trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Looking for opinions of people like Nick Bostrom or Anders Sandberg on current cryo techniques
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-10-17T20:36:53.567Z

In June 2012, Robin Hanson wrote a post promoting plastination as a superior to cryopreservation as an approach to preserving people for later uploading. His post included a paragraph which said:

We don’t actually know that frozen brains preserve enough brain info. Until recently, ice formation in the freezing process ripped out huge brain chunks everywhere and shoved them to distant locations. Recent use of a special anti-freeze has reduced that, but we don’t actually know if the anti-freeze gets to enough places. Or even if enough info is saved where it does go.

This left me with the impression that the chances of the average cryopreserved person today of being later revived aren't great, even when you conditionalize on no existential catastrophe. More recently, I did a systematic read-through of the sequences for the first time (about a month 1/2 ago), and Eliezer's post You Only Live Twice convinced me to finally sign up for cryonics for three reasons:

It's cheaper than I realized

Eliezer recommended Rudi Hoffman to help with the paperwork

Eliezer's hard drive analogy convinced me the chances of revival (at least conditionalizing on no existential catastrophe) are good

But then Paul Crowley pointed out to me that what I posted yesterday about trusting experts seems to imply I should take cryonics less seriously than I do. I thought about it awhile, and realizes that I suspect that even among academics who would be predisposed to take cryonics seriously, say attendees at the workshop that produced the Whole Brain Emulation roadmap, Robin's more cautious perspective is probably more typical. Or is it? I've tried to find information online, and the one thing I've found is the Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics, which carries this disclaimer:

Note: Signing of this letter does not imply endorsement of any particular cryonics organization or its practices. Opinions on how much cerebral ischemic injury (delay after clinical death) and preservation injury may be reversible in the future vary widely among signatories.

I don't find that terribly encouraging. So now I'm back to being pessimistic about current cryopreservation techniques (though I'm still signing up for cryonics because the cost is low enough even given my current estimate of my chances). But I'd very much be curious to know if anyone knows what, say, Nick Bostrom or An...
Meetup : Phoenix (Tempe) Less Wrong Meetup
by Danny_Hintze — 2013-10-17T17:51:45.330Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Phoenix (Tempe) Less Wrong Meetup

WHEN:
18 October 2013 02:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
300 E Orange Mall, Tempe, AZ

We will be meeting up in Hayden Library at ASU, probably to casually (causally? :P) discuss decision theory.

Text me at 602-501-9420 if there are any issues.

Discussion article for the meetup : Phoenix (Tempe) Less Wrong Meetup
Group Rationality Diary, October 16-31
by therufs — 2013-10-17T04:23:05.204Z

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for October 16-31.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

The poll earlier this month seems to be sufficiently in favor of maintaining the current schedule that extra votes are unlikely to change things much, but if you'd really like to register your opinion, you are welcome to do so here.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.

Immediate past diary: October 1-15

Next diary: November 1-15

Rationality diaries archive
Time-logging programs and/or spreadsheets 
by Torello — 2013-10-16T23:57:31.920Z

I currently log the total number of hours I work each day in an OpenOffice Spreadsheet. I input the start time, lunch/break time, and end time, and it calculates the total hours worked. I'm not savvy enough to create this type of spreadsheet myself, so I looked through a large number of templates online before finding one that works as I've described above. I'm still not crazy about the way that this spreadsheet is laid out.

If you can link to a spreadsheet available for download similar to the one described above, please do so in the comments.

If you use time-logging for various distinct projects throughout the day, please describe this process and link to the software you use (if possible).

More of a meta-discussion: how time-logging this enhanced your performance or time management?, for what types of projects/activities is it best to time-log?, general comments about the idea
How to Beat Procrastination (to some degree) (if you're identical to me)
by  — 2013-10-16T23:17:38.238Z

So, you procrastinate. A lot. And it's a really big problem in your life, and so you really want to, y'know, stop procrastinating. But for some reason, it's just not that easy.

So, why do you procrastinate?

It's probably a really hard question to answer. Is it "because I'm lazy"? That's not a useful answer, because "stop being lazy" is just as hard to do as "stop procrastinating". How about "because of akrasia"? That's not a real answer; that's just a restatement of the question in more vague terms. Maybe "because of hyperbolic discounting"? Even if that's true, that's not really a useful answer, because there's no way to turn hyperbolic discounting off. (Or is there? If you know of a way to turn hyperbolic discounting off, please tell us.)

Maybe your procrastination has three parts. First, once you start doing something interesting, it's very hard for you to stop; second, having stopped, you don't usually feel like starting to do something useful; and third, having started, you often find yourself losing focus and wanting to do something else.

So let's look at each of these parts in turn.

Once you start doing something interesting, it's hard for you to stop.

For you, this one's a pain in the ass. (I know this because for me, it's a pain in the ass, and since you're reading this article, you must be identical to me.) You've told yourself that once you find yourself doing something interesting, you're just going to stop immediately. But that doesn't work at all. You've tried setting a timer, and telling yourself that you'll definitely, absolutely stop when the timer goes off. But that doesn't work, either; you just ignore the timer. What if you set a timer to repeatedly and annoyingly beep at you until you tell it that you've started working? You repeatedly ignore the timer and quickly become annoyed.

For you, once this problem has started, there just doesn't seem to be a way to stop it. So the solution is to just not start in the first place. The ideal situation is that you're not doing any interesting and fun activities whatsoever until you're done working for the day (unless, of course, one of those activities is part of the work you're supposed to get done).

You should still take breaks, of course; don't expect to work for four hours solid without stopping. Just don't do anything interesting during your breaks. Listen to music, or stare out the window or someth...
Does Goal Setting Work?
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2013-10-16T20:54:25.164Z

tl;dr There's some disagreement over whether setting goals is a good idea. Anecdotally, enjoyment in setting goals and success at accomplishing them varies between people, for various possible reasons. Publicly setting goals may reduce motivation by providing a status gain before the goal is actually accomplished. Creative work may be better accomplished without setting goals about it. 'Process goals', 'systems' or 'habits' are probably better for motivation than 'outcome' goals. Specific goals are probably easier on motivation than unspecified goals. Having explicit set goals can cause problems in organizations, and maybe for individuals.

Introduction

I experimented by letting go of goals for a while and just going with the flow, but that produced even worse results. I know some people are fans of that style, but it hasn’t worked well for me. I make much better progress — and I’m generally happier and more fulfilled — when I wield greater conscious control over the direction of my life.

Steve Pavlina

The inherent problem with goal setting is related to how the brain works. Recent neuroscience research shows the brain works in a protective way, resistant to change. Therefore, any goals that require substantial behavioural change or thinking-pattern change will automatically be resisted. The brain is wired to seek rewards and avoid pain or discomfort, including fear. When fear of failure creeps into the mind of the goal setter it commences a de-motivator with a desire to return to known, comfortable behaviour and thought patterns.

Ray Williams

I can’t read these two quotes side by side and not be confused.

There’s been quite a bit of discussion within Less Wrong and CFAR about goals and goal setting. On the whole, CFAR seems to go with it being a good idea. There are some posts that recognize the possible dangers: see patrissimo’s post on the problems with receiving status by publicly committing to goals. Basically, if you can achieve the status boost of actually accomplishing a goal by just talking about it in public, why do the hard work? This discussion came up fairly recently with the Ottawa Less Wrong group; specifically, whether introducing group goal setting was a good idea.

I’ve always set goals–by ‘always’ I mean ‘as far back as I can i...
[Link] Low-Hanging Poop
by GLaDOS — 2013-10-16T20:51:07.771Z

Related: Son of Low Hanging Fruit

Another post on finding low hanging fruit from Gregory Cochran's and Henry Harpending's blog West Hunter.

Clostridium difficile causes a potentially serious kind of diarrhea triggered by antibiotic treatments. When the normal bacterial flora of the colon are hammered by a broad-spectrum antibiotic, C. difficile often takes over and causes real trouble. Mild cases are treated by discontinuing antibiotic therapy, which often works: if not, the doctors try oral metronidazole (Flagyl), then vancomycin , then intravenous metronidazole. This doesn’t always work, and C. difficile infections kill about 14,000 people a year in the US.

One recent trial shows that fecal bacteriotherapy, more commonly called a stool transplant, works like gangbusters, curing ~94% of patients. The trial was halted because the treatment worked so well that refusing to poopify the control group was clearly unethical. I read about this, but thought I’d heard about such stool transplants some time ago. I had. It was mentioned in The Making of a Surgeon, by William Nolen, published in 1970. Some crazy intern – let us call him Hogan – tried a stool transplant on a woman with a C. difficile infection. He mixed some normal stool with chocolate milk and fed it to the lady. It made his boss so mad that he was dropped from the program at the end of the year. It also worked. It was inspired by a article in Annals of Surgery, so this certainly wasn’t the first try. According to Wiki, there are more than 150 published reports on stool transplant, going back to 1958.

So what took so damn long? Here we have a simple, cheap, highly effective treatment for C. difficile infection that has only become officially valid this year. Judging from the H. pylori story, it may still take years before it is in general use.

Obviously, sheer disgust made it hard for doctors to embrace this treatment. There’s a lesson here: in the search for low-hanging fruit, reconsider approaches that are embarrassing, or offensive, or downright disgusting.

Investigate methods were abandoned because people hated them, rather because of solid evidence showing that they didn’t work.

Along those lines, no modern educational reformer utters a single syllable about corporal punishme

...
[Link] Distance from Harvard
by GLaDOS — 2013-10-16T20:43:57.107Z

Related: Loss of local knowledge affecting intellectual trends, The Hyborian Age

This post is from Gregory Cochran's and Henry Harpending's excellent blog West Hunter.

Barry Marshall once said that if he had gone to Harvard, he would have known that stomach ulcers were caused by stress, and wouldn’t even have considered the possibility that they might be caused by a bacterium. There are a number of other important innovators that sure look as if they benefited from living as far as possible from the sources of establishment opinion. Back when continental drift was officially nonsense, quite a few geologists in South Africa and Australia thought it must be correct – partly because there are local geological facts that are hard to explain any other way (like ancient glacial moraines in Australia whose rocks originated in South Africa) but also because physical distance translates into mental distance.

Of course this does not always work – distance is useful, but not sufficient.. Indonesia is pretty far from Harvard, but is a vast wasteland, intellectually. Ideally, you want a country full of people drawn from the populations that actually produce creative thinkers (Europeans, mostly) instead of the populations that ought to but don’t. And it should be really, really far away.

With the Internet and cell phones and all that, psychological isolation is harder to find. Once even California had some thoughts of its own, but that day is long past. If we want to keep progress from stalling out, we need people that don’t get sucked into to the usual crap – because they can’t.

The only real solution is interstellar colonization: the speed of light is your friend. A generation ship might do the job - even if it never arrived. It would be out there for hundreds of years, years in which the inhabitants could go their own way. Some of the ships would be boring, some of them would go crazy – but at least they’d be different.
Trusting Expert Consensus
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-10-16T20:22:10.507Z

I recently read Bryan Caplan's The Myth Of The Rational Voter. It's an excellent book in a lot of ways, and one of those ways is how it got me thinking about the issue of expert consensus. It's pushed me more towards thinking that hard data on what the experts in a given field believe about their area of expertise is incredibly useful. Specifically, based on examples from a variety of fields (listed below the fold), I'll conclude:

When the data show an overwhelming consensus in favor of one view (say, if the number of dissenters is less than the Lizardman's Constant), this almost always ought to swamp any other evidence a non-expert might think they have regarding the issue.

When a strong but not overwhelming majority of experts favor one view, non-experts should take this as strong evidence in favor of that view, but there's a greater chance that evidence could be overcome by other evidence (even from a non-expert's point of view).

When there is only barely a majority view among experts, or no agreement at all, this is much less informative than the previous two conditions. It may indicate agnosticism is the appropriate attitude, but in many cases non-experts needn't hesitate before having their own opinion.

Expert opinion should be discounted when their opinions could be predicted solely from information not relevant to the truth of the claims. This may be the only reliable, easy heuristic a non-expert can use to figure out a particular group of experts should not be trusted.

Notable incidental conclusions relating to specific fields include:

Economics doesn't have the kind of overwhelming consensus you find on some issues in the natural sciences, but there still seem to be a lot of things most economists agree on.

Atheists shouldn't be timid about citing the majority opinion of philosophers as evidence for atheism.

Non-experts should default to thinking probably there was a historical Jesus.

You should really seriously accept the mainstream scientific consensus on global warming.

Evolution

The efforts of the anti-evolution movement have had the unintended consequence of making many people, especially in the atheist/rationalist/skeptic community, especially well aware of just how strong the evidence for evolution is. Unusually good explanations of the evidence for evolution is available in books and websites. And the hard data on support for

...
Meetup : LW meetup: Polyphasic sleep and Offline habit training
by Vika — 2013-10-16T19:46:57.935Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LW meetup: Polyphasic sleep and Offline habit training

WHEN:
20 October 2013 02:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Citadel House, 98 Elm St, apt 1, Somerville, MA

Kenneth Chen, visiting from New York, will give a talk on Polyphasic Sleep. This is a technique that lets you sleep fewer hours, while potentially retaining the same level of well-being and cognitive capacity. Basically, you get a time-turner for the rest of your life, if it works for you. Ken switched to polyphasic sleep two months ago, and will share his experiences.

Victoria will run a CFAR-style session on offline habit training. This is an effective method of installing new habits by repeated deliberate practice, as an alternative to using willpower in real time. We will brainstorm new habits, and come up with repeatable procedures to train them.

Discussion article for the meetup : LW meetup: Polyphasic sleep and Offline habit training
[LINK] Productivity Ninja: 5 Powerful Tips For Getting More Stuff Done
by JQuinton — 2013-10-16T16:45:41.940Z

From the blog [Bakadesuyo](http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/10/productivity-ninja/):
>1) Know When You’re At Your Best
>And plan accordingly. To be a productivity ninja focus less on time management, and more on managing your energy.
>Charlie Munger, Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, used a system like this to make sure he was always growing.
>He identified the hours when he was at his best — and then routinely stole one of those peak hours for learning.
>>Charlie Munger hit upon one strategy when he was a young lawyer. He decided that whenever his legal work was not as intellectually stimulating as he’d like, “I would sell the best hour of the day to myself.” He would take otherwise billable time at the peak of his day and dedicate it to his own thinking and learning. “And only after improving my mind — only after I’d used my best hour improving myself — would I sell my time to my professional clients.”

There are four more entries, but posting them here would probably violate copyright. Anyone implement any of the suggestions listed?
Meetup: Philadelphia-- Taleb discussion
by NancyLebovitz — 2013-10-16T13:09:44.454Z

When: Sunday, October 20, 1 PM

Where: Nam Phuong at 11 St. and Washington St. Nam Phuong is a Vietnamese restaurant notable for good food, low prices, and very little background noise.

Discussion topic: Taleb on how to think about small probabilities.

Meetup discussion group.
Teaching rationality to kids?
by chaosmage — 2013-10-16T12:38:25.199Z

I'm finally getting around to reading "Thinking, Fast and Slow". Much of it I had already learned on LW and elsewhere. Maybe that's why my strongest impression from the book is how accessible it is. Simple sentences, clear and vivid examples, easy-to-follow exercises, a remarkable lack of references to topics not explained right away.

I caught myself thinking "This is a book I should have read as a kid". In my first language, I think I could have managed it as early as 11 years old. Since measured IQ is strongly influenced by habits of thinking and cognitive returns can be reinvested, I'm sure I would be smarter now if I had.

So I have decided to buy a stack of these books and give them to kids on their, say, 12th birthdays. Then maybe Dan Dennett's "Intuition Pumps" a year later - and HPMOR a year after that? I would like to see more suggestions from you guys.

It should be obviously better to start even earlier. So how do you teach rationality to a nine-year-old? Or a seven-year-old? Has anybody done something like that? Please name books, videos or web sites.

If such media are not available, creating them should be low-hanging fruit in the quest to raise the global IQ and sanity waterline. ELI5 writing is very learnable, after all, and ELI5 type interpretations of, say, the sequences, might be helpful for adults too.
[LINK] Spread the wings of uncertainty, the research drug version
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-10-16T12:37:48.808Z

EDIT: Image now visisble!

From Anders Sandberg:

Another piece examining predictive performance, this time in the pharmaceutical industry. How well can industry experts predict sales?

You guessed it, not very well. Not even when data really accumulated.

Large pharma has less bias than small companies, but the variance still overshadows everything.

First, most consensus forecasts were wrong, often substantially. And although consensus forecasts improved over time as more information became available, accuracy remained an issue even several years post-launch. More than 60% of the consensus forecasts in our data set were either over or under by more than 40% of the actual peak revenues (Fig. a). Although the overall median of the data set was within 4%, the distribution is wide for both under- and overestimated forecasts. Furthermore, a significant number of consensus forecasts were overly optimistic by more than 160% of the actual peak revenues of the product.

The unanswered question in this analysis is what companies and investors ought to be doing to forecast better. We do not offer a complete answer here, but we have thoughts based on our analysis.

Beware the wisdom of the crowd. The 'consensus' consists of well-compensated, focused professionals who have many years of experience, and we have shown that the consensus is often wrong. There should be no comfort in having one's own forecast being close to the consensus, particularly when millions or billions of dollars are on the line in an investment decision or acquisition situation.

Broaden the aperture on what the future could look like, and rapidly adapt to new information. Much of the divergence between a forecast and what actually happens is due to the emergence of a scenario that no one foresaw: a new competitor, unfavourable clinical data or a more restrictive regulatory environment. Companies need to fight their own inertia and the tendency to make only incremental shifts in forecasting and resourcing.

Try to improve. It appears that some companies and analysts may be better at forecasting than others (see Supplementary information S1 (box)). We suspect there is no magic bullet to improving the accuracy of forecasts, but the first step is conducting a self-assessment and recognizing that there may be a capability issue that needs to be addressed.