Harley-ml/lesswrong huggingface dataset:
# File Under "Keep Your Identity Small"

We know politics makes us stupid, but now there's [evidence](http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/eob/files/obrienellsworth2012b.pdf%E2%80%9D.pdf) (pdf) that politics makes us less likely to consider things from another's point of view. From the abstract:

> Replicating prior research, we found that participants who were outside during winter overestimated the extent to which other people were bothered by cold (Study 1), and participants who ate salty snacks without water thought other people were overly bothered by thirst (Study 2). However, in both studies, this effect evaporated when participants believed that the other people under consideration held opposing political views from their own. Participants who judged these dissimilar others were unaffected by their own strong visceral-drive states, a finding that highlights the power of dissimilarity in social judgment. Dissimilarity may thus represent a boundary condition for embodied cognition and inhibit an empathic understanding of shared out-group pain.

As Will Wilkinson [notes](http://bigthink.com/ideas/politics-vs-empathy?page=all):

> Got that? We overestimate the extent to which others feel what we're feeling, unless they're on another team.

Now this isn't necessarily a negative effect - you might argue that it's bias _correcting_. But implicitly viewing _them_ as so different that it's not even worth thinking about things from their perspective is scary in itself.
# A Poisson process paradox

From Steven Pinker's latest book:

> Suppose you live in a place that has a constant chance of being struck by lightning at any time throughout the year. Suppose that the strikes are random: every day the chance of a strike is the same, and the rate works out to one strike a month. Your house is hit by lightning today, Monday. What is the most likely day for the _next_ bolt to strike your house?

.

.

.

.

.

.

> The answer is “tomorrow,” Tuesday. That probability, to be sure, is not very high; let’s approximate it at 0.03 (about once a month). Now think about the chance that the next strike will be the day after tomorrow, Wednesday. For that to happen, two things have to take place. First lightning has to strike on Wednesday, a probability of 0.03. Second, lightning _can’t have struck on Tuesday_, or else Tuesday would have been the day of the next strike, not Wednesday. To calculate that probability, you have to multiply the chance that lightning will not strike on Tuesday (0.97, or 1 minus 0.03) by the chance that lightning will strike on Wednesday (0.03), which is 0.0291, a bit lower than Tuesday’s chances. What about Thursday? For that to be the day, lightning can’t have struck on Tuesday (0.97) or on Wednesday either (0.97 again) but it must strike on Thursday, so the chances are 0.97×0.97×0.03, which is 0.0282. What about Friday? It’s 0.97×0.97×0.97×0.03, or 0.274. With each day, the odds go down (0.0300 … 0.0291 … 0.0282 … 0.0274), because for a given day to be the next day that lightning strikes, all the previous days have to have been strike-free, and the more of these days there are, the lower the chances are that the streak will continue. To be exact, the probability goes down exponentially, accelerating at an accelerating rate. The chance that the next strike will be thirty days from today is 0.97^29x0.03, barely more than 1 percent.
> 
> Almost no one gets this right. I gave the question to a hundred Internet users, with the word _next_ italicized so they couldn’t miss it. Sixty-seven picked the option “every day has the same chance.” But that answer, though intuitively compelling, is wrong. If every day were equally likely to be the next one, then a day a thousand years from now would be just as likely as a day a month from now. That would mean that the house would be just as likely to go a thousand years without a strike as to suffer one next month. Of the remaining respondents, nineteen thought that the most likely day was a month from today. Only five of the hundred correctly guessed “tomorrow.”

I wonder if there's a name for this problem. He doesn't cite any prior art.
# The Singularity Institute STILL needs remote researchers (may apply again; writing skill not required)

**Update**: As of December 2012, we are still accepting applications!

A while ago, I [announced](/r/discussion/lw/9t8/the_singularity_institute_needs_remote/) that the Singularity Institute is hiring remote researchers. I've hired a few people, but I still need more remote researchers. I think I screened off too many otherwise capable people because the 'test task' I asked applicants to perform was too time-consuming.

So even if you've already applied and been rejected, please apply via the **[new application form](http://tinyurl.com/remote-researchers)**. The test task this time will not be quite so time consuming.

Pay is hourly and starts at $14/hr but that will rise if the product is good. You must be available to work at least 20 hours/week to be considered.

Perks:

*   Work from home, with flexible hours.
*   Age, location, and credentials are irrelevant; only the product matters.
*   Get paid to research things you're probably interested in anyway.
*   Contribute to human knowledge in immediately actionable ways. We need this research because we are about to _act_ on it. Your work will not fall into the [journal](http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Jacso-Five-year-impact-factor-data-in-the-Journal-Citation-Reports.pdf) [abyss](http://209.123.244.94/polArticles.cfm?Author_Desc=Bill%20McKelvey) that most academic research falls into.

If you're interested, **[apply here](http://tinyurl.com/remote-researchers)**.

Why post this job ad on LessWrong? We need people with some measure of [genuine curiosity](/lw/96j/what_curiosity_looks_like/).

Also see [Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently](/lw/5me/scholarship_how_to_do_it_efficiently/).
# against "AI risk"

Why does SI/LW focus so much on [AI-FOOM](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/FOOM) disaster, with apparently much less concern for things like

*   bio/nano-tech disaster
*   Malthusian upload scenario
*   highly destructive war
*   bad memes/philosophies spreading among humans or posthumans and overriding our values
*   upload singleton ossifying into a suboptimal form compared to the kind of superintelligence that our universe could support

[Why](/lw/ajm/ai_risk_and_opportunity_a_strategic_analysis/5yvd), for example, is lukeprog's strategy sequence titled "AI Risk and Opportunity", instead of "The Singularity, Risks and Opportunities"? Doesn't it seem strange to assume that both the risks and opportunities must be AI related, before the analysis even begins? Given our current state of knowledge, I don't see how we can make such conclusions with any confidence even _after_ a thorough analysis.

SI/LW sometimes gives the [impression](/lw/atm/cult_impressions_of_less_wrongsi/) of being a doomsday cult, and it would help if we didn't concentrate so much on a particular doomsday scenario. (Are there any doomsday cults that say "doom is probably coming, we're not sure how but here are some likely possibilities"?)
# Reframing the Problem of AI Progress

> "Fascinating! You should definitely look into this. Fortunately, my own research has no chance of producing a super intelligent AGI, so I'll continue. Good luck son! The government should give you more money."

Stuart Armstrong [paraphrasing](/lw/bfj/evidence_for_the_orthogonality_thesis/68hc) a typical AI researcher

I forgot to mention in my [last post](/r/discussion/lw/bnc/against_ai_risk/) why "AI risk" might be a bad phrase even to denote the problem of UFAI. It brings to mind analogies like physics catastrophes or astronomical disasters, and lets AI researchers think that their work is ok as long as they have little chance of immediately destroying Earth. But the real problem we face is how to build or become a superintelligence that shares our values, and given that this seems very difficult, any progress that doesn't contribute to the solution but brings forward the date by which we _must_ solve it (or be stuck with something very suboptimal even if it doesn't kill us), is bad. The word "risk" connotes a small chance of something bad suddenly happening, but slow steady progress towards losing the future is just as worrisome.

The [usual way](http://facingthesingularity.com/2011/not-built-to-think-about-ai/) of stating the problem also invites lots of debate that are largely beside the point (as far as determining how serious the problem is), like [whether intelligence explosion is possible](/lw/8j7/criticisms_of_intelligence_explosion/), or [whether a superintelligence can have arbitrary goals](/lw/bfj/evidence_for_the_orthogonality_thesis/), or [how sure we are that a non-Friendly superintelligence will destroy human civilization](/lw/bl2/a_belief_propagation_graph/). If someone wants to question the importance of facing this problem, they really instead need to argue that a superintelligence isn't possible (not even a [modest one](/lw/b10/modest_superintelligences/)), or that the future will turn out to be close to the best possible just by everyone pushing forward their own research without any concern for the big picture, or perhaps that we really don't care very much about the far future and distant strangers and should pursue AI progress just for the immediate benefits.

(This is an expanded version of a [previous comment](/lw/bnc/against_ai_risk/6b4p).)
# Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist [link]

A [dialogue](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/) discussing how thermodynamics limits future growth in energy usage, and that in turn limits GDP growth, from the blog Do the Math.

> **Physicist:** Hi, I’m Tom. I’m a physicist.
> 
> **Economist:** Hi Tom, I’m \[ahem..cough\]. I’m an economist.
> 
> **Physicist:** Hey, that’s great. I’ve been thinking a bit about growth and want to run an idea by you. I claim that [economic growth cannot continue indefinitely](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/ "Do the Math: Can Economic Growth Last?").
> 
> **Economist:** \[chokes on bread crumb\] Did I hear you right? Did you say that growth can _not_ continue forever?
> 
> **Physicist:** That’s right. I think physical limits assert themselves.
> 
> **Economist:** Well sure, nothing truly lasts _forever_. The sun, for instance, will not burn forever. On the billions-of-years timescale, things come to an end.
> 
> **Physicist:** Granted, but I’m talking about a more immediate timescale, here on Earth. Earth’s physical resources—particularly energy—are limited and may prohibit continued growth within centuries, or possibly much shorter depending on the choices we make. There are thermodynamic issues as well.

I think this is quite relevant to many of the ideas of futurism (and economics) that we often discuss here on Less Wrong. They address the concepts related to levels of civilization and mind uploading. Colonization of space is dismissed by both parties, at least for the sake of the discussion. The blog author has [another post](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/) discussing his views on its implausibility; I find it to be somewhat limited in its consideration of the issue, though.

He has also detailed the calculations whose results he describes in this dialogue in a few [previous](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/) [posts](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/). The dialogue format will probably be a kinder introduction to the ideas for those less mathematically inclined.
# Why I Moved from AI to Neuroscience, or: Uploading Worms

This post is shameless self-promotion, but I'm told that's probably okay in the Discussion section. For context, as [some of you are aware](/lw/88g/whole_brain_emulation_looking_at_progress_on_c/54l6), I'm aiming to model C. elegans based on systematic high-throughput experiments - that is, to upload a worm. I'm still working on course requirements and lab training at Harvard's Biophysics Ph.D. program, but this remains the plan for my thesis.

Last semester I gave [this lecture to Marvin Minsky's AI class](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW77lANeJas), because Marvin professes disdain for everything neuroscience, and I wanted to give his students—and him—a fair perspective of how basic neuroscience might be changing for the better, and seems a particularly exciting field to be in right about now. The lecture is about 22 minutes long, followed by over an hour of questions and answers, which cover a lot of the memespace that surrounds this concept. Afterward, several students reported to me that their understanding of neuroscience was transformed.

I only just now got to encoding and uploading this recording; I believe that many of the topics covered could be of interest to the LW community (especially those with a background in AI and an interest in brains), perhaps worthy of discussion, and I hope you agree.
# Should "latest insights" appear in the front page blurb?

The front page states

>  We use the latest insights from [cognitive science](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_science), [social psychology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_psychology),[probability theory](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Bayesian_probability), and [decision theory](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Decision_theory) to improve our understanding of _how the world works_ and _what we can do to achieve our goals_.

The use of "latest" is a minor turn-off for me. It reminds me of blogs' and mass-media news' uncritical approach to recent papers in health and psychology. It makes me think that LessWrong will be about grabbing a paper, summarizing its result, and explaining how to apply it in daily life.

LessWrong is cognizant of the problems in scientific publishing. We know that any individual paper is likely to be wrong - more so if the conclusions are highly unexpected. (The more sensational the headline, the less likely it is to be true).

LessWrong usually focuses on higher-level summaries when discussing scientific findings, especially in psychology. A typical top-level science post has lots of references, many to review articles and meta-analyses. That's not the impression I get from the front page, though, so I think it we could communicate the community's goals better by dropping the word "latest".

This point is similar to one made by Gabriel in [this comment](/lw/atm/cult_impressions_of_less_wrongsi/6134).
# 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' Chapter Summaries / Notes [link]

I recently read Kahneman's 'Thinking Fast and Slow' (actually listened to the audiobook) and I wanted to find a summary of the experiments he describes and I stumbled upon this: [http://sivers.org/book/ThinkingFastAndSlow](http://sivers.org/book/ThinkingFastAndSlow). It has a summary of the interesting/important points of each chapter. Most of the statements seem to be direct quotes from the book, so if you have it in an electronic format (it can easily be obtained from uh, various sources) you can search for those quotes and find the context.

Bonus: Notes from Dan Ariely's [Predictably Irrational](http://sivers.org/book/PredictablyIrrational) and also [many other books](http://sivers.org/book/).
# The Blue School

[The Blue School](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/nyregion/at-the-blue-school-kindergarten-curriculum-includes-neurology.html) appears to be a neuroscience driven playgroup for children to learn about their own neuroanatomy and emotional self-regulation and are given language to describe their feelings...

"So young children at the Blue School learn about what has been called “the amygdala hijack” — what happens to their brains when they flip out. Teachers try to get children into a “toward state,” in which they are open to new ideas. Periods of reflection are built into the day for students and teachers alike, because reflection helps executive function — the ability to process information in an orderly way, focus on tasks and exhibit self-control. Last year, the curriculum guide was amended to include the term “meta-cognition”: the ability to think about thinking.

“Having language for these mental experiences gives children more chances to regulate their emotions,” said David Rock, who is a member of the Blue School’s board and a founder of [NeuroLeadership Institute](http://www.neuroleadership.org/), a global research group dedicated to understanding the brain science of leadership.

That language is then filtered through a 6-year-old’s brain.

Miles, one of the kindergartners drawing their emotions, showed off his picture and described the battle it depicted between happiness and anger this way: “The happy fights angry, but angry gets blocked by the force field and can’t get out.” Happiness could escape through his mouth, Miles explained. But anger got trapped, turning into sadness.

With ample research showing that negative emotions impede learning while positive emotions broaden children’s attention and their ability to acquire and retain information, strategies for regulating emotions are getting more emphasis in progressive schools across the country."
# How accurate is the quantum physics sequence?

[Prompted by Mitchell Porter](/lw/bql/our_phyg_is_not_exclusive_enough/6cpu?context=5#6cpu), I asked on Physics StackExchange about the accuracy of the physics in the Quantum Physics sequence:

What errors would one learn from Eliezer Yudkowsky's introduction to quantum physics?

Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote an introduction to quantum physics from a strictly realist standpoint. However, he has no qualifications in the subject and it is not his specialty. Does it paint an accurate picture overall? What mistaken ideas about QM might someone who read only this introduction come away with?

I've had some interesting answers so far, including one from a friend that seems to point up a definite error, though AFAICT not a very consequential one: in [Configurations and Amplitude](/lw/pd/configurations_and_amplitude/), a multiplication factor of _i_ is used for the mirrors where -1 is correct.

Physics StackExchange: [What errors would one learn from Eliezer Yudkowsky's introduction to quantum physics?](http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23785/what-errors-would-one-learn-from-eliezer-yudkowskys-introduction-to-quantum-phy)
# [link]Mass replication of Psychology articles planed.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/is-psychology-about-to-come-undone/29045

The plan is to replicate or fail to replicate all 2008 articles from three major Psychology journals.

ETA: http://openscienceframework.org/ is the homepage of the group behind this.  It's still in Beta, but will eventually include some nifty looking science toolkits in addition to the reproducibility project.
# A question about Eliezer

I blew through all of MoR in about 48 hours, and in an attempt to learn more about the science and philosophy that Harry espouses, I've been reading the sequences and Eliezer's posts on Less Wrong. Eliezer has written extensively about AI, rationality, quantum physics, singularity research, etc. I have a question: how correct has he been?  Has his interpretation of quantum physics predicted any subsequently-observed phenomena?  Has his understanding of cognitive science and technology allowed him to successfully anticipate the progress of AI research, or has he made any significant advances himself? Is he on the record predicting anything, either right or wrong?   

Why is this important: when I read something written by Paul Krugman, I know that he has a Nobel Prize in economics, and I know that he has the [best track record of any top pundit in the US](http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/130485/claim-krugman-is-top-prognosticator-cal-thomas-is-the-worst/) in terms of making accurate predictions.  Meanwhile, I know that Thomas Friedman [is an idiot](/lw/hi/futuristic_predictions_as_consumable_goods/).  Based on this track record, I believe things written by Krugman much more than I believe things written by Friedman.  But if I hadn't read Friedman's writing from 2002-2006, then I wouldn't know how terribly wrong he has been, and I would be too credulous about his claims.  

Similarly, reading [Mike Darwin's predictions about the future of medicine](/lw/8yp/prediction_is_hard_especially_of_medicine/) was very enlightening.  He was wrong about nearly everything.  So now I know to distrust claims that he makes about the pace or extent of subsequent medical research.  

Has Eliezer offered anything falsifiable, or put his reputation on the line in any way?  "If X and Y don't happen by Z, then I have vastly overestimated the pace of AI research, or I don't understand quantum physics as well as I think I do," etc etc.
# What deserves cryocide?

So being signed up for cryonics shifts my views on life and death, as might be expected.

In particular, it focuses my views of success on the preservation of my brain (everything else too, just in case, but especially the brain).  This means, obviously, not just the lump of meat but also the information within it.

If I'm suffering a degenerative disease to that meat or its information, I'm going to want to cryocide to preserve the information (and the idea of living through slow brain death doesn't thrill me regardless).

What I don't know is: given the current state of science, what sorts of things do I need to be worried about?

In particular, I'm wondering about Alzheimer's; does it appear to be damage to the information, or to the retrieval mechanism?

But any other such diseases interest me in this context.

Thanks!

-Robin
# [LINK] Cracked provides a humorous primer on the Singularity

Cracked, [already known](/lw/89s/link_cracked_on_pitmk_fundamental_attribution/5572) for its lay-person-friendly approach to promoting rationality, now has a quick video that roughly explains the Singularity and why we should be worried about it while being funny and interesting to people who normally wouldn't care. Done in their After Hours series.

[http://www.cracked.com/video\_18400\_why-scariest-sci-fi-robot-uprising-has-already-begun.html](http://www.cracked.com/video_18400_why-scariest-sci-fi-robot-uprising-has-already-begun.html)
# Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 2

From Costanza's original [thread](/r/discussion/lw/932/stupid_questions_open_thread/) (entire text):

> This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well.  Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent.  If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

**Meta**:

*   How often should these be made? I think one every three months is the correct frequency.
*   Costanza made the original thread, but I am OpenThreadGuy. I am therefore not only entitled but _required_ to post this in his stead. But I got his permission anyway.
# Prisoner's Dilemma on game show Golden Balls

I found this to be a very interesting method of dealing with a modified Prisoner's Dilemma. In this situation, if both players cooperate they split a cash prize, but if one defects he gets the entire prize. The difference from the normal prisoner's dilemma is that if both defect, neither gets anything, so a player gains nothing by defecting if he knows his opponent will defect; he merely has the option to hurt him out of spite. Watch and see how one player deals with this.  
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0qjK3TWZE8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0qjK3TWZE8)
# Hofstadter's Superrationality

Possibly the main and original inspiration for Yudkowsky's various musings on what advanced game theories should do (eg. cooperate in [the Prisoner's Dilemma](/lw/tn/the_true_prisoners_dilemma/)) is a set of essays penned by Douglas Hofstadter (of _Godel, Escher, Bach_) 1983\. Unfortunately, they were not online and only available as part of a dead-tree collection. This is unfortunate. Fortunately the collection is available through the usual pirates as a scan, and I took the liberty of transcribing by hand the relevant essays with images, correcting errors, annotating with links, etc: [http://www.gwern.net/docs/1985-hofstadter](http://www.gwern.net/docs/1985-hofstadter)

The 3 essays:

1.  [discuss the Prisoner's dilemma](http://www.gwern.net/docs/1985-hofstadter#dilemmas-for-superrational-thinkers-leading-up-to-a-luring-lottery), the misfortune of defection, what sort of cooperative reasoning would maximize returns in a souped-up Prisoner's dilemma, and then offers a public contest
2.  then we learn [the results of the contest](http://www.gwern.net/docs/1985-hofstadter#irrationality-is-the-square-root-of-all-evil), and a discussion of ecology and the tragedy of the commons
3.  finally, Hofstadter gives [an extended parable](http://www.gwern.net/docs/1985-hofstadter#the-tale-of-happiton) about cooperation in the face of nuclear warfare; it is fortunate for us that it applies to most existential threats as well

I hope you find them educational. I am not 100% confident of the math transcriptions since the original ebook messed some of them up; if you find any apparent mistakes or typos, please leave comments.
# Learn a foreign language to reduce bias?

Interesting [new paper](http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/04/18/0956797611432178.abstract?rss=1) (anyone have a link to an ungated version). Abstract (emphasis added):

> Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. Four experiments show that the **framing effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue**. Whereas people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing manipulation in a foreign language. Two additional experiments show that **using a foreign language reduces loss aversion**, increasing the acceptance of both hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does.

Speakers of multiple languages: have you noticed a similar pattern in your own lives?
# Living Forever is Hard, part 3: the state of life extension research

Previous:

1.  ["Living Forever is Hard, or, the Gompertz Curve"](/lw/5qm/living_forever_is_hard_or_the_gompertz_curve/)
2.  ["Living Forever is Hard, part 2: Adult Longevity"](/lw/7jh/living_forever_is_hard_part_2_adult_longevity/)

From the excellent [Fight Aging!](http://www.fightaging.org/) blog comes a pointer to ["A Histogram of Results from Life Span Studies"](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/04/a-histogram-of-results-from-life-span-studies.php), a graph of thousands of animal studies by Kingsley G. Morse Jr. (updated version from mailing list):

![](http://i.imgur.com/Pcnj5.png)

(This is not the same as a [funnel plot](/lw/8nc/funnel_plots_the_study_that_didnt_bark_or/), as the y-axis is # of studies finding that percentage gain and nothing to do with the _n_ of studies.)

  
On the closed GRG mailing list, the compiler says:

> Many test the same intervention on a different strain of the same species, or with a different dose.

I asked some questions, and Steven B. Harris replied:

> “I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know.”  (Twain)  
>   
> Though I can observe that the center of that distribution isn't very far from no-effect, and one would expect that there's a publication bias toward reporting positive effects vs. null effects. I would think that could account for it entirely.  
>   
> There's also the problem we've discussed before, that feeling animals stuff they don't like the taste off, amounts to calorie restriction. So this clouds the issues terribly in non-CR studies, unless you're very, VERY careful to control them somehow.

The relevance of this summary graph to news like the C60 rodent life extension experiment is obvious. Reading GRG has been interesting and educational about that experiment; a rough summary of points made by various people including myself:

*   contradictory median/lifespan figures
*   duplicate image
*   small sample
*   doses of C60 small enough that the direct antioxidant activity can't be responsible
*   justifying cites not published when experiment started
*   the C60 was administered for brief period (think the analogy given was 'imagine taking a supplement only during your 40s and doubling your lifespan')
*   the massive life extension observed in the olive-oil-only rats - not doubling, but still really implausible
# Timeless physics breaks T-Rex's mind [LINK]

[From Dinosaur Comics](http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=2190), with a nice shout-out to [Eliezer's Timeless Physics post](/lw/qp/timeless_physics/)! (Look in the newspost below the comic.)

I can't wait until Ryan North gets around to [Newcomb's Problem](/lw/nc/newcombs_problem_and_regret_of_rationality/)...
# If calorie restriction works in humans, should we have observed it already?

Although there are no long-term scientific studies of calorie restriction in humans, there are religious groups, cults, and ascetics who voluntarily practice calorie restriction or intermittent fasting. Presumably there have been tens or hundreds of thousands of people who have practiced calorie restriction throughout most of their adult lives. There were/are probably also groups that involuntarily practice calorie restriction - servants, slaves, prisoners, or people who simply regularly don't have enough to eat.

If calorie restriction has a dramatic effect on life expectancy in humans, shouldn't we expect to observe extended life expectancy in at least some groups? Or would each of these groups likely have some mitigating circumstances that would shorten their lifespans, such as lack of medicine?

With an hour on Google, I found some references to Okinawa, to monks on Mount Athos, and to similar groups. In no case was there a reasonable claim of life expectancy over 90 (which would represent just a 10% improvement over life expectancy in Japan).

[This paper](http://www.nutritionj.com/content/10/1/107) reviews the evidence on calorie restriction in humans and other animals, including discussion of religious fasting, but there's no evidence there of fasting extending lifespan.

I found a few other sources where people asked this question (or made this point as an attack on CR), but I haven't yet found any good answers on the subject, and didn't find any discussion on LessWrong yet.
# Mindfulness Meditation Thread

Hi everybody,

There's been a bit of talk of [Mindfulness](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness_(psychology)) meditation around. I am curious about this, because it looks like it might be [practical advice](/lw/d4/practical_advice_backed_by_deep_theories/) backed by a [deep theory](/lw/blr/attention_control_is_critical_for/).

Unfortunately, all the tutorials on mindfulness meditation seem to be semi-practical advice backed by totally bogus theories (focus your energies, blah blah). I've been able to extract some useful stuff from such articles, but I don't know what I can trust, and I still don't fully understand how it's even supposed to work.

My current understanding is that you are supposed to pay attention to something and then pay attention to your attention, notice when you go off track, not judge yourself, and focus your attention back on the thing you were paying attention to. Or something.

I'd like to understand the technique at least well enough to judge success. When I'm doing chin-ups, it's easy to see if I did a chin-up or not, and how many, but I don't even know what this mindfulness stuff is supposed to look like.

If anyone knows more about what it's supposed to feel like, what the steps are an so on, I would really appreciate if you posted your knowledge here.
# A Kick in the Rationals: What hurts you in your LessWrong Parts?

A month or so ago I stumbled across [this](http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/biocentrism/201203/the-most-astounding-thing-in-the-universe).  It's a blog piece by one Robert Lanza M.D., a legitimate, respected biologist who has made important contributions to tissue engineering, cloning and stem cell research.  In his spare time, he is a crackpot.

I know I shouldn't give any of my time to an online pop-psychology magazine which has "Find a Therapist" as the second option on its navigation bar, but the piece in question could have been \*designed\* to antagonise a LessWrong reader: horrible misapplication of quantum physics, [worshipful treatment of the mysterious](/lw/iu/mysterious_answers_to_mysterious_questions/), [making a big deal over easily dissolvable questions](/lw/np/disputing_definitions/), bold and unsubstantiated claims about physics and consciousness... the list goes on.  I'm generally past the point in my life where ranting at people who are wrong on the internet holds any appeal, but this particular item got my goat to the point where I had to go and get my goat back.

If reading LW all these years has done anything, it's trained me to take apart that post without even thinking, so (and I'm not proud of this), I wrote a short seven-point response in the comments lucidly explaining its most obvious problems, and signed it Summer Glau.  It got removed, and I learned a valuable lesson about productively channeling my anger.

But this started me thinking about how certain things (either subjects or people) antagonise what I now think of as my LessWrong Parts, or more generally cause me distress on an epistemic level, and what my subjective experience of that distress is like so I can recognise and deal with it in future.

I've seen a few other people make comments describing this kind of distress, ([this](/lw/9g1/the_problem_with_too_many_rational_memes/5oum) description of "being forced to use your nicely sharpened tools on a task that would destroy them" seems particularly accurate).  Common culprits seem to be critical theory, postmodernism and bad philosophy.  I've also noticed some _people_ distress me in this fashion, in a way I'm still struggling to characterise.

Who else has this experience?  Do you have any choice examples?  What hurts you in your LessWrong Parts?
# Formalizing Value Extrapolation

A recent [post](http://ordinaryideas.wordpress.com/2012/04/21/indirect-normativity-write-up/) at my blog may be interesting to LW. It is a high-level discussion of what precisely defined value extrapolation might look like. I mostly wrote the essay while a visitor at FHI. 

The basic idea is that we can define extrapolated values by just taking an emulation of a human, putting it in a hypothetical environment with access to powerful resources, and then adopting whatever values it eventually decides on. You might want some philosophical insight before launching into such a definition, but since we are currently laboring under the threat of catastrophe, it seems that there is virtue in spending our effort on avoiding death and delegating whatever philosophical work we can to someone on a more relaxed schedule. 

You wouldn't want to run an AI with the values I lay out, but at least it is pinned down precisely. We can articulate objections relatively concretely, and hopefully begin to understand/address the difficulties. 

(Posted at the request of cousin_it.)
# Survey of older folks as data about one's future values and preferences?

One thing that struck me in the 2011 survey was that 90% of LW respondents were under age 38. I'm 57 myself. It seems that often rationality in planning our lives depends on estimates of what values and utility functions we will hold in the future. Has anyone looked systematically at what projected older versions of themselves would think, based on what relevant groups of existing older folks think?

"You'll understand when you're older" is an annoying form of argument. Arguably there's some grain of truth there when a 7-year-old tells you that sex is disgusting and he or she will never ever think it's anything but incredibly gross. But you could explain hormonal changes that as a matter of empirical fact change opinions on that subject in the vast majority of cases. I can't think of anything that dramatic that distinguishes 60-year-olds or 80-year-olds from 20-year-olds.

My dim recollection of studies is that on the whole as people age they tend to be less idealistic, more resigned to society the way it is rather than how it might be, and more constrained by realities of politics and economics (for starters).

I don't presume to offer anything in this regard based on my age, and in any case I'm only a single person (a nihilist when pressed, but one who finds himself happier pretending not to be and working sporadically for rationality, truth, justice, love, and all that good stuff).

When I read of cryonics, what comes to my mind is the escalating costs of health care and (as I see it) the need to curb the development of expensive life-extending medical procedures. Cryonics sounds instead like an extremely expensive procedure. Maybe no one is suggesting it be covered by health insurance, and it's just an option that some people pay out of pocket for. Even so, the "health care is a right, not a privilege" sentiment will mean that if it was shown to work, everyone would want it, and (in my estimation) society would go completely haywire in an unpleasant way.

Now, the substance of the above has probably been discussed elsewhere at length; I raise it is an example because when I was 21 I would have thought of it very differently than I do now.
# Do people think Less Wrong rationality is parochial?

I've spent so much time in the cogsci literature that I know the LW approach to rationality is basically the mainstream cogsci approach to rationality (plus some extra stuff about, e.g., [language](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/A_Human%27s_Guide_to_Words)), but... do other people not know this? Do people one step removed from LessWrong — say, in the 'atheist' and 'skeptic' communities — not know this? If this is causing credibility problems in our broader community, it'd be [relatively easy](/r/lesswrong/lw/7e5/the_cognitive_science_of_rationality/) to show people that Less Wrong is not, in fact, a "fringe" approach to rationality.

For example, here's Oaksford & Chater in the second chapter to the (excellent) new _[Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning](http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Thinking-Reasoning-Library-Psychology/dp/0199734682/)_, the one on normative systems of rationality:

Is it meaningful to attempt to develop a general theory of rationality _at all_? We might tentatively suggest that it is a prima facie sign of irrationality to believe in alien abduction, or to will a sports team to win in order to increase their chance of victory. But these views or actions might be entirely rational, given suitably nonstandard background beliefs about other alien activity and the general efficacy of psychic powers. Irrationality may, though, be ascribed if there is a _clash_ between a particular belief or behavior and such background assumptions. Thus, a thorough-going physicalist may, perhaps, be accused of irrationality if she simultaneously believes in psychic powers. A theory of rationality cannot, therefore, be viewed as clarifying either what people should believe or how people should act—but it can determine whether beliefs and behaviors are compatible. Similarly, a theory of rational choice cannot determine whether it is rational to smoke or to exercise daily; but it might clarify whether a particular choice is compatible with other beliefs and choices.

From this viewpoint, normative theories can be viewed as clarifying conditions of consistency… _Logic_ can be viewed as studying the notion of consistency over _beliefs_. _Probability_… studies consistency over _degrees of belief_. _Rational choice_ theory studies the consistency of beliefs and values with _choices_.

They go on to clarify that by probability they mean Bayesian probability theory, and by rational choice theory they mean Bayesian decision theory. You'll get the same account in the textbooks on the cogsci of rationality, e.g. _[Thinking and Deciding](http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Deciding-Jonathan-Baron/dp/0521680433/)_ or _[Rational Choice in an Uncertain World](http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Choice-Uncertain-World-Psychology/dp/1412959039/)_.
# What's wrong with psychology, anyway?

Came across this article, published in 1991 but hardly dated:

David T. Lykken, _[What's Wrong With Psychology, Anyway?](http://cogprints.org/371/3/148.pdf) _(PDF, 39 pages)

Anyone who's interested in psychology as a science might, I think, find it fascinating. Lots of stuff there about rationality-related failures of academic psychology. Several wonderful anecdotes, of which I'll quote one in full that had me laughing out loud --

> In the 1940s and ’50s. there was a torrent of interest and research surrounding the debate between the S-R _\[Stimulus-Response\]_ reinforcement theorists at Yale and Iowa City and the S-S _\[Stimulus-Stimulus\]_ expectancy theorists headquartered at Berkeley. As is usual in these affairs, the two sides produced not only differing theoretical interpretations but also different empirical findings from their rat laboratories, differences that ultimately led Marshall Jones to wonder if the researchers in Iowa and California might not be working with genetically different animals. Jones obtained samples of rats from the two colonies: and tested them in the simple runway situation. Sure enough, when running time was plotted against trial number, the two strains showed little overlap in performance. The Iowa rats put their heads down and streaked for the goal box, while the Berkeley animals dawdled, retraced, investigated, appeared to be making “cognitive maps” just as Tolman always said. But by 1965 the torrent of interest in latent-learning had become a backwater and Jones's paper was published obscurely (Jones & Fennel, 1965).

(I came across the reference to the article in the [HN discussion](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3888568) about a [project](http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/is-psychology-about-to-come-undone/29045), of independent interest, to try and replicate a sample of articles from three reputable journals in psychology in a given year)
# Non-orthogonality implies uncontrollable superintelligence

Just a minor thought connected with the [orthogonality](http://www.nickbostrom.com/superintelligentwill.pdf) [thesis](/lw/bfj/evidence_for_the_orthogonality_thesis/): if you claim that any superintelligence will inevitably converge to some true code of morality, then you are also claiming that no measures can be taken by its creators to prevent this convergence. In other words, the superintelligence will be uncontrollable.
# A few questions on International Rationality

Disclaimer: I'm still fairly new here, and though I did use the search bar it's entirely possible this has been discussed before. Just point me in the right direction if this is so.

While reading about 4chan's Japanese progenitor website, it occurred to me that I know nothing about the state of rationality in the non-English-speaking world, and more specifically the non-English-speaking internet. Is there a Russian version of SIAI? A Japanese Less Wrong? What about Korean Robin Hansons and Eliezer Yudkowskys?

If we take Religion as any indication of irrationality then America should be one of the least rational countries in the world. So if there are like-minded individuals out there speaking in languages we don't know, are we doing anything to collaborate with them? Do they have their own sequences and their own HPMORs which we could be reading?

And if there are no Singularitarian, Cryonics-Supporting, Utilitarianism-Advocating websites for the majority of the human race, isn't that a _huge deal_? Aren't Europeans and Asians more likely to be open to rationality, if only because of their atheism? If we want Friendly-AI to be developed, should we be translating the sequences into Chinese and Hindu as quickly as possible?
# Fiction: A Setting Justifying the Epistemic Aggressiveness Of A Religion Stand-in

I've just been thinking (a dangerous pastime, I know) and remembering my religious days, and one of the things that made me so anxious back then, and made adopting atheism so gratifying, what the sheer _drought_ of information. I had so many, so many questions, and there were no satisfying answers to be found.

How do souls work? When one dies, what does bodiless existence feel like? What happens in Resurrection Day, do cripples come back as such? Do transsexuals come in the body they identify with? Is it a matter of self-image?

How does God intervene in the gaps? What will Paradise be like? How will society be organized? Will there be further education? Will human nature be radically changed to accomodate eternity? What about Hell? How does it work? What's the point of it?

And what does _that_ verse mean? And what does _that_ other? And what if the letter of the law, once centuries have passed and context has changed, goes against its spirit? What would God actually want me to do? Why am I supposed to guess? Why is it so important that my faith in Him be groundless and unsubstantiated? Why has He stopped giving orders directly, why has he relied on fallibe intermediaries and easily-tampered-with books?

So, abundant questions, very few, very vague answers. _Important_ questions, too, an _eternity_ of one's afterlife depends on them! So, I was wondering: is it possible to come up with a fictional setting, resembling the Theist-Abrahamic vision of the world, but mundane (perhaps a game? a computer simulation? a F(?)AI run society?) in which this drought of information is actually justified?

As an example of what I'm going for, [Warhammer 40K's Imperium of Man gives us an example of a textbook fascist society whose every single trait is perfectly justified by the setting's rules.](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Analysis/Warhammer40000) (See the "actually has something consistent to say about utilitarianism" subsection). 

In what kind of world would a Supreme Authority's information-management policies resemble God's, and make _sense?_ I'm not saying "be good" or even "be fair", just "make sense". [Even in a Kafka-ish, "nonsensical" way](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yes,_Minister#Episode_Eight:_The_Tangled_Web).