Revolution, say 1940-1970 were simple too. Pretty much everybody understood that the kind of guy who is good at sports and dancing and similar things will get the girls, and they would pretty much just go to the dances on the weekends, where Tommy Dorsey type of music was played in the 1940's or the newer rock and roll in the 1960's, and these dances still had traces of the old ballroom etiquette where girls would be sitting on one side and the boys on the other and they would approach a sitting girl and politely ask them for a dance. And things would develop on their own from there. Although the SR meant people stopped marrying as virgins (excluding the religious crazy at least) the goal was still to get married after having a few relationships and women were pretty open about basically testing men for marriage or LTR and attitudes were monogamous so there was this idea that you knew those five boys are far better than you but still as the five prettiest girls at the dance grabbed a firm hold on them the other girls had to realize that they lost that game and they have to settle for you.

And the whole thing was made even simpler and easier by people pretty much being carbon copies of each other. Everybody wore the same clothes and hairstyles and due to having similar sportly hobbies most boys would have similar musculature, fat people were rare because eating outside formal mealtimes was less common and so on. Remember in the movie Easy Riders how guys having somewhat long hair is a scandal in a small town, because they are so used to looking like each other. Today people look very individual, and this means no look is really scandalous but on the other this also increased competition in looks.

At any rate this started to break down in the eighties. I was born in 1978 so I have not seen the first phases of the breakdown, but in 1994 already what my parents taught broke down. There was no more pair dancing, just people forming circles on the dancefloor or dancing alone. But I guess it is was still recognizable what you do there, go to a girl, shake together then invite for a drink.

From about 2005 on things really started to make no sense. I saw guys just go in the dancefloor and plain simply grind their crotch on the backside of girls. Are they their GFs? No it turned out for the younger folks it became normal to do it with strangers. But the fun part is this, risk increased. This behavior could get an attractive guy a zero-effort bang and get an unattractive guy arrested for harassment. Also, as I mentioned above, there were no carbon-copy looks anymore so people competed highly in looks.

All in all, it seems the whole thing became more and more incomprehensible. It seems it is highly optimized now for the best. Guys who figure out how to look really good, or read social cues really easily can have it extremely easy now, while the rest who think there should be rules you can learn with your brain have it increasingly difficult.

Things got better for me when I left the world of dancefloors and got into internet dating, in an instinctively anti-Tinder way, as in, looking for women with no or grainy photos and really intelligent texts on their profiles It did not mean they are ugly, it mean they did not want to be judged after their looks. They make good partners. I think with Tinder internet dating is becoming something similar to the dancefloor, highly optimized for a few and not working for most. It is important to stick to less looks focused types of internet dating sites and I think filtering for no picture is still a good idea. Disclaimer: it helped that I did not live in an area with a lot of obesity, or else the lack of a picture may easily mean gravity-distorting mass.

This comment by user "CharlieSheen" from a similar thread seems relevant

I'm actually at the point when I think it is impossible to give men useful advice to improve their sex lives and relationships because of the social dynamics that arise in nearly all societies. Actually good advice aiming to optimize the life outcomes of the men who are given it has never been discussed in public spaces and considered reputable.

Same can naturally be said of advice for women. I think most modern dating advice both for men and women is anti-knowledge in that the more of it you follow the more miserable you will end up being. I would say follow your instincts but that doesn't work either in our society since they are broken.

I find his point here quite insightful.

This illustrates the problem I have with how we leave boys' sexual development to the haphazard and just hope that they can figure it out somehow. What about the boys who can't or don't have these experiences and learn these skills at an appropriate age?

You certainly complain about this a lot. But do you have any suggestions of how to fix this problem?

This illustrates the problem I have with how we leave boys' sexual development to the haphazard and just hope that they can figure it out somehow.

That's not the problem. If you leave boys' sexual development to the haphazard, history shows most will figure it out. The problem is that society is actively giving boys bad advice.

I don't think this is strictly a male problem. I would guess the average person does not have as much sex as they would prefer. A lot of this is due to child rearing. Without strict controls on relationships, a lot of women throughout history would have ended up as single parents, their partners unsupportive of their fling that went a way they didn't expect.

I'm not sure if its possible to entirely avoid such problems unless we have better birth control systems or very different child raising practices; the latter is a whole new can of worms. By better birth control i'm referring to widespread usage, lack of side effects, and product satisfaction; not just availability and quality.

What about the boys who can't or don't have these experiences...

They fail to reproduce, presumably. Genetics and evolution are a harsh mistress. Is there some reason to think that males that do not find a mate should get some sort of assistance? Perhaps for them, 40 is the "appropriate age".

I think I could make a fairly strong case that anyone who is not capable of talking to peers of both sexes and learning the right social cues to find a mate is probably someone also poorly equipped to take care of the results of finding that mate in the first place, namely a relationship and children. And - that's fine, viva la difference - a nice thing about being an intelligent human being is that you are not necessarily constrained in your behavior by what might be best from the standpoint of genetics and survival of the species.

Don't use up your idiosyncrasy credits on this.

I would strongly recommend to not do anything of this type. The point is, rationality means a set of method that preferably every human being should learn and use. Ideally, it should be part of the school curriculum.

This means Rationalists should not be a separate tribe or subculture with a separate culture and lingo. Anything that unnecessarily sets apart Rationalists from everybody else is a bad idea because it prevents ideas from spreading. Instead of being seen as generally useful ideas, it will be seen as the ideas of "those" people. Some of this is hard to avoid, I really dislike R. being so tied up with transhumanism and AI because then everybody who finds that weird silly and geeky is less interested in learning R. methods. But at least in those cases there are fairly good reasons, as using the methods themselves may lead to those things. So it is a trade-off between making the methods popular and accessible vs. being honest about it leading to some ideas that look a lot like sci-fi geekdom and all the low social status it means.

But at least when there are not so compelling reasons R. should be like everybody else.

I don't consider death bad in of itself, but only a problem due to opportunity cost. If you create a new person, that's just as good as extending the life of an old one. I've noticed my instinct on that start to shift due to being on LessWrong, and I'm kind of creeped out by that. I don't want to make it happen more.

The Wikipedia article on swearing is interesting.

It gives reasons why swearing may be not only a human universal but also serves social and other functions.

Steven Pinker lists the following functions (The Stuff of Thought: Language As a Window Into Human Nature, 2007):

• Abusive swearing

• Cathartic swearing

• Dysphemistic swearing

• Emphatic swearing

• Idiomatic swearing

I had to lookup dysphemistic and from that I'm not sure about the distinction to abuse. I think some way to deal with abuse has to be found anyway so that usage is addressed by that. Cathartic is positive so cultivating that should be fine. Idiomatic swearing is a cultural usage that I'd guess interlinks with the other due to circumstances - which could be solved if the social tension behind it were solved (otherwise it would inevitably remain and should be accepted too. This leaves emphatic swearing which I'm not sure has positive effects. Or maybe it is just a weaker form of cathartic swearing (scaled depending on temperament/character).

Does absolutely EVERYTHING come back to women not throwing themselves at men for you?

EDIT seriously this is like a third of your posts. It gets thrown in as non-sequiturs everywhere for no apparent reason. Are you intentionally trolling?

Most of the article jumped out at me as bizarre. Wife bonuses are just a very formal and translucent process for negotiating a relationship. There's nothing wrong if two people want to negotiate like that. The $1500 purses are a better example. And lots of people plan for doomsday scenarios. And why wouldn't you want a doctor who could make house calls if you could afford it?

Namely, that this kind of sexual liberation doesn't necessarily work symmetrically for young men who grow up in these kinds of religious environments.

I do not think that a lack of symmetry is sufficient reason to scuttle an improvement in people's lives, which sex positivity appears to be.

I also observe that the sympathy one receives for a hardship is not linearly proportional to the amount one advertises that hardship.

You state that these stories are dishonest; do you have anything to support that?

You also state that you object to this sort of "propaganda" because it does not apply in the same way to males. I agree that differing sexual attitudes towards men and women lead to different experiences for men and women in the situations you're describing. But why would this lead to an objection? Pointing out life events that have helped some people (and likely wouldn't help some others) seems like a positive thing to do to help those who could be helped (in this case, women with sex-negative upbringings).

So even average-looking women who decide to break away from these restrictions usually have a relatively easy way to do so.

What does "relatively easy" mean here? Doing well in a sexually open culture may be especially hard for males with some sort of religious baggage and no real education in the matter (you have argued this quite persuasively elsewhere, and I broadly agree), but I doubt that it's anything easy for females in the same condition. Even the most un-inhibited folks have preferences and standards for their sex lives that don't boil down to just "having sex, and as much of it as possible, regardless of the circumstances and risks involved".

Just because religion isn't the root of all evil doesn't mean that it doesn't produce any of it.

In the US in the age bracket of 30 to 34 years only 2 percent never had sexual contact and less than 5 percent had no sexual contact in the last year. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr036.pdf

That doesn't mean that hardship of both male and female virgins doesn't exist but the numbers don't tell the story that you try to tell.

Namely, that this kind of sexual liberation doesn't necessarily work symmetrically for young men who grow up in similar religious environments.

What, going from under the control of others to in control of yourself feels better than going from in control of others to only in control of yourself? Why, who would have ever guessed??? Shocking!

Women naturally hold the gatekeeping position

You don't understand how patriarchy works.