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A1987dM12y80

I've found that it is difficult to become any better at argument and persuasion when you have a reputation as an intelligent person and can convince anyone of anything by merely stating it with a sufficiently straight face.

Or even without a straight face. Sometimes I've made wild guesses (essentially thinking aloud) and, no matter how many “I think”, “may”, “possibly” etc. I throw in, someone who has heard that I'm a smart guy will take whatever I've said as word of God.

Petra12y40

Yes. My personal favorite was in middle school, when I tried to dispel my assigned and fallacious moniker of "human calculator" by asking someone to pose an arithmetic question and then race me with a calculator. With a classroom full of students as witnesses, I lost by a significant margin, and not only saw no lessening of the usage of said nickname, but in fact heard no repeating of the story outside of that class, that day.

See in context

31 Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

by orthonormal

26th Dec 2011

6 min read

1440

31

If you've recently joined the Less Wrong community, please leave a comment here and introduce yourself. We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing, what you value, how you came to identify as a rationalist or how you found us. You can skip right to that if you like; the rest of this post consists of a few things you might find helpful. More can be found at the FAQ.

(This is the third incarnation of the welcome thread, the first two of which which now have too many comments to show all at once.)

A few notes about the site mechanics

Less Wrong comments are threaded for easy following of multiple conversations. To respond to any comment, click the "Reply" link at the bottom of that comment's box. Within the comment box, links and formatting are achieved via Markdown syntax (you can click the "Help" link below the text box to bring up a primer).

You may have noticed that all the posts and comments on this site have buttons to vote them up or down, and all the users have "karma" scores which come from the sum of all their comments and posts. This immediate easy feedback mechanism helps keep arguments from turning into flamewars and helps make the best posts more visible; it's part of what makes discussions on Less Wrong look different from those anywhere else on the Internet.

However, it can feel really irritating to get downvoted, especially if one doesn't know why. It happens to all of us sometimes, and it's perfectly acceptable to ask for an explanation. (Sometimes it's the unwritten LW etiquette; we have different norms than other forums.) Take note when you're downvoted a lot on one topic, as it often means that several members of the community think you're missing an important point or making a mistake in reasoning— not just that they disagree with you! If you've any questions about karma or voting, please feel free to ask here.

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It's definitely worth your time commenting on old posts; veteran users look through the recent comments thread quite often (there's a separate recent comments thread for the Discussion section, for whatever reason), and a conversation begun anywhere will pick up contributors that way. There's also a succession of open comment threads for discussion of anything remotely related to rationality.

Discussions on Less Wrong tend to end differently than in most other forums; a surprising number end when one participant changes their mind, or when multiple people clarify their views enough and reach agreement. More commonly, though, people will just stop when they've better identified their deeper disagreements, or simply "tap out" of a discussion that's stopped being productive. (Seriously, you can just write "I'm tapping out of this thread.") This is absolutely OK, and it's one good way to avoid the flamewars that plague many sites.

EXTRA FEATURES:

There's actually more than meets the eye here: look near the top of the page for the "WIKI", "DISCUSSION" and "SEQUENCES" links.

LW WIKI: This is our attempt to make searching by topic feasible, as well as to store information like common abbreviations and idioms. It's a good place to look if someone's speaking Greek to you.

LW DISCUSSION: This is a forum just like the top-level one, with two key differences: in the top-level forum, posts require the author to have 20 karma in order to publish, and any upvotes or downvotes on the post are multiplied by 10. Thus there's a lot more informal dialogue in the Discussion section, including some of the more fun conversations here.

SEQUENCES: A huge corpus of material mostly written by Eliezer Yudkowsky in his days of blogging at Overcoming Bias, before Less Wrong was started. Much of the discussion here will casually depend on or refer to ideas brought up in those posts, so reading them can really help with present discussions. Besides which, they're pretty engrossing in my opinion.

A few notes about the community

If you've come to Less Wrong to discuss a particular topic, this thread would be a great place to start the conversation. By commenting here, and checking the responses, you'll probably get a good read on what, if anything, has already been said here on that topic, what's widely understood and what you might still need to take some time explaining.

If your welcome comment starts a huge discussion, then please move to the next step and create a LW Discussion post to continue the conversation; we can fit many more welcomes onto each thread if fewer of them sprout 400+ comments. (To do this: click "Create new areticle" in the upper right corner next to your username, then write the article, then at the bottom take the menu "Post to" and change it from "Drafts" to "Less Wrong Discussion". Then click "Submit". When you edit a published post, clicking "Save and continue" does correctly update the post.)

If you want to write a post about a LW-relevant topic, awesome! I highly recommend you submit your first post to Less Wrong Discussion; don't worry, you can later promote it from there to the main page if it's well-received. (It's much better to get some feedback before every vote counts for 10 karma- honestly, you don't know what you don't know about the community norms here.)

If you'd like to connect with other LWers in real life, we have meetups in various parts of the world. Check the wiki page for places with regular meetups, or the upcoming (irregular) meetups page.

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* Normal_Anomaly
* Randaly
* shokwave
* Barry Cotter

A note for theists: you will find the Less Wrong community to be predominantly atheist, though not completely so, and most of us are genuinely respectful of religious people who keep the usual community norms. It's worth saying that we might think religion is off-topic in some places where you think it's on-topic, so be thoughtful about where and how you start explicitly talking about it; some of us are happy to talk about religion, some of us aren't interested. Bear in mind that many of us really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false, so starting with the most common arguments is pretty likely just to annoy people. Anyhow, it's absolutely OK to mention that you're religious in your welcome post and to invite a discussion there.

A list of some posts that are pretty awesome

I recommend the major sequences to everybody, but I realize how daunting they look at first. So for purposes of immediate gratification, the following posts are particularly interesting/illuminating/provocative and don't require any previous reading:

More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.

Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site.

(Note from orthonormal: MBlume and other contributors wrote the original version of this welcome message, and I've stolen heavily from it.)

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[-]Lara13y420

Hello everyone!

Thank You for this site and for sharing your thoughts, for genuinely trying to find out what is true. What is less wrong. This has brightened my view of humanity. :)

My name is Lara, I’m from Eastern Europe, 18 years old, currently studying physics, reading a lot and painting in my free time. For about a year and a half now I’ve been atheist; before then- devout and sincere christian, religious nerd of the church. A lot of things in the doctrine bothered me as compltely illogical, unfair and just silly, and somehow I tried to reason it all out, I truly believed, that the real Truth will be with God and that he will help me understand it better. As it turned out, truth seeking and religiosity were incompatible.

Now I’m fairly ‘recovered’- getting used to the new way of thinking about the world, but still care about what is really true and important, worth devouting my life to(fundamentalist upbringing :)). As I still live with my family, it is hard to pretend all the time, knowing they will have no contact with me whatsoever, when I come out; it is really good to find places like this, where people are willing to dig as deep as possible, no matter what, to understand better.

So thanks and sorry for my english. I hope someday I’ll be able to add something useful here and learn much more.

[-]orthonormal13y140

Welcome! Your English is excellent, don't worry on that count.

...also, that's a really tough predicament (hiding your atheism from your fundamentalist family), and I don't have anything wise to say about it, except that it isn't the end of the world when they do find out, and that often people will break their religious commitments rather than really abandon their children (so long as they can think of a religiously acceptable excuse to do so). But I'm not really qualified to give that advice. Hang in there!

[-]Dustin13y100

I sympathize with you as I'm an atheist with a fundamentalist family who would cut me out of their lives if they found out.

I also envy you, as you had your enlightenment happen at such an early age. I didn't have mine until I was pushing middle age and had created a family of my own...all whom were also fundamentalist. I still live "in the closet" so to speak...

1Raemon12y

Wow. Haven't heard of that type of situation before now and it sounds very frustrating. Don't have any relevant advice but I hope you find ways to deal with it.

9MichaelVassar13y

I'm sorry to hear that your family try to control you like this. Do you expect to physically live near them for long? If not, you may not need to tell them. Surely they have behaviors that they don't tell you about too, and don't honestly expect you to actually act as if you believed (just as they probably don't act that way themselves and expected you to grow out of the confused phase in your life when you were doing all that weird stuff that you did as a result of being a sincere and devout christian who expects things to be logical fair and non-silly once understood)

[-]Lara13y100

Thank you all for support, it is incredibly important.

Unfortunately it is a church norm to cut off everyone who leaves, and the doctrine is such that there is no way to be ‘inbetween’. The community is quite closed and one’s whole life is determined- from the way we dress(girls especially), to the way we make carriers (or stay at home and raise children). So in the beginning I decided not to tell anyone at all, knowing how painful it would be for everyone, but after some time I realised that I could not live like that my whole life; though egoistically, after I earn enough money to leave, I will.

9MichaelVassar13y

There are really a lot of possibilities for finding work if you need it, at least if you are a US citizen. I can help you with that if you want. If nothing else, http://lesswrong.com/lw/43m/optimal_employment/ is available. I bet that if a few LWers could get together to do this (possibly after absorbing some of our West Coast or NYC contingent culture first) and build an amazing community there. email me.

2[anonymous]13y

Would you mind me asking which denomination your family belongs to?

7thomblake13y

To expand on orthonormal's point, note impact bias. If you do end up having to be truthful with them, whatever consequences you're imagining now are probably far worse that what you will actually go through. People tend to carry on just fine. And remember that the virtue of honesty does not require telling all truths, but rather not communicating falsely. If telling your parents you are an atheist will mean to them that you are an amoral person, maybe you should not say so unless that is also true.

4[anonymous]13y

Hey Lara, being a Slovenian student of physics from a very devout Catholic family (which I actually occasionally still accompany to Sunday mass) I can definitely relate to your story. I coped by sharing my doubts with less religious family members, eventually sharing with my sister that I considered myself atheist. I mostly let my extended family think what they will, but I don't really work to hide my non-belief in any serious way any more. I don't however try to argue with them about it. Mostly because de-converting my family members in a mostly secular country didn't really feel like a top priority, but also because I saw it would be very hard to get them interested in rationality. And without that in my mostly secular country, it didn't really seem worth it since I've come to realize that non-religious delusion is as widespread as religious delusion. I was for a time somewhat conflicted on this, but my general attitude since then is that I love my my family because they are my family not because I think they are good at rational debate or hold true beliefs. I think most parents feel the same way about their children. I'd heartily recommend reading the sequences, since atheism is just the beginning. :) Best wishes, Konkvistador

[-]obfuscate13y340

Hi; I'm a lurker of about one year, and recently decided to stop lurking and create an account.

I'm an undergraduate in Portland-area Oregon. I study mathematics and computer science at Pacific University. I've been interested in rationality for a very long time, but Less Wrong has really provided the formalism necessary to defend certain tactics and strategies of thought over others, which has been very...helpful. :)

Speaking of Portland, it seems that there are many Portland Less-Wrongians and yet there is no meetup. I would like to start a meetup, so I need a bit of Karma to get one started.

[-]gyokuro13y320

Hi, I'm 15, so sadly cannot say much of my education yet, but at least I've read a fair deal. I find the ideas on this site somewhat unappreciated among my age group, but fascinating for me. I've lurked here for close to a year, but I'm irrationally shy of speaking over the internet. I hope to contribute if I find what I think interesting, regardless of my adverseness to commenting. Thank you for the welcome!

8KPier13y

There's an email list and occasional online meetups for LessWrong teenagers; you can join here. Welcome aboard!

1atucker13y

Seconded! Looking forward to meeting you, if you join the group.

[-]_ozymandias13y310

Hi everyone! I'm Ozy.

I'm twenty years old, queer, poly, crazy, white, Floridian, an atheist, a utilitarian, and a giant geek. I'm double-majoring in sociology and psychology; my other interests range from classical languages (although I am far from fluent) to guitar (although I suck at it) to Neil Gaiman (I... can't think of a self-deprecating thing to say about my interest in Neil Gaiman). I use zie/zir pronouns, because I identify outside the gender binary; I realize they're clumsy, but English's lack of a good gender-neutral pronoun is not my fault. :)

One of my big interests is the intersection between rationality and social justice. I do think that a lot of the -isms (racism, sexism, ableism, etc.) are rooted in cognitive biases, and that we're not going to be able to eliminate them unless we understand what quirks in the human mind cause them. I blog about masculism (it is like feminism! Except for dudes!) at No Seriously What About Teh Menz; right now it's kind of full of people talking about Nice-Guy-ism, but normally we have a much more diverse front page. I believe that several of the people here read us (hi Nancy! hi Doug! hi Hugh, I like you, when you say I'm wrong you... (read more)

6MBlume13y

Hi Ozy, it's really good to see you here, I enjoy the blog a lot. I remember reading one of your first social justice 101 posts, finding it peppered with LW links, and thinking "holy crap, somebody's using LW as a resource to get important background information out of the way while talking about something-really-important-that-isn't-itself-rationality -- this is awesome and totally what LW should be for", so that made me happy =)

3_ozymandias13y

Thanks! LW actually helped me crystallize that a lot of the stuff social-justice-types talk about is not some special case of human evil, but the natural consequence of various cognitive biases (that, in this case, serves to disadvantage certain types of people).

5MileyCyrus13y

Her blog is good. Instead of blindly cheering for a side in the feminism vs men's-rights football game, Ozymandias actually tries to understand the problem and recommend workable solutions.

5_ozymandias13y

Thank you very much, Miley! I tend to view feminism and men's rights as being inherently complementary: in general, if we make women more free of oppressive gender roles, we will tend to make men more free of oppressive gender roles, and vice versa. However, in the great football game of feminists and men's rights advocates, I'm pretty much on Team Feminism, which is why I get so upset when it's clearly doing things wrong. Also, my pronoun is zie, please. :)

1MileyCyrus13y

What I meant is that you actually demand results from your team, instead of giving them a free pass just because they have a certain label.

2NancyLebovitz13y

Hi, Ozy! I've enjoyed your writing at No Seriously What About Teh Menz; so it's good to see you here.

[-]Kallio13y300

Hi; I've been reading LessWrong for more than a year and a half, now, but I never quite got around to making an account until today.

So, introduction: I'm eighteen years old, female, transgender. I live in California, USA. I don't have a lot of formal education; I chose to be homeschooled as a little kid because my parents were awesome and school wasn't, and due to disability I've not yet entered college.

The road to rationalism was fairly smooth for me. I'm a weirdo in enough ways that I learned early on not to believe things just because everyone else believed them. It took a little bit longer for me to learn not to believe things just because I had always believed them.

I guess my major "Aha!" moment came when I was fourteen, after I finally admitted to myself that I was transgender. I had lied to myself, not to mention everyone else, for almost a decade and a half. I had shied away from the truth every time I'd had the opportunity to see it. And while I'd had pretty good reasons for doing so (Warning: Big-ass PDF), the truth felt better. Not only that, but knowing the truth was better, in measurable ways; it allowed me to begin to move my life in a direction I ac... (read more)

5[anonymous]13y

Welcome to the site Kallio! I don't think you are alone in your experience of this. People here are pretty contrarian, metacontrarian even. I hope that in the month since you've posted this you've continued to gain utility from the site. :) While I have long ago read most of them, there are still sequences that I haven't read in a systematic fashion and I don't think I'm that exceptional among long time readers in that regard, so once you feel you've gotten a good grasp on issues don't be afraid to post. Also if you have a question about the material, need a beta reader for a contribution or would just like to discuss stuff with someone, please feel free to PM me. All the best, Konkvistador

[-]lisa13y280

Hello!

I'm a 20 year old student at Georgia Tech, double majoring in Industrial Engineering and Psychology, and am spending the current semester studying abroad at the University of Leeds in the UK.

I read HPMOR this weekend on a bus trip to London and as soon as I returned I found this site and have been enthralled by the Sequences, which I am slowly working my way through.

All of my life I have loved to read and learn new things and think through them, but last year I came to the realization that my curiosity had started to die in my late high school years. I found myself caring about getting a good grade and then abruptly forgetting the information. Much of what I was "learning" I never truly understood and yet I was still getting praise from teachers for my good grades, so I saw no reason to invest more effort. Early last year, I realized that this was happening and attempt to rededicate myself to finding things that again made me passionate about learning. This was a major contribution to adding Psychology as a second major.

This semester of new classes in a new educational system combined with the past few days of reading the Sequences have sparked my interest in man... (read more)

4[anonymous]13y

Welcome to the site! Since I suspect you may find it interesting, have you read anything on spaced repetition so far? Also since I'm linking there I just want to warmly recommend gwern's site in general, he has a great knack for finding relevant information and presenting it well (good enough to get him a job at the Singularity Institute!) I've come to know and grown to dislike this feeling in the past few years of university. It is why I spend more effort than needed to try and make knowledge I learn become truly a part of me. Of course sometimes you just need to jump through hoops ... Consider asking around for a chavruta. The sequences are loooong (which is good since they are mostly well written) and talking to people about what you read is always fun. Taking up daenerys on her offer also sounds like a good idea indeed. Cheers, Konkvistador

2lisa13y

Hi, thank you for both the welcome and the wealth of helpful knowledge! I did find the info on spaced repetition, as well as everything else you linked me to, very interesting! I think my problem now is that my interest in so many different things has been sparked, and I'm having a hard time prioritizing what to read and research first!

4juliawise13y

Hi! I also loved finding a place where people were really excited about ideas. You might be interested in 80,000 Hours, a site on choosing careers that improve the world (and they're very much in favor of making money as a way to do this, though also in favor of education as a career!)

2[anonymous]13y

2TimS13y

Welcome to LessWrong. If you're interested, there's a meetup every other week that meets near Emory.

1Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) 13y

That's a dangerous idea! Books in the library that are more interesting than your textbooks tend to result in "waking up" four hours later to realize you've read an entire book on [interesting subject x] and are still no closer to researching [boring essay topic y]. Good luck though! Your classes do sound pretty interesting. Hopefully you can stay engaged. I think that's a brilliant idea, and it really needs to be done. The "but then you wouldn't make any money!" people are pretty annoying, but you can ignore them.

0JohnEPaton12y

That's cool that your studying a combination of Psychology and Engineering. I'm doing something similar and it seems to be very rare to find someone who is working in both of those fields. I'm sure that in the UK people would be even less understanding of this. It seems like over there you just choose one subject and that's all you do for the next three years. Keep on looking at those library books. I think the most important thing as an undergrad is to follow your interests even if this means dialling back on the effort you put into class work.

[-]Brigid13y270

Hi, I’m Brigid. I’ve been reading through the Sequences for a few weeks now, and am just about to start the Quantum Section (about which I am very excited). I found out about this site from an email the SIAI sent out. I’m an Signals Intelligence officer in the Marine Corps and am slated to get out of the military in a few months. I’m not too sure what I am going to do yet though; as gung-ho as I originally was about intel, I’m not sure I want to stay in that specific field. I was a physics and political science major in college, with a minor in women’s studies. I’ve been interested in rationality for a few years now and have thoroughly enjoyed everything I’ve read so far here (including HPMOR) . Also, if there is anyone who is interested in starting a Meetup group in Hawaii (Oahu) let me know!

7Eliezer Yudkowsky13y

Hi, Brigid! Pleased to have you here! Experience has shown that by far the best way to find out if anyone's interested in starting an LW group is to pick a meeting place, announce a meetup time, and see if anyone shows up - worst-case scenario, you're reading by yourself in a coffeeshop for an hour, and this is not actually all that bad.

5Shmi13y

Welcome! A warning: while the QM sequence in general is very readable and quite useful for the uninitiated, the many-worlds advocacy is best taken with a mountain of salt. Consider skipping the sequence on the first pass, and returning to it later, after you've covered everything else. It is fairly stand-alone and is not relevant to rationality in general.

8fubarobfusco13y

Well, there are a couple of things going on in the QM sequence. One of them is MWI. The other is the general debunking of the commonly-held idea that QM is soooooooo weeeeeeeeird.

2Shmi13y

Yes, that's the good part.

7Eliezer Yudkowsky13y

A meta-warning: Take shminux's "mountain of salt" advice with an equally large mountain of salt plus one more grain - as will become starkly apparent, there's a reason why the current QM section is written the way it is, it's not meant to be skipped, and it's highly relevant to rationality in general.

[-]Richard_Kennaway13y200

How would the Sequences be different, other than in the QM parts, if we lived in a classical universe, or if we had not yet discovered QM?

3[anonymous]13y

Wild Mass Guessing: in a classical universe, particles are definable individuals. This breaks a whole mess of things; a perfect clone of you is no longer you, and etc.

[-]JGWeissman13y150

a perfect clone of you is no longer you

The lack of identity of individual particles is knock down argument against our identities being based on the identities of individual particles. However, if there was identity of individual particals, this does not require that the identity of individual particles contribute to our identities, it would just remove a knock down argument against that idea.

2DanArmak13y

(Almost) all the particles in our bodies are replaced anyway, on the scale of a few years. Replacement here means a period of time when you're without the molecule, and then another comes in to take its place; so it's real whether or not particles have identities. This applies to quite large things like molecules. Once we know that, personal identity rooted in specific particles is shaky anyway.

1thomblake13y

An important point. Heraclitus probably didn't believe in lack of identity of individual particles, but he did believe we are patterns of information, not particular stuff. EDIT: On second thought, he'd probably work out lack of identity of individual particles if pressed, following from that.

7DanArmak13y

Not necessarily. "What/who is you" is a matter of definition to a large extent. If particles have identities (but are still identical to all possible measurements), that doesn't stop me from defining my personhood as rooted in the pattern, and identifying with other sufficiently similar instances of the pattern.

5Richard_Kennaway13y

That minds are physical processes seems discoverable without knowing why matter is made of atoms and what atoms are made of. That elimination of mentalism seems sufficient to justify the ideas of uploading, destructive cryonics, artificial people, and so on. But I'm actually more interested in what implications there are, if any, for practical rationality here and now. (I will be unmoved by the answer "But FAI is the most practical thing to work on, we'll all die if it's done wrong!!!")

[-]thomblake13y100

it's not meant to be skipped, and it's highly relevant to rationality in general.

A few people have asserted this, but how is it actually relevant? Is it just a case study, or is there something else there? As RichardKennaway asks, how does QM make a difference to rationality itself?

3ArisKatsaris13y

Speaking from a non-physicist perspective, much of what the QM sequence helped teach me is helping see the world from bottom-up; QM is regular, but it adds up to normality, and it's normality that's weird. Delving down into QM is going up the rabbit's hole away from weirdness and normality, and into mathematical regularity. By analogy, normal people are similarly weird because they're the normality that was produced as the sum of a million years of evolution. Which in turn helps you realize that a random mind plucked out of mindspace is unlikely to have the characteristics we attribute to humanlike normality. Because normality is weird. Once you go from bottom-to-top, you also help dissolve some questions like problems of identity and free will (though I had personally dissolved the supposed contradiction between free will and determinism many years before I encountered LessWrong) -- I still think that many knots people tie themselves over regarding issues like Quantum Suicide or Doomsday Dilemmas, are caused by insufficient application of the bottoms-up principle, or worse yet a half-hearted application thereof.

4DanArmak13y

It's bad enough that we've got people talking about things not being weird, as if weirdness is an objective property rather than something in the mind of the observer. Your words which I quoted are even worse; they're a self-contradiction. If you're not willing to let the word "weird" have its dictionary definition, please, please just taboo it and let the subject die, rather than trying to redefine it as the opposite of the original meaning.

4chaosmosis13y

The commenter was saying "our intuitive understanding of reality" is weird, I think. That's why the commenter was able to noncontradictorily say that Quantum Mechanics fixed some problems and made things less weird.

2thomblake13y

Yeah, that's roughly the best I could come up with, but it doesn't seem sufficient. Noticing the extent of cognitive bias is enough to figure out that humans are weird.

2Shmi13y

I have dutifully gone through the entire sequence again, enjoying some cute stories along the way, and my best guess of what EY means is that it is relevant not in any direct sense ("QM is what rationality is built on"), but more as a teaching tool: it brings "traditional Science" in conflict with "Bayesian rationality". (The Bayesianism wins, of course!) The MWI also lends some support to the EY's preferred model, Barbour's timeless physics, and thus inspires the TDT.

4thomblake13y

That still doesn't seem like enough to justify the reversal from "not relevant" to "highly relevant".

2Shmi13y

What reversal? I still think that it detracts from the overall presentation of "modern rationality" by getting people sidetracked into learning open problems in physics at a pop-sci level. Whatever points EY was trying to make there can surely be made better without it.

2thomblake13y

I meant where you said "not relevant" and Eliezer responded with "highly relevant". It sounds to me as though he thinks it's fundamental to rationality or something. Very confusing.

[-]Benedict12y260

Hey, I'm -name withheld-, going by Benedict, 18 years old in North Carolina. I was introduced to Less Wrong through HPMoR (which is fantastic) and have recently been reading through the Sequences (still wading through the hard science of the Quantum Physics sequence).

I'm here because I have a real problem- dealing with the consequences of coming out as atheist to a Christian family. For about a year leading up to recent events, I had been trying to reconcile Christian belief with the principles of rationalism, with little success. At one point I settled into an unstable equilibrium of "believing in believing in belief" and "betting" on the truth of religious doctrine to cover the perceived small-but-noteworthy probability of its veracity and the proposed consequences thereof. I'd kept this all secret from my family, putting on a long and convincing act.

This recently fell apart in my mind, and I confronted my dad with a shambling confession and expression of confusion and outrage against Christianity. I'm... kinda really friggin' bad at communicating clearly through spoken dialogue, and although I managed to comport myself well enough in the conversation, my dad... (read more)

[-]wedrifid12y360

my dad is unconvinced that the source of my frustrations is a conflicting belief system so much as a struggle with juvenile doubts.

That is roughly speaking what juvenile doubts are. The "juvenile" mind tackling with conflicts in the relevant socially provided belief system prior to when it 'clicks' that the cool thing to do is to believe that you have resolved your confusion about the 'deep' issue and label it as a juvenile question that you do not have to think about any more now that you are sophisticated.

Next week, from July 30 to August 3, he's going to take me to this big huge realignment thing,

You clearly do not want to go. His forcing you is a hostile act (albeit one he would consider justified) but you are going along with it. From this, and from your age, I infer that he has economic power over you. That is, you live with him or he is otherwise your primary source of economic resources. I will assume here that your Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) sucks and you have essentially no acceptable alternative to submission to whatever power plays your father uses against you. Regardless of how the religious thing turns out, developing your pot... (read more)

[-]Kawoomba12y110

Hi Benedict!

Bad news first: You will not be able to defend yourself. This is not because you're 18, it's not because you can't present your arguments in a spectacular fashion.

It is because noone will care about your arguments, they will wait for the first chance to bring some generic counter-argument, probably centering on how they will be there for you in your time of implied juvenile struggle, further belittling you.

And - how aggravating - this is actually done in part to protect you, to protect the relationship with your dad. With the kind of social capital, pride and identity that's on the line for your father, there is no way he could acknowledge you being right - he'd have to admit to himself that he's a phony in his own eyes, and a failure as a parent and pastor in the eyes of his peers.

To him it may be like you telling him he wasted his life on an imaginary construct, while for you it's about him respecting your intellectual reasoning.

Maybe the rational thing to do is not strive for something that's practically unattainable - being respected as an atheist on the basis of your atheist arguments - but instead focus on keeping the relationship with your parent intact while y... (read more)

9MixedNuts12y

Go in panic mode. This conference is not just making a case that Christianity is correct and debating about it. It's bombarding you with arguments for six days, where you won't hear an argument against Christianity or if you do it'll be awkward rude dissent from people in inferior positions, where you won't be able to leave or have time alone to think, and where you're going against your will in the first place. This is time for not losing your mind, not time for changing it. Don't keep an open mind, don't listen to and discuss arguments, don't change your mind because they're right, don't let the atmosphere influence you. If it helps you can think of it as like being undercover among huge patriots and resisting the temptation to defect (and their ideology may be better than yours), or like being in a psychiatrist hospital and watching out for abuse when you know the nurses will try to convince you your reactions are psychiatrist symptoms (and they may well be). So don't see anything at the conference as a social interaction or exchange of ideas. Your goals are to get out of there, to block everything out, to avoid attention, and to watch sharply for anything fishy. Block out the speakers, just watch the audience. If there's a debate be quiet and don't draw attention. If you're asked to speak, voice weak agreement, be vague, or pick peripheral nits. If you're asked to participate in group activities go through the motions as unremarkably as you can. At the socials be a bit distant but mostly your usual self when making small talk, but when someone starts discussing one of the conference topics pretend to listen and agree, smile and nod and say "Yes" and "Go on" and "Oh yeah, I liked that part" a lot. Lie like a rug if you must. Watch the social dynamics and the attitudes of everyone and anything that looks like manipulative behavior. You'll be bored, but don't try to think about any kind of deep topic, even unrelated (doing math and physics problems in your head a

6Vaniver12y

Hey! I've got a pastor father too, but thankfully my atheism doesn't seem to be a big deal for him. (It helps that I don't live nearby.) I think the "conflicting belief system" is, as I understand it, the right model. There's a Christian worldview, which has some basic assumptions (God exists, the Bible is a useful source for learning about God, etc.), and there's a reductionist worldview, which has some basic assumptions (everything can be reduced to smaller parts, experiments are a useful source for learning about reality, etc.), and the picture you can build out of the reductionist worldview matches the world better than the picture you can build out of the Christian worldview. (There are, of course, other possible worldviews.) I would not put much hope into being able to convince the people at this event that they should be atheists; I wouldn't even hope to convince them that you should be an atheist. And so the question becomes what your goals are. If you're concerned about recanting your atheism and meaning it, the main thing I can think of that might be helpful is the how to change your mind sequence. You can keep that model in mind and compare the experience you're undergoing to it- it's unlikely that they'll be using rational means of persuasion, and you can point out the difference. Starting a post in discussion is an alright idea; it'll work well if you mention specific arguments that you want to have responses to.

4TimS12y

Welcome. I'm sorry that you are in such an awkward situation with you family. In terms of dealing with this conference, I can only echo what MixedNuts said (except for the panicking part). I've always found this quote interesting: We have every reason to think that children's beliefs have no momentum - the evidence is right in front of us, they change their minds so often for such terrible reasons. By contrast, the fact that I disagree with another adult is not particular strong evidence that the other person is wrong. In other words, try to free yourself from feeling obligated to defend anything or feeling guilty for not engaging with those who wish to change your beliefs. You might consider explicitly saying "Social pressure is not evidence that you are right (or wrong)." If the people talking with you assert that they aren't using social pressure, then ask them to stop continuing the debate. Their willingness to leave is a victory for your emotional state, and their refusal is strong evidence that arriving at true beliefs is not really their goal - but the proper reaction to that stance is to leaving the conversation yourself, not try to win the "you are being rude" debate. In short, maximizing your positive emotional state doesn't rely on winning debates. Your goal should be to avoid having them at all. (If you hadn't already read the book your father found, I would have suggested declining to do so).

3OnTheOtherHandle12y

I'm not sure how much specific atheist reading you've done, but I found this list to be very helpful at articulating and formalizing all those doubts, arguments and wordless convictions that "this makes no sense." This is also a handy look at what would be truly convincing evidence of the truth of a particular religion's claims. The rest of that author's website is also wonderful.

2John_Maxwell12y

Hey, I agree with what wedrifid said. I fell in to the same trap of trying to beat religious nonsense out of people as a kid. It's a very sexy thing to think about but it doesn't really get you anywhere, in my experience. My only additional advice is that you consider trying to make your "recapitulation" to Christianity convincing. For example, don't give in right away, and make up a story for where you went wrong and why you're a Christian again, e.g. "I thought that x, but now I see that y and z, so x is wrong. I guess maybe God exists after all." Something to keep in mind when arguing with your dad (internally only): your dad is presenting you with evidence and arguments in favor of God's existence, but these amount to a biased sample. If you really want to know the truth, you should spend an equal amount of time hearing arguments from both Christians and atheists, or something like that. Also, you can check internally if any of his arguments hold up to this test: http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=8854

0wedrifid12y

Hey! It's Luke!

2Bundle_Gerbe12y

It does not sound to me like you need more training in specific Christian arguments to stay sane. You have already figured things out despite being brought up in a situation that massively tilted the scales in favor of christianity. I doubt there is any chance they could now convince you if they had to fight on a level field. After all, it's not like they've been holding back their best arguments this whole time. But you are going to be in a situation where they apply intense social pressure and reinforcement towards converting you. On top of that, I'm guessing maintaining your unbelief is very practically inconvenient right now, especially for your relationship with your dad. These conditions are hazardous to rationality, more than any argument they can give. You have to do what MixedNuts says. Just remember you will consider anything they say later, when you have room to think. I do not think they will convert you. I doubt they will be able to brainwash you in a week when you are determined to resist. Even if they could, you managed to think your way out of christian indoctrination once already, you can do it again. If you want to learn more about rationality specific to the question of Christianity, given that you've already read a good amount of material here about rationality in general, you might gain the most from reading atheist sites, which tend to spend a lot of effort specifically on refuting Christianity. Learn more about the Bible from skeptical sources, if you haven't before you'll be pretty amazed how much of what you've been told is blatantly false and how much about the bible you don't know (for instance, Genesis 1&2 have different creation stories that are quite contradictory, and the gospels' versions of the resurrection are impossible to reconcile. Also, the gospels of Matthew and Luke are largely copied from Mark, and the entire resurrection story is missing from the earliest versions of Mark.) I unfortunately don't know a source that gives a

2Grognor12y

Hello, friend, and welcome to Less Wrong. I do think you should start a discussion post, as this seems clearly important to you. My advice to you at the moment is to brush up on Less Wrong's own atheism sequence. If you find that insufficient, then I suggest reading some of Paul Almond's (and I quote): If you find that insufficient, then it is time for the big guy, Richard Dawkins: * The Blind Watchmaker * The God Delusion If you are somehow still unsatisfied after all this, lukeprog's new website should direct you to some other resources, of which the internet has plenty, I assure you. Edit: It seems I interpreted "defend myself" differently from all the other responders. I was thinking you would just say nothing and inwardly remember the well-reasoned arguments for atheism, but that's what I would do, not what a normal person would do. I hope this comment wasn't useless anyway.

0Zaine12y

While wading through all these responses for the very specific response you are looking for (which some charitable LW'er will probably provide if this thread is commented upon frequently enough), you might want to read "How to Win Every Argument - An Introduction to Critical thinking" by Nicholas Capaldi. It offers a brief overview of logic and rational argumentation, and touches upon fallacies and what this site calls the 'Dark Arts', which should help in arming you against common attacks. If you are mathematically minded, but don't want to go into too much depth, you might want to check out "Sherlock's Logic". Mind, the former text is more of a survey course, whereas the latter is more of an introductory course. I have read that Luke Muehlhauser has worked through a dilemma similar to yours, and his blog you may find valuable.

0Desrtopa12y

I'm sure some people will offer other counsel than preparing yourself and giving the most persuasive arguments you can, which may be worth taking seriously, but if you make such a discussion thread I'm confident that you will receive responses to your queries, and think it is highly probable that the post will receive positive karma.

0Shmi12y

The value of this particular sequence is a topic of open debate on LW, so don't get stuck on it, skip it on the first reading, you can revisit it later, after you cover more relevant stuff. While this would be one way to confront him, by pointing out that he is committing mortal sins of wrath and pride, your odds of success are not good. He is a trained professional heavy-weight who has control over you and is not interested in playing by the rules, except for his own. If you play by his rules, you lose. Think about how you can redefine the game, Kirk-like, to your advantage. As for the meetups, there is one in NC, not sure if this is close enough to you.

[-]Bakkot13y260

[-]Alejandro113y280

Several people have alreadt given good answers to your position on infanticide, but they haven't mentioned what is in my opinion the crucial concept involved here: Schelling points.

We are all agreed that is is wrong to kill people (meaning, fully conscious and intelligent beings). We agree that adult humans beings are people (perhaps excluding those in irreversible coma). The law needs to draw a bright line separating those beings which are people, and hence cannot be killed, from those who are not. Given the importance of the "non-killing" rule to a functioning society. this line needs to be clear and intuitive to all. Any line based on some level of brain development does not satisfy this criterion.

There are only two Schelling points, that is obvious, intuitive places to draw the line: conception and birth. Many people support the first one, and the strongest argument for the anti-abortion position is that conception is in fact in many ways a better Schelling point than birth, since being born does not affect the intrinsic nature of the infant. However, among people without a metaphysical commitment to fetus personhood, most agree that the burdens that prohibition of a... (read more)

[-]Bakkot13y130

7Emile13y

But there is no universal agreement on the "age of informed consent", it varies from country to country! And yes, the fact that the limit is arbitrary does undermine its strength; there are often scenarios of "reasonable" sex (in that most people don't consider it as wrong) that would be consider statutory rape or whatnot if the law was taken at the letter. (Also, heck, 10 months is a pretty crappy limit, why not 8 months five days and 42 minutes? 12 months would be much cleaner)

4Bakkot13y

5Alejandro113y

People disagree about obviousness of such things. For some people, a fetus is obviously a person too. For others, even a mentally deficient adult might not qualify as being obviously a person. Unlike you, I don't expect these disagreements to disappear anytime soon, and they are the reason that the law works better with bright Schelling point lines, if such exist. Age is non-ambiguous, but not non-arbitrary. Re your final objection, I agree that there are cases such as sexual consent where there are no clear Schelling points, and we need arbitrary lines. This does not mean that it is not best to use Schelling points whenever they exist. In the case of sexual consent, the arbitrariness of the line does have some unfortunate effects: for example, since the lines are drawn differently in different jurisdictions, people who move accross jurisdictions and are not epecially well informed might commit a felony without being aware. There are also problems with people not being aware of their partner's age, etc. Such problems are not too big and in any case unavoidable, but consider the following counterfactual: if all teenagers underwent a significant and highly visible discrete biological event at exactly age 16, it would make sense (and be an improvement over current law) to have an universal law using this event as trigger for the age of consent, even if the event had no connection to sexual and mental development and these were continuous. The event would be a Schelling point, such as birth is for personhood.

[-]Bakkot13y120

5Alejandro113y

This is a very good response, that allows us to make our disagreement more precise. I agree that choosing menstruation, or its hypothetical unisex counterpart, is unreasonable because it is too early. I disagree that birth is too early in the same way. Pretty much everyone in our society agrees that 12-year olds cannot meaningfully consent to sex (especially with adults), whereas many believe 6-month old children to be people -- in fact, many believe fetuses to be people! You might say that they are obviously wrong, but the "obviously" is suspicious when so many disagree with you, at the very least for Aumann reasons. To put it in another way: What makes you so certain that birth is so far off from what is reasonable as a line for personhood, when you are willing to draw your line at 10 months? That is much closer to birth than 17 is to 12 years old. Also, I think your analogy needs a bit of amending: the relevant question is, if there was a visible unisex menstruation happening at 17 years old, and an established tradition of taking that as the age of consent, why on earth would a society change the law to make it 16 years and 2 months instead?

6Bakkot13y

7Alejandro113y

One rough effort at such definition would be: "any post-birth member of a species whose adult members are intelligent and conscious", where "birth" can be replaced by an analogous Schelling point in the development in an alien species, or by an arbitrary chosen line at a similar stage of development, if no such Schelling point exists. You might say that this definition is an arbtrary kludge that does not "carve Nature at the joints". My reply would be that ethics is adapted for humans, and does not need to carve Nature at intrinsic joints but at the places that humans find relevant. Your point about different rates of development is well taken, however. I am also not an expert in this topic, so we'll have to let it rest for the moment.

3Bakkot13y

1Alejandro113y

For computers, hardware and software can be separated in a way that is not possible with humans (with current technology). When the separation is possible, I agree personhood should be attributed to the software rather than the hardware, so your machine should not be considered a person. If in the future it becomes routinely possible to scan, duplicate and emulate human minds, then killing a biological human will probably also be less of a crime than it is now, as long as his/her mind is preserved. (Maybe there would be a taboo instead about deleting minds with no backup, even when they are not "running" on hardware). It is also possible than in such a future where the concept of a person is commonly associated with a mind pattern, legalizing infanticide before brain development seats in would be acceptable. So perhaps we are not in disagreement after all, since on a different subthread you have said you do not really support legalization of infanticide in our current society. I still think there is a bit of a meta diagreement: you seem to think that the laws and morality of this hypothetical future society would be better than our current ones, while I see it as a change in what are the appropriate Schelling points for the law to rule, in response to technological changes, without the end point being more "correct" in any absolute sense than our current law.

1prase13y

As a data point for your statistics, I think that a 12-year old can meaningfully consent to sex. When it comes to issues of pregnancy and having children, the consequences are greater and I don't think such yound people can consent to this, but fortunately sex and children can be kept separate today with only weak side effects.

[-]Oligopsony13y110

I do think there are some advantages to setting the cutoff point just slightly later than birth, even if by just a few hours:
*evaluations of whether a person should come into existence can rest on surer information when the infant is out of the womb

non-maternal reproductive autonomy - under the current legal personhood cutoff, I can count this as an acceptable loss, as I consider maternal bodily autonomy and the interests of the child to be more important, but with infanticide all three can be reconciled
psychologically, parents (especially fathers) might feel more buy-in to their status, even if almost none actually end up choosing otherwise, and if infant non-personhood catches on culturally infant deaths very close to births might cause less grief among parents

(All this assumes that late-term abortions are a morally acceptable choice to make in their own right, of course, rather than something which must be legally tolerated to preserve maternal bodily autonomy.)

3daenerys13y

Mild updating of my original position due to this conversation: I still don't have many moral qualms about allowing parents to kill children, but realize that actually legalizing it in our current society would lead to some unintended consequences, due to considerations such as the Schelling point, and killing infants as a gateway to further sociopathic behaviours. Part of my difficulty is that some humans, such as infants, have less blicket than animals. If its ok to kill animals, then there's no reason to say it's not ok to kill blicket-less humans. Then I realize that even though it's legal to kill animals, it's still something I can't do for anything except certain bugs. Even spiders I let be, or take outside. So maybe a wiser way to reconcile these would be to say that since infants have less blicket than animals, and we don't kill infants, that we also shouldn't kill animals. It's what I live by anyway, and seems to cause less disturbance than saying that since infants have less blicket than animals and we kill animals, that it's ok to kill infants.

[-]wedrifid13y110

Part of my difficulty is that some humans, such as infants, have less blicket than animals. If its ok to kill animals, then there's no reason to say it's not ok to kill blicket-less humans. Then I realize that even though it's legal to kill animals, it's still something I can't do for anything except certain bugs. Even spiders I let be, or take outside.

Don't worry, there would probably be a baby killing service if it were legal. Just like we have other people to kill animals for us.

8Zetetic13y

I just want to point out this alternative position: Healthy (mentally and otherwise) babies can gain sufficient mental acuity/self-awareness to outstrip animals in their normal trajectory - i.e. babies become people after a while. Although I don't wholeheartedly agree with this position, it seems consistent. The stance that such a position would imply is that babies with severe medical conditions (debilitating birth defects, congenital diseases etc.) could be killed with parental consent, and fetuses likely to develop birth defects can be aborted, but healthy fetuses cannot be aborted, and healthy babies cannot be killed. I bring this up in particular because of your other post about the family with the severely disabled 6-year-old. I think it becomes a little more complicated when we're talking about situations in which we have the ability to impart self-awareness that was previously not there. On the practical level I certainly wouldn't want to force a family to either face endless debt from an expensive procedure or a lifetime of grief from a child that can't function in day to day tasks. It also brings up the question of whether to make animals self-aware, which is... kind of interesting but probably starting to drift off topic.

3FAWS13y

Are you aware that in many countries it's illegal to kill animals without good reason, and that wanting to get rid of a pet does not qualify?

1Bakkot13y

[-]occlude13y280

Infanticide of one's own children should be legal (if done for some reason other than sadism) for up to ten months after birth. Reason: extremely young babies aren't yet people.

I would recommend against expressing this opinion in your OKCupid profile.

[-]Emile13y110

Infanticide of one's own children should be legal (if done for some reason other than sadism) for up to ten months after birth. Reason: extremely young babies aren't yet people.

Arbitrary limits like "ten months" don't make for good rules - especially when there's a natural limit that's much more prominent: childbirth.

What exactly counts as "people" is a matter of convention; it's best to settle on edges that are as crisp as possible, to minimize potential disagreement and conflict.

Also "any reason other than sadism", eh? Like "the dog was hungry" would be okay?

4Multiheaded13y

EDIT: in the ensuing discussion, we came to an agreement that the psychopathy argument is only true of our present society, and, while strengthening our reasons to keep infanticide illegal right now, wouldn't apply to someplace without a strong revulsion to infanticide in the first place. I've updated my stance and switched to other arguments against infanticide-in-general.

1Emile13y

I'm sorry, I just can't parse your sentence, especially "anyone who seriously doesn't understand why punishing all parents able to kill their infant is an incredibly good idea". I suspect you chained too many clauses together and ended up saying the opposite of what you meant.

[-]drethelin13y100

I broadly agree that babies aren't people, but I still think infanticide should be illegal, simply because killing begets insensitivity to killing. I know this has the sound of a slippery slope argument, but there is evidence that desire for sadism in most people is low, and increases as they commit sadistic acts, and that people feel similarly about murder.

From The Better Angels of Our Nature: "Serial killers too carry out their first murder with trepidation, distaste, and in its wake, disappointment: the experience had not been as arousing as it had been in their imaginations. But as time passes and their appetite is rewhetted, they find the next on easier and more gratifying, and then they escalate the cruelty to feed what turns into an addiction."

Similarly, cathartic violence against non-person objects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharsis#Therapeutic_uses) can lead to further aggression in personal interactions.

I don't think we want to encourage or allow killing of anything anywhere near as close to people as babies. The psychological effects on people who kill their own children and on a society that views the killing of babies as good are too potentially terrible. Without actual data, I can say I would never want to live in a society that valued people as little as Sparta did.

[-]Bakkot13y100

5FiftyTwo13y

By what criterion do you consider babies sufficiently "close to people" that this is an issue, but not late term fetuses or adult animals? Specific example, an adult bonobo seems to share more of the morally relevant characteristics of adult humans than a newborn baby but are not afforded the same legal protection.

1drethelin13y

I don't think killing bonobos should be particularly legal. As far as fetuses, since my worry is psychological, I don't think there's a significant risk of desensitization to killing people since the action of going under surgery or taking plan b is so vastly removed from the act of murder.

4[anonymous]13y

What if only surgeons are licensed for infanticide on request, which must be done in privacy away from parent's eyes? That way desensitisation isn't worse than with surgeons or doctors who preform abortion, especially if aesthetics or poison is used. Before anyone raises the Hippocratic oath as an objection, let me give them a stern look and ask them to consider the context of the debate and figure out on their own why it isn't applicable.

4[anonymous]13y

Can't this same be said of last trimester abortions? In any case much like we find pictures or videos of abortion distasteful, I'm sure future baby-killing society would still find videos of baby killings distasteful. We could legislate infanticide needs to be done by professionals away from the eyes of parents and other onlookers to avoid psychological damage. Also forbid media depicting it except for educational purposes.

2Bakkot13y

9wedrifid13y

They're just p-zombies pretending to be people. They only get their soul at 10 months and thereafter are able to detect qualia. I would vote against this law. I'd vote with guns if necessary. Reason: I like babies. Tiny humans are cute and haven't even done anything to deserve death yet (or indicate that they aren't valuable instances of human). I'd prefer you went around murdering adults (adults being the group with the economic, physical and political power to organize defense.)

9Bakkot13y

3wedrifid13y

Most adults don't have traits I'd want a "person" to have. At least with babies there is a chance they'll turn out as worthwhile people.

3[anonymous]13y

Adults have a small chance of acquiring those traits too. Due to selection effects adults that don't have traits have a much lower probability than a fresh new baby of turning out this way. In a few decades genetic technology and better psychology and sociology may let us make decent probabilistic predictions about how they will turn out as adults. Are you ok with babies with very low probabilities of getting such traits being killed?

6wedrifid13y

As well as, of course, as having far less malleable minds that have yet to crystallize the habits their upbringing gives them. Far less averse, particularly in an environment where negative externalities cannot be easily prevented. Mind you I would still oppose legalization of killing people (whether babies or adults) just because they are Jerks. Not because of the value of the Jerks themselves (which is offset by their effects on others) but because it isn't just Jerks that would be killed. I don't want other people to have the right to choose who lives and who dies and I'm willing to waive that right myself by way of cooperation in order to see it happen.

2[anonymous]13y

I'm not sure why this is getting down voted. "Person" is basically LW speak for "particular kind of machine that has value to me in of itself". I don't see any good reason why I personally should value all people equally. I can see some instrumental value in living in a society that makes rules that operate on this principle. But generally I do not love my enemies and neighbours like myself. I'm sorry, I guess that's not very Christian of me. ;)

2wedrifid13y

Yes. The explanation given was significant. It takes a 110 years to make a 110 year old . In most cases I'd prefer to keep a 30 year old than either of them. More to the point I don't intrinsically value creating more humans. The replacement cost of a dead human isn't anything to do with the moral aversion I have to murder.

7Bakkot13y

2Estarlio13y

Do you really think it's wise to have a precedent that allows agents of Type X to go around killing off all of the !X group ? Doesn't bode well if people end up with a really sharp intelligence gradient.

8Bakkot13y

6wedrifid13y

I haven't downvoted, for what it is worth. Sure, you may be an evil baby killing advocate but it's not like l care!

5Solvent13y

I think you accidentally a word.

6TheOtherDave13y

I haven't seen anyone respond to your request for feedback about votes, so let me do so, despite not being one of the downvoters. By my lights, at least, your posts have been fine. Obviously, I can't speak for the site as a whole... then again, neither can anyone else. Basically, it's complicated, because the site isn't homogenous. Expressing conventionally "bad" moral views will usually earn some downvotes from people who don't want such views expressed; expressing them clearly and coherently and engaging thoughtfully with the responses will usually net you upvotes.

1Estarlio13y

I think you may have taken me to be talking about whether it was acceptable or moral in the sense that society will allow it, that was not my intent. Society allows many unwise, inefficient things and no doubt will do so for some time. My question was simply whether you thought it wise. If we do make an FAI, and encoded it with some idealised version of our own morality then do we want a rule that says 'Kill everything that looks unlike yourself'? If we end up on the downside of a vast power gradient with other humans do we want them thinking that everything that has little or no value to them should be for the chopping block? In a somewhat more pithy form, I guess what I’m asking you is: Given that you cannot be sure you will always be strong enough to have things entirely your way, how sure are you this isn’t going to come back and bite you in the arse? If it is unwise, then it would make sense to weaken that strand of thought in society - to destroy less out of hand, rather than more. That the strand is already quite strong in society would not alter that.

2Bakkot13y

1Estarlio13y

You did not answer me on the human question - how we’d like powerful humans to think . This sounds fine as long as you and everything you care about are and always will be included in the group of, ‘people.’ However, by your own admission, (earlier in the discussion to wedrifid,) you've defined people in terms of how closely they realise your ideology: You’ve made it something fluid; a matter of mood and convenience. If I make an AI and tell it to save only ‘people,’ it can go horribly wrong for you - maybe you’re not part of what I mean by ‘people.’ Maybe by people I mean those who believe in some religion or other. Maybe I mean those who are close to a certain processing capacity - and then what happens to those who exceed that capacity? And surely the AI itself would do so.... There are a lot of ways it can go wrong. You observe yourself to be a person. That’s not necessarily the same thing as being observably a person to someone else operating with different definitions. The opinion you state may influence what sort of AI you end up with. And at the very least it seems liable to influence the sort of people you end up with. -shrug- You’re trying to weaken the idea that newborns are people, and are arguing for something that, I suspect, would increase the occurrence of their demise. Call it what you will.

1Bakkot13y

2wedrifid13y

How did I misinterpret? I read that you don't include babies and I said that I do include babies. That's (preference) disagreement, not a problem with interpretation.

1Bakkot13y

1Multiheaded13y

"Encouraged" is very clearly not absolute but relative here, "somewhat less discouraged than now" can just be written as "encouraged" for brevity's sake.

1wedrifid13y

Yeah, I get it, you don't consider babies people and I do. So pretty much we just throw down (ie. trying to reason each other into having the same values as ourselves would be pointless). You vote for baby killing, I vote against it. If there is a war of annihilation and I'm forced to choose sides between the baby killers and the non-baby killers and they seem evenly matched then I choose the non-baby killers side and go kill all the baby killers. If I somehow have the option to exclude all consideration of your preferences from the optimisation function of an FAI then I take it. Just a plain ol' conflict of terminal values.

7Bakkot13y

2wedrifid13y

If babies were made of bacon then I'd have to rerun the moral calculus all over again! ;)

6TheOtherDave13y

Well, they are made of eggs. Actual eggs and counterfactual bacon are an important part of this nutritious breakfast.

5Solvent13y

What do you think of abortion?

9[anonymous]13y

Once we get artificial uteri I think it should be illegal except in cases of rape, but it should be legal to renounce all responsibility for it and put it up for adoption or let the other biological parent finance the babies coming to term. This has the neat and desirable effect of equalizing the position of the biological father and the biological mother.

3[anonymous]13y

Uteri?

3[anonymous]13y

Not a native speaker. And uterus is a surprisingly sparingly used word. Uterus. Uterus. Uterus. Thanks for the correction! :)

8[anonymous]13y

Any time ;) Just remember that if it ends with -us, it probably pluralizes to -i. That's only for latin-based words. Greek-based words, like octopus, can either be pluralized to octopuses or octopodes (pronounced Ahk-top-o-dees). And sometimes you have a new or technical latin-based word like "virus" which just pluralizes to "viruses." It's perfectly fine to pluralize uterus to uteruses, too, since it's so uncommon. English is a bitch. [Edited to give a longer explanation]

6gwern13y

I have to say, http://lesswrong.com/lw/47k/an_abortion_dialogue/ seems relevant to this entire comment tree.

2TimS13y

Your link (in the Discussion post) is broken.

1wedrifid13y

Better late than never? (From the looks of gwern's link I'm more interested in homophones.)

7MileyCyrus13y

Why is sadism worse than indifference? Are we punishing people for their mental states?

1Bakkot13y

4Solvent13y

Why does that seem like a reasonable thing to do? Isn't that just an incentive to lie about motives?

3Bakkot13y

5[anonymous]13y

Its illegal to torture an animal. Why wouldn't it be illegal to torture a baby while killing him? If a sadist can get jollies out of killing with painless poison his children and keeps making them for that purpose, I can't really see how this harms wider society if he pays for the pills and children himself.

1Multiheaded13y

Please rethink this. E.g. are you at all confident that this sadist wouldn't slip and go on to adults after their 10th child? Wouldn't you, personally, force people who practice this to wear some mandatory identification in public, so you don't have to wonder about every creepy-looking stranger? Don't you just have an intuition about the myriad ways that giving sadists such rights could undermine society?

5[anonymous]13y

Fine make it illegal for this to be done except by experts. No, why? We already give sadists lots of rights to psychologically and physical abuse people when this is done with consent or when we don't feel like being morally consistent or when there is some societal benefit to be had.

2Solvent13y

I don't understand your reasoning for either of those dot points.

5Bakkot13y

6soreff13y

I'd think that that the bulk of the resource cost of a newborn is the physiological cost (and medical risks) the mother endured during pregnancy. The general societal cost seems small in comparison.

2[anonymous]13y

We already treat accidental pregnant women basically the same as those who planned their pregnancy. Clearly we should distinguish and discriminate between them rather than lump them into the "pregnant woman" category (I take a lighter tone in some of my other posts here to provoke thought, but I'm dead serious about this). Also many people are way to stuck in their 21st century Eurocentric frame of mind to comprehend the personhood argument for infanticide properly. Let me help:

4TimS13y

On infanticide, is this a reasonable summary of your position:

1Bakkot13y

3TimS13y

Ok. I agree with you on the empirical assertions (I actually suspect that 10-month-olds also lack blicket). But my moral theory gives significant weight to blicket-potential (because blicket is that awesome), while your system does not appear to do so. Why not? ---------------------------------------- You mentioned to someone that the current system of being forced to provide for a child or place the child in foster care is suboptimal. I assume a substantial part of that position is that foster care is terrible (i.e. unlikely to produce high-functioning adults). I agree that one solution to this problem is to end the parental obligation (i.e. allow infanticide). This solution has the benefit of being very inexpensive. But why do you think that solution is better than the alternative solution of fixing foster care (and low quality child-rearing practice generally) so that it is likely to produce high-quality adults?

2Bakkot13y

1TimS13y

I agree there is a scale about how much weight to give blicket-potential. But I support a meta-norm about constructing a morality that the morality should add up to normal, absent compelling justification. That is, if a proposed moral system says that some common practice is deeply wrong, or some common prohibition has relatively few negative consequences if permitted, that's a reason to doubt the moral construction unless a compelling case can be made. It's not impossible, but a moral theory that says we've all doing it wrong should not be expected either. The fact that my calibration of my blicket-potential sensitivity mostly adds up to normal is evidence to me that the model is a fairly accurate description of the morality people say they are applying.

3Bakkot13y

1TimS13y

This is a historical claim that requires a bit more evidence in support. I don't doubt that infanticide has a rich historical pedigree. But I don't think infanticide was ever justified on a "human autonomy" basis, which seems to be your justification. For example, the relatively recent dynamic of Chinese sex-selection infanticide has not been based on any concept of personal autonomy, as far as I can tell. In general, I suspect that most cultures that tolerated infanticide were much lower on the human-autonomy scale than our current civilization (i.e. valued individual human life less than we do).

2gwern13y

I did some reading on the ancients and infanticide, and the picture is murky - the Christians were not responsible for making infanticide illegal, that seems to have preceded them, but they claimed the laws were honored mostly in the breach, so whether you give any credit to them depends on your theories of causality, large-scale trends, and whether the Christians made any meaningful difference to the actual infanticide rate.

1Bakkot13y

3wedrifid13y

Cultures are often fine with killing wives and children too, if they get too far out of line. They are yours after all.

2Bakkot13y

1TimS13y

Sigh. How did the post-modern moral nihilist become the defender of moral universalism? My argument is more that infanticide fits extremely poorly within the cluster of values that we've currently adopted. I am highly skeptical that this is true.

7CharlieSheen13y

An uncle of mine who is a doctor said that SIDS is a codeword for infanticide and that many of his colleagues admit as much.

2TimS13y

Either my model is false or this story is wrong. Specifically, I can't understand why a coroner would not take actions to facilitate the prosecution of a crime (infanticide is murder), because that is one of the jobs of a coroner. By contrast, I've heard that coroners are quite wiling to label a death as accidental when they believe it was suicide, because any legal violations are not punishable (suicide is generally illegal, but everyone agrees that prosecution is pointless).

2Multiheaded13y

Because he, like some who have posted here, is sympathetic to the baby-killing mothers under certain circumstances and doesn't mind helping them avoid prosecution? I wouldn't judge him, heavens forbid. I'd likely do the opposite in his place, but I respect his position.

1Prismattic13y

Labelling a suicide as an accident isn't legally trivial. It is, at least in some cases, an action that favors the interests of the heirs of suicides and disfavors the interests of life insurance companies.

0[anonymous]12y

If it works that way with euthanasia...

1Bakkot13y

1TimS13y

It looks like I misread you. I thought you were referring to moral conventions generally, while you seem to have been referring to moral conventions on infanticide. I agree that many historical cultures did not oppose infanticide as strongly as the current culture.

1Multiheaded13y

Major objection. When talking about society at large and not the small cluster of "rationalist" utilitarians (who are ever tempted to be smarter than their ethics), the current standard is "don't kill what our instincts register as people". The distinction being that John Q. Public hardly reflects on the matter at all. I believe that it's a hugely useful standard because it strengthens the relevant ethical injunctions, regardless of any inconveniences that it brings from an act utilitarian standpoint.

3Bakkot13y

1Multiheaded13y

NO! As you have yourself correctly pointed out, it is because most cultures, with ours being a notable exception, assign a low value to "useless" people or people who they feel are a needless drain on society. (mistake fixed)

1TheOtherDave13y

Hm. So what seems to follow from this is that most people don't actually consider killing people to be a particularly big deal, what they're averse to is killing people who contribute something useful to society... or, more generally, that most people are primarily motivated by maximizing social value. Yes? (I don't mean to be pedantic here, I just want to make sure I'm not putting words in your mouth.)

1Multiheaded13y

Blast me! I meant to say that our culture is an exception, not an "inclusion". So this statement is largely true about non-western cultures, but western ones mostly view the relatively recent concept of "individuality and personhood are sacred" as their main reason against murder.

1TheOtherDave13y

Ah, gotcha. That makes sense. So is your position that we inherited an aversion to murder from earlier non-western cultures, and then when we sanctified personhood we made that our main reason for our pre-existing aversion? Or that earlier cultures weren't averse to murder, and our sanctification caused us to develop such an aversion? Or something else?

2daenerys13y

If you say you don't want to kill an infant because of its potential for blicket, then you would also have to apply that logic to abortion and birth control, and come to the conclusion that these are just as wrong as killing infants, since they both destroy blicket-potential. Fetus- does not have blicket, has potential for blicket - killing it is legal abortion Infant- does not have blicket (you agreed with this), has potential for blicket - killing it is illegal murder Does not compute. One or the other outcomes needs to be changes, and I'm sure not going to support the illegalization of birth control. Note: I apologize if this is getting too close to politics, but it is a significant part of the killing babies debate, and not mentioning it just to avoid mentioning a political issue would not give accurate reasons.

3TimS13y

At a certain level, all morality is about balancing the demands of conflicting blicket-supported desires. So the balance comes out different at different stages. Yes, the difference between stages is quite arbitrary (and worse: obviously historically contingent). In short, I wish I had a better answer for you than I am comfortable with arbitrary distinctions (why is the speed limit 55 mph rather than 56?). From an outsider perspective, I'm sure it looks like I've been mind-killed by some version of "The enemy of my enemy (politically active religious conservatives) is my friend."

1nshepperd13y

One day in the future, if we somehow survive the existential threats that await us and a Still More Glorious Dawn does, in fact, dawn, one day we might have machines akin to 3D printers that allow us to construct, atom-by-atom, anything we desire so long has we know its composition and structure. Suppose I take one of these machines and program it to build me a human, then leave when it's half done. Does the construction chamber have blicket-potential?

1TimS13y

Sure. Unborn babies have blicket-potential. Heck, the only reason I don't say that unconceived babies have blicket potential is that I'm not sure that the statement is coherent. Blicket and blicket-potential are markers that special moral considerations apply. They don't control the moral decision without any reference to context.

3Multiheaded13y

(Let's collect academic opinions here) The utilitarian bioethicist Peter Singer claims that it's pretty much OK to kill a disabled newborn, but states that killing normal infants who are impossible for their parents to raise doesn't follow from that, and, while not being as bad as murdering an adult, is hardly justifiable. Note that he doesn't quite consider any wider social repercussions. http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/faq.html

9Bakkot13y

3Vaniver13y

Consider Heinlein:

3Bakkot13y

5EE43026F13y

More infanticide advocacy here : Recently, Francesca Minerva published in the Journal of Medical Ethics arguing the case that : "what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled." Random press coverage complete with indignant comments Actual paper, pdf, freely available

3Solvent13y

You're not the first one to argue this on LW. I'll find you the link in a second. Why can't sadists kill their babies? Why ten months, precisely? More importantly, why can't we kill babies? Why do you particularly bring up the "discrimination against youth" thing? But yeah, welcome to LW and all that.

8wedrifid13y

If anything it would seem more appropriate to prevent sadists from torturing their babies (including before and during the murder).

6Bakkot13y

2Strange713y

Would you approve of a man killing a child which his wife recently gave birth to, without the mother's permission, on the grounds that he does not believe himself to be the child's father? That's certainly not sadism. Or, if genetic testing has been done and the child's biological father is known, would you say it should be legal for the father to kill the child... say, because he disagrees with the married couple's religious beliefs and wants to deny them an easy recruit?

2Multiheaded13y

We had a couple of fair-sized threads on infanticide before. I suggest that everyone who hasn't seen them yet skims through before posting further arguments. http://lesswrong.com/lw/2l/closet_survey_1/1ou http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/1rmf Also: http://lesswrong.com/lw/35h/why_abortion_looks_more_okay_to_us_than_killing/

2ArisKatsaris13y

What benefit, other than satisfaction of sadism, do you see in infanticide of one's own children that wouldn't be satisfied by merely giving them up for adoption?

6Bakkot13y

5juliawise13y

Look at the youngest children in any adoption photolisting. The kids you usually see there are either part of a sibling group, or very disabled. (Example). There are children born with severe disabilities who are given up by their birth parents and are never adopted. (Example) The government pays foster parents to care for them. That's up to $2,000 per month for care, plus all medical expenses. Meanwhile, other kids are dying for lack of cheap mosquito nets. This use of money does not seem right to me.

3Multiheaded13y

At national level and above, the argument about "use of money" just plain fails. If you're looking for expenses to cut so that the money could be redirected for glaring needs like mosquito nets, foster care can't realistically appear on the cut list next to nuclear submarines and spaceflight.

1juliawise13y

True. I'd be happy to see those things cut as well. Though foster care is funded at a state level, I believe.

2[anonymous]13y

Why not permit the killing of babies not your own, for the same reason?

9Bakkot13y

2[anonymous]13y

It causes me a certain level of distress when a baby is harmed or killed, even if it is of no relation to me. Many people (perhaps almost all people) experience a similar amount of distress. Is it your point of view that the aggregate amount of harm caused in this way is not large enough to justify the prohibition on killing babies? Perhaps what you mean to argue with the house analogy is not that the parent is harmed, but that his property rights have been violated.

7Bakkot13y

6[anonymous]13y

Are those property rights transferable? Would you permit a market in infants?

8[anonymous]13y

Sure, adoption markets basically already exist, why not make them legal? Not only are wealthier people better candidates on average because they can provide for the material needs much better and will on average have a more suitable psychological profile (we can impose legal screening of adopters too, so they need to match other current criteria before they can legally buy on the adoption market if you feel uncomfortable with "anyone can buy"). It also provides incentives for people with desirable traits to breed, far more than just subsidising them having kids of their own.

7Bakkot13y

5gwern13y

One of the standard topics in economic approaches to the law is to discuss the massive market failures caused by not permitting markets in infants; see for example, Landes and Richard Posner's "The Economics of the Baby Shortage". I thought their analysis pretty convincing.

6[anonymous]13y

Don't worry, in the right culture and society this distress would be pretty minor.

3[anonymous]13y

The more interesting question is what to do when parents disagree about infanticide and the complications that come about from custody. Also adoption contracts would probably need to have a "don't kill my baby that I've given up clause" lest some people wouldn't want to give up children for adoption.

2Multiheaded13y

(edit) I have the feeling that I've got to state the following belief in plain text: Regardless of whether "babies are people" (and yeah, I guess I wouldn't call them that on most relevant criteria), any parent who proves able to kill their child while not faced with an unbearable alternative cost (a hundred strangers for an altruistic utilitarian, eternal and justified damnation for a deeply brainwashed believer) is damn near guaranteed to have their brain wired in a manner unacceptable to modern society. Such wiring so strongly correlates with harmful, unsympathetic psychopaths that, if faced with a binary choice to murder any would-be childkillers on sight or ignore them, we should not waver in exterminating them. Of course, a better solution is a blanket application of unbounded social stigma as a first line deterrent and individual treatment of every one case, whether with an attempt at readjustment, isolation or execution.

[-]soreff13y200

harmful, unsympathetic psychopaths

There is another, quite different, situation where it happens: Highly stressed mothers of newborns.

The answer to this couldn’t be more clear: humans are very different from macaques. We’re much worse. The anxiety caused by human inequality is unlike anything observed in the natural world. In order to emphasize this point, Robert Sapolsky put all kidding aside and was uncharacteristically grim when describing the affects of human poverty on the incidence of stress-related disease.
"When humans invented poverty," Sapolsky wrote, “they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever before seen in the primate world.”
This is clearly seen in studies looking at human inequality and the rates of maternal infanticide. The World Health Organization Report on Violence and Health reported a strong association between global inequality and child abuse, with the largest incidence in communities with “high levels of unemployment and concentrated poverty.” Another international study published by the American Journal of Psychiatry analyzed infanticide data from 17 countries and found an unmistakable “pattern of powerlessness, pov

... (read more)

[-]juliawise13y170

Infanticide has been considered a normal practice in a lot of cultures. The Greeks and Romans, for example, don't seem to have been run down by psychopaths.

I don't think we have a good way to know about the later harmful actions of people who kill their infants. Either we find them out and lock them up, in which case their life is no longer really representative of the population, or we don't know about what they've done.

4Multiheaded13y

I've managed to overlook the most important (and fairly obvious) thing, though! If the idea of "childkilling=bad" is weakly or not at all ingrained in a culture, it's easy to override both one's innate and cultural barriers to kill your child, so most normally wired people would be capable of it => the majority of childkillers are normal people. If it's ingrained as strongly as in the West today, there would be few people capable of overriding such a strong cultural barrier, => the majority of childkillers left would be the ones who get no barriers in the first place, i.e. largely harmful, unsympathetic psychopaths. The other ones would have an abnormally strong will to override barriers and self-modify, which can easily make them just as dangerous.

[-]juliawise13y120

Okay, got it. I agree that in a culture that condemns infanticide, people who do it anyway are likely to be quite different from the people who don't. But Bakkot's claim was that our culture should allow it, which should not be expected to increase the number of psychopaths.

I'm also not sure that unbounded social stigma is an effective way to deter people who essentially don't care about other people. We don't really know of good ways to change psychopathy.

(edited for clarity)

3soreff13y

You are overlooking the extreme situations some people are forced into. Looking at the act as being primarily a function of a person's internal state state can be a poor approximation. As nearly as I can tell, if an arbitrarily selected person in the West were put in a situation as dire as these infanticidal mothers had been forced into, they would quite probably do the same thing. Note that the geographical variation in infanticide rates is more plausibly consistent with external factors driving the rates than internal factors. The populations of the USA and Canada are not hugely different, yet there is a 2X difference in the rates between them (as I quoted from the article that I cited before). I strongly doubt that the proportion of psychopaths and extreme self-modifiers differs so strongly between the two nations - but the US has been shredding its social safety nets for years.

2Multiheaded13y

This is easy enough to check. Do most poor, fairly desperate people whose situation is sufficiently alike that of our hypothetical normal childkiller, in fact, kill their children? (No, I can't quite define "sufficiently alike" right off the bat. Wouldn't mind working it out together.)

2Multiheaded13y

With genocide of any foreigners and mass torture for entertainment also having been considered perfectly acceptable, the Roman culture in the flesh would certainly feel alien enough to us that an utilitarian, altruistic time traveler could likely be predicted to attempt to sway it, with virtually any means justifying the end for them.* I know I would, and I know that I'm not an unusual decision maker for the LW community. *(cue obvious SF story idea with the time traveler ending up as Jesus)

6juliawise13y

But these seem to have been larger cultural phenomena, not the unchecked actions of a few psychopaths. Psychopathy affects around 1% of the population, and I doubt so few people could have swayed the entire culture if the rest of them had no interest in killing people.

2Strange713y

One percent of the modern population. How much historical data is there?

4TheOtherDave13y

I suspect a lot of the people who would agree with this sentiment would change their minds in the face of a sufficiently compelling argument that there exists some scenario under which they would be able to kill their child.

[-]juliawise13y140

I've worked with parents of very disabled children, and it's not an easy life. For mothers especially, it becomes your career. I can imagine a lot of parents might consider infanticide if they knew that was going to be their life.

[-]daenerys13y180

Ditto, as someone who works in disability care and child care (including infant care), I support the baby-killing scenario.

I worked for a family that had a severely mentally and physically disabled 6-year old. She was at infant-level cognition, practically blind, and had very little control over her body. There was almost nothing going on mentally, but she was very volatile about sounds/music/surroundings. You could tell if she was happy or sad by whether she was laughing or crying, and she cried a LOT.

Trying to get her to STOP crying was extremely difficult, because there was no communication, and she never wanted the SAME things. However it was also very important to get her calm QUICKLY because if she cried too long she would have a "meltdown", be near inconsolable, throw up, and then you'd have to vent her stomach.

Her parents were the best at reading her. They trained people by pretty much putting you in a room with her, until you developed an ineffable intuitive ability to keep her happy. When I moved to a different city, it took them about 3-4 months to find a replacement for me who wouldn't quit by the second day. I was driving back to my old city once a week to ... (read more)

5Vaniver13y

So, my position is that the necessary standard to justify ending a 10 month old's life is only a bit lower than that of ending a 18 year old's life, and is only a bit higher than the necessary standard to justify ending a fetus's life. I'm patient. But what that statement often obscures is that I'm willing to let people meet that standard. I would support ending the individual you described at ages of 6 years, 60 years, 6 months, or 6 months after conception. But the acknowledgement that not every life should be continued is very different from a "return policy" sort of infanticide which Bakkot is justifying by saying "well, they're not people yet." Sometimes it's best to kill people, too, and so personhood isn't the true issue.

1orthonormal13y

Ah, I was wondering how the welcome thread got to more than 500 comments so quickly!

1[anonymous]13y

In other posts in this thread I've discussed infanticide, and proposed ways to reduce parental grief in cultures that would adopt it (I didn't say it should be adopted btw). But only now did I remember that the practice of infanticide where others preform the killing (something I proposed down thread as an implementation that would reduce psychological stress) reminded me of the practice of killing "mingi" (cursed) children in Ethiopia. Many of the individuals exposed to outside culture would prefer to adopt it or at least find ways to not kill the children while still severing them from the parents. While obviously CNN as always has a progressive-Eurocentric-mind-projection-fallacy spin in its reporting and the tribes in question may be just adopting preferences of higher status tribes and groups rather than because not practising it seems so much better than practising it. I do think this is weak evidence that people prefer to live in societies that don't practice infanticide. Also reading some of the accounts has caused me (rightfully or not) to increase the estimated psychological suffering of parents. But consider that this wasn't a choice in most cases, it isn't that large either. I shouldn't be surprised, humans are built to live in a world where life is cheap after all. I have no doubt that the practice of mingi historically did indeed help the tribe, taken as a whole traditions do tend to be adaptive in the environment in which they where established, but now that their (social) envrionment has changed, the practice seems to be falling out of favour.

1occlude13y

Please let me know if I've missed a discussion of this point; it seems important, but I haven't seen it answered. What is the particular and demonstrable quality of personhood that defines this okay to kill/not okay to kill threshold? In short, what is blicket?

4Bakkot13y

5occlude13y

I won't argue that newborns are people, because I have the same problem defining person that you seem to have. But until I can come up with a cogent reduction distilling person to some quality or combination of qualities that actually exist -- some state of a region of the universe -- then it seems prudent to err on the side of caution.

3Bakkot13y

4TheOtherDave13y

Well, one relatively simple question that might help clarify some things: do I remain a person when I'm asleep?

2Bakkot13y

4TheOtherDave13y

Cool. Would I still be a person while in a coma that I will naturally come out of in five years but not before? (I recognize that no observer could know that this was the case, I'm just asking whether in fact I would be, if it were. Put another way: after I woke up, would we conclude that I'd been a person all along?)

2Bakkot13y

[-]Bruno_Coelho13y230

Hi everybody,

I’m male, 24, philosophy student and live in Amazon, Brazil. I came across to LessWrong on the zombies sequence, because in the beginning, one of my intelectual interests was analytic philosophy. I saw that reductionism and rationality have the power to respond various questions, righting them to something factually tractable. My goals here is to contribute to the community in a useful form, learn as much as possible, become stronger and save the world reducing the risks of human extintion. I'm looking for some advice in these topics: bayesian epistemology, moral uncertain and the complexity of the wishes. If some of the participants in the forum can help me, I will be very grateful.

4orthonormal13y

Do you have specific questions? You could ask them here, or in the comments of the relevant posts (the age of the thread doesn't matter much, since more people read the Recent Comments sidebar than read any particular post's comments). Also, on the topic of morality, have you come across lukeprog's mini-sequence?

1Bruno_Coelho13y

Yes, I read part of the sequence and a recent post of lukeprog on his blog. He think that much of the language of morality is failed, and we have to substitute with another language more precise. In normative terms, decision theory is the best candidate,I suppose, but in the site we have various versions.

[-]dekelron13y230

Hi all,

I'm 25 from Israel. I worked in programming for 4 years, and have recently decided to move on to more interesting stuff (either math, biology, or neurology, don't know).

I'm new in LW, but have read OB from time to time over over the past 5 years. Several months ago I ran into LW, (re)read a lot of the site, and decided to stick around when I realized how awesome it is.

Nice to meet you all!

Ron

5MichaelVassar13y

Israel seems like a natural place for LW. Any thoughts on why the memes haven't gotten more traction there yet?

6erratio13y

Very naive guess: people in Israel live in constant high proximity to the two biggest mindkillers, religion and politics/nationalism, both of which have serious and immediate real-world consequences for them.

5FAWS13y

Now that you have some karma you should be able to post in the discussion section. Please make sure your post doesn't look like a spam ad, though.

6orthonormal13y

To follow up on what FAWS said, "What are good apps for rationalists?" is a much better title than "Useful Android Apps for the Rational Mind", since the latter sounds like you're trying to sell something to us.

[-]troll13y220

minimalist, 17, white, male, autodidact, atheist, libertarian, california, hacker, studying computer science, reading sequences, intellectual upbringing, 1 year bayesian rationalist, motivation deficient, focusing on skills, was creating something similar to bayesian rationality before conversion, have read hpmor (not intro to lw), interested in contributing to ai research in the future

[-]Richard_Kennaway13y160

The Identikit LessWrongian!

[-]Oscar_Cunningham13y130

"Minimalist" is implied by the sparsity of the rest of the comment, and so is ironically redundant.

[-]troll13y130

There are a few other reasons I could be formatting my introduction that way, such as being bad at English or writing in general. I used "minimalist" both as a heads up for the format and to draw away from the other possible explanations.

[-]thomblake13y120

I'm sure you're aware at this point, but with that description you blend into the wallpaper.

Thank you for creating a comment to link "stereotypical Less Wrong reader". If only you were a couple of years older.

Since you're 17, have you looked into the week-long summer camp?

1troll13y

I have and I have submitted an application.

[-]jimrandomh12y110

Consider restarting with a different account name. Trolling (that is, trying to provoke people) is not welcome here, and when your username is "troll", people will not (and should not) give you the benefit of doubt.

6MarkusRamikin13y

That handle bodes well.

[-]Multiheaded13y110

On an elitist gaming forum I used to frequent (RPG Codex), we called such things "post-ironic" (meaning "post-modern as fuck online performance art").

Basically the joke is that everyone gets the joke, and that allows its author to act as if it was no joke, and self-consciously reference that fact - which is the joke.

6Emile13y

Welcome to LessWrong! (For a cheap way to give a better impression, you may want to switch to another user name)

5shokwave13y

Contrarian?

[-]troll13y160

No.

1DSimon13y

Anti-contrarian?

3troll13y

If you mean 'against people who are contrarian', no. If you mean 'for popular opinions', no.

2Bugmaster12y

You weren't kidding when you said "minimalist". Nicely done.

1troll12y

I guess a lot of people are interested enough in an account with the handle "troll" to check my first post, but not enough to not consider the name when reviewing posts.

4Bugmaster12y

Realistically, when someone replies to one of my posts on some long thread, I don't take the time to click through their handle and find their own intro post. I don't think that doing so is a good use of my time, and I believe that I am typical in this regard. However, I do take the time to read their handle, and if it seems to say "I am not arguing in good faith", I take notice. This gives me an idea for a new Less Wrong feature, though: allow users to enter a short descriptions of themselves, and display it when the mouse hovers over their handle for a certain amount of time. I know how I'd implement it with jQuery, but I'm not sure how easy it would be to plug into the LW general architecture.

2Sniffnoy12y

I think it would be simpler to just allow people to add a short description of themselves to the user page. (And then maybe later the hovering thing can be added if people want that.)

0Bugmaster12y

Agreed; if we had that feature, then we could write the Greasemonkey (or whatever) extension as well, since it would just scrub their user page for the description.

5gwern12y

Don't we have that as part of the linked wiki userpages?

4Sniffnoy12y

...huh. OK, how on earth do you set up that "profile" thing you have? I can't find it anywhere in the preferences. I think we need to promote this a bit more.

6gwern12y

As far as I know, you just register the exact same account name on the LW wiki, and create your userpage, and it's transcluded over automatically.

4Sniffnoy12y

Hm. OK, I made myself a user page on the Wiki a few hours ago, and I still have no profile here. Do you know how long this is supposed to take?

6gwern12y

Second, minute, hour, day are the usual Schelling points for things updating. In this case, when I click on your username I get So I'm guessing the syncing is done daily.

0troll12y

Greasemonkey or a browser extension that injects javascript?

0Bugmaster12y

How would it get the intro post, though ?

[-]Malevola13y220

Less Wrong,

After lurking for about a week, I decided to register today. I have read some of the Sequences and a good many posts and comments. I am a life long agnostic who recently began to identify as atheist. I am interested in rationality for many reasons, however, my primary reason is that I'd like to learn more about rationality to help me get over my fear of death. A fear that I feel is very irrational, yet I am unable to shake it. I am 39, female and a mother, I have lots of college under my belt but no degree. I guess I never really cared about that. I am also a schizophrenic and that makes rationality quite challenging for me. (Not that it's not challenging for many people.)
I am looking forward to reading more of the Sequences and hope to be able to comment or post in the near future. I am glad I found this site. Thanks for your time.

8[anonymous]13y

2Malevola13y

Thank you, GabrielDuquette. I hope what I add is worthwhile.

[-]jswan13y220

I've been lurking here on and off since the beginnings at OB, IIRC, though more off than on. Expressed in the language of the recent survey: I'm an 43-year-old married white male with an advanced humanities degree working in the technical side of for-profit IT in the rural USA. I was raised in a non-theist environment and was interested in rationality tools from an early age. I had a spontaneous non-theistic mystical experience when I was 17 that led me to investigate (but ultimately reject) a variety of non-materialist claims. This led to a life-long interest in the workings of the brain, intuition, rationality, bias, and so on.

I enjoy LW primarily because of the interest in conscious self-improvement and brain hacking. I think that the biggest error I see in general among self-described rationalists is the tendency to undervalue experience. My thinking is probably informed most strongly by individual athletics, many of the popular writers in the rationalist tradition, and wide variety of literature. These days, I'm nursing obsessions with Python programming, remote backcountry cycling, and the writing of Rebecca Goldstein.

6orthonormal13y

There are a couple of things you could mean by this. Can you give an example?

[-]jswan13y140

There are indeed a couple of different ways I do mean it, but my best specific examples come from athletics. About eight or nine years ago I started getting seriously interested in long distance trail running. Like most enthusiastic autodidacts I started reading lots of material about shoes, clothing, hydration, nutrition, electrolytes, training, and so on. As I'm sure you've seen, a lot of people on the Internet can get paralyzed by analysis in the face of vast easily available information. In particular, they have a lot of trouble sorting out conflicting information gained from other knowledgeable people.

Frequently, further research will help you arrive at less-wrong conclusions. However, in some endeavors there really is a great deal of individual variation, and you just have to engage in lengthy, often-frustrating self-experimentation to figure out what techniques or training methods work best for you. This base of experience can't really be replaced by secondary research. Where research skill comes in, though, is in figuring out where to focus that secondary research (and this in itself is a skill that is honed by experience). As a friend of mine likes to put it: the best prac... (read more)

1orthonormal13y

I agree it's a common failure mode, and that the areas in which I've done cheap self-experimentation and kept notes showed remarkably quick improvement. There are some LW posts expounding the meme of actually trying things, but it's less prominent than it ought to be.

[-]Pesto13y200

I'm a 22-year-old mathematics graduate student, moving to Boston next year.

I was recommended HPMoR by another Boston math grad student, followed the authors' notes to read most of the sequences, and then started following lesswrong, although I didn't create an account until recently.

I can't say how I came to actually be a rationalist, though---most of the sequences seemed true or even obvious in hindsight when I first read them, and I've always had a habit of remembering "x tells me y is true" instead of "y is true" when x tells me y is true.

I'm signed up for cryonics. (Current probability estimates 90% that it preserves enough information to be reversible, 95% that I'll die with enough notice to be preserved, 50% that humanity'll advance far enough to reverse it, and 70% that CI'll survive that long.)

I'm vegetarian for carbon efficiency and because the animals that produce most of our meat have negative utility from awful conditions. I don't think sentience is the right standard; is there a good past lesswrong discussion about that?

5orthonormal13y

Impressive if true- the best way to test this might be playing a game like The Resistance... The last one I remember started off with a really confrontational post, and ended up being an angry discussion; I don't think I'll find and link it. I think you could write a better one, and I'd comment on it- I think your points are good reasons to cut back on meat and to strongly prefer small farms over industrial-scale meat (at least for pork, since pigs are the most sentient of our livestock), and I do both of these, but I don't find it worthwhile to go completely vegetarian.

0Alicorn12y

I like your username!

[-]jwmares13y190

I heard about LW from a startup co-founder. I'm 22, in Pittsburgh, graduating college in 4 months and on my 2nd startup. Raised hard-core Catholic, and still trying to pull together arguments from various sources as to the existence of God. The posts on LW have certainly helped, and I'd say I'm leaning towards atheism - though it's been a short journey of only 6 months or so since I've started to question my religion.

I'm very interested in the Singularity movement and how that will shape human philosophy and morality. I've also done some body hacking and started tracking my time, an interest which I think a lot of the LW community shares. Looking forward to becoming more active in the community!

[-]orthonormal13y130

Welcome!

The best unsolicited advice I have to give is this: your philosophical leanings are immensely sensitive to psychology, and in particular to the sort of self you want to project to the people around you. So if you want to decide one way or another on a philosophical question that's tormenting you, the biggest key is to surround yourself (socially, in real life) with people who will be pleased if you decide that way. If you want to do your best to figure out what's true, though, the best way is to surround yourself with people who will respect you whatever you decide on that matter, or else to get away from everyone you know for a week or two while you think about it.

Good luck!

2jwmares13y

Thanks ortho. I've definitely found that to be the case. I've also struggled to meet moral atheist girls, though a lot of that is also sampling bias (having only been looking for a few months). Interested to see how everything plays out!

[-]rv77ax13y190

Hello LW readers,

Long time lurker here. Just created this account so I can, probably, participated more in LW discussion.

I'm male, 27 years old, from Indonesia. I work as freelance software developer. I love music and watching movies. Any movies. Movie is the only way I can detached from reality and have a dream without a sleep.

I come from Muslim family, both of my parent is Muslim. Long story short, after finished my college, with computer science degree, I tried to learn extend my knowledge more in Islam. I read a lot of books about Islam history, Islam teaching, Quran commentary, book that explain hadith and Quran, etc. Every books that my parents have. Soon, with the help of Internet, I renounce my faith and become an atheist. I see rationalism, philosophy in general, as the way to see the world without giving any judgments. Because, in the end, there is no absolute truth, only facts and opinions.

I know LW from /r/truereddit, and has been reading some of the articles and discussions in here, very informative and thoughtful. The only thing I can help here probably by translating some of articles, especially the Sequences, into Bahasa Indonesia.

[-]cousin_it13y170

Because, in the end, there is no absolute truth, only facts and opinions.

Eliezer's essay The Simple Truth is a nice argument for the opposite. The technical name for his view is correspondence theory. A short summary is "truth is the correspondence between map and territory" or "the sentence 'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white".

5rv77ax13y

Actually, The Simple Truth is one of my favorite essay, and it's not the opposite of my statement. Autrey is the one who work with facts (reality) and Mark is the one who work with opinion (belief). Who jump at the cliff at the end ?

1thomblake13y

If you really want to be technical, I think it would be hard to say whether this view is supposed to be a correspondence or deflationary theory of truth, and some (including the linked article) would regard them as currently at odds. Personally, I think the distinction is not very important (which is also hinted at in the linked article) and it makes sense to use the language of both. The Simple Truth in particular casts it as deflationary; the shepherd doesn't even know what 'truth' is, and thinks questions about it are silly - he just knows that the pebbles work. ETA: To be slightly more helpful to readers, here's a relevant section of the SEP article that intends to illustrate the difference:

2TheOtherDave13y

One can, of course, get arbitrarily wrapped around the axle of reference here. "The man with a quarter in his shoe is about to die," said by George, who has a quarter in his shoe, shortly before his own death, is true... but most intuitive notions of truth leave a bad taste in my mouth if it turns out that George, when he said it, had not known about the quarter in his shoe and was asserting his intention to kill Sam, whom George mistakenly believed to have a quarter in his shoe. Which is unsurprising, since many intuitive notions of truth are primarily about evaluating the credibility and reliability of the speaker; when I divorce the speaker's credibility from the actual properties of the environment, my intuitions start to break down.

6orthonormal13y

There are several different things you could mean by this. Do you agree that, outside of human cognition, some things happen rather than others? And also, isn't it practically useful if our expectations are in line with the sorts of things that actually happen?

[-]KwHayes13y190

Hello! I'm male, 20-something, educator, living in Alberta, Canada. I came across LessWrong via some comments left on a Skepchick article.

My choice to become an educator is founded upon my passion for rational inquiry. I work in the younger grades, where teaching is less about presenting and organizing knowledge and more about the fundamental, formative development of the human brain. Because of this, I am interested in exploring the mental faculties that produce "curiosity behaviors" and the relationship between these behaviors and motivation.

I'm a constructivist at heart; I help guide my students to become masterful thinkers and doers by modifying environmental variables around them. Essentially, I trick them into achieving curriculum-mandated success by 'exploiting' their mental processes. In order to do this effectively, I need to understand as best I can the processes that guide human thoughts and behaviors. This is something I have been interested in since I was young - I am fortunate to have found a career that allows me to explore these interests and use my understanding to better my students'.

I've considered myself to be a rationalist since i was 16 or so, and ... (read more)

6NancyLebovitz13y

Welcome! I hope you'll post about some of the specific methods you're used with your students.

4cousin_it13y

This interests me because my small experience with teaching kids suggests that curiosity is indeed the bottleneck resource. Please post about your experiments and conclusions.

[-]OrdinaryOwl13y180

Hello Less Wrong!

I am a twenty year old female currently pursuing a degree in programming in Washington State, after deciding that calculus and statistics was infinitely more interesting to me than accounting and economics. I found LW via HPMOR, and tore through the majority of the Sequences in a month. (Now I'm re-reading them much more slowly for better comprehension and hopefully retention.)

I wish to improve my rationality skills, because reading the Sequences showed me that there are a lot of time-wasting arguments out there, and I want to spend my time doing productive, interesting, and fun things instead. Also, I've always enjoyed philosophy, so finding a site that uses scholarship and actual logic to tackle critical issues was amazing.

Other defining things about me: I like cooking, folding origami, playing video games, and reading science fiction, fantasy, and history books. I struggle with procrastination and akrasia. I look forward to self-improvement!

[-]WhiskyJack13y180

Howdy,

tl;dr This seems like a place that I can use to shore up some of my cognitive shortcomings, eliminate some bias and expand my worldview. Maybe I can help someone else along the way.

I have been reading the material here for the last several days and have decided that this is a community that I would like to be a part of and hopefully contribute to. My greatest interests are improving my map of the territory(how great is that analogy?), using my constantly improving map to be a better husband and father, and exploring transhumanist ideas and conceits.

I came to be a rationalist when I started reading somewhat milquetoast skeptical literature. Having been raised religious and having served in the Marine Corps I have found that I have a tendency to allow arguments from authority too much credence. If I am not careful I can serve as quite the dutiful drone.

It became important over the last few months that I be able to do as much of my own philosophical and scientific legwork as possible. If an author or speaker that I enjoy espouses ideas I am inclined to agree with it is vital (in my estimation) that I either be able to verify the information presented myself or locate reliable... (read more)

4TimS13y

Welcome to LessWrong. One of the most interesting parts of LessWrong for me is noticing the cognitive bias in our thought process. For example, noticing that one dislikes another solely because the other is a member of a different group. (Psychology calls this the in-group bias). Noticing those sorts of mistakes doesn't necessarily require all that much mathematical ability. In short, the hope in this community is that clear thinking helps you achieve your stated goals (rather than some inaccurate approximation created by unclear thinking from the imperfect brain). In short, don't sweat the math, there's lots of practical stuff that can be achieved without it. If you are particularly interested in improving your self-awareness, might I recommend Alicorn's Luminosity sequence?

[-]Kevedes12y170

null

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6[anonymous]12y

I know after reading this post, one of the first things I thought was that I wanted to read the article you mentioned. So I went and found the article and have linked it below in case any one else wanted to read it as well. http://betabeat.com/2012/07/singularity-institute-less-wrong-peter-thiel-eliezer-yudkowsky-ray-kurzweil-harry-potter-methods-of-rationality/ Thanks for referencing it!

2thomblake12y

That is an awesome article - thanks for finding the link!

[-]Elithrion13y170

Hello there!

I think I first saw LessWrong about three years ago, as it frequently came up in discussions on KW, the forum formerly linked to the Dresden Codak comic. This makes mine one of the longer lurking periods, but I've never really felt the urge to take discussion to the actual posts being discussed and talked about them elsewhere when I felt the need to comment. All this changed when Alicorn told me that when I was asked to make a post relevant to LessWrong that meant I actually had to post it on LessWrong (a revelation which I should have probably anticipated). So it has come to this.

The simplest place to start describing myself is by saying that I'm the type of person that skims through the 200 most recent comments to see which ones are well liked before writing anything.* In real life terms, I've finished up my bachelor's degree in December, after making various errors. Unfortunately, with it finished, I have discovered that I lack motivation to pursue a standard career, since just about the only things I find myself caring about are stories, knowing the future (in the general, not the personal, respect), and understanding things, particularly things related to people. (... (read more)

[-]windmil13y170

Hello all.

I've been lurking around here and devouring the sequences for about two years now. I haven't said much because I rarely feel like I have much that's useful, or I don't feel knowledgeable about the subject. But I thought I might start commenting a bit more.

I'm 19, in Florida and studying engineering. I really want to do something that will bring the world forward in some way, and right now that has me pointed at trying to put my personal effort towards nanotechnology. For now though I'm just trying to win classes and learn as much as I can.

Not too much more than 'hi', but there it is.

2orthonormal13y

Welcome! Although I disagree that this is the best direction for marginal technological development (in particular, I don't know if we're smart enough to not do nanotech horribly wrong), I expect you'll learn some extremely important things in the process of studying...

3windmil13y

It might not be. Of course I don't feel like I'm on track to help suddenly make atomically precise, self replicating nanomachines. But it would be nice to get closer to some mechanically precise manufacturing, or just certain better materials for some applications. Also I could make some money. I am an early engineering undergrad, so right now I'm mostly taking intro to anything at all classes and not doing any real work. I wouldn't be surprised if I changed directions at all.

1khafra13y

Good to meet you. AFAIK, since molybdenumblue and one other whose name I can't recall left, _ozymandias, you, and me are the only people here willing to admit to being Floridians. I'm a bit south of you, in Tampa Bay. edit: Heh, due to my terrifyingly slow computer, I noticed and added _ozymandias in a spacelike interval to your reply. Internet special relativity.

2windmil13y

Good to meet you too. There's also Ozy in Florida. That's a whole Three People!

[-]istihanifah12y160

4Kawoomba12y

So are we! Happy to have you along for the ride!

2Jack12y

Welcome!

[-]blob13y160

Hello!

I'm a mathematician and working as a programmer in Berlin, Germany. I read HPMOR after following a recommendation in a talk on Cognitive Psychology For Hackers and proceeded to read most of the sequences.

Reading LW has had several practical consequences for me: Spaced repetition and effective altruism were new to me. Things have also improved around social skills, exercise and nutrition.

I'm also part of a small Berlin LW meetup: spuckblase and me have met twice - and now we got contacted by two other Berlin based lurkers which prompted the creation of a wiki entry and a mailing list. We're now planning the first meetup that will actually get a meetup post and be announced in advance.

[-]Hermione13y160

Hi there. I'm Hermione (yes, really). I went to my first LW meetup recently and I'm now working on the Rationality Curriculum, so it feels like time to introduce myself and start getting involved in discussions.

There are a lot of things I'd be interested in talking about. I only found LW a couple of months ago so I'm trying to level up in rationality and work out how to teach others to do so at the same time. I'll probably be posting about this and asking for advice. Has anyone written about their experiences of reading the sequences for the first time? Should I try and absorb things really quickly, or is it better to take it slowly, and if so, what comes first? That kind of thing.

I've also been inspired by Alicorn's Luminosity sequence and have been piloting a beeper experiment, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi style. In order to understand myself and my moods better, I've been recording what I'm doing and how I feel at random times (3x/day). I'd like to improve the indicators I've been using. I struggle to get the right balance between quantitative (more analysable) and qualitative (more accurate). Any suggestions?

Finally, I'd really like to meet some more rationalists in person, so please PM me if you're in Brussels!

2gwern13y

I am slowly setting up a self-experiment with lithium focusing on mood, so I'm interested in the same question. Seth Roberts suggested I rate my mood on just a 0-100 scale as opposed to the 1-5 I was using; I suggested using the Brief POMS as an apparently standard mood rating tool (and used in previous lithium studies) but I haven't heard back.

1Kevin13y

Hello there! With regards to better understanding your moods and indicators, I'd suggest a bit of noting meditation, or at least adding some of the different kinds of things to note to your vocabulary of moods and indicators. http://kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/ Just see the lists from "First Gear".

[-]camie062613y160

Hi people :) I'm 16 from France and the Philippines, going to a Christian boarding school. Um, i met a guy on Omegle... he gave me a link to this website after a conversation about Christianity. Long story short, I'm confused. Maybe someone would like to help me get my head straight?

8Baughn13y

Sure~! Though for a starter, what in particular are you confused about? You might want to start by skimming Making Beliefs Pay Rent and Belief in Belief, which lacking evidence to the contrary I believe are most likely to be helpful.

2Anubhav13y

The guy who sent you here... That would be me. Baughn's links are a nice place to start. For the 'Ever wonder why we're here?' question, you should probably see Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions. It doesn't answer that, but I think it's vital if you're ever to find a satisfying answer. And if you think, even a bit, that it'd all be pointless if God or Jesus had never existed... You should read Explaining vs Explaining Away and Joy in the Merely Real. Everything that's beautiful about the world is beautiful no matter what! Of course, you're not going to buy all this straightaway, and that's fine.... Just leave yourself a line of retreat for now. (And that's another article you should read, especially if all of this is beginning to feel overwhelming.) But don't just rationalise all of this away-- it's an easy trap to fall into (and some of your friends have already fallen into it, from what you were telling me), and it's kind of pointless if your doubts end up just 'confirming' everything you'd already believed

[-][anonymous]13y160

Hello LW community, my name is Karl, but please call me MHD for short; here's a lot of sentences beginning with "I..." :

I am a 19 year old, slightly gifted individual, male of gender and psyche, bi, hard to define my preferred relationship structure; honestly my gonads and sexual preference are mostly irrelevant here.

I came here by way of HPMoR and was pressed to do some serious reading by my good friend, known around here as Armok_GoB.

I have at time of writing read sequences MaT and MAtMQ along with some non-structured link-walking, looking to read Reductionism next. My attitude is so far positive, but I read it with a healthy dose of sceptic afterthought and note-taking to verify that it really does make sense. You see, my native language is not English, and I have read a study that one is more gullible when communicating in a non-native language.

My mind is built for logical thinking and I have a knack for mathematics, physics and language. I know approx. 12 turing complete programming languages (C likes, LISPs, ML family, SmallTalk-esque, Assembly) reasonably well. I am looking into Tensors, Bayesian probability, formal logic, type theory, quantum physics, relativity, ... (read more)

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[-]Vladimir_Nesov13y250

I am not a fan of cryonics because I know that freezing, regardless of method, is a very good way to destroy tissue

Cryonics uses vitrification, which protects from the tissue-destroying crystal formation.
http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/vitrification.html

6wedrifid13y

Oh oh. That argument was just removed. Now what are you going to do? You can make up a new one to support your existing conclusion or you could make up a new conclusion based on what you know. Welcome to lesswrong.

8Kaj_Sotala13y

This seems needlessly confrontational, especially as a comment to a newcomer.

1wedrifid13y

That would seem to be in the eye of the beholder. I saw it as an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the most basic principle of lesswrong and instantly raise his standing in the tribe and reputation for sanity. I reject your accusation!

4Kaj_Sotala13y

My apologies for the misinterpretation, then.

2[anonymous]13y

All right, I'll play ball. If my devoting my career to AI research fails to make FAI, sure, I'll buy into cryonics. Right now I am 19 years old, poor as dirt, lives with my parents, healthy lifestyle, careful to the point of paranoia; show me a cryonics establishment in Denmark and I will reserve a space when I have the funding. (the "show me" is a rethoric, I intend to find out myself) I am generally optimistic with regards to FAI, and I am no strong Bayesian at all. You have a point, yeah, plain as day. And thank you Kaj_Sotala, for taking up on this, frankly not at all "fun" or "inviting" and, yes, frankly quite "needlessly confrontational," yet still true counterargument. wedrifid; there is a time to be direct and insulting in a playful kind of way. You need to learn when that time is. ETA: After a brief lookup of the term "Vitrification" i find the term "Toxicity" to feature, along with "Optimistic of the future." I am not sure what to think here, compelling arguments can be made for each.

1[anonymous]13y

The toxicity isn't a problem if it's going to be a brain upload, but it is a valid concern for any attempt at resurrecting the wetware.

5Vaniver13y

Welcome! Was the study in a non-native language? ;)

1[anonymous]13y

I actually don't remember; let me consult my sources for a spell.

2marchdown13y

That study sounds interesting, could you post a link if you happen to find it?

2jsteinhardt13y

Kudos for that. Sceptic afterthought is always good if you have the time to devote to it.

[-]Adriano_Mannino12y150

Hi all, I'm a lurker of about two years and have been wanting to contribute here and there - so here I am. I specialize in ethics and have further interests in epistemology and the philosophy of mind.

[-]Rejoyce13y150

Salutations and whatnot! My name is Joyce, I'm a high school sophomore. Probably on the younger side of the age spectrum here, but I don't mind starting young. The idea of rationality isn't new to me, I've always been more inclined to the "truth", even when it sometimes hurts. In my mind knowing more about the truth = better person, so that's my motivation for being here. I'm have better grades than the average, but for the past couple of years the thing I hated most about myself was the fact that I usually "coast" a class, get my A, and then promptly forget everything I've done in the class. My goal was "get an A", not "learn something new". I'd like to learn new things now, and actually retain it, instead of just coasting by. Knowledge is power. I want to be the best, like no one ever was.

Um. When I was younger, perhaps ten, while I was tinkering with Photoshop, my older cousin approached to me and tried to introduce to me the idea of fallacies. He's...nine years older than me, so he was a barely an adult. I forgot most of the conversation, but from what I DO remember, blaming a stomachache on the last thing you ate was falling prey to SOME... (read more)

6Vladimir_Nesov13y

This is actually one danger of learning about fallacies: you become more able at defeating arguments, and this holds irrespective of their truth, so if you have a standard tendency to privilege arguments for the positions you already hold, that makes it harder for you to change your mind. See the post Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People.

1arundelo13y

Probably post hoc ergo propter hoc.

[-]SpaceFrank13y150

Hello, Less Wrong.

Like some others, I eventually found this site after being directed by fellow nerds to HPMOR. I've been working haphazardly through the Sequences (getting neck-deep in cognitive science and philosophy before even getting past the preliminaries for quantum physics, and loving every bit of it).

I can't point to a clear "aha!" moment when I decided to pursue the LW definition of rationality. I always remember being highly intelligent and interested in Science, but it's hard for me to model how my brain actually processed information that long ago. Before high school (at the earliest), I was probably just as irrational as everyone else, only with bigger guns.

Sometime during college (B.S. in mechanical engineering), I can recall beginning an active effort to consider as many sides of an issue as possible. This was motivated less from a quest for scientific truth and more from a tendency to get into political discussions. Having been raised by parents who were fairly traditional American conservatives, I quickly found myself becoming some kind of libertarian. This seems to be a common occurrence, both in the welcome comments I've read here and elsewhere. I can'... (read more)

4DSimon13y

Welcome to LW! I like the "just with bigger guns" metaphor a lot; the trouble with intelligence is its ability to produce smart-seeming arguments for nearly any silly idea.

2SpaceFrank13y

Exactly. I also suspect that logical overconfidence, i.e. knowing a little bit about bias and thinking it no longer affects you, is magnified with higher intelligence. I can't help but remember that saying about great power and great responsibility.

[-]drnickbone13y150

Hi, I'm Nick Bone ... Just joined the site.

I'm based in the UK and interested in a wide variety of topics in science and associated philosophy. In particular, the basics of rationality (deductive and inductive logic, Bayesian Theorem, decision theory), foundations of mathematics (logic and set theory). Plus some of the old staples (classical arguments for/against existence of God, first cause, design, evil and so on).

My background is in mathematics and computer science (PhD in maths) and I'm currently working in an area of applied game theory. Generally I found the site by Googling, and the quality of discussion seems rather higher than on other discussion boards. Hope I can contribute.

By the way, I started off by putting together some thoughts on the "Doomsday Argument" and Strong Self-Selection Assumption which I hadn't seen discussed before. Since I'm brand new, and have no karma points, I'm not sure where to post them. Any suggestions?

3[anonymous]13y

Sounds like perfect material for the discussion section. :-)

[-]MixedNuts13y150

Common reasons I downvote with no comment: I think the mistake is obvious to most readers (or already mentioned) and there's little to be gained from teaching the author. I think there's little insight and much noise - length, unpleasant style, politically disagreeable implications that would be tedious to pick apart (especially in tone rather than content). I judge that jerkishness is impairing comprehension; cutting out the courtesies and using strong words may be defensible, but using insults where explanations would do isn't.

On the "just a-holes" note (yes, I thought "Is this about me?"): It might be that your threshold for acceptable niceness is unusually high. We have traditions of bluntness and flaw-hunting (mostly from hackers, who correctly consider niceness noise when discussing bugs in X), so we ended up rather mean on average, and very tolerant of meanness. People who want LW to be nicer usually do it by being especially nice, not by especially punishing meanness. I notice you're on my list of people I should be exceptionally nice to, but not on my list of exceptionally nice people, which is a bad thing if you love Postel's law. (Which, by Postel's law, nobody but me has to.) The only LessWronger I think is an asshole is wedrifid, and I think this is one of his good traits.

4[anonymous]13y

3Prismattic13y

I think there is a difference between choosing bluntness where niceness would tend to obscure the truth, and choosing between two forms of expression which are equally illuminating but not equally nice. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm using "a-hole" here to mean "One who routinely chooses the less nice variant in the latter situation." (This is not a specific reference to you; your comment just happened to provide a good anchor for it.)

1TheOtherDave13y

Of course, if that's the meaning, then before I judge someone to be an "a-hole" I need to know what they intended to illumine.

1daenerys13y

Would you mind discussing this with me, because I find it disturbing that I come off as having double-standards, and am interested to know more about where that impression comes from. I personally feel that I do not expect better behaviour from others than I practice, but would like to know (and update my behaviour) if I am wrong about this. I admit to lowering my level of "niceness" on LW, because I can't seem to function when I am nice and no one else is. However MY level of being "not nice" means that I don't spend a lot of time finding ways to word things in the most inoffensive manner. I don't feel like I am exceptionally rude, and am concerned if I give off that impression. I also feel like I keep my "punishing meanness" levels to a pretty high standard too: I only "punish" (by downvoting or calling out) what I consider to be extremely rude behavior (ie "I wish you were dead" or "X is crap.") that is nowhere near the level of "meanness" that I feel like my posts ever get near.

4MixedNuts13y

You come off as having single-standards. That is, I think the minimal level of niceness you accept from others is also the minimal level of niceness you practice - you don't allow wiggle room for others having different standards. I sincerely don't resent that! My model of nice people in general suggests y'all practice Postel's law ("Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send"), but I don't think it's even consistent to demand that someone follow it. ...I'm never going to live that one down, am I? Let's just say that there's an enormous amount of behaviours that I'd describe as "slightly blunter than politeness would allow, for the sake of clarity" and you'd describe as "extremely rude". Also, while I've accepted the verdict that " is crap" is extremely rude and I shouldn't ever say it, I was taken aback at your assertion that it doesn't contribute anything. Surely "Don't use this thing for this purpose" is non-empty. By the same token, I'd actually be pretty okay with being told "I wish you were dead" in many contexts. For example, in a discussion of eugenics, I'd be quite fine with a position that implies I should be dead, and would much rather hear it than have others dance around the implication. Maybe the lesson for you is that many people suck really bad at phrasing things, so you should apply the principle of charity harder and be tolerant if they can't be both as nice and as clear as you'd have been and choose to sacrifice niceness? The lesson I've learned is that I should be more polite in general, more polite to you in particular, look harder for nice phrasings, and spell out implications rather than try to bake them in connotations.

6Alicorn13y

I'm fine with positions that imply I should never have been born (although I have yet to hear one that includes me), but I'd feel very differently about one implying that I should be dead!

3lessdazed13y

Many people don't endorse anything similar to the principle that "any argument for no more of something should explain why there is a perfect amount of that thing or be counted as an argument for less of that thing." E.g. thinking arguments that "life extension is bad" generally have no implications regarding killing people were it to become available. So those who say I shouldn't live to be 200 are not only basically arguing I should (eventually, sooner than I want) be dead, the implication I take is often that I should be killed (in the future).

2TheOtherDave13y

Personally, I'd be far more insulted by the suggestion that I should never have been born, than by the suggestion that I should die now.

4Alicorn13y

Why?

2TheOtherDave13y

If someone tells me I should die now, I understand that to mean that my life from this point forward is of negative value to them. If they tell me I should never have been born, I understand that to mean not only that my life from this point forward is of negative value, but also that my life up to this point has been of negative value.

2Alicorn13y

Interesting. I don't read it as necessarily a judgment of value at all to be told that I should never have been born (things that should not have happened may accidentally have good consequences). Additionally, someone who doesn't think that I should have been born, but also doesn't think I should die, will not try to kill me, though they may push policies that will prevent future additions to my salient reference class; someone who thinks I should die could try to make that happen!

2TheOtherDave13y

Interesting. For my part, I don't treat saying things like "I think you should be dead" as particularly predictive of actually trying to kill me. Perhaps I ought to, but I don't.

3daenerys13y

Upvoted, and thank you for the explanation. If it helps, I didn't even remember that one of the times I've called someone out on "X is crap" was you. So consider it "lived down". You're right. How about an assertion that it doesn't contribute anything that couldn't be easily rephrased in a much better way? Your example of "Don't use this thing for this purpose", especially if followed by a brief explanation, is an order of magnitude better than "X is crap", and I doubt it took you more than 5 seconds to write.

[-]Joshua Hobbes13y150

So, am I a second-class citizen because I found this place via MoR?

Anyways, I've been Homeschooled for the majority of my education thus far, mostly due to my Creationist parents' concerns about government-run schools. Fortunately they didn't think to censor the internet, and here I am. My PSATs showed me in the 98th percentile, so I expect I'll be able to get into a decent university. Plan A has always been Engineering, but after going through a few of the more inspirational sequences I think I may readjust my plans and try to do some good for this planet. How does one get into the Singularity business?

7thomblake13y

I'm pretty sure that accounts for most of our new readership over the last year or so. ETA: To actually answer the question, no. I'm pretty sure the preferred method here currently is #1 below, but here are some options: 1. Make lots of money doing something else and then give it to SIAI. 2. The lukeprog method: Be insanely awesome at scholarship and get tens of thousands of Lw karma in a few months and be generally brilliant and become a visiting fellow and wow everyone at SIAI. 3. Go start your own Singularity. With blackjack. And hookers. Also, I'm generally of the opinion that having been suddenly inspired by something you read recently should be evidence against that thing being what you should do with your life (assuming your prior is based on your feelings about it). You should check out some of the material by Anna Salamon on how to take that kind of decision seriously (I don't have a useful link handy).

4NancyLebovitz13y

With great difficulty. And it's not clear whether there will be any repeat trade.

3Vaniver13y

Engineering is actually not that bad a way. It's worth taking a look at computer science, but pretty much any technical field will be involved somewhere along the way.

[-]kerspoon13y150

Hello,

I'm a 26 year old guy from the UK. I've finished writing my Ph.D. thesis in "Quantification of risk in large scale wind power integration" and I'm now working as a phone-app framework developer. I spent the last year on a round the world travel where I have spent a lot of my time writing practical philosophy. After coming back I found this site and read the core sequences. I loved them, they echoed a lot of my previous thoughts then took them much further. I felt like they would be easier to understand if they were one article so I have been re-writing bits of them for my own benefit. I am in two minds whether to post them here but I would appreciate the feedback to see if I have understood what was written.

4fburnaby13y

I'd love to see them when they're somewhere approaching done.

2orthonormal13y

Welcome! Lukeprog did a similar thing a while ago, which doubled for the rest of us as a good overview. I'd be interested in reading yours, too!

[-]HalMorris12y140

Thanks to Emile for suggesting I come here write something. I hope to get to the New York meetup on Sunday; I'm not ready for "rituals" and futuristic music just yet.

I just ran across LW by trying google terms along the lines of memetics "belief systems", etc., which led me to some books from late 90s like "Virus of the Mind", and in the last 2-3 years some just "OK" books on religions as virus-like meme systems. This kind of search to see what people may have said about some odd combination of thoughts that I suspect might be fruitful has brought me interesting results in the past. E.g. by googling ontological comedian, I discovered Ricky Gervais which has brightened my life (his movie "The Invention of Lying" out to be of interest to LW-ers). I'm interested in practical social epistemology -- trying to come up with creative responses to what looks like major chunks of the population (those pesky folks who elect presidents) being less and less moored in reality and going off into diverse fantasy lands -- or to put it another way, a massive breakdown in common sense about what sources are reliable.

I asked someone how she makes s... (read more)

2Qiaochu_Yuan12y

The obvious evolutionary argument that comes to mind is that not believing in bullshit, particularly the bullshit believed by powerful people in your tribe, could get you killed in the ancestral environment. Domains of human knowledge in which bullshit is not tolerated are those where that knowledge is constantly being tested against reality - computer programming is a good example, since you can't bullshit a compiler - and in other domains terrible things can happen. Global warming in particular seems to me to be a case where most people hold beliefs one way or the other primarily to signal affiliation with either the pro- or anti-global warming tribes. That belief certainly doesn't get tested against reality in any meaningful way in many people's lives.

2Nominull12y

Please don't learn anything from the black arts threads. That's why they're called "black arts", because you're not supposed to learn them.

4almkglor12y

Although it might be good to be aware that you shouldn't remove a weapon from your mental arsenal just because it's labeled "dark arts". Sure, you should be one heck of a lot more reluctant to use them, but if you need to shut up and do the impossible really really badly, do so - just be aware that the consequences tend to be worse if you use them. After all, the label "dark art" is itself an application of a Dark Art to persuade, deceive, or otherwise manipulate you against using those techniques. But of course this was not done lightly.

2Nornagest12y

Is that why? I wonder, sometimes. Given our merry band's contrarian bent, it occurs to me that calling something a "dark art" would be a pretty good way of encouraging its study while simultaneously discouraging its unreflective use. You'd then need to come up with some semi-convincing reasons why it is in fact too Dark for school, though, or you'd look silly. On the other hand it doesn't seem to be an Eliezer coinage, which would have made this line of thinking a bit more likely. "Dark Side epistemology" is, but has a narrow enough meaning that I'm not inclined to suspect shenanigans.

2JoshuaZ12y

Well, one could certainly learn from the dark arts threads what not to do and what to be aware of to watch out for.

2HalMorris12y

Well, yeah, my point exactly to reiterate from elsewhere [I'm interested in] spreading dark-art antibody memes, but you can't do that without taking a sample of the dark arts most prevalent at the moment, much as they must round up viruses every year to develop the yearly flu shot. So I wouldn't be looking for "the best" dark arts but rather the ones one is likely to encounter. E.g. a good source would be Newt Gingrich's "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control" memo (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4443.htm) EXCERPT: "In the video 'We are a Majority,' Language is listed as a key mechanism of control used by a majority party, along with Agenda, Rules, Attitude and Learning. As the tapes have been used in training sessions across the country and mailed to candidates we have heard a plaintive plea: 'I wish I could speak like Newt.' That takes years of practice ..." This introduces the famous word list: a list of smiley-face words to use when describing your own positions, and nasty-face words to use when putting words in the mouths of your opponents (or do I say 'enemies'?). Or there is the Paul Wyrich farewell letter which did much to propagate the meme "political correctness is cultural Marxism", or the Weyrich-inspired "The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement" (http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2011/02/integration-of-theory-and-practice.html), a document Lenin might have been proud of. I'm all about blunting the effectiveness of certain tactics that reduce the possibility of our thinking clearly (and by "our", I mean not that of LW, or the Second Foundation, but of the whole mass of people whose votes determine who we get to have as President, etc.) ASIDE: One place where Thomas Jefferson was one of the least small-gov't-ish founding fathers was education, and he was also all about disempowering religion memes NOTE: I don't mean to get onto politics per se - just practices that tend to turn it in

0wedrifid12y

You may be looking in the wrong place. I don't recall encountering any particularly impressive "Dark Arts" insights on this blog. You may be interested in, say, Robert Greene's The 48 Laws Of Power.

1HalMorris12y

That sounds a bit like a "how to" book of black arts - if so, not what I had in mind, except for the purpose of developing and spreading dark-art antibody memes, but you can't do that without taking a sample of the dark arts most prevalent at the moment, much as they must round up viruses every year to develop the yearly flu shot. So I wouldn't be looking for "the best" dark arts but rather the ones one is likely to encounter. E.g. a good source would be Newt Gingrich's "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control" memo (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4443.htm) EXCERPT: "In the video 'We are a Majority,' Language is listed as a key mechanism of control used by a majority party, along with Agenda, Rules, Attitude and Learning. As the tapes have been used in training sessions across the country and mailed to candidates we have heard a plaintive plea: 'I wish I could speak like Newt.' That takes years of practice ..." This introduces the famous word list: a list of smiley-face words to use when describing your own positions, and nasty-face words to use when putting words in the mouths of your opponents (or do I say 'enemies'?). Or there is the Paul Wyrich farewell letter which did much to propagate the meme "political correctness is cultural Marxism", or the Weyrich-inspired "The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement" (http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2011/02/integration-of-theory-and-practice.html), a document Lenin might have been proud of. I'm all about blunting the effectiveness of certain tactics that reduce the possibility of our thinking clearly (and by "our", I mean not that of LW, or the Second Foundation, but of the whole mass of people whose votes determine who we get to have as President, etc.) ASIDE: One place where Thomas Jefferson was one of the least small-gov't-ish founding fathers was education, and he was also all about disempowering religion memes

[-]Lykos13y140

Hello, everyone. I'm Lykos, and it's a pleasure to finally be posting here. I'm a high school junior and I pretty much discovered the concept of rationality through HP:MoR. I'm not sure where I discovered THAT. I'm an aspiring author, and am always eager to learn more, and rationality, I've found, has helped me with my ideas, both for stories and in general. I've currently read the Map and Territory sequence, and am going through Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions. I doubt I'll be posting much- I'll probably be spending most of my time basking in the intelligence of the rest of you.

Either way, it is a pleasure to join the community. Thank you.

[-]coffeespoons13y140

Hiya,

I've been occasionally reading for a while, and have decided to get a login. I suppose the reason I'm here is that it's become important in the last 2 years or so that my beliefs are as accurate as possible. I've slowly had to let go of some beliefs because the evidence didn't seem to support them, and while that's been painful it has been worthwhile.

I'm also a friend of ciphergoth's - we've discussed less wrong a lot! I don't feel like I know a great deal yet - I still need to read more of the sequences, so I'll stick to asking questions until I feel I know more :-).

I'm 28, female, and I live in Cambridge, UK. My academic background is in the philosophy/politics/economics area, and I work in accounts.

coffeespoons

1TimS13y

Welcome to LessWrong. If you like believing true things and don't think death is a necessary counterpart to life, you'll fit in great. If you have questions, might I suggest asking in the current open thread?

1Paul Crowley13y

Hurrah! welcome :)

[-]Modig13y140

I'm very excited to have found this community. In a way, it's like meeting a future, more evolved version of myself. So many things that I've read about here I've considered before, but often in a more shallow and immature way. A big thanks to all of you for that!

To the topic of me, I'm 24, male, and Swedish. After studying some of PJ Eby's work, I identify strongly as a naturally struggling person. I've been trying to figure out why for all my life, I think I read Wayne Dyer at about the same age as Eliezer read Feynman. Since then I've read a lot more, and at this point it seems like I have very credible explanations for why things turned out as they did.

Still, even though I might think I ought to have the tools now to stake out a better future path for myself, I'm plagued by learned helplessness and surrounded by ugh-fields. But as I see it there is only one best way forward - to learn more and then attempt to do things better.

I'm a great admirer of the stoic philosopher Lucius Seneca. Here's a short segment from one of his letters that resonates with me:

It is clear to you, I know, Lucilius, that no one can lead a happy life, or even one that is bearable, without the pursuit o

... (read more)

3Solvent13y

It's nice to have you here.

2lessdazed13y

I'm offended! Just kidding.

[-]Lleu13y140

19 male, currently in Florida.

Used to be a hardcore Christian. Then I started looking for alternate explanations and wound up believing in magic because I wanted it to be real. Then I read HP:MoR and it changed my life. My head is on a lot straighter now.

At first I thought this was just something cool. Then I was talking to someone about investing a fairly large amount of money. As we were talking, I was conscious of myself changing my plans to agree with him simply because he was nice. Despite this, he still changed my mind even though I recognized that he did it by being nice instead of a good argument. Had to go home before I could think clearly again.

It scared me that I could be so easily swayed by the Dark Arts, as I've heard them referred to. This might be something worth taking seriously after all.

So now I'm about to use what I learned to buy a car. A year ago, I would've just gone down with an informed friend and pick up something functional. Now I'm going down with a friend and a journal, identifying several possible vehicles and taking notes, then spend a week doing research on price, making sure I'm not being swayed by the salesman being nice, etc. before I actually spend any money.

I look forward to becoming less wrong.

[-]juliawise13y140

If "hunting down" psychopaths is our goal, we'd do better to look for people who torture or kill animals. My understanding is that these behaviors are a common warning sign of antisocial personality disorder, and I'm sure it's more common than infanticide because it's less punished. Would you advocate punishing anyone diagnosed with antisocial personality right away, or would you want to wait until they actually committed a crime?

I'd put taboos in three categories. Some taboos (e.g. against women wearing trousers, profanity, homosexuality, or atheism) seem pointless and we were right to relax them. Some taboos, like those against theft and murder, I agree we should hold in place because they produce so little value for the harm they produce. Some, like extramarital sex and abortion, are more ambiguous. They probably allow some people to get away with unnecessary cruelty. But because the the personal freedom they create, I think they produce a net good.

I put legalized infanticide in the third category. I gather you put it in the second? In other words, do you believe the harm it would create from psychopaths killing babies and generally being harder to detect would be greater than the benefit to people who don't raise unwanted children?

[-][anonymous]13y140

Sorry, you pointed out a counterargument made by Vladimir_Nesov, in a confrontational manner.

Also, thank your for reminding me that I have to sharpen my posting abilities.

Vladimir Nesov made a very true counterargument, you endorsed it to test my ability to change my standpoint. Nothing wrong with that; and lo and behold, I actually have. Congratulations, you and Vladimir_Nesov both get an upvote from the new guy.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

6wedrifid13y

Thankyou! Respond positively and thinking clearly despite (being primed to) consider an interaction to be a confrontation is potentially even more valuable trait to signal than ability to update freely. A valuable newcomer indeed!

[-]bramflakes13y140

Hello, I'm 16 years old and from the UK. I found this blog via MoR and I'vebeen lurking for a few months now (this is my first post I think), and I'm slowly but surely working my way through the sequences. I think I've gotten to the point where I can identify a lot of the biases and irrational thoughts as they form in my brain, but unfortunately I'm not well-versed enough in rationality to know how to tackle them properly yet.

1atucker13y

Welcome to LessWrong! Some other teenagers occasionally do online meetups, and we have a facebook group here

[-]whiteswan2113y130

Greetings, everyone. My name is Elizabeth, and I am a young adult female beginning to learn how to think for herself. I stumbled across this website right after reading Alicorn's fanfiction Luminosity in the summer of 2010. Due to some personal issues, life in general, and a dead hard drive, I stopped visiting Less Wrong up until a couple of weeks ago.

I found Less Wrong attractive because of its being a free resource on learning the art of rationality. Borderline Personality Disorder runs in my family, and so my hypothesis is that I personally am drawn to things like LW partly in order to "self-medicate" after years of chaos, unpredictability, and irrationality. Chances are likely that I will be very quiet on this website for several months at least: for one thing, that is my usual modis operandi when learning about and researching a topic; for another, it would seem that I need to thoroughly acquaint myself with the sequences and other such work in order to fully understand and be able to contribute to more recent posts/discussions.

1Alicorn13y

Squee! How'd you find it?

[-]Ebelean13y130

Hi y'all. I'm a senior in high school in the Silicon Valley who's been lurking for a couple of months. I've been working my way through the Sequences since then. I don't know how much I have to contribute to the discussion, since I'm a bit of a newcomer to rationalism, but I enjoy reading everyone else's discussions.

I was introduced to this site through my philosophy class- a research project on transhumanism led me to Eliezer Yudkowsky's site, which led me to here. I came here for the Sequences, stayed here for the intelligent discussion (just like almost everyone else on this page). I'm really interested in computer science and economics and how they intersect with rationality.

5orthonormal13y

Welcome! Cool! Was this an assigned topic or a self-chosen one? And since you're a HS senior, you might find it worthwhile to read the threads on where (or even whether) to go for college next year, or start your own thread if you want personalized advice.

[-][anonymous]13y130

I'm afraid you may have your bottom line written already. In the age of ultrasound and computer generated images or even better in the future age of transhuman sensory enhancement or fetuses being grown outside the human body the exact same argument can be used against abortion.

Especially once you remember the original context was a 10 month old baby, not say a 10 year old child.

7Multiheaded13y

Then I might well have to use it against abortion at some point, for the same reason: we should forbid people from overriding this part of their instincts.

2jaimeastorga200013y

Upvoted for bullet-biting.

[-]FloraFuture12y120

Hi everyone,

A few of you have met me on Omegle. I finally signed up and made an account here like you guys suggested.

About me: I'm 26 years old, and my hobbies include creative writing and PC games. My favorite TV show is Rupaul's Drag Race.

I think I share almost all of the main positions that people tend to have in this community. But I actually find disagreements more interesting, so that's mainly what I'm here for. One of my passions in life is debating. I did debate team and that sort of thing when I was younger, but now I'm more interested in how to seriously persuade people, not just debating for show. I still have a lot of improving to do, though. If anyone wants to exchange notes or get some tips, then let me know.

Love,

Flora

4MugaSofer12y

I'm going to be the first person to point out that your objective should be to come to the correct conclusion, not to persuade people, because if you can out-argue anyone who disagrees with you you'll never change your mind, and "not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change". With that noted, persuasion is a useful skill, especially if you're more rational than the average bear. Cryonics, for example, is a good low-hanging fruit if you can just get people to sign up for it.

0ThrustVectoring12y

Modafinil is another good low-hanging fruit, as far as utilons/hedons per lifetime goes. Melatonin, too, and is less illegal.

3orthonormal12y

Hi Flora! Re: debating and persuading, the reflexes you developed for convincing third parties to a debate can actually be counterproductive to persuading the person you're speaking with. For example, reciprocity) can really help: the person you're talking with is much more likely to really listen and consider your points if you've openly ceded them a point first. Practicing this has the nice side effect of making you pay more attention to their arguments and interpret them more charitably, increasing the chance that you learn something from your conversational partner in the process.

2FloraFuture12y

I totally agree with this. Really well said.

2Shmi12y

Welcome! Just wondering... How often (and about what) have you changed your mind about something big and important, as a result of a debate/discussion or just after some quiet contemplation?

0FloraFuture12y

Very, very often. Most of it is small steps, like minor adjustments, but a few debates/discussions have completely changed my thinking. I have definitely been wrong about a lot of things in the past. Some of my errors I have noticed through my own critical thinking. But I would say that most of my positions today have been shaped by how much I've let other people challenge them.

0FloraFuture12y

My objective is definitely to come to the correct conclusion. I know sometimes my positions win because other people can't argue their positions well, but without those debates, I have no way to really challenge my own ideas. I think as people go I tend to be self-critical, but even I can have blind spots. So I use debates to see if and where I have gone wrong. I've definitely gone wrong many times before. I don't believe in persuasion as "trickery" -- I see it as more getting past the emotional barriers for a real, productive discussion.

4TheOtherDave12y

It's also sometimes useful to arrange things - e.g., by making falsifiable predictions and comparing them to observed events -- so that observations of the world tend to correct our incorrect ideas.

0FloraFuture12y

You're right, but I don't think I'm alone in sometimes missing events that I should be taking into account, or not always being objective in the conclusions I make with them.

0TheOtherDave12y

Agreed. Can you clarify the relationship between those things, on the one hand, and your belief that you can't challenge your own ideas without debates, on the other? I'm not sure I follow your reasoning here.

2FloraFuture12y

Sorry, I didn't mean to say that I can't challenge myself at all. In practice I do try to challenge myself. I am saying that debates, where other people challenge me, help me fill in the gaps where I miss things, or am not being objective. Sometimes my inner dialogue says, "The way I'm thinking about this makes to me, and it seems logical and sound. I have tried but I can't think of anything wrong with it." And then I'll explain my reasoning to someone who disagrees, and they might say for example, "but you haven't considered this fact, or this possibility." And they're right, I haven't. That doesn't necessarily mean I'm wrong, or that they're right, but it does mean that I haven't been 100% effective at challenging myself to justify my own positions.

0TheOtherDave12y

Ah, I see. Yes, agreed, other people can frequently help clarify our thinking, e.g. by offering potentially relevant facts/possibilities we haven't considered. Absolutely. That said, for my own part I would eliminate the modifier "who disagrees" from your sentence. It's equally true that people who agree with me can help clarify my thinking in that way, as can people who are neutral on the subject, or think the question is ill-formed in such a way that neither agreement nor disagreement is appropriate. The whole "I assert something and you disagree and we argue" dynamic that comes along with framing the interaction as a "debate" seems like it gets in the way of my getting the thought-clarifying benefits in those cases, and is usually a sign that I'm concentrating more on status management than I am on clarifying my thinking, let alone on converging on true beliefs.

0FloraFuture12y

People who agree definitely can offer that, but people who disagree are going to be better at it and more motivated. They push you harder to strengthen your own reasoning and articulate it well. If you try to compare the two in practice I think you'll notice a huge difference. I think it can be uncomfortable sometimes to challenge and be challenged, but it doesn't need to be about status or putting other people down. In fact, it can be friendly and supportive. I really recommend it to people who enjoy critical thinking and want to challenge themselves in unexpected ways.

0TheOtherDave12y

My experience is that in general arguing with people pushes me to articulate my positions in compelling ways. If I want to clarify my thinking, which is something altogether different, other techniques work better for me. But, sure, I agree that arguing with articulate intelligent people who disagree with me pushes me harder to articulate my positions in compelling ways than arguing with people who lack those traits.

0Kawoomba12y

Ok, I'm interested. Describe what happened.

0FloraFuture12y

What do you mean? They were just friendly discussions, nothing super notable. I felt like all of them shared the same basic philosophy as me, so I felt like this was a community that I had a lot in common with.

2arundelo12y

Just in case you're not sure what Kawoomba's alluding to, Omegle has such a reputation for being used for sexual stuff that Kawoomba was surprised to learn people use it for nonsexual stuff.

0FloraFuture12y

lol that makes sense, I forget sometimes about Omegle's reputation

0Kawoomba12y

Didn't know you could have actual discourse on Omegle. I've only ever seen "happy" exchanges there, not friendly ones. I wonder if any of the LW pillars frequent Omegle ...

[-]Petra12y120

Hello!

I'm 18, an undergraduate at University of Virginia, pre-law, and found you through HPMOR.

Rationality has been a part of me for almost as long as I can remember, but for various reasons, I'm only recently starting to refine and formalize my views of the world. It is heartening to find others who know the frustration of dealing with people who are unwilling to listen to logic. I've found that it is difficult to become any better at argument and persuasion when you have a reputation as an intelligent person and can convince anyone of anything by merely stating it with a sufficiently straight face.

More than anything else, I hope to become here a person who is a little less wrong than when I came.

[-]John_Maxwell12y100

This "intelligent reputation" discussion is interesting.

I had kind of an odd situation as a kid growing up. I went to a supposedly excellent Silicon Valley area elementary school and was generally one of the smartest 2-4 kids in my class. But I didn't think of myself as being very smart: I brushed off all the praise I got from teachers (because the villains and buffoons in the fiction I read were all arrogant, and I was afraid of becoming arrogant myself). Additionally, my younger brother is a good bit smarter than me, which was obvious even at that age. So I never strongly identified as being "smart".

When I was older I attended a supposedly elite university. At first I thought there was no way I would get in, but when I was accepted and got in I was astonished by how stupid and intellectually incurious everyone was. I only found one guy in my entire dorm building who actually seemed to like thinking about science/math/etc. for its own sake. At first I thought that the university admissions department was doing a terrible job, but I gradually came to realize that the world was just way stupider than I thought it was, and assuming that I was anything close to normal was not an accurate model. (Which sounds really arrogant; I'm almost afraid to type that.)

I wonder how else being raised among those who are smarter/stupider than you impacts someone's intellectual development?

1Petra12y

This is interesting. Do you think your aversion to what you saw as arrogance, but which turned out to be (at least partially) accuracy, might have been overcome earlier if, for example, you'd been the clear leader, rather than having even a small group you could consider intellectual peers? Was that how you saw them?

3John_Maxwell12y

It's possible. Although for me to have been the "clear leader" you probably would've had to remove a number of people who weren't in the top 2-4 as well. And even then I might have just thought of my family as unusually great, because there'd still be my terrifyingly smart younger brother. Silicon Valley could be an odd place. I actually grew up in a neighborhood where most of the kids were of Indian descent (we played cricket and a game from India that I just found on Wikipedia called Kabaddi (I can't believe this is played professionally) in addition to standard US games). I didn't think to ask then, but I guess they were mostly children of immigrant software engineers? I haven't really lived anywhere other than the SF bay area yet, so I don't have much to compare it to. Right now I'm thinking I should prepare myself for way more stupidity and racial homogeneity.

1wedrifid12y

It took me a few seconds pondering the playing of cricket as 'odd' to realize that I need to identify with the Indians in this story.

0shokwave12y

Even as a native Aussie I sometimes find playing cricket to be odd.

8A1987dM12y

Or even without a straight face. Sometimes I've made wild guesses (essentially thinking aloud) and, no matter how many “I think”, “may”, “possibly” etc. I throw in, someone who has heard that I'm a smart guy will take whatever I've said as word of God.

4Petra12y

9DaFranker12y

Beware indeed of giving others more bouncy walls on which evidence can re-bounce and double-, triple-, quatruple-, nay, Npple-count! I once naively thought to improve others' critical thinking by boosting their ability to appraise the quality of my own reasoning. Lo' and behold, for each example I gave of a bad reasoning I had made or was making, each of them was inevitably using this as further evidence that I was right, because not only had I been right much more than not (counting hits and arguments are soldiers and all that), but the very fact that I was aware of any mistakes I was making proved that I could not make mistakes, for I would otherwise notice mistakes and thus correct myself. TL;DR: This remains a profoundly important unsolved problem in large-scale distribution, teaching and implementation of cognitive enhancement and bias-overcoming techniques. It's even stated in Luke's "So you want to save the world" list of open problems as "raising the sanity waterline", a major strategic concern for ensuring maximal confidence of results in this incredibly absurd thing they're working on.

4Cyan12y

The term in common usage is "n-tuple".

4DaFranker12y

Thanks. I paused for a second when I was about to write it, because I realized that I wasn't quite sure that that was how I should write it, but decided to skip over it as no information seemed lost either way and it had bonus illustrative and comical effect in the likely event that I was using the wrong term.

[-]wedrifid12y100

but decided to skip over it as no information seemed lost either way and it had bonus illustrative and comical effect in the likely event that I was using the wrong term.

Given all the evidence on 'bouncy' and 'npple-count' I must admit the comic illustration that sprung to mind may not have been the one you intended!

2A1987dM12y

Well... I just started to refuse to make calculations in my mind on demand, and I think I even kind-of freaked out a couple times when people insisted. It worked.

2TheOtherDave12y

I try to keep this sort of thing in mind when interpreting accounts of the implausible brilliance of third parties.

5TheOtherDave12y

Yeah, pretty much. It is sometimes useful, at that point, to put aside the goal of becoming better at argument and persuasion, and instead pursue for a while the goal of becoming better at distinguishing true assertions from false ones.

5DaFranker12y

Interestingly, the Authority Card seems subject to the Rule of Separate Magisteria. I'm sure you've also noticed this at some point. Basically, the reputedly-intelligent person will convince anyone of any "fact" by simply saying it convincingly and appearing to themselves be convinced, but only when it is a fact that is part of the Smart-person Stuff magisterium within the listener's model. As soon as you depart from this magisterium, your statements are mere opinion, and thus everything you say is absolutely worthless, since 1/6 000 000 000 = 0 and there are over six billion other people that have an opinion. In other words, I agree that it constitutes somewhat of a problem. I found myself struggling with it in the past. Now I'm not struggling with it anymore, even though it hasn't been "solved" yet. It becomes a constant challenge that resets over time and over each new person you meet.

3Petra12y

Of course, as a young person, this obstacle is largely eliminated by the context. Interact with the same group of people for a long period of time, a group through which information spreads quickly, and then develop a reputation for knowing everything. Downside: people are very disappointed when you admit you don't know something. Upside: life is easier. More important downside: you get lazy in your knowledge acquisition.

2A1987dM12y

This. Sometimes, when I tell people I don't know how to help them with something, they accuse me of being deliberately unhelpful with them because I'm selfish, angry with them, or something.

3beoShaffer12y

Hi Petra! Minor nitpick, its rationality not rationalism. Rationalism is something completely different.

6Petra12y

Pardon me, that falls into the grey area between typo and mistake, where the word in the brain doesn't come out on the page. I will correct it.

0A1987dM12y

Why the hell was that downvoted???

2DaFranker12y

My most reasonable guess: Because every cause wants to be a cult, and some unwary cultists of LessWrong could very easily fool themselves into thinking that any nitpicking over the use of similar words is misinterpretation of the Holy Sequence Gospel, because the Chapter of Words Used Wrong clearly states that words are meant to communicate and clarify ideas and meanings, and thus follows that arguing over words instead of arguing over their substance is inherently bad.

3DaFranker12y

Judging from the immediate downvote, I'll throw in a second guess that I might be doing some cultist preaching myself there.

[-]JohnEPaton12y120

Hello,

My name is John Paton. I'm an Operations Research and Psychology major at Cornell University. I'm very interested in learning about how to improve the quality of my thinking.

Honestly, I think that a lot of my thoughts about how the world works are muddled at the moment. Perhaps this is normal and will never go away, but I want to at least try and decrease it.

At first glance, this community looks awesome! The thinking seems very high quality, and I certainly want to contribute to the discussion here.

I also write at my own blog, optimizethyself.com

See you in the discussion!

-John

[-]agravier13y120

Hi Less Wrong, I'm a PhD researcher in Computational Neuroscience, with a background in AI and machine learning, and some past experience in the computing industry as software engineer. I live in Singapore, although I am French. Are there other members residing in Singapore?

[-][anonymous]12y110

Hello,

I am a nearly seventeen year old female in the US who was linked by a friend to The Quantum Physics Series on LessWrong after trying to understand whether or not determinism is /actually/ refuted by Quantum Mechanics. I am an atheist, I suppose.

This all began as a fascination with science because I thought it would permit me to attain ultimate knowledge, or ultimate understanding and thus control of "matter". Later, I became fascinated with nihilism and philosophy, in search of defining "objectivity". It took off from there and now I am currently concerned with consciousness and usage of artificial intelligence to transfer our biological intelligence to a more effective physical manifestation.

I'm a little scared, naturally, because I think this would change a lot of what we currently understand as humans. As Mitchell Heisman describes, there exists a relationship between the scientist and the science. If the scientist is changed, I would think that the science, or knowledge, would in itself change. Some questions I have ATM: "Does objectivity exist? Can it be created? Can the notion or belief or idea of objectivity be destroyed? Will intelligence bec... (read more)

0Mitchell_Porter12y

Hello. I think you are the first person I've ever seen cite Mitchell Heisman as if he was just another thinker, rather than a weird guy who forced his ideas upon the attention of the world by committing suicide. You're interested in the concept of "objectivity". It's certainly a crossroads concept where many issues meet. Maybe the major irony in the opposition between "objectivity" and "subjectivity" is that objectivity is a form of subjectivity! Here subjectivity is more or less a synonym for consciousness, and a subjectivity is a sensibility or a mindset: a state of mind in which the world is experienced and judged in a particular way. Consciousness is a relation between an experiencing subject and an experienced object, and objectivity is consciousness trying to banish from its perceptions (or cognitions) of the experienced object, any influences which arise from the experiencing subject. In a lot of modern scientific and philosophical thought, this has been taken to the extreme of even trying to escape the existence of an experiencing subject. Trying to catalogue and diagnose all the ways in which this happens would be a mammoth task, but one extreme form of the syndrome would be where the "scientific subject" achieves perfect unconsciousness of self, and exists in a subjective world that seems purely objective. That is, they would have a belief system that nothing exists but atoms (for example), and not only would they find a way to interpret everything they experience as "nothing but atoms", but they would also manage to avoid noticing their own mental processes in a way that would disturb this perception, by reminding them of their own existence. A more moderate state of mind would be one in which self-awareness is allowed, but isn't threatening because the thinker has some way of interpreting their thoughts, and their thoughts about their thoughts, as also being nothing but atoms. For example, the brain is a computer, and a thought is a computation, and

[-]erbeeflower12y110

Hello people, 49 year old father of 4 sons, 17-27, eldest of 9,i come from a background of mormonism, my parents having been converted when i was 3.

So my reality was the dissonance of mormon dogma and theology vs what i was being 'taught' at school,vs what i experience for my self.

Now, having been through the divorce of my parents(gross hypocrisy if you're a mormon) the suicide of my brother and my own divorce,also finding myself saying i would die/kill for my beliefs,i began to realise what a mess i was and started asking questions,leaving the church (demonstrating with placards every sunday for 2 years) in 1996.

So i found myself wanting and needing a new philosophy! I'm particularly interested in learning how to 'be less wrong'! I'm still looking around and am currently interested in the non aggression principle.

I look forward to learning the tools i see here,so that i may make more considered choices.I recognise i'm a clumsy communicator and probably i'm somewhat retarded in comparison to a lot of you. Anyway i look forward to watching and learning,maybe even contributing one day! Tim.

1Dolores198412y

Hello, Tim! Welcome to Less Wrong. Don't be too impressed, we're all primates here. If you're interested in learning about the cognitive tools people use here, I recommend reading the sequences. They're a little imposing due to sheer length, but they're full of interesting ideas, even if you don't fully agree. Best of luck, and I hope you find something of value here. -Dolores

[-]chloejune12313y110

Hi! I found LW by HPMoR like so many other people, and I have found a lot of interesting articles on here. I'm only 12, so there are tons of articles that I don't understand, but I am determined to figure them out. My name is Chloe and I hope that we can be friends!

[-]Rada13y110

Hello to all! I'm a 17-year-old girl from Bulgaria, interested in Mathematics and Literature. Since I decided to "get real" and stop living in my comfortable fictional world, I've had a really tough year destroying the foundations of my belief system. Sure, there are scattered remains of old beliefs and habits in my psyche that I can't overcome. I have some major issues with reductionism and a love for Albert Camus ("tell me, doctor, can you quantify the reason why?" ).

In the last year I've come to know that it is very easy to start believing without doubt in something (the scientific view of the world included), perhaps too easy. That is why I never reject an alternative theory without some consideration, no matter how crazy it sounds. Sometimes I fail to find a rational explanation. Sometimes it's all too confusing. I'm here because I want to learn to think rationally but also because I want to ask questions.

Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres brought me here. To be honest, I hate this character with passion, I hate his calculating, manipulative attitude, and this is not what I believe rationality is about. I wonder how many of you see things as I do and how many would think me naive. Anyway, I'm looking forward to talking to you. I'm sure it's going to be a great experience.

5David Althaus13y

Hi Rada, welcome to Lesswrong! I share your aversion for reductionism, at least from an emotional albeit not epistemical point of view. I'm afraid we have to deal with living in a reductionistic universe. But e.g. this post might persuade you that even a reductionistic universe can sometimes be quite charming, although by no means perfect. Oh, and yay for Camus!

[-][anonymous]13y110

I'm male, early 40s who grew up in the midwestern US but have lived in the UK for the past 10 years. I had a very strong evangelical/fundamentalist upbringing, but at the same time an obsessively "rational" attitude which developed in large part from my covert reading of period sf (the sort in which rebellious yet rational engineers outsmarted their rigid hierarchically-minded superiors and their extremely technologically advanced antagonists at the same time). No surprise therefore that my religious beliefs began to dissolve as soon as I went to university, finally coming out of the closet as a de-convert in 1999.

I'm a postdoctoral researcher in cognitive science - with secondary interests in philosophy of science, especially the manner of scientific inference and the different extents to which Bayesian inference has taken hold in different scientific domains at the present time. I've been lurking here for a few years after seeing posts or comments in various places elsewhere by people like ciphergoth and David Gerard (neither of whom I know in person).

I also tend to make way too many parenthetical statements when I write; even though I am completely aware I am overdoing it I just can't avoid it.

[-]Konradical13y110

Hello. My name is Konrad and I stumbled upon LessWrong a few weeks ago from Reddit. I've browsed some of the main pages since then, but until now haven't committed to reading much. I hope that after registering I'll be able to participate in the community and learn more. I'm 16 years of age and would describe myself as an agnostic theist. I'd also say that I'm curious about knowledge and the world so hopefully I'll learn a lot from this website.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

1TimS12y

Welcome to LessWrong. We are interested in how our brain seems to have defects that can prevent us from realizing what is true, and thinking about why that is and what can be done about it.

[-]mbrubeck13y110

[deleted]

[-]glennonymous13y110

Hi all,

My name is Glenn Thomas Davis. I am a 48-year old male living in Warren, NJ with my wife and 5-year old daughter. I was born and raised in Ketchikan, Alaska. I am a creative director for a pharmaceutical marketing agency. I have been interested in science and skepticism since reading Godel, Escher, Bach in my 20's, but became a really serious skeptic and atheist after I started listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast in 2005ish. I beacame a fan of Eliezer and the Singularity Institute after seeing him speak on Bloggingheads 3 years ago, and I recently subscribed to the Overcoming Bias NYC listserve.

Most of my online friends are from the San Francisco Bay Area where I lived for many years. Not exactly the world's most rational bunch, and they don't often appreciate my atheist rants. I have been delaying introducing myself here because I am resistant to putting in the effort and time to become a known presence from the ground up, or even to write a proper introductory post. However, it recently occurred to me I could just share pieces of writing I've already done for other, less like-minded groups. Here's one:

(In response to an otherwise rational person who ... (read more)

[-]Kouran13y110

Hello Less Wrong community, I am Kouran.

What follows may be a bit long, and maybe a little dramatic. I'm sorry if that is uncourteous, still I feel the following needs saying early on. Please bear with me.

I'm a recently be-bachelored sociologist from the Netherlands, am male and in my early twenties. I consider myself a jack of several trades – among them writing, drawing, cooking and some musical hobbies – but master of none. However, I do entertain the hope that the various interests and skills add up to something effective, to my becoming someone in a position to help people who need it, and I intend to take action to approach this end.

I found Less Wrong through the intriguing Harry Potter fanfiction story called 'the Methods of Rationality.' The story entertains me greatly, and the more abstract themes stimulate me and I find myself wishing to enter discussions regarding these matters. Instead of bothering the author of the story I decided to have a look here instead. Please note that I write this before having read any of the Sequences and only a few smaller articles. I intend to get on that soon, but as introductions go I feel it is better to present myself first. I hope you... (read more)

[-]orthonormal13y120

It sounds like the Straw Vulcan talk might be relevant to some of your thoughts on rationality and emotion...

6thomblake13y

That's just about right. Humans are massively irrational; but we tend to regard that as a bug and work to fix it in ourselves.

5lessdazed13y

Bias Diamond in a box: --CEV You imply that there is a standard of rationality people are deviating from. Yes?

5fburnaby13y

Hi Kouran, and welcome. Your critique of "rationalism" as you currently understand it is, I think, valid. The goal of LessWrong, as I understand it (though I'm no authority, I just read here sometimes), is to help people become more rational themselves. As thomblake has already pointed out, we tend to believe with you in the general irrationality of humans. We also believe that this is a sort of problem to be fixed. However, I also think you're being unfair to people who use the Rationality Assumption in economics, biology or elsewhere. You say that: That's not an assumption that the theory requires. The Rationality Assumption only requires us to interpret the actions of an agent in terms of how well it appears to help it fulfill its goals. It needn't be conscious of such "goals". This type of goal is usually referred to as a revealed preference. Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias, a blog that's quite related to LessWrong, also loves pointing out and discussing the particular problem that you've raised. He usually refers to it as the "Homo hypocritus hypothesis". You might enjoy reading some related entries on his blog. The gist of the distinction I'm trying to point to is actually pretty well-summarized by Joe Biden: It's my own humble opinion that economists occasionally make the naive jump from talking about revealed preferences to talking about "actual" preferences (whatever those may be). In such cases, I agree with you that a disposition toward "rationalism" could be dangerous. But again, that's not the accepted meaning of the word here. I also think it might be just as naive to take peoples' stated preferences (whether stated to themselves or others) to be their "actual" preferences. There have been attempts on LW to model the apparent conflict between the stated preferences and revealed preferences of agents, my favourite of which was "Conflicts Between Mental Subagents: Expanding Wei Dai's Master-Slave Model". If I were to taboo the word "rationality" in

[-]thomblake13y110

It's been a while, so I just wanted to express approval of these welcome threads. A glance over the comments we've gotten over the years should reveal that they really do make people feel welcome and help people get into discussion on the site.

[-]madison13y110

Hi everyone. 23 year old south american software developer/musician here. I've been lurking around and reading for a couple of months now and I've found a lot of useful and interesting information here. It has actually triggered in me a lot of thinking about thinking, about reflexivity and the need for being aware of one's methods of thinking/learning/communicating etc.

I've been having some thoughts lately on the positive aspects of "rationality-motivated" socialization, mainly because of what I've learned of LW's weekly meetups and also because it has been, so far, pretty difficult to find someone who's interested about rationality. The first google searches took me nowhere, though I have still to look somewhere around philosophy/mathematics departments of local universities.

Anyway thanks for the information and the friendly welcome, and also for the big corpus of material you make available.

[-]xumx13y110

I'm 22, Male, an undergraduate at Singapore Management University studying information systems. Interest in AI.

I want to live a "good" life, but different people/culture uses different value systems to view life... some focus on the 'Ending', some focus on the 'Journey', some sees no value at all... Therefore, I'm looking for a way to objectively measure the value of a person's life. (not sure if that is even possible)

Found LW while reading up on Singularity. Would love to make some LW friends. feel free to add me on facebook~ http://fb.me/mengxiang

9cousin_it13y

Try watching Daniel Kahneman's TED talk The riddle of experience vs memory, it's nice and seems relevant to your question.

2Dojan13y

Sam Harris also has a really good TED talk on "the Sience of Morality"

[-]wwa12y100

Hi!

Long time lurker here.

I'm 26 years old, CS graduate living in Wrocław (Poland), professional compiler developer, cryptography research assistant and programmer. I'm an atheist (quite possibly thanks to LW). I consider the world to be overall interesting. I have many interests and I always have more things to do than I have time for. I'm motivated by curiosity. I'm less risk-averse than most people around me, but also less patient. I have a creative mind and love chellanges. While being fairly successful lone wolf until now, I seek to improve my people skills because I belive I can't get much further all by myself.

When I found LW for the first time, it absorbed me. It took me about 4 months at 4-6h a day to read all of the Sequences and comments. While I strongly disagree with some of the material, I consider LW to have accelerated my personal developement 2 to 3 times simply by virtue of critical mass and high singal to noise ratio. I don't know any better hub for thought (links welcome!). I joined becuse I finally have something to say.

5Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) 12y

Welcome! If you're interested in making a post, I bet lots of us would be interesting in hearing that story. Join the club! It sounds like you've chosen a good career for someone who likes challenges, too. Agreed–same for me. If anything, the Sequences that I've disagreed with were better for me, in terms of making me think...even if I still disagreed after thinking about it, they were mostly things I had never thought about to that degree of depth before.

[-]BrianLloyd12y100

Hello; my name is Brian. It is with some trepidation that I post here because I am not entirely sure how or where I can contribute. On the other hand, if I knew how I could contribute then I probably wouldn't need to post here.

I seem to be a bit older than most people whose introductions I have read here. I am 58. I have spent most of my life as a software engineer, electrical engineer, technical writer, businessman, teacher, sailor, and pilot. (When I was young Robert A. Heinlein advised against specialization, an admonition I took to heart.)

My most recent endeavor was a 5-year stint in a private school as a teacher of science, math, history, government, engineering, and computer science/programming. The act of trying to teach these subjects in a manner that provides the necessary cross-connection caused me to discover that I needed to try to understand more about how I think and learn, as my ultimate goal was to help my students determine for themselves how they think and learn. Being able to absorb and regurgitate facts and algorithms is not enough. Real learning requires the ability to discover new understanding as well. (I am rather a fan of scientific method, as inefficient ... (read more)

4OrphanWilde12y

Y'all! There's an added bonus in that it annoys linguistic purists.

4BrianLloyd12y

Until Y'all degenerates into the singular and then you need a plural for the plural, i.e. "all y'all." Don't believe me? Go to Texas. ;-)

0A1987dM12y

You guys. (Unlike the singular, ISTM that the plural guys doesn't always imply ‘males’.)

[-]Erdrick12y100

Greetings fellow Ration-istas!

First of all, I'd like to mention how glad I am that this site and community exist. For many years I wondered if there were others like me, who cared about improving themselves and their capacity for reason. And now I know - now I just need to figure out how to drag you all down to sunny San Diego to join me...

My name is Brett, and I'm a 28 year old Computational Biologist in San Diego, California. I've thought of myself as a materialist and an atheist since my freshman year in college, but it wasn't until after I graduated that I truly began to care about rationality. I realized that though I was unhappy with my life, as a scientist I had access to the best tools around for turning that around - science and reason.

I was born with a de novo genomic translocation on my 1st chromosome that left me with a whole raft of medical problems through-out my childhood - funnel chest, cleft palate, mis-fused skull, you name it. As a result I was picked on and isolated for most of my childhood, and generally responded to stress by retreating into video games and SF novels. So I went to school to study genetics and biology, and I graduated from college with a ... (read more)

3candyfromastranger12y

A lot of people that I know seem to think that logic and reason are mostly just important in science, but they can improve so much in everyday life.

[-]WingedViper12y100

Hi,

I'm a German student-to-be (I am going to start studying IT in October) and I am interested in almost anything connected with rationality, especially the self improvement, biases and "how to save the world" parts. I hope that lesswrong will be (and it already has been to a certain amount) one of the resources for (re-)shaping my thinking and acting towards a better me and a better world.

I came here, like so many others ;-), because I wanted to check out the foundations/concepts behind HPMOR and I could not just leave again. So over the last few months I visited again and again to read some of the sequences and posts.

As I am interested in science, especially physics, maths, technology and astronomy, I have a question that I would like to ask the lesswrong community: What is a fast and secure way of determining the trustworthiness of scientists and scientific papers? I ask this because there is a lot of pseudoscience and poorly done science out there which often isn't easy to distinguish from unconventional/disrupting science (at least not for me).

all the best Viper

[-]LordSnow13y100

Hi everyone! I am still a high school student but very interested in what I read here on LessWrong! I decided to register to contribute to discussions. Until now, I have been lurking but hopefully I will be able to join the conversation in a useful way.

4John_Maxwell13y

Sorry to hear about that!

2LordSnow13y

I find your jumping to conclusions somewhat offensive. In fact, I don't feel socially disadvantaged for my interests.

1John_Maxwell13y

No! I refuse to believe that high school could be anything but a terrible prison! runs away screaming

1CuSithBell13y

Excellent! I also find this picture of high school sorta baffling.

1Randaly13y

Hiya LordSnow! If you want to get to know some of the other LW highschoolers, we have an (inactive) Google Group, and a Facebook Group.

[-]olalonde13y100

Hi all! I have been lurking LW for a few months (years?). I believe I was first introduced to LW through some posts on Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=olalonde). I've always considered myself pretty good at rationality (is there a difference with being a rationalist?) and I've always been an atheist/reductionist. I recently (4 years ago?) converted to libertarianism (blame Milton Friedman). I was raised by 2 atheist doctors (as in PhD). I'm a software engineer and I'm mostly interested in the technical aspect of achieving AGI. Since I was a kid, I've always dreamed of seeing an AGI within my lifetime. I'd be curious to know if there are some people here working on actually building an AGI. I was born in Canada, have lived in Switzerland and am now living in China. I'm 23 years old IIRC. I believe I'm quite far from the stereotypical LWer on the personality side but I guess diversity doesn't hurt.

Nice to meet you all!

2olalonde13y

Before I get more involved here, could someone explain me what is 1) x-rationality (extreme rationality) 2) a rationalist 3) a bayesian rationalist (I know what rationalism and Bayes theorem are but I'm not sure what the terms above refer to in the context of LW)

6Nornagest13y

In the context of LW, all those terms are pretty closely related unless some more specific context makes it clear that they're not. X-rationality is a term coined to distinguish the LW methodology (which is too complicated to describe in a paragraph, but the tagline on the front page does a decent job) from rationality in the colloquial sense, which is a much fuzzier set of concepts; when someone talks about "rationality" here, though, they usually mean the former and not the latter. This is the post where the term originates, I believe. A "rationalist" as commonly used in LW is one who pursues (and ideally attempts to improve on) some approximation of LW methodology. "Aspiring rationalist" seems to be the preferred term among some segments of the userbase, but it hasn't achieved fixation yet. Personally, I try to avoid both. A "Bayesian rationalist" is simply a LW-style rationalist as defined above, but the qualification usually indicates that some contrast is intended. A contrast with rationalism in the philosophical sense is probably the most likely; that's quite different) and in some ways mutually exclusive with LW epistemology, which is generally closer to philosophical empiricism.

3Bugmaster13y

As far as I understand, a "Bayesian Rationalist" is someone who bases their beliefs (and thus decisions) on Bayesian probability, as opposed to ye olde frequentist probability. An X-rationalist is someone who embraces both epistemic and instrumental rationality (the Bayesian kind) in order to optimize every aspect of his life.

[-]rejuvyesh13y100

Hello everyone!

I am Jayesh Kumar Gupta. I am from Jodhpur, India. I have been interested in rationality for some years now. I came across this site via HPMOR. I had been reading posts on the site for some years now, while trying to wade my way through the gigantic Sequences, but was not confident enough to join this group, (people here seem to know so much). Right now I am an undergraduate student at IIT Kanpur. Hopefully I too will contribute something to the site in the future.

Thanks!

1Normal_Anomaly13y

Welcome to Less Wrong! It's good to see that we're drawing an audience from all over the world. Don't worry about not knowing enough--a good fraction of regulars (myself included) weren't confident enough to join for a while. Now that you're out of lurkerdom, you'll gain confidence quickly. LW can be intimidating, but we're not as scary as we look. :)

[-]thespymachine13y100

Hello to the LessWrong universe.

I'm 23 years old. A lover of music (Last.fm): Ravel, Mozart, Radiohead, Sigur Rós, Animal Collective. And driven to learn.

My goal right now is to become a philosophy professor, and participate in radical, reason oriented movements to influence social change.

I value the intellect, the body, life, and the universe. I value learning - to improve the lives of others and myself, and to live most accordingly with 'nature.' I value those who direct themselves in a rational manner.

My rationality quest began when I was a child, always using legos to build new things and drawing. Eventually video games came into my life and problem solving drove me. However, due to immaturity and the social life of a middle/high schooler, I never really progress intellectually despite my love for science and 'deep' conversations with friends.
It wasn't until I was 20, and ended my relationship with a girl that philosophical thought dawned upon me. It was sparked by the breakup, because her family was religious and I molded myself to that lifestyle, but when it was over there was nothing there. I suppose, after losing who I thought was the love of my life, I began to se... (read more)

2[anonymous]13y

Welcome to Less Wrong! :) You sound like a pretty studious individual; you might enjoy some of the posts on inexpensive and efficient learning, if you haven't seen them already. Out of curiosity, what was the name of the blog that led you here?

2thespymachine13y

Thank you! Wow, this post you linked to is quite amazing. Thanks a bunch. ("autodidact" - I finally have a word for what I do, ha ha) anotherpanacea - the exact post is here

[-][anonymous]13y100

Hi, my name is Alexey, and although I've been around the website for a while and have been an active LessWrongian in real life meetups, I haven't actually introduced myself on the website yet. So here it goes.

I am an undergraduate student at the University of Cambridge, specialising in synthetic biology and aiming to go on to do research in that field. I am interested in raising x-risk awareness within the SynBio community and advancing a safe approach to research in this area.

I was introduced to LW by a friend, and soon realised that there is actually a community of rational people interested in much the same things as I am. I have enjoyed reading the Sequences and have definitely learned a lot.

Since finding the LW website and community has been such a great experience for me, I introduced many of my friends to it, have participated in setting up the Cambridge meetup group; and more recently organised the first meetup in Budapest. I find it very rewarding to be able to talk to and make friends with fellow rationalists!

As for my interests within the scope of LW, I find that I am interested in self-improvement in terms of identifying and overcoming biases, building and expanding rationalist communities and working on x-risk reduction in synthetic biology. In fact, I find that biologists are underrepresented within the LW community and hope that my knowledge of the subject can translate into useful contributions to the discussions here on the LW website, and in real life LW meetups!

[-]Crouching_Badger13y100

I'm reposting this here because there was a thread swap and I didn't get any takers in the former thread. Please let me interview you! It will be fun and wont take up too much time!

Hello, my name is Brett, and I am an undergraduate student at the University of North Texas, currently studying in the Department of Anthropology. In this semester, my classmates and I have been tasked with conducting an ethnographic study on an online community. After reading a few posts and the subsequent comments, LessWrong seemed like a great community on which to conduct an ethnography. The purpose of this study is to identify the composition of an online community, analyze communication channels and modes of interaction, and to glean any other information about unique aspects of the LessWrong community.

For this study I will be employing two information gathering techniques. The first of which will be Participant Observation, where I will document my participation within the community in attempts to accurately describe the ecosystem that comprises LessWrong. The second technique will be two interviews held with members of the community, where we will have a conversation about communication technique... (read more)

4kpreid13y

I recommend making a post to Discussion instead of a comment for this purpose.

1Alicorn13y

This survey may interest you in your pursuits.

[-]Raiden13y100

Hi, I am Raiden. For most of my life I have been an aspiring rationalist, even though I didn't call myself by that name. I was raised to think that I was some sort of super genius (it was a big shock in my later elementary school years to discover that I wasn't the smartest person in the world). This had the effect of causing me to associate some of my identity with intelligence. This led me to be a traditional rationalist; I had much admiration for the Spock stereotype, and I have been a atheist since childhood despite a fundamentalist religious family. In my freshmen year of high school, I was exposed to some self-help books that led me to seriously consider other virtues besides intelligence to be of value. This slowly revolutionized my view of the world.

Over the course of the next summer, I was exposed to the philosophy of Objectivism, and quickly became a strong adherent to it. I was from the beginning in agreement with the "Open Objectivist" group which said Objectivism is not a complete philosophy. I agree that objectivism descended into some sort of cult, and that Ayn Rand was one of history's greatest hypocrites. I also came to believe that this didn't disquali... (read more)

[-]Spectral_Dragon13y100

Hello! I came here researching free will for a school project. I'm currently 18, studying science at a fairly basic level in a small town in Sweden. I've so far read a few articles and the sheer amount of interesting thoughts in the articles made me want to stay. When I read what Lesswrong stands for, I knew I wanted to be a part of it, to try to become a better, hopefully wiser person.

I've liked philosophy for a long time, and don't usually like "because" as an answer for anything. I want to find out reasons behind everything. I'm so far not as good as I wish, due to limited time and wanting to read a lot of the articles, but not having enough time. However, I find it difficult to abandon half-read articles, even though they can be a bit of a long read compared to what I'm used to, excluding books.

Since I'm easily influenced by new ideas, too, as long as they make sense, I'm expecting myself to switch a lot. Lesswrong seems interesting, anyway, and I want to know more. I want more perspectives and thoughts. So far Lesswrong seems wonderful, and I think I'll like it. Hoping the community can oversee shortcomings when needed, but I'm expecting you all to be a nice bunch.

For science, and a greater understanding. Hopefully I'll be able to learn from you. But it's late now, and I'll be going now. Just thought I'd say hi.

[-]jacobt13y100

Hello. I'm a 19-year-old student at Stanford University majoring in Computer Science. I'm especially interested in artificial intelligence. I've been reading lesswrong for a couple months and I love it! There are lots of great articles and discussions about a lot of the things I think about a lot and things that I hadn't thought about but proceeded to think about after reading them.

I've considered myself a rationalist for as long as I can remember. I've always loved thinking about philosophy, reading philosophy articles, and discussing philosophy with other people. When I started reading lesswrong I realized that it aligned well with my approach to philosophy, probably because of my interest in AI. In the course of searching for a universal epistemology I discovered Solomonoff induction, which is an idea that I've been obsessed with for a couple years. I even wrote a paper about it. I've been trying to apply this concept to epistemology and cognitive science.

My current project is to make a practical framework for resource-bounded Solomonoff induction (Solomonoff induction where the programs are penalized for taking up too much time). Since resource-bounded induction ... (read more)

[-]juliawise13y100

I'm sorry about your turmoil, but I don't take responsibility for "creating" it.

[-]TimS13y100

First, any single relaxed taboo is a blow against the entire net of ethical inhibitions

This is not an uncontested statement.

2Multiheaded13y

Thanks for catching me, adjusted.

[-]sabre5113y100

I've posted a few rationality quotes, so it sounds like time to introduce myself. I'm a 22 year old software project manager from Wisconsin, been reading LW since June or so when MOR was really going strong.

I've been a very rational thinker for my whole life, in terms of explicitly looking for evidence/feedback and updating behaviors and beliefs, but only began thinking about it formally recently. I was raised Christian, and I consider my current state the result of a slow process of resolving dissonance based on contradictions or insufficient/contrary evidence. I'm most interested in theory of government and achieving best results given the rather unreliable ability of voters to predict or understand outcomes of different policies.

I also think, though, that ethics is just as important as rationality- choosing the correct goals is just as necessary as succeeding towards those goals. I've seen appreciation of this within LW that, for me, really sets it apart, so I hope I can make a larger contribution. As someone once said, the choice between Good and Evil is not about saying one or the other, but about deciding which is which.

2orthonormal13y

Welcome! If you're near Madison, there's a regular meetup there (on Mondays) which I highly recommend. Is that from The Sword of Good, or another source?

[-]Gob_Bluth13y100

Hello, I'm a high school senior who discovered this site somewhere on reddit and deeply enjoyed this article (http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth) and decided to check out more posts. I'm planning on studying engineering in college but I try to have a well-rounded knowledge on a myriad of subjects apart from math and science. The content here is very enticing and intellectually stimulating, and I will probably frequent this site in the future.

1KPier13y

Welcome to LessWrong! There's an email list and occasional online meetups for LessWrong teenagers; you can join here..

[-]Vaniver13y100

It happens to all of us sometimes, and it's perfectly acceptable to ask for an explanation.

I'd like to note that while acceptable to ask for an explanation, it is downright counterproductive to be petulant. Don't bother getting upset until you know why.

[-]jeronimo1965y90

Hello lesswrong community!

"Who am I?" I am a Network Engineer, who once used to know a bit of math (sadly, not anymore). Male, around 30, works in IT, atheist - I think I'll blend right in.

"How did I discover lesswrong?" Like the vast majority, I discovered lesswrong after reading HPMOR many years ago. It remains my favourite book to this day. HPMOR and the Sequences taught me a lot of new ideas and, more importantly, put what I already knew into a proper perspective. By the time HPMOR was finally finished, I was no longer sure where my worldview happened

... (read more)

3habryka5y

Welcome! Glad to have you join us!

3jeronimo1965y

Thank you! You have no idea how happy your reply makes me! In an irrationally large part, because I've seen your name in a book, but I just cannot help myself. You are alive! (Duh!) More importantly, the lesswrong community is alive! (Double Duh!, but going through the Sequences' comments can be a bit discouraging - like playing the first levels of a MMORPG, while the experienced player base has moved on to level 50.) Hopefully, we'll have many interesting discussions once I catch up. So much to look forward to! Will Alicorn be there? Will TheOtherDave explain what happened to the original Dave? You guys are legends. P.S. Sorry for the delayed response, I didn't notice the number next to the bell earlier. I'll make sure to check it frequently from now on.

3habryka5y

Glad to hear that! :) Looking forward to many future conversations, and sorry for the bell icon not being as obvious.

1jeronimo1965y

No worries :) and no reason to be sorry- the bell is quite obvious on PC, but my android phone only shows it when scrolling. Probably an issue on my side.

[-]Shmi12y90

Consider your second expectation falsified and update on it, as a "bayesian rationalist" would.

[-]troll12y110

Yeah okay.

[-]GESBoulder13y90

Hello to the LW Community. My name is Glenn, 49, from Boulder, Colorado. After completing my Master's degree in Economics, I began a career in investment management, with a diversion into elected politics (a city council, a regional council of governments, then the Colorado state legislature, along with corporate on non-profit boards). My academic work focused on decision theory and risk analysis and my vocation on their practical application. Presently, I manage several billion dollars' worth of fixed-income portfolios on behalf of local governments and ... (read more)

2Vaniver13y

Welcome! We're glad to have you.

[-]Paul_G13y90

Hi! My name is Paul, and I've been an aspiring rationalist for years. A long time ago, I realized implicitly that reality exists, and that there is only one. I think "rationality" is the only reasonable next thing to do. I pretty much started "training" on TvTropes, reading fallacies and the like there, as well as seeing ways to analyze things in fiction. The rules there apply to real life fairly well.

From there, I discovered Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and from there, this site. Been reading quite a bit on and off over... (read more)

[-]prashantsohani13y90

Hello, everyone! I'm 21, soon to graduate from IIT Bombay, India. I guess the first time I knowingly encountered rationality, was at 12, when I discovered the axiomatic development of Euclidean geometry, as opposed to the typical school-progression of teaching mathematics. This initial interest in problem-solving through logic was fueled further, through my later (and ongoing) association with the Mathematics Olympiads and related activities.

Of late, I find my thoughts turning ever more to understanding the working and inefficiencies of our macro-economy, ... (read more)

2Stuart_Armstrong13y

Well welcome, and hope you find yourself happy and interested here!

[-]e_c13y90

Hello folks! I'm a student of computer science, found Less Wrong a few years ago, read some articles, found myself nodding along, but didn't really change my mind about anything significant. That is, until recently I came across something that completely shattered my worldview and, having trouble coping with that, I found myself coming back here, seeking either something that would invalidate this new insight or help me accept it if it is indeed true. Over the past few days, I have probably been thinking harder than ever before in my life, and I hope to contribute to discussions here in the future.

2athingtoconsider13y

What's the insight?

[-]Ghatanathoah13y90

Hi everyone. I have been lurking since the site started, but did not have the courage to start posting until recently. I am a male college graduate in his mid-twenties, happily engaged and currently job-hunting, and have been fascinated by science and reason since I was a child. I was one of those people who actually identified with the "Hollywood Rational" robots and aliens in science fiction and wanted to be more like them. Science and science fiction socialized me and made me curious about the inner working of the universe.

I love the sequen... (read more)

[-]farsan13y90

Greetings, everyone.

My name is Francisco, and I am from Malaga, Spain. I am a dabbling rationalist, and a programmer/troubleshooter.

I started walking the path of rationality when I started keeping track of good luck/normal luck/bad luck events in order to check if Murphy's law was actually true, and then wondering why people actually believed in it. Later, I started reading about fallacies, and I finally arrived at LW via HMPOR, like many people.

I am currently reading my way through the Sequences, but my current project is to make Bayes' theorem more acce... (read more)

[-]larsyencken13y90

Hi all,

My name's Lars. I'm from Melbourne, Australia, and have a background in software/mathematics/languages. I've also tutored classes in logic and artificial intelligence. Like a lot of folks commenting here, I've been reading articles on LessWrong for a while, but now I'm keen to understand the community around it a bit more.

I've been interested in rationality for some years. One of my favourite posts so far is "Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-contrarianism". It helped me notice signalling in arguments, and reduce greatly the amount I do it my... (read more)

[-]Mutasir13y90

Hello everyone! I'm 19 years old BA student of Finance & Accounting from Poland. For some time I have been interested in rationalism, yet in my country internet community oriented with it is rather fledgling and mostly just non-theist in nature. I was brought here by HPMOR. I know Bayes' Theorem from my statistics classes, but it wasn't until recently that I began to understood how it could influence my way of thinking.

Please forgive me if I make small language errors in my posts, while I understand mostly everything written here (barring things that I... (read more)

3TheOtherDave13y

Welcome! Don't let language anxiety keep you from participating here; your English seems more than adequate to the job.

2MarkusRamikin13y

Witam.

[-]StephenCole13y90

Hello, all.

I'm an agnostic artist and general proponent of thinking (although I hope to become a more specific proponent of thinking now that I'm here) who enjoys working behind the scenes.

I'm the new executive assistant for the Center of Modern Rationality, and look forward to doing what I can to help get the Center running as smoothly as possible. If I'm doing my job right, you shouldn't even know I'm here.

[-]TheOtherDave13y90

Well, OK, let's examine it then.

We have some activity.
We see no particular reason to prevent people from doing that activity.
We see no good reason for people to do that activity.
We have a proposed law that makes that activity illegal.
Do I endorse that law?

The only case I can think of where I'd say yes is if the law also performs some other function, the benefit of which outweighs the inefficiencies associated with preventing this activity, and for some reason separating those two functions is more expensive than just preventing the activity. (This sort of... (read more)

[-]wedrifid13y90

I often "claim" my downvotes (aka I will post "downvoted" and then give reason.) However, I know that when I do this, I will be downvoted myself. So that is probably one big deterrent to others doing the same.

On the other hand if people agree with your reasons they often upvote it (especially back up towards zero if it dropped negative).

For one thing, the person you are downvoting will generally retaliate by downvoting you (or so it seems to me, since I tend to get an instant -1 on downvoting comments)

I certainly hope so. I would... (read more)

4[anonymous]13y

Do you think that's a good thing, or just a likely outcome? Downvoting explanations of downvotes seems like a really bad idea, regardless how you feel about the downvote. It strongly incentives people to not explain themselves, not open themselves up for debates, but just vote and then remove themselves from the discussion. I don't see how downvoting explanations and more explicit behavior is helpful for rational discourse in any way.

6MixedNuts13y

This is exactly the reaction I want to trolls, basic questions outside of dedicated posts, and stupid mistakes. Are downvotes of explanations in those cases also read as an incentive not to post explanations in general?

2[anonymous]13y

Speaking for myself, yes. I read it as "don't engage this topic on this site, period". I agree with downvoting (and ignoring) the types of comments you mentioned, but not explanations of such downvotes. The explanations don't add any noise, so they shouldn't be punished. (Maybe if they got really excessive, but currently I have the impression that too few downvotes are explained, rather than too many.)

1wedrifid13y

Comments can serve as calls to action encouraging others to downvote or priming people with a negative or unintended interpretation of a comment - be it yours or that of someone else -that influence is something to be discouraged. This is not the case with all explanations of downvotes but it certainly describes the effect and often intent of the vast majority of "Downvoted because" declarations. Exceptions include explanations that are requested and occasionally reasons that are legitimately surprising or useful. Obviously also an exception is any time when you actually agree they have a point.

1TheOtherDave13y

I might well consider an explanation of a downvote on a comment of mine to be a valuable contribution, even if I continue to disagree with the thinking behind it. Actually, that's not uncommon.

[-]FeatherlessBiped13y90

(Reposted from the wrong thread, per Kutta's suggestion)

If by "rationalist", the LW community means someone who believes it is possible and desirable to make at least the most important judgements solely by the use of reason operating on empirically demonstrable facts, then I am an ex-rationalist. My "intellectual stew" had simmered into it several forms of formal logic, applied math, and seasoned with a BS in Computer Science at age 23.

By age 28 or so, I concluded that most of the really important things in life were not amenable to th... (read more)

8orthonormal13y

Welcome! You'll be relieved to know that's not quite the Less Wrong dogma; if you observe that your conscious deliberations make worse decisions in a certain sphere than your instincts, then (at least until you find a better conscious deliberation) you should rely on your instincts in that domain. LWers are generally optimistic about applying conscious deliberation/empirical evidence/mathematical models in most cases besides immediate social decisions, though.

2FeatherlessBiped13y

Thanks for the introduction and welcome. Upvoted.

[-]Andrew-Psyches13y90

I'm Andrew, a 41 year old actuary, living in Chicago (and Sao Paulo in the summers). I came to rationality under the influence of Ayn Rand and the writing of Richard Dawkins but actually found the site after being sent a link by my sister. I am not a computer programmer at all, but read extensively on subjects like behavioral psychology, physics, genetics, evolution, and anything interesting related to real science. I am trying to apply the lessons from behavioral psychology and many other fields (including game theory, space design, use of incentives an... (read more)

[-]Laur13y90

Hi, I'm Laur, I'm in my mid-thirties (wow, when did that happen?), a software developer from Romania, currently living in the Netherlands. I found this site, as many others, via MoR, and I've been lurking for a while now - I'm subscribed to the RSS feed and slowly working my way through the sequences.

When young (and arguably foolish), I've made a few "follow your heart' kind of decisions that resulted in significant damage to my personal life, finances and career. For the past seven years I've been working my way out of that hole mainly by analysing ... (read more)

5orthonormal13y

Welcome! Could you expand on this? Being more rational, in the sense that LWers use it, isn't about acting like Spock all the time; instrumental rationality for humans includes relaxing, being silly, and all of the other things that make us more effective and happier overall.

[-]JohnW13y90

Hi everyone. I am an engineering graduate student in the SF Bay area, and will be working at a tech company in the south bay starting in the summer.

I have been lurking on this forum for about a year and a half, but this post convinced me to register for an account. I serendipitously found Less Wrong through an interesting post about the Amanda Knox murder trial. I have read a few of the sequences and all of MoR. I hope to get more involved in the future!

[-]RogerS12y80

Retired Mechanical Engineer with the following interests/prejudices.

Longstanding interest in philosophy of science especially in the tradition of Karl Popper.

Atheist to a first approximation but I can accept that some forms of religious belief can be regarded as "translations" of beliefs I hold and therefore not that keen on the "New Atheist" approach. Belong to a Humanist group in London (where I heard of LW). This has led me to revive an old interest in moral philosophy, especially as applied to political questions.

Happy to be called ... (read more)

[-]TheEleaticStranger12y80

Hi, I am interested in the neurobiology of decision-making and rationality and happened to stumble upon this site and decided to join.

-Cheers.

0shokwave12y

Welcome!

[-]Jost13y80

Hey everyone,

I'm Jost, 19 years old, and studying physics in Munich, Germany. I've come across HPMoR in mid-2010 and am currently translating it into German. That way, I found LW and dropped by from time to time to read some stuff – mostly from the Sequences, but rarely in sequence. I started reading more of LW this spring, while a friend and I were preparing a two day introductory course on cognitive biases entitled “How to Change Your Mind”. (Guess where that idea came from!)

I'm probably going to be most active in the HPMoR-related threads.

I was very int... (read more)

0OrphanWilde13y

There are two remedies: Thinking about the ideas, and reading other people's thoughts about the ideas. I generally recommend the former first, followed by the second, followed by the first again - don't read too much without giving yourself time to think the ideas through for yourself. My general rule with new ideas is to get the summary first and think it through - my personal goal is to have (at least) one criticism, (at least) one supporting argument, and (at least) one derived idea before I read other people's thoughts on the matter.

[-]Alerus13y80

Hi! So I've actually already made a few comments on this site, but had neglected to introduce myself so I thought I'd do so now. I'm a PhD candidate in computer science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. My research interests are in AI and Machine Learning. Specifically, my dissertation topic is on generalization in reinforcement learning (policy transfer and function approximation).

Given this, AI is obviously my biggest interest, but as a result, my study of AI has led me to applying the same concepts to human life and reasoning. Lately, I'v... (read more)

[-]Helloses13y80

Hi, I'm a long-time reader of Eliezer's various scribblings and I'm interested in getting a meetup group going in Minneapolis after we've had a few false starts. This is the post I'm trying to gather the karma to enable:

Meetup: Twin Cities, MN (for real this time)

THE TIME: 15 April 2012 01:00:00PM (-0600) THE PLACE: Purple Onion Coffeeshop, 1301 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis, MN

Hi. Let's make this work.

See also

[-]RogerG12y40

Hi Everyone,

I came across this website, LessWrong, from a philosophy forum. I'm new to this type of thing. I'm not a writer, nor a philosopher, but only someone that is interested in knowing the real truths, whether good, bad, or ugly. It appears to me that most people seem to believe in that which is most palatable to them, that which makes them feel best. I think I am different.

As I see it, all of reality exists ‘only’ from within my mind. All that I know about ‘anything’ come from the thoughts and feelings within my mind. Without thoughts and feelings, ... (read more)

[-][anonymous]12y40

Hey Less Wrong,

My name is Wes von Hochmuth and I am a 21 yr-old college Junior at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, nearby Seattle. I'm studying History and Neuroscience with a minor in Computer Science. It's an interesting combination. Tell you the truth, I am studying History because of my interest in Futurology and Futurism. Details aside, a thesis of mine has been, "If we study the past with history, how is it we study the future, history's opposite?"

This interest has driven me to start a community of my own, called r/Futu... (read more)

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

[-]Evercy13y40

Hello!

I am a university student studying biology in Ontario. I've actually known about lesswrong for a few years before I joined. My good friend likes to share interesting things that he finds on the internet, and he has linked me to this site more than once. Over time, lesswrong has grown increasingly relevant to my interests. Right now, I'm mainly reading posts and dabbling in the sequences. But I hope that I will be able to contribute some ideas in posts or comments once I get used to how things work around here. Some things that interest me are rhetor... (read more)

[-]Blackened13y40

Hello, LessWrong. I'm 20 years old, originally from Bulgaria, living and studying Software Engineering in London (just finished my 1st year). I have always wanted to know a lot about human thinking, because of my need to be as optimal as possible plus my interest in technical things plus my tendency to seek rigorous explanations. I still have a deep interest in psychology and I see some potential very powerful applications I'll feel inefficient without. The second thing I love is programming.

As a rationalist, I'm very strict to myself. I always go for the ... (read more)

[-]thomblake13y40

Why does everyone think that I want to convert them to Christianity?

You claim to have evidence that should convince you to be a Christian. We want to know that evidence. The Litany of Tarski applies: if God exists, I wish to believe that God exists. If God does not exist, I wish to believe that God does not exist.

[-]Bugmaster13y40

If you were in a group and you were shown a box with 5 dice in it for a brief moment, but later everyone agreed that there were only 4 dice...

This is a pretty standard example of reasoning under uncertainty. You have two possible events, "there were 5 dice" vs. "there were 4 dice". You want to assign a probability to each event, because, not being omniscient, you don't know how many dice there actually were. You have several percepts, meaning pieces of evidence: your memories and the claims of the other people. Each of these percepts... (read more)

[-]TimS13y40

I can't speak for thomblake, but there are experiences that could convince me that there was a powerful entity that intervened on behalf of humanity. They just haven't happened. And I have reasons to believe that they will never happen, including the fact that they haven't happened before - absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

[-]electricfistula13y40

I pose the question of what does being a superior rationalist do for you

In the aggregate of all possible worlds, I expect it will let me lead a happier and more fulfilling life. This isn't to say that there aren't situations where it will disadvantage me to be a rationalist (a killer locks me and one other person in a room with a logic puzzle. He will kill the one who completes the puzzle first...) but in general, I think it will be an advantage. Its like in the game of poker, sometimes, the correct play will result in losing. That is okay though, i... (read more)

3Bugmaster13y

If you knew this to be the case, the rational thing to do would be to avoid solving the puzzle :-) Religious people would disagree with you here, I'd imagine. This is another minor nitpick, but AFAIK not all Christian sects demand tithing (though some do).

2electricfistula13y

Agreed, but there is at least one possible scenario (where I don't know it is the case) where it would hurt me to be a superior rationalist. I imagine they would. Because they would disagree with me, I'd like for my beliefs to challenge theirs to trial by combat. That way, the wrong beliefs might be destroyed by the truth. Sure, 10% is not true of all Christian groups. To my knowledge though, all such groups run on donations from the faithful. If the number isn't 10% it is still greater than zero. Arguments here are over scale and not moral righteousness.

2TheOtherDave13y

I'm not so sure. I mean, it's not like all religious people agree about religious claims, any more than all political activists agree about political claims, or all sports fans agree about claims regarding sports teams. In fact, quite the contrary... I suspect that most religious people believe that the religious claims of most religious people are false.

1Jakinbandw13y

Indeed. My entire point was that it might be possible to recognize these situations and then act in an appropriate manner. (Or would that be being meta-rationalist?) Anecdotal evidence shouldn't be a cause to say something is horrible. If that were the case I could point to the secular schools I went to growing up where I was the only Christian in my class, and watched as the other kids fought, did hard drugs, had sex, and generally messed up their life and beat me up. On the other hand the Church was friendly, focused on working together and planning for the future. It focused on tolerance and accepting people who were hostile without hating them. If I was to go just from my childhood I would despise atheists with a passion. Depends on the church. The church that I go to most of the time has only 2 or three children in it and is mostly made up of members over 60. Besides, if you look at it from a Christian point of view, is it wrong to teach children when they are young? Would you advocate waiting till a person is 20 to start teaching them how to read, write and do math? I respectfully disagree. I would appreciate it if you could be respectful in turn. Is it as bad as telling a child that if they play in traffic they could cease to exist? Or that if they are not careful around a lawnmower they could end up with pain and disabilities for the rest of their lives? Define 'Bad' for me so that we can discuss this point. Not true for all churches. In fact I have yet to be in a single one that even suggests it. Usually it is more along the lines of "If you believe the work we are doing is good than please donate so that we may continue doing it." You know, kind of like what Eliezer is doing right now with the workshops he is setting up.

4Dolores198413y

Claims with a low Occamian prior are false (to within reasonable tolerances) by default to a rationalist. Deities in general tend to have extremely long minimum message lengths, since they don't play nice with the rest of our model of the universe, and require significant additional infra-structure. I suspect you would not be overly put out by the assertion that Rama or Odin isn't real. So, what makes your God different? I ask you honestly. If you can show strong, convincing evidence for why the existence of your God is special, I will be very, very interested. If you can demonstrate enough Bayesian evidence to bump the probability of Yahweh over 50%, you've got yourself a convert. Probably quite a few. But, the burden of evidence is on your shoulders.

3Jakinbandw13y

Ah, now that is a funny thing isn't it. Once upon a time I played a joke on a friend. I told him something that he would have never have believed unless it came from my own mouth, and then when he tried to tell others I just looked confused and denied it. He ended up looking like a fool. (For the record I asked him to tell nobody else). Why is this relevant? Because if for example (and no, I'm not saying this is what happened), God came out of the sky, pointed at me, and said "I exist." I would know that either he existed, or something else did that was trying to fool me into thinking he did. Either way I would have belief that something supernatural (outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts) had happened. Let's say I came onto this board and told everyone that. How would I 'prove' it? I could say it happened, but I doubt anyone here would believe me. I could try a few tests, but I'd be hard pressed with how to prove that a something of a godlike intelligence exists if it didn't want anyone else to find out. However I might not be smart enough, so I'll pose the question to you: How do you prove that a godlike entity exists if it doesn't want to be proven? Assume that it has complete freedom to move through time so that tricking it doesn't work because it can just go back in time (that's what omnipotent means after all). And that you don't know the reasons why it's staying hidden so no argument to try to get it to show itself will work. I look forward to suggestions. But unless there is something that works for that, I am just someone who believes because of experience, but knows of no way to prove it to others (though honestly I am making an assumption by saying god wants to stay hidden, it's the only reason I can think of).

4Dolores198413y

Actually, my default response for this sort of thing is to immediately go to a hospital, and get a head CT and a chat with a certified psychiatrist. I mean, sure, it could be the supernatural, but we KNOW mental illness happens. The priors for me being crazy (especially given some unique family history) are not very low. Much, much higher than the odds of a deity actually existing, given the aforementioned Occamian priors. You don't. Rationalism only works if God isn't fucking with you. That said, there's a huge space of possible constructs like that one (entities that conveniently eliminate all evidence for themselves). It's not infinite, but it's arbitrarily large. From a rationalist's perspective, if any of them were real, we wouldn't know, but the odds of them actually being real in the first place are... not high. Again with the Occamian prior. So, I'm not much moved by your analysis. That said, I am curious what your personal experience was.

3TheOtherDave13y

Proof is not typically necessary. People make claims about their experience all the time that they have no way of proving, as well as claims that they probably could prove but don't in fact do so, and I believe many of those claims. For example, I believe my officemate is married, although they have offered me no proof of this beyond their unsupported claim. I would say a more useful question is, "how do I provide another person with sufficient evidence that such an entity exists that the person should consider it likely?" And of course the answer depends on the person, and what they previously considered likely. (The jargon around here would be "it depends on their priors.") Mostly I don't think I can, unless their priors are such that they pretty much already believe that such an entity exists. Another question worth asking is "how do I provide myself sufficient evidence that such an entity exists that I should consider it likely?" I don't think I can do that either. Unrelatedly: Is "god exists, has the properties I believe it to have, and wants to stay hidden" really the only reason you can think of for the observable universe being as we observe it to be? I understand it's the reason you believe, I'm asking whether it's the only reason you can think of, or whether that was just hyperbole.

1Jakinbandw13y

My own belief is closer to: "Something very powerful and supernatural exists, doesn't seem to be hostile, and doesn't mind that I call it the Christian God." And while I would answer 'no' to that question, the amount of evidence that there is something supernatural if far greater than the amount of evidence that there are millions of people lying about their experiences. For instance, every culture has a belief in the supernatural. Now I would expect that social evolution would trend away from such beliefs. If you say, I can dance and make it rain, and then you fail, you would get laughed at. If you don't believe me gather a bunch of your closest friends and try it. The reason for people to believe someone else is if they had proof to back it up, or they already had reason to believe. Humans aren't stupid, and I don't think we've become radically more intelligent in the last couple thousand years. Why then is belief in the supernatural* everywhere? Is it something in our makeup, how we think? I have heard such a thing discounted by both sides. So there must be some cause, some reason for people to have started believing. And that's without even getting into my experiences, or those close to me. As was suggested, misremembering, and group hallucination are possible, but if that is the case than I should probably check myself and some people I know into a medical clinic because I would be forced to consider myself insane. Seeing things that aren't there wold be a sign of something being very wrong with me, but I do not any any other symptoms of insanity so I strongly doubt this is the case. I suppose when I get right down to it, either I and some others are insane with an unknown form of insanity, or there is something out there. *(outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts)

[-]TheOtherDave13y120

"Something very powerful and supernatural* exists, doesn't seem to be hostile, and doesn't mind that I call it the Christian God."

For what it's worth, I'm .9+ confident of the following claims:
1) there exist phenomena in the universe that "human science" (1) doesn't commonly accept.
2) for any such phenomenon X, X doesn't mind that you call it the Christian God
3) for any such phenomenon X, X doesn't mind that you call it a figment of your imagination
4) for any such phenomenon X, X is not "hostile" (2) to humans

So it seems we agree on that much.
Indeed, I find it likely that most people on this site would agree on that much.

the amount of evidence that there is something supernatural* if far greater than the amount of evidence that there are millions of people lying about their experiences.

As above, I think the evidence supporting the idea that there exist phenomena in the universe that "human science" (1) doesn't commonly accept is pretty strong. The evidence supporting the idea that people lie about their experiences, confabulate their experiences, and have experiences that don't map to events outside their own brains despite seeming to,... (read more)

5APMason13y

Well, don't be coy. There's no point in withholding your strongest piece of evidence. Please, get into it.

4Dolores198413y

Surprisingly, no. That said, religious people aren't lying. They're not even a lot crazier than baseline. I've had experiences which I recognize from my reading to be neurological that I might otherwise attribute to some kind of religious intervention. And those are coming from an atheist's brain not primed to see angels or gods or anything of that kind. As for why belief in the supernatural is everywhere, a lot of it has to do with how bad our brains are at finding satisfactory explanations, and at doing rudimentary probability theory. We existed as a species for a hundred thousand years before we got around to figuring out why there was thunder. Before then, the explanation that sounded the simplest was 'there's a big ape in the sky who does it.' And, even when we knew the real reason, we were so invested in those explanations that they didn't go away. Add in a whole bunch of glitches native to the human brain, and boom, you've a thousand generations of spooky campfire stories. If I were you, I would be terrified of that possibility. I would at least go to a psychiatrist and try to rule it out. It is a real possibility, and potentially the most likely one. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it isn't true.

4Desrtopa13y

I don't think you'll find such a thing readily discounted here. There are plenty of well established cognitive biases that come to play in assessment of supernatural claims. The sequences discuss this to some degree, but you might also be interested in reading this book which discusses some of the mechanisms which contribute to supernatural belief which are not commonly discussed here. We don't even need to raise the issue of the supernatural to examine whether people are likely to pass down beliefs and rituals when they don't really work. We can look at folk medicine, and see if there are examples of cures which have been passed down through cultures which perform no better than placebo in double blind tests. In fact, there is an abundance of such.

2Jakinbandw13y

Point. though I would point out that not all of them are wrong either. Just the good majority. That's neither here nor there though. Out of curiosity how does science explain people feeling knowing that people they care about are in trouble? My mother has made 4 phone calls, and I have witnessed 2 where she felt that someone was in trouble and called them. One of those calls was to me and it helped me greatly. While she has missed calling people that were in trouble, she has never once called someone with that intent and been wrong.She told me that it feels like someone is telling her to call them because they are in trouble. I can't know if that is true or not, but I can't think of her ever lying to me. This is even more interesting because one time she told me that she felt she needed to make the call just before she did, thereby predicting it. I know that she isn't the only person that does this, because I have read many accounts of people who believed a loved one had died when they were across the ocean during WWII. Personally I would go with psyonics if not god, but that might be because I played to many role-playing games. Sorry if this seems odd, it was just something that came to mind as I was thinking about supernatural* things. *(outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts)

6Desrtopa13y

I don't know if this is something that has been explained, or even if it's something that needs to be explained. It could be that you're operating under an unrepresentative dataset. Keep in mind that if you hadn't experienced a number of phone calls where the caller's intuition that something was wrong was correct, you wouldn't treat it as a phenomenon in need of explanation, but if you had experienced some other set of improbable occurrences, simply by chance, then that would look like a phenomenon in need of explanation. I personally have no experiences with acquaintances making phone calls on an intuition that something is wrong and being right, although I have experience with acquaintances getting worried and making phone calls and finding out there was really nothing to worry about. There's a significant danger of selection bias in dealing with claims like this, because people who experience, say, a sudden premonition that something has happened to their loved on across the sea at war, and then find out a couple weeks later that they're still alive and well, are probably not going to record the experience for posterity. I've encountered plenty of claims of improbable events before which were attributed to supernatural causes. If I consistently encountered ones that took the form of people correctly intuiting that a distant loved one was in trouble and calling them, I would definitely start to suspect that this was a real phenomenon in need of explanation, although I would also be interested in seeing how often people intuited that a distant loved one was in trouble, called them, found out they were wrong, and didn't think it was worth remembering. Maybe some of the improbable events I've heard about really are the result of more than chance, and have some underlying explanation that I'm not aware of, but I don't have the evidence to strongly suspect this. If you multiply a day times the population experiencing it, that's about 82,000 years of human experience

2Bugmaster13y

Has your mother ever called anyone when she felt they were in trouble, only to find out that they weren't, in fact, in trouble ? Confirmation bias is pretty strong in most humans. Wait... she predicted that she would call someone, and then went ahead and called someone ? This doesn't sound like much of a prediction; I don't think I'm parsing your sentence correctly. If your loved one is fighting in WWII, it's very likely that he or she would die, sadly... Why did you end up picking "god" over "psionics", then ?

2Jakinbandw13y

Not that I remember. My memory could be faulty, but thinking long and hard about it I don't remember it happening. She predicted they were in trouble. I think the phrase she used was "I think XXXX is in trouble and needs help." I could be misremembering though. It's a close call honestly, but if god exists, which I believe he does from other evidence listed in this over-sized thread, then adding psionics on top would be added complexity for no gain. If you already know that the earth goes around the sun because of gravity, why bother coming up with an alternate explanation for why Saturn goes around the sun? It might have another reason, but the simplest explanation is more likely to be right.

2thomblake13y

Even if that were true, and not a misremembrance or a post-hoc rationalization, you must take note of the many other people who have those feelings and no one was in trouble. You should expect in advance to hear more anecdotes about the times that someone really was in trouble, than anecdotes about the times they were not, so having heard them is very little evidence.

2TimS13y

Every culture has some different things they believe in, and call supernatural. That doesn't prove there really is a category of things that actually are supernatural. By analogy, belief by Himalayan people that the Yeti is real is not evidence that Bigfoot (in the northwestern United States) is real. Likewise, a Hindu's fervent belief is not evidence of the resurrection of Jesus. In short, the shortfalls in human understanding completely explain why primitive cultures believed "supernatural" was a real and useful label, even though that belief is false.

4APMason13y

I'm not sure whether it is the case that primitive cultures have a category of things they think of as "supernatural" - pagan religions were certainly quite literal: they lived on Olympus, they mated with humans, they were birthed. I wonder whether the distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" only comes about when it becomes clear that gods don't belong in the former category.

3TimS13y

I had a paragraph about that, citing Explain/Worship/Ignore, but I decided that it detracted from the point I was trying to make. If you already think that primitives did not use the label "supernatural," then you already think there isn't much evidence of supernatural phenomena - at least compared to the post I was responding to.

2thomblake13y

Not really. There are plenty of plausible explanations for that description that don't require positing something supernatural. And now if all you have is one event in your faulty human memory to go on, it counts for practically nothing. Given the low prior for the existence of most particular deities, updating on that piece of evidence should still give you a ridiculously low posterior. "I'm hallucinating" would probably be my winning hypothesis at the time it's happening, and "I'm misremembering" afterwards.

2electricfistula13y

I think this is called "behaving rationally". I understand "rationality" as using reason to my benefit. If there comes a time when it would be beneficial for me to do something, and I arrive at that conclusion through reason, then I'd consider that a triumph of rationality. I think if you are able to anticipate an advantage that could be gained by a behavior then refusing to perform that behavior would be irrational. You misunderstand me. It isn't my anecdotal evidence that makes me think the church is horrible. I just pointed out that I had spent a lot of time in churches to show that I have more than the passing familiarity with them that you attributed to me. I think the church is horrible because it threatens children, promotes inaccurate material and takes money from the gullible. While this is good that your church isn't abusing more children, it is still terrible to consign "2 or three children" to such mistreatment. Telling children that there is a hell and that they will go to it if they don't believe in something which is obviously flawed is a terrible thing to do. It is psychological child abuse and I don't think it says very much in your church's favor that it only abuses two or three kids. A child lacks the intellectual maturity to understand or evaluate complex ideas. A child is more trusting than an adult. If your parents tell you something is true, or that you should believe this minister when he talks about heaven, you are more likely to believe it. If your parents came to you now and told you about how they had just found out about Krishna and you should read the Bhagavad Gita you probably wouldn't be very receptive. And yet, your parents managed to convince you that the Bible was true. Why was that? Was it because through random chance you were born into a family that already believed in the one true religion? Or was it just that you adopted the religion you were exposed to. Because, when you were young your mind wasn't discriminating enough to

[-]Salemicus13y40

Hi everyone. I've been lurking here for a couple of years, but decided to register so I could contribute. I work in software and am in my early 30s.

I found this site through overcomingbias, which in turn I came across through the GMU-linked economics blogs. However, I wouldn't describe myself as a rationalist - I find the discussions here interesting, but I think that, by and large, folk wisdom is pretty accurate.

I love the sequences and Eliezer's writings generally - they are what first got me reading the site, and I have been greatly enjoying following the reposts. The ones on zombies in particular have really caused me to re-evaluate my thinking.

Thanks, and look forward to meeting you all!

[-]wirov13y40

Hi, I'm a (white, male) physics student from Germany and 20 years old. My main reason for not believing in any religion is Occam's razor. (I'm not sure whether this makes me atheist or agnostic. Any thoughts on that would be appreciated.)

I stumbled across HPMoR by accident in 2010 and read "Three Worlds Collide" and some other texts on Eliezer's personal website. During 2011, I did some Sequences-hopping (i.e. I started at one article and just followed inline links that sounded interesting, thus causing a tab explosion) I finally registered a few... (read more)

[-]dlthomas13y40

"The category Cat consists of all small categories, with functors between them as morphisms."

[-]TheOtherDave13y40

OK, now I am confused.

This whole thread started because you said:

[SIAI] are assuming that any AGI will inevitably (plus or minus epsilon) self-improve itself to transhuman levels.

and I asked why you believed that, as distinct from "...any AGI has a non-negligible chance of self-improving itself to transhuman levels, and the cost of that happening is so vast that it's worth devoting effort to avoid even if the chance is relatively low"?

Now you seem to be saying that SI doesn't believe that any AGI will inevitably (plus or minus epsilon) self-i... (read more)

4Bugmaster13y

Sorry, I think I am guilty of misusing terminology. I have been using AI and AGI interchangeably, but that's obviously not right. As far as I understand, "AGI" refers to a general intelligence who can solve (or, at least, attempt to solve) any problem, whereas "AI" refers to any kind of an artificial intelligence, including the specialized kind. There are many AIs that already exist in the world -- for example, Google's AdSense algorithm -- but SIAI is not concerned about them (as far as I know), because they lack the capacity to self-improve. My own hidden assumption, which I should've recognized and voiced earlier, is that an AGI (as contrasted with non-general AI) would most likely be produced through a process of recursive self-improvement; it is highly unlikely that an AGI could be created from scratch by humans writing lines of code. As far as I understand, the SIAI agrees with this statement, but again, I could be wrong. Thus, it is unlikely that a non-general AI will ever be smart enough to warrant concern. It could still do some damage, of course, but then, so could a busted water main. On the other hand, an AGI will most likely arise as the result of recursive self-improvement, and thus will be capable of further self-improvement, thus boosting itself to transhuman levels very quickly unless its self-improvement is arrested by some mechanism.

2TheOtherDave13y

OK, I think I understand better now. Yeah, I've been talking throughout about what you're labeling "AI" here. We agree that these won't necessarily self-improve. Awesome. With respect to what you're labeling "AGI" here, you're saying the following: 1) given that X is an AGI developed by humans, the probability that X has thus far been capable of recursive self-improvement is very high, and 2) given that X has thus far been capable of recursive self-improvement, the probability that X will continue to be capable of recursive self-improvement in the future is very high. 3) SIAI believes 1) and 2). Yes? Have I understood you?

[-]Nornagest13y40

As best I can tell it is impractical as an actual decision-making procedure for more complex cases, at least assuming well-formalized priors. As a limit to be asymptotically approached it seems sound, though -- and that's probably the best we can do on our hardware anyway.

[-]wedrifid13y40

i.e., to rewrite its own code, and possibly rebuild its own hardware, in order to become smarter and smarter -- then its intelligence will grow exponentially, until it becomes smart enough to easily outsmart everyone on the planet.

Recursively, not necessarily exponentially. It may exploit the low hanging fruit early and improve somewhat slower once those are gone. Same conclusion applies - the threat is that it improves rapidly, not that it improves exponentially.

[-]Ben Pace13y40

Hello all, I am a man of indiscriminate age (not true) and of indiscriminate gender (also not true). I hope you've learnt a lot about me. I'm curious about nearly all things. Thanks.

[-]blashimov13y40

Hello Everyone,

I heard about this site during my time at Yale as an undergrad, I am now a PhD student at Rice University in Environmental Engineering. I noticed the meetup for Houston seems to have died in May, if that turns out to be true I would like to start one. I am enjoying HPMOR immensely. I am very interested in raising the sanity waterline, and I am something of a policy wonk. I tend to follow separation of church and state issues, as well as science policy/creationism in the classrooms especially. I did read the intro on partisanship in the forums.

[-]anotherblackhat13y40

So much interesting stuff.

I've been reading through the sequences, and one peeked my desire to post, so I created an account. There are actually many things being discussed here that interest me. I'm not sure I'm a rationalist though, as I believe there are some lies that should be maintained rather than destroyed.

I'm interested in personal identity, not "Quantum Mechanics and Personal Identity", but where does "me" end.
The sound bite is "Am I my hat?" or to be more verbose, is my hat an extension of myself, and thus a part of... (read more)

1[anonymous]13y

I think you need to dissolve the question "Am I my hat?" as well as the "us vs. them" issue. See points 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 29 and then play a game of taboo. Now, if I am to argue "Am I my hat?" from my world view, I would say that when I remove my hat, peices of my skin are on the hat, and fibres of the hat are in my hair. That is one point of view. Now, say you created an exact copy of yourself, or me, or any other hat wearing person, only one of these two identical people was without headwear; would it still be the same person? When do groups of people begin reacting in a dynamic that might be described as "us vs. them" mentality? Hope that helps :)

[-]Arran_Stirton13y40

Hullo, I've been lurking around for quite a while after being introduced to LessWrong through the well-trodden HPMoR route.

I'm rather awful at this sort of thing, so here are my vital statistics: I'm 18, Male and live in the East Midlands region of the United Kingdom. The subject I pursue academically is Physics, however the scope of my interests is far larger and not worth detailing. Though I will say that working out what the ideal political system would look like is high on my to-do list.

More recently I've been toying with the idea of making a couple o... (read more)

1[anonymous]13y

Hello there, welcome to the LW community. It sounds like you have a good starting point, and I recon if you have the mathematics for it you'll love The Quantum Physics Sequence. You might want to look at Politics is the Mind Killer.

[-]Vladimir_Nesov13y40

Often, that means learning what true things to believe.

You don't learn which true things to believe or which false things to disbelieve. You learn (how to figure out) which things are true or false.

[-]TheOtherDave13y40

Completely independent of any of the rest of this, I absolutely endorse the legality of lying to people about why my child died, as well as the ethics of telling them it's none of their damned business, with the possible exception of medical or legal examiners. I certainly endorse the legality of lying to my mother about it.

Further, I would be appalled by someone who felt entitled to demand such answers of a mother whose child had just died (again, outside of a medical or legal examination, maybe) and would endorse forcibly removing them from the presence of a mother whose child has just died.

I would not endorse smacking such a person upside the head, but I would nevertheless be tempted to.

[-]TheOtherDave13y40

If I have a choice of parents, and a dietician is the most useful parent to have for achieving my goals, then yes, choosing a dietician for a parent is a rational choice. Of course, most of us don't have a choice of parents.

If I believe that children of dieticians do better at achieving their goals than anyone else, then choosing to become a dietician if I'm going to have children is a rational choice. (So, more complicatedly, is choosing not to have children if I'm not a dietician.)

Of course, both of those are examples of decisions related to the state o... (read more)

1Kouran13y

What do you mean? Whose irrationality? Isn't it more straightforward (it's there among the 'virtues of rationality' no?) to just not call things 'rational' if they do not involve thinking?

3TheOtherDave13y

Incidentally, you've caused me to change my mind. http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/96n/meta_rational_vs_optimized/

3Vladimir_Nesov13y

I don't think so, since that would be a trivial property that doesn't indicate anything, for there is no alternative available. Decisions can be made either correctly or not, and it's useful to be able to discern that, but the world is always what it actually is.

2TheOtherDave13y

It varies, and I might not even know. For example, if the arrangement of signs on a particular street intersection causes unnecessary traffic congestion, I might call it an irrational arrangement. In doing so I'd be presuming that whoever chose that arrangement intended to minimize traffic congestion, or at least asserting that they ought to have intended that. But I might have no idea who chose the arrangement. (I might also be wrong, but that's beside the point.) But that said, and speaking very roughly: irrationality on the part of the most proximal agent(s) who was (were) capable of making a different choice. Yes, it is. For example, what I just described above is a form of metonymy... describing the streetsign arrangement as irrational, when what I really mean is that some unspecified agent somewhere in the causal history of the streetsign was irrational. Metonymy is a common one among humans, and I find it entertaining, and in many cases efficient, and those are also virtues I endorse. But it isn't a straightforward form of communication, you're right. Incidentally, I suspect that most uses of 'rationality' on this site (as well as 'intelligence') could be replaced by 'optimization' without losing much content. Feel free to use the terms that best achieve your goals.

2TimS13y

If there is no alternative, there doesn't seem to be a possibility of improvement. If improvement is impossible, what exactly are we worrying about?

2Vladimir_Nesov13y

It's useful to know some things that are unchangeable.

[-]TimS13y40

Irrationality, which I would for now define as all human action and awareness that isn't rational thinking or that doesn't follow a rationally defined course of action

Some of the disagreement is definitional. We define rationality as achieving your goals. Rationality should win. Any act or [ETA: mental] process that helps with achieving goals is rational.

There's a followup assertion in this community that believing true things helps achieving goals. Although not all people in history have believed that, it's hard to deny that human thinking patterns... (read more)

[-]TheOtherDave13y40

Well, couching things in terms of status-signaling is conventional around here. But, sure, there are probably better candidates. Do you have anything in particular in mind you think should have been nominated instead?

[-]ahartell13y40

I was being a bit pedantic. When she says "don't lump the mentally ill together with evil murderers" I think she means "don't lump [psychotic] people in with evil murderers", which I don't disagree with. However, not all sociopaths are evil murderers. I would even say it's wrong to lump these mentally ill sociopaths together with evil murderers.

In other words, AspiringKnitter,

Please don't lump the mentally ill together with evil murderers.

1AspiringKnitter13y

Okay. I've never heard of any non-evil sociopaths before, but I'll accept that they exist if you tell me they do. What I meant was indeed that psychotic people aren't any more evil on average than normal people. The point is irrelevant to the thread, but I make it wherever it needs to be made because conflating the two isn't just sloppy, it harms real people in real life.

[-]Prismattic13y40

Also, many people on this site are just a-holes. Sorry.

I think it's more that there are a few a-holes, but they are very prolific (well, that and the same bias that causes us to notice how many red lights we get stopped at but not how many green lights we speed through also focuses our attention on the worst posting behavior).

3TheOtherDave13y

Interesting. Who are the prolific "a-holes"?

5Prismattic13y

Explicitly naming names accomplishes nothing except inducing hostility, as it will be taken as a status challenge. Not explicitly naming names, one hopes, leaves everyone re-examining whether their default tone is appropriately calibrated.

2TheOtherDave13y

I agree with you that naming names can be taken as a status challenge. Of course, this whole topic positions you as an abjudicator of appropriate calibration, which can be taken as a status grab, for the excellent reason that it is one. Not that there's anything wrong with going for status. All of that notwithstanding, if you prefer to diffuse your assertions of individual inappropriate behavior over an entire community, that's your privilege.

1Prismattic13y

I care about my status on this site only to the extent that it remains above some minimum required for people not to discount my posts simply because they were written by me. My interest in this thread is that like Daenerys I think the current norm for discourse is suboptimal, but I think I give greater weight to the possibility of that some of the suboptimal behavior is people defecting by accident; hence the subtle push for occasional recalibration of tone.

6wedrifid13y

There was a subtle push? I must of missed that while I was distracted by the blatant one!

1Prismattic13y

See, it's working!

5TheOtherDave13y

Just to be clear: I'm fine with you pushing for a norm that's optimal for you. Blatantly, if you want to; subtly if you'd rather. But I don't agree that the norm you're pushing is optimal for me, and I consider either of us pushing for the establishment of norms that we're most comfortable with to be a status-linked social maneuver.

1wedrifid13y

It left me evaluating whether it was me personally that was being called an asshole or others in the community and whether those others are people that deserve the insult or not. Basically I needed to determine whether it was a defection against me, an ally or my tribe in general. Then I had to decide what, if any, was an appropriate, desirable and socially acceptable tit-for-tat response. I decided to mostly ignore him because engaging didn't seem like it would do much more than giving him a platform from which to gripe more.

1magfrump13y

If it makes you feel better, when I read his post I thought lovingly of you. (I also believe your response was appropriate.)

[-][anonymous]13y40

How can you be so sure? Historically speaking, infanticide is the human norm.

It is just the last few centuries that some societies have gotten all upset over it.

In some respects modern society is closer in norms to societies that practised infanticide 100 years ago than to Western society of 100 years ago and we consider this a good thing. Why assume no future changes or no changes at all would go in this direction? And that likewise we'll eventually consider these changes good?

It is certainly weak evidence in favour of a practice being nasty that societies which practice it are generally nasty in other ways. But it is just that, weak evidence.

[-]wedrifid13y40

I would vote this up if not for the retract... accept my pseodo-vote.

2[anonymous]13y

Feel free to up vote other comments in this thread where I say basically the same thing.

[-]Crystalist12y30

Hi all,

Long time lurker, first time poster. I've read some of the Sequences, though I fully intend to re-read and read on.

I'm an undergrad at present, looking to participate in a trend I've been observing that's bring some of the rigor and predictive power of the hard sciences to linguistics.

I'm particularly interested in how language evolved, and under what physical/biological/computational constraints; What that implies about the neural mechanisms behind human behavior; and how to use those two to construct a predictive and quantitative theory of lingui... (read more)

[-]HBDfan12y30

Hi! I have read for a while. I read HPMOR and enjoyed the sequences. I prefer not to say where I live.

[-]palguay12y30

Hi Everyone, I stumbled upon this website while reading a comment on reddit, I am a programmer living in India , I came back to India in march after living in the US for 6 years.

I am interested in cognitive psychology and have started working on a pet project of mine to implement the various cognitive tasks available on commercial websites in my own website http://brainturk.com .

I hope to contribute to some discussions and learn from others here.

[-]Lukas_Gloor13y30

Hi! I discovered LW about a year ago and now I actually created an account. I study philosophy, and biology as minor. Sometimes I'm rather shocked by the things my fellow students believe and how they argue for their beliefs; I wish something like LW would be part of the standard curriculum. My main interests are ethics, philosophy of mind and evolutionary biology, and I'm looking forward to participating in discussions on these issues. Especially on ethics, as I'm skeptical regarding some of the views advocated on here (I'm a utilitarian). As someone who had read the original books several times, I was also delighted to find out about HPMoR recently.

[-]Strange713y30

I said "slavery stops," not "quality of life improves." Getting employers to compete in a way that benefits workers is a different problem, and obtaining for the workers the freedom to choose to starve (rather than, say, being executed as an example to others) is only the first step.

Quality of life for workers is also a very different problem from quality of life for open-market-adopted children, which was the original topic.

[-]Worthstream13y30

Hi, Worthstream here. I'm from Italy, as you will no doubt notice from my unusual choice of words. (Europeans then to overuse latin derived words in my experience)

I'm graduated in computer science, currently working as a web programmer, the kind of technical background i think is quite common here, judging by the number of useful applets and websites built by community members (Beeminder, just to name the first that comes to mind).

I'm a regional coordinator of the italian Mensa, a society i joined thinking that i would have found a lot of rational people. ... (read more)

5TheOtherDave13y

* raises finger * * opens mouth * * closes mouth * * lowers finger * Hi, Worthstream. Welcome to LW.! Yeah, CS backgrounds are pretty common here, as is being disappointed by Mensa, liking HP:MoR, and an ongoing struggle with managing the shiny distractions of the Internet.

[-]Jakinbandw13y30

Hello. I come from HPMoR. I identify as Christian, though my belief and reasons for belief are a bit more complex than that. I'll probably do a post on that later in 'how to convince me 2+2=3'. I also get told that I over think things.

Anyway, that's not the reason I joined. I was reading an article by Eliezer Yudkowsky and he stated that whatever can be destroyed by truth should be. This got me wondering in what context that was meant. My first thought was that it meant that we should strive to destroy all false beliefs, which has the side effect of not l... (read more)

7TimS13y

Welcome to LessWrong. There's a sizable contingent of people in this community who don't think that uncomfortable truths need be confronted. But I think they are wrong. As you say, one purpose of believing true things is to be better at achieving goals. To exaggerate slightly, if you believe "Things in motion tend to come to a stop," then you will never achieve the goal of building a rocket to visit other planets. You might respond that none of your actual goals are prevented by your false beliefs. But you can't know that in advance unless you know which of your beliefs are false. That's not belief, that's believing that you have a belief.. And adjusting your goals so that they never are frustrated by false beliefs is just a long-winded way of saying Not Achieving Your Original Goals. In theory, there might be a time when you wouldn't choose differently with a true belief that with a false belief. I certainly don't endorse telling an imminently dying man that his beloved wife cheated on him years ago. But circumstances must be quite strange for you to be confident that your choices won't change based on your beliefs. You, the person doing the believing, don't know when you are in situations like that because - by hypothesis - you have an unknown false belief that prevents you from understanding what is going on.

5electricfistula13y

Hi, I joined just to reply to this comment. I don't think there is a lot of complexity hidden behind "whatever can be destroyed by truth should be". If there is a false belief, we should try to replace it with a true one, or at least a less wrong one. Your argument that goes "But what if you were being tortured to death" doesn't really hold up because that argument can be used to reach any conclusion. What if you were experiencing perfect bliss, but then, your mind made up an elaborate fantasy which you believe to be your life... What if there were an evil and capricious deity who would torture you for eternity if you chose Frosted Flakes over Fruit Loops for breakfast? These kinds of "What if" statements followed by something of fundamentally unknowable probability are infinite in number and could be used to reach any conclusion you like and therefore, they don't recomend any conclusion over any other conclusion. I don't think it is more likely that I am being horribly tortured and fantasizing about writing this comment than I think it is likely that I am in perfect bliss and fantasizing about this, and so, this argument does nothing to recomend ignorance over knowledge. In retrospect (say it turns out I am being tortured) I may be happier in ignorance, but I would be an inferior rationalist. I think this applies to Christianity too. At the risk of being polemical, say I believed that Christianity is a scam whereby a select group of people convince the children of the faithful that they are in peril of eternal punishment if they don't grow up to give 10% of their money to the church. Suppose I think that this is harmful to children and adults. Further, suppose I think the material claims of the religion are false. Now, you on the other hand suppose (I assume) that the material claims of the religion are true and that the children of the faithful are being improved by religious instruction. Both of us can't be right here. If we apply the saying "whatever can be

4Bugmaster13y

Minor nitpick: these statements have a very low probability of being true due to the lack of evidence for them, not an unknowable probability of being true as your sentence would imply. Ok, but what about unfalsifiable (or incredibly unlikely to be falsified) claims ? Let's imagine that I am a religious person, who believes that a). the afterlife exists, and b). the gods will reward people in this afterlife in proportion to the number of good deeds each person accomplished in his Earthly life.The exact nature of the reward doesn't matter, whatever it is, I'd consider it awesome. Furthermore, let's imagine that I believe c). no objective empirical evidence of this afterlife and these gods' existence could ever be obtained; nonetheless, I believe in it wholeheartedly (perhaps the gods revealed the truth to me in an intensely subjective experience, or whatever). As a direct result of my beliefs, d). I am driven to become a better person and do more good things for more people, thus becoming generally nicer, etc. In this scenario, should my belief be destroyed by the truth ?

2electricfistula13y

Suppose we are neighbors. By some mixup, the power company is combining my electric bill to your own. You notice that your bill is unusually high, but you pay it anyway because you want electricity. In fact, you like electricity so much that you are happy to pay even the high bill to get continued power. Now, suppose that I knew all the details of the situation. Should I tell you about the error? I think this case is pretty similar to the one you've described about the religion that makes you do good things. You pay my bill because you want a good for yourself. I am letting you incur a cost, that you may not want to, because it will benefit me. I think in the electricity example I have some moral obligation to tell you our bills have been combined. I think this carries over to the religious example. There is a real benefit to me (and to society) to let you continue to labor under your false assumption that doing good deeds would result in magic rewards, but I still think it would be immoral to let this go on. I think the right thing to do would be to try and destroy your false belief with the truth and then try to convince you that altruism can be rewarding in and of itself. That way, you may still be an altruist, but you won't be fooled into being one.

3Jakinbandw13y

Just a minor update. This thread has grown to big for me to follow easily. I am ready every post in it, but real life is taking up a lot of my time right now so I will be very slow to reply. I found the limit of multiple conversations I can hold at one time before I get a headache, and it appears to be less than I suspected. Once again, sorry, didn't mean to drop out, but I stayed up way to late and even now I am recovering from sleep deprivation and still have an annoying headache. My body seems to want to wake up 2 hours before it should. I'll be back once I get my sleeping back to normal, and get some more time. Even then though I am going to try to limit myself to only a couple posts a day because while I enjoy discussions, it's very easy for me to forget everything else when I get drawn into them. I'll be back later. JAKInBAndW

1Bugmaster13y

Don't sweat it, I don't think anyone here expects you to answer all posts in an extremely rapid fashion. Ok, maybe some do, but you don't owe those people anything, anyway. This is a discussion site, not a job :-)

2CWG13y

Welcome. Getting beaten up as a child sucks. Hope your life is a whole lot better now. A somewhat related personal story: I was a Christian. I was plagued by doubts, and decided that I wanted to know what the truth was, even if it was something I didn't want to believe. I knew that I wanted Christianity to be true, but I didn't want to just believe for the sake of it. So I started doing more serious reading. Not rationalist writings, but a thoughtful theologian and historian, NT Wright, who I've also seen appear on documentaries about New Testament history. I read the first two in what he was planning as an epic 5 part series: "The New Testament and the People of God" and "Jesus and the Victory of God". I loved the way he explained history, and how to think about history (i.e. historiography). Also language, and ideas about the universe. He wrote very well, and warmly - you got the sense that this was a real human being, but he lacked the hubris that I'd often found in religious writers, and he seemed more interested in seeking truth than in claiming that he had it. He was the most rationalist of Christian writers that I came across. In the end, the essence of his argument seemed to be that there is a way of understanding the Bible that could tell us something about God - if we believe in a personal god who is involved in the universe... and that if we believe in that kind of god, described in the Old Testament, then the idea of taking human form, and becoming the embodiment of everything that Israel was meant to be, does make sense. (He went into much, much more depth here about , and I can't do him justice at all, 15 years after I read it.) He didn't push the reader to believe - he just stated that it was something that made sense to him, and he did believe it. He painted a picture and told a story which I found very appealing, to be honest. But in the end it didn't fit with how I understood the universe, based on the more solid ground of science. I finally

[-]beberly3713y30

Hello all, it seems like it is a common enough occurrence that it no longer seem embarrassing, but I too found LW via HPMOR, which was referred to me by a friend; my eyes and neck hurt for at least a week after spending far too much time reading from a laptop. I have a BS and an MS in mechanical engineering, I have spent some time as a researcher, a high school teacher and I am currently being an actual engineer at a biodiesel plant.

Growing up everyone told me I was going to become an engineer (I was one of those kids that took apart my toys to see how th... (read more)

[-]genisage13y30

Hello all! I'm a student of Mathematics and Computer Science and a fan of physics, linguistics, psychology, and biology.. I found lesswrong through HPMOR. I would say that I've been a rationalist for most of my life. Cognitive biases and logical fallacies, as well as methods for recognizing them, were explained to me at a young age. Unfortunately, lately I've noticed that I'm not holding myself to the same standards of rationality that I used to, and even worse, I've noticed myself using the fact that I'm being rational as an excuse to be unpleasant. So, partially in an effort to begin reforming myself and partly in search of something to help alleviate my boredom this summer, I made an account here.

[-]Monkeymind13y30

Came here doing research on QM and decided to try out some ideas. I learn to swim best by jumping right in over my head. My style usually doesn't win me many friends, but I recognize who they are pretty fast, and I learn what works and what doesn't.

Someone once called me jello with a temper....but I'm more like a toothless old dog, more bark than bite. The tough exterior has helped me in many circumstances.

On the first day as a new kid in high school, I walked up to the biggest, baddest senior there, with all his sheep gathered around him in the parking ... (read more)

[-]Bart11913y30

I stumbled here while searching some topic, and now I've forgotten which one. I've been posting for a few weeks, and just now managed to find the "About" link that explains how to get started, including writing an intro here. Despite being a software engineer by trade these past 27-odd years, I manage to get lost navigating websites a lot, and I still forget to use Google and Wikipedia on topics. Sigh. I'm 57, and was introduced to cognitive fallacies years as long ago as 1972. I've tried to avoid some of the worst ones, but I also fail a lot. I ... (read more)

[-]avichapman13y30

Hi,

I'm a software engineer in Adelaide, Australia. I've tried to be a rationalist all of my life, but had no idea that there were actual techniques that you can learn from others. I'd simply tried to confront myself on the biases that books told me I had, with various degrees of success. I'm very excited to be here.

One thing that bothers me, though, is that I am feeling increasingly isolated from others. It used to be that I had thought just enough to be 1 inferential step ahead of others. This made me seem smart when I talked. Now, I'm more than 1 inferen... (read more)

[-]Vulture13y30

By my understanding, learning is basically when a program collects the data it uses itself through interaction with some external system. Self-modification, on the other hand, is when the program has direct read/write acces to its own source code, so it can modify its own decision-making algorithm directly, not just the data set its algorithm uses.

2TheOtherDave13y

This seems to presume a crisp distinction between code and data, yes? That distinction is not always so crisp. Code fragments can serve as data, for example. But, sure, it's reasonable to say a system is learning but not self-modifying if the system does preserve such a crisp distinction and its code hasn't changed.

[-]wedrifid13y30

As far as I understand, the mission of SIAI (the people who host this site) is to prevent the rise of un-Friendly AGI, not to actually build one.

I think they are kind of keen on the idea of not dying too. Improving the chances that a Friendly AI will be created by someone is probably up there as a goal too.

4Bugmaster13y

Imagine that ! :-) That's a different goal, though. As far as I understand, olalonde's master plan looks something like this: 1). Figure out how to build AGI. 2). Build a reasonably smart one as a proof of concept. 3). Figure out where to go from there, and how to make AGI safe. 4). Eventually, build a transhuman AGI once we know it's safe. Whereas the SIAI master plan looks something like this: 1). Make sure that an un-Friendly AGI does not get built. 2). Figure out how to build a Friendly AGI. 3). Build one. 4). Now that we know it's safe, build a transhuman AGI (or simply wait long enough, since the AGI from step (3) will boost itself to transhuman levels). One key difference between olalonde's plan and SIAI's plan is the assumption SIAI is making: they are assuming that any AGI will inevitably (plus or minus epsilon) self-improve itself to transhuman levels. Thus, from their perspective, olalonde's step (2) above might as well say, "build a machine that's guaranteed to eat us all", which would clearly be a bad thing.

4wedrifid13y

A good summary. I'd slightly modify it in as much as they would allow the possibility that a really weak AGI may not do much in the way of FOOMing but they pretty much ignore those ones and expect they would just be a stepping stone for the developers who would go on to make better ones. (This is just my reasoning but I assume they would think similarly.)

3TheOtherDave13y

Can you clarify your reasons for believing this, as distinct from "...any AGI has a non-negligible chance of self-improving itself to transhuman levels, and the cost of that happening is so vast that it's worth devoting effort to avoid even if the chance is relatively low"?

2Bugmaster13y

That's a good point, but, from reading what Eliezer and Luke are writing, I formed the impression that my interpretation is correct. In addition, the SIAI FAQ seems to be saying that intelligence explosion is a natural consequence of Moore's Law; thus, if Moore's Law continues to hold, intelligence explosion is inevitable. FWIW, I personally disagree with both statements, but that's probably a separate topic.

[-]Larks13y30

Literary

[-]TheOtherDave13y30

On the off chance that you're actually trying to engage seriously here... you nod here in the general direction of an important point that comes up a fair bit on this site, namely that for human purposes it's not enough to be arbitrarily good at optimizing, it also matters what I'm optimizing for.

Put another way: sure, one way of becoming really successful at achieving my goals is by discarding all goals that are difficult to achieve. One way of becoming really successful at promoting my values is by discarding my existing values and replacing them with s... (read more)

[-]syzygy13y30

Hello, I am Nicholas, an undergraduate studying music at Portland State University. Even though my (at least academic) primary area of study is the arts, the philosophy of rationality and science has always been a large part of my intellectual pursuits. I found this site about a year ago and read many articles, but I recently decided to try to participate. Even before I was a rationalist, my education was entirely self-driven by a desire to seek the truth, even when the truth conflicted with what was widely believed by those around me (teachers, parents, e... (read more)

9TheOtherDave13y

More the latter than the former.. a social norm stemming from the pragmatic observation that discussions about politics tended to have certain properties that lowered their value. The question recurs regularly, usually in the form of "well, but, if we're really rational, shouldn't we be able to talk about politics?" To my mind, the people asking the question frequently neglect the second-order effects of regularly talking about politics on the sort of people who will join LW and what their primary goals are.

2syzygy13y

Could you clarify this point a little? I though the primary goals of LW include refining and promoting human rationality, and I see no reason why this goal would not apply to politics. Especially since irrational political theories can have a directly negative effect on the quality of life for many people.

[-]TheOtherDave13y140

Could you clarify this point a little?

Sure.

The Internet is full of people who seem to have as one of their primary goals to expound their chosen tribe's political affiliation and defend it against all opposition, even in spaces predominantly dedicated to something else.

If LessWrong becomes a place where local norms allow discussion of the nominal rationality of Libertarianism, or Liberalism, or Conservatism, or whatever, and contrasting it with the demonstrable irrationality of other political ideologies, I expect that a subset of those people will devote significant resources to expounding their chosen tribe's political affiliation and defend it against one another, taking care to from time to time intone the magic formulas "it would be rational to" and "that's not rational" to mask, perhaps even from themselves, the reality of what was going on.

I'd find LW a less useful community were that to happen. I suspect I'm not alone.

I though the primary goals of LW include refining and promoting human rationality, and I see no reason why this goal would not apply to politics.

Can you clarify this point a little? I don't see where I'm suggesting that this goal doesn't apply to politics. What I'm saying is I'm skeptical that a public internet group like LW can achieve this goal as applied to politics.

[-]RobinZ13y140

The primary goal of the present LessWrong community is to refine and promote human rationality. The primary goal of people who would register to join political conversations on LessWrong is liable to be different.

4witzvo13y

Tastefully left unsaid, is that giving people interested in political conversations an incentive to join Less Wrong could erode the quality of discussion. This is an important point. However, another important point is that maybe it's really important to the betterment of the world that there be a place on the internet, another site perhaps, where it is appropriate to discuss policy, but where the merits of the argument, and the accuracy of facts are of paramount importance. Such a site wouldn't be perfect, but surely it could be an improvement over what I've seen on the internet. Such a site could borrow from the scoring mechanisms that have worked on this site, but would need significant refinement. For example, any post which engaged is demagoguery would need to lead to severe chastisement. Another refinement would be tools that help to break an argument down. E.g. to decide which sentences in a post are factually accurate, and which sentences are fallacious (mockup). Additionally, since you can't talk about policy without treading on normative issues ("equality of opportunity is more important than helping out the disadvantaged" or "human rights are more important than animal rights") the site would need to find a way to carve these issues out of the discussion; not ignore them, just find a way to lay them succinctly to the side (I don't know how). Personally, I think the most important issue in politics is how to reform politics. I.e. how to ensure that our institutions function for "the common good" by making changes to rules/practices so that individual self-interest is channeled toward what's good for the group. I think this is a sound principle that can inform but not decide many issues. Maybe building a website in which reasonably rational policy choices are made could be a first step toward reforming our political institutions.

[-]thomblake13y30

Sorry, I'm just here ironically to recite empty platitudes about empiricism.

But seriously, figuring out how to know that is one of the big projects here.

1Hermione13y

hah. Has anyone made any progress? I was wondering if one could test group rationality by starting a conversation about something the group finds it hard to agree on. There are a few such topics here on LW and I'm sure there would be more if you added politics into the mix. The test would be so see whether the group could reach unanimity. I was thinking this might be a fun thing to try at the brussels meetups if they get going.

[-]mej1013y30

Hi. I've studied Computer Science and Mathematics at the undergraduate level. I currently work as a software engineer, but have been looking into fields that would allow me to work with more mathematics. I am also very much interested in entrepreneurship from both the "fix problems I see with the world" and the "get really wealthy" perspectives.

I have been reading LW and OB off and on for years, but have never quite made it through all of the sequences.

I am mainly interested in efficient learning and applications of rationality to eve... (read more)

[-]Bogomilist13y30

I think Wesnoth is a good strategy game for honing one's skills as a Bayesian. There is non-determinism in the game mechanics that require one to integrate numerous probabilistic events to be an effective player.

[-]orthonormal13y30

It's not that anyone hates you; they might kill you because they're afraid of you killing them first, if there were no legal deterrent against killing.

In particular, if you had any conflict with someone else in a world where killing was legal, it would quite possibly spiral out of control: you're worried they might kill you, so you're tempted to kill them first, but you know they're thinking the same way, so you're even more worried, etc.

[-]MixedNuts13y30

First step is to see if that's consistent across cultures. Any anthropologists?

[-]wedrifid13y30

How do you know?

It is a core belief of Bakkot's - nothing is going to change that. His thinking on the matter is also self consistent. Only strong social or personal influence has a chance of making a difference (for example, if he has children, all his friends have children and he becomes embedded in a tribe where non-baby-killing is a core belief). For my part I understand Bakkot's reasoning but do not share his preference based premises. As such changing my mind regarding the conclusion would make no sense.

More succinctly I don't expect reasoning wit... (read more)

[-]Multiheaded13y30

When currently thinking in far mode about this you like the idea, but seeing it in practice might easily horrify you.

I say the same about the general shape of your modern-society-with-legalized-infanticide.

1[anonymous]13y

And you are right to say so!

[-][anonymous]13y30

For your own safety, in every regard that such people could threaten it.

I don't think society considers that a valid reason for discrimination.

Also please remember surgeons can do nasty things to me without flinching if they wanted to, people do also occasionally have such fears since we even invoke this trope in horror movies.

Well, I've always thought that it's enormously and horribly wrong of us.

I generally agree.

But on the other hand I think we should give our revealed preference some weight as well, remember we are godshatter, maybe we should ... (read more)

[-][anonymous]13y30

EDIT: Read this on its Discussion thread, please, and discuss

[-]Bakkot13y30

4TheOtherDave13y

Huh. I don't follow the reasoning. Why do you expect social stigma attached to infanticide to correlate with less fun?

3Bakkot13y

2Nornagest13y

That's pretty much tautological -- you could as well express it as "forbidding things correlates with more fun unless there's some reason allowing something increases the amount of fun in the universe". What you really need for this argument to work is a way of showing that people attach intrinsic utility to increased latitude of choice, which in light of the paradox of choice looks questionable.

1Bakkot13y

2NancyLebovitz13y

Aside from any other possible issues, you're leaving out the possibility that one person may want to kill a baby that another person is very attached to. Do you have an age or ability level at which you think being a person begins?

5Bakkot13y

4Caspian13y

I expect this proposal could be taken seriously: when an owner wants to have a pet put down other than for humanitarian reasons, others who have had a close relationship to the pet, and are willing and able to take responsibility for it, get the right to veto and take custody of the pet. Ways in which Nancy's argument was not exactly like arguing that abortion should be illegal because other people might have gotten attached to the fetus: * She didn't say: therefore it should be completely prohibited. * There can be more interaction by non-mothers with a baby than a fetus. I'm not sure how much I will participate on this topic, it seems like a bit of a mind killer. I'm impressed we've found a more volatile version of the notorious internet abortion debate.

2MixedNuts13y

The standard reply to "But I like your fetus, don't kill it!" is "I'd let you have it, but we don't have the tech for me to give it to you now. My only options are going through several months of pregnancy plus labor, or killing it now. So down the drain it goes.". This suggests that inasmuch are there are people attached to fetuses not inside themselves, we should work on eviction tech.

2Multiheaded13y

Or, in any even slightly libertarian weirdtopia, it could be a matter of compensation for bearing the child.

2Multiheaded13y

Odd to hear that about a community upon which one member unleashed an omnipotent monster from the future that could coerce folks who know the evidence for its existence to do its bidding. And where, upon an attempt to lock said monster away, about 6000 random people were sorta-maybe-kinda-killed by another member as retaliation for "censorship". :D

2wedrifid13y

I expect this is a valid point. You can get away with far worse arguments when you have moral high ground to rely on.

1TheOtherDave13y

If I kill a person, the number of Fun-having-person-moments in the universe is reduced by the remaining lifetime that person would potentially have had. If I kill a baby, the number of Fun-having-person-moments in the universe is reduced by the entire lifetime of the person that baby would potentially have become. Reasoning sensibly about counterfactuals is hard, but it isn't clear to me why the former involves less total Fun than latter does. If anything, I would expect that removing an entire lifetime's worth of Fun-having reduces total Fun more than removing a fraction of a lifetime's worth.

7Bakkot13y

2A1987dM13y

If I believed the only reason nobody has killed me yet is because it is illegal to kill people, I wouldn't be very happy.

1TheOtherDave13y

(shrug) We're both neglecting lots of things; we couldn't have this conversation otherwise. I agree with you that the risk of being killed reduces Fun, at least in some contexts. (It increases Fun in other contexts.) Then again, the risk of my baby being killed reduces Fun in some contexts as well. I don't see any principled reason to consider the first factor in my calculations and not the second (or vice-versa), other than the desire to justify a preselected conclusion. I agree that it's not clear that adding a person to the universe increases the amount of Fun down the line. It's also not clear that subtracting a person from the universe reduces the amount of Fun. Reasoning sensibly about conterfactuals is hard.

5wedrifid13y

Go start breeding now. Or, say, manufacture defective condoms. (Or identify your real reason for not killing babies.)

1TheOtherDave13y

Please re-read the comment thread. If you still think we're talking about my reasons for doing or not doing anything in particular, let me know, and I'll try to figure out how to prevent such misunderstandings in the future.

[-][anonymous]13y30

Less Wrongcomments are threadedfor

If you've come to Less Wrong todiscuss a particular topic,

we havemeetupsin

Another example of this bug.

Edit: Apparently this is a known problem.

[-]cowtung10y20

I hope this finds you all well. Since I was young, I have independently developed rationalism appreciation brain modules, which sometimes even help me make more rational choices than I might otherwise have, such as choosing not to listen to humans about imaginary beings. The basis for my brand of rationality can be somewhat summed up as "question absolutely everything," taken to an extreme I haven't generally encountered in life, including here on LW.

I have created this account, and posted here now mainly to see if anyone here can point me at t... (read more)

3cowtung10y

Am I the first person to join this site in 2014, or is this an old topic? Someone please point me in the right direction if I'm lost.

3Salivanth10y

Welcome to Less Wrong! This is an old topic. Note the title: Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012). I'm not sure where the new topic is, or even if it exists, but you should be able to search for it. I recommend starting with the Sequences: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences The sequence you are looking for in regards to "right" and "should" is likely the Metaethics Sequence, but said sequence assumes you've read a lot of other stuff first. I suggest starting with Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions, and if you enjoy that, move on to How to Actually Change Your Mind.

1cowtung10y

Thank you, I have reposted in the correct thread. Not sure why I had trouble finding it. I think what I'm on about with regard to "deserve" could be described as simply Tabooing "deserve" ala http://lesswrong.com/lw/nu/taboo_your_words/ I'm still working my way through the sequences. It's fun to see the stuff I was doing in high school (20+ years ago) which made me "weird" and "obnoxious" coming back as some of the basis of rationality.

2A1987dM10y

The latest welcome thread is this one; traditionally a new one is started whenever the old one gets 500 comments.

1CCC10y

Hmmm. So, in short, you propose first deciding on what the best outcome will be, and then (ignoring the question of who deserves what) taking the actions that are most likely to lead to that outcome. That seems quite reasonable at first glance; but is it not the same thing as saying that the ends justify the means? That is to say, if the optimal outcome of a situation can only be reached by killing five people and an almost-as-good outcome results from not killing those five people, then would you consider it appropriate to kill those five people?

2cowtung10y

Can you describe a situation where the whole of the ends don't justify the whole of the means where an optimal outcome is achieved, where "optimal" is defined as maximizing utility along multiple (or all salient) weighted metrics? I would never advocate a myopic definition of "optimal" that disregards all but one metric. Even if my goal is as simple as "flip that switch with minimal action taken on my part", I could maybe shoot the light switch with a gun that happens to be nearby, maximizing the given success criteria, but I wouldn't do that. Why not? I have many values which are implied. One of those is "cause minimal damage". Another is "don't draw the attention of law enforcement or break the law". Another is "minimize the risk to life". Each of these have various weights, and usually take priority over "minimize action taken on my part". The concept of "deserve" doesn't have to come into it at all. Sure, my neighbor may or may not "deserve" to be put in the line of fire, especially over something as trivial as avoiding getting out of my chair. But my entire point is that you can easily break the concept of "deserve" down into component parts. Simply weigh the pros and cons of shooting the light switch, excluding violations of the concept of "deserve", and you still arrive at similar conclusions, usually. Where you DON'T reach the same conclusions, I would argue, are cases such as incarceration where treating inmates as they deserve to be treated might have worse outcomes than treating them in whatever way has optimal outcomes across whichever metrics are most salient to you and the situation (reducing recidivism, maximizing human thriving, life longevity, making use of human potential, minimizing damage, reducing expense...). The strawman you have minimally constructed, where there is some benefit to murder, would have to be fleshed out a bit before I'd be convinced that murder becomes justifiable in a world which analyzes outcomes without regard to who deserv

0CCC10y

Easily, as long as I'm permitted to choose poor metrics, or to choose metrics that don't align with my values. But then the problem with the example would be poor choice of metrics... Ah, that's important. By selecting the right values, and assigning weights to them carefully, you bring suitable consideration of the means back. ---------------------------------------- The difficulty is that choosing the right metrics is a non-trivial problem. The concept of "deserving" is a heuristic - not always accurate, but close enough to work most of the time, and far quicker to calculate than considering even possible influence on a situation. Having said that, of course, it is not always accurate. Some times, the outcome that someone deserves is not the best outcome; as with many heuristics, it's worth thinking very carefully (and possibly talking over the situation with a friend) before breaking it. But that doesn't mean that it should never be broken, and it certainly doesn't mean it should never be questioned. (Incidentally, every situation that I can work out where there appears to be some benefit to murder either comes down to killing X people in order to save Y people, where Y>X - in short, pitting the value "minimize the risk to life" against itself - or requires a near-infinite human population, which we certainly don't have yet)

[-]Kawoomba12y20

Probably found out about our "secret".

I mean that many of us are into My Little Pony.

[-]wedrifid12y20

By discussing this, we're only giving in to this;

| Oh but dang if there aren't like over a thousand comments here, jeez i don't want to sound like i'm crying for attention but i'm TOTALLY CRYING FOR ATTENTION, srsly i need help you dudes

What do you mean "only"? In the context of a thorough introduction, and a relevant request for advice lampshading his degree of desire for an answer like this is certainly excusable.

It's not "giving in" when you choose to do something you reflectively endorse doing without being subject to any more manipulation than a forthright request.

[-]Waterd12y20

I came to this site in search for truth. Or at least find some people that will help me identify that which is real or true and that which is not. I think one of my tools to do that is to debate with other people in the seek for same things I am. Not many people are really interested about that imo, or are really educated to be able to help me as much as I need. Because this problem a friend of mine directed me to this site, where I should find those people. The huge problem here is how this community decides to trade information. This "Article/commen... (read more)

2fubarobfusco12y

What facts — aside from your personal familiarity — about a forum-style site do you think are beneficial?

0Waterd12y

The fact that you can have subforums, and you can find the newest and most active threads on each subforum category, also that you can organize those subforums by thread titles only, instead of having to see half of the thread taking more space in the organization, making it harder to find what you are looking for.

0fubarobfusco12y

Yeah, it's tricky to follow particular threads in this site, and we only really have two "subforums" namely Main and Discussion. I think the Reddit style lends itself more to long articles than the forum style, though; and most forum systems I've seen don't have tree-structured threads, which makes following discussions hard. All in all, I'd prefer a good Usenet newsreader, but that's pretty much history now.

[-]aaronde12y20

Hello, everyone.

Recent college grad here from the Madison area. I've been aware of this site for years, but started taking it seriously when I stumbled upon it a few months ago, researching evidential (vs causal) decision theory. I realized that this community seriously discusses the stuff I care about - that really abstract, high-minded stuff about truth, reality, and decisions. I'm a math person, so I'm more interested in the theoretical, algorithmic side of this. I've been a rationalist since, at 15, I realized my religion was bunk, and decided I needed to know what else I was wrong about.

[-]Gaviteros12y20

Hellow Lesswrong!

My name is Ryan and I am a 22 year old technical artist in the Video Game industry. I recently graduated with honors from the Visual Effects program at Savannah College of Art and Design. For those who don't know much about the industry I am in, my skill set is somewhere between a software programmer, a 3D artist, and a video editor. I write code to create tools to speed up workflows for the 3D things I or others need to do to make a game, or cinematic.

Now I found lesswrong.com through the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality podcas... (read more)

[-]Zack_M_Davis13y20

It doesn't actually matter what line you use to define those reference points, however. [...] Within the theory here, consciousness makes your reference line special [...] The direction the patterns propagate doesn't really matter.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Can you describe a real or hypothetical experiment that would have different results depending on whether or not time is an artifact of consciousness?

0OrphanWilde13y

Not directly, but a proof that gravity propagates through time as easily as through space should go some of the way towards demonstrating that it is a normal spacial dimension, and I've considered a test for that - Gravity should, according to the ideas here, affect objects both in the past, and in the future. So if you have a large enough object to reliably detect its gravitational force, and a mechanism to stop it very suddenly, then, if you position yourself orthogonal to its resting place respective to its line of motion, at the moment the object stops, the center of gravity of its gravitational field should be further behind its line of motion than its current center of mass. A direct test... I'll have to ponder that one.

1Zack_M_Davis13y

But it sounds to me as if this is just saying that gravity takes time to propagate, which I'm told is already a standard prediction of relativity, so it doesn't help me understand your claim. Can you express your ideas in math? When I try to make the setup you describe more concrete, I end up thinking something like this: imagine a hypothetical universe that works in a mostly Newtonian way but with the exception that gravity propagates at some finite speed. (Of course, this is not how reality actually works: relativity is not just Newtonian physics with an arbitrary speed limit tacked on. But since I don't actually know relativity, I'm just going to use this made-up toy model instead with the hope that it suffices for the purposes of this comment---although the whole idea could just turn out to be utterly inconsistent in some way that isn't obvious to me at my current skill level.) Fix a coordinate system in space, choosing units of length and time such that the maximum speed is 1. Say there's an object with mass m traveling towards the origin along the negative y-axis at a constant speed of 0.5, and say furthermore that I have mass n, and I'm floating in space at (1, 0, 0). Then, at the moment when the object crosses the origin (you said it stopped suddenly in your setup, but I don't understand how that's relevant, so I'm ignoring it), I can't feel the gravity coming from the object at the origin yet because it would take a whole time unit to arrive at my position, but I should feel the gravity that's "just arriving" from one of the object's earlier positions---but which earlier position? Well, I couldn't figure that out in the few minutes that I spent thinking about the problem ... But hopefully you see what I'm trying to do here. When you say the English sentence "Light is a waveform distortion in gravity caused by variation in the position of the gravitic source," I don't really know how to interpret that, whereas if I have a proof a theorem or a worked proble

0OrphanWilde13y

The effect should continue past the point that gravity arrives from the current position - it will be very minute, as distance in time is related to distance in space by the speed of light (where the C in the interval formula comes from - C in m/s, time in s, very short periods of time are very "far away"), but if I'm correct, and gravity propagates through time as well as space, it should be there. We stop the object very suddenly because otherwise gravity from the future will counter out gravity from the past - for each position in the past, for an object moving in a straight relativistic line, there will be an equidistant position in the future which balances out the gravity from the position in the past. That is, in your model, imagine that gravity is being emitted from every position the particle moving in the line is at, or was ever at, or ever will be at; at the origin, the total gravitic force exerted on some arbitrary point some distance away is centered at the origin. If the particle stops at the origin, the gravity will be distributed only from the side of the origin the particle passed through. A second, potentially simpler test to visualize is simply that an object in motion, because some of its gravitic force (from the past and from the future) is consumed by vector mathematics (it's pulling in orthogonal directions to the point of consideration, and these orthogonal directions cancel out), exhibits less apparent gravitational force on another particle than one at rest. (Respective to the point of measurement.) Drawing a little picture: . .....................> (A single particle in motion; breaking time into frames for visualization purposes; the first and the last period, being equidistant and with complimentary vectors, cancel out all but the downward force; the same gravitational force is exerted as in the below picture, but some of it cancels itself out) versus, over the same time frame: . . The second particle configuration should result in g

3Zack_M_Davis12y

Again, I suspect people will have a much better chance at understanding your ideas if you make your explanations much more concrete and specific---maybe even to the point of using particular numbers. Abstraction and generality and intuitive verbal descriptions are beautiful and great, but they only work if everyone involved has an adequate mental model of exactly what it is that's being abstracted over. What do I mean, specifically and concretely, when I speak of specific and concrete explanations? Here's an example: let's consider two scenarios (very similar to the one I tried to describe in the grandparent)--- Problem One. There's a coordinate system in space with origin [x, y, z] = [0, 0, 0]. Suppose my mass is 80 kg, and that I'm floating in space ten meters away from the origin in the x-direction, so that my position is described as [10, 0, 0]. A 2000 kg object is moving at the constant velocity 10 m/s towards the origin along the negative y-axis, and its position is given as r(t) = [0, -50 + 10t, 0]. Calculate the force acting on me due to the gravity of the object at t=5, the moment the object reaches the origin. Problem Two. Everything is the same as in Problem One, except that this time, the object's position is described by the piecewise-defined function r(t) = [0, -50 + 10t, 0] if t < 5 and r(t) = [0, 0, 0] if t >= 5---that is, the object is stopped at the origin. Again, calculate the force on me when t = 5. Solutions for Newtonian Physics The answers are the same for both problems. Two objects with mass m and M exert a force on each other with magnitude GmM/r^2. At t = 5, I'm still at [10, 0, 0], and the object is at the origin, so I should experience a force of magnitude G(80 kg)(2000 kg)/(10 m)^2 = (6.67 10^-11 m^3/(kgs^2))(80 kg)(2000 kg)/(100 m^2) = 1.067 * 10^-7 N directed toward the origin. Now, you say that "for each position in the past, for an object moving in a straight relativistic line, there will be an equidistant position in the future

0OrphanWilde12y

To use a slightly different problem pair, because it would be easier for me to compute: Problem one. I have mass of 80kg at point [10,0] (simplifying to two dimensions, as I don't need Z). A 2,000 KG object is resting at position [0, 0]. The Newtonian force of 1.0687 10^-7 N towards the origin should be accurate. [Edit: 1.06710^-6 N, when I calculated it again. Forgot to update this section] Problem two. I have mass of 80kg at point [10,0] A 2,000 KG object is moving at 10 m/s along the Y axis, position defined as r(t) = [0, -50 + 10t]. Using strictly the time interval t = 0 -> t = 10, where t is in seconds, calculating the force when t=5... distance(t) = sqrt(10^2 + c^2((5 - t)^2) Gravity(t) = 6.67 10^-11 sum(802,000distance(t), for t > 0, t < 10) (10 / distance(t)) [Strictly speaking, this should be an integral over the whole of t, not a summation on a limited subset of t, but I'm doing this the faster, slightly less accurate way; the 10 / distance(t) at the end is to take only the y portion of my vectors, as the t portion of the gravitational vectors cancel out.] Which gives, not entirely surprisingly, 1.067 * 10^-6 N directed to the origin. (I think your calculation was off by an order of magnitude, I'm not sure why.) The difference between Newtonian gravity and gravity with respect to y is 3.38 * 10 ^-33. Which is expected; if the difference in gravitational force were greater, it would have been noticed a long time ago. I probably messed up somewhere in there, because my brain is mush and it's been a while since I've mucked about with vectors, but this should give you the basic idea.

3Zack_M_Davis12y

I must apologize for the delay in replying. Regretfully, I don't think I can spare any more time for this exchange (and am going to be taking a break from this and some other addicting sites), so this will likely be my final reply. Now I think I sort-of see what you're trying to do here, but I don't understand what's motivating that specific expression; it seems to me that if you want to treat space and time symmetrically, then the expression you want is something more like (80)\,dt}{10%5E2+(-50+10t)%5E2+c%5E2(5%20-%20t)%5E2}), which should be able to be evaluated with the help of a standard integral table. Please don't interpret this as hostility (for this is the sort of forum where it's actually considered polite to tell people this sort of thing), but my subjective impression is that you are confused in some way; I don't have the time or physics expertise to fully examine all the ideas you've mentioned and explain in detail exactly why they fail or why they work, but what you've said so far has not impressed me. If you want to learn more about physics, you are of course aware that there are a wide variety of standard textbooks to choose from, and I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.

0OrphanWilde12y

I do not interpret it, or any of your other responses, as hostility. (I've been upvoting your responses. I requested feedback, and you've provided it.) I did indicate the integral would be more accurate; I can run a summation in a few seconds, however, where an integral requires breaking out a pencil and paper and skills I haven't touched since college. It was a rough estimate, which I used strictly to show what it was such a test should be looking for. Since we aren't running the test itself, accuracy didn't seem particularly important, since the purpose was strictly demonstrative. (Neither formula is actually correct for the idea, however. The constant would be be wrong, and would need to be adjusted so the gravitational force would be equivalent to the existing formula for an object at rest.) Thank you for your time!

[-]CuSithBell13y20

Ah, I see what you mean. I don't think one has to believe in objective morality as such to agree that "morality is the godshatter of evolution". Moreover, I think it's pretty key to the "godshatter" notion that our values have diverged from evolution's "value", and we now value things "for their own sake" rather than for their benefit to fitness. As such, I would say that the "godshatter" notion opposes the idea that "maladaptive is practically the definition of immoral", even if there is something of a correlation between evolutionarily-selectable adaptive ideas and morality.

[-]Strange713y20

How would you define "parent," then? It's not a tangent, it's an important edge case. I'm trying to understand exactly where our views on the issue differ.

For what it's worth, I agree with you unreservedly on the age discrimination thing. In fact, I think it's the root of a lot of the current economic problems: a majority of the population is essentially being warehoused during their formative years, and then expected to magically transform into functional, productive adults afterward.

[-]Bugmaster13y20

I think this example shows that what matters is not the consequences of your actions, but your intent when you take those actions.

From whose point of view ? If you are committed to poisoning your hapless friend, then presumably you either don't care about morality, or you'd determined that this action would be sufficiently moral. If, on the other hand, I am attempting to evaluate the morality of your actions, then I can only evaluate the actions you did, in fact, perform (because I can't read your mind). Thus, if you gave your friend a cup of tea with s... (read more)

[-]Bugmaster13y20

In the same way it is possible that a supernatural* being is out there, and people are just misinterpreting what the gifts it bestows mean.

Sure, it's possible, but lots of things are possible, even if we limit them to the things we humans can imagine. We can imagine quite a lot: Cthulhu, Harry Potter, the Trimurti, Gasaraki, werewolves of all kinds, etc. etc. The better question is: how likely is it that a supernatural being exists ?

[-]thomblake13y20

I have no way to prove I am not lying however so what would be the point?

If you have evidence that could overcome the low prior for God's existence were you not lying, then that would be worth hearing even if we would believe you're lying. I'm not aware of such evidence for particular deities.

[-]TimS13y20

I don't agree that supernatural should be defined as "outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts."

There are lots of phenomena that science can't explain, or for which there is no commonly accepted explanation. That's not particularly interesting. What would be interesting is a phenomena that science admits it will never be able to explain.

[-]CuSithBell13y20

A single experience of that kind would be terrible evidence for Christianity, and merely poor evidence for the supernatural. A coherent set of experiences indicative of a consistent, ongoing supernatural world (or specifically a Christian world) would be much more convincing.

[-]Kindly13y20

A bit of both. I knew about Bayes' theorem for a while, as a not-terribly-exciting mathematical statement. But I had a few discussions about the philosophy of it, if you will, when taking a class on information theory. That sort of thing is interesting to read about, and that's how I ended up typing it into Google.

By far the most useful introduction to Bayes' theorem I've read, though, was in this short story, which I found later. I don't often use Bayes' theorem, but when I do, I prefer to do the calculation in my head, because it impresses people. This i... (read more)

[-]blob13y20

I have decks for:

English vocabulary. I've learned many new words and sometimes get an explanation for a word I had only inferred the meaning of from the context - and guessed wrongly.
Family facts, mostly birthdays. It's a minor thing really, but I used to not know how old everyone is. And more than once I felt bad when someone asked about the age of a parent and I had to say 'no idea'.
Random facts I've looked up several times before or that I don't want to have to ever admit not knowing. Like the age of the solar system, the first few digits of Euler

... (read more)

[-]Dmytry13y20

Clarified in the edit. This site very much focusses on choosing rationally (between very few options), what one should believe, and such. If you want to achieve your goals, you need to get better at problem solving, which you do by solving various problems (duh). Problem solving involves picking something good out of a space of enormous number of possibilities.

[-][anonymous]13y20

Unless "man" is taken to mean "member of humanity."

Also, gender isn't necessarily the same as biological sex.

[-]Bugmaster13y20

I hate to sound trite, but you could also try taking a few math and physics classes, or perhaps online equivalents thereof (perhaps somewhere like the Khan Academy, though I haven't looked at their physics videos myself and cannot endorse them). There's nothing wrong with reading articles and listening to advice, but nothing beats doing the work yourself. Well, at least it has been helpful for me personally; YMMV.

1Arran_Stirton13y

My apologies I must have miss-conveyed my meaning. I am in fact taking the largest number of classes at my disposal for both mathematics and physics. My main reason for liking the Quantum Physics Sequence is more to do with the depiction of quantum mechanics as not strange. I think the problem here is the accidental omission of the word "my" when mentioning the testing of ideas. The ideas in question are my own and I'm not looking for someone else to do the work for me. I've already done the work to some extent but regardless of however many times I examine my arguments I cannot be certain I am right. Even after getting a secondary opinion I won't be able to be entirely certain however I will have more evidence for (or be it against) the I haven't made a massive error model of reality. (The idea being to counteract any biases / ignorances I have that I may be unaware of.) But yes, although I do not feel the general notion of your comment is applicable to myself, I do agree with it in principle.

1Bugmaster13y

In that case, you could consider writing up your ideas and posting them as an article for discussion on this site. While I personally am probably underqualified to judge your work, others here should be more than capable of doing so. You could also submit your writeup to some journal, or a math-heavy forum or, heck, even Slashdot.

2Arran_Stirton13y

Sorry if my response seemed a bit indignant, I didn't mean to come across that way. At the moment I'm just trying to find some way to safely test the aforementioned ideas, I'm worried I'm wrong, very worried. Hence I don't want to waste too many peoples time for no good reason and I fear I've already wasted quite a bit of yours. That would be why I haven't already posted an article to the discussion section. The arguments in question are not purely math, although there is math involved it's nothing particularly complex. My main problem is in finding someone who understands the problem (Pascal's Mugging) well enough to understand the background to my argument. One of the avenues of action I decided to take was finally posting my introduction here and mentioning it in that. Just to clarify, I'm 18 and very aware of my capacity for being wrong which is why I'm not even posting a writeup to LessWrong yet. My experience is far too limited for me to be able to accurately ascertain my validity. Submitting a writeup to a journal would be madness. Worse than that even, it would be crackpottery. Again, sorry for the indignation. I'm working on it.

[-]TheOtherDave13y20

I can't see why that makes a difference in the context of my question, so feel free to choose whichever interpretation you prefer.

For my part, it seems entirely plausible to me that a person's understanding of what it means to be the primary caregiver for a child will change between time T1, when they are pregnant with that child, and time T2, when the child has been born... just as it seems plausible that a person's understanding of what a three-week stay in the Caribbean will be like will change between time T1, when they are at home looking at brochure... (read more)

[-]Arran_Stirton13y20

I can't say I blame you for not reading it; it took me about three months to get through it! However Common Sense Atheism has An Intuitive Explanation of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem, it's much easier to read and explains many of the bits that Eliezer skips over.

As for integrating the importance of rationality I scarcely know where to begin; it's a large topic. First and foremost read this. Secondly realise how important opinions are, and that it's not okay to "have your own opinion" as schools will common condition... (read more)

1Raiden13y

Thanks for your input, it was quite enlightening. I especially appreciate the Common Sense Atheism post. That's a wonderful blog and what originally led me to this site, but I had no idea that article was on there. Concerning what you said about the Holocaust and such, that had actually occurred to me before, but in a different manner. I reasoned that even if I felt 99% certain that my moral beliefs were accurate, there was that 1% chance that they could be wrong. Hitler may well have felt 99% certain that he was correct. I became to afraid to really do much of anything. I thought, "What if it is in some weird way the utmost evil to not kill millions of people? It seems unlikely, but it seemed unlikely to Hitler that he was in the wrong. What if somehow similarly it is wrong to try to ascertain what is right? What if rationality is somehow immoral?" Of course I never actually consciously thought that was true, but I fear my subconscious still believes it. That is my greatest debilitation, that lingering uncertainty. I now consciously hold the idea that it is at least better to try and be right than to not try at all, that it would be better to be Hitler than to be 40 years old and living with my mom, but my subconscious still hasn't accepted that. I believe that is why I have difficulty integrating rationality. Some part of my mind somewhere says, "But what if this is wrong? What if this is evil? You're only 99.99999999% certain. What if religious fundamentalism is the only moral choice?"

[-]TheOtherDave13y190

It's not a rhetorical question, you know. What happens if you try to answer it?

I have a pill in my hand. I'm .99 confident that, if I take it, it will grant me a thousand units of something valuable. (It doesn't matter for our purposes right now what that unit is. We sometimes call it "utilons" around here, just for the sake of convenient reference.) But there's also a .01 chance that it will instead take away ten thousand utilons. What should I do?

It's called reasoning under uncertainty, and humans aren't very good at it naturally. Personally, my instinct is to either say "well, it's almost certain to have a good effect, so I'll take the pill" or "well, it would be really bad if it had a bad effect, so I won't take the pill", and lots of studies show that which of those I say can be influenced by all kinds of things that really have nothing to do with which choice leaves me better off.

One way to approach problems like this is by calculating expected values. Taking the pill gives me a .99 chance of 1000 utilons, and a .01 chance of -10000 utilons; the expected value is therefore .99 1000 - .01 10000 = 990 - 100; the result is positive, so I should ta... (read more)

1Arran_Stirton13y

Glad to be of help! Well the thing about probabilities (in Bayesian statistics) is that they represent the amount of evidence you have for the true state of reality. In general being 50% certain means you have no evidence for your belief, less that 50% means you have evidence against it and greater than 50% means you have evidence for it. You'll get to it as you read more of An Intuitive Explanation. The important thing to note is that to be 99% certain something is true as a rationalist you actually have to have evidence for it being true. Rather than feeling that you're 99% certain, Bayes theorem allows you to see how much evidence you actually have in a purely quantitative way. That's why there's so much talk of "calibration" here, it's an attempt at aligning the feeling of how certain you are with how certain the evidence says you should be. You can also work out the expected value of what your actions would be if you are wrong. For Hitler, if he thought there was a 1% chance of him being wrong he could work out the expected number of wasted lives as 0.01*11,000,000 which is 110,000 (and that's using the lower bound of people killed during the holocaust). Hence, if I were Hitler, I wouldn't risk instigating the holocaust until I had much more information/evidence. Being rational is about looking at the way the world is and acting based on that. The point is, the most moral thing to do is the most likely thing to be moral. If God turns out to exist (although there are masses of evidence against that) and he asks you why you weren't a religious fundamentalist, you'll have a damn good answer.

[-]lisa13y20

Hi! Thanks for the welcome!

Studying abroad has been amazing - it's really making me think about all sorts of things I've never thought of and I'm loving noticing the subtle cultural differences!

If I have any questions, I'll be sure to PM you - thank you so much for the offer! :)

[-]scmbradley13y20

I have lots of particular views and some general views on decision theory. I picked on decision theory posts because it's something I know something about. I know less about some of the other things that crop up on this site…

[-]TheOtherDave13y20

I'm not sure where you live, but is killing someone who you think will try to kill you some day actually considered self-defense for legal purposes there? I'm pretty sure self-defense doesn't cover that in the US.

2A1987dM13y

No. I guess I misunderstood what orthonormal meant by “afraid of you killing them first”...

[-]Nornagest13y20

Okay. What kind of murder are we talking about? What made up most of the extra-- was it all sorts of things or was it duels? And was it accepted or was it frowned on? Were murderers prosecuted? Did victims' families avenge them?

I'm not historian enough to say for sure, unfortunately. Judicial duels were part of the culture there, but the textual sources indicate that informal feuds were common, as were robbery and various other forms of informal violence. You could bring suit upon a murderer or other criminal in order to compel them to pay blood money or suffer in kind, but there was much less central authority than we're used to, and nothing resembling a police force.

[-]TheOtherDave13y20

I agree that we shouldn't assume that emotionally volatile people fail upon most such temptations.
I agree that my reasoning here is cold (indeed, I said as much myself, though I used the differently-loaded word "dispassionate").
I agree that if impulse control is generally nonhereditable (and, again, I don't just mean genetically), the argument I use above doesn't apply.
I agree that different cultures train their members to "control their emotions" to different degrees. (Or, rather, I don't think that's true in general, but we've specifi... (read more)

[-]Vladimir_Nesov13y20

It's all irrelevant to my point, which is a self-contained criticism of a particular argument you've made in this comment and doesn't depend on the purpose of that argument.

(Your quoting someone else's writing without clarification, in a reply to my comment, is unnecessarily confusing...)

[-]Vladimir_Nesov13y20

You use an invalid argument to argue for a correct conclusion. It doesn't generally follow that something that can't be improved is not worth "worrying about", at least in the sense of being a useful piece of knowledge to pay attention to.

[-]TimS13y20

I think the word rationality could use protection against too much emotional attachment to it. It should retain a specific meaning instead of becoming 'everything that's useful'.

I'm not in love with using the word "rationality" for what this community means by rationality. But (1) I can't come up with a better word, (2) there's no point in fighting to the death for a definition, and (3) thanks to the strength of various cognitive biases, it's quite hard to figure out how to be rational and worth the effort to try.

6TheOtherDave13y

I think various forms of "optimization" would probably fit the bill. That is, pretty much everything this site endorses about "rationalists" it would also endorse about "efficient optimizers." But the costs associated with such a terminology shift don't seem remotely worth the payoff.

[-]Vladimir_Nesov13y20

I admire the community's mission to try and change people. But by the same line of argument I use above I think focusing only on how people think and how they might think better is not going to be enough.

One level up, consider who does the focusing how. The goal may be to build a bridge, an tune an emotion, or correct the thinking in your own mind. One way of attaining that goal is through figuring out what interventions lead to what consequences, and finding a plan that wins.

[-]dlthomas13y20

If it is in the genetic interests of the children to perform actions with such-and-such a risk level relative to the reward in social recognition, why is it not in the genetic interests of the parent to promote that precise risk level in the child?

2Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) 13y

No idea, actually. The following is possible stuff that my brain has produced, i.e. pure invented bullshit. It could be that this discrepancy used to be less of a problem, when society was more constant from one generation to the next and most 'risky' behaviours were obviously rewarding to both teens and adults . Based on anecdotal conversations with my parents, it seems like some things that are considered 'cool' by most of my own peer group were considered 'just stupid' by the people my parents hung out with when they were teenagers. There's also the factor that in the modern environment, as compared to the ancestral environment, most people don't keep the same group of friends in their twenties and thirties as in their teens. The same person can be unpopular in high school, when "coolness" is more correlated to risk taking, and yet be popular in a different group later when they have a $100 000-a-year job and an enormous house with a pool in it, and nobody remembers that back in high school they had no friends. Parents who have survived this phase may consider it okay for their children to be less popular as teenagers in order to prepare for later "success" as they define it, but to a teenager actually living through it day by day, the (http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0/adaptationexecuters_not_fitnessmaximizers/) in their brain will still rate their peers' approval as far more important than safety, and adjust their pleasure and pain in different situations accordingly...since, in an ancestral environment of small groups that stayed together, impressing people at age 14 would have a much greater effect on your later success as an adult.

[-]gwern13y20

You may find the article in http://lesswrong.com/lw/jx/we_change_our_minds_less_often_than_we_think/5lkb well worth your time.

[-]thomblake13y20

I mean, to my mind, having a diëtician for a parent ... is not rational

Assuming for the moment that having a dietitian for a parent really does help one achieve one's goals, yes it is rational, to the extent that it can be described as an act or process. That is, if you can influence what sorts of parents you have, then you should have a dietitian.

Similarly, it would be rational for me to spend 20 minutes making a billion dollars, even though that's something I can't actually do.

1Kouran13y

Whether a dietitian-parents could help you achieve all kinds of goals. Generally you'd be likely to have good health, you're less likely to be obese. Healthy, well-fed people tend to be taller, a dietician could use diet changes to reduce acne problems and whatnot. It is generally accepted that healthy, tall, good-looking people have better chances at achieving all sorts of goals. Also, dieticians are relatively wealthy highly-educated people. A child of a dietician is a child of privilege, upper middle class! Anyway, my point is exactly that nobody can choose their parents.TimS said: I would consider parenthood a process. But having a certain set of parents instead of another has little to do with rationality, despite most parents being 'usefull'. In the same way, I would not consider it rational to like singing, even though the acquired skills of breathing and voice manipulation might help you convey a higher status or help with public speaking. To decide to take singing lessons, if you want to become a public speaker, might be rational. But to simply enjoy singing shouldn't be considered so, even if it does help with your public speaking. Because no rational thought is involved.

3TimS13y

Ha, you caught me using loose language. At a certain level, instrumental rationality is a method of making better choices, so applying it where there doesn't appear to be a choice is not very coherent. Instrumental rationality doesn't have anything to say about whether you should like singing. But if want skill at singing, instrumental rationality suggests music lessons. As an empirical matter, I suggest there are lots of people who would like to be able to sing better who do not take music lessons for various reasons. We can divide those reasons into two patterns: (1) "I want something else more than singing skill and I lack the time/money/etc to do both," or (2) "Nothing material prevents me from taking singing lessons, but I do not because of anxiety/embarrassment/social norms." Again, I assert that a substantial number of people decide not to take singing lessons based solely on type 2 reasons. This community thinks that this pattern of behavior is sub-optimal and would like to figure out how to change it.

2thomblake13y

Yes, at this point we're just disputing definitions. But I think we're in agreement with all the relevant empirical facts; if you were able to chose your parents, then it would be rational to choose good ones. Also, one is not usually able to choose one's parents.

1Kouran13y

Thanks for your quick replies. Yes we are agreed in those two points. I'm going to try something that may come off as a little crude, but here goes: Point 1: If every act or process that helps me is to be called rational, then having a diëtician for a parent is rational. Point 2: The term rational implies involvement of the 'ratio', of thinking. Point 3: No rational thinking, or any thinking at all, is involved in acquiring one's parents. Even adaptive parents tend to acquire their child, not the other way around. Conclusion; Something is wrong with saying that everything that leads to the attainment of a goal is rational. Perhaps another term should be used for things that help achieve goals but that do not involve thinking, let alone rational or logically sound thinking. This is important because thought is often overstated in the prevalence with which it occurs, and also in the causal weight that is attached to it. Thought is not omnipresent, and thought is often of minor importance in accurately explaining a social phenomenon.

4Vladimir_Nesov13y

"Rationality/irrationality" in the sense used on LW is a property of someone's decisions or actions (including the way one forms beliefs). The concept doesn't apply to the helpful/unhelpful things not of that person's devising.

2thomblake13y

I'd prefer to reject point 2. Arguments from etymology are not particularly strong. We're using the term in a way that has been standard here since the site's inception, and that is in accordance with the standard usage in economics, game theory, and artificial intelligence.

2TheOtherDave13y

If I have a choice of whether to enjoy singing or not, and I've chosen to take singing lessons, I ought to choose to enjoy singing.

[-]TheOtherDave13y20

OK, then... I suspect you and I have very different understandings of what being property entails. If you're interested in unpacking your understanding, I'm interested in hearing it.

[-]TheOtherDave13y20

Hypothetical question: if my child expresses the desire to go live with some other family, and that family is willing, and in my judgment that family will treat my child roughly as well as I will, is it OK for me to deny that expressed desire and keep my child with me?

[-]TheOtherDave13y20

Even granting that, it's still true that if Nornagest is right and my emotional responses are calibrated in terms of expected status-maximization, then it makes sense to consider emotional responses in terms of (among other things) status-maximization for legal purposes.

[-]TheOtherDave13y20

I agree that pretty much all communication does this, yes. Sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly.

As to why... because I see the norm you're pushing as something pretty close to the cultural baseline of the "friendly" pole of the American mainstream, which I see as willing to trade off precision and accuracy for getting along. You may even be pushing for something even more "get along" optimized than that.

I mostly don't mind that the rest of my life more or less optimizes for getting along, though I often find it frustrating when i... (read more)

[-]Bakkot13y20

[-]Multiheaded13y20

Akon was resting his head in his hands. "You know," Akon said, "I thought about composing a message like this to the Babyeaters. It was a stupid thought, but I kept turning it over in my mind. Trying to think about how I might persuade them that eating babies was... not a good thing."
The Xenopsychologist grimaced. "The aliens seem to be even more given to rationalization than we are - which is maybe why their society isn't so rigid as to actually fall apart - but I don't think you could twist them far enough around to believe

... (read more)

3nshepperd13y

The question was "how do you know?", not "what do you mean?". Aliens are almost certain to fundamentally disagree with humans in a variety of important matters, by simple virtue of not being genetically related to us. Bakkot is a human. Different priors are called for.

[-][anonymous]13y20

1) How can you so easily predict others' level of distress if you don't feel much distress from that source in the first place?

Looking at other humans. Perhaps even humans in actually existing different cultures.

2) Don't forget about scale insensitivity. Don't forget that some scale insensitivity can be useful on non-astronomical scales, as it gives bounds to utility functions and throws a light on ethical injunctions.

This is a good counter point. I just think applying this principle selectively is too easy to game a metric, to put too much weight to it in preliminary discussion.

[-]Jayson_Virissimo13y20

Because its illegal to kill other people's pets or destroy their property? Duh.

So, premeditated killing of someone else's child should be criminal damage rather than murder?

4wedrifid13y

What monetary value does the child have, for the purpose of calculating damages I wonder? We should do early testing to see how much status the parents were likely to gain via the impressiveness of their possession in the future. Facial symmetry, genetic indicators...

3[anonymous]13y

Maybe. Maybe we could just keep it murder, I don't know. There is no law (heh) we have to be consistent about this. In many places across the world killing a pregnant women is tried as a double murder (I think this includes some US states).

[-][anonymous]13y20

.uiru'e .i'i

1Michelle_Z13y

I've recently started trying to learn a bit about lojban. .ui

[-]TheOtherDave13y20

I've never held that other people should be allowed to kill your baby, for precisely that reason

(rereads thread) Why, so you haven't. I apologize; the fear of having my baby killed (well, by anyone other than me, anyway) is as you say irrelevant to your point. My error.

[-]DasAllFolks13y20

First meetup is now scheduled!

[-]therufs12y10

Might one respectfully request an edit with link to the newest welcome post here? I found the newer one rather by accident.

[-]seagreen12y10

Hey everyone!

I'm a programmer from the triangle area on the east coast. I'm interested in applied rationality through things like auto-analytics.[1] I'm also interested in how humans can best adapt to information technology. Seriously, people, this internet thing? It is out there!

From what I gather of LW stereotypes my personal life is so cliche I'm not even going to bother. Uh, I think tradition is kind of important? I guess that makes me kind of unique . . .

[1] Specifically I'm interested in getting a standardized database format for things like food con... (read more)

[-]fubarobfusco12y10

Street preacher? Movement organizer? Dissident rabbi?

0Desrtopa12y

I'd lean towards cult leader. Edit in response to downvote: while I can certainly see how this could be interpreted as a simple attack on Christianity, considering that the figure in question apparently encouraged followers to give up their belongings to live in communes and made statements strongly indicative of encouraging followers to regard family members who were not followers as outgroup members, I think this is a fair descriptor.

2wedrifid12y

He (whether fictional or otherwise) seemed more like a celebrity than a cult leader. The real cult leader was Saul/Paul.

0Nornagest12y

It's really hard to say, considering that practically everything recorded about him seems to have been filtered through Paul at some stage. You can take a stab at it with the help of some pretty sophisticated textual analysis methods (I think the Jesus Seminar did a pretty good, though not unimpeachable, job of this), but ultimately an analysis always depends as much on readers' preconceptions as it does on the actual text. Kind of like trying to get an handle on Socrates' ideas when all we've got to base them on is Plato and a handful of contemporary commentaries -- except worse, since analogous commentaries don't exist in this case. I'd lean toward "dissident rabbi" based on the charitable version of my reading of the New Testament, but readings of the New Testament are notoriously idiosyncratic for the same reasons.

0Desrtopa12y

You can see my edit for further justification. Paul took up the mantle of leadership and effectively made the religion, but that doesn't mean that Jesus wasn't a cult leader.

[-]CuSithBell13y10

For those who think that morality is the godshatter of evolution, maladaptive is practically the definition of immoral.

Disagree? What do you mean by this?

Edit: If I believe that morality, either descriptively or prescriptively, consists of the values imparted to humans by the evolutionary process, I have no need to adhere to the process roughly used to select these values rather than the values themselves when they are maladaptive.

[-]Bakkot13y10

1Strange713y

I'd say so, yeah. It's kind of a tricky function, though, since there are two reasons I'm logically willing to give preferential treatment to an organism: likelyhood of said organism eventually becoming the ancestor of a creature similar to myself, and likelyhood of that creature or it's descendants contributing to an environment in which creatures similar to myself would thrive.

[-]Bakkot13y10

1Estarlio13y

I suppose I had, yes. It never really occurred to me that they might be that intelligent - but, yeah, having done a bit of reading they seem smart enough that I probably oughtn’t to eat them. Wolves definitely seem like people to me, yes. Adult humans are definitely on the list and wolves do pack behaviours which are very human-like. Killing a wolf for no good reason should be considered a moral wrong on par with murder. There's not to say that I think it should result in legal punishment on par with killing a human, mind, it's easier to work out that humans are people than it is to work out that wolves are - it's a reasonable mistake. Insects like wasps and flies don't seem like people. Red pandas do. Dolphins do. Cows... don't. But given what I've discovered about pigs that bears some checking --- and now cows do. Hnn. Damn it, now I won't be able to look at burgers without feeling sad. All the videos with loads of blood and the like never bothered me, but learning that food-animals are that intelligent really does. Have you imagined what life would be like if you were stupider, or were more intelligent but denied a body with which that intelligence was easy to express? If your person-hood is fundamental to your identity, then as long as you can imagine being stupider and still being you that still qualifies as a person. In terms of how old a person would be to have the sort of capabilities the person you're imaging would have, at what point does your ability to empathise with the imaginary-you break down? ---------------------------------------- As far as I know how, yes. If you've got some ways of thinking that we haven't been talking about here, feel free to post them and I'll do my best to run them. If Babies weren't people the world would be less horrifying. Just as if food-animals are people the world is more horrifying. But it would look the same in terms of behaviours - people kill people all the time, I don't expect them not to without other criter

[-]Bakkot13y10

[-]Alejandro113y10

Actually...

The 55 mph speed limit was a vain attempt by the Federal government to reduce gasoline consumption; initially passed in the 1974 Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act the law was relaxed in 1987 and finally repealed in 1995 allowing states to choose their speed limits. Highways and cars are safer today than in the 1970s and on many highways speed limits were increased to 65 mph. Higher speed limits are often safer because what is worse than speed is variable speed, some people driving fast and some driving slow. When the speed limit is set

... (read more)

[-]Strange713y10

The slave trade thing might be prevented by specifically forbidding the quick or anonymous sale of children. Have the current and prospective parents jump through some hoops, get interviewed by a social worker, etc. and the whole thing thoroughly documented. Find an equilibrium that keeps the nonmonetary transaction costs high enough that low-level slave traders won't think it's worth the trouble to 'go legit,' and the paper trail thick enough that corrupt aristocrats won't want to take the risk of public humiliation, without actually making it more difficult for the beleaguered biological parents than raising an unwanted child themselves.

2wedrifid13y

The ultimate slavery counter: red tape!

2Strange713y

Working from the assumption that slave-traders are in it for the money? Yeah. Slavery stops happening when it becomes more cost-effective to pay the workers directly, than to pay guards to coerce them. The main use of slave labor is agriculture, because it's easy to have a large group within a single overseer's line of sight, and output is easy to measure. Child labor has historically succeeded there because of the low skill requirement, and because an individual child's lower productivity was matched by lower housing and food costs. If a child costs more to acquire than an adult - specifically if that difference in up-front costs outweighs the net present value of that slim productivity-per-upkeep-cost advantage - anyone who keeps using children for unpaid ag labor will simply be driven out of the market by competitors willing to do the math. The app people worry about is sex. Police and prosecuting attorneys (in the US, at least) are already willing to resort to extremely dubious tactics to score a pedophile conviction; this would give them a legitimate audit trail to follow. Someone seeking to purchase a child for such purposes would not dare attract so much official attention... unless they were suicidally stupid, which is the sort of problem that solves itself.

[-]Nornagest13y10

This question is fraught with politics and other highly sensitive topics, so I'll try to avoid getting too specific, but it seems to me that thinking of this sort of thing purely in terms of a potentiality relation rather misses the point. A self-extracting binary, a .torrent file, a million lines of uncompiled source code, and a design document are all, in different ways, potential programs, but they differ from each other both in degree and in type of potentiality. Whether you'd call one a program in any given context depends on what you're planning to do with it.

[-]Bakkot13y10

[-]Desrtopa13y10

Knowing more about the processes that actually gave rise to your parents' pronouncements on religion, do you think you were right to assign as much weight of evidence to them as you originally did?

3witzvo13y

Ah. Well, you've got me there. I'll think about it. Your comment makes me think, though, about a more general issue. Is there a name for a bias that can happen if you think about an issue multiple times and get more and more convinced by, what actually, is essentially only one piece of evidence?

2Desrtopa13y

Well, there are various ways to double-count evidence, but that sounds a lot like the idea discussed in this post.

2witzvo13y

Thanks.

[-][anonymous]13y10

Well, you are certainly a lot better at Bayesian Statistics than I am. But if I am to base my "physics-defying, benevolent, superintelligent sky wizard" hypothesis on evidence such as badly written holy books that look spuriously like hodge-podge culture dumps, the general religious disagreement, the continued non-answering of prayers, failure to divine simple mathematical or physical truths, and how science is significantly more productive, well... Every time a prayer goes unanswered I can theoretically update on it for a lower credence. Every c... (read more)

[-]wedrifid13y10

Positing a divine being is a more complex explanation than any physical explanation I can conceive of.

Really? Can you not, by way of conception, take the divine being scenario, hack around with it so that it can no longer be considered a divine being then tack on some arbitrary and silly complexity? (Simulations may be involved, for example.)

Conceiving of complex stuff seems to be a trivial task, so long as the complexity is not required to be at all insightful.

[-]Jakinbandw13y10

[Note: Skip stuff in brackets if religious talk annoys or offends you]

(Why does everyone assume that this has to do with religion? If I was asking this about religion wouldn't that already signify that I didn't believe, I just wanted to? My belief comes from actual events that I have witnessed, and tested, and been unable to falsify. )

The example with the bleeding out was sort of a personal one because it happened to me. I cut my foot with an axe. I was far from help, and a helicopter wouldn't pick me up for another 4 hours. If I had been off to the side b... (read more)

1Bugmaster13y

I personally operate by Crocker's Rules, but others may not be, so I appreciate the warning nonetheless. It's probably because you said you identify as a Christian, and Christians tend to advance this sort of argument more often than non-theists, regarding Christianity specifically. That said, your argument is general enough to apply to non-religious topics, as well. At this point, I should mention that I didn't mean to bring up your personal traumatic experience, and I apologize. If you think that discussing it would be too distressing, please stop reading beyound this point. If you truly believed you were about to die no matter what, why would you waste time on tying off your foot ? It sounds to me like you weighed the chances of you dying, and made a decision to spend some time on tying off the foot, instead of spending it in contemplation or something similar. What is it ? Can you describe some examples ? Your own experience with the bleeding foot is not one of them, because your death would've negatively affected quite a few people (including yourself). Understood. However, if everyone thought like you do, no one would be tracking near-Earth asteroids right now. Some people are doing just that, though, in the expectation that if a dangerous asteroid were to be detected, we'd have enough time to find a solution that does not involve all of us dying.

[-]Shmi13y10

Have you noticed any confusion?

It just seems almost too good to be true that I now get what plenty of genius quantum physicists still can't.

Hmm, "too good to be true"... Does this suggest anything?

In physics, you can get absolutely clear-cut issues. Not in the sense that the issues are trivial to explain. But if you try to apply Bayes to healthcare, or economics, you may not be able to formally lay out what is the simplest hypothesis, or what the evidence supports.

So why bother with an example where Bayes works the worst and is most con... (read more)

[-]dlthomas13y100

This is an actual testable prediction. Suppose such an exception is found experimentally (for example, self-decoherence due to gravitational time dilation, as proposed by Penrose, limiting the quantum effects to a few micrograms or so). Would you expect EY to retract his Bayesian-simplest model in this case, or "adjust" it to match the new data? Honestly, what do you think is likely to happen?

Honestly, when the first experiment shows that we don't see quantum effects at some larger scale when it is otherwise believed that they should show up, I expect EY to weaken, but not reverse, his view that MWI is probably correct - expecting that there is an error in the experiment. When it has been repeated, and variations have shown similar results, I expect him to drop MWI, because it now longer explains the data. I don't have a specific prediction regarding just how many experiments it would take; this probably depends on several factors, including the nature and details of the experiments themselves.

This is from my personal model of EY, who seems relatively willing to say "Oops!" provided he has some convincing evidence he can point to; this model is derived solely from what I've read here, and so I don't ascribe it hugely high confidence, but that's my best guess.

[-]chaosmosis13y10

I don't think those definitions really capture some of the relevant connotations that weirdness has related to accuracy and consistency. I personally didn't even realize the exact problem you had with the commenter because the way zhe used "weird" made perfect sense to me.

I also don't like prescriptivist theories of grammar very much and think that the original comment was clearly understandable and was perhaps less clearly intended to subvert the common belief that "QM is weird", which is a belief that has been criticized in multiple p... (read more)

5DanArmak13y

Me neither. I'm bringing up dictionary definitions as descriptions, not as prescriptions. I happen to agree with the dictionary (and it's not my native language anyway), and since you seem to use a different meaning/definition, please tell me what it is! I, at least, apparently still don't understand it. Or rather, I understand the intent (because it's been explained) but can't understand how that intent can be read from the original words.

[-]olalonde13y10

Human level intelligence is unable to improve itself at the moment (it's not even able to recreate itself if we exclude reproduction). I don't think monkey level intelligence will be more able to do so. I agree that the SIAI scenario is way overblown or at least until we have created an intelligence vastly superior to human one.

4Vulture13y

Uh... I think the fact that humans aren't cognitively self-modifying (yet!) doesn't have to do with our intelligence level so much as the fact that we were not designed explicitly to be self-modifying, as the SIAI is assuming any AGI would be. I don't really know enough about AI to know whether or not this is strictly necessary for a decent AGI, but I get the impression that most (or all) serious would-be-AGI-builders are aiming for self-modification.

[-]wedrifid13y10

Is that question literal or metaphorical?

Almost certainly metaphorical. I mean, at the very least the Marines would have used explosives rather than fire.

[-]TheOtherDave13y10

That said, where there exists a measurable difference between an implementable approximation of utilitarianism and an implementable approximation of some other moral principle X, then it makes sense to consider oneself a utilitarian or an Xian even if one is, as you say, accepting deviations from utilitarianism or X in order to achieve implementability.

[-]XiXiDu13y10

You guys seriously should invest in general problem solving exercises.

Would just googling "problem solving exercises" be enough? What are you talking about, exactly?

I think what Dmytry is talking about is that Less Wrong does not stand up to its goals.

Eliezer Yudkowsky once wrote that rationality is just the label he uses for his "beliefs about the winning Way - the Way of the agent smiling from on top of the giant heap of utility."

Wouldn't it make sense to assess if you are actually winning by solving problems or getting rich etc... (read more)

4Dmytry13y

Yea, basically that. Every fool can make correct choice between two alternatives with a little luck and a coin toss. Every other fool can get it by looking at first fool. You gets heaps of utility by looking in giant solution spaces where this doesn't work. You don't get a whole lot by focussing all your intellectual might on doing something that fools do well enough. See, Eliezer grew up in religious family, and his idea of intelligence is choosing the correct beliefs. I grew up in poor family; my idea of intelligence is much more along the lines of actually succeeding via finding solutions to practical problems. Nobody's going to pay you just because you correctly don't believe in God. Not falling for the sunk cost fallacy at very best gets you to square 1 with lower losses - that's great, and laudable, and is better than sinking more costs, but it's only microscopic piece of problem solving. The largest failure of reasoning is failure to even get a glimpse at the winning option, because its lost inside huge space.

1katydee13y

Isn't this being done?

[-]lazado13y10

i don't think much of rationality but i like smart people.

now pls hug me in a very rational way.

thanks

9TimS13y

Welcome to Lesswrong. We like rationality because it helps us achieve our goals. You might call it optimizing our lives. Unfortunately, mass media portrayals of "rationality" make it seem like smart people want to lose all emotions and become Vulcan. That's a stupid goal, and not what we mean by rationality If you have something you want to talk about, click Discussion in the heading, then post in the open thread.

[-][anonymous]13y10

Ideally, you should aim to defeat the strongest version of your opponent's argument that you can think of--it's a much better test of whether your position is actually correct, and it helps prevent rationalization. Rather than attacking a version of your opponent's argument that is weak, you should attack the strongest possible version of it. On LessWrong we usually call this Least Convenient Possible World, or LCPW for short. (I've also seen it called "steel man," because instead of constructing a weaker "straw man" version of your opp... (read more)

[-]Shephard13y10

Imagine a snowball that's rolling down an infinite slope. As it descends, it picks up more snow, rocks, sticks, maybe some bugs, I don't know. Maybe there are dry patches, too, and the snowball loses some snow. Maybe the snowball hits a boulder and loses half of its snow, and what remains is less than 10% original snow material. But it still can be said to be this snowball and not that snowball because its composition and history are unique to it - it can be identified by its past travels, its momentum, and the resulting trajectory. If this can be taken to... (read more)

[-]anotherblackhat13y10

What's so great about the ability to (justify to yourself that it's okay to) skip over the Chinese Room Argument that it's worth making your overall epistemology provably worse at figuring out what's true?

Nothing.
Can you actually prove it's worse, or were you just asking a hypothetical?

More generally, there's a big difference between lying to yourself and lying to other people. Lying to others is potentially useful when their actions, if they knew the facts, would contradict your goals. It's harder to come up with a case where your actions would contr

... (read more)

[-]Kevin13y10

Right, I meant that you could just add the vocabulary of noting meditation to the beeper study without actually doing the meditation.

[-]Multiheaded13y10

Maybe. Maybe society would create new norms to fix that.

I'd like to mention that I'm emphatically not a libertarian (in fact identifying as socialist), and find many absurdities with its basic concept (see Yvain's "Why I Hate Your Freedom); however, I'd always like to learn more about how it could plausibly work from its proponents, and am ready to shift towards it if I hear some unexpectedly strong arguments.

[-]orthonormal13y10

At least in my country, killing someone for self-defence is already legal.

Right, but "I accidentally ran over his dog, and I was worried that he might kill me later for it, so I immediately backed up and ran him over" probably won't count as self-defense in your country. But it's the sort of thing that traditional game theory would advise if killing was legal.

This really is a case where imposing an external incentive can stop people from mutually defecting at every turn.

(Plus, I don't think I'm going to threaten to kill someone in the forese

... (read more)

[-]AspiringKnitter13y10

But the fear you get from Silent Hill is fear you can walk away from and know you're not going to be attacked by zombies and nor will your loved ones. You choose when to feel it. You choose whether to feel it at all, and how often. Making fear that is known to be unfounded available on demand to those who choose it is not even in the same ballpark as making everyone worry that they're going to be killed.

1Nornagest13y

True enough, and I'm not going to rule out the existence of people calibrated to enjoy low or zero levels of simulated threat (I'm pretty sure they're common, actually). It's also pretty obvious that there are levels of fear which are unFun without qualification, hence the "suitably calibrated" that I edited into the grandparent. But -- and forgive me for the sketchy evopsych tone of what I'm about to say -- the response is there, and I find it unlikely that for some reason we've evolved to respond positively to simulated threats and negatively to real ones. Being a participant in one of the safer societies ever to exist, I don't have a huge data set to draw on. But I have been exposed to a few genuinely life-threatening experiences without intending to (mostly while free climbing), and while they were terrifying at the time I think the final fun-theoretic balance came out positive. My best guess, and bear in mind that this is even more speculative, is that levels of risk typical to contemporary life would have been suboptimal in the EEA.

2Strange713y

How would you feel about a society otherwise similar to our own which included some designated spaces with, essentially, a sign on the door saying "by entering this room, you waive all criminal and civil liability for violent acts committed against you by other people in this room" and had a subculture of people who hung out in such places, intermittently mutilating and murdering each other?

1TheOtherDave13y

Death represents pretty significant disutility; if the experience was significantly life-threatening, you're attributing some correspondingly significant utility to the experience of surviving. How confident are you?

[-]TheOtherDave13y10

So I repeat my question: does the regret and remorse in case 1 actually matter? For example, what if a parent was regretful and remorseful about having their child forcibly put up for adoption; would that change your position?

I understand the argument that the infant's life is valuable, and am not challenging that here. It was your invoking the parent's regret and remorse as particularly relevant here that I was challenging.

[-]TheOtherDave13y10

Maybe.

Suppose, for example, that what you're describing here as instability/emotional volatility -- or, more operationally, my likelihood of doing something unrecoverable-from which I generally abhor based on a very quickly passing once-in-a-lifetime temptation -- is hereditable (either genetically or behaviorally, it doesn't matter too much).

In that case, I suspect I would rather that infants born to emotionally volatile/unstable parents ten million years ago had not matured to breeding age, as I'd rather live in a species that's less volatile in that wa... (read more)

[-]Bakkot13y10

[-]thomblake13y10

See What Do We Mean By "Rationality".

Summary: "Epistemic rationality" is having beliefs that correspond to reality. "Instrumental rationality" is being able to actualize your values, or achieve your goals.

Irrationality, then, is having beliefs that do not correspond to reality, or being unable to achieve your goals. And to the extent that humans are hard-wired to be likely irrational, that certainly is a bug that should be fixed.

1Kouran13y

By that definition you might say that, but that still leaves the problem I tend to adress, that rationality (and by the supplied definition also irrationality) is suscribe to people and actions where thinking quite likely did not take place or was not the deciding factor of what action came about in the end. It falsely divides human experience into 'rational' and 'erroneously rational/irrational'. Thinkin is nog all that goes on among humans.

[-][anonymous]13y10

my moral beliefs are consequentialist, and therefore actually formulated as "prevent the greatest possible number of murders" rather than "kill the fewest possible people personally", so it's not actually accurate to say I have to override moral beliefs to advocate removing sociopaths from society.

Of course. I agree that one death is preferable to many, no matter who or what does the killing. I am talking about the effects on yourself of endorsing murder, and possibly the less noble real reason you chose that solution.

Maybe you have ... (read more)

[-]Multiheaded13y10

He started "investigating" a child's value to parents with things like the status they could gain from it, instead of obvious things like their instinctive emotional response to it, etc. That's manifestly not what most parents think and feel like.

5wedrifid13y

Emotional distress caused does seem like another important consideration when calculating damages received for baby/property destruction. It probably shouldn't be the only consideration. Just like if I went and cut someone's arm off it would be appropriate to consider the future financial and social loss to that person as well as his emotional attachment to his arm. It doesn't seem very egalitarian but it may be a bigger crime to cut off the arm of a world class spin bowler (or pitcher) than the arm of a middle manager. It's not like the latter does anything that really needs his arm.

3Nornagest13y

While I don't fully disagree, I'm not sure that's a meaningful objection. One implication of the status-signaling frame is that our instinctive emotional responses (among other cognitive patterns) are calibrated at least partly in terms of maximizing status; it doesn't require any conscious attention to status at all, let alone an explicit campaign of manipulation.

[-]wedrifid13y10

Why do you feel it's correct to interpret it as defection in the first place?

In case you were wondering the translation of this from social-speak to Vulcan is:

Calling people assholes isn't a defection, therefore you saying - and in particular feeling - that labeling people as assholes is a defection says something personal about you. I am clever and smooth for communicating this rhetorically.

So this too is a defection. Not that I mind - because it is a rather mild defection that is well within the bounds of normal interaction. I mean... it's not li... (read more)

3dlthomas13y

That is not a correct translation. Calling someone an asshole may or may not be defection. In this case, I'm not sure whether it was. Examining why you feel that it was may be enlightening to me or to you or hopefully both. Defecting by accident is a common flaw, for sure, but interpreting a cooperation as a defection is no less damaging and no less common.

[-][anonymous]13y10

The difference is, I'm quite a bit more distrustful of your legal infanticide's perspectives than you're distrustful of my personal self-modification's perspectives.

I'm not sure this is so. We should update towards each other estimates of the other's distrustfulness. I'm literally horrified by the possibility of a happy death spiral around universal altruism.

[-][anonymous]13y10

Making ourselves care as much as we'd privately want to, at least to try and see how it goes?

Revealed preferences are precisely what we end up doing and actually desire once we get in a certain situation. Why not work it out the other way around? How can you be sure maximum utility is going with this shard line and not the other?

Because it sounds good? To 21st century Westerners?

[-][anonymous]13y10

For every example you list (polyamory, etc)

I think you mean "for every example you are likley to list", I didn't list any.

I bet I can find you a counterexample of equivalent strength.

What exactly would that accomplish? I said more similar in some respects, didn't I? I didn't say on net or overall.

[-]Solvent13y10

if everyone who'd find it preferable to our world was (in real life) hit by a truck tomorrow, my utility function would increase.

I think you should take that back, personally. I can understand you saying it out of frustration, but saying that you want people dead is generally a bad thing to do.

[-]Multiheaded13y10

Pretty negligible, but still orders of magnitude above Bakkot just altering society to tolerate infanticide on his own.

1wedrifid13y

I would tend to agree for what it's worth.

[-]Bakkot13y10

2orthonormal13y

FWIW, I disagree with you but you don't set off my "sociopath alarm". I think you and Multiheaded may not be able to have a normal conversation with each other, but each of you seems to get along fine with the rest of LW.

2TheOtherDave13y

I'm curious: did you?

6Bakkot13y

[-]TheOtherDave13y10

Do you mean that it's pretty certain that I'm not obliged to be trying to have as many children as possible at all times?

Or that it's pretty certain that the fact that it's not clear that adding a person to the universe (as things stand today) will, on average, increase the amount of fun had down the line is why I'm not obliged to be trying to have as many children as possible at all times?

Or both?

Also: how important is it to you to manage your handle's reputation in such a way as to maximize your ability to sway someone on LW in areas concerning ethical values and empathy?

[-]Bakkot13y10

1Vaniver13y

I would love to loan you money at 20% interest. Send me a private message if you're interested. When playing chess, how many moves ahead do you look? A man produces about 47 billion sperm a year; a woman releases 13 eggs a year; a couple that tries to become pregnant over the course of a year will have a 75% chance of live birth pregnancy if the female is 30. So each feasible sperm-egg combination over the course of a year has about a trillionth chance of making it to a live birth. * As soon as conception happens, then you've got a zygote which is very likely to make it to live birth. And once it makes it to live birth, it's very likely to make it to adulthood. So there seems to be a very bright line at conception. (Contraceptives prevent conception; condoms by preventing sperm from entering, the pill by preventing ovulation, and so on.) (I should note that I think there are sound reasons to treat a risk that will end one out of a trillion people chosen at random as less of a concern than a risk that is certain to end a certain person, and that this line of reasoning depends heavily on this premise, but it would take too long to go into those reasons here. I can in another comment if you're interested.) *Noting that 'potential resulting individual DNAs' are individually much less likely than just sperm-egg combinations.

3MixedNuts13y

From the NIH: So your bright line should be heartbeat, or at least zygote implantation. This does not significantly affect your conclusions.

2Vaniver13y

The jump from 1e-12 to .5 seems brighter to me than the jump from .5 to .8. (.5 is also historically significant, as only about half of born children would live to see puberty for much of human history.)

3Bakkot13y

1Vaniver13y

What role should the future play in decision-making? It is not clear to me that prohibiting murder derives from that position or mandates birth. By quantification of "merely." If we determine that a particular coma patient has a 90% chance of reawakening and becoming a person again, then it seems almost as bad to end them as it would be to end them once they were awake. If we determine that a particular coma patient has a 5% chance of reawakening and becoming a person again, then it seems not nearly as bad to end them. If we determine that a particular coma patient has a 1e-6 chance of reawakening and becoming a person again, then it seems that ending them has little moral cost. If infants are nearly guaranteed to become people, then failing to protect them because we are impatient does not strike me as wisdom.

1Bakkot13y

[-]TimS13y10

Link to a previous discussion I had about post-modernism and science. Brief summary: Models - no, Predictions - yes.

[-]dekelron13y10

Actually I doubt it's something that complicated. In my opinion, the site is not known because there are few people to publicize it, loop.

Anyhow, ARE there more LWers from Israel? I would really like it if there was a meetup here.

3dbaupp13y

According to this survey, there are at least 2 people from Israel (from Haifa and Kfar Saba).

[-]DasAllFolks13y10

First meetup is now scheduled!

[-]DasAllFolks13y10

I'm happy to hear it! I'll be announcing a Philadelphia meetup shortly; I hope to see you on the comment thread!

[-]_ozymandias13y10

Where are you? I'm in Fort Lauderdale and the Tampa area. If we're near each other maybe we could arrange one of those meetup thingies...

2daenerys13y

Hi ozy! I am really happy to see you on here! I enjoy your blog. This map shows that as of last week-ish there were at least four Floridians on LW. Unfortunately, their identity is unknown, and you guys seem to be spread out. But if you post a meetup, you can see who responds. Good luck!

[-]blashimov12y00

Could I get that more information, if more is to be had? I am a gad student, and somewhat disconnected from the undergrad social networks.

[-]deathbyzen12y00

Hey all! I actually registered to ask a question. I'm trying to find this website that was linked from the comments section of a LW article. I believe the comment was left on a "Quotes" post this year. Basically, it was a website that seemed to be about either a technique or a book that was about listening to the different parts of your brain or self. Sorry if this is really vague, I don't know if anyone is ever going to actually read this, but I would appreciate an email to my username at gmail. I'll check back here again, and maybe try to get some karma so I can post a discussion thread about this. It's really bugging me because I can only vaguely remember what the website was about to begin with.

2fubarobfusco12y

This sounds like Internal Family Systems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Family_Systems_Model

[-]MixedNuts12y00

How do you know that Jesus was a philosopher?

[-][anonymous]12y00

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

[-]Ben Pace12y00

Well, I am glad we cleared that up. ;-) I'll make sure to remember, In case I ever forget my gender.

[-]Strange712y00

Well, keep in mind, even inside such a room social norms would rapidly evolve against letting things get too exciting, it's just that there wouldn't be any recourse to a larger legal system to resolve the finer points.

Maybe a big guy sits down in the corner with a tattoo across his bare chest saying "I am the lawgiver, if anyone in the room I watch is injured or killed without appropriate permission I will break the aggressor's arms" and mostly follows through on that. When somebody kicks the lawgiver's ass without taking over the job, everybody else votes with their feet.

[-]OrphanWilde13y00

Howdy.

I was a sometimes-reader of Overcoming Bias back in the day, and particularly fond of the articles on quantum physics. Philosophically, I'm an Objectivist. I identify a lot of people as Objectivist, however, including a lot of people who would probably find it a misnomer.

I created my account pretty much explicitly because I have some thoughts on theoretical (some might prefer the term "quantum", but for reasons below, this isn't accurate) physics and wanted (at this point, needed might be more accurate) feedback, and haven't had much succ... (read more)

6Risto_Saarelma12y

The general mile-a-minute solve-all-of-physics style of presentation here is tripping my crackpot sensors like crazy. You might want to pick one of your physics topics and start with just that. Also, wondering how much you actually know about this stuff. I'm not a physicist, but ended up looking up bits about relativistic spacetime when trying to figure out what on earth Greg Egan is going on about these days. Now this bit, seems to be just wrong. A big deal with Minkowski spacetime is that the time dimension has a mathematically different behavior from the three space dimensions, even when you treat the whole thing as a timeless 4-dimensional blob. You can't plug in a fourth "spatial dimension, no different from any other", and get the physics we have.

0OrphanWilde12y

Minkowski spacetime is primarily concerned with causal distance; whether event A can be causally related to event B. Time has a negative sign when you're considering causality, because your primary goal is to see whether any effect from event A could have been involved in event B. Using the Minkowski definition of time, an object A ten million light years away from object B has a negligible spacetime distance from that object ten million years in the future and ten million years in the past from any given point in time.

5Dreaded_Anomaly12y

This sounds like nonsense from the start. It's a bunch of words put together in a linguistically-acceptable way, but it's not a meaningful description of reality. I suspect the reason you have had trouble getting feedback is that this presentation of your theory sets off immediate and loud "crackpot" alarms. For example: light, photons, are quanta of the electromagnetic field. To get more technical, photons are a mixture of the two neutral electroweak bosons B_0 and W_0 due to electroweak symmetry breaking. I have done these calculations (in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory) as well as some of the many experiments which support them. I understand these claims as beliefs which constrain my anticipated experiences. If you are going to attempt to replace apparently all of contemporary physics with a new theory, you must specify how that theory is better. Does it give better explanations of current results, trading complexity with how well it fits the data? Does it predict new results? How can we test the theory, and how does it constrain our expectations? What results would falsify the theory? Answering these questions, i.e. doing science, requires careful mathematical theory along with support from experiment. A few pages of misused jargon - essentially gibberish - does not qualify. I'm not interested in engaging with this theory point-by-point; there's not enough substance here to do so. My goal here is to provide you with some idea of how to be taken seriously when proposing new scientific theories. Throwing around a bunch of unsupported, incomprehensible claims is not the way.

0OrphanWilde12y

It has a few predictions, and a few falsifications; for light as a waveform, it predicts, for example, that any region of space where light cannot escape, also will not propagate gravitic waves. It also predicts that singularities with sufficient energy will disperse in a manner inconsistent with Hawking Radiation, and may predict an upper bound on the mass of singularities. The light as a gravitic wave idea you take particular offense to here would predict that the frequency of blackbody radiation is exactly the same as the frequency of motion, and more broadly that the frequency of motion of particles is precisely the same as the frequency of light emitted by those particles. Any object in motion should generate electromagnetic waves. Two particles in a spacetime-synchronous oscillation should exhibit no apparent electromagnetic effects on one another. Also, a particle in electromagnetic radiation should exhibit predictably different relativistic behavior, such that the idea could be tested by exposing a series of particles with short half-lives to high-amplitude, low-frequency electromagnetic radiation and seeing how those half-lives change; because light would represent gravitational density, it should be possible to both increase and decrease the half life in a predictable manner according to relativity.

1Dreaded_Anomaly12y

It's good that you have predictions, although this is still just words and math would be much clearer. Fundamentally, light as a representation of gravitational density or as a gravity wave does not make sense. We know the properties of photons very well, and we know the properties of gravity very well from general relativity. The two are not compatible. At a very simple level, gravity is solely attractive, while electromagnetism can be both attractive and repulsive. Photons have spin 1, while a theoretical graviton would have spin 2 for a number of reasons. They have different sources (charge-current for photons, stress-energy for gravity). There is a lot of complicated, well-developed theory underlying these statements. The frequency of light emission is not the same as the frequency of motion of the particle. In matter, light is emitted by electrons transitioning from a higher energy level to a lower energy level. A simple model for light emission is an atom exposed to a time-dependent (oscillatory) perturbing electric field. The frequency of the electric field affects the probability of emission but not the frequency of the light; that is only determined by the difference in energy between the high and low energy levels. (This must be true just from conservation of energy.) The electric field need not be resonant with the expected light frequency for emission to occur, though that resonance does unsurprisingly maximize the transition probability. This model comes from Einstein and there are many good, accessible discussions at an undergraduate level, e.g. in Griffith's Quantum Mechanics. It makes many validated predictions, such as the lifetimes of excited atomic states. Further, not all motion has a frequency, and not all objects in motion emit EM radiation. Neutrinos are constantly in motion and have never been measured to give off electromagnetic waves. If they did, they'd be a lot easier to detect! In the Standard Model, they don't couple to photons becau

0OrphanWilde12y

Note that I challenge this assertion about gravity a bit later on, stating that it itself is a wave, both attracting and repelling at different distances. The perturbing electric field in your case isn't moving matter, though; it takes sufficient levels of energy to force an electron to transition to a different energy level, which corresponds (in a very loose sense) with a different orbit. I'll leave that alone, though, because either way, there's an experiment which can confirm or deny my suspicions. Not all waves have a frequency, either, in the strictest sense; waves can be non-oscillatory. Doing some research into Cherenkov radiation on this matter, as I may be able to formulate a test for this. Also, two electrons with the same rest frame -don't- interact electromagnetically, hence why electrons in cathode ray tubes travel in straight lines. (I'm pretty sure this holds; let me know if there's something I'm missing here.) (Unfortunately, standard theory already explains this, which is disappointing.) (Thank you very much for your responses. They're pointing me in some very good directions to do research.)

3Dreaded_Anomaly12y

Yes, you state that, without proof or support. Electromagnetism and gravity are different forces, both with infinite range but different strengths and behaviors, to the best of our experimental and theoretical knowledge. People measure these things at every scale we can access. Now you're moving goalposts and contradicting your earlier claims. Yes, two electrons in the same rest frame interact electromagnetically. Of course, if there is not some restoring force opposing their repulsion, they will accelerate away from each other and no longer be in the same rest frame. Cathode rays travel in straight lines because they are subjected to a potential large enough to overcome the repulsion between the electrons. If you have just an electron gun without the rest of the apparatus, the beam will spread out.

3Zack_M_Davis13y

I don't know very much physics, but this is wrong: Everything I've read about special relativity says that the interval between two events in spacetime is given by %5E2%20+%20(y-y_0)%5E2%20+%20(z-z_0)%5E2%20-%20(t-t_0)%5E2}), the square root of the sum of the squares of the differences in their spatial coordinates minus the square of the difference in the time coordinate; the minus sign in front of the t^2 term says that time and space don't behave the same way.

0thomblake13y

I would normally downvote an out-of-context wall of text like the above, but upvoted in accordance with Welcome post norms.

2OrphanWilde13y

My apologies. I looked for rules, but couldn't find any. "If you've come to Less Wrong to discuss a particular topic, this thread would be a great place to start the conversation." seemed to indicate that this is where I should start.

0RobertLumley12y

Hey! Welcome to LW. I've upvoted you too, but if you're looking for feedback on your OP, I'm too stupid to be having this conversation. :-) Edit, since you mentioned you're an objectivist, you might be interested in the general prevailing opinion on Rand around these parts. That being said, LW does have a number of members who were, at one point, or perhaps still are, respectful of Rand.

0OrphanWilde12y

Howdy! I'm not sure strict Randian Objectivists would agree that I'm an Objectivist; I use the term pretty broadly to describe anybody who ascribes to the philosophy, not necessarily the ethics. I take Ayn Rand at her word when she says people should think for themselves (the closest she got to a proscription in any of her works), and am not terribly impressed by much of her fan club, which refuses to. That said, I'm not particularly impressed by that criticism, which, like most criticisms of Ayn Rand, revolves mainly around her personal life.

0Vaniver12y

If you're interested in more recent discussion of that article, you can find some here.

0RobertLumley12y

Hm. I don't necessarily agree it revolves around her personal life. The main gist of the post is A. Rand acknowledged no superior, B. If you don't acknowledge some way in which you are flawed you can never improve, so C. This is kind of a stupid thing to say. I used to call myself a neo-objectivist, mostly because it was a word that had no definition, so I could claim I meant whatever I wanted. And I have a lot of respect for many of the conclusions that Rand came to. But the arrogance of her system is pretty off-putting to me. Related, "Mozart was a Red", a play Murray Rothbard wrote parodying the time Rand invited him to come meet her.

0OrphanWilde12y

I've yet to meet somebody better than me at arguing politics; that doesn't mean it's impossible for me to get better, however, which is one of my motivations in continuing to do so. I'm not sure that A logically leads to B.

5Vaniver12y

Are you measuring this in times that you think you lost a political argument, times your opponent thought you won a political argument, or times you learned something interesting by discussing politics?

0RobertLumley12y

There's a difference: you (presumably) acknowledge that it's possible for you to get better at arguing politics. Rand did not. Rand believed it was impossible for anyone to be better than her.

0thomblake13y

No reason to take my preferences as generally normative. Though I do.

[-]OnyeTemi13y00

Hello everyone, i'm new to this and i actually do not know much about what's going on here, i just need help to find some textbooks recommendation to boost my academic performance this session. i am a year 2 Accounting student in the University of Lagos (Unilag),Nigeria. i hope you will be of great help.

[-]Aegist13y00

Hello Less Wrong Community, I am here because I need as many rational debaters as possible - and it looks like I have found the central chamber of the kingdom here!

I am working on a project called rbutr - it is a simple tool which allows rebuttals to be connected to claims on a webpage-level. The purpose of which is to alert internet users to the existence of rebuttals to the specific page they are viewing, providing them with a simple way to click through to the counter-argument page.

So ideally, the community heping to build this resource (which is going ... (read more)

0thomblake13y

"rbutr" sounds unmarketable.

[-]Estarlio13y00

What about fish? I'm pretty sure many fish are significantly more functional than one-month-old humans, possibly up to two or three months. (Younger than that I don't think babies exhibit the ability to anticipate things. Haven't actually looked this up anywhere reputable, though.)

I don't know enough about them - given they're so different to us in terms of gross biology I imagine it's often going to be quite difficult to distinguish between functioning and instinct - this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/3189941.stm

Says that scientist... (read more)

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