Would one get banned from this journal for registering the testing of 100 only slightly different hypotheses at p=0.01?
CasioTheSane
Karma: 510
If you’re not sure which of those fields you prefer, a physics undergraduate is a gateway to all of them. I did physics and then ended up getting really interested in biology, and am working on a PhD in bioengineering. Physics teaches you to tackle hard problems with mathematics- a skill that can be applied to any intellectual pursuit.
PhD students in science and engineering are generally paid, so it’s not a huge financial burden. It’s not a waste of time either, if you choose the right professor you’ll be free to work on whatever you think is interesting and important.
Publishing is not as time consuming as you think, and it’s much more helpful to the scientific community and your career than blog posts. Good peer reviewed publications will almost guarantee you support to keep working on whatever you think is worth working on.
If you do good work in science but put it just on blogs, it will likely get lost where other scientists will never learn from your work and build on it, and you will be seen as unproductive and will lose your academic career. This could change in the future, but that’s how it is now. Many scientists will assume that you didn’t publish it because it had glaring flaws preventing it from passing peer review, and therefore isn’t even worth reading.
The most important part of an undergraduate degree is doing research. If you don’t do any research as an undergrad, you will have a hard time getting into a PhD program, and you’ll also have no reason to believe you’d like it, or succeed in it.
I suspect that it’s not the telling of the goal, but the feedback you get from your audience that changes your ability to put effort towards a goal.
Dopamine drives action and is highest when the desired outcome is most uncertain (probability ~0.5). IE, If you’re uncertain of success, but think it’s attainable this is when you’re most motivated to work hard. Therefore, presumably a goal that someone is already working hard towards already has a perceived probability of success around 0.5.
If your interaction with others about your intentions raises your perceived probability of success, through say comments such as “that will be so easy for you, you’ll do great” this will lower dopamine. Conversely, if people say “that’s truly impossible- you’re wasting your time” and you believe them, that will also lower dopamine and reduce effort.
If you want to help someone achieve their goals when they explain them, the best reaction is probably to help maintain their uncertainty of success or failure. For example “that will be really difficult, but I think you have a chance if you really work hard at it” is probably more helpful than “you’re so smart, I have zero doubt that you’ll achieve the goal.”
If you’re already working hard on a goal, it’s probably better not to confide in others because you don’t know how they will respond, and how that might influence your ability to remain motivated. If you do confide in someone who is usually encouraging, it wouldn’t hurt to explain a real reason why the goal will be very difficult for you to achieve. I don’t know why you’d confide in people who are usually discouraging…
Actually, I tested it with some complex equations and it typeset them correctly. This is a useful tool, albeit not for the problem at hand.
Health in the modern era, health in the 21st century is a learned skill.
-Jeff Olson
As a new lesswrongER, perhaps the most exciting thing about this community is the ability to reference Douglas Adams un-cited and assume that people will know exactly what I’m talking about.
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.
-Douglas Adams
I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.
-Douglas Adams
“Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin and the catflap!”
“The what?” said Richard.
“The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a …”
“Yes,” said Richard, “there was also the small matter of gravity.”
“Gravity,” said Dirk with a slightly dismissed shrug, “yes, there was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely a discovery. It was there to be discovered.” …
“You see?” he said dropping his cigarette butt, “They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later. But the catflap … ah, there is a very different matter. Invention, pure creative invention. It is a door within a door, you see.”
-Douglas Adams
How to use human history as a nutritional prior?
All foods both exhibit toxicity, and provide nutrients. I think the goal of nutrition is to choose the right foods in the right amounts to balance nutritional needs with toxic effects.
Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. When you really look into it we don’t know much about human nutrition, but some choices are still better than others with the information we do have. The problem is I am having trouble finding a rigorous way to weigh these different choices. I guess the real question isn’t “is gluten toxic?” but “are gluten containing foods more or less toxic than other alternatives which meet the same nutritional requirements?”
That’s a great point about the lead cups, and smoking. It certainly makes me wonder what other things are hurting our health right now, that we potentially have the clues to identify but haven’t managed to connect the dots yet.
That only makes sense in cases where you have no additional data suggesting that some foods are healthier than others.
Also, if a few foods exist which exhibit chronic toxicity at low doses, but you don’t know which foods those are, wouldn’t it be safer to limit the total number of different foods you consume, as to limit the chance of consuming a particularly bad one by chance? While atypical, there could be cases where the toxicity curve is relatively flat, and lower doses don’t really protect you. For example, an endocrine toxin that simulates a hormonal signal even at a low dose.
Are you actually suggesting that people attack chip fab plants in attempt to prevent WBE from occurring before de novo AGI?
I think if you were successful, you’d be more likely to prevent either from occurring than to prevent WBE from occurring first. It takes a whole lot of unfounded technological optimism to estimate that friendly de novo AGI is simple enough that an action like this would make it occur first, when we don’t even know what the obstacles really are.
What do your probability estimates and expected value calculations say?
I agree with your assessment that this would effectively delay WBE, and therefore increase the chances of it occurring last but I can’t even guess at how likely that is to actually be effective without at least a rough estimate of how long it will take to develop de novo AGI.
Your idea is very interesting, but I’ll admit I had a strong negative emotional reaction. It’s hard for me to imagine any situation under which I would sit down and do some calculations, check them over a few times, and then go start killing people and blowing stuff up over the result. I’m not prepared to joint the Rational Liberation Front just yet.
//edit: I also really want to see where brain emulation research goes, out of scientific curiosity.
Radiation actually appears to exhibit hormesis- small doses of ionizing radiation likely activate some protective response, which decreases rather than increases cancer risk.
I think allergens, and compounds which initiate autoimmune disease (gluten in coeliacs) are a good example of something which remains toxic at low doses. There hasn’t been a lot of research into it, but even extremely low doses of gluten seem to be harmful to coeliacs.
Why would you think they’re a joke? We seem to be on a clear path to achieve it in the near future.
Yes, it exists: http://genomera.com
They’re actively running experiments and collecting data but are in “beta testing” and are very exclusive on whom they allow to join. I’m disappointed they didn’t choose me when I filled out their request for a beta invite.
A huge problem with collecting data like this in the US population, is that everyone has a similar diet. There’s so few people totally excluding gluten, you can’t expect to measure it’s effects with epidemiological diet surveys: you need to actually do a controlled trial where you tell people to avoid it.
In China where only about half of people eat foods with gluten the biggest epidemiological study ever performed (the China Study) did find that wheat intake was independently correlated with overall mortality (http://rawfoodsos.com/the-china-study/). They never published this finding themselves, but the correlation is clearly there in the data.
There’s a lot of question about their methodology- they didn’t keep or report data on individuals, but lumped whole communities together as single data points. There’s likely a lot of highly correlated regional habits that weren’t on the questionnaire, and I tend to find the whole study pretty questionable. For the most part, it’s just comparing the health of rural farmers with wealthier urban Chinese- the two groups have radically different health, lifestyle, and diets and we can only control for the few questions they actually asked.
Perhaps now that gluten avoidance seems to be becoming a “fad diet” in western countries, suddenly it will be possible to actually collect good data on this.
You have to be careful what you mean by carcinogen. I suspect what you’re saying is true for some chemical carcinogens and ionizing radiation in single burst exposures, but not for other time varying patterns of ionizing radiation exposure.
It hasn’t been confirmed in humans, but ionizing radiation exposure most certainly doesn’t have a linear dose response with in vitro cell lines. Well, it does for single doses- but initial doses to be protective against future doses (hormesis): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1533272/?tool=pmcentrez
Ionization of DNA molecules is going to be linear in response to radiation, but you can’t assume that will result in a linear cancer risk. Cells can up and down regulate their DNA repair mechanisms under varying conditions, allowing for a much more complicated relationship between radiation and cancer risk.
In this case, cells appear to up-regulate poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) in response to past radiation exposure, increasing the chance of an accurate repair after an ionization event damages one strand.
//edit: The nucleus is also not the only potential site of cancer inducing mutations, the mitochondrial genome is another possibility.
I suspect this is because we’re still missing major parts of quantum mechanics.
Richard Feynman’s famous quote is accurate. Before I studied physics in college I was pretty sure that I still had a lot to learn about quantum mechanics. After studying it for several years, I now have a high level of confidence that I know almost nothing about quantum mechanics.