trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Help describing decibans?
by DataPacRat — 2013-09-04T00:44:02.428Z

I'm in the process of writing up an Internet Draft for a file-format, part of which involves assigning logarithmic confidence values measured in decibans. There's still a good ways to go before it'll be in good enough shape to even have a chance at being considered for an RFC; part of that is describing "decibans", and how to use them, to people who've never heard of the things before. I'd like to get a good introductory text for that nailed down before submitting the next revision; and since LW is where I first learned of decibans, I'd like to evoke as much constructive criticism as I can get here.

Here's my current draft of the text to replace the relevant section of the current revision:

3.1. Parameter: CONFIDENCE
Namespace:
Parameter name: CONFIDENCE
Purpose: To specify the confidence of the authority that the
information of the given parameter is accurate, measured in decibans.
Value type: A single number, usually an integer.
Description:
A CONFIDENCE value of 0 decibans indicates odds of 1:1 (ie, 50%) that
the information is correct. A change of 10 decibans changes the odds by
a factor of 10; 10 decibans means 1:10 odds (~90%), 100 decibans 1:100
odds (~99%), -10 decibans 10:1 odds against (~10%). A change of 1
deciban is roughly equivalent to changing the odds by a factor of 5:4.
Here is a table covering enough integer deciban values to allow for
easy reference.
Decibans / Level of belief / Rough Odds / notes
-127 / 0.00000000002% / 1:5 trillion
-30 / 0.1% / 1:1,000
-20 / 1.0% / 1:100
-10 / 9.9% / 1:10
-9 / 11.2% / 1:8
-8 / 13.7% / 1:6
-7 / 16.7% / 1:5
-6 / 20.0% / 1:4
-5 / 24.0% / 1:3
-4 / 28.5% / 2:5 / a reasonable doubt
-3 / 33.3% / 1:2
-2 / 38.7% / 2:3 / probable cause
-1 / 44.3% / 4:5
0 / 50.0% / 1:1 / neither belief nor disbelief; agnosticism, 1 bit
1 / 55.7% / 5:4, 1.25:1 / preponderance of the evidence
2 / 61.3% / 3:2, 1.5:1
3 / 66.6% / 2:1 / clear and convincing evidence
4 / 71.5% / 5:2, 2.5:1
5 / 76.0% / 3:1 / beyond a reasonable doubt, 1 standard deviation, 2 bits
6 / 80.0% / 4:1
7 / 83.3% / 5:1
8 / 86.3% / 6:1
9 / 88.8% / 8:1 / 3 bits
10 / 90.9% / 10:1 / one nine
11 / 92.6% / 25:2, 12.5:1
12 / 92.5% / 15:1 / 4 bits
13 / 95.2% / 20:1 / lone studies with p=0.05, 2 standard deviations
14 / 96.2% / 25:1
15 / 96.8% / 30:1 / 5 bits
16 / 97.6% / 40:1
17 / 98.0% / 50:1
18 / 98.4% / 60:1 / 6 bits
19 / 98.8% / 80:1
20 / 99.0% / 100:1 / two nines, lone studies with p=0.01
21 / 99.

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Ignorance in parenting
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2013-09-03T10:00:18.863Z

Followup to: Strategic ignorance and plausible deniability

My in-law always says: "For children it is easier be forgiven then to get permission."

EDIT: This post is superseeded by my Book Review: Kazdin's The Everyday Parenting Toolkit I recommend reading only that. The remaining insight of this post is: Children expend more brain power on their parents than the parents on them.

Kaj_Sotala wrote

Parents may also pretend that they don't notice their kids engaging in some minor misbehavior, if they don't want to lose their authority but don't feel like interfering either.

I can say from experience: That is risky.

Children (esp. small ones) expend significantly more brain power on their parents than the parents on their children (your mileage may vary). I can assure you that they will notice these cases - at least some - and take that into account one way or the other.

If the children notice this they may assume that you either condone, accept, bear or ignore it. None of these has positive effects.

Possible alternative strategies:

Invest the energy on the necessary consequences (these will be well invested because you save on lots of further occassions)

Signal the child that you did notice, tolerate but do not accept it. This indicates to the child that the border to really unacceptable behavior is near. If the child still continues you do not get around to act. I do this with a smile and treat it as a gamed played by the child. This breaks a possible tension but may have disadvantages for discipline.

Establish clear limits to acceptable behavior that avoid repeated testing of where the border actually is.

Less restrictions that may be broken to begin with.

I am influenced by The Adlerian School. Of relevance here is Striving for significance.

The testing of limits and the resulting interaction with the parent give the child a feeling of significance if the parent acknoledges the act of the child even if he doesn't agree with it. On the other hand ignoring the act of the child is negative feedback about significance.

EDIT: The asymmetry between parents and children with respect to the effectiveness of deniability can be generalized to any situation where one actor has significantly less overall information about the situation than another actor and thus might not be able to reliably estimate whether deniability is poss...
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign, Illinois
by Mestroyer — 2013-09-03T05:40:20.396Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign, Illinois

WHEN:
08 September 2013 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Illini Union South Lounge 1401 W Green St Urbana, IL 61801

Meetup topic will again be determined by popular consensus at the actual meetup. I will have Zendo, Wits and Wagers (with cards that can be used independently for calibration games), and Pandemic, a cooperative strategy board game. Cross posted on the mailing list.

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign, Illinois
True Optimisation 
by LearnFromObservation — 2013-09-03T03:50:06.585Z

Hello less wrong community! This is my first post here, so I know that my brain has not (obviously) been optimised to its fullest, but I've decided to give posting a try.

Recently, someone very close to me has unfortunately passed away, leading to the invitable inner dilemma about death. I don't know how many of you are fans of HPMOR, but the way that Harry's dark side feels about death? Pretty much me around death, dying, etc. however, I've decided to push that to the side for the time being, because that is not a useful of efficient way to think.

I was raised by a religious family, but from the age of about 11 stopped believing in deities and religious services. However, I've always clung to the idea of an afterlife for people, mainly because my brain seems incapable of handling the idea of ceasing to exist. I know that we as a scientific community know that thoughts are electrical impulses, so is there any way of storing them outside of brain matter? Can they exist freely out of brain matter, or could they be stored in a computer chip or AI?

The conflict lies here: is immortality or mortality rational?

Every fibre in my being tells me that death is irrational and wrong. It is irrational for humanity to not try and prevent death. It is irrational for people to not try and bring back people who have died. Because of this, we have lost some of the greatest minds, scientific and artistic, that will probably ever exist. Although the worlds number of talented and intelligent people does not appear to be finite, I find it hard to live in a world where so muh knowledge is being lost every day.

but on the other hand, how would we feed all those people? What if the world's resources run out? As a transhumanist, I believe that we can use science to prevent things like death, but nature wasn't designed to support a population like that.

How do we truly optimise the world: no death and without destruction of the planet?
Useful Habits Repository
by XFrequentist — 2013-09-03T01:58:16.970Z

Repositories are awesome, and we should have more of them.

I recently completed BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits, and it's a pretty lightweight way to install new habits (recommended). However, I realized I could use a better repository of useful habits.

So, please use this thread to suggest habits that you've found useful. Bonus points for evidence/anecdata of usefulness.

Obviously, 1 habit per comment makes upvotes a clearer signal of collective approval.
How valuable is it to learn math deeply?
by JonahS — 2013-09-02T18:01:13.433Z

I've been wondering how useful it is for the typical academically strong high schooler to learn math deeply. Here by "learn deeply" I mean "understanding the concepts and their interrelations" as opposed to learning narrow technical procedures exclusively.

My experience learning math deeply

When I started high school, I wasn't interested in math and I wasn't good at my math coursework. I even got a D in high school geometry, and had to repeat a semester of math.

I subsequently became interested in chemistry, and I thought that I might become a chemist, and so figured that I should learn math better. During my junior year of high school, I supplemented the classes that I was taking by studying calculus on my own, and auditing a course on analytic geometry. I also took physics concurrently.

Through my studies, I started seeing the same concepts over and over again in different contexts, and I became versatile with them, capable of fluently applying them in conjunction with one another. This awakened a new sense of awareness in me, of the type that Bill Thurston described in his essay Mathematics Education:

Mathematics is like a flight of fancy, but one in which the fanciful turns out to be real and to have been present all along. Doing mathematics has the feel of fanciful invention, but it is really a process of sharpening our perception so that we discover patterns that are everywhere around.

I understood the physical world, the human world, and myself in a way that I had never before. Reality seemed full of limitless possibilities. Those months were the happiest of my life to date.

More prosaically, my academic performance improved a lot, and I found it much easier to understand technical content (physics, economics, statistics etc.) ever after.

So in my own case, learning math deeply had very high returns.

How generalizable is this?

I have an intuition that many other people would benefit a great deal from learning math deeply, but I know that I'm unusual, and I'm aware of the human tendency to implicitly assume that others are similar to us. So I would like to test my beliefs by soliciting feedback from others.

Some ways in which learning math deeply can help are:

Reduced need for memorization (while learning math). When you understand math deeply, you see how many different mathematical problems are special cases of a single more genera

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Reflective Control
by lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall) — 2013-09-02T17:45:58.356Z

You've had those moments -- the ones where you're very aware of where you're at in the world, and you're mapping out your future and plans very smartly, and you're feeling great about taking action and pushing important things forwards.

I used to find myself only reaching that place, at random, once or twice per year.

But every time I did, I would spend just a few hours sketching out plans, thinking about my priorities, discarding old things I used to do that didn't bring much value, and pushing my limits to do new worthwhile things. I thought, "This is really valuable. I should do this more often."

Eventually, I named that state: Reflective Control.

As often happens, by naming something it becomes easier to do it more often.

At this time, I still had a hazy poorly working feeling about what it was. So I tried to define it. After many attempts, I came to this:

> Reflective Control is when you're firmly off autopilot, in a high-positive and high-willpower state, and are able to take action.

You'll note there's four discreet components to it: firmly off autopilot (reflective), high positivity, high will, and cable of and oriented towards taking action.

I also asked myself, "How to know if you're in Reflective Control?"

My best answer of an exercise for it is,

> You set aside the impulses/distractions, and try to set a concrete Control-related goal. This is meta-work, meaning the process of defining your life and what needs to happen next. You do this calmly. By setting a concrete Control-related goal successfully and then executing on it, you know you're in an RC state.

> Example: "I will identify all the open projects I've got, and the next steps for each of them."

With that definition and that exercise in hand, I was able to do something which works almost magically when I wanted to take on big challenges: I could rate myself from 1-100 on the four key elements of the component, and then set a concrete goal to achieve, and analyze a little about which factor might be holding me back. Here is an example from my journal:

> Reflective 70/100, positive 70/100, will 65/100, action 40/100… ok, I'm feeling good once a good, just some anxiety suppressing will a little and action quite a bit, but no problem. My goal is to finish the xxx outline before I leave here.

I've found this incredibly useful. Summary:

*There's a state I call "Re...
Book Review: Heuristics and Biases (MIRI course list)
by So8res — 2013-09-02T15:37:15.211Z

I'm reviewing the books on the MIRI course list.

Upon deciding to read the course list, the first book I picked up was Heuristics and Biases. It's a tome of 42 papers in psychology detailing a vast array of human biases. This post constitutes a review of the book in general, as well as a brief summary of each paper.

This review includes a number of biases not covered by the Sequences.

Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgement

This book is dry. Dry like old sand. On Venus. When the sun's out.

I'd never had my mind blown by text so dry before.

Most of the 42 papers introduced studies that revealed cognitive biases. A few other papers summarized and discussed results, proposing models that could explain many biases at once. Each paper came with lots of data.

The book had two main themes. The first was an exploration of heuristics and biases. The second was an argument that biases are not secretly great.

There's a segment of the psychologist population who argue that biases are not actually failures but instead the result of contrived experiments. Researchers are just looking at people wrong.

This book dedicates a handful of papers to tearing such arguments apart (via compelling biases and studies on real world data). There was one particular quote that stuck with me (which I'll have to paraphrase, since I lent the book out a few days ago):

People in the human-optimality camp seem to think there is only one type of error in human judgement, that being the error of psychologists when they design tests.

I was sort of hoping for a paper studying the bias of psychologists as they design tests for biases, just so I could read the fallout.

But I digress. Such arguments didn't interest me much, as I came to the table ready and willing to believe that the brain has many pathological failure modes.

Fortunately, the main focus of the book was the varied ways in which brains fail at simple tasks. Many of the biases within are famous or were discussed in the sequences. In those cases, it was good to see the actual experimental setups and the real data. Many other biases were completely new to me.

The high points of each chapter are summarized below. I've marked the most salient chapters with green numbers (in the table of contents) and green headers (in the text).

Table of Contents

Extensional vs Intuitive reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgem

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Baseline of my opinion on LW topics
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2013-09-02T12:13:36.749Z

To avoid repeatedly saying the same, I'd like to state my opinion on a few topics I expect to be relevant to my future posts here.

You can take it as a baseline or reference for these topics. I do not plan to go into any detail here, and I will not state all my reasons or sources. You may ask for separate posts if you are interested. This is only to provide a context for my comments and posts elsewhere.

If you google me, you may find some of my old (but not that off the mark) posts about these positions, e.g., here:

http://grault.net/adjunct/index.cgi?GunnarZarncke/MyWorldView

Now my position on LW topics.

The Simulation Argument and The Great Filter

On The Simulation Argument, I go for

"(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage."

Correspondingly on The Great Filter, I go for failure to reach

"9. Colonization explosion".

This is not because I think humanity will self-annihilate soon (though this is a possibility). Instead, I hope that humanity will earlier or later come to terms with its planet. My utopia could be like The Pacifists (a short story in Analog 5).

Why? Because of essential complexity limits.

This falls into the same range as "It is too expensive to spread physically throughout the galaxy." I know that negative proofs about engineering are notoriously wrong - but that is my best guess. Simplified, one could say that the low-hanging fruits have been taken, and I have some empirical evidence on multiple levels to support this view.

Correspondingly there is no singularity because progress is not limited by raw thinking speed but by effective aggregate thinking speed and physical feedback.

What could prove me wrong?

If a serious discussion would ruin my well-prepared arguments and evidence to shreds (quite possible).

At the very high end, a singularity might be possible if one could find a way to simulate physics faster than physics itself (trading physical space for time).

UPDATE 2022-08-30:

If you had asked me about my confidence levels above, I would have said something like 80% that no colonization explode would be possible. And 90% that space colonization would be slower than 0.5c.

Since then I have updated toward a) less compute needed to implement AI, b) more compute available (Moore stretching farther), and c) more technical progress possible than expected (popular exa...
Rudeness
by Odinn — 2013-09-02T10:49:53.145Z

Really new to this site, I'm hitting a problem I've experienced in other aspects of my life as a student, employee and comedic performer: I'm extremely rude. I don't realize it at the time, thinking that I'm just being blunt, forceful and direct. In the sense that those can all be definitions of similar concepts, then yeah! Well, confidence in myself is a great asset, and I've turned it to positive effect, especially when I need to intimidate someone with a roguish smile and a calm, iron-hard assertion backed up by a blistering intensity (I sound like a Marty-Stu right now. Draco will want his leather pants back.)

But making rationally sound argument should not be about winning. It should be about accuracy, clarity and sanity. If you disagree with me on something I need to remind myself not to automatically fight. What good is being alpha when I'm ignoring my confusion and avoiding my embarrassment at possibly being mistaken. Not to mention that this is an internet forum, so limitations of the medium means attempting to look like a tough guy winds up hollow and sad, like a chocolate Easter bunny that's gone off.

Okay, I'm not one for similes, but I am one for trying to make myself more sane.
Artificial explosion of the Sun: a new x-risk?
by lukeprog — 2013-09-02T06:12:39.019Z

Bolonkin & Friedlander (2013) argues that it might be possible for "a dying dictator" to blow up the Sun, and thus destroy all life on Earth:

The Sun contains ~74% hydrogen by weight. The isotope hydrogen-1 (99.985% of hydrogen in nature) is a usable fuel for fusion thermonuclear reactions. This reaction runs slowly within the Sun because its temperature is low (relative to the needs of nuclear reactions). If we create higher temperature and density in a limited region of the solar interior, we may be able to produce self-supporting detonation thermonuclear reactions that spread to the full solar volume. This is analogous to the triggering mechanisms in a thermonuclear bomb. Conditions within the bomb can be optimized in a small area to initiate ignition, then spread to a larger area, allowing producing a hydrogen bomb of any power. In the case of the Sun certain targeting practices may greatly increase the chances of an artificial explosion of the Sun. This explosion would annihilate the Earth and the Solar System, as we know them today. The reader naturally asks: Why even contemplate such a horrible scenario? It is necessary because as thermonuclear and space technology spreads to even the least powerful nations in the centuries ahead, a dying dictator having thermonuclear missile weapons can [produce] (with some considerable mobilization of his military/industrial complex)—an artificial explosion of the Sun and take into his grave the whole of humanity. It might take tens of thousands of people to make and launch the hardware, but only a very few need know the final targeting data of what might be otherwise a weapon purely thought of (within the dictator’s defense industry) as being built for peaceful, deterrent use. Those concerned about Man’s future must know about this possibility and create some protective system—or ascertain on theoretical grounds that it is entirely [impossible]. Humanity has fears, justified to greater or lesser degrees, about asteroids, warming of Earthly climate, extinctions, etc. which have very small probability. But all these would leave survivors—nobody thinks that the terrible annihilation of the Solar System would leave a single person alive. That explosion appears possible at the present time. In this paper is derived the “AB-Criterion” which shows conditions wherein the artif

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Teapots and Soda Cans
by Odinn — 2013-09-01T22:21:32.456Z

Reading an earnest and thought provoking editorial1 from one James Wood, reviewing 'Letter To a Christian Nation' by Sam Harris. Though atheist himself, he admits a flagging patience with certain attitudes of atheists. I can concede that an atheist's superior and glib demeanor may be due to frustration and no small amount of pessimistic inference about the human condition, though I had to comment about a rebuttal he gives regarding Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot2.

He claims that God, so much grander and more complex than a teapot, cannot be banished with such a simplistic comparison, when I would insist that God is actually much less believable than the teapot for that exact reason. I think Russell's teapot is due for an update which is more approachable and grounded. Here goes:

I claim that there is a discarded Coke can somewhere in the vastness of the Sahara, but I will brook absolutely no discussion about doubting my claim or investigating it for veracity. "Okay," you think, "I suppose I can assume that much to be true. Whatever this man's sources, the odds of a Coke can being somewhere in the desert must be considerable." But I then elaborate with claims that it's actually many, many cans, folded into glorious and artistically pleasing forms, and my obdurate refusal to discuss how it can be proved continues. At this point even the most generous theists would likely start getting annoyed with my odd behavior, yet at the very least what I'm asking you to believe isn't outside the realm of possibility. For all you know (though I refuse to allow you to check) there could be a folk art bazaar currently set up in the Sahara, so really it costs you very little to entertain my view.

And then I say that the cans have taken on beautiful, shimmering consciousness and are forming a society which hides from humanity, burying their chrome castles beneath the sand and moving their aluminum cities whenever we get too close to discovering them. "But..." you try to cut in. Before you can even begin to tell me what you find odd about my fantasy, I'm on the next detail. I claim that all of our major technological achievements of the last several hundred years are all thanks to the secret influence of the Shiny Can People.

Now you have countless legitimate doubts, but every time you try to tell me that, for starters, soda didn't even come in aluminum cans several hundr...