Abd

Karma: 12

Abd 29 Jul 2015 21:53 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Cold fusion: real after all?
Thanks, Eliezer. You suggested “Although many claims have been made and some claims continue to be made, none of the claims has ever been replicated reliably despite a very great deal of effort.”

That is what the article claims. “The term was popularised with the work of Pons and Fleischmann, which gained tremendous publicity but was irreproducible.[1]

The citation is to a study on lenr-canr.org that clearly demonstrates the opposite. The entire Rational Wiki article is trolling, designed to insult and irritate, which is typical of the RatWiki approach.

I’m still an admin there, totally useless. Wikipedians came there to impose the Wikipedian view on the cold fusion article, there is a huge history (as the article points out, but doesn’t point out details), but, bottom line, when I found that RatWiki was quite willing to tolerate me being told to “go fuck your kids,” by a Wikipedian attack dog who had created the disruption on Wikipedia that led to the second cold fusion ArbCom case (where I was actually confirmed in my filing claim) I essentially gave up on the site.

David Gerard was a big part of that. Technocrat, VIP Wikipedian, and quite willing to impose his opinions instead of actually learning what is in sources. Hence the article is full of “information” that is contrary to the sources cited. Try to explain that there? Tl:dr.

Yet, at least, the article points to some sources of interest. Those have been excluded from Wikipedia. The article snark is visible on RatWiki, the Wikipedia article pretends to be neutral. Some of the same pseudoskeptical ideas prevail in both places.

The claim that cold fusion researchers are motivated by a dream of limitless energy is a common claim. It was said about me. I have no idea that cold fusion is necessarily useful for energy production, just that it is not impossible. My interest on Wikipedia was encyclopedic,” not POV-pushing. I was very careful about that, but I confronted abusive administration, twice, successfully.* That is quite enough to make a non-administrator persona non grata on Wikipedia. So then, once banned there, I actually became involved in the field, hence my published article. My goal is to promote careful research, with increased precision, and I have the support of at least one of the most notable critics of cold fusion. This is what science is about.

Abd 29 Jul 2015 21:20 UTC
0 points
on: Cold fusion: real after all?
Wow, it’s been more than two years since I commented on Less Wrong. Great article here, though, as usual with cold fusion, it still contains some misunderstandings. Let me dispose of some of them by fiat.

Anything to do with Rossi is not science. There have been demonstrations and tests, including one with a level of independence that remained inadequate. Rossi is commercial, his methods are secret, and so any reports from him cannot be reproduced. It’s trivially easy to dismiss Rossi as a fraud, but on closer examination, the matter is complex. He might be a fraud, or he might have something, and most of us, to know the truth about it, will have to wait. Personally, I don’t trust a word he says without verification, which has nothing to do with fraud, necessarily, but everything to do with his being a commercial actor with possible motive to confuse competition.

Something like this is true with Swartz, though Swartz does disclose much more. In the end, it is proprietary ttechnology and crucial details are withheld. So while Swartz may have put on some interesting demos, again, this is not really science, and Swartz has an … interesting … reputation in the field. Swartz, in general, thinks that almost everyone else is wrong.

When I first saw Iwamura’s results, I thought this was IT. Conclusive. However, the devil is in the details, and that was six years ago, I’ve learned a great deal since then. As noted, NRL was unable to replicate, even though working with Iwamura. To be sure, NRL has had great difficulty replicating any cold fusion results. I don’t know why. I have discussed this extensively with an NRL researcher, and he has, in fact, seen results that convinced him that the phenomenon was real. However, this is the bottom line: sketchy and anecdotal results are far from enough to overturn a massive rejection cascade, which cold fusion went through in 1989, and the effects linger.

Direct evidence is needed. It exists.

What is remarkable is that the author here seems to be unaware of it. I attempted to cover that in the Wikipedia article, because this is amply found in reliable source. It was excluded, and so was I.

It remains missing, in spite of secondary peer-reviewed source. Editors who would have known to place it have been banned.

(Iwamura’s results are still on the table, they have not been rejected. However, the significance of those results is entirely unclear. The reactions reported are not those reported by others. Transmutation reactions are somehow “sexy.” However, the best established transmutation in FP Heat Effect experiments is to tritium, and that is about a million times down in level from helium. it’s like the neutron results: people get all excited by them, but levels are very low, at best roughly a million times down from tritium. All this distracts from the main event. It’s exciting because those results are “nuclear,” and thus unexpected in a chemical environment. But nobody ever looked this close before.)

Cold fusion was very much unexpected. The name could be misleading. Pons and Fleischman actually claimed an “unknown nuclear reaction,” and they knew full well that what they had found didn’t match the known deuterium fusion reaction. I could give many reasons why that’s impossible under the PF conditions. There is an obvious conclusion: the effect is not the known deuterium fusion reaction. It is something else.

However, it is fusion, as to result, and what is being fused is deuterium, but that straight fusion reaction is very well-known, and half the reactions produce tritium and half produce a neutron, the latter would be at fatal levels if the heat produced were from this.

Instead, helium is produced. d + d → helium plus gamma is a very rare branch, normally. In this case, the helium and heat are commensurate, and at the fusion ratio, but that is wonky! I.e., if there is a single nuclear product, there must also be a gamma, and those gammas are not observed, the energy ends up entirely as heat. There are proposed mechanisms that handle this, but none of them, so far, match experiment enough to be useful, none have been tested and confirmed.

Cold fusion is a mystery. That’s been my theme, now, for some years. We do not know how this reaction takes place. We know some of the conditions, and we know the result (heat and helium). See my paper in Current Science: http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/108/04/0574.pdf

There is another article in that Current Science issue by Mike McKubre that fully addresses why there were so many early replication failures. http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/108/04/0495.pdf

This is all quite well-known.

Running a Fleischmann-Pons experiment is still very difficult. There are protocols now with “success” at greater than fifty percent, i.e., more than half of the cells will show statistically significant heat, sometimes much more than that. The search for a “reliably reproducible experiment” distracted many from studying what was already available, protocols that sometimes generate the heat. What is needed, then, is to measure helium. Helium is not easy to measure, at the levels involved. There is always a concern about leakage. However, leakage is unlikely to produce helium that is correlated to the heat production (and “heat” in these cases is not very hot, not enough to, say, foster leakage. In some work, the cell is held at constant elevated temperature, so the “excess heat” is how much that heating is backed off to maintain the temperature). This work has been done many times, see my paper. Don’t pay much attention to the diagram, that was eye candy wanted by some. It is a result, but it could be very confusing, that’s from gas-loaded work, not a Fleischmann-Pons experiment.

The fact is that this work could all be done again. It has not had a priority in the field for about a decade, because people working in the field already know that helium is the main product (almost entirely). If anyone is still not convinced that the Anomalous Heat Effect—as it is now being called—is real, supporting research to confim this with increased precision would be in order. (Right now, Storms estimate, the reaction Q is 25 +/- 5 MeV/4He, compared to a theoretical value of 23.8 MeV/4He. The difficulty is in capturing and measuring all the helium, but it can be done. McKubre’s best work has the error bars at 10%, and that is still quite a bit seat-of-the-pants.

Setting aside the commercial efforts, which are almost entirely with nickel-hydrogen reactions, we think, palladium deuteride as a fuel may never be practical. However, we won’t really know until we understand the mystery. Palladium is scarce. Unless reaction efficiency can be drastically increased, there isn’t enough palladium to handle our energy needs. That’s why nickel and hydrogen are so interesting, but … the science behind NiH is nowhere near as well established as with PdD. We don’t know the product, for example. Storms thinks it is deuterium, but he has no evidence, just a theory.

(The correlation is not weak, it is very strong. In particular, in extensive experimental series, if there is no heat, there is no anomalous helium. If there is heat, there is almost always commensurate helium, and the exceptions are not only rare, but explainable.

As to explosions, I know of none that were clearly nuclear. SRI was chemistry, and that might be so of others. The most interesting was a melt-down, not an explosion, the original Pons and Fleischmann event from 1984. In that case, the heat might have been nuclear; it was the P&F account of the damage that may have convinced the University of Utah to back these electrochemists. They responded by scaling down. Probably a good idea.

Abd 19 Nov 2012 1:26 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: Kawoomba’s comment on: Why Real Men Wear Pink

Apathy isn’t ever a virtue.

Why are you telling me what I can or cannot consider a virtue?

Ah, you may consider anything you like about anything. You may, for example, consider anorexia a virtue.

However, if simple indifference is a virtue, then I have a limitless supply of virtue, because I am indifferent to a limitless supply of possible objects.

“Lesser social awareness” is a recognized psychological impairment (it means “lesser than normal,” or “lesser” as in lessened for the individual), perhaps a developmental or affective disorder.

Indifference about status may be something we might laud, under some circumstances, but it can also be an indicator of depression.

Again, the operative conditional is “may be.” The word “apathy” is also important. That’s why I distinguished between apathy and indifference. Apathy is an abnormal indifference. Someone who is apathetic about food is anorexic.

The situation under consideration was someone “giving up on being fashionable.” That implies a change, that the person was concerned about fashion or appearance previously. Obviously, this might be the result of some turning to more important concerns, but, as stated, and with real people, a shift like that can be a symptom of a disorder.

So, Kawoomba, what is your concern here? What’s important about this topic?

Personally, I’m concerned about anyone who would think of apathy as a virtue. Apathy is a psychological condition, it is not “rational.”

Indifference may be rational. One who is apathetic will not even consider issues or investigate possibilities. One who investigates possibilities may decide that they are indifferent among a number of possible choices.

I might even be a fashionista, but on a particular day decide to wear those old torn pants and shirt, even if they are the “wrong color,” and so what? But that’s not apathy, it’s indifference. Apathy isn’t really a choice, it’s a disabling of the mechanisms that make choices and take action.

At least that’s what “apathy” means to me. When I’m apathetic, I don’t want to get up in the morning. It’s all too much trouble. It could mean anything from not enough coffee to girlfriend deficiency anemia.

Or it could be something deeper.

Abd 18 Nov 2012 23:43 UTC
−3 points
in reply to: Kawoomba’s comment on: Why Real Men Wear Pink
Apathy isn’t ever a virtue.

It might indicate that something is irrelevant, but it was only stated that this “may be” an indicator of a “deeper problem,” i.e., various psychological disorders do have apathy, particularly a loss of concern for how one appears to others, as a symptom.

Abd 17 Nov 2012 14:50 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Rationality Quotes November 2012

I adopted an African girl. What “race” is she? What determines this?

What determines it? Ancestry. Race is basically a way of asking “who were your ancestors?” and accepting a blurry answer because, well, each person has a lot of ancestors!

That is not what “race” means when people use the word. Race is a division of humanity into categories. Who determines the categories? Do those categories naturally occur? On what does the “race” category depend? Can “race” be identified visually? Can it be genetically determined?

Yes, if you divide people up into “races,” or into geographical population groups, and study their genetics, you can find statistical significance, but the two divisions will produce differing evaluations for individuals.

The classic way to identify someone’s “race” involves identifying one’s own group visually (and sometimes behaviorally, perhaps through dialect or language), and then lumping together those who don’t seem to match “my race” into other groups. That is why someone who is “mixed race” will be lumped into the “other group,” until the mixture becomes small enough to not be visible. How people perceive themselves is irrelevant to this process.

“Race” is a racist concept, naturally. The word “racist” is hot, and gets mixed up with racial chauvinism, but that’s distracting. I use “racism” to refer to the belief in race as an objective reality.

That version of race is obviously a biological reality, because people have different ancestries, even going back long distances, and the ancestry distribution can be geographically plotted.

I wrote that population genetics was a reality. Race is not. It’s arbitrary, and race is not scientifically defined. The conclusion is a non sequitur. Race has been totally discredited academically, and that’s not just political correctness.

Knowing she was adopted from Africa, odds are good that she’s mostly African.

Odds are entirely that she is African, i.e., she was born in Africa. I know that her grandparents were born in Africa, in her tribal region. Beyond that, I don’t know. Probably it goes back further, but there are always strays.

If her ancestry plot maintains “African” location, say entirely, back, say, 20 generations, does that mean that she is racially “African”? I hope you’d know that this could give results that might seem preposterous to those who depend on visual identification of “race.”

The basic question is being ignored. How is “race” identified? As used, my “race” does not depend on where I was born. It depends on … what? Where someone else was born? Who, specifically? What lumps all these people together? And separates them from others, who might look quite the same?

That’s only one step more informative than “human,” since it only gives you the archaic racial category- Negroid- which tells you as much as “Caucasoid” or “Mongoloid.”

“Archaic racial category.” So race is being used to define race? Those are just as you stated, “racial” categories, which assumes some identity based on … what?

Ethnicity would give a much narrower picture- about one person in six is African, but only about one person in four thousand is Gurage.

Adding on the data that she’s Ethiopian muddies the picture- due to its northeastern position, Ethiopia has been the site of significant mixing, and there’s quite a bit of ethnic diversity: the primary ethnicity, Oromo, is only a third of the population- your Chinese daughter, though, most likely has significant Han ancestry (92% of the population of mainland China).

Lucky guess about my Chinese daughter. The one-child policy impacts Han Chinese the most.

However, “Ethiopian” tells you almost nothing about “race.” Let’s start with this: Each tribal grouping in Ethiopia, by default, considers itself to be very different from the others. There are over seventy such groupings in Ethiopia, if we mark them by language.

So, using the archaic terms and assuming she’s from one of the more prevalent ethnicities, your daughter probably has about 60% Caucasoid ancestry and 40% Negroid ancestry.

Unlikely, in fact. She’s from the Kambata-Timbaro Tribal Region, her native language was Kambatigna. It’s a minor ethnicity, there are maybe a few hundred thousand Kambata.

In the U.S., she is readily identified by people as “Black.” She doesn’t look “Ethiopian” (which is popularly known through high-Arab ancestry general appearance). Is “Black” a race? What defines it?

I once had a friend tell me that my Chinese daughter was, of course, going to be more intelligent than the Ethiopian girl.

So, good IQ estimates in Africa are generally hard to come by, but Ethiopia supposedly has the world’s lowest average IQ, at 63 (administered in 1991, sample size of 250), and China is estimated to have an average IQ of 100. Working off that data (and assuming both groups have a standard deviation of 15), that gives a 96% chance that the Chinese daughter is smarter.

Was that a test administered racially, or was it according to how and where the child was raised and tested?

What kind of intelligence was measured? Intelligence generally confers survival value, but the form of intelligence selected shifts with environment.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Of course, given that they’re your daughters, there’s not much reason to guess; you could just get them both tested, which would be way cheaper and more informative than sponsoring another test of Ethiopian national IQ.

Ethiopian “national IQ” is totally irrelevant. Somehow, Ethiopia, with that supposedly low IQ, managed, almost uniquely in Africa, to avoid extended outside control, with an ancient and literate culture.

What I personally know is that, possibly contrary to stereotypes, the Ethiopian girl is highly competitive, she stars at whatever she does, the Chinese girl—raised here since she was under a year old—is shyer and suffers from the shadow of her younger sister. Both girls have no difficulty figuring out how to do what they want on computers. I have no confidence that IQ tests would tell me much of value, though at some point both girls will be tested to determine if they belong in “gifted” programs.

My racist friend knew nothing about my daughter’s ethnicity, he was judging entirely on “African,” based on his early experience with “Blacks” on the street in America (are they “African”?) , which wasn’t, shall we say, “positive.”

Abd 17 Nov 2012 2:00 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Rationality Quotes November 2012

The fact is, race is a good predictor of things like civilization, intelligence, violence, etc. I offer no explanations.

Eh? What is this thing you call “race,” Earth Monkey?

We used to think the answer was obvious. You know, it’s obvious what “race” someone is, isn’t it? Until you start to look at the details.

Race is a cultural convention. There is a science of population genetics, and it isn’t about “race.” Rather, people use population genetics to infer the social marker called “race.”

I adopted an African girl. What “race” is she? What determines this? She has tribal markings on her eyes—or the scars from tribal medicine for conjunctivitis, hard to tell—but the markings are characteristic of her region and tribe, so someone who knows could tell where she comes from, as to the region.

I once had a friend tell me that my Chinese daughter was, of course, going to be more intelligent than the Ethiopian girl. The Chinese daughter is no slouch, intellectually, but her younger sister is definitely smart as hell. My friend was a racist. Lots of people are racist. That is, they believe that race is a biological or even a “spiritual” reality. He wasn’t being mean, he was just being ignorant.

Abd 16 Nov 2012 21:38 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Rationality Quotes November 2012
We are seeing political memes here, standard stories or arguments. First, the mercury in CFLs compared to the impact of incandescents. That one is just plain silly, and hairyfigment cited some good sources. Sure, mercury in CFLs is a matter of concern, but in the real world, we must compare choices until we have better ones.

As to Female Genital Mutilation, I have a perspective on it, as I have a daughter from Ethiopia, a place where female circumcision is practiced, and there was some suspicion that she had been circumcised. (Believe it or not, it’s not always easy to tell. The ultimate professional opinion was, No.)

Is it “mutilation” or is it a “cultural practice” or does it have some other purpose?

There are all kinds of variation in the process. But to start, what about “Male Genital Mutilation,” i.e., circumcision, which is practically universal in Islam and Judaism? Female circumcision is controversial in Islam, and, apparently, was a pre-Islamic practice that was allowed, the Prophet is reported as saying, “If you cut your women, cut only a little.” It was never considered an obligation by sane Muslim scholars.

The horror stories that are told about FGM are far, far from a “little.” Probably the soundest approach to alleviating suffering here would be education, and that is exactly what is going on in Ethiopia.

Someone who imagines that there is some moral absolute here is dreaming. It looks like a cultural absolutism is being suggested. This culture is good and that culture is bad. Personally, I’m horrified by the extreme stories. However, I was also circumcised as a boy, it was routine, and my parents were Christian. And that has gone in and out of fashion over the years. Because my older boys were born at home, they were not immediately circumcised. There were problems, later, and eventually they went through the procedure. And it was a real problem, the doctor botched it. It would have been trivial at birth. Does that mean that boys should be circumcized?

No. It may indicate that if it’s going to be done, doing it earlier is probably less traumatic, for technical reasons. And doing it is largely a matter of cultural preference, and people do get crazy over Male Genital Mutilation.

Abd 15 Nov 2012 21:05 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Empirical claims, preference claims, and attitude claims
I don’t know how much to trust the Wikipedia article, but logical positivism, in its strong forms, is meaningless. That is, it is based on a proposition that by its own criteria, is not verifiable. However, what is truly valuable—because I say so! -- is developing a recognition of what is verifiable and what is not. To go further and claim that unverifiable statements are therefore meaningless is to go too far.

A writer here wrote, about the statement “[JB] sucks.” And another commented, what if “JB’s music is objectively crappy music??” After this was tagged as not a rational statement, he changed the text to read “That JB’s music is crappy music according to some standard.”

It gets preposterous. Yes, the writer was correct. If there is a standard, which can be objectively applied, for “crappy music,” then one could make a claim that the music is “objectively crappy by the standard.”

But that standard itself, is it objective? How was it determined? Suppose we take a survey of his target audience, choosing 100 children in a certain age range. If the survey has a scale of 1-10, with names for each choice, with, say, 1-2 being labelled “crappy,” and we play them a song, and ask for their response, and a majority of them rate it as “crappy,” that would allow us to claim a certain kind of objective measurement (of a subjective response).

But this is not what we ordinarily mean when we say something is “crappy.” I would mean

(1) I don’t like it.

(2) We don’t like it. (I.e., me and some undefined group, maybe my friends).

(3) It doesn’t work, it’s buggy, ugly, etc.

But the expression is not objective, it doesn’t point to objective measures or standards. If we had something objective to report, we wouldn’t say it that way, except perhaps as a summary or lead-in.

Language is fluid, ordinary human speech is not mathematics. I’ll put it this way: it’s always wrong and it’s always right. That is, it is always possible to interpret it to find flaws, and always possible to find something that works.

I don’t want to say “is true,” because that would enter a completely different territory of discussion. Right now, we are talking about types of statements, and it’s a valuable inquiry.

Abd 14 Nov 2012 21:02 UTC
0 points
in reply to: hankx7787’s comment on: Empirical claims, preference claims, and attitude claims
Anyone who would propose “objectively crappy” isn’t expressing rationality. There is no “objectively crappy,” unless you have objective standards for “crappy,” and apply them objectively.

I think Justin Bieber sucks.

I’m not going to tell my daughter that, because it’s just my own reaction, and my daughter would kill me.

Okay, okay, she wouldn’t kill me. She’d just tell me I’m an idiot. She’d be right.

I’m training her to distinguish between judgment and fact. It’s a task, she’s eleven. She does understand, when she’s sane. But the programming is strong that opinion is Real, man. And you actually are an Idiot, Dad.

Except when I just did something she likes (which is most of the time) and she is saying You are Awesome, Dad. Hey, I think she’s Awesome, too. That’s an objective fact.

Heh!

“Justin Bieber sucks” is a subjective comment. It would be so even if every human being agreed, and, rather obviously, that’s not the case.

Abd 14 Nov 2012 19:38 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Empirical claims, preference claims, and attitude claims

For example, how do you classify your very first (meta-)claim: “None of them are falsifiable claims about the nature of reality.” Is it an opinion?

The snarky answer: It’s not a falsifiable claim.

Any claim might be falsifiable if it is adequately specified, so that it becomes testable. If a claim, as stated, isn’t falsifiable, it might become so through specification. The author hints at this with:

“Justin Bieber sucks”. There are a few ways we could interpret this as shorthand for a different claim.

And some of the “different claims” may be falsifiable.

Ultimately, we could also take unfalsifiable claims as being expressions of some attitude. It’s only when we try to determine if they are “true” as applied to some reality “out there” that we run into trouble.

The value of the post is in practicing and developing the skill of ready identification of the whole class of claims that are not factual, i.e., not about reality aside from our judgments, opinions, estimations, theories, preferences, conclusions.

Abd 14 Nov 2012 19:17 UTC
8 points
in reply to: MixedNuts’s comment on: Rationality Quotes November 2012

China forces everyone to use it.

Oversimplified. One-child policy. I have an adopted Chinese daughter, I went to China for the adoption in 2002, and I talked about the policy with Chinese working for the adoption agency.

“Artificial birth control” is one method by which Chinese might avoid unwanted children, but if anyone is forced to use it, that’s not official by the government. However, there were isolated, unofficial actions taken by local officials, sometimes, cases of forced abortion.

See also Two-child policy.

Normal enforcement of the policy is through fines on excess children, the definition of excess varies by region, ethnic group, and, sometimes, the sex of already-born children. The most stringent requirements are on the Han majority

The situation is much more complex than most in the West might imagine..

Abd 14 Nov 2012 3:28 UTC
−3 points
in reply to: ialdabaoth’s comment on: Bayes for Schizophrenics: Reasoning in Delusional Disorders

And frankly, looking at the world that way, I think I’d rather be dead than continue to perform in this environment. So all my attempts at “motivation” and “effort” get tainted by that evaluation.

A certain kind of personal trap has been laid out and described, quite well. There is a set of ideas or “takes” on reality that have been accepted as real, but ideas and takes are never real. The error is widespread and normal, even encouraged, but when the content goes awry, the results can be devastating.

The key in the above statement is “this environment.” There is no “this environment.” As Buckaroo Banzai said, “Wherever you go, there you are.” Any environment contains ample evidence to support almost any interpretation, and our ability as human beings to invent interpretations is vast, so everywhere we look, we can find what we have believed.

We may imagine that the goal is to invent interpretations that are “true.” But interpretations are neither true nor false. The problem with the value-laden interpretations being invented here is the effects they cause. There are useful interpretations, that empower us, and ones that don’t.

There are two kinds of interpretations. The first, and fundamental kind, is predictive, it takes raw sensory data and predicts what is coming next. That’s not the problematic kind, though if we get stuck in an inefficient predictive mode, believing our predictions are “true,” confirmation bias can still strike. Still, this kind of interpretation can be readily tested.

The problem is in the second kind of interpretation, the division into good and bad, sane and insane, and hosts of these higher-level interpretations. They are much further from reality than the first kind of interpretation, and it is far more difficult to test them. How do we test if the world (“this environment”) is actually good or evil, friendly or hostile?

We are continually creating our world, but we imagine that we are only discovering it. So we are easily victims of “how it is.” Yet we make up “how it is”! That’s a judgment, it is actually a choice.

We imagine that we are constrained in our choices by our identity, but the identity does not exist. That’s ancient rationality. the self is an illusion. Let’s put it this way: if it comes from causation from the past, that’s not a choice, it’s just a machine.

Is there anything other than the machine? You have a choice in how to answer this question! One of the choices is “No.” That, then, will create you—and continue to create you—as a victim of the past, while at the same time, if you are normal, you still think that you are “real.” That’s actually inconsistent.

Far be it from me to confine anyone to only two choices, but there is at least another choice. “Yes,” there is something else, which can be experienced. But it is not a “thing” other than the machine. We are machines, but what we don’t know is the capacity of the machine. It may be that the machine can do things we never dreamed of.

Including, by the way, connecting with other people so that we are no longer limited by individual identity. Doing this may take training, it is not necessarily automatic for all of us, and especially not for those of us who were asocially intelligent. (Like me, for example.)

It’s highly likely that our friend here has experienced situations like what he describes, and being caught in a belief that this defines his future is obviously painful. But what do those situations have to do with today and tomorrow, unless he keeps recreating them?

ialdabaoth, I hope you won’t give up. I don’t think you need to learn something new, exactly, you need to unlearn stuff that you have accepted routinely, and for a long time. Rather than MoreRight, you need to be LessWrong. See what remains when you start dropping stuff that maintains the trap, that doesn’t help you.

You will continue to think the thoughts that you thought, but you don’t have to believe them. The ancient technique is to identify them as what they are, made-up interpretations, chatter, coming from the past. Some will be useful, so use them. Many will be other than that. Keep your eyes open, you will know the difference. Test ideas, don’t imagine that they are truth. They are tools.

Abd 14 Nov 2012 3:16 UTC
2 points
in reply to: aceofspades’s comment on: Firewalling the Optimal from the Rational
I pointed to sources that contain huge lists of sources, including such studies. Some of what I pointed to is free. There is no need to reproduce this here. The relevance here is to cascades, which occur without “conspiracies.”

A common response to a cascade being pointed out is to call the observer a “conspiracy theorist,” and that happens even if no conspiracy has been alleged. That people might be unconsciously motivated by issues of reputation and “face” is just what’s so for human beings.

I mentioned funding and was explicit that I did not know if this had an actual effect on recommendations.

Taubes has laid out the history of the “official dietary recommendations,” and he makes a persuasive case that some serious errors were made, and that some are persisting in beliefs that are not consistent with what is scientifically known.

Anyway, aceofspades asks for studies. He didn’t specify the context, but it was that he had written

Would you mind linking to this research that shows low carb diets lower cardiac risk factors?

I linked to extensive coverage of that research, by science journalists. However, specifically, and just what I picked up quickly:

Weight loss with a low-carbohydrate, Mediterranean, or low-fat diet. (Blood lipids, i.e., cardiac risk factors, were studied.)

Comparison of the Atkins, Zone, Ornish, and LEARN diets for change in weight and related risk factors among overweight premenopausal women: the A TO Z Weight Loss Study: a randomized trial. (Lipid profile was studied.)

Systematic review of randomized controlled trials of low-carbohydrate vs. low-fat/low-calorie diets in the management of obesity and its comorbidities. (This is a “systematic review,” very much on point as to cardiac risk.)

Part of my own experience:

I was under forty when my doctor, whom I trusted greatly, recommended that I go on a low-fat diet because I had mildly elevated cholesterol. Over 20 years later, the results: I’d gained about 30 lbs, my cholesterol levels were a lot higher. Sure, I wasn’t terribly compliant, but I’d shifted the balance greatly toward low-fat. Turns out my experience was typical. Compliance with low-fat diets is commonly poor, and the effect of the recommendation is often weight gain and worsening lipids. So then statins are prescribed....

My new doctor suggested the South Beach diet (kind of a compromised lower-fat or lower-sat-fat Atkins diet, also by a famous cardiologist), but I did the research this time, and found that the science was stronger behind Atkins. I told him, and he led me into his office and handed me the standard textbook on diabetes, written in the 1920s, that described what was then the standard treatment for type II diabetes. A low-carb diet. Insulin had just been discovered, and insulin was considered a miracle drug for the rest, who didn’t respond to low-carb diets. Fast forward, the American Diabetes Association discourages low-carb diets. Why? It’s really a good question!

Well, why hadn’t this doctor told me straight out about low-carb, that my high cholesterol was not necessarily a problem? It’s a little thing called “standard of practice.” He could lose his job and/or his license. However, he could smile at me and tell me “whatever you are doing, keep it up.” (Because my lipids and other indicators of heart health improved greatly.)

And then I found from a biopsy that I have prostate cancer. Taubes describes a plausible mechanism for how high-carb diets can increase the incidence of prostate cancer.

My story is anecdotal, and there is much we don’t know about diet, but “experts” still confidently tell us what to eat and what not to eat, and it’s entirely possible that the advice given to me, in full good faith, 30 years ago, led me into a potentially fatal disease. And similar may be true for many others. And it is still going on.

I was referred to a radiation oncologist who advised radiation treatment, if not surgery. So, again, I did the research, and found that the latest advice for someone exactly my age and situation was “watchful waiting.” I’m still more likely to die from something else than prostate cancer.

So why the recommendation from the oncologist? Well, it’s what he does. Go to a carpenter, you are likely to get some advice that involves a hammer. But is he aware of the latest research? Probably, though possibly not. But he’s not about to recommend something based on that, because it is not yet the “standard of practice,” and he can get his ass sued. Even if the advice was right as to risks.)

Cascades are a real problem that dumb down social structures, and especially when they create a “scientific consensus” that isn’t rooted in science and the scientific method. Cascades, however, occur in all kinds of social situations.

Abd 14 Nov 2012 1:11 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey

Hm. When I originally read your description of solving the matrices, it seemed to me like your algorithm was shaped the wrong way- I would look at the matrix, identify the transformation, predict what the right answer would be, and then find it in the options. (I only used serious thought and hypothesis falsification on the last question.) Now I’m less confident that I understand my algorithm for identifying the transformation.

That loss of confidence is a clue that you are understanding the process better.

How do you “identify the transformation”? That’s the whole banana!

There is a separate step, finding the answer in the set of answers, which is a partial confirmation. If one is not certain of the entire transformation, but has identified aspects of it, possible elements of the transformation, sometimes the choice can be made by elimination among the answers. But the process you describe is my own default, and that’s how I started. At first it was trivial. It got less simple. Then I saw that I was going to run out of time! Then it became a matter of optimizing what I was going to answer, once I got that I was unlikely to complete.

Obviously, I could take the test again, but that would defeat the purpose. I did go back to review certain problems, for the discussion here. Yes, to be a more standard intelligence test, the results should be reported by age. I suspect that, unless someone has trained for this kind of test, raw results will peak at a certain age, then decline after that.

Or the test could be untimed, in which case I’d expect I could do very well. I might do better than some younger people, just as “smart,” who aren’t as careful. I would not generally be satisfied with less than total, accurate prediction, with a simple algorithm. (Any answer could be justified with a complicated enough algorithm.)

Back to the question of how the transformation is identified. It’s an excellent question. It is questions like this that must be answered to develop artificial intelligence.

And for general artificial intelligence, they must be answered in the general case. It may be possible to find specific, “trick” algorithms that work for specific problems. But humans can solve these problems “out of the box,” so to speak, without almost no instruction. How do we do that?

Rather obviously, we are designed to detect patterns of behavior, which we use for prediction.

Abd 13 Nov 2012 17:55 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey
There is little doubt in my mind that there is an age-related shift. Calling it “bad” would be shallow. There is a trade-off.

I don’t see it as a difference in “ability to solve,” but rather as a difference in the speed with which untrained heuristics can be used. That could be related to the effect I’ve long noticed, a marked decline in an ability to multiprocess, to handle multiple independent threads or processes. If solving the matrix involves testing a large number of possibilities, the more that can be tested at once, the faster the process will be. It’s as if I’ve moved toward being a Turing machine, from being massively parallel.

I would not consciously perceive the “separate processes,” necessarily. Rather, the result of them would pop up in my consciousness as “ideas.” I’d just “see” the solution.

The decline might be the result of increased capacity being devoted to depth rather than breadth. If so, it’s not a “bad” happening, but a relative disability related to an improvement in a different ability.

It points to certain issues in life extension, however. The brain might naturally reach a kind of saturation. Life extension without intelligence enhancement in some way, i.e., the development of cyborg technology, might not be all so valuable. (We are experiencing this to a degree in that we have rapid access to massive information, but the bandwidth of those connections is generally narrow.)

But these are just ideas. I have no specific test of “depth.”

Abd 13 Nov 2012 17:37 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Emile’s comment on: Meta: What do you think of a karma vote checklist?
I’m not sure it will do much good, but here is the post, and this is a permanent link to the discussion as it stands now. This was a goodbye post, to AD, one of the seemingly saner members of the RationalWiki community, an elected moderator. There is a link in my goodbye post back to AD’s comment in a discussion that included history, but that’s a lot more than I expect people here to be interested in. Suffice it to say that the user has a history of being exactly what he says he is, a highly effective troll. He says “professional.”

(To understand some of the discussion, “promote” on RatWiki means “remove sysop privileges” or sometimes “block.”)

Abd 13 Nov 2012 17:14 UTC
0 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Meta: What do you think of a karma vote checklist?
A “public vote system” has been used for centuries in standard deliberative process. You go to a Town Meeting and think that a question should not be considered, and you so move, and that is subject to immediate and very public vote. Private voting systems have been used and often have an abusive effect. Such systems, in standard process, when allowed, generally require a supermajority. Elections are an exception, where secret ballots are standard.

Much comment here seems to assume yes/no on “private.” It’s possible to collect data on “impressions” that is private, and it is not necessarily abusive. It can become abusive when this is used in a fixed decision-making system.

The karma system is quite popular, and the way it works should not, ideally, be damaged by “improvements.” Improvements may address the ways that it does not work, and there are a number.. There are many good ideas in this thread. Some of them, implemented raw, could do harm. Hence the need for discussion and the development of informed consensus, which can be very different from raw, knee-jerk consensus. Such raw consensus can be used to develop starting points, and is worthy of respect, but not worship.

Otherwise a community is vulnerable to cascades and to confirmation bias.

Standard deliberative process uses committee systems for topics not ready for full consideration and vote. The conversations take place in small groups, where brainstorming may be more open and less harmful, and, ideally, all significant points of view are represented in those groups. Distributed communication is essential for sound and efficient social process.

Abd 13 Nov 2012 16:48 UTC
0 points
on: Meta: What do you think of a karma vote checklist?
By the way, setting up a “reason” option, is an excellent idea, properly implemented. It could be a checklist, with one option being to enter a specific explanation. This then becomes metacomment, only in-the-face of those concerned to look at it. Layering.

Abd 13 Nov 2012 16:43 UTC
4 points
on: Meta: What do you think of a karma vote checklist?
I’m new here and might not understand the present karma system completely or correctly. I like it, in certain ways, but I also know, from long internet history, that systems like this can be abused.

A well-known and acknowledged internet troll just openly threatened (on RationalWiki, where I’ve retired) to come here and harass me. I know what he does. I’m not concerned about argument from him, the karma system will handle that. However, he will also do these things, it can be predicted:

*He will look at all my past contributions and will down-vote them as much as allowed.

*He will register new accounts as needed. He’s highly skilled at this.

*He will look for any method of gaming the system, he will probe for vulnerabilities.

*He doesn’t care about the site purpose. He cares about winning a game.

The present karma system looks vulnerable to activity like this. I don’t see any clear sign that he’s been active so far. I reached a nadir of about −40, which is not surprising, I had raised certain issues that might be unpopular here. I modified my behavior, that’s a positive effect of the karma system. I’m at −2 right now.

His threat might be empty. However, these are the problems with the karma system that I see:
1. The voting is anonymous and there is no accountability. There is a suggestion that’s been made that downvoting should have a cost. It’s possible that all voting should have a cost. Otherwise we get voting (an action with consequences) with no personal responsibility (leading to a weighting toward people who really don’t care, but just respond, knee-jerk, possibly irrationally).
2. Voting systems ideally represent what happens in the brain. We have affective and aversive responses, and we do make decisions based on the overall weight. However, rational process, internally, can look at each response and value or devalue it, and the same happens in social processes with responsible actors. In the karma system, there is no way to look at what is producing up-votes and down-votes, and most votes are not accompanied by any comment at all.
3. Voting is presently three-valued, like Range 3 voting: i.e., values of −1, 0, +1. While this can be a great voting system (substantially better than binary), the total votes in each category, in real systems, can make a big difference in subsequent process. I.e., a net of −1 based on a single downvote, is a very different creature than the same net with 50 ups and 51 downs. The latter is probably of high interest! It would indicate a true divided community, as distinct from one that doesn’t care, it could indicate an area that needs more discussion. If it’s +50 and −53, it would indicate the same thing, the difference is in the noise, but now the karma system would inhibit the very discussion needed.
This leads to some immediate suggestions:
1. Report the votes in each category, not just the total.
2. Increase the resolution, i.e., say, allow double voting in each category of vote, and categorize these separately. (The system then becomes Range 5.)
3. Consider systems that make users more accountable. Perhaps report for each user how many upvotes they cast and how many downvotes. Or even make voting not anonymous. In real deliberative organizations, all opinion is public, and secret ballot is never used for issues, only for certain kinds of elections. An Objection to Consideration of the Question, for example, is subject to immediate, public vote. And if someone still wants to raise the issue, they know to whom to talk, individually. That is a device that increases social intelligence (distributed conversations).
4. Use a percentage rule for consequences of vote totals, rather than a fixed difference.
It is a general situation that internet process is at a primitive stage. Moving toward simulation of intelligent decision-making process could greatly improve the effectiveness of any society.

The karma system is a great step toward this, but appears vulnerable in certain ways.

Abd 13 Nov 2012 15:48 UTC
2 points
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Logical Pinpointing
I don’t have an answer to the specific question, only to the class of questions. To approach understanding this, we need to distinguish between reality and what points to reality, i.e, symbols. Our skill as humans is in the manipulation of symbols, as a kind of simulation of reality, with greater or lesser workability for prediction, based in prior observation, of new observations.

“Apples” refers, internally, to a set of responses we created through our experience. We respond to reality as an “apple” or as a “set of apples,” only out of our history. It’s arbitrary. Counting, and thus “behavior like integers” applies to the simplified, arbitrary constructs we call “apples.” Reality is not divided into separate objects, but we have organized our perceptions into named objects.

Examples. If an “apple” is a unique discriminable object, say all apples have had a unique code applied to them, then what can be counted is the codes. Integer behavior is a behavior of codes.

Unique applies can be picked up one at a time, being transferred to one basket or another. However, real apples are not a constant. Apples grow and apples rot. Is a pile of rotten apple an “apple”? Is an apple seed an apple? These are questions with no “true” answer, rather we choose answers. We end up with a binary state for each possible object: “yes, apple,” or “no, not apple.” We can count these states, they exist in our mind.

If “apple” refers to a variety, we may have Macintosh, Fuji, Golden delicious, etc.

So I have a basket with two apples in it. That is, five pieces of fruit that are Macintosh and three that are Fuji.

I have another basket with two apples in it. That is, one Fuji and one Golden Delicious.

I put them all into one basket. How many apples are in the basket? 2 + 2 = 3.

The question about integer behavior is about how categories have been assembled. If “apple” refers to an individual piece of intact fruit, we can pick it up, move it around, and it remains the same object, it’s unique and there is no other the same in the universe, and it belongs to a class of objects that is, again, unique as a class, the class is countable and classes will display integer behavior.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten with this. “Integer behavior” is not a property of reality, per se, but of our perceptions of reality.