If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.
Why am I not signed up for cryonics?
Here's my model.
In most futures, everyone is simply dead.
There's a tiny sliver of futures that are better than that, and a tiny sliver of futures that are worse than that.
What are the relative sizes of those slivers, and how much more likely am I to be revived in the "better" futures than in the "worse" futures? I really can't tell.
I don't seem to be as terrified of death as many people are. A while back I read the Stoics to reduce my fear of death, and it worked. I am, however, very averse to being revived into a worse-than-death future and not being able to escape.
I bet the hassle and cost of cryonics disincentivizes me, too, but when I boot up my internal simulator and simulate a world where cryonics is free, and obtained via a 10-question Google form, I still don't sign up. I ask to be cremated instead.
Cryonics may be reasonable for someone who is more averse to death and less averse to worse-than-death outcomes than I am. Cryonics may also be reasonable for someone who has strong reasons to believe they are more likely to be revived in better-than-death futures than in worse-than-death futures. Finally, there may be a fundamental error in my model.
This does, however, put me into disagreement with both Robin Hanson ("More likely than not, most folks who die today didn't have to die!") and Eliezer Yudkowsky ("Not signing up for cryonics [says that] you've stopped believing that human life, and your own life, is something of value").
So are you saying the P(worse-than-death|revived) and the P(better-than-death|revived) probabilities are of similar magnitude? I'm having trouble imagining that. In my mind, you are most likely to be revived because the reviver feels some sort of moral obligation towards you, so the future in which this happens should, on the whole, be pretty decent. If it's a future of eternal torture, it seems much less likely that something in it will care enough to revive some cryonics patients when it could, for example, design and make a person optimised for experiencing the maximal possible amount of misery. Or, to put it differently, the very fact that something wants to revive you suggests that that something cares about a very narrow set of objectives, and if it cares about that set of objects it's likely because they were put there with the aim of achieving a "good" outcome.
(As an aside, I'm not very averse to "worse-than-death" outcomes, so my doubts definitely do arise partially from that, but at the same time I think they are reasonable in their own right.)
A new comet from the oort cloud, >10 km wide, has been discovered that is doing a flyby of Mars in October of 2014. The current orbit is rather uncertain, but it is probably passing within 100,000 km and the max likelihood is ~35,000 km. There is a tiny but non-negligable chance this thing could actually hit the red planet, in which case we would get to witness an event on the same order of magnitude as the K-T event that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs! (and lose everything we have on the surface of the planet and in orbit.)
I, for one, hope it hits. That would not be a once in a lifetime opportunity. That would be a ONCE IN THE HISTORY OF HOMINID LIFE opportunity! We would get to observe a large impact on a terrestrial body as it happened and watch the aftermath as it played out for decades!
As is, the most likely situation though is one in which we get to closely sample and observe the comet with everything we have in orbit around Mars. The orbit will be nailed down better in a few months when the comet comes out from the other side of the sun.
And to quote myself towards the end of the last open thread:
I don't know if this has been brought up around here before, but the B612 foundation is planning to launch an infrared space telescope into a venus-like orbit around 2017. It will be able to detect nearly every earth-crossing rock larger than 150 meters wide, and a significant fraction down to a few at 30ish meters. The infrared optics looking outwards makes it much easier to see the warm rocks against the black of space without interference from the sun and would quickly increase the number of known near earth objects by two orders of magnitude. This is exactly the mission I've been wishing / occasionally agitating for NASA to get off their behinds and do for five years. They've got the contract with Ball Aerospace to build the spacecraft and plan to launch on a Falcon 9 rocket. And they accept donations.
I saw a mention of that elsewhere, but I didn't realize that the core had a lower bound of 10km. Wow. I really hope it impacts too; we saw some chatter about the need for a space guard with a dinky little thing hitting Chelyabinsk, but imagine the effect of watching a dinosaur-killer hit Mars!
Zeo Inc is almost certainly shutting down.
Zeo users should assume the worst and take action accordingly:
- Update your sleep data and then export all your sleep data from the Zeo website as a CSV (the bar on the right hand side, in tiny grey text)
- Upgrade your Zeo with the new firmware if you have not already done so, so it will store unencrypted data which can be accessed without the Zeo website.
- Depending on how long you plan to use your Zeo, you may want to buy replacement headbands (~$15 each, I think you can get a year's use out of them). Amazon still stocks the original bedside unit's replacement headbands and the cellphone/mobile unit replacement headbands but who knows how many they still have?
I'm sad that they're closing down. I've run so many experiments with my Zeo, and there doesn't seem to be any successor devices on the horizon: all the other sleep devices I've read of are lame accelerometer-based gizmos.
I wanted to apologize for the post I made on Discussion yesterday. I hope one of the mods deletes it. I should have thought more carefully before posting something controversial like that. I made multiple errors in the process of writing the post. One of the biggest mistakes I made was mentioning the name of a certain organization in particular, in a way that might harm that organization.
In the future, before I post anything, I will ask myself, "Will this post raise or lower the sanity waterline?" The post I made clearly didn't really do much for the former, and could easily have contributed to the latter. For that I am filled with regret.
I have a part-time job, and I will be donating at least $150 of my income to the organization I mentioned and possibly harmed in the previous post I made.
I'm not making this comment for the purpose of gaining back karma; I'm making it because I still want to be taken seriously in this community as a rationalist. I know that this may never happen, now, but if that's the case, I can always just make another account. Less Wrong is amazing, and I like it here.
I'm not making this comment for the purpose of gaining back karma; I'm making it because I still want to be taken seriously in this community as a rationalist. I know that this may never happen, now, but if that's the case, I can always just make another account.
Based on your handle I assumed you already had another account. I do suggest making another one now. There is no need to take that baggage with you---leave that kind of shit as anonymous.
Google Reader is being killed 1 July 2013. Export your OPML and start searching for a new RSS reader...
I posted this in the waning days of the last open thread, but I hope no one will mind the slight repeat here.
The last Dungeons and Discourse campaign was very well-received here on Less Wrong, so I am formally announcing that another one is starting in a little while. Comment on this thread if you want to sign up.
A call for advice: I'm looking into cognitive behavioral therapy—specifically, I'm planning to use an online resource or a book to learn CBT methods in hopes of preventing my depression from recurring. It looks like these methods have a good chance of working, although the evidence isn't as strong as for in-person CBT. At this point, I'm trying to decide which resources to learn from. Any recommendations or anecdotes would be appreciated.
My wife's a psychologist and depression is one of her specialties. Here are her recommendations:
Self-Therapy for Your Inner Critic book
Free guided meditations for "The Mindful Way Through Depression" (get some practice before using "working with difficulty" meditation): streamable or downloadable
And the associated book
Please let us know how it goes.
Over the past month, I have started taking melatonin supplements, instigated a new productivity system, implemented significant changes in diet and begun a new fitness routine. February is also a month where I anticipate changes in my mood. I find myself moderately depressed and highly irritable with no situational cause, and I have no idea which of these things, if any, are responsible.
This is not ideal.
I'd been considering breaking my calendar down into two-week blocks, and staging interventions in accordance with this. Then the restless spirit of Paul Graham sat on my shoulder and told me to turn it into an amazing web service that would let people assign themselves into self-experimental cohorts, where they're algorithmically assigned to balanced blocks so that effects of overlapping interventions can be teased apart.
I've never really gotten that into the whole Quantified Self thing, but I'd be keen to see if something like this existed already. If not, I'd consider putting such a thing together.
Any discussion/observations on this general subject?
It seems plausible to me that traditional financial advice assumes that you have traditional goals (e.g. eventually marrying, eventually owning a house, eventually raising a family, and eventually retiring). Suppose you are an aspiring effective altruist and willing to forgo one or more of these. How does that affect how closely your approach to finances should adhere to traditional financial advice?
I have been reading up on religious studies (yes, I ignored that generally sound advice never to study anything with the word 'studies' in the name) in order to better understand Chinese religion.
Unexpectedly, I have found the native concepts are useful (perhaps even more useful) outside the realm of religion. That is to say, distinctions like universalist/particularist, conversion/heritage, and concepts like orthodoxy, orthopraxy, reification, etc... are useful for thinking about apparently "non-religious" ideologies (including, to some extent, my own).
My first instinct when hearing a claim is to try and figure out if it is true, but I fear I have been missing the point (since much of the time, the truth of the claim is irrelevant to the speaker) and instead should focus more on the function a given (stated) belief plays in the life (especially the social life) of the person making the assertion (at least, on the margin).
So apparently I should be somewhat concerned about dying by poisoning. Any simple tips for avoiding this? It looks like the biggest killers are painkillers and heavy recreational drugs, neither of which I take, so I might be safe.
I finished Coursera "Data Analysis" last night. (It started back in January.)
It's basically "applied statistics/some machine learning in R": we get a quick tour of data clean up and munging, basic stats, material on working with linear & logistic models, use of common visualization and clustering approaches, prediction with linear regression and trees and random forests, then uses of simulation such as bootstrapping.
There's a lot of material to cover, and while there's plenty of worked out examples in the lectures, I don't see anyone learning R or statistics just from this course - you should definitely have used R to some degree before (at least running some t-tests or graphs), and you will definitely benefit from already knowing what a p-value is and how you would calculate it by hand (because eg. you'll be flummoxed when the lecturer Leek works out a confidence interval 'by hand' while coding - "where does this magic value 1.96 come from?!").
On the plus side, I liked all the examples and the curriculum seems useful and well-chosen. It's a reasonable introduction to 'data science'. I think my time wasn't wasted doing this Coursera: I'm more comfortable with some of the more advanced/exotic techniques, and picked up many R tips, some of which have come in handy already (eg. some of the data munging tips were useful in working with Touhou music data, and I've been able to replace all my homebrew Haskell multiple-correction code in various nootropics & Zeo experiments with a standard R library function p.adjust, which I had no idea existed until the lecture on multiple comparison introduced it to me) - although as of yet I have not used bootstraps or random forests* or splines in anger. (But if any is thinking about doing it in the future, see my comment about the prerequisites.)
On the negative side: like most of the other students, I think this should've been a longer course than 8 weeks and that the estimate of 5hrs/wk is misleading. The pace was very unforgiving. I was relatively well-prepared for this course, but I still wound up submitting for the second data analysis assignment a paper I think was very substandard. Why? Well, though we had two weeks or so to do it, I deliberately didn't do much work on it in the first week because in the first assignment you couldn't do a good job without the lectures from the week before the assignment was due, and I didn't want to get bushwhacked again; but in the actual week before, I got completely distracted by my Touhou music project, and so I wound up just not having the time or energy to do it. Similar things happened to a lot of other students: there was no slack or recovery time.
(There were also the usual teething problems of any new course: wrong or misleading quizzes, errors in lectures, that sort of thing. The peer review grading seems particularly poor, with the required grades being based on pretty superficial aspects of the submitted analyses.)
* EDIT: I have since employed random forests or bootstrapping in http://www.gwern.net/Weather , http://www.gwern.net/hpmor , & http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns
So you guys remember soylent? I was thinking I could get similar benefits blending simple foods and adding a good multivitamin to fill in any gaps.
So I've worked on it on and off for a couple of days, and here is a shot at what a whole food soylent might contain:
http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/recipe/2786310/2
So um if anybody wants to confirm or critique this, that would be cool
I've just noticed that hovering the mouse pointer over a post's or comment's score now displays a balloon pop-up with information how large percentage of votes was positive. New feature or am I just really bad at noticing black stuff appearing suddenly on my screen?
Anyway, it's pretty nice. You can, for example, upvote a comment from 0 to 1, notice that the positive vote ratio changes only by a few percent and suddenly realize that there's a war going on in there.
Does anyone know which of the books on the academic side of CFAR's recommended reading list are likely to be instrumentally useful to someone who's been around here a couple years and has read most of the Sequences? It seems likely that there's some useful material in there, but I'd rather avoid reviewing a bunch of stuff.
Gamification of productivity:https://habitrpg.com/splash.html
I haven't signed up yet because I'm still assessing whether the overhead of filling it out is going to be too much of a trivial inconvenience, but thought some others might be interested. From poking around, it looks like it has a lot of potential but is still a little raw. It has the core game elements firmly in place but lacks the public status/accountability elements of good games (through acheivements/badges) and Fitocracy (through community/public accountability).
UPDATE: signed up, will report back next month
This comment discusses information hazards, but not in much detail.
"Don't link to possible information hazards on Less Wrong without clear warning signs."
— Eliezer, in the previous open thread.
"Information hazard" is a Nick Bostrom coinage. The previous discussion of this seems to have focused on what Bostrom calls "psychological reaction hazard" — information that will make (at least some) people unhappy by thinking about it. Going through Bostrom's paper on the subject, I wonder if these other sorts of information hazards should also be avoided here:
- Distraction hazards — addictive products, games, etc.; especially those that have been optimized to be so. Examples: Links to video games; musical earworms; discussions of addictive drug use; porn.
- Role model hazards — discussions of people doing harmful things; bad examples that readers might imitate. Examples: Talking about suicide and thoughts leading to it; fatalistic discussion of bad habits.
- Biasing hazards — information that amplifies existing biased beliefs. Examples skipped to avoid a distracting political discussion here.
- Embarrassment hazard — discussions of embarrassing things happening to people in the community. Examples: Links to scandalous or distorted stories about members of the community; gossip in general.
Another thing that seems to fit this pattern that I have seen elsewhere is a Trigger Warning, which is used before people discuss something like rape, discrimination, etc... which can remind people who have experienced those about it, causing some additional trauma from the event.
Math and reading gaps between boys and girls
However, even in countries with high gender equality, sex differences in math and reading scores persisted in the 75 nations examined by a University of Missouri and University of Leeds study. Girls consistently scored higher in reading, while boys got higher scores in math, but these gaps are linked and vary with overall social and economic conditions of the nation.
Saving the world though ECONOMICS
In a world of magic and fantasy, there exist two worlds: the Human World and the Demon World of fantasy creatures. Fifteen years ago, the "War of the Southern Kingdoms” broke out between both sides, each intending to conquer the other. Both sides were locked in a stalemate, until a young male human decides to do something about it. Known as the Hero, he is a skilled and powerful warrior who has traveled to the Demon World to end their evil by killing their leader, the Demon Queen.
But what surprised the Hero when he storms the Demon Queen's castle is that the latter doesn't want a fight. She just wanted to reveal to him a sordid truth: the war has never always been about good versus evil — it's a far more complicated affair, with each side being equally good and evil all the same.
On one hand, the war helped unite erstwhile feuding kingdoms against a common enemy. On the other hand, it allowed opportunists to take advantage of their own races and get rich off the war — powerful, corrupt humans control the poor and weak, while warmongering demon clans harass pacifistic ones. Then there's the prospects should one side win: the losers gets oppressed, while the winners break down into infighting over the spoils. Prematurely ending the war is an even worse idea, because so much money, time and resources have been spent for the war effort soldiers could never get any compensation should a ceasefire be signed immediately, causing each side to break down into civil war against their former employers.
Fortunately, the Demon Queen has a better idea, and she wants the Hero's help: forge a peaceful end to the war with the least repercussions by playing behind the scenes and at the same time introduce sweeping reforms on all levels of society. Convinced, the Hero agrees to join her as they try to forge a peaceful way out, gaining allies and companions in the process.
Is anyone else watching Maoyuu Maou Yuusha, or reading the relevant novels? It's about as close to rationalist fiction as I've ever seen a commercial work be. It goes way further than the premise; a strong spirit of secular humanism is embedded into the story and its characters, and it's got some of the finest examples examples of a Patrick Stewart Speech I've seen this side of fantasy.
As for distraction hazards, I have often seen links to TvTropes been posted with a warning sign, both here and in other sites. (Sometimes a plain "Warning: TvTropes link", sometimes a more teasing "Warning: do not click link unless you have hours to spare today".)