Open Thread, March 16-31, 2012

In the notes for the current chapter of HPMOR, we have the following:

General P/S/A: If you were good at algebra and are presently making less than $120,000/year, you should test yourself to see if you enjoy computer programming. Demand for programmers far outweighs supply, and if you have high talent it's an extremely easy and well-paying career to enter. I expect that at least 1% of the people reading this could be better employed as programmers than in their present occupations.

I greatly enjoy programming, and am currently employed at about half that doing tech support, where my only time to actively program is in bash scripts. I followed the link to the quixey challenge, and while I was not solving them in under a minute, I am consistently solving the practice problems. My question is this: now what?

I have no experience in actual development, beyond the algorithm analysis classes I took 6 years ago. I have a family of 6, and live in the KCMO area- how do I make the jump into development, from no background? Anyone have any experience in that transition?

A meta-anthropic explanation for why people today think about the Doomsday Argument: observer moments in our time period have not solved the doomsday argument yet, so only observer moments in our time period are thinking about it seriously. Far-future observer moments have already solved it, so a random sample of observer moments that think about the doomsday argument and still are confused are guaranteed to be on this end of solving it.

(I don't put any stock in this. [Edit: this may be because I didn't put any stock in the Doomsday argument either.])

A notion I got from reading the game company discussion-- how much important invention comes from remembering what you wanted before you got used to things?

I didn't want to put this as a discussion post in its own right, since it's not really on topic, but I suspect it might be of use to people. I'd like a "What the hell do you call this?" thread. It's hard to Google a concept, even when it might be a well-established idea in some discipline or other. For example:

Imagine you're playing a card game, and another player accidentally exposes their cards just before you make some sort of play. You were supposed to make that play in ignorance, but you now can't. There are several plays you could make which would have been beyond suspicion had you made them in ignorance, but if you make them now, they will be seen as suspect and opportunist in light of your opponent's blunder, so you feel obliged to make a less favourable play that is at least beyond reproach.

Is there a term to describe this? It, and various other social analogues, seem to crop up quite a lot in various guises, but I don't have a satisfactory label for it.

Alternatively, does anyone else have a "what the hell do you call this?" they want to throw out to the crowd?

How difficult would it be to code the user displays so that they also show average karma per comment, or better yet a karma histogram? Would that significantly increase the time it takes the site to load?

Because the number of quotes already used is increasing, and the number of LW users is increasing, I propose that the next quotes thread should include a new rule: use the search feature to make sure your quote has not already been posted.

I want to post some new decision theory math in the next few days. The problem is that it's a bit much for one post, and I don't like writing sequences, and some people don't enjoy seeing even one mathy post, never mind several. What should I do? Compress it into one post, make it a sequence, keep it off LW, or something else?

Hi. Long time reader, first time poster (under a new name). I posted once before, than quit because I am not good at math and this website doesn't offer many examples of worked out problems of Bayes theorem.

I have looked for a book or website that gives algebraic examples of basic Bayesian updates. While there are many books that cover Bayes, all require calculus, which I have not taken.

In a new article by Kaj_Sotala, fallacies are interpreted in the light of Bayes theorem. I would like to participate in debates and discussion where I can identify common fallacies and try to calculate them using Bayesian methods, which may not require calculus but simple algebra and basic logic of probability.

However, if someone could simply create an article with a few worked examples of Bayesian updating, that would still be very helpful. I have read the explanations but I am just not very good at math. I have passed (A's and B's) in college trig, algebra, and precal, but I flunked out of calculus. Maybe in the future when I am more financially secure I could spend the time to really understand more complicated Bayesian updates.

Right now, I feel like there is a real need to simply have some basic worked out examples. Not long explanations, just problems with the math worked out. Preferably non calculus based problems.

I decided to finally start reading the The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate. I am not sure how much time I will have but I will post my thoughts along the way as replies to this comment. This also an opportunity for massive downvotes :-)

f.lux and sleep aid follow-up: About a month or two ago, I posted on the open thread about some things I was experimenting with to get to bed regularly at a decent hour. Here are the results:

f.lux: I installed f.lux on my computer. This is a program that through the course of the day, changes your display from blue light to red light, on the theory that the blue light from your computer keeps you awake. When I first installed it, the red tint to my screen was VERY noticeable. Anecdotally, I ended up feeling EXTREMELY tired right after installing it, and fell asleep within about half hour, despite the fact that it was only 8:30p.

Now, the red tint to my screen at night is barely noticeable, which is good, but it doesn't make me feel super-tired like it did the first night I installed it. I didn't keep any quantitative measurements of my sleep patterns, so I can't tell if f.lux has helped or not, but I think its possible effects may be negated by the extremely bright lights I have in my room. I definitely feel more tired when I turn those off, which I don't normally do. (But I should...)

Verdict: I would recommend installing f.lux if you are having trouble getting yourself to bed on time, especially if you do a lot of computer usage at night. The results are iffy, but the cost is minimal (maybe 2 minutes of your time to download, and then it's on your computer and you never have to worry about it again.)

Sleep Aid: I also tried taking a sleep aid (Diphenhydramine HCl- it's non-addictive and OTC) about half an hour before I thought I should start going to bed. This worked great! It is much easier to think "I should go to bed soon-ish. I'll take a sleep aid now," than to think "I should stop everything I'm doing and get ready for bed NOW." Once you've taken the pill, you're pretty much committed to going to bed soon, plus it makes you nice and tired.

Unfortunately, I also ended up starting to have really bad headaches within a couple of days, so I stopped using them. When I used the pill at night, I would have a headache the next day. If I didn't use the pill, I wouldn't have a headache. I intend to try this again at some point with melatonin. I might also try again with the same pills, just to make sure that the first trial didn't just happen to coincide with me being sick.

Verdict: It's definitely effective, so give it a try, but recognize that they might cause headaches.

I have been wondering for a while: what's the source for the A Human's Guide to Words sequence? I mean EY had to come up with that somehow and unlike with the probability and cognitive science stuff, I have no idea what kind of books inspired A Human's Guide to Words. What are the keywords here?

Activity on these seems to be dying down, so my own reply to this comment is a poll.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data talk by Peter Norvig.

I'm often walking to somewhere and I notice that I have a good amount of thinking time, but that I find my head empty. Has anyone any good ideas on useful things to occupy my mind during such time? Visualisation exercises, mental arithmetic, thinking about philosophy?

It depresses me a little, how much easier it is to make use of nothing but a pen and paper, than it is to make use of when that is removed and one has only one's own mind.

I'm an undergraduate student majoring in computer science. What career and subsequent studies should I aim for in order to be able to solve interesting and useful problems?

Did you folk see this one?

The Problem with ‘Friendly’ Artificial Intelligence - Adam Keiper and Ari N. Schulman.

Universal power switch symbols are counter-intuitive. A straight line ends. It doesn't go anywhere. It should mean "stop." A circle is continuous and should mean "on". A line penetrating a circle has certain connotations that means keep it going (or coming) but definitely not "standby". How can we change this?

Polyamory: if anyone is interested in my notes ( http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2012-gwern-polyamory.txt ), I've updated them with a big extract from Anapol 2010 - apparently she noticed a striking frequency of Asperger's in polyamory circles. Of course LW has never been accused of hosting very many of those...

Are there any good examples of what would be considered innate human abilities (cognitive or otherwise) that are absent or repressed in an entire culture?

For example, are there examples of culture-wide face-blindness/prosopagnosia? Are there examples of cultures that can't apply the Gaze heuristic, or can't subitize?

This is for reasoning about criticisms to universal grammar, in particular the lack of recursion in the Pirahã language, so that one is kind of begging the question. The closest I can come up with at the moment (which really isn't very close at all) is the high incidence of perfect pitch amongst native speakers of tonal languages.

A vague discussion of AI risks has just broken out at http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/03/amazing-bezos.html#comments Marginal Revolution gets a lot of readers who are roughly in the target demographic for LW - anyone fancy having a go at making a sensible comment in that thread that points people in the right direction?

Richard Carrier's book looks like it's going to spread the word of Bayes. To the theists, too. And there's a media-friendly academic fight in progress. Just the thing!

Any recommendations for books/essays on contemporary hermeneutics whose authors are aware of Schellingian game theory and signalling games? Google Scholar has a few suggestions but not many and they're hard to access.

Would it be useful to make a compressed version of the Sequences, at the ratio one Sequence into one article which is approximately one article into one paragraph? It would provide an initial information for people who would like to read the Sequences, but do not have enough time. Each paragraph would be followed by a "read more" hyperlink to the original article.

A proposal: make public an anonymised dataset of all Karma activity over an undisclosed approximate three-month period from some point in the past 18 months.

What I would like is a list of anonymised users, a list of posts and comments in the given three-month period (stripped of content and ancestry, but keeping a record of authorship), and all incidents of upvotes and downvotes between them that took place in the given period. This is for purposes of observing trends in Karma behaviour, and also sating my curiosity about how some sort of graph-theoretic-informed equivalent of Karma (kind of like Google PageRank) might work. I would also be curious to see what other data-types might make of it.

What good reasons are there for not making this data available?

Someone has to go to the trouble of pulling it from the database I would personally be prepared to pay up to $13.50 for your time and effort. I would also be surprised if someone hasn't at least snook a peak at this data already, because it's kind of interesting.

Violation of LW user privacy The biggie, really. It's possible that a tenacious individual could use this data to deduce the voting habits of specific users. I've been thinking about how I might go about doing this if given the data in question, which informed the "approximate three months at some point in the past eighteen months" time frame. Without timestamps or details of comment ancestry, and without knowing the exact length of the snapshot period, I suspect anyone trying to extract this information would struggle enormously.

I am fascinated in how people would try and accomplish this, though, so please tell me how you'd go about it. My personal method would be to scrape the site to build up a record of post and comment authorship over time. Any given period would then have a "fingerprint" of authors to number of posts that you could compare against the dataset. This becomes harder, but not impossible, with a time period of unspecified length. This could be mitigated by the data being deliberately sabotaged prior to publication, in such a way that confounds this method while still keeping the broader trends available for analysis.

Any other concerns people would have with this? Alternatively, any awesome things they'd like to do with the data?

Is there a term in many-party game theory for a no-win, no-lose scenario; that is where by sacrificing a chance of winning you can prevent losing (neutrality or draw)?

Jane McGonigal's new project SuperBetter may be useful to you as an incentive framework for self-improvement.

The Essence Of Science Explained In 63 Seconds

A one minute piece of Feynman lecture candy wrapped in reasonable commentary. Excellent and most importantly brief intro level thinking about our physical world. Apologies if it has been linked to before, especially since I can't say I would be surprised if it was.

Here it is, in a nutshell: The logic of science boiled down to one, essential idea. It comes from Richard Feynman, one of the great scientists of the 20th century, who wrote it on the blackboard during a class at Cornell in 1964. YouTube

Think about what he's saying. Science is our way of describing — as best we can — how the world works. The world, it is presumed, works perfectly well without us. Our thinking about it makes no important difference. It is out there, being the world. We are locked in, busy in our minds. And when our minds make a guess about what's happening out there, if we put our guess to the test, and we don't get the results we expect, as Feynman says, there can be only one conclusion: we're wrong.

The world knows. Our minds guess. In any contest between the two, The World Out There wins. It doesn't matter, Feynman tells the class, "how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is, if it disagrees with the experiment, it is wrong."

This view is based on an almost sacred belief that the ways of the world are unshakeable, ordered by laws that have no moods, no variance, that what's "Out There" has no mind. And that we, creatures of imagination, colored by our ability to tell stories, to predict, to empathize, to remember — that we are a separate domain, creatures different from the order around us. We live, full of mind, in a mindless place. The world, says the great poet Wislawa Szymborska, is "inhuman." It doesn't work on hope, or beauty or dreams. It just...is.

Is it possible to increase our computational resources by putting ourselves in a simulation run in such a way as to not require as much quantum wave function collapse to produce a successive computational state?

Something I would quite like to see after looking at this post: a poll of LW users' stances on polarised political issues.

There are a whole host of issues which we don't discuss for fear of mindkilling. While I would expect opinion to be split on a lot of politically sensitive subjects, I would be fascinated to see if the LW readership came down unilaterally on some unexpected issue. I'd also be interested to see if there are any heavily polarised political issues that I currently don't recognise as such.

Why would this be a bad idea?

Does anyone know much about general semantics? Given the very strong outside view similarities between it and less wrong. Not to mention the extent to which it directly influenced the sequences it seems like it's history could provide some useful lessons. Unfortunately, I don't really know that much about it.

I just thought of a way to test one of my intuitions about meta-ethics, and I'd appreciate others thoughts.

I believe that human morality is almost entirely socially constructed (basically an anti-realist position). In other words, I think that the parts of the brain that implement moral decision-making are incredibly plastic (at least at some point in life).

Independently, I believe that behaviorism (i.e. the modern psychological discipline descended from classical conditioning and operant conditioning) is just decision theory plus an initially plastic punishment/reward system.

In short, if behaviorism makes false predictions of human behavior - the same error in different eras and cultures - then that seems like evidence that my plasticity based meta-ethics theory is wrong.

Does anyone see any holes in that logic? Is anyone aware of examples in which behaviorism has failed to accurately predict in the ways I have described?

I think have seen offers to help edit LW post, but can't remember were. Does anyone know what I may be thinking of?

People have irrational beliefs. When people come to lesswrong and talk about them, many say "oops" and change their mind. However, often they keep their decidedly irrational beliefs despite conversation with other Lesswrongers who often point out where they went wrong, and how they went wrong, and perhaps a link to the Sequence post where the specific mistake is discussed in more detail.

Some examples:

http://lesswrong.com/user/Jake_Witmer/

This guy was told he was being Mindkilled. Many people explained to him what was wrong with his thinking, and why it was wrong, and how it was wrong, and what he could do, and all manner of helpful advice and discussion. He rejected it, left the site and hasn't been seen since.

Another: http://lesswrong.com/user/911truther/

Not much to say. Eliezer the Wise and Always Correct himself declared him a troll.

Another: http://lesswrong.com/user/sam0345/

Generally pretty irrational dude. Asked to leave lesswrong by the powerful and great Eliezer because his comments were so bad.

Another, different example:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1lv/the_wannabe_rational/

MrHen had great insights into rationality and seemed to be a well upvoted member of lesswrong. He also believed in God. He was around in 2010 and again in 2011 for a bit, and hasn't posted in a while now.

Perhaps a more controversial example:

http://lesswrong.com/user/Mitchell_Porter/?count=50&after=t1_5tl5

Around Feb 3rd Mitchell Porter brought a debate about colour, the mind, dualism, and similar thoughts. I'm actually not sure if this was resolved, but there seemed to be some small consensus (kinda) that he was talking the Crackpot Offer. This was suggested to him.

Mitchell Porter is still around, and is an active user that seems to have lots of useful insights to many things. he is very well upvoted.

To any of these people, I am sorry for mentioning you guys like this if you are offended or anything like that.

So why am I bringing this up?

Well, people fail at being rational all the time. However, there are countless examples like these, from people who turned up, got insanely downvoted, then left, and regular users who otherwise get lots of karma and are very rational.

The main thing I wanted to do was just POINT IT OUT and see if anyone wants to comment on the fact that this happens, in LessWrong, surely the place where they are MOST likely to see why and how they are wrong.

What does this mean that so many people do not? What does it mean that such failures happen so often that I could choose random examples off the top of my head? I mean, some of the things it means are obvious, but this pains me and I need it to discussed somewhere because I find it important and I think that more people should be aware that this happens and should make more concerned, perhaps vapid comments about it.

Also, thinking of upgrading to discussion post. Tell me if that's a bad idea.

If you have read this, please tell me what you think.

Recommendations for a book/resource on comparative religion/mythology, ideally theory-laden and written by someone with good taste for hermeneutics? Preferably something that doesn't assume that gods aren't real. (I'm approaching the subject from the Gaimanian mythological paradigm, i.e. something vaguely postmodern and vaguely Gods Need Prayer Badly, but that perspective is only provisional and I value alternative perspectives.)

[Weird irrational rant]

A week and a half ago, I either caught some bug or went down with food poisoning. Anyway, in the evening I suddenly felt like shit and my body temperature jumped to 40C. My mom gave me some medicine and told me to try and get some sleep. My state of mind felt a bit altered, and I started praying fervently to VALIS. My Gnostic faith has been on and off for the last few years, but in that moment, I was suddenly convinced that it was a test of some sort, and that the fickle nature of reality would be revealed to me if I wouldn't waver in my belief. I felt that it's a point where my life could change, possibly for the better.

Therefore, I thought of and swore three oaths: an oath of scholarship - to obtain both rational and subjective ("spiritual") knowledge, and use it to search for truth; an oath of compassion - to treat all deserving beings with kindness and fairness, and to oppose evil with a healing word rather than hatred; and an oath of evangelism - to seek out fellow nutjobs who would be interested in this woo, and try to convert them. Hence this comment.

I kept praying for two hours or so, then slept for two more hours, and when I woke up I felt completely normal. The doctor came by later that day and found nothing wrong with me. I need to reflect on the whole thing more thoroughly. Anyway, I now believe with more certainty than before that there's a benevolent entity (which I'll keep calling VALIS, although she's better known as St. Sophia) acting in the simulation around us, and that it influences minds and events subtly, helping a fallen spark from outside the simulation that is within us to break free of its bondage.

If you felt that this comment is worthless, yeah, I guess it's hardly in line with LW's goals. But maybe someone will feel sympathetic. Hmm, perhaps I should really have a serious discussion with Will_Newsome about it all. From what I've seen of his posts on Catholicism, he seems to hold the opposing view, worshipping what the Gnostics would call the Demiurge. But at least he'd ponder these matters seriously.