tigerthink

Comment scores make group beliefs far more obvious. Common knowledge of group beliefs is a necessary condition for groupthink.

>The one thing in this experiment that might (I intuit) help discourage groupthink related behaviors is hiding one's own score from oneself, because people will then be less emboldened when they're being idiots just for expressing popular opinions.

The thing we need to be afraid of is public praise or shame for writing a well-received or poorly-received comment.

>Unfortunately, this will also (I intuit) discourage people when they're being smart from as readily taking another look at whether what they've said is idiotic when others recognize the idiocy.

I disagree. When people are called out publicly for unpopular beliefs, they tend to commit to them even stronger.

Consider the following two stories. In Story A, Joe is downmodded on a comment with no replies and his low score is public knowledge. Joe becomes unhappy and stubborn. In Story B, Joe is downmodded on a comment with no replies and his low score is private knowledge. Joe wonders what might have caused so many to individually downmod his comment. He replies to his comment and says "Just curious, I noticed that a lot of people seem to be downmodding my comment. Is there some sort of flaw in my argument that I'm not seeing?"

In the same way, software advice that doesn't take the form of deductive argument from mutually agreed-upon principles is largely valuable insofar as the person peddling it is experienced and honest.

Garageband.

So maybe the banks need to set a higher threshold on who they loan to. This doesn't say much about the effectiveness of microcredit for well-qualified applicants.

http://www.spicyelephant.com/decks/523 http://www.spicyelephant.com/decks/577 http://www.spicyelephant.com/decks/659

You probably have to register for an account if you want the site to apply supermemo-type techniques. I don't recommend using the site in the long term because it will eventually force you to register for $20.

This is the kind of stupid romanticism that pisses me off coming from writers.

I agree there will be unexpected good benefits associated with biotech research.

>Again, we already have that, it's called mother nature. HIV, Ebola, 1918 flu, current flu, etc, all natural.

None of those were designed to be harmful.

>Almost as soon as we invent the nuclear bomb, we also invest nuclear power.

This is not an example of symmetry. The nuclear bomb gave humanity the power to destroy itself forever. Nuclear power has not given humanity the power to preserve itself forever.

>If we have the ability to create super viruses on demand, then we also have the ability to create drugs for them, to detect them, to stop transmission, and most obviously to create vaccines for them. If you can manufacture the virus, it would be one hell of a cosmic improbability that you are also NOT able to manufacture a vaccine for it.

Are you sure you aren't exaggerating? You call that cosmically improbable? Remember, we are talking about things that haven't even been discovered yet.

Let me put it this way. If you had such extraordinary predictive power about which technologies will be invented in what order, you could make a lot of money in the stock market. And extraordinary predictive power is what you need to rule scenarios that are compatible with all formulations of the laws of physics as being "cosmically improbable". I agree that such predictive power may exist in astronomy. I disagree that such predictive power exists in technology forecasting, or pretty much anything involving humans for that matter.

If you continue to stand by this position, I will decide that you're not worth convincing and unlikely to be convinced and leave the discussion.

>Alternatively if we don't have the knowledge to make viruses and vaccines on demand, that won't stop mother nature from her never ending quest to kills us all.

"Mother nature" has no quest to kill us. All the damage that's been done by naturally-occuring viruses has been by accident. So someone who was consciously optimizing to create a maximally harmful virus might be able to do a lot more.

Unless the research is directed at curing aging, aging will always cause people to get more and more susceptible to disease as they get older.

>and that we can't find cures for yet undiscovered diseases.

What I was saying there was that you can't find a cure for a disease you haven't discovered yet. Do you disagree?

>And the asshole most likely to create a more easily transmissible HIV is mother nature.

There are six billion humans on Earth and the population is growing. All we need for disaster is one person who's intelligent, driven, and wants to destroy the human race. I agree that person would be very atypical. I disagree that we can be confident no one will ever fit that profile.

If some asshole creates a contagious HIV, then discovering cures faster than diseases will hardly save us.

You get diminishing utility from curing diseases anyway. Say you discover cures for half the world's currently incurable diseases at random. My guess is that our life expectancy would increase by less than a decade. People are still going to age.

And I'm not sure the threat of a contagious HIV would ever go away. It'd be hard finding a cure for a disease that wasn't even created yet.

My guess is that there's already too much momentum behind this sort of research for us to halt it. Do you think requiring background checks for purchasers of biotech supplies would make the field more or less attractive to a hypothetical evil mastermind?

http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Zone-Terrifying-True-Story/dp/0385...

It sounds like you're saying that each supervirus mankind creates marginally increases the chance that a Bad Thing will happen. Isn't marginally increasing the chance that a Bad Thing will happen also Bad?

Also, how close do you think that HIV and MRSA are to the upper bound on supervirus potency?

Right. So there is a sweet spot: you want to monitor often enough that you aren't bankrupt in a millisecond, but not so often that your profit becomes 50% of what it could be. I'm not familiar with the algorithms used in trading, but assuming they're complex, the sanity check that I'm proposing would not use a very large portion of your cycles.

>If it's different, then one of them is incorrect.

The presenter spoke of humans shutting off the system when it was causing them to lose a lot of money (in older days when their system was slower?) Presumably the humans were using some algorithm other than the one they implemented to decide whether to shut the system off. Which algorithm is incorrect?

How complicated do you think the algorithm the humans use would be to implement?

>You should watch the video, I think you will find especially interesting the part where he describes how they were unable to pay enough money to get people to even carefully review certain types of code.

I watched the first half. I stopped watching when it became apparent that I would get more out of the video if I knew OCaml, and I plan to learn it at some point.

>That is a static check. Metamath does not fork a process and monitor your proof, assuming that were somehow possible.

I'm talking about the effectiveness of using one system to confirm the correctness of another. For some reason, someone put a lot of hours into Metamath when they could have put the same hours into checking their own proofs. Why do you think they did that?

A final point: He mentioned that their software is in constant need of updating. Every update is an opportunity to introduce a critical error. It seems likely to me that monitoring software would not be in need of constant updating, since the algorithm that the humans use to determine when to turn off the machine probably does not change along with the things he mentioned.

Right. That's why you should have software monitoring things instead of a human.

>Besides – why write more code to check if your original code is correct, when you can just write correct code? And if you write software to check your software, then do you have to write software to check the checking software? Police police police police...

Same reason it makes sense to have proof checking software like Metamath. It's fairly easy to write software that has an 90% probability of being correct. It's maybe three times harder to write software that has a 99% probability of being correct, so it's cheaper to write 90% likely to be correct software and then another piece of 90% likely to be correct software that checks it. That's what my intuition says.

Anyway, I think monitoring software would be much easier to write than actual trading software.

if bank_account < 0.9 * prev_bank_account: stop_trading()

Erm, I always upmod comments that I consider insightful. I think the picture is more complicated than you make it out to be.