Douglas Reay graduated from Cambridge University (Trinity College) in 1994. He has since worked in the computing and educational sectors.
Douglas_Reay
How minimal is our intelligence?
Examine your assumptions
How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy
How do you think LessWrong does at productive discussion of gender issues (when discussed) compared to other communities you have experience of that have a similar gender ratio (eg the Science Fiction community)? Do you think the LessWrong community would benefit most from a higher, lower, or about the current frequency of such discussions?
LiveJournal Memes
Global Workspace Theory
[Book Review] “The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t.”, by Nate Silver
What should a friendly AI do, in this situation?
What topics (if any) have you considered posting about (or replying to), but then decided not to because of fear of gender-specific negative response or attention? If there any specific question you’d be interested in participating in a future discussion upon, on the same anonymous lines as this one?
- 9 Sep 2012 12:22 UTC; 25 points) 's comment on Call for Anonymous Narratives by LW Women and Question Proposals (AMA) by (
Conformity
Why? Have women been complaining that you make them feel uncomfortable by how you talk to them?
Think of the basic advice in the first few links as being like a computer trouble shooting guide that starts off by saying “Is the plug in the socket? Is the socket turned on? Have you tried rebooting?”. Sort of a checklist, that you only need to work through if there is actually a problem.
Kind of like: “Do women glare and yell at you when you hug them? Check whether you’re using the PolyApproved (tm) procedure of making the awkward ‘wanna hug?’ gesture first, and only proceeding to an actual hug if the gesture is reciprocated. Note for advanced users: there are alternative procedures and short cuts which can be used at your own risk.”
The Ape Constraint discussion meeting.
I don’t think there’s any ‘distributed application’ which seems fitted for a prediction market
I don’t see any intrinsic reason why one couldn’t be written. Splitting the problem into pieces:
Posing questions A distributed database could hold these
Validating questions You’d want some form of reputation system or elected panel of moderators, to verify which newly posed questions had the required properties (eg not a duplicate, clear criteria on how the question is to be resolved, etc). Again, elections and webs of trust can both be handled in a distributed fashion with no centralised authority.
Resolving questions Marking which side of the ‘bet’ wins, or if it is still unresolved. Similar issues to validating, though more at stake. Need perhaps the possibility of submissions of evidence and counter-submissions.
Placing bets Easiest way would be for the person to place their sum of money in escrow, encrypted with the key spread out and requiring X out of Y holders of the key parts to release it upon resolution. Alternatively allow people to purchase insurance from ‘market makers’ who, in turn, have large sums in escrow backing the bets. No central authority or website required, though you could certainly use websites as convenience aggregator gateways to the underlying distributed data.
Metadata Keeping track of reputations of who is winning how much, which bets are busy or have a lot staked upon them, etc.
Can you think of an aspect of having a prediction market that REQUIRES there to be a single central website?
Can anyone here honestly state that they learned something from this thread?
I would note that, even if true, we are unlikely to see replies of the form “I learned that I am creepy” or “I knew I am creepy, but from this thread I learned that LessWrong is aware of the problem and I’m unlikely to get away with it in meetings because people have named the problem and are aware of the importance of picking up on it.”
There doesn’t seem to be anyone arguing seriously that Less Wrong is a cult, but we do give some newcomers that impression.
The LW FAQ says: >
Why do you all agree on so much? Am I joining a cult?
We have a general community policy of not pretending to be open-minded on long-settled issues for the sake of not offending people. If we spent our time debating the basics, we would never get to the advanced stuff at all. Yes, some of the results that fall out of these basics sound weird if you haven’t seen the reasoning behind them, but there’s nothing in the laws of physics that prevents reality from sounding weird.
I suspect that putting a more human face on the front page, rather than just linky text, would help.
Perhaps something like a YouTube video version of the FAQ, featuring two (ideally personable) people talking about what Less Wrong is and is not, and how to get started on it. For some people, seeing is believing. It is one thing to tell them there are lots of different posters here and we’re not fanatics; but that doesn’t have the same impact as watching an actual human with body cues talking.
What is life?
Suggestion : make it easier to work out which tags to put on your article
[LINK] Intrade Shuts Down
Looking at the Americas, we have evidence of cultures with agriculture and pottery, roughly equivalent to Europe’s Linear A, going back about 6000 years ago (4000 BCE). We have writing dating back to about 3000 years ago (1000 BCE), though this was probably delayed by much of their function earlier being usurped by quipu (which date back at least to 2600 BCE). This corresponds to the emergence of the first long term stable cities in the Americas starting at about 1500 BCE and the growth, about 1000 years later, of Teotihuacan, a true majestic city rivalling ancient Ur in size and influence.
So yes, that is an independent (but later) development of civilization, which I think endorses the idea that once the climate settled down after the intergalacial, our species was going to develop civilization on a fairly quick timescale (compared to biological evolutionary timescales), and that it wasn’t lack of intelligence holding us up.
Thus my caveat “we know of”.
However, while it would be quite possible for a victor to erase written mention of a rival, it is harder to erase beyond all archaeological recovery the signs of a major city that’s been stable and populated for a thousand years or more. For instance, if we look at Jericho, which was inhabited earlier than Ur was, we don’t see archaeological evidence of it becoming a major city until much later than Ur (see link and link).
If there was a city large enough and long lived enough, around before Ur, that passed onto Ur the bundle of things like writing and hierarchy that we known Ur passed onto others, then I’m unaware of it, and the evidence has been surprisingly thoroughly erased (which isn’t impossible, but neither is it a certainty that such a thing happened).
See also the comment about Uruk. There were a number of cities in Sumer close together that would have swapped ideas. But the things said about calories and types of grain apply to all of them.