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(This is the fourth incarnation of the welcome thread, the first three of which which now have too many comments. The text is by orthonormal from an original by MBlume.)
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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.
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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.
Comments (843)
I am a new member and have been looking at Blogs for the first time over the past few weeks. I have written a book, finished last month, which deals with many of the issues about reasoning discussed at this site, but I attempt to cut through them somewhat, as there is so much potential in the facts out there to be ordered that I don't spend a lot of time considering the theory relating to my reasoning in providing some order to it in my book. I discuss reasoning, and many of the principles raised in posts here, but my interest is in reasonably framing the conditions of my hypotheses and making them clear, whatever they may be. For example, immediately before 2 particles collides we can fairly accurately predict what will happen because our conditions are very closed, but nature has broad universal sweeps of properties in four forces and how they more generally structure matter (including biology and humans in particular) and hypotheses relating to those explanations are more broad.
My book tries to cover the entire sweep on nature, based upon the use of the four forces in physics, and extends to an explanation of the emergence of biology on planetary surfaces. You are all most welcome to read it, its a free download at http://home.iprimus.com.au/marcus60/1.pdf and well worth a quick flip to see if the coverage interests you. My website in www.thehumandesign.net (a non-spiritual Design) for additional information including a Blog in future. It is entirely novel, and without any input from scientists or philosophers. I am a lawyer of long standing, and do my research by checking facts at the library (and internet now) and I simply constructed a view over a period of several decades. A bit like ongoing Sunday contemplations accumulated into a theory. I hope you enjoy it, and my posts at this site if I get an opportunity to contribute further.
Folks, a reminder that downvotes against introduction posts on the "Welcome" thread are frowned upon. There's nothing in the parent comment that should be sufficient to override that norm.
Yes there is---the rest of the comments that also advertise the book while attempting to shame Vladimir out of downvoting him for allegedly sinister emotional reasons. Making that sort of status challenge can be a useful way to establish oneself (or so the prison myth goes) but also often backfires and also waives the 'be gentle with the new guy' privileges.
People should consider themselves free to ignore thomblake's frowns and vote however they please in this instance. There is no remaining obligation to grant marcusmorgan immunity to downvotes.
Hey. I'd like to submit an article. Please upvote this comment so that I may acquire enogh points to submit it.
It sounds like you have some extremely strong Ugh Fields. It works like this:
A long, long time ago, you had an essay due on Monday and it was Friday. You had the thought, "Man, I gotta get that essay done", and it caused you a small amount of discomfort when you had the thought. That discomfort counted as negative feedback, as a punishment, to your brain, and so the neural circuitry which led to having the thought got a little weaker, and the next time you started to have the thought, your brain remembered the discomfort and flinched away from thinking about the essay instead.
As this condition reinforced itself, you thought less and less about the paper, and then eventually the deadline came and you didn't have it done. After it was already a day late, thinking about it really caused you discomfort, and the flinch got even stronger; without knowing it, you started psychologically conditioning yourself to avoid thinking about it.
This effect has probably been building in you for years. Luckily, there are some immediately useful things you can do to fight back.
Do you like a certain kind of candy? Do you enjoy tobacco snuff? You can use positive conditioning on your brain the same way you did before, except in the opposite direction. Put a bag of candy on your desk, or in your backpack. Every time you think about an assignment you need to do, or how you have some job applications to fill out, eat a piece of candy. As long as you get as much pleasure out of the candy as you get pain out of the thought of having to do work, the neural circuitry leading to the thought of doing work will get stronger, as your brain begins to think it is being rewarded for having the thought.
It doesn't take long at all before the nausea of actually doing work is entirely gone, and you're back to being just "lazy". But at this point, the thought of doing work will be much less painful, and the candy (or whatever) reward will be much stronger.
All you have to do is trick your brain into thinking it will get candy every time it thinks about doing work. Even if you know that it's just you rewarding yourself, it still works. Yeah, it's practically cheating, but your goal should be to do what works. Just trying really, really hard isn't just painful; it also doesn't work. Cheat instead.
What would help?
You could start or attend a lesswrong meetup, maybe you'll find some like-minded people.
Or talk to some of your professors, some of them should be pretty smart. Maybe also try meeting new folks, maybe older students?
Go to okcupid, search for lesswrong, yudkowsky or rationality and meet some like-minded people. You don't have to date them.
I know, it's pretty hard, I myself don't click with 99,9% of all people and I'm definitely under +3 sigma.
What worked for me in a related situaton was leveraging comparative advantage by:
1) Finding somebody who isn't broken in the same specific way, 2) Providing them with something they considered valuable, so they'd have reason to continue engaging, 3) Conveying information to them sufficient to deduce my own needs, 4) Giving them permission to tell me what to do in some limited context related to the problem, 5) Evaluating ongoing results vs. costs (not past results or sunk costs!) and deepening or terminating the relationship accordingly.
None of these steps is trivial; this is a serious project which will require both deep attention and extended effort. The process must be iterated many times before fully satisfactory results can reasonably be expected. It's a very generalized algorithm which could encompass professional counseling, romance, or any number of other things.
Oh hey, you're girl!me. Maybe what helped me will help you?
Getting on bupropion stopped me being miserable and hurting all the time, and allowed me to do (some) stuff and be happy. That let me address my executive function issues and laziness; I'm not there yet, but I'm setting up a network of triggers that prompt me to do what I need.
This will hurt like a bitch. When you get to a semi-comfortable point you just want to stop and rest, but if you do that you slide back, so you have to push through pain and keep going. But once the worst is over and you start to alieve that happiness is possible and doing things causes it, it gets easier.
So I'd advise you to drag yourself to a psychiatrist (or perhaps a therapist who can refer you) and see what they can do. If you want friends and/or support, you could drop by on #lesswrong on Freenode, it's full of cool smart people. If I can help, you know where to find me.
RIT can be a pretty miserable place in the winter, I know from personal experience. Maybe you have some seasonal affective disorder in addition to your other issues? Vitamin D in the morning and melatonin in the evening might help, and of course exercise is good for all sorts of mood related issues - so joining one of the clubs might be a good idea, or take a class like fencing (well, I enjoyed the fencing class anyway...) or start rockclimbing at the barn. Clubs might be a good idea in general, actually - the people in the go club were not stupid when I was there and it was nice hanging out in Java Wally's.
First of all, I encourage you to take advantage of the counseling and psychological services available to you on campus, if you have not already done so. They're very familiar with psychological pain.
Second, I encourage you to go to a Less Wrong meetup when you get the chance. There's a good chance you'll find people there who are as smart as you and who care about some of the same things you care about. There are listings for meetups in Toronto, Albany, and New York City. I can personally attest that the NYC meetup is great and exists and has good people.
Finally, I wish I could point you to resources that are especially appropriate for trans people, but I don't know what they are.
I really hope that you will be okay.
I know there's at least 3 MtF semi-regulars on this board, and one more who turned down Aubrey de Grey for a date once; so it's not like you're alone here. But I agree with Kawoomba that there are resources focused more closely on your problems than a forum on rationality, and these will help better and quicker. If you cannot intellectually respect anyone there enough that talking would help, Shannon Friedman does life coaching (and Yvain is on the last leg of his journey to becoming a psychiatrist).
If there's a sequence that would directly help you, it's probably Luminosity.
I think I understand. There is something of what you describe here that resonates with my own past experience.
I myself was always much smarter than my peers; this isolated me, as I grew contemptuous of the weakness I found in others, an emotion I often found difficult to hide. At the same time, though, I was not perfect; the ease at which I was able to do many things led me to insufficient conscientiousness, and the usual failures arising from such. These failures would lead to bitter cycles of guilt and self-loathing, as I found the weakness I so hated in others exposed within myself.
Like you, I've found myself becoming more functional over time, as my time in university gives me a chance to repair my own flaws. Even so, it's hard, and not entirely something I've been able to do on my own... I wouldn't have been able to come this far without having sought, and received, help. If you're anything like me, you don't want to seek help directly; that would be admitting weakness, and at the times when you hurt the worst, you'd rather do anything, rather hurt yourself, rather die than admit to your weakness, to allow others to see how flawed you are.
But ignoring your problems doesn't make them go away. You need to do something about them. There are people out there who are willing to help you, but they can't do so unless you make the first move. You need to take the initiative in seeking help; and though it will seem like the hardest thing you could do... it's worth it.
Hello and goodbye.
I'm a 30 year old software engineer with a "traditional rationalist" science background, a lot of prior exposure to Singularitarian ideas like Kurzweil's, with a big network of other scientist friends since I'm a Caltech alum. It would be fair to describe me as a cryocrastinator. I was already an atheist and utilitarian. I found the Sequences through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
I thought it would be polite, and perhaps helpful to Less Wrong, to explain why I, despite being pretty squarely in the target demographic, have decided to avoid joining the community and would recommend the same to any other of my friends or when I hear it discussed elsewhere on the net.
I read through the entire Sequences and was informed and entertained; I think there are definitely things I took from it that will be valuable ("taboo" this word; the concept of trying to update your probability estimates instead of waiting for absolute proof; etc.)
However, there were serious sexist attitudes that hit me like a bucket of cold water to the face - assertions that understanding anyone of the other gender is like trying to understand an alien, for example.
Coming here to Less Wrong, I posted a little bit about that, but I was immediately struck in the "sequence rerun" by people talking about what a great utopia the gender-segregated "Failed Utopia 4-2" would be.
Looking around the site even further, I find that it is over 90% male as of the last survey, and just a lot of gender essentialist, women-are-objects-not-people-like-us crap getting plenty of upvotes.
I'm not really willing to put up with that and still less am I enthused about identifying myself as part of a community where that's so widespread.
So, despite what I think could be a lot of interesting stuff going on, I think this will be my last comment and I would recommend against joining Less Wrong to my friends. I think it has fallen very squarely into the "nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists" cognitive failure mode.
If you're interested in one problem that is causing at least one rationalist to bounce off your site (and, I think the odds are not unreasonable, where one person writes a long heartfelt post, there might be multiple others who just click away) here you go. If not, go ahead and downvote this into oblivion.
Perhaps I'll see you folks in some years if this problem here gets solved, or some more years after that when we're all unfrozen and immortal and so forth.
Sincerely,
Sam
Why not stay around and try to help fix the problem?
Fixing the problem needs less people with a highly polarizing agenda, not more.
Ordinarily I'd leave this for SamLL to respond to, but I'd say the chances of getting a response in this context are fairly low, so hopefully it won't be too presumptuous for me to speculate.
First of all, we as a community suck at handling gender issues without bias. The reasons for this could span several top-level posts and in any case I'm not sure of all the details; but I think a big one is the unusually blurry lines between research and activism in that field and consequent lack of a good outside view to fall back on. I don't think we're methodologically incapable of overcoming that, but I do think that any serious attempt at doing so would essentially convert this site into a gender blog.
To make matters worse, for one inclined to view issues through the lens of gender politics, Failed Utopia 4-2 is close to the worst starting point this site has to offer. Never mind the explicitly negative framing, or its place within the fun theory sequence: we have here a story that literally places men on Mars on gender-essentialist grounds, and doesn't even mention nonstandard genders or sexual preferences. No, that's not meant to be taken all that seriously or to inform people's real behavior. Doesn't matter. We're talking enormously poor associations here.
From there, the damage has basically been done. If you take that as a starting point and look around the site with gender in mind -- perhaps not even consciously trying to vet things in those terms, but having framed things in that way -- you aren't going to go anywhere good with it. Facts like the predominately male gender mix (which I'd be inclined to explain in terms of background demographics; computer science is the dominant intellectual framework here and that field's even more gender-skewed) or the evopsych reasoning we use occasionally start to look increasingly sinister, and every related data point's going to build on an already dismal impression. These data points are in fact pretty sparse -- we don't talk much about gender here, for what I see as good reasons -- but they're fairly salient if you're looking for them. And there aren't many pointing in the other direction.
I don't agree with the conclusion. But I can see where it's coming from, and once it's been accepted sticking around to fight a presumptively hopeless battle wouldn't be a very smart move. Now, can we prevent impressions like this from being formed without losing sight of our primary goals or engaging in types of moderation that aren't going to happen with our current leadership and culture? That I'm not sure of.
As far as I can tell, we as a species suck at handling gender issues without bias, the closest thing to an exception to that I recall seeing being some (not all) articles (but usually not the comments) on the Good Men Project and the discussions on Yvain's “The $Nth Meditation on $Thing” blog post series.
Yeah, I was fairly impressed with Yvain's posts on the subject; if we did want to devote some serious effort to tackling this issue, I can think of far worse starting points.
s/gender//
Though I think that this particular forum sucks less at handling at least some issues.
Since I cannot imagine anything but a few cherry picked examples that could have led to your impression, let me use some of my own (the number of cases is low):
The extremely positive reception of Alicorns "Living Luminously" sequence (karma +50 for the main post alone, Anja's great and technical posts (karmas +13, +34, +29) all indicate that good content is not filtered along gender lines, which it should be if there were some pervasive bias.
Even asserting that understanding anyone of the other gender is "like trying to understand an alien" does not imply any sort of male superiority complex. If you object to sexism as just pointing out that there are differences both based on culture and genetics, well you got me there. Quite obviously there are, I assume you don't live in a hermaphrodite community. Why is it bad when/if that comes up? Forbidden knowledge?
Are you sure that's the rationalist thing to do? Gender imbalance and a few misplaced or easily misinterpreted remarks need not be representative of a community, just as a predominantly male CS program at Caltech and frat jokes need not be representative of College culture.
It's possible that user is sensitive to gender issues precisely because it's comparatively difficult and not entirely rationalist to leave a community like Caltech.
It's generally the stance of gender-sensitive humans that no one should have to listen to the occasional frat joke if they don't want to. I agree with everything else in your post; that final "can't you take a frat joke?" strikes me as defensive and unnecessary.
You're right, it was too carelessly formulated.
Will you fix it? =) Is there an established protocol for fixing these sorts of things?
The edit button? :P
Is that a protocol, strictly speaking? "Pressing the edit button" would be a protocol with only one action (not sufficient).
Maybe there will be a policy post on this soon.
You're right, strictly speaking, the protocol would be TCPIP. :)
(There is no mandatory or even authoritative social protocol for this situation. The typical behavior is editing and then putting an EDIT: brief explanation of edit, but just editing with no explanation is also fine, particularly if nobody's replied yet, or the edit is explained in child comments).
Well earlier today I clarified (euphemism for edited) a comment shortly after it was made, then found a reply that cited the old, unclarified version. You know what that looks like, once the tribe finds out? OhgodImdone.
In a hushed voice I just found out that EY can edit his comments without an asterisk appearing.
Did you use a Rawlsian veil of ignorance when judging it? From a totally selfish point of view, I would very, very, very much rather be myself in this world than myself in that scenario (given that, among plenty of other things, I dislike most people of my gender), but think of, say, starving African children or people with disabilities. I don't know much about what it feels like to be in such dire straits so I'm not confident that I'd rather be a randomly chosen person in Failed Utopia 4-2 than a randomly chosen person in the actual world, but the idea doesn't sound obviously absurd to me.
Thanks for writing this. It's true that LW has a record of being bad at talking about gender issues; this is a problem that has been recognized and commented on in the past. The standard response seems to have been to avoid gender issues whenever possible, which is unfortunate but maybe better than the alternative. But I would still like to comment on some of the specific things you brought up:
I think I know the post you're referring to, I didn't read this as sexist, and I don't think that indicates a male-techy failure mode on my part about sexism. Some men are just really, really bad at understanding women (and maybe commit the typical mind fallacy when they try to understand men, and maybe just don't know anyone who doesn't fall into one of those categories), and I don't think they should be penalized for being honest about this.
I haven't seen too much of this. Edit: Found some more.
Where? Edit: Found some of this too.
This is a somewhat dangerous weapon to wield. It is very easy to classify any attempt to counter this argument as falling into the failure mode you describe; please don't use this as a fully general counterargument.
Try to keep in mind selection effects. The post was titled Failed Utopia - people who agreed with this may have posted less than those who disagreed.
I confess to being somewhat surprised by this reaction. Posts and comments about gender probably constitute around 0.1% of all discussion on LessWrong.
Whenever I see a high quality comment made by a deleted account (see for example this thread where the two main participants are both deleted accounts), I'd want to look over their comment history to see if I can figure out what sequence of events alienated them and drove them away from LW, but unfortunately the site doesn't allow that. Here SamLL provided one data point, for which I think we should be thankful, but keep in mind that many more people have left and not left visible evidence of the reason.
Also, aside from the specific reasons for each person leaving, I think there is a more general problem: why do perfectly reasonable people see a need to not just leave LW, but to actively disidentify or disaffiliate with LW, either through an explicit statement (SamLL's "still less am I enthused about identifying myself as part of a community where that's so widespread"), or by deleting their account? Why are we causing them to think of LW in terms of identity in the first place, instead of, say, a place to learn about and discuss some interesting ideas?
LW is a hub for several abnormal ideas. An implication that you're affiliated with LW is an implication that you take these ideas seriously, which no reasonable person would do.
Some people come from a background where they're taught to think of everything in terms of identity.
It may be because lot of LW regulars visibly think of it in terms of identity. LW is described by most participants as a community rather than a discussion forum, and there has been a lot of explicit effort to strengthen the communitarian aspect.
Some possibilities:
There have been deliberate efforts at community-building, as evidenced by all the meetup-threads and one whole sequence, which may suggest that one is supposed to identify with the locals. Even relatively innocuous things like introduction and census threads can contribute to this if one chooses to take a less than charitable view of them, since they focus on LW itself instead of any "interesting idea" external to LW.
Labeling and occasionally hostile rhetoric: Google gives dozens of hits for terms like "lesswrongian" and "LWian", and there have been recurring dismissive attitudes regarding The Others and their intelligence and general ability. This includes all snide digs at "Frequentists", casual remarks to the effect of how people who don't follow certain precepts are "insane", etc.
The demographic homogeneity probably doesn't help.
I agree with these, and I wonder how we can counteract these effects. For example I've often used "LWer" as shorthand for "LW participant". Would it be better to write out the latter in full? Should we more explicitly invite newcomers to think of LW in instrumental/consequentialist terms, and not in terms of identity and affiliation? For example, we could explain that "joining the LW community" ought to be interpreted as "making use of LW facilities and contributing to LW discussions and projects" rather than "adopting 'LW member' as part of one's social identity and endorsing some identifying set of ideas", and maybe link to some articles like Paul Graham's Keep Your Identity Small.
One of the times the issue of overidentifying with LW came up here, about a year ago, I mentioned that my self-description is "LW regular [forum participant]". It means that I post regularly, but does not mean that I derive any sense of identity from it. "LWer" certainly sounds more like "this is my community", so I stay away from using it except toward people who explicitly self-identify as such. I also tend to discount quite a bit of what someone here posts, once I notice them using the pronoun "we" when describing the community, unless I know for sure that they are not caught up in the sense of belonging to a group of cool "rationalists".
I think the "LWer" appellation is just plain accurate (but then I've used the term myself). Any blog with a regular group of posters & commenters constitutes a community, so LW is a community. Posting here regularly makes us members of this community by default, and being coy about that fact would make me feel odd, given that we've strewn evidence of it all over the site. But I suspect I'm coming at this issue from a bit of an odd angle.
"Here at LW, we like to keep our identity small."
Nice one.
As a hypothesis, they may be ambivalent about discontinuing their hobby ("Two souls alas! are dwelling in my breast; (...)) and prefer to burn their bridges to avoid further ambivalence and decision pressures. Many prefer a course of action being locked in, as opposed to continually being tempted by the alternative.
I guess you get considered fully unclean even if you're only observed breaking a taboo a few times.
Your comment's first sentence answers your second paragraph.
Hi there community! My name is Dave. Currently hailing from the front range in Colorado, I moved out here after 5 years with a Chicago non-profit - half as executive director - following a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome (four years after being diagnosed with ADHD-I). That was three years ago. Much has happened in the interim, but long story short, I mercilessly began studying what we call AS & anything related I could find. After a particularly brutal first-time experience with hardcore passive-aggressivism (always two sides to every situation, but it doesn't work well when no one will talk about it :P), I became extremely isolated, & have been now for about a year. I'm in my second attempt to return to school via a great community college, but unfortunately the same difficulties as last term are getting in the way.
BUT, that's a different story! I've had this site recommended to me a few times now because over the course of my isolation I've become completely preoccupied with all sorts of fun mental projects, ranging in topics from physics to consciousness to quantum mechanics to dance. My current big projects (I bounce around a loooooot) are creating a linear model for the evolution of cognitive development & showing in some way why I'm not sure i agree that time is the fourth dimension. Oh, also trying to develop a structure for understanding :)
After looking through a few of the welcome threads here, I'm excited to be here! Now all I have to do is keep consistent...
Hello and welcome to lesswrong, your goal to understanding time as the 4th dimension stuck out to me in that it reminded me of a post that i found beautiful and insightful while contemplating the same thing. timeless physics has a certain beauty to it that resonates to me much better then 4th dimensional time and sounds like something you would appreciate.
Sure does, but don't let yourself get tempted by the Dark Side. Beauty is not enough, it's the ability to make testable predictions that really matters. And Eliezer's two favorite pets, timeless physics and many worlds, fail miserably by this metric. Maybe some day they will be a stepping stone to something both beautiful and accurate.
You have a very good point and have shown me something that I knew better and will have to keep an eye on closer for now on.
That being said Beauty is not enough to be accepted into any realm of science but thinking about beautiful concepts such as timeless physics could increase the probability of thinking up an original testable theory that is true.
In particular I'm thinking how the notion of absolute time slowed down the discovery of relativity while if someone were to contemplate the beautiful notion of relative time, relativity could have been found much faster.
Hello Michael and Amanda Connolly from Phoenix Arizona here! we are looking for like minded people in Arizona too start a meetup group with. We are working on A documentary on rational thinking! its Called Rated R for Rational
http://www.indiegogo.com/RatedR?a=1224097
shoot us off an Email if you live in Arizona!
I'm new on Less Wrong and I want to solve P vs. NP.
Welcome!
A fresh perspective on hard problems is always valuable.
Getting the skills to be able to solve hard problems is even more valuable.
Hi everyone!
Well, I'm new-ish here, and this site is really big, so I was wondering where I should start, like, which articles or sequences I should read first?
Thanks!
Hello everyone!
My personal and professional development keep leading me back to the LessWrong sequences, so I've gathered up enough humility to join in the discussions. I hope to meet your high standards.
I'm 27 and my background is in business and the life sciences; I see rationality as a critically important tool in these areas, but ultimately a relatively minor tool for life as a successful human animal. As such I see this community as being similar to a bodybuilding/powerlifting community, where the interest is in training the rational faculty instead of physical strength.
Edit: Wow, all my comments downvoted? That's a pretty strongly negative response. Care to explain?
From what I can see, people probably thought you were belaboring a point which was not a part of the discussion at hand. You said you were answering the moral value of "there exists 3^^^3 people AND..." versus the situation without that prefix, but people discussing it did not take that interpretation of the problem, nor did Eliezer when he asked it. You might say that to determine the value of 3^^^3 people getting specks in their eye you would have to presuppose it included the value of them existing, but nobody was discussing that as if it were part of the problem. It sucks, yeah, but the way that people prefer to have discussions wins out, and you can but prefer it or not, or persuade in the right channels. A good lesson to learn, and don't be discouraged.
Thank you.
Greetings! I am Viktor Brown (please do not spell Viktor with a c), and I tend to go by deathpigeon (please do not capitalize it or spell pigeon with a d) on the internet. (I cannot actually think of a place I don't go by deathpigeon...) I'm currently 19 years old. I'm unemployed and currently out of school since my parents cut off me off for paying for school. I consider myself to be a rationalist, a mindset that comes from how I was raised rather than any particular moment in my life. When I was still in university, I was studying computer science, a subject that still interests me, and I learned some programming in C++. When I get a positive enough income flow that I can afford to continue my schooling, I plan on continuing to study computer science. Around the internet, I tend to hang out in the TvTropes fora, where I also go by deathpigeon. I make a point of regularly reviewing my beliefs, be they political, religious, or something else. I'm not entirely sure what else to say, since I'm terrible with social situations, and introducing myself to a bunch of strangers is a situation I'm especially bad with.
ouch... who the hell downvotes a greeting post?
Hi, I'm Rixie, and I read this fan fic called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by lesswrong, so I decided to check out Lesswrong.com. It is totally different from what I thought it would be, but it's interesting and I like it. And right now I'm reading the post below mine, and wow, my comment sounds all shallow now . . .
Hi Rixie! Don't worry! Lots of people came to LessWrong after reading HPMoR (myself included). I know it can be intimidating here at first, but well worth the effort, I think.
You might also be interested in Three Worlds Collide. It's another fiction by the same guy who wrote HPMoR, and a bunch of the Sequence posts here.
If you have any questions about anything, feel free to PM me!
And, question: What does 0 children mean? It's on the comments which were down-voted a lot and not shown.
Hi! I was wondering where to start on this website. I started reading the sequence "How to actually change your mind", but there's a lot of lingo and stuff I still don't understand. Is there a sequence here that's like, Rationality for Beginners, or something? Thanks.
Probably the best thing you can do, for yourself and for others, is to post comments on the posts you've read, asking questions where you don't understand something. The sequences ought to be as easy to understand as possible, but the reality may not always approach the ideal.
But if the jargon is the problem, the LW wiki has a dictionary
I found the order presented in the wiki's guide to the sequences to be quite helpful.
Hello, newbie here. I'm intrigued by the premise of this forum.
About me: I think a lot- mostly by myself. That's trained me in some really lazy habits that I am looking to change now.
In the last few weeks, I noticed what I think are some elemental breakdowns in human politics. When things go bad between people, I think it can be attributed to one of three causes: immaturity, addiction, or insanity. I would love to discuss this further, hoping someone's interested.
I wasn't going to mention theism, but it's here in the main post, and suddenly I'm interested: I trend toward the athiestic- I'm really unimpressed with my grandmother's deity, and "supernatural" doesn't seem a useful or interesting category of phenomena. But I like being agnostic more than atheist, just on a few tiny little wiggle-words that seem powerfully interesting to me, and I notice that other people seem to find survival value in it. So that's probably something I will want to talk about.
Many of my more intellectual friends and neighbors can seem like bullies a lot of the time. So I like the word "rationality" in the title of this place, much more than I like "science" or "logic". When I see the war of the darwin fish on people's bumpers, I remember that the Romans still get a lot of credit for their accomplishments even though math and science as we know it barely existed. Obsession with mere logic seems to put an awful lot of weight on some unexamined premises- and people don't talk in formal logic any more than they math in roman numerals.
I'm not against vaccination, but I am a caregiver to a profoundly autistic child. It's frustrating to try to have any sort of conversation about autism without it devolving into a vaccination tirade.
I don't think of myself as a 9/11 "truther", and yet I still have many questions about those events and the response that trouble me. Some of these questions are getting answered now that the 10 year anniversary has seen the release of more information. As with the Kennedy assassination, I don't think the full story will ever be widely known. I'm cynical enough that I doubt that it matters.
SETI fascinates me. Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs- not so much. Whitley Streiber is actually kind of interesting, when I can muster up the required grains of salt.
Anyway, it feels a bit like I'm crawling out from under a rock, not sure what the weather is really like out here. I want to outgrow the pleasures of cleverness, hoping for some happiness in wisdom.
Hi. 18 years old. Typical demographics. 26.5-month lurker and well-read of the Sequences. Highly motivated/ambitious procrastinator/perfectionist with task-completion problems and analysis paralysis that has caused me to put off this comment for a long time. Quite non-optimal to do so, but... must fight that nasty sunk cost of time and stop being intimidated and fearing criticism. Brevity to assure it is completed - small steps on a longer journey. Hopefully writing this is enough of an anchor. Will write more in future time of course.
Finally. It is written. So many choices... so many thoughts, ideas, plans to express... No! It is done! Another time you silly brain! We must choose futures! We will improve, brain, I promise.
I look forward to at last becoming an active member of this community, and LEVELING UP! Tsuyoku naritai!
I'm Robby Oliphant. I started a few months ago reading HP:MoR, which led me to the Sequences, which led me here about two weeks ago. So far I have read comments and discussions solely as a spectator. But finally, after developing my understanding and beginning on the path set forth by the sequences, I remain silent no more.
I am fresh out of high school, excited about life and plan to become a teacher, eventually. My short-term plans involve going out and doing missionary work for my church for the next two years. When I came head on against the problem of being a rationalist and a missionary for a theology, I took a step back and had a crisis of belief, not the first time, but this time I followed the prescribed method and came to a modified conclusion, though I still find it rational and advantageous to serve my 2 year mission.
I find some of this difficult, some of this intuitive and some of this neither difficult or intuitive, which is extremely frustrating, how something can appears simple but defy my efforts to intuitively work it. I will continue to work at it because rationality seems to be praiseworthy and useful. I hope to find the best evidence about theology here. I don't mean evidence for or against, just the evidence about the subject.
I appreciate your altruistic spirit and your goal of gathering objective evidence regarding your religion. I'm glad to see you beginning on the path of improving your rationality! If you haven't encountered the term "effective altruist" yet or have not yet investigated the effective altruist organizations, I very much encourage you to investigate them! As a fellow altruistic rationalist, I can say that they've been inspiring to me and hope they're inspiring to you as well.
I feel it necessary to inform you of something important yet unfortunate about your goal of becoming a teacher. I'm not happy to have to tell you this, but I am quite glad that somebody told you about it at the beginning of your adulthood:
The school system is broken in a serious way. The problem is with the fundamental system, so it's not something teachers can compensate for.
If you wish to investigate alternatives to becoming a standard school teacher, I would highly recommend considering becoming involved with effective altruists. An organization like THINK or 80,000 hours may be very helpful to you in determining what sorts of effective and altruistic things you might do with your skills. THINK does training for effective altruists and helps them figure out what to do with themselves. 80,000 hours helps people figure out how to make the most altruistic contribution with careers they already have.
For information regarding religion, I recommend the blog of a former Christian (Luke Muehlhauser) as an addition to your reading list. That is here: Common Sense Atheism. I recommend this in particular because he completed the process you've started - the process of reviewing Christian beliefs - so Luke's writing may be able to save you significant time and provide you with information you may not encounter in other sources. Also, due to the fact that he began as a Christian, I'm guessing that his reasoning was not unnecessarily harsh toward Christian ideas like they might have been otherwise. The sampling of his blog that I've read is of good quality. He's a rationalist, so that might be part of why.
See also Lockhart's Lament (PDF link) . That said, in my own case, competent teachers (such as Lockhart appears to be) did indeed make a difference. Though my IQ is much closer to the population than the IQ of an average LWer's, so maybe my anecdotal evidence does not apply (not that it ever does, what with being anecdotal and all).
I can't fathom that you'd say that if you had read Gatto's speech.
I am very interested in the reaction you have to the speech (It's called The Seven Lesson School Teacher, and it's in the beginning of chapter 1).
Would you indulge me?
Also:
Failing to teach reasoning skills in school is a crime against humanity.
Offtopic: Does anyone know where you can find that speech in regular HTML format? I defenitely read it in that format, but I can't find it again.
Ontopic: While I appreciate (and agree with) the point he's making, overall, he uses a lot of exaggeration and hyperbole, at best. It seems pretty clear that specific teachers can make a difference to individuals, even if they can't enact structural change.
Also:
What do you mean by "crime against humanity"?
I should also point out that, while Gatto makes some good points, his overall thesis is hopelessly lost in all the hyperbole, melodrama, and outright conspiracy theorizing. He does his own ideas a disservice by presenting them the way he does. For example, I highly doubt that mental illnesses, television broadcasts, and restaurants would all magically disappear (as Gatto claims on pg. 8) if only we could teach our children some critical thinking skills.
Connection between education and sanity
Check out Ed DeBono's CORT thinking system. His research (I haven't thoroughly reviewed it, just reciting from memory) shows that by increasing people's lateral thinking / creativity, it decreases things like their suicide rate. If you have been taught to see more options, you're less likely to choose to behave desperately and destructively. If you're able to reason things out, you're less likely to feel stuck and need help. If you're able to analyze, you're less likely to believe something batty. Would mental illness completely disappear? I don't think so. Sometimes conditions are mostly due to genes or health issues. But there are connections, definitely, between one's ability to think and one's sanity.
If you don't agree with this, then do you also criticize Eliezer's method of raising the sanity waterline by encouraging people to refine their rationality?
Connection between education and indulging in passive entertainment
As for television, I think he's got a point. When I was 17, I realized that I was spending most of my free time watching someone else's life. I wasn't spending my time making my own life. If the school system makes you dependent like he says (and I believe it does) then you'll be a heck of a lot less likely to take initiative and do something. If your self-confidence depends on other expert's approval, it becomes hard to take a risk and go do your own project. If your creativity and analytical abilities are reduced, so too will be your ability to imagine projects for yourself to do and guide yourself while doing them. If your love for learning and working is destroyed, why would you want to do self-directed projects in the first place? And if you aren't doing your own projects your own way, that sucks a lot of the life and pleasure out of them. Fortunately, for me, a significant amount of my creativity, analytical abilities, and a significant amount of my passion for learning and working survived school. That gave me the perspective I needed to make the choice between living an idle life of passive entertainment, and making my own life. Making my own life is more engaging than passive entertainment because it's tailored to my interests exactly, more fulfilling than accomplishing nothing could ever be, more exciting than fantasy can be because it is real, and more beneficial and rewarding in both emotional and practical ways than entertainment can be due to the fact that learning and working opens up new social and career opportunities.
If the choice you are making is between "watch TV" and "not watch TV" you're probably going to watch it.
But if you have a busy mind full of ideas and thoughts and passions, that's not the choice you're perceiving. You've got the choice between "watch character's lives" and "make my own life awesome and watch that". If you felt strongly that you could make your own life awesome, is there anything that could convince you to watch TV instead?
Gatto doesn't do a good job of giving you perspective so you can understand his point of view here. He didn't explain how incredible it can feel to have a mind that is on, how engaging it can be to learn something you're interested in, how satisfying it is to do your own d* project your own d* way and see it actually work! He doesn't do a good job of helping you imagine how much more motivation you would experience if your creativity and analytical abilities were jacked up way beyond what they are. If your life was packed full of thoughts and ideas and self-confidence, could you spend half your free time in front of a show? If you had the kind of motivation it causes to feel like you're in the process of building an amazing life, would you be able to still your mind and focus on sitcoms?
I wouldn't. I can't. It is as if I am possessed by this supernova sized drive to DO THINGS.
Restaurants and education
I honestly don't know anything about whether these are connected. My best guess is that Gatto loves to cook, but had found not being taught how to cook to be a rather large obstacle in the way of enjoying it.
I mostly agree with the things you say, but these are not the things that Gatto says. Your position is a great deal milder than his.
In a single sentence, he claims that if only we could set up our schools the way he wants them to be set up, then social services would utterly disappear, the number of "psychic invalids" would drop to zero, "commercial entertainment of all sorts" would "vanish", and restaurants would be "drastically down-sized".
This is going beyound hyperbole; this borders on drastic ignorance.
For example, not all mental illnesses are caused by a lack of gumption. Many, such as clinical depression and schizophrenia, are genetic in nature, and will strike their victims regardless of how awesomely rational they are. Others, such as PTSD, are caused by psychological trauma and would fell even the mighty Gatto, should he be unfortunate enough to experience it.
While it's true that most of the "commercial entertainment of all sorts" is junk, some of it is art; we know this because a lot of it has survived since ancient times, despite the proclamations of people who thought just like Gatto (only referring to oil paintings, phonograph records, and plain old-fashioned writing instead of electronic media). As an English teacher, it seems like Gatto should know this.
And what's his beef with restaurants, anyway ? That's just... weird.
Do you feel the same way about fiction books, out of curiosity ?
If Eliezer claimed that raising the sanity waterline is the one magic bullet that would usher us into a new Golden Age, as we reclaim the faded glory of our ancestors, then yes, I would disagree with him too. But, AFAIK, he doesn't claim this -- unlike Gatto.
I agree that saying "all these problems will disappear" is not the same as saying that "these problems will reduce". I felt the need to explain why the problems would reduce because I wasn't sure you saw the connections.
I have to wonder if having a really well-developed intellect might offer some amount of protection against this. Whether Gatto's intellect is sufficiently well-developed for this is another topic.
I don't know. I love not cooking.
Actually, yes. When I am fully motivated, I can spend all my evenings doing altruistic work for years, reading absolutely no fiction and watching absolutely no TV shows. That level of motivation is where I'm happiest, so I prefer to live that way.
I do occasionally watch movies during those periods, perhaps once a month, because rest is important (and because movies take less time to watch than a book takes to read, but are higher quality than television, assuming you choose them well).
I see the connections, but I do not believe that some of the problems Gatto wants to fix -- f.ex. the existence of television and restaurants -- are even problems at all. Sure, TV has a lot of terrible content, and some restaurants have terrible food, but that's not the same thing as saying that the very concept of these services is hopelessly broken.
It probably would, but not to any great extent. I'm not a psychiatrist or a neurobiologist though, so I could be widely off the mark. In general, however, I think that Gatto is falling prey to the Dunning–Kruger effect when he talks about mental illness, economics, and many other things for that matter.
For example, the biggest tool in his school-fixing toolbox is the free market; he believes that if only schools could compete against each other with little to no government regulation, their quality would soar. In practice, such scenarios tend to work out... poorly.
That's fair, and your preferences are consistent. However, many other people see a great deal of value in fiction; some even choose to use it as a vehicle for transmitting their ideas (f.ex. HPMOR). I do admit that, in terms of raw productivity, I cannot justify spending one's time on reading fiction; if a person wanted to live a maximally efficient life, he would probably avoid any kind of entertainment altogether, fiction literature included. That said, many people find the act of reading fiction literature immensely useful (scientists and engineers included), and the same is true for other forms of entertainment such as music. I am fairly convinced that any person who says "entertainment is a waste of time" is committing a fallacy of false generalization.
The existence of television technology isn't, in my opinion, a problem. Nor is the fact that some shows are low quality. Even if all of them were low quality, I wouldn't necessarily see that as a problem - it would still be a way of relaxing. The problem I see with television is that the average person spends 4 hours a day watching it. (Can't remember where I got that study, sorry.) My problem with that is not that they aren't exercising (they'd still have an hour a day which is plenty of exercise, if they want it) or that they aren't being productive (you can only be so productive before you run out of mental stamina anyway, and the 40 hour work week was designed to use the entirety of the average person's stamina) but that they aren't living.
It could be argued that people need to spend hours every day imagining a fantasy. I was told by an elderly person once that before television, people would sit on a hill and daydream. I've also read that imagining doing a task correctly is more effective at making you better at it than practice. If that's true, daydreaming might be a necessity for maximum effectiveness and television might provide some kind of similar benefit. So it's possible that putting one's brain into fantasy mode for a few hours of day really is that beneficial.
Spending four hours a day in fantasy mode is not possible for me (I'm too motivated to DO something) and I don't seem to need anywhere near that much daydreaming. I would find it very hard to deal with if I had spent that much of my free time in fantasy. I imagine that if asked whether they would have preferred to watch x number of shows, or spent all of that free time on getting out there and living, most people would probably choose the latter - and that's sad.
I think that people would also have to have read the seven lessons speech for the problems he sees to be solved. Maybe eventually things would evolve to the point where schools would not behave this way anymore without them reading it, because it's probably not the most effective way of teaching, but I don't see that change happening quickly without people pressuring schools to make those specific changes.
However, I'm surprised that you say "In practice, such scenarios tend to work out... poorly." Do you mean that the free market doesn't do much to improve quality, or do you just mean that when people want specific changes and expect the free market to implement them, the free market doesn't tend to implement those specific changes?
I'm also very interested in where you got the information to support the idea, either way.
After reading Ayn Rand's the Fountainhead, my feeling was that even though much of the writing was brilliant and enjoyable, I could have gotten the key ideas much faster if she had only published a few lines from one of the last chapters. I'm having the same reaction to the sequences and HPMOR. I enjoy them and recognize the brilliance in the writing abilities, but I find myself doing things like reading lists of biases over and over in order to improve my familiarity and eventually memorize them. I still want to finish the sequences because they're so important to this culture, but what I have prioritized appears to be getting the most important information in as quickly as possible. So, although entertainment is a way of transmitting ideas, I question how efficient it is, and whether it provides enough other learning benefits to outweigh the cost of wrapping all those ideas in so much text. I could walk all the way to Florida, but flying would be faster. People realize this so if they want to take vacations, they fly. Why, then, do they use entertainment to learn instead of seeking out the most efficient method?
It makes sense from the writer's point of view. I have said before that I was very glad that Eliezer decided to popularize rationality as much as possible, as I had been thinking that somebody needed to do that for a very long time. His writing is interesting and his style is brilliant and his method has worked to attract almost twelve million hits to his site. I think that's great. But the fact that people probably would not have flocked to the site if he had posted an efficient dissemination of cognitive biases and whatnot is curious. Maybe the way I learn is different.
I think it depends on whether you use "waste of time" to mean "absolutely no benefit whatsoever" or "nowhere near the most efficient way of getting the benefit".
The statement "entertainment is an inefficient way to get ideas compared with other methods" seems true to me.
I'm afraid this account has swung to the opposite extreme---to the extent that it is quite possibly further from the truth and more misleading than Gatto's obvious hyperbole.
Schizophrenia is one of the most genetically determined of the well known mental health problems but even it is heavily dependent on life experiences. In particular, long term exposure to stressful environments or social adversity dramatically increases the risk that someone at risk for developing the condition will in fact do so.
As for clinical depression, the implication that due to being 'genetic in nature' means that the environment in which an individual spends decades of growth and development in is somehow not important is utterly absurd. Genetics is again relevant in determining how vulnerable the individual is but the social environment is again critical for determining whether problems will arise.
That's a good point, I did not mean to imply that these mental illnesses are completely unaffected by environmental factors. In addition, in case of some illnesses such as depression, there are in fact many different causes that can lead to similar symptoms, so the true picture is a lot more complex (and is still not entirely well understood).
However, this is very different from saying something like "schizophrenia is completely environmental", or even "if only people had some basic critical thinking skills, they'd never become depressed", which is how I interpreted Gatto's claims.
For example even with a relatively low heritability rate, millions of people would still contract schizophrenia every year worldwide -- especially since many of the adverse life experiences that can trigger it are unavoidable. No amount of critical thinking will reduce the number of victims to zero. And that's just one specific disease among many, and we're not even getting into more severe cases such as Down's Syndrome. If Gatto thinks otherwise, then he's being hopelessly naive.
I have, in fact, read the Speech before, quite some time ago. My point is that outstanding teachers can make a big positive difference in the students' lives (at least, that was the case for me), largely by deliberately avoiding some or all of the anti-patterns that Gatto lists in his Speech. We were also taught the basics of critical thinking in an English class (of all places), though this could've been a fluke (or, once again, a teacher's personal initiative).
I should also point out that these anti-patterns are not ubiquitous. I was lucky enough to attend a school in another country for a few of my teenage years (a long, long time ago). During a typical week, we'd learn how to solve equations in Math class, apply these skills to exercises in Statistics, stage an experiment and record the results in Physics, then program in the statistics formulae and run them on our experimental results in Informatics (a.k.a. Computer Science). Ideas tend to make more sense when connections between them are revealed.
I haven't seen anything like this in US-ian education, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that some school somewhere in the US is employing such an approach.
Edited to add:
I share your frustration, but there's no need to overdramatize.
Speaking as a rationalist and a Christian, I've always found that a bit too propaganda-ish for my tastes. And I wouldn't call Luke's journey "completed", exactly. Still, it can be valuable to see what others have thought in similar positions to you, in a shoulders-of-giants sort of way.
I think it would be better to focus on improving your rationality, rather than seeking out tracts that disagree with you. There's nothing wrong with reading such tracts, as long as you're rational enough not to internalize mistakes from it (on either side) but I wouldn't make it your main goal.
Sam Bhagwat has served a mission and has posted here about how to emulate the Latter-day Saints' approach to community-building..
Hahaha! I find it heartening that that is your response to me wanting to be a teacher. I am quite aware that the system is broken. My personal way of explaining it: The school system works for what it was made to work for; avoiding responsibility for a failed product.
The parents are not responsible; the school taught their kids.
The students are not socially responsible; everything was compulsory, they had no choice to make.
Teachers are not to blame; they teach what they are told to teach and have the autonomy of a pre-AI computer intelligence.
The administrators are not to blame; They are not the students' parents or teachers.
The faceless, nameless committees that set the curriculum are not responsible, they formed then separated after setting forth the unavoidably terrible standards for all students of an arbitrary age everywhere.
So the product fails but everyone did they're best. No nails stick out, no one gets hammered.
I have high dreams of being the educator that takes down public education. If a teacher comes up with a new way of teaching or an important thing to teach, he can go to class the next day and test it. I have a hope of professional teachers; either trusted with the autonomy of being professionals, or actual professionals in their subject, teaching only those that want to learn.
Also the literature on Mormons fromDesrtopa, Ford and Nisan I am thankful for. I enjoyed the Mormonism organizational post because I have also noticed how well the church runs. It is one reason I stay a Latter-Day Saint in this time of Atheism mainstreaming. The church is winning, it is well organized, service and family-oriented, and supports me as I study rationality and education. I can give examples, but I will leave my deeper insights for my future posts; I feel I am well introduced for now.
I love Mormonism.
Possibly because I love Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Mormonism seems to be at least partially inspired by it.
That seems rather unlikely, inasmuch as the first English translation was in 1896 - by which point Smith had preached, died, the Mormons evacuated to Utah, begun proselytizing overseas and baptism of the dead, set up a successful state, disavowed polygamy, etc.
I would be quite interested to see a more detailed post regarding that last part. Of course, I am just some random guy on the Internet, but still :-)
I don't think you'll find much discussion of theology here, since in these parts religion is generally treated as an open and shut case. The archives of Luke Muelhauser's blog, Common Sense Atheism, are probably a much more abundant resource for rational analysis of theology; it documents his (fairly extensive) research into theological matters stemming from his own crisis of faith, starting before he became an atheist.
Obviously, the name of the site is rather a giveaway as to the ultimate conclusion that he drew (I would have named it differently in his place,) and the foregone conclusion might be a bit mindkilling, but I think the contents will probably be a fair approximation of the position of most of the community here on religious theological matters, made more explicit than they generally are on Less Wrong.
I would love to hear more details, both about the process and about the conclusion, if you are brave/foolish enough to share.
Hello everyone, Like many people, I come to this site via an interest in transhumanism, although it seems unlikely to me that FAI implementing CEV can actually be designed before the singularity (I can explain why, and possibly even what could be done instead, but it suddenly occurred to me that it seems presumptuous of me to criticize a theory put forward by very smart people when I only have 1 karma...).
Oddly enough, I am not interested in improving epistemic rationality right now, partially because I am already quite good at it. But more than that, I am trying to switch it off when talking to other people, for the simple reason (and I'm sure this has already been pointed out before) that if you compare three people, one who estimates the probability of an event at 110%, one who estimates it at 90%, and one who compensates for overconfidence bias and estimates it at 65%, the first two will win friends and influence people, while the third will seem indecisive (unless they are talking to other rationalists). I think I am borderline asperger's (again, like many people here) and optimizing social skills probably takes precedence over most other things.
I am currently doing a PhD in "absurdly simplistic computational modeling of the blatantly obvious" which better damn well have some signaling value. In my spare time, to stop my brain turning to mush, among other things I am writing a story which is sort of rationalist, in that some of the characters keep using science effectively even when the world is going crazy and the laws of physics seem to change dependent upon whether you believe in them. On the other hand, some of the characters are (a) heroes/heroines (b) awesomely successful (c) hippies on acid who do not believe in objective reality (not that I am implying that all hippies/people who use lsd are irrational). Maybe the point of the story is that you need more than just rationality? Or that some people are powerful because of rationality, while others have imagination, and that friendship combines their powers in a my little pony like fashion? Or maybe its all just an excuse for pretentious philosophy and psychic battles?
Welcome!
Made me think of this article. Yes, you may be able, in the short run, to win friends and influence people by tricking yourself into being overconfident. But that belief is only in your head and doesn't affect the universe–thus doesn't affect the probability of Event X happening. Which means that if, realistically, X is 65% likely to happen, then you with your overconfidence, claiming that X is bound to happen, will eventually look like a fool 35% of the time, and will make it hard for yourself to leave a line of retreat.
Conclusion: in the long run, it's very good to be honest with yourself about your predictions of the future, and probably preferable to be honest with others, too, if you want to recruit their support.
I'm Abd ul-Rahman Lomax, introducing myself. I have six grandchildren, from five biological children, and I have two adopted girls, age 11 from China, and age 9 from Ethiopia.
Born in 1944, Abd ul-Rahman is not my birth name, I accepted Islam in 1970. Not being willing to accept pale substitutes, I learned to read the Qur'an in Arabic by reading the Qur'an in Arabic.
Back to my teenage years, I was at Cal Tech for a couple of years, being in Richard P. Feynman's two years of undergraduate physics classes, the ones made into the textbook. I had Linus Pauling for freshman chemistry, as well. Both of them helped create how I think.
I left Cal Tech to pursue a realm other than "science," but was always interested in direct experience rather than becoming stuffed with tradition, though I later came to respect tradition (and memorization) far more than at the outset. I became a leader of a "spiritual community," and a successor to a well-known teacher, Samuel L. Lewis, but was led to pursue many other interests.
I delivered babies (starting with my own) and founded a school of midwifery that trained midwives for licensing in Arizona.
Self-taught, I started an electronics design consulting business, still going with a designer in Brazil.
I became known as one of the many independent inventors of delegable proxy as a method of creating hierarchical communication structure from the bottom up. Social structure, and particularly how to facilitate collective intelligence, has been a long-term interest.
I was a Muslim chaplain at San Quentin State Prison, serving an almost entirely Black community. In case you haven't guessed, I'm not black. I loved it. People are people.
So much I'm not saying yet.... I became interested in wikis early on, but didn't get to Wikipedia until 2005, becoming seriously active in 2007. Eventually, I came across an abusive blacklisting of a web site, a well-known archive of scientific papers on cold fusion. I'd been very aware of the 1989 announcement and some of the ensuing flap, but had assumed, like most people with enough knowledge to know what it was about, that the work had not been replicated.
When I looked, I became interested enough to buy a number of major works in the area (including almost all of the skeptical literature).
Among those who have become familiar, cold fusion (a bit of a misnomer; at the least it was prematurely named), is an ultimately clear example of how pseudoskepticism came to dominate a whole field, for over fifteen years. The situation flipped in the peer-reviewed journals beginning about eight years ago, but that's not widely recognized, it is merely obvious if one looks at what has been published in that period of time..
Showing this is way beyond the scope of this introduction, but I assume it will come up. I'm just asserting what I reasonably conclude, having become familiar with the evidence, (and I'm working with the scientists in the field now, in many ways).
As to rational skepticism, I was known to Martin Gardner, who quoted a study of mine on the so-called Miracle of the Nineteen in the Qur'an, the work of Rashad Khalifa, whom I knew personally.
I naively thought, for a couple of days, that a rational-skeptic approach to cold fusion might be welcome on RationalWiki. Definitely not. Again, that's another story. However, I'm not banned there and have sysop privileges (like most users).
On RationalWiki, however, I came across the work of Yudkowsky, and this blog. Wow! In some of the circles in which I've moved, I've been a voice crying in the wilderness, with only a few echoes here and there. Here, I'm reluctant to say anything, so commonly cogent is comment in this community. I know I'm likely to stick my foot in my mouth.
However, that's never stopped me, and learning to recognize the taste of my foot, with the help of my friends, is one way in which I've kept my growth alive. The fastest way to learn is generally to make mistakes.
I'm also likely to comment, eventually, on the practical ontology and present reality of Landmark Education, with which I've become quite familiar, as well as on the myths and facts which widely circulate about Landmark. To start, they do let you go to the bathroom.
Meanwhile, I've caught up with HPMOR, and am starting to read the sequences. Great stuff, folks.
Hi LWers,
I am Robert and I am going to change the world. Maybe just a little bit, but that’s ok, since it’s fun to do and there’s nothing else I need to do right now. (Yay for mini-retirements!)
I find some of the articles here on LW very useful, especially those on heuristics and biases, as well as material on self-improvement although I find it quite scattered among loads of way to theoretic stuff. Does it seem odd that I have learned much more useful tricks and gained more insight from reading HPMOR than from reading 30 to 50 high-rated and “foundational” articles on this site? I am sincerely sad that even the leading rationalists on LW seem to struggle getting actual benefits out of their special skills and special knowledge (Yvain: Rationality is not that great; Eliezer: Why aren't "rationalists" surrounded by a visible aura of formidability?) and I would like to help them change that.
My interest is mainly in contributing more structured, useful content and also to band together with fellow LWers to practice and apply our rationalist skills. As a stretch goal I think that we could pick someone really evil as our enemy and take them down, just to show our superiority. Let me stress that I am not kidding here. If rationality really counts for something (other than being good entertainment for sciency types and sci-fi lovers), then we should be able to find the right leverages and play out a great plot which just leaves everyone gasping “shit!” And then we’ll have changed the world, because people will start taking rationality serious.
Let me send out a warm “thank you” to you all for welcoming me in your rationalist circles!
Welcome!
Because they don't project high status with their body language?
Re: Taking out someone evil. Let's be rational about this. Do we want to get press? Will taking them out even be worthwhile? What sort of benefits from testing ideas against reality can we expect?
I think humans who study rationality might be better than other humans at avoiding certain basic mistakes. But that doesn't mean that the study of rationality (as it currently exists) amounts to a "success spray" that you can spray on any goal to make it more achievable.
Also, if the recent survey is to be believed, the average IQ at Less Wrong is very high. So if LW does accomplish something, it could very well be due to being smart rather than having read a bunch about rationality. (Sometimes I wonder if I like LW mainly because it seems to have so many smart people.)
Hello! I'm David.
I'm 26 (at the time of writing), male, and an IT professional. I have three (soon to be four) children, three (but not four) of which have a different dad.
My immediate links here were through the Singularity Institute and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which drove me here when I realized the connection (I came to those things entirely separately!). When I came across this site, I had read through the Wikipedia list of biases several times over the course of years, come to many conscious conclusions about the fragility of my own cognition, and had innumerable arguments with friends and family that changed minds, but I never really considered that there would be a large community of people that got together on those grounds.
I'm going to do the short version of my origin story here, since writing it all out seems both daunting and pretentious. I was raised rich and lucky by an entrepreneur/university professor/doctor father and a mother who always had to be learning something or go crazy (she did some of both). I dropped out of a physics major in college and got my degree in gunsmithing instead, but only after I worked a few years. Along the way, I've politically and morally moved around, but I'm worried that the settling of my moral and political beliefs is a symptom of my brain settling rather than because of all of my rationalizations.
There are a few reasons that I haven't commented on here yet (mostly because I despise any sort of hard work), and this is an attempt to break some of those inhibitions and maybe even get to know some people well enough (i.e. at all) to actively desire discourse.
Ok, David Fun Facts time:
I know enough Norwegian, Chinese, Latin, Lojban, and Spanish to do...something useful maybe?
I almost never think of what I'm saying before I say it (as in black-box), and I let it continue because it works.
Corollary: I curse a lot when I'm comfortable with people.
Corollary: My voice is low and loud, so it carries quite far.
I play a lot of video games, board games, and thought experiment games.
Greetings LWers,
I'm an aspiring Friendliness theorist, currently based at the Australian National University -- home to Marcus Hutter, Rachael Briggs and David Chalmers, amongst others -- where I study formal epistemology through the Ph.B. (Hons) program.
I wasn't always in such a stimulating environment -- indeed I grew up in what can only be deemed intellectual deprivation, from which I narrowly escaped -- and, as a result of my disregard for authority and despise for traditional classroom learning, I am largely self-taught. Unlike most autodidacts, though, I never was a voracious reader, on the contrary I barely opened books at all, instead preferring to think things over in my head; this has left me an ignorant person -- something I'm constantly striving to improve on -- but has also protected me from many diseased ideas and even allowed me to better appreciate certain notions by having to rediscover them myself. (case in fact, throughout my adolescence I took great satisfaction in analysing my mental mechanisms and correcting for what I now know to be biases, yet I never came across the relevant literature, essentially missing out on a wealth of knowledge)
For a long time I've aspired to join a cultural movement modelled on the principles of the Enlightenment and, to my eyes, LW, MIRI, CFAR, FHI and CSER are exactly the kind of community that can impact society through the use of reason. Alas, I was long unaware of their existence and when I first heard about the 'Singularity' I immediately dismissed it as the science fiction it sounds like, but thankfully this is no longer the case and I can now start making my modest contributions to reducing existential risk.
Lastly, I've never had my IQ measured properly -- passing the Mensa admission test places me at least two SDs above the norm, but that's hardly impressive by LW standards -- and, as much as I value such an indicator, I'm too emotionally invested in my intelligence to dare undergo psychometric testing. (for what it's worth, as a child my development was precocious -- e.g. the development of my motor skills was superior to that of the subjects taking part in this well-known longitudinal study)
I've opened up a lot to you, LWers; I hope my only regret will be not having discovered you earlier...
Isn't that a proper IQ test? At least it is where I live. Funny how we like to talk about things we're good at. The real test is "time from passing test to time you leave to save the yearly fee."
That's awesome. Don't miss Marcus' lectures, such a sharp mind. Also, midi - Imperial March (used to be?) playing on his home page.
Yes and no; it's some version of the Cattell, but it's not administered individually, has a lowish ceiling and they don't reveal your exact result.
For the record, you needn't join in order to take their heavily subsidised admission test.
"machine/emergent intelligence theorist" would not box you in as much. Friendliness is only one model, you know, no matter how convincing it may sound.
"machine intelligence researcher" is also much more employable -- which isn't saying much.
One can signal differently to make oneself more palatable to different audiences and, indeed, "machine/emergent intelligence theorist" is less confining, while "machine intelligence researcher" is more suitable for academia or industry; here at LW, however, I needn't conceal my specific interests, which happen to be in AI safety and friendliness.
Nice! What part of FAI interests you?
Too soon to say, as I discovered FAI a mere two months ago -- this, incidentally, could mean that it's a fleeting passion -- but CEV has definitely caught my attention, while the concept of a reflective decision theory I find really fascinating. The latter is something I've been curious about for quite some time, as plenty of moral precepts seem to break down once an agent -- even a mere homo sapiens -- reaches certain levels of self-awareness and, thus, is able to alter their decision mechanisms.
Hello, everyone!
I'd been religious (Christian) my whole life, but was always plagued with the question, "How would I know this is the correct religion, if I'd grown up with a different cultural norm?" I concluded, after many years of passive reflection, that, no, I probably wouldn't have become Christian at all, given that there are so many good people who do not. From there, I discovered that I was severely biased toward Christianity, and in an attempt to overcome that bias, I became atheist before I realized it.
I know that last part is a common idiom that's usually hyperpole, but I really did become atheist well before I consciously knew I was. I remember reading HPMOR, looking up lesswrong.com, reading the post on "Belief in Belief", and realizing that I was doing exactly that: explaining an unsupported theory by patching the holes, instead of reevaluating and updating, given the evidence.
It's been more than religion, too, but that's the area where I really felt it first. Next projects are to apply the principles to my social and professional life.
Welcome!
The least attractive thing about the rationalist life-style is nihilism. It's there, it's real, and it's hard to handle. Eliezer's solution is to be happy and the nihilism will leave you alone. But if you have a hard life, you need a way to spontaneously generate joy. That's why so many people turn to religion as a comfort when they are in bad situations.
The problem that I find is that all ways to spontaneously generate joy have some degree of mysticism. I'm looking into Tai Chi as a replacement for going to church. But that's still eastern mumbo-jumbo as opposed to western mumbo-jumbo. Stoicism might be the most rational joy machine I can find.
Let me know if you ever un-convert.
Hello!
I actually started an account two years ago, but after a few comments I decided I wasn't emotionally or intellectually ready for active membership. I was confused and hurt for various reasons that weren't Less Wrong's fault, and I backed away to avoid saying something I might regret. I didn't want to put undue pressure on myself to respond to topics I didn't fully understand. Now, after many thousands of hours reading and thinking about neurology, evolutionary psychology, and math, I'm more confident that I won't just be swept up in the half-understood arguments of people much smarter than I am. :)
Like almost everyone here, I started with atheism. I was raised Hindu, and my home has the sort of vague religiosity that is arguably the most common form in the modern world. For the most part, I figured out atheism on my own, when I was around 11 or 12. It was emotionally painful and socially costly, but I'm stronger for the experience. I started reading various mediocre atheist blogs, but I got bored after a couple of years and wanted to do something more than shoot blind fish in tiny barrels. I wanted to build something up, not just tear something down (no matter how much it really should be torn down.)
The actual direct link to Less Wrong came from TV Tropes. I suspect it's one of the best gateway drugs because TV Tropes, while not explicitly atheist or rationalist, does more to communicate the positive ideals and emotional memes of LW-style rationality than most of the atheosphere does. For the first time, I got the sense that "our" way of thinking could be so much more powerful than simply bashing religion and astrology.
One important truth beyond atheism that I have slowly come to accept is inborn IQ differentials, between individuals and groups of individuals. I had to face the fact that P(male| IQ 2 standard deviations above mean) was significantly higher than 50%. I had to deal with the fact that historical oppression probably wasn't the end-all be-all explanation for why women on average hadn't done as much inventing and discovering and brilliant thinking as men. I had to face the fact that mere biology may have systematically biased my half of the population against greatness. And it hurt. I had to fight the urge to redefine intelligence and/or greatness to assuage the pain.
I further learned that my brain was modular, and the bits of me that I choose to call "I" don't constitute everything. My own brain could sabotage the values and ideals and that "I" hold so dearly. For a long time I struggled with the idea that everything I believed in and loved was fake, because I couldn't force my body to actually act accordingly. Did I value human life? Why wasn't I doing everything I possibly could to save lives, all the time? Did I value freedom and autonomy and gender equality? Why could I not help sometimes being attracted to domineering jerks?
It took me a while to accept that the newly-evolved, conscious, abstractly-reasoning, self-reflecting "I" simply did not have the firepower to bully ancient and powerful urges into submission. It took me a while to accept that my values were not lies simply because my monkey brain sometimes contradicted them. The "I" in my brain does not have as much power as she would like; that does not mean she doesn't exist.
Other, non-rationality related information: I love writing, and for a long time I convinced myself that therefore I would love being a novelist. Now, I recognize that I would much rather compose a non-fiction or reflective essay, although ideas for fiction stories still flood in and I rarely do much about it due to laziness and/or fear. I fell in love with Avatar: The Last Airbender for its great storytelling and its combination of intelligence and idealism. I adore Pixar and many Disney movies for the sweetness and heart. I like somewhat traditional-sounding music with easily discernible lyrics that tells a story; I can't get into anything that involves screaming or deliberate disharmony. Show-tunes are great. :)
I don't want to lose the hope/idealism/inner happiness that makes me able to in-ironically enjoy Disney and Pixar and Avatar; I consciously cultivate it and am lucky to have it. If this disposition will be "destroyed by the truth"...well, I have a choice to make then.
Have you seen the new My Little Pony show? It's really good. It's sweet without being twee.
I've been through this kind of thing before, and Less Wrong did nothing for me in this respect (although Less Wrong is awesome for many other reasons). Reading Ayn Rand on the other hand made all the difference in the world in this respect, and changed my life.
We seem to have a lot of Airbender fans here at LW -- Alicorn was the one who started me watching it, and I know SarahC and rubix are fans.
Welcome =)
Did you see Brave? I thought it was great.
I'm not sure about Disney, but the you should still be able to enjoy Avatar. Avatar (TLA and Korra) is in many ways a deconstruction of magical worlds. They take the basic premise of kung-fu magic and then let that propagate to it's logical conclusions. The TLA war was enabled by rapid industrialization when one nation realized they could harness their breaking the laws of thermodynamics for energy. The premise of S1 Korra is exploring social inequality in the presence of randomly distributed magical powers.
In these ways, Avatar is less Harry Potter and more HPMoR.
Honestly, I was disappointed with the ending of Season 1 Korra: (rot13)
Nnat zntvpnyyl tvirf Xbeen ure oraqvat onpx nsgre Nzba gbbx vg njnl, naq gurer ner ab creznarag pbafrdhraprf gb nalguvat.
I'm not necessarily idealistic enough to be happy with a world that has no consequences or really difficult choices; I'm just not cynical enough to find misanthropy and defeatism cool. That's why children's entertainment appeals to me - while it can be overly sugary-sweet, adult entertainment often seems to be both narrow and shallow, and at the same time cynical. Outside of science fiction, there doesn't seem to be much adult entertainment that's about things I care about - saving the world, doing something big and important and good.
ETA: What Zach Weiner makes fun of here - that's what I'm sick of. Not just misanthropy and undiscriminating cynicism, but glorifying it as the height of intelligence. LessWrong seemed very pleasantly different in that sense.
They run strongly in families (although it's not clear exactly how, since neither of Katara's parents appears to have been a waterbender). It's not really random.
You are correct. I wouldn't consider it much different from personality. It's part heritable, part environmental and upbringing, and part randomness.
Now you've got me wondering if philosophers in the Avatar universe have debates on whether your element/bending is nature vs nurture.
Now I want an ATLA fanfic infused with Star Trek-style pensive philosophizing. :D
I would argue that it has even more potential than HP for a rationalist makeover. Aang stays in the iceberg and Sokka saves the planet?
Great to see you here and great to hear you took the time to read up on the relevant material before jumping in. I'm confident that you will find many people who comment quite a bit don't have such prudence, so don't be surprised if you outmatch a long time commenter. (^_^)
Yesss! This is exactly how I felt when I found this community.
Consciously keeping your identity small and thus not identifying with everyone who happens to have the same internal plumbing might be helpful there.
Hello, I'm a 21 year old undergraduate student studying Economics and a bit of math on the side. I found LessWrong through HPMOR, and recently started working on the sequences. I've always been torn between an interest in pure rational thinking, and an almost purely emotional / empathetic desire for altruism, and this conflict is becoming more and more significant as I weigh options moving forward out of Undergrad (Peace Corp? Developmental Economics?)... I'm fond of ellipses, Science Fiction novels and board games - I'll keep my interests to a minimum here, but I've noticed there are meetups regularly; I'm currently studying abroad in Europe, but I live close to Washington DC and would enjoy meeting members of the community face to face at some point in the future!
Edit: If anyone reads this, could you either direct me to a conversation that addresses the question "How has LW / rational thinking influenced your day to day life, if at all," or respond to me directly here (or via PM) if you're comfortable with that! Thanks!
Those are not at all at odds. Read e.g. Why Spock is Not Rational, or Feeling Rational.
Relevant excerpts from both:
and
Your purely emotion / empathetic desire for altruism governs setting your goals, your pure rational thinking governs how you go about reaching your goals. You're allowed to be emotionally suckered, eh, influenced into doing your best (instrumental rationality) to do good in the world (for your values of 'good')!
Thank you for the reading suggestions! Perhaps my mind has already packaged Spock / lack of emotion into my understanding of the concept of 'Rationality.'
To respond directly -
Though if pure emotion / altruism sets my goals, the possibility of irrational / insignificant goals remains, no? If for example, I only follow pure emotion's path to... say... becoming an advocate for a community through politics, there is no 'check' on the rationality of pursuing a political career to achieve the most good (which again, is a goal that requires rational analysis)?
In HPMoR, characters are accused of being 'ambitious with no ambition' - setting my goals with empathetic desire for altruism would seem to put me in this camp.
Perhaps my goal, as I work my way through the sequences and the site, is to approach rationality as a tool / learning process of its own, and see how I can apply it to my life as I go. Halfway through typing this response, I found this quote from the Twelve Virtues of Rationality:
There is no "correct" way whatsoever in setting your terminal values, your "ultimate goals" (other agents may prefer you to pursue values similar to their own, whatever those may be). Your ultimate goals can include anything from "maximize the number of paperclips" to "paint everything blue" to "always keep in a state of being nourished (for the sake of itself!)" or "always keep in a state of emotional fulfillment through short-term altruistic deeds".
Based on those ultimate goals, you define other, derivative goals, such as "I want to buy blue paint" as an intermediate goal towards "so I can paint everything blue". Those "stepping stones" can be irrational / insignificant (in relation to pursuing your terminal values), i.e. you can be "wrong" about them. Maybe you shouldn't buy blue paint, but rather produce it yourself. Or rather invest in nanotechnology to paint everything blue using nanomagic.
Only you can (or can't, humans are notoriously bad at accurately providing their actual utility functions) try to elucidate what your ultimate goals are, but having decided on them, they are supra-rational / beyond rational / 'rational not applicable' by definition.
There is no fault in choosing "I want to live a life that maximizes fuzzy feelings through charitable acts" over "I'm dedicating my life to decreasing the Gini index, whatever the personal cost to myself."
Hi, my name is Alex. I'm not that smart as ppl posting articles here. My ability to properly challenge the captcha only from 2nd attempt while registering here in LW proves this :) So I was learning math when being student, now working in IT. While typing this comment I've been thinking what is my purpose of spending time here and reading different info... and suddenly realized that i'm 29 already and life is too short to afford thinking wrong and thinking slow. So hope to improve myself to be able learn and understand more and more things. Cheers to everyone :)
Hi, I'm Edward and have been reading the occasional article on here for a while. I've finally decided to officially join as this year I'm starting to do more work on my knowledge and education (especially maths & science) and I like the thoughtful community I see here. I'm a programmer, but also have a passion for history. Just as I was finishing university, my thinking led me to abandon the family religion (many of my friends are still theists). I was going to keep thinking and exploring ideas but I ended up just living - now I want to begin thinking again.
Regards, Edward
Hello LW community. I'm a HS math teacher most interested in Geometry and Number Theory. I have long been attracted to mathematics and philosophy because they both embody the search for truth that has driven me all my life. I believe reason and logic are profoundly important both as useful tools in this search, and for their apparently unique development within our species.
Humans aren't particularly fast, or strong, or resistant to damage as compared with many other creatures on the planet, but we seem to be the only ones with a reasonably well developed faculty for reasoning and questioning. This leads me to believe that developing these skills is a clear imperative for all human beings, and I have worked hard all my life to use rational thinking, discourse and debate to better understand the world around me and the decisions that I make every day.
This is what drove me towards teaching as a career, as I see my profession as providing me with the opportunity to help young people better understand the importance of reason and logic, as well as help them to develop their ability to utilise them.
I'm excited to finally become a member of this community which seems to share in many of the values I hold dear, and look forward to many intriguing and thought provoking discussions here on LW!
I used to have a different account here, but I wanted a new one with my real name so I made this one.
I study computer and electrical engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, though I'm not finding it very gratifying (rationalists are rare creatures around here for some reason), and I'm trying as hard as I can to find some other way to get paid to code/think so I can drop out. Here's my occasionally-updated reading list, and my favorite programming language is Clojure.
Background:
21-year old transgender-neither. I spent 13 years enveloped by Mormon culture and ideology, growing up in a sheltered environment. Then, everything changed when the Fire nation attacked.
Woops. Off-track.
I want my actions to matter, not from others remembering them but from me being alive to remember them . In simpler terms, I want to live for a long time - maybe forever. Death should be a choice, not an unchanging eventuality.
But I don't know where to start; I feel overwhelmed by all the things I need to learn.
So I've come here. I'm reading the sequences and trying to get a better grasp on thinking rationally, etc., but was hoping to get pointers from the more experienced.
What is needed right now? I want to do what I can to help not only myself, but those whose paths I cross.
~Jenna
Welcome! Have you considered signing up for cryonics?
Aside from the occasional X-files episode and science fiction reading, I don't know much about cryonics.
I considered it as a possibility but dislike that it means I'm 'in suspense' while the world is continuing on without me. I want to be an active participant! :D
Certainly, but when you no longer can be, it's nice to have an option of becoming one again some day.
Option might be too strong a word. Its nice to have the vanishingly-small possibility. I think its important for transhumanists to remind ourselves that cryonics is unlikely to actually work, its just the only hail-mary available.
Far as I can tell, the basic tech in cryonics should basically work. Storage organizations are uncertain and so is the survival of the planet. But if we're told that the basic cryonics tech didn't work, we've learned some new fact of neuroscience unknown to present-day knowledge.
Don't assign vanishingly small probabilities to things just because they sound weird, or it sounds less likely to get funny looks if you can say that it's just a tiny chance. That is not how 'probability' works. Probabilities of basic cryonics tech working are questions of neuroscience, full stop; if you know the basic tech has a tiny probability of working, you must know something about current vitrification solutions or the operation of long-term memory which I do not.
I actually am signed up for cryonics.
My issue with the basic tech is that liquid nitrogen, while a cheap storage method, is too cold to avoid fracturing. Experience with imaging systems leads me to believe that fractures will interfere with reconstructions of the brain's geometry, and cryoprotectants obviously destroy chemical information.
Now, it seems likely to me that at some point in the future the fracturing problem can be solved, or at least mitigated, by intermediate temperature storing and careful cooling processes, but that won't fix the bodies frozen today. So I don't doubt that (barring large neuroscience related, unquantifiable uncertainty) cryonics may improve to the point where the tech is likely to work (or be supplanted by plastination methods,etc), it is not there now, and what matters for people frozen today is the state of cryonics today.
Saying there are no fundamental scientific barriers to the tech working is not the same thing as saying the hard work of engineering has been done and the tech currently works.
Edit: I also have a weak prior that the chemical information in the brain is important, but it is weak.
Since this is the key point of neuroscience, do you want to expand on it? What experience with imaging leads you to believe that fractures (of incompletely vitrified cells) will implement many-to-one mappings of molecular start states onto molecular end states in a way that overlaps between functionally relevant brain states? What chemical information is obviously destroyed and is it a type that could plausibly play a role in long-term memory?
"many-to-one mappings of molecular start states onto molecular end states in a way that overlaps between functionally relevant brain states" is probably too restrictive. I would use "possibly functionally different, but subjectively acceptably close brain states".
The cryoprotectants are toxic, they will damage proteins (misfolds, etc) and distort relative concentrations throughout the cell. This information is irretrievable once the damage is done. This is what I refereed to when I said obviously destroyed chemical information. It is our hope that such information is unimportant, but my (as I said above fairly uncertain) prior would be that the synaptic protein structures are probably important. My prior is so weak because I am not an expert on biochemistry or neuroscience.
As to the physical fracture, very detailed imaging would have to be done on either side of the fracture in order to match the sides back up, and this is related to a problem I do have some experience with. I'm familiar with attempts to use synchrotron radiation to image protein structures, which has a percolation problem- you are damaging what you are trying to image while you image it. If you have lots of copies of what you want to image, this is a solvable problem, but with only one original you are going to lose information.
Edit: in regards to the first point, kalla724 makes the same point with much more relevant expertise in this thread http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8f4/neil_degrasse_tyson_on_cryogenics/ His experience working with synapses leads him to a much stronger estimate that cryoprotectants cause irreversible damage. I may strengthen my prior a bit.
How do you know? I'm not asking for some burden of infinite proof where you have to prove that the info can't be stored elsewhere. I am asking whether you know that widely functionally different start states are being mapped onto an overlapping spread of molecularly identical end states, and if so, how. E.g., "denaturing either conformation A or conformation B will both result in denatured conformation C and the A-vs.-B distinction is just a little twist of this spatially isolated thingy here so you wouldn't expect it to be echoed in any exact nearby positions of blah" or something.
Do you think it's at all likely that the connectome can be recovered after fracturing by "matching up" the structure on either side of the fracture?
It seems to me that they're also questions of engineering feasibility. A thing can be provably possible and yet unfeasibly difficult to implement in reality. Consider the difference between, say, adding salt to water and getting it out again. What if the difference in cost and engineering difficulty between vitrifying and successfully de-vitrifying is similar? What if it turns out to be ten orders of magnitude greater?
I think the most likely failure condition for cryonics tech (as opposed to cyronics organizations) isn't going to be that revival turns out to be impossible, but that revival turns out to be so unbelievably hard or expensive that it's never feasible to actually do. If it's physically and information-theoretically allowed to revive a person, but technologically impractical (even with Sufficiently Advanced Science), then its theoretical possibility doesn't help the dead much.
I have the same concern about unbounded life extension, actually; but I find success in that area more probable for some reason.
(personal disclosure: I'm not signed up for cryonics, but I don't give funny looks to people who are. Their screws seem a bit loose but they're threaded in the right direction. That's more than one can say for most of the world.)
Is this your true objection? What potential discovery in neuroscience would cause you to abandon cryonics and actively look for other ways to preserve your identity beyond the natural human lifespan? (This is a standard question one asks a believer to determine whether the belief in question is rational -- what evidence would make you stop believing?)
Personally, I would be very impressed if anyone could demonstrate memory loss in a cryopreserved and then revived organism, like a bunch of C. elegans losing their maze-running memories. They're very simple, robust organisms, it's a large crude memory, the vitrification process ought to work far better on them than a human brain, and if their memories can't survive, that'd be huge evidence against anything sensible coming out of vitrified human brains no matter how much nanotech scanning is done (and needless to say, such scanning or emulation methods can and will be tested on a tiny worm with a small fixed set of neurons long before they can be used on anything approaching a human brain). It says a lot about how poorly funded cryonics research is that no one has done this or something similar as far as I know.
Hmm, I wonder how much has been done on figuring out the memory storage in this organism. Like, if you knock out a few neurons or maybe synapses, how much does it forget?
Since it's C. elegans, I assume the answer is 'a ton of work has been done', but I'm too tired right now to go look or read more medical/biological papers.
Anders Sandberg who does get the concept of sufficiently advanced technology posts saying, "Shit, turns out LTM seems to depend really heavily on whether protein blah has conformation A and B and the vitrification solution denatures it to C and it's spatially isolated so there's no way we're getting the info back, it's possible something unknown embodies redundant information but this seems really ubiquitous and basic so the default assumption is that everyone vitrified is dead". Although, hm, in this case I'd just be like, "Okay, back to chopping off the head and dropping it in a bucket of liquid nitrogen, don't use that particular vitrification solution". I can't think offhand of a simple discovery which would imply literally giving up on cryonics in the sense of "Just give up you can't figure out how to freeze people ever." I can certainly think of bad news for particular techniques, though.
OK. More instrumentally, then. What evidence would make you stop paying the cryo insurance premiums with CI as the beneficiary and start looking for alternatives?
Anders publishes that, CI announces they intend to go on vitrifying patients anyway, Alcor offers a chop-off-your-head-and-dunk-in-liquid-nitro solution. Not super plausible but it's off the top of my head.
Can you name currently available alternatives to cryonics which accomplish a similar goal?
Apologies, misinterpreted the question.
In my case, to name one contingency: if the NEMALOAD Project finds that analysis of relatively large cellular structures doesn't suffice to predict neuronal activity, and concludes that the activity of individual molecules is essential to the process, then I'd become significantly more worried about EHeller's objection and redo the cost-benefit calculation I did before signing up for cryonics. (It came out in favor, using my best-guess probability of success between 1 and 5 percent; but it wouldn't have trumped the cost at, say, 0.1%.)
To name another: if the BPF shows that cryopreservation makes a hash of synaptic connections, I'd explicitly re-do the cost-benefit calculation as well.
He's kind of been working on that for a while now.
(I suppose that works either as "subvert the natural human lifespan entirely through creating FAI" or "preserve his identity for time immemorial in the form of 'Harry-Stu' fanfiction" depending on how cynical one is feeling.)
Have you seen the comments by kalla724 in this thread?
Edit: There's some further discussion here.
I'd say full speed ahead, Cap'n. Basic cryonics tech working - while being a sine qua non - isn't the ultimate question for people signing up for cryonics. It's just a term in the probability calculation for the actual goal: "Will I be revived (in some form that would be recognizable to my current self as myself)?" (You've mentioned that in the parent comment, but it deserves more than a passing remark.)
And that most decidedly requires a host of complex assumptions, such as "an agent / a group of agents will have an interest in expending resources into reviving a group of frozen old-version homo sapiens, without any enhancements, me among them", "the future agents' goals cannot be served merely by reading my memory engrams, then using them as a database, without granting personhood", "there won't be so many cryo-patients at a future point (once it catches on with better tech) that thawing all of them would be infeasible, or disallowed", not to mention my favorite "I won't be instantly integrated into some hivemind in which I lose all traces of my individuality".
What we're all hoping for, of course, is for a benevolent super-current-human agent - e.g. an FAI - to care enough about us to solve all the technical issues and grant us back our agent-hood. By construction at least in your case the advent of such an FAI would be after your passing (you wouldn't be frozen otherwise). That means that you (of all people) would also need to qualify the most promising scenario "there will be a friendly AI to do it" with "and it will have been successfully implemented by someone other than me".
Also, with current tech not only would true x-risks preclude you from ever being revived, even non x-risk catastrophic events (partial civilizatory collapse due to Malthusian dynamics etc.) could easily destroy the facility you're held in, or take away anyone's incentive to maintain it. (TW: That's not even taking into account Siam the Star Shredder.)
I'm trying to avoid motivated cognition here, but there are lot of terms going into the actual calculation, and while that in itself doesn't mean the probability will be vanishingly small, there seem to be a lot more (and given human nature, unfortunately likely / contributing more probability mass) scenarios in which your goal wouldn't be achieved - or be achieved in some undesirable fashion - than the "here you go, welcome back to a society you'd like to live in" variety.
That being said, I'll take the small chance over nothing. Hopefully some decent options will be established near my place of residence, soon.
I think it might be important to remind others of that too, when discussing the subject. Especially for people who are signed up but have a skeptical social circle, "this seems like the least-bad of a set of bad options" may be easier for them to swallow than "I believe I'm going to wake up one day."
Is this the same thing as "agender"?
<3!!
Yes, it's the same. Transgender-neither sounds better to me, though, so I used that term.
But if I find that agender is more accessible I'll switch.
And yep, I'm an Avatar the Last Airbender junkie. :)
Hi. I discovered LessWrong recently, but not that recently. I enjoy Yudkowsky's writings and the discussions here. I hope to contribute something useful to LessWrong, someday, but as of right now my insights are a few levels below those of others in this community. I plan on regularly visiting the LessWrong Study Hall.
Also, is it "LessWrong" or "Less Wrong"?
You'll fit in great.
I endorse "Less Wrong" as a standalone phrase but "LessWrong" as an affixed phrase (e.g., "LessWrongian").
Good question... :-)
The front page and the About page consistently use the one with the space... except in the logo. Therefore I'm going to conclude that the change in typeface colour in the logo counts as a space and the ‘official’ name is the spaced one.
I went through the same reasoning pattern as you right before reading this comment. So I think I'll stick with "Less Wrong", for the time being.
We are currently undertaking a study on popular perceptions of existensial risk, our goal is to create a publicly accesible index of such risks, which may then be used to inform and catalyze comprehension through discussion generated around them.
If you have a few minutes, please follow the link to complete a brief, anonymous questionnaire - your input will be appreciated !
Survey Link : http://eclipsebureau-survey.questionpro.com/
Join us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/eclipse.bureau
Hello everyone. My name is Vadim Kosoy, and you can find some LW-relevant stuff about me in my Google+ stream: http://plus.google.com/107405523347298524518/about
I am an all time geek, with knowledge / interest in math, physics, chemistry, molecular biology, computer science, software engineering, algorithm engineering and history. Some areas in which I'm comparatively more knowledgeable: quantum field theory, differential geometry, algebraic geometry, algorithm engineering (especially computer vision)
In my day job I'm a technical + product manager of a small software group in Mantis Vision (http://www.mantis-vision.com/) a company developing 3D video cameras. My previous job was in VisionMap (http://www.visionmap.com/) which develops airborne photography / mapping systems, where I led a team of software and algorithm engineers.
I knew about Eliezer Yudkowsky and his friendly AI thesis (which I don't fully accept) for some time, but discovered this community only relatively recently. For me this community is interesting because of several reasons. One reason is that many discussions are related to the topics of transhumanism / technological singularity / artificial intelligence which I find very interesting and important. Another is that consequentialism is a popular moral philosophy here, and I (relatively recently) started to identify myself as strongly consequentialist. Yet another is that it seems to be a community where rational people discuss things rationally (or at least try), something that society all over the world misses as much direly as the idea seems trivial. This is in stark contrast the usual mode of discourse about social / political issues which is extremely shallow and plagued by excessive emotionality and dogmatism. I truly believe such a community can become a driver of social change in good directions, something with incredible impact
Recently I became very much interested with the subject of understanding general intelligence mathematically, in particular by the methods of computer science. I've written some comments here about my own variant of the Orseau-Ring framework, something I wished to expand into a full article but didn't have the karma for it. Maybe I'll post in on LW discussion.
My personal philosophy: As I said, I'm a consequentialist. I define my utility function not on the basis of hedonism or anything close to hedonism but on the basis of long-term scientific / technological / autoevolutional (transhumanist) progress. I don't believe in the innate value of h. sapiens but rather in the innate value of intelligent beings (in particular the more intelligence the more value). I can imagine scenarios in which a strong AI destroys humanity which are from my P.O.V. strongly positive: this is my disagreement with the friendly AI thesis. However I'm not sure whether any strong AI scenario will be positive, so I agree it is a concern. I also consider myself a deist rather than an atheist. Thus I believe in God, but the meaning I ascribe to the word "God" is very different from the meaning most religious people ascribe to it (I choose to still use the word "God" since there are a few things in common). For me God is the (unknowable) reason for the miraculous beauty of universe, perceived by us as the beauty of mathematics and science and the amazing plethora of interesting natural phenomena. God doesn't punish/reward for good/bad behavior, doesn't perform divine intervention (in the sense of occasional violations of natural law) and doesn't write/dictate scriptures and prophesies (except by inspiring scientists to make mathematical and scientific discoveries). I consider the human brain to be a machine, with no magic "soul" behind the scenes. However I believe in immortality in a stranger metaphysical sense which is something probably too long to detail here
I'm 29.9 years old, married with child (boy, 2.8 years old). I live in Israel since the age of 7 but I was born in the USSR. Ethnically I'm an Ashkenazi Jew. I enjoy science fiction, good cinema ( but no time to see any since my son was born :) ) and many sorts of music (but rock is probably my favorite). Glad to be here!
Welcome! You should probably join the MAGIC list. Orseau and others hang out there, and Orseau will probably comment on your two posts if you ask for feedback on that list. Also, if you ever visit California then you should visit MIRI and do some math with us.
Welcome! We're all 29.9 years old, here. I look forward to your comments, hopefully you'll find the time for that post on your Orseau-Ring variant.
Regarding your redefinition of god, allow me just a small comment: Calling an unknowable reason "god" - without believing in such a reason's personhood, or volition, or having a mind - invites a lot of unneeded baggage and historical connotations that muddle the discussion, and your self-identification, because what you apparently mean by that term is so different from the usual definitions of "god" that you could just as well call yourself a spiritual atheist (or related).
Speak for yourself, youngster ! Why, back in my day, we didn't have these "internets" you whippersnappers are always going on about, what with the cats and the memes and the facetubes and the whatnot. We had to make our own networks, by hand, out of floppies and acoustic modems, and we liked it . Why, there's nothing like an invigorating morning hike with a box of 640K floppies (formatted to 800K) in your backpack, uphill in the snow both ways. Builds character, it does. Mumble mumble mumble get off my lawn !
Peter here,
I stumbled onto LW from a link on TvTropes about the AI Box experiment. Followed it to an explanation of Bayes' Theorem on Yudowsky.net 'cause I love statistics (the rage I felt knowing that not one of my three statistics teachers ever mentioned Bayes was an unusual experience).
I worked my way through the sequences and was finally inspired to comment on Epistemic Viciousness and some of the insanity in the martial arts world. If your goal is to protect yourself from violence, martial arts is more likely to get you hurt or thrown in jail.
It seems inappropriate that I went by Truth_Seeker before discovering this site, so a chose a handle that was in opposition to that. And I like the word aether.
My name is Itai Bar-Natan. I have been lurking here for a long time, more recently I start posting some things, but only now do I formally introduce myself.
I am in grade 11, and I began reading less wrong at grade 8 (introduced by Scott Aaronson's blog). I am a former math prodigy, and am currently taking one graduate-level course in it. This is the first time I am learning math under the school system (although I not the first time I attended math classes under the school system). Before that, I would learn from my parents, who are both mathematicians, or (later on) from books and internet articles.
Heedless of Feynman, I believe I understand quantum mechanics.
One weakness I am working to improve on is the inability to write in large quantities.
I have a blog here: http://itaibn.wordpress.com/
I consider less wrong as a fun time-waster and a community which is relatively sane.
Give her to Headless Feyn-man!
Are you, by any chance, related to Dror?
Yes, I am his son.
Hellooo! I de-lurked during the survey and gradually started rambling at everyone but I never did one of these welcome posts!
My exposure to rationality started with idea that your brain can have bugs, which I had to confront when I was youngish because (as I randomly mentioned) I have a phobia that started pretty early. By then I had fairly accurate mental models of my parents to know that they wouldn't be very helpful/accommodating, so I just developed a bunch of workarounds and didn't start telling people about it until way later. The experience helped me reason about a lot of these blue-killing robot types of situations, and get used to handling involuntary or emotional responses in a goal-optimizing way. As a result, I'm interested in cognitive biases, neurodiversity and braaains, as well as how to explain and teach useful life skills to my tiny brother so that he doesn't have to learn them the hard way.
My undergrad degree is in CS/Math, I'm currently a CS grad student (though I don't know if I'm sticking around) and I'm noticing that I have a weird gap in my understanding of AI-related discussions, so I'll probably start asking more questions about it. I regret to admit I've been avoiding probability because I was bad at it, but I'm slowly coming around to the idea that it's important and I need to just suck it up and learn. Also, a lot of sciencey people whine about this, but I think AP Lit (and similar classes) helped me think better; it taught me to read the question carefully, read the text closely, pay attention to detail and collect evidence! But it has possibly made me way too sensitive to word choice; I apologize for comments saying "you could have used this other word but you didn't, so clearly this means something!" when the other word has never crossed your mind.
I started reading the site so long ago that I can't actually remember how I found it. One of the things I appreciate the most about the community is the way people immediately isolate problems, suggest solutions and then evaluate results, which is awesome! and also not an attitude I'm used to seeing a lot. I also appreciate having a common vocabulary to discuss biases, distortions, and factors that lead to disagreements. There were a lot of concepts I wanted to bring up with people that I didn't have a concise word for in the past.
I am Yan Zhang, a mathematics grad student specializing in combinatorics at MIT (and soon to work at UC Berkeley after graduation) and co-founder of Vivana.com. I was involved with building the first year of SPARC. There, I met many cool people at CFAR, for which I'm now a curicculum consultant.
I don't know much about LW but have liked some of the things I have read here; AnnaSalamon described me as a "street rationalist" because my own rationality principles are home-grown from a mix of other communities and hobbies. In that sense, I'm happy to step foot into this "mainstream dojo" and learn your language.
Recently Anna suggested I may want to cross-post something I wrote to LW and I've always wanted to get to know the community better, so this is the first step, I suppose. I look forward to learning from all of you.
Welcome! It's good to see you here.
I am Pinyaka. I've been lurking a bit around this site for several months. I don't remember how I found it (probably a linked comment from Reddit), but stuck around for the main sequences. I've worked my way through two of them thanks to the epub compilations and am currently struggling to figure out how to prioritize and better put into practice the things that I learn from the site and related readings.
I hope to have some positive social interactions with the people here. I find that I become fairly unhappy without some kind of regular socialization in a largish group, but it's difficult to find groups whose core values are similar to mine. In fact, after leaving a quasi-religious group last year it occurred to me that I've always just fallen in with whatever group was most convenient and not too immediately repellant. This marks the first time I've tried to think about what I value and then seek out a group of like minded individuals.
I also hope to find a consistent stream of ideas for improving myself that are backed by reason and science. I recognize that removing (or at least learning to account for) my own biases will help me build a more accurate picture of the universe that I live in and how I function within that framework. Along with that, I hope to develop the ability to formulate and pursue goals to maximize my enjoyment of life (I've been reading a bunch of lukeprogs anti-akrasia posts recently, so following through on goals is on my mind currently).
I am excited to be here.
Hi Pinyaka!
Semi-seriously, have you considered moving?
Welcome! You might enjoy it if you show up to a meetup as well.
I'm Shai Horowitz. I'm currently a duel physics and mathematics major at Rutgers university. I first learned of the concept of "Bayesian" or "rationality" through HPMOR and from there i took it upon myself to read the Overcoming Bias post which has been an extremely long endeavor of which I have almost but not yet accomplished. Through conversation with others in my dorm at Rutgers I have realized simply how much this learning has done to my thought process and it allowed me to hone in on my own thoughts that i could see were still biased and go about fixing them. Through this same reasoning it became apparent to me that it would be largely beneficial to become an active part in the lesswrong community to sharpen my own skills as a rationalist while helping others along the way. I embrace rationality for the very specific reason that I wish to be a Physicists and realize that in trying to do so i could (as Eliezer puts hit) "shoot off my own foot" while doing things that conventional science allows. In the process of learning this I did stall out for months at a time and even became depressed for a while as I was stabbing my weakest points with the metaphorical knife. I do look back at laugh at the fact now that a college student was making incredibly bad decisions to get over the pain of fully embracing the second law of thermodynamics and its implications, which to me seems to be a sign of my progress moving forward. I don't think that i will soon have to face a fact as daunting as that one and with the knowledge that I know how to accept even that law I will now be able to accept any truths much more easily. That being said even though hard science is my primary purpose for learning rationality I am a bit of a self proclaimed polymath and have spent recent times learning more of psychology and cognition then simply the cognitive bias's i need to be self weary of. I just finished the book "Influence: Science and Practice" which I've heard Eliezer mention multiple times and very recently as in this week my interest have turned into pushing standard ethical theories to there limits as to truly understand how to make the world a better place and to unravel the black box that is itself the word "better". I conclude with I would love to talk with anyone experienced or new to rationality about pretty much any topic and would very much like if someone would message me. furthermore if anyone reading this goes to Rutgers university or is around the area, a meet up over coffee or something similar would make my day.
Welcome! I am really curious what you mean by
My thoughts on its implications are along the lines of even if cryogenics works or the human race finds some other way of indefinitely increasing the length of the human life span, the second law of thermodynamics would eventually force this prolonged life to be unsustainable. That combined with the adjusting of my probability estimates of an afterlife made me have to face the unthinkable fact that there will be a day in which i cease to exist regardless of what i do and i am helpless to stop it. while i was getting over the shock of this i would have sleepless night which turned into days that i was to tired to be coherent which turned into missing classes which turned into missed grades. In summation I allowed a truth which would not come to pass for an unthinkable amount of time to change how i acted in the present in a way in which it did not warrant (being depressed or happy or any action now would not change that future).
Hello,
I found this site via HPMOR, which was the most awesome book I have read for several years. Besides being awesome as a book there were a lot of moments during reading I thought wow, there is someone who really thinks quite like myself. (Which is unfortunately something I do not experience too often.) Thus I was interested in who the author of HPMOR is, so I googled “less wrong”.
This site really held what HPMOR promised, so I spend quite some time reading through many articles absorbing a lot of new and interesting concepts.
Regarding my own person, I am a 30 years old biochemist currently working on my master thesis in structural biology. I grew up and live in Cologne, Germany.
I am, since early childhood very interested in everything science, engineering and philosophy related, thus inferential distances to most topics discussed here were not too large. On the downside most people perceive me as quite nerdy. This is reinforced by my rather poor social skill(I am possibly on the spectrum) so I was bullied a lot during childhood. Thus my social life was quite dim, though it improved quite a lot during my twenties, mostly due to having a relationship.
I was raised with an agnostic respectively weakly catholic (maybe there is a god, perhaps or something) worldview, and became increasingly atheistic during my teen-years, though this is not really remarkable and pretty much the default for scientifically educated people in Germany. Further on a lot of transhumanistic idea(l)s have a lot of appeal to me.
Besides the clarity and high intellectual level of discourse on this site I really like the technophilic / progress optimistic worldview of most people here. The general technology is evil meme held by a lot of “intellectuals” really puts me of, especially if they do not realize, that their entire live depends utterly on the very technology they shun.
My main criticism is an (IMHO) over-representation of the ai-foom scenario as a projected future, though this is a post on its own (which I hope to write up soon).
I have been lurking the site for quite some time now (> 1 year) mostly due to akrasia related reasons. First I really like reading interesting ideas and dislike writing so if I can spend time on less wrong this time has a much higher hedonic quality for me if I read articles than if I write my own article or comments. Second, whenever I read a post here and find something missing or imprecise or even wrong, in most cases someone already pointed it out often more precisely and eloquently than I could have done, so I mostly did not feel to much need to comment anyway.
I decided to delurk now anyway, because I have several ideas for posts in mind, which I hope to write up over the next few weeks or month, hopefully contributing to the awesomeness of this site. Further on I contemplate starting an LW meet-up group in my hometown (I could use som help / advise there).
Cudos and an unconditional upvote to the person who first guesses the meaning of my username.
Hey everyone,
As I continue to work through the sequences, I've decided to go ahead and join the forums here. A lot of the rationality material isn't conceptually new to me, although much of the language is very much so, and thus far I've found it to be exceptionally helpful to my thinking.
I'm a 24 year old video game developer, having worked on graphics on a particular big-name franchise for a couple years now. It's quite the interesting job, and is definitely one of the realms I find the heady, abstract rationality tools to be extremely helpful. Rationality is what it is, and that seems to be acknowledged here, a fact I'm quite grateful for.
When I'm not discussing the down-to-earth topics here, people may find I have a sometimes anxiety-ridden attachment to certain religious ideas. Religious discussion has been extremely normal for me throughout my life, so while the discussion doesn't make me uncomfortable, my inability to come to answers that I'm happy with does, and has caused me a bit of turmoil outside of discussion. Obviously there is much to say about this, and much people may like to say to me, but I'd like to first get through all the sequences, get all of my questions about it all answered, pay attention a bit to the discussions here, and I'll go from there. I have no grand hopes to finally put these beliefs to rest, but I will go to lengths to see whether it is something I should do. To pick either seems to me to suppose I have a Way to rationality, if I understand the point correctly. I would invite any and all discussion on the topic, and I appreciate the little "welcome to Theists" in the main post here. :)
See you all around.
Welcome! Glad to see you here. :D
Hello,
I'm Ben. I'm here mainly because I'm interested in effective altruism. I think that tracing through the consequences of one's actions is a complex task and I'm interested in setting out some ideas here in the hope that people can improve my reasoning. For example, I've a post on whether ethical investment is effective, which I'd like to put up once I've got a couple of points of karma.
I studied philosophy and theology, and worked for a while in finance. Now, I'm trying to work out how to increase the positive impact I have, which obviously demands answers about both what 'positive impact' means, and what the consequences are of the choices I make. I think these are far from simple to work out; I hope just to establish a few points with which I'm satisfied enough. I think that exposing ideas and arguments to thoughtful people who might want to criticise or expand them could help me a lot. And this seems a good place for doing that!
Hi, I'm Alex.
Every once in a while I come to LessWrong because I want to read more interesting things and have more interesting discussions on the Internet. I've found it a lot easier to spend time on Reddit (having removed all the drivel) and dredging through Quora to find actually insightful content (seriously, do they have any sort of actual organization system for me to find reading material?) in the past. LessWrong's discussions have seemed slightly inaccessible, so maybe posting an introduction like I'm supposed to will set in motion my figuring out how this community works.
I'm interested in a lot of things here, but especially physics and mathematics. I would use the word "metaphysics" but it's been appropriated for a lot of things that aren't actually meta-physics like I mean. Maybe I want "meta-mathematics"? Anyway, I'm really keen on the theory behind physical laws and on attempts at reformulating math and physics into more lucid and intuitive systems. Some of my reading material (I won't say research, but ... maybe I should say research) recently has been on geometric algebra, re-axiomizing set theory, foundations and interpretations of quantum mechanics, reformulations of relativity, quantum field theory's interpretation, things like that. I have a permanent distaste for spinors and all the math we don't try to justify with intuition when teaching physics, so I've spent a lot of my last few years studying those.
I was really intrigued by the articles/blog posts? on what proofs actually mean and causality a few months ago; that's when I started reading the site. I've spent the better part of the last year sifting through all kinds of math ideas related to reinterpretations or 'fundamental' insights, so I hope hanging around here can expose me to some more.
Oh, and I've spent a good amount of time on the Internet refuting crackpots who think they solved physics, so I, um, promise I'm not one.
I'm a programmer by trade and have a good interest in revolutionary (or just convenient) software projects and disruptive ideas and really naive, idealist world-changing ideas, which is fun.
I have read some of the sequences and such but - I guess I'm a rationalist at heart already, maybe because I've studied lots of logic and such, but a lot of it of the basic stuff seemed pretty apparent to me. I was already up to speed on Bayes and quantum mechanics, for example, and never considered anything other than atheism. And I already optimize and try to look at life in terms of expected payoffs and other very rational things like that. But, it's possible I've missed a lot of the material here - I find navigating the site to be pretty unintuitive.
I'm based in Seattle and I hope to go to the meetups if they... ever happen again. I mostly just like talking to smart people; I find it makes my brain work better - as if there's some sort of 'conversation mode' which hypercharges my creativity.
Oh, and I have a blog: http://ajkjk.com/blog/. I'm slightly terrified of linking it; it's the first time I've shown it to anyone but friends. It only has 6 posts so far. I've written a lot more but deleted/hid them until they're cleaned up.
Now I'm tempted to spread a meme. Have you heard Martin-Loef type theory? In my opinion, it's a much better foundation of mathematics than ZFC.
Be very careful thinking you are done. I was in pretty much exactly the same position as you about a year ago. ("yep, I'm pretty rational. Lol @ god; I wonder what it's like to have delusional beliefs"). After a year and a half here, having read pretty much everything in the sequences and most of the other archives, running a meetup, etc, I now know that I suck at rationality. You will find that you are nowhere near the limits, or even the middle, of possible human rationality.
Further, I now know what it's like to have delusional beliefs that are so ingrained you don't even recognize them as beliefs, because I had some big ones. I probably have more. There not easy to spot from the inside.
On the subject of atheism... I used to be an atheist, too. The rabbit hole you've fallen into here is deep.
The Seattle guys are pretty cool, from those I've met. Go hang out with them.
Don't be mysterious, Morpheus, please elaborate.
Okay, sure. Rather I mean: I feel like I'm passed the introductory material. Like I'm coming in as a sophomore, say. But - I could be totally wrong! We'll see.
I've definitely got counter-rational behaviors ingrained; I'm constantly fighting my brain.
And, if we're pedantic about things pretty similar to atheism, I might not be an atheist. I'm not up to speed on all the terms. What do you call:
I was calling that atheism.
Seems like agnosticism to me, or atheism in a broader sense. The narrow atheism is a belief in zero gods.
From your blog:
This is amazing, yet seems so obvious in retrospect. So many of us have turned into blue-minimizing robots without realizing it. Hopefully breaking the reward feedback loop with your extension would force people to try to examine their true reasons for clicking.
I was pretty pleased with myself for discovering that. It - sorta works. I still find myself going to Reddit, but so far it's still "feeling" less addictive (which is really hard to quantify or describe). Now I'm finding myself just clicking to websites more looking for something, rather than specifically clicking links. I've been sleeping badly lately, though, and I find that my brain is a lot more vulnerable to my Internet addiction when I haven't slept well - so it's not a good comparison to my norm.
Incidentally, if anyone wanted me to I could certainly make the extension work on other browsers. It's the simplest thing ever, it just injects 7 clauses of CSS into Reddit pages. I thought about making it mess with other websites I used (hackernews, mostly) but I decided they weren't as much of a problem and it was better to keep it single-purpose for now.
Aaron's blog brought me here. Sad that he's no longer with us.
I have been thinking for a long time about overcoming biases, and to put them into action in life. I work as an orthopaedic surgeon in the daytime and all I see around me is an infinite amount of bias. I can't take it on unless I can understand them and apply them to my life processes!
Hello. I've read sequence articles and discussion off this website for a while now. Been hesitant to join before because I like to keep my identity small but recently realized that being able to talk to others about topics on this site will make me more effective at reaching my goals.
Armchairs are very comfortable and I'm having some mental difficulty putting the effort into the practice of achieving set goals. It's very hard to actually do stuff and easy to just read about interesting topics without engaging.
I'm interested more in meta-ethics than in physics, more in decision theory than practical AI. My first comments will likely be in the sequences or in discussion comments of a few specific natures.
This should be fun, I look forward to talking with you. Ask me any questions that arouse your curiosity.
The browsing experience with Kibitzing off is strange but not unpleasant. How long did it take for you to get accustomed to it?