Is LessWrong interested in Bayesian machine learning introductory articles?
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The Joy of Bias
I was kinda surprised to see IQ as an external factor; my impression is that internal vs. external locus of control is actually personality traits vs. circumstances and environment, and IQ obviously falls into the first category.
If you consider IQ and mental health external factors, what are the internal factors, then? Willpower? But willpower is determined by the brain structure just as IQ and mental health and other personality traits.
Basically, if you assign everything to the “external” category, so that the “internal” is an empty set (or almost empty), then one’s success is determined by “external” factors. No surprise here.
I know that I’ve read about a number of biases by now, but they don’t come to mind very easily. If I wish to become wary enough to spot cognitive biases in my own thought, then I might appreciate being able to quickly summon many examples of cognitive biases to mind.
You probably don’t need to be able to make a full list of cognitive biases off the top of your head; rather, you need to have relevant memory about biases triggered whenever you encounter a situation where you are prone to them. As for training this, you can, say, open a list of biases at the end of the day, and figure out which biases you were affected by during the day, and try to remember those.
Of course, if you often want to tell others about cognitive biases, memorize a few of them with some good examples.
I think that all self-help / “learning to learn” / etc. articles should contain a short summary telling us some reasons to actually believe anything written below. Like references to relevant research, or author’s real life achievements, or something. Generally, one shouldn’t rely on personal anecdotes; but for self-help, even having a single data point is often too high a standard.
In your article, I couldn’t find a single bit of evidence in support of your claims.
Well, everyone will likely die sooner or later, even post-Singularity (provided that it will happen, which isn’t quite a solid fact).
Anyway, I think that any morality system that proclaims unethical all and every birth happened so far is inadequate.
Articles on such topics are notorious for their average bad quality. Reformulating in Bayesian terms, the prior probability of your statements being true is low, so you should provide some proofs or evidence—or why I (or anyone) should believe you? Have you actually checked if it works? Have you actually checked if it works for somebody else?
I don’t think that personal achievements are a bullet-proof argumentation for such an advice. Still, when I read something like this, I’m pretty sure that it contains valuable information, although it is probably a mistake to follow such advice verbatim anyway. So, if you have Hamming-level credentials, it will help.
As for your article, probably the only way to fix it is to add proofs to your statements. What evidence supports them? Is there any psychological research to back up your claims? Why do you think it is optimal (or near-optimal) way to learn skills?
This is a good self-help article. Can you see the reference list? :)
Agreed that LW is in a kind of stagnation. However, I think that just someone writing a series of high-quality posts would suffice to fix it. Now, the amount of discussion in comments is quite good, the problem is that there aren’t many interesting posts.
If a group said that they thought A was an important issue and the solution was X, most members would pay more attention than if a random individual said it. No-one would have to listen to anything they say, but I imagine that many would choose to. Furthermore if the exec were all actively involved in the projects, I imagine they’d be able to complete some themselves, especially if they choose smaller ones.
It isn’t quite a good thing; many people noticed that LW is somewhat like Eliezer’s echo chamber. Actually, we should endorse high-quality opinions different from LW mainstream.
Disagreed.
The old introduction may be obscure, but at least it is informative. A visitor can follow the links, read 5 minutes about biases (if it is required) and then he gets some understanding of what this site is actually about. The new version is much more vague. Who would like to think more clearly, improve their lives and make major disasters less likely? Well, pretty much everybody.
I don’t think that minor changes, like rephrasing introduction or adding disclaimers about criticisms to FAQ will have any noticeable effect. To attract significantly more people, you should write actual content, like HPMoR or the sequences.
Personally, when I recommend LessWrong to friends, I tell a few words about what it is, so they don’t actually have to read introduction at all. Or, even better, link directly to the sequences.
Anyway, remember that one data point is one data point. People in marketing have their A/B tests for a reason; now, it’s unclear whether the new introduction will attract more people because of its apprehensibility or less because of its vagueness.
These aren’t illusions, even free will; let alone time, money and probability.
Free will concept (as used by anyone but philosophers) makes sense; there are things that are controlled by your conscious processes. For example, now I’m deliberately controlling my arms to type this comment, isn’t it a free will? Of course, I’m entity within physics, my thoughts and actions are fully determined by physics laws (whether random or not), etc, etc. Yet, I can deliberately move my arm.
Probability isn’t an illusion; probability is a measure of uncertainty, and probability theory is a large and very useful field mathematics which supplies us with knowledge about how to use such a nice tool. It’s not an illusion; it’s a mathematical concept.
Time isn’t an illusion; no matter how timeless your physics theory, it must contain explanation for phenomena that you now call time. If you develop a shiny new gravitation theory, apples won’t fall differently. You can a new shiny timeless physics, butwhatever you now call time isn’t going to disappear. It would be explained as a dimension, or as a function of position of all particles in the universe.
As for money, I don’t quite understand why they are considered an illusion at all. I have checked banknotes in my wallet; they are real, as far as I can tell. Did you mean some economical misconceptions?
And the effort required to earn the money to buy the ring is also wasted.
No, it’s not. You have produced (hopefully) valuable goods or services; why they are wasted, from the viewpoint of society?
AFAIK, you should confirm email to comment.
Why do you prefer offline conversations to online?
Off the top of my head, I can name 3 advantages of online communication, which are quite important to LessWrong:
You don’t have to go anywhere. Since the LW community is distributed all over the world, it is really important; when you go to meetups, you can communicate only with people who happen to be in the same place as you, when you communicate online, you can communicate with everyone.
You have more time to think before reply, if you need to. For example, you can support your arguments with relevant research papers or data.
As you have noticed, online articles and discussions remain available on the site. You have proposed to write articles after offline events, but a) not everything will be covered by them and b) it requires additional effort.
Well, enjoy offline events if you like to; but the claim that people should always prefer offline activities over online activities is highly questionable, IMO.
I believe that both making notes and making flashcards are suboptimal; the best (read: fastest) method I know is to read and understand what you want to learn, then close your eyes and recall everything in full detail (that is hard, and somewhat painful; you should try to remember something for at least few minutes before giving up). Re-read whatever you haven’t remembered. Repeat until convergence.
In math, it helps to solve problems and find counterexamples to theorem conditions, because it leads to deeper understanding, which makes remembering significantly easier. Also try to make as much connections to already known facts and possible applications as possible: our memory is associative.
I’m starting to suspect that we’re arguing on definitions. By search I mean the entire algorithm of finding the best hypothesis; both random hypothesis checking and Aristotelian logic (and any combination of these methods) fit. What do you mean?
Narrowing the hypothesis space is search. Once you narrowed the hypotheses space to a single point, you have found an answer.
As for eagles: if we build a drone that can fly as well as an eagle can, I’d say that the drone has an eagle-level flying ability; if a computer can solve all intellectual tasks that a human can solve, I’d say that the computer has a human-level intelligence.
It’s extremely hard to ban the research worldwide, and then it’s extremely hard to enforce such decision.
Firstly, you’ll have to convince all the world’s governments (btw, there are >200) to pass such laws.
Then, you’ll likely have all powerful nations doing the research secretly, because it provides some powerful weaponry / other ways to acquire power; or just out of fear that some other government will do it first.
And even if you somehow managed to pass the law worldwide, and stopped governments from doing research secretly, how would you stop individual researchers?
The humanity hasn’t prevented the use of nuclear bombs, and has barely prevented a full-blown nuclear war; while nuclear bombs require national-level industry to produce, and are available to a few countries only. How can we hope to ban something which can be researched and launched in your basement?
I’ve started commenting here recently, but I’m a long time lurker (>1 year). Also, I was speaking about self-help articles in general, not conditional on whether they are posted on LW—it makes sense, because pretty much anyone can post on LW.
Now I found a somewhat less extreme example of what I think is an OK post on self-help although it doesn’t have scientific references, because a) the author told us what actual results he achieved and, more importantly, b) the author explained why he thinks that the advice works in the first place.
Personally, I don’t find your post consistent with my observations, but it’s not my main objection—my main objection is that throwing an instruction without any justification is a bad practice, especially on such a controversial topic, especially in a rationalist community.
Short answer: use differential entropy and differential mutual information.
Differential entropy and Shannon entropy are both instances of a more general concept; Shannon entropy for discrete distributions and differential entropy for absolutely continuous ones.
KL-divergence is actually more about approximations, than about variables dependence; it would be strange to use KL-divergence for your purposes, since it is non-symmetric. Anyway, KL-divergence is tightly connected to mutual information:
%20=%20KL(p(x,y)%7C%7Cp(x)p(y)))Differential mutual information is a measure of variables’ dependence; differential entropy is a measure of… what? In the discrete case we have the encoding interpretation, but it breaks in the continuous case. The fact that it can be negative shouldn’t bother you, because its interpretation is unclear anyway.
As for (differential) mutual information, it can’t be negative, as you can see from the formula above (KL-divergence is non-negative). Nothing weird occurs here.
Any “fundamentally” random process can be seen as a deterministic process. Since it will have a single outcome, we can set it as the only outcome possible, and yield a fully deterministic process which is indistinguishable from the original, random, process. In other words, we can say that a fundamentally random process is a deterministic process which relies on hidden variables which are unreachable for us.
I have noticed that many people here want LW resurrection for the sake of LW resurrection.
But why do you want it in the first place?
Do you care about rationality? Then research rationality and write about it, here or anywhere else. Do you enjoy the community of LWers? Then participate in meetups, discuss random things in OTs, have nice conversations, etc. Do you want to write more rationalist fiction? Do it. And so on.
After all, if you think that Eliezer’s writing constitute most of LW value, and Eliezer doesn’t write here anymore, maybe the wise decision is to let it decay.
Beware the lost purposes.