trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[QUESTION]: What are your views on climate change, and how did you form them?
by VipulNaik — 2014-07-08T14:52:06.756Z

Note: Please see this post of mine for more on the project, my sources, and potential sources for bias.

I have written a couple of blog posts on my understanding of climate forecasting, climate change, and the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis (here and here). I also laid down the sources I was using to inform myself here.

I think one question that a number of readers may have had is: given my lack of knowledge (and unwillingness to undertake extensive study) of the subject, why am I investigating it at all, rather than relying on the expert consensus, as documented by the IPCC that, even if we're not sure is correct, is still the best bet humanity has for getting things right? I intend to elaborate on the reasons for taking a closer look at the matter, while still refraining from making the study of atmospheric science a full-time goal, in a future post.

Right now, I'm curious to hear how you formed your views on climate change. In particular, I'm interested in answers to questions such as these (not necessarily answers to all of them, or even to only these questions).

What are your current beliefs on climate change? Specifically, would you defer to the view that greenhouse gas forcing is the main source of long-term climate change? How long-term? Would you defer to the IPCC range for climate sensitivity estimates?

What were your beliefs on climate change when you first came across the subject, and how did your views evolve (if at all) on further reading (if you did any)? (Obviously, your initial views wouldn't have included beliefs about terms like "greenhouse gas forcing" or "climate sensitivity").

What are some surprising things you learned when reading up about climate change that led you to question your beliefs (regardless of whether you changed them)? For instance, perhaps reading about Climategate caused you to critically examine your deference to expert consensus on the issue, but you eventually concluded that the expert consensus was still right.

If you read my recent posts linked above, did the posts contain information that was new to you? Did any of this information surprise you? Do you think it's valuable to carry out this sort of exercise in order to better understand the climate change debate?
Search Engines and Oracles
by HalMorris — 2014-07-08T14:27:02.792Z

Some time ago, I was following a conversation about Wolfram Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com/), an attempt to implement a sort of general purpose question answerer, something people have dreamed about computers doing for decades. Despite the theoretical availability to find out virtually anything from the Internet, we seem pretty far from any plausible approximation of this dream (at least for general consumption). My first attempt was:

Q: "who was the first ruler of russia?"
A: Vladimir Putin

It's a problematic question that depends on questions like "When did Russia become Russia", or "What do we count, historically as Russia", or even what one means by "Ruler", and a reasonably satisfactory answer would have had to be fairly complicated -- either that, or the question would have to be reworded to be so precise that one name could serve as the answer.

On another problematic question I thought it did rather well:

Q: what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen african swallow?

What occurred to me though, is that computer science could do something quite useful intermediate between "general purpose question answerer" and the old database paradigm of terms ANDed or ORed together. (Note that what Google does is neither of these, nor should it be placed on a straight line between the two -- but discussion of Google would take me far off topic).

A simple example of what I'd really like is a search engine that matches *concepts*. Does anyone know of such a thing? If it exists, I should possibly read about it and shut up, but let me at least try to be sure I'm making the idea clear:

E.g., I'd like to enter <<rulers of russia>>, and get a list of highly relevant articles.

Or, I'd like to enter <<repair of transmission of "1957 Ford Fairlane">> and get few if any useless advertisements, and something much better than all articles containing the words "repair" "transmission" and "1957 Ford Fairlane" -- e.g., *not* an article on roof repair that happened to mention that "My manual transmission Toyota truck rear-ended a 1957 Ford Fairlane".

It seems to me mere implementation of a few useful connectives like "of", and maybe the recognition of an adjective-noun phrase, and some heuristics like expanding words to *OR*ed lists of synonyms (ruler ==> (president OR king OR dictator ...)) would yield quite an improvement over th...
Consider giving an explanation for your deletion this time around. "Harry Yudkowsky and the Methods of Postrationality: Chapter One: Em Dashes Colons and Ellipses, Littérateurs Go Wild"
by Will_Newsome — 2014-07-08T02:53:50.355Z

My stupid fanfic chapter was banned without explanation so I reposted it; somehow it was at +7 when it was deleted and I think silently deleting upvoted posts is a disservice to LessWrong. I requested that a justification be given in the comments if it were to be deleted again, so LessWrong readers could consider whether or not that justification is aligned with what they want from LessWrong. Also I would like to make clear that this fanfic is primarily a medium for explaining some ideas that people on LessWrong often ask me about; that it is also a lighthearted critique of Yudkowskyanism is secondary, and if need be I will change the premise so that the medium doesn't drown out the message. But really, I wouldn't think a lighthearted parody of a lighthearted parody would cause such offense.

The original post has been unbanned and can be found here, so I've edited this post to just be about the banning.
SSRIs: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
by Scott Alexander — 2014-07-08T02:06:48.000Z

The claim that “SSRIs don’t work” or “SSRIs are mostly just placebo” is most commonly associated with Irving Kirsch, a man with the awesome job title of “Associate Director Of The Program For Placebo Studies at Harvard”.

(fun fact: there’s actually no such thing as “Placebo Studies”, but Professor Kirsch’s belief that he directs a Harvard department inspires him to create much higher-quality research.)

In 1998, he published a meta-analysis of 19 placebo-controlled drug trials that suggested that almost all of the benefits of antidepressants were due to the placebo effect. Psychiatrists denounced him, saying that you can choose pretty much whatever studies you want for a meta-analysis.

After biding his time for a decade, in 2008 he struck back with another meta-analysis, this being one of the first papers in all of medical science to take the audacious step of demanding all the FDA’s data through the Freedom of Information Act. Since drug companies are required to report all their studies to the FDA, this theoretically provides a rare and wonderful publication-bias-free data set. Using this set, he found that, although antidepressants did seem to outperform placebo, the effect was not “clinically significant” except “at the upper end of very severe depression”.

This launched a minor war between supporters and detractors. Probably the strongest support he received was a big 2010 meta-analysis by Fournier et al, which found that

The magnitude of benefit of antidepressant medication compared with placebo increases with severity of depression symptoms and may be minimal or nonexistent, on average, in patients with mild or moderate symptoms. For patients with very severe depression, the benefit of medications over placebo is substantial.

Of course, a very large number of antidepressants are given to people with mild or moderate depression. So what now?

Let me sort the debate about antidepressants into a series of complaints:

1. Antidepressants were oversold and painted as having more biochemical backing than was really justified

2. Modern SSRI antidepressants are no better than older tricyclic and MAOI antidepressants, but are prescribed much more because of said overselling

3. There is large publication bias in the antidepressant literature

4. The effect size of antidepressa...
Carbon dioxide, climate sensitivity, feedbacks, and the historical record: a cursory examination of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis
by VipulNaik — 2014-07-08T01:58:40.238Z

Note: In this blog post, I reference a number of blog posts and academic papers. Two caveats to these references: (a) I often reference them for a specific graph or calculation, and in many cases I've not even examined the rest of the post or paper, while in other cases I've examined the rest and might even consider it wrong, (b) even for the parts I do reference, I'm not claiming they are correct, just that they provide what seems like a reasonable example of an argument in that reference class.

Note 2: Please see this post of mine for more on the project, my sources, and potential sources for bias.

In a previous post, I attempted simple time series forecasting for temperature from the outside view, i.e., as a complete non-expert would. I introduced carbon dioxide concentrations as an explanatory variable near the end of the post, but did not consider in detail the mechanisms through which carbon dioxide concentrations affect temperature. In this post, I switch to what Eliezer Yudkowsky has called the weak inside view. That's something like the inside view, but without knowledge of all the relevant details. Obviously, I'm somewhat constrained here: I can't take the full inside view because I don't know enough about the atmospheric system (partly because the state of human knowledge about the atmospheric system is incomplete, and partly because I know only a very miniscule fraction even of that small amount of human knowledge). But I think that the weak inside view also offers an alternate perspective to the inside view and is valuable in its own right.

One of the reasons I felt the need to switch from the outside view is that the issue is sufficiently complex, but at the same time, the component phenomena are sufficiently well-enumerated that a weak inside view can help. My initial framing of the issue was in terms of separating the roles of theory and evidence in belief in anthropogenic global warming. But a better weak inside view led me to the conclusion that most of the debate didn't center around the greenhouse effect or the level of direct radiative forcing at all; rather, it focused on the magnitude of positive feedback to greenhouse gas forcing (and therefore, the value of climate sensitivity) and the attribution of recent warming to greenhouse gas forcing versus other phenomena (such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and variation in solar activity)....
Meetup : Sydney Meetup - July
by taryneast — 2014-07-08T01:49:36.564Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Meetup - July

WHEN:
23 July 2014 07:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
Sydney City RSL, 565 George St, Sydney, Australia 2000

6:30 PM for early discussion 7PM general dinner-discussion after dinner we'll have our rationality exercise and a more specific discussion-topic.

I'll book another table under the name "less wrong".We normally meet in the restaurant on level 2. So far they've always put it about 5m to the left of the lift, up against the kitchen area.

The theme for this month is Finance
- how to get started
- how to plan for your retirement
- how to calculate if you're on target

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Meetup - July
Recent updates to gwern.net (2013-2014)
by gwern — 2014-07-08T01:44:01.951Z

Previous: 2011, 2012-2013

“It cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof. / It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, nor the sapphire. / The gold and the crystal cannot equal it: and the exchange of it shall not be for vessels of fine gold. / No mention shall be made of coral, or of pearls: for the price of wisdom is above rubies.”

Another 477 days are past, so what have I been up to? In roughly topical & chronological order, here are some major additions to gwern.net:

Statistics:

Google Alerts: analysis of all my emails from Google Alerts to see whether/when they started to be less useful.

Google shutdowns: compiled dataset of past & present Google products for a survival analysis attempting to investigate common claims about why Google abandons things & predict which would be shutdown in the next 5 years. So far the model’s predictions are doing well.

applied survival analysis to modeling Methods of Rationality reviews on FF.net

reproduced a paper analyzing Bitcoin exchange shutdown or theft risk.

Public release of the Mnemosyne spaced repetition dataset (18GB of 121.2m flashcard reviews, collected ~2004-2014)

nootropics survey analysis

power simulation of the penalty from omitting important covariates in logistic regression

did some spaced repetition research using the Mnemosyne logs: found weekly & time of day effects on memory performance - with a clear circadian rhythm; while my results aren’t conclusive, my analysis of 48m flashcard reviews from the public database finds that the best time for recalling your flashcards seem to be noon. (I haven’t looked at time correlates with next review, though.)

QS:

DNB meta-analysis expanded with a dozen or so studies & a new covariate (whether payment reduces gains: it doesn’t)

compiled a small meta-analysis of creatine’s effect on intelligence

updated my analysis of SDr’s sleep data

2013 Lewis meditation quasi-experiment: A Quantified Selfer and a few other guys did some meditation while doing an arithmetic game; turned out to be a perfect application for multilevel modeling

Modafinil: price table update

Sleep and lunar phases: A recent paper claimed that there’s a phase-of-the-moon effect on circadian rhythms; since I have so much sleep data on myself, I thought I’d

...
Guarding Against the Postmodernist Failure Mode
by NoSignalNoNoise — 2014-07-08T01:34:33.440Z

The following two paragraphs got me thinking some rather uncomfortable thoughts about our community's insularity:

We engineers are frequently accused of speaking an alien language, of wrapping what we do in jargon and obscurity in order to preserve the technological priesthood. There is, I think, a grain of truth in this accusation. Defenders frequently counter with arguments about how what we do really is technical and really does require precise language in order to talk about it clearly. There is, I think, a substantial bit of truth in this as well, though it is hard to use these grounds to defend the use of the term "grep" to describe digging through a backpack to find a lost item, as a friend of mine sometimes does. However, I think it's human nature for members of any group to use the ideas they have in common as metaphors for everything else in life, so I'm willing to forgive him.

The really telling factor that neither side of the debate seems to cotton to, however, is this: technical people like me work in a commercial environment. Every day I have to explain what I do to people who are different from me -- marketing people, technical writers, my boss, my investors, my customers -- none of whom belong to my profession or share my technical background or knowledge. As a consequence, I'm constantly forced to describe what I know in terms that other people can at least begin to understand. My success in my job depends to a large degree on my success in so communicating. At the very least, in order to remain employed I have to convince somebody else that what I'm doing is worth having them pay for it.

- Chip Morningstar, "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything: My Postmodern Adventure"

The LW/MIRI/CFAR memeplex shares some important features with postmodernism, namely the strong tendency to go meta, a large amount of jargon that is often impenetrable to outsiders and the lack of an immediate need to justify itself to them. This combination takes away the selective pressure that stops most groups from going totally crazy. As far as I can tell, we have not fallen into this trap, but since people tend to fail to notice when their in-group has gone crazy, this is at best weak evidence that we haven't; furthermore, even assuming that we are in fact perfectly sane now, it will still take effort to maintain that state.

Based on the paragraphs quote...
Meetup : Calibration Training and Potluck - Portland
by  — 2014-07-08T01:31:36.074Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Calibration Training and Potluck - Portland

WHEN:
12 July 2014 06:31:27PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Portland, Oregon

I'm looking to do some calibration training using the format described in How to Measure Anything. I'm looking forward to meeting you all. Message me for address.

Discussion article for the meetup : Calibration Training and Potluck - Portland
LINK: Melting Arctic is releasing millions of tons of methane
by polymathwannabe — 2014-07-07T23:31:07.499Z

Only the first half of this page is devoted to stating facts; the latter half is a call for political action. The facts section states that the millions of tons of methane trapped in the Arctic ice are a factor not commonly taken into account in future climate models, and its release will very quickly worsen global warming to the point of posing a serious existential risk.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/giant-methane-monster-lurking?paging=off
[QUESTION]: LessWrong web traffic data?
by VipulNaik — 2014-07-07T21:41:08.435Z

I remember that LessWrong used to track its web traffic through through SiteMeter, but it was removed in November 2013 due to issues. Historical data about LessWrong is still available through SiteMeter, but the data stretches back only 12 months. I'm not sure if the data October 2013 and earlier is reliable either. Still, it was something that anybody could access.

Cookie Checker shows that LessWrong is currently using Google Analytics to track traffic. Does anybody know who maintains the Google Analytics account, and whether the data can be shared? While I'm mainly interested in seeing the data for myself, others here might also be interested in it, so it might be nice if a public summary of visit and pageview counts could be shared.
Useful Standardized Tests?
by adam_strandberg — 2014-07-07T20:26:05.519Z

When trying to learn something new, it's very useful to have goals not just in terms of reading and absorbing content (i.e. read this physics textbook) but also to have new things that you can do (i.e. be able to solve any momentum transfer problem). "Be able to pass this test" is a more action-y and exciting way to view knowledge acquisition than just "read this book".

Unfortunately, as everyone knows, standardized tests usually suck. But given how many of them there are, there must be some good ones out there- even if the score doesn't tell you as much as you'd like, then at least you can gauge how you're doing by how confusing or difficult it is for you to work through the questions. (I feel like it would be a good idea to work any standardized test you were studying for your own purposes without looking at the multiple choice answers to really test yourself.) For my purposes, I would say that a good standardized test is one such that, if you actually know the material that the test is testing, you can confidently say that you know the field.

I would say that the Physics GRE is probably an example of a good standardized test. I never took it, but I was a physics major as an undergrad, and looking over the questions I can see that it cuts a pretty good swath across the field. If you know enough to answer all those questions and know why your answers are right, then you have a very solid grounding in the field. I, for one, would need to review some stuff I've forgotten if I were to take it for real (namely optics).

For starting to learn new programming languages, a less conventional "standardized" test is solving Project Euler problems in that language.

I'm particularly interested in examples of this for cognitive science and/or neuroscience, since I'm trying to read a lot about those fields and I'd like to know what's expected of someone educated in them. Also there tend to be many fewer resources for workable problems in these fields than in the harder sciences, which I'm more used to.
Time series forecasting for global temperature: an outside view of climate forecasting
by VipulNaik — 2014-07-07T16:25:08.038Z

Note: In this blog post, I reference a number of blog posts and academic papers. Two caveats to these references: (a) I often reference them for a specific graph or calculation, and in many cases I've not even examined the rest of the post or paper, while in other cases I've examined the rest and might even consider it wrong, (b) even for the parts I do reference, I'm not claiming they are correct, just that they provide what seems like a reasonable example of an argument in that reference class.

Note 2: Please see this post of mine for more on the project, my sources, and potential sources for bias.

As part of a review of forecasting, I've been looking at weather and climate forecasting. I wrote one post on weather forecasting and another on the different time horizons for weather and climate forecasting. Now, I want to turn to long-range climate forecasting, for motivations described in this post of mine.

Climate forecasting is turning out to be a fairly tricky topic to look into, partly because of the inherent complexity of the task, and partly because of the politicization surrounding Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).

I decided to begin with a somewhat "outside view" approach: if you were simply given a time series of global temperatures, what sort of patterns would you see? What forecasts would you make for the next 100 years? The forecast can be judged against a no-change forecast, or against the forecasts put out by the widely used climate models.

Below is a chart of four temperature proxies since 1880, courtesy NASA:

The Hadley Centre dataset goes back to 1850. Here it is (note that the centrings on the temperature axis are slightly different, because we are taking means of slightly different sets of numbers, but we are anyway interested only in the trend so that does not matter) (source):

Eyeballing, there does seem to be a secular trend of increase in the temperature data. Perhaps the naivest way of calculating the rate of change is to calculate (final temperature - initial temperature)/(time interval) to calculate the annual rate of change. Using that method, we get a temperature increase of about 0.54 degrees Celsius per century.

But just using final and initial temperatures overweights those two values and ignores the data in the other temperature readings. A somewhat more sophisticated approach (albeit still a pretty unsophisticated approach) is a li...