It makes me think of Richard Hamming talking about having "an attack".

I think most people here have some sort of similar problem. Mine isn't being emotionless (ha!) but not knowing the right thing to say, putting my foot in my mouth, and so on. Occasionally coming across as a pedant, which is so embarrassing.

I may be getting better at it, though. One thing is: if you are a nerd (in the sense of passionate about something abstract) just roll with it. You will get along better with similar people. Your non-nerdy friends will know you're a nerd. I try to be as nice as possible so that when, inevitably, I say something clumsy or reveal that I'm ignorant of something basic, it's not taken too negatively. Nice but clueless is much better than arrogant.

And always wait for a cue from the other person to reveal something about yourself. Don't bring up politics unless he does; don't mention your interests unless he asks you; don't use long words unless he does.

I can't dance for shit, but various kinds of exercise are a good way to meet a broader spectrum of people.

Do I still feel like I'm mostly tolerated rather than liked? Yeah. It can be pretty depressing. But such is life.

As for dating -- the numbers are different from my perspective, of course, but so far I've found I'm not going to click really profoundly with guys who aren't intelligent. I don't mean that in a snobbish way, it's just a self-knowledge thing -- conversation is really fun for me, and I have more fun spending time with quick, talkative types. There's no point forcing yourself to be around people you don't enjoy.

I have myself been accused of being an android or replicant on many occasions. The best way that I've found to deal with this is to make jokes and tell humorous anecdotes about the situation, especially ones that poke fun at myself. This way, the accusation itself becomes associated with the joke and people begin to find it funny, which makes it "unserious."

b) my overly precise (for most people, not here) speech patterns

The kind of ultra rational Bayesian lingustic patterns used around here would be considered obnoxiously intellectual and pretentious (and incomprehensible?) by most people. Practice mirroring the speech patterns of the people you are communicating with, and slip into rationalist talk when you need to win an argument about something important.

When I'm talking to street people, I say "man" a lot because it's something of a high honorific. Maybe in California I will need to start saying "dude", though man seems inherently more respectful.

In my experience, something as simple as adding a smile can transform a demeanor otherwise perceived as "cold" or "emotionless" to "laid-back" or "easy-going".

I suggest a lot of practice talking to non-nerds or nerds who aren't in their nerd mode. (And less time with your ex!)

A perfect form of practice is dance. Take swing dancing lessons, for example. That removes the possibility of using your overwhelming verbal fluency and persona of intellectual brilliance. It makes it far easier to activate that part that is sometimes called 'human' but perhaps more accurately called 'animal'. Once you master maintaining the social connection in a purely non-verbal setting adding in a verbal component yet maintaining the flow should be far simpler.

"Fake it until you make it" is surprisingly good advice for this sort of thing. I had moderate self-esteem issues in my freshman year of college, so I consciously decided to pretend that I had very high self-esteem in every interaction I had outside of class. This may be one of those tricks that doesn't work for most people, but I found that using a song lyric (from a song I liked) as a mantra to recall my desired state of mind was incredibly helpful, and got into the habit of listening to that particular song before heading out to meet friends. (The National's "All The Wine" in this particular case. "I am a festival" was the mantra I used.)

That's in the same class of thing as acting like Regina Spektor or Feynman; if you act in a certain way consistently enough, your brain will learn that pattern and it will begin to feel more natural and less conscious. I don't worry about my self-esteem any more (in that direction, at least).

Date nerdier people? In general, many nerdy rational individuals have a lot of trouble getting a long with not so nerdy individuals. There's some danger that I'm other optimizing but I have trouble thinking how an educated rational individual would have be able to date someone who thought that there was something wrong with using terms like "a priori." That's a common enough term, and if someone uses a term that they don't know they should be happy to learn something. So maybe just date a different sort of person?

While I'm not planning to pursue cryopreservation myself, I don't believe that it's unreasonable to do so.

Industrial coolants came up in a conversation I was having with my parents (for reasons I am completely unable to remember), and I mentioned that I'd read a bunch of stuff about cryonics lately. My mom then half-jokingly threatened to write me out of her will if I ever signed up for it.

This seemed... disproportionately hostile. She was skeptical of the singularity and my support for the SIAI when it came up a few weeks ago, but she's not particularly interested in the issue and didn't make a big deal about it. It wasn't even close to the level of scorn she apparently has for cryonics. When I asked her about it, she claimed she opposed it based on the physical impossibility of accurately copying a brain. My father and I pointed out that this would literally require the existence of magic, she conceded the point, mentioned that she still thought it was ridiculous, and changed the subject.

This was obviously a case of my mom avoiding her belief's true weak points by not offering her true objection, rationality failures common enough to deserve blog posts pointing them out; I wasn't shocked to observe them in the wild. What is shocking to me is that someone who is otherwise quite rational would feel so motivated to protect this particular belief about cryonics. Why is this so important?

That the overwhelming majority of those who share this intense motivation are women (it seems) just makes me more confused. I've seen a couple of explanations for this phenomenon, but they aren't convincing: if these people object to cryonics because they see it as selfish (for example), why do so many of them come up with fake objections? The selfishness objection doesn't seem like it would be something one would be penalized for making.

A factual error:

when he first announced his intention to have his brain surgically removed from his freshly vacated cadaver and preserved in liquid nitrogen

I'm fairly sure that head-only preservation doesn't involve any brain-removal. It's interesting that in context the purpose of the phrase was to present a creepy image of cryonics, and so the bias towards the phrases that accomplish this goal won over the constraint of not generating fiction.

I wonder if Peggy's apparent disvalue of Robin's immortality represents a true preference, and if so, how should an FAI take it into account while computing humanity's CEV?

That was very nearly terrifying.

Good article overall. Gives a human feel to the decision of cryonics, in particular by focusing on an unfair assault it attracts (thus appealing cryonicist's status).

The hostile wife phenomenon doesn't seem to have been mentioned much here. Is it less common than the article suggests or has it been glossed over because it doesn't support the pro-cryonics position? Or has it been mentioned and I wasn't paying attention?

Playing Conway's Life is a great exercise - I recommend trying it, to anyone who hasn't. Feel free to experiment with different starting configurations. One simple one which produces a wealth of interesting effects is the "r pentomino":

Edit: Image link died - see Vladimir_Nesov's comment, below.

This also reminded me that I wanted to go through the Intentional Stance by Daniel Dennett and find the good bits. Also worth reading is the wiki page.

I think he would state that the model you describe comes from folk psychology.

A relevant passage

"We have all learned to take a more skeptical attitude to the dictates of folk physics, including those robust deliverances that persist in the face of academic science. Even the "undeniable introspective fact" that you can feel "centrifugal force" cannot save it, except for the pragmatic purposes of rough-and-ready understanding it has always served. The delicate question of just how we ought to express our diminished allegiance to the categories of folk physics has been a central topic in philosophy since the seventeenth century, when Descartes, Boyle and other began to ponder the meta-physical status of color, felt warmth, and other "secondary qualities". These discussions, while cautiously agnostic about folk physics have traditionally assumed as unchallenged the bedrock of folk-psychological counterpart categories: conscious perceptions of color, sensations of warmth, or beliefs about the external "world"."

In lesswrong people do tend to discard the perception and sensation parts of folk psychology, but keep the belief and goal concepts.

You might have trouble convincing people here, mainly because people are interested in what should be done by an intelligence, rather than what is currently done by humans. It is a lot harder to find evidence for what ought to be done rather than what is done.

Already done; see Dasher and especially its Google Tech Talk.

It doesn't reach the 0.7-1 bit per character limit, of course, but then, according to the Hutter challenge no compression program (online or offline) has.

This is already exploited on cell phones to some extent.

This is not a distortion of the original meaning. “Feeding the trolls” is just giving them replies of any sort — especially if they're well-written, because you’re probably investing more effort than the troll.

I don't think this is unique to LW at all. I've seen well-argued rebuttals to trolls labeled as feeding in many different contexts including Slashdot and the OOTS forum.

Part of the San Francisco skyline, maybe?

Thanks. This is the first time I ever noticed this. Absolutely no idea what it is or why it's there. Talk about selective blindness!

Here is a useful post directly criticizing Shalizi's claims: http://humanvarieties.org/2013/04/03/is-psychometric-g-a-myth/

I pointed this out to my buddy who's a psychology doctoral student, his reply is below:

I don't know enough about g to say whether the people talking about it are falling prey to the general correlation between tests, but this phenomenon is pretty well-known to social science researchers.

I do know enough about CFA and EFA to tell you that this guy has an unreasonable boner for CFA. CFA doesn't test against truth, it tests against other models. Which means it only tells you whether the model you're looking at fits better than a comparator model. If that's a null model, that's not a particularly great line of analysis.

He pretty blatantly misrepresents this. And his criticisms of things like Big Five are pretty wild. Big Five, by its very nature, fits the correlations extremely well. The largest criticism of Big Five is that it's not theory-driven, but data-driven!

But my biggest beef has got to be him arguing that EFA is not a technique for determining causality. No shit. That is the very nature of EFA -- it's a technique for loading factors (which have no inherent "truth" to them by loading alone, and are highly subject to reification) in order to maximize variance explained. He doesn't need to argue this point for a million words. It's definitional.

So regardless of whether g exists or not, which I'm not really qualified to speak on, this guy is kind of a hugely misleading writer. MINUS FIVE SCIENCE POINTS TO HIM.

But neither of those are particularly compelling reasons for disagreement - can anyone more familiar with the psychological/statistical territory shed some light?

Shalizi's most basic point — that factor analysis will generate a general factor for any bunch of sufficiently strongly correlated variables — is correct.

Here's a demo. The statistical analysis package R comes with some built-in datasets to play with. I skimmed through the list and picked out six monthly datasets (72 data points in each):

• atmospheric CO2 concentrations, 1959-1964
• female UK lung deaths, 1974-1979
• international airline passengers, 1949-1954
• sunspot counts, 1749-1754
• average air temperatures at Nottingham Castle, 1920-1925
• car drivers killed & seriously injured in Great Britain, 1969-1974

It's pretty unlikely that there's a single causal general factor that explains most of the variation in all six of these time series, especially as they're from mostly non-overlapping time intervals. They aren't even that well correlated with each other: the mean correlation between different time series is -0.10 with a std. dev. of 0.34. And yet, when I ask R's canned factor analysis routine to calculate a general factor for these six time series, that general factor explains 1/3 of their variance!

However, Shalizi's blog post covers a lot more ground than just this basic point, and it's difficult for me to work out exactly what he's trying to say, which in turn makes it difficult to say how correct he is overall. What does Shalizi mean specifically by calling g a myth? Does he think it is very unlikely to exist, or just that factor analysis is not good evidence for it? Who does he think is in error about its nature? I can think of one researcher in particular who stands out as just not getting it, but beyond that I'm just not sure.

I think this is one of the few cases where Shalizi is wrong. (Not an easy thing to say, as I'm a big fan of his.)

In the second part of the article he generates synthetic "test scores" of people who have three thousand independent abilities - "facets of intelligence" that apply to different problems - and demonstrates that standard factor analysis still detects a strong single g-factor explaining most of the variance between people. From that he concludes that g is a "statistical artefact" and lacks "reality". This is exactly like saying the total weight of the rockpile "lacks reality" because the weights of individual rocks are independent variables.

As for the reason why he is wrong, it's pretty clear: Shalizi is a Marxist (fo' real) and can't give an inch to those pesky racists. A sad sight, that.

I wish there is an area of science that gives reductionist explanations of morality, that is, the detailed contents of our current moral values and norms. One example that came up earlier was monogamy - why do all modern industrialized countries have monogamy as a social norm?

I'm currently reading The Moral Animal by Robert Wright, because it was recommended by, among others, Eliezer. I'm summarizing the chapters online as I read them. The fifth chapter, noting that more human societies have been polygynous than have been monogamous, examines why monogamy is popular today; you might want to check it out.

As for the wider question of reductionist explanations of morality, I'm a fan of the research of moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt (New York Times article, very readable paper).

There are many momentous issues here.

First: I think a historical narrative can be constructed, according to which a future unexpected in, say, 1900 or even in 1950 slowly comes into view, and in which there are three stages characterized by an extra increment of knowledge. The first increment is cryonics, the second increment is nanotechnology, and the third increment is superintelligence. There is a highly selective view; if you were telling the history of futurist visions in general, you would need to include biotechnology, robotics, space travel, nuclear power, even aviation, and many other things.

In any case, among all the visions of the future that exist out there, there is definitely one consisting of cryonics + nanotechnology + superintelligence. Cryonics is a path from the present to the future, nanotechnology will make the material world as pliable as the bits in a computer, and superintelligence guided by some utility function will rule over all things.

Among the questions one might want answered:

1) Is this an accurate vision of the future?

2) Why is it that still so few people share this perspective?

3) Is that a situation which ought to be changed, and if so, how could it be changed?

Question 1 is by far the most discussed.

Question 2 is mostly pondered by the few people who have answered 'yes' to question 1, and usually psychological answers are given. I think that a certain type of historical thinking could go a long way towards answering question 2, but it would have to be carried out with care, intelligence, and a will to objectivity.

This is what I have in mind: You can find various histories of the world which cover the period from 1960. Most of them will not mention Ettinger's book, or Eric Drexler's, or any of the movements to which they gave rise. To find a history which notices any of that, you will have to specialize, e.g. to a history of American technological subcultures, or a history of 20th-century futurological enthusiasms. An overkill history-based causal approach to question 2 would have a causal model of world history since 1960, a causal model of those small domains in which Ettinger and Drexler's publications had some impact, and finally it would seek to understand why the causal processes of the second sort remained invisible on the scale of the first.

Question 3 is also, intrinsically, a question which will mostly be of interest to the small group who have already answered 'yes' to question 1.

A good illustration of multiple discovery (not strictly 'discovery' in this case, but anyway) too:

While Ettinger was the first, most articulate, and most scientifically credible person to argue the idea of cryonics,[citation needed] he was not the only one. In 1962, Evan Cooper had authored a manuscript entitled Immortality, Scientifically, Physically, Now under the pseudonym "N. Durhing".[8] Cooper's book contained the same argument as did Ettinger's, but it lacked both scientific and technical rigor and was not of publication quality.[citation needed]

I completely lack the moral intuition that one should create new conscious beings if one knows that they will be happy. Instead, my ethics apply only to existing people. I am actually completely baffled that so many people seem to have this intuition.

Thus, there is no reason to copy Bob. (Moreover, I avoid the repugnant condition.)

Same answer I give for all other cases of software life: our ability to run Bob is more resilient against information theoretic death. So as long as we store enough to start him from where he left off, he never feels death, and we have met our moral obligations to him.

(First LW post from my first smartphone btw.)

Why do you link to a blog, rather than an introduction or a summary? Is this to test whether we find it so silly that we don't look for their best arguments?

My impression is that antinatalists are highly verbal people who base their idea of morality on how people speak about morality, ignoring how people act. They get the idea that morality is about assigning blame and so feel compelled only to worry about bad acts, thus becoming strict negative utilitarians or rights-deontologists with very strict and uncommon rights. I am not moved by such moralities.

Maybe some make more factual claims, eg, that most lives are net negative or that reflective life would regret itself. These seem obviously false, but I don't see that they matter. These arguments should not have much impact on the actions of the utilitarians that they seem aimed at. They should build a superhuman intelligence to answer these questions and implement the best course of action. If human lives are not worth living, then other lives may be. If no lives are worth living, then a superintelligence can arrange for no lives to be lead, while people evangelizing antinatalism aren't going to make a difference.

Incidentally, Eliezer sometimes seems to be an anti-human-natalist.

I have long wrestled with the idea of antinatalism, so I should have something to say here. Certainly there were periods in my life in which I thought that the creation of life is the supreme folly.

We all know that terrible things happen, that should never happen to anyone. The simplest antinatalist argument of all is, that any life you create will be at risk of such intolerably bad outcomes; and so, if you care, the very least you can do is not create new life. No new life, no possibility of awful outcomes in it, problem avoided! And it is very easy to elaborate this into a stinging critique of anyone who proposes that nonetheless one shouldn't take this seriously or absolutely (because most people are happy, most people don't commit suicide, etc). You intend to gamble with this new life you propose to create, simply because you hope that it won't turn out terribly? And this gamble you propose appears to be completely unnecessary - it's not as if people have children for the greater good. Etc.

A crude utilitarian way to moderate the absoluteness of this conclusion would be to say, well, surely some lives are worth creating, and it would make a lot of people sad to never have children, so we reluctantly say to the ones who would be really upset to forego reproduction, OK, if you insist... but for people who can take it, we could say: There is always something better that you could do with your life. Have the courage not to hide from the facts of your own existence in the boisterous distraction of naive new lives.

It is probably true that philanthropic antinatalists, like the ones at the blog to which you link, are people who have personally experienced some profound awfulness, and that is why they take human suffering with such deadly seriousness. It's not just an abstraction to them. For example, Jim Crawford (who runs that blog) was once almost killed in a sword attack, had his chest sliced open, and after they stitched him up, literally every breath was agonizing for a long time thereafter. An experience like that would sensitize you to the reality of things which luckier people would prefer not to think about.

Either antinatalism is futile in long run, or it is existential threat.

If we assume that antinatalism is rational, then in long run it will lead to reduction of part of human population, that is capable/trained to do rational decisions, thus making antinatalists' efforts futile. As we can see, people that should be most susceptible to antinatalism don't even consider this option (en masse at least). And given their circumstances they have clear reason for that: every extra child makes it less likely for them to starve to death in old age, as more children more chances for family to control more resources. It is big prisoner dilemma, where defectors win.

Edit: Post-humans are not considered. They will have other means to acquire resources.

Edit: My point: antinatalism can be rational for individuals, but it cannot be rational for humankind to accept (even if it is universally true as antinatalists claim).

Even if antinatalism is true at present (I have no major opinion on the issue yet) it need not be true in all possible future scenarios.

In fact, should the human race shrink significantly [due to antinatalism perhaps], without societal collapse, the average utility of a human life should increase. I find it highly unlikely that even the maximum average utility is still less than zero.

The antinatalist argument goes that humans suffer more than they have fun, therefore not living is better than living. Why don't they convert their loved ones to the same view and commit suicide together, then? Or seek out small isolated communities and bomb them for moral good.

I believe the answer to antinatalism is that pleasure != utility. Your life (and the lives of your hypothetical kids) could create net positive utility despite containing more suffering than joy. The "utility functions" or whatever else determines our actions contain terms that don't correspond to feelings of joy and sorrow, or are out of proportion with those feelings.

Here's one: I bet if you asked lots of people whether their birth was a good thing, most of them would say yes.

If it turns out that after sufficient reflection, people, on average, regard their birth as a bad thing, then this argument breaks down.

This needs to be a top-level post. Even with minimal editing. Please.

(ETA: It's not so much that we need to have another go at the cryonics debate; but the above is an argument that I can't recall seeing discussed here previously, that does substantially change the picture, and that illustrates various kinds of reasoning - about scaling properties, about predefining thresholds of acceptability, and about what we don't know we don't know - that are very relevant to LW's overall mission.)

It is coherent to talks about "A causes B", to the contrary it's a mistake to say that everything is caused by physical laws, and therefore you have no free will, for example (as if your actions don't cause anything). Of course, any given event won't normally have only one cause, but considering the causes of an event makes sense. See the posts on free will, and then the solution posts linked from there. The picture you were thinking about is probably from these posts.

It couldn't have been "Timeless Causality" or "Causality and Moral Responsibility", could it?

My kind of test would be like this:

1) Do you always seem to be able to predict the future, even as others doubt your predictions?

If they say yes ---> "That's because of confirmation bias, moron. You're not special."

There's an online test for calibration of subjective probabilities.

I would love for this to exist! I have some notes on easily-tested aspects of rationality which I will share:

The Conjunction Fallacy easily fits into a short multi-choice question.

I'm not sure what the error is called, but you can do the test described in Lawful Uncertainty:

Subjects were asked to predict whether the next card the experiment turned over would be red or blue in a context in which 70% of the cards were blue, but in which the sequence of red and blue cards was totally random. In such a situation, the strategy that will yield the highest proportion of success is to predict the more common event. For example, if 70% of the cards are blue, then predicting blue on every trial yields a 70% success rate. What subjects tended to do instead, however, was match probabilities - that is, predict the more probable event with the relative frequency with which it occurred. For example, subjects tended to predict 70% of the time that the blue card would occur and 30% of the time that the red card would occur. Such a strategy yields a 58% success rate.

You could do the positive bias test where you tell someone the triplet "2-4-6" conforms to a rule and have them figure out the rule.

You might be able to come up with some questions that test resistance to anchoring.

It might be out of scope of rationality and getting closer to an intelligence test, but you could take some "cognitive reflection" questions from here, which were discussed at LessWrong here.