avichapman

• avichapman 30 Apr 2012 22:09 UTC

  3 points

  on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (2012)

  Hi,

  I’m a software engineer in Adelaide, Australia. I’ve tried to be a rationalist all of my life, but had no idea that there were actual techniques that you can learn from others. I’d simply tried to confront myself on the biases that books told me I had, with various degrees of success. I’m very excited to be here.

  One thing that bothers me, though, is that I am feeling increasingly isolated from others. It used to be that I had thought just enough to be 1 inferential step ahead of others. This made me seem smart when I talked. Now, I’m more than 1 inferential step ahead in many areas for many people, and this leads to confusion and a lack of communication. Now people think I’m crazy and ignore me. Well, except for those of my friends who are coming with me on this journey. I hope being part of this community will a good social experience. And if anyone here is from Adelaide, I’d love to meet you in person!

  Is there any way for a newbie to ask questions of an old hand? A few weeks ago, I read about using Bayes’ Theorem to evaluate evidence. Now, I see its use everywhere. I just read a post on Pharyngula that took what seemed like a very emotional stance on what also seemed to be able to be perfectly modelled with a Bayesian equation. Without the actual percentages, I had to make certain assumptions about relative values, but came to a surprising conclusion. Now I need someone to check my work and tell me if I did it wrong.

  Anyway, I’m glad to meet you all! Avi

• avichapman 1 May 2012 5:53 UTC

  7 points

  on: The Allais Paradox

  I know this was posted 4 years ago, but I had a thought. If I was offered a certainty of $24,000 vs a ³³⁄₃₄ chance of $27,000, my preference would depend on whether this was a once-off. If this was a once-off, my primary concern would be securing the money and being able to put food on the table tonight. Option 1 will put food on the table with 100% certainty, while Option 2 will not.

  If, however, the option was to be offered many times, I would optimise for greatest return—Option 2. If I miss out this month, I’ll just scrape for food until next month, when chance are I’ll get the money.

  I think I just answered my own question. If my goal can be reached with $24,000, then Option 1 is the best one because it reaches the goal in one guaranteed fell swoop. However, if my goal is to make lots of money, then Option 2 is the way to go, because it makes the most over time.

  That make sense to anyone?

• avichapman 2 May 2012 21:41 UTC

  9 points

  on: The Third Alternative

  Neat. This helped me less than a day after I read it. I find dieting hard, and this morning my work ran out of milk. I felt that I had no alternative but to purchase fast food for breakfast. I quickly realised that this fit the pattern of a false dilemma, noticed my place in the pattern as the guy with the hidden motive and forced myself to look for other options. It didn’t take me long after that to discover that while the two kitchens in my building were empty of milk, there were other buildings.

  Huzzah!

• avichapman 3 May 2012 5:59 UTC

  0 points

  on: That Alien Message

  This makes me goggle at the possibility of what an AI with access to a quantum computer could do. There are already programs out there for generating and testing hypotheses, but obviously they take ages to work through the solution space. With a quantum computer, all we would have to do is feed it data about the universe and it would almost instantly spit out hypotheses ranked in order of probability, with suggested tests for sorting through them. This is terribly exciting!

• avichapman 7 May 2012 1:00 UTC

  1 point

  on: Ad­vice for an iso­lated Ra­tion­al­ist?

  I’m in a similar situation. My nearest meetup is in Melbourne, too. But for me Melbourne is 9 hours’ drive away. I’m not just looking for friends—of which I have a few already, I’m also looking for a partner. Of all the woman I’ve met in the last decade (taken or otherwise), I’ve only met one who would not be turned off by this stuff and that one was taken.

  On the friends front, I’ve sent messages to the two Less Wrong members that I could find who live in Adelaide, but no response yet. On the partner front, I recently had a date with a woman who asked me what I believed about the beginning of the world as an atheist. I said I open the science book and see what it says and then reread it every few years to get up to date. This led into a discussion of rationality, after which things cooled off. I haven’t heard back from her since then.

  So do I need to keep my mouth shut about the things I think about? Or just wait for the statistically unlikely occurrence of a rationalist, un-taken woman who is also interested in me?

• avichapman 7 May 2012 4:10 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Ad­vice for an iso­lated Ra­tion­al­ist?

  I could have come across the wrong way. I’m pretty sure I mentioned a utility function at one point. I tried not to come across as cold. I think I gave her a chance to express her views. But she never did, so either I didn’t do a good enough job or she had another reason not to express them (shock at me, never thought about it, etc).

• avichapman 16 May 2012 4:31 UTC

  4 points

  on: Evolu­tions Are Stupid (But Work Any­way)

  Generations to fixation = 2 ln(N) /​ s Probability of fixation = 2s

  Are there domains limits for ‘s’ on those equations?

  It seems to me that if you have an s that is negative, you get a nonsensical answer for both equations. Though I suppose that equation one’s answer can be interpreted to mean that it would take -[Generations to fixation] generations for a bad, but ubiquitous mutation to get winnowed down to one individual.

  But with the second equation, a negative s leads to a less than zero chance of fixation and an s higher than 50% leads to a greater than 100% chance of fixation.

• avichapman 22 May 2012 4:16 UTC

  11 points

  on: Feel­ing Rational

  I was talking to someone the other day about our treatment of sexual offenders. She seemed to be insinuating that I didn’t care about the plight of the victims because by proposed solutions were all aimed at reducing sexual violence rather than punishing the offenders.

  I told her that the injustices visited upon the victims of sexual abuse made me very angry, which made me passionate about fixing the problem. Having set my goal of reducing sexual violence, it behooved me not to let my anger at the perpetrator distract me from the task of achieving that goal. If I’m ever presented with a choice where I can either punish the perpetrator or help the victim (or future potential victims), I chose the latter. You can’t always do both at the same time.

  So I suppose emotions can be rational in that they can arise from truth, but they can also be very irrational in that they prevent winning your goals.

A digi­tized be­lief net­work?

• avichapman 28 May 2012 23:52 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Curiouskid’s comment on: A digi­tized be­lief net­work?

  Thanks for that. Request to join sent.

• avichapman 28 May 2012 23:54 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Arran_Stirton’s comment on: A digi­tized be­lief net­work?

  That’s a great idea. And in the domain of physics, it might be a lot easier to quantify the probability that a belief is wrong. And what theories theories rest upon. The same could be done for pure mathematics.

• avichapman 29 May 2012 0:01 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: A digi­tized be­lief net­work?

  I think that’s a great idea. We could offer it as a web-based individual tool and then apply some sort of analysis to the results to come up with the data we might need to offer guidance in decision theory.

• avichapman 29 May 2012 0:05 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Thomas’s comment on: A digi­tized be­lief net­work?

  That’s where such a tool could come in handy. To propagate in a human mind, you must evaluate every belief that rests on the changed belief. And then do it again for the beliefs that rested on the beliefs, etc. At any stage, you can make a mistake in logic and propagate an incorrect belief. A computer would take seconds and would not make such mistakes. You wouldn’t have to believe what the computer tells you, but if it tells you what you didn’t expect to see, it would be a good idea to consider its reasoning.

• avichapman 29 May 2012 0:19 UTC

  2 points

  on: A digi­tized be­lief net­work?

  Hi all,

  I wrote this and then went away for a long weekend. I’m glad to see that everyone’s enjoying it. After reading all of the comments, I’ve applied to join the Facebook group mentioned by Curiouskid.

  I also agree with the suggestion that it would need to be a model of a personal Baysian Network with an attached decision theory tool to help users make logical choices about what they enter and how the assess probabilities. For example, instead of asking for a probability, it might ask how many times in a lifetime you’d expect to be wrong about something you feel this confident about. (How often are you likely to go to sleep on Tuesday and wake up on a day other than Wednesday? There’s probably a lot of people who live their whole lives without that ever happening.)

  Moreover, it would be web-based, with the decision theory tool making use of the database of individual networks to help form a view of communal knowledge. (This part would never be perfect, because the size of the sum of the individual networks would be so large that NP-hard considerations come into play.) It would need to be able to show its work in graphic format when one of its assessments is challenged.

  I will read up on existing argument mapping tools and the deliberations of the aforementioned Facebook group. If no one else is already doing this, I think we should do it. Anyone have any knowledge on how to go about it?

  I think it would be a case of having a period of discussing the problem with a growing wiki page (or something) containing information about the problem to be solved. After that, we could discuss the shape of the solution. Only after that, those with the technical knowledge could discuss the best way of actually implementing the solution. Then we could divide up the work between those with the time and appropriate skills and actually do it.

• avichapman 1 Jun 2012 1:53 UTC

  2 points

  on: Asch’s Con­for­mity Experiment

  I was all set to ask whether the result of female groups’ increased conformity had any explanatory power over the question of why there aren’t more woman in the rationalist movement. Then as I read on, it became less likely that female psychology had anything to do with it. Rather, in-group vs out-group psychology did. Males, being the socially more privileged gender, are more likely to see themselves as ‘just normal’ rather than part of a particular group called ‘males’.

  Of course, this lends itself to predictions. In a given grouping that self-identifies strongly as that grouping (such as woman, minority ethnicities, etc), if that group is very into a particular subject, its members will also likely be into it. Whereas, with a group that is less likely to self identify (such as American Caucasians, Americans within American borders (but not abroad) and men) the conformity on interests will be less.

  Have there been any studies done to test this minority vs majority group conformity idea?

• avichapman 4 Jun 2012 0:27 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: avichapman’s comment on: Asch’s Con­for­mity Experiment

  I’m not upset about losing points for this post, but I am a bit confused about it. Many out there know more about this stuff than I do. Did I say something factually inaccurate or engage in bad reasoning? I want to know so that I don’t repeat my mistake.

• avichapman 4 Jun 2012 3:25 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: TimS’s comment on: Asch’s Con­for­mity Experiment

  Ah.

  I had suspected that it might be because someone had tried to infer my position on such matters from my asking of the question and didn’t like the implication. I did, after all, admit to including the thesis that ‘the observed high conformance of a group of females is influenced by an aspect of female psychology’ in my list of possible explanations for the high conformance in that group, even though I ended up rejecting that hypothesis.

  (I suspect that your position viz a viz whether either gender is superior is not that different than my own. But to be clear, my position is that both genders possess great capacity for type 2 cognition, which is the most important measurement of human success. Any difference between healthy adults of either gender in their use of such cognition comes down to social factors, which can be changed to create a fairer society.)

  I’m still surprised about the second paragraph’s inaccuracy, though. In my experience, the chants of “USA, USA, USA” occur at sporting matches against other countries. That’s not an ‘internal to America’ thing. Then again, I don’t live in America and haven’t for many years. I chose America because I was trying to cater my words to my audience. Perhaps that was wrong and I should have spoken from experience instead. (I’m Australian.)

  I want to use every word accurately, so I would be most appreciative if you could give me a few examples of jargon I’ve used and a description (or link to one) of the way it should actually be used.

  Thanks, Avi

  PS—Yes. It was just one vote, so maybe I got re-upvoted or something. Oh well. The experienced alerted me to an issue. That’s all anyone could ask of it.

Mailing List for Digi­tized Belief Net­work Discussion

• avichapman 19 Jun 2012 3:46 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: cultureulterior’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 16, chap­ter 85

  I’ve been seeing stuff like this all thread: “That’s why nppbeqvat gb Ibyqrzbeg/​Evqqyr/​Fnynmne vg frrzf gb unir whfg orra n terng frecrag, abg n onfvyvfx, juvpu vf whfg jung ur jbhyq fnl. Guvf nyfb rkcynvaf gur qnzntrq guvaxvat Uneel frrf.”

  What does it mean? I assume it’s some sort of code.

• avichapman 19 Jun 2012 4:15 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: arundelo’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 16, chap­ter 85

  Thanks. Now I’m in on the secret. :)