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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:
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Comments (843)
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.
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.
Given that you're abnormally intelligent, you probably need less information to deduce any given thing than most people would. The flip side of that is, other people need more information than you think they will, especially on subjects you've studied extensively (such as the inside of your own mind).
Given that you haven't figured out the problem yourself yet, they probably also need more information than you currently have. You might be able to save yourself some trouble (not all of it, but every little bit counts) on research and communication in step #3 by aiming step #1 at people who've already studied the general class of problem in depth. Does RIT have a psych department? Make friends with some of the students there and they'll probably give you a long list of bad guesses (each of which is a potential lead on the actual problem) for free.
Given that you're trans, you probably also have an unusually good idea of what you want. Part of the difficulty of step #2 is that other people cannot be counted on to be fully aware of, let alone adequately explain, their own desires.
If your introspection is chewing itself bloody, maybe it just needs a metaphorical bite block. Does RIT have a group of people who get together for tabletop roleplaying games? Those are going to be big soon. http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/24656/
The goal is to connect with people who will, for one reason or another, help you without being asked, such that the help will keep coming even while you are unable to ask. They don't necessarily need to do it consciously, or in a way that makes any sense.
What exactly do you mean by "writing?"
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.
I showed up at the doctor's during drop-in hours. I was "voluntarily" admitted to the hospital, put on fluoxetin (Prozac), and discharged a few days later. After some months, it became clear Prozac was making me worse. Since my depression is the atypical subtype (low motivation, can become happy by doing things, oversleeping, overeating), they switched me to bupropion (Wellbutrin). That worked.
Doctors (or at least these particular doctors) know their stuff, but I double-check everything on Crazy Meds.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I'm not totally sure I'd call this sufficient evidence since functional damage != many-to-one mapping but it would shave some points off the probability for existing tech and be a pointer to look for the exact mode of functional memory loss.
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 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.
Just to be a cryo advocate here for a moment, if the information of interest is distributed rather than localized, like in a hologram (or any other Fourier-type storage), there is a chance that one can be recovered as a reasonable facsimile of the frozen person, with maybe some hazy memories (corresponding to the lowered resolution of a partial hologram). I'd still rather be revived but having trouble remembering someone's face or how to drive a car, or how to solve the Schrodinger equation, than not to be revived at all. Even some drastic personality changes would probably be acceptable, given the alternative.
Oh, sure. Or if the sort of information that gets destroyed relates to what-I-am-currently-thinking, or something similar. If I wake up and don't remember the last X minutes,or hours, big deal. But when we have to postulate certain types of storage for something to work, it should lower our probability estimates.
Do you have a sense of how drastic a personality change has to be before there's someone else you'd rather be resurrected instead of drastically-changed-shminux?
Not really. This would require solving the personal identity problem, which is often purported to have been solved or even dissolved, but isn't.
I'm guessing that there is no actual threshold, but a fuzzy fractal boundary which heavily depends on the person in question. While one may say that if they are unable to remember the faces and names of their children and no longer able to feel the love that they felt for them, it's no longer them, and they do not want this new person to replace them, others would be reasonably OK with that. The same applies to the multitude of other memories, feelings, personality traits, mental and physical skills and whatever else you (generic you) consider essential for your identity.
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.)
Getting aging to stop looks positively trivial in comparison - The average lifespan of different animals already varies /way/ to much for there to be any biological law underlying it. So turning senescence off altogether should be possible. I suspect evolution has not already done so because overly long-lived creatures in the wild were on average bad news for their bloodlines - banging their grand daughters and occupying turf with the cunning of the old. Uhm. Now I have an itch to set up a simulation and run it.. Just so stories are not proof. Math is proof.
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.
Either is acceptable, though I'd say "Less Wrong" is slightly better.
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 !
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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).
Maybe from a consequentialist point-of-view, it's best to use the word "God" when arguing my philosophy with theists and use some other word when arguing my philosophy with atheists :) I'm thinking of "The Source". However there is a closely related construct which has a sort-of personhood. I named it "The Asymptote": I think that the universe (in the broadest possible sense of the word) contains a sequence of intelligences of unbounded increasing power and "The Asymptote" is a formal limit of this sequence. Loosely speaking, "The Asymptote" is just any intelligence vastly more powerful than our own. This idea comes from the observation that the known history of the universe can be regarded as a process of forming more and more elaborate forms of existence (cosmological structure formation -> geological structure formation -> biological evolution -> sentient life -> evolution of civilization) and therefore my guess is that there is something about "The Source" which guarantees a indefinite process of this kind. Some sort of a fundamental Law of Evolution which should be complementary, in a way, to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
I disagree that they are necessarily more elaborate. I don't think we (as humanity) fully appreciate the complexity of cosmological structures yet (and I don't think we will until we get out there and take a closer look at them; we can only see coarse features from several lightyears away). And civilisation seems less elaborate than sentience, to me.
Well, civilization is a superstructure of sentience an is more elaborate in this sense (i.e. sentience + civilization is more elaborate than "wild" sentience)
I take your point. However, I can turn it about and point out that cosmological structures (a category that includes the planet Earth) must by the same token be more elaborate than geological structures.
Sure. Perhaps I chose careless wording but when I said "cosmological structure formation -> geological structure formation" my intent was the process thereby a universe initially filled with homogeneous gas develops inhomogeneities which condense to form galaxies, stars and planets which undergo further processes (galaxy collisions, supernova explosions, collisions within stellar systems, geologic / atmospheric processes within planets) that produce more and more complex structure over time.
I see.
Doesn't that whole chain require the entropy of the universe to be negative? Or am I missing something?
You mean that this process has the appearance of decreasing entropy? In truth it doesn't. For example gravitational collapse (the basic mechanism of galaxy and star formation) decreases entropy by reducing the spatial spread of matter but increases entropy by heating matter up. Thus we end up with a total entropy gain. On cosmic scale, I think the process is exploiting a sort-of temperature difference between gravity and matter, namely that initially the temperature of matter was much higher than the Unruh temperature associated with the cosmological constant. Thus even though the initial state had little structure it was very off-equilibrium and thus very low entropy compared to the final equilibrium it will reach.
Huh. I don't think that I know enough physics to argue this point any further.
I strongly doubt the existence of any truly unbounded entity. Even a self-modifying transhuman AI would eventually run out of atoms to convert into computronium, and out of energy to power itself. Even if our Universe was infinite, the AI would be limited by the speed of light.
Wait, so is it bounded or isn't it ? I'm not sure what you mean.
There are plenty of planets where biological evolution had not happened, and most likely never will -- take Mercury, for example, or Pluto (yes yes I know it's not technically a planet). As far as we can tell, most of not all exoplanets we have detected so far are lifeless. What leads you to believe that biological evolution is inevitable ?
In an infinite universe, the speed-of-light limit is not a problem. Surely it limits the speed of computing but any computation can be performed eventually. Of course you might argue that our universe it asymptotically de Sitter. This is true, but it also probably metastable and can collapse into a universe with other properties. In http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.3796 the authors present the following line of reasoning: there must be a way to perform an infinite sequence of measurements since otherwise the probabilities of quantum mechanics would be meaningless. In a similar vein I speculate it must be possible to perform an infinite number of computation (or even all possible computations). The authors then go on to explore cosmological explanation of how that might be feasible.
The sequence is unbounded in the sense that any possible intelligence is eventually superseded. The Asymptote is something akin to infinity. The Asymptote is "like an intelligence but not quite" in the same way infinity is "like a number but not quite"
Good point. Indeed it seems that life formation is a rare event. So I'm not sure whether there really is a "Law of Evolution" or we're just seeing the anthropic principle at work. It would be interesting to understand how to distinguish these scenarios
wedrifid already replied better than I could; but I'd still like to add that "eventually" is a long time. For example, if the algorithm that you are computing is NP-complete, then you won't be able to grow your hardware quickly enough to make any practical difference. In addition, if our universe is not eternal (which it most likely is not), then it makes no sense to talk about an "infinite series of computations".
Sorry, but I literally have no idea what this means. I don't think that infinity is "like a number but not quite" at all, so the analogy doesn't work for me.
Well, so far, we have observed one instance of "evolution", and thousands of instances of "no evolution". I'd say the evidence is against the "Law of Evolution" so far...
For algorithms with exponential complexity, you will have to wait for exponential time, yes. But eternity is enough time for everything. I think the universe is eternal. Even an asymptotically de Sitter region is eternal (but useless since it reaches thermodynamic equilibrium), however the universe contains other asymptotic regions. See http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.3796
A more formal definition is given in my comment http://lesswrong.com/lw/do9/welcome_to_less_wrong_july_2012/8kt7 . Less formally, infinity is "like a number but not quite" because many predicates into which a number can be meaningfully plugged in, also work for infinity. For example:
infinity > 5 infinity + 7 = infinity infinity + infinity = infinity infinity * 2 = infinity
However not all such expressions make sense:
infinity - infinity = ? infinity * 0 = ?
Formally, adding infinity to the field of real numbers doesn't yield a field (or even a ring).
There is clearly at least one Great Filter somewhere between life creation (probably there is one exactly there) and appearance of civilization with moderately supermodern technology: it follows from Fermi's paradox. However it feels as though there is a small number of such Great Filters with nearly inevitable evolution between them. The real question is what is the expected number of instances of passing these Filters within the volume of a cosmological horizon. If this number is greater than 1 then the universe is more pro-evolution than what is anticipated from the anthropic principle alone. Fermi's paradox puts an upper bound on this number, but I think this bound is much greater than 1
Does this hold in a universe that is also expanding (like ours)? Such a scenario makes the 'infinite' property largely moot given that any point within has an 'observable universe' that is not infinite. That would seem to rule out computations of anything more complicated than what can be represented within the Hubble volume.
Yes, this was exactly my point regarding the universe being asymptotically de Sitter. The problem is that the universe is not merely expanding, it's expanding with acceleration. But there are possible solutions to this like escaping to an asymptotic region with a non-positive cosmological constant via false vacuum collapse.
Why postulate that such a limit exists?
To really explain what I mean by the Asymptote, I need to explain another construct which I call "the Hypermind" ( Kawoomba's commented motivated me to invest in the terminology :) ).
What is identity? What makes you today the same person like you yesterday? My conviction is that the essential relationship between the two is that the "you of today" shares the memories of "you of yesterday" and fully understands them. In a similar manner, if a hypothetical superintelligence Omega would learn all of your memories and understand them (you) on the same level you understand yourself, Omega should be deemed a continuation of you, i.e. it assimilated your identity into its own. Thus in the space of "moments of consciousness" in the universe we have a partial order where A < B means "B is a continuation of A" i.e. "B shares A's memories and understands them". The Hypermind hypothesis is that for any A and B in this space there is C s.t. C > A and C > B. This seems to me a likely hypothesis if you take into account that the Omega in the example above doesn't have to exist in your physical vicinity but may exist anywhere in the (multi/)universe and have a simulation of you running on its laptop.
The Asymptote is then a formal limit of the Hypermind. That is, the semantics of "The Asymptote has property P" is "For any A there is B > A s.t. for any C > B, C has property P". It is then an interesting problem to find non-trivial properties of the Asymptote. In particular, I suspect (without strong evidence yet) that the opposite of the Orthogonality Thesis is true, namely that the Asymptote has a well-defined preference / utility function
This seems like a rather simplistic view, see counter-examples below.
"conviction" might not be a great term, maybe what you mean is a careful conclusion based on something.
except that we forget most of them, and that our memories of the same event change in time, and often are completely fictional.
Not sure what you mean by understanding here, feel free to define it better. For example, we often "understand" our memories differently at different times in our lives.
So, if you forgot what you had for breakfast the other day, you today are no longer a continuation of you from yesterday?
That's a rather non-standard definition. If anything, it's close to monotonicity than to accumulation. If you mean the limit point, then you ought to define what you mean by a neighborhood.
To sum up, your notion of Asymptote needs a lot more fleshing out before it starts making sense.
Good point. The description I gave so far is just a first approximation. In truth, memory is far from ideal. However if we assign weight to memories by their potential impact on our thinking and decision making then I think we would get that most of the memories are preserved, at least on short time scales. So, from my point of view, the "you of today" is only a partial continuation of the "you of yesterday". However it doesn't essentially changing the construction of the Hypermind. It is possible to refine the hypothesis by stating that for every two "pieces of knowledge" a and b, there exists a "moment of consciousness" C s.t. C contains a and b.
Actually I overcomplicated the definition. The definition should read "Exists A s.t. for any B > A, B has property P". The neighbourhoods are sets of the form {B | B > A}. This form of the definition implies the previous form using the assumption that for any A, B there is C > A, B.
Hmm, it seems like your definition of Asymptote is nearly that of a limit ordinal.
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 !
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!
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!
Typo fixed.
Are you, by any chance, related to Dror?
Yes, I am his son.
To my eternal embarrassment, I was, as a youth, quite taken in by "The Bible Code." Very taken in, actually. That ended suddenly when someone directed to the material written by your father and McKay (I think?). Small world, I guess? :)
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.
Fortunately, it's also very easy to get a basic grip on it. Multiplication, addition, and a few simple formulae can lead to some very interesting results.
A probability is always written as a number between 0 and 1, where 1 is absolute certainty and 0 cannot happen in any circumstances at all, no matter how unlikely. A one in five chace is equal to a probablity of 1/5, or 0.2. The probability that event E, with probability P, is false is 1-P. The chances of independent events E and F, with probabilities P and Q, occurring in succession is P*Q. (This leads to an interesting result if you try to work out the odds of at least two people in a crowd sharing a birthday)
Probability theory also involves a certain amount of counting. For example; what are the chances of rolling a seven with two ordinary, six-sided dice? (Assuming that the dice are fair, and not weighted).
Each dice has a one-in-six chance of showing any particular number. For a given pair of numbers, that's 1/6*1/6=1/36. And, indeed, if you list the results you'll find that there are 36 pairs of numbers that could turn up: (1, 1), (1, 2), (2, 1), (1, 3)... and so on. But there's more than one pair of numbers that adds up to 7; (2, 5) and (1, 6), for example.
So what are the odds of rolling a 7 with a pair of dice?
Yeah, it's the counting problems that I've been avoiding! Because there are some that seem like you've done them correctly and someone else does it differently and gets a different answer and they still can't point out what you did wrong so you never quite learn what not to do. And then conditional probabilities turn into a huge mess because you forget what's given and what isn't and how to use it togetherrrr.
I hope it's a sixth, but at least this question is small enough to write out all the combinations if you really have to. It's the straight flushes and things that are murder.
Ah, I see. You'll be glad to know that there are often ways to shortcut the counting process. The specifics often depend on the problem at hand, but there are a few general principles that can be applied; if you give an example, I'll have a try at solving it.
It is, indeed.
In fact, many if not most concepts in probability theory deal with various ways of avoiding the counting process. It gets way too expensive when you start handling billions of combinations, and downright impossible when you deal with continuous values.
asdfjkl; I wrote out all the pairs. -_- Can't trust these problems otherwise! Grumble.
"You are never too cool to draw a picture" -- or make a list or a chart. This particular problem is well served by a six-by-six grid.
Dice are okay; it's the problems with cards that get toooo huge. :)
Can you give an example?
I will try to hunt one down! It's usually the problems where you have to choose a lot of independent attributes but also be careful not to double-count.
Also, when someone explains it, it's clear to see why their way is right (or sounds right), but it's not clear why your way is wrong.
Yes, I notice that people are in general either bad at giving or reluctant to give this kind of feedback. I think I'm okay at this, so I'd be happy to do this by PM for a few problems if you think that would help.
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.
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.
There's also the fact that it wasn't even written until after Joseph Smith had died, translation not even being an issue. (In point of fact, Nietzsche was born the same year that Joseph Smith died.)
Nonetheless! I am convinced a time traveler gave Joseph Smith the book.
The Education system in the US, or the education system everywhere?
Can't speak for Everywhere, but it's certainly not just the US. Ireland has much the same problem, although I think it's not quite as bad here.
In Italy it's also very bad, but the public opinion does have a culprit in mind (namely, politics).
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'd like to know how they [=consequentialist deists stuck in religions with financial obligations] justify tithing so much of their income to an ineffective charity.
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.
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.
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 could've sworn that I saw his entire book in HTML format somewhere, a long time ago, but now I can't find it. Perhaps I only imagined it.
From what I recall, in the later chapters he claims that our current educational system was deliberately designed in meticulous detail by a shadowy conspiracy of statists bent on world (or, at the very least, national) domination. Again, my recollection could be widely off the mark, but I do seem to remember staring at my screen and thinking, "Really, Gatto ? Really ?"
I read Dumbing Us Down, which might not be the book you're thinking of -- if memory serves, he's written a few -- but I don't remember him ever quite going with the conspiracy theory angle.
He skirts the edges of it pretty closely, granted. In the context of history of education, his thesis is basically that the American educational system is an offshoot of the Prussian system and that that system was picked because it prioritizes obedience to authority. Even if we take that all at face value, though, it doesn't require a conspiracy -- just a bunch of 19th- and early 20th-century social reformers with a fondness for one of the more authoritarian regimes of the day, openly doing their jobs.
Now, while it's pretty well documented that Horace Mann and some of his intellectual heirs had the Prussian system in mind, I've never seen historical documentation giving exactly those reasons for choosing it. And in any case the systems diverged in the mid-1800s and we'd need to account for subsequent changes before stringing up the present-day American school system on those charges. But at its core it's a pretty plausible hypothesis -- many of the features that after two World Wars make the Prussians look kind of questionable to us were, at the time, being held up as models of national organization, and a lot of that did have to do with regimentation of various kinds.
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.
What does "evidence about X" mean, as opposed to "evidence for X" ?
My interpretation is "evidence that was not obtained in the service of a particular bottom line."
I'd interpret it as "evidence which bears on the question X" as opposed to "Evidence which supports answer Y to question X."
For instance, if you wanted to know whether anthropogenic climate change was occurring, you would want to search for "evidence about anthropogenic climate change" rather than "evidence for anthropogenic climate change."
Fair enough, that makes sense. I guess I just wasn't used to seeing this verbal construct before.
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.
You may find this story (a scientist dealing with evidence that conflicts with his religion) interesting.
http://www.exmormonscholarstestify.org/simon-southerton.html
Sam Bhagwat has served a mission and has posted here about how to emulate the Latter-day Saints' approach to community-building..
I would love to hear more details, both about the process and about the conclusion, if you are brave/foolish enough to share.
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.
Haha hey QC. Remind me sometime to learn the "get ridiculously high points in karma-based communities and learn a lot" metaskill from you... you seem to be off to a good start here too ;)
Step 1 is to spend too much time posting comments. I'm not sure I recommend this to someone whose time is valuable. I would like to see you share your "street rationalist" skills here, though!
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?
I'm sort of averse to moving at the moment, since I'm in the middle of getting my doctorate, but I'll likely have to move once I finish that. Do you have specific suggestions? I have always picked where I live based on employment availability and how much I like the city from preliminary visits.
In that case its going to strongly depend on your field, and if your going into academia specifically you likely won't have much of a choice. That said NY and the Bay Area are both good places for finding rationality support.
Welcome! You might enjoy it if you show up to a meetup as well.
Thank you. I haven't seen one in Iowa yet, but I do keep an eye out for them.
Welcome!
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...
As long as you frame it as a question about your understanding of relativity, and about the validity of the relativity theory itself, sure, why not.
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.
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).
Hey. I'd like to submit an article. Please upvote this comment so that I may acquire enogh points to submit it.
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.
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
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
Is that ... like ... allowed?
edit: I agree with you and object to all the conditioning against contradicting "sacred" values (sexism = ugh, bad).
By whom? (Of course, that's not literally true, since the overwhelming majority of all 3.5 billion male humans alive are people I've never met or heard of and so I have little reason to dislike, but...)
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.
Why not stay around and try to help fix the problem?