Dreaded_Anomaly

Karma: 2,182

Dreaded_Anomaly Oct 25, 2014, 5:50 AM
52 points
on: 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Submitted, answering almost all questions.

The hardest question was choosing a single favorite LW post.

Also, I wasn’t sure if Worm should count as more than one book. (It didn’t end up mattering.)

A scanner + Photoshop makes it significantly easier to measure digit ratios.

Dreaded_Anomaly Oct 25, 2014, 4:51 AM
15 points
in reply to: lmm’s comment on: Non-standard politics

killing the same entity inside someone else is just as bad as killing it outside

89% of abortions occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy (source). A 12-week-old fetus is not viable outside of the womb.

Also worth noting is that the majority of pregnancies are terminated by natural miscarriage within that 12 week period. In most such cases, the mother has not even realized she was pregnant. (source) Do you consider these natural miscarriages to be the equivalent of human deaths from disease or injury, and if so, what should be done about them?

Dreaded_Anomaly Oct 25, 2014, 4:42 AM
13 points
on: question: the 40 hour work week vs Silicon Valley?

Are these companies simply wrong and are actually hurting themselves by overextending their human resources?

Yes, unquestionably. We’ve known how human productivity works for over 100 years now. This knowledge has been “forgotten” due to the effects of tough, largely unprotected labor markets. If the guy at the next desk over stays an hour later than you every day, he’ll look like he’s working harder, so he’ll be less likely to get laid off. Once you have multiple people thinking that way and no opposing structure to encourage cooperation, you get a classic status arms race.

Why Crunch Modes Doesn’t Work: Six Lessons

Executive Summary

When used long-term, Crunch Mode slows development and creates more bugs when compared with 40-hour weeks.

More than a century of studies show that long-term useful worker output is maximized near a five-day, 40-hour workweek. Productivity drops immediately upon starting overtime and continues to drop until, at approximately eight 60-hour weeks, the total work done is the same as what would have been done in eight 40-hour weeks.

In the short term, working over 21 hours continuously is equivalent to being legally drunk. Longer periods of continuous work drastically reduce cognitive function and increase the chance of catastrophic error. In both the short- and long-term, reducing sleep hours as little as one hour nightly can result in a severe decrease in cognitive ability, sometimes without workers perceiving the decrease.

Managers decide to crunch because they want to be able to tell their bosses “I did everything I could.” They crunch because they value the butts in the chairs more than the brains creating games. They crunch because they haven’t really thought about the job being done or the people doing it. They crunch because they have learned only the importance of appearing to do their best to instead of really of doing their best. And they crunch because, back when they were programmers or artists or testers or assistant producers or associate producers, that was the way they were taught to get things done.

Another good article about the history of the 40-hour work week is Why We Have to Go Back to a 40-Hour Work Week to Keep Our Sanity on AlterNet. I recognize the political leaning of AlterNet may be offputting to some, so consider yourselves warned. I also don’t necessarily endorse their theory that Asperger’s Syndrome is to blame for the rise of overwork in Silicon Valley.

Dreaded_Anomaly Oct 25, 2014, 4:21 AM
4 points
in reply to: VAuroch’s comment on: What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong?
Suicide is indeed often an impulsive act, in which the urge must coincide with the means.

Stronger evidence for this claim:

Decrease in suicide rates after a change of policy reducing access to firearms in adolescents: a naturalistic epidemiological study.

The use of firearms is a common means of suicide. We examined the effect of a policy change in the Israeli Defense Forces reducing adolescents’ access to firearms on rates of suicide. Following the policy change, suicide rates decreased significantly by 40%. Most of this decrease was due to decrease in suicide using firearms over the weekend. There were no significant changes in rates of suicide during weekdays. Decreasing access to firearms significantly decreases rates of suicide among adolescents. The results of this study illustrate the ability of a relatively simple change in policy to have a major impact on suicide rates.

Use of army weapons and private firearms for suicide and homicide in the region of Basel, Switzerland.

FINDINGS: Firearm suicides were clearly the most frequent means of suicide. They were also used in 30.0% of domestic homicides, although other means were used at similar rates. Firearms for suicide were mainly used by men, especially army weapons. These men were younger, professionally better qualified, and fewer had ever been treated in one of the local state psychiatric services.

Dreaded_Anomaly Jan 9, 2014, 2:47 AM
12 points
in reply to: Daniel_Burfoot’s comment on: Physics grad student: how to build employability in programming & finance
This is qualitatively a good point, but quantitatively you should be careful. There are only ~7 people in the world who are 6 sigmas above the mean (using a normal distribution).

Dreaded_Anomaly Jan 9, 2014, 2:39 AM
9 points
on: Physics grad student: how to build employability in programming & finance
I’m also a physics grad student (experimental high energy) who is considering industry jobs in addition to postdocs. I’ve attended several career panels in the past few years. Most recently, a panel was held at Fermilab. One of the panelists started a blog, Science Jobs Headquarters, where you can read about that panel and get other good advice.

A few of my takeaways from the panel: 1) Python is really useful and everyone should learn it. (I need to work on taking this advice. I mostly develop in C++, and my Python is patchy.) 2) Some companies want to hire people with very specific skills and experience, but other companies are just looking for smart people who can learn on the job. The important point here is that few skills are absolutely essential to get a job in data science/private research/consulting/etc. Even if you’re not a Python whiz, there are still people looking to hire you. 3) The website Glassdoor was recommended for investigating companies at which you might want to work.

Dreaded_Anomaly Jan 9, 2014, 1:30 AM
−2 points
on: Rationality Quotes January 2014

You should act in a way that, if everyone acted that way, things would work out.

— Louis C.K.

Dreaded_Anomaly Nov 22, 2013, 4:04 AM
49 points
on: 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Taken, answering all of the questions I was capable of answering. I will be very interested to see the results on some of the new questions. (The shifts on existing questions could also be interesting, but I don’t expect much to change.)

Dreaded_Anomaly Nov 3, 2013, 10:23 PM
12 points
on: [Link] Lost and Found
This reminds me of the researcher’s maxim:

A month in the laboratory can often save an hour in the library.

— Frank Westheimer

Dreaded_Anomaly Oct 24, 2013, 3:08 PM
3 points
on: LINK: “This novel epigenetic clock can be used to address a host of questions in developmental biology, cancer and aging research.”

Note: The discrepancy in spelling (“ageing” vs. “aging”) is in the original.

To indicate this more concisely, you can put [sic] after “Ageing” in the quote.

Dreaded_Anomaly Oct 3, 2013, 11:07 PM
−5 points
on: Rationality Quotes October 2013

Holden: Oh, my God!

Buffy: Oh, your God what?

Holden: Oh, well, you know, not my God, because I defy him and all of his works, but—Does he exist? Is there word on that, by the way?

Buffy: Nothing solid.

— “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” Season 7, Episode 7 “Conversations with Dead People”

Dreaded_Anomaly Sep 22, 2013, 12:16 AM
4 points
in reply to: somervta’s comment on: Amplituhedron?
You can watch/listen to Arkani-Hamed’s recent talk at SUSY 2013. At around 2:00, he says:

locality and unitarity emerging just as algebraic and geometric properties of this object

At around 6:00, a written slide describes his strategy:

Reformulate QFT, Eviscerating Locality + Unitarity → see them arise as emergent phenomena

He goes on to discuss this subject in more detail.

Also, (somewhat technical) slides from his former student have a section called “Emergent Locality and Unitarity”.

Dreaded_Anomaly Sep 13, 2013, 4:15 PM
4 points
in reply to: tut’s comment on: Rationality Quotes September 2013
There’s also title text (often called a tool tip) which appears when you hover the mouse over an image, but is a plain HTML feature.

Dreaded_Anomaly Sep 11, 2013, 1:52 AM
0 points
on: High School, Human Capital, Signaling and College Admissions
As a senior in high school, I had the option to take two different computer science courses.

Option 1: AP Computer Science A, taught at my high school. The teacher was one of my school’s math teachers who had some programming experience. (My school had not actually offered a comp sci course since I started there, even though Intro to Java was on the books.)

Option 2: An independent study in computer science, taught at the local vocational high school. The teacher had a master’s degree in computer science from Brown and had worked for Macromedia/Adobe. (She was also the daughter of my school district’s Director of Technology, whom I knew as a student representative to the Technology Committee.)

On the surface, Option 1 looks better for college admission, since it’s an AP course. There may also be some perceived bias against vocational schools. However, I chose Option 2. This proved to be the superior choice. I had already taught myself basic programming skills, and the independent nature of the course meant I was able to learn at my own pace and study different topics with a knowledgeable teacher.

When I started college, it turned out that the AP Comp Sci A test wasn’t even worth any course credit. Actually, the Computer Science department did not require Computer Science I as a prerequisite for more advanced courses, assuming that if a student could pass Computer Science II, they didn’t need to take the previous course. Choosing the better course allowed me to get a jump-start on learning more once I got to college. Although I did not end up completing my intended computer science minor due to too many course conflicts with my physics major, I still found it useful to have an advantage from my high school course. I continue to use the lessons I learned from my high school teacher (who excelled at teaching object-oriented programming and data structures) in my current software/programming-heavy research on the CMS experiment.

Full disclosure: the non-AP course did not contribute to my weighted GPA or class rank because I took it in the last semester of my senior year. The last semester was not counted since rankings had to be decided before the semester ended, both for reporting to colleges and for the purpose of valedictory and salutatory addresses during graduation.

Dreaded_Anomaly Sep 11, 2013, 1:12 AM
0 points
on: High School, Human Capital, Signaling and College Admissions

Kevin’s school offers a molecular biology elective during second semester, which is not an honors or AP course. Kevin would like to take the elective during the second semester of his junior year, in addition to his other coursework, but he knows that doing so would lower his GPA, so he decides not to.

In Kevin’s story, the class ranking system was poorly designed: it rewarded some students for achieving less rather than for achieving more. The colleges that Kevin applied to were relying on a faulty measure of quality.

Taking a non-honors or AP course only harms one’s GPA (in this ranking system) if it replaces an honors or AP course. There have to be enough honors or AP courses offered to fill a student’s entire schedule in order for this to be the case.

Ranking systems which do not weight honors or AP courses can also encourage students to achieve less. This can even happen when honors courses of different difficulties end up with the same weighting.

I think the real lesson to draw from such examples is that creating a measure by taking information which exists in a multidimensional space and projecting it into a single dimension can lead to perverse incentives. (A similar idea is mentioned in another comment in this thread, but I thought it worth pointing out the general principle.)

Dreaded_Anomaly Sep 10, 2013, 10:16 PM
40 points
0
on: Three ways CFAR has changed my view of rationality

So you might reason, “I’m doing martial arts for the exercise and self-defense benefits… but I could purchase both of those things for less time investment by jogging to work and carrying Mace.” If you listened to your emotional reaction to that proposal, however, you might notice you still feel sad about giving up martial arts even if you were getting the same amount of exercise and self-defense benefits somehow else.

Which probably means you’ve got other reasons for doing martial arts that you haven’t yet explicitly acknowledged—for example, maybe you just think it’s cool. If so, that’s important, and deserves a place in your decisionmaking. Listening for those emotional cues that your explicit reasoning has missed something is a crucial step

This is a great example of how human value is complicated. Optimizing for stated or obvious values can miss unstated or subtler values. Before we can figure out how to get what we want, we have to know what we want. I’m glad CFAR is taking this into account.

Dreaded_Anomaly 16 Aug 2013 3:57 UTC
16 points
in reply to: TrE’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 26, chapter 97
We could just run through the whole list of Things I Won’t Work With.

Dreaded_Anomaly 1 Jul 2013 18:14 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: mwengler’s comment on: Newbomb’s parabox

For perfect prediction of the universe, the universe must be COMPLETELY simulated. The mechanism to simulate the universe must have memory sufficient to store the state of the universe completely. But that storage mechanism must then store its own state completely, PLUS the rest of the universe. And of course inside the state stored, must be a complete copy of the stored information, PLUS the rest of the universe.

The mechanism can just store a reference to itself.

Dreaded_Anomaly 30 Jun 2013 21:38 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Skeeve’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 19, chapter 88-89
It’s plausible that having one’s Patronus dispelled by one’s future self is not as noticeable as having one’s Patronus countered by a killing curse.

Alternatively, an even simpler option is that it was still Present-Harry’s patronus, just given updated instructions by Future-Harry.

Dreaded_Anomaly 30 Jun 2013 20:27 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: Skeeve’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 19, chapter 88-89

When asked to find Hermione, why would Harry’s Patronus have found a simulacrum instead of the real one?

The Patronus that came back to Harry could be Future-Harry’s Patronus, if time travel is involved.

Note: I don’t personally place a high probability on theories involving time travel in this instance, but they do present a possible explanation for that objection.