Posts

Correcting errors and karma 2012-04-29T17:03:06.424Z
Pre-commitment and meta at the Cambridge UK meetup 2012-04-29T15:17:57.656Z
Meetup : Cambridge UK 2012-02-11T04:12:22.416Z
Meetup : Cambridge UK 2012-01-30T23:36:12.764Z
Meetup : Cambridge UK 2012-01-25T23:47:49.070Z

Comments

Comment by rebellionkid on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 104 · 2015-02-16T02:27:49.925Z · LW · GW

Make the game end when the clock runs over, or when the snitch is caught, whichever is sooner. And make the snitch worth ~half the typical point spread of a match.

Comment by rebellionkid on Why the tails come apart · 2014-08-07T07:52:04.702Z · LW · GW

Fantastic, I wish I'd had this back when almost everyone in LW/EA circles I met was reading the biography of everyone in the ' fortune 400 and trying to spot the common factors. A surprisingly common strategy that's likely not to work for exactly these reasons.

Comment by rebellionkid on Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? · 2013-08-03T22:21:40.885Z · LW · GW

Notice I said nothing at all about racism or our policy responses to race. Of course intra-group variation is more important, that's obvious and applies to height too. This much is well known and irrelevant to my point.

The thing I'm interested here is why it's commonly accepted that there ought (in a strong moral sense) to be no correlation. Not our response to the actual existence of that correlation.

Comment by rebellionkid on Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? · 2013-08-03T20:38:10.977Z · LW · GW

I hope it is false.

I think this is the most interesting sentence in the whole discussion.

Let's be clear. Racial groupings are really very significant pieces of evidence. There's huge amounts of genetics that correlates, huge amounts of culture that correlates, huge amounts of wider environment that correlates. It would be frankly astonishing if things like IQ, reaction time, hight, life expectancy, and rates of disease didn't also correlate.

So, we ought to expect to see a correlation, and in fact a whole bunch of studies say we do. ... And then those studies are put under far more than average pressure. See people below wanting to dismiss Raven's Progressive Matrices as culturally biased. Why on earth do we want there to be no such correlation with IQ.

We're very happy to say there's a correlation between race and hight, between race and life expectancy, between race and disease, between race and income. Why not race and IQ? Why do we want that to be false?

Comment by rebellionkid on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 25, chapter 96 · 2013-08-03T20:10:33.088Z · LW · GW

Thanks for that. Sorry, should have explained my meaning better. I was looking for a clue of the form "the chapter translates it as 'defeated' but it actually means 'banished'" or similar. Along the lines of Harry's massive mistranslation of 'nihil supernum'.

Comment by rebellionkid on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 25, chapter 96 · 2013-08-01T12:38:24.379Z · LW · GW

Ok, I'm now frustrated and bored by online translators. Can someone give me a hand and translate that? I get some of it, but never enough to actually check meaning properly.

Comment by rebellionkid on CEA does not seem to be credibly high impact · 2013-02-22T19:34:29.919Z · LW · GW

Can I just make clear my role here. 1) I've had general conversation with Jonathan about CEA and MIRI, in which several of these criticisms were raised. 2) I checked over the numbers for the GWWC impact assessment. 3) I've also said that criticism in public is often productive, and that public scrutiny of CEA on LW would be helpful for people choosing between it and MIRI. 4) I saw a draft of the post before it was published.

I want to make it very clear that: 1) I do not endorse this post. 2) I did not do detailed fact-checking for it. 3) I do not want this post to be seen as my view, either in a private capacity or with my CEA hat on. 4) That I'm deeply sorry if my actions have harmed the reputation of CEA. This was never my intention.

Adam Casey

Comment by rebellionkid on Pain · 2012-05-08T17:50:03.908Z · LW · GW

Is it obvious that the second attitude would be terribly much harder to achieve? By which I mean is it clear that the cost of becoming sufficiently conservative is higher than the cost of the pain?

Comment by rebellionkid on Pre-commitment and meta at the Cambridge UK meetup · 2012-04-29T17:19:28.083Z · LW · GW

No problem.

Comment by rebellionkid on Pre-commitment and meta at the Cambridge UK meetup · 2012-04-29T17:05:24.723Z · LW · GW

Have updated the post, sorry for misreading your writing.

Comment by rebellionkid on A speculation on Near and Far Modes · 2012-03-30T23:41:41.834Z · LW · GW

He was also horrific at politics. Nobody with half a political brain writes this: http://books.google.co.uk/books/reader?id=3bgPAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader

Comment by rebellionkid on Optimizing Sleep · 2012-02-16T00:17:56.337Z · LW · GW

Update. I've discovered I dont function nearly so well at night as I had anticipated. I was running with core sleep 4-8, after shifting this to 2-6 I can see an improvement.

Also notable features: I can shift the naps around a fair amount, but too much core sleep, or hitting the snooze button after waking from core sleep throws me off for a long time after. The amount of sleep in each session doesn't seem as important in how I feel afterwards as how I wake up. Waking up in the middle of deep sleep going blurg and snoozing for 10 mins is followed by feeling awful. Being in light enough sleep that my phone screen turning back on before the alarm goes off is enough to wake me and then getting straight out of bed is followed by feeling really energetic.

It's incredible how much sleep I'm able to get in the naps. Sometimes schedules mean I can only really afford 10/15 mins, and I feel myself waking up from real sleep after this.

Comment by rebellionkid on Meetup : Cambridge UK · 2012-02-11T11:20:36.331Z · LW · GW

Sorry, trying to be cunning and failing.

Comment by rebellionkid on [deleted post] 2012-02-11T11:07:19.689Z

Sorry for confusion. Mistyped the date. The meeting is on Sunday not Saturday.

Comment by rebellionkid on Dutch Books and Decision Theory: An Introduction to a Long Conversation · 2012-02-05T10:33:48.638Z · LW · GW

I'd always thought "What bets do I take" was the justification for Bayesian epistemology. Every policy decision (every decision of any kind) is a statement of the form "I'm prepared to accept these costs to receive these outcomes given these events", this is a bet. If Bayesian epistemology lets you win bets then that's all the justification it could ever need.

Comment by rebellionkid on Optimizing Sleep · 2012-02-03T01:32:52.091Z · LW · GW

At the moment I'm tracking sleep with a pen and paper, just started with an Android app. Zeo was totally unknown to me. Thankyou, will investigate this.

My plan is to go by the metric that matters to me, university work. I get enough data there to notice something going wrong. Not the same detail as proper Anki-style benchmarking, however there is an extra variable in my case (resulting in high variance on the day/week scale), that would spoil such results.

Comment by rebellionkid on Optimizing Sleep · 2012-02-02T02:26:10.036Z · LW · GW

I'm starting an experiment today. The program is Everyman: 3 20 min naps at midday, the afternoon and the evening with core sleep gradually decreasing, hopefully to a small number of hours. I have early morning lectures and function well at night, so short of being nocturnal decreasing my core sleep looks the best way to be efficient. Will keep this tread updated with results.

Comment by rebellionkid on Meetup : Cambridge UK · 2012-01-28T23:58:09.853Z · LW · GW

There were certainly enough people interested to make this regular. To get involved if you weren't here today join the google group at http://groups.google.com/group/cambridgelesswrong

Comment by rebellionkid on Meetup : Cambridge UK · 2012-01-27T21:31:42.834Z · LW · GW

Last February.

Comment by rebellionkid on Meetup : Cambridge UK · 2012-01-27T21:29:29.676Z · LW · GW

Edited to include this.

Comment by rebellionkid on Meetup : Cambridge UK · 2012-01-26T17:01:10.498Z · LW · GW

Hopefully future meetups will be on a regular basis so they can be advertised in good time.

Comment by rebellionkid on Archimedes's Chronophone · 2012-01-09T17:44:47.001Z · LW · GW

Archimedes died in 212 BC. Justinian closed the pagan schools and killed of the classical research project in 529 AD. The first book of the Quran was delivered in 610 AD. So sharing with the Islamic scientists (who had all read Aristotle anyway) doesn't make sense.

But an expansion of the communication between places like Alexandria, Athens, Cos etc could be a really good plan.

Comment by rebellionkid on Archimedes's Chronophone · 2012-01-09T17:35:51.290Z · LW · GW

My understanding is not that he "didn't think to" run experiments, rather he actively rejected the doing of experiments. The idea is that one can study nature, study things as they naturally are, because that is them acting in accordance with their inherent properties. But it makes no sense to study things in a lab, in an artificial environment. If I launch something out of a cannon then I disturb it from how it inherently acts. Of course something acting against how it inherently acts is pointless to study. Likewise doing any kind of experiment will only tell you about your experiment (at best) and tell you nothing of the natural state of things.

Comment by rebellionkid on Einstein's Arrogance · 2011-12-17T02:54:29.514Z · LW · GW

Just to point out what may be a nitpick or a clarification. It's perfectly possible for infinity many positive things to sum to a finite number. 1/2+1/4+1/8+...=1.

There can be infinitely many potential murderers. But if the probability of each having done it drops off fast enough you can avoid anything that is literally infinitesimal. Almost all will be less than 1/3^^^^^^3 of course, but that's a perfectly well defined number you know how to do maths with.

Comment by rebellionkid on Pascal's Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities · 2011-12-16T18:30:27.337Z · LW · GW

Enormously higher probability is not 1. This still doesn't mean the statement is zero evidence.

Comment by rebellionkid on Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality · 2011-11-01T00:26:19.533Z · LW · GW

An amusing n=3 survey of mathematics undergrads at Trinity Cambridge:

1) Refused to answer. 2) It depends on how reliable Omega is/but you cant (shouldn't) really quantify ethics anyway/this situation is unreasonable. 3) Obviously 2 box, one boxing is insane.

3 said he would program an AI to one box. And when I pointed out that his brain was built of quarks just like the AI he responded that in that case free will didn't exist and choice was impossible.

Comment by rebellionkid on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 9 · 2011-09-28T00:33:17.298Z · LW · GW

A lot of the "hate" between colleges is perpetuated in the same way as most Cambridge traditions. Freshers read on wikipedia what Cambridge traditions are and then emulate them. There is belief in belief that people from St Johns are horrible but not much more.