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Weight lifters feeling "pumped" is similarly literal. I get this from rock climbing more often than lifting, but after a particularly strenuous climb, your arm muscles feel inflated--they're engorged with blood. It can take a minute for it to subside.
Vader is clearly homicidal and irrational. Leia's superior rationality won't slow him down. Leia recognizes that immediately, but she should also have realized that revealing the base's location wouldn't prevent him from destroying the planet.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-happens-in-a-mind-that-cant-see-mental-images-20240801/
I think there's a lot of research that shows we're fairly bad at predicting how other people see the world, and how much detail there is in their heads. I've read quite a few books that talk about how some people presume that other people are speaking metaphorically when they talk about imagining scenes in color or in 3-d, or how they can "hear" a musical piece in their mind. Those who can assume that others just aren't trying. Face-blindness wasn't recognized for quite a while.
Some people are much better at doing mental rotations of 3-d objects than others. I can do a decent mental image of the inside of an orange, an apple, a persimmon, or a pear, but perhaps I've spent more time cutting up fruit than others. My mental image of the internal shape of the branches in our persimmon tree is pretty detailed, since I've been climbing inside to pick fruit and trim for 35 years.
google.com/images?q=mental+rotation+three-dimensional+objects
There was a time when I was working on n-dimensional data structures that I could cleanly think in 4 or 5 dimensional "images". They weren't quite visual, since vision is so 2-d, but I could independently manipulate features of the various dimensions separately.
When looking at full-color stereograms, you have to have a mental model of the image depth to make sense of it, even if the rendering is all of surfaces.
The Iowa Election Markets were roughly contemporaneous with Hanson's work. They are often co-credited.
Proofreading comment:
Please change "folks" to "focus"
I don't see a place for listing book orders, so does this use an automated Market Maker? What's the algorithm? (e.g. Hanson's LMSR?) Where can we find the code?
Cooking tainted meat doesn't denature prions. (They aren't "alive", so they can't be "killed".) Neither do most biological processes, as you might expect in the normal case of digestion. As the article above mentions, they can persist in the environment for years.
It can take temperatures of several hundred degrees to denature them.
Prion diseases are slow to develop (up to decades), incurable, and always fatal.
I think the "always fatal" part of this sentence is vacuous. Unless the meaning is something akin to "kills within X years of contracting the disease", it can only mean "kills the victim if they don't die of something else first." (In fact, the article later says "Humans infected with BSE, meanwhile, can harbor it for up to decades post-exposure, and live an average of over a year after showing symptoms.")
There are two known infectious prion diseases in people. ... Kuru ... vCJD
Wikipedia lists fatal familial insomnia, and two others.
But it doesn’t seem to infect people. Is it ever going to? If a newly-emerged virus were sweeping across the US and killing deer, which could be spread through consuming infected meat, I would think “oh NO.” I’d need to see very good evidence to stop sounding the alarm.
Scrapie, in sheep, has been known since at least 1732, and isn't thought to spread to humans.
I think a thing that most people neglect is that dishwashers are designed for approximately a family of four preparing and eating two meals a day together, which leads to a certain accumulation of dishes, and the dishwasher needing to be run at least every other day. That means a certain amount of time for the detritus to dry on the dishes. If you have a smaller dishwasher, or more people eating, the dishwasher will be run more often, and it'll be more effective at cleaning dirtier dishes. If you run the dishwasher daily, #4 or #5 might work well for you. If there are only two eating, or you're eating more take-out (fewer pots and pans) and you only do a load every 4 or 5 days, then the dishes need to be cleaner going into the dishwasher.
Silly hats are commonly associated with some cults and secret societies, so that's not particularly a mark in your favor. "not taking yourselves too seriously" is a plus, but neither dress code nor anti-dress code will get you there.
It's helpful to the community to file a report with the BBB. And next time check the references there rather than trusting the super's recommendations.
With only two questions about what people believe, I expected to see a matrix showing number of people in each 2-d category. The most interesting result is how do answers to the two questions correlate.
The laws in the US (generally local or state) are almost always written to criminalize transactions that involve "chance, consideration, and interest".
"Chance" basically means that the outcome is outside the control of the participants. In Texas, poker is defined as a game of skill, so the outcome is, by definition, not a matter of chance. Most other places don't take that stance.
"Consideration" means that the parties put up something of value. Another way around these laws is often taken by prediction markets (or casino nights) within a company. The participants might win something, but the initial stake is provided by the sponsor.
"Interest" means that the parties stand to gain something if the outcome is in their favor. If the winnings will go to charity, you aren't breaking any laws. This is the work-around exploited by Long Bets.
It seems to me that one could make a solid case that prediction markets demonstrate skill, since there is consistency over time of who wins and who loses. A variety of PMs have demonstrated that there are super-predictors who have a consistent ability to do well. The issue is that the laws are written and enforced locally, so there's no one to go to to get a blanket ruling that you won't be prosecuted. If you offer PM services throughout the US, then every local prosecutor who thinks the publicity will help her in the next election can take you to court, and you have to win all the cases in order to not lose your shirt.
Please correct "her parents had took her to Third Hand Book Emporium" to "her parents had taken her to Third Hand Book Emporium".
The focus on categorizing negative outcomes seems to obscure a lot of relevant detail. If you broaden the view to include things from non-takeover to peaceful cooperation, it would probably be evident that the boundaries are soft and scenarios near the edge aren't as definitely bad as this makes them appear. I think we might learn more about possible coexistence and how thing might turn out well if we spend less time focused on imagined disasters.
First I'd point out that scenarios like Drexler's "Reframing Superintelligence" aren't that far from the *Flash Economy* scenario, and there's probably a gradual blend across the boundary. My current thinking is similar to that, though I characterize it as AIs participating in an economy, which includes competition and cooperation. You get ahead in an economy by providing services that others are willing to pay for. If you do that for very long, you are incentivized to learn that cooperation (filling a need) is the way to garner resources that give you the ability to get more done.
Second I'd point out that there are many voices currently arguing that the largest companies of today (FANG, often) have too much power and are monopolizing societies' resources. I'd just like to contrast that with the same arguments made in earlier eras about IBM, Microsoft, AT&T, Standard Oil, big Hollywood, the railroad trusts, the A&P stores, and many others. If you have the right viewpoint, you can look at an economy where someone is earning more money than you think is just, and believe that they're going to own the world in another year if nothing is done to stop them. It's usually competition and innovation that keeps this from happening and not government or other concerted action.
typo: serious => series in the second sentence
I think the crux is right-of-way. Boats and ships have elaborate rules that always establish a right-of-way that can be clearly established after the fact, so all pilots and captains adhere their behavior to their expectations about the rules. The other thing about navigation on water is that in a close encounter the boat with the right-of-way is required to follow through so the other parties can predict what they can do. This is also not true on the road, leading to the phenomenon of drivers "politely" waving you to go out of turn.
The rules of the road aren't nearly as clear. (for instance, when they give the right of way to the car that arrived earlier at an intersection, that's not decidable after the fact).
The role of traffic lights is ensconced in the law, so pressing the button causes the lights to change, and the lights impact who has the right of way. It doesn't matter what the light thinks as long as the light changes.
Of course, I also remind myself at crosswalks that having the right-of-way is insufficient defense in an encounter between a pedestrian and a car.
This puts things in a substantially different light than popular explanations of bubbles caused by “greed” or popping from “fear”. There is something to those too: the subprime mortgages of ‘08 were in fact greedy, bad decisions; the private wealth-hoarding after recessions can in fact delay recovery. But we can have the understanding that the economy will have some cyclical nature from these feedback loops no matter what, and ask the question: how stable could it be aside from this?
Treating greed as something that grows and shrinks over time and has a causative effect is a really bad model. It's much more useful to think as greed as a renewable resource that takes advantage of opportunities when the incentives are strong and feedback loops are weak. The subprime mortgage crisis had examples of both. The CRA and congressional interference gave banks incentives to issue more loans with weaker underwriting standards. The "greedy" borrowers were taking advantage of a situation where they could more easily get a loan than at other times. Borrowers always have a higher estimate of their ability to repay than the banks do; it is the banks responsibility to draw a line somewhere.
This is orthogonal to your point, but you're conflating two different descriptions of the mechanisms of aging when you attribute "7 hallmarks of aging" to Aubrey de Grey. Aubrey talks about seven distinct forms of damage that result from metabolic activity. There's a separate discussion that addresses 9 hallmarks, though that is less attributable to any single researcher. The framework has been adopted by the NIH, AFAR, and extensively discussed in Sinclair's book Lifespan.
There's a fair amount of overlap between the two, but they're distinct frameworks. de Grey's theory talks about 7 distinct types of cellular damage that might be mitigated by separate interventions. (e.g. "mitochondrial mutations" by outsourcing the production of proteins, "extracellular linkages" by AGE breakers). The 9 Hallmarks approach identifies vaguer clouds of disfunction, only some of which are amenable to direct intervention. (e.g. "epigenetic alterations", "loss of proteostasis", "deregulated nutrient sensing").
Typo watch:
Collectivization is so safe that days people with epilepsy often cure themselves by joining a collective.
should be
Collectivization is so safe that these days people with epilepsy often cure themselves by joining a collective.
"two" should be "to".
I didn't get around to this until 5/15, so the answers had been revealed, but I didn't peek. I made a simple spread sheet so I could look at all the cases by species and age.
My bids were
1: 60, 2: 21, 3:25, 4:30, 5:47, 6:30, 7:25, 8: 18, 9:24, 10:22, 11:20, 12:19, 13: 27
MY results were:
You net a profit of 71sp
(The Expected Value of your strategy was 68sp)
I don't believe in chiropractic either, but I go occasionally when I have pains that conventional treatments don't help. It has probably been 20 years since my last visit, but I'd guess there have been 5-10 occasions when I went for 1 or a few sessions. Sometimes things got better faster than I expected, other times it took as long as I expected doing nothing would.
*The placebo effect is an effect.* There's no reason to refuse to take advantage of it when other things don't seem to be working. The big benefit of the placebo effect is that it has few deleterious side effects, so it doesn't hurt to make use of it, while some drugs aren't nearly as safe.
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I'm all about epistemology. (my blog is at pancrit.org) But in order to engage in or start a conversation, it's important to take one of the things you place credence in and advocate for it. If you're wishy-washy, in many circumstances, people won't actually engage with your hypothesis, so you won't learn anything about it. Take a stand, even if you're on slippery ground.
To begin with, there are significant risks of medical complications—including infections, electrode displacement, hemorrhage, and cognitive decline—when implanting electrodes in the brain.
This is all going to change over time. (I don't know how quickly, but there is already work on trans-cranial methods that is showing promise.) If we can't get the bandwidth quickly enough, we can control infections, electrodes will get smaller and more adaptive.
enhancement is likely to be far more difficult than therapy.
Admittedly, therapy will come first. That also means that therapy will drive development of techniques that will also be helpful for enhancement. The boundary between the two is blurry, and therapies that shade into enhancement will definitely be developed before pure enhancement, and be easier to sell to end users. For example, for some people, treatment of ADHD spectrum disorders will definitely be therapeutic, while for others it be seen as attractive enhancements.
Not only can the human retina transmit data at an impressive rate of nearly 10 million bits per second, but it comes pre-packaged with a massive amount of dedicated wetware, the visual cortex, that is highly adapted to extracting meaning from this information torrent and to interfacing with other brain areas for further processing.70 Even if there were an easy way of pumping more information into our brains, the extra data inflow would do little to increase the rate at which we think and learn unless all the neural machinery necessary for making sense of the data were similarly upgraded.
The visual pathway is impressive, but it's very limited in the kinds of information it transmits. It's a poor way of encoding bulk text, for instance. Even questions and answers can be sent far more densely with a much narrower channel. A tool like Google Now that tries to anticipate areas of interest and pre-fetch data before questions arise to consciousness could provide a valuable backchannel, and it wouldn't need near the bandwidth, so ought to be doable with non-invasive trans-cranial techniques.
I'm confused by the framing of the Anvil problem. For humans, a lot of learning is learning from observing others, seeing their mistakes and their consequences. We can predict various events that will result in other's deaths based on previous observation of what happened to yet other people. If we're above a certain level of solipsism, we can extrapolate to ourselves.
Does the AIXI not have the ability to observe other agents? Is it correct to be a solipsist? Seems like a tough learning environment if you have to discover all consequences yourself.
It's still possible to extrapolate from stubbing your toe, burning your fingers on the stove, and mashing your thumb with a hammer. Is there some reason to expect that AIXI will start out its interactions with the world by picking up an anvil rather than playing with rocks and eggs?
I don't answer survey questions that ask about race, but if you met me you'd think of me as white male.
I'm more strongly libertarian (but less party affiliated) than the survey allowed me to express.
I have reasonably strong views about morality, but had to look up the terms "Deontology", "Consequentialism", and "Value Ethics" in order to decide that of these "consequentialism" probably matches my views better than the others.
Probabilities: 50,30,20,5,0,0,0,10,2,1,20,95.
On "What is the probability that significant global warming is occurring or will soon occur, and is primarily caused by human actions?", I had to parse several words very carefully, and ended up deciding to read "significant" as "measureable" rather than "consequential". For consequential, I would have given a smaller value.
I answered all the way to the end of the super bonus questions, and cooperated on the prize question.
In my group at work, it's relatively common to chat "interruptible?" to someone who's sitting right next to you. You can keep working until they're free to take the interrupt, and they don't need to take the interrupt utill they're ready.
In f2f conversations, it's mostly an interrupt culture, but with some conventions about not breaking in in groups larger than 4 or so.
I believe that emotions play a big part in thinking clearly, and understanding our emotions would be a helpful step. Would you mind saying more about the time you spend focused on emotions? Are you paying attention to your concrete current or past emotions (i.e. "this is how I'm feeling now", or "this is how I felt when he said X"), or more theoretical discussions "when someone is in fight-or-flight mode, they're more likely to Y than when they're feeling curiosity"?
You also mentioned exercises about exploiting emotional states; would you say more about what CFAR has learned about mindfully getting oneself in particular emotional states?
|New information can be gained that increases the expected work remaining despite additional valuable work having been done.
That's progress.
When I've argued with people who called themselves utilitarian, they seemed to want to make trade-offs among immediately visible options. I'm not going to try to argue that I have population statistics, or know what the "proper" definition of a utilitarian is. Do you believe that some other terminology or behavior better characterizes those called "utilitarians"?
Did Munroe add that? It's incorrect. There are lots of situations in which it's reasonable to calculate while throwing away an occasional factor of 2.2.
downvoted. You're saying you don't know anything about the context provided by a story that is apparently of interest to (at least) several readers here, and you're proud of not sharing the context. Doesn't seem like something to crow about without first finding out if the content is frivolous.
Atul Gawande has a new article on how the medical industry can learn from other businesses that use production methods to achieve consistent results. He mentions a couple of national start-ups that are trying to use consistent evidence-based practices, and continuous review of outcomes to make health care more reliable and consistent and do it at a profit.
My significant other keeps a garden, and we have several productive fruit trees that we enjoy getting fruit from. Squirrels take a significant amount of fruit, and cats leave unwelcome surprises in the garden.
We trap squirrels and remove them to county parks. (We don't do anything about the cats.)
Marginally increasing the frequency of squirrels and cats is a negative externality for us. I'm glad you aren't feeding squirrels (or cats) near us.
"and the wisdom to know the difference"
For many more exercises exploring status behavior (both high and low), see Keith Johnstone's Impro. (Here's my review.) Johnstone's theory of improvisation (and acting in general) is that most of the weight of convincing the audience is carried by relative status distinctions among the actors. He provides a detailed set of exercises for exploring and understanding subtle and extreme differences so actors can be comfortable on stage projecting whatever distinction is called for.
Without the follow-up report, this is hardly evidence that the theory works. I guess it counts as evidence that the theory is convincing.
My point wasn't just that I wouldn't make a good torturer. It seems to me that ordinary circumstances don't provide many opportunities for anyone to learn much about torture, (other than from fictional sources). I have little reason to believe that inexperienced torturers would be effective in the time-critical circumstances that seem necessary for any convincing justification of torture. You may believe it, but it's not convincing to me. So it would be hard to ethically produce trained torturers, and there's a dearth of evidence on the effectiveness of inexperienced torturers in the circumstances necessary to justify it.
Given that, I think it's better to take the stance that torture is always unethical. There are conceivable circumstances when it would be the only way to prevent a cataclysm, but they're neither common, nor easy to prepare for.
And I don't think I've said that it would be ethical, just that individuals would sometimes think it was necessary. I think we are all better off if they have to make that choice without any expectation that we will condone their actions. Otherwise, some will argue that it's useful to have a course of training in how to perform torture, which would encourage its use even though we don't have evidence of its usefulness. It seems difficult to produce evidence one way or another on the efficacy of torture without violating the spirit of the Nuremberg Code. I don't see an ethical way to add to the evidence.
You seem to believe that sufficient evidence exists. Can you point to any?
You wanted an explicit answer to your question. My response is that I would be unhappy that I didn't have effective tools for finding out the truth. But my unhappiness doesn't change the facts of the situation. There isn't always something useful that you can do. When I generalize over all the fictional evidence I've been exposed to, it's too likely that my evidence is wrong as to the identity of the suspect, or he doesn't have the info I want, or the bomb can't be disabled anyway. When I try to think of actual circumstances, I don't come up with examples in which time was short and the information produced was useful. I also can't imagine myself personally punching, pistol-whipping, pulling fingernails, waterboarding, etc, nor ordering the experienced torturer (who you want me to imagine is under my command) to do so.
Sorry to disappoint you, but I don't believe the arguments I've heard for effectiveness or morality of torture.
Maybe my previous answer would have been cleaner if I had said "I don't think I can procure useful information by torturing someone when time is short." It's a relatively easy choice for me, since I doubt that even with proper tools, that I could appropriately gauge the level of pain to the necessary calibration in order to get detailed information in a few minutes or hours.
When I think about other people who might have more experience, it's hard to imagine someone who had repeatedly fallen into the situation where they were the right person to perform the torture so they had enough experience to both make the call, and effectively extract information. Do you want to argue that they could have gotten to that point without violating our sense of morality?
Since my question is "What should the law be?", not "is it ever conceivable that torture could be effective?" I still have to say that the law should forbid torture, and people should expect to be punished if they torture. There may be cases where you or I would agree that in that circumstance it was the necessary thing to do, but I still believe that the system should never condone it.
I'm not completely convinced that all the people who were punished believed they were not doing what their superiors wanted. I understand that that's the way the adjudication came out, but that's what I would expect from a system that knows how to protect itself. But I'll admit I haven't paid close attention to any of the proceedings.
Is there any good, short, material laying out the evidence that none of the perpetrators heard anything to reinforce the mayhem from their superiors--non-coms etc. included? Your sentence "the people who went to jail went there for violating orders" leaves open the possibility that some of the illegal activity was done by people who thought they were following orders, or at least doing what their superiors wanted.
If you are right, then I'll agree that Abu Ghraib was orthogonal to the main point. But I'm not completely convinced, and it seems likely to me that it looks exactly like a relevant case to the Arab street. Whether or not there were explicit orders from the top of the institution, it looked to have been pervasive enough to have to count as policy at some level.
I've been investing in stocks (occasionally) and mutual funds (consistently) for about thirty years, and I endorse Vaniver's advice heartily. I think overall, I'm up on stocks, due to doing most of my stock investing in cyclical stocks that I can buy and sell repeatedly over the course of many years. This has worked for me with both SGI and Cypress, which I repeatedly bought at low prices and sold at high prices. If you try this and find that you're not buying low and selling high, then you should stick to mutual funds and a buy-and-hold strategy. I've dabbled in other stocks where I thought I knew something and could time it, but few of those have turned out well. Happily, I knew I was dabbling, and kept the amounts low, so I got a valuable less for a relatively low price.
Mostly, I invest in mutual funds. I have subscribed to a newsletter that specializes in rating No Load funds (there are a couple). This gives me a monthly opportunity to review the performance of the funds I'm invested in, so I can tell when they stop being in the top performers and roll my money over to a different investment.
I record the monthly performance of each of my investments in a spreadsheet (used to be a paper notebook). The newsletter tells me which quintile the performance is in compared to the fund's peers. I highlight 1st and 2nd quintile in green, and 5th quintile in red. When the number of reds gets to be high compared to the greens, I look for a different fund with better recent performance. The commercials always say "past performance is no guarantee of future returns", but it's the only indication you can use. Most of the time performance is consistent over periods of a few years, so you have to look back a year or so when evaluating, and monitor continuing performance in a consistent way.
This whole process takes far more attention than most people are willing to put into it (a few hours a month on an on-going basis, and several hours every six months or so when choosing new investents), and few investors do even as well as the rate of growth of the broad market. That's why investing in the S&P 500 or an even broader market index is a good idea. If you put your money in a broad index and let it sit, you'll do better than 3/4 of investors.
Vanguard is only one decent brokerage. I personally use Schwab, but there are several others with reasonable prices.
For instance: you can keep getting new data on economics, but there's no way anyone's going to let you do an experiment.
This is somewhat true of macroeconomics, but manifestly untrue of microeconomics. Economists are constantly doing experiments to learn more about how incentives and settings affect behavior. And the results are being applied in the real world, sometimes in environments where alternative hypotheses can be compared.
And even in macroeconomics, work like that explained in Freakonomics shows how people can compare historical data from polities that chose different policies and learn from the different outcomes. So even if no individual scientist will be allowed to conduct a controlled experiment on the macroeconomy, there are enough competing theories that politicians are constantly following different policies, and providing data that sheds light on the consequences of different choices.
Over the course of your natural lifetime, your past light-cone will extend by about 100 years. Since it already envelopes almost 14 billion years, you won't get much new information relative to what you already know.
You are forgetting the impact of improving science. In fact, most of what we know about the 14 billion year light cone has been added to our knowledge in the last few hundred years due to improved instruments and improved theories. As theories improve, we build better instruments and reinterpret data we collected earlier. As I explained in a recent comment, suggesting new tests for distinguishing between states of the universe is an important part of the progress of science.
You are right about the growth rate of the accessible light cone, but we will continue to improve the amount of information we extract from it over time until our models are perfect.
The game of Science vs. Nature is more complicated than that, and it's the interesting structure that allows scientists to make predictions that are better than "what we've seen so far is everything there is." In particular, the interesting things in both Chemistry and particle Physics is that scientists were able to find regularities in the data (the Periodic Table is one example) that led them to predict missing particles. Once they knew what properties to look for, they usually were able to find them. When a theory predicts particles that aren't revealed when the right apparatus is constructed, we drop the theory.
But in the meantime, you'd have a more interesting game (and closer to Zendo) if Nature gave you a way of classifying objects. In Zendo, there is only one dimension. Something is a match (I forget Zendo's terminology) or it isn't. [In the real world, one of the possible moves is inventing a new test. "If I hold the object up to the light, what do I see?"] Some new tests turn out not to reveal anything useful, while others give you a whole new way of categorizing all the things you thought you knew about before.
In this context, Occam's razor is a rule about inventing rules to explain complex behavior, not rules about how many things there are. Your objective is to explain a pile of evidence, and you get to make up whatever story you like, but in the end, your story has to guide you in predicting something that hasn't happened yet. If you can make better predictions than other scientists, you can have as complicated a rule as you like. If you and they make the same predictions, then the observers get to break the tie by deciding which rule is simpler.
I don't believe much in penance. (The dictionary I checked said "self punishment as a sign of repentance". I don't think either aspect is valuable.) It's not related to the question of how we should treat people when they have conditions that are often under voluntary control.
We should convince them that (assuming they agree that it would be better to not have the condition) their best approach is to accept that the condition is at least partially under voluntary control, that control always appears hard, and therefore to change their lifestyle so as to address the problem. If they agree that the condition is a problem, and they find a magic bullet to solve the problem, then no penance is required. If there's no magic bullet, then they can try to change their lifestyle, but there is no need to for them to punish themselves for not understanding the situation before.
Was it Yoda who said "There is no try, there is only do"? The point is Alicorn's point about making it a top priority. You may have meant to be this positive, but you didn't sound this positive.
I love "Codd help you". Brilliant!
"The Cult of Statistical Significance" suggests that we're looking for tests that display power rather than significance.