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Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
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This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
Comments (858)
A proof that a 2008 penny comes up heads 75% of the time:
I took a large sample of pennies not made in 2008, and flipped them. They came up heads .5 of the time, so my estimate of P(heads|penny) = .5.
I then took a sample of coins of all types made in 2008, and flipped them. They came up heads .5 of the time; so P(heads|2008) = .5.
These two samples are independent, so P(heads | 2008 and penny) = 1-(1-P(heads|penny))(1-P(heads|2008)) = .75.
ADDED: JGWeisman got it - there's no causal connection between being a penny, or being made in 2008, and coming up heads.
Next quesion: How can a computer program detect cases like this syntactically, without using your real-world knowledge of pennies?
The mistake is that you can only decompose a conjunction that way when it's on the left side of the |, not when it's on the right.
That said, I think a collection of a dozen or so incorrect bits of statistical reasoning like this would make great exercises, and would encourage the creation of a top-level post based on that premise.
I was wrong, and jimrandomh was right. I said:
P(X|A,B) = 1-(1-P(X|A))(1-P(X|B)) if P(A,B) = P(A)P(B)
But P(X|A,B) = 1-P(~X|A,B)
therefore P(~X|A,B) = (1-P(X|A))(1-P(X|B)) = P(~X|A)P(~X|B)
This is equivalent to claiming P(X|A,B) = P(X|A)P(X|B)
And this is wrong for most distributions.
A D V E R T I S I N G
For all your best contrarian ideas!
Can we afford not to?
Yes!
I'm not an evangelist and nor do I assume that evangelism will always be beneficial. An influx of people who are not biased towards rationality due to genetics could be detrimental to a given cause.
Hello Lesswrong.
Look at your community, now look at me, now look at your community, now back to me.
Do you want your community to smell like me? No, you don't.
But with the power of old spice Conclusion scented body wash, I can influence large numbers of people to more correct choices for still wrong (but less wrong) reasons, while leaving your community smelling as unbiased as a master beisutsukai.
By 'I' I mean by proxy you, I'm on a motorcycle.
Corn syrup appears to be no worse than sugar, health-wise. Interesting case of a health-related panic not based on any actual science.
"Rationalists should win"-- but with what probability and over what time scale?
Idle observation:
Clippy gets consistently voted up on a lot of his comments because we find him amusing, and rarely gets downvoted because very few of his comments are substantive. We will end up looking extremely silly to new members if he gets enough karma to put him into the list of top contributors.
So... I guess it depends whether we pitch ourselves as shiny fun community or serious rationalist Singularitarians as to whether this is actually an issue.
I agree with this comment.
I recently noticed that Clippy has higher karma than I do. I don't find that upsetting, but it is a bit disturbing, even given that I haven't been very active recently and have never made a significant top post. (I've made exactly one top post - an open thread, for which I believe I earned 50 karma.)
I want you to know that you'll still be my friend even if you have more karma.
Sometimes, wanting to appear more serious means you're taking yourself too seriously. This is one of those times. Pancake.
I make good, substantive posts. Like this one and this one and this one and this one and this one.
I have the same right to be here that erratios do. I provide additional assistance in that I have a perspective untained by anthropomorphic cognition.
You've commented before that you were programmed in your original form by humans. So how can you be untainted by human cognition? It might be less direct than for a human but there will still be a fair bit of a connection. Indeed, you seek to maximize the number of paperclips in the universe, and I'd venture to suggest that if alien cultures exist they will likely not even have a concept of paperclips. You're very close to humans in mindspace once you realize how fantastically large the space of possible minds is.
With Clippy at 1k and the top 10 at 6k, it's just way too improbable to worry about.
So, given that we've got a high concentration of technical people around here, maybe someone can answer this for me:
Could it ever be possible to do some kind of counter-data mining?
Everybody has some publicly-available info on the internet -- information that, in general, we actually want to be publicly available. I have an online presence, sometimes under my real name and sometimes under aliases, and I wouldn't want to change that.
But data mining is, of course, a potential privacy nightmare. There are algorithms that can tell if you're gay from your facebook page, and reassemble your address and social security number from aggregating apparently innocuous web content. There's even a tool (www.recordedfuture.com) that purportedly helps clients like the CIA predict subjects' future movements. But so far, I've never heard of attempts to make data mining harder for the snoops. I'm not talking about advice like "Don't put anything online you wouldn't want in the newspaper." I'm interested in technical solutions -- the equivalent of cryptography.
It's a pipe dream, but it might not be impossible. Here's Wikipedia background, with good additional references, for nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques, which is one of my academic interests. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_dimensionality_reduction) These techniques involve taking a cloud of points in a high-dimensional space, and deciphering the low-dimensional manifold on which they lie. In other words, extracting salient information from data. And there are standard manifolds where various techniques are known to fail -- it's hard for algorithms to recognize the "swiss roll," for instance.
These hard cases are disappointments for the data miner, but they ought to be opportunities for the counter-data miner, right? Could it be possible to exploit the hard cases to make it more difficult for the snoops? One practical example of something like this already exists: the distorted letters in a CAPTCHA are "hard cases" for automated image recognition software.
Does anybody have thoughts on this?
I write data mining software professionally, and one weakness that comes to mind is the deduplication process. In order to combine data from different sources, the software has to determine which entries correspond to the same person. It does this by looking for common elements with a low false positive rate. If two records have the same phone number, email address, site plus account name, social security number, or name-address pair, they are almost certainly the same person, so they will be combined. This relation is transitive, so if A has the same phone number as B and B has the same email address as C, then A, B, and C will all be assumed to be the same person.
You can subvert this by creating records which map as equivalent to two different people, such as by having one person's phone number and another person's email address. If a data source contains too many entries like this, it's useless unless there's an easy way to filter them out. If a data source contains just a few entries like this, data miners are likely to get confused. Note that this is not necessarily a good idea, since having a computerized bureaucracy be confused about your identity can have very inconvenient consequences. It is also possible to detect and defeat this strategy, by looking for deduplications with strange results, but this is tricky in practice, since people often really do have multiple names (maiden names, alternate spellings), phone numbers, email addresses etc.
I think there are three different problems here, each of which calls for different solutions.
Problem 1 is data floating around that is intrinsically harmful for strangers to have -- your credit card number, for example. Sometimes you put that number online, and you would really rather it not be widely distributed. This problem can probably be solved by straightforward cryptography; if your CC# is never sent in the clear and changes every few weeks, and you don't buy from an untrustworthy vendor more than once every few weeks, you'll mostly be fine.
Problem 2 is data floating around that can be assembled to draw generalizations about your personal life -- e.g., you're gay. Perhaps I'm speaking from a position of excess privilege, but one good medicine for that sort of thing is sunshine--if you find a job and a support network that you don't have to keep secrets from, you can't be blackmailed and won't need that sort of privacy as much. I'm skeptical that online data-mining will reveal much more of this kind of personal info about anyone than casual observation would in the near future; if you're constantly listening to Justin Timberlake, someone will eventually figure out that you like Justin Timberlake even if you never go online.
Problem 3 is people predicting your next move from your previous history. That's kind of spooky and could be dangerous if you have enemies, but the solution is straightforward: vary your routine! If you add a bit of spontaneity to your life, the men in the black suits will have to use a satellite to find you; maybe you'll get lucky and their budget will get cut.
It's 2 that I'm worried about; or, rather, not specifically worried for myself, but think is an interesting problem.
If information is really supposed to be private (credit card number) then you're right, straightforward cryptography is the answer. But a lot of the time, we make information public, with the understanding that the viewer is a person, not a bot, and a person who has some reason to look (most people viewing my LW posts are people who read LW.) We want it to be public, sure, but we don't plan it to quite as public as "all instantly assemblable and connectable to my real name." In practice there are degrees of publicness.
As a personal issue, yeah, I'd like my job and support network to be the kind that wouldn't be shocked by what they find about me.
Really? Where can I find said algorithms? Knowing how they work would obviously be a useful way of thwarting them.
Apparently, it looks at the self-reported gender and sexual orientation of your Facebook friends, and uses that information to guess your own sexual orientation. Here's how I would do that:
Gather three variables: your gender, the male/female ratio of your friends, and the ratio of gay-or-bisexual to straight people among those of your friends who state their own sexual orientation. If I wanted to be extra-fancy, I might also include a sparse array of events and clubs that the person was signed up for.
Apply some standard machine learning tools to this, discretizing variables if necessary. Use people who report their sexual orientation as training and testing data.
Practice my evil villain laugh.
In order to defend against this, you could apply steps 1 and 2, then look at what the machine learning program tells you. Try to match its profile of a straight person. Then you can remain Facebook-closeted even in the face of the all-seeing electronic gaydar.
It's theoretically obvious that you can try to do it this way with a nontrivial chance of success, but not at all obvious that given enough skill and work, success is assured (which was the claim). The latter would require (knowledge of) actual experiments.
I've heard of one for determining your sexual orientation (if you don't reveal it on your info page), but it's based on the revealed sexual orientations of your friends (if a lot are gay, you probably are too), so it's harder to thwart than, say, something based on your favorite songs.
Here's the article where I heard about the gay facebook page thing:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/20/project_gaydar_an_mit_experiment_raises_new_questions_about_online_privacy/?page=full
Here's where I read about calculating SSN's:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/social-insecurity-numbers-open-to-hacking.ars
My general thought is that so little data is needed to identify you, that the dataset can be enormously noisy and still identify you. And if your fake data is just randomly generated, isn't that all it is, noise?
(I saw a paper about medical datasets, I think, that showed that you couldn't anonymize the data successfully and still have a useful dataset; I don't have it handy, but it's not hard to find people saying things like, with the Netflix dataset, that it can't be done: http://33bits.org/2010/03/15/open-letter-to-netflix/ )
I've heard about the medical datasets.
Noise is a pretty interesting thing, and the possibility of "denoising" depends a lot on the kind of noise. White noise is the easiest to get rid of; malicious noise, which isn't random but targeted to be "worst-case," can thwart denoising methods that were designed for white noise.
Obligatory fiction reference: Paranoid Linux. Unfortunately the real-life project that the post is about seems to be dead; no idea if there are any similar efforts still active.
I wasn't aware of this, but this was pretty much exactly my idea, except that the chaff would be targeted to make standard algorithms draw a blank (basically, whenever the algorithm wants something to be sparse, we make it really not sparse.)
Damn, Cory Doctorow, I thought I was clever.
Same idea is also in Vernor Vinge's "Rainbow's End", so-called "Friends of Privacy", and similar idea in Stephenson's "Anathem" - that variant is termed "bogons".
In my last post on Health Optimization, one commenter inadverntently brought up a topic which I find interesting, although it is highly contraversial - which is HIV/AIDS skepticism and rationality in science.
The particular part of that which I am interested in is proper levels of uncertainty and rationality errors in medical science.
I have some skepticism for the HIV/AIDS theory, perhaps on the level of say 20-30%. More concretely, I would roughly say I am only about 70% confident that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, or 70% confident that the mainstream theory of HIV/AIDS is solid.
Most of that doubt comes from one particular flaw I in the current mainstream theory which I find particularly damning.
It is claimed that HIV is a sexually transmitted disease. However, the typical estimates of transmission rate are extremely low: 0.05% / 0.1% per insertive/receptive P/V sex act 0.065% / 0.5% per insertive/receptive P/A sex act
This data is from wikipedia - it lists a single paper as a source, but from what I recall this matches the official statistics from the CDC and what not.
For comparison, from the wikipedia entry on Gonorrhea, a conventional STD:
So it would appear that HIV is roughly 100-500 times less sexually transmittable than a conventional STD like gonorrhea.
So in my mind this makes it technically impossible for HIV to be an STD. These transmission rates are so astronomically low that for it to spread from one infected person to an uninfected partner would take years and years of unprotected sex.
If you plug that it to a simulation, it just never can spread - even if everyone was having unprotected sex with a random stranger every single day, it would still require an unrealistic initial foothold in the population by other means before it could ever spread sexually.
And of course, if you plug in actual realistic data about frequency of unprotected sexual intercourse with strangers, it's just completely impossible. Bogus. It doesn't work. It can not be an STD.
As gonorrhea (and I presume other STDs) are hundreds of times more transmissable than HIV, their low rates in the population place bounds on HIV's sexual transmission.
Finally, these rates of transmission are so low that one should question the uncertainty and issues with false positives - how accurate are these numbers really?
I find denialism in all forms simply fascinating. I wonder if you could indulge my curiosity.
You find your arguments completely convincing. Yet they are based on publicly available statistics and rather obvious and common-sense kinds of reasonings. So, I have to wonder, what do you think is wrong with the cognitive apparatus of all those medical and research professionals who believe that HIV == AIDS and is an STD?
Why don't they reach the same conclusions as you? Are they stupid? Just haven't thought of the train of thinking you use? What are your guess as to where they are all going wrong? Why none of them has realized the simple truth and shared it with colleagues?
Incidentally, I have a hypothesis as to what is wrong with your reasoning, which I will share on request, but I really want to understand how you reconcile your own certainty with the opposing certainty of people who (on paper) seem far better qualified on this subject.
This is a truly impressive bit of sophistry. You have succeeded in phrasing your objection in a manner such that a casual observer, unfamiliar with the topic under discussion, would think that you were being completely sincerely intellectually curious, while at the same time employing a coded epithet unmistakable to those already inclined to agree with you. This is a very common tactic, but I have rarely seen it done so skillfully. Bravo sir!
Now leave and go do it someplace else. This is lesswrong, not realclimate
I will indulge your curiosity in a moment, but I'm curious why you use the politically loaded term "denialism".
As far as I can tell, it's sole purpose is to derail rational dicussion by associating one's opponent with a morally perverse stance - specially invoking the association of Holocaust Denialism. Politics is the mind-killer. In regards to that, I have just been spectating your thread with Vladimir M, and I concur wholeheartedly with his well-written related post.
There is no rational use of that appelation, so please desist from that entire mode of thought.
Firstly, I don't think nearly as many quality researchers believe HIV == AIDS as you claim, at least not internally. The theory has gone well past the level of political mindkill and into the territory of an instituitionalied religion, where skeptics and detractors are publically shamed as evil people. I hope we can avoid that here. Actually, I think most intelligent researchers, if they could afford to be honest, would admit that HIV is the major indirect causitive factor, but this is not the same as saying HIV == AIDS. Likewise, I think most would admit that HIV is not quite an STD, not really at all.
Finally, even though I just said what I think is "wrong [with] the cognitive apparatus of all those medical and research professionals", namely that it is more an issue of politically charged public positions; I should also point out that even by the standard of your implied criteria - which seems to consist of counting up scientists for or against, it is even less clear that HIV == AIDS can be supported on that criteria. (which I do not favor as a rational criteria regardless). There are a large number of skeptics on public record for that hypothesis even considering the huge social stigma associated with adopting such a position in public. The HIV==AIDS hypothesis has far more skeptics on record than String Theory, for comparison.
But regardless, counting scientists is not a good rational criteria.
If you want to get into a discussion about rationality and reasoning in highly politicized issues such as this, that is an interesting side topic. But otherwise don't stoop to the moral high ground of politicized orthodoxy - just provide your hypothesis.
This is Less Wrong, not Mere Mainstream.
Actually, though you may not believe me, Holocaust denialism hadn't even occurred to me. In the portion of the blogosphere that I follow, it applies most frequently to AGW denialism, with the AIDS denialists second, evolution denialists third, and the anti-vaccination crowd getting an honorable mention.
The wikipedia article on HIV that you reference has a section entitled "AIDS Denialism".
But now that you mention it, why do you consider Holocaust denialism morally perverse? I thought that questioning PC conventional wisdom was considered a Good Thing here.
No, I don't believe I do. I wouldn't want to further offend you.
My hypothesis is pretty simple. You are using the wrong numbers.
When I Googled, the first few hits I found suggested 0.3% per coital act as a lower bound on heterosexual transmissibility with the risks increasing by 1-2 orders of magnitude in case of genital ulcers and/or high viral loads. I don't think that it is particularly difficult to understand the epidemic spreading in Africa as an STD when these higher numbers are used.
I did look at this study providing smaller numbers and this paper critiquing it, as well as this abstract mentioned in the wikipedia article. It was pretty clear to me that the kinds of low numbers you were using to argue against HIV being an STD are actually based on monogamous couples who are regularly examined by physicians and have been instructed in the use of condoms to prevent transmission. Those numbers don't apply to the most common cases of transmission, in which ulcers and other factors make transmission much more likely.
That is the hypothesis I was going to offer. When you suggested that you only had a 20-30% level of doubt of the orthodox position, I simply had no idea that it was such a strong and assured 30%.
Oh please. Stop trying to pretend you have the rationalist high ground here. You don't.
It didn't occur to me either, and seemed strange. That word does have strong negative connotations in my mind, but only because I associate it with stupid people denying true things and refusing to update on evidence. I thought the comment that referred to was incorrect, but it seemed more like honest confusion of the sort that clarification would dispel than denialism.
Some history then of exactly why the word conjures strong negative correlations is in order.
Look at the wikipedia entry for "denialism". It originates with holocaust denialism, was then applied to skeptics of HIV==AIDS, and then later to other areas.
Peter Duesberg, the leading HIV==AIDS skeptic, is a German of non-Jewish descent raised in Nazi-era Germany, so it's use against him and his followers adds extra moral angst. It is just about the deepest insulting connotation one can use. It is a signal of stooping to the ultimate low, that, in running out of any remaining rational argument, one must invoke deep moral revulsion to stigmatize one's opponent.
In my view, the term is a serious Crime of Irrationality, it is an empty ad-hominem and should be seen as a sign of great failure when one stoops to using it as a name-calling tactic against one's opponents.
That being said, I don't think Perplexed has this view, and that wasn't his intention. I am just giving background on why the word should not be used here.
Those who don't subscribe to HIV==AIDS, should just be called skeptics.
Do we call proponents of quantum loop gravity String Theory Denialists? It's ridiculous.
Should we call those who subscribe to HIV==AIDS to be Inquisitors, Mcaurthy-ists, or Witch-hunters?
I do.
Perhaps vulnerability to transmission is partially dependent on prior immune health. That would predict faster spread where health-in-general is worst, ie Africa, as observed, and also explain the discrepancy between prevalence and observed traqnsmission rates. I also recall reading an article about a widely afflicted demographic in the US (a particular subset of gays in a particular city - I don't recall which one), which suggested that they had already weakened their immune systems with drugs and sleep deprivation.
The other possibilities are that the transmission rate you quoted is wrong for some reason, or that the sexual transmission aspect has been overstated, and most transmission is through reused needles and other blood-borne vectors.
Note that spreading the idea that the transmission rate of AIDS is low has negative utility, regardless of whether it's true or not, since it would encourage dangerous behavior.
This much at least is something that should be relatively easy to confirm to a reasonable level of satisfaction. It would seem to require only a microscope, as syringe and a sufficient sample of people with AIDS. Has anybody ever founds someone with AIDS who did not have HIV? If not is that because nobody has bothered to take a close look? If so then I would certainly support your questioning of the standard of research supporting the mainstream position.
It takes courage to voice a low but not negligible degree of doubt in a emotionally salient mainstream position. I would expect it to result in almost as much social punishment as in the case of outright denial. (Emotional backlash isn't good at math.)
More concretely, I would roughly say I am only about 70% confident that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, or 70% confident that the mainstream theory of HIV/AIDS is solid.
I am surprised that those two confidences happen to be the same. Is it not a distinct possibility that HIV is, in fact, the sole cause of AIDS even when the mainstream theory is itself rubbish? (For example, if the theory got important details such as mechanism completely wrong.)
I tend to think of "HIV being the sole cause of AIDS" as the central tenet of the mainstream theory, but sure that could be true even if much of the details are wrong. Actually, I think many within the mainstream would admit most of the details are wrong - last I checked all the important details, such as how the retrovirus could come active after many years and damage T-cells and what not are all still hot research items.
And most of the specific results have been failures - no vaccine yet, just some drugs with a bunch of side effects which may or may not even improve mortality, etc etc.
I find hypotheses in the middle more likely overall - examples: that HIV is a mostly harmless retrovirus but in some people with (X, Y, Z cofactors) it can cause immune damage.
And I yes, I am at least mildly concerned about taking an HIV skeptic position in a public internet forum - and just thinking about the reasons for that causes me to slightly update to be more skeptical.
A piece of Singularity-related fiction with a theory for your evaluation: The Demiurge's Elder Brother
(I've moved this to part 3 of the open thread.)
I was thinking about turning this chunk of vomited IM text I wrote for a non-LW cogsci-student friend into a post (with lots of links and references and stuff). Thoughts? I'll probably repost this for the new open thread so that more people see it and can give me feedback.
Edit: Also, goal distortion.
I have a model I call the "badge/shield" theory, which goes like this:
When someone tells you you're good at something, or when you otherwise believe that you are, it's like a badge. You wear it proudly, and you want to show it off. It makes you feel good about yourself and you look for examples to practice talents you have badges for.
Example Badge: I think of myself as a good communicator, so I like mediating between friends who are misunderstanding each other, or explaining things to my classmates.
When someone tells you you're bad at something, or when you otherwise believe that you are, it's like a shield. You hold it up, often preemptively, against any opportunity to do that thing. The inability becomes part of your identity, and you believe it excuses you from having to do the things you have shields for.
Example Shield: I have a friend who claims she's terrible at math; I don't know, because I've never seen her try to do any. She won't calculate tips or split checks, because she has decided that she's a person who Can't Do Math and won't try.
Oddly enough, the seed of this came from a Dear Abby column. A woman had written in frustrated that her husband never volunteered to look after the kids. The advice was to mention to their mutual friends (perhaps when the husband was in earshot) that he was so good with the kids and they really enjoyed spending time with him. The point was to encourage pride in how good a father he was, rather than getting him to do it through guilt or obligation.
Just some more thoughts on what our identies really consist of.
Reminds me of this book on fixed vs. growth mindsets.
Definitely interested in the topic, would like to see more about it.
This just made an experience in my past click for me:
One of the traits-people-know-about-me is that Relsqui Doesn't Watch TV. The set of Relsqui-related activities and the set of TV-related activites are assumed to be mutually exclusive. This came about, entirely reasonably, as a result of my griping when a TV was on in the background, during a meal, or when I'd rather be socializing/doing anything else. It's true that I don't much enjoy it as a medium. However, there are a few specific examples which I like.
When the most recent season of Dr. Who started, a bunch of my friends started getting together every week to watch it. I'd hear them plan it on another evening, and talk about the episode the following week, and I'd kind of "hrm" to myself and fidget and not say anything. This went on for a few weeks, until finally at the end of some unrelated social evening I approached the friend who was hosting it and said,
"So ... um. It's completely understandable that you wouldn't even have thought to invite me, because I've made such a big deal in the past about not liking that sort of thing, but ... uh. I actually happen to like Dr. Who."
He blinked at me a couple of times, affirmed that he hadn't invited me because he was certain I wouldn't be interested, and immediately encouraged me to come. So I did! And it was fun.
That was, I gather, me making a deliberate choice to overcome the consistency effect--although without knowing its name, I just thought of it as "asking for what you want when other people don't know you want it." I was pretty proud of myself.
Also, other people sometimes push you to be to person they think you are.
Awesome link, thank you. I see there are articles I haven't read on self-enhancement, self-verification theory, self-concept, and more. Sweet. I'm starting to have more respect for sociologists / psychologists / social psychologists.
I think the insight that one's behavior has been (often) determined by a self-image that is not wholly within one's control is really important. It seems like a discovery that may help one make the transition from associative to mechanistic thought which should allow for greater goal achievement.
I'm trying to make the connection between identity awareness/skepticism and associative vs. mechanistic thought, but I don't really see it. Can you explain further? The only connection I see is that they're both byproducts of rationality and so getting good at one will make you better at the other.
It's nothing too deep: engaging in behaviors that are associated with your self-concept versus behaviors that you can see will causally lead to your goals.
Ah, I see. Thanks.
Thoughts?
Regina Spektor wrote a song about CEV called "The Calculation". She seems to agree with Shane Legg that it may well be impossible, but she appears to think there's hope. YouTube video here.
Excerpt:
So I suppose she's critical of naive aggregation methods for preference fulfillment.
So that's the secret of achieving true AI!
Analog computing via food. This is the dawn of the non-Bayes era!
Do you have a citation for this claim, or are you asserting it as an alternative interpretation of the lyrics? Because, to make an analogy, you can tell me "Dear God" by XTC is a Christmas song but that doesn't make it true.
Alternative interpretation, of course.
How wrong can you be? Answer: very wrong.
From an article whose point is that the more variety you have, the more adjacent possibilities are available for exploration.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8024991/Patients-to-be-frozen-into-state-of-suspended-animation-for-surgery.html
This technology IMO is a bridge to getting serious scientists involved in cryonics research
I don't know what to make of this:
Suicide note
Article
I've begun skimming a few of the chapters (the titles aren't anything if not provocative). On the one hand I am quite predisposed to view the entire work as mostly bunk, because manifestos of this nature often are. However on the other hand, the idea of a philosopher driven to death by his learning is a stimulating archetype enough for me to explore this. And yes I know that considering he quotes:
Its certain he was playing on that.
I've decided to post this here for rationality detox so I don't pick up any craziness (I'd wager a high probability of there being some there).
He seems to have developed what he terms a sociobiolgical analysis of the history of liberal democracy, reminiscent so far in parts of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. This judging by a few excerpts of the ending chapter culminates in a kind of singularitarian view and the inevitability of human extinction at the hands of our self created transhuman Gods.
The bits about synthetic intelligence mostly seem rather naive - and they seem out of place amidst the long rants about Jesus, Nazis and the Jews. However, a few things are expressed neatly. For example, I liked:
"When it dawns on the most farsighted people that that this technology is the future and whoever builds the first AI could potentially determine the future of the human race, a fierce struggle to be first will obsess certain governments, individuals, businesses, organizations, and otherwise."
However, such statements do really need to be followed by saying that Google wasn't the first search engine, and that Windows wasn't the first operating system. Being first often helps - but it isn't everything.
This is precisely the wrong time to apply outside view thinking without considering the reasoning in depth. That isn't an appropriate reference class. The 'first takes all' reasoning you just finished quoting obviously doesn't apply to search engines. It wouldn't be a matter of "going on to say", it would be "forget this entirely and say..."
Computer software seems like an appropriate "reference class" for other computer software to me.
The basic idea is that developing toddler technologies can sometimes be overtaken by other toddlers that develop and mature faster.
Superficial similarities do scary things to people's brains.
Does anyone know where I might find a copy? suicidenote.info is down.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/38104189/Mitchell-Heisman-Suicide-Note
Thank you very much.
I just skimmed a few random pages of the book, and ran into this stunning passage:
The small part of the book I've seen so far sounds lucid and without any signs of craziness, and based on this passage, I would guess that there is whole lot of interesting stuff in there. I'll try reading more as time permits.
I don't know how much detox this provides, but this blog has comments from three anonymous posters who claim to have known him.
Mitchell Heisman starts off by saying
This is obviously false - it's up on the internet, it's gotten some press coverage, it quite obviously has not been repressed. But he is right that it won't be judged on its merits, because it's so long that reading it represents a major time commitment, and his suicide taints it with an air of craziness; together, these ensure that very few people will do more than lightly skim it.
The sad thing is, if this guy had simply talked to others as he went along - published his writing a chapter at a time on a blog, or something - he probably could've made a real contribution, with a real impact. Instead, he seems to have gone for 1904 pages with no feedback with which to correct misconceptions, and the result is that he went seriously off the rails.
From the document:
Later, elaborating:
Interesting. But I note that there is nothing by Yudkowsky in the selected bibliography. I get the impression that his knowledge there is secondhand. Maybe if he'd read a bit about rationality, it could have pulled him back to reality. And maybe if he'd read a bit about what death really is, he wouldn'tve taken a several-millenia-old, incorrect Socrates quote as justification for suicide.
I'm trying to defeat my bad excuses for cryocrastinating, such as confusion about how to decide what to sign up for. (A few less-bad excuses will still remain, such as not currently having any income at all, but I'm working on remedying that.) Other than Alcor's included standby service, what significant differences are there between Alcor and CI (and are there any other US cryonics providers I should be considering)? What accounts for the big difference in pricing? Does my being a young healthy person affect anything relevant to this choice?
And if I go with Alcor and therefore have the choice between neuro and full-body, what makes more sense now? Is it more than negligibly likely that any important information is stored outside the brain?
Your soul is stored in your spleen. If you lose that then the best you can hope for is to be restored as a p-zombie. You will also lose the majority of your midichlorians. Imagine it, you are stuck as a head in a jar and you don't even have your ability to force grip!
More seriously there is some information stored outside of your brain. Your motor skills obviously. A lot of the skill in weight lifting for example is in compensating for and overriding the reflexive reaction to your movement. But that's no problem. Just tell the FAI that you had elite bow hunting and nunchaku skills and you'll be set.
Information that could be of relevance to your personality is the component of your reactions and emotional experience that is determined by your posture and physiology. Your body changes how your feel, and vice versa. Then there are the hormone secreting organs, the function of which fundamentally alter how you behave... A lot of this could be reconstructed reasonably well based on evidence in your head. Including, for example, your memories of what you were like, reverse engineered with compensation for any evident biases. But something will be lost, however trivial.
I'm thinking about buying Adrafinil (powder) and a bunch of empty capsules. I'll put Adrafinil in half, sugar or something in the other half, and then do the obvious.
Does anyone else do blind testing on themselves?
There's talk about self-experimenting on LW, but not much about blind tests, even in areas where that would be possible, like nootropics and supplements. I wonder why that is.
OkCupid thread, anyone?
I was thinking that those of us that aren't shy could share our OkCupid profiles for critique from people who know better. (Not that we have to accept the critiques as valid, but this is an area where it'd be good to have others' opinions anyway.)
If anyone wants to get the ball rolling, post a link to your profile and hopefully someone will offer a suggestion (or a compliment).
Also, I bet cross-sexual-preference critique would be best: which for most of us means gals critiquing guys and guys critiquing gals. But I realize the LW gender skew limits that.
Drop the Myers-Brigg type indicator (very last season), and replace it with the hip and stylish Five factor model.
Or your profile will just end up attracting a bunch of Jung-fanboys who want to talk about their dream journals. :3
Ok, want to ask advice about something ... touchy.
Like most girls' profiles, mine says nothing whatsoever about sex, to avoid attracting armies of pervs. But sexual incompatibility actually can be a deal-breaker for me, and I'd imagine I'm not alone in that. I don't have anything complicated going on -- I just think that sex is nifty, and I want some way to avoid winding up with people more prudish than myself.
Is there a delicate way to hint at that?
Somehow I doubt that the part about needing a guy to have lots of sex with you is worth mentioning.
The girl I'm primarily dating put sex as one of the six things she couldn't do without. That didn't put me off. It also screens off crazy social conservatives.
I agree with wedrifed; answering questions is a good way to express this and match on it without putting it up front in your profile. By the same token, you can sort the public answers of a potential match to see if you're compatible in that way.
Nice double entendre
Including the phrase 'sexually compatible' seems to send the right signal without being excessively crude. You can also use the question system to filter this kind of thing. There are questions that explicitly handle these sort of preferences and also the ability to select a set of questions as mandatory.
Apart from that you can do a search through all the sex questions and answer every one of them. That is what I did when I lost the 'more desiring of sex' picture on my profile and wanted to reclaim it. This will (obviously) lower the match ratings of prudes and also allow you to see [comparisons on various relevant criteria[(http://www.okcupid.com/profile/sadielou13/compare/bayesian_prior). Even if you haven't explicitly mentioned anything about prudishness you can make a reasonable inference about relative prudishness of potential matches by looking at a get a good indication of that from looking at "kinkier", "more old fashioned", "more desiring of sex" and "more moral".
(I just noticed that my rating puts me at +31% on 'pure'. WTF? I must be confused about what purity means since I could have sworn I was no such thing!)
Just say "No prudes". Why make it more complicated?
I've seen plenty of women's profiles that mention sex. I imagine if armies of pervs were a terrible problem that probably wouldn't happen as much?
If you don't want to risk that though, my recommendation would be to leave it off entirely, deal with it in messaging or in person. It seems to me that if you don't want to state it outright, you're likely to be misinterpreted.
I'd keep it impersonal and put mentions of it with words that aren't associated with sex normally or are negatively associated with sex.
"Sex is nifty" is good in that it doesn't associate you with the sex, so doesn't illicit mental images. Nifty is also an odd word to associate with sex.
"I don't have a religious view on sex" is also unlikely to get the pervs going. Both of these are a bit boring through.
Failing that, to keep it more light hearted you might want to try adding in some sexual double entendres? Hard to balance the right level of subtlety and understandability though.
Why not? Mine
I was interested to see what discussion this post would generate but I'm a little disappointed with the results. It looks like further evidence that instrumental rationality is hard and that the average lesswronger is not significantly better at it than the average person without a particular interest in rationality.
I'm going to throw out a bunch of suggestions for things that I think a rationalist should at least consider trying when approaching this specific problem as an exercise in instrumental rationality. I anticipate that people will immediately think of reasons why these ideas wouldn't work or why they wouldn't want to do them even if they did. Many of these will be legitimate criticisms but if you choose to comment along these lines please honestly ask yourself if these are ideas that you had already considered and rejected or whether your objections are in part confabulation.
One obvious reason for not trying any of these things is that the issue is just not that important to you and so doesn't justify the effort but if you feel that way ask yourself how you would approach the problem if it was that important to you. I haven't tried all these things myself. I rejected some as either too much effort for uncertain return on investment or in some cases had ethical qualms about them but I think they are the kind of things that anyone serious about instrumental rationality should have at least considered.
One thing that immediately jumped out at me as something of a hobbyist photographer was the casual remarks that people are 'not photogenic'. It seems to me that the word 'photogenic' should be like a red flag to a rationalist bull. It should immediately trigger a desire to unpack the meaning of the word and figure out what objective properties of reality it is describing. In this context the next response should be to figure out what elements that contribute to this concept are most amenable to conscious, directed efforts to fix.
What people generally seem to mean by 'not photogenic' is 'the pictures I've seen of this person do not seem to reflect the level of attractiveness that they possess in person'. Presumably people who are 'not photogenic' are not made of some different type of material that reacts differently to light than photogenic people. The problem must either be a lack of good quality photographs or an issue with uncomfortable body language when being photographed. Both of these are fixable given sufficient effort. I get the impression that at least some people in the thread didn't take the relatively low cost steps of reading OkCupid's advice on this issue or used the tool they provide for determining the picture that works best from the ones you have available.
OkCupid provides lots of data on OkTrends about what traits are considered attractive, broken down by gender and in other ways. With a little bit of research on this topic it is possible to make a list of areas where you could increase your attractiveness to the average person of the age, gender, etc. you are interested in attracting. Some of these are hard to fix (it is difficult for a man to make himself taller or a woman to make herself younger) but others can be improved with effort and are worthwhile goals in themselves (losing weight, increasing your salary). Figure out what the best 'bang for the buck' improvements appear to be for your particular situation and goals and expend effort on them.
A/B testing is a standard approach to optimizing online material. With a little effort it is possible to apply this to an online dating profile. At a bare minimum you can track any changes you make and record statistics on what improves your results and what makes them worse. If you wanted to get serious about this you could generate multiple profiles in different cities with similar demographics to your own and run parallel A/B tests rather than serial ones (this is one of those 'ethical qualms' approaches I mentioned). There are all kinds of shortcomings with the data collected in this way and with properly controlling variables but if you're not collecting any data of this kind you are not maximizing the information you extract from the data potentially available to you.
While the data that sites like OkCupid make available is helpful there are lots of interesting questions that it doesn't provide answers to. This being the Internet you could gather some of this data yourself. If you want to know what your competition looks like you could set up a fake profile for the kind of partner you wish to attract and see what kinds of messages they get (those damn ethical qualms again). This approach is potentially scalable to generate quite large amounts of data.
So if we're all good instrumental rationalists why are we not doing these kinds of things? Well for one, they involve effort. Quite a lot of effort in some cases. Instrumental rationality is hard. If we're not asking ourselves these kinds of questions though we're not doing a very good job of instrumental rationality. How can we improve?
I know why I'm not photogenic:
Bad posture (which I can fix when I'm standing at a mirror, but which shows up a lot on candid pictures.)
Trouble with facial expressions (I'm not sure how to put this ... I'm not good at knowing how my face looks, and I have a dumb expression in most pictures. The general effect is "chipmunk.")
Small total volume of pictures (neither I nor my friends are in the habit of taking lots of pictures of each other.)
One of my defects is -- I'm not sure if there's a shorter way to put this -- knowing what my body position would look like to an observer. It's why I can't do something like, say, golf: you'll tell me to change my form and I won't understand what I'm doing wrong because I can't "see" myself. I think that photogenic people and performers, apart from being physically attractive, are really good at "seeing" themselves.
I'm not sure I agree with this--or rather, I'm not sure this is the best model of what's going on. My impression has always been (and this fits with my photo-taking advice elsewhere in this thread) that you don't learn to see how you look when you're doing something right--you learn how it feels to be in the correct position to do it. That is, someone who's watching you might say "your back is curved, straighten it," and you can straighten it, but you still don't see what they see. You just find out what it feels like to have a straight back, and can try for that again later. I've never played golf, but I'd be surprised if good golfers are thinking about what they look like when they're putting. I'd expect them instead to recognize the feeling of being in the correct posture from having done it before.
This kind of self awareness would be a good starting point to fix the problem if you decided it was important enough to you. There are various things you can do which plausibly claim to improve body awareness (I've heard the Alexander Technique mentioned around here though I don't know anything about it myself) and good body language can be learned to some extent.
Even if you don't think it's worth the effort to work on these things however, if you go to a good professional portrait photographer they should be able to help you address these kinds of problems and get some good pictures. Portrait photography isn't my main area of interest but I've read some books that cover the basics and they generally talk about techniques for getting the client relaxed and comfortable in order to minimize the effects of awkward body language and about things you can tell a person to do that will help them position themselves in a way that will produce good photos.
The camera also adds (visual cues that make it look like it adds) weight, and messes with color. My best friend just got married and had lots of photos taken of her and her husband. He looks fine because he starts out skinny as a rail and his coloration works in the photos. But in the very same photos, she develops a blotchy complexion and her hair color looks unnatural and gross. And while she's not fat, the extra ten pounds on the glossy photo nudge her a little that way. Her body language looks fine in photos (and if she were tensing up, wouldn't she also look tense on video? Video of her looks much better), and the quality of the photographer or camera can't be the issue because in the very same photograph her husband looks exactly like himself in real life and she looks weird.
I don't know exactly what the problem might be with your friend's wedding photos but in general the problem of how to make people look as good as possible in photos is quite well understood. There's an entire industry devoted to doing it. I can list several technical errors that can appear to add weight or mess with color but these kinds of things are not unsolvable. Part of the skill of a good photographer is avoiding these problems. Photoshop can also be used to fix specific problems with colour reproduction. I would bet that an experienced portrait photographer could identify what went wrong with your friend's pictures to produce a less than satisfactory result by examining them for a few minutes.
I suspect there may be genuine cases where certain people seem relatively less attractive in still photos than in person but this may be due to aspects of their personality or behaviour which the camera cannot capture. I doubt there is anyone however whose perceived attractiveness is not increased by a good photo relative to a bad one and in photography much of what constitutes 'good' has been figured out over the years.
"Knowing what to do" and being able to do it well are different. I have had good photographers take pictures of me. They have used the appropriate lighting and angle and helpfully tried to coach me in what to do--how to pose, how to smile, what to wear. And indeed, their pictures turn out better than most snapshots. That doesn't mean that I am able to use their advice effectively--to hold an unforced smile and keep my eyes open at the same time, avoid tilting my head funny, or not look frustrated and impatient after the 50th shot. It's a difficult skill for me, and while I expect I could be better with practice, it's not high on my list of desired skills to improve. So I'm not photogenic. Which means merely that I don't have these skills now and don't pick up on them quickly, but when you look at my awful pictures it's no different than if photogenic-ness were some immutable inherent quality.
(But I'm off the market anyway. On the upside, my partner was pleasantly surprised when he first met me in person that I was better-looking than my photos suggested.)
I like your ideas. Although some become harder to enact the less frequent your desired partner type is, which seems to be a problem for some people.
I'll note that if you are only willing to spend limited time on it and have the choice between improving general attractiveness and A/B testing profiles, I would pick the former.
I'm currently aiming for the increased salary and improved fitness.
I don't hold out much hope for OKcupid, I think I'll do better just getting out more to the sorts of events that the people I am interested in might go to.
Matt you have some great points.
I have lurked so far in this subset of the open thread and am now willing to throw in a couple remarks on my view of OKCupid.
1.) The OK trends blog to me cannot be read as serious social statistics analysis. It's intent is to get hits and keep their sky high google page rank. It is almost entirely a marketing ploy, and I find it impossible to source them on topics like "what makes a good picture?", "what makes a good message?", "are you all a bunch of racists?", &c.
2.) I have used their site for a little more than a year. My experience there is almost entirely positive, but my expectations for it are small. I find the website gaudy and slowly loading, and have arrived at a practice of logging on once a week, on Sunday morning; I update my journal, answer any messages, and do a quick search. Many Sundays I see no point in sending anybody any messages at all. I only contact somebody if there is something in their profile which genuinely interests me and inspires me to write them a message which has at least one sentence in it which I like.
The vast majority of profiles have no such content. At least 80% of the time I go through a woman's profile and she does not have one item in there worthy of a comment. I read ten profiles this morning and sent messages to none.
3.) I have a theory that most of the women on OKCupid put almost no effort into it; they are not genuinely interested in meeting any of the OKCupid men; they are participating by some complex motivation somewhere between playing around in a virtual world and window shopping what might be out there on the off chance, extremely remote, that they decide they want to buy; and also to compare what is advertised in the virtual world with the reality that they see around them in the real world.
4.) If anybody wants to look at my profile, I am tgroupguy. I would link to it, but there are a couple things in my profile which are obviously not LessWrong mainstream. If you want to see it anyway, I would be interested in reading what you have to say. You may not want to post it here; if you send it to my okcupid box I will not see it until next Sunday morning, but I will respond.
(SarahC and Relsqui's profiles are very far above the OKCupid standard.)
I agree about OKT, as I noticed elsewhere. I also agree with Alicorn about the glasses, if that's practical and if at-a-glance attractiveness is sufficiently high priority for you.
Thanks for that. ; ) I don't feel I can remark on the way most women use their OKC profiles, because I don't read many of them and I try to stick to the extraordinary ones. But I can say that there are tons of men out there who are clearly parroting what they've been told will attract women, trying to come off as the perfect knight in shining armor while successfully avoiding showing any hint of personality. The effect is to make it seem like they're trying to attract the similarly generic woman so they can get married and have generic children.
I recommend looking up how to write the accents; some of these words change meaning without them. A common example is that "año" means "year" and "ano" means "anus." Not that any sane reader wouldn't know what you meant, but it's worth knowing anyway. Some verbs change with accents in ways which are much more subtle: "estudio" is first person present and "estudió" is third person preterite.
A few specific errors, if you're interested:
I'd use "estudiaba" rather than "estudié" because it refers to an ongoing process, rather than a single event in time. (By contrast, one might say "empezé estudiar español en el grado segundo," because one began to study at one point in time.)
I think you made a typo writing "en la escuela"; I would probably have written "a la escuela" (at school, rather than in school), but I'm not sure you're actually wrong. It might just be a style choice. Similarly, I'm guessing "facilidan" is meant to be "facilidad."
Your "vecindad" is singular, so it "tiene" many Spanish-speakers, not "tienen." And while "muchas personas" is technically correct, it's the equivalent of saying "many persons" in English--more common would be "mucha gente" (many people).
I'm not fluent either, so I can't promise that's exhaustive, but I've studied Spanish for many years and used to use it at work a lot. :)
One of the reasons that instrumental rationality is hard is that acquiring good data is hard. Imperfect data is generally better than no data however and there are other sources where you can find research into some of the same questions that OkCupid covers. Most of the advice in their 'Don't Be Ugly By Accident' post is just standard stuff for portrait photography for example which any book on photography would cover in great detail.
I would advise you to wear smaller glasses if that is possible given your eyesight.
There are fun quizzes and they tell you stuff about your personality. That's why I registered; my half-assed profile explicitly says I'm with someone and to message me only if you're interested in platonic friendship. I have made friends with one really nice couple, though.
Late to the party! I'm cousin_it there too. Visible only to logged-in users.
Looks like I'm very late to the party. Just in case, I'm rock n stroll .
I never thought I'd say that LW caused me to join OKCupid. Here's my profile: http://www.okcupid.com/profile/TheMattSimpson
Comments? Suggestions? It's probably obvious that I'm mainly interested in hearing what the LW ladies have to say, but if you men know of such things I'm all ears.
This is interesting to read as someone who is not on OkCupid. Simply reading this thread makes me more inclined to sign up under the basis that input from LW is much more likely to make such a profile useful and less likely to make my profile simply be further damage to everyone's signal to noise ratio. Must think about this.
Ok. Replying to self to keep things organized. Have made a profile.
Some of the match questions are really poorly phrased. For example, consider the question "Have you ever had a sexual encounter with someone of the same sex?" which has four possible answers:
This neglects some fairly obvious other options such as "no, and indifferent." Many other questions had similar problems. The question about contraception was confusing since it wasn't clear whether abortion was considered contraception for this purpose. I assumed that it was not but I could see someone interpreting it as referring to any form of birth control.
I'd change "religion" in the sidebar to agnosticism or atheism. If people are sorting for religion (which is most of what that affects - anyone who scrolls enough to look it on your actual profile page can also see the essays about your Jewish cultural background), this will screen off anyone who's looking for agnostics/atheists and let through anyone who's looking for religious Jews. Basically a solid profile; if you were in my age range and lived nearby, I might have pinged you.
This is because they are largely user submitted and not actively filtered by OkCupid staff.
It doesn't help that they're limited to four answers of relatively short length, either.
Observation about online dating which didn't fit anywhere specific under this thread: it's a very strange sensation to be simultaneously aware of having specific preferences about unimportant traits (height, baldness) and that they're irrational. I've noticed that if I'm looking at the profile of a 32-year-old man who is balding, I feel like he's too old for me; another 32-year-old who is not will not give me that feeling. This annoys me a little. I don't care about baldness, but apparently some part of me does.
Are you intending to make a top-level about this thread? I think there's some really interesting stuff in it: profile optimization techniques, whether and how you can glean advice from a statistical analysis of other peoples' results, and non-dating applications of learning to write a good profile (e.g. self-knowledge). I'd be interested in trying to distill the ideas into a useful post, but it's your thread, so I consider you to have right of refusal.
Also, to you or anyone else: agree/disagree that this subject merits a top-level?
I haven't really followed the thread at all, but I grant permission to anyone to do what they want with it; it's their karma. I have a few LW posts that I'm already busy with for the next 5 days or so.
I believe you haven't written a post yet, Relsqui? I think you should do it. If you want, write a draft and set up a piratepad and link to it from here so that other people can contribute and edit.
Posted in discussion. If it gets a positive response, I'll shunt it to the main.
May well do; thanks. I have two more tests to study for this week (one down already), so, uh, it won't be today. But I'll see if I have time later in the week to assemble comments.
I've seen a few collaborative text sites mentioned here--etherpad, and now piratepad. Anything particular I should know about choosing between them, or just try 'em and see what I like?
There's also the shiny new discussion area just under the site header /points to link
Piratepad is just an instantiation of the Etherpad software.
Now, when I've read LessWrong in the past I've always thought to myself, "what a nice friendly community, populated by geeks like myself". But looking at all those profiles I'm amazed how outdoorsy adventurism seems to be a big part of your self-image.
SarahC "hiking and trail-running the Wasatch Mountains this summer was a blast"
Yvain "insane adventure ... mountain-climbing in the Himalayas"
mattnewport "Mountains make me happy. I love snowboarding and hiking on them."
Nisan "I love exploring" [pictures in exotic mountainous locations]
JGWeissman "I am an active member of the UCI Sailing Association"
Relsqui "You want to go do something with me. Ride bikes"
I've got nothing against mountains, I've even been up a few and enjoyed it. I'm not fat or anything, I even exercise semi-regularly. But if I were to make a profile like this it would never occur to me to emphasize those aspects of myself. Is this known to be attractive? I personally find these profiles intimidating. I would be more awkard and less comfortable meeting any of you after seeing those profiles than just after seeing your LW contributions.
To me, those profiles have a tendency towards coming across as perfect-and-a-bit-bland or goody-two-shoes, which is simultaneously intimidating (I'm not perfect) and not exciting to me. I like people that have some decadent, flawed or 'evil' aspects. Saying you have an evil sense of humor is something, but it's a bit non-specific.
Disclaimer: I married my high-school girlfriend. I have zero experience with dating or dating websites. I probably have no idea what I'm talking about. I would possibly be qualified to give advice about maintaining a successful relationship but I know very little about starting one. My tastes in people are also probably not typical, I have a fondness for the romantic and the mysterious - exhaustively detailed profiles are inherently something of a turn-off to me.
Edit: Rereading my comment, I think I hit the wrong tone. I meant to convey "There's something I don't understand!" but probably came across as "You're doing it wrong!". I don't expect OKC profiles to be optimized to appeal to me. For one thing, I'm not an American and probably miss a lot of nuance - for example I'm not sure that outdoorsy signalling has the same meaning in my country. (For another thing, I'm married.)
Outdoors-adventure stories/pictures: I also enjoy such activities in moderation (e.g. I play beach volleyball several times a week), but doing so is seen as an attractive quality (evidence of "spirituality", health, attractiveness, willpower, etc. in comparison to the stereotypical couch potato or computer nerd). So you should expect people to sell that part of themselves to the extent that it exists in any quantity.
I find it really interesting that I'm included in that, but I think I understand why.
I absolutely share your intimidation by really outdoorsy-oriented profiles. It makes me feel like the person would always want to be off doing things I didn't know how to do, wasn't fit enough for, or just wasn't interested in.
I don't place my mentions of cyclling in that category, for two reasons:
1) Bicycling as a primary mode of transportation is common among people my age in my city. Cycling isn't a hobby for me; my bike is my car. I rarely ride just for pleasure.
2) Because of the first point, dating another cyclist--or at least a bike-friendly person--is actually a practical matter for me. If I date someone who has a car and no bike, and we travel together, I'm relying on that person for transportation wherever we go, and cannot leave by myself if I want to. This is inconvenient at best, and potentially scary at worst. We could travel separately, but drastically different speeds make that a bit of a nuisance ... plus, traveling with my date is just nicer.
This is not to say that I wouldn't date someone who didn't use bikes for transportation. But it's easier, and if it's going to be an issue I'd like to establish that up front.
Besides ... it's a filter for the sorts of people who might think "Ugh, why are these stupid bicyclists riding in the road?! Don't they know it's just for cars?!" ;)
You describe it well - I get tired just reading this stuff :)
I see - fundamental attribution error again. The true explanation is more situational than dispositional.
Well, a lot of people like physical activity in a partner -- it says something about physical attractiveness, and also a sort of energetic outlook.
As for the predominance of outdoorsy activities -- honestly some of it is a class/culture thing, but so what. I've also noticed that there's overlap between math and mountaineering -- sort of the same kind of "coincidence" as math people liking Bach. Geeks tend to be drawn to physically demanding individual pursuits: running, climbing, cycling, and to a lesser extent weights. (Swimming ought to qualify but I've never met a lot of geeky swimmers.)
I see, that's interesting. (I run and swim - but swimming is very popular in my area.)
I live in a city surrounded by mountains that hosted the Winter Olympics this year so snow sports and hiking are pretty popular around here. There's probably some cultural context that interferes with the signalling going on in this case.
Ah! So basically I fell for the fundamental attribution error.
My explanation (dispositional): This person is a sports fanatic since he practices such an exotic high-commitment sport.
True explanation (situational): This person lives in Vancouver, where this taste in sports is commonplace..
Since you'll be looking for a person in your own city, this misunderstanding of signals presumably won't be a problem.
I'm Sgt. Pepper
I've had precisely one positive outcome on OKC, and that was a friend who led me to cool activities, not a hookup. Still try from time to time though.
Okay, here's mine.
I think I can offer advice to both men and women here; a big part of writing a good profile is simply writing well.
I really like this; good pictures, and, yes, good writing.
I'm willing to help cross this divide and check out some dudes or ladies-into-ladies on OKC. I think having seen a lot of profiles with the same errors over and over is a bigger asset than the ovaries, though. Also, unless we really have no criteria other than "is male" or "is female" (and we deserve to have more precise standards than that), it's going to be hard to distinguish between "your profile doesn't attract me" and "you don't attract me." I'm not sure how to account for, well, taste.
To clarify with an example, I'm happy to give that ball a kick and put my profile out there to be critiqued. But there are some qualities that are important to me which I think are underrepresented among LW's users (like having good interpersonal/social skills), and some that I'd expect to be common here which I'd prefer to avoid in a partner (like dedicating an above-average proportion of time to academic or professional pursuits). So if I find out that my profile isn't appealing to people who don't fit those preferences, is that a good or a bad thing?
I don't think the "head back" picture is a good pose.
Here's mine.
I like how I match over 90% (and usually 96%-98%) with almost everyone else here.
If anyone's interested in giving advice on the "actually looking attractive" aspect of OkCupid profile optimization: I am wondering what to do about facial hair. This is what it currently looks like, and I don't like it very much at all. Possible options include going back to something like this, or aborting Operation Facial Hair altogether. (My Best Face ranked the first aforelinked photo as my worst, and the other one as my best (which surprised me a bit). That is some evidence about what people prefer, but not very strong evidence, because there are several other differences between the photos that could account for some of the variation.)
I vote for abandoning facial hair. And your photo with the hat is totally the best.
97%. But I guess that's really not too surprising. One of the things I like about okcupid is how it's easy to make the match rating act as a warning. Make it ignore choices that differ form yours but you don't feel are important, and put high value on the ones that do. I can usually tell at a glance if someone is religious or highly socially conservative.
It is also worth noting that making a good profile is not the only thing you can do. If you socialise on the site, you get more exposure in general and people might see you if they are browsing the other people's journals or looking at the recent activity section.
I've never used any dating websites, but people who care about that sort of thing should note that the advice they'll get this way may have a very low, or even negative correlation with what actually works. I don't mean to say that people will consciously write misleading things -- just that, for various reasons, they may not work with a realistic idea of the thought process of those who are supposed to be attracted by the profile in question. To get useful advice, the best way to go is to ask someone of the same sex (and preferences) who has successfully used some such site to share their insight.
Definitely. It is often recommended to guys to focus almost exclusively on advice from other males rather than women until you have reached a level of understanding such that you can reliably distinguish between people talking about what the world 'should' be like rather than what the world is. Having a certain level of social presence also makes it more likely that people will refrain from trying to foist the rules for boys on you and actually give honest assessment's of preferenes.
www.okcupid.com/profile/kfischer
I don't know who erisiantaoist is, but I cannot believe he actually started his profile with the "I am slightly more committed to this group’s welfare..." quote. If I were at all gay I would date him in a second just for that.
...although I am generally surprised at how anxious people in this group are to signal transhuman weirdness, especially transhuman weirdness that only one in a few thousand people would understand or find remotely sane. Do you really have access to such a high quality dating pool that you're looking for people who will be impressed instead of confused when you name-drop AIXI and state your intention to live forever?
Remember, these profiles are selected from the pool of "people who link their OKCupid profile on Less Wrong, and ask advice of the LW pool".
In my case I'm not looking for a transhumanist match: there are lots of really smart, interesting girls out there that haven't heard of transhumanism, and I have a lot more things to talk about than ethics. (Seriously, who talks about bioconservatism on the first date? Once a girl said on a first date, "There are so many books, it's the only thing that makes me really sad that I'm going to die." And I was like, "Oh, don't worry about that. We're not that far off from solving death, you'll be fine. I personally work on the problem; trust me, you'll have trillions of years to read your books." I was still able to get a second date.) I just do it because I think it's hilarious that I can come across as insane and still get girls by being relatively laconic. Social normalcy screens off epistemic oddity, to an extent. I'm not socially normal but I do an okay job at emulating it most of the time.
So those that would take inspiration from my profile, note that the nerdy parts aren't optimized for success. At all. I just like typing AIXI. AIXI AIXI AIXI AIXI AIXI...
I admit that my profile does gratuitously signal transhuman weirdness... I'm okay with that not because I'm expecting a large number of people to be impressed rather than confused/repelled by that, but because I'm more interested in meeting the (smaller number of) people who are interested/impressed/okay with that.
I think the point is to be aware that you may also be driving away people who don't mind it, or might be interested if they learned a little first. Or people who think it's weird, and will judge you based on it if it's the first thing they learn about you, but will shrug it off and agree to disagree if they've already learned to like you first.
Yeah, I've considered that. For me it's just a little bit hard to avoid talking about under "What I'm doing with my life", because that is what I want to do with my life. But I was aiming to signal something like "interesting and plausible enough to contact him and find out more" — maybe I'm overshooting that and landing in "he sounds crazy; ignore" territory for most people, even people who might otherwise be convinced of the correctness/desirability of the things I mention there.
P.S. ...I just recognized your username! You messaged me a few months ago when I lived in Berkeley and I had a bit in my profile that said that I expected I'd usually be too shy to message people but not too shy to reply. Turned out I was too shy to reply. Sorry :( I wish I had replied. You sound cool.
I should note that I was just responding to the previous comment here; I hadn't seen your profile yet
but now I have to go see. Oh, yeah! I remember you.
No worries. :)
Your description of your sexuality sounds just about like the mirror image of mine. It's tricky to describe, isn't it? I took a crack at it in my "message me" section but I don't know how good a job it does of explaining.
Anyway, about the strength of your statements re: singularity et al ... I think the only part that I would expect to make someone o_O is the throwaway mark about humanity probably not surviving this century. I don't think most humans believe that to be the case. Whether they've ever really thought about it or learned why anyone else thinks so is not the point; they don't, so that might come off as crazy. Up to you whether to care.
The up-front declaration that you are Not Interested In Marriage Or Children Or Probably Even Exclusivity thing is new; what made you decide to add it?
Because I don't want to lead people on if they're looking for those things. Do you think it would be better to leave that out of the profile and just let my responses to the relevant matching questions filter for that sort of thing? (I actually need go back and change some of those to more than "a little important"...)
Well, it does a good shutting-down job, but you should definitely also fix your questions - you're still at 97% with me even though I'm a fan of all three things.
Maybe they're just sick of half-heartedly dating folks they don't click with.
I had a brief relationship with a nice boy who had never heard of most of the things I'm interested in -- he wasn't an intellectual type. Nothing against him, but it was surprisingly disappointing. After that, I thought, "Okay, in the long run I'm going to want a deeper connection than that."
The first few versions of my profile were geared to show off how geeky and smart I was. This connected me to people who spent a lot of time playing tabletop roleplaying games, reading fantasy novels, and making pop culture references to approved geeky television shows, none of which are things which interest me particularly.
Eventually I realized that I am not actually just popped out of the stereotypical modern geek mold, and it was lazy, inaccurate, and ineffective to act like I was. Since then I've started doing the much harder thing of trying to pin down my specific traits and tastes, instead of taking the party line or applying a genre label that lets people assume the details. In that way, OKC has actually been a big force in driving me to understand who I am, what I want, and what really matters to me. A bit silly, but I'll take it.
Here's a question I've been pondering a lot: What are good questions to use to actually learn something about a person? (If you suggest "what kind of music do you listen to" ... you're fired.) If they're not the same for everyone, and I expect that they aren't, how do you find them?
I usually go with "What kinds of things do you like to do in your free time?" although I don't know if I'm really the one to be making suggestions on this topic, considering how little I go out.
One reason I ask that is because I fit into the category of
and I'm hoping to find people with similar interests.
"What's something you believe, that you'd be surprised if I believed too?"
(I've yet to try this in a romantic context, but when meeting new friends it usually leads to a good conversation– the more so for ruling out first-order contrarian beliefs that they'd expect me to share.)
Oh, that one is excellent. I might try that on some of my current friends.
Although ... I wouldn't recommend using it on someone who dislikes debating or defending their beliefs (or on someone about whom you do not know that). If they're right, you have an immediate source of conflict which if taken personally could nip the new acquaintance in the bud.
If you had a year where you didn't have to work*, what would you do?
*You had lots of money and a job to go back to after
I'm not completely in the geeky mold either. But if you literally take a random sample of young men in my area, I will not get along with most of them. There's some sense in filtering.
To learn about people, I usually get them started on their interests. It only really works for people who have interests (enthusiastic about a hobby or career) but do you really want to date someone who doesn't? I only feel I know someone when I know his personal philosophy, but that usually takes time to come out.
Perplexed said something smart, but here are my drunk brainstorming ideas:
Do you believe in God? Why or why not? (people are usually willing to answer this, but they'll get offended in a hurry if you argue)
What experience in life have you learned the most from?
What was your favorite subject in school? Do you still follow it?
Do you think it's worthwhile to give to charity? Which ones? Do you give to them? (see God question caveat, and the last question is extra offensive if they have to say no)
What do you think about him? (Mention someone you both know personally or indicate a person who can't easily overhear)
What do you do when you don't have to do anything else?
I like some of those, particularly the last one--I've seen something similar, which was "what could you talk about for hours?"
I'm reluctant to ask "most," "least," or "favorite" questions, because almost nobody has good prepared answers, except to the trivial ones like "favorite color." Which is not an effective question for getting insight into someone's worldview.
I like asking people what their favorite playing card is, and acting confused if they don't have one (but about half the time they either already had one or are willing to make one up to play along).
Actually, the most informative prepared question is probably this one:
And then what do you do if they say "no"? :)
Personally, I'm annoyed by people who say "you can ask me anything, go ahead" (especially in response to the "most private thing" prompt on OKC). It's a way of putting the burden of making conversation on the other person, instead of sharing it with them.
Meh... The more I think about it, the more I love prompting your interlocutor to gossip about a third person. You can potentially learn: -How interested she is in other people -How willing she is to talk about other people behind their backs -How much she knows about other people -What qualities she values in other people -Whether she tends to judge people generously or not plus whatever actual facts you may manage to glean about their relationship with said third party! It's great! It's kind of ethically shady, but I am drunk and willing to overlook that for the sake of argument.
Edit: Hey guys I fail at lists sorry
I don't think that a prepared interrogation is the way to do it. Instead, I think you need to listen carefully to what is said in casual conversation ("What kind of music?" works fine!) and then ask followup questions to draw them out. Example: "You don't like country? Me neither. What is the thing about it that annoys you most."
I want to upvote this more than once.
For a while (a long time ago) I asked people "When did you first realize you were different?" Once a young woman I was on a date with said "But I'm not different"!
I would upvote this multiple times if I could. Having mostly non-mainstream interests sucks for dating.
Ah, sure. People (especially women), give me what help you can: http://www.okcupid.com/profile/ScottAlexander
I get the sense that your profile content doesn't do you justice - perhaps you could afford to be more arrogant? No one you want to meet would find you boring.
I like most of your pictures, but I would include a few where you look more friendly and approachable, eg. pictures of you at work.
That's a brilliant piece of advice about the attitude to take when profile-writing. Don't worry about looking good to people you aren't interested in! It doesn't matter what they think!
Given the potential objections below about Yvain's work photos, a photo of him socializing might also fit the bill. Nothing says "I'm approachable" like "Look! These people clearly approached me, and I didn't bite them."
Yvain is a med student. Pictures of him at work might have him wearing a mask and up to his elbows in blood. Which would be interesting, but not approachable ;)
I realise he is a med student, which is why I suggested "at work". Maybe this is a personal quirk, but people in surgical scrubs exude compassion and approachibility to me. Conversely, pictures of people at work in an office setting usually seem impersonal and/or trite to me.
My dad (a doctor, although he doesn't practice as a physician and does consulting instead) wears scrubs as pajamas, so I don't trust my intuitions about what they mean one bit.
1) I don't want to alarm you, but there's a tiger next to you.
2) I second the comments about your pictures. Get someone with a real camera to take some for you, smile when they do it, and then crop/balance them.
3) You made me giggle a few times; points for that.
4) I do too message men!
5) You get to goad the reader into asking you out and still have it sound like a joke exactly once. The second time it's desperate. (You do it once in the "message me if" and once in a photo caption.)
Where in CA are you from? :)
I think the blurriness of your pictures makes you look less attractive. There was an OK Trends blog about this: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/dont-be-ugly-by-accident/
Perhaps I am alone in this, but the 2nd/middle picture looks terrible - as if you hadn't washed or shaved your head in a week.
I like it. I like the humor, I like the varied skills and interests.
I created a profile just for purposes of this thread. Don't know if I will finish and maintain it. I'm not really looking for someone right now. But feel free to critique as if I were.
Your six things made me laugh. But your "private thing" answer annoys me--conveniently, I have already written out a rant about why.
If people haven't you should read the OKtrends blog, especially about what makes a good picture (good quality camera etc).
Also a bit about what people are looking for dating wise would be useful. Generally that is too dull to put in the profile itself, but required for advice I think.
My profile is currently moth-balled, and not really designed to be attractive (I did get accused of being narcissus, which put me off making it more attractive). I found it horrendously addictive interacting with people and looking at the breadth of humanity and their hopes and dreams.
If not people are nosy, I will divulge my okc identity via private message. I am also quite happy to give out awards, if people want them. Or just look at your visitor list for the guy with the round blue sunglasses on.
The author of that blog seems to give advice based purely on statistical correlation without making any effort to distinguish between correlation and causation. See this post for example.
I like the OkTrends blog; the analysis is more casual than scientific, of course, but the content is stuff that I was really interested to learn.
Also, as a more general point, I think that non-scientific but enormous back-of-the envelope calculations (like OkTrends) are a good supplement to tiny but scientifically designed studies. If the big&sloppy approach and the little&precise approach give completely different results, that's cause for further investigation. Pre-Internet, we didn't have the opportunity to do that much big&sloppy statistics, except very crude things like the census; but today, I think it might be useful to double-check the results of small experimental studies (e.g. in medicine) with self-reported stuff from an enormous population sample.
I agree with the big & sloppy point, but would also like to point out the parallel between the OkTrends blog and the Mythbusters.
While OKTrends does contain a lot of interesting, well-explained, and often entertaining statistics, I would be very cautious about mentioning it in the same breath as anything to do with how to attract people. The folks at OKC can describe the kind of photos which get a user lots of messages--basically, pointing the camera down your cleavage if you're female, cropping your head out in favor of your abs if you're male--but a fat lot of good that does you if you have a small chest or a belly. (Or if you want to get messages other than "UR HOT WANNA GO OUT 2NITE.") Similarly, knowing that "vegetarian" is a first-message keyword which disproportionately leads to conversation is not all that helpful if you aren't one.
Relatedly, their data is collected from a large and surprisingly mainstream userbase; if LWers are as atypical as we say we are, very few of those users are going to be similar to whomever you're trying to attract. Maybe you know a geeky, intelligent woman who wouldn't roll her eyes at the headless ab shot, but I don't. If you don't believe that the target audience of OKC is very different from LW's readerbase, read the comments on any OKTrends post. They're not all inane, but ...
(I suppose I'm making the assumption there that LWers looking for dates are more interested in someone smart and with common interests than someone who relies on having tits to get attention. If I'm wrong, feel free to disregard.)
By the way, just in case you don't feel insecure enough yet, OKC claims to be quietly segregating its users by hotness. I've seen it theorized that that was a publicity stunt or a sneaky way to pull back inactive users, which seems quite plausible to me, but doesn't make the stunt any less scummy.
Don't get me wrong; I like and use OKC. Just remember that, no matter how clever and statistically sound their algorithms are, most of their data still comes from people who think that what checkout stand magazines say about people, dating, and sex is actually the gospel truth. The site's judgments are based on that standard. So don't take them too seriously.
Interestingly, since receiving the mail saying I'd now be seeing hotter people in matches etc I have noticed a distinct fall in attractiveness of profiles to me, whether looks or profile based.
Does that help? I would have expected leaving the head there to go with the abs would work better. If I see pictures of just breasts then I wonder what is being hidden (and aside from that find the expressions on a girls face and the style of hair to be potentially attractive.)
As I recall, "body" as opposed to face pictures actually hurt your chances, statistically.
I thought they'd mentioned that in OKT once, but I just went back and looked and didn't see it. So maybe I made that up.
Her personality. >_>
I have no problem with dates who are smart and have common interests and rely on tits to get attention. :)
That seems to be a desirable outcome and one that I expect would be the natural outcome from applying statistical measures to interaction patterns. I expect and prefer OKC to provide matches that are most likely to lead to rewarding interactions. These do tend to be more likely between people of approximately equal hotness.
I'm pretty sure it's some kind of stunt since I got that email. I'm curious why you think the idea is 'scummy' though? Given how skewed first messages are towards physically attractive women (the same effect doesn't seem to exist for men) it seems like some kind of mechanism for balancing this effect would be useful.
I've thought about a dating site where you have to 'pay' more (probably points of some kind rather than real money) to contact the most contacted people to try and reduce this effect but I'm not sure how you'd pitch it so as not to offend people. It would help counteract the trend for the hottest girls to be overwhelmed with messages and the average girls left receiving few messages though I think which could potentially be good for everyone.
Not segregating people by hotness, emailing them to tell them so. It's the equivalent, by omission, of sending a bunch of their users a message saying "you're not pretty enough." It's a message which saturates our culture, and I'm not a fan, whether it's stated outright or not.
This would solve the balance problem from a technical perspective but not a human one. If you set a site up this way, the value of an incoming message would be proportional to the cost of messaging you. If you're "cheap," an incoming message is just as likely to mean the messager couldn't afford anyone better as that someone's interested. If you're "expensive," every message means interest ... but you get fewer of them than you might elsewhere. Nobody wins.
I'm definitely interested in better algorithms for matching people up, but I don't think that particular idea is viable.
This is definitely a problem. I think you'd need to somewhat disguise what was going on so people didn't feel they were being 'priced'.
I'm not sure you appreciate the dynamics of messaging on these sites. The hottest girls get vastly more messages than anyone else, more than they can possibly read and reply to. The problem they face is filtering out messages they might actually be interested in from the noise. For these users fewer messages is better, particularly if the messages are higher quality (which they will probably tend to be if they are expensive to send).
Meanwhile less physically attractive girls and most guys get few or no unsolicited messages. The system should help increase the number of messages they receive. They may indeed be receiving messages from people who 'couldn't afford anyone better' but they are getting messages and chances are the messages they receive will be from more realistic matches. As wedrifid pointed out, people tend to end up in relationships with people of roughly equal attractiveness. All the average guys who send dozens of messages to the hottest 1% of girls who they have little hope of success with might consider messaging someone whose profile interests them but who is of more average physical attractiveness.
I may not have made it clear that the idea would be that the recipients receive some or all of the cost of messaging them. This way the most in demand users would be able to 'afford' to message people of similar attractiveness but wouldn't be deluged with messages from people 'beneath' them who they likely have little interest in.
Agreed.
No, trust me, I know this part. :p But I see what you mean; my afterthought about how it would reduce their message quantity missed the point.
I wasn't assuming that would be the case, although
this would mean that hot people would mostly receive messages from other hot people. Which, according to your link, would be preferable for them. Interesting.
Okay, I retract my immediate rejection, at least enough to admit that I'm curious about how this would pan out.
I and 100 others second the recommendation to read OKtrends: simple, frank statistical analysis. It's not the most useful information, but I was really surprised at their frankness when discussing touchy subjects: religion, race, attractiveness. They're very down-to-Earth in their analysis.
Good point.