This post is shameless bragging:
I donated two days of pay to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative. As always, this is incredibly easy to do. If you would like to do so, here is a link:
Should we listen to music? This seems like a high-value thing to think about.* Some considerations:
Music masks distractions. But we can get the same effect through alternatives such as white noise, calming environmental noise, or ambient social noise.
Music creates distractions. It causes interruptions. It forces us to switch our attention between tasks. For instance, listening to music while driving increases the risk of accidents.
We seem to enjoy listening to music. Anecdotally, when I've gone on "music fasts", music starts to sound much better and I develop cravings for music. This may indicate that this is a treadmill system, such that listening to music does not produce lasting improvements in mood. (That is, if enjoyment stems from relative change in quality/quantity of music and not from absolute quality/quantity, then we likely cannot obtain a lasting benefit.)
Frequency of music-listening correlates (.18) with conscientiousness. I'd guess the causation's in the wrong direction, though.
Listening to random music (e.g. a multi-genre playlist on shuffle) will randomize emotion and mindstate. Entropic influences on sorta-optimized things (e.g. mindstate) are usually harmful. And the music-listening people do nowadays is very unlike EEA conditions, which is usually bad.
(These are the product of 30 minutes of googling; I'm asking you, not telling you.)
Here are some ways we could change our music-listening patterns:
Music modifies emotion. We could use this to induce specific useful emotions. For instance, for productivity, one could listen to a long epic music mix.
Stop listening to music entirely, and switch to various varieties of ambient noise. Moderate ambient noise seems to be best for thinking.
Use music only as reinforcement for desired activities. I wrote a plugin to implement this for Anki. Additionally, music benefits exercise, so we might listen to music only at the gym. The treadmill-like nature of music enjoyment (see above) may be helpful here, as it would serve to regulate e.g. exercise frequency - infrequent exercise would create music cravings which would increase exercise frequency, and vice versa.
Listen only to educational music. Unfortunately, not much educational music for adults exists. We could get around this by overlaying regular music with text-to-speeched educational material or with audiobooks.
* I've been doing quantitative attention-allocation optimization lately, and "figure out whether to stop listening to music again" has one of the highest expected-utilons-per-time of all the interventions I've considered but not yet implemented.
I went through the literature on background music in September 2012; here is a dump of 38 paper references. Abstracts can be found by searching here and I can provide full texts on request.
Six papers that I starred in my reference manager (with links to full texts):
- Chamorro-Premuzic, Tomas, Montserrat Gomà-i-Freixanet, Adrian Furnham, and Anna Muro. 2009. “Personality, Self-Estimated Intelligence, and Uses of Music: A Spanish Replication and Extension Using Structural Equation Modeling.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 3 (3): 149–155. doi:10.1037/a0015342.
- Dobbs, Stacey, Adrian Furnham, and Alastair McClelland. 2011. “The Effect of Background Music and Noise on the Cognitive Test Performance of Introverts and Extraverts.” Applied Cognitive Psychology 25 (2) (March 23): 307–313. doi:10.1002/acp.1692.
- Hallam, Susan. 2012. “The Effects of Background Music on Health and Wellbeing.” In Music, Health, and Wellbeing, edited by Raymond A. R. MacDonald, Gunter Kreutz, and Laura Mitchell. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199586974.003.0032.
- Perham, Nick, and Joanne Vizard. 2011. “Can Preference for Background Music Mediate the Irrelevant Sound Effect?” Applied Cognitive Psychology 25 (4) (July 20): 625–631. doi:10.1002/acp.1731.
- Schellenberg, E. Glenn. 2012. “Cognitive Performance after Listening to Music: A Review of the Mozart Effect.” In Music, Health, and Wellbeing, edited by Raymond A. R. MacDonald, Gunter Kreutz, and Laura Mitchell. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199586974.003.0022.
- Waterhouse, Lynn. 2006. “Multiple Intelligences, the Mozart Effect, and Emotional Intelligence: A Critical Review.” Educational Psychologist 41 (4) (December): 207–225. doi:10.1207/s15326985ep4104_1.
One-word summary of the academic literature on the effects of listening to background music (as of September 2012): unclear
Yeah. I may not feel as strongly as you about this, but I still feel music is something intrinsically valuable to me. At least something about is is, and I haven't yet found a better substitute for it. If I stop listening to music entirely, I feel like the world is a bit more devoid of value to me. It might make sense to talk about this for those who don't feel strongly about the matter, but for me personally this starts to drift into the Straw Vulcan territory.
Music randomizes emotion and mindstate.
Wait, where did "randomizes" come from? The study you link and the standard view says that music can induce specific emotions. The point of the study is that emotions induced by music can carry over into other areas, which suggests we might optimize when we use specific types of music. The study you link about music and accidents also suggests specific music decreased risks.
All the papers I'm immediately seeing on Google Scholar suggest there is no association between background music and studying effectiveness, or if there is, it's only negative for those that don't usually study to music. If that's accurate, either people are already fairly aware of whether music distracts them, they would adapt to it given time, or they don't know what kinds of music are effective for them due to lack of experience.
A public service announcement.
If you only rarely peek out from underneath your rock and don't know about Heartbleed you should bother to find out. Additional info e.g. here. A pretty basic tool to check servers is here.
Notable vulnerable services were, for example, Gmail and Yahoo Mail.
List of affected sites with recommendations on which to change your password. Unfortunately, you should also probably change any other sites on which you use the same password.
It's a good time to do an Expected Utility calculation!
if you think that: p(having your accounts compromised) ( pain if accounts are compromised) > 1 (inconvenience of changing passwords), then change em!
Also, might be a good opportunity for you to start using a password manager like LastPass
...then change em!
Before you change the password, though, make sure that the website patched the vuln and got a new certificate as private keys were one of those things potentially leaked. Changing the password for a site which didn't patch and get a new cert is worse than useless.
App Academy has been discussed here before and several Less Wrongers have attended (such as ChrisHallquist, Solvent, Curiouskid, and Jack).
I am considering attending myself during the summer and am soliciting advice pertaining to (i) maximing my chance of being accepted to the program and (ii) maximing the value I get out of my time in the program given that I am accepted. Thanks in advance.
EDIT: I ended up applying and just completed the first coding test. Wasn't too difficult. They give you 45 minutes, but I only needed < 20.
EDIT2: I have reached the interview stage. Thanks everyone for the help!
EDIT3: Finished the interview. Now awaiting AA's decision.
EDIT4: Yet another interview scheduled...this time with Kush Patel.
EDIT5: Got an acceptance e-mail. Decision time...
EDIT6: Am attending the August cohort in San Francisco.
I work at App Academy, and I'm very happy to discuss App Academy and other coding bootcamps with anyone who wants to talk about them with me.
I have previously Skyped LWers to help them prepare for the interview.
Contact me at [email protected] if interested (or in comments here).
Inspired by economical lolcats, I guess we should have some rationality lolcats. Here are a few quick ideas:
Two big cats next to each other, a third smaller cat in front of them or hiding somewhere aside. "Consider the third alternative"
One cat standing on hind legs, other cat crouching. "If P(H|E) > P(H) ... then P(H|~E) < P(H)"
Cat examining a computer mouse. "Iz mouse 'by definishun' ... still can't eat"
Cat ripping apart paper boxes. "Stop compartmentalizing"
Cat ripping apart a map. "The map is not the territory"
Cat riding a vacuum cleaner ... something about Friendly AI.
Kittens riding a dog. "Burdensome details"
Cat looking suspiciously at a whirlpool in a bathtub. "Resist the affective spiral"
Or simply a picture of some smart cat (cat with glasses?) and some applause-light texts, like "All your Bayes are belong to us"
I am not sure what is the proper procedure for creating these; specifically whether there is some good source of legally available cat images. What is the correct font to use, and whether there are some tools for conveniently adding texts to pictures. Anyone has experience with this?
Does anyone else here have bizarre/hacky writing habits?
I discovered Amphetype, a learn-to-type application that allows you to type passages from anything that you get as a text file. But I've started to use it to randomly sample excerpts from my own writing. The process of re-typing it word for word makes me actually re-process it, mentally speaking, and I often find myself compelled to actually re-write something upon having re-typed it.
Something similar that I've had positive results with is to print out a draft, open a new file, and make myself transcribe the new draft to a new file.
An idea: a rationality hackathon.
From what I see, it seems like rationalists don't act on ideas often enough. To help people get the motivation to act on ideas, I sense that a hackathon would be effective. People would talk and group together to prototype different ideas, and at the end of the hackathon, participants would vote on the best ideas, and hopefully this would spark some action.
I guess what makes this different from the typical hackathon is:
1) Participants would be Less Wrong readers, or people part of other rationality-minded communities.
2) The goal would be to start things that are as beneficial as possible to the world (people at hackathons usually just want to build something "cool").
Thoughts?
Are there any listings of rationalist houses and/or Less Wrong users looking for an apartment?
If not, do you guys think it should be a feature that is added to lesswrong.com? IMO, it's something that has the potential to improve a lot of lives, and doesn't take that much effort to implement. So ROI-wise, it seems like something worthy of doing.
There now exists a wiki page for this: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Listing_of_Rationalist_Houses
ROI-wise, the best first move seems to write a comment on Open Thread, asking: "Are there any rationalist houses with free capacity? Alternatively, are there any LessWrong users looking for an appartment (please write the locality)?"
If you get answers, you can put them in wiki afterwards. If you don't get answers... then making the wiki page would probably accomplish nothing.
A nice puzzle which I found in this Math Overflow page: Is there a position with a finite number of chess pieces on an infinite chessboard, such that White has a forced win in ω moves? The meaning of this is that White has a move such that, for every possible response of Black, White has a guaranteed checkmate in a number of moves bounded by a finite number N; but before Black's first move, we cannot put a bound on how large N might be.
The thread gives a solution, and also links to this paper, where higher ordinals and questions of computability in infinite chess are also considered.
What's so special about HPMoR?
Some people seem to think that it is more than just a decent read: that it genre-breaking, that it transcends the rules of ordinary fiction. Some people change their life-pattern after reading HPMoR. Why?
For some context on who is asking this question: I've read 400 pages or more of HPMoR; as well as pretty much everything else that Eliezer has written.
I can't speak for others, but I love HPMoR. I honestly believe it's one of the best pieces of fiction I've ever read, so I'll try to describe my own reasons.
Tropes and Plot Devices: I've read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy and HPMoR avoids a lot of the downfalls of the genre such as dei ex machina, whiny/angsty heroes, and phleboninum/unobtainium. Eliezer is familiar enough with common tropes that he does a great job of applying them in the right contexts, subverting them interestingly, and sometimes calling them out and making fun of them directly.
The First Law of Rationalist Fiction: Roughly, that characters should succeed by thinking in understandable, imitable ways, not by inexplicable powers or opaque "bursts of insight" that don't really explain anything. After hearing this ideal stated outright and seeing it in practice, a lot of other fiction I've read (and, unfortunately, written) seems a lot less satisfying. Eliezer does a fantastic job at giving a look into the characters' minds and letting you follow their thought patterns. This makes it even more satisfying when they succeed and even more crushing when they fail.
Application of the Sequences: As someone who had read the sequences more than once before reading HPMoR, it was both fun and enlightening to see the ideas put into practice in a high-stakes scenario. As someone who was familiar with the ideas beforehand, I got to smile and "get the reference," yet also be surprised by the application. I honestly believe that I've started applying rationality to my real life more after reading MOR and seeing examples of how to do it.
Balance of Power: I think MOR does an excellent job of maintaining a balance of power between the characters. At times, you think your protagonist is horribly weak and at other times, they appear very strong, though perhaps in a different way from the other characters. The conflict is never one-sided.
The Characters: The characters are dynamic, multi-faceted, and sometimes morally ambiguous. You never fully understand their goals or motives, but they are there and they are consistent. Even the "dark" characters have certain insights to share that sound "bad", but are nonetheless seductive and often hard to argue with.
The World and the Lore: As a long-time Harry Potter fan, seeing this kind of adaptation of the world is just fun. It's a rich world in which to set a story and Eliezer does a great job expanding the lore, making some of it grittier, and making a lot of it much deeper and more mysterious. While he had a great platform to start from, the world-building is fantastic.
Overall, the story is incredibly entertaining and fun to read. It has a lot more to offer than most fiction out there. I love it.
I'm also somewhat confused by this. I love HPMoR and actively recommend it to friends, but to the extent Eliezer's April Fools' confession can be taken literally, characterizing it as "you-don't-have-a-word genre" and coming from "an entirely different literary tradition" seems a stretch.
Some hypotheses:
- Baseline expectations for Harry Potter fanfic are so low that when it turns out well, it seems much more stunning than it does relative to a broader reference class of fiction.
- Didactic fiction is nothing new, but high quality didactic fiction is an incredibly impressive accomplishment.
- The scientific content happens to align incredibly well with some readers' interests, making it genre-breaking in the same way The Hunt for Red October was for technical details of submarines. If you are into that specific field, it feels world-shatteringly good. For puns about hydras and ordinals, HPMoR is the only game in town, but that's ultimately a sparse audience.
- There is a genuine gap in fiction that is both light-hearted and serious in places which Eliezer managed to fill. Pratchett is funny and can make great satirical points, but doesn't have the same dramatic tension. Works that otherwise get the dramatic stakes right tend to steer clear of being light-hearted and inspirational. HPMoR is genre-breaking for roughly the same reasons Adventure Time gets the same accolades.
One more hypothesis after reading other comments:
HPMoR is a new genre where every major character either has no character flaws or is capable of rapid growth. In other words, the diametric opposite of Hamlet, Anna Karenina, or The Corrections. Rather than "rationalist fiction", a better term would be "paragon fiction". Characters have rich and conflicting motives so life isn't a walk in the park despite their strengths. Still everyone acts completely unrealistically relative to life-as-we-know-it by never doing something dumb or against their interests. Virtues aren't merely labels and obstacles don't automatically dissolve, so readers could learn to emulate these paragons through observation.
This actually does seem at odds with the western canon, and off-hand I can't think of anything else that might be described in this way. Perhaps something like Hikaru No Go? Though I haven't read them, maybe Walter Jon Williams' Aristoi or Ian Banks' Culture series?
The Culture books tend to star people on the margins of the eponymous Culture: disaffected citizens, spies, mercenaries, people from other involved (and usually more conservative) civilizations. They almost always have serious character flaws (a number of them are out-and-out assholes) and while character development does occur, generally toward Culture values, it's not usually dramatic. On the other hand, the culture itself, and the AI entities that run it, are presented as having few to no flaws from the narrative's perspective. While the characters are often critical of it, it's fairly clear where the author's sympathies lie.
They're not rationalist fiction in the sense that Methods is, or even in the sense that Asimov's Foundation books are. They do make for a decent stab at eutopia from a socially liberal soft-transhumanist perspective, though not an especially radical one.
Hmm... Atlas Shrugged does have (ostensible) paragons. Rand's idea of Romanticism as portraying "the world as it should be" seems to match up: "What Romantic art offers is not moral rules, not an explicit didactic message, but the image of a moral person—i.e., the concretized abstraction of a moral ideal." (source) Rand's antagonists do tend to be all flaws and no virtues though.
Characters act against their own interests in HPMoR... and in Hikaru no Go, for that matter. Just, you get to see why they're doing it so it seems more reasonable at the time. Which is of course how it seems to them. We're just used to characters doing things that don't seem like good ideas at the time in other works.
It's fun and absurd and complicated and fulfills the inner need to overanalyze that a lot of geeky people like myself have. Me and a bunch of friends in college were reading it as it came out and speculating wildly on what would happen next, especially about motives, and especially around Azkaban. But it was just a popular fanfic with an absurd hilarious premise that we liked (and that would occasionally lead to me oversleeping and missing the first half hour of my astrobiology class). Another work of comparable interest that had quite a similar effect on several of my friends around the same time was Homestuck.
Nowdays we have nearly completely lost interest. Partially because we have learned of the existence of people who take it too seriously / have changed their life-pattern after reading it which adds an ugh effect and partially because it's become rather overdone / takes itself too seriously. My interest in it that remains has changed from fun to morbid fascination.
Since one big problem with neural nets is their lack of analyzability, this geometric approach to deep learning neural networks seems probably useful.
This is not a Rationality Quote, but it might be about transhumanism if you squint. From a short Iron Man fanfic, Skybreak, cut for relevance:
He tells the recruits that technology will never replace them. He tells them that flight will always be there for them, that flight has to be there for them, because they are masters of the sky and what the hell were humans meant to do, except fly?
…
He knows men will never stop flying. Not because the machines will stop coming, because they won't. Not because the future's gonna step aside for him, because it won't. Rhodey knows because he's seen the future. He's seen technology, he's been friends with the biggest and best damn technologist on the goddamned planet.
And when Tony made the armour, he took away the plane, not the man. When Tony set out to fly, he put the engines literally in a man's hands, put wings on his feet, and broke the sound barrier with his fucking forehead.
A career question, asked with EA aims in mind, that will hopefully be relevant to many other LW members.
I am considering CS research as a career path, probably in one of AI/ML/distributed systems. I'm currently working as a software developer and I have done extensive MOOC work to pick up a CS background in terms of coursework, but my undergraduate degree is in math and I have no published research.
If I decide that getting a PhD was worthwhile and wanted to apply to good programs, where would I start building my resume and skills? Independent research project? Sufficiently impressive projects within my current company? Should I just get a master's and see how that goes?
Alternately, is it possible to get involved with industry research without a PhD? What would such a career path look like?
Thoughts on any or all of the above questions, suggestions for people to talk to, etc. would be much appreciated.
How to Get into Grad School for Math, Engineering or Computer Science
Juniors and seniors often ask me how to get into a Ph.D. program. Having looked at applications for three years now, I feel like I can offer some good advice. [This advice applies for masters students too.] The one-word version of that advice is: PUBLISH.