trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Effects of Castration on the Life Expectancy of Contemporary Men
by Fluttershy — 2015-08-08T04:37:52.592Z

Follow-up to: Lifestyle Interventions to Increase Longevity

Abstract

A recent review article by David Gems discusses possible mechanisms by which testosterone and dihydrotestosterone could shorten the life expectancies of human males, and examines previous research on the effects of castration on male survival. However, Gems does not examine how age at castration affects how much castration extends one's life by, which this post does. In general, castration after puberty in males prolongs life to a lesser extent than castration before the onset of puberty.

Additionally, Gems' review does not estimate how long modern-day eunuchs might live relative to intact human males. Two of the other three known studies on the effects of castration on human life expectancies found that, historically, castration prolonged life by more than a decade in the median case. However, some of the life expectancy gains from castration are due to the increased ability of eunuchs to fight off infections. The fact that fewer men die from infections in the 21st century than was the case in previous centuries means that modern-day eunuchs gain fewer years of life from castration than eunuchs gained from castration in the past. As seen from comparing Figure 3b and Figure 4, eunuchs castrated just before the onset of puberty extended their (mean) life expectancies by 11 years in Hamilton & Mestler's study, though modern eunuchs castrated at similar ages might expect to extend their life expectancies by 7 years.

Introduction

A few relevant studies, such as the study of institutionalized eunuchs by Hamilton & Mestler, the study of Korean eunuchs by Min, Lee, and Park, and the review article by Gems are particularly worth reading or skimming for those interested in this topic. The excel file showing the work behind this post is also available. These documents are supplementary; reading them is not a prerequisite for reading this post.

This post will examine the proposition that castration of human males (specifically, orchiectomy, the surgical removal of both testicles, but not the penis) either before or after the onset of puberty will extend both their life expectancy, and their lifespan. In light of antagonistic pleiotropy, it a priori makes sense that castration might extend one's life expectancy.

A number of papers have...
Scientific studies and trust
by NancyLebovitz — 2015-08-07T16:44:06.175Z

A study found that registering outcomes meant that positive outcomes dropped a lot. The researchers looked at 30 large National Heart Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) funded trials between 1970 and 2000. Of those studies, 17 or 57% showed a significant positive result. They then compared that to 25 similar studies published between 2000 and 2012. Of those, only 2 or 8% were positive. That is a significant drop – from 57% to 8% positive studies."

I also ran across a study which had same intriguing, plausible, nuanced results about the effects of timeouts, reasoning, and compromising on improving children's behavior. How much should I trust it?
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2015-08-07T15:15:47.575Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on July 31st. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

[Indianapolis] Gen Con: Applied Game Theory: 01 August 2015 02:00PM
Kyiv, Ukraine: 02 August 2015 06:30PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Ann Arbor meetup: 22 August 2015 02:00AM
Australia-wide Online Hangout - August: 09 August 2015 07:30PM
Frankfurt Meetup: 13 August 2015 06:30PM
Munich LessWrong Meetup August: Correctness Heuristics: 15 August 2015 07:48PM
San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks: 03 August 2015 06:15PM
Scotland August meetup: 09 August 2015 02:00PM
Warsaw integration: Barbecue on the beach: 31 July 2015 06:30PM

The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX - Caffe Medici: 01 August 2015 11:53AM
Canberra: Guilt: 08 August 2015 06:00PM
Melbourne August Rationality Dojo: Decision Making: 02 August 2015 03:00PM
Moscow regular meetup: effective altruism, debates, hypothesis formulation: 02 August 2015 02:00PM
Moscow LW lecture centre meetup: 09 August 2015 03:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - August: 02 August 2015 04:00PM
Sydney Meetup - August: 26 August 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - September: 06 September 2015 04:00PM
Sydney Meetup - September: 23 September 2015 06:30PM
Tel Aviv: 04 August 2015 07:00PM
Vienna: 15 August 2015 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Optical Illusions: 02 August 2015 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an atte...
Gatekeeper variation
by JoshuaFox — 2015-08-07T13:44:10.231Z

A new variation on the Gatekeeper idea, thanks to Zvi Schreiber.

We block all but one IO channel for our AGI.

We create a formally verified proof-verification system as a gatekeeper. We pass the Gatekeeper a decision problem with a formal proof that it is in the complexity class UP ("Unambiguous Non-deterministic Polynomial-time"). The Gatekeeper verifies the proof, and passes the decision problem to the AGI. If the AGI provides an answer, the Gatekeeper validates that this is the unique valid answer (which it can do in polynomial time) and if so it passes the answer to us.

The advantage of this approach over one-bit and other Oracles is that the AI can do some useful problem solving with zero discretion as to the data it communicates. It can either give the unique answer or no answer at all. Such a gatekeeper is feasible with today's technology.

To keep the AGI from communicating by choosing the timing of its answer, the Gatekeeper always communicates the answer (or the fact that there it is not yet one from the AGI) after exactly 1 hour.

(The idea of restricting an Oracle AI to choosing from predetermined list of verifiable answers has been mentioned, but I don't remember anyone adding this formalism.)

The usual caveats on Oracles apply. Like other Oracles, this is a stopgap rather than a solution to the FAI problem.

The laws of physics still give the AGI a causal link to its environment, even if it is in a Faraday cage.

Even a one-bit Oracle AI can exert optimization power when asked multiple questions.

Answers aren't enough to ensure safety: We may be asking the wrong questions or not understanding the implications of the answers.

Objections specific to this idea:

Only certain problems can be fed to the AGI, and perhaps not the relevant ones. However, UP includes integer factorization and other interesting problems, suggesting that this could be a useful tool.

This idea does not say that the AGI has figured out how to do all UP in polynomial time, just that it has figured out fast solutions for a larger subset of UP than humans have. So the additional optimization power exerted by the AGI may not be very large.
Forecasting health gaps
by  — 2015-08-05T04:14:24.311Z

You're an average person.

You don't know what diseases you'll get in the future.

You know people get diseases and certain populations get diseases more than others, enough to say certain things cause diseases.

You're not quite the average person.

You have a strong preference against sickness and a strong belief in your ability to mitigate deleterious circumstances.

You have access to preventative research. You know if you don't work in a coal mine, overtrain when running, and eat healthy, you can stay healthier than those who take those risks.

You know that some disease outcomes are less than predictable, so you want to work towards the available of treatments that fill gaps in the availability of therapeutics. For instance, you might want a treatment for HIV to be developed, in case you become HIV infected, since there is a risk of HIV exposure for almost anyone exposed to unprotected sex, since they won't necessarily know their sexual partners entire serohistory (noologism?)
However, you don't know which diseases you will get. So how do you prioritise?

Perhaps, medical device and pharmaceutical company strategies could be ported to your situation.

Most people, including non-epidemiologist researchers, don't have access to epidemiology data sets.

Most people, don't have the patience to read a book on medical market research

You don't have the funds or connections to employ the world's only specialist in the area of medical market forecasting.

At least he's broken down the field into best practice questions:

Where can we find epidemiological information/data?

How do we judge/evaluate it?

What is the correct methodology for using it?

What's useful and what's not useful for pharma market researchers?

How do we combine/apply it with MR data?

The only firm, other than Bill's, that appears to specialist in the area fortunately breaks down the techniques in the field for us:

Integrated forecasts based on choice modeling or univariate demand research to ensure that the primary marketing research is aligned with the needs of forecast

Volumetric new product forecasting to provide the accuracy required for pre-launch planning

Combination epidemiology-/sales-volume-based forecast models that provide robust market sizing and trend information

Custom patient flow models that represent the dynamics of complex markets not possible with cross-sectional methods

Oncology-specific

...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun and Games
by RobinZ — 2015-08-05T01:00:34.747Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun and Games

WHEN:
09 August 2015 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery

Crossposted from the mailing list. As usual, congregation in the courtyard from 3:00 to 3:30 p.m., meeting proper 3:30 to closing.

We'll be meeting to play games and/or just hang out and talk, whichever seems more fun.

If you want to get people together for a big game, or a specific game, post here looking for players and get an early start because they'll be kicking us out a little before 7pm.

Remember to bring games!

Upcoming Meetups:

Aug 16: Mini Talks

Aug 23: Plant & Animal Breeding

Aug 30: Fun and Games (outdoors maybe)

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun and Games
Which LW / rationalist blog posts aren't covered by my books & courses?
by iarwain1 — 2015-08-04T22:55:16.414Z

I've read a few of the Sequences (probably about 50-100 individual posts), but I've only occasionally come away with insights and perspectives that I hadn't already thought of or read elsewhere. I've read a bunch of the popular books on cognitive science and decision theory, including everything on the CFAR popular books list. I'm also about to start an undergrad in statistics with a minor (or possibly a second major) in philosophy.

My question is: Are there specific LW posts / Sequences / other rationalist blog posts that I should read that won't be covered by standard statistics and philosophy courses, or by the books on CFAR's popular reading lists?
Meetup : Turku
by PyryP — 2015-08-04T18:21:44.712Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Turku

WHEN:
08 August 2015 03:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Kauppiaskatu 4, 20100 Turku, Finland

Casual meetup in Cosmic Comic Cafe.

Discussion article for the meetup : Turku
Is simplicity truth indicative?
by 27chaos — 2015-08-04T17:47:14.869Z

This essay claims to refute a popularized understanding of Occam's Razor that I myself adhere to. It is confusing me, since I hold this belief at a very deep level that it's difficult for me to examine. Does anyone see any problems in its argument, or does it seem compelling? I specifically feel as though it might be summarizing the relevant Machine Learning research badly, but I'm not very familiar with the field. It also might be failing to give any credit to simplicity as a general heuristic when simplicity succeeds in a specific field, and it's unclear whether such credit would be justified. Finally, my intuition is that situations in nature where there is a steady bias towards growing complexity are more common than the author claims, and that such tendencies are stronger for longer. However, for all of this, I have no clear evidence to back up the ideas in my head, just vague notions that are difficult to examine. I'd appreciate someone else's perspective on this, as mine seems to be distorted.
Essay: http://bruce.edmonds.name/sinti/
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Excerpts from good writing
by rocurley — 2015-08-04T15:57:26.557Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Excerpts from good writing

WHEN:
10 August 2015 06:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1061 Market St #4, San Francisco, CA 94103

We'll be meeting to share interesting excerpts from things!

I can be reached at 301-458-0764 if you need help getting in. As always, feel free to show up late.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Excerpts from good writing
We really need a "cryonics sales pitch" article.
by CronoDAS — 2015-08-03T22:42:10.421Z

Every so often, I see a blog post about death, usually remarking on the death of someone the writer knew, and it often includes sentiments about "everyone is going to die, and that's terrible, but we can't do anything about it have so we have to accept it."
It's one of those sentiments that people find profound and is often considered Deep Wisdom. There's just one problem with it. It isn't true. If you think cryonics can work, as many people here do, then you believe that people don't really have to die, and we don't need to accept that we've only got at most about a hundred years and then that's it.

And I want to tell them this, as though I was a religious missionary out to spread the Good Word that you can save your soul and get into Christian Heaven as long as you sign up with Our Church. (Which I would actually do, if I believed that Christianity was correct.)

But it's not easy to broach the issue in a blog comment, and I'm not a good salesman. (One of the last times I tried, my posts kept getting deleted by the moderators.) It would be a lot better if I could simply link them to a better sales pitch; the kind of people I'm talking to are the kinds of people who read things on the Internet. Unfortunately, not one of the pro-cryonics posts listed on the LessWrong wiki can serve this purpose. Not "Normal Cryonics", not "You Only Live Twice", not "We Agree: Get Froze", not one! Why isn't there one? Heck, I'd pay money to get it written. I'd even pay Eliezer Yudkowsky a bunch of money to talk to my father on the telephone about cryonics, with a substantial bonus on offer if my father agrees to sign up. (We can discuss actual dollar amounts in the comments or over private messages.)

Please, someone get to work on this!
[Link] The Much Forgotten and Ignored Need to Have Workable Solutions
by Emile — 2015-08-03T22:02:33.510Z

I ran across this article: The Much Forgotten and Ignored Need to Have Workable Solutions, that might interest some, either for the Rationality or the Effective Altruism aspects.

For a very rough summary: Academia (more specifically, the humanities) gives too much credit to describing problems (i.e. complaining) and not enough on thinking about good solutions, which is the difficult and important part.

Some quotes if you don't want to read the whole thing:

Of course the biggest assumption of all that is being shown to be inconsistent with actual behaviour is that of rationality – Richard Thaler’s Misbehaving and other behavioural research is showing that people are subject to various biases and often do not make rational decisions. This is especially scary for theoretical economists, whose entire universe pretty much depends on the rational representative household.

If their assumptions are rather strict and may not hold up in real-life, their call for a policy response is technically null and void. A good example is with auctions, where previously designers (economists) would rely heavily on the Revenue Equivalence Theorem in creating the rules of auctions. Yet, many of them forget that the assumptions of Revenue Equivalence aren’t always satisfied, for example the possibility of collusion, which can prove to significantly reduce the revenue of the seller.

The best paper on a time economists forgot about ECON 101 has to be this review of European 3G auctions. What was most clear for me from Klemperer’s work is that you can get all up in complex auction theory and mechanism design, but if you forget how very basic concepts in economics work in conjunction with that, you can get easily derailed. They basically put the cart before the horse – they forgot that they had to satisfy their own assumptions before applying their model to reality.

More questions: is the policy they suggest cumbersome, intangible and unable to be monitored for success? This is another pet peeve of mine – my blood boils when people say “We need to fix gender stereotypes! We need to create awareness! We need to change societal attitudes!” without suggesting how it should be done, how this monumental task will be measured for good performance and how they propose regulating all the sources of these things.

Also, how would they justify that s

...
Integral vs differential ethics, continued
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-08-03T13:25:08.053Z

I've talked earlier about integral and differential ethics, in the context of population ethics. The idea is that the argument for the repugnant conclusion (and its associate, the very repugnant conclusion) is dependent on a series of trillions of steps, each of which are intuitively acceptable (adding happy people, making happiness more equal), but reaching a conclusion that is intuitively bad - namely, that we can improve the world by creating trillions of people in torturous and unremitting agony, as long as balance it out by creating enough happy people as well.

Differential reasoning accepts each step, and concludes that the repugnant conclusions are actually acceptable, because each step is sound. Integral reasoning accepts that the repugnant conclusion is repugnant, and concludes that some step along the way must therefore be rejected.

Notice that key word, "therefore". Some intermediate step is rejected, but not for intrinsic reasons, but purely because of the consequence. There is nothing special about the step that is rejected, it's just a relatively arbitrary barrier to stop the process (compare with the paradox of the heap).

Indeed, things can go awry when people attempt to fix the repugnant conclusion (a conclusion they rejected through integral reasoning) using differential methods. Things like the "person-affecting view" have their own ridiculousness and paradoxes (it's ok to bring a baby into the world if it will have a miserable life; we don't need to care about future generations if we randomise conceptions, etc...) and I would posit that it's because they are trying to fix global/integral issues using local/differential tools.

The relevance of this? It seems that integral tools might be better suited to deal with the bad convergence of AI problem. We could set up plausibly intuitive differential criteria (such as self-consistency), but institute overriding integral criteria that can override these if they go too far. I think there may be some interesting ideas in that area, potentially. The cost is that integral ideas are generally seen as less elegant, or harder to justify.
Rationality Quotes Thread August 2015
by Sabiola — 2015-08-03T09:50:08.880Z

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
Open thread, Aug. 03 - Aug. 09, 2015
by MrMind — 2015-08-03T07:05:57.365Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Does Probability Theory Require Deductive or Merely Boolean Omniscience? 
by Ronny Fernandez — 2015-08-03T06:54:31.012Z

It is often said that a Bayesian agent has to assign probability 1 to all tautologies, and probability 0 to all contradictions. My question is... exactly what sort of tautologies are we talking about here? Does that include all mathematical theorems? Does that include assigning 1 to "Every bachelor is an unmarried male"?1 Perhaps the only tautologies that need to be assigned probability 1 are those that are Boolean theorems implied by atomic sentences that appear in the prior distribution, such as: "S or ~ S".

It seems that I do not need to assign probability 1 to Fermat's last conjecture in order to use probability theory when I play poker, or try to predict the color of the next ball to come from an urn. I must assign a probability of 1 to "The next ball will be white or it will not be white", but Fermat's last theorem seems to be quite irrelevant. Perhaps that's because these specialized puzzles do not require sufficiently general probability distributions; perhaps, when I try to build a general Bayesian reasoner, it will turn out that it must assign 1 to Fermat's last theorem.

Imagine a (completely impractical, ideal, and esoteric) first order language, who's particular subjects were discrete point-like regions of space-time. There can be an arbitrarily large number of points, but it must be a finite number. This language also contains a long list of predicates like: is blue, is within the volume of a carbon atom, is within the volume of an elephant, etc. and generally any predicate type you'd like (including n place predicates).2 The atomic propositions in this language might look something like: "5, 0.487, -7098.6, 6000s is Blue" or "(1, 1, 1, 1s), (-1, -1, -1, 1s) contains an elephant." The first of these propositions says that a certain point in space-time is blue; the second says that there is an elephant between two points at one second after the universe starts. Presumably, at least the denotational content of most english propositions could be expressed in such a language (I think, mathematical claims aside).

Now imagine that we collect all of the atomic propositions in this language, and assign a joint distribution over them. Maybe we choose max entropy, doesn't matter. Would doing so really require us to assign 1 to every mathematical theorem? I can see why it would require us to assign 1 to every tautological Boolean combination of ato...