trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds
by Vive-ut-Vivas — 2010-11-08T21:42:32.423Z

Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds:

For 10 weeks, Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate one of these sugary cakelets every three hours, instead of meals. To add variety in his steady stream of Hostess and Little Debbie snacks, Haub munched on Doritos chips, sugary cereals and Oreos, too.

His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most -- not the nutritional value of the food.

The premise held up: On his "convenience store diet," he shed 27 pounds in two months.

But the highlight, for LW-ers, comes at the end:

Despite his weight loss, Haub feels ambivalence.

"I wish I could say the outcomes are unhealthy. I wish I could say it's healthy. I'm not confident enough in doing that. That frustrates a lot of people. One side says it's irresponsible. It is unhealthy, but the data doesn't say that."
Do we have a technological growth problem?
by  — 2010-11-08T16:28:14.213Z

Is meaningful technological growth speeding up or slowing down? How would we be able to tell?

"Technology is improving faster today than ever" and "Technology isn't improving as fast as it used to" are both plausible statements on the face of it. I'm not sure how we could tell which is true. Looking at rates of new patents doesn't seem like a good measurement, since it could reflect changes in how willing people are to seek patents.

I'm starting to find more plausible the dismal hypothesis that technological improvement is slowing down, and that therefore human prosperity around the world is endangered. Think about the Industrial Revolution. Think about the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, the lightbulb. Think about the computer and the Web. Now think about the past ten years. What's being done that's radically new?

Of course this is a vague way of thinking about things, and probably colored by my own gloominess. I'm writing here in the hopes that other people will have sounder methods for looking at this question.

Between 1800 and the present, per capita world GDP increased by about a factor of 16, after centuries of near-stagnation. (Link.) I don't know why with great confidence, but the conventional-wisdom explanation is usually something like technology, perhaps combined with political or financial factors. What does seem certain to me is that anything that threatens that 200-year run of good fortune is incredibly dangerous, and we should look out for such risks, unless they're all-but-impossible. Risks to global economic growth are not quite existential risks, but they're risks to everyone's material well-being.

Is there anyone here who thinks there exist such risks?
A writer describes gradually losing language
by NancyLebovitz — 2010-11-08T15:57:31.094Z

A writer's memoir of a brain tumor slowly destroying his ability to use language

When I came to read this passage "…floating and flailing weightlessly.…" I said the word "weightlessly" as "walterkly". It took quite a bit of effort to be fully sure that this was a mistake; and more effort and repeating to grasp what exactly this nonsense word was, to establish its sound – I had to construct it phoneme by phoneme – clearly enough to write it down. And it seems that the reading eye, darting backwards and forwards, was plucking letters from the whole vicinity, and mixing them up, having lost its usual ability to sort them.What the whole thing emphasises, of course, is how what we call self-command is really a matter of having reliable automatic mechanisms, unthinking habits or instincts.
Have no heroes, and no villains
by PhilGoetz — 2010-11-07T21:15:52.604Z

"If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!"

When Edward Wilson published the book Sociobiology, Richard Lewontin and Stephen J. Gould secretly convened a group of biologists to gather regularly, for months, in the same building at Harvard that Wilson's office was in, to write an angry, politicized rebuttal to it, essentially saying not that Sociobiology was wrong, but that it was immoral - without ever telling Wilson. This proved, to me, that they were not interested in the truth. I never forgave them for this.

I constructed a narrative of evolutionary biology in which Edward Wilson and Richard Dawkins were, for various reasons, the Good Guys; and Richard Lewontin and Stephen J. Gould were the Bad Guys.

When reading articles on group selection for this post, I was distressed to find Richard Dawkins joining in the vilification of group selection with religious fervor; while Stephen J. Gould was the one who said,

"I have witnessed widespread dogma only three times in my career as an evolutionist, and nothing in science has disturbed me more than ignorant ridicule based upon a desire or perceived necessity to follow fashion: the hooting dismissal of Wynne-Edwards and group selection in any form during the late 1960's and most of the 1970's, the belligerence of many cladists today, and the almost ritualistic ridicule of Goldschmidt by students (and teachers) who had not read him."

This caused me great cognitive distress. I wanted Stephen Jay Gould to be the Bad Guy. I realized I was trying to find a way to dismiss Gould's statement, or at least believe that he had said it from selfish motives. Or else, to find a way to flip it around so that he was the Good Guy and someone else was the Bad Guy.

To move on, I had to consciously shatter my Good Guy/Bad Guy narrative, and accept that all of these people are sometimes brilliant, sometimes blind; sometimes share my values, and sometimes prioritize their values (e.g., science vs. politics) very differently from me. I was surprised by how painful it was to do that, even though I was embarrassed to have had the Good Guy/Bad Guy hypothesis in the first place. I don't think it was even personal - I didn't care who would be the Good Guys and who would be the Bad Guys. I just want there to be Good Guys and Bad Guys.
The hard limits of hard nanotech
by lsparrish — 2010-11-07T00:49:21.431Z

What are the plausible scientific limits of molecular nanotechnology?

Richard Jones, author of Soft Machines has written an interesting critique of the room-temperature molecular nanomachinery propounded by Drexler:

Rupturing The Nanotech Rapture

If biology can produce a sophisticated nanotechnology based on soft materials like proteins and lipids, singularitarian thinking goes, then how much more powerful our synthetic nanotechnology would be if we could use strong, stiff materials, like diamond. And if biology can produce working motors and assemblers using just the random selections of Darwinian evolution, how much more powerful the devices could be if they were rationally designed using all the insights we've learned from macroscopic engineering.

But that reasoning fails to take into account the physical environment in which cell biology takes place, which has nothing in common with the macroscopic world of bridges, engines, and transmissions. In the domain of the cell, water behaves like thick molasses, not the free-flowing liquid that we are familiar with. This is a world dominated by the fluctuations of constant Brownian motion, in which components are ceaselessly bombarded by fast-moving water molecules and flex and stretch randomly. The van der Waals force, which attracts molecules to one another, dominates, causing things in close proximity to stick together. Clingiest of all are protein molecules, whose stickiness underlies a number of undesirable phenomena, such as the rejection of medical implants. What's to protect a nanobot assailed by particles glomming onto its surface and clogging up its gears?

The watery nanoscale environment of cell biology seems so hostile to engineering that the fact that biology works at all is almost hard to believe. But biology does work--and very well at that. The lack of rigidity, excessive stickiness, and constant random motion may seem like huge obstacles to be worked around, but biology is aided by its own design principles, which have evolved over billions of years to exploit those characteristics. That brutal combination of strong surface forces and random Brownian motion in fact propels the self-assembly of sophisticated structures, such as the sculpting of intricately folded protein molecules. The cellular environment that at first seems annoying--filled with squishy objects and the chaotic banging around of p

...
Variation on conformity experiment
by  — 2010-11-06T18:24:41.438Z

A new variation on the Asch conformity experiment was recently published. The experiment was performed in Japan and used polarizing glasses to show different lines to different people in the same room, so that the subjects had to disagree with others they actually knew, and who genuinely believed that they were answering correctly. The study found that women conformed by giving a wrong answer about a third of the time, but men did not.

Learned about this via Ben Goldacre's blog.
What do you read? What would "desk archeology" produce? 
by ThomasR — 2010-11-06T15:13:48.280Z

I would like to do a kind of poll:

Which books/articles do you read now, which ones are on your reading list?

What would a "desk archeologist" find when digging up your desk?

Some links:

"A Stratigraphic Analysis of Desk Debris",
"Are we able to think clearly when surrounded by mess, asks Clive James":
Stanford historian on the singularity
by Alex Flint — 2010-11-06T10:01:29.868Z

Ian Morris on "why the west rules", which seems to be a provocative title for an interesting book on historical geographical trends and their projection into the future: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvkHiL-H2io. He starts talking about the future at minute 27 and basically concludes that a singularity scenario is one of two possibilities for the 21st century, the other being collapse. Nothing new, but encouraging to see this increasingly in the mainstream.
POLL: Realism and reductionism
by draq — 2010-11-05T21:13:52.568Z

A second attempt.

Defintions:

universe: that which contains everything.

reality: the realm of natural phenomena.

scientific theory: a theory that identifies natural phenomena.

morality: the realm of normative rules.

normative theory: a theory that identifies normative rules.

identification: "this natural phenomenon has following properties" or "this normative rule says: ... "

What are you?

Please answer in the form of [ABC0]{4}, where 0 stands for no opinion. Feel free to add an explanation.

Example: B0BA stands for anti-realism, no opinion on values, weak ontological realism, scientific reductionism.

1A realism

Reality is external to the mind.

It is possible to evaluate which scientific theory is more correct.

1B anti-realism

Reality is external to the mind.

It is impossible to evaluate which scientific theory is more correct.

1C subjectivism

Reality is a product of the mind.

2A value realism

Morality is external to the mind.

It is possible to evaluate which normative theory is better.

2B value anti-realism

Morality is external to the mind.

It is impossible to evaluate which normative theory is better.

2C value relativism

Morality is a product of the mind.

3A strong ontological reductionism

Mental phenomena are reducible to reality and reality is reducible to mathematics.

Mathematics is the universe.

3B weak ontological reductionism

Mental phenomena are reducible to reality, but reality is not reducible to mathematics.

Reality (and mathematics) is the universe.

3C anti-reductionism

Mental phenomena are not reducible to reality and reality is not reducible to mathematics.

4A scientific reductionism

The entirety of scientific theories can be reduced to some axiomatic theories.

4B scientific anti-reductionism

The entirety of scientific theories cannot be reduced to some axiomatic theories.

New natural phenomena require new irreducible scientific theories.
Are the effects of UFAI likely to be seen at astronomical distances?
by NancyLebovitz — 2010-11-05T13:05:43.970Z

My comment to a discussion of great filters/existential risk:

How likely is it that a UFAI disaster would produce effects we can see from here? I think "people can't suffer if they're dead" disasters (failed attempt at FAI) is possibly more likely than paperclip maximizers.
Not sure what a money-maximizing UFAI disaster would look like, but I can't think of any reason it would be likely to go far off-planet.
National dominance-maximizing UFAI is a hard call, but possibly wouldn't go off-planet. It would depend on whether it's looking for absolute dominance of all possible territory or dominance/elimination of existing enemies.
Goertzel on Psi in H+ Magazine
by Kaj_Sotala — 2010-11-05T09:09:31.202Z

Ben Goertzel has a rather long psi-related article in Humanity Plus Magazine, apparently prompted by the recent precognition study to be published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. He's arguing that psi is real and we should expect to see the results of this study replicated.

I grew up very skeptical of claims of psychic power, jaded by stupid newspaper astrology columns and phony fortune-tellers claiming to read my future in their crystal balls for $20. Clearly there are many frauds and self-deluded people out there, falsely claiming to perceive the future and carry out other paranormal feats. But this is no reason to ignore solid laboratory evidence pointing toward the conclusion that, in some cases, precognition really does exist.
Religious/Worldview Techniques
by katydee — 2010-11-05T08:04:41.977Z

This is really weird, but I find myself strongly drawn towards religion (specifically, Christianity), which for some reason feels intuitively right to me. I *know* or at least seem to know that I'm just infected with a meme, I know all the standard arguments, and the majority of my friends are atheists, but it feels right to the extent that I am experiencing serious mental discomfort at not believing. Are there techniques that can help in this situation? I find that I can change my worldview fairly easily in many regards, but this one is deep-rooted.
Explaining information theoretic vs thermodynamic entropy?
by wedrifid — 2010-11-04T23:41:01.232Z

What is the best way to go about explaining the difference between these two different types of entropy? I can see the difference myself and give all sorts of intuitive reasons for how the concepts work and how they kind of relate. At the same time I can see why my (undergraduate) physicist friends would be skeptical when I tell them that no, I haven't got it backwards and a string of all '1's has nearly zero entropy while a perfectly random string is 'maximum entropy'. After all, if your entire physical system degenerates into a mush with no order that you know nothing about then you say it is full of entropy.

How would I make them understand the concepts before nerdy undergraduate arrogance turns off their brains? Preferably giving them the kind of intuitive grasp that would last rather than just persuading them via authoritative speech, charm and appeal to authority. I prefer people to comprehend me than to be able to repeat my passwords. (Except where having people accept my authority and dominance will get me laid in which case I may have to make concessions to practicality.)
The Curve of Capability
by rwallace — 2010-11-04T20:22:48.876Z

or: Why our universe has already had its one and only foom

In the late 1980s, I added half a megabyte of RAM to my Amiga 500. A few months ago, I added 2048 megabytes of RAM to my Dell PC. The later upgrade was four thousand times larger, yet subjectively they felt about the same, and in practice they conferred about the same benefit. Why? Because each was a factor of two increase, and it is a general rule that each doubling tends to bring about the same increase in capability.

That's a pretty important rule, so let's test it by looking at some more examples.

How does the performance of a chess program vary with the amount of computing power you can apply to the task? The answer is that each doubling of computing power adds roughly the same number of ELO rating points. The curve must flatten off eventually (after all, the computation required to fully solve chess is finite, albeit large), yet it remains surprisingly constant over a surprisingly wide range.

Is that idiosyncratic to chess? Let's look at Go, a more difficult game that must be solved by different methods, where the alpha-beta minimax algorithm that served chess so well, breaks down. For a long time, the curve of capability also broke down: in the 90s and early 00s, the strongest Go programs were based on hand coded knowledge such that some of them literally did not know what to do with extra computing power; additional CPU speed resulted in zero improvement.

The breakthrough came in the second half of last decade, with Monte Carlo tree search algorithms. It wasn't just that they provided a performance improvement, it was that they were scalable. Computer Go is now on the same curve of capability as computer chess: whether measured on the ELO or the kyu/dan scale, each doubling of power gives a roughly constant rating improvement.

Where do these doublings come from? Moore's Law is driven by improvements in a number of technologies, one of which is chip design. Each generation of computers is used, among other things, to design the next generation. Each generation needs twice the computing power of the last generation to design in a given amount of time.

Looking away from computers to one of the other big success stories of 20th-century technology, space travel, from Goddard's first crude liquid fuel rockets, to the V2, to Sputnik, to the half a million people who worked on Apollo, we again find that suc...
Specification failure
by cousin_it — 2010-11-04T18:56:38.301Z

I got made a moderator recently, and noticed that I have the amazing ability to ban my own comments. For added efficiency/hilarity I can even do it from my own user page, now complete with nifty "ban" links! I thought it would be neat to publicize this bug before it gets fixed, because it makes for a wonderful example of specification failure - the kind of error that can doom any attempt to create AGI/FAI. How do you protect against such mistakes in general, if you're not allowed to test your software? Discuss.

Tangentially related: a blogger asks visitors to write a correct binary search routine without testing it even once, then test it and report the results. Much wailing ensues. (I succeeded - look for "Vladimir Slepnev" - but it was a surreal experience.)
POLL: Reductionism
by draq — 2010-11-04T17:55:20.027Z

Since there is no handy toll to create polls on LW, please post comments on your position.

As which of the following would you identify yourself? (I am not good at rationalist taboo, thus please excuse me for ambiguous terms.)

Strong ontological reductionst

See defintion on Wikipedia. Someone who believes that mental phenomena can be fully reduced to physics and that physics can be fully reduced to mathematics. That is, desires and electrons don't have any fundamental qualities, but are in the end mathematical objects. And nothing exists outside the mathematical realm.

Weak ontological reductionist

Someone who believes that mental phenomena don't have any qualities outside the domain of physics. Every aspect of mental phenomena can be fully reduced to physical phenomena. But physical phenomena are not necessarily mathematical objects.

Strong scientific reductionist

Someone who believes that quantum mechanics is wrong and Laplace's demon can exist in principle (if unrestricted by physical limitations).

Weak scientific reductionist

Someone who concedes that it is impossible in principle to predict complicated physical systems, but that the concepts and theories in chemistry and biology are mere approximations and simplifications of complicated physical computations to sidestep the (faster-than-)exponential wall. That is, chemical and biological models are not fundamental, but are reducible to physical theories (if we had the theoretical computational power to simulate the models).

Please also comment if you are not a reductionist and explain what kind of reductionist you are not.
Light cone eating AI explosions are not filters
by KatjaGrace — 2010-11-04T16:31:40.000Z

Some existential risks can’t account for any of the Great Filter. Here are two categories of existential risks that are not filters:

Too big: any disaster that would destroy everyone in the observable universe at once, or destroy space itself, is out. If others had been filtered by such a disaster in the past, we wouldn’t be here either. This excludes events such as simulation shutdown and breakdown of a metastable vacuum state we are in.

Not the end: Humans could be destroyed without the causal path to space colonization being destroyed. Also much of human value could be destroyed without humans being destroyed. e.g. Super-intelligent AI would presumably be better at colonizing the stars than humans are. The same goes for transcending uploads. Repressive totalitarian states and long term erosion of value could destroy a lot of human value and still lead to interstellar colonization.

Since these risks are not filters, neither the knowledge that there is a large minimum total filter nor the use of SIA increases their likelihood. SSA still increases their likelihood for the usual Doomsday Argument reasons. I think the rest of the risks listed in Nick Bostrom’s paper can be filters. According to SIA averting these filter existential risks should be prioritized more highly relative to averting non-filter existential risks such as those in this post. So for instance AI is less of a concern relative to other existential risks than otherwise estimated. SSA’s implications are less clear – the destruction of everything in the future is a pretty favorable inclusion in a hypothesis under SSA with a broad reference class, but as always everything depends on the reference class.
Katja Grace's Anthropic Reasoning in the Great Filter
by Larks — 2010-11-04T10:47:18.301Z

The wonderful Katja Grace has just uploaded her thesis, Anthropic Reasoning in the Great Filter, linked to from her blog (which contains a convientient summary)

She discusses how deal with indexical updating; updating on information not simply based on the likelihood that it occur somewhere, but the relative number (or proportion) of obersevers who would see that informtation.